21 February 2006

Disappearing People...Disappearing History
Germany Weighs if It Played Role in Seizure by U.S.
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
This article was reported by Don Van Natta Jr., Souad Mekhennet, and Nicholas Wood, and was written by Mr. Van Natta.
NYT, 21 February 2006
For more than a year, the German government has criticized the United States for its role in the abduction of a German man who was taken to an American prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he said he was held and tortured for five months after being mistaken for a terrorism suspect.
German officials said they knew nothing about the man's abduction and have repeatedly pressed Washington for information about the case, which has set off outrage here. At a meeting in Berlin last December, Chancellor Angela Merkel demanded an explanation from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the incident.
But on Monday in Neu-Ulm near Munich, the police and prosecutors opened an investigation into whether Germany served as a silent partner of the United States in the abduction of the man, Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Arab descent who was arrested Dec. 31, 2003, in Macedonia before being flown to the Kabul prison.
SEE ALSO:
U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
By SCOTT SHANE
NYT, 21 February 2006
In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.
The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.
But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.
Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."
"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."
After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.
Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.
"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

Police Tied to Death Squads
U.S. military officials say they suspect Iraq's highway patrol, staffed largely by Shiites, is deeply involved in torture and killings.
By Solomon Moore
LA Times, 21February 2006
A 1,500-member Iraqi police force with close ties to Shiite militia groups has emerged as a focus of investigations into suspected death squads working within the country's Interior Ministry.
Iraq's national highway patrol was established largely to stave off insurgent attacks on roadways. But U.S. military officials, interviewed over the last several days, say they suspect the patrol of being deeply involved in illegal detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings.
The officials said that in recent months the U.S. has withdrawn financial and advisory support from the patrol in an effort to distance the American training effort from what they perceived to be a renegade force.
"We don't train them, we don't give them equipment, we don't conduct site visits over there. They are just bad, criminal people," said a high-ranking U.S. military officer who advises the Interior Ministry. The officer was one of three who each spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they wanted to maintain relationships with Iraqi police officials and avoid retaliation by U.S. military superiors.
Last month, Iraqi army soldiers stopped a 22-member squad of uniformed highway patrol officers at a nighttime checkpoint in northern Baghdad and discovered a man in their custody who told them the police planned to kill him. His contention was supported by confessions of officers in the squad, U.S. advisors said.
U.S. officials have called 2006 "the year of the police" and have placed a renewed emphasis on training officers. The Bush administration repeatedly has said the development of Iraq's security forces must occur before withdrawal of U.S. troops can begin.

The Memo
How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted.
by JANE MAYER
New Yorker, 27 February issue
...The memo is a chronological account, submitted on July 7, 2004, to Vice Admiral Albert Church, who led a Pentagon investigation into abuses at the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It reveals that Mora’s [general counsel of the United States Navy] criticisms of Administration policy were unequivocal, wide-ranging, and persistent. Well before the exposure of prisoner abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, in April, 2004, Mora warned his superiors at the Pentagon about the consequences of President Bush’s decision, in February, 2002, to circumvent the Geneva conventions, which prohibit both torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” He argued that a refusal to outlaw cruelty toward U.S.-held terrorist suspects was an implicit invitation to abuse. Mora also challenged the legal framework that the Bush Administration has constructed to justify an expansion of executive power, in matters ranging from interrogations to wiretapping. He described as “unlawful,” “dangerous,” and “erroneous” novel legal theories granting the President the right to authorize abuse. Mora warned that these precepts could leave U.S. personnel open to criminal prosecution.
In important ways, Mora’s memo is at odds with the official White House narrative. In 2002, President Bush declared that detainees should be treated “humanely, and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles” of the Geneva conventions. The Administration has articulated this standard many times. Last month, on January 12th, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, responding to charges of abuse at the U.S. base in Cuba, told reporters, “What took place at Guantánamo is a matter of public record today, and the investigations turned up nothing that suggested that there was any policy in the department other than humane treatment.” A week later, the White House press spokesman, Scott McClellan, was asked about a Human Rights Watch report that the Administration had made a “deliberate policy choice” to abuse detainees. He answered that the organization had hurt its credibility by making unfounded accusations. Top Administration officials have stressed that the interrogation policy was reviewed and sanctioned by government lawyers; last November, President Bush said, “Any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture.” Mora’s memo, however, shows that almost from the start of the Administration’s war on terror the White House, the Justice Department, and the Department of Defense, intent upon having greater flexibility, charted a legally questionable course despite sustained objections from some of its own lawyers.

Navigating the New Court
LA Times, 20 February 2006
A LOT OF FOLKS ARE IN A TIZZY about Tuesday's Supreme Court session. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. will hear his first oral arguments. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will hear his first environmental cases. The Bush administration, hardly known for its enthusiastic enforcement of federal environmental laws, will argue vehemently in favor of one of the most comprehensive environmental laws on the books, the Clean Water Act. Most exciting of all, at least for court junkies, the cases could provide clues about the new justices' view of the Constitution's commerce clause, which established the federal government's power to regulate local matters that at least theoretically affect interstate commerce. Depending on its interpretation, the new court could decide to upend the balance of state and federal power as we know it.
But it probably won't. As much as some activists may want the court to issue a grand statement about the limits of constitutional power, it's more likely to focus on the definition of a single, ordinary word.
That word is "navigable." Two cases — Rapanos vs. United States and Carabell vs. Army Corps of Engineers — pose serious challenges to the 1972 Clean Water Act. That law gives the federal government authority to regulate "navigable waters" in the U.S. Over the decades courts have defined that term broadly; in 1985, the Supreme Court said it included wetlands if they were adjacent to navigable waters. Tuesday's cases concern wetlands that are (or may be) connected, but not adjacent, to navigable bodies. The question, which is more about the law than about the Constitution, is whether the federal government has the authority to regulate these as well.
An eclectic cast of characters says it does: Besides the Bush administration, there are environmental groups, hunting clubs, four former Environmental Protection Agency administrators (two Republicans and two Democrats), a star-studded group of scientists (including Jared Diamond and Edward O. Wilson), nine current and former members of Congress who helped draft the Clean Water Act and 34 states, including California. On the other side are home-building organizations, advocates for limited government, farming and petroleum interests and many Western water authorities, including Southern California's Metropolitan Water District.

Millions Not Joining Medicare Drug Plan
Despite Outreach, Poor Seniors Miss Out On Low-Cost Coverage
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post, 21 February 2006
A $400 million campaign by the Bush administration to enroll low-income seniors in prescription drug coverage that would cost them just a few dollars per prescription has signed up 1.4 million people, a fraction of the 8 million eligible for the new coverage.

20 February 2006

A matter of priorities...
Privacy Guardian Is Still a Paper Tiger
A year after its creation, the White House civil liberties board has yet to do a single day of work.
By Richard B. Schmitt
LA Times, 20 February 2006
For Americans troubled by the prospect of federal agents eavesdropping on their phone conversations or combing through their Internet records, there is good news: A little-known board exists in the White House whose purpose is to ensure that privacy and civil liberties are protected in the fight against terrorism.
Someday, it might actually meet.
Initially proposed by the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was created by the intelligence overhaul that President Bush signed into law in December 2004.
More than a year later, it exists only on paper.

When many thought the 'Age of Ideology' had passed, the Rightwing brought it back with a vengeance...This is a critique offered by a 'reformed NeoCon.'
After Neoconservatism
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
NYT, 19 February 2006
As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.
But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

Facing Pressure, White House Seeks Approval for Spying
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 20 February 2006
After two months of insisting that President Bush did not need court approval to authorize the wiretapping of calls between the United States and suspected terrorists abroad, the administration is trying to resist pressure for judicial review while pushing for retroactive Congressional approval of the program.
The administration opened negotiations with Congress last week, but it is far from clear whether Mr. Bush will be able to fend off calls from Democrats and some Republicans for increased oversight of the eavesdropping program, which is run by the National Security Agency.
The latest Republican to join the growing chorus of those seeking oversight is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Graham, a former military prosecutor whose opinion on national security commands respect in the Senate, said he believed there was now a "bipartisan consensus" to have broader Congressional and judicial review of the program.

The Torturers Win
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 20 February 2006
Justice? Surely you jest.
Terrible things were done to Maher Arar, and his extreme suffering was set in motion by the United States government. With the awful facts of his case carefully documented, he tried to sue for damages. But last week a federal judge waved the facts aside and told Mr. Arar, in effect, to get lost.
We're in a new world now and the all-powerful U.S. government apparently has free rein to ruin innocent lives without even a nod in the direction of due process or fair play. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who, according to all evidence, has led an exemplary life, was seized and shackled by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year. He was tormented physically and psychologically, and at times tortured.
The underground cell was tiny, about the size of a grave. According to court papers, "The cell was damp and cold, contained very little light and was infested with rats, which would enter the cell through a small aperture in the ceiling. Cats would urinate on Arar through the aperture, and sanitary facilities were nonexistent."
Mr. Arar's captors beat him savagely with an electrical cable. He was allowed to bathe in cold water once a week. He lost 40 pounds while in captivity.
This is a quintessential example of the reprehensible practice of extraordinary rendition, in which the U.S. government kidnaps individuals — presumably terror suspects — and sends them off to regimes that are skilled in the fine art of torture. In terms of vile behavior, rendition stands shoulder to shoulder with contract killing.
If the United States is going to torture people, we might as well do it ourselves. Outsourcing torture does not make it any more acceptable.
SEE ALSO:
Senior Lawyer at Pentagon Broke Ranks on Detainees
By TIM GOLDEN
NYT, 20 February 2006
One of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution, a newly disclosed document shows.
The lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, a Republican appointee who retired last month after more than four years as general counsel of the Navy, was one of many dissenters inside the Pentagon. Senior uniformed lawyers in all the military services also objected sharply to the interrogation policy, according to internal documents declassified last year.
But Mr. Mora's campaign against what he viewed as an official policy of cruel treatment, detailed in a memorandum he wrote in July 2004 and recounted in an article in the Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, made public yesterday, underscored again how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject.

The Mensch Gap
Paul Krugman
NYT, 20 February 2006
[Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services.]
I could go on. Officials in this administration never take responsibility for their actions. When something goes wrong, it's always someone else's fault.
Was it always like this? I don't want to romanticize our political history, but I don't think so. Think of Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote a letter before D-Day accepting the blame if the landings failed. His modern equivalent would probably insist that the landings were a "catastrophic success," then try to lay the blame for their failure on the editorial page of The New York Times.
Where have all the mensches gone? The character of the administration reflects the character of the man at its head. President Bush is definitely not a mensch; his inability to admit mistakes or take responsibility for failure approaches the pathological. He surrounds himself with subordinates who share his aversion to facing unpleasant realities. And as long as his appointees remain personally loyal, he defends their performance, no matter how incompetent. After all, to do otherwise would be to admit that he made a mistake in choosing them. Last week he declared that Mr. Leavitt is doing, yes, "a heck of a job."
But how did such people attain power in the first place? Maybe it's the result of our infantilized media culture, in which politicians, like celebrities, are judged by the way they look, not the reality of their achievements. Mr. Bush isn't an effective leader, but he plays one on TV, and that's all that matters.
Whatever the reason for the woeful content of our leaders' character, it has horrifying consequences. You can't learn from mistakes if you won't admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a lot about the policy disasters of recent years — the failed occupation of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, the failed drug plan.
Above all, the anti-mensches now ruling America are destroying our moral standing. A recent National Journal report finds that we're continuing to hold many prisoners at Guantánamo even though the supposed evidence against them has been discredited. We're even holding at least eight prisoners who are no longer designated enemy combatants. Why? Well, releasing people you've imprisoned by mistake means admitting that you made a mistake. And that's something the people now running America never do.

Last Word on 'Chap-a-Quick-Dick Incident'
Cheney Is a 'Deep Moral Coward, Afraid of Accountability'
Surrogates sent out to blame the victim...
Josh Marshall
Talking Points Memo, 20 February 2006
[From a previous post -- Even if Dick Cheney is blameless in this matter in any deep moral sense, let's not forget that his immediate reaction was to send out his surrogates to publicly blame what happened on the victim.
Actually, that may afford him too much credit since it wasn't actually his 'immediate' reaction. It was his considered reaction after the 24 hour cooling off period he gave himself between the shooting and when he chose to make it public.
By my count, he continued to have his public surrogates blame Whittington for fully three days. He only relented and took responsibility himself when the public and no doubt private political clamor became too much to sustain.
That's Dick Cheney.]
...Right out of the box there was Katharine Armstrong (call her surrogate #1): Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself ... The vice president didn't see him. The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by God, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."
Then Scott McClellan who builds on Armstrong's initial point (call him surrogate #2): "I don't know all the specifics about it, but I think Mrs. Armstrong spoke publicly about how this incident occurred. And if I recall, she pointed out that the protocol was not followed by Mr. Whittington, when it came to notifying the others that he was there. And so, you know, unfortunately these types of hunting accidents happen from time to time."
Then Mary Matalin (call her surrogate #3): "The vice president was concerned. He felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do."
This just isn't even up for debate. Until they were forced to switch course the party line was that Whittington screwed up by sneaking up behind the vice president.
About physical courage I don't know the answer. But all available evidence suggests that the Mr. Cheney is a man of deep moral cowardice. Makes a mistake and shoots his friend; blames the friend. Only he won't do it directly. So he gets underlings to do it for him. Forced to speak out publicly, he appears before a ringer-journalist guaranteed not to press uncomfortable questions.
It's all of a piece with the man's record. He's afraid of accountability. That's why he's such a fan of self-protecting secrecy. That's why he's big on smearing government whistle-blowers. It's really just two sides of the same coin. He's afraid of accountability. It's the same reason why he's such a notorious prevaricator -- lies to avoid accountability.
These are all the hallmarks of a moral coward.

'Unitary Executive' Suppresses Science, Intellectual Freedom and the Rule of Law
By CORNELIA DEAN
NYT, 19 February 2006
David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist and president of the California Institute of Technology, is used to the Bush administration misrepresenting scientific findings to support its policy aims, he told an audience of fellow researchers Saturday. Each time it happens, he said, "I shrug and say, 'What do you expect?' "
But then, Dr. Baltimore went on, he began to read about the administration's embrace of the theory of the unitary executive, the idea that the executive branch has the power or even the obligation to act without restraint from Congress. And he began to see in a new light widely reported episodes of government scientists being restricted in what they could say in public.
"It's no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of scientific freedom," he said. "It's part of the theory of government now, and it's a theory we need to vociferously oppose." Far from twisting science to suit its own goals, he said, the government should be "the guardian of intellectual freedom."
...Leslie Sussan, a lawyer with the Department of Health and Human Services who emphasized that she was speaking only for herself, drew applause when she said she saw the administration's science policies as "an attack on the rule of law as a basis for self-government and democracy."

