Cheney Cites Justifications For Domestic Eavesdropping
Secret Monitoring May Have Averted 9/11, He Says

By Jim VandeHei and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 5, 2006; A02



Vice President Cheney said yesterday that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks might have been prevented if the Bush administration had had the power to secretly monitor conversations involving two of the hijackers without court orders.

As part of an effort to sell Americans on the administration's recently disclosed program to eavesdrop on telephone and e-mail communications between the United States and people overseas without a warrant, Cheney told a small group of conservatives at the Heritage Foundation that instead of being able to "pick up" on the terrorist plot "we didn't know they were here plotting until it was too late."

But Cheney did not mention that the government had compiled significant information on the two suspects before the attacks and that bureaucratic problems -- not a lack of information -- were primary reasons for the security breakdown, according to congressional investigators and the Sept. 11 commission. Moreover, the administration had the power to eavesdrop on their calls and e-mails, as long as it sought permission from a secret court that oversees clandestine surveillance in the United States.

The bigger problem was that the FBI and other agencies did not know where the two suspects -- Cheney's office confirmed that he was referring to Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar -- were living in the United States and had missed numerous opportunities to track them down in the 20 months before the attacks, according to the Sept. 11 commission and other sources.

In his speech, scheduled as part of a White House offensive to defend the recently disclosed surveillance program, Cheney painted an ominous portrait of U.S. security without the controversial practice. Critics said the surveillance has been unconstitutional, carried out without explicit congressional approval or court oversight. The administration said it gained broad powers from a congressional resolution after Sept. 11.

Cheney said the National Security Agency program, combined with the expanded surveillance powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, has saved lives -- and thwarted terrorist attacks.

"No one can guarantee that we won't be hit again, but neither should anyone say that the relative safety of the last four years came as an accident," Cheney said. "America has been protected not by luck but by sensible policy decisions."

Under a secret order signed by President Bush after Sept. 11, the NSA was freed from its normal restraints and allowed to eavesdrop on the international communications of U.S. citizens and residents. Bush and other administration officials have said the spying has been limited to cases involving suspected al Qaeda associates here or overseas. "This wartime measure is limited in scope to surveillance associated with terrorists," Cheney said.

A few hours earlier, Bush met with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top officials at the Pentagon and offered an optimistic appraisal of progress in Iraq and the broader terrorism fight. Bush highlighted the recent decision to slightly reduce troop levels in Iraq and suggested that additional withdrawals could come this year.

"Later this year, if Iraqis continue to make progress on the security and political sides that we expect, we can discuss further possible adjustments with the leaders of a new government in Iraq," Bush said. The White House is planning speeches in the next few weeks to highlight progress in Iraq and defend the spying program, which has come under heavy criticism from Democrats and some Republicans. The program is expected to be scrutinized in hearings later this month.

Cheney said if the administration had the power "before 9/11, we might have been able to pick up on two of the hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon."

Even without the warrantless domestic spying program, however, the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies had important clues about the Sept. 11 plot and the hijackers before the attacks, according to media reports and findings by Congress and the commission.

For example, the NSA intercepted two electronic messages on Sept. 10, 2001, that warned of the attacks -- but the agency failed to translate them until Sept. 12. The Arabic-language messages said "The match is about to begin" and "Tomorrow is zero hour," intelligence officials said.

U.S. intelligence sources have said that NSA analysts were unsure who was speaking on the intercepts but that they were considered a high enough priority for translation within two days.

Cheney's apparent reference to Alhazmi and Almihdhar is also incomplete, leaving out the fact that several government agencies had compiled significant information about the duo but had bungled efforts to track them.

According to the Sept. 11 commission's report, released in 2004, the NSA first identified Alhazmi and Almihdhar in December 1999, passing the information to the CIA but conducting no further research.

In 2000, the CIA failed to place Alhazmi and Almihdhar on a watch list despite their ties to a terrorist summit in Malaysia. The CIA also mishandled efforts to follow them after the summit and failed to share information about them with the FBI, including the crucial fact that both men had U.S. visas, the commission found.

By late August 2001, the FBI finally had information that Almihdhar had recently entered the United States. But the search for the suspected al Qaeda operative was treated as routine and assigned to a rookie agent, according to the commission report.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who heads Rand Corp.'s Washington office, said it is unclear what communications could have been intercepted if the FBI and other agencies did not know where Alhazmi and Almihdhar were.

Hoffman also said Cheney's comments ignore the breadth of the government failures before the attacks, which were due to structural problems rather than a single missed lead.

"It's not that legislation was lacking; it was a systemic failure," he said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

CIA gave Iran nuclear design in botched plot : new book Wed Jan 4, 4:26 PM ET



The CIA, using a double-agent Russian scientist, may have handed a blueprint for a nuclear bomb to Iran, according to a new book which has ruffled the US national security establishment.

"State of War" by James Risen, the New York Times reporter who exposed the Bush administration's controversial domestic spying operation, claims the plans contained fatal flaws designed to derail Tehran's nuclear drive.

But the deliberate errors were so rudimentary they would have been easily fixed by sophisticated Russian nuclear scientists, the book said.

The operation, which took place during the Clinton administration in early 2000, was code-named Operation Merlin and "may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA," according to Risen.

It called for the unnamed scientist, a defector from the Soviet nuclear program, to offer Iran the blueprint for a "firing set" -- the intricate mechanism which triggers the chain reaction needed for a nuclear explosion.

According to Risen's book, the agent, posing as a greedy Russian scientist keen to steel secrets, delivered to plans as instructed by the CIA to Iran's mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.

He had been told by CIA officers that the Iranians already had the technology detailed in the plans -- and that the ruse was simply an attempt by the agency to find out the full scope of Tehran's nuclear knowledge.

But, contrary to orders not to open the packet, he added a note which made it clear he could help fix the flaws -- for money.

The CIA declined to comment in detail on the book's claims on Iran -- but issued a vigorous condemnation of Risen's work and methods.

"Readers deserve to know that every chapter of State of War contains serious inaccuracies," said Jennifer Millerwise, CIA Director of Public Affairs.

"The author's reliance on anonymous sources begs the reader to trust that these are knowledgeable people. As this book demonstrates, anonymous sources are often unreliable.

"It is most alarming that the author discloses information that he believes to be ongoing intelligence operations, including actions as critical as stopping dangerous nations from acquiring nuclear weapons.

"Setting aside whether what he wrote is accurate or inaccurate, it demonstrates an unfathomable and sad disregard for US national security and those who take life-threatening risks to ensure it."

In the same chapter, Risen also claimed that a CIA officer once mistakenly sent a message to an agent, who turned out to be a turncoat, in Iran exposing the US spy network in the country.




Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Bush could bypass new torture ban
Waiver right is reserved
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | January 4, 2006

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ''signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

''The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach ''will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

Some legal specialists said yesterday that the president's signing statement, which was posted on the White House website but had gone unnoticed over the New Year's weekend, raises serious questions about whether he intends to follow the law.

A senior administration official, who spoke to a Globe reporter about the statement on condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman, said the president intended to reserve the right to use harsher methods in special situations involving national security.

''We are not going to ignore this law," the official said, noting that Bush, when signing laws, routinely issues signing statements saying he will construe them consistent with his own constitutional authority. ''We consider it a valid statute. We consider ourselves bound by the prohibition on cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment."

But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive the law's restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national security. He cited as an example a ''ticking time bomb" scenario, in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.

''Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, [but] he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case," the official added. ''We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come into conflict, but it's possible that they will."

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

''The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,' " he said. ''They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."

Golove and other legal specialists compared the signing statement to Bush's decision, revealed last month, to bypass a 1978 law forbidding domestic wiretapping without a warrant. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without a court order starting after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The president and his aides argued that the Constitution gives the commander in chief the authority to bypass the 1978 law when necessary to protect national security. They also argued that Congress implicitly endorsed that power when it authorized the use of force against the perpetrators of the attacks.

Legal academics and human rights organizations said Bush's signing statement and his stance on the wiretapping law are part of a larger agenda that claims exclusive control of war-related matters for the executive branch and holds that any involvement by Congress or the courts should be minimal.

Vice President Dick Cheney recently told reporters, ''I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it. . . . I would argue that the actions that we've taken are totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president."

Since the 2001 attacks, the administration has also asserted the power to bypass domestic and international laws in deciding how to detain prisoners captured in the Afghanistan war. It also has claimed the power to hold any US citizen Bush designates an ''enemy combatant" without charges or access to an attorney.

And in 2002, the administration drafted a secret legal memo holding that Bush could authorize interrogators to violate antitorture laws when necessary to protect national security. After the memo was leaked to the press, the administration eliminated the language from a subsequent version, but it never repudiated the idea that Bush could authorize officials to ignore a law.

The issue heated up again in January 2005. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales disclosed during his confirmation hearing that the administration believed that antitorture laws and treaties did not restrict interrogators at overseas prisons because the Constitution does not apply abroad.

In response, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, filed an amendment to a Defense Department bill explicitly saying that that the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees in US custody is illegal regardless of where they are held.

McCain's office did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.

The White House tried hard to kill the McCain amendment. Cheney lobbied Congress to exempt the CIA from any interrogation limits, and Bush threatened to veto the bill, arguing that the executive branch has exclusive authority over war policy.

But after veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress approved it, Bush called a press conference with McCain, praised the measure, and said he would accept it.

Legal specialists said the president's signing statement called into question his comments at the press conference.

''The whole point of the McCain Amendment was to close every loophole," said Marty Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Justice Department from 1997 to 2002. ''The president has re-opened the loophole by asserting the constitutional authority to act in violation of the statute where it would assist in the war on terrorism."

Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, called Bush's signing statement an ''in-your-face affront" to both McCain and to Congress.

''The basic civics lesson that there are three co-equal branches of government that provide checks and balances on each other is being fundamentally rejected by this executive branch," she said.

''Congress is trying to flex its muscle to provide those checks [on detainee abuse], and it's being told through the signing statement that it's impotent. It's quite a radical view."



© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Democrats to Delay Alito Confirmation Vote By JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer

Senate Democrats plan to delay the Judiciary Committee's vote on Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court for at least a week, slowing what could have been a quick confirmation process for President Bush's pick to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter had hoped to hold a committee vote on Alito's nomination on Jan. 17, a little over a week from the Monday start of the federal appellate judge's confirmation hearings.

But Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., on Thursday that Democrats will invoke their right to hold the Alito committee vote over for one week, Senate leadership aides told The Associated Press.

The aides spoke on conditions of anonymity because the move had not been announced yet.

Frist had been pushing for a Jan. 20 confirmation vote for Alito in the full Senate. The date of the Senate's confirmation vote would also have to be delayed if the Democrats follow through on their plan to delay.

The Supreme Court is in recess until Feb. 21.

Reid spokesman Jim Manley, when contacted, refused to comment. Calls to Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record) of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee's top Democrat, were not immediately returned.

During the confirmation process for now-Chief Justice John Roberts, Republican and Democratic senators agreed not to delay the committee vote on his nomination by using the customary one-week delay. No such agreement was reached on Alito.

The move is the latest in a tactical battle between Republicans and Democrats over Alito's nomination. The longtime conservative lawyer and judge will face the Judiciary Committee on Monday for his confirmation hearings to become the 110th Supreme Court justice.

Democrats haven't completely given up the notion of blocking Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, though they're certainly not talking about it before his confirmation hearings.

"I don't think anybody today sees a reason for a filibuster, but they may after the hearing if the answers are troubling to them or they feel they haven't gotten the answers to important questions," said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor.

Democrats contend Alito is too conservative and could undermine some rights if confirmed. Some of their liberal supporters have urged Democrats to do whatever they can to block the nomination, including a filibuster.

It takes 41 votes to sustain a filibuster. With the Senate split with 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and one Democratic-voting independent, Democrats could launch an Alito filibuster with no GOP votes.

Democrats have said repeatedly they don't plan to filibuster Alito's nomination, although they also have refused to promise to refrain from the stalling tactic on the federal appeals court judge.

"I don't think it's wise for members to try and outline a strategy other than to make sure these hearings are comprehensive and they're done with dignity and respect for the nominee," said Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. "The future will take care of itself."

The final decision will be made after the hearings, said Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

"If he is out of the mainstream and will use his tremendously powerful position as Supreme Court judge to impose his views on the American people, then there's a potential for a filibuster, and no one really knows that until the hearings," Schumer said.

Republicans say they're ready to fight, including the so-called nuclear option, which would let the GOP ban judicial filibusters. "I will use all the tools I have to simply get an up-or-down vote on the floor of the Senate for the president's judicial nominees," Frist said in January.

To be successful, a filibuster would need almost all of the 44 Democrats behind it and certainly all of the Democratic leaders. But the Senate's senior Democrat, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, has said several times on the Senate floor that he has seen no reason to filibuster Alito's nomination.

Other Democrats have echoed that since Alito's October nomination.

In addition, the "Gang of 14" — centrist senators who brokered a deal last year to keep Frist from banning filibusters — has splintered, with at least two of the Republicans saying they would vote to ban filibusters if Democrats try one on Alito.

Frist needs a majority vote in the Senate for such a ban. If all 100 senators voted, Democrats would need 51 votes to stop Frist. No Republicans have said they would even consider opposing Alito.

To pull off a successful filibuster, Democrats need things to go their way both inside and outside the hearings, said Julian Zelizer, a Supreme Court expert at Boston University.

When it comes to abortion and voting rights, Zelizer said, "If he is too hostile, if he's too confrontational, if he fails to convey the sense that he's evolved on these issues since the 1980s, there is a chance that Democrats will see this as reason to filibuster," he said.

Events outside the hearing also will have an influence, Zelizer said, especially the guilty pleas of Jack Abramoff, the once-powerful lobbyist who has agreed to testify in a political corruption investigation.

It could "increase the willingness of the Democrats to be even tougher in the Alito hearings, sensing that the Republican leadership is in trouble," Zelizer said.

Meanwhile, Democrats announced several witnesses for the Alito hearing, including Beth Nolan, a White House counsel for President Clinton; Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe; National Bar Association president Reginald Turner and Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL-Pro Choice America.

___

On the Net:

Supreme Court: http://www.supremecourtus.gov

Senate Judiciary Committee: http://judiciary.senate.gov/



Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Gen. Pace Criticizes Sen. Murtha Remark
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer


A Democratic congressman's remarks about the military are damaging to troop morale and to the Army's efforts to rebound from a recruiting slump, the nation's top general said Thursday.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked at a Pentagon news conference to comment on remarks by Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., a Marine Corps veteran who has become a leading voice in Congress advocating an early withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Pace was asked specifically about an ABC News interview this week in which Murtha, 73, said if he were eligible to join the military today he would not, nor would he expect others to join.

"That's damaging to recruiting," Pace said. "It's damaging to morale of the troops who are deployed, and it's damaging to the morale of their families who believe in what they are doing to serve this country."

Pace called the news conference to discuss his weeklong trip to Iraq and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region. He said he found good troop morale and a "quiet confidence" that U.S. efforts in Iraq were on the right track. He added that Murtha's comments were among the first things he heard about upon returning Tuesday.

Military officers usually are reluctant to get drawn into political debates, but Pace said Murtha's remarks about recruiting are relevant to his responsibilities as Joint Chiefs chairman.

Pace praised the congressman's record but criticized his remarks.

"When a respected leader like Mr. Murtha, who has spent 37 extremely honorable years as a Marine, fought in two wars, has served the country extremely well in the Congress of the United States — when a respected individual like that says what he said, and 18- and 19-year-olds look to their leadership to determine how they are expected to act, they can get the wrong message," Pace said.

Aides at Murtha's Johnstown, Pa., office did not immediately return a call for comment.

Pace also predicted that the Saddam Hussein loyalists and other Iraqis who comprise the great bulk of the insurgency will increasingly give up, now that Iraq has approved its own constitution and held elections.

Pace said he believes the violence, which flared anew Thursday on one of the bloodiest days in Iraq in months, will abate as more Iraqis become convinced that the December elections will produce a representative government that will improve their lives.

"As they see their own government providing a way ahead that all of their citizens can understand as progress for their country, ... those who are fighting against the government right now who are Iraqis will more and more lay down their arms and decide to become part of the future of Iraq and not the past," Pace said.

In describing the continuing violence, Pace pointedly referred to terrorists and the al-Qaida network, rather than the anti-government Iraqis who are believed to comprise more than 90 percent of the insurgency.

"I do believe that over the course of the coming year that violence will subside," he said.




Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


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'Shake it out for Jesus': Churches co-opt hip-hop
Often known for its misogynistic lyrics and glorification of violence,
rap music is moving in a spiritual direction. By Nate Herpich
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0106/p01s02-ussc.html?s=hns

Sago raises red flags for mine oversight
'Serious and substantial' violations quadrupled at the coal mine in
2005. By Mark Clayton and Amanda Paulson
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0106/p01s03-ussc.html?s=hns

How Alito would shift high court on key issues
His confirmation could impact abortion, campaign-finance reform,
affirmative action, and the death penalty. By Warren Richey
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0106/p01s04-usju.html?s=hns

Transcript of Remarks by The President after Meeting with Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense

1/5/2006 11:25:00 AM

Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2580

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a transcript of remarks by The President after meeting with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and Former Secretaries of State and Former Secretaries of Defense:

The Roosevelt Room

10:31 A.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: It's been my honor to host former Secretaries of State and Secretaries of Defense from Republican administrations and Democratic administrations here at the White House. I've asked Secretary Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld and Ambassador Khalilzad and General Casey to bring these men and women up to date on our strategy for victory in Iraq.

I've also had a chance to listen to their concerns, their suggestions about the way forward. Not everybody around this table agree with my decision to go into Iraq, I fully understand that. But these are good solid Americans who understand that we've got to succeed now that we're there. And I'm most grateful for the suggestions that have been given. We take to heart the advice; we appreciate your experience and we appreciate you taking time out of your day.

We have a dual track strategy for victory. On the one hand, we will work to have a political process that says to all Iraqis, the future belongs to you. And on the other hand, we'll continue to work on the security situation there. The main thrust of our success will be when the Iraqis are able to take the fight to the enemy that wants to stop their democracy, and we're making darn good progress along those lines.

Again, I want to thank you all for coming. I appreciate your interest. I appreciate you being such a solid citizen of our country.

END 10:33 A.M. EST

http://www.usnewswire.com/

-

Missing intel bill would break 27-year run
By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor

WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- For the first time in 27 years, congressional officials fear there will not be an Intelligence Authorization Act passed this session of Congress.

According to lawmakers and staff from both parties, the bill was blocked in the Senate before the holiday recess by a single Republican lawmaker in a dispute over amendments requiring reports to Congress on secret detention facilities for terror suspects and access to pre-war presidential intelligence briefings on Iraq.

Now some fear that further efforts to pass the will become embroiled in the controversy about the Bush administration's secret use of warrantless national security wiretaps.

"I think we might have missed an opportunity at the end of last year," said one Democratic Senate aide who deals with intelligence issues, adding that "the window might have closed by now."

