January 20, 2006
Oil Markets Are Jittery Over Possibility of Sanctions Against Iran
By JAD MOUAWAD
As world leaders and diplomats debate how to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions, the worry among analysts these days is the fate of the country's oil sector.

The prospect of sanctions against Iran might have been easily shrugged off a few years ago, when the world sat comfortably on millions of barrels of untapped oil capacity. But the picture today is quite different. Iran exports more oil than the world's current spare capacity.

The lurking fear among many oil analysts is a darker version of what happened in Iraq: a diplomatic or military confrontation with a major Middle East oil producer that again leads to disruptions in supplies and provokes a spike in oil prices.

If for any reason exports from Iran, which pumps twice the oil Iraq does, suddenly stopped, other producers would not be able to make up the loss - in contrast to 2003, when Saudi Arabia and Kuwait cranked up output to make up for the drop in Iraqi exports after the American-led invasion.

These concerns are not completely ill-founded. Over the weekend, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hinted that his country might be willing to use the "oil weapon" - that is, curbing oil exports - if faced with international sanctions. At the same time, some members of the United States Senate said Iran should be sanctioned regardless of the consequences for oil prices.

Such talk may turn out to be part of the negotiating tactics on both sides. But it is fanning waves of anxiety in oil markets, which have been rattled since Jan. 3, when Iran announced its decision to resume a nuclear research program that had been suspended since an agreement was reached with France, Germany and Britain in late 2004.

The announcement led to a breakdown with European negotiators and raised the likelihood of international action against Iran.

While American and European negotiators are campaigning to have the standoff handled by the United Nations Security Council, Russia and China are urging more talks.

Oil markets have reacted strongly to the breakdown. Crude oil prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange have risen 9.5 percent since the beginning of the year. They closed yesterday at $66.83 a barrel, up $1.10, or 1.7 percent. Oil prices, which dropped to $55 in November, are again headed toward record levels.

To be sure, other factors have contributed to the recent price rally. Nigeria's main oil-producing region is experiencing unrest, and forecasters expect strong growth in demand this year. But as the confrontation over the nuclear research program swells, Iran is turning out to be the biggest risk for oil markets this year.

With 10 percent of the world's reserves, Iran is the second-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose pricing policy it helps shape (Saudi Arabia is No. 1).

The country pumps four million barrels of oil each day and exports two-thirds of it, mainly to Japan and China. Analysts said Iran's standing in the oil markets permits it to assert itself more than others seeking to develop a nuclear program.

"Why are the Iranians pushing so aggressively instead of biding their time, like North Korea did? The obvious answer is that Iran is in a far stronger position," said Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy based in New York. "Iran can respond in ways that can be very painful to the international community. Iran has leverage."

Frank Verrastro, the head of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the international community had to answer some very tough questions when it considered Iran's position.

"How do you punish an international actor when it produces a commodity that everyone needs? What can get Iran's attention without inflicting pain on everyone else?" Mr. Verrastro said. "Up until now, it has been a huge game of chicken."

Given the overall tightness in global energy supplies, analysts said, it is unlikely that Iran's oil exports will be embargoed if the dispute is taken to the Security Council. But alternatives, like banning foreign investments in Iran's oil business or transfers of technology for that industry, might still cripple Iran's struggling petroleum sector.

"The best punishment, because it would be the most effective, would be to deprive Iran of its oil exports," said Muhammad-Ali Zainy, an energy economist at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London. "But the problem is that this would create a big shortage on the oil markets and lead to a price explosion. It would be disastrous. It is something no one can afford."

"On the other hand, Iran can't afford to use its oil weapon, either," he said. "It relies on its oil revenue too much."

Iran derives about 50 percent of its government revenue and most of its foreign currency earnings from oil sales. Thanks to high prices, it is expected to earn more than $40 billion from oil sales in 2005.

At the same time, the Iranian regime is betting that the global markets cannot afford to live without its oil. That may prove to be a miscalculation. While the world may go through a short spike in prices if Iran curbs exports, analysts say that oil markets have shown resilience, as they did last year after the loss of oil production from the Gulf of Mexico.

In recent years, Iran has played on differences between the United States, which has barred its companies from doing business in Iran, and Europe or China, which have invested heavily in Iran's oil industry.

Iran has also been paying close attention to Asian customers, particularly China and India, to offset the growing hostility from the West, and has awarded exploration licenses to companies from France, Russia, Japan and China.

The strategy has not been completely successful. BP, which is based in London, said early last year that it would avoid doing business in Iran because of the American sanctions. Also, because of harsh contractual terms, oil companies have become wary of investing in Iran. The result has been sluggish production growth.

While most producers are pumping at full capacity to meet record world demand, Iran has been unable to reach its nominal production quota assigned by OPEC, 4.11 million barrels a day.

In the United States, the standoff is increasingly perceived as the top foreign policy and security challenge for President Bush's second term. On Sunday, Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," said the United States should press for international sanctions against Iran. He added, "If the price of oil has to go up, then that's a consequence we would have to suffer."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Tight Immigration Policy Hits Roadblock of Reality

BY RACHEL L. SWARNS
Published: January 20, 2006

Aurelino Valdez interviewed a Guatemalan in McAllen, Tex., and Eligio Pena, right, interviewed Hondurans in Harlingen after they were held.
McALLEN, Tex. - In September, domestic security officials promised to tighten control of the border with Mexico by swiftly deporting all illegal immigrants seized there, ending the practice of releasing thousands of illegal immigrants to the streets each year because of shortages of beds in detention centers.

The move was hailed by President Bush and Republicans in Congress, who said the policy would deter the surging numbers of illegal immigrants who cross the murky swells of the Rio Grande here or scramble across the border in Arizona and California. But in this border town on the front lines of the efforts to combat illegal immigration, some Border Patrol agents say they continue to face an uphill battle, with too many illegal immigrants and too few detention beds.

In the first three months of the 2006 fiscal year, the number of illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico who were caught crossing the border surged nearly 30 percent compared with the corresponding period last year, notwithstanding hopes that the policy would deter such would-be immigrants.

Despite the promise of nearly 2,000 more detention beds to ensure that illegal immigrants do not flee before being deported, thousands continue to be released with notices to appear in court.

One morning in January, a month when, typically, relatively few illegal immigrants cross the river, no detention beds were available for women here and none for families, Border Patrol officials said.

Nationally, 18,207 illegal immigrants, nearly 60 percent of the total apprehended, were released on their own recognizance in the first three months of this fiscal year.

But officials say progress is clearly being made. The number of illegal Brazilian immigrants apprehended soared last summer but plunged more than 90 percent in the month after the strict detention and deportation policy started. The number of illegal immigrants from Honduras who were caught dropped 33 percent.

Officials remain confident that the policy will be applied across the board by October, as planned.

Some Congressional analysts and immigration agents remain doubtful about meeting the deadline.

To illegal immigrants seized these days, the decision to release or deport often seems to depend on luck.

Sebastián Zapeta Toc, 25, a Guatemalan who paddled across the Rio Grande in an inner tube, was snared under the strict deportation policy, known as expedited removal. Mr. Zapeta Toc was told that he would be detained and deported without seeing an immigration judge.

"We're going to send you back to your country," a border agent, Jaime Sanchez, told him.

On the same day, 12 illegal Chinese immigrants, including three young women who dreamed of catching a bus to New York, were released with notices to appear in court. A woman from El Salvador who sorted coffee beans there, and three people from Eritrea were also released.

Statistics show that 70 percent of these immigrants, classified by domestic security officials as "other than Mexican" or "O.T.M.'s," fail to appear for their court dates.

Mexicans continue to arrive in much larger numbers than citizens of other countries. Apprehensions have remained mostly stable for three years, officials said, and 90 percent of illegal immigrants from Mexico are returned within hours of capture. But the number of non-Mexicans crossing the border illegally has soared after smugglers learned that illegal immigrants were being released upon being seized, officials said.

The officials said the number of illegal immigrants released with court notices would continue to decrease as new beds become available. Speedier deportations will also free up beds, they added.

A study released last fall by the Congressional Research Service, an arm of Congress, said officials would still "not have enough beds to accommodate every O.T.M." this year, even with the added slots.

Some immigration agents fear that the bed shortage will worsen in the spring and summer, when illegal immigrants' crossings typically increase. Officials acknowledge that the shortage of detention space has forced them to detain some groups of illegal immigrants, primarily Central Americans, who arrive in the largest numbers, while releasing others.

But even with the difficulties, officials say they are moving more aggressively than before.

The number of people processed through expedited removal increased to 10,607 in the first quarter of this fiscal year, up from 4,227 in the first quarter of last year, official figures show.

Although the number of illegal immigrants released on their own recognizance remains high, it is not as high as last year. In the 2005 fiscal year, 70 percent of illegal immigrants classified as "other than Mexican" were released.

" 'Catch and release' has been reduced dramatically," said the chief of the Border Patrol, David V. Aguilar.

Chief Aguilar said officials were working to address the shortage of detention space and to streamline deportations by encouraging nations to accept their citizens more readily when they are returned.

"The commitment has been to go from a situation of 'catch and release' to a situation of 'catch and remove,' " Chief Aguilar said. "And that's the direction we're moving in."

A spokeswoman for the White House, Erin Healy, said President Bush was encouraged by the decline in the number of Brazilians who have been seized.

"When illegal immigrants know they will be caught and sent home promptly," Ms. Healy said, "they're going to be less likely to cross the border illegally in the first place."

T. J. Bonner, the president of the union of Border Patrol agents, said many agents remained frustrated.

"They're claiming that they're placing everyone into expedited removal, and that that will solve the problem," Mr. Bonner said. "The truth is that we simply don't have the detention space to hang on to people in any substantive manner to deter anyone from coming into this country."

The problem has ballooned as tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from countries like Brazil and El Salvador, along with others as far afield as India and Romania, wade into the rushing river here in hopes of reaching the United States.

In the 2003 fiscal year, 49,545 illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico were seized crossing the Southwestern border. By the 2005 fiscal year, which ended last September, the figure had jumped to 155,000. In addition, concerns have been growing about the possibility of border crossings by gang members and terrorists.

Border Patrol agents say smugglers have been quick to find loopholes in the new rules.