Drug Plan's Start May Imperil G.O.P.'s Grip on Older Voters
By ROBIN TONER
NYT, 19 February 2006
 Older voters, a critical component of Republican Congressional victories for more than a decade, could end up being a major vulnerability for the party in this year's midterm elections, according to strategists in both parties. Paradoxically, one reason is the new Medicare drug benefit, which was intended to cement their loyalty.
During next week's Congressional recess, Democrats are set to begin a major new campaign to highlight what Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, describes as "this disastrous Republican Medicare prescription drug plan."
Democratic incumbents and challengers plan nearly 100 public forums around the country, armed with briefing books and talking points on a law that, party leaders assert, "was written by and for big drug companies and H.M.O.'s, not American families."
Recognizing the widespread criticism of the new drug program, Republican senators met in a closed session with administration officials this week to discuss the rocky rollout of the plan and prepare for questions back home.
But pollsters say the Republicans' difficulties with the over-60 vote go beyond the complicated drug benefit, which began Jan. 1.
President Bush's failed effort to create private accounts in Social Security last year was also unpopular with many older Americans. That, in addition to confusion over the drug benefit, has "taken the key swing vote that's been trending the Republicans' way and put it at risk for the next election," said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster.
...Surveys show that older voters remain skeptical; a new nationwide poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group, found that retirees were almost twice as likely to say they viewed the benefit unfavorably (45 percent) as favorably (23 percent). Last month's New York Times/CBS News Poll found that most did not expect the law to lower drug costs over the next few years.
In the 22nd Congressional District, in Florida, where State Senator Ron Klein, a Democrat, is challenging Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr., a Republican, Mr. Klein said the prescription drug issue was part of a general economic squeeze, including higher homeowners' insurance and gas prices, that retirees were feeling.
"Things have gotten pretty rough in the last couple years, and these Medicare prescription drug costs, on top of the other issues, are weighing pretty heavily on people with fixed incomes," Mr. Klein said. "Let's start thinking about the consumer side, instead of figuring out how to prop up the pharmaceutical and insurance industries."

Israel Suspends Tax Money Flow to Palestinians
By STEVEN ERLANGER
AP via NYT, 20 February 2006
The Israeli cabinet decided Sunday to immediately freeze the transfer of about $50 million a month in tax and customs receipts due to the Palestinian Authority, arguing that the swearing in of a Hamas-dominated legislature on Saturday meant that the Palestinians were now led by the militant group.
...The State Department said it would have no comment on the Israeli decision.

18-19 February 2006

Apparent Death Squad Is Linked to Iraqi Ministry
By Nelson Hernandez and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post, 17 February 2006
U.S. and Iraqi authorities discovered an apparent death squad operating within the country's Interior Ministry last month when Iraqi troops prevented a group of highway patrol officers from killing a Sunni Arab man the officers had arrested, an American military spokesman said Thursday.
The 22 men, dressed in the camouflage uniforms of special police commandos, were stopped by chance at an Iraqi army checkpoint in northern Baghdad, according to Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who gave a detailed account of the incident to the Chicago Tribune for an article published Thursday. When the soldiers asked the police what they were doing, they responded bluntly: They were going to execute their captive. Instead, they wound up in jail.
...The incident is the first hard evidence to support the widely held suspicion among Sunni Arabs that vigilantes in the country's Shiite-dominated police force are rounding up Sunnis and killing them.
..."We have always said that men in police and Interior Ministry commando uniforms use Interior Ministry vehicles, raid our houses and arrest our sons," said Adnan Dulaimi, a leader in a coalition of Sunni parties. "After a short time, we find some of them tortured or killed and thrown either on a sidewalk or in the river. We have warned all the officials and the American forces, but they did not respond to our calls until the American forces found this group."
"Discovering this group or gang is one of many similar cases," said Ayad Samarraie, a member of the Sunni-led Iraqi Islamic Party. "I am sure there are other groups who continue doing this."

Iran Was on Edge; Now It's on Top
The war in Iraq has bolstered the regime's influence in the region and made it bolder.
By Megan K. Stack and Borzou Daragahi
LA Times, 18 February 2006
The Islamic government in neighboring Iran watched with trepidation in March 2003 when U.S.-led troops stormed Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime and start remaking the political map of the Mideast.
In retrospect, the Islamic Republic could have celebrated: The war has left America's longtime nemesis with profound influence in the new Iraq and pushed it to the apex of power in the region.
...When Jordan's King Abdullah II warned a year ago with uncharacteristic bluntness that the emergence of a new government in Iraq could create a "Shiite crescent," Shiites in Iraq reacted angrily and Jordanian officials insisted the king had been misunderstood.
But many analysts believe he meant exactly what he said: that a fortified Iranian influence now stretches throughout Iraq, through the Kurdistan region into Turkey, to an ever weaker Syria and down into Lebanon's Hezbollah-dominated south, on Israel's border. Iran's hand also stretches into the heart of the Arabian peninsula through Shiite communities scattered in the Persian Gulf countries.

Suicide Attacks on NATO Escalating in Afghanistan
The campaign appears to be aimed at eroding public support for the alliance's expanded role.
By Paul Watson, Times Staff Writer
Washington Post, 18 February 2006
As NATO troops replace U.S. forces on southern Afghanistan's battlefields, insurgents are waging a suicide bombing campaign that appears aimed at shaking the alliance's public support in Europe and Canada.
Four years after the Taliban regime was toppled, the test of wills threatens to set back the U.S.-led war on terrorism in Afghanistan, American and Afghan analysts say.
Suicide bombings were rare in Afghanistan until last fall, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began debating a move into southern Afghanistan.
The mission is expected to draw NATO into the first ground combat in its 57-year history. Fighting Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in rugged, often mountainous terrain would be a major step beyond NATO's previous peacekeeping missions or the alliance's 78-day air war against Serbia in 1999 to end atrocities in Kosovo. The NATO forces are set to take over from U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan this spring, but will depend on American attack helicopters and other aircraft for support.
The decision to take on the mission came only after considerable debate within the alliance. The formal discussion began in September, about the time insurgents launched a wave of suicide attacks. At least 22 suicide bombers have struck since then, more than double the total for the previous three years.
Bombers have targeted Canadian, German, Italian, Portuguese and other NATO troops, whose main mission has been peacekeeping and building schools and hospitals, not fighting insurgents..
Mir Akbar Ansari, a senior prosecutor in Afghanistan's anti-terrorism courts, believes that the suicide bombers are going after NATO troops because they see them as weak links in the efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.
"I think the rise of attacks in Afghanistan nowadays is aimed at the weak forces, such as Canada and others, and that is because these countries can easily be threatened," Ansari said.
"The terrorists want the Americans to be alone in Afghanistan, so that they can deal with them later. Al Qaeda doesn't want to leave its nest in Afghanistan."

In the Mideast, the Third Way Is a Myth
By Shibley Telhami
LA Times, 17 February 2006
..in this historic moment Islamists remain the most well-organized alternative to governments, a situation that is unlikely to change soon. And current governments are not popular: A survey I conducted in October with Zogby International (in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates) asked Arabs which world leaders they admired most (outside their own countries). The only leader who received double-digit support was French President Jacques Chirac (for his perceived defiance of the United States on Iraq). No sitting Arab ruler received more than 2 percent. A plurality of Arabs believe that the clergy plays "too little" a role in Arab politics. There is a vacuum of leadership that will inevitably cost governments in truly free elections.
This leaves U.S. foreign policy with limited choices. Full electoral democracy in the Middle East will inevitably lead to domination by Islamist groups, leaving the United States to either continue a confrontational approach, with high and dangerous costs for both sides, or to find a way to engage them -- something that has yet to be fully considered. Given this, skepticism about the real aims of these groups should be balanced by openness to the possibility that their aims once they are in power could differ from their aims as opposition groups. This requires partial engagement, patience, and a willingness to allow such new governments space and time to put their goals to the test of reality. Hamas, in fact, could provide a place for testing whether careful engagement leads to moderation.
If we are not willing to engage, there is only one alternative: to rethink the policy of accelerated electoral democracy and focus on a more incremental approach of institutional and economic reform of existing governments. There is no realistic third party that's likely to emerge anytime soon.
Whatever the message of American foreign policy on democracy, it has not been clear in the Middle East. Most Arab governments see the American advocacy of democracy as primarily aimed at pressuring them to cooperate on strategic issues (such as Iraq, the war on terrorism and the Palestinian-Israeli issue) and at diverting attention from the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The majority of Arabs surveyed in our poll do not believe that the United States is serious about the pursuit of democracy and that the Middle East is even less democratic than it was before the Iraq war.
The focus on democracy, and the United States as a key agent in driving it, has been a distraction from other central challenges. The single most significant demographic variable correlated with anti-Americanism in the Arab world is income. In Gaza, where unemployment is nearly 50 percent, per capita income is half of what it was in the late 1990s. Income is related to the quality of education. In Egypt, home to one-quarter of Arabs, Cairo University, the leading Arab university, is now rated 28th -- in Africa. Human rights violations remain widespread in the region, where our own troubling behavior toward prisoners has significantly hampered our ability to lecture others. Concerted efforts in those areas of economic, educational and judicial development, coupled with a strong human rights policy, have a far greater chance to make a difference.
Despite all its troubles, the United States remains the most powerful country, still powerful enough to reshuffle the deck in the Middle East. But it will never be powerful enough to determine where the cards fall.

Democracy or corporate state?
Federal Efforts Take Care of Big Businesses
A series of quiet moves would give industries an unprecedented amount of protection at the expense of civil lawsuits and state regulations.
By Myron Levin and Alan C. Miller
LA Times, 19 February 2006
Near sunrise on a summer morning in 2001, Patrick Parker of Childress, Texas, swerved to avoid a deer and rolled his pickup truck.
The roof of the Ford F-250 crumpled, and Parker didn't stand a chance. His neck broke and, at 37, he was paralyzed from the chest down. He sued, and Ford Motor Co. settled for an undisclosed amount.
"You can imagine what happens when you're belted in and the roof comes down even with the door," Parker said. "Your options are death or quadriplegia."
Parker's case and hundreds like it are behind a beefed-up roof safety standard proposed in August by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But safety regulators tucked into the proposed rule something vehicle makers have long desired: protection from future roof-crush lawsuits like the one Parker filed.
The surprise move seeking legal protection for automakers is one in a series of recent steps by federal agencies to shield leading industries from state regulation and civil lawsuits on the grounds that they conflict with federal authority.
Some of these efforts are already facing court challenges. However, through arcane regulatory actions and legal opinions, the Bush administration is providing industry with an unprecedented degree of protection at the expense of an individual's right to sue and a state's right to regulate.
In other moves by the administration:
The highway safety agency, a branch of the Department of Transportation, is backing auto industry efforts to stop California and other states from regulating tailpipe emissions they link to global warming. The agency said last summer that any such rule would be a backdoor attempt by states to encroach on federal authority to set mileage standards, and should be preempted.
The Justice Department helped industry groups overturn a pollution-control rule in Southern California that would have required cleaner-running buses, garbage trucks and other fleet vehicles.
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has repeatedly sided with national banks to fend off enforcement of consumer protection laws passed by California, New York and other states. The agency argued that it had sole authority to regulate national banks, preempting state restrictions.
The Food and Drug Administration issued a legal opinion last month asserting that FDA-approved labels should give pharmaceutical firms broad immunity from most types of lawsuits. The agency previously had filed briefs seeking dismissal of various cases against drug companies and medical-device manufacturers.
In a letter to President Bush on Thursday, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said, "It appears that there may have been an administration-wide directive for agencies ... to limit corporate liability through the rule-making process and without the consent of Congress."
Administration officials said the initiatives had not been centrally coordinated.
...Preemption initiatives by regulatory agencies have drawn less public attention than controversial legislative moves supported by the White House. With administration support, Congress has restricted class-action suits and banned certain claims against gun makers and vaccine producers.
By embedding similar protections for businesses in regulatory changes, the administration has advanced Bush's repeated pledge to rein in what he calls junk lawsuits.
On Thursday, for example, when the Consumer Product Safety Commission adopted a rule to curb mattress fires, it recommended for the first time that courts bar suits against manufacturers that comply with the new standard.
Schakowsky called the move "part of an unfortunate and troublesome pattern ... to undermine consumer rights."
In addition to trying to bar suits over vehicle roof failures, the highway safety agency in recent months has sought broad legal protection for manufacturers in two other rules on the grounds that lawsuits could undermine its safety goals. One rule related to rear seat belts and the other to visibility requirements for trucks.
No similar exemption clauses have been attached to any other highway safety agency rule changes for 35 years.
Industry executives, lobbyists and lawyers have shuttled through jobs in the highway safety agency and other departments over the years, but in the Bush administration, auto industry ties have grown more conspicuous.
Before becoming White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr. served as a General Motors Corp. vice president and as chief executive of the top auto industry trade group.
The acting head of the highway safety agency, Jacqueline Glassman, was a senior attorney for DaimlerChrysler Corp. before she became the agency's chief counsel in 2002.
Jeffrey A. Rosen, who became general counsel at the Transportation Department in 2003, was a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis, a powerhouse law firm that has defended GM in numerous product-liability suits and represents the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.
...critics say the preemption push contradicts the conservative ideals of a limited federal government and states' rights — principles espoused by Bush.
"This is the most aggressive federal government in the history of the United States," said California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, a Democrat.
Some say the election calendar is spurring the moves.
"The message has been clear in the last couple of years that if industries are going to get protection, they need to get it now," because no one knows what will happen in the next election, said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor.
...In the past, said California's Atty. Gen. Lockyer, when industries challenged state regulations, "the federal government abstained from those lawsuits."
Now, he said, there's "a policy of rubber-stamping whatever business wants, and that's too bad."

Senate Rejects Wiretapping Probe
By Charles Babington and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post, 17 February 2006
The Bush administration helped derail a Senate bid to investigate a warrantless eavesdropping program yesterday after signaling it would reject Congress's request to have former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and other officials testify about the program's legality. The actions underscored a dramatic and possibly permanent drop in momentum for a congressional inquiry, which had seemed likely two months ago.
Senate Democrats said the Republican-led Congress was abdicating its obligations to oversee a controversial program in which the National Security Agency has monitored perhaps thousands of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents and foreign parties without obtaining warrants from a secret court that handles such matters.
"It is more than apparent to me that the White House has applied heavy pressure in recent days, in recent weeks, to prevent the committee from doing its job," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the intelligence committee, said after the panel voted along party lines not to consider his motion for an investigation.

