HMMM....

Other branches included

Correction:

New evidence suggests second shooter killed RFK, by David Edwards and Nick Juliano, rawstory.com (March 26, 2008)

"Forty years after Democratic rising star Robert F. Kennedy was killed at a Los Angeles hotel during his presidential run, new evidence suggests the man serving a life sentence for his murder did not fire the shots that killed the charismatic senator.

Forensic scientists met at a conference in Connecticut this week to discuss their independent findings that cast serious doubt on the Kennedy assassination. Sirhan Sirhan is serving a life sentence in Kennedy's death, but the conference presenters argue he could not have fired the fatal shot that killed Kennedy.

One investigator, Dr. Robert Joling, has studied the Kennedy assassination for nearly four decades. He determined the fatal shot came from behind Kennedy, while Sirhan was four to six feet in front of the senator and never got close enough to shoot him from behind, an NBC affiliate reports.

Analysis by another forensics engineer, Philip Van Praag, of a Canadian journalists tape recording, known as the Pruszynski recording, determined that 13 shots were fired while Kennedy was killed, although Sirhan's gun only held eight bullets, according to the NBC reporter. This suggests that a second shooter was involved in the assassination.

Van Praag's analysis led him to conclude that a second gun that was fired matched a type owned by one of the security guards in Kennedy's entourage.

"When that security guard was asked about owning that gun at first he admitted, 'Yes I owned that kind of gun but I got rid of it two months before the assassination.'" correspondent Amy Parmenter said on MSNBC Wednesday. "It turns out upon further investigation, in fact, he did not get rid of that gun until five months after the shooting. Of course, you can see where we're going with this. ... That security guard, was in fact behind Senator Kennedy when the fatal shot was fired.""

Obama's Passportgate: Historical Echo, by Robert Parry, Consortium News (March 21, 2008)

"Five presidential elections ago, when another George Bush was in the White House and when Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee, State Department officials conducted an improper search of Clinton's passport files, an echo of the current case in which Barack Obama's passport files were penetrated three times this year.

    The State Department announced on March 20 that two State Department contractors were fired and a third disciplined for accessing Obama's files. Based on preliminary information, it was unclear what the motive of the Obama search was.

    In 1992, the evidence revealed that representatives of George H.W. Bush, then fighting for a second term, pulled strings at the State Department and at U.S. embassies in Europe to uncover and disseminate derogatory information about Bill Clinton's loyalty and his student trips to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

    That assault on Clinton's patriotism moved into high gear on the night of Sept. 30, 1992, when Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Tamposi - under pressure from the White House - ordered three aides to pore through Clinton's passport files in search of a purported letter in which Clinton supposedly sought to renounce his citizenship.

    Though no letter was found, Tamposi still injected the suspicions into the campaign by citing a small tear in the corner of Clinton's passport application as evidence that someone might have tampered with the file, presumably to remove the supposed letter. She fashioned that speculation into a criminal referral to the FBI.

    Within hours, someone from the Bush camp leaked word about the confidential FBI investigation to reporters at Newsweek magazine. The Newsweek story about the tampering investigation hit the newsstands on Oct. 4.

    The article suggested that a Clinton backer might have removed incriminating material from Clinton's passport file, precisely the spin that the Bush people wanted.

    Immediately, President George H.W. Bush took the offensive, using the press frenzy over the criminal referral to attack Clinton's patriotism on a variety of fronts, including his student trip to the Soviet Union in 1970. With his patriotism challenged, Clinton saw his once-formidable lead shrink. Panic spread through the Clinton campaign.

    Bush allies put out another suspicion, that Clinton might have been a KGB "agent of influence." Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times headlined that allegation on Oct. 5, 1992, a story that attracted President Bush's personal interest.

    "Now there are stories that Clinton … may have gone to Moscow as [a] guest of the KGB," Bush wrote in his diary that day. [For the fullest account of the 1992 Passportgate case, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

    Democratic Suspicions

    The suspicions about Clinton's patriotism might have doomed Clinton's election, except that Spencer Oliver, then chief counsel on the Democratic-controlled House International Affairs Committee, suspected a dirty trick.

    "I said you can't go into someone's passport file," Oliver told me in a later interview. "That's a violation of the law, only in pursuit of a criminal indictment or something. But without his permission, you can't examine his passport file. It's a violation of the Privacy Act."

    After consulting with House committee chairman Dante Fascell and a colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Oliver dispatched a couple of investigators to the Archives warehouse in Suitland.

    The brief congressional check discovered that State Department political appointees had gone to the Archives at night to search through Clinton's records and those of his mother.

    Oliver's assistants also found that the administration's tampering allegation rested on a very weak premise, the slight tear in the passport application. The circumstances of the late-night search soon found their way into an article in the Washington Post, causing embarrassment to the Bush campaign.

    Yet still sensing that the loyalty theme could hurt Clinton, President Bush kept stoking the fire. On CNN's "Larry King Live" on Oct. 7, 1992, Bush suggested anew that there was something sinister about a possible Clinton friend allegedly tampering with Clinton's passport file.

    "Why in the world would anybody want to tamper with his files, you know, to support the man?" Bush wondered before a national TV audience. "I mean, I don't understand that. What would exonerate him - put it that way - in the files?

    The next day, in his diary, Bush ruminated suspiciously about Clinton's Moscow trip: "All kinds of rumors as to who his hosts were in Russia, something he can't remember anything about."

    But the GOP attack on Clinton's loyalty prompted some Democrats to liken Bush to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who built a political career in the early days of the Cold War challenging people's loyalties without offering proof.

Was Spitzer Targeted, by Paul Campos, Rocky Mountain News (March 12, 2008)

Spitzer’s Shame Is Wall Street’s Gain, by Robert Scheer, truthdig.com (March 12, 2008)

".....

wouldn’t have written this column had I not read The Wall Street Journal’s Page 1 news story headlined “Wall Street Cheers as Its Nemesis Plunges Into Crisis.” The article begins with the crowing statement “It’s Schadenfreude time on Wall Street” and goes on to quote those whom Spitzer went after over what should be considered the criminal greed that has predominated on Wall Street. It was Spitzer, as much as anyone, who sounded the alarm on the subprime mortgage crisis, the obscene payouts to CEOs who defrauded their shareholders and the other financial scandals that have brought the U.S. economy to its knees.

The best rule of thumb these days is that ordinary Americans should be mightily depressed over any news that Wall Street hustlers cheer, for they have been exposed as a dangerous pack of scoundrels quite willing to rob decent, hardworking people of their homes. And of course no one on Wall Street ever paid for sex."

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime, by Eliot Spitzer, Washington Post (February 14, 2008)

"The following article was published in The Washington Post the day after New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer allegedly engaged the services of a call girl at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC.

How the Bush administration stopped the states from stepping in to help consumers.

    Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

    Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

    Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

    What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

    Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

    Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

    In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

    But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

    Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.

    When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers."

Carlyle Group May Buy Major CIA Contractor: Booz Allen Hamilton, by Tim Shorrock, CorpWatch (March 8, 2008)

"The Carlyle Group, one of the world's largest private equity funds, may soon acquire the $2 billion government contracting business of consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the biggest suppliers of technology and personnel to the U.S. government's spy agencies. Carlyle manages more than $75 billion in assets and has bought and sold a long string of military contractors since the early 1990s. But in recent years it has significantly reduced its investments in that industry. If it goes ahead with the widely reported plan to buy Booz Allen, it will re-emerge as the owner of one of America's largest private intelligence armies.

    Reports of a potential Carlyle acquisition of Booz Allen's government unit began circulating among U.S. military contractors in December 2007, after Booz Allen's senior partners and board members - a group of 300 vice presidents who own the privately-held firm - gathered at company headquarters in McLean, Virginia, for an extraordinary two-day meeting.

    According to a December 15 letter to Booz Allen employees from CEO Ralph W. Shrader that was released by the firm, the vice presidents signed off on a "new strategic direction" that would involve separating the company's commercial and government units and operating them as separate companies. That was widely seen, both inside and outside the company, as a sign that a sale of one or both of the units was imminent. Shrader said the company hoped to come to a resolution of the issues involved by March 31, 2008.

    In January 2008, major newspapers - each quoting unnamed people close to the situation - reported that discussions between Booz Allen and Carlyle about the sale of the government unit were underway. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal will be "centered on Booz Allen's influence in defense and intelligence contracting. If an agreement is reached the sale price will likely be around $2 billion."

    Christopher Ullman, Carlyle's chief spokesman, could neither confirm nor deny that a deal was in the works, and declined to comment to CorpWatch about the reports. Because of Carlyle's long experience in the defense sector, he added, such companies "would be a priority for us when the price is right and it's the right fit for us." George Farrar, a Booz Allen spokesman, said his company "has refused to discuss particulars of any ongoing discussions" and would not comment beyond what Shrader wrote in his December 15 missive to Booz Allen's workforce.

    Who Is Booz Allen Hamilton?

    In 2006, Booz Allen Hamilton, a privately held company based in McLean, Virginia, had a global staff of 18,000 and annual revenues of $3.7 billion. Its work for U.S. government agencies accounts for more than 50 percent of its business. Notably Booz Allen is a key adviser and prime contractor to all of the major U.S. intelligence agencies - the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the National Security Agency (NSA), and - as well as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Defense and most of the Pentagon's combatant commands.

    On its website, Booz Allen describes its intelligence work as part of its broader expertise in information technology. "Whether dealing with homeland security, peacekeeping operations, or the battlefield, success depend on the ability to collect, safeguard, store, distribute, fuse, and share information - on getting the right information to the right place at the right time," it says. "Our security professionals work in partnership with clients to develop capabilities ... for protecting information and networks against cyber and physical threats."

    That has not always been the case: Booz Allen Hamilton was founded as a management consultancy in 1914 in Chicago by three businessmen whose surnames gave the firm its name. In 1940, after more than three decades of giving advice to top ranking companies in America's manufacturing and service economy, such as Montgomery Ward, Goodyear Tire and the Illinois State Railroad, Booz Allen started working for the U.S. military, where its clients included the Army, the Navy, and, after the war, the Air Force and the Pentagon.

    Its initial contracts with the Navy in 1940 set the pace for its military work: as a management consultant, Booz Allen helped the Navy restructure for World War II and permeated its ranks with contractors ("Each Navy bureau had a Booz rep," Investors Daily reported in a 2005 profile of the firm). That relationship served as a template for Booz Allen's later work in intelligence and national security where its personnel worked inside government agencies alongside public employees.

    Since the late-1990s, Booz Allen has forged a particularly close relationship with the NSA, the spy agency that monitors global telephone, e-mail and Internet traffic for the U.S. military and political leaders, which hired Booz Allen as its chief outside consultant on Project Groundbreaker. This $4 billion project outsourced the NSA's internal communications and networking systems to a consortium led by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and the IT subsidiary of Northrop Grumman.

    Today, among the many services Booz Allen provides to intelligence agencies, according to its Website, are war-gaming - simulated drills in which military and intelligence officials test their response to potential threats like terrorist attacks - as well as data-mining and analysis of imagery and intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites, the design of cryptographic, or code-breaking, systems (an NSA specialty) and "outsourcing/privatization strategy and planning." The company's 2007 annual report spells out several other areas of expertise, including "all source analysis," an intelligence specialty managed by the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) that draws on public sources of information, such as foreign newspapers and textbooks, to add texture to data gathered by spies and electronic surveillance.

    According to the company's annual report, Booz Allen is also working on one of the most important spy initiatives launched in recent years: the Cryptographic Modernization Program. Air Force General John C. Koziol, the commander of the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, described this program as an attempt to combine a variety of intelligence technologies to pick up tell-tale signs of chemicals and other substances - into a single electronic package that can be used by combat and special operations commanders to track the enemy.

    Booz Allen is a full partner in the project, according to General Koziol, an idea that has been "fully endorsed" by the Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, the nation's spy chief - himself a Booz Allen alumnus.

    Revolving Door

    To carry out its tasks at the intelligence agencies, Booz Allen has hired a dazzling array of former national security officials and foot-soldiers. In 2002, Information Week reported that Booz Allen had more than 1,000 former intelligence officers on its payroll. In 2007, as this reporter was researching a chapter about Booz Allen for his forthcoming book, he asked the company if it could confirm that number or provide a more accurate one, and received an e-mail reply from spokesman George Farrar: "It is certainly possible, but as a privately held corporation we consider that information to be proprietary and do not disclose."