Republicans and administration officials said they would try and bring the bill up when Congress reconvenes later this year.

The 2006 Intelligence Authorization Bill, S1803, was voted out unanimously by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in October 2005; the House had already passed its version of the law back in June.

The annual bill -- which has passed every year since the establishment of the House and Senate committees on intelligence in 1978 -- provides the legislative framework within which the nation's intelligence agencies carry out their missions and spend the money Congress appropriates for them.

Money for the sprawling and fractious collection of agencies referred to as the intelligence community is contained in the classified "black" budget of the Pentagon, and funded through the secret annexes to the defense appropriations bill.

Congressional officials say that if the intelligence authorization bill does not pass this year, U.S. intelligence agencies will still be able to spend the money Congress appropriated for them, but several important reforms, improvements and innovations will be left in limbo.

Its authors say this year's Senate bill would set up an inspector general for the new director of national intelligence; strengthen counter-terrorism information-sharing by temporarily suspending parts of the Privacy Act; and make the directors of the three biggest-spending military intelligence agencies subject to Senate confirmation.

If the Senate bill does not pass, the House version will also die. Following long-standing concern from lawmakers of both parties, the House bill reduced or eliminated funding for a small number of hugely expensive satellite programs.

House committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., told United Press International at the time that the programs were on a "disastrous path" owing to poor management and "sloppy performance."

"When you put a marker down that says 'The House does not authorize any more money to be put into this program,' or 'X amount of dollars are going to fenced off until certain things happen' that is a marker in the sand that somebody has to respond to," he said.

The annual intelligence bill typically includes classified annexes running to hundreds of pages, packed with these kinds of detailed efforts to restrain, guide or direct spending and policy, according to congressional staff.

"This bill is what Congress uses to guide the intelligence (agencies)," said the Democratic Senate aide, "It deals in detail with a large number of big programs."

"One of the criticisms that's been leveled by observers is that congressional oversight (of intelligence) is weak," the aide continued. "This (failure to pass the bill) is indicative of the terrible weakness of our oversight."

The Senate bill was blocked by a Republican who exercised his/her right to remain anonymous, according to GOP staff.

Because of the way the Senate's rules are designed to ensure that debate is difficult to curtail, moving a bill through the chamber expeditiously requires a parliamentary procedure known as unanimous consent. A single objection can force Senate leaders to contemplate a lengthy floor debate, and effectively preclude consideration of a bill altogether if managers believe the legislative agenda is already too crowded.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the senior-most Democrat on the intelligence committee, said in a floor statement just before the recess that blocking the bill was designed to prevent the passage of three amendments added to it with the consent of the GOP committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas.

"I am informed that one or more Republican Senators object to the inclusion of (these) amendments," said Rockefeller, "even though Chairman Roberts has accepted those amendments -- and those amendments were agreed to by the full committee."

"They told the Democratic leader's staff, 'We can't clear this with those amendments,'" explained the Democratic Senate staffer.

Two of the amendments require reports to Congress about the network of secret detention facilities reportedly operated by the CIA outside the United States. The classified reports -- from Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte about the facilities and from intelligence agency inspectors general about the welfare of individual detainees -- would be submitted to the intelligence committees of both chambers.

The third, submitted by former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, requires the White House to give the two committees copies of Presidential Daily Briefing items about Iraq from Jan. 20, 1997 -- the beginning of President Clinton's second term -- to March 19, 2003 -- the date of the U.S. invasion.

A Senate Republican staffer familiar with the issue told UPI that Roberts' main concern had been to get the bill to the floor before the recess. "To do that," the staffer said, "the chairman was prepared not to object to those amendments so that the bill could get to conference."

The staffer added just because the hold on the bill was placed by a single objector did not mean that they were alone in their views. "I'm sure there are a lot of Republican Senators who disagree with one or more of those amendments."

The staffer said that Roberts nevertheless hoped to see the bill brought up when Congress resumes work, adding that without it, "There is no guidance to the intelligence community from Congress."

White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino told UPI the administration still hoped to see the bill made law. "We will continue to work with Congress as (it) goes through the legislative process," she said.

But some observers now believe that any effort to bring the legislation to the Senate floor will inevitably become embroiled in the gathering storm of controversy over the National Security Agency's program of warrantless wiretaps on Americans calling or being called by foreign phone numbers thought linked to al-Qaida.

"There will be people (on both sides of the aisle) now who will want to (use the bill to) deal with this (NSA) issue," said the Democratic staffer, predicting that this would likely stymie efforts to pass it.






© Copyright 2006 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Surveillance Court Is Seeking Answers:

Some judges who spoke on the condition of anonymity yesterday said they want to know whether warrants they signed were tainted by the NSA program. Depending on the answers, the judges said they could demand some proof that wiretap applications were not improperly obtained.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11461.htm

===
Rep. Harman says reports to Congress violated law :

The briefings on the program under which Americans and other people in the United States are selected for eavesdropping without court warrants were limited to the so-called Gang of Eight.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...MNG1LGHHF81.DTL

===
Did Bush wiretap CNN's Christiane Amanpour? :

New York Times reporter James Risen first broke the story two weeks ago that the National Security Agency began spying on domestic communications soon after 9/11. In a new book out Tuesday, "State of War," he says it was a lot bigger than that.
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/di...christiane.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January 6, 2006
Coal Miners' Notes of Goodbye, and Questions on a Blast's Cause
By FELICITY BARRINGER and BRENDA GOODMAN
SAGO, W.Va., Jan. 5 - As he huddled with 11 fellow miners trying to shelter from poisonous air in one of the farthest reaches of the Sago Mine, Martin Toler Jr. took an insurance form and a pencil from his pocket. In faint sentences of farewell and religious conviction, he let his family know that death, as it approached, came gently.

"Tell all - I see them on the other side," Mr. Toler, a 51-year-old mine foreman, wrote. Nearby were the words, "It wasn't bad, I just went to sleep." And at the bottom, "I love you."

Word of Mr. Toler's note and similar ones from other miners, who were found dead late Tuesday in the wake of an unexplained explosion, offered a coda, at once heartbreaking and consoling, to the emotional maelstrom of the past four days.

At the same time, the guardedly optimistic reports about the one surviving miner grew even more guarded as officials at the West Virginia University hospital in Morgantown said the miner, Randal McCloy Jr., 27, was being transferred to a Pittsburgh hospital with special facilities for treating patients suffering from brain damage after oxygen deprivation.

Mr. McCloy is in a coma, and Dr. Larry Roberts, director of the university's trauma center, said, "We have not seen the neurological improvement we would like to see."

Throughout the day, the families, the state and federal agencies, the mine owners and the communities around Upshur County started their next round of tasks. The families contacted funeral directors, worried about the cost of these services and awaited the end of the autopsies being conducted by the West Virginia medical examiner.

The most confounding question for mining industry experts is what triggered the explosion early Monday morning, just after the first two teams of miners had entered the coal mine. A mined-out chamber perpendicular to the main shaft had been sealed off four weeks ago with twin seals two or more feet thick. These seals were blown out into the main shaft with such force that some debris struck a second team of more than a dozen men who were riding in on a rail car hundreds of feet away.

Three members of the second crew, in interviews Wednesday night, said they turned around and groped their way blindly back to the entrance on foot. Four rescuers met them partway down the smoky shaft with another rail car and brought most of them out. Three of the rescuers and the crew boss then went back down the shaft as far as the smoke would allow but could not reach the other team, which had been on the far side of the explosion.

One theory is that lightning from an early-morning storm had been conducted into the sealed chamber and had ignited the methane gas inside. A federal contractor, the Tucson office of Vaisala Inc., a Finnish company, measured two lightning strikes within a mile and a half of the mine in less than a second, said Nick Demetriades, the manager of applications and technology for the company's lightning division.

The strikes, which occurred at 6:26:35.5 and 6:26:35.7 on Monday, apparently came not long before the explosion, which has been placed at about 6:30 a.m. The second of the two discharges of energy into the ground was four to five times more powerful than typically occurs, Mr. Demetriades said. Vaisala's observations were first reported by The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia.

In a news release issued Thursday morning, executives of the mine's owner, the International Coal Group, said that the accident investigation phase had begun and that mine managers had met with state and federal regulatory officials. "Information will come in very slowly because it is essential that every aspect of what led to the tragedy be studied carefully before the findings are announced," the statement said.

In a second statement late Thursday, the company said it was unsure how long the mine would remain closed but that it was trying to find temporary jobs elsewhere for the 145 employees there. The statement added, "The joint investigation by state, federal and mining officials is under way, and I.C.G. is an active participant in the investigation and is cooperating fully with the authorities."

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, met with several families of the dead miners on Thursday afternoon and then visited the Sago Baptist Church, the epicenter of the emotional explosion when anxious relatives were first told that all 12 miners had survived and then, about three hours later, that all but one had died.

Standing outside as it began to sleet, Mr. Rockefeller said the families had told him that their relatives "went to the farthest place they could go." He did not elaborate on the contents of the notes, recalling instead the tears they evoked.

Peggy Cohen, the daughter of Fred Ware Jr., one of the miners who died, said in an interview Thursday that no note had been found with her father's body but that when she went to identify it, the medical examiner or one of his aides said that notes found with the other bodies said, in her words, "We're not suffering. We just went to sleep."

Mr. Toler's older brother, Tom, said: "I knew he would have left a note. It was heart-wrenching, but I was glad to get it."

He added that Martin Toler Jr. was "a very religious man."

"I know he spent his last hours talking to the other people there," Tom Toler said. "He had several other Christians with him in his crew."

And, he said, his brother "was pretty healthy."

"I figured he'd seen several members of his crew 'go to sleep,' as he called it, before he did," Mr. Toler said.

In his news conference at the church, Mr. Rockefeller said the family members he had met with questioned the amount of time it took to send rescue teams into the mine.

"Some people talked about inertia," he said, adding that these family members, whom he did not identify, "felt that everyone was waiting for everyone else to make a move" in a command center that had representatives of the company, the state government and the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 6, 2006
While Lone Survivor Lies in Coma, Many Speak of 'Miracle'
By DENISE GRADY and JAMES DAO
The only survivor of the West Virginia mining tragedy, Randal McCloy Jr., was transferred to Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh yesterday, where his doctors said they hoped treatment with hyperbaric oxygen would help him recover from a brain injury.

"We have not seen the neurological improvement we would like to see," said Dr. Larry Roberts, director of the trauma center at West Virginia University.

Mr. McCloy, 27, remained in a coma, and Dr. Roberts said his brain, heart, liver and kidneys had been harmed by inadequate levels of oxygen resulting from the combination of too little air and too much carbon monoxide during the 40 hours in which he was trapped in the mine.

"It really does fall into the realm of a miracle that he's with us at all," Dr. Roberts said at an evening news conference. "Three minutes of oxygen deprivation to the brain can result in irreversible brain damage - three minutes. Compare that to what Randy underwent in the mines, 40-plus hours" of at least partial oxygen deprivation.

How and why Mr. McCloy survived, when 12 other miners died, is a mystery. Speculation ranged from his youth to luck to the selflessness of the other trapped miners.

Brief signs of hope for Mr. McCloy came about 1 p.m. yesterday when he blinked when his name was called and then did so again 10 minutes later. He showed no more responses after that, Dr. Roberts said.

High levels of carbon monoxide were measured in the mine after the blast. It is a colorless, odorless gas that mixes with air and can block the body's uptake of oxygen. High levels can cause death.

Hyperbaric therapy, the same treatment given to scuba divers suffering from the bends, is also used to treat carbon monoxide poisoning. Patients breathe 100 percent oxygen (room air is 21 percent oxygen) in a chamber where the atmospheric pressure is two to three times normal. The idea is to help the oxygen penetrate tissues it cannot reach under normal conditions.

In carbon monoxide poisoning, brain damage can continue to occur even after the gas has left the bloodstream, because it can set off a cascade of destructive chemical reactions in brain cells. Studies have shown that hyperbaric oxygen, given soon after the carbon monoxide exposure, can stop those reactions and prevent some of the brain damage.

Dr. Roberts said that there was only a "slim" chance the treatment would help Mr. McCloy, but that his family wanted to try it.

An expert on carbon monoxide poisoning and hyperbaric therapy, Dr. Christian Tomaszewski of Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C., said: "The last study published said anywhere up to 24 hours it seemed to be effective. That doesn't mean it doesn't work later, but it's very controversial. The sooner the better."

The fact that Mr. McCloy is young and in good shape probably helped his survival, Dr. Tomaszewski said, noting that younger people have stronger hearts and more resilient brains than older people, and are better able to withstand low levels of oxygen.

Dr. Susan Long, a general surgeon who treated Mr. McCloy immediately after he was removed from the mine, said Mr. McCloy had no traumatic injuries like major cuts or broken bones. His condition was that of "a patient in shock due to exposure and cold," she said. The temperature in the mine was about 50 degrees.

Dr. Long said some doctors had speculated that Mr. McCloy might have been unconscious for much of the 40 hours because he showed signs of rhabdomyolysis, the breakdown of muscle tissue that can occur from pressure if a person lies immobile for a long time. She said the tissue breakdown pours protein into the bloodstream that puts added stress on the kidneys, and Mr. McCloy's kidneys were already in trouble because he was dehydrated. For those reasons, he was put on dialysis.

Dr. Long also said the initial tests at her hospital showed he did not have high levels of carbon monoxide in his blood. But she said that could be because the gas had already started leaving his bloodstream.

His youth may have had something to do with it, she said. But she said other theories had been shared among medical professionals, like perhaps the other miners died quickly, leaving oxygen canisters that he could use. "Something got him through that initial high level of carbon monoxide," Dr. Long said.

Mr. McCloy's father, Randal McCloy Sr., told The Associated Press that although he had no proof, he believed in his heart that the older miners had given his son their oxygen canisters, knowing that he was the father of two young children.

At the office of the United Mine Workers of America in Fairmont, W.Va., union officials said they were stunned that he lived. "It really is amazing," said Ron Bowersox, who handles health and safety issues. Mr. McCloy had a collapsed lung, and miners wondered if that might somehow have helped him. Doctors said they doubted it had an effect.

Terry Osborne, a union vice president, offered another theory: that Mr. McCloy, known as "Skinny," required less oxygen than the other, heavier men. His supply might have lasted long enough to get him through the worst of the crisis.

Mr. Osborne also said surviving the toxic atmosphere in a makeshift barricade might come down to luck: air quality can vary significantly in a mine shaft, and perhaps Mr. McCloy was in a corner where the carbon monoxide level was lowest.

Gary Gately contributed reporting from Morgantown, W.Va., for this article.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 6, 2006
U.S. Farmers to Begin Testing Chickens for Flu
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
In an effort to head off an epidemic of dangerous bird flu, the nation's chicken farmers will immediately begin testing nearly all flocks for influenzas, an industry trade group announced yesterday.

The National Chicken Council said that poultry-processing companies that control about 90 percent of the nation's chicken production had joined the program. By Jan. 16, they are to start testing about 1.6 million birds a year, a council spokesman said.

A poultry expert, Carol Cardona, said the decision "makes perfect scientific sense" in that it creates a system for spotting mutating influenza strains and could help avert panics over routine flus that affect birds.

However, Dr. Cardona said, the surveillance program might not speed farmers' ability to spot the dangerous H5N1 flu strain that has killed millions of chickens in Asia and 76 humans.

The H5N1 strain is so lethal that if it reaches the Americas, it is likely to be detected soon anyway because it will probably kill the entire first flock it infects.

"There's no producer on this planet that's going to accept 100 percent mortality without notifying someone," said Dr. Cardona, a poultry veterinarian at the University of California, Davis.

At the Agriculture Department, the chief of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, W. Ron DeHaven, agreed that "any blip in bird mortality" would alert poultry farmers that the H5N1 strain had arrived. But Dr. DeHaven added that "any surveillance in avian influenza is a good thing." The chicken industry's program is stricter than his department's voluntary one, he said.

Flus are common in birds, and most produce only respiratory symptoms, leaving the birds safe to eat once they recover. Lethal strains are already legally "notifiable" diseases, meaning that a farmer or a veterinarian who finds them in a flock must notify state veterinarians, who must in turn notify the United States Department of Agriculture.

"But we're not waiting for signs to show up," said Richard Lobb, a chicken council spokesman.

Under the program, chicken farmers, most of whom raise flocks under contract with major processors like Tyson Foods or Pilgrim's Pride, will take swabs or beak samples from 11 chickens in each healthy flock. Any suspicious results found in local laboratories will be sent on to a U.S.D.A. laboratory in Ames, Iowa, for confirmation, Mr. Lobb said.

Because a flock of broilers goes from hatchlings to slaughter in as little as seven weeks, the industry produces about 150,000 flocks a year, Mr. Lobb said. Each will be tested about two weeks before slaughter.

If any H5 or H7 strains of virus are found, the flock will be destroyed on the farm, he said, and all flocks in a two-mile radius will be held for weekly testing.

There is no H5N1 flu in the Western Hemisphere now, global health authorities say. The most likely possible sources of introduction are thought to be birds smuggled in for the pet trade or for cockfighting, or migratory birds, particularly ducks and geese that mingle in the Arctic nesting grounds with birds from Asia and then fly southward along the Pacific Coast in the spring. (If the flu mutates into a strain that passes easily between humans, however, the most likely introduction source will be a jet passenger, doctors say.)

More than 99 percent of the chickens consumed in the United States are raised here, the chicken council said, and the rest are imported from Canada. Commercial chickens, including many of those advertised as "free range," are raised in hangar-sized barns and, if they ever go outside, are kept away from wild birds by netting.

Some chickens are raised in backyard flocks or as pets, and remain a greater risk because they can mingle with migrating birds. State agriculture laboratories encourage owners to take them in for voluntary testing.

The chicken industry has been working for about two years on a flu-testing program, Dr. Cardona said. Chicken flocks that get mild flus, she said, are usually quarantined until they recover and then sold for food.

The surveillance program "means more H5's and H7's will be found," she said. She noted that an outbreak of mild H5N2 flu in domestic ducks in Canada just before Thanksgiving caused a brief public panic before it was made clear that it was not the dangerous H5N1 strain.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 6, 2006
Republican Senator Defends Briefings on Domestic Spying
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 - In a sign of growing partisan division over domestic eavesdropping, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday defended the Bush administration's limited briefings for Congress on the secret program and accused the committee's top Democrat of changing her position on the issue.

Also Thursday, 27 House Democrats sent a letter to President Bush asking for information about the National Security Agency eavesdropping program, including whether communications from or to members of Congress and journalists were intercepted.

The Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, was responding to a statement Wednesday by Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California, that the law requires that the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees be informed of the N.S.A. program. By briefing only the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses and of the committees, the administration violated the law, Ms. Harman wrote in a letter to the president.

In a letter to Ms. Harman, Mr. Hoekstra said the briefings were in compliance with the National Security Act of 1947, which says the committees should be informed of intelligence activities, though "with due regard for" the need to protect secrets.

"The committee has been informed, in good faith by the president of the United States," through briefings he and Ms. Harman attended, Mr. Hoekstra wrote.