17 February 2006

White House Rejects U.N. Report Calling for Guantanamo Closure
By Maggie Farley
LA Times, 16 February 2006
The White House today rejected a United Nations report saying that the Guantanamo Bay detention center should be closed and that treatment of detainees in some cases amounted to torture, calling it a "rehash" of old allegations.
The U.N. report — officially released today but reported in Monday's Los Angeles Times — concludes that the U.S. treatment of detainees violated their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constituted torture.
It also urged the United States to close the military prison in Cuba and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington's justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.
The report, compiled by five U.N. envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees' lawyers and families, and U.S. officials, followed an 18-month investigation ordered by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The team did not have access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Nonetheless, its findings — notably a conclusion that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques "must be assessed as amounting to torture" — are likely to stoke U.S. and international criticism of the prison.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan defended the treatment of detainees held at the prison at a news conference today.
"These are dangerous terrorists that we're talking about that are there," he said. "We know that Al Qaeda terrorists are trained in trying to disseminate false allegations."
Nearly 500 people captured abroad since 2002 in Afghanistan and elsewhere and described by the U.S. as "enemy combatants" are being held at Guantanamo Bay.
"We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the U.S. government," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and one of the envoys said earlier. "There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture."
"This report is not aimed at criticizing," Nowak said. "It is looking at what international human rights law says about Guantanamo. We are hoping that this report will actually strengthen the dialogue."
SEE ALSO:
UN Calls for Guantánamo Bay to Close
· Try detainees or release them, says report
· Prisoners' treatment 'amounts to torture'
· Bush government dismisses report
The Guardian, 16 February 2006
The United States should close down its detention camp in Guantánamo Bay and give its detainees an independent trial or release them, a United Nations report released today suggests.
The 54-page report called on Washington "to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment".
The UN commission on human rights report was based on interviews with former detainees, public documents, media reports, lawyers and a questionnaire filled out by the US government.
SEE ALSO:
Salon Exclusive: The Abu Ghraib Files
Never-published photos, and an internal Army report, show more Iraqi prisoner abuse -- evidence the government is fighting to hide.
By Mark Benjamin
Salon.com, 16 February 2006
...The photographs we are showing in the accompanying gallery represent a small fraction of these visual materials. None, as far as we know, have been published elsewhere. They include: a naked, handcuffed prisoner in a contorted position; a dead prisoner who had been severely beaten; a prisoner apparently sodomizing himself with an object; and a naked, hooded prisoner standing next to an American officer who is blandly writing a report against a wall. Other photographs depict a bloody cell.
The DVD also includes photographs of guards threatening Iraqi prisoners with dogs, homemade videotapes depicting hooded prisoners being forced to masturbate, and a video showing a mentally disturbed prisoner smashing his head against a door. Oddly, the material also includes numerous photographs of slaughtered animals and mundane images of soldiers traveling around Iraq.
Accompanying texts from the CID investigation provide fairly detailed explanations for many of the photographs, including dates and times and the identities of both Iraqis and Americans. Based on time signatures of the digital cameras used, all the photographs and videos were taken between Oct. 18, 2003, and Dec. 30, 2003.
It is noteworthy that some of the CID documents refer to CIA personnel as interrogators of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But no CIA officers have been prosecuted for any crimes that occurred within the prison, despite the death of at least one Iraqi during a CIA interrogation there.
Human-rights and civil-liberties groups have been locked in a legal battle with the Department of Defense since mid-2004, demanding that it release the remaining visual documents from Abu Ghraib in its possession. It is not clear whether the material obtained by Salon is identical to that sought by these groups, although it seems highly likely that it is.
Barbara Olshansky, deputy legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, "We brought the lawsuit because we wanted to make sure the public knew what the government was doing, particularly at these detention facilities," and, "It is the public's right to know."
...The Pentagon initially argued in federal court that release of more Abu Ghraib images would violate the privacy rights of the Iraqi prisoners. Later, government lawyers argued that public release of the records might "endanger" soldiers in Iraq because publication of the pictures could incite further violence.
The government's argument was rejected by a federal district court last September. Judge Alvin Hellerstein said in his ruling, "Terrorists do not need pretexts for their barbarism." Release of the photographs in the suit has been delayed as the government appeals Hellerstein's decision.
Meanwhile, military trials of the soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib continue. Next month, two more enlisted men, both dog handlers, will face a military court at Fort Meade in Maryland. No high-ranking officer or official has yet been charged in the abuse scandal that blackened America's reputation across the world.
SEE ALSO:
Iraq Seeks Control of Prisons in Wake of Abuse Scandal
By Middle East correspondent Mark Willacy
ABC News, 16 February 2006
Iraq's Human Rights Minister has called on US-led forces to hand over the running of all prisons to the Iraqi Government.
The minister was responding to the broadcast of new images showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib jail.
...The Minister says the Government is very worried about the Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and he is calling on the US-led forces in Iraq to hand them and the running of all jails over to the government in Baghdad.
US forces are believed to be holding about 14,000 detainees in Iraq.

US Pursues "Inoculation" Strategy to Curb Chavez
By REUTERS via NYT, 16 February 2006
Washington wants to curb Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's anti-American influence by lobbying allies to try to expose any anti-democratic policies, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday.
The United States has tried different strategies to counter Chavez, ranging from confronting him to ducking a fight.
In what she termed an ``inoculation'' strategy, Rice said she had sought support from Europe and other Latin American nations to highlight U.S. charges that the populist Chavez abuses his power to target political opponents and business leaders.
``The international community has just got to be much more active in supporting and defending the Venezuelan people,'' Rice told a congressional hearing.
She said she had urged governments to go public with criticism of a treason trial against leaders of a movement, Sumate, that failed to oust Chavez in a recall referendum. ''This kangaroo trial of Sumate is a disgrace,'' she said.
And she urged labor movements to back striking workers.
Speaking late on Thursday night, Chavez questioned what he called the confused signals in Washington's policy toward Caracas and dismissed attempts by Rice to isolate his government in the world's No. 5 oil exporter.
``She's calling foreign ministers, she's called Spain, she has called Brazil, good friends of ours, and Austria, to warn them about Venezuela, to form a block against Venezuela,'' Chavez told reporters outside Miraflores Presidential Palace.
``What could be more aggressive? All we can do is resist this imperialist abuse and defeat it,'' he said.
Flush with revenues from high-priced oil exports and allied with Cuba, Chavez has thrived, is popular in Latin America and has come to symbolize much of the anti-American sentiment in a region that has increasingly opposed U.S. economic policies.
That regional popularity has undercut Rice's efforts to use neighboring nations to curb Chavez, who has used strengthened ties with leftist governments to reject America's free trade ambitions for the hemisphere.
His outspoken criticism of the Bush administration has also angered some U.S. lawmakers.
Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, and influential player on U.S. policy toward Latin America, said Chavez may give $50 million to the Palestinian group Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist organization.
Venezuelan Foreign Ministry officials were not available to comment on those remarks.
Such a move would further strain deteriorating ties between the United States and one of its top oil suppliers after the countries each expelled diplomats this year in a dispute over alleged U.S. espionage.
Chavez has said the United States wants to put sanctions on Venezuela for being a state sponsor of terrorism.

Congressional Eunuchs Exercise Oversight...
Accord in House to Hold Inquiry on Surveillance
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 17 February 2006
Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday that they had agreed to open a Congressional inquiry prompted by the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. But a dispute immediately broke out among committee Republicans over the scope of the inquiry.
Representative Heather A. Wilson, the New Mexico Republican and committee member who called last week for the investigation, said the review "will have multiple avenues, because we want to completely understand the program and move forward."
But an aide to Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who leads the committee, said the inquiry would be much more limited in scope, focusing on whether federal surveillance laws needed to be changed and not on the eavesdropping program itself.
The agreement to conduct an inquiry came as the Senate Intelligence Committee put off a vote on conducting its own investigation after the White House, reversing course, agreed to open discussions about changing federal surveillance law. Senate Democrats accused Republicans of bowing to White House pressure.
For weeks, the Bush administration has been strongly resisting calls from Democrats and some Republicans for a full review into the National Security Agency's surveillance program, saying such inquiries are unnecessary and risked disclosing national security information that could help Al Qaeda.
...But Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Mr. Hoekstra, said: "This is not an inquiry into the program. It's a comprehensive review of the FISA statute."

Despite Fears, a Dubai Company Will Help Run Ports in New York
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
NYT, 17 February 2006
The Bush administration dismissed the security concerns of local officials yesterday and restated its approval of a deal that will give a company based in Dubai a major role in operating ports in and around New York City.
Representatives of the White House and the Treasury Department said they had given their approval for Dubai Ports World to do business in the United States after a rigorous review. The decision, they said, was final.
Dubai Ports World is buying the British company that currently operates the cruise-ship terminal on the West Side of Manhattan, one of the biggest cargo terminals in New York Harbor, and terminals in Philadelphia, Baltimore and other big ports.
Several lawmakers, including Representative Peter T. King of Long Island, who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Senator Charles E. Schumer, have criticized the administration for its approval of the deal, saying it was done too quickly and without enough scrutiny of the ramifications for security at American ports.
"In the post-9/11 world, there should have been a presumption against this company," said Mr. King, a Republican. He added that people in the intelligence community had told him they had concerns about how the company operated the port of Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates.

Bipartisan Support Emerges for Federal Whistle-Blowers
By SCOTT SHANE
NYT, 17 February 2006
Even as the Bush administration presses an aggressive campaign against leaks, some Congressional Republicans are joining Democrats in supporting government employees who say they have been punished for disclosing sensitive information on reported abuses.
Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, is leading the defense of whistle-blowers who have spoken out about abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, illicit federal wiretapping and other matters. "It's absolutely essential that we have a system that allows people to speak out about abuses, especially in the national security realm," Mr. Shays said in an interview.
...In recent weeks, both Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales have called for vigorous pursuit and prosecution of leakers. But the disclosure of the N.S.A. program has prompted deeply mixed feelings in Congress, including on the part of Mr. Shays.
"I don't think it should have been made public, but I do think it should be dealt with," Mr. Shays said, referring to assertions that eavesdropping without court warrants violates the law.
Mr. Shays praised the "great courage" of Specialist Samuel J. Provance, an Army intelligence officer who was demoted and stripped of his clearance after speaking out in 2004 about the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. Specialist Provance told the subcommittee that he had repeatedly tried to tell superiors about the physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi inmates at the prison. But as the abuse came to light and a Defense Department investigation began, he concluded that officials were determined to limit the blame to a small number of military police officers while covering up the role of military intelligence officers and their superiors.
"When I made clear to my superiors that I was troubled about what had happened, I was shown that the honor of my unit and the Army depended on either withholding the truth or outright lies," Specialist Provance said.
Specialist Provance, who eventually spoke to ABC News and other members of the news media about Abu Ghraib, said his military career had been derailed. His duties in Germany, he said, now consist of "picking up trash and guard duty," a situation that Mr. Shays called "amazing."
Another witness, Russell Tice, a former security administration employee, surprised some members of Congress by disclosing that he was advised by the agency that he could not discuss certain top secret "special access programs" even with members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in closed session.
A Jan. 9 letter to Mr. Tice from a security agency official, given to the subcommittee, informed him that neither the members nor the staff of the Intelligence Committees had the necessary clearances to be told of the special-access programs. Mr. Tice said there were "illegalities and unconstitutional activity" in the special-access programs that were not related to the eavesdropping that he would like to describe to Congress in a properly secure setting.

Bush’s Tax and Budget Policies Fail to Promote Economic Growth
By John Irons and Lee Price
CVenter for American Progress, 16 February 2006
Read full report
The economic evidence is clear: the president’s tax changes have not worked to improve the health of the economy. Business investment, employment, and wages have all underperformed past recoveries. Furthermore, the choices made in the president’s budget put at risk the future health of the nation by running massive deficits and by cutting back on important national investments in education, science, and energy.
Tax Policy
Bush’s tax policy has created a ballooning federal budget deficit that threatens our future prosperity. Between early 2001 and September 2005, tax changes reduced revenue by $870 billion. The tax cuts that favor the most prosperous cannot be defended on grounds of fairness. But the president has tried to justify them as promoting a stronger, more prosperous economy for everyone. In fact, however, the tax changes since 2001 have failed to spur business investment, jobs, wages, or overall growth.
The rhetoric for the tax cuts was appealing: by taxing income less, businesses would be encouraged to make new investments and people would work harder, knowing that they would keep more of what they earn. It has not worked out that way. Business investment has failed to recover at a normal rate and labor force participation has fallen. Rather than people coming into the workforce at higher rates, the opposite has happened. If the workforce had grown with the population since 2001, there would be 3 million more people between the ages of 20 and 65 in the workforce.
Business Investment
According to proponents of the tax cuts, cutting corporate income taxes and personal income tax rates was supposed to “improve the investment incentives of America’s businesses.” Small business owners, especially, were supposed to respond to lower individual tax rates by investing more and hiring new workers. In addition, more than $200 billion of cuts were specifically tied to business investment, reducing the cost as a way to encourage purchases of equipment, software, structures and machinery.
The cuts were an utter failure. Business investment has always recovered after a recession, but this was the most sluggish recovery in memory. As a result, business investment has grown 65% more slowly since the peak of the business cycle five years ago than the average for similar periods after nine cycle peaks in the last 60 years. (A business cycle includes a recession and the expansion until the next recession. The peak of a business cycle occurs just before a recession.)