    Buried deep on the company's Web site, however, a much larger number is confirmed in an explanation of a Booz Allen information technology contract with the DIA, which carries out intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It stated that the Booz Allen team "employs more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel." TS/SCI stands for top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence, one of the highest possible security ratings, which would make Booz Allen one of the largest employers of cleared personnel in the United States.

    Many of these former intelligence officers at Booz Allen, do the same jobs as they did for the government. For example, Keith Hall, a Booz Allen vice president initially worked in Army intelligence and on one of the congressional intelligence committees. In the early 1990s, he was hired by the CIA to manage budgets and policy development for then-Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates. During that time, he played an instrumental role in creating the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which was later renamed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. During the Clinton administration, Hall was named Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for space programs and, simultaneously, director of the NRO, the agency that manages the nation's military satellite program.

    Now, as a Booz Allen executive, Hall leads a "strategic intelligence initiative" that integrates the company's extensive contracting activities for the NRO and the NGA. Recently, one of his most important tasks involved chairing a 2005 homeland security study group that recommended a major expansion of information and data-sharing between U.S. spy agencies that work outside the country and domestic law enforcement, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). "The study's findings have become a road map for the government in making decisions related to critical information sharing in support of homeland security," Booz Allen boasts in its 2007 annual report. (See our article, Domestic Spying, Inc.)

Other key executives who came to Booz Allen from the spy agencies include R. James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, who was hired in 2003 to run Booz Allen's "global resilience" division, which advises corporations on security issues, and Joan A. Dempsey, a career U.S. intelligence official and a former top aide to former CIA Director George Tenet, who was hired in 2005 as a Booz Allen vice pr other key intelligence agencies.

    It is these senior managers who would most likely benefit from a sale to Carlyle.

    Unlike many of its competitors in the intelligence industry, Booz Allen is a privately held company whose shares are owned by its 300 vice presidents of whom "approximately 80 are in government support," Booz Allen's Farrar told CorpWatch. For these vice presidents, Carlyle's infusion of capital, and its $2 billion buyout of their shares, will make them very rich men and women indeed. After all, $2 billion divided by 80 is $25 million; even if Booz Allen's shares were divided equally, which is unlikely, that's an astounding windfall for any executive.

    Booz Allen CEO Ralph Shrader

    The man most responsible for Booz Allen's growth as an intelligence contractor is Ralph Shrader, who has been running the company as chairman and CEO since 1998. Shrader, an electrical engineer by training, came to Booz Allen in 1974 after serving at senior management levels of two prominent telecommunications companies - Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company's government communications system division. These positions prepared him well for his later work at Booz Allen as a consultant to the telecommunications industry. According to his official biography, he "led major assignments" for the industry as a Booz Allen consultant and was deeply involved in the company's "landmark work for AT&T" when that company was broken up by the government.

    In those assignments, Shrader may have been exposed to the telecommunications industry's close ties to U.S. intelligence. During the years he worked for Western Union and RCA, those companies, along with ITT World Communications, were part of a secret surveillance program known as Minaret in which telecommunication companies, with the concurrence of a handful of high-ranking executives, handed over to the NSA information on all incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams - an early version of the NSA's warrantless surveillance program launched by the Bush administration after the September 11th attacks. Minaret, and the involvement of the private companies in NSA spying, was exposed by the congressional committees investigating intelligence abuse in the mid-1970s, and was the inspiration behind the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which set the rules - including the important requirement for warrants - for domestic surveillance of telephone traffic.

    None of this is alluded to in Booz Allen's official literature, of course; but Shrader, upon his appointment as CEO in 1998, mentioned in a rare press interview (with the Financial Times) that the most relevant background for his new position of chief executive was his experience working for telecommunications clients and doing classified military work for the U.S. government - "something of a Booz specialty," the FT pointed out.

    Booz Allen adds on its website that Shrader, as CEO, has also "led important programs for the U.S. National Communications System and the Defense Information Systems Agency," two of the most important classified intelligence networks in use by the federal government. Under Shrader, Booz Allen also became the NSA's most important outside consultant, culminating in its advisory role in Project Groundbreaker. That project, which awarded its first contracts in the summer of 2001, put Booz Allen in a prime position to capture NSA and other intelligence work in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, when intelligence budgets, and NSA surveillance, increased substantially.

    "War on Terror" Contracts

    After September 11th, 2001, by Booz Allen's own account, the firm helped the government reshape its spying capabilities to match the new era of counterinsurgencies and terrorist threats. "The nature of intelligence changed dramatically in the wake of 9/11," Christopher Ling, a Booz Allen vice president, explains in the company's most recent annual report. "An entire analytic production system geared to detect large-scale cold war adversarial capabilities was suddenly required to transform." At Booz Allen, he added, "We are finding innovative ways to integrate intelligence and operations, enabled by advanced visualization and data management capabilities, which has allowed us to pioneer tactics, techniques, and procedures."

    In addition to serving as a prime contractor on Admiral John Poindexter's controversial Total Information Awareness project, Booz Allen was active on both the military and economic fronts on the "war on terror." For the Pentagon, it helped develop the "blue force" tracking system that allows soldiers and commanders in Iraq and other battlegrounds the ability to electronically identify friendly troops. And in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, Booz Allen sponsored and organized several conferences aimed at helping U.S. corporations secure contracts in occupied Baghdad, with former CIA director Woolsey, one of the most ardent backers of the war, as a keynote speaker.

    Under Shrader's leadership, Booz Allen played an instrumental role after September 11th in proselytizing for a greater corporate role in national and homeland security. This was important, the Booz Allen CEO said at a CEO summit he organized in 2002, because "business leaders cannot opt out of geopolitics and leave the job of security solely to government and the military."

    Deepening the corporate alliance with the Bush administration and its war on terror also had significant advantages for Booz Allen and its fellow corporations: on one hand, it drastically increased their contracts with military and intelligence agencies; and on the other, homeland security provided a convenient excuse for reducing government oversight and regulation. These dual interests were spelled out in unusual detail in 2004 by Richard Wilhelm, a former CIA and NSA officer who once served as national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore and now leads Booz Allen's business with the CIA and the Office of the DNI.

    Speaking to a conference on information-sharing and counterterrorism, Wilhelm explained that the "right mix of policies" for business should include a wide range of "incentives" and "cooperative arrangements," including "appropriate protections from Freedom of Information Act requirements and other unintended consequences of more open information sharing." Government, he argued, should "help make the business case, and then sweeten it - because industry will share information when there is a business case to do so." In other words, corporations were happy to participate in the exchange of information about terrorism and other security threats, but only if there were enough rewards. And for Booz Allen, those rewards have been sweet indeed, as a short list of their recent unclassified contracts attests. They include:

    Little Congressional Scrutiny?

    In spite of its tremendous power as a contractor, Booz Allen has received very little criticism or even scrutiny from the U.S. Congress. In January 2007, the Senate had a rare opportunity to inquire about the company when it held hearings on Michael McConnell's nomination as Director of National Intelligence (see box). Prior to the hearing, several senators said they would question McConnell about Booz Allen's role as a contractor; but the hearing was a desultory affair, and few questions were asked of the new DNI about the high level of contracting among the spy agencies or the specific role of Booz Allen.

    A month later, a Booz Allen contract with the Department of Homeland Security came under close scrutiny in the House. In February 2007, Henry Waxman, a Democratic Congressman from California, the chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, charged that Booz Allen had a significant conflict of interest over its contract to oversee an $8 billion contract with the DHS Secure Border Initiative known as SBI-Net. Under the contract, Boeing and other companies will build a "virtual fence" of cameras, radar and sensors that will transmit imagery and data to border patrol agents working along the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico. (See CorpWatch's "Fencing the Border".)

    The conflict arose, said Waxman, because Booz Allen had long-standing business partnerships with Boeing, the prime contractor for SBI-Net, and could therefore not provide objective oversight of the program. At the hearing, Waxman pointed out to DHS officials that they had hired 98 people to oversee the SBI-Net contract. "But the problem is that 65 of these people don't work for the government. They work for the contractor," he said. "You're relying on them to do the function that a government ordinarily would do." DHS officials responded that Booz Allen had been hired for advice, not for oversight.

    Waxman's criticism could be made of a myriad of contracts Booz Allen holds with intelligence agencies. At the NSA, for example, it has advised the agency about several contracts that involve companies that Booz Allen has close business ties with. That is also true at the NRO, the NGA and the CIA. So far, however, no reports of conflicts of interest have emerged from Congress, which in any case exercises little oversight over intelligence contracts.

    In another damaging report issued in 2007, the General Accounting Office, the audit arm of the U.S. Congress, found that the Department of Homeland Security was spending nearly $16 billion a year on goods and services from the private sector, making it the third-largest employer of contractors in the federal government. Among the beneficiaries of DHS' spending was Booz Allen Hamilton, which in 2006 was awarded a $43 million no-bid contract to provide services to the DHS intelligence unit. Upon reading the $16 billion DHS figures in the GAO report, Joseph Lieberman, an independent U.S. senator from Connecticut, angrily commented: "plainly put, we need to know who is in charge at DHS - its managers and workers, or the contractors."

    The Washington Post later found that Booz Allen's no-bid intelligence contract with DHS had ballooned in value from $2 million in 2003 to over $30 million in 2006 - 15 times its original value. When DHS lawyers first examined the Booz Allen deal, the Post said, they found it was "grossly beyond the scope" of the original contract and had violated government procurement rules. An open competition was ordered by DHS lawyers, but delayed for a year. During that time, the Post said, "the payments to Booz Allen more than doubled again under a second no-bid arrangement, to $73 million."

    Union Protests

    So far, the only public criticism of the potential Carlyle-Booz Allen deal has come from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the country's largest labor unions. Last year, the union launched a blistering attack on Carlyle and the private equity industry in a widely distributed report called "Behind the Buyouts: Inside the World of Private Equity." The gist of the report was that Carlyle, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts (KKR) and other large private equity funds were undermining the U.S. economy by avoiding taxes and creating "harsh consequences," such as layoffs, for workers and communities. In late 2007, when Carlyle acquired the assets of Manor Care, a chain of nursing homes where the SEIU is trying to organize workers, the union stepped up its campaign.
 

    In January 2008, after rumors of a Carlyle takeover of Booz Allen surfaced in the press, SEIU issued a blistering press release denouncing the potential deal. The union's criticism of the proposed acquisition didn't focus on Booz Allen's role in intelligence outsourcing but on Carlyle's ties with the Mubadala Development fund of the Government of Abu Dhabi. In 2007, that fund paid $1.35 billion to buy a 7.5 percent ownership stake in Carlyle's general partnership.

    As a result of that investment, the SEIU charged, Carlyle was risking national security. "The potential for a Carlyle Group-Booz Allen buyout demands urgency on the part of lawmakers and regulators to examine the risks faced by the U.S. when foreign governments potentially have access to classified and other sensitive national security information through their stake in U.S. companies," the union declared in a press release. In an interview with CorpWatch, Stephen Lerner, the director of SEIU's Private Equity Project, said the union launched this nationalist campaign out of concern that classified information from Booz Allen could leak into the hands of the Abu Dhabi fund, thus compromising U.S. security interests.

    "When you combine buyout firms, which have much less reporting requirements because they are private, with opaque sovereign wealth funds, you get a toxic stew of secrecy," he said. Asked how or why Booz Allen executives might leak classified information to a foreign government, he replied: "The point is, you have no way of knowing if they would or wouldn't." He added that, while the SEIU has not taken a position on Booz Allen's extensive role in intelligence outsourcing, the issue of "government jobs being done by private contractors" might emerge in the future for the union.

    (The SEIU does not mention in its material that the California Public Employees Retirement System, the pension fund for California state retirees where the SEIU has significant influence, owns five percent of the Carlyle Group.)

    Carlyle's Ullman, who recently discussed the union campaign with SEIU president Andrew Stern during a conference on private equity, rejected the SEIU's claims. The charges that the Abu Dhabi investment could jeopardize national security "is really an obscene allegation," he said. Ullman added that the Abu Dhabi fund was a "passive investor" in Carlyle and would have no role in the management of Carlyle companies. "Carlyle's portfolio companies have a pristine track record in handling sensitive government data," he said. "Giving top secret and classified data to foreign governments is known as treason, and is punishable by jail and worse. That would be a fairly strong impediment" to leaks.

    In any case, there is virtually no evidence to suggest that any US intelligence contractor has leaked classified information, and it's unlikely the union's allegations will be a factor if the Carlyle Group does decide to acquire Booz Allen Hamilton.