In recent months, some illegal immigrants have begun claiming to be from El Salvador because a court ruling from the 1980's, when civil war wracked that country, requires officials to allow Salvadorans to see judges before deportation. Domestic security officials are trying to change that.

And the shortage of detention space for families has led to an increase in the number of unrelated illegal immigrants who say they are families.

"It filters back," said Ed Payan, assistant chief of the Border Patrol station here. "They know who is being let go."

Such loopholes have left holes in what many frustrated agents had hoped would be a consistent, tough policy. The problem has led to startling divergences of fate for illegal immigrants in the hands of the Border Patrol.

Mauricio Peña and Floridalma Escalante Marroquín said they had made much of the long, hard journey through Mexico toward the United States together. Mr. Peña had hoped to find work in Houston. Ms. Escalante had hoped to reunite with a sister in Los Angeles. In January, they were caught heading into Texas. They figured they would be sent home.

But Mr. Peña, 19, is from Honduras. Ms. Escalante, 35, is from El Salvador. He was shipped to a detention center to be processed for deportation. Ms. Escalante was released to the streets, free to find her way in the United States.

Rice Explains Aid Restructuring to USAID Employees

By Bradley Graham and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 20, 2006; A02



Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice faced a barrage of pointed questions yesterday from employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development, who expressed concerns that an administration move to centralize the management of foreign assistance will weaken the agency and place short-term political goals ahead of long-term development aims.

Rice took the unusual step of holding a town-hall-style meeting with hundreds of USAID employees after announcing the creation of a high-level State Department position to oversee all foreign aid programs.

Rice said the position -- director of foreign assistance -- is intended to bring greater coherence and efficiency to a broad patchwork of often overlapping assistance programs that now total about $19 billion. Randall L. Tobias, a former pharmaceuticals industry executive who has headed the administration's global AIDS program for the past 2 1/2 years, was named to fill the position and also to serve as the new USAID administrator.

The moves eased fears at USAID that the agency, set up in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy, would be merged into the State Department. But it prompted other worries, voiced in the questioning, that USAID's strategic planning role might end up diminished and that the agency's corps of experienced foreign aid specialists might be superseded by Foreign Service officers.

In her nearly hour-long appearance before a standing-room-only crowd gathered in the cavernous Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium next to USAID headquarters, Rice offered assurances that USAID will continue to play a key role in setting development strategy and that the administration will maintain a long-term view on development issues. "If we have a short-term perspective, we will fail," she said.

Several longtime USAID officials who heard Rice said in brief interviews afterward that her decision to hold the meeting was itself a significant gesture, but they also made clear that they will be withholding final judgment about the revamped management structure.

"The plan, in broad strokes, makes sense," said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the interview was not authorized. "But the devil is going to be in the details."

The choice of Tobias drew some criticism. He has little experience in development issues other than the anti-AIDS effort, and some activists have faulted him for placing less emphasis on condom use than on abstinence to reduce the spread of AIDS, and for moving too slowly to promote inexpensive generic drugs.

But his supporters in the administration and in Congress stressed his management skills yesterday. "He has proven in his private and public sector responsibilities that he can successfully manage big organizations and complicated programs," Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.

The foreign assistance initiative is part of a series of moves announced by Rice this week under the banner "transformational diplomacy." Her plan, announced Wednesday, to redeploy U.S. diplomats from Europe to difficult assignments in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere received some backing yesterday from the American Foreign Service Association.

J. Anthony Holmes, the association's president, said his group supports the plan in general but is concerned about the security arrangements for diplomats who will be placed in large cities away from capitals. He also questioned whether the government has the financial resources to carry out Rice's vision.

