December 31, 2007

"In western Virginia, far from the limelight, United States Attorney John L. Brownlee found himself on the telephone last year with a political and legal superstar, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

    For years, Mr. Brownlee and his small team had been building a case that the maker of the painkiller OxyContin had misled the public when it claimed the drug was less prone to abuse than competing narcotics. The drug was believed to be a factor in hundreds of deaths involving its abuse.

    Mr. Giuliani, celebrated for his stewardship of New York City after 9/11, soon told the prosecutors they were wrong.

    In 2002, the drug maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., hired Mr. Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, to help stem the controversy about OxyContin. Among Mr. Giuliani's missions was the job of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him.

    So it was no small success when, after the call, Mr. Brownlee did what many people might have done when confronted with such celebrity: He went out and bought a copy of Mr. Giuliani's book, "Leadership."

    "I wanted to be prepared for my meetings with him," Mr. Brownlee said in a recent interview.

    Over the past few weeks, Mr. Giuliani's consulting business has received increasing scrutiny, at times forcing him to defend his business as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination.

    But his work for Purdue, the company's first and longest-running client, provides a window into how he used his standing as an eminent lawyer, a Republican insider and a national celebrity to aid a controversial client and build a business fortune.

    A former top federal prosecutor, Mr. Giuliani participated in two meetings between Purdue officials and the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency investigating the company. Giuliani Partners took on the job of monitoring security improvements at company facilities making OxyContin, an issue of concern to the D.E.A.

    As a celebrity, Mr. Giuliani helped the company win several public relations battles, playing a role in an effort by Purdue to persuade an influential Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, not to blame it for OxyContin abuse.

    Despite these efforts, Purdue suffered a crushing defeat in May at the hands of Mr. Brownlee when the company and three top executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges.

    Mr. Giuliani, who declined to discuss his work for Purdue for this article, has refused to talk in detail about his firm's clients. He has said that he is no longer involved in the day-to-day management of the firm, which still represents Purdue.

    Giuliani Partners would not say how much Purdue had paid it, but one consultant to the drug maker estimated that Mr. Giuliani's firm had, in some years, earned several million dollars from the account.

    "Everything I did with Giuliani Partners has been totally legal, totally ethical," Mr. Giuliani recently told The Associated Press. "There's nothing for me to explain about it. We've acted honorably, decently."

"Tax revenue is down considerably across the nation, creating budget shortfalls and forcing hard choices on what to cut.

    Denver - Dozens of states, counties and cities across the nation will enter the new year facing deep and unexpected budget holes as the widening mortgage crisis cuts sharply into tax revenue.

    Elected officials, scrambling to adjust, are trimming money for public schools, reducing grants to help the homeless, even asking police to dry-clean their uniforms less often.

    "We're talking about a pretty tough fiscal environment for the next four or five years," said Christopher W. Hoene, the director of policy and research for the National League of Cities. "Libraries, parks, after-school programs ... you'll see lots of questions raised about cities' abilities to fund them."

    What makes this all so painful is that up until a few months ago, many government officials felt certain they could weather the storm. They knew property values wouldn't soar forever. So they factored a downturn into budget calculations. They built up sizable emergency funds.

    But the rainy day they prepared for turned out to be a monsoon.

    "We had predicted a slowdown - but not this much," said Tim Nash, finance director for Greeley (population 90,000), a college town in a heavily agricultural region of north-central Colorado. Nash thought he was being prudent when he budgeted for 200 new housing starts in the city this year, down from 310 last year.

    He wasn't even close.

    Instead of the $2.6 million that Nash expected in sales taxes on new construction, Greeley will collect $1.2 million. As a result, Greeley has left vacant 49 city positions, most of them building inspectors whose services are, abruptly, no longer in demand.

    The effects of the housing slowdown are not being felt evenly across the nation; in states such as Wyoming, Alaska and Texas, they're more than offset by the boom in oil and gas prices. But in a recent survey, 24 states reported that their tax collections had taken a hit because of the housing crisis.

    The 10 most affected states, including California, Nevada and Arizona, will lose a combined $6.6 billion in tax revenue next year, according to a report prepared for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

    "We're at the early stage of a problem that's going to get worse," said Corina Eckl, an analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

December 27, 2007

"    New York - Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a plan in 1950 to suspend the right to habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty, The New York Times reported on their web site on Saturday.

    Hoover wanted President Harry Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage" and sent the plan to the White House 12 days after the start of the Korean War, the Times reported, citing a newly declassified document.

    There is no evidence to suggest Truman or any other president approved any part of Hoover's proposal.

    According to the Hoover plan, the FBI would "apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous" to national security.

    The arrests would come from a list of approximately 12,000 names that Hoover had been compiling for years, the Times said.

    "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus," Hoover's proposal said, referring to the right to seek relief from illegal detention, a centuries-old fundamental principle of law.

    According to the Constitution, habeas corpus must prevail "unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it." But Hoover's proposal broadened that to include "threatened invasion" or "attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory," the Times said.

    Prisoners would have the right to an eventual hearing from a board made up of one judge and two citizens. The hearings, however, would "not be bound by the rules of evidence," Hoover's letter added.

" Clarksburg, West Virginia - The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

    Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

    "Bigger. Faster. Better. That's the bottom line," said Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which operates the database from its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.

    The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.

    The use of biometric data is increasing throughout the government. For the past two years, the Defense Department has been storing in a database images of fingerprints, irises and faces of more than 1.5 million Iraqi and Afghan detainees, Iraqi citizens and foreigners who need access to U.S. military bases. The Pentagon also collects DNA samples from some Iraqi detainees, which are stored separately.

    The Department of Homeland Security has been using iris scans at some airports to verify the identity of travelers who have passed background checks and who want to move through lines quickly. The department is also looking to apply iris- and face-recognition techniques to other programs. The DHS already has a database of millions of sets of fingerprints, which includes records collected from U.S. and foreign travelers stopped at borders for criminal violations, from U.S. citizens adopting children overseas, and from visa applicants abroad. There could be multiple records of one person's prints.

    "It's going to be an essential component of tracking," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's enabling the Always On Surveillance Society."

    If successful, the system planned by the FBI, called Next Generation Identification, will collect a wide variety of biometric information in one place for identification and forensic purposes.

    In an underground facility the size of two football fields, a request reaches an FBI server every second from somewhere in the United States or Canada, comparing a set of digital fingerprints against the FBI's database of 55 million sets of electronic fingerprints. A possible match is made - or ruled out-as many as 100,000 times a day.

    Soon, the server at CJIS headquarters will also compare palm prints and, eventually, iris images and face-shape data such as the shape of an earlobe. If all goes as planned, a police officer making a traffic stop or a border agent at an airport could run a 10-fingerprint check on a suspect and within seconds know if the person is on a database of the most wanted criminals and terrorists. An analyst could take palm prints lifted from a crime scene and run them against the expanded database. Intelligence agents could exchange biometric information worldwide.

    More than 55 percent of the search requests now are made for background checks on civilians in sensitive positions in the federal government, and jobs that involve children and the elderly, Bush said. Currently those prints are destroyed or returned when the checks are completed. But the FBI is planning a "rap-back" service, under which employers could ask the FBI to keep employees' fingerprints in the database, subject to state privacy laws, so that if that employees are ever arrested or charged with a crime, the employers would be notified.

 Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the ability to share data across systems is problematic. "You're giving the federal government access to an extraordinary amount of information linked to biometric identifiers that is becoming increasingly inaccurate," he said.

    In 2004, the Electronic Privacy Information Center objected to the FBI's exemption of the National Crime Information Center database from the Privacy Act requirement that records be accurate. The group noted that the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001 found that information in the system was "not fully reliable" and that files "may be incomplete or inaccurate." FBI officials justified that exemption by claiming that in law enforcement data collection, "it is impossible to determine in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely and complete."

    Privacy advocates worry about the ability of people to correct false information. "Unlike say, a credit card number, biometric data is forever," said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster. He said he feared that the FBI, whose computer technology record has been marred by expensive failures, could not guarantee the data's security. "If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can't just get a new eyeball," Saffo said.

    In the future, said CITeR director Lawrence A. Hornak, devices will be able to "recognize us and adapt to us."

    "The long-term goal," Hornak said, is "ubiquitous use" of biometrics. A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and allow his face and iris images to be captured without ever stepping up to a kiosk and looking into a camera, he said.

    "That's the key," he said. "You've chosen it. You have chosen to say, 'Yeah, I want this place to recognize me.' ""

"For US Army soldiers entering basic training at Fort Jackson Army base in Columbia, South Carolina, accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior appears to be as much a part of the nine-week regimen as the vigorous physical and mental exercises the troops must endure.

    That's the message directed at Fort Jackson soldiers, some of whom appear in photographs in government issued fatigues, holding rifles in one hand, and Bibles in their other hand.

    Frank Bussey, director of Military Ministry at Fort Jackson, has been telling soldiers at Fort Jackson that "government authorities, police and the military = God's Ministers,"

    Bussey's teachings from the "God's Basic Training" Bible study guide he authored says US troops have "two primary responsibilities": "to praise those who do right" and "to punish those who do evil - "God's servant, an angel of wrath." Bussey's teachings directed at Fort Jackson soldiers were housed on the Military Ministry at Fort Jackson web site. Late Wednesday, the web site was taken down without explanation. Bussey did not return calls for comment. The web site text, however, can still be viewed in an archived format.

    The Christian right has been successful in spreading its fundamentalist agenda at US military installations around the world for decades. But the movement's meteoric rise in the US military came in large part after 9/11 and immediately after the US invaded Iraq in March of 2003. At a time when the United States is encouraging greater religious freedom in Muslim nations, soldiers on the battlefield have told disturbing stories of being force-fed fundamentalist Christianity by highly controversial, apocalyptic "End Times" evangelists, who have infiltrated US military installations throughout the world with the blessing of high-level officials at the Pentagon. Proselytizing among military personnel has been conducted openly, in violation of the basic tenets of the United States Constitution.

    Perhaps no other fundamentalist Christian group is more influential than Military Ministry, a national organization and a subsidiary of the controversial fundamentalist Christian organization Campus Crusade for Christ. Military Ministry's national web site boasts it has successfully "targeted" basic training installations, or "gateways," and has successfully converted thousands of soldiers to evangelical Christianity.

    Military Ministry says its staffers are responsible for "working with Chaplains and Military personnel to bring lost soldiers closer to Christ, build them in their faith and send them out into the world as Government paid missionaries" - which appears to be a clear-cut violation of federal law governing the separation of church and state.

    "Young recruits are under great pressure as they enter the military at their initial training gateways," the group has stated on its web site. "The demands of drill instructors push recruits and new cadets to the edge. This is why they are most open to the 'good news.' We target specific locations, like Lackland AFB [Air Force base] and Fort Jackson, where large numbers of military members transition early in their career. These sites are excellent locations to pursue our strategic goals."

MRFF uncovered another recent Campus Crusade for Christ promotional video filmed at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs that would appear to violate the same military rules detailed in the IG report. Cadets and academy officials appear in uniform discussing how Campus Crusade for Christ helped strengthen their bonds with Jesus.

    Scot Blom, the Campus Crusade for Christ director assigned to work at the Air Force Academy, says in the video the organization "has always been very intentional about going after the leaders or the future leaders" and that's why Campus Crusade for Christ picked the Air Force Academy to spread its fundamentalist Christian message. Every week, according to the video, cadets are encouraged to participate in a Bible study class called "cru" short for "crusade."

    "Our purpose for Campus Crusade for Christ at the Air Force Academy is to make Jesus Christ the issue at the Air Force Academy and around the world," Blom says in the video. "They're government paid missionaries when they leave here."

 "When You Join the Military, Then You Are Also in the Ministry"

    The executive director of Military Ministry, retired US Army Major General Bob Dees, wrote in the organization's October 2005 "Life and Leadership" newsletter, "We must pursue our particular means for transforming the nation - through the military. And the military may well be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure. Militaries exercise, generally speaking, the most intensive and purposeful indoctrination program of citizens...."

    Moreover, Military Ministry's parent organization, Campus Crusade for Christ, has been re-distributing to military chaplains a DVD produced a decade ago where Tommy Nelson, a pastor at the Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas, tells an audience of Texas A&M cadets and military officers when they join the military "then you are also in the ministry."

    "I, a number of years ago, was speaking at the University of North Texas - it happens to be my alma mater, up in Denton, Texas - and I was speaking to an ROTC group up there, and when I stepped in I said, "It's good to be speaking to all you men and women who are in the ministry," and they all kind of looked at me, and I think they wondered if maybe I had found the wrong room, or if they were in the wrong room, and I assured them that I was speaking to men and women in the ministry, these that were going to be future officers," Nelson says in the DVD. "

"The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ignored his staff's written findings in denying California's request for a waiver to implement its landmark law to slash greenhouse gases from vehicles, sources inside and outside the agency told The Times on Thursday.

    "California met every criteria ... on the merits. The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years on all the other waivers," said an EPA staffer. "We told him that. All the briefings we have given him laid out the facts."

    EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson announced Wednesday that because President Bush had signed an energy bill raising average fuel economy that there was no need or justification for separate state regulation. He also said that California's request did not meet the legal standard set out in the Clean Air Act.

    But his staff, which had worked for months on the waiver decision, concluded just the opposite, the sources said Thursday. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the media or because they feared reprisals.

    California Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols said she was also told by EPA staff that they were overruled by Johnson.

    She said Johnson's decision showed "that this administration ignores the science and ignores the law to reach the politically convenient conclusion."

    Nichols, who served as assistant EPA administrator overseeing air regulations under President Clinton, said she had helped write waiver decisions there, and "I know California met all the criteria on this one."

    California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vowed to fight in court to overturn the decision.

    Technical and legal staff also concluded that if the waiver were denied, EPA would very likely lose in court to the state, the sources said.

"The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed changes that could prevent many shareholders from raising issues of social and environmental corporate responsibility.

    Over the past few decades, shareholder resolutions have played a significant role in persuading major companies to improve their labor, environmental and corporate governance practices.

    In 2004, Coca-Cola executives backed a shareholder resolution that led the company to invest in HIV prevention in Africa. The measure passed with flying colors.

    Over the past 15 years, a series of shareholder resolutions have helped force Nike to monitor labor conditions in its international supply chain. And shareholder resolutions have persuaded corporations, including Tyco and American Electric Power, to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

    But the SEC has proposed curbing these non-binding shareholder resolutions after a Sept. 2006 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District in New York spurred the agency to clarify a rule on whether shareholders can pass resolutions to nominate a person for a company's board of directors. As a result of the court's decision, the SEC drafted two proposals. The first would prevent such nominations. The second would allow them - but only with extensive restrictions. In the document explaining these proposals, SEC commissioners also discussed changing the way with which shareholder resolutions are dealt.

 Along with targeting deforestation, sweatshops, greenhouse gas emissions, investment in oppressive regimes and other such issues, non-binding shareholder resolutions can address corporate governance issues, including creating transparency, non-discriminatory hiring, and capping CEO salaries. Many times, a company may agree to change its policies to avoid having a resolution included on the proxy statement for its annual meeting.

    But in the SEC's recent proposal, the agency suggests allowing corporations to "opt-out" of allowing non-binding advisory shareholder resolutions.

    "The companies that don't want to be held accountable would be the ones to opt-out," says Tim Smith, chairman of the Social Investment Forum, a nonprofit organization whose members include hundreds of banks, mutual fund companies, analysts, and other financial professionals and institutions.

    The SEC proposal also mentions replacing the shareholder resolution process with an electronic chat room and increasing the "resubmission threshold," which is the percentage of votes a resolution must receive in order to be introduced the following year.

    Currently, a resolution needs only 3 percent of votes its first year to be re-introduced, 6 percent the second year and 10 percent the third year.

    The SEC document discusses raising these thresholds to 10, 15 and 20 percent, respectively.

    "About 80 percent of resolutions do get enough votes to come back," says John Wilson, director of socially responsible investing for Christian Brothers Investment Services. "But when you talk about needing 15 to 20 percent more votes, you'll exclude a lot of good resolutions that people just don't know about."

    Wilson says that when his group started filing climate change resolutions in the '90s there wasn't much interest. Now the resolutions are so popular that one filed with ExxonMobil got 31 percent of the vote this year.

    In 2007, shareholders filed a record 43 climate change-related resolutions with U.S. companies, with 15 of them leading to positive actions, including resolutions filed with ConocoPhillips, Wells Fargo and Hartford Insurance, according to the Investor Network on Climate Risk, a $4 trillion network of investors with the stated mission of "promoting better understanding of the investment risks and opportunities posed by climate change."

    The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable (neither of which responded to interview requests for this story) filed public comments supporting curbs on shareholder resolutions, as did a handful of companies, such as General Motors, Xerox and Apache. Critics of advisory shareholder resolutions commonly refer to them as representing "special interests."

    "How can groups with trillions of dollars invested be special interests?" asks Smith.

    If the SEC's proposals are instituted, socially responsible investors and advocacy groups whose interests they represent fear companies would be freer to profit from exploitative and destructive practices without fear of public oversight.

    "It would be a big loss," says Wilson."

"Washington - The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Wednesday that employers could reduce or eliminate health benefits for retirees when they turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare.

    The policy, set forth in a new regulation, allows employers to establish two classes of retirees, with more comprehensive benefits for those under 65 and more limited benefits - or none at all - for those older.