    Shadow Intelligence Agency

    Booz Allen prides itself on the long-term personal relationships it has forged between its personnel and their government clients. "We stay for a lifetime," Mark J. Gerencser, the senior vice president in charge of Booz Allen's government contracting division, remarked in 2006. A quick study of their biographies posted on Booz Allen's Website suggests that this is indeed true - the senior management have shuttled back and forth between the company and the government for their entire lives.

    As the director of Booz Allen's U.S. government business, for example, Gerencser serves in "several broad-based roles," including "representing industry" to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which manage the Pentagon's vast intelligence operations. He is also a member of Booz Allen's leadership team that sets the strategic direction of the company, and has run many of the war games staged by Booz Allen for its government clients.

    Just below him in the company's intelligence hierarchy is Ken Wiegand, another senior vice president. Weigand came to Booz Allen in 1983 after working for a decade in Air Force intelligence, and now leads the firm's work for national intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the Department of Homeland Security. His specialty, the Website says, includes imagery intelligence operations, which are managed by the NGA, one of Booz Allen's most important clients.

    Senior vice president Joseph W. Mahaffee, a veteran of naval intelligence, is the leader of Booz Allen's Maryland procurement office business, which puts him in charge of the company's contracts with the NSA in Fort Meade. He focuses on "meeting the Information Assurance mission objectives" of the NSA with various technology services, including systems engineering, software development and "advanced telecommunications analysis."

    Another key Booz Allen figure at the NSA is Marty Hill, who came to the company after a 35-year career in signals intelligence and electronic warfare and previously served as an expert on "information operations capabilities and policy" for Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. He leads of team of 1,200 professionals engaged in all aspects of "signals intelligence" including technical analysis, systems development and operations.

    Vice President Pamela Lentz is a former cryptology officer with the Navy and once worked as a program manager for TRW, one of the nation's oldest intelligence contractors (it is now owned by Northrop Grumman). She is Booz Allen's "client service officer" for the DIA and other military intelligence markets, which includes intelligence units within the Navy, Air Force, Army, the unified combatant commands and the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Among other tasks, Lentz manages a 120-person Booz Allen team that supports the NRO, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation's military spy satellites. She also runs a task force that supports human intelligence collection efforts at the DIA.

    Vice President Laurene Gallo, a former intelligence analyst at the NSA, leads a Booz Allen "intelligence research and analysis" team that support several agencies, including the CIA, the DNI and the National Counterterrrorism Center. Vice President Richard Wilhelm, whose job at Booz Allen is to work with the CIA and the ODNI, came to the company after a long career in U.S. intelligence that included stints directing the Joint Intelligence Center for Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and the NSA's first director of information warfare.

    Vice President William Wansley, a former Army intelligence officer, leads a team of experts in "strategic and business planning" who support the CIA's National Clandestine Service, the part of the CIA that conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies, as well as the DNI. Another vice president Robert W. Noonan, a retired Army lieutenant general who once served as the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence and the commanding general of the U.S. Army's Intelligence and Security Command, is in charge of expanding Booz Allen's military intelligence business within all the armed services, the combatant commands, the DIA and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

    It is each of these vice presidents who are poised to personally profit from a corporate takeover by the Carlyle Group.

    Who is the Carlyle Group?

    The Carlyle Group is a private equity fund - a group of financial advisers that invests large sums of money from pension funds, large corporations, wealthy individuals and foreign banks into privately held companies in many different industries, and then run those companies until the market is right to sell them at a substantial profit. During the early years of the George W. Bush administration, it gained attention - and some notoriety - because of the large number of former high-ranking political figures it had attracted as advisers and managers. They included former President George H.W. Bush, former Secretary of State James Baker and former British Prime Minister John Major.

    Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Carlyle was in the news again when newspapers revealed that Osama Bin Laden's family in Saudi Arabia - which owns one of the world's largest construction companies - held a stake in the fund. The stake was quickly liquidated after the news broke.

    Until the recent slowdown in the financial markets, the private equity industry, with over $160 billion under its control, was widely seen as one of the most important drivers of the global economy, pumping venture capital into high-tech startups and buy-out capital into corporate reorganizations worldwide. They are extremely active in Britain, where more than 20 percent of the private sector workforce is employed by companies that are, or have been, the targets of private equity investments. Business magazines credit them with breaking up some of America's worst-run conglomerates and bringing competition to Japan's highly regulated and incestuous banking industry.

    "Private equity funds now wield much of the transformational power at the heart of the capitalist system," The Economist magazine recently observed. In addition to Carlyle, which has more than $75 billion under management, industry leaders include the Blackstone Group ($30 billion), Bain Capital ($27 billion), Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. ($26 billion) and Texas Pacific Group ($20 billion).

    Carlyle, the largest of the funds, is best-known for owning large military contractors and aerospace contractors, such as United Defense Industries, the maker of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and other weapons systems, which it sold to BAE Systems in 2004, and Vought Aircraft Industries, a major producer of structural assemblies for commercial, military and business aircraft, which it still holds. Other military contractors that have gone through Carlyle's hands include EG&G, LTV Aerospace and Magnavox Electronic Systems.

    During the 1990s, when it made most of these acquisitions, the fund was led by former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, who served during the Carter administration as deputy director of the CIA. During his tenure, Carlyle bought and sold nearly a dozen companies active in the intelligence industry. They include BDM International, an influential company that, during the 1990s, provided some of the U.S. Army's first contract interpreters and, through a subsidiary known as Vinnell Corporation, once trained the Saudi National Guard. It was eventually sold to Northrop Grumman and is now part of that company's huge intelligence division.

    U.S. Investigative Service, which Carlyle bought in 1996 and sold in 2007, is the largest provider of security investigations for employees and contractors hired by the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and other agencies, and in recent months has been training Iraqi police commandoes under contract to the Pentagon. (See CorpWatch coverage of USIS.)

    Another spectacular acquisition was QinetiQ, the privatized arm of Britain's military research corporation. It was acquired by Carlyle in 2003, sold in 2007, and recently emerged as one of the premiere U.S. intelligence contractors - after netting a $470 million profit for Carlyle. (See our article "QinetiQ goes Kinetic".)

    Carlyle, however, has divested itself of most of its military holdings. "In our current U.S. portfolio, there's none," Carlyle's Ullman told CorpWatch. Today, most of its investments are concentrated in commercial industries, such as real estate and banking. During a few months' span in 2006, for instance, Carlyle did a "manufacturing deal, an education deal, a consumer products deal, and buildings deal, and a financial services deal," according to an account in the Washingtonian magazine. Its holdings are extensive and pervasive: every time you rent a car from Hertz, catch a quick breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts or get ice-cream at Baskin-Robbins, you're sending money to Carlyle.

    A $2 billion acquisition of Booz Allen's contracting business would therefore put Carlyle back in the big leagues of military contractors.
 

    Michael McConnell

    Booz Allen Hamilton's most illustrious alumnus is Michael McConnell, the current Director of National Intelligence, the top spy job in the country, who epitomizes the term revolving door, spinning from government job to industry and back again.

    McConnell was a senior Pentagon official during George Bush Senior's administration and the first Gulf War, where he worked for Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of Defense, as the chief intelligence adviser to General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cheney was so impressed with McConnell's work during the war that he appointed him to head the NSA in 1993 (he later intervened personally to convince McConnell to take the DNI job in 2007).

    McConnell subsequently spent more than 10 years as a Booz Allen senior vice president in charge of the company's extensive contracts in military intelligence and information operations for the Pentagon. In that job, his official biography states, McConnell provided intelligence support to "the U.S. Unified Combatant Commanders, the Director of National Intelligence Agencies, and the Military Service Intelligence Directors." That made him a close colleague of not only Donald Rumsfeld, who ran the Pentagon from 2001 to 2007, but of Vice President Cheney, who has served President Bush as a kind of intelligence godfather since the earliest days of the administration.

    As Booz Allen's chief intelligence liaison to the Pentagon, McConnell was at the center of action, both before and after the September 11 attacks. During the first six years of the Bush administration, Booz Allen's contracts with the U.S. government rose dramatically, from $626,000 in 2000 to $1.6 billion in 2006. McConnell and his staff at Booz Allen were deeply involved in some of the Bush administration's most controversial counterterrorism programs. They included the Pentagon's infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme run by former Navy Admiral John Poindexter, which was an attempt to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases. (Congress cancelled the program over civil liberties concerns, but much of the work was transferred to the NSA, where Booz Allen continued to receive the contracts.)

    In 2002, when the CIA launched a financial intelligence project to track terrorist financing with the secret cooperation of SWIFT, the Brussels-based international banking consortium, Booz Allen won a contract to serve as an "outside" auditor of the project.

    In January 2007, McConnell resigned from Booz Allen after he was appointed by President George W. Bush to his current job. He now oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, and thus much of Booz Allen's government business. (See this reporter's 2007 Salon article.)

    Of Unions, Pension Funds and the Carlyle Group

    The SEIU's campaign material on the Carlyle Group, including a 40-page white paper on private equity issued last year, fails to mention a salient fact: that many SEIU members are affiliated with a pension fund that holds a significant stake in the Carlyle Group.

    That fund is the California Public Employees Retirement System, the world's largest public pension fund, often known as CalPERS. It has held a five percent stake in Carlyle's core management group since 2000, and therefore profits every time Carlyle makes money from one of its investments. Many of the California state officials who sit on CalPERS boards are also members of the SEIU, although they officially only represent their employer, not the union.

    In 2001, this reporter attended a meeting of the CalPERS investment board where Carlyle's three founding managers appeared as witnesses. The public meeting took place at a time when Carlyle was a hot media topic because of its close ties to the Bush administration and its prominence as the nation's 11th largest military contractor. Several SEIU officials attended the meeting, and the questioning of Carlyle was led by a CalPERS official who belonged to the SEIU. However, the investment board didn't ask about Carlyle's military industry investments, and instead posed a single, softball question about Carlyle's views on the U.S. investment climate.

    Asked why the SEIU hasn't mentioned CalPERS' stake in Carlyle in any of its literature, Stephen Lerner, the director of SEIU's Private Equity Project, replied that the union didn't start investigating the pension fund's role in Carlyle until 2007.

    Until then, "we never really thought about CalPERS' investment in Carlyle," he said. "Now that we're digging in deeper, we're raising lots of questions." Under SEIU's initiative, a California lawmaker has introduced legislation that would prohibit CalPERS from investing in private equity funds owned in part by overseas funds from countries that don't "generally respect human rights." According to an SEIU handout, the legislation "is only applicable to private equity firms in which sovereign wealth funds have an ownership stake," such as Carlyle.

    Carlyle's Ullman responded that the legislation could hurt the people it is supposed to protect. California lawmakers "should consider the detrimental impact on California pensioners who have benefited greatly from CalPERS' investment in, and ownership of, the Carlyle Group," he told CorpWatch."

FCC Official Wants Probe of "60 Minutes" Blackout, by Peter Kaplan, Reuters (March 3, 2008)

"A U.S. Federal Communications Commission official is seeking an inquiry into the blacking out of a politically charged segment of the CBS News magazine "60 Minutes" by a local television station in Alabama.

    FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said he had asked the chairman of the FCC to open an inquiry into the February 24 incident at WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Alabama, in which civil rights footage from the 1960s was blacked out.

    "The FCC now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here," Copps said at a luncheon with media watchdog groups. "Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?"

    Copps is one of two Democratic appointees on the five-member FCC. The chairman of the agency, Kevin Martin, is a Republican.

    Martin responded by saying he would look into the matter but has not indicated yet whether he would issue a letter of inquiry to the station, a source close to the commission said.

    The "60 Minutes" segment centered on the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who was convicted in 2006 on charges of corruption.

    The program made the case that Siegelman had been wrongly convicted on the basis of a politically motivated case built by Republican prosecutors and White House political advisor Karl Rove.

    The blackout of the segment in Huntsville prompted an editorial in The New York Times the following week that raised comparisons between the WHNT incident and systematic efforts by a Mississippi TV station to suppress information about the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

    WHNT denied that the blackout was politically motivated. It said it had failed to get the segment on the air because of an equipment failure at the station that cut off the feed from CBS. WHNT said the problem was corrected a few minutes before the end of the Siegelman segment.

...."

"With a viral campaign underway via e-mail, right-wing radio, and on the street suggesting that Barack Obama is a black "Manchurian Candidate," secretly trained as a Muslim fanatic who will insinuate himself into the White House, thence to undermine all that we hold dear, perhaps it is time to look at the Manchurian Candidate we already have in the White House, who, together with his handler over in Blair House, has pretty much done all the damage already.