Rice said 100 Foreign Service officers due to rotate into posts in Europe and Washington this summer will get new assignments. Holmes said a number of the officers are halfway through training for such difficult languages as Russian and Polish, and so the new assignments will be "very disruptive for families and individuals."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Sen. Kennedy Speaks on the Nomination of Samuel Alito Washington Post
Well, thank you, Melody, for that generous introduction, and thank you for your vision and effective leadership on so many issues of such paramount concern to the nation. Our Judiciary Committee in in the Senate today just isn't the same without you. I'm grateful to the Center for American Progress for hosting us here today, and I commend you for the difference you've already begun to make. Keep up the great work. It's an honor to be here to address all of you on the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. As you know so well, the stakes for our nation could not be higher. This is the vote of a generation. If confirmed, this nominee will have an enormous impact on our basic rights and liberties for years and even decades to come. The Alito hearings, as well as those for Chief Justice Roberts before them, show the need for change in the way that we learn a nominee's views on our laws and the Constitution. Instead of a free and honest exchange of ideas, our hearings have become stylized and choreographed appearances in which the nominees are coached to say as little as possible. And when it comes to lifetime appointments to the highest court in the land, surely the American people deserve better. After all, the Supreme Court is the guardian of our most cherished rights and freedoms. They are protected by the most solemn promises of the Constitution and symbolized in four eloquent words inscribed above the entrance to the Supreme Court: "Equal Justice Under Law. " Those words are meant to guarantee that our courts will be an independent check against abuses of power by the other two branches of government. It is a commitment that our courts will always be a place where the poor and the powerless and the underprivileged can stand on equal footing with the wealthy and the powerful and the privileged. And the Senate has a constitutional duty to ensure that any person confirmed to the court will uphold that clear ideal. The nomination of Judge Alito is particularly significant because it comes at a time of new challenges for the nation and for the court. Suddenly, in this new century, we are faced with unprecedented claims by the White House for sweeping expansions of presidential power that are grave threats to the rule of law. Despite progress in recent decades, we continue to face serious inequalities and injustices in our society, as demonstrated so clearly by the immense tragedy a few months ago in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. We face new controversies over governmental intrusion into people's private lives -- from the interference with personal medical decisions on how long a loved one should be kept on life support, to new attempts to limit or even deny a woman's reproductive decisions. KENNEDY: We face new attacks on the progress that we have made in civil rights. The signs proclaiming "whites only" may be gone, but we know that discrimination and bigotry in countless other manifestations still blights our societies and limits opportunity. One of the most important of all the responsibilities of the Supreme Court is to enforce the constitutional limitations on presidential power. A justice must have the courage and the wisdom to speak truth to power, to tell even the president that he has gone too far. Chief Justice John Marshall was that kind of justice when he told President Jefferson that he had exceeded his war-making powers under the Constitution. Justice Robert Jackson was that kind of justice when he told President Truman that he could not misuse the Korean War as an excuse to take over the nation's steel mills. Chief Justice Warren Burger was that kind of justice when he told President Nixon to turn over the White House tapes on Watergate. And Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, was that kind of justice when she told President Bush that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens. We need that kind of justice on the court as much as ever. For today, we have a president who believes that torture can be an acceptable practice despite laws and treaties that explicitly prohibit it; we have a president who claims the power to arrest American citizens on American soil, jail them for years without the benefit of counsel or access to the courts; we have a president who claims that he has the authority to spy on American citizens on American soil without a court order. KENNEDY: The record of Judge Alito is clear and ominous. Examine his writings. Read the transcript of the hearings. Consider the cases he's decided. The record demonstrates that we cannot count on Judge Alito to blow the whistle when the president is out of bounds. Judge Alito is a longstanding advocate of the expansion of executive power, even at the expense of individual liberty. His statements show that he favors a far greater role for the president than is currently recognized by the Supreme Court. In his now notorious job application to the Justice Department, he cast doubts on the role of the courts as well. He said, "I believe very strongly ... in the supremacy of the elected branches of government." He never explained his reason for advocating such an extraordinary departure from the basic understanding of the Constitution, that the courts are intended to be co-equal with the president and the Congress. And when asked about the extreme statement, he said only that it was "inapt." That's certainly true, but it does not begin to tell the American people why he would make a statement so at odds with basic system of checks and balances that have guided our democracy for two centuries. Judge Alito's testimony gave us no clue, but one thing is clear. If the elected branches become supreme, the Supreme Court will not be able to fulfill its historic role of enforcing constitutional limits on presidential power. His statement may have been music to the ears of the Reagan Justice Department, but it was a shock of a thousand volts to all of us who care about our democracy and the rule of law. Judge Alito's consistent advocacy of what he called "the gospel" of the "unitary executive" is just as troubling. Professor Steven Calabresi, one of the originators of the unitary executive theory and a co-founder of the Federalist Society, has acknowledged that if the concept is implemented, it would produce a radical change in how the government operates. As he wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1992, "The practical consequences of this theory is dramatic: It renders unconstitutional independent agencies and counsels to the extent that they exercise discretionary executive power." Independent agencies, such as the Federal Election Commission, created to see that our voting laws are properly enforced and interpreted, would be subject to the president's control. KENNEDY: The same is true of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is charged with preventing corporate abuses such as we recently saw in the case of Enron, with tragic consequences for American workers. It would compromise the historic independence of the Federal Reserve Board, giving the president unprecedented and dangerous power to manipulate the economy. It would compromise the mission of every agency created to protect hardworking Americans from the exploitation of those who care only about profits, not the health and the welfare and the very safety of their employees. Nor is the impact of this bizarre theory limited to the independence of administrative agencies. It has a major effect on other assertions of presidential power as well. Discussing President Bush's aggressive claims for unprecedented executive power in the field of national security, even Professor Calabresi stated recently that without accepting such a theory, there would be no way that President Bush's anti-terrorism policies could be constitutionally justified. During his confirmation hearing, Judge Alito attempted to downplay his extreme view of executive power. But he did not disavow them. He refused to candidly discuss his current views of the constitutional limits on presidential power. Instead, he pointed to the Supreme Court's rejection of the unitary executive theory. He cited the court's decision affirming that independent agencies who investigate executive branch abuses can be removed from the presidential control. But a speech he gave in 2000 to the Federalist Society provides an insight into his real view. He stated that he believed that the theory of unitary executive best captures the meaning of the Constitution's text and structure. He went on to strongly criticize those rulings rejecting the theory of the unitary executive. KENNEDY: He then outlined a strategy for bypassing the court's precedents, including the same independent counsel case he claimed to support in testimony before the Judiciary Committee last week. When Judge Alito made that speech, he was not applying for a job in the Justice Department. He'd already been serving as an appellate judge for 10 years. The timing of the speech to the Federalist Society may be significant. In November 2000, the Florida recount was on and the right wing was salivating over the prospect that George Bush would prevail in that close election. Judge Alito may well have been submitting his application for a Supreme Court nomination. Judge Alito also failed to satisfactorily explain his controversial advice as a Justice Department official that "the president's understanding of a bill should be just as important as that of Congress." He recommended that when the President signs a bill passed by Congress, he should issue a signing statement announcing his own interpretation of the law in the hope of influencing the way courts would construe the law. That proposal was clearly the recommendation of an activist seeking to reduce the power of Congress and expand the presidential power beyond its traditional boundary. The fundamental role of Congress is to pass laws and define what those laws mean in the text of the statutes themselves or in their legislative history. That power is exclusively for Congress, not the president. As Justice Hugo Black wrote in the steel seizure case, "In the framework of our Constitution, the President's power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker. The Constitution limits his functions in the lawmaking process to the recommending of laws he thinks wise and vetoing of laws he thinks are bad." Some years ago, the Supreme Court rejected the line item veto as unconstitutional. KENNEDY: It reaffirmed Justice Black's view that presidents may either veto or sign bills that Congress passes. They cannot pick and choose the provisions they will enact. But the kinds of signing statements that Judge Alito advocates amount to a back-door line item veto of congressional actions. President Bush showed this with his recent signing statement on a bill that contained Senator McCain's ban on torture. In that statement, the president reserved the right to ignore the McCain requirements and even asserted that in certain circumstances his actions are beyond the reach of the courts. These views exalting presidential power are troubling enough on their own. But they are also reflected in Judge Alito's decisions as a judge. His record on the bench only reinforces the deep concerns raised by his broad expressions of support for executive power. His deference to executive power is especially clear in cases where persons claimed the government violated the privacy and security of their homes. He refuses to enforce core constitutional standards protecting individuals against low-level government officials in routine situations, and there is no reason to believe he will say no to a president who violates individual rights under the cloak of national security. Time and again in cases involving claims of privacy, security, and freedom from unjustified searches and seizures under the Bill of Rights, he has accepted the government's defense. That was true in his dissent defending a strip search of a 10-year-old girl without a warrant. Even now, when asked about the decision, Judge Alito repeatedly refuses to admit that he was wrong. Michael Chertoff, the former head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, who is now President Bush's secretary of homeland security, served with Judge Alito in that case, and he sharply criticized Judge Alito's view as threatening to turn the requirement of a search warrant into little more than a rubber stamp. In still another case, Judge Alito ruled that it was reasonable for marshals carrying out an unresisted civil eviction to pump a sawed-off shotgun at a farming family sitting in their living room. The family had committed no crime. A fellow judge on the case dissented in calling the marshals' conduct "Gestapo-like," since "seven marshals had detained and terrorized a family and friends, and ransacked a home, while carrying out an unresisted civil eviction." Yet Judge Alito's decision meant that the family never got a trial before a jury of their peers. KENNEDY: In another area of controversy, his views on issues of particular concern to women should give every woman pause, from his role in striking down the key provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act, to his opposition to the privacy of women's reproductive decisions. He was unwilling to accept the constitutional right of privacy recognized by the current Supreme Court. Judge Alito's testimony failed to resolve the very serious concerns that he's itching to overturn Roe v. Wade. He said that he will keep an "open mind" on the issue. But there is no comfort to those who know his record. The record includes his 1985 memo to the Reagan administration's solicitor general. And in that memo, he advised that the best way to undermine Roe was by gradually chipping away at its protections, and we have every reason to believe that he will do exactly that if confirmed to the Supreme Court. On the court of appeals he was required to follow Supreme Court decisions, but as a member of the Supreme Court, he'll be free to overrule those precedents when he disagrees, no matter how well- established and longstanding. A third area of major concern is Judge Alito's record on civil rights. He has a 15-year record on the court of appeals, and the facts are inescapable. The weight of his record in job discrimination cases is against the victims of discrimination. Time and again, he voted to make it more difficult than the law intended for victims to prevail in court or uphold a verdict in their favor. His written opinions on racial discrimination in employment have consistently ruled against African Americans on the merits of claims alleging such discrimination. During the hearings, his supporters pointed out that he joined opinion by other judges supporting such claims in two cases and issued procedural opinions supporting such claims in several other cases. But on opinions he has authored, he has issued no less than 30 decisions dismissing job discrimination claims. KENNEDY: And in many of the cases where he voted against the victim, his fellow judges ruled that they had a valid claim of discrimination. In one case, a hotel worker claimed that she was denied promotion because she was an African-American. The 3rd Circuit held she was entitled to a trial because the employer had falsely stated that she was unqualified and evaluated her qualifications differently compared to white applicants. But Judge Alito would have denied her the chance to prove her case. His colleagues -- his colleagues -- on the court wrote that his dissent would have "eviscerated" the employee's statutory right to be free from job discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In another case, in which a disabled person sought physical access to medical school under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the court's majority wrote that "few if any Rehabilitation Act cases would survive" if Judge Alito's view prevailed. In another case, a jury ruled that a woman had provided enough evidence to show she had wrongly lost her job because of sex discrimination. Ten members of the 3rd Circuit who heard the case on the appeal agreed. Only Judge Alito argued that she hadn't proved adequately the discrimination -- only Judge Alito. In still another dissent, Judge Alito voted to deny a mentally retarded young man the chance to challenge severe abuse. In his very first job out of high school, he had suffered vicious sexual harassment -- held down in front of a group of workers, subjected to sexual touching, feared he would have been raped. The employer didn't dispute the facts. Yet Judge Alito would have denied him a trial. Judge Alito even dissented from a ruling prohibiting the removal of African-American jurors because of their race. It's unbelievable in today's America, in a case involving a minority defendant, that Judge Alito was willing to ignore overwhelming evidence that the government insisted on an all-white jury. These cases are not isolated instances. It's all in the record. Law professors at Judge Alito's alma mater, Yale Law School, analyzed more than 400 of his published opinions and concluded: "In the area of civil rights law, Judge Alito consistently has used procedural and evidentiary standards to rule against female, minority, age and disability claimants..." "In the context of these civil rights cases, Judge Alito seems relatively willing to defer to the claims of employers, the government, over the individuals advancing civil rights claims." KENNEDY: And other objective observers who have examined Judge Alito's record have reached a similar conclusion. According to an analysis by the respected University of Chicago law professor, Cass Sunstein, said, "when there is a conflict between institutions and individual rights, Judge Alito's dissenting opinions argued against individual rights 84 percent of the time. In almost all of the cases in which Judge Alito dissented in order to reject an individual rights claim, he was sitting on a court with a majority of Republican appointees." A comprehensive review of Judge Alito's published opinions by Knight-Ridder similarly found that Judge Alito has "seldom sided" with "an employee alleging discrimination" and "almost never found a government search unconstitutional..." An analysis published by The Washington Post found that "routinely, he defers to government officials and others in positions of authority" and has "very little sympathy for those asserting rights against the government." In sum, in case after case, Judge Alito's decisions demonstrate a systematic tilt toward the powerful institutions and against individuals attempting to vindicate their rights. He cites a few instances in which he has decided for the little guy, but they are few and far between. Justice Lewis Powell captured the spirit of America best when he said: "Equal justice under law is not merely a caption on the facade of the Supreme Court building. It is perhaps the most inspiring idea of our society. It is one of the ends for which our entire legal system exists." In evaluating Supreme Court nominees, there are no more important questions than whether they are dedicated to equal justice under law. Judge Alito is a highly intelligent man, but his record does not show a judge who is willing to enforce the constitutional limitations on executive power when government officials intrude on individual rights. His record does not show a judge who is open to the claims of vulnerable individuals asking only justice against powerful institutions. His record does not show a judge who upholds the liberty and privacy of citizens seeking to protect their fundamental rights. His record just does not show a judge who is committed to equal justice under law. That is why I oppose his confirmation to the Supreme Court, and I fervently hope that the Senate will do so as well. Thank you very much.
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One of Iraq's most influential Sunni Arab leaders called on Friday for American journalist Jill Carroll to be freed as her kidnappers' deadline expires. "Release this journalist who strived for Iraq, defended Iraqis and condemned the war in Iraq," Adnan Dulaimi, head of the General Conference of the Iraqi People, a political grouping, told a news conference in Baghdad. Carroll had just left Dulaimi's office on Jan. 7 when she was abducted by gunmen. The kidnappers set a deadline of Friday for killing her if authorities did not release women prisoners.
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Authorities say two workers are unaccounted for following a fire that erupted in an underground coal mine late Thursday in Mellville, West Virginia - about 180 miles southwest of the Sago mine where tragedy struck early this month. The fire broke out at the Aracoma Mine in Mellville, about 60 miles southwest of Charleston, according to Lara Ramsburg, spokeswoman for Gov. Joe Manchin. Jeff Gillenwater, a spokesman for the mine's owner, Massey Energy, said the blaze began on a conveyer belt inside the mine and the mine itself was not on fire.
Congress to Examine Mine Safety FOX News
Boxes might save miners Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
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Bin Laden threatens US but also offers a 'truce' Globe and Mail
Breaking a yearlong silence, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden threatened new attacks on the United States yesterday, but he also offered a truce if Americans would reject President George W. Bush's continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The President scoffed at the suggestion. "We do not negotiate with terrorists," his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said. "We put them out of business. The terrorists started this war and the President made it clear that we will end it at a time and place of our choosing." If nothing else, the audio tape, portions of which were broadcast by Al-Jazeera, proved that Mr. bin Laden is still alive, capable of rallying his followers and willing to wage his own war for hearts and minds in both the Muslim world and the United States, where anti-war sentiment is growing. He called for an end to hostilities, saying, "Both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan." The White House heaped scorn on the offer and the al-Qaeda leader's latest claims, acidly noting that the last tape from Mr. bin Laden, 13 months ago, urged Iraqis not to vote. Since then, Iraqis have twice defied skeptics and the threats of insurgents to vote in overwhelming numbers. As top Bush administration officials reacted to the tape by arguing it showed that al-Qaeda's leadership is weak and under severe pressure, Mr. bin Laden aimed his sometimes lofty message past the President and directly to Americans, urging them to rally against the war that he said "was enriching only a few." "Your President is misinterpreting public opinion polls that show that the vast majority of you support the withdrawal of your forces from Iraq," the al-Qaeda leader said in the tape. Mr. Bush's approval ratings and public support for the war have sagged to all-time lows in recent months as the grim milestone of 2,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq was passed, and the insurgency showed no signs of abating despite massive Iraqi turnout at the polls and a mammoth effort to deploy tens of thousands of newly trained Iraqi security forces alongside the more than 140,000 U.S. troops in the country. Undeterred, Mr. Bush has dismissed opposition and international calls to pull U.S. troops from Iraq. "We are winning. Clearly, al-Qaeda and the terrorists are on the run," Mr. McClelland said yesterday. Mr. bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi who embraced radical Islam, formed al-Qaeda and committed himself to an armed struggle to oust infidels from the Muslim holy lands in the Middle East, has been a heavily hunted fugitive for years. Yesterday's tape broke the longest silence since before the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings that vaulted al-Qaeda from a shadowy terrorist organization to the target of Mr. Bush's open-ended ideological war. The tape, authenticated as being a recording of Mr. bin Laden's voice by the Central Intelligence Agency, includes references to July's London bombers and events in late November, suggesting it was recorded last month. But there were no references to the Iraqi election on Dec 15 or to the missile strike this week that killed several al-Qaeda operatives but apparently missed its intended target, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is Mr. bin Laden's deputy. A white-robed Mr. bin Laden was last seen in an October of 2004 videotape just before the U.S. presidential election. He said then that Americans could avoid being attacked again if they retreated from Muslim lands. In yesterday's tape, the offer was for a broader truce; albeit one short on details. Although Al-Jazeera broadcast only excerpts of the 10-minute tape, it published an Arabic text of it on its website. In one key passage, Mr. bin Laden seems to be extending an olive branch to ordinary Americans. "Based on the substance of the polls, which indicate Americans do not want to fight Muslims on Muslim land, nor do they want Muslims to fight them on their land, we do not mind offering a long-term truce based on just conditions that we will stand by," he said. "There is nothing wrong with this solution except that it deprives the influential people and warlords in America from hundreds of billions of dollars." Vice-President Dick Cheney was dismissive of the offer. "I'm not sure what he is offering by way of a truce," said Mr. Cheney, perhaps the most hawkish of Mr. Bush's trusted advisers. "I don't think anyone would believe him." If nothing else, the tape will erase notions, fed by the Bush administration, that Mr. bin Laden is dead. Former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, who has been fiercely critical of the Bush administration, said "the initial significance of this [tape] is that he's still alive." Beyond that, he told the Associated Press, "the only new element in his statement is that they are planning an attack soon on the United States." The symbolic importance of Mr. bin Laden may be more significant than his ability to actually run al-Qaeda or direct operations, one analyst said. "Al-Qaeda is becoming more of a brand name than an actual organization, or even a movement. So long as Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Mr. al-Zawahiri, remain at large, they will serve as figureheads, providing moral support and broad strategic guidance to the fighters dispersed across the globe who will do the actual training, planning and execution of operations," said Fred Burton, vice-president for counterterrorism and corporate security at Statfor, a private intelligence firm. He also suggested the offer of a truce and the reasoning for the lack of attacks against the United States -- along with the usual threats of an impending attack against the United States -- indicate a "reactive and defensive posture on the part of the militant Islamist group."