Bush Pushes Consumer Driven Health Care
By DEB RIECHMANN
AP via Washington Post, 16 February 2006
President Bush argued Thursday that the United States needs a health care system in which patients pay more directly for their care, because that will turn them into comparison shoppers whose interest in a good deal will drive costs down.
Bush said the current system, in which employers and insurance companies are the most involved in paying health care bills, makes individuals less engaged in the cost of the procedures they get.
"When somebody else pays the bills, rarely do you ask price or ask the cost of something," the president said during a panel discussion on his health care initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services. "The problem with that is that there's no kind of market force, there's no consumer advocacy for reasonable price when somebody else pays the bills. One of the reasons why we're having inflation in health care is because there is no sense of market."
Bush is making a series of appearances this month to highlight priorities he outlined in his State of the Union address. It was the second day in a row that the president emphasized the need for changes to the nation's health care system. On Wednesday, he pushed his call for an expansion of health savings accounts at the headquarters of the Wendy's fast-food chain in Ohio.
Health savings accounts were a big theme Thursday, as well.
Bush wants to encourage more people to open health savings accounts by increasing the tax advantages.
People who open such accounts also must buy a high-deductible insurance policy for catastrophic expenses that requires an individual to pay for at least the first $1,050 in expenses and families the first $2,100. Bush wants to let people put enough money in their health savings accounts to cover all their health insurance costs, not just the deductibles as allowed now. This would allow them to set aside more money tax-free.
Democrats argue that the accounts don't help those in need. They say it takes money to pay premiums on the high-deductible insurance policies, and that the working poor do not have extra money to set aside in the accounts.

Glaciers Flow to Sea at a Faster Pace, Study Says
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYT, 17 February 2006
The amount of ice flowing into the sea from large glaciers in southern Greenland has almost doubled in the last 10 years, possibly requiring scientists to increase estimates of how much the world's oceans could rise under the influence of global warming, according to a study being published today in the journal Science.
The study said there was evidence that the rise in flows would soon spread to glaciers farther north in Greenland, which is covered with an ancient ice sheet nearly two miles thick in places, and which holds enough water to raise global sea levels 20 feet or more should it all flow into the ocean.
The study compared various satellite measurements of the creeping ice in 1996, 2000 and 2005, and was done by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Kansas.

Specter Denies Funneling Money for Lobbyist
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
NYT, 17 February 2006
Senator Arlen Specter defended himself and a member of his staff on Thursday after the disclosure that clients of a lobbyist married to the staff member had received money through the senator's actions.
Vicki Siegel Herson, who until recently was Mr. Specter's legislative assistant on the Appropriations Committee, is married to Michael Herson, a top executive of the lobbying firm American Defense International.
Mr. Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and his staff confirmed that six of Mr. Herson's clients received a total of about $50 million over the last four years through items Mr. Specter inserted into military appropriations bills in a process known as "earmarking." The earmarks were first reported Thursday in USA Today.
In a conference call with reporters Thursday afternoon, Mr. Specter said that neither he nor his aide, who uses her maiden name professionally, had violated any ethics rules.
"Vicki Siegel's husband did not lobby me or anybody in my office," Mr. Specter said, adding that she left her position with the committee six months ago for unrelated personal reasons. She remains on his staff.
Still, Mr. Specter said he would conduct a further inquiry into the possibility that Ms. Siegel might have knowingly played a role in allocating federal money to one of her husband's clients.

Illinois Student Paper Prints Muslim Cartoons, and Reaction Is Swift
By MONICA DAVEY
NYT, 17 February 2006
Since the morning the cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad were republished in the student newspaper at the University of Illinois here, response has been swift and split.
Muslim students and others held a protest on the main quadrangle on Tuesday, saying they were stunned and hurt by The Daily Illini's publication on Feb. 9 of the images that had stirred so much violence and caused so much pain in other parts of the world. Some members of The Daily Illini staff said they were furious, too, and in Wednesday's editions, the publisher announced that the editor in chief and opinions page editor had been suspended, pending an investigation into how the cartoons had ended up in the paper.
"This has gotten crazy," said Acton H. Gorton, 25, the suspended editor in chief who decided to run 6 of the 12 cartoons even though he said he found them "bigoted and insensitive." Mr. Gorton received calls for his resignation but also a deluge of praise, including comments of support from students as he walked on campus. "We did this to raise a healthy dialogue about an important issue that is in the news and so that people would learn more about Islam. Now, I'm basically fired."
Most major American newspapers, including The New York Times, have not published the cartoons, which were first published in a Danish newspaper last September.

On Private Web Site, Wal-Mart Chief Talks Tough
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and MICHAEL BARBARO
NYT, 17 February 2006
In a confidential, internal Web site for Wal-Mart's managers, the company's chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., seemed to have a rare, unscripted moment when one manager asked him why "the largest company on the planet cannot offer some type of medical retirement benefits?"
Mr. Scott first argues that the cost of such benefits would leave Wal-Mart at a competitive disadvantage but then, clearly annoyed, he suggests that the store manager is disloyal and should consider quitting.
The Web site, which Mr. Scott uses to communicate his tough standards to thousands of far-flung managers, gives a rare glimpse into the concerns that are roiling Wal-Mart's retailing empire, from the company's sagging stock price to how it treats its workers. Judging by the managers' questions, Mr. Scott has an internal public relations challenge that in some ways mirrors the challenge he faces from outside critics.
And while Mr. Scott's postings are usually written in a careful, even guarded manner, they can often be revealing — for example, showing a defensiveness and testiness with critics — that Mr. Scott normally keeps under wraps.
Copies of Mr. Scott's postings covering two years were made available to The New York Times by Wal-Mart Watch, a group backed by unions and foundations that is pressing Wal-Mart to improve its wages and benefits. Wal-Mart Watch said it received the postings from a disgruntled manager. While the existence of the Web site and Mr. Scott's participation in it have been known, transcripts have never been made public before.

"The Wal-Mart Effect"
Charles Fishman interviewed on the Diane Rehm Show, 16 February 2006
A look at how the world's largest retailer is transforming the American economy.
Guests
Charles Fishman, senior writer, Fast Company

CIA Terror Expert Charges Politicized Intelligence
Paul Pillar interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, 16 February 2006
The Bush administration misused intelligence to justify decisions like going to war in Iraq, according to former senior CIA official Paul Pillar. From 2000 to 2005, Pillar was the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.
Read Pillar's Article

17 February 2006

White House Rejects U.N. Report Calling for Guantanamo Closure
By Maggie Farley
LA Times, 16 February 2006
The White House today rejected a United Nations report saying that the Guantanamo Bay detention center should be closed and that treatment of detainees in some cases amounted to torture, calling it a "rehash" of old allegations.
The U.N. report — officially released today but reported in Monday's Los Angeles Times — concludes that the U.S. treatment of detainees violated their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constituted torture.
It also urged the United States to close the military prison in Cuba and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington's justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.
The report, compiled by five U.N. envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees' lawyers and families, and U.S. officials, followed an 18-month investigation ordered by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The team did not have access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Nonetheless, its findings — notably a conclusion that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques "must be assessed as amounting to torture" — are likely to stoke U.S. and international criticism of the prison.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan defended the treatment of detainees held at the prison at a news conference today.
"These are dangerous terrorists that we're talking about that are there," he said. "We know that Al Qaeda terrorists are trained in trying to disseminate false allegations."
Nearly 500 people captured abroad since 2002 in Afghanistan and elsewhere and described by the U.S. as "enemy combatants" are being held at Guantanamo Bay.
"We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the U.S. government," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and one of the envoys said earlier. "There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture."
"This report is not aimed at criticizing," Nowak said. "It is looking at what international human rights law says about Guantanamo. We are hoping that this report will actually strengthen the dialogue."
SEE ALSO:
UN Calls for Guantánamo Bay to Close
· Try detainees or release them, says report
· Prisoners' treatment 'amounts to torture'
· Bush government dismisses report
The Guardian, 16 February 2006
The United States should close down its detention camp in Guantánamo Bay and give its detainees an independent trial or release them, a United Nations report released today suggests.
The 54-page report called on Washington "to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment".
The UN commission on human rights report was based on interviews with former detainees, public documents, media reports, lawyers and a questionnaire filled out by the US government.
SEE ALSO:
Salon Exclusive: The Abu Ghraib Files
Never-published photos, and an internal Army report, show more Iraqi prisoner abuse -- evidence the government is fighting to hide.
By Mark Benjamin
Salon.com, 16 February 2006
...The photographs we are showing in the accompanying gallery represent a small fraction of these visual materials. None, as far as we know, have been published elsewhere. They include: a naked, handcuffed prisoner in a contorted position; a dead prisoner who had been severely beaten; a prisoner apparently sodomizing himself with an object; and a naked, hooded prisoner standing next to an American officer who is blandly writing a report against a wall. Other photographs depict a bloody cell.
The DVD also includes photographs of guards threatening Iraqi prisoners with dogs, homemade videotapes depicting hooded prisoners being forced to masturbate, and a video showing a mentally disturbed prisoner smashing his head against a door. Oddly, the material also includes numerous photographs of slaughtered animals and mundane images of soldiers traveling around Iraq.
Accompanying texts from the CID investigation provide fairly detailed explanations for many of the photographs, including dates and times and the identities of both Iraqis and Americans. Based on time signatures of the digital cameras used, all the photographs and videos were taken between Oct. 18, 2003, and Dec. 30, 2003.
It is noteworthy that some of the CID documents refer to CIA personnel as interrogators of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But no CIA officers have been prosecuted for any crimes that occurred within the prison, despite the death of at least one Iraqi during a CIA interrogation there.
Human-rights and civil-liberties groups have been locked in a legal battle with the Department of Defense since mid-2004, demanding that it release the remaining visual documents from Abu Ghraib in its possession. It is not clear whether the material obtained by Salon is identical to that sought by these groups, although it seems highly likely that it is.
Barbara Olshansky, deputy legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, "We brought the lawsuit because we wanted to make sure the public knew what the government was doing, particularly at these detention facilities," and, "It is the public's right to know."
...The Pentagon initially argued in federal court that release of more Abu Ghraib images would violate the privacy rights of the Iraqi prisoners. Later, government lawyers argued that public release of the records might "endanger" soldiers in Iraq because publication of the pictures could incite further violence.
The government's argument was rejected by a federal district court last September. Judge Alvin Hellerstein said in his ruling, "Terrorists do not need pretexts for their barbarism." Release of the photographs in the suit has been delayed as the government appeals Hellerstein's decision.
Meanwhile, military trials of the soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib continue. Next month, two more enlisted men, both dog handlers, will face a military court at Fort Meade in Maryland. No high-ranking officer or official has yet been charged in the abuse scandal that blackened America's reputation across the world.
SEE ALSO:
Iraq Seeks Control of Prisons in Wake of Abuse Scandal
By Middle East correspondent Mark Willacy
ABC News, 16 February 2006
Iraq's Human Rights Minister has called on US-led forces to hand over the running of all prisons to the Iraqi Government.
The minister was responding to the broadcast of new images showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib jail.
...The Minister says the Government is very worried about the Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and he is calling on the US-led forces in Iraq to hand them and the running of all jails over to the government in Baghdad.
US forces are believed to be holding about 14,000 detainees in Iraq.

US Pursues "Inoculation" Strategy to Curb Chavez
By REUTERS via NYT, 16 February 2006
Washington wants to curb Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's anti-American influence by lobbying allies to try to expose any anti-democratic policies, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday.
The United States has tried different strategies to counter Chavez, ranging from confronting him to ducking a fight.
In what she termed an ``inoculation'' strategy, Rice said she had sought support from Europe and other Latin American nations to highlight U.S. charges that the populist Chavez abuses his power to target political opponents and business leaders.
``The international community has just got to be much more active in supporting and defending the Venezuelan people,'' Rice told a congressional hearing.
She said she had urged governments to go public with criticism of a treason trial against leaders of a movement, Sumate, that failed to oust Chavez in a recall referendum. ''This kangaroo trial of Sumate is a disgrace,'' she said.
And she urged labor movements to back striking workers.
Speaking late on Thursday night, Chavez questioned what he called the confused signals in Washington's policy toward Caracas and dismissed attempts by Rice to isolate his government in the world's No. 5 oil exporter.
``She's calling foreign ministers, she's called Spain, she has called Brazil, good friends of ours, and Austria, to warn them about Venezuela, to form a block against Venezuela,'' Chavez told reporters outside Miraflores Presidential Palace.
``What could be more aggressive? All we can do is resist this imperialist abuse and defeat it,'' he said.
Flush with revenues from high-priced oil exports and allied with Cuba, Chavez has thrived, is popular in Latin America and has come to symbolize much of the anti-American sentiment in a region that has increasingly opposed U.S. economic policies.
That regional popularity has undercut Rice's efforts to use neighboring nations to curb Chavez, who has used strengthened ties with leftist governments to reject America's free trade ambitions for the hemisphere.
His outspoken criticism of the Bush administration has also angered some U.S. lawmakers.
Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, and influential player on U.S. policy toward Latin America, said Chavez may give $50 million to the Palestinian group Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist organization.
Venezuelan Foreign Ministry officials were not available to comment on those remarks.
Such a move would further strain deteriorating ties between the United States and one of its top oil suppliers after the countries each expelled diplomats this year in a dispute over alleged U.S. espionage.
Chavez has said the United States wants to put sanctions on Venezuela for being a state sponsor of terrorism.

Congressional Eunuchs Exercise Oversight...
Accord in House to Hold Inquiry on Surveillance
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 17 February 2006
Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday that they had agreed to open a Congressional inquiry prompted by the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. But a dispute immediately broke out among committee Republicans over the scope of the inquiry.
Representative Heather A. Wilson, the New Mexico Republican and committee member who called last week for the investigation, said the review "will have multiple avenues, because we want to completely understand the program and move forward."
But an aide to Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who leads the committee, said the inquiry would be much more limited in scope, focusing on whether federal surveillance laws needed to be changed and not on the eavesdropping program itself.
The agreement to conduct an inquiry came as the Senate Intelligence Committee put off a vote on conducting its own investigation after the White House, reversing course, agreed to open discussions about changing federal surveillance law. Senate Democrats accused Republicans of bowing to White House pressure.
For weeks, the Bush administration has been strongly resisting calls from Democrats and some Republicans for a full review into the National Security Agency's surveillance program, saying such inquiries are unnecessary and risked disclosing national security information that could help Al Qaeda.
...But Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Mr. Hoekstra, said: "This is not an inquiry into the program. It's a comprehensive review of the FISA statute."

Despite Fears, a Dubai Company Will Help Run Ports in New York
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
NYT, 17 February 2006
The Bush administration dismissed the security concerns of local officials yesterday and restated its approval of a deal that will give a company based in Dubai a major role in operating ports in and around New York City.
Representatives of the White House and the Treasury Department said they had given their approval for Dubai Ports World to do business in the United States after a rigorous review. The decision, they said, was final.
Dubai Ports World is buying the British company that currently operates the cruise-ship terminal on the West Side of Manhattan, one of the biggest cargo terminals in New York Harbor, and terminals in Philadelphia, Baltimore and other big ports.
Several lawmakers, including Representative Peter T. King of Long Island, who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Senator Charles E. Schumer, have criticized the administration for its approval of the deal, saying it was done too quickly and without enough scrutiny of the ramifications for security at American ports.
"In the post-9/11 world, there should have been a presumption against this company," said Mr. King, a Republican. He added that people in the intelligence community had told him they had concerns about how the company operated the port of Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates.