He said he was "surprised and somewhat bewildered" by Ms. Harman's letter because she had not previously complained about the briefings. Mr. Hoekstra told Ms. Harman that he found her letter to the president "completely incongruent" with her previous position.

"In the past," he said, "you have been fully supportive of this program and the practice by which we have overseen it."

The security agency's program, disclosed last month in The New York Times, involves eavesdropping without court warrants on the telephone calls and e-mail messages of people in the United States who officials say have been linked to terrorism suspects overseas.

Ordinarily, the law requires a warrant from a special intelligence court for such eavesdropping. But Mr. Bush has said he authorized the intercepts under his power as commander in chief.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, released the 27 Democrats' letter. It asks for copies of all legal opinions on the spying program; the numbers of Americans singled out; and the names of agencies getting the information the agency collected.

F.B.I. agents and N.S.A. employees have been warned by their bosses not to discuss the program.

The warnings at the security agency, which were sent after the Times article appeared, came in two e-mail messages dated Dec. 16 and Dec. 22 from Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the agency's director, to the N.S.A. work force. They were released on Thursday to The Times in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

In the Dec. 16 message, General Alexander wrote, "Rest assured that any operation, regardless of sensitivity, is conducted within the law and in the best interest of our nation."

He reminded the employees in the same message that the program remained classified.

"We do not comment on intelligence operations, actual or alleged - to do so is professionally irresponsible and may put Americans or allied personnel in peril," he wrote.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 6, 2006
At Hearings, Democrats Plan to Call Critics of Alito's Integrity
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 - Signaling their intent to put up a tough fight in next week's hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Senate Democrats said Thursday that they would call at least two witnesses who could question his personal credibility as well several experts on civil rights and constitutional law.

One witness is John G. S. Flym, a legal scholar. In 2002, Mr. Flym served as counsel to a plaintiff suing the mutual fund company Vanguard in a case that came before Judge Alito on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Judge Alito had pledged at his confirmation hearings for the appeals court in 1990 that he would recuse himself from cases involving Vanguard, which managed his investments, and when a panel including him ruled unanimously in the company's favor, Mr. Flym complained to the court.

Judge Alito has attributed the lapse to an error in a courthouse computer system that screened for potential conflicts. Ethics guidelines did not require him to recuse himself, and he volunteered to do so at his confirmation hearings to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

The other witness expected to address Judge Alito's character is Stephen R. Dujack, a journalist who has criticized a conservative alumni group to which Judge Alito belonged. The group, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, opposed the university's admission of women, criticized its affirmative action policies and urged the admission of more alumni children. It went out of business around 1987.

Judge Alito wrote in a 1985 application for a promotion in the Reagan administration that he belonged to the group. Records of the group give no indication that he played an active role in it, and in a response to a Senate judicial questionnaire for the Supreme Court nomination Judge Alito said he did not recall being a member until he was reminded by the disclosure of his 1985 application.

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the witnesses were a sign that Democrats were grasping for objections. "It just shows how desperate they are to come up with something to criticize him for," he said.

Mr. Cornyn noted that Judge Alito had stepped aside for a rehearing of the Vanguard case, calling it "clearly a case of no harm no foul."

In a meeting with reporters Thursday, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and a member of the Judiciary Committee, called Concerned Alumni of Princeton "anti-black" and "anti-women," and questioned why Judge Alito had failed to mention his membership in response to the Senate questionnaire for his confirmation to the federal appeals court.

Laying the groundwork for other lines of Democratic attack, Mr. Kennedy argued that Judge Alito's opinions in cases that divided his court showed a pattern of rulings in favor of government power and against individual plaintiffs. "Is there any limit on executive authority this nominee will recognize?" he asked.

In a separate presentation, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and another member of the Judiciary Committee, echoed similar themes, focusing on arguments Judge Alito had made for a "unitary" approach to executive power.

Judge Alito has argued that all executive branch authority ultimately resides in the hands of the president, and he has objected in particular to a statute that created a special prosecutor outside the authority of the executive branch. But he has not spelled out how far he believes such authority extends.

Mr. Schumer said Judge Alito's approach had ominous implications.

"The president would seem to have inherent authority to wiretap American citizens without a warrant, to ignore Congressional acts at will or to take any other action he saw fit under his inherent powers," he said, adding that Judge Alito should be prepared to explain his views more fully before the committee.

Other witnesses expected to be called by Democrats include the constitutional law professors Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard and Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke University; Representative Charlie Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the Hispanic Caucus Civil Rights Task Force; Fred Gray, a veteran civil rights lawyer; and Kate Michelman, a former president of Naral Pro-Choice America.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Bush slams Arabic TV


Friday 06 January 2006, 4:38 Makka Time, 1:38 GMT


Bush says the US is being misrepresented



Related:
Bush seeks counsel on Iraq



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George Bush, the US president, has criticised Arabic television for giving a false impression of the United States - but admitted that Americans needed to do a better job of communicating their ideals.



Launching a National Security Language Initiative to boost the teaching of foreign languages, Bush said it was a way to help combat the notion that the United States was bullying in imposing its concept of freedom.

"You can't convince people unless you can talk to them," Bush told a State Department audience.

The language initiative, which aims to boost learning of Russian, Chinese, Hindi, Farsi, Arabic and other languages, was part of a strategic plan to protect the United States and spread democracy, Bush said.

"You can't figure out America when you're looking on some of these TV stations - you just can't - particularly given the message that they spread," he said. "Arabic TV does not do our country justice."

Propaganda?

"You can't convince people unless you can talk to them"

George Bush,
US President

"They ... sometimes put out propaganda that just isn't right, it isn't fair, and it doesn't give people the impression of what we're about."

State Department officials said the aim of the plan was to get children involved in learning foreign languages from kindergarten and to fund more programmes through university-level and beyond.

The White House will ask Congress for $114 million in the 2007 budget to initiate the plan, involving a number of agencies including the education and defence departments.

Especially since the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon, CIA and other agencies have bemoaned a shortage of experts in Arabic and other "exotic languages", particularly for translating security information.

"We need intelligence officers who, when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu, know what they're talking about," Bush said.

Memories are still fresh of two messages intercepted from suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network on 10 September, 2001, that said, "Tomorrow is zero hour", and "The match begins tomorrow". They were translated on September 11 and only given to policy-makers on 12 September.

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 3
January 6, 2006


** CRS ON WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE
** INFORMATION SHARING POLICY FAULTED
** KEEPING CURRENT ON GOVERNMENT SECRECY


CRS ON WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE

The Congressional Research Service has prepared a detailed
evaluation of Bush Administration legal claims regarding
Presidential authority to conduct warrantless electronic
surveillance within the United States.

The CRS authors sift through each of the statutory, constitutional
and other arguments that have been presented in defense of the
reported NSA surveillance activity, and ultimately find them
wanting.

A final determination on the matter is impossible, they note,
"without an understanding of the specific facts involved and the
nature of the President's authorization, which are for the most
part classified."

In the end, however, "the Administration's legal justification, as
presented in the [December 22, 2005] summary analysis from the
Office of Legislative Affairs, does not seem to be as
well-grounded as the tenor of that letter suggests," they
cautiously conclude.

See "Presidential Authority to Conduct Warrantless Electronic
Surveillance to Gather Foreign Intelligence Information,"
Congressional Research Service, January 5, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/m010506.pdf


INFORMATION SHARING POLICY FAULTED

Government initiatives to promote information sharing among and
between federal and state agencies have failed to achieve their
objectives, a new congressional staff report finds.

"Despite numerous directives, exhortations, and invitations to do
so, federal policymakers have failed to develop uniform standards
for converting classified intelligence into an unclassified or
'less classified' format that can be disseminated rapidly to
appropriate state, local, and tribal authorities to thwart
terrorist attacks," the report says.

The reports recounts in unblinking detail each new announcement of
a bold innovation in information sharing policy, and its
subsequent failure.

"This distressing lack of leadership has persisted for more than
four years."

The authors propose a law enforcement-driven approach to
information sharing based on a model adopted in the United
Kingdom.

The report was prepared by Democratic staff for Rep. Bennie G.
Thompson, ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland
Security.

See "Beyond Connecting the Dots: A VITAL Framework for Sharing Law
Enforcement Intelligence Information," House Committee on
Homeland Security Democratic Staff Report, December 28, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2005_rpt/vital.pdf


KEEPING CURRENT ON GOVERNMENT SECRECY

A sizable inventory of organizations, web sites, and publications
concerned in some way with government secrecy was presented in a
recent survey.

"In the interest of sharing information, here is a list of Web
sites, blogs, listservs, and newsletters that could help clients
needing access to government documents but who might experience
difficulty locating that information. The list is arranged by
government watchdog sites, sites that provide access to
government documents, sites that document government secrecy, and
advocacy groups that report on FOIA news."

See "Shhh!!: Keeping Current on Government Secrecy" by Laura
Gordon-Murnane, Searcher: The Magazine for Database
Professionals, January 2006:

http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jan06/Gordon-Murnane.shtml



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

President Bush Reacts to Sharon's Condition
By Scott Stearns
White House
05 January 2006



Bush administration officials say they expect the Middle East peace process to continue making progress despite a massive stroke suffered by Israeli leader Ariel Sharon.


George Bush
President Bush says America sends its deepest sympathies to Prime Minister Sharon as Israeli doctors hope to help him recover from a Wednesday stroke.

"We pray for his recovery," said Mr. Bush. "He is a good man, a strong man, a man who cared deeply about the security of the Israeli people, and a man who had a vision for peace. May God bless him."

Speaking to U.S. university leaders at the State Department, Mr. Bush said Americans are praying for the Israeli leader as he lies immobilized in hospital.


Ariel Sharon in his office, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2006
Doctors say Prime Minister Sharon will remain sedated for at least another 48 hours before they attempt to revive him to test his cognitive abilities.

Doctors do not believe it will be possible for Mr. Sharon to return to work under the current circumstances. His deputy has taken over as acting prime minister.

Israel's cabinet has agreed to go ahead with plans for national elections March 28. Prime Minister Sharon had recently formed a new political party and was widely expected to win that vote before his stroke.

There has also been concern about the affect Mr. Sharon's illness might have on the timing of Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for later this month.


Condoleezza Rice
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says both votes should be held as planned, despite prospects that Palestinian elections could see a rise in the Islamic Hamas movement, which the United States considers a terrorist group.

"I don't really believe we can favor postponing elections because we fear an outcome," she said. "I think that's not appropriate. The Palestinian authority needs to do everything that it can, Fatah needs to do everything that it can, to demonstrate to Palestinian people that life under a freely-elected Palestinian legislative council that would then work with the president that has been elected there, that life will be better, life would be more secure."

Ms. Rice says the Bush administration's position on Hamas has not changed, but its political role is an internal matter for Palestinians

Analysis: Olmert does have a chance
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published January 5, 2006


WASHINGTON -- Conventional Wisdom, especially among Washington neo-conservatives, is already asserting that Ariel Sharon's transformation of Israeli politics is a dead duck because of his apparently incapacitating stroke. But as is so often the case, the CW may be wrong. Sharon's interim successor Ehud Olmert has a chance to rescue Sharon's cause.

Assuming Sharon will indeed be unable to return as prime minister because of the stroke that felled him Wednesday, Olmert, his right-hand man and chosen Number Two, still has a two and a half month window of opportunity serving as acting prime minister until the scheduled March 28 parliamentary elections to establish his credibility as a national leader and restore the credibility of Sharon's Kadima, or "Forward!" political movement.


Much instant punditry in Washington and Tel Aviv has already assumed this is impossible, and there is no doubt, as we noted in these columns Wednesday, that Sharon's stroke gives his long-time leader and now once again Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu a strong chance to come in from the cold and restore the Likud's tattered fortunes and his own. But that is by no means an inevitable outcome. Olmert has a lot more going for him against Netanyahu than is generally assumed.

First, Kadima enjoys the support of leading generals apart from Sharon in its top political line-up. Its ranks include current Defense Minister and former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, probably the outstanding former general in Israeli political life with Sharon out of the picture and the man who led the IDF through its ultimately victorious struggle against the deadly Second Palestinian intifada, and Avi Dichter, who rebuilt Israel's General Security Service, the Shabak, popularly known as Shin Bet, to a formidably high level operational efficiency against Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.

Likud under Netanyahu can no longer boast of any comparable depth of talent from Israel's military and security worlds. And indeed it is an open secret in Israeli political circles that during his three years as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 relations between Netanyahu and his military chiefs were the worst they have been in recent Israeli history. The Israeli military establishment, who loved Sharon, would far prefer to go on dealing with Olmert.

Olmert also now has a chance to leverage his greatest asset in his political career -- his great experience and political skill -- while vaulting over the great drawback that always held him back -- his lack of charisma with the Likud Party's grassroots members, who always preferred Sharon or Netanyahu to him.

But Netanyahu's vaunted charisma never carried over to the wider Israeli public. Even when he won the premiership in a 1996 direct election, it was only by the narrowest possible margin against Shimon Peres, the greatest loser in Israeli political history and a man who lost every one of his six elections for prime minister as Labor Party leader. (Menahem Begin lost six in a row too; but then he won two straight.) And three years later, Netanyahu was swept out of office by a landslide against the untested and, as it turned out, politically hapless Ehud Barak, a far less formidable figure than Olmert.

Recent polls have consistently shown Likud and Netanyahu down to a mere 13-14 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, the Israeli parliament, only one third of the numbers that Sharon brought them to in his last landslide victory.

The neo-conservative CW is that most of those lost voters will now flock back to Likud, but in fact Netanyahu himself had lost many, if not most of them for good.

Both as prime minister and in his recent successful stint as Sharon's finance minister, he stabilized Israel's wider economy, but at the cost of slashing public services and social support for Israel's poor, now numbered well over one million of the total six million population. And Likud's traditional strength in its 28 years as Israel's dominant party was in enjoying the reliable support of those poor, Sephardi, or Oriental Jewish voters. Many, if not most, of them are now flocking back to the revitalized Labor Party under its own charismatic new leader Amir Peretz, the first Sephardi leader Labor has ever had in its long history.

Indeed, even before Sharon's stroke, opinion polls showed his new Kadima movement capable of winning as many as 25-26 seats in the Knesset even if Sharon was removed from the scene.

The greatest political threat facing Olmert over the next two months, in fact, will not be the threat of a revived Likud under Netanyahu, but dissension within Kadima's own ranks. And even here, the new party is more unified and coherent than is commonly assumed.

For all the high profile accession of figures like former Labor leader Peres, whose defection appeared motivated in large part out of jealous pique against Peretz, who beat him for the Labor leadership, Kadima's leadership ranks are predominantly filled with Likud defectors. And they know that there will be no political mercy for them if they crawl back to their old party.

Netanyahu's best bet, indeed, will be to try and charm Mofaz, former Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and other high profile defectors back to his ranks. But Olmert will be working overtime to convince them their prospects are better if they stay with him.



This may well prove to be the decisive political battleground of the election. For on the outcome of this subtle political intrigue may hinge the Israeli public's perception of whether Kadima was just a one man show and a short term flash in the pan, or whether it really reflects deep-seated, lasting changes in the Israeli body politic.

In fact, Olmert has two more aces in the hole in trying to get this case across: First, he inherits from Sharon the advice of political consultant Eyal Arad, the Karl Rove of recent Israeli politics. His political and image-building expertise got Netanyahu into the prime minister's office in 1996, but he later angrily broke with his patron under terms of intense personal bitterness and backed Sharon in his efforts to succeed Netanyahu as Likud leader and then keep him on the outer margins of the party. Arad will be working overtime for Olmert to keep his old friend but now archenemy Netanyahu from returning to the prime minister's office in Jerusalem.

Second, not only is Netanyahu anathema to the working class Sephardi voters who have returned to Labor, but the European Ashkenazi Israeli middle class who were the backbone of Labor under Peres and Yitzhak Rabin and who forsook it for Tommy "Yossi" Lapid's Shinui ("Change") party have left Shinui in great droves to join Kadima. They never trusted Netanyahu, his extreme nationalism and his courting of ultra-religious Jewish leaders. If Olmert can hold on to most or many of them, he can keep Kadima as the Number One or Number Two party, even without Sharon and then still control up to 50 of the 120 Knesset seats in partnership with Labor.

None of this guarantees Olmert's success, or Netanyahu's failure. But it gives Olmert much more of a chance than people yet realize. Also, Olmert is now the effective leader of the nation and historically deputies who take over after the tragic death or sudden removal of a popular national leader, like Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman and Lyndon Johnson, when they succeeded Warren G. Harding. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy enjoyed astronomical surges in popular support that last many months or even years.

If the immensely experienced and politically shrewd Olmert is the beneficiary of that, he could be Israel's leader for a lot longer than anybody dreams.

What Is Science? Part II: Pennsylvania 's Intelligent Design case
By Lloyd Eby
World Peace Herald Contributor
Published January 5, 2006


WASHINGTON -- Both sides in the evolution vs. intelligent design (ID) controversy invested a lot of energy, interest, and expectation in the court case concerning the Dover, Pennsylvania school board that had mandated reading of a statement favorable to ID in the district's biology classes. The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge John Jones, delivered on December 20, 2005, went against the teaching of ID. But the judge then went on to thoroughly criticize and denounce the ID position itself. (The judge's opinion is available in pdf file online at i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/images/12/20/kitzmiller.pdf )

In his opinion - the case is known as Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area School District, 04cv2688 - the judge referred to the scientific revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries, saying that since then "science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena." He continued, "This revolution entailed the rejection of the appeal to authority, and by extension revelation, in favor of empirical evidence." A bit later he wrote, "While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science. This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers as 'methodological naturalism' and is sometimes known as the scientific method. Methodological naturalism is a 'ground rule' of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify." The judge ended by declaring that ID is not science but religion and that it therefore must be excluded from science classes.


The most noteworthy 17th century case on this matter was that of Galileo, who came into conflict with the religious authorities of his day - the Catholic Church - because of his views on cosmology, views that were declared by that religious hierarchy to be false because they conflicted with Church doctrine and authority. The Galileo case is frequently seen as the great opening salvo, or at least a central battle, in the so-called war between science and religion. Thus, in thinking about this present ID controversy, it is useful and instructive to review the case of Galileo. Here is a summary of it, taken from the website phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node52.html).

"In 1611 Galileo came to the attention of the Inquisition for the first time for his Copernican views. Four years later a Dominican friar, Niccolo Lorini, who had earlier criticized Galileo's view in private conversations, files a written complaint with the Inquisition against Galileo's Copernican views. Galileo subsequently writes a long letter defending his views to Monsignor Piero Dini, a well connected official in the Vatican; he then writes his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina arguing for freedom of inquiry and travels to Rome to defend his ideas.

"In 1616 a committee of consultants declares to the Inquisition that the propositions that the Sun is the center of the universe and that the Earth has an annual motion are absurd in philosophy, at least erroneous in theology, and formally a heresy. On orders of the Pope Paul V, Cardinal Bellarmine calls Galileo to his residence and administers a warning not to hold or defend the Copernican theory; Galileo is also forbidden to discuss the theory orally or in writing. Yet he is reassured by Pope Paul V and by Cardinal Bellarmine that he has not been on trial nor being condemned by the Inquisition."