In bin Laden's own words
The following are edited excerpts from a new audiotape of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in which he appears to address the American people: 'My message to you is about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to end them. . . . [The] war in Iraq is raging with no let-up, and operations in Afghanistan are escalating in our favour, thank God. . . . Pentagon figures show the number of your dead and wounded is increasing not to mention the massive material losses, the destruction of the soldiers' morale there. . . . . . .Despite all the barbaric methods, they have not broken the fierceness of the resistance. The mujahedeen, thank God, are increasing in number and strength. . . . The mujahedeen, with God's grace, have managed repeatedly to penetrate all security measures adopted by the unjust allied countries. The proof of that is the explosions you have seen in the capitals of the European nations who are in this aggressive coalition. The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. The operations are under preparation and you will see them in your homes, . . . with God's permission. We don't mind offering you a long-term truce on fair conditions that we adhere to (we are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat) so both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce, so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war. There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America who have supported Bush's election campaign with billions of dollars -- which lets us understand the insistence by Bush and his gang to carry on with war. If you [Americans] are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you. . . . Finally, I say that war will go either in our favour or yours. If it is the former, it means your loss and your shame forever, and it is headed in this course. If it is the latter, read history! We are people who . . . will seek revenge all our lives. The nights and days will not pass without us taking vengeance like on Sept. 11, God permitting. As for us, we have nothing to lose. A swimmer in the ocean does not fear the rain. . . . Don't let your strength and modern arms fool you. They win a few battles but lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are much better. We were patient in fighting the Soviet Union with simple weapons for 10 years, and we bled their economy and now they are nothing. In that there is a lesson for you.'
Is defiant tape a sign of weakness? Telegraph.co.uk
City fury as Osama threatens attacks New York Daily News
New York Times - DetNews.com - CNN - Bloomberg - all 1,740 related »

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January 20, 2006
Google Resists U.S. Subpoena of Search Data
By KATIE HAFNER and MATT RICHTEL
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 19 - The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to compel Google, the Internet search giant, to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries as part of the government's effort to uphold an online pornography law.

Google has been refusing the request since a subpoena was first issued last August, even as three of its competitors agreed to provide information, according to court documents made public this week. Google asserts that the request is unnecessary, overly broad, would be onerous to comply with, would jeopardize its trade secrets and could expose identifying information about its users.

The dispute with Google comes as the government is moving aggressively on several fronts to obtain data on Internet activity to achieve its law enforcement goals, from domestic security to the prosecution of online crime. Under the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, for example, the Justice Department has demanded records on library patrons' Internet use.

Those efforts have encountered resistance on privacy grounds.

The government's move in the Google case, however, is different in its aims. Rather than seeking data on individuals, it says it is trying to establish a profile of Internet use that will help it defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law that would impose tough criminal penalties on individuals whose Web sites carried material deemed harmful to minors.

The law has faced repeated legal challenges. Two years ago, the Supreme Court upheld an injunction blocking its enforcement, returning the case to a district court for further examination of Internet-filtering technology that might be an alternative in achieving the law's aims.

The government's motion to compel Google's compliance was filed on Wednesday in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., near Google's headquarters in Mountain View. The subpoena and the government's motion were reported on Thursday by The San Jose Mercury News.

In addition to records of a week of search queries, which could amount to billions of search terms, the Google subpoena seeks a random list of a million Web addresses in its index.

Charles Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said on Thursday that three Google competitors in Internet search technology - America Online, Yahoo and MSN, Microsoft's online service - had complied with subpoenas in the case.

Mr. Miller declined to say exactly how the data would be used, but according to the government's filings, it would help estimate the prevalence of material that could be deemed harmful to minors and the effectiveness of filtering software. Opponents of the pornography law contend that filtering software could protect minors effectively enough to make the law unnecessary.

The government's motion calls for Google to surrender the information within 21 days of court approval.

Although the government has modified its demands since last year, Google said Thursday that it would continue to fight. "Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and their demand for information overreaches," said Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel, referring to government lawyers. "We intend to resist their motion vigorously."

Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was hired by the Justice Department to analyze search engine data in the case, said in legal documents that search engine data provided crucial insight into information on the Internet.

"Google is one of the most popular search engines," he wrote in a court document related to the case. Thus, he said, Google's databases of Web addresses and user searches "are directly relevant."

But Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online industry newsletter, questioned the need for a subpoena. "Is this really something the government needs Google to help them with?" he said.

As for Google's rivals, MSN declined to speak directly to the case but released a statement saying it generally "works closely with law enforcement officials."

Mary Osako, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said the company complied with the subpoena "on a limited basis." And Andrew Weinstein, a spokesman for AOL, said that company gave the Justice Department a generic list of anonymous search terms from a one-day period.

Susan P. Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York, said she could understand why the companies complied. "There's this real perception that if you're not with us you're against us," she said. "So the major companies will cooperate with enormously burdensome requests just to avoid future vengeance being wreaked on them" by the Justice Department.

In its brief history, Google has made "Don't be evil" an operating principle, even as it has come to endure scrutiny and criticism over its increasing inroads into a variety of businesses beyond Web searches, from advertising to mapping.

And Google and its rivals have been criticized for their business practices in China, where Google and MSN have filtered keywords like "human rights" and "democracy" out of their search-engine results. Last fall, it was revealed that Yahoo had cooperated with authorities seeking the identity of a Chinese e-mail subscriber who had distributed a government warning about protests; he is now serving a 10-year prison term.

While its court filings against the Justice Department subpoena have emphasized the burden of compliance and threat to its trade secrets, Google also pointed to a chilling effect on its customers.

"Google's acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services," it said in an October letter to the Justice Department. "This is not a perception Google can accept. And one can envision scenarios where queries alone could reveal identifying information about a specific Google user, which is another outcome that Google cannot accept."

For its part, the Justice Department said the data received from Google's rivals showed that the search query information did not contain "any additional personal identifying information" and that trade secrets would be protected under procedures at the trial court.

"Google thus should have no difficulty in complying in the same way as its competitors have," the government's motion said.

Critics of the effort to subpoena Google say the immediate issue is not pornography or privacy, but whether the government has established its need for the information.

"The government's attitude, apparently, is that it's entitled to information without justification," said Aden Fine, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has led the fight against the 1998 pornography law. "Like everyone else in litigation, they need to justify their request for information."

Even as the government has yet to put the 1998 law into effect, the pornography industry has faced a legal offensive on other fronts. Congress in recent years has increased the resources and sharpened the laws available to the Justice Department to go after makers of hard-core videos and other content.

At the same time, though, the industry is booming, recording $12.6 billion in revenue in 2005 from distribution of sexually explicit content, and from other forms of entertainment, like strip clubs. A big reason for the growth is technology, with sales from Internet distribution hitting $2.5 billion in 2005, according to testimony given to the Senate on Thursday.

American Web sites that show explicit content get as many as 60 million visitors a day, according to testimony given to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation by Paul Cambria, general counsel for the Adult Freedom Foundation, an organization that represents the interests of the pornography industry.

In fighting the 1998 law, the civil liberties union has argued that whether or not pornography is available on the Internet, the law is unconstitutional because it will limit the distribution of acceptable forms of free speech. Under the law, Web site operators face criminal charges for publishing sexually explicit material unless they have a way of verifying that viewers are over 17.