    More than 10 million retirees rely on employer-sponsored health plans as a primary source of coverage or as a supplement to Medicare, and Naomi C. Earp, the commission's chairwoman, said, "This rule will help employers continue to voluntarily provide and maintain these critically important health benefits."

    Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose an average of 6.1 percent this year and have increased 78 percent since 2001, according to surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Because of the rising cost of health care and the increased life expectancy of workers, the commission said, many employers refuse to provide retiree health benefits or even to negotiate on the issue.

    In general, the commission observed, employers are not required by federal law to provide health benefits to either active or retired workers.

"The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that employers have the right to prohibit workers from using the company's email system to send out union-related messages, a decision that could hamper communications between labor unions and their membership.

    In a 3-to-2 ruling released on Friday, the board held that it was legal for employers to prohibit union-related email so long as employers had a policy barring employees from sending email for "non-job-related solicitations" for outside organizations.

    The ruling is a significant setback to the nation's labor unions, which argued that email systems have become a modern-day gathering place where employees should be able to communicate freely with co-workers to discuss work-related matters of mutual concern.

    The ruling involved The Register-Guard, a newspaper in Eugene, Ore., and email messages sent in 2000 by Suzi Prozanski, a newspaper employee who was president of the Newspaper Guild's unit there. She sent three email messages about marching in a town parade and urging employees to wear green to show support for the union in contract negotiations.

    During the years that this case was pending, many companies were uncertain whether they could bar union-related email. But the labor board's decision gives companies nationwide the green light to prohibit union-related email as part of an overall nonsolicitation policy.

    "An employer has a 'basic property right' to regulate and restrict employee use of company property," the board's majority wrote. "The respondent's communications system, including its email system, is the respondent's property."

    Labor leaders attacked the decision, calling it part of board rulings that have favored employers and undercut workers.

"    A new effort to ensure the 2008 presidential election is held using verifiable paper ballots and random audits to ensure accurate vote counts is underway in Congress.

    Early next year, Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., will introduce the "Confidence in Voting Act of 2008," which would provide $500 million to counties and other election jurisdictions to replace controversial paperless electronic voting systems before the 2008 presidential election. The bill envisions voters using paper ballots that are marked by hand, or ballots that are printed on Election Day after voters use a computer to make their choices. An electronic scanner, like a standardized test, would then tally the ballots.

    The bill also provides $100 million for audits, where 3 percent of all paper ballots - including absentee and early voting - would be hand-counted to verify the electronic count before winners would be certified. Those audits would be public, according to the New Jersey congressman.

    The bill also would pay for printing "emergency" paper ballots to be used as backup if there were a "failure" of paperless voting systems, although it does not state what constitutes an emergency or a failure.

    "The overall goal is to have audited elections based on voter-verified paper ballots throughout the country," Holt said. "Audits must be completed and discrepancies resolved before certification of the winner. You could publish the results on Election Night, but they would not be final."

    The proposal by Holt comes against a backdrop of congressional gridlock on voting technology issues and studies by top election officials in key states, notably California and Ohio, which have documented security and accuracy problems with all-electronic voting systems. In some states, election administrators have wanted to update voting systems before 2008's presidential vote but have lacked the necessary funds.

Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again: How the Right Stole 2004 and Will Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), said the country will not have accurate vote counts unless it returns to a system of hand-counted paper ballots.

    "I am not impressed," he said. "The best that one can say about optical scanners is that they are prone to frequent breakdowns. In the 2006 election, they malfunctioned from coast to coast. In 13 counties in Kentucky, optical scanners failed to come through for various reasons. There were problems reported in Colorado and California and Maine. Optical scanners are delicate machines that break down, miscount and malfunction."

    Miller also said that these voting systems are also "susceptible to manipulation."

    "It is somewhat encouraging that optical scan (voting systems) require paper ballots of some kind, as opposed to DRE machines, which are paperless. There is paper involved, and that is a good thing. But optical scanners have been involved in some of the most suspicious races in the country."

    Miller said the machines were used in the 2002 gubernatorial election in Alabama, where former Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman lost after a midnight recount shifted 6,000 votes to his Republican opponent, Bob Riley. He also pointed to California's 50th congressional district, where Democrat Francine Busby lost to Republican Brian Bilbray after election workers took machines homes with them and the GOP boasted of a last-minute surge in absentee ballots in a June 2006 special election.

    "It is all very well for the bill to stipulate there will be an audit protocol," Miller said. "Even if that audit protocol were iron-clad, the fact is audits are belated. They occur after Election Night. Unless this bill outlaws the (television) networks' practice of calling the winner on Election Night, the audits won't make a dime's worth of difference because any ex post facto revelations will strike most people as the desperate measures of sore losers ..."

    "The alternative is hand-counted paper ballots," Miller said. "Only in Washington does that notion get dismissed as utopia."

    But Rep. Holt dismissed criticism that paper ballots could not be counted electronically.

    "I know that some have argued somewhat illogically that they could not even imagine a touch-screen electronic device that was properly calibrated, or a DRE as a ballot-marking device. I don't see why not," he said. "I just think they are wrong. The key is whether you have an auditable record of the votes that the voter has verified. That is what counts. It is not when the electronic count is taken. It is the audit trail."

    "If this were a perfect world, the new bill would be OK," Miller said, after hearing Holt's comment. "But the real world has been perpetrated by election fraud. I don't think the perpetrators of fraud have anything to fear from this bill.""

"Christmastime is bonus time on Wall Street, and the Gucci set has been blessed with another record harvest.

    Forget the turbulence in the financial markets and the subprime debacle. Forget the dark clouds of a possible recession. Bloomberg News tells us that the top securities firms are handing out nearly $38 billion in seasonal bonuses, the highest total ever.

    But there's a reason to temper the celebration, if only out of respect for an old friend who's not doing too well. Even as the Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar, the American dream is on life-support.

    I had a conversation the other day with Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union. He mentioned a poll of working families that had shown that their belief in that mythical dream that has sustained so many generations for so long is fading faster than sunlight on a December afternoon.

    The poll, conducted by Lake Research Partners for the Change to Win labor federation, found that only 16 percent of respondents believed that their children's generation would be better off financially than their own. While some respondents believed that the next generation would fare roughly the same as this one, nearly 50 percent held the exceedingly gloomy view that today's children would be "worse off" when the time comes for them to enter the world of work and raise their own families.

    That absence of optimism is positively un-American.

    "These are parents who cannot see where the jobs of the future are that will allow their kids to have a better life than they had," said Mr. Stern. "And they're not wrong. That's the problem."

    Record bonuses on Wall Street at a time when ordinary working Americans are filled with anxiety about their economic future are signs that the trickle-down phenomenon that was supposed to have benefited everyone never happened.

 The rich, boosted by the not-so-invisible hand of the corporate ideologues in government, have done astonishingly well in recent decades, while the rest of the population has tended to tread water economically, or drown.

"    The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office shows.

    The poorest fifth of households had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005, while just the increase in income for the top 1 percent came to $524.8 billion, a figure 37 percent higher.

    The total income of the top 1.1 million households was $1.8 trillion, or 18.1 percent of the total income of all Americans, up from 14.3 percent of all income in 2003. The total 2005 income of the three million individual Americans at the top was roughly equal to that of the bottom 166 million Americans, analysis of the report showed.

    The report is the latest to document the growing concentration of income at the top, a trend that President Bush said last January had been under way for more than 25 years.

    Earlier reports, based on tax returns, showed that in 2005 the top 10 percent, top 1 percent and fractions of the top 1 percent enjoyed their greatest share of income since 1928 and 1929.

" The latest estimate of the growing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide battle against terrorism - nearly $15 billion a month - came last week from one of the Senate's leading proponents of a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq.

    "This cost of this war is approaching $15 billion a month, with the Army spending $4.2 billion of that every month," Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska), the ranking Republican on the Appropriations defense subcommittee, said in a little-noticed floor speech Dec. 18. His remarks came in support of adding $70 billion to the omnibus fiscal 2008 spending legislation to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, as well as counterterrorism activities, for the six months from Oct. 1, 2007, through March 31 of next year.

    While most of the public focus has been on the political fight over troop levels, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported this month that the Bush administration's request for the 2008 fiscal year of $189.3 billion for Defense Department operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and worldwide counterterrorism activities was 20 percent higher than for fiscal 2007 and 60 percent higher than for fiscal 2006.

    Pentagon spokesmen would not comment last week on Stevens's figure but said their latest estimate for monthly spending for Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism was $11.7 billion as of Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 2007.

    One reason for Stevens's larger cost figure may be that U.S. troop levels in Iraq peaked at 180,000 in November, which is part of the 2008 fiscal year, and will fall only slightly in the next three months. In addition, in its December report, the CRS noted that the Pentagon does not include intelligence operations and other classified activities in its cost estimates, nor does it tally congressional add-ons for the National Guard and reserve forces.

    "Stevens is being realistic," said Gordon Adams, who served as the senior national security official at the Office of Management and Budget from 1993 to 1997, in the Clinton administration.

    Pointing out that Bush's request comes out to $15.8 billion per month, Adams said: "Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror are not getting cheaper. . . . This will go down some, as the surge comes home, but not as much as people think."

    He added: "More and more of these so-called emergency funds are being used to repair and buy new military hardware," because "the Pentagon is worried that defense budgets will start to go down next year."

Offshoring Interests and Economic Dogmas Are Destroying the U.S. Dollar, by Paul Craig Roberts, Creators Syndicate (December 17, 2007)

"If you were building a Republican presidential candidate from a kit, imagine what pieces you might use: an athletic build, ramrod posture, Reaganesque hair, a charismatic speaking style and a crisp dark suit. You'd add a beautiful wife and family, a wildly successful business career and just enough executive government experience. You'd pour in some old GOP bromides - spending cuts and lower taxes - plus some new positions for 2008: anti-immigrant rhetoric and a focus on faith.

    Add it all up and you get Mitt Romney, a disquieting figure who sure looks like the next president and most surely must be stopped.

    Romney's main business experience is as a management consultant, a field in which smart, fast-moving specialists often advise corporations on how to reinvent themselves. His memoir is called Turnaround - the story of his successful rescue of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City - but the most stunning turnaround he has engineered is his own political career.

    If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you'd swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you're left to wonder if there's anything at all at his core.

    As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1994, he boasted that he would be a stronger advocate of gay rights than his opponent, Ted Kennedy. These days, he makes a point of his opposition to gay marriage and adoption.

    There was a time that he said he wanted to make contraception more available - and a time that he vetoed a bill to sell it over-the-counter.

    The old Romney assured voters he was pro-choice on abortion. "You will not see me wavering on that," he said in 1994, and he cited the tragedy of a relative's botched illegal abortion as the reason to keep abortions safe and legal. These days, he describes himself as pro-life.

    There was a time that he supported stem-cell research and cited his own wife's multiple sclerosis in explaining his thinking; such research, he reasoned, could help families like his. These days, he largely opposes it. As a candidate for governor, Romney dismissed an anti-tax pledge as a gimmick. In this race, he was the first to sign.

    People can change, and intransigence is not necessarily a virtue. But Romney has yet to explain this particular set of turnarounds in a way that convinces voters they are based on anything other than his own ambition.

When New Hampshire partisans are asked to defend the state's first-in-the-nation primary, we talk about our ability to see the candidates up close, ask tough questions and see through the baloney. If a candidate is a phony, we assure ourselves and the rest of the world, we'll know it.

    Mitt Romney is such a candidate. New Hampshire Republicans and independents must vote no."

December 19, 2007

    "Washington - The Federal Communications Commission narrowly approved on Tuesday a loosening of media ownership restrictions in the 20 biggest U.S. cities, despite objections from consumer groups and a threat by some U.S. senators to revoke the action.

    The FCC voted 3-2, along party lines, to ease the 32-year-old ban on ownership of a newspaper and broadcast outlet in a single market.

    In addition, the FCC action exempted 36 newspaper-broadcast ownership combinations that had been grandfathered under the previous rule. It also gave exemptions to six combinations that were pending before the agency.

    The FCC's Republican chairman, Kevin Martin, called the move a "relatively minimal loosening of the ban" and said it "may help to forestall the erosion in local news coverage."

    The vote came over the objections of the FCC's two Democratic commissioners and in the face of opposition from lawmakers in Congress.

    The FCC action provoked an immediate rebuke from the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan.

    Dingell said he was "greatly displeased" that Martin had gone ahead with the vote despite calls for him to take more time to study the issue.

" Washington - At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

    The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

    Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

    It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

    One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been "vigorous sentiment" among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Chertoff Concealed Role in Tape Destruction, by Jason Leopold, truthout.org (December 19, 2007)

"    Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff advised the CIA between 2002 and 2003 that its agents had the legal authority to use techniques that included waterboarding on one of the agency's so-called "high level detainees," according to a little-known report published in January 2005.

    That interrogation was videotaped and the tape later was destroyed

    Chertoff was head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division when CIA officials inquired whether its agents could be charged with violating the federal anti-torture statute for employing interrogation methods such as waterboarding. The tactic causes detainees to slowly drown, and is generally terminated before the detainees die.

    "The CIA was seeking to determine the legal limits of interrogation practices for use in cases like that of Abu Zubaydah, the Qaeda lieutenant who was captured in March 2002," says a January 29, 2005, New York Times story. That story quoted unnamed sources who told the newspaper that "Chertoff was directly involved in these discussions, in effect evaluating the legality of techniques proposed by the CIA by advising the agency whether its employees could go ahead with proposed interrogation methods without fear of prosecution."

    During his Senate confirmation hearing in February 2005, Chertoff maintained that he provided the CIA broad guidance in response to its questions about interrogation methods and never specifically addressed the legality regarding waterboarding or other techniques.

"Year end is a good time to look back and reflect on what's ahead. If past is prologue, however, the outlook isn't good, and nothing on the horizon suggests otherwise. Voters last November wanted change but got betrayal from the bipartisan criminal class in Washington. Their attitude shows in an October Reuters/Zogby (RZ) opinion poll with George Bush at 24% that tops Richard Nixon's worst showing of 25% at his lowest 1974 Watergate point. And if that looks bad, consider Congress with "The Hill" reporting from the same RZ Index that our legislators scored a "staggering 11%, the lowest (congressional) rating in history," but there's room yet to hit bottom and a year left to do it. Why not with lawmakers' consistent voter sellout and failure record that keeps getting worse.

It's been that way ever since 9/11 with both sides of the aisle complicit with the administration. This article looks back at the record, and year end is a good time to review it. It's hard imagining another as bad with a President defiling the law and once telling Republican colleagues the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper."

He didn't just say it. He governs by it, gets away with it, and former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, says "a coup has occurred (with another to come from) the next 9/11....that completes the first (that's) seen a steady assault on every fundamental (aspect) of our Constitution (to create) an executive government (to) rule by decree" no different from a police state.

Author Naomi Wolf spells it out in her April, 2007 Guardian article - "Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps." In it, she argues the Bush administration is following the same script any "would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms," and she lists them. They range from "invoking a terrifying internal and external enemy" to "creat(ing) a gulag" to spying on everyone to harassing opposition to controlling the media to calling dissent treason to "suspend(ing) the rule of law." She also notes how much "simpler" it is to shut down democracy than "to create and sustain" it, and that's today's threat.

It's not with jackboots in the streets but by a steady "process of erosion" with the public largely unaware and distracted by media mind manipulators. It's happening today, and Wolf sounds the alarm with the words of James Madison saying "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands....is the definition of tyranny," and that's the condition now in America. This article reviews the record for the past seven years. It's not pretty.

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, (unlike every Pope in memory) condemned it in a wide-ranging UK Muslim magazine interview. It was quoted in a November 25 Sunday Times column headlined "US is 'worst' imperialist" and wields its power more reprehensibly than Britain ever did in its heyday. He explained that American overseas adventurism led to "the worst of all worlds" and expressed pessimism about the current state of western civilization and Washington's own misguided sense of mission.

He critiqued the "war on terror" and stated America lost the moral high ground post-9/11 and needs to launch a "generous and intelligent programme of aid to the (nations it) ravaged;....check (its) economic exploitation of defeated territories" and demilitarize them. He called the West fundamentally adrift and our "definition of humanity (isn't) working." He denounced America's violence and belief it can solve problems left for "other people (to clean up and) put....back together - Iraq, for example." Another is the condition at home.

Since taking office in January, 2001, George Bush signed a blizzard of Executive Orders and attached dozens of "signing statements" to hundreds of law provisions even though nothing in the Constitution allows this practice, and the Supreme Court banned line-item vetos. He continues to do it while Congress and the courts condone his claiming unconstitutional "unitary executive" authority to ignore the law and do as he pleases in the name of "national security" on his say alone.

It began on 9/11 when George Bush addressed the nation and declared a "war on terrorism," asked for world support to win it, and began what became "our government's emergency (preventive war strategy) response plans." The scheme was to ignore the law, go to war, and destroy our civil liberties to keep us safe from "rogue states, 'bad guys,' and evil-doers" throughout an "arc of instability" from the South American Andean region (mainly Colombia) to North Africa through the Middle East to the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia. Congress as well acted right out of the box with two audacious resolutions that surrendered its authority to the executive, allowed him to proceed, and signaled what would come.

The first one came September 18, 2001 in a joint "House-Senate Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)" that authorized "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States." A second followed in the October, 2002 "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of the United States Armed Forces Against Iraq," and the rest is history. This article reviews other key congressional legislation to the present along with George Bush's blatant abuse of presidential power.