George Bush came to office in 2001 promising a new era of integrity, civility, and "compassionate conservatism," an era of humble American foreign policy, and a bipartisan approach to government. What did we actually get?

Once in office, this chameleon president almost immediately set out to embroil the country in a major war in the Middle East against the nation of Iraq. The game plan was laid out at the president's first National Security Council meeting, attended by Vice President Dick Cheney (the man holding Bush's controller), Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill (who later spilled the beans about the session).

Bush also famously ignored all warnings about the imminent attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How much he and the rest of the administration knew about that attack in advance, or whether elements within the administration may have even helped it along, remains the subject of considerable interest and investigation and may never be answered, but it is clear that there were ample warnings about it, and he did nothing -- even rudely blowing off a briefer who tried to alert him to the danger.

Moreover, it is known that Israeli Mossad agents (who we know have close ties to both the U.S. intelligence apparatus and to the Neo-cons who infest the Bush White House) did indeed have advance knowledge, and were set up across New York Harbor with a video camera to tape the attack on the Twin Towers (they were subsequently arrested by New Jersey police, only to be later released and sent back to Israel, through intercession by the U.S. government). As well, we know that unidentified people made a killing by placing negative bets, called "puts," on the stocks, several days before 9-11, of the two airlines that were hijacked, American and United, and of two investment banks that would be seriously hurt by the building collapses, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. (The puts were placed through an investment bank, Alex Brown, which until a year earlier had been headed by a man who moved over to become the number three person in the CIA.) It's hard to escape the conclusion that the Bush/Cheney Administration, at a minimum, wanted an attack on American soil, and a national disaster that would put the country on a war footing.

Certainly instead of rallying the public and defending the nation's democratic traditions and its Constitution, Bush and his handlers after 9-11 immediately set in motion a concerted scare campaign to undermine both. While urging the public to buy sheets of plastic and duct tape to construct "safe rooms" in their homes, they rammed through Congress a deceitfully named measure, the so-called Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act), which effectively undermined most of the articles of the Bill of Rights (and which appeared, suspiciously, fully drawn up in bill form, only days after the attacks).

At the same time, the president, only one week after the attacks, obtained an Authorization for Use of Military Force for a military attack on the Taliban government in Afghanistan and on Al Qaeda forces in that country, which he subsequently interpreted broadly as an authorization for a global "war" on terror, which he then claimed made him effectively a dictator with absolute power both at home and abroad (the so-called "unitary executive" theory). Under this claim of absolute power as commander in chief in time of war, Bush went on to order the use of torture against captives, foreign and domestic, including U.S. citizens, to strip even U.S. citizens of the right of habeas corpus -- that is, the right to have their arrest and detention brought before a federal court -- and to establish secret torture centers around the globe and on military installations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba.

As well, even before the 9-11 attacks, the president began a sweeping program of electronic spying, run through the super-secret National Security Agency, on Americans' telephone and Internet activities. It was and remains a program that deliberately avoids seeking warrants and court approval even by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court -- a body that has only rejected some five requests for warrants out of hundreds of thousands sought since its establishment in 1978.

Finally, in a perhaps fatal undermining of the Constitution, the president after 9-11 began a practice of simply refusing to enact or obey laws passed by the Congress, effectively rendering the legislative branch an impotent debating club.

Not content to simply explode or dismantle the legal foundations of the American government and rule of law, Bush and his handlers also went about systematically destroying the country's basic institutions and even its economy.

The education system was fatally ensnared in a test-driven system called "No Child Left Behind," which has, in short order, dumbed down public education to an extent shocking even to this already anti-intellectual society, with many schools simply giving up the teaching of art, literature, or history, to focus desperately on math and reading that their students would do well enough on standardized tests to keep the schools from losing their funding.

The dollar has been cast adrift to become the new lira as the government has gone on an unprecedented borrowing spree to fund endless war and ever-larger military budgets, while erasing the taxes on the wealthy, the super-rich, and corporations. Banks were given free rein to enter into all manner of risky ventures, leading to the current collapse in credit. Corporations were encouraged to ship their production and jobs overseas. Homeowners were encouraged to spend, spend, spend and to mortgage their homes to the hilt and then some. Towns, cities, and pension funds were encouraged to invest in fantastic "structured" products that were actually towering card houses. Domestic car manufacturers were encouraged to build every larger, ever more voracious gas-guzzling vehicles, pumping out ever larger quantities of carbon into the already overstressed atmosphere.

The nation's infrastructure -- its roads, dams, bridges, levies, airports, veterans hospitals, etc. -- were left to decay with predictable results, the most dramatic of which was the loss of an entire city, New Orleans, to a routine Category 3 hurricane (after which, the president did nothing to rescue the survivors or fund a recovery).

Surveying at the appalling wreckage left after eight years of the Bush administration, it is hard to recognize the country that he started out with in 2001. A once proud nation -- one that only a few years ago was admired around the world and that now is viewed as a pariah and a rogue state -- today trembles before a handful of turbaned fanatics holed up in caves in the Hindu Kush, its trillion-dollar high-tech military colossus fought to a standstill in Iraq and Afghanistan by a few thousand brave men and women armed with RPGs, antique AK-47s, and home-made roadside bombs. A nation that once was the envy of the world for its free society now has scientists afraid to report their findings, university professors afraid to support outspoken colleagues, members of Congress afraid to defend their Constitution, citizens afraid of their neighbors, journalists afraid of government criticism, and lawyers afraid to defend clients.

Hey, this place starts to look and feel an awful lot like the China I lived in back in 1991!

Forget all the nonsense about Barack Obama being a closet Muslim. We already have our Manchurian Candidate in the White House, and he has largely accomplished what he was programmed to do: destroy the country.

The truth is this: If at the end of their second term, Bush and Cheney were to hop on a plane and fly off to a hideout in the mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border, leaving a "Nya-nya!" note on the White House dining room table, few people would really be very surprised. "

Ralph Nader loves John McCain-In 2004, Nader asked McCain to help his campaign -- and the senator rushed to his side. Is the consumer advocate now returning the favor?, by Joe Conason, salon.com (February 29, 2008)

"Irritated Democrats -- and everyone else who feels that we have heard more than enough from Ralph Nader -- cannot help wondering why he would be running for president yet again, at the risk of becoming a permanent national joke. Is he stroking his own ego, as some critics complain? Is he motivated by principle to offer voters a different choice, as he will insist? Both those explanations may still be plausible, although between 2000 and 2004 his support fell from 3 percent to 0.3 percent, which is not exactly an ego boost nor an endorsement of third-party politics. Even in 2000, when he made his strongest (and most disastrous) showing, he fell far short of his own 5 percent target.

But the evidence suggests another possible motive for Nader to run this year -- namely, that he hopes to help his longtime ally John McCain, to whom he owes at least one big favor. Nader is already focusing his fire on the Democrats, with his Web site featuring dozens of press releases attacking Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while none voice the slightest criticism of McCain. In his latest round of television appearances, Nader trained his fire directly on Obama.

Nader's proclivity to boost Republicans and blast Democrats has been a matter of historical record ever since the Florida debacle eight years ago, when his 97,000 votes probably deprived Al Gore of victory in that crucial state. Although the consumer advocate and his supporters continue to deny any such culpability, Republicans clearly feel that his presence on the ballot works to their advantage. As Mike Huckabee noted on hearing of Nader's impending announcement last week, a Nader candidacy tends to siphon votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee. "So naturally," said Huckabee bluntly, "Republicans would welcome his entry into the race."

Actually, Republicans have learned to do more than merely "welcome" Nader. Four years ago, Republican officials and activists in certain swing states helped gather signatures to gain ballot access for Nader, while several major Republican donors sent generous checks to his campaign. And no Republican spoke out more forthrightly on his behalf than McCain, who in 2004 urged the authorities in Florida to put Nader on the ballot there despite his failure to qualify -- and who sent his own lawyer down to the Sunshine State to fight for Nader in court.

McCain launched that intervention from his perch as chairman of the Reform Institute, a Washington think tank funded by corporate soft money and liberal foundations and staffed by McCain staffers and partisans. On the surface, at least, the Arizona senator was pursuing a principled defense of open ballot access, and he recalled how establishment Republicans had used legal technicalities to block him from the New York primary ballot in 2000. He sent Trevor Potter, a prominent attorney and former Federal Election Commission member who has long represented him, to assist the Nader forces in Tallahassee. It was an inspiring story of shared democratic values that crossed the ideological spectrum.

But as the New York Times reported on Sept. 17, 2004, there was a political back story behind McCain's assistance to Nader. According to the Times, "Mr. Potter said that the Nader campaign first sought Mr. McCain's backing in the case last week and that subsequently the Bush campaign also asked him to get involved." (Candidate Nader and his running mate, Peter Camejo, issued a statement thanking McCain and the Reform Institute that is for some reason no longer available on the Nader campaign Web site.)

That tantalizing sequence of events suggests McCain's motive in backing Nader may well have been partisan as well as principled, since the "maverick" senator had only weeks earlier sworn his fealty to George W. Bush on the dais at the Republican National Convention. Certainly the Bush campaign would have felt reassured knowing that Nader would be on the ballot again in Florida, like a lucky rabbit's foot.

....."

Are Your Savings and Investments Safe From Bank Failures?, by Christopher Laird, The Market Oracle (February 28, 2008)

"Time to ask a few good questions about your Interest rates - I think its time to start asking some basic questions about what we all think we are doing financially. Is what we do appropriate for the times? Or, more to the point, do we view risk appropriately?

Do we live in a time where we might just see our personal banks, or financial institutions such as money market funds, MMFs, fail?

We might want to start asking questions about our financial reality, times, and our own assumptions about what is safe or not safe. Interest rates are one key.

Many of us have some gold. Gold is considered money par excellence, has no particular guarantees on it, other than its atomic weight. People world wide have a basic instinct that considers gold and silver money. The trait is so deeply ingrained that it has survived over thousands of years, even as nations failed, currencies failed, and people lost all their savings. But gold offers no interest. So, for our accounts that do offer interest, how should we look at that?

I think that the time is right to start asking ourselves if the financial world we live in is as safe as we might think. Let me make the point like this….

Suppose that you found out that your financial account was on the verge of being locked – like we hear some money market funds have had to do – to stop people from fleeing headlong and then the fund has to sell assets at fire sale prices. What would you do? Well, I'm sure that you would drop everything and move that money out before the account was frozen. But how can one find out before that happens, or is imminent?

It's a basic example, but, rather poignant today. Poignant now. I drove by a small bank recently and they were offering over 6% on a checking account! With a sign out front.
That is so high, that one has to ask himself how that bank can offer that interest rate, when that is about what 30 year fixed rate mortgages are at?

Or, more to the point, doesn't that show how urgent that bank is to get deposits?

We just put out an alert about this phenomenon to our readers. We suggested that, if you are being offered a rather high interest rate by your financial institution, that maybe you should consider that a warning sign. This applies to banks, broker accounts, and MMFs.

.....

So, now, we read about the FDIC is on a hiring binge. And also there are various news comments hither and yon, where it's expected that we are going to be seeing a good number of bank failures as the credit crisis expands, and eventually drags them under. This will affect not only banks but money market funds and many financial accounts.

If you are following the bank crisis of late, and realize that the Fed and the ECB alone have pumped out an astounding $2 trillion of help to financial institutions since August 07, that maybe we all ought to be double checking the status of our financial accounts, and if – I think this is particularly important – our accounts are offering a bit higher interest than the norm, to consider this a risk profile.

If your bank, (I would say this applies to most countries right now) offers something like 6% on mere checking accounts, or CDs even, maybe you ought to consider that a risk profile.

In any case, we ought to all be asking questions about how safe we think our financial accounts are, and if they offer higher interest than the norm, to consider looking around for saver havens. You need to find out what the going interest rates are for your area.

Now, I would consider 4% a maximum interest rate for a sound institution, and that is just a general observation based on 30 year fixed rates being about 6%. I think you might find that to be the case in many countries right now, ie 4% max.

....."

WHNT's Technical Glitches, NY Times Editorial (February 27, 2008)

" In 1955, when WLBT-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss., did not want to run a network report about racial desegregation, it famously hung up the sign: "Sorry, Cable Trouble." Audiences in northern Alabama might have suspected the same tactics when WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate, went dark Sunday evening during a "60 minutes" segment that strongly suggested that Don Siegelman, Alabama's former Democratic governor, was wrongly convicted of corruption last year.