"In 1630 he completed his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in which the Ptolemaic and Copernican models are discussed and compared and was cleared (conditionally) to publish it by the Vatican. The book was printed in 1632 but Pope Urban VIII, convinced by the arguments of various Church officials, stopped its distribution; the case is referred to the Inquisition and Galileo was summoned to Rome despite his infirmities.

"In 1633 Galileo was formally interrogated for 18 days and on April 30 Galileo confesses that he may have made the Copernican case in the Dialogue too strong and offers to refute it in his next book. Unmoved, the Pope decides that Galileo should be imprisoned indefinitely. Soon after, with a formal threat of torture, Galileo is examined by the Inquisition and sentenced to prison and religious penances; the sentence is signed by 6 of the 10 inquisitors. In a formal ceremony at the church of Santa Maria Sofia Minerva, Galileo abjures his errors. He is then put in house arrest in Sienna. After these tribulations he begins writing his Discourse on Two New Sciences.

"Galileo remained under house arrest, despite many medical problems and a deteriorating state of health, until his death in 1642. The Church finally accepted that Galileo might be right in 1983."

The religious authorities won that particular battle, but they lost the war. Although Galileo was silenced and put under house arrest, while overtly recanting and assenting to the religious authorities, he supposedly muttered under his breath "nevertheless it moves" (speaking about the earth), and even the Church ultimately had to admit that he was right. Convinced belief about something may be suppressed and forced into silence for a time but it cannot be changed by overt threat or authority no matter how fierce that threat or strong that authority, as has been shown over and again throughout the history of attempts to suppress unpopular or unappreciated political, religious, scientific, or other beliefs and opinions. Moreover, the scientific approach embodied by Galileo has its own authority and rational force, a force and authority that cannot be blocked or thwarted by the supposed authority of religion and revelation.

Even if you favor some form of ID, as I do, you should recognize that the ID proponents vastly overplayed their weak hand in this Dover case and deserved to lose. Nowhere did or do ID proponents perform any of the philosophical heavy lifting needed to show where and how the demarcation should be made between science and non-science, nor did or do they produce any credible attempt - credible to the larger non-ID scientific community - to show how ID could be incorporated into the corpus of received scientific methodology. They also tried to claim that ID is not religion, but they did not give a credible account of how it is either good science and thus not just religion, or how religion and science could or should be merged, if, as I suspect, that is really their view. Because of those catastrophic failures they deserved the scorching that Judge Jones gave them.

One widely held view about the correct demarcation criterion is that a scientific statement, in order to be genuinely scientific, must be falsifiable (More on falsification theory at another time) - there must be some condition or statement, that, if shown to be true, would show that the purported claim or theory is false. ID proponents have not really answered that condition, either by showing convincingly what would falsify their ID claim or by showing that the falsifiability criterion itself is wrong. Today's science proceeds - mostly anyway - through data gathering, testing of statements, conjecture of theories and testing of those theories, retesting, and then presenting those theories and data to peers in refereed journals and/or scientific colloquia, so that a community of scientific peers can examine and argue about the theories and the evidence for them. That too, as Judge Jones correctly noted, the ID proponents have not done.

But the judge did go much too far in his opinion. He noted, correctly, that Galileo had based his cosmological views on observations of nature, and not on any supernatural revelation or authority. But Judge Jones went beyond both his competence and the proper bounds of his office when he propounded an answer - and a tendentious one at that - to the question, "What is science?" and then went on to declare that science must be restricted to methodological naturalism.

A central consideration here is whether genuine science needs to be restricted to verifiable claims, as the judge declared. As a matter of fact, since all law-like scientific theories do go beyond the actual evidence that is or can be given for them, natural science itself necessarily enters the realm of non-verifiable metaphysics. (The term "metaphysics" comes from Aristotle's work that was placed after his Physics in the corpus of all his works, and that went beyond the Physics into the conditions or factors that needed to be the case, in his view, so that the physical sciences could exist). As John Passmore has written, "[scientific] laws are, by the nature of the case, not conclusively verifiable; there is no set of experiences such that having these experience is equivalent to the truth of a scientific law." (Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, p. 55) If we make, for example, the scientific law-like statement "Pure silver melts at 961.78 degrees Celsius," we are necessarily going beyond our experience and observation because we have not tested every sample of silver in the universe to see whether that statement is true, nor could we do so. So that statement, and every scientific statement like it, should be regarded as being metaphysical. Metaphysical claims go beyond scientific data itself into an extra-observable domain where statements or claims go beyond the evidence for them.

As I understand them, the proponents of ID hold that many biological organisms and structures exhibit such abundant evidence of complexity and of seeming to have been designed (Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker and other important works on these issues and one of today's most adamant opponents of ID and proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution, explicitly admits this) that the most reasonable conclusion is that they have in fact been designed (Dawkins adamantly denies this). That is to say, responsible ID proponents hold that, in the face of this observable complexity of seeming design, the most likely and intellectually credible conclusion is that these organisms did not and could not, in fact, have come about through the blind or mechanistic processes described by Darwinist or neo-Darwinist evolution, but, instead, came about through actual design by some intelligence. At least one such ID proponent holds that some biological structures exhibit what he calls "irreducible complexity," meaning that one part of the complex structure could not be taken away without the entire structure becoming inoperative or even collapsing completely. This means, he claims, that these structures could not have come about through the gradual and lengthy, small step by small step process described by Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.

There is growing evidence that methodological naturalism does not yield answers to some of the most intriguing questions that arise at the edges of today's science. How could an irreducibly complex biological structure come about through evolutionary methods that require gradualism - that go against what is known in revolutionary biology as saltationism or the view that completely new living things appeared all at once in discontinuous jumps from what existed before? In the domain of astrophysics, how is it that there exist a significant number of physical constants such that if they were different by as little as one part in twenty decimal places (i.e. 1 in 10 to the 20th power) or even less, the universe could not exist? (Although his conclusion that God exists does not follow from the evidence he presents for it, Michael A. Corey's book The God Hypothesis does a quite good job of laying out and explaining the meaning and implications of a number of those physical constants for readers who are non-scientists). If the Big Bang really happened, where did it come from and what came before it? Where did that first living cell come from and how did it come into existence? - the question known in biology as the question or problem of abiogenesis. (Darwinism and neo-Darwinism do not have any answers to the question of abiogenesis.)

Proponents of ID do offer a strong inductive argument for their conclusion, although it is not deductively conclusive - it is possible that, by some unexplained means, the blind and mechanistic physical world and the processes described in today's neo-Darwinian theory of evolution got lucky. It is also possible that naturalistic answers could or will ultimately be found for each of the questions given above. But the ID argument looks at the evidence and concludes that it is so infinitesimally unlikely that these design-marked structures could have come about through a process that has no intelligence or design behind it that the most credible or likely conclusion is that the ID claim is, in fact, overwhelmingly justified.

Whether or not ID is a scientific theory or whether it goes beyond science into an extra-scientific metaphysical - or religious - realm depends on what we consider to be the domain and limits of science. While correct in rejecting the teaching of ID in high school biology classes as impermissible because ID as presented in the evidence given in his courtroom is religious - a conclusion supported by the evidence he cited in his opinion - the judge went too far in his attempt to draw a bright and hard line between science and religion.

It is true, as Judge Jones asserts, that methodological naturalism has been the stance of the sciences - usually anyway - from the beginnings of the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries to now. But many people, among them a lot of today's proponents of neo-Darwinist evolution, move from the scientific stance of methodological naturalism to metaphysical naturalism. In other words they make a leap - a leap that is not supported by either good logic or good observation - from a method of science in which only natural explanations are to be accepted as scientific, to a declaration that only natural phenomena exist and that all natural phenomena can be explained without reference to extra natural (supernatural) phenomena and existence(s). (See my article, "Viewpoint: The Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Controversy" in the World Peace Herald, Oct. 6, 2005, available at www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20051006-032210-6932r , for a discussion of the many different meanings of "evolution" and ways this term is used). Thus, in the stance of many of its proponents, Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution frequently becomes a semi-religious view because it is given as a support for the view that no supernatural reality exists, and because it is offered as an answer to the question of "ultimate things." Such answers are, by their nature, at least semi-religious if not fully so.

I predict that sometime in the future - say a hundred years hence - this case and Judge's Jones opinion in it will turn out to be seen as having been like the Catholic Church's case against Galileo. Except that this time the winning and losing sides will have switched; the proponents of evolution and scientific naturalism will by then have lost the war against religion and ID, even though they won the Dover battle.

--

Lloyd Eby holds a doctorate in the philosophy of science and teaches in the philosophy department of the George Washington University, Washington, DC.

US in final stage of national security revamp
By Caroline Daniel in Washington
Published: January 5 2006 22:05 | Last updated: January 5 2006 22:11

The White House is in the final stages of updating its National Security Strategy document, the first formal reassessment of its foreign policy posture since the landmark 2002 paper that set the stage for pre-emptive strikes against terrorist threats.


The revised version is expected to be published next month, administration officials confirmed. It is being drafted by National Security Council officials, led by Peter Feaver, a former Duke University academic, but has not yet been presented to President George W. Bush for approval.

The September 2002 document, which marked the most profound shift in US foreign and security policy since President Harry S. Truman in 1947 laid out the strategy of containing the Soviet Union, provoked controversy by claiming the right to strike unilaterally and pre-emptively against hostile states and terrorists groups seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction. The US invaded Iraq six months later.

The new document will mark the first time Stephen Hadley, national security adviser, has put his stamp on the administration’s security policy. Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, led the 2002 review.

NSC officials declined to comment on what changes were likely to be made to the existing strategy. However, analysts predicted it would emphasise nation-building and the problems of weak states, rather than the targeting of rogue states. Many of the key themes of the 2002 document were mentioned by Mr Bush in speeches ahead of its publication, suggesting that his recent four keynote Iraq speeches will set the tone of the current review.

Ivo Daalder, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said: “In 2002 the fundamental nature of the threat was al-Qaeda and links with state sponsors, and was about rogue states. The president’s speeches over the last three, four months have identified the threat away from states to an organised group of extremist ideologists, and that democracy is the way to counter that. None of that is in the 2002 document, so there is a re-evaluation of the threat.”

Some neo-conservatives expressed concern that the updated document could mark a retreat from the more assertive positions of 2002, such as pre-emption, the signature strategy of the administration.

Gary Schmitt, resident scholar at the AEI , the American Enterprise Institute and and former executive director of the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century, said: “This will be interesting to watch, as everyone dissects every sentence and paragraph to see if there is some change of course, some sign the president is less ‘neo-con’ in the strategic path he has set the country on.”

The review coincides with the quadrennial defence review, which is due next month and will redirect military priorities. Defence department officials have warned contractors to expect flatter budgets.

Homeland security job filled amid controversy
By Philip Dine
POST-DISPATCH WASHINGTON BUREAU
01/05/2006

Tracy Henke
WASHINGTON

When Tracy A. Henke assumes a top homeland security job Monday, she will begin under a swirl of controversy.

Henke, a former Missourian, will be managing the federal government's coordination with state and local officials for natural disasters and terrorist attacks. The controversy involves the way she was named to the post, as well as her background and qualifications for the job.

Her supporters call her an extraordinarily hard-working and effective administrator. But some critics said she had little experience relevant to the job she is about to assume, while others questioned her role in a racial-profiling study last year that resulted in some discord within the Justice Department.
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Henke was among 17 recess appointments President George W. Bush made late Wednesday while the Senate was not in session, bypassing the normal process of Senate confirmation. Administration officials said the jobs needed to be filled and that the Senate was not acting quickly enough.

Her appointment was criticized Thursday by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which held a hearing on Henke's nomination last month.

Lieberman said he was "particularly troubled" that Bush appointed Henke before the committee held a vote, saying that showed "disrespect for the Senate and for the American people." Lieberman urged the committee to engage in "particularly searching oversight" over Henke's actions while she is in office.

A spokeswoman for Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the committee chairman, said it was "unfortunate that the White House has circumvented the normal nomination process."

Henke, who turns 37 today, is currently acting assistant attorney general at the Justice Department. In her new post, she will be executive director of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness, and is soon slated to become assistant secretary of homeland security, performing the same functions.

Henke will be responsible for helping state and local officials prepare for terrorist threats and natural disasters. She also will oversee training exercises, technical assistance and allocation of resources. She will manage a $3 billion budget, 250 employees and a large base of contractors.

Henke worked for Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., before being brought into the Justice Department by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. Bond said that in Washington, Henke has been "consistently promoted in recognition for her work," and has gained bipartisan respect.

Critics weren't mollified.

"The fact is you're putting political loyalty above professional experience," said P.J. Crowley, director of homeland security at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank. "We're at risk of seeing another Mike Brown," a reference to the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Brown was fired after the poor federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

Experience

Henke is from Moscow Mills, between Wentzville and Troy. After graduating in 1991 from the University of Missouri at Columbia with a degree in political science, she held several low- to midlevel jobs with then-Sen. John C. Danforth, R-Mo., first in his St. Louis district office, then in Washington.

Rob McDonald, who was Danforth's chief of staff and hired Henke, calls her "a tremendously hard worker" who got along well with state and local agencies in Missouri and brings an aggressive spirit to work. "Tracy can be a bull in a china shop," he said. "She's a doer."

Offered a job by Bond as a legislative assistant, she rose to become his senior policy adviser. In 2001, Ashcroft, a former Missouri governor and senator who had just been appointed attorney general, brought her to the Justice Department.

David Heyman, an expert in homeland security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said members of Congress are understandably concerned about whether Henke possesses relevant experience.

"In a post-Katrina environment, members who are responsible for congressional oversight want to be assured that the appointments are meritorious," Heyman said. Such concerns have been heightened in Henke's case because the nomination process has been cut short - meaning questions about experience and qualification persist, Heyman said.

Jim Carafano, a homeland security expert at the Heritage Foundation, said that while Henke may not be an expert in homeland security, she has much relevant experience in dealing with state and local officials.

"This is really about knowing how state and local governments operate, being able to work with local and state officials," he said. "That is the critical thing. She's not out there supervising operations. She's basically looking at state and local strategies and the allocation of resources."

Henke noted that while at the Justice Department, one of her tasks involved overseeing the Office for Domestic Preparedness, which subsequently moved to the Homeland Security Department when it was established in 2003.

Racial-profiling study

Last year, the Justice Department did a study that found black and Hispanic motorists stopped for traffic violations were more likely than white motorists to be handcuffed, arrested and face other sanctions.

Henke decided that mentioning the apparent racial disparities in the department's press release on the study would be misleading because it didn't properly reflect the study's findings. The department's head of the bureau of statistics disagreed, complained that he was getting political pressure from Henke to change the text, and was subsequently reassigned.

At last month's nomination hearing, Lieberman said he feared that Henke's actions "may have undermined the office's reputation for objectivity and independence."

Henke said in an interview Thursday that she had "edited it to make it accurately reflect the underlying document." The report itself noted that the disparity could not be attributed to racial matters because the study hadn't looked into the behavior of stopped motorists, she said, but explaining all that would have made the press release too lengthy. In the end, she said, the press release simply wasn't issued.

Marc Short, a homeland security spokesman, said Bush had decided that in the interest of national security, it was "imperative" to appoint Henke rather than wait for Senate action. The Senate had had time to act since her nomination in the summer, Short said.

Short said Henke responded to a number of questions at the hearing and in writing, and had been "more than cooperative," providing "literally reams of paper," though he said he wasn't sure whether she had answered subsequent questions.

That was disputed by the spokeswoman for Sen. Collins, the committee chairwoman, who said the post-hearing questions, submitted in writing, had not been addressed.

"We never received the answers to those questions," she said.

Abramoff Scandal Gives Impetus to Reform
By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jan 6, 9:13 AM ET



There's the shame factor and then the fear factor. Both, according to one senator, explain the sudden congressional interest in cleaning up the relationships between lobbyists and lawmakers now that Jack Abramoff's wheeling and dealing has been exposed.

Bills dealing with lobbying ethics that have been dormant for months are getting a new look as lawmakers digest the consequences of Abramoff pleading guilty to corruption and tax evasion charges, and his agreement to cooperate in an influence-peddling investigation that could taint dozens of members of Congress.

The "dramatic revelations" about Abramoff's activities "will help spur reform," said Sen. Russ Feingold (news, bio, voting record), D-Wis. "That's the way it always works."

Feingold noted that the campaign finance scandals of the 1996 presidential elections provided an impetus for eventually passing a new campaign spending law he and Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., had been pushing for years.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., reacting to the Abramoff's guilty plea this week, has pledged to "examine and act on any necessary changes to improve transparency and accountability for our body when it comes to lobbying."

The third-ranking Republican in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, is already working on legislation that could include steps to address some of the excesses revealed by the Abramoff case, which involved defrauding Indian tribe clients and arranging campaign contributions, trips, meals and entertainment for public officials they hoped to influence.

In the House, Republican leadership aides said there was a good chance that lobbying legislation will get a vote this year.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (news, bio, voting record), D-Ill., said the momentum for action is very different from last May when he said GOP leaders gave the cold shoulder to a lobbying ethics measure he introduced with Rep. Marty Meehan (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass. He said he was told that the bill was unnecessary, a stunt.

It's now become clear, Emanuel said, that "we've got to overhaul the system that rewarded a pay-for-play practice."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led Republicans to a House majority in 1995 by stressing how power had corrupted Democrats, said GOP leaders can no longer ignore the issue. "If they intend to retain a majority," he told reporters, "they need to take the lead in saying to the country 'we need to clean this mess up.'"

Bruce Josten, vice president for government affairs with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of Washington's most influential lobbying groups, said he was "left incredulous" by the Abramoff case, adding that it "clearly is going to have a long tail reaching into Congress."

There probably will be new rules and laws, he said. But, he added, "Congress needs to keep in mind that this is not a typical way of conducting business in this town."

Bills already introduced would tighten regulations in such areas as disclosure, trips and entertaining, gift exchanges and moving from the public sector into lobbying jobs.

McCain, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and Rep. Christopher Shays (news, bio, voting record), R-Conn., are promoting legislation that would require grassroots organizations, often run by professional lobbyists, to disclose their lobbying activities. Lawmakers and their aides would have to pay fair market value for use of private planes. Sports and entertainment tickets in skyboxes would be valued at the cost of the highest priced ticket in the arena.

Like that bill, Feingold's proposal has a "revolving door" provision that extends from one year to two years the waiting period for administration and congressional employees before they could take lobbying jobs. Feingold also would prohibit lobbyists from giving gifts to members or their staffs.

Rep. David Obey (news, bio, voting record), D-Wis., with the backing of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, has proposed a package that would bar lobbyists from paying for, sponsoring or arranging congressional trips. Obey, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, also would end some of the lobbying activities carried out by congressional leaders themselves, such as promising special projects to win votes for other legislation.