His first action came November 13, 2001 when he issued Military Order Number 1 that one analyst called a "coup d'etat," and "watershed moment in (the) country," that was a hint of what would follow. This order violated the spirit and letter of a civil society under constitutional law with a firewall separating it from the military. No longer, and it got worse later on when its provisions resurfaced by act of Congress. That's discussed below. First, Military Order Number 1 and what's in it:

-- it let the President usurp authority to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest any non-citizens (and later citizens as well) anywhere in the world if he claims they're involved in international terrorism and to hold them indefinitely without charge, evidence or allowing them due process in a court of law.

-- however, IF trials are allowed, they would be by special ad hoc "military commissions," not civil courts and in secret, with evidence obtained by torture allowed, those found guilty given no right of appeal, and they can be secretly executed.

-- no civil court has authority in these cases even if victims are identified and legal counsel wishes to represent them.

Few knew then that on November 13, 2001 US citizens lost their civil liberties, but that would come out later on. It's still ongoing with Congress and the courts complicit in the willful destruction of our democracy that was already on life support. Today, it's gone.

Use of National Security ((NSPDs) and Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPDs)

In the Bush administration, NSPDs replaced the Presidential Decision and Review Directives under Bill Clinton and others under different names since the Kennedy administration began the practice. Earlier ones remain in force unless superseded. They're much like Executive Orders (EOs) with the "full force and effect of law," relate to national security, and for that reason remain classified unless or until made public. In seven years, George Bush issued dozens of NSPD's that are too many to review as well as over 20 Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPDs). A few key ones are discussed below.

The October 25, 2001 NSPD-9 deserves special note and was titled "Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States." On March 23, 2004, Donald Rumsfeld gave this explanation of its classified contents to the 9/11 Commission:

-- "To eliminate the Al Queda network;

-- To use all elements of national power to do so -- diplomatic, military, economic, intelligence, information and law enforcement;

-- To eliminate sanctuaries for Al Queda and related terrorist networks -- and if diplomatic efforts to do so failed, to consider additional measures."

On April 1, 2004, the White House released this statement on the directive:

The NSPD called on the Secretary of Defense to plan for military options "against Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including leadership, command-control, air and air defense, ground forces, and logistics (along with similar efforts) against Al Queda and associated terrorist facilities in Afghanistan."

Here's the problem. The administration adopted these measures on September 4, 2001, seven days before 9/11. George Bush then signed them into binding law in NSPD-9 on October 25, 2001 to conceal when they originated.

    "Washington- The Bush administration is pushing to take control of the promotions of military lawyers, escalating a conflict over the independence of uniformed attorneys who have repeatedly raised objections to the White House's policies toward prisoners in the war on terrorism.

    The administration has proposed a regulation requiring "coordination" with politically appointed Pentagon lawyers before any member of the Judge Advocate General corps - the military's 4,000-member uniformed legal force - can be promoted.

    A Pentagon spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the reasoning behind the proposed regulations. But the requirement of coordination - which many former JAGs say would give the administration veto power over any JAG promotion or appointment - is consistent with past administration efforts to impose greater control over the military lawyers.

    The former JAG officers say the regulation would end the uniformed lawyers' role as a check-and-balance on presidential power, because politically appointed lawyers could block the promotion of JAGs who they believe would speak up if they think a White House policy is illegal.

    Retired Major General Thomas Romig, the Army's top JAG from 2001 to 2005, called the proposal an attempt "to control the military JAGs" by sending a message that if they want to be promoted, they should be "team players" who "bow to their political masters on legal advice."

    It "would certainly have a chilling effect on the JAGs' advice to commanders," Romig said. "The implication is clear: without [the administration's] approval the officer will not be promoted."

    The new JAG rule is part of a set of proposed changes to the military's procedures for promoting all commissioned officers, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe. The Pentagon began internally circulating a draft of the changes for comments by the services in mid-November, and the administration will decide whether to make the changes official later this month or early next year.

" Washington - Pared-down energy legislation cleared the Senate on Thursday by a wide margin after the oil industry and utilities succeeded in stripping out provisions that would have cost them billions of dollars.

    The legislation still contains a landmark increase in fuel-economy standards for vehicles and a huge boost for alternative fuels. But a $13 billion tax increase on oil companies and a requirement that utilities nationwide produce 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources were left on the floor to secure Republican votes for the package.

    The tax measure and the renewable electricity mandate were included in an energy bill that easily passed the House last week. But industry lobbyists focused their attention on Republican members of the Senate and on the White House, which repeatedly threatened to veto the bill if the offending sections were not removed.

    Earlier in the week, Senate leaders agreed to drop the renewable electricity section. And on Thursday, after a failed effort to cut off debate on the bill, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said he would reluctantly remove the tax provisions as well, clearing the way for passage in the early evening.

    The slimmed-down bill passed 86-8.

    The Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned electric utilities, led the opposition to the renewable electricity mandate. Along with its member companies in the Midwest and Southeast, the group carried out an extensive lobbying campaign warning that the bill would cause sharp increases in electric rates.

    The institute was joined by the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce and groups representing the paper, mining, petrochemical and refining industries.

    Dan Riedinger, a spokesman for the institute, said that a federal mandate would conflict with mandates for renewable power in place in more than half the states and that this could possibly complicate efforts to pass a nationwide program to combat climate change.

    "The federal government jumping in now and second-guessing the states and enacting a fuel mandate in advance of economy-wide greenhouse gas regulation just wasn't going to make it out of Congress," Mr. Riedinger said.

"    By a narrow margin, the Senate today failed again to block a Republican-led filibuster on an energy bill as GOP leaders made a stand against a $21.8 billion, 10-year tax package that would have extended incentives for wind and solar energy and reduced some tax breaks for oil companies.

    The vote stalled a bill that includes tougher fuel and appliance efficiency standards and a requirement for a massive increase in biofuels.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said he would introduce another version of the energy bill, without the tax package, perhaps as soon as today. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the revised bill would get wide bipartisan support.

    The bid to end debate failed even though Democratic presidential candidates - Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Barack Obama (Ill.), Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) - returned from the campaign trail to lend their support to the energy bill. They were scheduled to rush back to Iowa in time for a debate this afternoon.

    The 59-40 vote - one vote short of the margin needed to end debate and clear the way for a vote on the measure - came after warnings from the White House and Sen. Pete V. Domenici (N.M.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, that President Bush would veto the bill because of the tax component.

    Nine Republicans voted in favor of ending debate and one Democrat, Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.), voted against it. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, was not present.

"Migrant workers chained, beaten and forced into debt, exposing the human cost of producing cheap food.

    Immokalee, Florida - Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom.

    When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen.

    The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5.

    Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today.

    Between December and May, Florida produces virtually the entire US crop of field-grown fresh tomatoes. Fruit picked here in the winter months ends up on the shelves of supermarkets and is also served in the country's top restaurants and in tens of thousands of fast-food outlets.

    But conditions in the state's fruit-picking industry range from straightforward exploitation to forced labour. Tens of thousands of men, women and children - excluded from the protection of America's employment laws and banned from unionising - work their fingers to the bone for rates of pay which have hardly budged in 30 years.

    Until now, even appeals from the former president Jimmy Carter to help raise the wages of fruit-pickers have gone unheeded. However, with Florida looming as a key battleground during the the next presidential election, there is hope that their cause will be raised by the Democratic candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards.

    Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about $200 (£100) a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of America's overweight families piled high. The migrants, largely Hispanic and with many of them from Mexico, are the last wretched link in a long chain of exploitation and abuse. They are paid 45 cents (22p) for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes collected. A worker has to pick nearly two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes - a near impossibility - in order to reach minimum wage. So bad are their working and living conditions that the US Department of Labour, which is not known for its sympathy to the underdog, has called it "a labour force in considerable distress".

    A week after the escapees managed to emerge from the van in which they had been locked up for the night, police discovered that a forced labour operation was supplying fruit-pickers to local growers. Court papers describe how migrant workers were forced into debt and beaten into going to work on farms in Florida, as well as in North and South Carolina. Detectives found another 11 men who were being kept against their will in the grounds of a Florida house shaded by palm trees. The bungalow stood abandoned this week, a Cadillac in the driveway alongside a black and chrome pick-up truck with a cowboy hat on the dashboard. The entire operation was being run by the Navarettes, a family well known in the area.

Blumner: Longtime Republican Attack Dog Is Feasting on Labor Unions, by Robyn Blumner, Salt Lake Tribune (December 16, 2007)

"    Don Todd has quite a resume. If you like dirt.

    In 1996, Todd was called "one of the best mudslingers and muckrakers in town," by GOP strategists in the Beltway publication The Hill.

    In his work for the Republican National Committee, Todd is reportedly the one who discovered that a Massachusetts prison inmate committed a murder after being furloughed, and convinced Lee Atwater to use Willie Horton in an ad against Michael Dukakis in 1988.

    Since the late 1970s, Todd has been at the forefront of a Republican attack machine. In 1980, he chaired a group called Anybody but Church that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to cast aspersions on Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho - the remarkable senior senator who had held the nation's out-of-control intelligence agencies to account.

    In a 1999 piece by the Chicago Tribune, Todd was called "the father of opposition research." As then-research director at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he was described as toiling "in a dim basement office in the Ronald Reagan Republican Center" with a computer screen-saver that said "Convict Clinton."

    Today Todd has a different job. Soon after George Bush became president, Todd was tapped as head of the Office of Labor-Management Standards in the U.S. Labor Department.

    Why might someone with no depth of experience in accounting, government administration or the complexities of union finance be placed at the helm of this agency?

    Need we ask?

    Organized labor is the bete noire of the Republican Party for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that union members better understand what public policies benefit workers, meaning they are more likely to vote Democratic. The office Todd heads is charged with ensuring that unions act democratically and transparently. It has the power to investigate the internal workings of unions, audit their finances and to implement new reporting rules - even onerous ones.

    As documented in a new report, "Beyond Justice," by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, Todd is using these tools to the advantage of his party's anti-union objectives.

    The Bush administration, which is so reflexively antagonistic toward regulation, has been pouring additional resources into Todd's regulatory agency. As the CAP report points out, even as inflation-adjusted spending for things like Occupational Safety and Health Administration enforcement is down 8 percent from 2001 levels, Todd's office has grown by 20 percent.

    Since Todd took over, new reporting requirements have been instituted (with more to come) that unions say have substantially increased the time and expense involved in compliance, such as turning a 125-page submission into 800 pages.

    The object isn't so much to assist union members - who is going to slog through an 800-page report? - but to redirect valuable resources.

    None other than hyperpartisan Newt Gingrich sought to use this strategy. As a Republican congressman from Georgia, Gingrich wrote then-Labor Secretary Lynn Martin in 1992 suggesting that increasing OLMS reporting standards would "weaken our opponents and encourage our allies."

"    Senate and House Democrats attacked the Republican-led National Labor Relations Board at a Congressional hearing on Thursday, saying its recent decisions had favored employers over workers.

    The Democrats focused on 61 board decisions issued in September that, among other things, made it harder for unions to organize workers and harder for illegally fired employees to collect back pay.

    "This board has undermined collective bargaining at every turn, putting the power of the law behind lawbreakers, not law victims," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

    At the hearing, Wilma B. Liebman, a Democratic member of the five-member board, which oversees unionization rules for workers in private industry, repeatedly clashed with the board's Republican chairman, Robert J. Battista.

    "Virtually every recent policy choice by the board," Ms. Liebman said, "impedes collective bargaining, creates obstacles to union representation or favors employer interests."

"Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has quietly revised the department's ethics policy so a review panel can only consider matters referred to it by two of the department's top officials.

    A Kempthorne spokesman said the change clarified how the ethics panel would receive complaints, but an environmental group said Kempthorne was weakening his own ethics policy before it could even take effect.

    "Dirk Kempthorne proclaimed ethical fidelity like a lion but has pursued it like a lamb," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Ruch's group revealed the ethics change after receiving documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

    Ruch said Kempthorne secretly scaled back an ethics plan he announced last summer with great fanfare. The plan was widely seen as a response to a series of ethics violations at the department, including the conviction of former Deputy Secretary J. Steven Griles, who was sentenced to 10 months in prison for lying to senators in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

    Another former official, Julie MacDonald, resigned as a deputy assistant secretary after the department's inspector general found she had bullied scientists and improperly leaked information about endangered species to private groups.

    In a June 27 memo, Kempthorne announced a 10-point plan he said would make Interior "a model of an ethical workplace." The centerpiece was a "conduct accountability board" that would review allegations of wrongdoing. The panel got off to a rocky start after it first chairman, former Assistant Interior Secretary Mark Limbaugh, promptly resigned to become a lobbyist. The panel is now chaired by National Park Service Director Mary Bomar.

    The change to the conduct accountability board - made July 25 but not announced by the Interior Department - states that the board can only review matters referred to it by Deputy Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett or Kempthorne's chief of staff, Brian Waidmann.

    In other words, said Ruch, if Griles was still at Interior "he could have determined whether his own egregious ethical lapses would be eligible for board review. So much for ethics being job one."

    Spokesman Chris Paolino said Kempthorne created the accountability board and has no interest in weakening it. The revision was intended to clarify how the board - an informal group that does not have its own office or staff - would handle complaints, Paolino said.

    "It's not a freestanding board, and it was not designed to go out and find this information and such," he said.

    If the allegations involve the deputy secretary, the chief of staff could contact the accountability panel - and vice versa, Paolino said."

"Election officials in the presidential battleground state will have no one but themselves to blame because they ignored real solutions for months.

    It is a very odd spectacle. Ohio's Democratic secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, who was elected on a pledge to clean up voting problems in her presidential battleground state, is now under attack by would-be progressive allies for her solutions.

    And her critics, who on Tuesday said her remedies could disenfranchise tens of thousands of likely Democratic voters in Ohio's primary in March and in next fall's presidential election, are not even aware of the biggest irony of all: Brunner could have solved the same problems months ago if she would have settled a federal voting rights suit from the 2004 election. Instead of working through the federal courts, she is now fighting in Ohio's notoriously partisan political arena.

    "All the critics' concerns are valid. But they are confirming stuff that was known months ago and was in the (proposed court) consent decree," said Robert Fitrakis, an attorney, political scientist and journalist from Columbus, Ohio, who - at the request of Ohio's attorney general - was part of a legal team that drafted a proposed settlement that contained 50 legal reforms to make Ohio elections more transparent, accurate and accountable. "They have had a rational blueprint in their hands since April."

    Instead, Brunner this fall conducted an extensive $1.9 million study of vulnerabilities in Ohio's electronic voting systems and predictably found major problems, and then late last week announced a series of solutions for 2008. Those suggestions were criticized in a teleconference on Tuesday by the New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, the Verified Voting Foundation, Cleveland State University's Center for Election Integrity and a member of Brunner's own advisory voting rights council.

    "No matter what happens, there will be no good answer," said Larry Norden, chair of the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security, speaking of voting in the March presidential primary in the state's largest county, where Cleveland is located.

    "We are aware there is a lot of criticism," said Patrick Gallaway, Brunner's spokesman. "These are all truly recommendations right now. Jennifer Brunner as secretary of state is not going to dictate at this point what she thinks the solutions should be for a fix in Ohio. We want to work in a bipartisan fashion with the Ohio legislature and governor, and figure out what the best solution should be for the state."

  However, Columbus attorney Robert Fitrakis has another view. After the 2004 election, he, Columbus attorney Cliff Arnebeck and others compiled evidence of problems with that presidential election. That record was used in reports by the House Judiciary Committee, cited by Democrats who unsuccessfully challenged Ohio's 2004 Electoral College votes and became the basis for a federal voting rights lawsuit that alleged intentional voter suppression of minorities.

    That suit, which was filed in August 2006 - before Brunner was elected - resulted in a federal court order to preserve the 2004 ballots as evidence. When Brunner came into office, she asked all 88 Ohio counties to preserve those records and found that 56 counties had destroyed part or all of their 2004 ballots - violating the court order.

    During the spring of 2007, Ohio's attorney general's office - representing the secretary of state - asked Arnebeck and Fitrakis to draft a settlement document, called a consent decree. contained 50 legal and policy solutions that, if adopted, would have dealt with most of the problems uncovered by Brunner's recent study of Ohio's voting systems. However, Fitrakis said Brunner never took the lawsuit or proposed settlement seriously. In September, he published the draft decree on his website, FreePress.org.

    "She is making 101-level mistakes that everyone in the voting integrity movement has been talking about for years," he said. "She chooses optical scans, but goes to central counting. That is not an improvement. In Miami County in 2004, 16,000 votes were added at the close of voting in central counting. She comes to the right conclusion on DREs (direct recording electronic or paperless voting machines), but not the right implementation."

    "They cut off negotiation," Fitrakis said, speaking of settling the federal voting right case. "They never acknowledged they had the solution in their hands. They have done nothing but stall. We warned the attorney general ... They could settle a federal case and take it out of the state political realm. The judge could monitor it. What they are doing by delaying is running out of time and opening themselves up to new lawsuits." "

"   Denver - Colorado's secretary of state has declared many of the state's electronic voting machines to be unreliable, but said Tuesday that some of them could still be used in November if a software patch was installed.

    Other machines that failed could be replaced with equipment certified for use in other states, Secretary of State Mike Coffman said.

    Coffman met with a task force of state lawmakers to discuss what Colorado should do the day after he decertified three of the four voting equipment manufacturers allowed in the state, affecting six of Colorado's 10 most populous counties.

    Either of Coffman's solutions mentioned Tuesday would have to be approved by the Legislature. The lawmakers on the task force gave no indication of whether they would accept the proposals.