    The report presented new evidence that the charges against Mr. Siegelman may have been concocted by politically motivated Republican prosecutors - and orchestrated by Karl Rove. Unfortunately, WHNT had "technical problems" that prevented it from broadcasting a segment (the problems were resolved in time for the next part of the show) that many residents of Alabama would no doubt have found quite interesting.

    After initially blaming the glitch on CBS in New York, the affiliate said it learned "upon investigation," and following a rebuke from the network, that "the problem was on our end." It re-broadcast the segment at 10 p.m., pitting it against the Academy Awards on rival ABC, before Daniel Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar. As public criticism grew, it ran it again at 6 p.m. on Monday.

    Stan Pylant, WHNT's president and general manager, assured viewers that "there was no intent whatsoever to keep anyone from seeing the broadcast."

    WHNT is owned by Oak Hill Capital Partners, a private equity firm whose lead investor is one of the Bass brothers of Texas. The brothers are former business partners of George W. Bush and generous contributors to Republican causes.

    In 1969, the F.C.C. revoked the license of WLBT in Jackson after the commission established a systematic effort by the broadcaster to suppress information about the civil rights movement. Today, broadcast rules have changed, giving stations more leeway to decide what to air. Dropping a single report is unlikely to set the regulators in motion. Still, it would be deeply troubling if a partisan broadcaster could suppress information on the public airwaves and hide behind a technical fig leaf.

    In this case, if the blackout was intentional, it may also have been counterproductive. Rather than take attention away from allegations that Mr. Siegelman was the victim of a partisan campaign, WHNT's technical glitch seems to lend support to the charge."

White House Email Users Could Have Erased Records, by Matt Renner, truthout.org (February 27, 2008)

"Destroyed email records may not be recovered before Bush leaves office.

    During a technical and tense Congressional hearing, the testimony of current and former White House officials and the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) revealed a possible explanation for the loss of millions of White House email records.

    Previous investigations revealed the Bush administration removed the White House email archiving system put in place by the Clinton administration, and failed to replace it. Instead of implementing a standard archiving system like the ones used by businesses or other Federal agencies, the White House set up a procedure that amounted to taking email records and manually storing them on a hard drive.

    The Bush archiving system was characterized as "primitive" by Steven McDevitt, a former information technology specialist in the White House Office of Administration. In 2002, McDevitt warned White House lawyers and administrative staff the stopgap system of manually archiving records was deeply flawed because an individual user could tamper with the records without leaving any evidence of their malfeasance behind.

    "In mid-2005, prior to the discovery of the potential email issues, a critical security issue was identified and corrected. During this period it was discovered that the file servers and the file directories used to store the retained email .pst files were accessible by everyone on the EOP network," McDevitt wrote on page nine of his sworn statement. The storage method "provided no mechanism or audit trail that tracked changes to data files or the activities performed by users or system administrators. The integrity of the data could be called into question because it was not possible to ensure that inappropriate action, either intentional or unintentional, could not occur," McDevitt wrote in his statement.

    Congressman John Sarbanes (D-Maryland) implied the archiving system had been intentionally destroyed by the Bush administration to allow White House staff to cover their tracks and erase evidence of wrongdoing.

    "I have to believe that [American citizens] would find it completely implausible that this amount of email would just disappear by accident. And I mean to imply what I'm implying," Sarbanes said.

    The House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing was billed as an examination of possible violations of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) - a law that is supposed to force presidents to retain all the documents and records of their office and the office of the vice president. Two alleged violations of the PRA have surfaced as a result of previous investigations.

    Internal White House Email Records Destroyed

    In 2005, as a result of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson's identity, staff at the White House Office of Administration (OA) discovered a massive hole in the archived email records. This hole was estimated at ten million missing emails, including entire days for which all email records had been erased. The discovery of these missing records led to an investigation by the information technology staff. According to McDevitt, the staff analyzed the situation and created a recovery plan to try and restore some of the lost records by using emergency data backup tapes. Instead of implementing the recovery plan, the Bush administration brought in Theresa Payton to take charge of the situation.

    Payton was a witness in Tuesday's hearing. She explained her office had scrapped the recovery plan, and started over from scratch, causing a delay that could extend past the Bush presidency.

    When asked about her reasoning for essentially throwing out the work of a 15-member team of internal White House staff, Payton said she was not made aware of a 250-page report prepared by McDevitt's team and that she found their work to be unreliable.

    Congresswoman Eleanor Norton (D-Washington, DC) grilled Payton on this point. Norton demonstrated Payton had tried to downplay the analysis that had been done by McDevitt's team in a sworn statement Payton made to a court in January. In the statement, Payton challenged the assertion that OA staff had created a "detailed analysis" of the records problem. Payton stated she was only aware of "a chart created by a former employee," that detailed the problem. Payton asserted that the analysis done by McDevitt lacked "supporting documentation," prompting her office to start the entire analysis over again.

    "This is amazing testimony given the position that you were in and the post you held," Norton said, "why didn't you mention the 250-page supporting document in your declaration?"

    "That document had not been made available to me. We produced a lot of documents in response to this. And so that document must not have been on the radar of my team to inform me," Payton responded.

    Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland) accused Payton of "kicking the can down the road," by restarting the analysis of the email problem from the beginning. Cummings called it "paralysis by diagnosis." Payton later said she could not guarantee the restarted email recovery process would be complete by the end of the Bush administration's final term.

....."

Missing E-Mails May Never Be Found-Lawmaker says RNC won’t try to restore them, by Dan Eggen, Boston Globe (February 27, 2008)

"After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel’s chairman said yesterday.

The move increases the likelihood that an untold number of RNC e-mails dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush administration, including many sent or received by former presidential adviser Karl Rove, will never be recovered, according to House Democrats and public records advocates.The RNC had previously told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it was attempting to restore e-mails from 2001 to 2003, when the RNC had a policy of purging all e-mails, including those to and from White House officials, after 30 days. But Chairman Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, disclosed during a hearing yesterday that the RNC has now said it “has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails.”

“The result is a potentially enormous gap in the historical record,” Waxman said, including the time leading up to the start of the Iraq war.

Danny Diaz, RNC spokesman, said in a statement that the committee “is fully compliant with the spirit and letter of the law.” He declined to comment any further.

Administration officials have acknowledged that Rove and many other White House officials routinely used RNC accounts for government business, despite rules requiring that they conduct such business through official communications channels. The RNC also deleted all e-mails until 2004, when it exempted White House officials from its e-mail purging policy.

The RNC dispute is part of a broader debate over whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records - including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions - for history and in case of any future legal demands.

A former White House technology manager told Waxman’s committee in statements released yesterday that the Bush administration’s e-mail system “was primitive and the risk that data would be lost was high.” Steven McDevitt, who left the White House in 2006, said he supervised an internal study that found hundreds of days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices from January 2003 to August 2005. The study stated a range when tallying the total number of days in which each office had no recorded e-mails, from 473 - which had been previously reported - to more than 1,000, McDevitt said.

...."

Automated Killer Robots ‘Threat to Humanity’: Expert, Agence France-Presse (February 27, 2008)

"Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.

“They pose a threat to humanity,” said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world — from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones — can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4,000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Sharkey.

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

It we are not careful, he said, that could change.

Military leaders “are quite clear that they want autonomous robots as soon as possible, because they are more cost-effective and give a risk-free war,” he said.

Several countries, led by the United States, have already invested heavily in robot warriors developed for use on the battlefield.

South Korea and Israel both deploy armed robot border guards, while China, India, Russia and Britain have all increased the use of military robots.

Washington plans to spend four billion dollars by 2010 on unmanned technology systems, with total spending expected rise to 24 billion, according to the Department of Defense’s Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032, released in December.

James Canton, an expert on technology innovation and CEO of the Institute for Global Futures, predicts that deployment within a decade of detachments that will include 150 soldiers and 2,000 robots.

The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, said Sharkey.

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. “I don’t know why that has not happened already,” he said.

But even more worrisome, he continued, is the subtle progression from the semi-autonomous military robots deployed today to fully independent killing machines.

“I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination terrifies me,” Sharkey said.

....."

Getting the Strait Story, by Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium (February 22, 2008)

"The Pentagon spun a minor melee off the coast of Iran into a direct menace to US interests. Why isn't Congress concerned?

    "You will explode in a few minutes." According to the Pentagon, those menacing words, directed at U.S. warships, came from an Iranian Guard Corps sailor aboard an armed speedboat that maneuvered uncomfortably close to the American ships in the Strait of Hormuz early last month. The incident very nearly escalated into a military confrontation with Iran.

    But there's a problem with the Pentagon's version of events: it was highly misleading. The threat likely didn't come from an Iranian sailor, nor was the confrontation as dramatic as the Pentagon portrayed it. Yet, the administration nearly spun this fairly insignificant episode into a casus belli. How has the Democratic Congress reacted to the Pentagon's phony depiction of this encounter? It hasn't. Six weeks have passed without any hint of a congressional inquiry.

    Should Congress decide to probe the administration's portrayal of the Hormuz confrontation, its jurisdiction over the issue would be fairly broad. An investigation into the matter could hypothetically involve any number of congressional committees, including the House and Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, as well as Henry Waxman's House oversight committee.

    In the days following the January 6 confrontation, I asked staff members of all the relevant committees what action, if any, might be taken. The House Armed Services Committee, I was told, was following the matter closely. And in its first week back from the Christmas recess the Senate Armed Services Committee received a staff briefing on the incident. But since then neither committee has indicated that its members are concerned with the possibility that the Pentagon may have misled the public. (Aides on the House Foreign Affairs and the Senate Foreign Relations committees did not respond to repeated inquiries.)

    The lone voice of congressional concern appears to be Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.), who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs. Last fall, his committee held a series of hearings examining the tense relationship between the U.S. and Iran, including the possibility that a minor melee-quite like the one in the Strait-could trigger an accidental war.

    "The recent incident in the Strait of Hormuz underscores the need for means to be developed to prevent inadvertent armed escalation between the U.S. and Iran," he says, adding that "incidents involving Iranian speedboats are not unforeseeable.... We've known about these tactics for many, many years." He notes that his subcommittee will continue to investigate "conflict de-escalation mechanisms that should be in place in order to ensure that our country does not fall into an armed conflict that would not be in our national security interests."

    But the possibility of an accidental war is somewhat tangential to the matter at hand. The real question is whether key details of the Hormuz confrontation were distorted by the Pentagon.

    And evidence suggests that they were.

...."

Pentagon report investigated lasers that put voices in your head, by Lisa Zyga, physorg.com (February 18, 2008)

"A recently unclassified report from the Pentagon from 1998 has revealed an investigation into using laser beams for a few intriguing potential methods of non-lethal torture. Some of the applications the report investigated include putting voices in people's heads, using lasers to trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body to a point of feverish confusion - all from hundreds of meters away.

A US citizen requested access to the document, entitled "Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons," under the Freedom of Information Act a little over a year ago. There is no evidence that any of the technologies mentioned in the 10-year-old report have been developed since the time it was written.

The report explained several types of non-lethal laser applications, including microwave hearing, disrupted neural control, and microwave heating. For the first type, short pulses of RF energy (2450 MHz) can generate a pressure wave in solids and liquids. When exposed to pulsed RF energy, humans experience the immediate sensation of "microwave hearing" - sounds that may include buzzing, ticking, hissing, or knocking that originate within the head.

Studies with guinea pigs and cats suggest that the mechanism responsible for the phenomenon is thermoelastic expansion. Exposure to the RF pulses doesn´t cause any permanent effects, as all effects cease almost immediately after exposure ceases. As the report explains, tuning microwave hearing could enable communicating with individuals from a distance of up to several hundred meters.

......"

Navy Research Paper: 'Disrupt Economies' with Man-Made 'Floods,' 'Droughts', by Noah Shachtman, Wired (February 11, 2008)

"A recently-unearthed U.S. Navy research project calls for creating mad-made floods and droughts to "disrupt [the] economy" of an enemy state. 

"Weather modification was used successfully in Viet Nam to (among other things) hinder and impede the movement of personnel and material from North Viet Nam to South Viet Nam," notes a Naval Air Warfare Weapons Division - China Lake research proposal, released last month through the Freedom of Information Act.  But "since that time military research on Weather Modification has dwindled in the United States."