Bipartisan Support Emerges for Federal Whistle-Blowers
By SCOTT SHANE
NYT, 17 February 2006
Even as the Bush administration presses an aggressive campaign against leaks, some Congressional Republicans are joining Democrats in supporting government employees who say they have been punished for disclosing sensitive information on reported abuses.
Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, is leading the defense of whistle-blowers who have spoken out about abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, illicit federal wiretapping and other matters. "It's absolutely essential that we have a system that allows people to speak out about abuses, especially in the national security realm," Mr. Shays said in an interview.
...In recent weeks, both Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales have called for vigorous pursuit and prosecution of leakers. But the disclosure of the N.S.A. program has prompted deeply mixed feelings in Congress, including on the part of Mr. Shays.
"I don't think it should have been made public, but I do think it should be dealt with," Mr. Shays said, referring to assertions that eavesdropping without court warrants violates the law.
Mr. Shays praised the "great courage" of Specialist Samuel J. Provance, an Army intelligence officer who was demoted and stripped of his clearance after speaking out in 2004 about the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. Specialist Provance told the subcommittee that he had repeatedly tried to tell superiors about the physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi inmates at the prison. But as the abuse came to light and a Defense Department investigation began, he concluded that officials were determined to limit the blame to a small number of military police officers while covering up the role of military intelligence officers and their superiors.
"When I made clear to my superiors that I was troubled about what had happened, I was shown that the honor of my unit and the Army depended on either withholding the truth or outright lies," Specialist Provance said.
Specialist Provance, who eventually spoke to ABC News and other members of the news media about Abu Ghraib, said his military career had been derailed. His duties in Germany, he said, now consist of "picking up trash and guard duty," a situation that Mr. Shays called "amazing."
Another witness, Russell Tice, a former security administration employee, surprised some members of Congress by disclosing that he was advised by the agency that he could not discuss certain top secret "special access programs" even with members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in closed session.
A Jan. 9 letter to Mr. Tice from a security agency official, given to the subcommittee, informed him that neither the members nor the staff of the Intelligence Committees had the necessary clearances to be told of the special-access programs. Mr. Tice said there were "illegalities and unconstitutional activity" in the special-access programs that were not related to the eavesdropping that he would like to describe to Congress in a properly secure setting.

Bush’s Tax and Budget Policies Fail to Promote Economic Growth
By John Irons and Lee Price
CVenter for American Progress, 16 February 2006
Read full report
The economic evidence is clear: the president’s tax changes have not worked to improve the health of the economy. Business investment, employment, and wages have all underperformed past recoveries. Furthermore, the choices made in the president’s budget put at risk the future health of the nation by running massive deficits and by cutting back on important national investments in education, science, and energy.
Tax Policy
Bush’s tax policy has created a ballooning federal budget deficit that threatens our future prosperity. Between early 2001 and September 2005, tax changes reduced revenue by $870 billion. The tax cuts that favor the most prosperous cannot be defended on grounds of fairness. But the president has tried to justify them as promoting a stronger, more prosperous economy for everyone. In fact, however, the tax changes since 2001 have failed to spur business investment, jobs, wages, or overall growth.
The rhetoric for the tax cuts was appealing: by taxing income less, businesses would be encouraged to make new investments and people would work harder, knowing that they would keep more of what they earn. It has not worked out that way. Business investment has failed to recover at a normal rate and labor force participation has fallen. Rather than people coming into the workforce at higher rates, the opposite has happened. If the workforce had grown with the population since 2001, there would be 3 million more people between the ages of 20 and 65 in the workforce.
Business Investment
According to proponents of the tax cuts, cutting corporate income taxes and personal income tax rates was supposed to “improve the investment incentives of America’s businesses.” Small business owners, especially, were supposed to respond to lower individual tax rates by investing more and hiring new workers. In addition, more than $200 billion of cuts were specifically tied to business investment, reducing the cost as a way to encourage purchases of equipment, software, structures and machinery.
The cuts were an utter failure. Business investment has always recovered after a recession, but this was the most sluggish recovery in memory. As a result, business investment has grown 65% more slowly since the peak of the business cycle five years ago than the average for similar periods after nine cycle peaks in the last 60 years. (A business cycle includes a recession and the expansion until the next recession. The peak of a business cycle occurs just before a recession.)

Bush Pushes Consumer Driven Health Care
By DEB RIECHMANN
AP via Washington Post, 16 February 2006
President Bush argued Thursday that the United States needs a health care system in which patients pay more directly for their care, because that will turn them into comparison shoppers whose interest in a good deal will drive costs down.
Bush said the current system, in which employers and insurance companies are the most involved in paying health care bills, makes individuals less engaged in the cost of the procedures they get.
"When somebody else pays the bills, rarely do you ask price or ask the cost of something," the president said during a panel discussion on his health care initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services. "The problem with that is that there's no kind of market force, there's no consumer advocacy for reasonable price when somebody else pays the bills. One of the reasons why we're having inflation in health care is because there is no sense of market."
Bush is making a series of appearances this month to highlight priorities he outlined in his State of the Union address. It was the second day in a row that the president emphasized the need for changes to the nation's health care system. On Wednesday, he pushed his call for an expansion of health savings accounts at the headquarters of the Wendy's fast-food chain in Ohio.
Health savings accounts were a big theme Thursday, as well.
Bush wants to encourage more people to open health savings accounts by increasing the tax advantages.
People who open such accounts also must buy a high-deductible insurance policy for catastrophic expenses that requires an individual to pay for at least the first $1,050 in expenses and families the first $2,100. Bush wants to let people put enough money in their health savings accounts to cover all their health insurance costs, not just the deductibles as allowed now. This would allow them to set aside more money tax-free.
Democrats argue that the accounts don't help those in need. They say it takes money to pay premiums on the high-deductible insurance policies, and that the working poor do not have extra money to set aside in the accounts.

Glaciers Flow to Sea at a Faster Pace, Study Says
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYT, 17 February 2006
The amount of ice flowing into the sea from large glaciers in southern Greenland has almost doubled in the last 10 years, possibly requiring scientists to increase estimates of how much the world's oceans could rise under the influence of global warming, according to a study being published today in the journal Science.
The study said there was evidence that the rise in flows would soon spread to glaciers farther north in Greenland, which is covered with an ancient ice sheet nearly two miles thick in places, and which holds enough water to raise global sea levels 20 feet or more should it all flow into the ocean.
The study compared various satellite measurements of the creeping ice in 1996, 2000 and 2005, and was done by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Kansas.

Specter Denies Funneling Money for Lobbyist
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
NYT, 17 February 2006
Senator Arlen Specter defended himself and a member of his staff on Thursday after the disclosure that clients of a lobbyist married to the staff member had received money through the senator's actions.
Vicki Siegel Herson, who until recently was Mr. Specter's legislative assistant on the Appropriations Committee, is married to Michael Herson, a top executive of the lobbying firm American Defense International.
Mr. Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and his staff confirmed that six of Mr. Herson's clients received a total of about $50 million over the last four years through items Mr. Specter inserted into military appropriations bills in a process known as "earmarking." The earmarks were first reported Thursday in USA Today.
In a conference call with reporters Thursday afternoon, Mr. Specter said that neither he nor his aide, who uses her maiden name professionally, had violated any ethics rules.
"Vicki Siegel's husband did not lobby me or anybody in my office," Mr. Specter said, adding that she left her position with the committee six months ago for unrelated personal reasons. She remains on his staff.
Still, Mr. Specter said he would conduct a further inquiry into the possibility that Ms. Siegel might have knowingly played a role in allocating federal money to one of her husband's clients.

Illinois Student Paper Prints Muslim Cartoons, and Reaction Is Swift
By MONICA DAVEY
NYT, 17 February 2006
Since the morning the cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad were republished in the student newspaper at the University of Illinois here, response has been swift and split.
Muslim students and others held a protest on the main quadrangle on Tuesday, saying they were stunned and hurt by The Daily Illini's publication on Feb. 9 of the images that had stirred so much violence and caused so much pain in other parts of the world. Some members of The Daily Illini staff said they were furious, too, and in Wednesday's editions, the publisher announced that the editor in chief and opinions page editor had been suspended, pending an investigation into how the cartoons had ended up in the paper.
"This has gotten crazy," said Acton H. Gorton, 25, the suspended editor in chief who decided to run 6 of the 12 cartoons even though he said he found them "bigoted and insensitive." Mr. Gorton received calls for his resignation but also a deluge of praise, including comments of support from students as he walked on campus. "We did this to raise a healthy dialogue about an important issue that is in the news and so that people would learn more about Islam. Now, I'm basically fired."
Most major American newspapers, including The New York Times, have not published the cartoons, which were first published in a Danish newspaper last September.

On Private Web Site, Wal-Mart Chief Talks Tough
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and MICHAEL BARBARO
NYT, 17 February 2006
In a confidential, internal Web site for Wal-Mart's managers, the company's chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., seemed to have a rare, unscripted moment when one manager asked him why "the largest company on the planet cannot offer some type of medical retirement benefits?"
Mr. Scott first argues that the cost of such benefits would leave Wal-Mart at a competitive disadvantage but then, clearly annoyed, he suggests that the store manager is disloyal and should consider quitting.
The Web site, which Mr. Scott uses to communicate his tough standards to thousands of far-flung managers, gives a rare glimpse into the concerns that are roiling Wal-Mart's retailing empire, from the company's sagging stock price to how it treats its workers. Judging by the managers' questions, Mr. Scott has an internal public relations challenge that in some ways mirrors the challenge he faces from outside critics.
And while Mr. Scott's postings are usually written in a careful, even guarded manner, they can often be revealing — for example, showing a defensiveness and testiness with critics — that Mr. Scott normally keeps under wraps.
Copies of Mr. Scott's postings covering two years were made available to The New York Times by Wal-Mart Watch, a group backed by unions and foundations that is pressing Wal-Mart to improve its wages and benefits. Wal-Mart Watch said it received the postings from a disgruntled manager. While the existence of the Web site and Mr. Scott's participation in it have been known, transcripts have never been made public before.

"The Wal-Mart Effect"
Charles Fishman interviewed on the Diane Rehm Show, 16 February 2006
A look at how the world's largest retailer is transforming the American economy.
Guests
Charles Fishman, senior writer, Fast Company

CIA Terror Expert Charges Politicized Intelligence
Paul Pillar interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, 16 February 2006
The Bush administration misused intelligence to justify decisions like going to war in Iraq, according to former senior CIA official Paul Pillar. From 2000 to 2005, Pillar was the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.
Read Pillar's Article

16 February 2006

A White House Failure to Communicate and Respond to Events? That Can't Be Good.
By Ronald Brownstein and Peter Wallsten
LA Times, 16 February 2006
Throughout his presidency, George W. Bush has been admired for his ability to set clear goals and doggedly follow a path to achieve them.
But Bush and his White House often seem to struggle when pressed to react to unexpected events, a difficulty highlighted Wednesday by the continuing furor over Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident and a congressional committee's sharply critical report about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
...Bush and his aides "are not very good at … quick reaction, on-the-fly decision-making," Kettl said.
The Cheney shooting and the Katrina response have raised tough questions about what the president knows, when he knows it and how the White House shares information with elected officials and the public.
The hunting imbroglio has sparked a related question about Bush's management style: whether he has provided the vice president too much autonomy in an administration in which Cheney has wielded as much influence as any second in command.
White House counselor Dan Bartlett rejected the suggestion that the two controversies pointed to communication failures among Bush and his aides. "That's just over-interpreting," he said.
Yet other observers, in both parties, maintained the incidents underscored concerns about Bush's willingness and capacity to react to unanticipated challenges.
"If the buck stops with you, you are the person who has to take charge," said Leon E. Panetta, a White House chief of staff under President Clinton. "I get the impression in this White House that the buck sometimes stops everywhere else but [with] the president…. Frankly, that mentality leads to nothing but trouble."
Some senior Republicans, including top officials from previous GOP administrations, privately said they shared Panetta's views.
One GOP fundraiser close to the White House said he thought the administration's response to the news that Cheney had mistakenly shot a fellow hunter Saturday so closely replicated the Katrina experience that he wondered, "Is this a bad dream we are seeing again?"
"There is a pattern here," said the fundraiser, who requested anonymity when discussing the administration's workings.
For Bush, the Cheney and Katrina issues jab at exposed political nerves.
The charge that the White House waited too long to release information about the hunting accident came as polls found that the percentage of Americans who considered Bush trustworthy had declined since his first term.
Likewise, the percentage of Americans who said they considered Bush a strong leader had fallen before Wednesday's report by a House special investigating committee criticized the administration's response to Katrina.
"All of this intensifies existing concerns that the public has about this administration," said Andy Kohut, executive director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a nonpartisan polling organization.
From his initial campaign for Texas governor in 1994, Bush has excelled at establishing and adhering to long-term plans. He is rigorous about sustaining a message or limiting his legislative agenda to a few priorities. But that laser-like focus can sometimes leave the administration unable to quickly recognize the significance of events that don't fit into their blueprint, critics say.
"That's just not how they think," said Ron Klain, a former Clinton administration aide.
White House aides said Bush could be an aggressive and skeptical questioner, especially on issues about which he cared passionately.
But the question of whether the president receives a wide enough range of information has persisted for years...