    In his announcement Monday, Coffman said Colorado's actions would have national repercussions. "What we have found is that the federal certification process is inadequate," he said.

    The decertification decision, which cited problems with accuracy and security, affects electronic voting machines in Denver and five other counties. A number of electronic scanners used to count ballots were also decertified.

    Coffman would not comment Monday on what his findings mean for past elections, despite his conclusion that some equipment had accuracy issues.

"    A significant number of electronic-voting machines in use in Colorado aren't reliable enough nor secure enough for compliance with state laws, the Colorado secretary of state said today.

    "The results today will have national repercussions across the country," Mike Coffman said during a press conference.

    Coffman announced his office had determined that Sequoia's electronic-voting machines - the Edge II and the Edge II Plus - both failed due to security-risk factors.

    He also said the optical-scan devices eScan and BallotNow, manufactured by Hart, showed they could not accurately count ballots.

    ES&S optical-scan devices failed as well because of the inability to determine whether they worked properly. That manufacturer's electronic-voting machine, iVotronic, also failed because it can be easily disabled by voters. In addition, that system lacked an audit trail.

    Premier, formerly Diebold, machines did pass muster with the state.

"  Cincinnati - All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state's top elections official has found.

    "It was worse than I anticipated," the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. "I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others."

    At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.

    Ms. Brunner proposed replacing all of the state's voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohio's 88 counties. She wants all counties to use optical scan machines that read and electronically record paper ballots that are filled in manually by voters.

    She called for legislation and financing to be in place by April so the new machines can be used in the presidential election next November. She said she could not estimate the cost of the changes.

"The Justice Department's voting rights chief stepped down Friday amid allegations that he'd used the position to aid a Republican strategy to suppress African-American votes.

    John Tanner became the latest of about a dozen senior department officials, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who've resigned in recent months in a scandal over the politicization of the Justice Department in the Bush administration.

    In recent months, McClatchy has reported on a pattern of decision-making within the department's Civil Rights Division, of which the Voting Rights Section is a part, that tended to narrow the voting rights of Democratic-leaning minorities.

    Tanner has been enmeshed for months in congressional investigations over his stewardship of the unit that was established to protect minority-voting rights. He drew increased focus this fall after he told a Latino group: "African-Americans don't become elderly the way white people do. They die."

    In addition, the Justice Department opened an internal investigation into allegations that Tanner unfairly had deprived two veteran African-American staffers of bonuses and that he and a deputy had misused tax dollars on official trips.

"Very rarely, I read a press account and see the footprint of a new world—there it is, lurking amidst the smudged black ink in the thin column. Sometimes it is a technological breakthrough that promises to make life easier, safer, or longer. But sometimes it is a redefinition of the parameters of human society. And sometimes it’s downright frightening. Time to pull it out of the banality of that newsprint and think.

And it happened on Sunday morning. The article is by Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Scott Shane, and it’s called “Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry.” Take the time to read this article carefully. Here are a few key grafs:

For months, the Bush Administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program. But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

What Lichtblau, Risen and Shane are describing is the dawn of a new National Surveillance State in the United States, a public-private partnership. And the object of this partnership—which emerges as a criminal conspiracy, quite literally, between telecom companies and the Bush Administration—is to watch and listen to you and everything you do. Of course, they will say it’s about “terrorists,” or about “narcotics traffickers.” And indeed every authoritarian and wannabe totalitarian system from the dawn of time has cast its snooping on citizens in just these terms. No problems with the honest citizen, they say, it’s the criminals and the enemies we’re after. We need your cooperation. But the technology used makes no such distinction—it is snooping on everyone.

We learn about this mostly thanks to an engineer who saw what was happening and began to ask questions

The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency “could listen in” with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said.

“At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something isn’t right.”

So the United States intelligence agencies in cahoots with major telecom providers are intercepting and reviewing your communications. This is occurring without warrants. And the legal community is in accord: it was criminal conduct. And that’s why the Bush Administration is frantically pushing right now for immunity: to ensure that its collaborators face no adverse consequences from their criminal acts. What kind of society does this sound like?

Now let’s tack on one further extremely disturbing fact. One telecom company said “no.” It was Qwest. The Qwest response to overtures was simple: “We’d love to work with you on this. But you do need to change the law so we can do it legally.” Apparently as soon as that happened, Qwest lost a series of important government contracts. And the next thing you know, the Justice Department was feverishly working on a criminal investigation looking at Qwest’s CEO on insider trading allegations—amidst very strange dealings between the Justice Department and the federal judge hearing the case. Of course, this is all the purest coincidence. Or maybe not. What kind of society does this sound like?

"To all intents and purposes, the Wahabi religious establishment of Saudi Arabia has just issued a fatwa against the US dollar. This bears watching.

A message issued by 26 leading clerics warns that inflation has reached intolerable levels in the Gulf kingdom. 

While it does not vilify the dollar explicitly, the apparent political aim is to undermine the country’s dollar peg.

“The rulers should seek to try to remedy this crisis in a way that would ease people’s suffering.”

“We direct this message to the rulers and officials: we remind you of Prophet Mohammad’s words that you are shepherds who are responsible for your flock,” it said.

The statement was posted across the Islamic world. The background to this has been a raging debate in Gulf religious and economic circles about the destructive effects of the sliding dollar.

Among the lead-authors is Sheikh Nasser al-Omar, known for his fatwa against US-led forces in Iraq.

He has long preached the collapse of American-led capitalism, and now sees a perfect moment to plunge the knife. We can guess that al-Qaeda Inc is thinking along the same lines.

My own hunch is that the next al-Qaeda strike will not be a symbolic blow to a great building or city, but rather a carefully-timed economic blow: either by cutting – or trying to cut - the oil jugular, or by trying to precipitate a run on the dollar. 

"Stocks fell sharply last week on news of accelerating inflation which will limit the Federal Reserves ability to continue cutting interest rates. On Tuesday the Dow Jones Industrials tumbled 294 points following the Fed's announcement of a quarter point cut to the Fed Funds rate. On Friday, the Dow dipped another 178 points when government figures showed consumer prices had risen 0.8% last month after a 0.3% gain in October. The stock market is now lurching downward into a “primary bear market”. There has been a steady deterioration in retail sales, commercial real estate, and the transports. The financial industry is going through a major retrenchment losing more than 25% in aggregate capitalization since July. The real estate market is collapsing. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced on Friday that he will declare a "fiscal emergency" in January and ask for more power to deal with the $14 billion budget shortfall from the meltdown in subprime lending. Economists are beginning to publicly acknowledge what many market analysts have suspected for months; the nation's economy is going into a tailspin which will inevitably end in a hard landing.

Morgan Stanley's Asia Chairman, Stephen Roach, made this observation in a New York Times op-ed on Sunday:

“This recession will be deeper than the shallow contraction earlier in this decade. The dot-com-led downturn was set off by a collapse in business capital spending, which at its peak in 2000 accounted for only 13 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. The current recession is all about the coming capitulation of the American consumer — whose spending now accounts for a record 72 percent of G.D.P.”

Most people have no idea how grave the present situation is or the disaster the country will face if trillions of dollars of over-leveraged bonds and equities begin to unwind. There's a widespread belief that the stewards of the system—Bernanke and Paulson—can somehow steer the economy through this “rough patch” into calm waters. But they cannot, and the presumption shows a basic misunderstanding of how markets work. The Fed has no magical powers and will it allow itself to be crushed by standing in the path of a market-avalanche. As foreclosures and bankruptcies increase; stocks will crash and the fed will step aside to safety. That much is certain.

In the last few weeks, Bernanke and Paulson have tried a number of strategies that have failed miserably. Paulson concocted a plan to help the major investment banks consolidate and repackage their nonperforming mortgage-backed junk into a “Super SIV” to give them another chance to unload their bad investments on the public. The plan was nothing more than a public relations ploy which has already been abandoned by most of the key participants. Paulson's involvement is a real black eye for the Dept of the Treasury. It makes it look like he's willing to dupe investors as long as it helps his well-heeled Wall Street buddies.

Paulson also put together an “industry friendly” rate freeze that is supposed to help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure. But the plan falls well short of providing any meaningful aid to the estimated 3.5 million homeowners who are facing the prospect of defaulting on their loans if they don't get government assistance. Recent estimates by industry experts say that Paulson's plan will only help a meager 140,000 mortgage holders, leaving millions of others to fend for themselves. Paulson has proved over and over that he is just not up to the task of confronting an economic challenge of this magnitude head-on.

Fed chief Bernanke hasn't done much better than Paulson. His three-quarter point cut to the Fed's Funds rate hasn't lowered interest rates on mortgages, stimulated greater home sales, stabilized the stock market or helped banks deal with their massive debt-load. It's been a flop from start to finish. All its done is weaken the dollar and trigger a wave of inflation. In fact, government figures now show energy prices are rising at a whopping 18.1% annually. Bernanke is apparently following Lenin's injunction that “The best way to destroy the Capitalist System is to debauch the currency.”

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve initiated a “coordinated effort” with the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the and the Swiss National Bank to address the “elevated pressures in short-term funding of the markets.” The Fed issued a statement that “it will make up to $24 billion available to the European Central Bank (ECB) and Swiss National Bank to increase the supply of dollars in Europe.” (Bloomberg) The Fed will also add as much as $40 billion, via auctions, to increase cash in the U.S. Bernanke is trying to loosen the knot that has tightened Libor rates in England and reduced lending between banks. The slowdown is hobbling growth and could send the world into a recessionary spiral. Bernanke's “master plan” is little more than a cash giveaway to sinking banks. It has no chance of succeeding. The Fed is offering $.85 on the dollar for mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that sold last week in the E*Trade liquidation for $.27 on the dollar. At the same time, the Fed has promised to keep the identities of the banks that are borrowing these emergency funds secret from the public. Thus, accountability and transparency have been both been shattered by one shortsighted action. The Fed is conducting its business like a bookie.

Unfortunately, the Fed bailout has achieved nothing. Libor rates---which are presently at seven-year highs---have not come down at all. This is causing growing concern among the leaders of the Central Banks around the world, but there's really nothing they can do about it. The banks are hoarding cash to meet their capital requirements. They are trying to compensate for the loss of value to their (mortgage-backed) assets by increasing their reserves. At the same time, the system is clogged with trillions of dollars of bad paper which has brought lending to a grinding halt. The massive injections of liquidity from the Fed have done nothing to improve lending or lower interbank rates. It's been a complete flop. Bernanke has lost control of the system. The market is driving interest rates now. If the situation persists, the stock market will crash.

Huckabee spot reminds Paul of fascism prediction, by David Edwards and Jason Rhyne, rawstory.com (December 18, 2007)

December 12, 2007

Evidence From Waterboarding Could Be Used in Military Trials, by Josh White, Washington Post (December 12, 2007)

" The top legal adviser for the military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees told Congress yesterday that he cannot rule out the use of evidence derived from the CIA's aggressive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, a tactic that simulates drowning.

    Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, who oversees the prosecutors who will try the detainees at military commissions, said that while "torture" is illegal, he cannot say whether waterboarding violates the law. Nor would he say that such evidence would be barred at trial.

    "If the evidence is reliable and probative, and the judge concludes that it is in the best interest of justice to introduce that evidence, ma'am, those are the rules we will follow," Hartmann said in response to questions from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing.

    Hartmann also declined to say that waterboarding would be illegal if used by another country on U.S. forces, drawing expressions of concern from Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). Graham has advocated that techniques used by all U.S. agencies conform to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading tactics.

    Hartmann's testimony came amid broad discussion of the use of waterboarding on at least three important terrorist suspects who were taken into secret CIA custody after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The CIA announced last week that it destroyed videotapes in 2005 that depicted the use of harsh interrogation tactics on two detainees, arguing that the move was made to protect personnel visible on the recordings.

...."

CIA Photos "Show UK Guantanamo Detainee Was Tortured", by Robert Verkaik, Independent/UK (December 10, 2007)

"  Lawyers for a British resident who the US government refuses to release from Guantanamo Bay have identified the existence of photographs taken by CIA agents that they say show their client suffered horrific injuries under torture.

    The photographic evidence will be vital to clear Binyam Mohammed, 27, who the Americans want to bring before a Military Commission on charges of terrorism, say his lawyers.

    Last week it emerged that Britain had negotiated the release of four detainees who have British residence status but Mr Mohammed, who speaks with a London accent, and at least three others are being held back.

    In a letter sent to the Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Britain is urged to ask the US to stop the CIA destroying the pictures.

    Clive Stafford-Smith, the legal director of Reprieve representing Mr Mohammed, said that he also knows the identity of the agents who were present when his client was allegedly beaten and tortured. Writing to Mr Miliband, he said: "Given the opportunity, we can prove that the evidence was the fruit of torture. Indeed, we can prove that a photographic record was made of this by the CIA. Through diligent investigation we know when the CIA took pictures of Mr Mohammed's brutalised genitalia, we know the identity of the CIA agents who were present including the person who took the pictures (we know both their false identities and their true names), and we know what those pictures show."

    He added: "I have been privy to materials that allegedly support the finding that Mr Mohammed should be held, and while I cannot discuss some here (due to classification rules), I can state unequivocally that I have seen no evidence of any kind against Mr Mohammed that is not the bitter fruit of torture."

    Reprieve says it will be pressing for criminal prosecutions against the CIA agents alleged to have carried out the torture.

    Last week it emerged that the CIA destroyed hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the torture of detainees held by the US.

..."

Man Held by CIA Says He Was Tortured, by William Glaberson, NY Times (December 9, 2007)

" Washington - The first of the so-called high-value Guantánamo detainees to have seen a lawyer claims he was subjected to "state-sanctioned torture" while in secret C.I.A. prisons, and he has asked for a court order barring the government from destroying evidence of his treatment.

    The request, in a filing by his lawyers, was made on Nov. 29, before officials from the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that the agency had destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda that current and former officials said included the use of harsh techniques.

    Lawyers for the detainee, Majid Khan, a former Baltimore resident, released documents in his case on Friday. They claim he "was subjected to an aggressive C.I.A. detention and interrogation program notable for its elaborate planning and ruthless application of torture" to numerous detainees.

    The documents also suggest that Mr. Khan, 27, and other high-value detainees are now being held in a previously undisclosed area of the Guantánamo prison in Cuba he called Camp 7.

    Those detainees include 14 men, some suspected of being former Qaeda officials, who President Bush acknowledged were held in a secret C.I.A. program. They were transferred to military custody at Guantánamo last year.

    Asked about Mr. Khan's assertions, Mark Mansfield, a C.I.A. spokesman, said, "the United States does not conduct or condone torture." He said a small number of "hardened terrorists" had required what he called "special methods of questioning" in what he called a lawful and carefully run program.

    The documents were heavily redacted by government security officials, and none of Mr. Khan's specific assertions of torture could be read. One entire page was blacked out.

    In addition to the court filing, Mr. Khan's lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York released recently declassified notes of their first meetings with Mr. Khan, in October. The notes asserted that he had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder because of his treatment, including memory problems and "frantic expression." They said he was "painfully thin and pale."

...."

Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002, by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen, Washington Post (December 9, 2007)

"In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

    Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

    "The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

    Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration's counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.

    Yet long before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

    With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

...."

EPA Pushed to Lower Reporting Standards, by H. Josef Hebert, AP (December 12, 2007)

    "Washington - The White House pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken requirements that companies annually disclose releases of toxic chemicals, congressional auditors say.

    In a study scheduled to be released next week, the Government Accountability Office says the changes mean that industry will have to file 22,000 fewer reports each year, reducing an important public monitoring tool on industrial emissions.

    The EPA rushed to complete the changes because of "pressure" from the White House Office of Management and Budget to reduce the regulatory burdens on industry, says the report obtained by The Associated Press. The White House overstated the cost-savings to industry of making the changes, it added.

    "The EPA administrator expedited the process in order to meet a commitment to OMB," which had pushed to reduce the paperwork burden on industry by the end of 2006, said the GAO.

    For more than two decades, industries and businesses have had to disclose to the EPA the amount of toxic chemicals they produce, store and discharge into the air, water and ground. Communities, watchdog groups, local neighborhoods and even the Internal Revenue Service have used the information

    Last December, the EPA reduced the amount of information that needed to be disclosed in the Toxic Release Inventory Report, or TRI, process. Companies were allowed to use shorter, less detailed forms if they used less than 5,000 pounds of toxic chemicals or released less than 2,000 pounds. Previously more detailed information had to be provided in longer forms if there was as little as 500 pounds, a threshold that the new rule maintains only for some of the most dangerous chemicals.

...."

Ominous Arctic Melt Worries Experts, by Seth Borenstein, AP (December 12, 2007)

"An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”

....."

Democrats Accuse White House of Cooking Climate Change Testimony, by Erika Bolstad and Lesley Clark, McClatchy Newspapers (December 10, 2007)

"Washington - The White House censored climate scientists and edited their testimony on global warming before Congress, Democrats charged Monday after a 16-month investigation into allegations of political interference with scientific inquiries.

    The Bush administration was "particularly active in stifling discussions" of a potential link between climate change and the intensity of hurricanes, according to the findings in a draft report issued Monday by Democrats on the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

    Climate scientists are divided about whether the storms that hit the U.S. in 2004 and 2005 were part of a cyclical weather pattern or attributable to higher global temperatures.

    The report said that after Hurricane Katrina, the administration steered journalists toward government scientists who discounted a link between climate change and increased hurricane intensity. It also accused staffers on the Senate Commerce Committee of influencing the public testimony of climate experts such as former National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield.