The proposal suggests a study of the latest weather manipulation techniques, to "give the U.S. military a viable, state-of-the-art weather modification capability again."  With that in hand, American forces would be able...

To impede or deny the movement of personnel and material because of rains-floods, snow-blizzards, etc.

(2) To disrupt economy due to the effect of floods, droughts, etc.

The proposal is undated.  But it's pretty clearly from the Cold War. Not only is "the Soviet Union (Russia)" mentioned.  The money is also relatively small, by today's standards -- less than a half-million dollars, over two years.   

The proposal is undated.  But it's pretty clearly from the Cold War. Not only is "the Soviet Union (Russia)" mentioned.  The money is also relatively small, by today's standards -- less than a half-million dollars, over two years.   

A military in-house newspaper calls  "weather modification" an "area of China Lake preeminence.   Between 1949 and 1978, China Lake developed concepts, techniques, and hardware that were successfully used in hurricane abatement, fog control, and drought relief. Military application of this technology was demonstrated in 1966 when Project Popeye was conducted to enhance rainfall to help interdict traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail."  (Here's a picture of China Lake's "Cold Cloud Modification System."

In 1980, the United States ratified a treaty banning military weather manipulation.   But every once in a while, someone in the armed forces floats the idea of doing it again.  "Our vision is that by 2025 the military could influence the weather on a mesoscale [theater-wide] or microscale [immediate local area] to achieve operational capabilities," a 1996 Air Force-commissioned study reads. 

....."

Sibel Edmonds Must Be Heard, by Philip Giraldi, Huffington Post (February 4, 2008)

"Sibel Edmonds is the FBI translator turned whistleblower who decided to go public late in 2002 and has been seeking to tell her story about high level corruption in the United States government involving Turkey and Israel. What makes her story particularly compelling is that the corruption relates to the theft and sale of United States defense secrets, most particularly nuclear technology. Sibel obtained her information while translating Turkish language telephone intercepts directed against several Turkish lobbying groups who had contact with senior officials in the Bush Administration, both at the Pentagon and in the State Department. Many of the officials involved are apparently the same neoconservatives who cooked the books to enable the rush to war against Iraq and who are continuing to urge more wars in the Middle East, most notably against Iran and Syria. Several of them are close allies of leading Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

To stop Sibel from telling her story, then Attorney General John Ashcroft subjected her to a state secrets privilege gag order after her appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes in October 2002 that not only forbade her providing details of her employment with FBI but also made the ban retroactive so that anything relating to her case would be considered a state secret. Edmonds had been discouraged by her experience with CBS as her most important points wound up on the cutting room floor. Then came the gag order, which she has observed while working assiduously to get bits and pieces of her story out in various ways. In October 2007 she decided to tell all without regard for the consequences, stating that she would provide details of her allegations to any American media outlet that would let her collaborate in the final edit so that her message would not be lost. There were no takers. Last month, The Sunday Times of London decided to pick up her story and has now produced a long feature article called “For Sale: the West’s Deadliest Nuclear Secrets” plus two follow-ups. The story was picked up and replayed all over the world, but not by the mainstream media in the United States.

Why should Sibel be heard? Mostly because her story, if true, involves corruption at the highest levels of government coupled with the sale of secrets vital to the security of the United States. One of her claims is that a senior State Department officer who has been identified as Marc Grossman, recorded by the FBI while arranging to pick up bribes from a Turkish organization, also revealed the identity of the CIA cover company Brewster Jennings to a Turkish contact in late 2001. The Turk then passed on the information to a Pakistani intelligence officer who presumably warned the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation network that the CIA was apparently pursuing. Some might call that treason and it should be noted that it occurred two years before Robert Novak’s notorious exposure of Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings which led to the conviction of Scooter Libby.

Edmonds should also be listened to because she clearly had access to the documents that she describes and because she has proven that she is a credible witness. Two US Senators and the 9/11 Commission found her testimony and recollection of facts to be reliable, as did an FBI Inspector General’s office internal investigation. More to the point, if Edmonds is telling the truth there are documents in FBI files that would confirm her account. What she is claiming, if it is all true, is fact-based, not speculative.

But the media remains silent in spite of considerable efforts to get them on board and provide some coverage of her very serious charges. Since the recent Sunday Times articles, her story has been brought to the attention of news editors at MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, to PBS’s Bill Moyers, to The New York Times, The Washington Times, and to both ABC and CBS news in an attempt to arouse some interest. But there has been no response, not even a courteous “Thank you very much for contacting us….” What are so-called gadflies like Olbermann and Moyers afraid of? The suggestion that the media does not want to face the potential legal consequences of the gag order has been cited but lacks substance as much of the Sibel story is already out in public and the details of her allegations can be pieced together without actually interviewing her in violation of the state secrets privilege. Also, no one in the media has actually claimed that the lack of interest is based on the potential legal consequences. The silence has been deafening, suggesting that other forces are at work.

And it is not just the media. Congress has a responsibility to look into Edmonds’ allegations. Congressman Henry Waxman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been stonewalling Edmonds and her supporters, preferring instead to look into steroids use among professional athletes. To be sure, some in the media and Congress are undoubtedly nervous because the Edmond’s story involves Israel and corrupt officials both in Washington and Tel Aviv. Many of the American former and current officials involved are considered to be particularly close to the Israeli government and to the Israeli lobby AIPAC. Others fear that FBI investigative reports or wiretaps revealing illegal contributions or bribery of congressmen could open up a can of worms that many would prefer to keep closed.

...."

Book: 911 Commission Executive Director Had Closer White House Ties Than Publicly Disclosed, by Hope Yen, AP (February 4, 2008)

"The Sept. 11 commission’s executive director had closer ties with the White House than publicly disclosed and tried to influence the final report in ways that the staff often perceived as limiting the Bush administration’s responsibility, a new book says.

Philip Zelikow, a friend of then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, spoke with her several times during the 20-month investigation that closely examined her role in assessing the al-Qaida threat. He also exchanged frequent calls with the White House, including at least four from Bush’s chief political adviser at the time, Karl Rove.

Zelikow once tried to push through wording in a draft report that suggested a greater tie between al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and Iraq, in line with White House claims but not with the commission staff’s viewpoint, according to Philip Shenon’s “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.”

Shenon, a New York Times reporter, says Zelikow sought to intimidate staff to avoid damaging findings for President Bush, who at the time was running for re-election, and Rice. Zelikow and Rice had written a book together in 1995 and he would later work for her after the commission finished its job and she became secretary of state in 2005.

The Associated Press obtained an audio version of Shenon’s book, which is to go on sale Tuesday.

Reached by the AP, Zelikow provided a 131-page statement with information he said was provided for the book. In it, Zelikow acknowledges talking to Rove and Rice during the course of the commission’s work despite a general pledge he made not to. But he said the conversations never dealt with politics.

The White House had no immediate comment Sunday.

According to the book, when Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey learned the extent of Zelikow’s ties to the administration, he confronted Republican chairman Tom Kean and demanded to know why someone with such apparent conflicts of interest had been hired.

“Look Tom,” Kerrey is quoted as saying, “either he goes or I go.” Kean eventually persuaded Kerrey to stay.

....."

Why Were the 9/11 Tapes Destroyed?, by Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch (February 4, 2008)

"Many Americans are content with the 9/11 Commission Report, but the two chairmen of the commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton are not. Neither was commission member Max Cleland, a US Senator who resigned from the 9/11 Commission, telling the Boston Globe (November 13, 2003): "This investigation is now compromised." Even former FBI director Louis Freeh wrote in the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 17, 2005) that there are inaccuracies in the commission's report and "questions that need answers."

Both Kean and Hamilton have twice stated publicly, once in their 2006 book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, and again in the January 2, 2008, New York Times, that there are inaccuracies in their report and unanswered--or mis-answered--questions.

On the second day of this new year, Kean and Hamilton accused the CIA of obstructing their investigation: "What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the President, to investigate one of the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction."

In their book, Kean and Hamilton wrote that they were unable to obtain "access to star witnesses in custody who were the only possible source for inside information about the 9/11 plot."

The only information the commission was permitted to have about what was learned from interrogations of alleged plot ringleaders, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, came from "thirdhand" sources. The commission was not permitted to question the alleged plotters in custody or even to meet with those who interrogated the alleged plotters. Consequently, write Kean and Hamilton, "We had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information" that was fed to them by third party hands. "How could we tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was telling us the truth?"

The fact that video tapes of the interrogations existed was kept secret from the 9/11 Commission.

The video tapes have since been destroyed. The destruction of the videos has become an issue because of White House involvement in the decision to destroy the tapes and because the videos are believed to have been destroyed because they reveal methods of torture that the Bush administration denies using.

According to President Bush, the US does not practice torture even though he and his Department of Justice (sic) assert the right to torture.

Is the torture issue a red herring? The 9/11 Commission was not tasked with investigating interrogation methods or detainee treatment. The commission was tasked with investigating al Qaeda's participation in the 9/11 attack and determining the perpetrators of the terrorist event. There was no reason to withhold from the commission video evidence of confessions implicating al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Was the video evidence withheld from the 9/11 Commission because the alleged participants in the plot did not confess, did not implicate al Qaeda, and did not implicate bin Laden?

There is no reason for the Bush administration to fear the torture issue. The Justice Department's memos have legalized the practice, and Congress has passed legislation, signed by President Bush, giving retroactive protection to US interrogators who tortured detainees. The Military Commissions Act passed in September 2006 and signed by Bush in October 2006 strips detainees of protections provided by the Geneva Conventions: "No alien unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights." Other provisions of the act strip detainees of speedy trials and of protection against torture and self-incrimination. The law has a provision that retroactively protects torturers against prosecution for war crimes.

Did the Bush administration cleverly take advantage of the torture claims in order to spin the destruction of the CIA video tapes as a "torture story." It is conceivable that the tapes were destroyed because they reveal the absence of confession to the plot. As Kean and Hamilton ask, without evidence how do we know the truth?

All we have is the word of the administration that told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that, while sitting on a NIE report that concluded that Iran had terminated its weapons program in 2003, told us that Iran had an ongoing nuclear weapons program and was close to having a nuclear weapon."

NYT's Reporter Claims Rove Influenced 9/11 Commission Report, by Max Holland, Washington Decoded (January 30, 2008)

"In a revelation bound to cast a pall over the 9/11 Commission, Philip Shenon will report in a forthcoming book that the panel's executive director, Philip Zelikow, engaged in "surreptitious" communications with presidential adviser Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials during the commission's 20-month investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

    Shenon, who led The New York Times' coverage of the 9/11 panel, reveals the Zelikow-Rove connection in a new book entitled "The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation," to be published next month by TWELVE books. "The Commission" is under an embargo until its February 5 publication, but Washington DeCoded managed to purchase a copy of the abridged audio version from a New York bookstore.

    In what's termed an "investigation of the investigation," Shenon purports to tell the story of the commission from start to finish. The book's critical revelations, however, revolve almost entirely around the figure of Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs prior to his service as the commission's executive director. Shenon delivers a blistering account of Zelikow's role and leadership, and an implicit criticism of the commissioners for appointing Zelikow in the first place - and then allowing him to stay on after his myriad conflicts-of-interest were revealed under oath.

    Shenon's narrative is built from extensive interviews with staff members and several, if not all of, the commissioners. He depicts Zelikow as exploiting his central position to negate or neutralize criticism of the Bush administration so that the White House would not bear, in November 2004, the political burden of failing to prevent the attacks.

    "The Commission" includes these specific revelations:

....."

Anderson Cooper's CIA Past, by Lew Rockwell, lewrockwell.com (January 30, 2008)

"CNN's Anderson Cooper spent summers interning for a career with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to a report at a gossip website.

"Following his sophomore and junior years at Yale—a well-known recruiting ground for the CIA—Cooper spent his summers interning at the agency's monolithic headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in a program for students interested in intelligence work," reports Radar Online.

"His involvement with the agency ended there, and he chose not to pursue a job with the agency after graduation, according to a CNN spokeswoman, who confirmed details of Cooper's CIA involvement to Radar." See this article. And thanks to Brad Funkhouser for this post.

....."

The Black Box Economy, by Stephen Mihm, Boston Globe (January 27, 2008)

THE PAST YEAR has been a harrowing one for the world's financial markets, shaken by subprime crises, credit crunches, and other ills. Things have only gotten stranger in the past week, with stock prices swinging wildly in every major market - drastically down, then back up.