Lieberman said history has shown that the influence of money in politics will never be totally eradicated. But stronger laws and more disclosure will help restore the trust of Americans in the system, he said, and, "will make this for the short term a pretty pristine place to be."

___

On the Net:

Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/



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Bush Trumpets New Economic Numbers
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer

President Bush shrugged off a report showing weaker-than-expected job growth on Friday and declared that "the American economy heads into 2006 with a full head of steam."

Bush rattled off a string of recent government reports suggesting a growing U.S. economy, and he used his speech to the Chicago Economic Club to prod Congress to extend his administration's tax cuts that are due to expire.

"In 2005, the American economy turned in a performance that is the envy of the industrialized world," Bush said.

Bush, who also visited the Chicago Board of Trade, spoke as he and leaders of his economic team fanned out to trumpet recent improvements in the economy despite Friday's mixed jobs report showing a slowdown in monthly hiring.

U.S. payrolls expanded by 108,000 jobs during December, about half of expectations. But hiring in November was revised sharply upward, to 305,000 new jobs instead of the earlier reported 215,000. And the unemployment rate declined last month to 4.9 percent from 5.0 percent in November.




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Voices From History Echo Anew

By Jim VandeHei

President Bush summoned most of the living former secretaries of state and defense to the White House yesterday for what participants described as a cordial but pointed discussion about the future of Iraq.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

House GOP Calls for DeLay Replacement
By DAVID ESPO, AP Special Correspondent

Embattled Rep. Tom DeLay's hopes of reclaiming his position as House majority leader suffered a potentially fatal setback on Friday as a growing number of fellow Republicans called for new leadership in the midst of a congressional corruption scandal.

"It's clear that we need to elect a new majority leader to restore the trust and confidence of the American people," said Rep. Jim Ramstad (news, bio, voting record) of Minnesota, as two fellow Republicans circulated a petition calling for new elections.

Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., whose own hold on power appears secure, signaled he would not stand in the way of elections that could produce changes in several leadership posts.

"This is consistent with the speaker's announcement ... that House Republicans would revisit this matter at the beginning of this year," said his spokesman, Ron Bonjean, referring to the petition drive.

DeLay gave no indication he was ready to renounce his hopes of returning to the post he held before his indictment last year on campaign finance charges in his home state of Texas.

But with Hastert planning an overseas trip beginning early next week, it appeared an announcement on new elections could come within a few days.

The developments occurred near the end of a week in which lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the central figure in a growing public corruption investigation and a man with close ties to Republicans, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and several other charges in two federal courtrooms. At the same time, an Associated Press/Ipsos poll showed that 49 percent of those surveyed said they would prefer to see Democrats in control of Congress and 36 percent said Republicans.

Apart from leadership changes, several GOP officials said leaders were hoping to announce plans next week for ethics-related legislation.

Rep. Roy Blunt (news, bio, voting record) of Missouri, who took over as majority leader temporarily when DeLay stepped aside following his indictment on state charges, is certain to run for the post if new elections are held. Rep. John Boehner (news, bio, voting record) of Ohio, a former member of the leadership, is his likeliest rival, and there may be other contenders as well.

DeLay, whose defiant, take-no-prisoners style has won him the admiration and respect of fellow Republicans, has insisted he is innocent of wrongdoing and has said he intends to reclaim his leadership post once he is cleared.

Hastert and other Republicans accepted that arrangement temporarily last year, and DeLay maneuvered to win the dismissal of charges or gain an acquittal by early February.

But Abramoff's guilty pleas appears to have changed the political environment for Republicans 11 months before the midterm elections.

"The situation is that Tom's legal situation doesn't seem to be reaching clarity," Rep. John Kline (news, bio, voting record) of Minnesota said in an interview. "There are stories of more indictments or questions associated with Jack Abramoff. And I think that Tom DeLay is going to have to concentrate on that."

DeLay spokesman Kevin Madden said the congressman "appreciates that a majority of his colleagues recognizes that he remains committed to fulfilling his responsibilities as majority leader and that he'll be quickly exonerated in Texas."

"And he appreciates that a majority of his colleagues won't give in to what is essentially character assassination by insinuation," Madden said.

Republican rules permit an election to fill the vacancy, and aides to Reps. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Charles Bass of New Hampshire said the two men were circulating a petition that would allow the rank-and-file to pick new leadership quickly.

The developments with Abramoff have "brought home the fact that we need not just new leaders but a course correction," Flake said.

While Flake is a conservative in a safe congressional district, others calling for a change were more moderate Republicans who could face difficult re-election campaigns this fall.

"I do not want Tom Delay to return," said Rep. Heather Wilson (news, bio, voting record) of New Mexico, who has faced tough challengers in several recent elections.

"Three of his former senior staff members have admitted or have been implicated in corrupt and illegal activities to get money for themselves by influencing legislation," she said. "Whether or not Mr. Delay was involved himself or knew this was going on, he is responsible for his office. I cannot tolerate this."

Rep. Jim Gerlach (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., said through a spokesman that he, too, will sign the petition.

"He believes the conference needs bold leaders whose integrity is above reproach and who will lead us on much needed ethics reform and other reforms necessary to move the nation forward," said the spokesman, John Gentzel.

Abramoff frequently had stressed his ties to DeLay in the course of seeking business from prospective lobbying clients, and had hired a number of former DeLay aides as employees. One of them, Michael Scanlon, pleaded guilty last November as part of the same investigation that led to Abramoff's confession of guilt this week.

According to papers filed in court, Abramoff paid the wife of another DeLay aide $50,000 over several months as part of an effort to kill legislation opposed by his lobbying clients.

Under GOP rules the signatures of 50 lawmakers on a petition would be sufficient to call a special meeting. Once convened, a majority vote would be required to hold elections.

Alternatively, DeLay could decide on his own to renounce his claim on the leadership post he left last year, or Hastert could intervene more forcefully, making any petition a mere formality.

___

Associated Press writers Fred Frommer, Sam Hananel, Andrew Miga and Kimberly Hefling contributed to this report.



Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


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Secretive military unit sought to solve political WMD concerns prior to securing Iraq, intelligence sources say
Larisa Alexandrovna


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New allegations indicate that American civilian military leadership may have used an off-book quasi-military team to address political issues, placing those concerns above securing peace in the region, RAW STORY has learned.

Three U.S. intelligence sources and a source close to the United Nations Security Council say that the Pentagon civilian leadership under the guidance of Stephen Cambone, appointed to lead Defense Department intelligence in March 2003, dispatched a series of “off book” missions out of the ultra-secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP). The team was tasked to secure the following in order of priority: fallen Navy pilot Scott Speicher, WMD and Saddam Hussein.

While it is known that an authorized special operations unit was dispatched before the invasion of Iraq with similar objectives, sources say another team also operated on the ground in Iraq, primarily from the summer until the fall of 2003. This team appears to have been composed of 4-5 men.

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The Fallen Navy Pilot

Lieutenant Commander Michael “Scott” Speicher was shot down over Iraq in 1991 during the first day of Operation Desert Storm. He was classified as Killed in Action (KIA) within a few months thereafter.

Sources say that in order to convince the administration to invade Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi, the discredited leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and poster boy for neoconservative hawks, claimed that Speicher was alive and being held as a prisoner of war.

Chalabi -- considered by many to be a con-man and dilettante with a long history of scheming and dealings -- spun yarn after yarn about Iraqi WMD programs to hawks within the administration unable to find credible evidence of WMD from their own intelligence community in order to support a pre-emptive war.

Known abroad for counterfeiting and bank fraud, Chalabi was convicted in 1992 by a Jordanian court and sentenced to twenty-two years of hard labor. The longtime Iraqi exile had his home and offices raided by US forces in May 2004 after allegations that he was passing classified US documents along to Iranian intelligence. He has since been appointed to head the oil ministry, despite being unable to win a single seat in Iraq’s December election.

Sources from the US and foreign intelligence communities found Chalabi’s claims of WMD false, but administration hawks pushed for invasion using him as one of the primary sources. The New York Times’ Judith Miller also relied heavily on Chalabi for single-source information about a fictional Iraqi WMD program.

Sources say that along with promises of Speicher and WMD, Chalabi also promised to deliver Iraqi tribal chieftains to support coalition forces on the ground. So called “swoop” teams of special ops forces deployed in the region prior to the invasion were assured that support on the ground from tribal leaders would be ready upon the arrival of US and British forces. But like the claims of Speicher and WMD, no such support materialized.

Task Force 20 and other units

The primary operational team responsible for the early activity on the ground in Iraq was Task Force 20, which was comprised of CIA, FBI, Green Berets, Delta Force operators, and commandos from the Navy's Special Warfare Development Group. Task Force 20 consisted of roughly a 40-man assault team and a private aviation unit provided by Special Operations Command. Sources believe this was the team tasked with the three objectives of securing the fallen pilot, the weapons, and the dictator.

Other groups operating at this same time included the 75th Exploitation Task Force, a unit of roughly 900 specialists, made up of smaller tactical teams, who followed on the heels of TF20. Judith Miller was embedded with one of the units of the 75th.

Sources say the Office of Special Plans deployed several extra-legal and unapproved task force missions prior to and after combat operations began. Under the supervision of Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the OSP ran largely unsupervised and operated in secrecy. According to those familiar with the plans, the off-book missions were approved by Feith -- himself currently under investigation by the FBI for allegations of passing US secrets to Israel and Iran -- Cambone and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

But the lines between what were considered sanctioned forces and those considered almost as rogue units began to blur shortly after the invasion. Whether this was done deliberately to misrepresent official military, CIA, and other operations missions in the region, or whether this confusion stems from a lack of coordination remains unknown.

It is also difficult to establish whether or not TF20’s various sub-teams were used by civilian leadership to achieve other goals, not known to the primary unit.

What is, however, apparent is that the Office of Special Plans’ teams were deployed in obscurity and on occasion even bumped into sanctioned special ops teams, creating a sense of unease among the various forces on the ground.

Sources raised most concern about an alleged off-book 4-5 man team which operated in the summer through the fall of 2003. What this team was doing and under whose authority it operated is unclear.

Yet at least one source close to the UN Security Council tells RAW STORY that the smaller team was acting on behalf of Office of Special Plans and Defense Department leadership, specifically under the guidance of Feith and in tandem with Cambone.

Though most sources pointed to TF20 as the most likely to have spawned the clandestine force, one intelligence source disagreed. The source noted that by mid-2003 TF20 had been to nearly all of the major Iraqi installations without finding any evidence of WMD.

One intelligence source says the Office of Special Plans’ off-book team was using Speicher and WMD as a pretext for whatever their real objective may have been.

Secret team looked to ‘solve’ WMD problem?

This smaller unnamed team was tasked with interviewing former Iraqi intelligence officers in hopes of securing help with a “political WMD” problem, a source close to the UN Security Council says.

During the summer of 2003 through the fall of 2003, the team, whose members who were not named by sources, is said to have interviewed many Iraqi intelligence and former intelligence officers. The UN source says that the political problem discussed had more to do with solving the lack of WMD than anything else.

“They come in the summer of 2003, bringing in Iraqis, interviewing them,” the UN source said. “Then they start talking about WMD and they say to [these Iraqi intelligence officers] that ‘Our President is in trouble. He went to war saying there are WMD and there are no WMD. What can we do? Can you help us?’”

The source said intelligence officers understood quickly what they were being asked to do and that the assumption was they were being asked to provide WMD in order for coalition forces to find them.

“But the guys were thinking this is absurd because anything put down would not pass the smell test and could be shown to be not of Iraqi origin and not using Iraqi methodology,” the source added.

Former and current US intelligence officers explain that such forensics is essential and would have in fact proved if a weapons stash found was using Iraqi methodology.

“A good example of how forensics is used can be found in the recent development around enriched uranium isotopes found on centrifuges in Iran,” one said. “Iran claimed to have purchased the centrifuges from Pakistan, but certain people pushing for war with Iraq were claiming that this was evidence of Iraqis reconstituting their nuclear weapons program. The forensics showed that the Iranians were telling the truth and that they in fact had purchased the items from Pakistan, a US ally.”

Nonpartisan arm of Congress says wiretaps may be illegal
RAW STORY


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A 44-page nonpartisan Congressional Research Service report on whether President Bush had the legal authority to impose surveillance on international calls without consulting Congress found that Bush's claim of executive power was not "well grounded" in law, RAW STORY has learned.

The report, issued Thursday, offers the strongest indication to date that secretive National Security Agency spying conducted in the wake of Sept. 11 was illegal. It was prepared by legislative attorneys at the nonpartisan research arm of Congress.

It noted that Congress has had an active role in regulating surveillance, and was unlikely to inherently defer to the executive branch.

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"The history of Congress’ active involvement in regulating electronic surveillance within the United States leaves little room for arguing that Congress has accepted by acquiescence the NSA operations here at issue," the report said.

“It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here under discussion," it added.

The attorneys said the spying's legality is specifically tied to whether the authorization for war inherently validated the President's order.

“Whether such electronic surveillances are contemplated by the term “all necessary and appropriate force”...turns on whether they are... an essential element of waging war,” the report said.

It did, however, suggest that some courts might have allowed the move.

“Court cases evaluating the legality of warrantless wiretaps for foreign intelligence purposes provide some support for the assertion that the President possesses inherent authority to conduct such surveillance,” the report asserted.

Ultimately, however, the report said it was impossible to determine the legality of the taps without access to classified information surrounding the decision.

“Whether an NSA activity is permissible under the Fourth Amendment and the statutory scheme outlined above is impossible to determine without an understanding of the specific facts involved and the nature of the President’s authorization, which are for the most part classified,” it concluded.

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January 7, 2006
Pentagon Study Links Fatalities to Light Armor
By MICHAEL MOSS
A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.

The ceramic plates in vests now worn by the majority of troops in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed in the Pentagon study of marines from March 2003 through June 2005, bullets and shrapnel struck the marines' shoulders, sides or areas of the torso where the plates do not reach.

Thirty-one of the deadly wounds struck the chest or back so close to the plates that simply enlarging the existing shields "would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome," according to the study, which was obtained by The New York Times.

For the first time, the study by the military's medical examiner shows the cost in lost lives from inadequate armor, even as the Pentagon continues to publicly defend its protection of the troops.

Officials have said they are shipping the best armor to Iraq as quickly as possible. At the same time, they have maintained that it is impossible to shield forces from the increasingly powerful improvised explosive devices used by insurgents in Iraq. Yet the Pentagon's own study reveals the equally lethal threat of bullets.

The vulnerability of the military's body armor has been known since the start of the war, and is part of a series of problems that have surrounded the protection of American troops. Still, the Marine Corps did not begin buying additional plates to cover the sides of their troops until last September, when it ordered 28,800 sets, Marine officials acknowledge.

The Army, which has the largest force in Iraq, is still deciding what to purchase, according to Army procurement officials. They said the Army was deciding among various sizes of plates to give its 130,000 soldiers, adding that they hoped to issue contracts this month.

Additional forensic studies by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner's unit that were obtained by The Times indicate that about 340 American troops have died solely from torso wounds.

Military officials said they had originally decided against using the extra plates because they were concerned they added too much weight to the vests or constricted the movement of soldiers. Marine Corps officials said the findings of the Pentagon study caused field commanders to override those concerns in the interest of greater protection.

"As the information became more prevalent and aware to everybody that in fact these were casualty sites that they needed to be worried about, then people were much more willing to accept that weight on their body," said Maj. Wendell Leimbach, a body armor specialist with Marine Corps Systems Command, the corps procurement unit.

The Pentagon has been collecting the data on wounds since the beginning of the war in March 2003 in part to determine the effectiveness of body armor. The military's medical examiner, Dr. Craig T. Mallak, told a military panel in 2003 that the information "screams to be published." But it would take nearly two years.

The Marine Corps said it asked for the data in August 2004; but it needed to pay the medical examiner $107,000 to have the data analyzed. Marine officials said financing and other delays had resulted in the study's not starting until December 2004. It finally began receiving the information by June 2005. The shortfalls in bulletproof vests are just one of the armor problems the Pentagon continues to struggle with as the war in Iraq approaches the three-year mark, The Times has found in a continuing examination of the military procurement system.

The production of a new armored truck called the Cougar, which military officials said had so far withstood every insurgent attack, has fallen three months behind schedule. The small company making the truck has been beset by a host of production and legal problems.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is still relying on another small factory in Ohio to armor all of the military's principal transport trucks, the Humvee, and it remains backlogged with orders. The factory, owned by Armor Holdings, increased production in December after reports in The Times about delays drew criticism from Congress. But the Marine Corps said it was still waiting for about 2,000 of these vehicles to replace other Humvees in Iraq that are more lightly armored, and did not expect final delivery until June.

An initiative begun by the Pentagon nearly two years ago to speed up production by having additional companies armor new Humvees remains incomplete, Army officials said.

Body armor has gone through a succession of problems in Iraq. First, there were prolonged shortages of the plates that make the vests bulletproof. Last year, the Pentagon began replacing the plates with a stronger model that is more resistant to certain insurgent attacks.

Almost from the beginning, some soldiers asked for additional protection to stop bullets from slicing through their sides. In the fall of 2003, when troops began hanging their crotch protectors under their arms, the Army's Rapid Equipping Force shipped several hundred plates to protect their sides and shoulders. Individual soldiers and units continued to buy their own sets.

The Army's former acting secretary, Les Brownlee, said in a recent interview that he was shown numerous designs for expanded body armor back in 2003, and had instructed his staff to weigh their benefits against the perceived threat without losing sight of the main task: eliminating the shortages of plates for the chest and back.

Army procurement officials said that their efforts to purchase side ceramic plates had been encumbered by the Army's much larger force in Iraq compared with the Marines' and that they wanted to provide manufacturers with detailed specifications. Also, they said their plates would be made to resist the stronger insurgent attacks.

The Marine Corps said it opted to take the older version of ceramic to speed delivery. As of early last month, officials said marines in Iraq had received 2,200 of the more than 28,000 sets of plates that are being bought at a cost of about $260 each.

Marine officials said they had supplied troops with soft shoulder protection that can repel some shrapnel, but remained concerned that ceramic shoulder plates would be too restrictive. Similarly, they said they believed that the chest and back plates were as large as they could be without unduly limiting the movement of troops.

The Times obtained the three-page Pentagon report after a military advocacy group, Soldiers for the Truth, learned of its existence. The group posted an article about the report on its Web site earlier this week. The Times delayed publication of this article for more than a week until the Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of its report. Pentagon officials declined to discuss details of the wound data, saying it would aid the enemy.

"Our preliminary research suggests that as many as 42 percent of the Marine casualties who died from isolated torso injuries could have been prevented with improved protection in the areas surrounding the plated areas of the vest," the study concludes. An additional 23 percent might have been saved with side plates that extend below the arms, while 15 percent more could have benefited from shoulder plates, the report says.

In all, 526 marines have been killed in combat in Iraq. A total of 1,706 American troops have died in combat there. The findings and other research by military pathologists suggests that an analysis of all combat deaths in Iraq, including those of Army troops, would show that 300 or more lives might have been saved with improved body armor.