    "The White House exerted unusual control over the public statements of federal scientists on climate change issues," said the report, which acknowledges that there's no scientific consensus on whether global warming leads to stronger hurricanes.

    The report also charges that the administration has engaged in a "systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warning."

...."

California Electoral Vote Plan Won't Make June Ballot, by Dan Morain, LA Times (December 7, 2007)

"A proposed initiative that drew national attention for its potential to affect the 2008 presidential election will not appear on the June ballot, organizers said Thursday.

    Republican backers of the measure, which could have titled the presidential contest toward the GOP nominee by changing how California awards electoral votes, conceded that they were unable to raise sufficient money.

    Sacramento consultant Dave Gilliard, the campaign manager, said that even if a financial angel were to shower the campaign with $1 million, there is not enough time to qualify the measure for June.

    "I was surprised that more people that finance these types of efforts didn't step forward," Gilliard said. "We had strong supporters and good supporters but didn't come anywhere close to making the budget."

    Deadlines passed last week for submitting petitions to elections officials, who would have determined whether supporters had gathered the necessary 434,000 signatures of registered voters. Typically, gathering enough signatures costs about $2 million; organizers must overshoot their mark to allow for invalid names.

    Gilliard said proponents held out hope that the measure could appear on the November ballot, with the presidential contest. But he said that was a dicey scenario: Even if it were on that ballot and won voter approval, it might not affect the 2008 election.

    The initiative might not kick in until 2012, Gilliard said - adding that courts likely would decide the question.

...."

Spy Court Won't Release US Wiretap Documents, by Matt Apuzzo, AP (December 11, 2007)

    "Washington - The nation's spy court said Tuesday that it will not make public its documents regarding the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

    The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in a rare public opinion, said the public has no right to view the documents because they deal with the clandestine workings of national security agencies.

    The American Civil Liberties Union asked the court to release the records in August. Specifically, the organization asked for the government's legal briefs and the court's opinions on the wiretapping program.

    Writing for the court, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates refused. Releasing the documents would reveal closely guarded secrets that enemies could used to evade detection or disrupt intelligence activities, he said.

...."

Inquiry Begins Into Tapes' Destruction, by Mark Mazetti and David Johnston, NY Times (December 9, 2007)

    "Washington - The Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency's internal watchdog on Saturday began a joint preliminary inquiry into the spy agency's destruction of hundreds of hours of videotapes showing interrogations of top operatives of Al Qaeda.

    The announcement comes amid new questions about which officials inside the C.I.A. were involved in the decision to destroy the videotapes, which showed severe interrogation methods used on two Qaeda suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

    The agency operative who ordered the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the C.I.A.'s national clandestine service, known as the Directorate of Operations until 2005. On Saturday, a government official who had spoken recently with Mr. Rodriguez on the matter said that Mr. Rodriguez told him that he had received approval from lawyers inside the clandestine service to destroy the tapes.

    This disclosure could broaden the scope of the inquiry into the tapes' destruction. Several officials said that top lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department advised the C.I.A. in 2003 not to destroy the videos.

...."

“Missing” Evidence Is Familiar Bush Pattern, by Glenn Greenwald, salon.com (December 8, 2007)

"The New York Times‘ revelation that “the Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody” conclusively demonstrates obstruction of justice which, if Michael Mukasey has an ounce of integrity or independence, will be the subject of a serious and immediate criminal investigation. While the revelation is obviously significant, it is also is part of a long-standing pattern of such obstruction.

In April, I compiled a long list of the numerous court proceedings and other investigations which were impeded by extremely dubious claims from the Bush administration that key evidence was mysteriously “missing.” Much of the “missing” evidence involved precisely the type of evidence that the CIA has now been forced here to admit it deliberately destroyed: namely, evidence showing the conduct of its agents during interrogation of detainees.

The most glaringly similar case was when, during the trial of Jose Padilla, DOJ prosecutors told the federal court that key videotapes of Padilla’s interrogations by DOD agents, including the last interrogation they conducted of him, could not be located, a claim which — for obvious reasons — prompted expressions of incredulity from the Bush-appointed federal judge and virtually everyone else:

....."

CIA Destroyed Two Tapes Showing Interrogations, by Mark Mazzetti, NY Times (December 7, 2007)

    "Washington - The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency's custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

    The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects - including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody - to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.

    In a statement to employees on Thursday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said that the decision to destroy the tapes was made "within the C.I.A." and that they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value.

    The destruction of the tapes raises questions about whether agency officials withheld information from Congress, the courts and the Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program.

...."

Big Brother U.S. Government Subpoenaed Amazon.com to Obtain Book Purchasing Records of Customers, by Mike Adams, News Target.com (December 8, 2007)

"(NewsTarget) Newly unsealed court records have revealed that the U.S. government issued a subpoena to Amazon.com seeking to obtain the identities of customers purchasing books through the Amazon marketplace. The snooping attempt was blocked by U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker who wrote in a recently-unsealed ruling, "Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon's customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases."

Is the U.S. government trying to profile the psychology of its citizens by secretly data mining their book purchasing habits? Since 9/11 and the passage of the ill-designed Patriot Act (which, if anything, is traitorous, not patriotic), it seems that the U.S. government is aggressively expanding its powers to search records, tap phones and surveil electronic messages, all in an effort to conduct Gestapo-like profiling operations on its own citizens. It is now a well-known fact, for example, that domestic phone calls and e-mails are now tracked and recorded by the U.S. government, then mined for "dangerous" words which are linked back to those callers.

"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Judge Crocker wrote in his ruling. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else."

......"

Gang Rape Cover-Up by US, Halliburton/KBR, by Brian Ross, Maddy Sauer and Justin Rood, ABC News (December 10, 2007)

"A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

    Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

    "Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

    In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

    "It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."

    Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

    "I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

    "We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" - from her American employer.

    Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container.

    According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally."

    Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

....."

Blackwater's Bu$ine$$, by Jeremy Scahill, The Nation (December 6, 2007)

"Gunning down seventeen Iraqi civilians in an incident the military has labeled "criminal." Multiple Congressional investigations. A federal grand jury. Allegations of illegal arms smuggling. Wrongful death lawsuits brought by families of dead employees and US soldiers. A federal lawsuit alleging war crimes. Charges of steroid use by trigger-happy mercenaries. Allegations of "significant tax evasion." The US-installed government in Iraq labeling its forces "murderers." With a new scandal breaking practically every day, one would think Blackwater security would be on the ropes, facing a corporate meltdown or even a total wipeout. But it seems that business for the company has never been better, as it continues to pull in major federal contracts. And its public demeanor grows bolder and cockier by the day.

Rather than hiding out and hoping for the scandals to fade, the Bush Administration's preferred mercenary company has launched a major rebranding campaign, changing its name to Blackwater Worldwide and softening its logo: once a bear paw in the site of a sniper scope, it's now a bear claw wrapped in two half ovals--sort of like the outline of a globe with a United Nations feel. Its website boasts of a corporate vision "guided by integrity, innovation, and a desire for a safer world." Blackwater mercenaries are now referred to as "global stabilization professionals." Blackwater's 38-year-old owner, Erik Prince, was No. 11 in Details magazine's "Power 50," the men "who control your viewing patterns, your buying habits, your anxieties, your lust.... the people who have taken over the space in your head."

In one of the company's most bizarre recent actions, on December 1 Blackwater paratroopers staged a dramatic aerial landing, complete with Blackwater flags and parachutes--not in Baghdad or Kabul but in San Diego at Qualcomm Stadium during the halftime show at the San Diego State/BYU football game. The location was interesting, given that Blackwater is fighting fierce local opposition to its attempt to open a new camp--Blackwater West--on 824 acres in the small rural community of Potrero, just outside San Diego. Blackwater's parachute squad plans to land at the Armed Forces Bowl in Texas this month and the Virginia Gold Cup in May. The company recently sponsored a NASCAR racer, and it has teamed up with gun manufacturer Sig Sauer to create a Blackwater Special Edition full-sized 9-millimeter pistol with the company logo on the grip. It comes with a Limited Lifetime Warranty. For $18, parents can purchase infant onesies with the company logo.

....."

December 5, 2007

Tribunal Rejected Intelligence on Detainee, by Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post (December 5, 2007)

"    Just months after U.S. Army troops whisked a German man from Pakistan to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002, his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist.

    "USA considers Murat Kurnaz's innocence to be proven," a German intelligence officer wrote that year in a memo to his colleagues. "He is to be released in approximately six to eight weeks."

    But the 19-year-old student was not freed. Instead, over the next four years, two U.S. military tribunals that were responsible for determining whether Guantanamo Bay detainees were enemy fighters declared him a dangerous al-Qaeda ally who should remain in prison.

    The disparity between the tribunal's judgments and the intelligence community's consensus view that Kurnaz is innocent is detailed in newly released military and court documents that track his fate. His attorneys, who sued the Pentagon to gain access to the documents, say that they reflect policies that result in mistreatment of the hundreds of foreigners who have been locked up for years at the controversial prison.

 The Supreme Court intends to weigh the legitimacy of the military tribunals at a hearing this morning. Lawyers for Kurnaz and other detainees plan to argue that the panels violate the U.S. Constitution and international law. They say that the proceedings have not provided Guantanamo Bay detainees with a fair and impartial hearing.

    Lawyers for the Bush administration will argue that the tribunals have afforded suspected enemies all the rights to which they are entitled. The administration maintains that detainees need not know all of the evidence against them. The tribunals were established in 2004 after the Supreme Court ruled that such panels are needed when holding prisoners indefinitely, and Congress endorsed them in 2005.

"Last June a revealing marketing video from the law firm, Cohen & Grigsby appeared on the Internet. The video demonstrated the law firm's techniques for getting around US law governing work visas in order to enable corporate clients to replace their American employees with foreigners who work for less. The law firm's marketing manager, Lawrence Lebowitz, is upfront with interested clients: "our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested US worker."

If an American somehow survives the weeding out process, "have the manager of that specific position step in and go through the whole process to find a legal basis to disqualify them for this position--in most cases there doesn't seem to be a problem."

No problem for the employer he means, only for the expensively educated American university graduate who is displaced by a foreigner imported on a work visa justified by a nonexistent shortage of trained and qualified Americans.

University of California computer science professor Norm Matloff, who watches this issue closely, said that Cohen & Grigsby's practices are the standard ones used by hordes of attorneys, who are cleaning up by putting Americans out of work.

The Cohen & Grigsby video was a short-term sensation as it undermined the business propaganda that no American employee was being displaced by foreigners on H-1b or L-1 work visas. Soon, however, business organizations and their shills were back in gear lying to Congress and the public about the amazing shortage of qualified Americans for literally every technical and professional occupation, especially IT and software engineering.

Everywhere we hear the same droning lie from business interests that there are not enough American engineers and scientists. For mysterious reasons Americans prefer to be waitresses and bartenders, hospital orderlies, and retail clerks.

As one of the few who writes about this short-sighted policy of American managers endeavoring to maximize their "performance bonuses," I receive much feedback from affected Americans. Many responses come from recent university graduates such as the one who "graduated nearly at the top of my class in 2002" with degrees in both electrical and computer engineering and who "hasn't been able to find a job."

A college roommate of a family member graduated from a good engineering school last year with a degree in software engineering. He had one job interview. Jobless, he is back at home living with his parents and burdened with student loans that bought an education that offshoring and work visas have made useless to Americans.

The hundreds of individual cases that have been brought to my attention are dismissed as "anecdotal" by my fellow economists. So little do they know. I also receive numerous responses from American engineers and IT workers who have managed to hold on to jobs or to find new ones after long intervals when they have been displaced by foreign hires. Their descriptions of their work environments are fascinating.

For example, Dayton, Ohio, was once home to numerous American engineers. Today, writes one surviving American, "I feel like an alien in my own country--as if Dayton had been colonized by India. NCR and other local employers have either offshored most of their IT work or rely heavily on Indian guest workers. The IT department of National City Bank across the street from LexisNexis is entirely Indian. The nearby apartment complexes house large numbers of Indian guest workers filling the engineering needs of many area businesses."

I have learned that Reed Elsevier, which owns LexisNexis, has hired a new Indian vice president for offshoring and that now the jobs of the Indian guest workers may be on the verge of being offshored to another country. The relentless drive for cheap labor now threatens the foreign guest workers who displaced America's own engineers.

One software engineer wrote to me protesting the ignorance of Thomas Friedman for creating a false picture of American engineers being outdated and for "denouncing American engineers and other workers as 'xenophobes' for opposing their displacement by foreign guest workers." The engineer also took exception to the "willful ignorance or cynicism of Bruce Bartlett and George Will" who he described as "bootlicks for pro-outsourcing lobbies."

.......

Integrity is so lacking in America that the shortage myth serves the interests of universities, funding agencies, employers, and immigration attorneys at the expense of American students who naively pursue professions in which their prospects are dim. Initially it was blue-collar factory workers who were abandoned by US corporations and politicians. Now it is white-collar employees and Americans trained in science and technology. Princeton University economist Alan Blinder estimates that there are 30 to 40 million American high end service jobs that ultimately face offshoring.

As I predict, and as BLS payroll jobs data indicate, in 20 years the US will have a third world work force engaged in domestic nontradable services."

Waxman, Mukasey and Ten Million Missing Emails, by Matt Renner, truthout.org (December 5, 2007)

"    A government watchdog group now says at least ten million White House emails, which may contain information about the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA status, have been destroyed by the Bush administration.

    In a report from April, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) detailed a massive hole in the White House email records. The report, titled "Without a Trace: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act," accused the Bush administration of destroying "more than 5 million" emails and failing to attempt to recover them.

    According to CREW, their sources now tell them the number of missing emails is at least ten million.

    Anne Weisman, CREW's chief counsel, said the revised estimate "highlights that this is a very serious and systematic problem at the White House." Currently CREW and The National Security Archives are suing the Bush administration in an attempt to force the administration to restore the missing documents from backup tapes.

    The missing emails were discovered in the fall of 2005 when staff at the White House Office of Administration were attempting to respond to a subpoena from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald for any White House records relating to the leak of Plame Wilson's identity.

    The CREW report includes a letter from Fitzgerald that shows his investigation was hampered by problems with the White House email archiving system. "... we have learned that not all email of the office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system," Fitzgerald wrote in his letter to I. Lewis Libby's attorneys.

    The report detailed two separate possible violations of the Presidential Records Act (PRA), a law passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal that requires the preservation of all presidential documents for the historical record. The first violation was the use of unofficial email accounts by White House staff to conduct official business. This revelation made headlines during the US attorney firings investigation, which remains ongoing.

    The second potential violation, which received little media coverage, was the destruction of internal emails at the White House. According to CREW, two independent White House insiders have confirmed a massive systematic failure occurred that wiped out "hundreds of days" of email records between March 2003 and October 2005.

    When the report was first issued in April, White House spokesperson Dana Perino was asked specifically about the millions of missing emails. She stated there was a system in place that archived emails sent to and from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the Office of the Vice President (OVP) that complied with the PRA. She suggested any email that had been deleted would be available on backup tapes that serve as a second level of defense by storing data in case of any failure.

    However, according to the CREW report, the archiving system the White House used has been inadequate and a plan to restore the destroyed records was never acted upon.

......"

America Is Going Fascist, by Michael Nenonen, The Republic of East Vancouver (December 4, 2007)

Reading Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), I realized the hour is later than I thought.

Many of us have watched the Bush regime’s actions with a growing feeling of horror intertwined with a sense that somehow we’ve seen all of this before, but we aren’t sure where. We’re confused because what we’re seeing conflicts with unexamined and deeply held assumptions we have about American freedom. Wolf’s short but meticulously documented book shows that what is happening in America has indeed happened many times before, not in the United States, but rather in places like Chile, Italy, Russia, and Germany. In each case, people couldn’t understand why they didn’t recognize where they were heading before they passed the point of no return.
 

It's shifting fast

Wolf argues that the United States is undergoing a “fascist shift” from an authoritarian but still relatively open society to a totalitarian society. The techniques for forcing this shift have evolved over the last century and are now studied by aspiring tyrants the world over. These methods are even part of the formal curriculum in places like the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, where thousands of Latin Americans have been trained by the United States government in the most savage techniques of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut down open societies. They invoke an external and internal threat in order to convince the population to grant their rulers extraordinary powers. They establish secret prisons that practice torture, prisons that are initially few in number and only incarcerate social pariahs, but that quickly multiply and soon imprison “opposition leaders, outspoken clergy, union leaders, well-known performers, publishers, and journalists.” They develop a paramilitary force that operates without legal restraint. They set up a system of intense domestic surveillance that gathers information for the purposes of intimidating and blackmailing citizens. They infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize citizens’ groups. They arbitrarily detain and release citizens, especially at borders. They target key individuals like civil servants, academics, and artists in order to ensure their complicity or silence. They take control of the press. They publicly equate dissent with treason. Finally, they suspend the rule of law. All of these strategies are being employed in America today.

Consider the evidence

The Bush administration and its supporters have consistently portrayed the security threat posed by international terrorists as a threat to the very survival of Western civilization in order to justify permanent war and to keep the American public in a state of panic and paranoia.

The prisons at Guantanamo and God-knows how many CIA “Black Sites” torture their inmates, even though human rights organizations have demonstrated that the majority of at least Guantanamo’s inmates are innocent victims of mass arrests. The inmates are designated as “enemy combatants” who have no rights under international or American law. And there is nothing stopping American presidents from filling these prisons with American citizens. In an April 24 2007 article for the Huffington Post, Wolf writes that thanks to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, “the president has the power to call any US citizen an ‘enemy combatant’. He has the power to define what ‘enemy combatant’ means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define ‘enemy combatant’ any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly. Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial.” She points out that while currently Americans in such situations will be spared any torture except psychosis-inducing isolation and can look forward to eventual trials, these rights typically evaporate in the final stages of a fascist shift.