Whatever the courts ultimately decide on the pornography law at issue, however, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the Google case pointed to a larger struggle for the identity of the Internet.

"Search engines are at the center of that battle, both here and in other countries," said Professor Wu. "By asserting its power over search engines, using threats of force, the government can directly affect what the Internet experience is. For while Google is fighting the subpoena, it's clear that if they lose, they will comply."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Tutorial on How to Find the Real Numbers
Just How Big is the Defense Budget?
By WINSLOW T. WHEELER

On Dec. 21, 2005, Congress passed a defense appropriations bill, which according to the press releases of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, and many news articles subsequently written, funded "defense spending" for the United States for the current fiscal year, 2006. The impression made by the press releases and the news articles was that the $453 billion advertised in the bill, H.R. 2863, constitutes America's defense budget for 2006.[1]

That would be quite incorrect. In fact, the total amount to be spent for the Department of Defense in 2006 is $13 billion to $63 billion more, the latter figure assuming full funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you also count, non-DOD "national defense" costs, add another $21 billion, and, if you count defense related security costs, such as homeland security, the congressional press release numbers are more than $200 billion wrong.

Having observed, and in past years participated in, the obscuration of just how much the United States actually spends for defense, this author believes it would assist the debate over the defense budget in this country by identifying its actual size. The "defense spending" bill enacted in December had the title, "Making appropriations to the Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2006 and for other purposes." It was a little heavy on those "other purposes" [2] and it did not comprise all the money the Defense Department received and will receive for 2006.

To peer through the opaqueness of congressional defense appropriations, it is necessary to run through the numbers; all the numbers. The first step is to understand the "defense spending" bill, H.R. 2863, as enacted:

* Division A of the bill appropriated $453.3 billion, but not all of it for DOD. $522 million went to the CIA for unclassified "intelligence community management" and to the Coast Guard. This makes the DOD total in Division A $452.8 billion.[3]

* Division B, Title I, Chapter 1 of the bill adds to DOD $4.4 billion for its expenses to rescue and relieve civilians and to undo damage to DOD contractors from Hurricane Katrina.

* Chapter 7 of Division B adds another $1.4 billion to rebuild DOD facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

* Division B, Title II, Chapter 2 adds $130 million for DOD work for protection from the threat of the Avian Flu pandemic.

* Division B, Title III, Chapter 2 cuts the DOD budget by $80 million in rescissions (cancelled spending). More importantly, Chapter 8 in this title cuts DOD, and all other federal spending, except the Department of Veterans Affairs and "emergency" spending, by one percent "across the board." The cut is mandated to occur in every single program of the affected accounts, nothing is exempted. The reduction to DOD is $4.0 billion. The actual total for DOD in the bill is $454.8 billion, over a billion more than what the appropriations committees implied.

But that's not all for the Defense Department's budget. Add $12.2 billion for military construction.

For reasons of politics and jurisdiction, Congress appropriates money for the Defense Department in two separate bills: the Department of Defense Appropriations bill and the Military Construction Appropriations bill -- which these days is also wrapped in with other spending, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs. The "MilCon" bill funds military bases in the states and districts of almost every member of Congress.

A major Capitol Hill activity is writing press releases for local newspapers about the goodies the senators and representatives add for their military facilities back home. They also write press releases about the goodies they add in the DOD appropriations bill. (Having two bills to write press releases about is better than one.) So, that gets DOD spending for 2006 to $466.7 billion. That's all, right? Nope. Add about another $50 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is already $50 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan in the $466.7 billion appropriated in H.R. 2863. However, war spending in 2005 was over $100 billion, and most expect 2006 to cost at least as much. Nonetheless, Congress decided to provide just $50 billion for ongoing military operations, about enough money for the first six months of the fiscal year.

It will run out in about March 2006.

Before then, Congress and the president will need to add more, up to another $50 billion. It is that amount that Pentagon and congressional officials privately say they anticipate will be added in a "supplemental" appropriations request in early 2006.[4] OK, that gets the total to $516.7 billion. Done now, right? Nope. There are other defense activities in the Department of Energy to keep America's nuclear arsenal reliable and effective and to develop new nuclear weapons.

Add another $16.4 billion. There are also defense related costs in the Selective Service, the National Defense Stockpile, parts of the General Services Administration, and other miscellany. Add still another $4.7 billion. That gets the total to $537.8 billion. This figure constitutes the "National Defense" budget function (known to budget geeks as budget function "050") in presidential budget requests and congressional budget resolutions. You may also want to count even more spending, such as the costs of the Department of Homeland Security, which is certainly national defense in a generic sense. Add about $41 billion. [5]

You might also want to consider some of the human consequences of current and previous wars; add about $68 billion for Veterans Affairs. Also, consider adding the costs of reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan which counts in the State Department's budget, plus all the other costs for international security, diplomacy, and foreign aid, as administered by Condoleezza Rice; add about $23 billion.

If you count all these costs, the total is $669.8 billion. This amount easily outdoes the rest of the world. In fact, if you count just the costs of the National Defense budget function, the approximate $538 billion we spend is $29 billion more than the $509 billion the entire rest of the world spends. [6]

Pick the number you believe to be most appropriate for "defense spending" in 2006. Presumably, you will not be using the $453 billion widely advertised by Congress and the press. Now, there can be an accurate debate on whether this budget is too large or too small. Please proceed.

Confused by this welter of numbers? Not surprising; below are the important parts.


U.S. Defense and Security Spending Fiscal Year 2006

H.R. 2863 Grand total for the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, (but not all Congress has appropriated to DOD) $454.5 Billion

H.R. 2528, Military Construction Appropriations: $12.2 Billion

Total Appropriated to Date to Dept. of Defense: 466.7

Likely 2006 Supplemental (Possible amount to complete Iraq/Afghanistan war costs for 2006) $50 billion

Likely Total for DOD for 2006 $516.7 billion

Department of Energy/Defense Activities Appropriations (Funds nuclear weapons activities): $16.4 Billion

Other non-DOD defense activities (Funds Selective Service, National Defense Stockpile, etc.): $4.7 billion

Total for "National Defense" (Constitutes the National Defense Budget Function (Budget Function 050) in presidential budgets) $537.8 billion

Homeland Security (Approximate amount for non-DOD Homeland Security costs): $41 billion

Veterans Affairs $68 billion

International Security (Approximate amount for reconstruction aid, foreign arms sales, development assistance, etc.) $23 billion

Total for non-defense but security related costs $132 billion

Grand Total for All international security and defense costs $669.8


Winslow T. Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. He spent 31 years working for US Senators from both parties and the Government Accountability Office. He contributed an essay on the defense budget to CounterPunch's new book: Dime's Worth of Difference. Wheeler's new book, "The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security," is published by the Naval Institute Press.

1] See Dec. 17, 2005, U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, "Conferees Approve FY 2006 Defense Spending Bill." See first sentence in addition to the press release's title.

[2] The bill was passed by Congress on Dec. 21, 2005, and it was signed into law by the president on Dec. 30, 2005. It is now Public Law 109-148.

[3] To be entirely correct, significant amounts of the funds ostensibly appropriated to DOD are actually for the various U.S. intelligence agencies, some of them outside DOD. Last year, a defense official accidentally told the press the classified intelligence budget amounted to about $40 billion. The appropriations for intelligence agencies are buried in various parts of the DOD bill. For example, the account, "Other Research and Development," for the Air Force might have a few billion for CIA or NSA programs. The details of these intelligence appropriations are available only to members of Congress and a very small number of staffers. The paperwork resides in a secure vault in the Capitol building for those cleared members and staff to read; very few do.

[4] As this is written, the press is reporting DOD and OMB to be considering a supplemental of not $50 billion to finish out war funding in 2005 but $80 billion to $100 billion. Insiders report that the press has this wrong; it is more likely that DOD and OMB will ask for about $50 billion more for 2006 and a "down payment" for 2007 war costs of $40 billion to $50 billion.

[5] This number and those below for the VA and international security are not from congressional budget data but from "The Military Balance 2005-2006," International Institute for Strategic Studies, Routledge, 2005, p. 42 . The final actuals for these agencies in 2006, including not just appropriations but also "mandatory" or "entitlement" spending, is not available and likely will not be for a few weeks, as of this date.

[6] "SIPRI Yearbook 2005; Armaments, Disarmament and International Security," Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 310.

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January 19, 2006
Hillary Clinton Says White House Has Mishandled Iran
By JOHN O'NEIL
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton last night criticized the Bush administration for its response to Iran's nuclear program, saying it had chosen to "downplay" the crisis over the past several years.

In a speech at Princeton University, Mrs. Clinton, a New York Democrat, joined the Bush administration's call for sanctions against Iran, and also said that the threat of military action against nuclear sites should not be ruled out.

But she was critical of the administration for letting European nations take the lead in negotiations over the last several years.

"I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran because the White House chose to downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations," Ms. Clinton said, according to a transcript of the speech published by The Daily Princetonian. "I don't believe you face threats like Iran or North Korea by outsourcing it to others and standing on the sidelines."

Since 2002 Britain, France and Germany have led talks meant to assure that Tehran's nuclear program would not give it the capacity to build weapons. The three countries last week declared that Iran's decision to resume nuclear research had brought the talks to an end, and, with the United States in support, asked that the matter be sent to the United Nations Security Council for possible action.

The Bush administration has long favored sanctions, but had deferred action at the request of the European nations, who convinced Iran in 2003 to suspend its nuclear program. Mr. Bush last week said that he would pursue a vigorous diplomatic push to get as many countries as possible on board for possible United Nations action. On North Korea, the Bush administration has refused that nation's request for direct talks over its nuclear program and instead has worked in concert with China, South Korea, Russia and Japan.

Iran today continued to give mixed signals in reaction to the push for a United Nations referral. Its oil minister, Davoud Danesh-Jafari, told the official Iranian news agency that "in case of sanctions, other countries will suffer as well as Iran."

"One of the consequences will be the unleashing of a crisis in the oil sector and particularly a price hike," he said, according to Reuters.

At the same time, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, told the BBC that his country wanted a compromise and hoped to resume the European talks.

"They should not ask a brave nation with very good scientists not to engage in nuclear research," he said. "If they want guarantees of no diversion of nuclear fuel we can reach a formula acceptable to both sides."