Last week the Federal Reserve announced the biggest cut in overnight lending rates in more than two decades. Congress, not to be outdone, is slapping together a massive deficit spending package aimed at giving the economy an emergency booster shot.

Despite the anxiety, nobody is stockpiling canned goods just yet. The prevailing assumption in today's economy is that recessions and bear markets come and go, and that things will work out in the end, much as they have since the Great Depression. That's because there's a collective confidence that the market is strong enough to correct itself, and that experts in charge of the financial system will understand how to mount a vigorous defense.

Should we be so confident this time? A handful of financial theorists and thinkers are now saying we shouldn't. The drumbeat of bad news over the past year, they say, is only a symptom of something new and unsettling - a deeper change in the financial system that may leave regulators, and even Congress, powerless when they try to wield their usual tools.

That something is the immense shadow economy of novel and poorly understood financial instruments created by hedge funds and investment banks over the past decade - a web of extraordinarily complex securities and wagers that has made the world's financial system so opaque and entangled that even many experts confess that they no longer understand how it works.

Unlike the building blocks of the conventional economy - factories and firms, widgets and workers, stocks and bonds - these new financial arrangements are difficult to value, much less analyze. The money caught up in this web is now many times larger than the world's gross domestic product, and much of it exists outside the purview of regulators.

Some of these new-generation investments have been in the news, such as the securities implicated in the mortgage crisis that is still shaking the housing market. Others, involving auto loans, credit card debt, and corporate debt, are lurking in the shadows.

The scale and complexity of these new investments means that they don't just defy traditional economic rules, they may change the rules. So much of the world's capital is now tied up in this shadow economy that the traditional tools for fixing an economic downturn - moves that have averted serious disasters in the recent past - may not work as expected.

In tell-all books, financial blogs, and small-circulation newsletters, a handful of insiders have begun to sound the alarm, warning that governments and top bankers may simply no longer understand the financial system well enough to do anything about it.

......"

Ex-Lawmaker Charged in Terror Conspiracy, by Lara Jakes Jordan, AP (January 16, 2008)

" Washington - A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.

    The former Republican congressman from Michigan, Mark Deli Siljander, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.

    A 42-count indictment, unsealed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Mo., accuses the Islamic American Relief Agency of paying Siljander $50,000 for the lobbying - money that turned out to be stolen from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

    Siljander, who served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, was appointed by President Reagan to serve as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations for one year in 1987.

....."

Do U.S. pandemic plans threaten rights, ACLU asks, by Maggie Fox, Reuters (January 14, 2008)

"U.S. policy in preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic is veering dangerously toward a heavy-handed law-enforcement approach, the American Civil Liberties Union said on Monday.

The group, which advocates for individuals' legal rights based on the U.S. Constitution, said federal government pandemic plans were confusing and could emphasize a police and military approach to outbreaks of disease, instead of a more sensible public health approach.

"Rather than focusing on well-established measures for protecting the lives and health of Americans, policymakers have recently embraced an approach that views public health policy through the prism of national security and law enforcement," the ACLU report reads.

......

The ACLU said it was worried that the plan called for military and police involvement in enforcing a quarantine.

The ACLU experts said they were especially disturbed by an October executive order from President George W. Bush that directed HHS to establish a task force to plan for potential catastrophes like a terrorist attack, pandemic influenza or a natural disaster that would ensure full use of Department of Defense resources.

....."

Inside the Martial Law Act of 2006, by James Bovard, Counterpunch (January 9, 2008)

"Martial law is perhaps the ultimate stomping of freedom. And yet, on September 30, 2006, Congress passed a provision in a 591-page bill that will make it easy for President Bush to impose martial law in response to a terrorist "incident." It also empowers him to effectively declare martial law in response to what he or other federal officials label a shortfall of "public order" -- whatever that means.

It took only a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president's ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened those restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the United States without the express permission of Congress. (This act was passed after the depredations of the U.S. military throughout the Southern states during Reconstruction.)

But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act.

The Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act aim to deter dictatorship while permitting a narrow window for the president to temporarily use the military at home. But the 2006 reforms basically threw any concern about dictatorial abuses out the window.

Section 1076 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2006 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from "Insurrection Act" to "Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act." The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only "to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy." The new law expands the list of pretexts to include "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition" -- and such a "condition" is not defined or limited.

Dead Souls: The Pentagon Plan to Create Remorseless "Warfighters", by Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque (January 11, 2008)

"Penny Coleman at Alternet.com gives us a look at a new program designed to dull the moral sensibilities of American soldiers in combat on the imperial frontiers: Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War.

But as we'll see below, this attempt to peddle magic pills to chase away the horrors of war is just one front in a long-term, wide-ranging "warfighter enhancement program" -- including the neurological and genetic re-engineering of soldiers' minds and bodies to create what the Pentagon calls "iron bodied and iron willed personnel": tireless, relentless, remorseless, unstoppable.

......"

Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb - A Real 9/11 Cover-UP?, by Dave Lindorff, Counterpunch (January 7, 2008)

"If a new article just published Saturday in the Times of London based upon information provided by US government whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, we have not only solid evidence of prior knowledge of 9-11 by high up US government officials, but evidence of treasonous activity by many of those same officials involving efforts to provide US nuclear secrets to America's enemies, even including Al Qaeda.

The story also casts a chilling light on the so-called "accidental" flight of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard an errant B-52 that flew last Aug. 30 from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The Sunday Times reports that Edmonds, whose whistleblowing efforts have been studiously ignored by what passes for the news media in American news media, approached the Rupert Murdoch-owned British paper a month ago after reading a report there that an Al-Qaeda leader had been training some of the 9-11 hijackers at a base in Turkey, a US NATO alley, under the noses of the Turkish military.

.....

Edmonds claims in the Times that even as she was providing evidence of moles within the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the nuclear weapons establishment, who were providing nuclear secrets for cash, through Turkey, to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, agencies within the Bush administration were actively working to block investigation and to shield those who were committing the acts of treason.

.....

If Edmonds' story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and nuclear information from the U.S., it casts an even darker shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained incident last August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and regulations of 40 years' standing, loaded and flew off with six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

That incident only came to public attention because three as yet unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which were picked up by other US news organizations.

An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an "accident," but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is impossible, and argue that there had to have been a chain or orders from above the level of the base commander for such a flight to have occurred.

Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which included several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel occurring in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six 150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been no Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into what happened.

Yet in view of Edmonds' story to the London Times, alleging that there has been an ongoing, active effort for some years by both Al Qaeda and by agents of two US allies, Turkey and Pakistan, to get US nuclear weapons secrets and even weapons, and that there are treasonous moles at work within the American government and nuclear bureaucracy aiding and abetting those efforts, surely at a minimum, a major public inquiry is called for.

Meanwhile, there is enough in just this one London Times story to keep an army of investigative reporters busy for years. So why, one has to ask, is this story appearing in a highly respected British newspaper, but not anywhere in the corporate US media?."

CHEMTRAILS: Is U.S. Gov't. Secretly Testing Americans 'Again'?, KSLA (December 21, 2007)

What Is He Capable Of? The Presidential Psychology at the end of Days, by John P Briggs, M.D. and JP Briggs II, Ph.D.  (January 10, 2008)

"The true rule in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it has any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded. - Abraham Lincoln, June 20, 1848

    In defiance of his circumstances as an unpopular, lame duck president with a minority party in Congress, George W. Bush pursues a sharply autocratic tone. He has intimidated both parties in Congress and violated the Constitution. Through dissimulation and delay, he has forced the nations of the world to conclude they must wait until his term ends to negotiate any serious treaty on the imminent perils of climate change.

    A sort of thousand-mile stare has descended on the country. Frank Rich writes, "we are a people in clinical depression" as a result of Bush's leadership. Perhaps, a more apt diagnosis would be "dissociation." Like a child or spousal victim of a psychological abuser, Bush's "victims" try to mentally compartmentalize him; they attempt to get on with their lives - even as he keeps on being abusive. You can hear the dissociation when Congressional leaders talk about their inability to make Washington work as it should.

    Some, including Daniel Ellsberg, who challenged the autocratic aspirations of Richard Nixon by releasing the Pentagon Papers, suggest Bush has already created a "presidential coup." Ellsberg has said, "If there's another 9/11 under this regime, it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed."

    We would like to answer several questions here. Is the president psychologically capable of such treasonous behavior? Why and how does his psychology make it so difficult for Democrats and others to stand up against his negativity and destructiveness (what he thinks of as his optimism)? How might they neutralize his psychology, which seems geared to inflict harm?

Behind the Torture, All That Stuff He Can't Admit

    The president's reflex to justify his right to use torture, even as he insists "we don't torture," illuminates how his psychology works and provides a glimpse into its dark potential.

....

    The Core Conflict

    The central, secret conflict that consumes George W. Bush and motivates much of his action can be summed up in a few words: the desperate need to avoid, contain and disguise disabling fears about his competence and adequacy in a context where he expects to feel superior. Out of this core conflict have arisen his good and evil worldview, his lack of empathy, even cruelty, his competitiveness, his bullying, his inability to make a rational decision (despite styling himself "the decider"), his tendency for deception and self-deception, his proclivity for unconsciously sabotaging the success of his own projects.

....

  When the Defenses Become the Reality

    We have noted in previous articles other prominent defenses Bush employs to cover his feelings of inadequacy: He is a classic emotional bully. Bullies disguise sensations of their own weakness by splitting the weakness off and casting it out of their own conscious awareness - projecting it - onto the consciousness of others. They generate a stream of signals and behaviors that keep others on guard and seek to enfeeble them. Bush's signing statements where he reserves the right not to abide by the law he's just adopted, his foreign policy asserting his right to preemptive strikes, his denial of Habeas Corpus, his fixation on retaining the torture option, his rejection of subpoenas from Congress, his diminishment of people by giving them nicknames - at different scales, these are emotional bullying tactics. Friends from his younger days remember that in basketball and tennis games Bush would force opponents who had beaten him to continue playing until he had worn down their will so he could beat them. Bush emotionally bullies his White House staff, making them afraid to tell him any news that doesn't fit his "optimistic" expectations. Draper reports senior staffer Josh Bolton greeting Bush each morning with the line, "Thank you for the privilege of serving." (397)

    In January 2000 - and more decisively after September 11, 2001 - Bush came into possession of what we have called his "presidential defense." He became "the decider," the "commander guy," leader of the most powerful nation on earth overseeing a war he imagines is without end. Bush feels that his powerful office means - magically - that reality is his to define. Many have noted that the president is convinced that just because he says a thing will be so, it will be so.

.....

Then, What Is He Capable of?

    After previous articles about Bush's psychology, we received a number of emails from clinicians agreeing with our description of Bush's basic psychodynamic, and offering their diagnoses. These varied from one another, sometimes substantially, as might be expected, since no one we know of has had access to a first-hand psychiatric evaluation of Mr. Bush. What can we say about his psychopathology? We find no evidence in the public record that the president hears voices or is mentally ill in a way that would require hospitalization or medication, though some psychiatrists or psychopharmacologists might prescribe medication if he came in for treatment of his own accord. We think Bush's psychological dysfunctions are profound, but they are of the sort that would probably not arouse notice if he were, say, the owner of the Texas Rangers, a job he apparently enjoyed. (Draper 42) (Of course, being a baseball team owner replayed his central theme: his father had the baseball talent and he lacked it.) That said, we believe the effect of the presidency on Bush's psychodynamics and the effect of Bush's psychodynamics on the presidency have created a situation where his personality is as genuinely dangerous to the nation as if he were delusional.

    Psychologically, Bush's one non-negotiable position is that he must never have to face his failures because once he found Jesus as his personal savior, he put all his failures (and failings) behind him. But now, after seven years as president, his failure is everywhere. Unlike presidents Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson and even Richard Nixon, Bush seems incapable of coping with his defeats by taking some redeeming direction. In the next year, we believe his behavior will continue to be guided by his need for massive avoidance of his feelings of inadequacy, particularly with regard to Iraq. Success in other areas means little to him and he gives them scant concern for his "legacy." He has identified himself as "a war president." The war is linked to his vague sense of divine mission, his internal aggression, his never-ending competition with his father.