They're called "mercenaries"

Military contractors are the regime’s paramilitary force. Blackwater’s mercenaries, many of whom were trained by Latin America’s most horrific police states, have operated in Iraq outside of Iraqi, American, and military law, and have murdered uncounted innocent Iraqis with impunity. Domestically, Blackwater was contracted to provide hundreds of armed security guards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and there’s evidence that they fired on civilians. Blackwater’s business plan calls for their use in future disasters and emergencies throughout the United States, and it’s supported by some of the biggest powerbrokers in America.

American intelligence agencies are now bypassing court orders to wiretap citizens’ telephones, spy on their e-mails, and monitor their financial transactions, and the USA Patriot Act forces corporations, booksellers, librarians, and doctors to turn over previously confidential information about Americans to the state.

Thousands of human rights, environmental, anti-war, and other citizens’ groups have been infiltrated by government agents, many of whom have clearly acted as agent provocateurs in order to undermine the groups’ solidarity and to legitimize police actions against them.

Political opponents listed

America’s Transportation Security Administration maintains a terrorist watch list of tens of thousands of Americans who are now subjected to security searches and arbitrary detention at airports. The list includes people like Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and respected constitutional scholar Walter F Murphy.

US Attorneys, CIA agents, military lawyers, and other civil servants who’ve disagreed with the Bush administration have been threatened and fired. David Horowitz and his colleagues have mounted a well-funded nation-wide intimidation campaign that has university students spying on their professors and that has successfully coerced regents at State Universities to discipline or fire left-leaning professors like Ward Churchill. The regime’s supporters have organized campaigns to damage the careers of artists like the Dixie Chicks for criticism of the president and his policies.

The administration has Fox News in its pocket, it has paid journalists for positive coverage, it has disseminated misinformation through the media, and it’s ferociously attacking critical journalists. Arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high. The Bush administration’s outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame was done in retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson, whose New York Times op-ed piece exposed lies that the Bush administration used to lead the nation to war. Worse than this, independent journalists appear to be marked for death by American forces in Iraq. In her Huffington Post article, Wolf writes, “The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. . . . In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.” The goal of these tactics, as she writes in The End of America, is to create “a new reality in which the truth can no longer be ascertained and no longer counts.”

Dissent = treason

In recent years, prominent Republicans like Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan, and William Kristol have accused liberal journalists of treason and espionage for publishing leaked material damaging to the administration, and in February 2007, Republican Congressman Don Young said “Congressmen who wilfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are sabateurs, and should be hanged.” This would be amusing, were it not for the Bush administration’s revival of the draconian 1917 Espionage Act after half a century’s slumber.

And finally, the Bush administration shows contempt for the law. In The End of America, Wolf writes that Bush has used more signing statements than any previous president, and by doing so has relegated “Congress to an advisory role. This abuse lets the President choose what laws he wishes to enforce or not, overruling Congress and the people. So Americans are living under laws their representatives never passed. Signing statements put the president above the law.” He has also gutted the Posse Comitatus Act, which was created to prevent the president from maintaining a standing army for use against American citizens. Wolf writes that the 2007 Defence Authorization Bill lets the president “expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops without the permission of the governor when ‘public order’ has been lost; he can send these troops out into our streets at his direction—overriding local law enforcement authorities—during a national disaster, epidemic, serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or ‘other condition.’” On its own, this is an incredible expansion of presidential power, but when combined with the use of military contractors like Blackwater it gives the president almost dictatorial authority.

Wolf shows that fascist shifts don’t happen overnight, but rather over a course of years during which the fascists’ plans unfold at an accelerating pace. Germany in 1933 was further along this path than it was in 1931, and Germany in 1935 was farther along than it was in 1933. Similarly, America in 2007 is farther along the path than it was in 2005, or will be in 2009, provided that a massive pro-democracy movement, complete with impeachment proceedings, doesn’t reverse the shift while there’s still time. A simple Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election won’t do the job unless the institutional and legal environment created by the Bush administration is thoroughly dismantled. Regardless of whether the next president is a Republican or a Democrat, he or she will inherit a legacy of centralized power that a democracy simply can’t tolerate.

Left behind

Unfortunately, during the shift opposition politicians and activists still tend to perceive the world through a democratic frame of reference, and this prevents them from seeing that their opponents are no longer operating within this frame. As the opposition is tying its boxing gloves, the fascists are breaking out the machetes.

......"

".....when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at.

No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).

On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the ‘doomsday seed bank.’ Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.

The seed bank is being built inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island near the small village of Longyearbyen. It’s almost ready for ‘business’ according to their releases. The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. It will contain up to three million different varieties of seeds from the entire world, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future,’ according to the Norwegian government. Seeds will be specially wrapped to exclude moisture. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault's relative inaccessibility will facilitate monitoring any possible human activity.

Did we miss something here? Their press release stated, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future.’ What future do the seed bank’s sponsors foresee, that would threaten the global availability of current seeds, almost all of which are already well protected in designated seed banks around the world?

Anytime Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto and Syngenta get together on a common project, it’s worth digging a bit deeper behind the rocks on Spitsbergen. When we do we find some fascinating things.

The first notable point is who is sponsoring the doomsday seed vault. Here joining the Norwegians are, as noted, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the US agribusiness giant DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred, one of the world’s largest owners of patented genetically-modified (GMO) plant seeds and related agrichemicals; Syngenta, the Swiss-based major GMO seed and agrichemicals company through its Syngenta Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation, the private group who created the “gene revolution with over $100 million of seed money since the 1970’s; CGIAR, the global network created by the Rockefeller Foundation to promote its ideal of genetic purity through agriculture change.

.......

Now the Svalbard Seed Bank begins to become interesting. But it gets better. ‘The Project’ I referred to is the project of the Rockefeller Foundation and powerful financial interests since the 1920’s to use eugenics, later renamed genetics, to justify creation of a genetically-engineered Master Race. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race.

The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet. Now this is getting really intriguing. The same Rockefeller Foundation created the pseudo-science discipline of molecular biology in their relentless pursuit of reducing human life down to the ‘defining gene sequence’ which, they hoped, could then be modified in order to change human traits at will. Hitler’s eugenics scientists, many of whom were quietly brought to the United States after the War to continue their biological eugenics research, laid much of the groundwork of genetic engineering of various life forms, much of it supported openly until well into the Third Reich by Rockefeller Foundation generous grants.²

The same Rockefeller Foundation created the so-called Green Revolution, out of a trip to Mexico in 1946 by Nelson Rockefeller and former New Deal Secretary of Agriculture and founder of the Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Company, Henry Wallace.

The Green Revolution purported to solve the world hunger problem to a major degree in Mexico, India and other select countries where Rockefeller worked. Rockefeller Foundation agronomist, Norman Borlaug, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work, hardly something to boast about with the likes of Henry Kissinger sharing the same.

In reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970’s, ‘If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.’

......

A crucial aspect driving the interest of the Rockefeller Foundation and US agribusiness companies was the fact that the Green Revolution was based on proliferation of new hybrid seeds in developing markets. One vital aspect of hybrid seeds was their lack of reproductive capacity. Hybrids had a built in protection against multiplication. Unlike normal open pollinated species whose seed gave yields similar to its parents, the yield of the seed borne by hybrid plants was significantly lower than that of the first generation.

That declining yield characteristic of hybrids meant farmers must normally buy seed every year in order to obtain high yields. Moreover, the lower yield of the second generation eliminated the trade in seed that was often done by seed producers without the breeder’s authorization. It prevented the redistribution of the commercial crop seed by middlemen. If the large multinational seed

companies were able to control the parental seed lines in house, no competitor or farmer would be able to produce the hybrid. The global concentration of hybrid seed patents into a handful of giant seed companies, led by DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto’s Dekalb laid the ground for the later GMO seed revolution. ⁴

In effect, the introduction of modern American agricultural technology, chemical fertilizers and commercial hybrid seeds all made local farmers in developing countries, particularly the larger more established ones, dependent on foreign, mostly US agribusiness and petro-chemical company inputs. It was a first step in what was to be a decades-long, carefully planned process.

.......

With the true background of the 1950’s Rockefeller Foundation Green Revolution clear in mind, it becomes especially curious that the same Rockefeller Foundation along with the Gates Foundation which are now investing millions of dollars in preserving every seed against a possible “doomsday” scenario are also investing millions in a project called The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

AGRA, as it calls itself, is an alliance again with the same Rockefeller Foundation which created the “Gene Revolution.” A look at the AGRA Board of Directors confirms this.

It includes none other than former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as chairman. In his acceptance speech in a World Economic Forum event in Cape Town South Africa in June 2007, Kofi Annan stated, ‘I accept this challenge with gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and all others who support our African campaign.’

......

t is no accident that the Rockefeller and Gates foundations are teaming up to push a GMO-style Green Revolution in Africa at the same time they are quietly financing the ‘doomsday seed vault’ on Svalbard. The GMO agribusiness giants are up to their ears in the Svalbard project.

Indeed, the entire Svalbard enterprise and the people involved call up the worst catastrophe images of the Michael Crichton bestseller, Andromeda Strain, a sci-fi thriller where a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood threatening the entire human species. In Svalbard, the future world’s most secure seed repository will be guarded by the policemen of the GMO Green Revolution--the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, Syngenta, DuPont and CGIAR.

.......

We can legitimately ask why Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation along with the major genetic engineering agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Syngenta, along with CGIAR are building the Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic.

Who uses such a seed bank in the first place? Plant breeders and researchers are the major users of gene banks. Today’s largest plant breeders are Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Dow Chemical, the global plant-patenting GMO giants. Since early in 2007 Monsanto holds world patent rights together with the United States Government for plant so-called ‘Terminator’ or Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits ‘suicide’ after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed.

This clever genetically engineered terminator trait forces farmers to return every year to Monsanto or other GMO seed suppliers to get new seeds for rice, soybeans, corn, wheat whatever major crops they need to feed their population. If broadly introduced around the world, it could within perhaps a decade or so make the world’s majority of food producers new feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed companies such as Monsanto or DuPont or Dow Chemical.

That, of course, could also open the door to have those private companies, perhaps under orders from their host government, Washington, deny seeds to one or another developing country whose politics happened to go against Washington’s. Those who say ‘It can’t happen here’ should look more closely at current global events. The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not. 

These private companies, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical hardly have an unsullied record in terms of stewardship of human life. They developed and proliferated such innovations as dioxin, PCBs, Agent Orange. They covered up for decades clear evidence of carcinogenic and other severe human health consequences of use of the toxic chemicals. They have buried serious scientific reports that the world’s most widespread herbicide, glyphosate, the essential ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide that is tied to purchase of most Monsanto genetically engineered seeds, is toxic when it seeps into drinking water.⁹ Denmark banned glyphosate in 2003 when it confirmed it has contaminated the country’s groundwater.¹⁰

The diversity stored in seed gene banks is the raw material for plant breeding and for a great deal of basic biological research. Several hundred thousand samples are distributed annually for such purposes. The UN’s FAO lists some 1400 seed banks around the world, the largest being held by the United States Government. Other large banks are held by China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Germany and Canada in descending order of size. In addition, CGIAR operates a chain of seed banks in select centers around the world.

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Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation. Can the development of patented seeds for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?

The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920’s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics,’ the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines. Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, ‘we want to exterminate the Negro population.’ ¹¹

A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in 2001 announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto.

In the 1990’s the UN’s World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tentanus, a sickness arising from such things as stepping on a rusty nail. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally liable to step on rusty nails as women.

Because of that curious anomaly, Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested. The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO only to women of child-bearing age contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.

It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller’s Population Council, the World Bank (home to CGIAR), and the United States’ National Institutes of Health had been involved in a 20-year-long project begun in 1972 to develop the concealed abortion vaccine with a tetanus carrier for WHO. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault, donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine. ¹²

Is it a coincidence that these same organizations, from Norway to the Rockefeller Foundation to the World Bank are also involved in the Svalbard seed bank project? According to Prof. Francis Boyle who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by the US Congress, the Pentagon is ‘now gearing up to fight and win biological warfare’ as part of two Bush national strategy directives adopted, he notes, ‘without public knowledge and review’ in 2002. Boyle adds that in 2001-2004 alone the US Federal Government spent $14.5 billion for civilian bio-warfare-related work, a staggering sum.

Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright estimates that over 300 scientific institutions and some 12,000 individuals in the USA today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare. Alone there are 497 US Government NIH grants for research into infectious diseases with biowarfare potential. Of course this is being justified under the rubric of defending against possible terror attack as so much is today.

Many of the US Government dollars spent on biowarfare research involve genetic engineering. MIT biology professor Jonathan King says that the ‘growing bio-terror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population.’ King adds, ‘while such programs are always called defensive, with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.’ ¹³

Time will tell whether, God Forbid, the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Bank of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation is part of another Final Solution, this involving the extinction of the Late, Great Planet Earth."

The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act: A Tutorial in Orwellian Newspeak, by Robert Weitzel, commondreams.org (December 1, 2007)

"“Political language has to consist largely of euphemisms . . . and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
- George Orwell -

H.R 1955: the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 recently passed by the House-a companion bill is in the Senate-is barely one sentence old before its Orwellian moment:

It begins, “AN ACT - To prevent homegrown terrorism, and for other purposes.”

Those whose pulse did not quicken at “other purposes” have probably not read George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” or they voted for the other George both times.

Orwell’s jeremiad on the corruption of the English language and its corrosive effect on a democracy was written two years before his novel 1984 spelled out in chilling detail the danger of Newspeak, which renders citizens incapable of independent thought by depriving them of the words necessary to form ideas other than those promulgated by the state.

After its opening “tribute” to Orwell, H.R 1955 is strategically peppered with Newspeak regarding the establishment of a National Commission and university-based Centers of Excellence to “examine and report upon the fact and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States” and to make legislative recommendations for combating it.

The “sheer cloudy vagueness” of H.R 1955, as well as its terror factor, may account for its bipartisan 404-6 House vote but how, in an era informed by the Bush-Cheney administration’s egregious assault on the Bill of Rights, can the phrase “other purposes” fail to raise the “National Terror Alert” from its current threat level of “elevated” to “severe.”

Future “other purposes” will undoubtedly be justified by the Act’s use of the term “violent radicalization,” which it defines as “the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence . . .” or by the folksy, Lake Wobegonesque “homegrown terrorism,” defined as “the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born [or] raised . . . within the United States . . . to intimidate or coerce the United States, the civilian population . . . or any segment thereof . . . [italics added].”

In the service of some self-serving “other purposes,” will “extremist beliefs” become any belief the temporary occupants of the White House consider antithetical and threatening to their political agenda?

Will “ideologically based violence” or the use of “force” become little more than the mayhem resulting after a peaceful protest, daring to move beyond the barbed wire of the free speech zone, is attacked by a truncheon-wielding riot squad armed with tear gas, German Shepard dogs and water cannons?

Will the unarmed, constitutionally protected dissenters who are fending off blows or dog bites, or who are striking back in self-defense become “homegrown terrorists” and suffer draconian sentences for their attempt to “intimidate or coerce” the state with free thought and free speech?

A clue to future “other purposes” may lie in the Act’s parentage. The proud House “mother” of the Patriot Act’s evil twin is Rep. Jane Harmon (D-CA), chair of the Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee. Rep. Harmon has admitted to a long and productive relationship with the RAND Corporation, a California based think-tank with close ties to the military-industrial-intelligence complex. RAND’s 2005 study, “Trends in Terrorism,” contains a chapter titled, “Homegrown Terrorist Threats to the United States.” Is this Act a bastard child?

Keep in mind that the RAND Corporation was set up in 1946 by Army Air Force General Henry “Hap” Arnold as “Project RAND” sponsored by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Keep in mind also that Donald Rumsfeld was its chairman from 1981 to 1986 and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s felonious former chief of staff, and Condoleezza Rice were trustees. Enough said!

RAND maintains that “homegrown terrorism” will not be the result of jihadist sleeper cells. Rather, it will result from anti-globalists and radical environmentalists who “challenge the intrinsic qualities of capitalism, charging that in the insatiable quest for growth and profit, the philosophy is serving to destroy the world’s ecology, indigenous cultures, and individual welfare.”

Further, RAND claims that anti-globalists and radical environmentalists “exist in much the same operational environment as al Qaida” and pose “a clear threat to private-sector corporate interests, especially large multinational business.” Therein lies the real “other purposes.”

Predictably then, H.R. 1955 is not about protecting homegrown Americans. That protection is only incidental to its “other purposes” of protecting homegrown corporate interest and its unconscionable manipulation of the American political process to fill its coffers. Any thought or speech or action- however protected it might be by the Bill of Rights-that threatens corporate hegemony and profit will no doubt suffer the “other purposes” clause of the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.

Anyone doubting the Orwellian nature of a “bastard child” that equates anti-globalists and environmentalists with al Qaida terrorists will do well to read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and to acquaint themselves with the fate of Winston Smith in 1984."

‘Homegrown’ Suppression of Dissent, by Jules Boykoff, commondreams.org (November 30, 2007)

"Last month the U.S. House of Representatives flew a stealth mission under the mainstream media’s radar, passing startling legislation that targets constitutionally protected political speech and paves a path for the government’s suppression of dissent.