The United States and Europe have made clear that they will not accept any program that includes research that would give Tehran the know-how to develop weapons.

In her Princeton speech, Ms. Clinton spoke of the gravity of Iran's program in terms similar to those used by the Administration.

"Let's be clear about the threat we face," Ms. Clinton said. "A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, to its neighbors and beyond."

"We cannot and should not - must not - permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons," she said. "In order to prevent that from occurring, we must have more support vigorously and publicly expressed by China and Russia, and we must move as quickly as feasible for sanctions in the United Nations."

The United States and the European nations have called for an emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Feb. 2, and have begun circulating a draft resolution that would refer Iran to the Security Council.

Russia and China have both expressed opposition to sanctions, at least at this point, and are reluctant even to support a Security Council referral. The United States and the European nations have sought to reassure Russia and China that, for now, referral to the Security Council will not necessarily lead to sanctions.

Last week, Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, said that the Bush administration was correct in not ruling out possible military action to block an Iranian nuclear weapons program, but stressed that force should only be used after every other measure had been exhausted.

In general, Democrats have been supportive of the administration decision to take a back seat to the Europeans in negotiations, and many have expressed alarm whenever the conservative Republicans engaged in a more aggressive posture toward Iran.

Ms. Clinton's speech last night laid out a markedly tougher approach. She has already been under fire from many liberal activists in the Democratic party for her support of the war in Iraq and refusal to call for an immediate American pullout.

Iraq also figured in Ms. Clinton's speech, as she so drew a link between the Iranian conflict and events there. Shiite parties with close links to Iran appear to have been the biggest winners in last month's Iraqi elections, whose final results are to be released soon.

"Part of the problem that we confront with Iran today is, of course, its involvement in and influence over Iraq," she said.

Ms. Clinton said she was against an immediate military pullout, but said the American military commitment should not be "open ended."

"If last December's elections lead to a successful Iraqi government, that should allow us to start drawing down our troops during this year while leaving behind a smaller contingent in safe areas with greater intelligence and quick-strike capabilities," she said.

"That will help us stabilize the new Iraqi government," Ms. Clinton said. "It will send a message to Iran that they do not have a free hand in Iraq despite their considerable influence and personal and religious connections there."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Bush faces battle to regain political clout By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

President George W. Bush is battling eroded public confidence in his leadership over issues like Iraq, the economy and corruption as he seeks to recapture his political clout before November's elections.

Bush, forced to scale back the scope of his second-term plans as his approval ratings sank to record lows for his presidency in late 2005, gets a fresh chance to jump-start his agenda with his State of the Union speech at the end of the month.

Analysts expect few bold new initiatives from an embattled president who jettisoned the centerpiece of his second-term agenda, an overhaul of Social Security, in the face of widespread opposition.

"This is a wounded president right now," said pollster John Zogby. "He doesn't have public opinion at his back. He can't ask too much of Congress because they are already worried about their own re-election."

Bush's political troubles could jeopardize Republican control of the U.S. Congress in November, and analysts see little relief for Bush in coming months.

"It's unrealistic to expect him to gain back too much more ground given the deep polarization in this country about the Bush presidency," said Karlyn Bowman, a poll analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, citing Iraq as the chief culprit.

"This will not be the year when it will be easy for him to pick up support. Whenever Americans have troops in harm's way, they are just anxious," she said.

Bush's vulnerability to events in Iraq and the Middle East, reinforced on Thursday with the release of a new audiotape from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and the potential for new revelations in the scandal probe of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff make Bush's political outlook even more difficult.

In December, a Gallup Poll found majorities disapproved of Bush's handling of the economy, Iraq, foreign affairs, Hurricane Katrina and immigration. The war on terrorism remained Bush's strength, with 52 percent supporting him.

White House and Republican aides say Bush will avoid laundry lists and stick to big themes in his State of the Union speech, emphasizing his plans on the economy, health care, Iraq and the war on terrorism.

"I would be surprised to see the White House scaling back on anything. That would be an admission they are operating from a position of weakness," Republican consultant Rich Galen said.

MODEST REBOUND

Bush made a modest recovery in recent polls -- his approval rating is still mired in the low or mid-40s in most surveys, although up slightly since December -- after a campaign-style push late in the year to sell his policies on Iraq and the economy.

A Gallup Poll report said the average approval rating for Bush's fifth year, which ended on Thursday, was 45.8 percent. That is well behind the fifth-year averages of Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Harry Truman.

It was only slightly better than Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who were both nearing unhappy ends to their presidencies in their fifth year due to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, respectively.

Bush will be hamstrung on spending in 2006 by a budget deficit of more than $400 billion, and his shaky political standing has raised questions about how much help he can offer Republicans competing for control of both chambers of Congress and 36 governor's offices in November.

Bush plans to be active on the campaign trail this year, and Republican campaign officials said he and Vice President Dick Cheney remained the party's star fund-raisers.

"I don't think you can find any Republican in the country who wouldn't be ecstatic to go to a fund-raiser with the president or vice president and have their picture taken. They are still a huge draw," said Carl Forti, a spokesman for the House Republican campaign committee.

When and where Bush will be used for campaign rallies and advertisements in the fall is up in the air.

"We try to run these races district by district," Forti said. "It will really just depend on which part of the country and which district you are talking about."



Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

ACLU rebukes Justice Department findings on wiretaps as 'spin'
RAW STORY
Published: January 19, 2006
The American Civil Liberties Union today strongly rebuked analysis provided by the Justice Department that argues that there is a legal basis for the warrantless domestic surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency as authorized by President Bush in a release to RAW STORY.

The release follows.

House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are scheduled to hold a forum on the issue tomorrow, where the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Director Caroline Fredrickson will testify. On Tuesday of this week, the ACLU filed a legal challenge to the NSA program on behalf of a group of prominent journalists, nonprofits, terrorism experts and community advocates. The ACLU has also called for the appointment of an independent special counsel to investigate the matter and has requested, through the Freedom of Information Act, information about the NSA's program of warrantless spying on Americans.

The following can be attributed to Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director:

“President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales can manufacture all of the legal justifications they want, but the facts and laws show that this warrantless surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“Any opinion coming from the Justice Department has to be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, given Attorney General Gonzales’ involvement in the warrantless spying as White House counsel. The fox may now be guarding the henhouse, which is why we need an independent special counsel.

“Congress must hold open, substantive hearings to let the American public know how their privacy was invaded. The president must not use a claim of preserving the nation as justification to undermine the very principles that define our nation. Freedom, liberty and privacy must be protected and preserved.”

Security Stepped Up After Bin Laden Threat ABC News
Osama bin Laden's latest tape, verified by the CIA, says more attacks are planned on Security is being stepped up across the country today after the release of a new audiotape in which Osama bin Laden threatens to attack the U.S. homeland — though the government is not elevating the national alert level. The new security measures are being taken as ABC News learns that al Qaeda Web sites have posted messages saying yet another tape is about to be released — this one from al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who apparently escaped a missile attack that targeted him in Pakistan a week ago. The Web sites say he will mourn his colleagues who were killed in that attack. The bin Laden tape, declared authentic by the CIA, was broadcast Thursday by the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera. It was scratchy, and bin Laden's voice sounded weak — less robust than on his last audiotape a year ago. But there was nothing weak about what he had to say. "The operations are under way," he said in a translation of the tape, which was in Arabic. "And you will see them inside your own home as soon as they are finished, God willing." "He has renewed his threats against the United States," said FBI Assistant Director John Miller, who once interviewed bin Laden as a reporter for ABC News. "He has renewed his threats to have an attack on U.S. soil."

Truce Offer?
On the tape, bin Laden claimed that U.S. security measures were not difficult to penetrate and that al Qaeda was winning the battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also boasted of attacks on European capitols as proof of al Qaeda's strength. "We have heard messages from al Qaeda and bin Laden where they have promised attacks and attacks have come to fruition," Miller said. "We've also seen tapes where they have promised attacks and then nothing has happened. That's the reason that we take every communication seriously." Bin Laden's tough talk was followed by an offer of a truce with the United States. "We have no objection to a long-term truce with you," he said, "based on fair conditions that we would fulfill." White House spokesman Scott McClellan said it was a sign of weakness. "We do not negotiate with terrorists," McClellan said. "We put them out of business." Richard Clarke, a former White House security adviser who is now an ABC News consultant, told "Good Morning America" that bin Laden's "truce" offer was nothing more than a repackaging of his demand that the United States withdraw from all Arab countries. "That's not a real truce offer. That's just his definition of victory for him," Clarke said. "If there is a major attack in the United States, he'll be able to say, 'Look, we gave the United States a chance … and they didn't take the offer.' " Clarke told ABC News Radio that sensitive targets in the United States remained vulnerable to attack. "If they were smart, and if they planned, and if they took advantage of our many vulnerabilities in this country that we still haven't addressed, they could do a lot of damage," he said. Clarke added that an attack on a gas or chemical plant, for instance, might leave 17,000 Americans dead.

Heightened Security
The Department of Homeland Security said it had no plans to raise the national security threat level. But precautions were being taken. In response to the new tape, Homeland Security officials are sending out a bulletin to 18,000 police agencies telling them to review all their intelligence. Government sources told ABC News that local officials were being warned to pay attention to mass transit — including subways, commuter trains and metro buses. Airports, water-treatment plants, chemical plants, and facilities storing radioactive material are also of concern. A recent 9/11 Commission report card identified major areas of weakness in the country's security, including cargo being loaded on airplanes, imported cargo on ships, and mass transit. "When I get on an airplane, I am less worried about the passengers than what is going into the hold below," said Lee Hamilton, former congressman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission. "I worry about containers being shipped into this country. I worry more about rail security than I do air security." The national terror threat level currently stands at yellow, or elevated. The government has raised the alert level to orange, signaling a high threat risk, seven times since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
It's all about the voice Asia Times Online
Bin Laden warns of attacks, offers truce Gainesville Sun
DetNews.com - Melbourne Herald Sun - Los Angeles Times - ABC Online - all 1,985 related »

Reporter's kidnapping shows new attitude in Iraq San Francisco Chronicle
The grainy video shows abducted reporter Jill Carroll sitting on the floor, her dark, tangled hair pulled back from her tired face. Three black-clad men wearing kaffiyeh scarves to conceal their identities stand over her; two of them are holding Kalashnikov automatic rifles. If the United States doesn't release all Iraqi women in military custody by tonight, the woman's captors say, she will be killed. Carroll's kidnapping Jan. 7 does more than just underscore the risks journalists take daily to report in Iraq and the obstacles they face as they try to tell the story. Her abduction also epitomizes the continuing erosion in Iraq of the once-common understanding that reporters are neutral observers, not pawns combatants can use for political reasons. That erosion, and the resulting sense of insecurity, often prompts reporters to limit what they cover, reflecting what is, and what is not, being reported.
Sunni Politician Pleads for Release of American Journalist Washington Post
Reporter's Dad Appeals To Kidnappers CBS News
Los Angeles Times - Times Online - ABC News - San Jose Mercury News - all 2,820 related »

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 8
January 20, 2006


** JUSTICE DEPT ISSUES WHITE PAPER ON NSA SURVEILLANCE
** THE LEGAL SIGNIFICANCE OF PRESIDENTIAL SIGNING STATEMENTS
** NSA: REDACTING WITH CONFIDENCE


JUSTICE DEPT ISSUES WHITE PAPER ON NSA SURVEILLANCE

The Department of Justice renewed its legal defense of warrantless
domestic intelligence surveillance by the National Security
Agency in a 42 page white paper transmitted to Congress
yesterday.