    We believe the great foreseeable peril of Bush's remaining year in office is the intersection of his Christian defense with Iran. In recent months, when Bush warned that Iran sought to launch World War III, he seems to have unconsciously told us it is he who wants war. The neo-conservative agenda to capture the Middle East for its oil, only reinforces Bush's own psychological reasons for attacking Iran: 1) to certify his biblical mission, and 2) to avoid facing the colossal incompetence of the Iraq war by bequeathing a widened and inextricable conflict to his successor. We believe Bush is aware that the long-term chaos that might result from an attack on Iran could confound the historical image of his administration enough to make his own failures harder to see. In 50 or 100 years - after he is dead, anyway - historians might even see his worldview in a favorable light. After all, they're still debating George Washington. That's what he thinks. The presidency has become for Bush like the popular "global domination" board game he played with fellow undergrads at Yale. There, he was known as the player willing to take the most risks.

    Despite the mainstream press's inclination to construe the president's position euphemistically as a "hard line" on Iran, anyone who followed other reports, including Seymour Hersh's in The New Yorker, could reasonably conclude that the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate was a serious blow to Bush and Cheney's long-standing effort to provoke, create or discover a pretext to attack Iran and expand the Middle East wars. Hersh reported that in 2006 the president and vice president had pressed for use of nuclear weapons against Iranian facilities but were rebuffed by the military. We believe the president is probably already committed internally to pursue this belligerent course for his legacy. Vague fantasies of an "end-of-days" mission may be in his mind, as well.

    It remains to be seen whether Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - Bush's father's designated new "minder" inside the administration - or senior military commanders can prevent Cheney from finding a way to operationalize the decision. So far they've succeeded. Meanwhile, the Democrats appear to be in denial about the risk of Bush's intentions. They know that almost everyone in authority who is rational actor believes taking on Iran at this time would be a colossal blunder, and they assume - though they must know better - that Bush will be persuaded by that rationality. We think this "misunderestimates" his psychology. The Democrats should overcome their denial and take their own preemptive action to block him from such an attack.

    Some have imagined a worse scenario. In 2007, a statement to a small group of constituents by Democratic representative John Olver of Amherst, Mass., made the rounds on the Internet. Olver worried that Bush would attack Iran, declare a national emergency and suspend the 2008 elections. A clarifying email from Olver's press secretary to us said the congressman had no evidence that any of this would happen but that he had worried about a "thought crime" on the part of the president.

    Is Bush psychologically capable of acting out such a "thought crime," maneuvering to remain in power? Would Bush ever actually move to suspend the Constitution? Unfortunately, he's done just that already, in significant ways. How committed is he really to the idea of democracy he talks about incessantly? Psychologically these are interesting questions. Given his tendency to polarize and split his ambivalence, we'd have to say that his constant pieties about democracy suggest the opposite is significantly at work in his consciousness. He's even joked about it: "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." Of course, he would vehemently deny that he is dictator even if he became one.

    When Draper asked Bush about what plans he had after leaving the White House, they appeared vague, shiftless: making more money than his father on speaking engagements, setting up some foundation or something for encouraging democracy. "I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch." (406) His fantasies suggest his polarized ambivalence. He may yearn to escape into his old drinking days shiftlessness to get out from under the constant anxiety he feels about being competent as president; yet, he also seems keenly aware of the narcotic feeling of being a "consequential" person with a biblical mission, surrounded by the most powerful psychological defenses in the world. (Once out of office, how will he return to the family that knows his secret?) Is Bush capable of wanting to take the nation down an authoritarian road (a different question from whether he could get away with it)? If there were a terrorist attack on US soil or the assassination of a candidate, he could claim he is defending America by postponing the election. Cheney's office could provide the Constitutional rationale. With Bush's psychohistory, it's easy to become paranoid. Purely speculating: We think that Olver's "thought crime" is not the first thing on the president's mind and that he is not so out of touch with reality that he wouldn't have serious pause at such an action. (Martial law hasn't worked well for Pakistani strong man Pervez Musharraf.) That said, we believe Bush's psychodynamics could propel him in that direction if certain conditions arose.

    As Greenwald observes: "The most dangerous George Bush is the one who feels weak, impotent, and under attack. Those perceptions are intolerable for him and it is doubtful if there are many limits, if any, on what he would be willing to do in order to restore a feeling of potency and to rid himself of the sensations of his own weakness and defeat." (95)

......

  Members of Congress can stop being victims of the president's abusive psychology. You can confront a polarizer about his behavior without yourself becoming a polarizer. Instead of splitting ambivalence as Bush does, ambivalence can be used it to think through a clear course of action . The Constitution helps, in this case. The Democrats might, for example, articulate their balancing duties under the Constitution and carefully and firmly distinguish them from acts of partisan opposition. They might publicly acknowledge that this president, with the past complicity of Congress, has damaged our institutions. They could insist on the investigative and deliberative process called for by our system of government. Methodically holding Bush and his administration to account for his abuses (such a thing has never before happened to him) may be the most effective way to neutralize the further acting out of his dangerous psychology. It would empower others in his administration to resist him. It would refocus Congress on its own responsibilities in the constitutional process. Of course, to accomplish this would require some adults and "profiles in courage.""

Doubts Raised on Technology Sales to China, by Steven R. Weisman, NY Times (January 2, 2008)

"  Washington - Six months ago, the Bush administration quietly eased some restrictions on the export of sensitive technologies to China. The new approach was intended to help American companies increase sales of high-tech equipment to China despite tight curbs on sharing technology that might have military applications.

    But today the administration is facing questions from weapons experts about whether some equipment - newly authorized for export to Chinese companies deemed trustworthy by Washington - could instead end up helping China modernize its military. Equally worrisome, the weapons experts say, is the possibility that China could share the technology with Iran or Syria.

    The technologies include advanced aircraft engine parts, navigation systems, telecommunications equipment and sophisticated composite materials.

    The questions raised about the new policy are in a report to be released this week by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, an independent research foundation that opposes the spread of arms technologies.

    The administration's new approach is part of an overall drive to require licenses for the export of an expanded list of technologies in aircraft engines, lasers, telecommunications, aircraft materials and other fields of interest to China's military.

    But while imposing license requirements for the transfer of these technologies, the administration is also validating certain Chinese companies that may import these technologies without licenses.

    Five such companies were designated in October, but as many as a dozen others are in the pipeline for possible future designation.

    Mario Mancuso, Under Secretary of Commerce for industry and security, said the new system of broadening the list of technologies that require licenses, but exempting some trustworthy companies from the license requirement, results in more effective protections.

 "We believe that the system we have set up ensures that we are protecting our national security consistent with our goal of promoting legitimate exports for civilian use," he said in an interview. "We have adopted a consistent, broad-based approach to hedging against helping China's military modernization."

    But the Wisconsin Project report, made available to The New York Times, asserts that two non-military Chinese companies designated as trustworthy are in fact high-risk because of links to the Chinese government, the People's Liberation Army and other Chinese entities accused in the past of ties to Syria and Iran.

    One of the Chinese companies, the BHA Aero Composites Company, is partly owned by two American companies - 40 percent by the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing and 40 percent by the aerospace materials maker Hexcel. The remaining 20 percent is owned by a Chinese government-owned company, AVIC I, or the China Aviation Industry Corporation I.

    "In principle, you could find companies that would be above suspicion, but in this case they haven't done it," said Gary Milhollin, Washington director of the Wisconsin Project. "If you just look at the relations these companies have, rather than be above suspicion, they are highly suspicious."

    The Wisconsin Project report also charges that both Boeing and Hexcel have been cited for past lapses in obtaining proper licenses for exports.

    Spokesmen for both Boeing and Hexcel said in interviews that they are fully confident that BHA has no ties to the Chinese military and that its use of aircraft parts and materials were strictly for commercial and civilian ends.

....."

FBI's Hoover Planned Mass US Jailings: Report, Reuters (December 22, 2007)

The Torture Tape Fingering Bush As a War Criminal, Times Online/UK (December 24, 2007)

"Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood darkness.

There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of scenario cooked up in Matt Damon’s riveting Bourne series are fantasy compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the Potomac.

And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously bad guy - someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man deeply involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.

President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was withholding information, “used an alternative set of procedures”, which were “safe and lawful and necessary”.

Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know - it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word “torture” to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah’s interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.

Ron Suskind’s masterful 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine recorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda’s plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture - information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary - and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.

A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda’s leaders all believed Zubaydah “was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone. You think they’re going to tell him anything?” Even though preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good - though not unique - information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.

The Washington Post reported that “current and former officials” said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these “alternative procedures”, as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions. They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases.

And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not “torture” but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah’s incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorised war crimes.

And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed.

See what I mean by Hollywood? We know about the destruction because someone in the government told The New York Times. We also know the 9/11 Commission had asked the administration to furnish every piece of relevant evidence with respect to Zubaydah’s interrogation and was not told about the tapes. We know also that four senior aides to Bush and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, discussed the destruction of the tapes - including David Addington, Cheney’s right-hand man and the chief legal architect of the administration’s detention and interrogation policies.

At a press conference last Thursday the president gave an equivocal response to what he knew about the tapes and when he knew it: “The first recollection is when CIA director Mike Hayden briefed me.” That briefing was earlier this month. The president is saying he cannot recall something - not that it didn’t happen. That’s the formulation all lawyers tell their clients to use when they need to avoid an exposable lie.

This is not, of course, the first big scandal to have emerged over the administration’s interrogation policies. You can fill a book with the sometimes sickening details that have come out of Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan, Camp Cropper in Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.

The administration has admitted that several prisoners have been killed in interrogation, and dozens more have died in the secret network of interrogation sites the US has set up across the world. The policy of rendition has sent countless suspects into torture cells in Uzbekistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere to feed the West’s intelligence on jihadist terrorism.

But this case is more ominous for the administration because it presents a core example of what seems to be a cover-up, obstruction of justice and a direct connection between torture and the president, the vice-president and their closest aides.

....."

Mitt Romney’s Pursuit of Tyrannical Power, Literally, by Glenn Greenwald, salon.com (December 23, 2007)

"In yet another superb piece of journalism, the peerless Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe submitted to the leading presidential candidates a questionnaire asking their views on 12 key questions regarding executive power. Savage’s article accompanying the candidates’ responses makes clear why these matters are so critical:

In 2000, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were not asked about presidential power, and they volunteered nothing about their attitude toward the issue to voters. Yet once in office, they immediately began seeking out ways to concentrate more unchecked power in the White House — not just for themselves, but also for their successors. . . .

Legal specialists say decisions by the next president — either to keep using the expanded powers Bush and Cheney developed, or to abandon their legal and political precedents — will help determine whether a stronger presidency becomes permanent.

“The sleeper issue in this campaign involves the proper scope of executive power,” said Richard Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor.

All of the leading Democrats — Edwards, Dodd, Biden, Clinton, Richardson and Obama — submitted responses, as did Mitt Romney, John McCain and Ron Paul. Refusing to respond to the questions were — revealingly — Giuliani, Thompson and Huckabee. Significantly, if not surprisingly, all of the candidates who did respond, with the exception of Romney, repudiated most of the key doctrines of the Bush/Cheney/Addington/Yoo theories of executive omnipotence, at least for purposes of this questionnaire. I’ll undoubtedly write more about those responses shortly.

But by far the most extraordinary answers come from Mitt Romney. Romney’s responses — not to some of the questions but to every single one of them — are beyond disturbing. The powers he claims the President possesses are definitively — literally — tyrannical, unrecognizable in the pre-2001 American system of government and, in some meaningful ways, even beyond what the Bush/Cheney cadre of authoritarian legal theorists have claimed.

After reviewing those responses, Marty Lederman concluded: “Romney? Let’s put it this way: If you’ve liked Dick Cheney and David Addington, you’re gonna love Mitt Romney.” Anonymous Liberal similarly observed that his responses reveal that “Romney doesn’t believe the president’s power to be subject to any serious constraints.” To say that the President’s powers are not “subject to any serious constraints” — which is exactly what Romney says — is, of course, to posit the President as tyrant, not metaphorically or with hyperbole, but by definition.
Each of the questions posed by Savage is devoted to determining the extent of presidential power the candidate believes exists and where the limits are situated. On every issue, Romney either (a) explicitly says that the President has the right to act without limits of any kind or (b) provides blatantly nonresponsive answers strongly insinuating the same thing.

......"

Romney Should Not Be the Next President, Concord Monitor Editorial (December 22, 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."

Police State America - A Look Back and Ahead, by Stephen Lendman, Information Clearing House (December 18, 2007)

"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.

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.”

....."

Big Oil to Sign Iraq Deals Soon, by Ben Lando, UPI (December 6, 2007)

"Doomsday Seed Vault" in the Arctic - Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don’t, by F. William Engdahl, globalresearch.ca (December 4, 2007)