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 would establish a ten-member National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism primarily comprised of Congress members. It would also give the Department of Homeland Security the power to create “a university-based Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism” to “study the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots” of U.S.-based radicalization and terrorism.

Despite its overwhelming support in the House–where it passed 404 to 6–this law is severely problematic in three main ways.

First of all, it’s superfluous. We don’t need more laws against “violent radicalization” and “homegrown terrorism.” We already have plenty of legislation outlawing murder, conspiracy, arson, and other crimes that the government often associates with terrorism, not to mention wide-reaching terrorism laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and the Military Commissions Act, all of which can be applied to U.S. citizens.

As such, the bill is less an honest effort to combat actual terrorism than it is ideology-drenched window dressing designed to win political points and electoral votes.

Second, the measure takes aim at political speech that is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Groups and individuals trying to further “political or social objectives” are explicitly the focus of the act, which brings up questions around the freedom of assembly.

From a judicial perspective, this bill is a constitutional challenge waiting to happen.

Sure the bill claims, “Any measure taken to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence…should not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, or civil liberties of United States citizens or lawful permanent residents.”

But given the actual text of the bill and the Bush administration’s penchant to engage in warrantless surveillance, this flimsy caveat assuring that dissent will not be suppressed is tantamount to saying “I don’t do cocaine, I just like the way it smells.”

Third, too often the bill employs alarmingly over-broad definitions. The bill states that “ideologically based violence” is “the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.”

It doesn’t take the imagination of an avant-garde poet to envision scenarios in which radical political dissidents could get sucked into the wide-swirling vortex of “ideologically based violence.”

What if protesters use their bodies during a direct action to take over an intersection or to block traffic, as anti-war activists in Olympia, Washington have done recently? Can this seriously be dubbed “homegrown terrorism”?

What about an anarchist who hurls a brick through a corporate window to make a political statement? Is this vandalism really “violent radicalization” or “homegrown terrorism”?

The bill also defines “violent radicalization” in part as “adopting or promoting an extremist belief system,” but what exactly is “an extremist belief system”? Anti-capitalism? Socialism? Anarchism? Neo-conservatism?

Even a cursory look backward through U.S. history reveals heroic figures who could be dubbed “violent radicals” or “homegrown terrorists” under the proposed bill, from U.S. revolutionaries like Sam Adams to gun-toting slavery abolitionists like John Brown to militant civil-rights organizers like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Shortly after the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” The Senate, which is currently considering a virtually identical version of the bill, would do well to resurrect “the spirit of resistance” and finally say no to the Bush administration’s persistent whittling of our civil liberties.

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Business Lobby Presses Agenda Before '08 Vote, by Robert Pear, NY Times (December 1, 2007)

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Unions Disclose Long List of Anti-Worker NLRB Cases, by Mark Gruenberg, Press Associates (November 25, 2007)

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Secrecy Invoked on Abramoff Lawsuits, by Pete Yost, AP (December 1, 2007)

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National Debt Grows $1 Million a Minute, AP (December 3, 2007)

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America must live with being a bargain basement, by John Gapper, Financial Times (November 30, 2007)

"It is the holiday season in New York City. Thanksgiving is over, the decorations are up on Fifth Avenue and the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza has been lit – this year with energy-efficient light-emitting diodes rather than the traditional lightbulbs. All that remains is for New Yorkers to spend money.

To shop in New York this year, however, is to hear a rich array of European accents. In Bloomingdale’s the other day, two French women were debating the quality of Ralph Lauren towels. As I crossed Avenue of the Americas this week, I heard a British family complaining about the eggs they had for breakfast.

In 1973, Genesis released an album called Selling England by the Pound. It was the time of the oil shock and the album looked back nostalgically over a wealth of English sub-culture. Coincidentally, the Genesis tour of the same name is being recreated in December in New York by the Canadian band The Musical Box, which will perform a multi-media tribute in Tribeca.

These days, with oil approaching $100 a barrel and the Middle East once again overflowing with petrodollars while the US frets over the possibility of recession next year, America is being sold by the dollar.

The shopping surge is due to the weak dollar, which is approaching $1.50 to the euro and is above two dollars to the pound. It is cheaper for Europeans to take a flight to New York for their Christmas shopping than to do it in their own countries.

Rampant European consumption is not confined to Christmas presents. The New York housing market has until recently defied the gloom in other states and carried on rising. But dollar weakness makes New York apartments seem cheap to foreigners: some condominium developers are increasingly relying on foreigners to sustain demand.

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The investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government this week struck a deal to buy 4.9 per cent of Citigroup, one of the US banks that has been badly hit by the subprime credit crisis. Another Abu Dhabi fund has acquired 8 per cent of AMD, the US chip manufacturer.

Dubai, another of the United Arab Emirates, has been on the prowl for US assets, buying 9.9 per cent of the Och-Ziff hedge fund. Others are looking in the US as well. SK Telecom, the South Korean operator, this week made a joint approach with Providence Equity, a private equity firm, to take a $5bn stake in Sprint, the US mobile operator.

All of this activity has awakened memories of the period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Japanese investors bought US trophy assets including the Pebble Beach golf course in California. That coincided with US introspection about whether it was being overtaken as a manufacturing power by Japan and by other Asian countries.

Today’s imbalance is less industrial than financial. The US has been running a large trade deficit with the rest of the world, importing manufactured goods from Asia and energy from the Middle East. That has created a savings glut in Asia and boosted sovereign wealth funds set up by states such as Abu Dhabi.

The funds are now flowing back in the form of capital investment. In the past, Arab governments mostly put their petrodollars into Treasury bonds but they are now spreading into equity as well. It is a natural financial rebalancing act but it unnerves some politicians and commentators.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page this week recalled that Sheikh Zayed, father of the current ruler of Abu Dhabi, owned the fraud-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International in the 1990s. It warned that “Arab interests will now have inordinate sway over America’s largest bank”, since Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia already holds a 3.9 per cent stake.

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A stake in Citi is just the start - State-backed foreign entities will continue to try to snap up ailing Western firms., by Colin Barr, Fortune (November 29, 2007)

"So you're lousy with petrocash or other export-driven windfalls, and itching to put your depreciating dollars to work. Where to start? Here's Fortune's handy tip sheet:

DO look for an iconic property. It's no mistake that when Abu Dhabi's investment fund took a big stake in a U.S. company this week, it chose as its target perhaps the world's best-known financial institution: Citigroup (Charts, Fortune 500).

Other recent purchases by overseas investors have run along this same big-name theme. Deals this year include Dubai's purchase of a nearly 5% interest in electronics giant Sony (Charts), Abu Dhabi's acquisition of a 7.5% stake in the well-connected private equity outfit the Carlyle Group, and China's $3 billion bet on wheeler-dealer Blackstone (Charts).

The search for icons goes back at least to the 1980s, when Japanese investors bought Rockefeller Center and the Pebble Beach golf club. Like this week's Citi stake sale, the Japanese real estate grabs were the source of some alarm at the time, as wags wondered if the U.S. was consigning itself to a future of economic serfdom.

Since then, property markets have boomed and Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach have changed hands yet again, putting them back in American hands and removing much of the sting of the late 80s upheaval.

But James Post, a management professor at Boston University, warns that Americans shouldn't underestimate the implications of the surge of foreign investment in U.S. companies. He says the magnitude of the Citi deal -- which gives Abu Dhabi 4.9% of the bank for $7.5 billion -- is "a splash of cold water" that should wake Americans up to the consequences of the bad choices they've made in the past decade. He cites the massive rise in consumption that has crushed the value of the dollar, for starters.

He also cautions that nowadays, deep-pocketed foreign buyers aren't just looking for visibility or ego gratification. They're becoming stakeholders in U.S. businesses and, by extension, in American society -- like it or not.

"This is more about long-term influence," Post says of the Abu Dhabi-Citi deal, which brought the struggling bank an expensive -- yielding 11% -- slug of much-needed capital. He says Americans' orgy of overconsumption in recent years led to a rash of U.S. borrowing from China and the oil exporters in the Middle East. Now, as these creditors look to put their piles of cash to work, "inevitably we'll see Middle East political influence rising," Post says.

So who's next? The Citi deal and a recent Abu Dhabi investment in chipmaker Advanced Micro (Charts, Fortune 500) suggests the oil czars are looking closely at beaten-down stocks. Some second-tier U.S. banks like Countrywide (Charts, Fortune 500) and Washington Mutual (Charts, Fortune 500) are trading at steep discounts to book value, making them potentially interesting to investors willing to take a gamble.

A Morgan Stanley report suggests the sovereign wealth funds would be more likely to be interested in big securities firms like UBS and Deutsche Bank, as well as outfits that have exposure to fast-growing emerging markets.

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The Violent Radicalization Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, by Matt Renner, truthout.org (November 29, 2007)

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Mississippi Attorney Indicted in Bribery Case, by Michael Kunzelman, AP (November 28, 2007)

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The Plot to Rig the 2008 US Election, by Johann Hari, Independent/UK (November 29, 2007)

"In the long, hot autumn of 2000, the world was shocked by the contempt for democracy shown by the Republican Party. They knew their man had lost the popular vote to Al Gore by half a million votes. They knew the majority of voters in Florida itself had pulled a lever for Gore. But they fought - amid the confetti of hanging chads - to stop the state’s votes being counted, and to ensure that the Supreme Court imposed George W Bush.

Today, that contempt for democracy is on display again. In California right now, there is a naked, out-in-the-open ploy to rig the 2008 presidential election - and it may succeed.

To understand how this works, we have to roam back to the 18th century, and learn about the odd anachronistic leftover they are trying to use now to thwart democracy. Back then, America’s founding fathers decided not to introduce a system where US presidents would be directly elected, with the votes totted up in Washington, DC, and the winner being the man with the most. Instead, they chose a complex system called the electoral college. This stipulates that American citizens do not vote directly for a president. Instead, they technically vote for 539 state-wide “electors”, who then gather six weeks after the election to pick the President.

The founders designed it this way for a number of reasons. They wanted the smaller states to have a say, so they gave them a disproportionate number of electoral college votes. They also believed that, in a country that was largely isolated and illiterate, voters wouldn’t know much about out-of-state figures, and would be better off picking intermediaries who could exercise discretion on their behalf.

It is the worst part of the Constitution, producing perverse results again and again. On four occasions there has been such a big gap between the national popular vote and the state-by-state electoral college votes that the guy with fewer real supporters in the country got to be President. It happened in 1824, 1876, 1888 and - most tragically for the world - in 2000.

Today, the Republicans are trying to exploit the discontent with the electoral college among Americans in a way that would rig the system in their favour. At the moment, every state apart from Maine and Nebraska hands out its electoral college votes according to a winner-takes-all system. This means that if 51 per cent of people in California vote Democrat, the Democrats get 100 per cent of California’s electoral votes; if 51 per cent of people in Texas vote Republican, the Republicans get 100 per cent of Texas’ electoral votes.

The Republicans want to change this - but in only one Democrat-leaning state. California has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1988, and winning the sunny state is essential if the Democrats are going to retake the White House. So the Republicans have now begun a plan to break up California’s electoral college votes - and award a huge chunk of them to their side.

They have launched a campaign called California Counts, and they are trying to secure a state-wide referendum in June to implement their plan. They want California’s electoral votes to be divvied up not on a big state-wide basis, but according to the much smaller congressional districts. The practical result? Instead of all the state’s 54 electoral college votes going to the Democratic candidate, around 20 would go to the Republicans.

If this was being done in every state, everywhere, it would be an improvement. California’s forgotten Republicans would be represented in the electoral college, and so would Texas’s forgotten Democrats. But by doing it in California alone, they are simply giving the Republicans a massive electoral gift. Suddenly it would be extremely hard for a Democrat ever to win the White House; they would need a landslide victory everywhere else to counter this vast structural imbalance against them on the West Coast.

You can see this partisan agenda if you look at who is behind the campaign. It was set up by Charles “Chep” Hurth III - a Republican donor to Rudy Giuliani. It was drafted by Tom Hiltachk - a Republican attorney. Its signature drive was co-ordinated by Kevin Eckery - a Republican consultant. Its funds were provided by Paul Singer - a Republican billionaire and one of Rudy Giuliani’s biggest donors. Its chief fundraiser is Anne Dunsmore - who went there straight from her post as national deputy campaign manager for Giuliani. Seeing a pattern yet?

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The Big Brother software that lets bosses spy on workshy and troublemaking employees, by David Derbyshire, Daily Mail/UK (November 28, 2007)

"Innocent emails sent in work time could soon be used to decide if workers are potential thieves, industrial spies or troublemakers.

Scientists have developed a new type of "Big Brother" software that automatically scans emails to create a personality profile for each member of staff.

Although it is designed to tackle workplace cybercrime, the system could be adapted to show whether employees are workshy, take too much sick leaves or are applying for jobs elsewhere.

The programme is the brainchild of computer experts working for the U.S. military, and will soon be available for any company or institution to download for free.

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The software scans through every email sent by a worker and looks for patterns of words - or absences of words - that reveal clues about their personality.

The system relies on the assumption that the riskiest employees for crime are those who are disgruntled, alienated and fed-up.

First it searches emails for "social" words such as "dinner", "drink", "fun", "tonight", "love", "weekend", "family" and "game".

If someone is not discussing their social lives with colleagues, it could be a sign that they are alienated, the magazine New Scientist reports today. Being a loner doesn't mean someone is a potential thief, however.

So the system checks to see if anyone is discussing sensitive subjects with those outside work that they never discuss with colleagues.

If they do, they are flagged up as having "clandestine, sensitive interests".

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Domestic Spying, Inc., by Tim Shorrock, Special to CorpWatch (November 27, 2007)

"A new intelligence institution to be inaugurated soon by the Bush administration will allow government spying agencies to conduct broad surveillance and reconnaissance inside the United States for the first time. Under a proposal being reviewed by Congress, a National Applications Office (NAO) will be established to coordinate how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law enforcement and rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic intelligence gathering that would make the U.S. one of the world's most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific agencies with no responsibility for national security or law enforcement.

The intelligence-sharing system to be managed by the NAO will rely heavily on private contractors including Boeing, BAE Systems, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). These companies already provide technology and personnel to U.S. agencies involved in foreign intelligence, and the NAO greatly expands their markets. Indeed, at an intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, last month, the titans of the industry were actively lobbying intelligence officials to buy products specifically designed for domestic surveillance.

The NAO was created under a plan tentatively approved in May 2007 by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell. Specifically, the NAO will oversee how classified information collected by the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and other key agencies is used within the U.S. during natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other events affecting national security. The most critical intelligence will be supplied by the NSA and the NGA, which are often referred to by U.S. officials as the “eyes” and “ears” of the intelligence community.

The NSA, through a global network of listening posts, surveillance planes, and satellites, captures signals from phone calls, e-mail and Internet traffic, and translates and analyzes them for U.S. military and national intelligence officials.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which was formally inaugurated in 2003, provides overhead imagery and mapping tools that allow intelligence and military analysts to monitor events from the skies and space. The NSA and the NGA have a close relationship with the super-secret National Reconnaissance Agency (NRO), which builds and maintains the U.S. fleet of spy satellites and operates the ground stations where the NSA’s signals and the NGA’s imagery are processed and analyzed. By law, their collection efforts are supposed to be confined to foreign countries and battlefields.

The National Applications Office was conceived in 2005 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which Congress created in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The ODNI, concerned that the legal framework for U.S. intelligence operations had not been updated for the global “war on terror,” turned to Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Virginia -- one of the largest contractors in the spy business. The company was tasked with studying how intelligence from spy satellites and photoreconnaissance planes could be better used domestically to track potential threats to security within the U.S.. The Booz Allen study was completed in May of that year, and has since become the basis for the NAO oversight plan. In May 2007, McConnell, the former executive vice president of Booz Allen, signed off on the creation of the NAO as the principal body to oversee the merging of foreign and domestic intelligence collection operations.

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Center helps war on terror, but is it threat to privacy?, by Dan Browning and Mark Brunswick, Star Tribune (November 7, 2007)

"Minutes after the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River, the Department of Homeland Security's National Operations Center called Mike Bosacker wanting to know what was going on, and whether terrorism might have been involved.

Bosacker got the call because he and nine analysts work at the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center (MNJAC) in Minneapolis.

Known generically as an information "fusion center," MNJAC is one of more than 40 such centers that grew out of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to ensure that future threats wouldn't fall through the cracks that traditionally have separated law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Next year, MNJAC is expected to seek funding from state taxpayers for the first time.

But the idea of fusion centers worries some legislators and data privacy experts, who have raised concerns of privacy violations and unwarranted domestic spying. Bosacker said that soon after the 35W bridge collapsed this summer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sent MNJAC video that helped investigators quickly quell terrorism concerns, according to special agent Paul McCabe, spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Minneapolis office.

Coordinating that kind of rapid information-sharing is just how the fusion centers are supposed to work, Bosacker said.

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Public Libraries for Profit, by Akito Yoshikane, In These Times (November 27, 2007)

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Impending Destruction of the US Economy, by Paul Craig Roberts, Information Clearing House (November 28, 2007)

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In the 21st century, the US economy has been driven by consumers going deeper in debt.  Consumption fueled by increases in indebtedness received its greatest boost from Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s low interest rate policy.  Greenspan covered up the adverse effects of offshoring on the US economy by engineering a housing boom.  The boom created employment in construction and financial firms and pushed up home prices, thus creating equity for consumers to spend to keep consumer demand growing. 