The white paper essentially reiterates at greater length the
previous defenses articulated by the Bush Administration: (1)
the NSA surveillance action was authorized by Congress when it
passed the 2001 resolution on use of military force against al
Qaeda; and (2) the President has inherent authority to conduct
such surveillance in any case. Both assertions are widely
disputed.

"The President -- in light of the broad authority to use military
force in response to the attacks of September 11th and to
prevent further catastrophic attack expressly conferred on the
President by the Constitution and confirmed and supplemented by
Congress in the AUMF [authorization for use of military force]
-- has legal authority to authorize the NSA to conduct the
signals intelligence activities he has described. Those
activities are authorized by the Constitution and by statute,
and they violate neither FISA nor the Fourth Amendment," the
document concludes.

See "Legal Authorities Supporting the Activities of the National
Security Agency Described by the President," Department of
Justice White Paper, January 19, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/doj011906.pdf


THE LEGAL SIGNIFICANCE OF PRESIDENTIAL SIGNING STATEMENTS

When he signed the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act, which
included a prohibition against torture of detainees in U.S.
custody, President Bush issued a signing statement implying that
he could disregard the new prohibition in his capacity as
commander in chief.

"The executive branch shall construe [the statute], relating to
detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional
authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive
branch and as Commander in Chief," he wrote in the December 30,
2005 statement on H.R. 2863.

The use of Presidential signing statements to create a kind of
quasi-legislative history intended to influence future judicial
rulings is a relatively new and increasingly controversial
phenomenon.

"So far as we have been able to determine, Presidential signing
statements that purported to create legislative history for the
use of the courts was uncommon -- if indeed it existed at all --
before the Reagan and Bush Presidencies," according to a 1993
memorandum from the Department of Justice Office of Legal
Counsel.

"The Reagan and Bush Administrations made frequent use of
Presidential signing statements, not only to declare their
understanding of the constitutional effect of the statutory
language, but also to create evidence on which the courts could
rely in construing such language."

Among other problems with this practice, "it is arguable that 'by
reinterpreting those parts of congressionally enacted
legislation of which he disapproves, the President exercises
unconstitutional line-item veto power'."

See "The Legal Significance of Presidential Signing Statements,"
prepared by Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger,
November 3, 1993:

http://www.usdoj.gov/olc/signing.htm


NSA: REDACTING WITH CONFIDENCE

The National Security Agency has issued new guidance to assist
officials in redacting (censoring) documents in Microsoft Word
format and producing unclassified Adobe Portable Document (PDF)
files without inadvertently disclosing sensitive information.

"MS Word is used throughout the DoD and the Intelligence
Community (IC) for preparing documents, reports, notes, and
other formal and informal materials. PDF is often used as the
format for downgraded or sanitized documents."

"There are a number of pitfalls for the person attempting to
sanitize a Word document for release."

For example, "As numerous people have learned to their chagrin,
merely converting an MS Word document to PDF does not remove all
[sensitive] metadata automatically."

"This paper describes the issue, and gives a step-by-step
description of how to do it with confidence that inappropriate
material will not be released."

See "Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized
Reports Converted From Word to PDF," National Security Agency,
December 13, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/nsa-redact.pdf



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

In opening statement, Democrat takes on warrantless wiretaps
RAW STORY
Published: January 20, 2006

STATEMENT OF CONGRESSMAN JOHN CONYERS, JR. MORE SOON.

Live audio of the hearings is available at Pacifica radio. The hearings were supposed to be on CSPAN.org but their website is currently down.

There can be no doubt that today we are in a constitutional crisis that threatens the system of checks and balances that has preserved our fundamental freedoms for more than 200 years. There is no better illustration of that crisis than the fact that the president is openly violating our nation’s laws by authorizing the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The Bush Administration offers two arguments to justify their actions. First, they assert, that warrantless searches were authorized by the Afghanistan use of force resolution. Second, they say, the Constitution permits and even mandates such actions. To this member and indeed to most of our nation’s legal community, neither argument is remotely plausible or credible.

As for the Administration’s claim of statutory authority, a plain reading of the text of the resolution reveals that there is no reference whatsoever to domestic surveillance. Former Majority Leader Daschle told us that the resolution was narrowed from the Administration’s initial request to avoid such construction, and the Attorney General went so far as to admit that they were told by Members of Congress that it would be “difficult if not impossible” to amend the law to authorize such a program. As Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe wrote me, “to argue that one couldn’t have gotten congressional authorization ... after arguing that ... one did get congressional authorization ... takes some nerve.”

In terms of inherent constitutional authority, this too flies in the face of both common sense and legal precedent. If the Supreme Court didn’t let President Truman use this authority to take over the steel mills during the Korean War in 1952, and wouldn’t let President Bush use the authority to indefinitely hold enemy combatants in 2005, it is quite obvious the constitution doesn’t allow warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens today. As Justice O’Connor wrote “a state of war is not a blank check.”

Perhaps what is most troubling of all is that if we let this domestic spying program continue, if we let this president convince us that we are at war, so he can do what he wants, we will allow to stand the principle that the president alone can decide what laws apply to him. I submit that is not only inconsistent with the principles upon which our Republic was founded, it denigrates the very freedom we have been fighting for since the tragic events of September 11. That is why we are holding today’s hearing.

Copyright © 2004-06 Raw Story Media, Inc. All rights reserved. | Site map |Privacy policy

January 20, 2006
Pentagon Analyst Gets 12 Years for Disclosing Secret Data
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:45 p.m. ET

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- A former Pentagon analyst who gave classified information to an Israeli diplomat and two members of a pro-Israel lobbying group was sentenced Friday to more than 12 years in prison.

Lawrence A. Franklin, 59, a policy analyst whose expertise included Iraq and Iran, pleaded guilty in October to three felony counts in exchange for having three other counts dropped.

In sentencing Franklin, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said the facts of the case led him to believe that Franklin was motivated primarily by a desire to help the United States, not hurt it.

The 12-year, 7-month sentence was on the low end of federal sentencing guidelines.

Franklin said at his plea hearing in October that he did not intend to harm the United States and that he was motivated by frustration with U.S. policy in the Middle East when he gave classified information to the diplomat and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

He said he received far more information from the Israeli diplomat than he ever disclosed.

The two former AIPAC members, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, have also been charged and are scheduled to go to trial in April. Their lawyers have argued the two were engaged in routine lobbying work and their discussions with Franklin are protected under First Amendment guarantees of free speech.

Franklin will not serve his prison term until after the government's prosecution of Rosen and Weissman, and prosecutors may seek a reduction of Franklin's sentence if they believe his cooperation warrants it.

Ellis said Franklin believed the National Security Council was insufficiently concerned with the threat posed by an unspecified Middle Eastern nation and that Franklin thought leaking information might eventually persuade the Security Council to take more serious action.

While the Middle Eastern country was not named in the court record, sources and the facts of the case point to Iran.

Ellis said he viewed Franklin's case differently than a case involving information leaked to the Soviets at height of the Cold War.

''But not different to the extent of excuse. Not at all,'' Ellis said.



Copyright 2006 The Associated Press Home

January 21, 2006
Lawyers in C.I.A. Leak Case Seek to Subpoena Journalists
By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 - Lawyers for Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff told a federal judge on Friday that they would seek to subpoena reporters and news organizations to obtain additional documents that could assist in his defense in the C.I.A. leak case.

In legal papers filed in federal court, the lawyers for Mr. Cheney's former aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., did not identify the reporters or news organizations that they intended to subpoena nor did the lawyers identify what kind of information might be sought.

But the lawyers told the federal district judge, Reggie B. Walton, in the filing that Mr. Libby's trial could be delayed by the effort to gather more information from journalists who could be expected to resist the subpoenas. No trial date has been set.

The filing on Friday was a joint submission by the defense and the prosecution, made at the request of the judge in advance of a Feb. 3 hearing on the status of the case. The legal paper, a road map to unresolved issues in the case, suggested there could be bruising legal fights ahead.

The combative tone of the statements by Mr. Libby's defense team seemed to underscore the assertions of his lawyers that they intended to conduct an aggressive legal strategy. Mr. Libby has pleaded not guilty.

It was not clear whether Judge Walton would approve additional subpoenas, or if granted, whether they would survive a legal challenge. Several reporters have already provided testimony and documents in the case to the grand jury - some after waging lengthy battles in court.

On other matters, defense lawyers said that "significant disagreements exist" about the "nature and scope" of the government's obligations to turn over material in its possession to Mr. Libby's lawyers, a legal process known as discovery that is a crucial early phase of almost every criminal proceeding.

Defense lawyers said the disagreements centered on issues like whether prosecutors were obliged to turn over to the defense information from the government about how much reporters knew of the employment of Valerie Wilson, the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the case, from sources other than Mr. Libby.

Other disagreements cited by defense lawyers focused on whether the prosecution had to turn over to Mr. Libby's lawyers information about Ms. Wilson's status as a covert employee at the C.I.A.