Mr. Vice President, It's Time to Go
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 16 February 2006
It's time for Dick Cheney to step down — for the sake of the country and for the sake of the Bush administration.
Mr. Cheney's bumbling conduct at the upscale Armstrong Ranch in South Texas seemed hilarious at first. But when we learned that Harry Whittington had suffered a mild heart attack after being shot by the vice president in a hunting accident, it became clear that a more sober assessment of the fiasco at the ranch and, inevitably, Mr. Cheney's controversial and even bizarre behavior as vice president was in order.
There's a reason Dick Cheney is obsessive about shunning the spotlight. His record is not the kind you want to hold up for intense scrutiny.
More than anyone else, he was fanatical about massaging and distorting the intelligence that plunged us into the flaming quagmire of Iraq. He insisted that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was hot on the trail of nukes. He pounded away at the false suggestion that Iraq was somehow linked to Al Qaeda. And he spread the word that the war he wanted so badly would be a cakewalk.
"I really do believe," he told Tim Russert, "that we will be greeted as liberators."
Well, he got his war.
...Matters went haywire, of course, when he shot Mr. Whittington...
That was the moment when the legend of the tough, hawkish, take-no-prisoners vice president began morphing into the less-than-heroic image of a reckless, scowling incompetent who mistook his buddy for a bird.
This story is never going away. Harry Whittington is Dick Cheney's Monica. When Mr. Whittington dies (hopefully many years from now, and from natural causes), he will be remembered as the hunting companion who was shot by the vice president of the United States. This tale will stick to Mr. Cheney like Krazy Glue, and that's bad news for the Bush administration.
The shooting and Mr. Cheney's highhanded behavior in its immediate aftermath fit perfectly with the stereotype of him as a powerful but dangerous figure who is viewed by many as a dark force within the administration. He doesn't even give lip service to the idea of transparency in his public or private life. This is the man who fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep his White House meetings with energy industry honchos as secret as the Manhattan Project. (Along the way he went duck hunting at a private camp in rural Louisiana with Justice Antonin Scalia.)
This is also the man whose closest and most trusted aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice as a result of the investigation into the outing of a C.I.A. undercover operative, Valerie Wilson.
Mr. Cheney is arrogant, defiant and at times blatantly vulgar. He once told Senator Patrick Leahy to perform a crude act upon himself.
A vice president who insists on writing his own rules, who shudders at the very idea of transparency in government, whose judgment on crucial policy issues has been as wildly off the mark (and infinitely more tragic) as his actions in Texas over the weekend, and who has now become an object of relentless ridicule, cannot by any reasonable measure be thought of as an asset to the nation or to the president he serves.
The Bush administration would benefit from new thinking and new perspectives on the war in Iraq, the potential threat from Iran, the nation's readiness to cope with another terror attack, the development of a comprehensive energy policy and other important issues.

A Deadly Vacuum - Michael Chertoff
NYT's editorial, 16 February 2006
In the Bush administration, there is no such thing as failure at the top. When something goes wrong because of bad leadership, punishment is meted out to the foot soldiers and middle management, while the people in charge remain unscathed. Now we'll see whether the rule holds true in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Yesterday an 11-member, all-Republican Congressional panel released a scathing report on the leadership failures before, during and after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. This report, 520 pages in all, needs to be examined carefully for as many specific disaster-response lessons as possible. For example, more than four years after Sept. 11, many of the same communications issues that hampered operations at the World Trade Center — impeding the emergency responders' ability to talk to one another — still plagued Katrina rescue and relief missions.
But right now one thing is clear. While there is no shortage of incompetent public officials involved in this tragedy, one stands out above the rest. That person is Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
According to the panel's report, Mr. Chertoff has "primary responsibility for managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster," yet he handled his decision-making responsibilities "late, ineffectively, or not at all."
According to the panel's report, Mr. Chertoff has "primary responsibility for managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster," yet he handled his decision-making responsibilities "late, ineffectively, or not at all." A FEMA official named Marty Bahamonde sent word back to Washington on the same day Katrina struck, saying the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans had been breached. This was not based on a rumor; he had seen it with his own eyes from a Coast Guard helicopter. FEMA public affairs officials sent Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff an e-mail note that night. The former FEMA director, Michael Brown, says he notified the White House at the same time. Yet the next day, President Bush said New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," while Mr. Chertoff flew to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu.
These are the people charged with protecting us and, failing that, rescuing us. This department was put together based on the belief that everyone would be safer with every facet of preparedness, protection and response under one umbrella. The first time this new system was tested, it failed. And it failed on Mr. Chertoff's watch.

Not so Good  for the U.S.; Not so Bad for Iraq?
Radical Cleric Rising as a Kingmaker in Iraqi Politics
By ROBERT F. WORTH and SABRINA TAVERNISE
NYT, 16 February 2006
Late Saturday night, on the eve of a crucial vote to choose Iraq's next prime minister, a senior Iraqi politician's cellphone rang. A supporter of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr was on the line with a threat.
"He said that there's going to be a civil war among the Shia" if Mr. Sadr's preferred candidate was not confirmed, the politician said.
Less than 12 hours later, and after many similar calls to top Shiite leaders, Mr. Sadr got his wish. The widely favored candidate lost by one vote, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the interim prime minister, was anointed as Iraq's next leader.
"Everyone was stunned; it was a coup d'état," said the politician, a senior member of the main Shiite political coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance.
It was a crowning moment for Mr. Sadr, whose sudden rise to political power poses a stark new set of challenges for Iraq's fledgling democracy. The man who led the Mahdi Army militia's two deadly uprisings against American troops in 2004 now controls 32 seats in Iraq's Parliament, enough to be a kingmaker. He has an Islamist vision of Iraq's future, and is implacably hostile to the Iraqis closest to the United States — the mostly secular Kurds, and Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister.
Mr. Sadr's militia fighters have been quieter since the uprisings, but they are suspected in a range of continuing assassinations and other abuses that American officials have pledged to stop. Mr. Sadr himself was accused by the American of arranging a killing in 2004, though the arrest warrant was quietly dropped.
"It will be harder to take on the Mahdi Army with Jaafari as prime minister," said a Western official in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be seen as interfering in Iraqi politics. "Jaafari could not have been elected without Sadr's support."
In one sense, his participation represents the realization of a central American goal: to bring populist, violent figures — whether Sunni or Shiite — off the battlefield and into democratic politics.
Mr. Sadr's new influence and his populist roots may even help achieve the American goal of a broad-based government that includes all of Iraq's sects and ethnic groups.
SEE ALSO:
Iraq: Questions Arise Over Al-Ja'fari Nomination
By Kathleen Ridolfo
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 15 February 2006
Kurdish and Sunni Arab political parties raised concerns about the future shape of the Iraqi government after the Shi'ite-led United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) nominated Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja'fari on 12 February to retain his position in the incoming Iraqi government. His nomination has raised concerns among secular Shi'a as well, who have supported recent calls for the formation of a national unity government.
Al-Ja'fari, who leads the Islamic Al-Da'wah Party, beat out Adil Abd al-Mahdi, a member of the Shi'ite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), in the internal UIA election by just one vote, 64 to 63.
The closeness of the vote reflects the growing split between the two powerful Shi'ite political parties. SCIRI head Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim began distancing himself from al-Ja'fari last year, after the latter came under increased public criticism for the poor performance of his transitional government. Other Shi'ite leaders left the UIA ahead of the 15 December parliamentary elections, complaining the government was wrecked by favoritism and a monopolization of power.

In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency
Middle East Report N°50
International Crisis Group, 15 February 2006
This report was featured on ABC's Nightline (U.S.). Click here to watch the footage.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
In Iraq, the U.S. fights an enemy it hardly knows. Its descriptions have relied on gross approximations and crude categories (Saddamists, Islamo-fascists and the like) that bear only passing resemblance to reality. This report, based on close analysis of the insurgents’ own discourse, reveals relatively few groups, less divided between nationalists and foreign jihadis than assumed, whose strategy and tactics have evolved (in response to U.S. actions and to maximise acceptance by Sunni Arabs), and whose confidence in defeating the occupation is rising. An anti-insurgency approach primarily focused on reducing the insurgents’ perceived legitimacy – rather than achieving their military destruction, decapitation and dislocation – is far more likely to succeed.
Failure to sufficiently take into account what the insurgents are saying is puzzling and, from Washington’s perspective, counter-productive. Abundant material – both undervalued and underutilised – is available from insurgent websites, internet chat, videos, tapes and leaflets. Over the past two years such communication has assumed more importance, both among insurgent groups and between groups and their networks of supporters or sympathisers. This report, the first exhaustive analysis of the organised armed opposition’s discourse, seeks to fill the gap, and the lessons are sobering.

U.S. militarism offers job security for life...but how long might that be?
America's Long War
Simon Tisdall and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian, 15 February 2006
Last week US defence chiefs unveiled their plan for battling global Islamist extremism. They envisage a conflict fought in dozens of countries and for decades to come. Today we look in detail at this seismic shift in strategic thinking, and what it will mean for Britain
The message from General Peter Pace, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, was apocalyptic. "We are at a critical time in the history of this great country and find ourselves challenged in ways we did not expect. We face a ruthless enemy intent on destroying our way of life and an uncertain future."
Gen Pace was endorsing the Pentagon's four-yearly strategy review, presented to Congress last week. The report sets out a plan for prosecuting what the the Pentagon describes in the preface as "The Long War", which replaces the "war on terror". The long war represents more than just a linguistic shift: it reflects the ongoing development of US strategic thinking since the September 11 attacks.
Looking beyond the Iraq and Afghan battlefields, US commanders envisage a war unlimited in time and space against global Islamist extremism. "The struggle ... may well be fought in dozens of other countries simultaneously and for many years to come," the report says. The emphasis switches from large-scale, conventional military operations, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, towards a rapid deployment of highly mobile, often covert, counter-terrorist forces.
Among specific measures proposed are: an increase in special operations forces by 15%; an extra 3,700 personnel in psychological operations and civil affairs units - an increase of 33%; nearly double the number of unmanned aerial drones; the conversion of submarine-launched Trident nuclear missiles for use in conventional strikes; new close-to-shore, high-speed naval capabilities; special teams trained to detect and render safe nuclear weapons quickly anywhere in the world; and a new long-range bomber force.
The Pentagon does not pinpoint the countries it sees as future areas of operations but they will stretch beyond the Middle East to the Horn of Africa, north Africa, central and south-east Asia and the northern Caucasus.
...Unconventional approach
The report, whose consequences are still being assessed in European capitals, states: "This war requires the US military to adopt unconventional and indirect approaches." It adds: "We have been adjusting the US global force posture, making long overdue adjustments to US basing by moving away from a static defence in obsolete cold war garrisons, and placing emphasis on the ability to surge quickly to troublespots across the globe."
...Priorities
The report identifies four priority areas
· Defeating terrorist networks
· Defending the homeland in depth
· Shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads
· Preventing hostile states and non-state actors from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction
Lawrence's legacy
The Pentagon planners who drew up the long war strategy had a host of experts to draw on for inspiration. But they credit only one in the report: Lawrence of Arabia.

Okay, So It's a Plan, Not a Plot...
Rice Says No U.S. Aid for Hamas-Led Gov't
By BARRY SCHWEID
AP via Washington Post, 15 February 2006
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice informed Congress on Wednesday that no U.S. assistance will be provided to a Hamas-led Palestinian government.
Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the Bush administration would not turn its back on such humanitarian programs as immunizing children against disease.
"But no money will go to that government," Rice said under questioning by Sen. George Allen, R-Va.
"I don't want a penny of taxpayer money going to Hamas," Allen told Rice.
"Neither do I," she replied.
The administration is in the midst of reviewing U.S. aid to the Palestinians.
Israeli and U.S. officials have denied any plot to topple the Hamas-led government that will be formed soon, but any decision to shelve all or most U.S. aid could undercut Hamas' standing with the Palestinians.
SEE ALSO:
Rice to Ask for $75 Million to Promote Democracy in Iran
By JOHN O'NEIL
NYT, 15 February 2006
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a Senate panel today that she plans to ask for $75 million to promote democracy in Iran, but she met with sharp questioning from Democrats about whether Bush administration policies were promoting the rise of anti-American governments around the world.
Ms. Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the money for Iran, on top of $10 million already provided in the current budget, would be used to "support the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people," and to counter the influence of Tehran's new hard-line regime.
"No one wants to see a Middle East that is dominated by an Iranian hegemony, particularly one that has access to nuclear technology," Ms. Rice said, and she later called Iran "our biggest single strategic challenge" in the region.
...Senator Barbara Boxer of California cited international polls that she said showed America's low standing in world opinions, and tied them to gains made by unfriendly parties in Venezuela and Bolivia as well as the Middle East.
"There are times when elections turn out in ways that we would prefer that they had not," Ms. Rice acknowledged. But she said that giving people a chance to make free choices was preferable to a policy that denied them that freedom.
The victory by Hamas, she said, has posed " a difficult moment in the prospects for peace." But, she said, "the Palestinian people got a chance to go to the polls and express their desire for change."
"I don't think our policy can be that you can only have elections if you are going to elect candidates who we favor," she said.
Senator Lincoln Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican, countered, "if we don't talk to the winners, I think that's a problem."

New Images of Abu Ghraib Abuse Are Broadcast in Australia
By DAVID STOUT
NYT, 15 February 2006
An Australian television network broadcast today previously unseen pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers, scenes the State Department said were "absolutely disgusting" but that added nothing to what was already known about the scandal.
The videotapes and photographs of naked captives at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad were consistent with images shown earlier in the United States and depict captives naked, with hoods over their heads and posed in sexual situations.
One video shows a handcuffed man pounding his head against a metal cell door. The same prisoner is shown in other pictures dangling upside down and naked from a top bunk and smeared with his own feces, according to the Special Broadcasting Service's "Dateline" program.
The man was mentally ill and became a "plaything" for the guards who "experimented with ways to restrain them," the S.B.S. reported, according to The Associated Press in Sydney. The S.B.S. declined to say where it had obtained the pictures.
The State Department legal adviser, John B. Bellinger 3d, said the latest pictures "show once again just the reprehensible conduct that was going on in Abu Ghraib," conduct "that is absolutely disgusting."
Mr. Bellinger noted that, following the instances of abuse in late 2003 and their disclosure early in 2004, there had been numerous public investigations, prosecutions and internal reviews. "And it's unfortunate, in fact, that these photographs are coming out further and fanning the flames," Mr. Bellinger said, referring to the Australian broadcast.
But critics of the Pentagon's handling of the episode said the latest disclosures only confirm the need for a truly independent investigation into abuse of prisoners not only at Abu Ghraib but in Afghanistan and at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba. The critics say only an outside investigation could adequately look into possible wrongdoing up the entire chain of command, to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Bill Goodman, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said his organization would continue to sue the federal government to release all pertinent videotapes and photographs. He the State Department's assertion that it would be better to keep them under wraps "absurd" and reflective of an administration philosophy that "the less information the people have, the better democracy operates."
The American Civil Liberties Union had a similar reaction. "We continue to see undeniable evidence that abuse and torture have been widespread and systematic, yet high-level government officials have not been held accountable for creating the policies that led to these atrocities," said Anthony D. Romero, the A.C.L.U.'s executive director.
The prisoner-abuse scandal has been acutely embarrassing for the United States military, whose members are taught to treat prisoners with respect. The incidents at Abu Ghraib were considered especially damaging to the United States' image among Iraqi civilians and in the wider Arab world, where nudity is disdained.