Military officials and defense contractors said the Pentagon's procurement troubles had stemmed in part from miscalculations that underestimated the strength of the insurgency, and from years of cost-cutting that left some armoring companies on the brink of collapse as they waited for new orders.

To help defeat roadside ambushes, the military in May 2005 contracted to buy 122 Cougars whose special V-shaped hull helps deflect roadside bombs, military officials said. But the Pentagon gave the job to a small company in South Carolina, Force Protection, that had never mass-produced vehicles. Company officials said a string of blunders had pushed the completion date to June.

A dozen prototypes shipped to Iraq have been recalled from the field to replace a failing transmission. Steel was cut to the wrong size before the truck's design drawings were perfected. Several managers have left the company.

Company officials said they had also lost time in an interservice skirmish. The Army, which is buying the bulk of the vehicles, asked for its trucks to be delivered before the Marine vehicles, and company officials said that move had upended their production process until the Army agreed to get back in line behind the Marines.

"It is what it is, and we're running as fast as we can to change it," Gordon McGilton, the company's chief executive, said in an interview at its plant in Ladson, S.C.

On July 5, two former employees brought a federal false-claims case that accuses Force Protection of falsifying records to cover up defective workmanship. They allege that the actions "compromise the immediate and long-term integrity of the vehicles and result in a deficient product," according to legal documents filed under seal in the United States District Court in Charleston and obtained by The Times.

The legal claim also accuses the company of falsifying records to deceive the military into believing the company could meet the production deadlines. The United States Attorney's office in South Carolina declined to comment on the case. The Marine Corps says the Justice Department did not notify it about the case until December.

Force Protection officials said they had not been made aware of the legal case. They acknowledged making mistakes in rushing to fill the order, but said that there were multiple systems in place to monitor the quality of the trucks, and that they were not aware of any deficiencies that would jeopardize the troops.



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January 7, 2006
Basis for Spying in U.S. Is Doubted
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - President Bush's rationale for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants rests on questionable legal ground, and Congress does not appear to have given him the authority to order the surveillance, said a Congressional analysis released Friday.

The analysis, by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan research arm of Congress, was the first official assessment of a question that has gripped Washington for three weeks: Did Mr. Bush act within the law when he ordered the National Security Agency, the country's most secretive spy agency, to eavesdrop on some Americans?

The report, requested by several members of Congress, reached no bottom-line conclusions on the legality of the program, in part because it said so many details remained classified. But it raised numerous doubts about the power to bypass Congress in ordering such operations, saying the legal rationale "does not seem to be as well grounded" as the administration's lawyers have argued.

The administration quickly disputed several conclusions in the report.

The report was particularly critical of a central administration justification for the program, that Congress had effectively approved such eavesdropping soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by authorizing "all necessary and appropriate force" against the terrorist groups responsible. Congress "does not appear to have authorized or acquiesced in such surveillance," the report said, adding that the administration reading of some provisions of federal wiretap law could render them "meaningless."

The president acknowledged last month that he had given the security agency the power to eavesdrop on the international telephone and e-mail communications of Americans and others in the United States without a warrant if they are suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

The Justice Department is investigating the disclosure of the program, first reported in The New York Times. With Congressional hearings expected this month, the Congressional research report intensified debate on the program. Administration lawyers quickly responded that Mr. Bush had acted within his constitutional and statutory powers.

"The president has made clear that he will use his constitutional and statutory authorities to protect the American people from further terrorist attacks," said Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, adding that the program represented "a critical tool in the war on terror that saves lives and protects civil liberties at the same time."

Many Democrats and some Republicans pointed to the findings as perhaps the strongest indication that Mr. Bush might have exceeded his authority in fighting terrorism.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, who leads the House Democratic Policy Committee, said the report "raises serious questions about the president's legal authority to conduct domestic spying."

Mr. Miller said the justifications for the program were unacceptable.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the report made "absolutely clear that the legal authorities advanced by the president in justifying domestic surveillance are on very shaky ground."

Thomas H. Kean, a Republican who was chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, weighed in for the first time in the debate. Mr. Kean said he counted himself among those who doubted the legality of the program. He said in an interview that the administration did not inform his commission about the program and that he wished it had.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress passed in 1978 after widespread abuses by intelligence agencies, created a system for court-ordered wiretaps for terrorism and espionage suspects. That system "gives very broad powers to the president and, except in very rare circumstances, in my view ought to be used," Mr. Kean said.

"We live by a system of checks and balances," he said. "And I think we ought to continue to live by a system of checks and balances."

One reason the administration has cited for not seeking to change the intelligence law and obtain specific approvals for eavesdropping was that it might "tip off" terrorists to the program. The Congressional research service found that unconvincing.

"No legal precedent appears to have been presented," the study said, "that would support the president's authority to bypass the statutory route when legislation is required" simply because of secrecy.

Opinions on domestic spying have largely broken down, though not exclusively, along partisan lines, causing splits between the top Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

The analyses of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress created in 1914, are generally seen as objective and without partisan taint, said Eleanor Hill, staff director of the Congressional inquiry on the Sept. 11 attacks.

Because of its importance, the report was repeatedly reviewed by senior staff members at the research service for accuracy and bias before its release, officials there said.

Some Democrats say the administration bypassed the authority of Congress in ordering the eavesdropping. One congressman said he was actively misled. In a letter released Friday, Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, complained to the N.S.A. over what he described as deception by its director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander of the Army.

Mr. Holt, a physicist who has worked as an arms control specialist at the State Department, visited the agency on Dec. 6 for a briefing by General Alexander and agency lawyers about protecting Americans' privacy. The officials assured him, Mr. Holt said, that the agency singled out Americans for eavesdropping only under warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

After the program was disclosed, Mr. Holt wrote a blistering letter to General Alexander, expressing "considerable anger" over being misled. An agency spokesman, Don Weber, declined to comment on the letter.



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January 7, 2006
As Rescue Lagged, Miners' Air and Time Ran Out
By JAMES DAO
and FELICITY BARRINGER
SAGO, W.Va., Jan. 6 - It is perhaps the most heartbreaking question raised by a heartbreaking accident. Did 12 miners die deep inside the Sago Mine because, instead of trying to walk to safety after an explosion, they waited for help that took too long to arrive?

They apparently had enough oxygen in their respirators to last an hour or more and no wall of debris blocked their escape, mine company officials said. They could not have known it, but there was breathable air inside the mine, possibly just 2,000 feet away.

Cut off from communications with the outside, surrounded by thick smoke and deep darkness, they might have believed a fire was raging ahead of them, or that the mine roof was in danger of collapsing. They might have become disoriented by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Whatever the answer, they did what the textbooks instruct: they built a simple barricade out of plastic cloth in an alcove 13,000 feet from the mine portal and hunkered down to wait for help. That help arrived more than 40 hours later, when all but one were dead.

"If they had been able to walk another 1,500 feet, they might have made it," said Dennis O'Dell, the health and safety administrator for the United Mine Workers of America, who helped in the rescue.

Autopsies by the state's chief medical examiner found that the 12 miners died of carbon monoxide intoxication, John Law, a spokesman for the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, said on Friday.

As state and federal investigators began a sweeping investigation of the accident, they have begun grappling with some of the most perplexing questions to have been raised about mine safety in memory.

What caused the explosion, which apparently occurred in a sealed, abandoned part of the mine? What led to the miscommunication that caused the miners' families to believe for three hours that the men had been rescued? Why was one miner, Randal McCloy Jr., able to survive?

And would a quicker response have saved the miners as they huddled behind their barricade, harboring their oxygen and scribbling notes to their families?

There was no rescue team on the mine site, so teams had to be called in from other mines, a process that might have been slowed by holiday vacations, rescue officials said. The closest federal team, in Morgantown about 70 miles away, had lost members to attrition and took several more hours to deploy, said J. Davitt McAteer, a former assistant secretary of mine safety and health under the Clinton administration.

And once the teams arrived at the site, equipment had to be mustered, maps reviewed and air quality tested. There were concerns about fire. The result was that the first teams did not enter the mine until more than 11 hours after the explosion, the mine company's owner, International Coal Group, said.

Those delays might have been unavoidable, and it was not clear that the men could have been saved even with a faster response. But some experts assert that the delays point to broader problems in the nation's mine rescue system.

A 1995 federal study concluded that the system was antiquated, losing people and poorly financed. But Mr. McAteer said few of those concerns had been addressed.

"Time is the enemy in mine rescues," Mr. McAteer, now a vice president of Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, said. "Always is. You know that from the start."

For the miners heading into the Sago Mine, which had been closed Saturday and Sunday for the New Year's holiday, the workweek began at 5 a.m. Monday at the dressing area. Less than an hour later, 26 men were joking their way down the incline to the mine, where they ducked out of a violent thunderstorm.

Two small rail cars waited. One team of 13 - including Martin Toler Jr., Jesse Jones, Randal McCloy Jr. and Terry Helms - clambered into the first car. But Hoy Keith, a 62-year-old miner for 31 years, said his crew had been left a runt railcar that could not fit them. A new car was found, and the second team left 10 minutes late. Those minutes might have saved them.

The mine resembles a backward "F," with the closest corridor called First Left, and the next one called Second Left. The first crew dropped Mr. Helms somewhere past First Left, then headed into Second Left.

Minutes later, around 6:30 a.m., Mr. Keith's team reached First Left. Just then, what felt to them like a fist of hurricane-force wind punched through them. Somewhere ahead, something had exploded.

Chunks of rock and coal pelted the miners. Sheets of dirt splattered their safety glasses. "It filled my mouth full of mud, my nose full of mud, my ears full of coal dust," said Ron Grall, who is 63. "I couldn't breathe."

In seconds, the men got out of the car, donned respirators and groped for each other and then for the wall that would guide them outside. After 700 or 800 feet, they heard shouts of "Fresh air!" Rescuers with a railcar met them and took them to the entrance.

But Owen Jones, the foreman of the rescued crew, refused to stay put. With three rescuers, he headed back to search for his brother, Jesse Jones. "Just about everybody was hollering for him to go home," Mr. Keith said. "But people who had their heads knew he had a brother in there." The four got about 9,000 feet inside the mine before they turned back because of concerns about toxic air.

On the other side of the explosion were 13 men. Mr. Helms, whose job included checking for methane gas, was hit with its full force and probably died of injuries related to the blast. The other 12 were ahead of him in Second Left, where they would remain for the duration of the ordeal.

Outside the mine, the rescue effort was slowly getting assembled. Mine officials called state and federal regulators, many of whom were still off for the holiday and had to be reached at home or on cellphones. Two teams from nearby Barbour County, who had a contract with the Sago Mine, were summoned, but supervisors knew that would not be enough, so they requested help from other mining companies.

One of the first teams to arrive was from the Robinson Run mine near Fairmont, W. Va., owned by Consul Energy, about 50 miles away. Jeff Bienkoski, a 54-year-old member of that team, had just finished a 10-hour shift when he got the call at about 10 a.m. He gathered his equipment and raced to the mine, arriving after 12:30 p.m., he said, about six hours after the explosion is believed to have occurred. Mines are not required by federal law to have rescue teams on site provided such teams can arrive within two hours. Company officials declined to comment on when the first teams arrived in Sago.

In the next few hours, several more of the specially trained teams arrived. But they were not allowed to go into the mine until nearly 6 p.m., more than 11 hours after the explosion, company officials said.

Though it always takes time for teams to review maps, check equipment and develop a strategy, critics of the mining company, including the mine workers union, have questioned why it took so long for the teams to be allowed into the mine.

Matt Barkett, a spokesman for the mine's owner, said the main reason for the delay was concern about high carbon monoxide levels inside the mine, which were initially measured at 1,300 parts per million, enough to kill a person without a respirator in minutes. He said the high levels had raised concerns about fire.

Once inside, the six- to eight-man teams worked meticulously, rotating through the mine in shifts. Mine rescues are extraordinarily dangerous because of the threat of secondary explosions, toxic gases and roof cave-ins. At a mine owned by Jim Walter Resources Inc. in Alabama, nine men who ran to the aid of some injured miners were killed in a secondary explosion in 2001.

"These mine rescue guys are eager, they aren't afraid of the devil," Mr. O'Dell said. "Sometimes you've got to keep them from going too fast."

Charles Ross, 54, who worked for 25 years on a mine rescue team for Consul Energy, said the rescuers must carefully check for damage to the roof. Concrete and metal walls used to direct the flow of air must be repaired to restore proper ventilation. The air must be repeatedly checked. And every square inch must be inspected for bodies or barricades.

"People don't realize how much work there is," Mr. Ross said. "It's time consuming."

Across the street from the mine entrance, relatives and friends had gathered at the Sago Baptist Church. Frustration was growing at the pace of the rescue.

One of the people trying to soothe the families was Gov. Joe Manchin III, who had been in Atlanta on Monday morning to see West Virginia University play in the Sugar Bowl but flew home that afternoon as the magnitude of the accident became clear. Mr. Manchin lost an uncle in a mine accident in 1968.

For the rest of Monday and throughout the day Tuesday, family members waited for updates from the company.

Then before 9 p.m. on Tuesday, company officials informed family members at the church that one miner's body had been found, but that there was still no sign of the others. People wailed in anguish, but Mr. Manchin saw a ray of hope. That miner was later identified as Mr. Helms.

But the rail car a few hundred feet from his was empty. Even lunch pails had been taken. All that remained were casings from the miner's respirators. To Mr. Manchin, it seemed a sign that the miners had escaped the blast and did what they were supposed to do: found breathable air and built a barricade to keep the toxic air out.

"That would be our miracle scenario," said Lara Ramsburg, Mr. Manchin's spokeswoman. "If you were looking for something to hang onto, this was something. You were thinking: they got out of there."

At about 11:45 Tuesday night, a call came from a "fresh air" rescue operation base deep inside the mine - so called because workers do not need respirators. Though the exact wording of the call is uncertain, company officials say a roomful of people heard the same message: The 12 miners had been found, and all were alive. Pandemonium broke out inside the rescue command center. Someone used a cellphone to call people at the church with the news. The church bells began tolling and a celebration began. A joyful Mr. Manchin made his way from the church to the command center to seek confirmation, telling someone, "Miracles do happen."

But two miles inside the mine, there was only one survivor, Mr. McCloy, and the rescue team was struggling to stabilize and then move him to the fresh air base. When they reached that base, they called the command center with a new message: They were coming out with the one survivor.

What caused the miscommunication is unclear. Mine company officials said it might have been the result of garbled transmissions by rescue workers wearing oxygen masks, or a misinterpretation of that transmission by the fresh air base.

Mr. O'Dell said that sending messages from the mine was a three-step process, requiring radio calls between two rescue bases where miners were wearing oxygen masks to the fresh air base, which had a hard wire line to the command center.

Mr. O'Dell said that the rescue workers he debriefed told him that the message they sent initially was, in essence, "We found all 12 bodies. One is alive." But somehow that became, "We found all 12 bodies. All are alive."

In the chaos, a debate emerged over what to tell the families, if anything. Mr. O'Dell said he urged officials to tell the families there was a problem. "We were sick in there knowing there was a celebration going on outside," he said. "There was a moral obligation for the company to step up."

But company officials said they did not want to upset the families with incomplete information, and they dispatched another rescue team into the mine to double check the condition of the miners, which took another two hours.

Sometime after 2:30 a.m., company officials notified families at the church that only one man had survived. The church exploded in anger.

It was not clear what position state and federal officials, who were theoretically in charge of the rescue operation, took in the debate. But Ms. Ramsburg defended the decision to wait.

"The company was honestly trying to make sure they had the most accurate information to pass on to these families," she said.

The Baptist church in Sago grew quiet after the bodies were brought out and taken to a local school, where relatives identified them.

Some relatives received notes found with the men. Mr. Toler wrote in uneven block letters, "Tell all - I see them on the other side. Jr."

Along Route 20, the main road from Sago to Buckhannon, businesses edited signs that days before had expressed hope for a miracle. "God Has 12 New Angels," said the sign outside the Go-Mart on Friday.

At the church, journalists were largely gone Friday. The mud their wheels had churned up in the driveway had disappeared under a fresh load of gravel: the first hint of repair in a community that remained broken.



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January 7, 2006
Bush Cites 2 Million New Jobs in 2005 and Healthy Economy
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - The United States generated about 200,000 new jobs a month in the last part of 2005, a healthy pace that President Bush immediately used on Friday as part of a broader campaign to promote his economic record and agenda of tax cuts, tighter limits on government spending and more trade.

The nation added 108,000 jobs in December as the unemployment rate edged down to 4.9 percent, the Labor Department said Friday.

The job creation in December was much lower than most forecasters had expected, but the Labor Department also said the nation added far more jobs in November, 305,000, than it had estimated last month.

Over all, the nation added about two million jobs in 2005, about the same as in 2004. Hourly wages rose about 3.1 percent over the year, a faster clip than in 2004 but not quite enough to keep up with inflation.

Mr. Bush and his top team spread out across the country on Friday to celebrate what administration officials see as a largely unappreciated success amid gloomy news about the war in Iraq, criminal investigations into prominent Republicans and a sense among many people that the economy is not as good as the numbers say it is.

"The American economy heads into 2006 with a full head of steam," Mr. Bush told a gathering of business executives in Chicago, citing data not only on job creation, but also on gains in productivity and homeownership. Then, he used his appearance to demand that Congress extend his major tax cuts on wages and on dividends, capital gains and estate taxes.

"By cutting taxes on income, we helped create jobs," Mr. Bush said. "To keep this economy growing, to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive, to make sure that the United States of America is the most productive nation in the world, the United States Congress must make the tax cuts permanent."

Vice President Dick Cheney echoed the theme at a visit to a Harley-Davidson factory in Kansas, while other top members of the economic team gave speeches in New York, Pittsburgh and Louisville, Ky.

By almost all measures, last year was a good one for the American economy. The economy expanded by about 3.6 percent in 2005, the fourth consecutive year of solid growth, despite the soaring energy prices and the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Consumer prices climbed at a rate of 3.5 percent for the 12 months ended in November, but only about 2 percent after excluding the volatile sectors of food and energy.

Many analysts said, however, that Mr. Bush's policies were not the primary reason for the economy's strength.

"Tax cuts had very little to do with it," said Narimen Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight, a forecasting firm in Lexington, Mass. "You had a housing boom, which had very little to do with tax cuts, driving consumer spending. We also had before this year the dollar coming down, which helped drive up exports."

Analysts also noted that hourly wages did not keep up with inflation last year. The Labor Department estimated that hourly wages were about 3.1 percent higher in December than they were a year earlier.

Mr. Bush has been eager to highlight his differences with Democrats over economic policy. He has sought to set up a contrast between what the White House says is a job-creating agenda and a Democratic approach that White House officials say would lead to higher taxes, a further surge in spending on domestic programs and a drift toward protectionism. Republicans say they expect Mr. Bush to make those assertions increasingly in coming months and include them in his State of Union address, tentatively scheduled for Jan. 31.