This source of US economic growth is exhausted and imploding.  The full consequences of the housing bust remain to be realized.  American consumers lack discretionary income and can pay higher taxes only by reducing their consumption.  The service industries, which have provided the only source of new jobs in the 21st century, are already experiencing falling demand.  A tax increase would cause widespread distress.

As John Maynard Keynes and his followers made clear, a tax increase on a recessionary economy is a recipe for falling tax revenues as well as economic hardship.

Superpower America is a ship of fools in denial of their plight.  While offshoring kills American economic prospects, “free market economists” sing its praises.  While war imposes enormous costs on a bankrupt country, neoconservatives call for more war, and Republicans and Democrats appropriate war funds which can only be obtained by borrowing abroad.  

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Lobbying Lucre Awaits Lott, by Jeanne Cummings, Politico (November 27, 2007)

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Financial problems' hastened Lott's retirement, Specter says, by Bill Toland and Jerome L. Sherman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (November 27, 2007)

"Sen. Arlen Specter yesterday said it was his understanding that new regulations on lobbying by ex-lawmakers played a significant role in Sen. Trent Lott's decision to retire, contradicting what the Mississippi senator told reporters in his home state.

If he steps down at the end of the year, Mr. Lott, a Republican, will be able to begin lobbying after just a year's wait, rather than two.

Mr. Specter suggested Mr. Lott has been experiencing "financial problems" since Hurricane Katrina destroyed his beachfront home in Pascagoula, Miss., in 2005. Soon after, he involved himself in a class-action legal dispute with State Farm Insurance, claiming the wreckage was caused primarily by the high winds and not by flooding. Many homeowner's policies don't cover flood damage but will cover wind damage.

Mr. Specter said the early retirement would allow Mr. Lott to make more money than he does now, and even said that it's not easy for a senator to make ends meet on the $165,000 base salary, noting that most of them have to keep two homes -- one in their home states and one in or near Washington, D.C.

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Head of Rove Inquiry in Hot Seat Himself, by John R. Wilke, Wall Street Journal (November 28, 2007)

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Montclair State Unveils Mandatory 'School Phone'-Students Must Carry And Pay For GPS-Based Cell Device, wcbstv.com (November 27, 2007)

"College students at Montclair State University are all talking about a new requirement that will require students to have a cell phone.

CBS 2 HD has learned more on this required feature that is forcing students to dig into their wallets.

At Montclair State, there is no excuse for being out of touch.

"'School Phone' I use for campus e-mail, different things like that," freshman Angela Vuocolo said.

That's right.

First-year student Vuocolo said 'School Phone' -- as in a Sprint-operated cell phone -- is now mandatory for all students. It's the first program of its kind in the country.

The cost: $420 a year for a base plan which is bundled into the tuition bill.

It includes just 50 peak voice minutes a month, but unlimited text messaging to any carrier, unlimited campus-based data usage, and student activated emergency GPS tracking.

"What it does is allow students to have an extra pair or group of people watching over them when they're going from one location to another," Montclair Police Department Chief Paul Cell said.

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Honeywell Technology to Help U.S. Military Rapidly Analyze Intelligence, tradingmarkets.com (November 26, 2007)

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Stalked by a cell phone: Who's spying on you?, by Michelle Esteban, komotv.com (November 26, 2007)

"SEATTLE - For most of us, the cell phone is our lifeline, but in the wrong hands it's can be a high-tech snooping device.

Somebody could be watching or listening with software that could turn your cell phone into their eyes and ears to track your every move.

"Your phone can basically spy on you in a heartbeat," says security expert Howard Schmidt.

A man we'll call "Dirk," who spoke on condition of anonymity, says he worried about his cyber stalker -- his ex-girlfriend. Even when Dirk's cell phone was off, his ex spied on him.

She managed to access his cell remotely without him knowing. With Dirk's cell phone she knew his every move: when he was alone at the corner coffee shop, what he bought at the grocery store, who he ate dinner with -- even details about his dinner conversation.

"She always seemed to know where I was at -- 'So you're with so-and-so' -- and I would be with that person, all the time," says Dirk.

At first, Dirk chalked it up to a good guess and blamed himself for being paranoid.

"She would say 'I'm psychic. I know how you think.'"

He believed it. But when his ex knew things he intentionally didn't tell her, that's when it clicked: his cell phone was her microphone.

"She knows too much, there is no way she could know this, without having a listening device," Dirk said.

Sneaky Software

"You don't know what your mobile phone is doing beyond what you think it's doing," insists Schmidt, who worked as a cyber security adviser to the White House and Microsoft's chief security officer.

He insists it all comes down to one word: software. If a stalker gets a hold of your phone, he can install it.

"Some of the software is designed so it will take that conversation and send it through the Internet to a Web site and you can click on the Web site and listen to it," says Schmidt.

Schmidt says once the software is installed, you can listen in on conversations from anywhere in the world.

And in Dirk's case, even if the phone was off, his ex could hear any conversation taking place within the vicinity of the cell phone.

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Black Friday Die Die Die-America’s most obscene shopping day meets its doom in an oily nightmare hell. All true!, by Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle (November 28, 2007)

"Is this why they hate us? Why we hate ourselves? Is this why we seem to have no real idea who the hell we are anymore, or what it means to have a humane and thoughtful national identity, and therefore we happily scratch and claw and fight our way into giant fluorescent-lit hellpits for a chance at a $29 DVD player and some crappy plasma TVs and a pallet of heavily discounted spatulas?More broadly: Is this why we’re suffering such a general feeling of ennui and disgust and apathy in the culture right now, the nagging feeling that we have no center and God has abandoned us and we therefore simply cannot consume enough goods and technology to try and fill the void? The answer seems rather obvious.

I don’t even know what Kohl’s is. I’m guessing some sort of mass-crap superstore, like Best Buy or Target or T.J. Maxx or a weird amalgam of all of those and it doesn’t really matter because last Friday they opened at 4 a.m. for the mad rush of Black Friday shoppers, because if there’s one thing you want to do when your body is groggy and sleep tugs at your heart and your dreams have turned vacant and sad, it’s grope cheap waffle makers before sunrise.

Wal-Mart opened at 5. Target opened at 6. Across America, gluttony ruled. There were stores that had nothing whatsoever to do with gifting or holiday largess, stores with names like Cabinetry and More or Rug Depot that nevertheless opened at 6 or 7 a.m. on that now-ominous, insane, fateful day, if for no other reason than to capitalize on the fact that there were so many franctic zombified credit-carded bodies swarming about and it would be foolish not to take advantage.

Some say Christmas day most accurately captures the true nature of the American spirit. Some say it’s Easter. Or the Fourth of July. They are all wrong. Black Friday has become, far and away, the most glorious expression of the true American idea, the gleaming capitalist leviathan at its most violent and orgasmic. Deny it at your peril.

Every year, there are new layers, new strata of absurdity. This year, retailers were reportedly angry that there are now a few blogs dedicated entirely to Black Friday sales, and those blogs were posting secret inside info on which particular items the various stores had marked down for the supersale, those bait-and-switch items on which the shops willingly take a huge loss in order to lure in shoppers in the hopes they will grab not only the $8 electric skillet but also an expensive digital camera and what the hell, a new stove and a drill set and a car.

Which reminds me of the nice discussion I had over Thanksgiving dinner about oil. My dinnermate’s belief was that, as oil prices creep up and gas prices inch toward four, five, 10 bucks a gallon in the U.S. over the next decade, one of the first things to suffer will be the megastores, the Wal-Marts and the Targets and their Black Friday-promoting ilk, and not merely because their transportation costs will skyrocket and it will be increasingly unfeasible for them to ship their sweatshop crap over from China and then truck it from the docks to the individual stores.

No, he suggested Wal-Mart and its rapacious brethren will begin to fade because people in the more rural parts of America will refuse to pay the 10 or 15 bucks in fuel costs for a round-trip drive to the nearest big box mega-outlet just to get some crackers and shampoo and some nails. Instead, they will return to shopping locally, in their own neighborhoods and downtowns, where the shops are smaller and the hardware store owner knows them personally. They might still haul ass to Wal-Mart once a month for a serious shopping excursion, but that won’t be enough for the big boxers to stay in business for long. And lo, the world will improve. A little.

I am not so certain. Firstly, I do not underestimate the power of Wal-Mart, et al to viciously alter the time/space continuum for their own benefit, and to figure out a way around the transport issue, perhaps by cutting the pay of their sweatshop workforce from eight cents a month to four and by strapping enormous pallets of crappy ink-jet printers and porcelain Jesus figurines to the backs of trained dolphins and send them over from Shanghai. They are just that kind of malevolent.

More importantly, I also just read the disturbing piece in the New Yorker about the massive new oil boom, how the petroleum titans are right now stampeding into Canada to lay claim to the land and build massive facilities for the extraction of a heavy hydrocarbon called bitumen from the enormous deposits of tar sand found there, in order to convert it into synthetic crude oil.

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America's Days of Reckoning, by Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch (November 26, 2007)

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Fed pumps $8bn into market to head off new crunch, by Stephen Foley, Independent/UK (November 27, 2007)

"Central bankers are becoming nervous that a renewed credit crunch could destabilise financial markets around the end of next month, and the US Federal Reserve has pumped an initial $8bn (£3.9bn) into the market to help ease the mounting pressure.

Wall Street banks have been hoarding cash rather than lending it out, fearful that losses on US mortgages and related products are undermining the strength of their balance sheets.

And the Federal Reserve said that the problem could become acute before 31 December, when many institutions close their books on the financial year and when many important accounting calculations are made.

In a highly unusual move, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said yesterday that it was putting an additional $8bn into the financial system through 43-day loans, money that won't have to be paid back until 10 January. The duration of the loans is substantially longer than that in normal market operations by the Fed.

If Wall Street's banks become unwilling or unable to lend to each other, there could be knock-on consequences throughout the financial system, with high street lenders and other businesses finding it impossible or punitively expensive to find the short-term money required to fund their operations. It was just such a credit crunch that led to the problems at Northern Rock at the height of the crisis in the summer.

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Stunned by Lack of Outrage, Not Outrageous Acts, Times Herald-Record (November 26, 2007)

"I continue to be stunned.

Not by Bush any longer. There was a time when I was stunned by nearly everything he did. Or said. Who wouldn’t be stunned by a president who could say, “They misunderestimated me,” and sincerely believe he’s on top of things?

Nor by Cheney. His pure evil no longer surprises me, although there was a time when he routinely stunned me. Torture? Torture??

Not by Congress, either. There was a time when I was stunned by that crowd’s sheeplike mentality. I’d hear them decry the war, decry torture, decry Bush’s growing deficit, then I’d drop my jaw as they voted time and again to give the president carte blanche.

No longer. I fully expect Congress to disappoint, to fail to do its job in balancing the White House power grab.

I’m no longer stunned by the politicized courts nor by the media, which is unwilling to offend and uses vague, watered-down language instead of strong condemnations of this, the worst presidency in history.

So who continues to stun me?

I will tell you. I am stunned by all that is left of America: Americans.

I am stunned by the public’s lack of outrage over all this presidency has done to ravage our nation. Where is the outrage over this war-without-end? Over waterboarding? Over our dead and maimed soldiers?

I am stunned that Americans aren’t writing angry letters to the editor about the Iran rhetoric, this carbon copy of lies that led up to Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

I am stunned that Americans didn’t take to the streets with placards condemning Bush for vetoing a bill that would have ensured health care for children.

I am stunned that Americans aren’t rioting over federal money that has helped only the rich in New Orleans rebuild while the poor still live homeless.

I am stunned that Americans aren’t storming the White House as Bush accuses the Democrats of irresponsible spending on domestic programs even as he destroys the economy with his war and his deficit.

I am stunned that Americans haven’t marched on Washington over the rising unemployment rate, over corporate greed that is causing millions to lose their homes, over our rotting infrastructure.

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Welcome to the Jackboot State, Ann Arbor Division, by Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch (November 24/25, 2007)

Flight Logs Reveal Secret Rendition, by Stephen Grey, London Sunday Times (November 25, 2007)

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Probe finds other DHS fake briefing, by Eileen Sullivan, AP (November 26, 2007)

"The fake October news conference held by the Federal Emergency Management Agency was not the first time a Homeland Security public affairs official has acted like a reporter by asking questions during a briefing.

In January 2006, an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked a question during a news conference in San Antonio, Texas, according to an investigation by the Homeland Security Department — the parent agency of both FEMA and ICE.

The ICE public affairs official was standing with about 12 reporters but did not identify herself when she posed the question, Homeland Security's head of public affairs, J. Edward Fox, wrote in a Nov. 19 letter to the chairman of the House Homeland Security committee. The government employee was verbally reprimanded for asking the question after the news conference, Fox told Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

Unlike the recent FEMA incident, Fox said the ICE public affairs official was advised against asking the question, but asked anyway and did not identify herself as staff. San Antonio reporters knew she was a public affairs official at the time.

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AP Chief Slams Case Against Photographer, AP (November 24, 2007)

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Bowen Sues Over Sale of Voting Equipment, Technology News Daily (November 25, 2007)

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Firefighters Taking New Role as Anti-Terrorist Eyes of the US Government, by Eileen Sullivan, AP (November 23, 2007)

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A Story of Surveillance - Former Technician 'Turning In' AT&T Over NSA Program, by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post (November 7, 2007)

"His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.

"What the heck is the NSA doing here?" Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.

A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.

Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts.

The plain-spoken, bespectacled Klein, 62, said he may be the only person in the country in a position to discuss firsthand knowledge of an important aspect of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. He is retired, so he isn't worried about losing his job. He did not have security clearance, and the documents in his possession were not classified, he said. He has no qualms about "turning in," as he put it, the company where he worked for 22 years until he retired in 2004.

"If they've done something massively illegal and unconstitutional -- well, they should suffer the consequences," Klein said. "It's not my place to feel bad for them. They made their bed, they have to lie in it. The ones who did [anything wrong], you can be sure, are high up in the company. Not the average Joes, who I enjoyed working with."

In an interview yesterday, he alleged that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T . Contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes that the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content.

He said the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing "peering links," or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data -- the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica's text -- per second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the government's warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005.

Claudia Jones, an AT&T spokeswoman, said she had no comment on Klein's allegations. "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers' privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security," she said.

The NSA and the White House also declined comment on Klein's allegations.

Klein is urging Congress not to block Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action suit pending in federal court in San Francisco, as well as 37 other lawsuits charging carriers with illegally collaborating with the NSA. He was accompanied yesterday by lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed Hepting v. AT&T in 2006. Together, they are urging key U.S. senators to oppose a pending White House-endorsed immunity provision that would effectively wipe out the lawsuits. The Judiciary Committee is expected to take up the measure Thursday.

In summer 2002, Klein was working in an office responsible for Internet equipment when an NSA representative arrived to interview a management-level technician for a special job whose details were secret.

"That's when my antennas started to go up," he said. He knew that the NSA was supposed to work on overseas signals intelligence.

The job entailed building a "secret room" in an AT&T office 10 blocks away, he said. By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.

"That was my 'aha!' moment," Klein said. "They're sending the entire Internet to the secret room."

The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.

"This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style," he said. "The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T's customers but everybody's."

One of Klein's documents listed links to 16 entities, including Global Crossing, a large provider of voice and data services in the United States and abroad; UUNet, a large Internet provider in Northern Virginia now owned by Verizon; Level 3 Communications, which provides local, long-distance and data transmission in the United States and overseas; and more familiar names such as Sprint and Qwest. It also included data exchanges MAE-West and PAIX, or Palo Alto Internet Exchange, facilities where telecom carriers hand off Internet traffic to each other.

"I flipped out," he said. "They're copying the whole Internet. There's no selection going on here. Maybe they select out later, but at the point of handoff to the government, they get everything."

Qwest has not been sued because of media reports last year that said the company declined to participate in an NSA program to build a database of domestic phone-call records out of concern about its legality. What the documents show, Klein contends, is that the NSA apparently was collecting several carriers' communications, probably without their consent.

Another document showed that the NSA installed in the room a semantic traffic analyzer made by Narus, which Klein said indicated that the NSA was doing content analysis.

Steve Bannerman, Narus's marketing vice president, said in an interview that the NarusInsight system is "the world's most powerful Internet traffic processing engine." He said it is used to detect worms, as well as to capture information to help authorities stop criminal activity. He said it can track a communication's origin and destination, as well as its content. He declined to comment on AT&T's use of the system.

Klein said he decided to go public after President Bush defended the NSA's surveillance program as limited to collecting phone calls between suspected terrorists overseas and people in the United States. Klein said the documents show that the scope was much broader.

Klein was last in Washington in 1969, to take part in an antiwar protest. Now, he said with a chuckle, he's here in a gray suit as a lobbyist."

Iraq's Laboratory of Repression, by Robert Parry, Consortium News (November 20, 2007)

"The Bush administration is turning Iraq into a test tube for modern techniques of repression, from sophisticated biometrics that track populations to devastating weapons systems that combine night-vision optics from drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging and deadly firepower from the sky to kill suspected insurgents.

These high-tech capabilities, when mixed with loose rules of engagement that allow U.S. troops to kill Iraqis at the slightest sign of hostility, have contributed to what U.S. generals and a growing number of American journalists are hailing as an improving security situation.

Or, as President George W. Bush reportedly told Australia’s deputy prime minister in September, “We’re kicking ass.”

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The End of America? Naomi Wolf Thinks It Could Happen, by Don Hazen, alternet.org (November 21, 2007)