Abramoff Bragged of Ties to Rove
The disgraced lobbyist helped get Bush to meet the leader of Malaysia, a former associate says.
By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
LA Times, 16 February 2006
When the government of Malaysia sought to repair its tarnished image in the U.S. by arranging a meeting between President Bush and its controversial prime minister in 2002, it followed the same strategy as many other well-heeled interests in Washington: It called on lobbyist Jack Abramoff for help.
It was a tall order. The then-prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, had been chastised by the Clinton administration for repeated anti-Semitic statements and for jailing political opponents. But it was important to the Malaysians, according to a former Abramoff associate who attended meetings with the Malaysian ambassador and the lobbyist.
Abramoff contacted presidential advisor Karl Rove on at least four occasions to help arrange a meeting, the witness said.
Finally, the former associate said, Rove's office called to tell Abramoff that the Malaysian leader soon would be getting an official White House invitation.
Neither the former Abramoff associate nor any others who spoke about the Malaysian contacts wanted their names used, out of fear they might damage future business opportunities.

Feingold Again Tries to Block Patriot Act
AP via NYT, 16 February 2006
In a case of legislative deja vu, Sen. Russell Feingold launched another lonely filibuster against the USA Patriot Act, saying protracted talks produced only a ''fig leaf'' to cover weaknesses that leave people vulnerable to government intrusion.
''What we are seeing is quite simply a capitulation to the intransigent and misleading rhetoric of a White House that sees any effort to protect civil liberties as a sign of weakness,'' Feingold said during a floor speech Wednesday that kicked off his latest filibuster.
To the contrary, says virtually every other senator, years of talks over the expiring 16 provisions of the terrorism-fighting law have produced tighter limits on government power when compared to the original version that was passed a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.
...Feingold said the new deal only makes one, modest, improvement over the House-Senate compromise and current law: The deal makes clear that there would be judicial review of ''gag orders'' issued with court-ordered subpoenas for information, but sets several conditions. Under one, the review can only take place after a year and requires the recipient of the order to prove that the government has acted in bad faith, Feingold said.
''That is a virtually impossible standard to meet,'' he said. ''What we have here is the illusion of judicial review.''
Senior members of his party, including Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Richard Durbin of Illinois and Dianne Feinstein of California, have said they will vote for the new deal.

George gets one right!!!
No Checks, Many Imbalances
By George F. Will
Washington Post, 16 February 2006
The next time a president asks Congress to pass something akin to what Congress passed on Sept. 14, 2001 -- the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) -- the resulting legislation might be longer than Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Congress, remembering what is happening today, might stipulate all the statutes and constitutional understandings that it does not intend the act to repeal or supersede.
But, then, perhaps no future president will ask for such congressional involvement in the gravest decision government makes -- going to war. Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be. This monarchical doctrine emerges from the administration's stance that warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency targeting American citizens on American soil is a legal exercise of the president's inherent powers as commander in chief, even though it violates the clear language of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was written to regulate wartime surveillance.
Administration supporters incoherently argue that the AUMF also authorized the NSA surveillance -- and that if the administration had asked, Congress would have refused to authorize it. The first assertion is implausible: None of the 518 legislators who voted for the AUMF has said that he or she then thought it contained the permissiveness the administration discerns in it. Did the administration, until the program became known two months ago? Or was the AUMF then seized upon as a justification? Equally implausible is the idea that in the months after Sept. 11, Congress would have refused to revise the 1978 law in ways that would authorize, with some supervision, NSA surveillance that, even in today's more contentious climate, most serious people consider conducive to national security.
Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes.
The administration's argument about the legality of the NSA program also has been discordant with its argument about the urgency of extending the USA Patriot Act. Many provisions of that act are superfluous if a president's wartime powers are as far-reaching as today's president says they are.

New Revelations about Bush Administration Misuse of Science...
Call for Openness at NASA Adds to Reports of Pressure
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYT, 16 February 2006
Top political appointees in the NASA press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences, public affairs officers at the agency say.
The disclosure comes nearly two weeks after the NASA administrator, Michael D. Griffin, called for "scientific openness" at the agency. In response to that, researchers and public affairs workers at the agency have described in fresh detail how political appointees altered or limited news releases on scientific findings that could have conflicted with administration policies.
Some examples have been reported to senior scientists and administrators who are assembling complaints as part of a review of communications policies demanded by Dr. Griffin, who became administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in April. Others have been described or provided to The New York Times.
Press officers, who were granted anonymity because they said they were still concerned for their jobs despite Dr. Griffin's call for openness, said much of the pressure in late 2004 was placed on Gretchen Cook-Anderson. At the time, Ms. Cook-Anderson was in charge of managing the flow of earth science news at NASA headquarters.
In a conference call with colleagues in October 2004, the colleagues said, she said that Glenn Mahone, then the assistant administrator for public affairs, had told her that a planned news conference on fresh readings by a new NASA satellite, Aura, that measures ozone and air pollution, should not take place until after the election.
In an e-mail message yesterday, Ms. Cook-Anderson, who now works as a writer and editor for NASA through a contractor, said, "While I can't discuss these matters, I won't disagree with that description of what took place."

House GOP Won't Revisit Flawed Budget Bill
By ANDREW TAYLOR
AP via Yahoo!News, 15 February 2006
A clerk's mistake could mean a budget bill President Bush signed isn't technically law, but congressional Republicans said again Wednesday they have no plans to try to fix the problem.
Even though Alabama attorney Jim Zeigler has filed a lawsuit charging the $39 billion deficit-cutting legislation Bush signed is unconstitutional because the House and Senate failed to pass identical versions, House GOP leaders insist there's no problem.
"I believe that it's law," said House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo.
Not so, says Zeigler, a Republican activist.
"An eighth-grader in civics class knows that a bill cannot become law unless the identical bill passes the House and Senate and is signed by the president," Zeigler said.
The bill, which Bush signed Feb. 8, tightens rules for Medicaid nursing home eligibility to make it more difficult for those who have transferred their assets to their families or to charities to qualify for Medicaid.
Zeigler, who advises the elderly on eligibility for nursing home care under the Medicaid program for the poor and disabled, filed suit Monday in federal court in Mobile, Ala., naming Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a defendant. Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller declined comment on the case.
House Democrats, accusing GOP leaders of abusing the legislative process, have asked for another vote. On the last vote Feb. 1, the bill passed by the narrowest of margins, 216-214.
At issue is a provision involving the period of time the government pays to rent some types of durable medical equipment before medical suppliers transfer it to Medicare patients.
The Senate voted for 13 months, as intended by Senate and House negotiators, but a Senate clerk erroneously put down 36 months in sending the bill back to the House for a final vote, and that's what the House approved Feb. 1.
By the time the bill was shipped to Bush, the number was back to 13 months as passed by the Senate but not the House.
The White House and House and Senate GOP leaders say the matter is settled because the mistake was technical and that top House and Senate leaders certified the bill before transmitting it to the White House.

If It's Sunday, It's Conservative: An Analysis of the Sunday Talk Show Guests
on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 - 2005
Executive Summary by Media Matters, 14 February 2006
The Sunday-morning talk shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC are where the prevailing opinions are aired and tested, policymakers state their cases, and the left and right in American politics debate the pressing issues of the day on equal ground. Both sides have their say and face probing questions. Or so you would think.
In fact, as this study reveals, conservative voices significantly outnumber progressive voices on the Sunday talk shows. Media Matters for America conducted a content analysis of ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, and NBC's Meet the Press, classifying each one of the nearly 7,000 guest appearances during President Bill Clinton's second term, President George W. Bush's first term, and the year 2005 as either Democrat, Republican, conservative, progressive, or neutral. The conclusion is clear: Republicans and conservatives have been offered more opportunities to appear on the Sunday shows - in some cases, dramatically so.

Microsoft v. EU Reminiscent of Saddam v. UN
Microsoft Lashes Out at European Regulators
By PAUL MELLER
NYT, 16 February 2006
In a stinging rebuke to the European Commission, Microsoft insisted Wednesday that it had complied with the commission's antitrust requirements and sharply criticized the way the regulator had conducted its compliance review.
Microsoft, facing possible fines of 2 million euros a day, submitted a 75-page response to the commission, Europe's top antitrust authority, just hours before a midnight deadline. The company said it had met the requirements of the commission's antitrust ruling of March 2004, and accused the commission of obfuscation.
...In the ruling two years ago, the [EU] commission branded Microsoft a monopoly abuser, ordered it to change its business practices in Europe and fined it 497 million euros for using the ubiquity of Windows to extend its dominance to other sectors of the software market, like server systems.
The commission said in a statement Wednesday that it would consider Microsoft's response carefully. "It is the commission that decides if Microsoft is in compliance with the ruling, not Microsoft," said Jonathan Todd, the commission's spokesman on competition matters.
On Dec. 22, the commission said Microsoft had not yet complied with its ruling. The agency said that "Microsoft had not yet provided complete and accurate specifications of the interoperability information which it is obliged to disclose."
Microsoft, however, said it had filed the technical documents to the commission by the Dec. 15 deadline. Those documents answered the remaining questions the commission had on the company's compliance, Microsoft said.
The commission, however, said it received nothing from Microsoft until after its public statement on the company. "This documentation was actually supplied on Dec. 26," the commission said.
Microsoft insists it has complied with the 2004 ruling, which among other things ordered the company to reveal technical details about the Windows operating system that would allow rival server software programs to work as well with Windows as Microsoft's own server software does.
"Microsoft has complied fully with the technical documentation requirements," the company said Wednesday.
An independent monitor approved by Microsoft who oversees the company's compliance with the ruling found, however, that the documents provided by Microsoft last fall did not meet the commission's requirements.
The monitor, Neil Barrett, a computer science professor at Cranfield University in England, told the commission last fall that he could not use Microsoft's instructions to make rival server software comparable to Microsoft's.
On Wednesday, Microsoft also complained that the commission failed to inform it of shortfalls in its response in time.
"The commission waited many months before informing Microsoft that it believed changes were necessary to the technical documents, and then gave Microsoft only a few weeks to make extensive revisions," the company said in its filing to the commission.
Microsoft has requested an oral hearing with antitrust officials and rivals in the software industry. The hearing will probably be held some time in the next two to three weeks, the commission said.
After the hearing, the commission will consult with national antitrust regulators from the 25 member states of the European Union. At that point, if it still believes Microsoft has not complied with the 2004 ruling, it will issue another ruling against the company, fining it 2 million euros a day retroactively to Dec. 15, the date Microsoft was supposed to have submitted all the necessary information.

15 February 2006

Can You Say "Permanent Bases"?
The American Press Can't
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com, 14 February 2006
We're in a new period in the war in Iraq -- one that brings to mind the Nixonian era of "Vietnamization": A President presiding over an increasingly unpopular war that won't end; an election bearing down; the need to placate a restive American public; and an army under so much strain that it seems to be running off the rails. So it's not surprising that the media is now reporting on administration plans for, or "speculation" about, or "signs of," or "hints" of "major draw-downs" or withdrawals of American troops. The figure regularly cited these days is less than 100,000 troops in Iraq by the end of 2006. With about 136,000 American troops there now, that figure would represent just over one-quarter of all in-country U.S. forces, which means, of course, that the term "major" certainly rests in the eye of the beholder.
In addition, these withdrawals are -- we know this thanks to a Seymour Hersh piece, Up in the Air, in the December 5th New Yorker -- to be accompanied, as in South Vietnam in the Nixon era, by an unleashing of the U.S. Air Force. The added air power is meant to compensate for any lost punch on the ground (and will undoubtedly lead to more "collateral damage" -- that is, Iraqi deaths).
It is important to note that all promises of drawdowns or withdrawals are invariably linked to the dubious proposition that the Bush administration can "stand up" an effective Iraqi army and police force (think "Vietnamization" again), capable of circumscribing the Sunni insurgency and so allowing American troops to pull back to bases outside major urban areas, as well as to Kuwait and points as far west as the United States. Further, all administration or military withdrawal promises prove to be well hedged with caveats and obvious loopholes, phrases like "if all goes according to plan and security improves..." or "it also depends on the ability of the Iraqis to..."

Congressional Probe of NSA Spying Is in Doubt
White House Sways Some GOP Lawmakers
By Charles Babington
Washington Post, 15 February 2006
Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.
The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a Democratic-sponsored motion to start an inquiry into the recently revealed program in which the National Security Agency eavesdrops on an undisclosed number of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents without obtaining warrants from a secret court. Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it.
..."The administration has obviously gotten the message that they need to be more forthcoming," Snowe said. [Absolutely Incredible!]

325,000 Names on Terrorism List
Rights Groups Say Database May Include Innocent People
By Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen
Washington Post, 15 February 2006
The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of alleged international terrorism suspects or people who aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.
The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) -- created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency -- contains a far greater number of international terrorist suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed. Because the same person may appear under different spellings or aliases, the true number of separate individuals is estimated to be more than 200,000, according to NCTC officials.
...The government has been trying to streamline what counterterrorism officials say are more than 26 terrorism-related databases compiled by agencies throughout the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Names from the NCTC list are provided to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), which in turn provides names for watch lists maintained by the Transportation Security Administration and other agencies.
Civil liberties advocates and privacy experts said they were surprised by the size of the NCTC database, and they said it further heightens their concerns that such government terrorism lists include the names of large numbers of innocent people. Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel for privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the numbers "shocking but unfortunately not surprising."
...The NCTC name repository began under its predecessor agency in 2003 with 75,000 names, and it continues to grow. The center was created as part of a broad reorganization of U.S. intelligence agencies after failures to disrupt the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It is the main agency for analyzing and integrating terrorist intelligence and is under direction of Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.
Its central database is the hub of an elaborate network of terrorism-related databases throughout the federal bureaucracy. Terrorism-related names and other data are sent to the NCTC under standards set by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6, signed by President Bush in September 2003, according to a senior NCTC official. The directive calls upon agencies to supply data only about people who are "known or appropriately suspected to be . . . engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism."
..."If being placed on a list means in practice that you will be denied a visa, barred entry, put on the no-fly list, targeted for pretextual prosecutions, etc., then the sweep of the list and the apparent absence of any way to clear oneself certainly raises problems," said David D. Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has been sharply critical of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies.
...Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the size of the NCTC list and other terrorism-related databases underscores the severity of the "false positive" problem, in which innocent people -- including members of Congress -- have been stopped for questioning or halted from flying because their names are wrongly included or are similar to suspects' names.
"One of the seemingly unsolvable problems is what do you do when someone is wrongly put on this watch list," Rotenberg said. "If there are that many people on the list, a lot of them probably shouldn't be there. But how are they ever going to get off?"