Mr. Bush and his aides skirted around some of the biggest challenges facing the economy, including the slowing of the housing market, the surge in energy prices and the potentially long-term destabilizing effect of the nation's growing foreign indebtedness.

Democrats said that Mr. Bush was out of touch with the needs of the middle class and was thoughtlessly determined to expand tax breaks for the nation's wealthiest people.

"While some corporations are enjoying increased profits, the benefits of economic growth still have not reached many hard-working middle-class families," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic Senate leader. "Instead of pushing to spend billions of dollars on tax breaks for millionaires and the special interests, Republicans in the White House and Congress should join Democrats in pursuing policies that will address the factors squeezing middle-class families today."

Mr. Bush and his aides have said, however, that the economy's performance showed their approach was creating jobs.

"Some in Washington said these tax cuts would not work," Mr. Cheney said at the Harley-Davidson factory. But after seeing the nation add more than four million jobs since 2003, he said, "it's getting pretty hard for the critics to make the case that somehow these tax cuts weren't good for the economy."

Most forecasters predict that economic growth will continue at a respectable pace through 2006, though many also say that the pace will slow and they caution that there are some major uncertainties.

Perhaps the biggest uncertainty is the housing market, which has expanded at an explosive pace for the last several years as a result of extremely low interest rates. With mortgage rates climbing, and home buyers less confident that house prices will keep rising, demand is expected to slow. In addition, homeowners could sharply scale back on home-equity loans.

Investors had a mixed reaction to the new data on employment. Yields on 10-year Treasury notes rose slightly. The dollar dropped against the euro and the yen, an unusual response in the face of strong economic news.

But stocks jumped to their highest levels since 2001. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 77.16 points, or 0.7 percent, to 10,959.31, a level not seen since June 7, 2001. The Nasdaq composite index was up 28.75 points, or 1.3 percent, to 2,305.62, its highest since May 2001. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index was up 11.97 points, or 0.94 percent, to 1,285.45.

The new unemployment data provided mixed signals about the economy's underlying strength.

Retailers shed 15,600 jobs in December, despite the holiday shopping rush, the Labor Department reported. Over all, employment at department stores and other general merchandise retailers was down, the government said, because seasonal hiring was lower than usual and the industry's total employment has been "trending down."

Employment at construction companies fell by 9,000 jobs, the biggest drop since February 2003 and a possible indicator of a retrenchment in home building.

The unemployment rate edged down to 4.9 percent in December from 5 percent in November, but that decline had little to do with the comparatively small gain in jobs. Rather, it stemmed from the fact that more people dropped out of the work force.

The unemployment rate has ranged from 4.9 percent to 5.1 percent since last March.



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January 6, 2006
Extra Armor Could Have Saved Many Lives, Study Shows
By MICHAEL MOSS
A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003 but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.

The ceramic plates in vests currently worn by the majority of military personnel in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed in the Pentagon study of marines from March 2003 through June 2005, bullets and shrapnel struck the marines' shoulders, sides or areas of the torso where the plates do not reach.

Thirty-one of the deadly wounds struck the chest or back so close to the plates that simply enlarging the existing shields "would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome," according to the study, which was obtained by The New York Times.

For the first time, the study by the military's medical examiner shows the cost in lost lives from inadequate armor, even as the Pentagon continues to publicly defend its protection of the troops. Officials have said they are shipping the best armor to Iraq as quickly as possible. At the same time, they have maintained that it is impossible to shield forces from the increasingly powerful improvised explosive devices used by insurgents. Yet the Pentagon's own study reveals the equally lethal threat of bullets.

The vulnerability of the military's body armor has been known since the start of the war, and is part of a series of problems that have surrounded the protection of American troops. Still, the Marine Corps did not begin buying additional plates to cover the sides of their troops until this September, when it ordered 28,800 sets, Marine Corps officials acknowledge.

The Army, which has the largest force in Iraq, is still deciding what to purchase, according to Army procurement officials. They said the Army is deciding between various sizes of plates to give its 130,000 soldiers; the officials said they hope to issue contracts this month.

Additional forensic studies by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner's unit that were obtained by The Times indicate that about 340 American troops have died solely from torso wounds.

Military officials said they had originally decided against using the extra plates because they were concerned they added too much weight to the vests or constricted the movement of soldiers. Marine Corps officials said the findings of the Pentagon study caused field commanders to override those concerns in the interest of greater protection.

"As the information became more prevalent and aware to everybody that in fact these were casualty sites that they needed to be worried about, then people were much more willing to accept that weight on their body," said Major Wendell Leimbach, a body armor specialist with Marine Corps Systems Command, the marine procurement unit.

The Pentagon has been collecting the data on wounds since the beginning of the war in part to determine the effectiveness of body armor. The military's medical examiner, Craig T. Mallak, told a military panel in 2003 that the information "screams to be published." But it would take nearly two years.

The Marine Corps said it asked for the data in August 2004; but it needed to pay the medical examiner $107,000 to have the data analyzed. Marine officials said funding and other delays resulted in the work not starting until December 2004. It finally began receiving the information by June 2005. The shortfalls in bulletproof vests are just one of the armor problems the Pentagon continues to struggle with as the war in Iraq approaches the three-year mark, The Times has found in an ongoing examination of the military procurement system.

The production of a new armored truck called the Cougar, which military officials said has thus far withstood every insurgent attack, has fallen three months behind schedule. The small company making the truck has been beset by a host of production and legal problems.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is still relying on another small factory in Ohio to armor all of the military's principal transport truck, the Humvee, and it remains backlogged with orders. The facility, owned by Armor Holdings, increased production in December after reports in The Times about delays drew criticism from Congress. But the Marine Corps said it is still waiting for about 2,000 of these vehicles to replace other Humvees in Iraq that are more lightly armored, and does not expect final delivery until June.

An initiative begun by the Pentagon nearly two years ago to speed up production by having additional firms armor new Humvees remains incomplete, Army officials said.

Body armor has gone through a succession of problems in Iraq. First, there were prolonged shortages of the plates that make the vests bulletproof. This year, the Pentagon began replacing the plates with a stronger model that is more resistant to certain insurgent attacks.

Almost from the beginning, some soldiers asked for additional protection to stop bullets from slicing through their sides. In the fall of 2003, when troops began hanging their crotch protectors under their arms, the Army's Rapid Equipping Force shipped several hundred plates to protect their sides and shoulders. Individual soldiers and units continued to buy their own sets.

The Army's former acting secretary, Les Brownlee, said in a recent interview that he was shown numerous designs for expanded body armor back in 2003, and instructed his staff to weigh their benefits against the perceived threat without losing sight of the main task: eliminating the shortages of plates for the chest and back.

Army procurement officials said that their efforts to purchase side ceramic plates have been encumbered by their much larger force, and that they wanted to provide manufacturers with detailed specifications. Also, they said their plates will be made to resist the stronger insurgent attacks.

The Marines said they opted to take the older version of ceramic to speed delivery. As of early last month, officials said marines in Iraq had received 2,200 of the more than 28,000 sets of plates that are being bought at a cost of about $260 each.

Marine officials said they have supplied troops with soft shoulder protection that can repel some shrapnel, but remain concerned that ceramic shoulder plates would be too restrictive. Similarly, they said they believe the chest and back plates are as large as they can be without unduly limiting the movement of troops.

The Times obtained the 3-page Pentagon report after a military advocacy group, Soldiers for the Truth, learned of its existence. The group posted an article about the report on its website earlier this week. The Times delayed publication of this article for more than a week until the Pentagon confirmed the veracity of its report. Pentagon officials declined to discuss details of the wound data, saying it would aid the enemy.

"Our preliminary research suggests that as many as 42 percent of the Marine casualties who died from isolated torso injuries could have been prevented with improved protection in the areas surrounding the plated areas of the vest," the study concludes. Another 23 percent might have been saved with side plates that extend below the arms, while 15 percent more could have benefited from shoulder plates, the report says. In all, 526 marines have been killed in combat in Iraq. A total of 1,706 American troops have died in combat.

The findings and other research by military pathologists suggests that an analysis of all combat deaths in Iraq, including those of Army personnel, would show that 300 or more lives might have been saved with improved body armor.

Military officials and defense contractors said the Pentagon's procurement troubles have stemmed in part from miscalculations that underestimated the strength of the insurgency, and from years of cost-cutting that left some armoring firms on the brink of collapse as they waited for new orders.

To help defeat roadside ambushes, the military in May 2005 contracted to buy 122 Cougars whose special V-shaped hull helps deflect roadside bombs, military officials said. But the Pentagon gave the job to a small firm in South Carolina, Force Protection, that had never mass-produced vehicles. Company officials said a string of blunders has pushed the completion date to June.

A dozen prototypes shipped to Iraq have been recalled from the field to replace a failing transmission. Steel was cut to the wrong size before the truck's design drawings were perfected. Several managers have left the firm.

Company officials said they also lost time in an inter-service skirmish. The Army, which is buying the bulk of the vehicles, asked for its trucks to be delivered before the Marine vehicles, and company officials said that move upended their production process until the Army agreed to get back in line behind the marines. "It is what it is, and we're running as fast as we can to change it," Gordon McGilton, the company's chief executive, said in an interview at its plant in Ladson, S.C.

On July 5, two former employees brought a federal false claims case that accuses Force Protection of falsifying records to cover up defective workmanship. They allege that the actions "compromise the immediate and long term integrity of the vehicles and result in a deficient product," according to legal documents filed under seal in the United States District Court in Charleston and obtained by The Times.

The legal claim also accuses the company of falsifying records to deceive the military into believing the firm could meet the production deadlines. The United States Attorney's office in South Carolina declined to comment on the case. The Marine Corps says the Justice Department did not notify it about the case until December.

Force Protection officials said they had not been made aware of the legal case. They acknowledged making mistakes in rushing to fill the order, but said there were multiple systems in place to monitor the quality of the trucks, and that they were not aware of any deficiencies that would jeopardize the troops.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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January 7, 2006
Inquiry Says F.B.I. Erred in Implicating Man in Attack
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - Overconfidence in its own fingerprint-identification technology and sloppy paperwork contributed to the F.B.I.'s wrongly implicating a Portland, Ore., lawyer in the deadly 2004 Madrid train bombing, a Justice Department investigation said Friday.

But the investigation, by the department's inspector general's office, said there had been no misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and no abuse of the antiterrorism USA Patriot Act in the case of the lawyer, Brandon Mayfield.

Mr. Mayfield was jailed for two weeks in May 2004 as a material witness before he was cleared.

Although Mr. Mayfield's Islamic faith was not a factor in the initial stages of the bombing investigation, when F.B.I. technicians erroneously concluded that a print found on a plastic bag near the Madrid attack scene matched one of Mr. Mayfield's, it may have slowed his ultimate exoneration, the Justice Department inquiry found.

The inspector general said the chain of errors that led to Mr. Mayfield's jailing was in part because of the "unusual similarity" between Mr. Mayfield's fingerprints and those found at the bomb site on March 11, 2004.

"However, we concluded that the examiners committed errors in the examination procedure, and that the misidentification could have been prevented through a more rigorous application of several principles of latent fingerprint identification," the inquiry found.

In the report, the inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, said that he concurred with several changes in F.B.I. laboratory procedures put in place as a result of the Mayfield case, "particularly with respect to the development of more objective criteria for declaring an identification," but that still more changes were necessary, including stricter documentation of errors and their causes.

The F.B.I. has apologized to Mr. Mayfield, who contends in a suit against the government that he was singled out because of his religion. The bureau, which has denied that accusation, said Friday that it was pleased that the inspector general had found no official wrongdoing and no violation of the antiterrorism law, which Congress passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to bolster government surveillance powers.

Mr. Mayfield, whose wife is an Egyptian immigrant, had represented a suspected terrorist in a child-custody case in Portland. And when the F.B.I.'s much-praised Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System seemed to show a match between a print at the bombing scene and his own, he came under heavy suspicion.

The report said F.B.I. affidavits apparently conveyed the impression that the Spanish authorities agreed with the F.B.I.'s fingerprint work - when, in fact, Spanish investigators had already told their American counterparts they had serious doubts about whether there was a match.

Overconfidence in the F.B.I.'s fingerprint system, which can electronically sift millions of prints quickly, and too little confidence in the skills of the Spanish authorities helped to steer the investigation in the wrong direction, the report said. So did "circular reasoning," or the temptation to find fingerprint similarities that were not really there, once several genuine similarities had been detected.



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January 7, 2006
Justices to Say When Police Can Enter Private Home
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to try to define, more precisely than in the past, the emergencies that can justify a warrantless police entry into a private home.

The case is an appeal filed by the State of Utah from a Utah Supreme Court decision early last year that four Brigham City police officers violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure by entering a home to break up a fight.

The police, who went to the home in response to a neighbor's complaint about a loud party, did not have a warrant and did not announce their presence before walking through an open back door. They arrested three occupants for disorderly conduct, intoxication and contributing to the delinquency of a minor by allowing a teenager to drink.

The Utah trial court, appeals court and Supreme Court all ruled that the evidence of alcohol consumption could not be introduced at trial because of the illegal police entry.

Supreme Court precedents have established numerous exceptions to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. Two are at issue in this case, Brigham City v. Stuart, No. 05-502. One is an exception for "exigent circumstances," in which split-second judgments must be made by the police to prevent, for example, the destruction of evidence. The other is an "emergency aid" exception, in which the police are permitted to act immediately to prevent injury or to assist an injured person.

The Utah courts held that the circumstances of this case did not justify invoking either of the exceptions. The garden-variety altercation, visible to the police through a window, did not amount to an "exigent circumstance," the Utah Supreme Court said. It also said the police could not claim the "emergency aid" exception because they did not enter the home for the purpose of providing medical assistance.

In the state's appeal, Utah's attorney general, Mark L. Shurtleff, is arguing that the "subjective motivations of police officers" are irrelevant as long as the entry was "objectively reasonable." State courts are divided on how to apply either of the exceptions, the state's brief said.

The justices granted six new cases for argument in April and decision before the current term ends in early summer. There was no word on the most closely watched case from among the several hundred available for the justices' action at their Friday morning conference: the Bush administration's appeal from a decision by the federal appeals court in St. Louis that declared unconstitutional the federal ban on so-called partial birth abortions.

Accepting a Justice Department appeal, the court agreed to decide whether a conviction should automatically be overturned if a defendant has been denied representation by the lawyer of his choice.

In this case, a defendant facing trial in federal district court in St. Louis on charges of conspiring to distribute marijuana wanted a lawyer from California, who had a good track record of representing federal drug defendants, to represent him.

But the lawyer, Joseph Low, was not admitted to practice before the district court, necessitating the judge's permission for him to proceed with the case. The judge denied permission, and the defendant, Cuauhtemoc Gonzalez-Lopez, was represented by a less experienced local lawyer. He was convicted and sentenced to 24 years in prison.

On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said the defendant had been deprived of his "fundamental" constitutional right to a lawyer of his choice, a denial that it said "infects the entire trial process" and required automatic reversal of his conviction.

The government's appeal, United States v. Gonzalez-Lopez, No. 05-352, argues that "rules of automatic reversal are highly disfavored and should be reserved for only the most egregious constitutional errors." To win a new trial, the government maintains, a defendant who has been deprived of the lawyer of his choice should be required to show that the "counsel of choice might well have made a difference to the outcome."

The court also agreed to decide whether parents who successfully sue a public school system's special-education plan for their disabled child are entitled to be reimbursed for the money they spent on expert witnesses. The lower federal courts are in dispute on this question.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal law that entitles children with disabilities to a "free appropriate public education," authorizes courts to order school systems to reimburse parents for their legal fees incurred in bringing a successful challenge to a proposed education plan, but does not mention expert witness fees.

In this case, Arlington Central School District v. Murphy, No. 05-18, the federal appeals court in New York found that expert fees were implicitly covered.



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January 7, 2006
Rebels in G.O.P. Call for DeLay to Be Replaced
By CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - A rebellious band of House Republicans moved Friday to bar Representative Tom DeLay of Texas from regaining his position as majority leader, demanding a vote to replace him permanently at the top of the party hierarchy.

Acting in the wake of Tuesday's guilty plea to corruption charges by the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, once a close ally of Mr. DeLay, Representatives Jeff Flake of Arizona and Charles Bass of New Hampshire began circulating a petition on Friday to collect 50 signatures needed to call a party leadership election. By midafternoon, they had commitments from about two dozen lawmakers, aides said.

"Rightly or wrongly, Mr. DeLay is seen as the public face of Washington, and it is not healthy right now," Mr. Flake said. "We need a course correction."

While the petition calls only for the election of a permanent majority leader, the rank-and-file could push for more if enough lawmakers conclude a broader shake-up is warranted. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois appears safe in his spot, but the turmoil represented another significant challenge to his ability to hold his caucus together without the help of Mr. DeLay, his longtime partner in running the House.

At least one Republican, Representative Melissa A. Hart of Pennsylvania, said Friday that if there is to be an election it should encompass a wider evaluation of the leadership. "The current letter being circulated by Congressmen Flake and Bass does not go far enough," she said in a statement. "The Republican Conference is run by a leadership team and when the majority leader position becomes vacant, the conference needs the ability to reassess the leadership team as a whole."

One senior House leadership aide, who would not be publicly identified discussing the delicate topic of internal leadership elections, said the leadership situation was volatile, making it difficult to foresee what might occur. "It feels to me like we are going to see some changes," the aide said.

Mr. DeLay was forced to give up his leadership post in September after his indictment in Texas on campaign-related charges of money laundering. He has said repeatedly that he intends to try to resolve those charges quickly and return to his place as the No. 2 House Republican. But admissions of criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Abramoff and the continuing federal investigation of former senior aides to Mr. DeLay have intensified political anxiety among Republicans at the start of a potentially pivotal election year.

But a spokesman for Mr. DeLay, a very determined politician who has never shied from a fight, suggested that he would resist any effort to oust him permanently.

"Mr. DeLay appreciates the fact that a majority of his colleagues recognize that he remains committed to resuming and fulfilling his responsibilities as majority leader as soon as he is exonerated in Texas, which he believes will happen by the end of the month," said Kevin Madden, the DeLay spokesman.

House officials predicted that Mr. Hastert would ultimately schedule an election, which could force a vote by Republicans to remove from the leadership a man responsible for much of their past political success but someone increasingly viewed as a political liability because of a continuing swirl of ethical and legal questions.

A divisive leadership battle has the potential to roil the House just as President Bush and Congressional Republicans are unveiling their election-year agenda through Mr. Bush's State of the Union speech and other events. It could also lead to new faces in the leadership ranks as Republicans try to demonstrate they are seriously responding to the lobbying scandal, which could still ensnare other lawmakers.

Should an election occur, several lawmakers would be potential candidates for majority leader, beginning with Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 3 House Republican, who took over Mr. Delay's post. Others include Representatives John A. Boehner of Ohio, chairman of the education committee and a past member of the leadership; Mike Pence of Indiana, leader of a group of House conservatives; John Shadegg of Arizona; Jerry Lewis of California, chairman of the Appropriations Committee; and Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, head of the party's campaign arm.

Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for Mr. Hastert, stopped short of saying an election would be set but said the push by the lawmakers was "consistent with the speaker's announcement that this would only be a temporary structure and House Republicans would revisit this matter at the beginning of the year."

Mr. Flake would not identify others who have agreed to sign the call for the election and said he hoped that Mr. Hastert would agree to one without the formality of a petition. But Mr. Flake said he was confident he could get 50 signatures if necessary, a task complicated by the fact that the House is in recess and lawmakers are scattered around the nation and the world.

Many top lawmakers were expected to be traveling again next week but senior aides said they viewed an election as inevitable once the House reconvened Jan. 31. They anticipated an announcement would be made once Mr. Hastert and other senior lawmakers worked out the timing and developed what one described as a "graceful exit strategy" for Mr. DeLay.

Mr. DeLay has aggressively challenged the notion that he acted improperly in his dealings with Mr. Abramoff, saying that trips arranged by the lobbyist and donations received were all properly disclosed and reported. But Mr. Flake and others have said it appears the Abramoff cloud will be hanging over Mr. DeLay for some time and, when added to the court fight in Texas, it sends the wrong message to voters when Democrats have promised to make Mr. DeLay and corruption a central campaign theme. To counter that effort, House Republicans are also preparing a package of new lobbying rules and limits on gifts and travel.

Republicans evidently have reason to worry about their image. An Associated Press-Ipsos public opinion poll released Friday showed voters sharply favoring Democrats over Republicans in a general party matchup for Congress, 49 percent to 36 percent.

"With the majority leader, their job is not just to shape legislation and control the floor, it is to help the majority stay the majority," Mr. Flake said. "You want to be comfortable and have the opportunity for Tom DeLay to contribute money and come to the district. Right now that comfort level is not there."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

US Navy hands murder suspect to Japan police Reuters
The US Navy handed over a US sailor suspected of killing and robbing a 56-year-old Japanese woman to Japanese police on Saturday, a spokesman said. Seaman William Reese, 21, was arrested after being escorted to the local police station in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, where he is suspected of killing Yoshie Sato on January 3. Japanese media said Reese, who is based aboard the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier, had confessed to the killing, but neither local police nor the Navy could confirm the reports. Sato was found bleeding and unconscious near a building in Yokosuka and died from internal injuries, police have said. Domestic media reports said the sailor had returned to base in blood-stained clothes, but had been vague as to his motives for the attack. Reese had been based on the Kitty Hawk at Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, since May 2004 in his first navy assignment since completing his training, Commander John Wallach, director of public affairs for the U.S. Naval Forces Japan said. The incident comes at an awkward time, as Tokyo and Washington attempt to hammer out a deal with Japanese local communities to allow the reorganization of U.S. bases in Japan in an attempt to make the U.S. military more flexible. A U.S.-Japan pact governing the conduct of U.S. military personnel in Japan does not require the transfer of military suspects until they are charged. But after the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old Japanese girl by three U.S. servicemen on the southern island of Okinawa, which triggered huge protests there, Washington agreed to give favorable consideration to pre-indictment transfers in the case of suspected rape, murder and other "heinous" crimes. Japan's foreign ministry expressed satisfaction with the U.S. handling of the incident. "The suspect was quickly identified thanks to thorough cooperation between the U.S. and Japanese investigative authorities," it said in a statement. "The two governments will continue to cooperate closely on the case." Nearly 50,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Japan under the allies' bilateral security treaty. Many in the Yokosuka area also opposed to U.S. Navy plans to replace the aging conventionally powered Kitty Hawk with what would be the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to be based in Japan, the only country ever hit by atomic bombs.
US Sailor Arrested on Murder Charges ABC News
US Sailor Arrested on Murder Charges Forbes
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Mine Survivor Has Inflammation in Lung Forbes
The lone survivor of the West Virginia coal mining tragedy probably started to inhale large amounts of dust and gases in the last hour he spent in the mine as he lay on his left side, causing inflammation in his left lung, a doctor said Friday. Dr. Richard Shannon, speaking for a team of doctors treating Randal McCloy Jr., said that stabilizing the inflammation will be important for getting the miner off a ventilator. "That does constitute a serious issue. ... We are working very diligently with keeping those airways open," Shannon said. The dust and gases were inhaled because McCloy, in the hour before his rescue, lost the ability to cough, sneeze or control his airway, the doctor said.
Mine Survivor Has Inflammation in Lung ABC News
Wife gives miner sound, smell of home Pittsburgh Post Gazette
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DeLay won't seek return to House leadership post San Jose Mercury News
Republican Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas has given up trying to get his job back as majority leader of the House of Representatives. The once-powerful politician stepped down from his leadership post in September after he was indicted on money laundering and conspiracy charges related to a campaign finance case in Texas. Since then, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri has handled the majority leader duties. DeLay's move came shortly after several dozen congressmen loaned support to a petition for a special leadership election. A source close to DeLay said the confluence of events last week - the guilty plea by lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who agreed to testify against lawmakers; a movement to unseat DeLay by some in the House GOP; and the ongoing Texas criminal probe - persuaded him to give up his bid to return as majority leader. "During my time in Congress, I have always acted in an ethical manner within the rules of our body and the laws of our land. I am fully confident time will bear this out," DeLay told fellow Republicans in a letter Saturday. However, "I cannot allow our adversaries to divide and distract our attention." "Everybody war-gamed out scenarios," a congressional source told the New York Daily News. "But there were more uncertainties than certainties." DeLay, 58, had previously said he planned to resume his role as majority leader after he was cleared on the current charges. Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) praised DeLay's decision: "He realized he was going to become the issue, and I think he's doing the right thing for the party." And House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was quick to hail the move: "For years, at the expense of the American people, the House Republicans have enabled and benefited from the Republican culture of corruption engineered by Tom DeLay."
Tom Delay's Statement on Stepping Down Forbes
DeLay halts bid to regain House post Boston Globe
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Alito set to step into the spotlight Seattle Times
Even before Judge Samuel Alito arrives on Capitol Hill for his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee appear lined up solidly against him. The big question is whether they will try to block the nomination by filibuster, and if so, which side will be left standing when the political dust settles. For Alito, the son of an Italian immigrant who grew up in New Jersey with a dream of being a major-league baseball pitcher, the hearings are a hurdle between him and an even bigger dream. After months of meeting senators privately and staying mum before the news media, they will provide him with a forum to emerge from the shadow of the previous nominee, Chief Justice John Roberts.
Alito's future hinges on past Houston Chronicle
Alito battle brewing Arizona Republic
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Richmond Police Link Slayings Los Angeles Times
Two men are charged in the killings of seven people. The victims include musician Bryan Harvey and his family. Two men were captured Saturday and charged in the killings of seven people
Two men charged in deaths of seven Richmond Times Dispatch
Police arrest two men in seven Virginia slayings Seattle Times
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Job Growth Sluggish as Bush Trumpets Economy Los Angeles Times
As officials boast of tax cuts' success, Labor Department figures show lower than expected employment gains in December.
Bush to focus on healthy economy in effort to recharge his agenda San Diego Union Tribune
Bush Confident About Economy for 2006 Forbes
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IBM Cuts Pension Plan Red Herring
IBM said it will stop contributing to its pension program in the United States in 2008 to save billions on expenses, while also increasing contributions to its 401(k) program. The company said it wants to shift the future focus of its retirement benefits toward the more predictable cost structure offered by 401(k) programs. Big Blue said it would contribute up to 10 percent of an employee’s salary to the 401(k) program. The move is part of a trend across corporate America away from defined benefit programs such as the traditional pension, and encouraging more employees to contribute their own money to 401(k) accounts. Last June, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would modify its retirement benefit package by moving more pensions into 401(k) accounts while it also cut 14,500 jobs (see HP to Slash 14,500 Jobs). Last month, Verizon froze pensions for management personnel (see Verizon Ends Manager Pensions).
IBM to freeze pensions at end of next year Boston Globe
IBM Halts Pensions in Favor of 401(k)s Washington Post
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Doctors: Mine Explosion Survivors Improves Forbes
The critically injured sole survivor of a West Virginia coal mine explosion has shown signs that his condition is improving, his attending physician said Sunday. Randal McCloy Jr. has been in a medically induced coma since last week's underground blast to allow his brain time to heal. "We had a chance to see Randy as of last night, throughout the night and this morning and we would consider his condition still critical," Dr. Larry Roberts told reporters at West Virginia University Hospital. "However, he has shown some signs of improvement." McCloy, of Simpson, W.Va., was rescued early Wednesday after being trapped in the Sago Mine near Tallmansville, in north-central West Virginia, for about 42 hours. Twelve other men who were inside the mine with him died.
Doctors: Mine Explosion Survivor Improves Houston Chronicle
Mine blast survivor shows signs of improvement CTV.com
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Alito may be the worst choice:

AT THIS moment in American history, it would be hard to find a worse Supreme Court nominee than Samuel A. Alito Jr. His ideology captures everything extremist about the Bush administration. If confirmed, Alito would serve as Bush's enabler.
http://tinyurl.com/cdavh

Key question for Alito: presidential power
His confirmation hearings are expected to delve into civil rights,
abortion, and government regulation. By Gail Russell Chaddock
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0109/p01s02-usju.html?s=hns

Republicans scramble to pick new leader after Tom DeLay bows out
The GOP may gain image points with his resignation as House majority
leader, but it is losing a key disciplinarian. By Gail Russell Chaddock
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0109/p02s01-uspo.html?s=hns

Abramoff scandal spurs lobbying reform
Both sides of the aisle are pushing for tougher standards of
registration, disclosure, and oversight. By Linda Feldmann
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0109/p02s02-uspo.html?s=hns

From roads to rails, California to rebuild
Moving to the political center, the governor has announced a $222
billion plan to repair public works. By Daniel B. Wood
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0109/p03s02-uspo.html?s=hns

NSA chief not concerned by congressional inquiries:

A 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, forbids domestic spying on U.S. citizens without the approval of a special court. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Bush secretly authorized the NSA to intercept communications without court approval.
http://tinyurl.com/9645r

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Report disputes spy plan legality:

The non-partisan research arm of Congress on Friday questioned the legal foundation of President Bush's decision to order eavesdropping on Americans without court warrants.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/13572257.htm

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Orwell could have a case against Bush:

Lawyers for the estate of George Orwell have announced their intention to sue President Bush for plagiarism.
http://www.americanpolitics.com/20051220Young.html

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The lie detector you'll never know is there:

THE US Department of Defense has revealed plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925335.800

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Computer chips get under skin of enthusiasts :

The computer chips, which cost about $2, interact with a device installed in computers and other electronics. The chips are activated when they come within 3 inches of a so-called reader, which scans the data on the chips. The "reader" devices are available for as little as $50.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060106/tc_nm/...ogy_implants_dc

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DeLay's Decision Won't End GOP Troubles :

Republicans worried about their party's future have succeeded in pushing embattled former Majority Leader Tom DeLay off the stage. Even so, the Republicans' election-year troubles are far from over.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/stor...5530519,00.html

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Officials Focus on a 2nd Firm Tied to DeLay :

Having secured a guilty plea from the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, prosecutors are entering a new phase of the corruption investigation in Washington and are focusing on a lobbying firm that may hold the key to whether Tom DeLay or other lawmakers will face criminal charges in the case.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11483.htm

===
Tyco acknowledges it was source of $1.6m pocketed by Abramoff:

Tyco International, whose former CEO became a symbol of corporate corruption, acknowledged Thursday it is the Jack Abramoff client referred to as "Company A" in court documents describing the lobbyist's scheme to funnel millions of dollars in lobbying fees to himself.
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic...S0201/101060157

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New Job for Former Cheney Aide:

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who served as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney until his October 28 indictment and subsequent resignation, has joined the Hudson Institute as a senior adviser, it was announced on Friday.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Pa...L20060106c.html

Among Evangelicals, A Kinship With Jews
Some Skeptical of Growing Phenomenon

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 8, 2006; A01



DANVILLE, Va. -- Everyone who worships at the Tabernacle quickly learns three facts about its deeply conservative pastor. He comes from a broken home. He rides a canary-yellow Harley. And he loves the Jews.

There is some murmuring about the motorcycle. But the 2,500 members of this Bible-believing, tradition-respecting Southern Baptist church in southern Virginia have embraced everything else about the Rev. Lamarr Mooneyham.

Out of his painful childhood experiences, Mooneyham, 57, preaches passionately about the importance of home. Out of his reading of the Bible, he preaches with equal passion about God's continuing devotion to the Jewish people.

"I feel jealous sometimes. This term that keeps coming up in the Old Book -- the Chosen, the Chosen," says the minister, who has made three trips to Israel and named his sons Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. "I'm a pardoned gentile, but I'm not one of the Chosen People. They're the apple of his eye."

Scholars of religion call this worldview "philo-Semitism," the opposite of anti-Semitism. It is a burgeoning phenomenon in evangelical Christian churches across the country, a hot topic in Jewish historical studies and a wellspring of support for Israel.

Yet many Jews are nervous about evangelicals' intentions. In recent weeks, leaders of three of the nation's largest Jewish groups -- the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Union for Reform Judaism -- have decried what they see as a mounting threat to the separation of church and state from evangelicals emboldened by the belief that they have an ally in the White House and an opportunity to shift the Supreme Court.

"Make no mistake: We are facing an emerging Christian right leadership that intends to 'Christianize' all aspects of American life, from the halls of government to the libraries, to the movies, to recording studios, to the playing fields and locker rooms . . . from the military to SpongeBob SquarePants," the ADL's national director, Abraham H. Foxman, said in a Nov. 3 speech.

Julie Galambush, a former American Baptist minister who converted to Judaism 11 years ago, has seen both sides of the divide. She said many Jews suspect that evangelicals' support for Israel is rooted in a belief that the return of Jews to the promised land will trigger the Second Coming of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and mass conversion.

"That hope is felt and expressed by Christians as a kind, benevolent hope," said Galambush, author of "The Reluctant Parting," a new book on the Jewish roots of Christianity. "But believing that someday Jews will stop being Jews and become Christians is still a form of hoping that someday there will be no more Jews."

The result is a paradox -- warming evangelical attitudes toward Jews at a time of rising Jewish concern about evangelicals -- that could be a turning point in the uneasy alliance between Jewish and Christian groups that ardently back Israel but disagree on much else.

The Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, chairman of the evangelical American Family Association, warned in a Dec. 5 radio broadcast that Foxman was "in a bind" because the "strongest supporters Israel has are members of the religious right -- the people he's fighting."

"The more he says that 'you people are destroying this country,' you know, some people are going to begin to get fed up with this and say, 'Well, all right then. If that's the way you feel, then we just won't support Israel anymore,' " Wildmon said.

Philo-Semitism is far from universal among the 60 million to 90 million U.S. adults who identify themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. But it has strong roots, not only in the Hebrew scriptures shared by both faiths but also in the belief that today's Jews and Christians have common antagonists, such as secularism, consumerism and militant Islam.

In his sermons, Mooneyham returns again and again to God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 12: "I will bless those who bless you, and curse him who curses you."

It is a theme echoed in many conversations at the Tabernacle, a plain red-brick church in a community that has seen one factory after another close, yet where the congregation made a Christmas offering of $25,000 to help pay for the immigration of Russian Jews to Israel.

"I believe everyone in this church felt it was the best thing we've ever done with missionary money, to help the Jewish people go home," said Dorothy Pawlowski, 72, who tithes to the church.

And it is a message being passed to the next generation. On Thursday nights, J.J. Vogltanz, a deacon, uses a Christian textbook to lead his three home-schooled children in science experiments designed to illustrate Bible verses. One of the first things he taught them about Jesus, he said, was that "he was a Jew."

Asked whether he also taught his children that the Jews rejected Jesus, Vogltanz, 34, paused. "I'm not sure it's constructive to assign blame," he said.

Mark A. Noll, a professor of Christian thought at Wheaton College, a center of evangelical scholarship in Illinois, said evangelicals are beginning to move away from supersessionism -- the centuries-old belief that with the coming of Jesus, God ended his covenant with the Jews and transferred it to the Christian church.

Since the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church and some Protestant denominations have renounced supersessionism and stressed their belief that the covenant between God and the Jewish people remains in effect.

Evangelicals generally have not taken that step, but "among what you might call the evangelical intelligentsia, questions of supersessionism have come onto the table," Noll said. "It's in play among evangelicals in the way that it was in mainline Protestantism and Catholicism -- but wasn't among evangelicals -- 30 or 40 years ago."

At Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical training ground in Pasadena, Calif., President Richard J. Mouw hosted a kosher breakfast for 20 rabbis a week before Christmas. "More and more, we're inviting Jews as guest lecturers," Mouw said. "We're looking at rabbinic literature and how we can better understand the Bible through rabbinic eyes. That's a real push for us."

Jacques Berlinerblau, a visiting professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University, said the rise of philo-Semitism in the United States has led Jewish scholars to look back at previous periods of philo-Semitism, such as in Amsterdam in the mid-17th century. He said revisionists are increasingly challenging the standard "lachrymose version" of Jewish history, questioning whether persecution has been the norm and tolerance the exception, or vice versa.

Still, some Jews think that philo-Semitism is just the flip side of anti-Semitism.

"Both are Semitisms: That is, both install the Jews at the center of history. One regards this centrality positively, the other regards it negatively. But both are forms of obsession about the Jews," said Leon Wieseltier, a Jewish scholar and literary editor of the New Republic.

The Southern Baptist Convention, to which the Tabernacle belongs, passed a resolution in 1867 calling on its members to convert Jews and renewed that call as recently as 1996. Its former president, Bailey Smith, declared in 1980 that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew," and it currently supports about 15 congregations of messianic Jews, who are popularly associated with the organization Jews for Jesus.

So Mooneyham has a ready answer for Jews who doubt his motives: "I think they have a right to be suspicious of just about everybody, given the history."

He also has a personal story. The pivotal moment of Mooneyham's childhood came at age 7 when his parents, in the middle of a divorce, took him and his three sisters to a church parking lot in Burlington, N.C., and parceled them out to relatives for a few weeks. Those few weeks turned into years. The family never came together again.

Nearly 45 years later, the pastor was watching television before a Sunday morning church service when he came upon an infomercial by Rabbi Yechiel Z. Eckstein, founder of a group called the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Eckstein was standing in Israel with an elderly woman from Russia who said she was finally home.

"She started crying, he started crying, and I started crying," Mooneyham said. "Then I said, 'Lord, help me, because I'm really going to throw my congregation a curveball today. We're going to help Jews -- we're not going to witness to them, we're just going to help them. Because I know what home means.' "

Since that day five years ago, according to Eckstein, the Tabernacle has sent more than $175,000 to the fellowship, which has a donor base of 400,000 Christians and has contributed more than $100 million to Israeli causes.

"I can only say that what we've done should speak for itself, because we've given and we've asked nothing in return," Mooneyham said. "And that's the way it will stay."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company