Ineptitude was the only wall...
Weldon: 'Able Danger' ID'd Atta 13 Times
By KIMBERLY HEFLING
AP via LA Times, 14 February 2006
Pre-Sept. 11 intelligence conducted by a secret military unit identified terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta 13 different times, a congressman said Tuesday.
During a Capitol Hill news conference, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., said the unit -- code-named "Able Danger" -- also identified "a problem" in Yemen two weeks before the attack on the USS Cole. It knew the problem was tied into the port of Aden and involved a U.S. platform, but the ship commander was not made aware of it, Weldon said.
The suicide bombing of the Cole killed 17 sailors on Oct. 12, 2000.
If anyone had told the Cole's commander that there was any indication of a problem in Aden, "he would not have gone there," Weldon told reporters. "He had no clue."
Weldon would not say who provided evidence of such intelligence to him.
Since August, Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has pushed Congress and the Pentagon to investigate the workings of Able Danger, which used data mining to identify links that might indicate the workings of terrorists. If he is correct, it would change the timeline for when government officials first became aware of Atta's links to al-Qaida.
Former members of the Sept. 11 commission have dismissed Weldon's findings.
Cmdr. Greg Hicks, a Pentagon spokesman, released a statement saying that Pentagon officials welcome the opportunity to address these issues during a hearing scheduled Wednesday before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.

Abramoff-Rove-Bush Connection Solid and Lucrative
Abramoff Charged Malaysia for Meeting With Bush
By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
LA Times, 14 February 2006
When the government of Malaysia sought to repair its tarnished image in the U.S. by arranging a meeting between President Bush and its controversial prime minister in 2002, it did what many other well-heeled interests in Washington did: It called on well-connected lobbyist Jack Abramoff for help.
It was a tall order. The prime minister, Mahatir Mohamed, had been chastised by the Clinton administration for repeated anti-Semitic statements and for jailing his political opponents. But it was important to the Malaysians, according to an Abramoff associate who attended meetings with the Malaysian ambassador and Abramoff.
Abramoff contacted presidential adviser Karl Rove on at least four occasions to help arrange a meeting, according to an eyewitness to the activities.
Finally, this former associate said, Rove's office called to tell Abramoff personally that the Malaysian leader would soon be getting an official White House invitation.
In May 2002, Mahatir met with Bush in the Oval Office and his photograph with the president was beamed around the world.
Abramoff received $1.2 million from the Malaysian government for his lobbying services in 2001 and 2002, according to an Abramoff associate. Documents obtained by Senate investigators appear to confirm at least $900,000 of that amount.
...His reputation for close relationships with the White House and congressional officials enabled him to charge stratospheric fees from his lobbying clients -- and the president's meeting with Malaysia's prime minister enhanced that reputation.
The Malaysia episode sheds new light on the practices of Abramoff, the man at the center of a burgeoning corruption scandal, and suggests a closer tie than previously acknowledged between the now-disgraced lobbyist and the highest levels of the Bush White House.

Drink too much? Get high occasionally? Steal stuff or assault people?  NO PROBLEM!
Army Accepts Crime in Recruits
To fill its needs, military issues waivers for some past minor offenses
By Tom Bowman
Baltimore Sun, 14 February 2006
Struggling to boost its ranks in wartime, the Army has sharply increased the number of recruits who would normally be barred because of criminal misconduct or alcohol and illegal drug problems, once again raising concerns that the Army is lowering its standards to make its recruiting goals.
Last year, almost one in six Army recruits had a problem in their background that would have disqualified them from military service. In order to accept them, the Army granted special exceptions, known as recruiting waivers.
Recruits with medical problems made up the largest single category of those given waivers. However, the largest increase was among recruits with a history of either criminal conduct or drug and alcohol problems, according to data provided by the Army.
In all, the Army granted waivers to 11,018 recruits in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, 2005, or 15 percent of those accepted into the service that year. Those figures are up sharply from 2004, when 9,300 waivers were granted, or about 12 percent of those joining the Army.
The Army provided the recruiting figures to The Sun yesterday after the newspaper obtained partial statistics.
Despite the increase in the proportion of those accepted with problems in their background, the Army failed to meet its recruiting target.
...There was a significant increase in the number of recruits with what the Army terms "serious criminal misconduct" in their background.
That category includes aggravated assault, robbery, vehicular manslaughter, receiving stolen property and making terrorist threats, according to Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky.
The number of recruits in that category increased to 630, from 408 in 2004, reversing at least a four-year trend in which the number of recruits with serious criminal misconduct in their background had declined, according to Army statistics.
The largest increase in waivers was for recruits with misdemeanor convictions. There were 4,587 waivers granted last year in that category, up from 3,667 in 2004. The category includes those with convictions for assault punishable by a fine of less than $500, resisting arrest, public drunkenness and contempt of court, said Smith.
There were 737 waivers for alcohol and illegal drugs, up from 650 the previous year, which also reversed at least a four-year trend of declines in that category. Smith said those waivers were for recruits who tested positive for amphetamines, marijuana or cocaine during recruit processing. A waiver is required to let the recruit wait 45 days before taking another test.
The largest category of waivers was for medical conditions, such as asthma, flat feet or some hearing loss, officials said. There were 5,064 medical waivers in 2005, an increase from the 4,567 in 2004.
..."The United States Army is not broken."
...Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey said recently that the Army is increasing the number of recruiters and beefing up bonuses, but he acknowledged that attempting to boost the size of the Army during a war is "very challenging."

U.S. Cuts Funds for Family Planning Overseas, Stirring Opposition
By CELIA W. DUGGER
NYT, 14 February 2005
President Bush, who acted on his first full day in office five years ago to deny federal aid to overseas groups that help women obtain abortions, is for the first time proposing sharp cuts in financing for international family planning programs that the White House had described as one of the best ways to prevent abortion.
Since 2001, the administration had adhered to Mr. Bush's commitment to maintain the financing of such programs at $425 million, the same level as in the last year of the Clinton administration.
But in the president's new budget proposal, financing would fall 18 percent, from $436 million this year to $357 million.
The cuts are stirring strong opposition from nonprofit groups and Democrats on the House and Senate appropriations subcommittees responsible for foreign aid. They say the reductions would mean more unintended pregnancies for the world's poorest women, and more dangerous abortions in countries where the procedure is outlawed.
"It's ironic that an administration outwardly committed to reducing the incidence of abortion would take away valuable tools for preventing unwanted pregnancies," said Representative Nita M. Lowey, Democrat of New York.

Market price: It's all relative Net Worth...
A Cancer Drug Shows Promise, at a Price That Many Can't Pay
By ALEX BERENSON
NYT, 15 February 2006
Doctors are excited about the prospect of Avastin, a drug already widely used for colon cancer, as a crucial new treatment for breast and lung cancer, too. But doctors are cringing at the price the maker, Genentech, plans to charge for it: about $100,000 a year.
That price, about double the current level as a colon cancer treatment, would raise Avastin to an annual cost typically found only for medicines used to treat rare diseases that affect small numbers of patients. But Avastin, already a billion-dollar drug, has a potential patient pool of hundreds of thousands of people — which is why analysts predict its United States sales could grow nearly sevenfold to $7 billion by 2009.
Doctors, though, warn that some cancer patients are already being priced out of the Avastin market. Even some patients with insurance are thinking hard before agreeing to treatment, doctors say, because out-of-pocket co-payments for the drug could easily run $10,000 to $20,000 a year.
Until now, drug makers have typically defended high prices by noting the cost of developing new medicines. But executives at Genentech and its majority owner, Roche, are now using a separate argument — citing the inherent value of life-sustaining therapies.
If society wants the benefits, they say, it must be ready to spend more for treatments like Avastin and another of the company's cancer drugs, Herceptin, which sells for $40,000 a year.

Unprecedented level of propaganda:
Administration's PR Detailed
Nonpartisan group says $1.6b includes promotional ads
By Rick Klein
Boston Globe, 14 February 2006
The Bush administration spent more than $1.6 billion over a 30-month period on public relations and advertising contracts to promote its policies and programs, according to a report released yesterday by the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress.
The contracts included $2.5 million to present the Army's strategy in the global war on terrorism; $86 million to explain the new Medicare prescription drug benefit in a bilingual ad campaign; and $29,900 to warn the public of the ''consequences and potential dangers" of buying prescription drugs from foreign sources. The bulk of the spending -- slightly more than $1 billion -- went toward armed forces recruitment campaigns.
The Democrats who requested the study did not take issue with such spending, given the need to attract more military recruits. But they said White House spending on campaigns like the promotion of the war on terrorism and Bush's prescription drug programs warrant a closer look.
''The extent of the Bush administration's propaganda effort is unprecedented and disturbing," said Representative George Miller of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. ''I would hope that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle would agree that changes need to be made to rein in the president's propaganda machine."

A political addiction to money...
Popular Ohio Democrat Drops Out of Race, and Perhaps Politics
By IAN URBINA
NYT, 14 February 2006
Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and popular Democratic candidate in Ohio's closely watched Senate contest, said yesterday that he was dropping out of the race and leaving politics altogether as a result of pressure from party leaders.
Mr. Hackett said Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Harry Reid of Nevada, the same party leaders who he said persuaded him last August to enter the Senate race, had pushed him to step aside so that Representative Sherrod Brown, a longtime member of Congress, could take on Senator Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent.
Mr. Hackett staged a surprisingly strong Congressional run last year in an overwhelmingly Republican district and gained national prominence for his scathing criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War. It was his performance in the Congressional race that led party leaders to recruit him for the Senate race.
But for the last two weeks, he said, state and national Democratic Party leaders have urged him to drop his Senate campaign and again run for Congress.
"This is an extremely disappointing decision that I feel has been forced on me," said Mr. Hackett, whose announcement comes two days before the state's filing deadline for candidates. He said he was outraged to learn that party leaders were calling his donors and asking them to stop giving and said he would not enter the Second District Congressional race.
"For me, this is a second betrayal," Mr. Hackett said. "First, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me."
Mr. Hackett was the first Iraq war veteran to seek national office, and the decision to steer him away from the Senate race has surprised those who see him as a symbol for Democrats who oppose the war but want to appear strong on national security.
"Alienating Hackett is not just a bad idea for the party, but it also sends a chill through the rest of the 56 or so veterans that we've worked to run for Congress," said Mike Lyon, executive director for the Band of Brothers, a group dedicated to electing Democratic veterans to national office. "Now is a time for Democrats to be courting, not blocking, veterans who want to run."
But Democratic leaders say Representative Brown, a seven-term incumbent from Avon, has a far better chance of toppling Senator DeWine.
"It boils down to who we think can pull the most votes in November against DeWine," said Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. "And in Ohio, Brown's name is golden. It's just that simple."
Mr. Fern added that Mr. Brown's fund-raising abilities made him the better Senate candidate. By the end of last year, Mr. Brown had already amassed $2.37 million, 10 times what Mr. Hackett had raised.
Senator Reid did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

More 'free market' magic...the 'invisible hand' is in your pocket again
Complaints Mounting Over College Savings Accounts
Tighter controls on plans proposed
By Ross Kerber
Boston Globe, 14 February 2006
John Trainor thought he was being savvy when he opened a pair of college savings accounts for his two young sons in 1999. But disappointed with their poor returns, Trainor has nearly stopped putting money into the plan and now counts on other investments to cover expected tuition costs.
''I'd almost have been better off sticking it in a mattress," said Trainor, a schoolteacher who lives in Lunenburg.
In the decade since they were created by Congress, so-called 529 college savings plans have soared in popularity. By the end of last year, Americans had $80.3 billion invested in 8.1 million accounts.
But as the first generation of students and parents to take advantage of the plans reaches college, complaints are mounting about poor returns, high fees, and confusion generated by the 80-odd different savings programs offered by state agencies around the country.

Wake up, wake up!
A Reassertion of GOP Common Sense?
By Scot Lehigh
Boston Globe, 14 February 2006
It's been a long time coming, but more Republicans are waking up to the realization that the Bush administration is an inept exercise in ideological excess.
...In Sunday talk-show appearances, the magazine reports, Hagel can be this blunt in his critique: ''This party that sometimes I don't recognize anymore has presided over the largest growth of government in the history of this country and maybe even the history of man."
Bruce Bartlett, a conservative analyst, has been making a similar case for some time. A Reagan policy adviser and a deputy assistant treasurer in George H. W. Bush's administration, Bartlett is iconoclastic enough to acknowledge that Bill Clinton's fiscal and economic approach produced results conservatives should have hailed.
''At least on economic policy, there is much to praise and little to criticize in terms of what was actually done (or not done) on his watch," he wrote in July 2004.
Still, the title of his new book will surely make the White House squirm: ''Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." (Given the huge deficits Reagan's own policy occasioned, one could argue that Bush is Reagan's fiscal heir.)
The book also castigates the White House for ''an anti- intellectual distrust of facts and analysis" and an obsession with secrecy, according to yesterday's Times.
Even on the issue of warrantless eavesdropping, we're starting to see some real resistance from the president's own party. Displaying no regard for legitimate constitutional concerns, the White House has signaled that it may make the surveillance program a campaign issue in the midterm elections.
But at least some Republicans are refusing to give the administration political cover. In last week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, several GOP senators made it clear they wouldn't countenance the administration's flimsy legal justifications.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for one, was dismissive of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's assertion that the resolution authorizing force in Iraq had conferred wiretapping authority on the president.
''This statutory force resolution argument that you're making is very dangerous in terms of its application for the future," Graham warned. ''When I voted for it, I never envisioned that I was giving to this president or any other the ability to go around FISA carte blanche," he said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Since then, Republican Representative Heather Wilson of New Mexico, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a National Security Council aide in George H. W. Bush's administration, has gone so far as to call for a congressional inquiry into the matter.
Then there's the congressional probe of the government's response to the New Orleans flooding. Despite fears that a Republican-led investigation would be a whitewash, the report, to be released tomorrow, is expected to be harshly critical of the administration's performance.
It's easy for a White House skilled at the art of the permanent campaign to dismiss Democratic criticism as politics as usual. It's far harder, however, to discount the increasingly vocal concerns of those on the president's own side of the aisle.