Another dispute, the defense lawyers said, involves whether prosecutors must relinquish documents in the government's possession about classified briefings and meetings that Mr. Libby attended from May 2003 to March 2004.

In their part of the submission, prosecutors told the judge that they had already turned over more than 10,150 pages of documents to defense lawyers and were preparing to hand over more, including a declassified transcript of Mr. Libby's two grand jury appearances in 2004.

The filing suggested there might be other skirmishes to come. Mr. Libby's lawyers said they had yet to present their request for permission to use other classified documents in his defense, a potentially significant issue if prosecutors challenge the relevancy of the material.

Mr. Libby was indicted in October on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, accused of lying to F.B.I. investigators and to the grand jury about his dealings with reporters in the leak case. Mr. Libby, who had been one of the most influential figures in the White House, immediately resigned.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

January 21, 2006
More Attacks and Meetings on a Program Under Fire
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 - Vice President Dick Cheney gave Congressional leaders a closed-door briefing at the White House Friday on the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, as Democrats escalated their attacks on President Bush over the operation by drawing comparisons to British tyrants and Nazi Germany.

With the White House under increasing attack over the program, the administration also announced that President Bush, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the agency, will each give talks next week in support of the program.

The day's events showed the White House's increasingly forceful effort to build public support for the program, as it seeks to demonstrate that Mr. Bush acted within constitutional authority in ordering the agency to monitor international e-mail and phone calls linked to Al Qaeda without seeking warrants.

While the White House usually says it pays no attention to public opinion polls, Scott McClellan, the press secretary, said at a briefing Friday that recent surveys "overwhelmingly show that the American people want us to do everything within our power to protect them."

But several opinion polls this month showed a clear divide over the issue. One poll, conducted two weeks ago by CNN/USA Today, found that 50 percent of those surveyed thought it was right for the president to order wiretaps without warrants and that 46 percent said it was wrong.

With some leading lawmakers voicing increasing unease over the program, Mr. Cheney met at the White House situation room for about an hour Friday morning to discuss it with Congressional leaders.

While officials would not discuss the substance of the briefing, Democratic Congressional leaders were thought to have expressed complaints about the limited nature of the briefings. A nonpartisan Congressional study earlier this week said that the limited briefings might have violated Congressional oversight law, and Democrats are asking that future briefings be opened to all members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

While Mr. McClellan would not discuss Mr. Cheney's briefing, he said: "We have briefed Congressional leaders more than a dozen times. We continue to brief members of Congress in an appropriate manner."

Meanwhile, House Democrats, frustrated that Republican leaders had refused to hold hearings on the matter, held an unusual unofficial hearing of their own on Friday.

The eight Democratic lawmakers at the event were unrelenting in their criticism of a program that they said would open the way to unlimited presidential powers. Some questioned whether Mr. Bush's authorization of it was an impeachable offense.

Several lawmakers and witnesses compared the administration to a British monarchy, casting Mr. Bush as George III. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, even compared the president's powers to those the Nazis used early to cement their power.

Mr. Nadler said that as he read the broad presidential power claimed by Mr. Bush, "if he were in Germany in 1933, he would not have required the Enabling Act to pass the Reichstag to claim the power," a reference to the law that gave Hitler broad power to run the country.

When asked about the remark, Mr. Nadler's spokesman, Reid Cherlin, said: "He's not comparing Bush to Hitler. He's saying that Nazi Germany is our most extreme example of the rapid expansion of executive power and even there, there was legislative approval of an emergency package."

In a later statement, Mr. Cherlin said Mr. Nadler had "picked an example that he shouldn't have" in illustrating his point.

The White House declined to send anyone to testify at the Democratic event. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who leads the House Judiciary Committee and who has declined to schedule hearings on the eavesdropping program, said the event did not meet Congressional standards because of a "completely one-sided list of witnesses."

While several witnesses brought reputations as liberal critics of the administration, one witness, Bruce Fein, had been a senior Justice Department official under President Ronald Reagan and was critical of the program's legal underpinnings.

Mr. Fein suggested that he would have resigned rather than acquiesce in such a program.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Iraq 'not a precedent' for Iran
From correspondents in Washington
20jan06

US Vice President Dick Cheney has warned against seeing US military intervention in Iraq as a precedent for possible action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

"It would be a mistake to go back and try to predict what might or might not happen, based on what happened in some other country in the past," Mr Cheney said in an interview with the Fox News Channel Neil Cavuto program.
"The fact of the matter is, it is a problem for the world if the Iranians have nuclear weapons, especially with a government headed up by the kind of individual that's there today," he said. "We are working aggressively to avoid having that situation arise."

Mr Cheney said he expected the UN Security Council to take up the matter, which could mean sanctions against Tehran, after the next meeting of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

He also described Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said that Israel should be wiped off the map and has questioned the Holocaust, as "a pretty strange duck".

© Herald and Weekly Times

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Justice Dept. gives 42-page rationale for secret spying
Logic questioned by many in Congress
- Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Friday, January 20, 2006



Washington -- Taking aim at a rising chorus of critics, the Bush administration issued its most thorough defense Thursday of President Bush's domestic spying program as a valid exercise of his wartime powers the past four years in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The 42-page Justice Department white paper said Congress in October 2001 implicitly granted Bush authority to order the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a warrant on Americans and others in the United States when it gave him the power to use force against al Qaeda.

The Justice Department rationale for the domestic eavesdropping program rejects the arguments of Bush's critics who say the president is breaking the law by sanctioning the activity without the approval of a judge as required for domestic spying. Those same critics -- inside and outside Congress -- repeated Thursday their view that the president is twisting the October 2001 congressional use-of-force resolution way beyond its original intent to try to justify the illegal activity.

Justice Department officials said they released the report, which was addressed to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Democratic leader Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales ordered the department to provide Congress and the American people with more information on the spying program.

Officials said they weren't reacting to recent developments such as Tuesday's lawsuits challenging the president's authority for the eavesdropping or to former Democratic Vice President Al Gore's call on Monday for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate possible administration lawbreaking in the warrantless surveillance.

The criticism will continue today when House Judiciary Committee Democrats hold an ad hoc hearing to take testimony from several critics of the eavesdropping.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled Congress' first official hearing into Bush's controversial program on Feb. 6. Gonzales, Bush's former White House counsel, is expected to use the white paper as the framework for his testimony as the opening witness.

The Justice Department, in its report, said Bush acted within the historic bounds of wartime presidents to prevent "any future acts of international terrorism against the United States." It also said that under Article II of the Constitution the president has sweeping powers in dealing with foreign enemies because he is the "sole organ" in foreign affairs.

The department, along with Vice President Dick Cheney in a separate appearance in New York City, also said all the National Security Agency activity involved international communications, which officials believe is connected with al Qaeda or related terrorist networks.

"Obviously no one can guarantee that we won't be hit again, but our nation has been protected by more than luck," Cheney said in defending the administration's spying efforts.

The Justice Department legal analysis said the snooping did not violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires federal authorities to get warrants for such wiretaps because when Congress passed the law, it envisioned that it could be modified by future congressional acts. The 2001 resolution constituted such an additional modification, according to the Justice Department's lawyers.

The report also said that the activity did not violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on "unreasonable searches and seizures" because federal courts have recognized the president's right to collect foreign intelligence without warrants.

"Warrantless surveillance is well-established," said Steven Bradbury, acting assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel, in a briefing for reporters. "Presidents have done it in virtually every armed conflict the country has been engaged in."

Bradbury said the 2001 congressional resolution gave Bush "very broad authorization to use all necessary force to protect the country against armed attack."

But Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who will be among those testifying today at the Democrats' hearing, said it's clear that the 2001 use-of-force resolution did not authorize Bush to conduct the warrantless eavesdropping.

He said that in 2001, "Congress rejected demands for the administration to expand its powers. And now the administration is arguing that the same Congress that rejected these powers gave them these powers. There is no question the president violated federal law."

Turley belittled the Justice Department's legal analysis.

"It's hard to tell if this should be filed in the Library of Congress under fiction or nonfiction," he said. Howard Gantman, spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said that in preparation for Gonzales' scheduled Feb. 6 appearance at the Senate Judiciary Committee, she has asked for a briefing by Justice Department lawyers to explain the justifications for the spying program.

But he said the department had so far refused. Feinstein, a member of the Judiciary Committee, has criticized the Bush program.

The ACLU, which sued Bush and the security agency seeking to stop the warrantless interception of electronic communications, has joined Gore's call for a special counsel.

ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said, "Any opinion coming from the Justice Department has to be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, given Attorney General Gonzales' involvement in the warrantless spying as White House counsel. The fox may now be guarding the henhouse, which is why we need an independent special counsel."

E-mail Edward Epstein at eepstein@sfchronicle.com.

Page A - 10
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file...MNGEVGQDE81.DTL


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

Analysis: Google Case Raises New Questions
By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jan 20, 7:26 PM ET

Already on the defensive over its domestic spying program, the Bush administration has alarmed privacy and free-speech advocates by demanding search information about millions of users of Google and other Internet companies.

The moves raise questions about how far the government should be allowed to go to probe into American homes. The administration is pushing back hard, defending its surveillance as helping to protect the nation from terrorism and, to a lesser extent, shield minors from pornography.

Critics see the moves as an unwarranted expansion of presidential authority.

"Sure, the more intrusive the government becomes, the more potential crime it can solve," said Daniel J. Solove, associate professor of law at George Washington University Law School.

"But our society is founded on the fact that we don't want to give the government this broad-based power," said Solove, author of the book, "The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age."

The administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law blocked by the Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google Inc. for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine.

Google is fighting the Justice Department subpoena that the company has termed "unduly burdensome, vague and intended to harass." Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week asked a federal judge in California to order Google to comply.

"We are trying to gather up information in order to help the enforcement of a federal law to ensure the protection, quite frankly, of our nation's children against pornography," Gonzales said in Washington on Friday. "We are not asking for the identity of Americans."

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Microsoft Corp. confirmed that they had complied, at least partially, with similar subpoenas. America Online, owned by Time Warner Inc., said it provided a list of search requests already publicly available from other sources.

"You have to be alarmed at the idea that the government can come in and say, 'I want you to give me your statistical data.' This could be the first step on the way for asking for the content of the e-mails," said Shayana Kadidal, an attorney for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

The Justice Department has not asked for names or computer addresses. But the search-engine subpoenas reinforced concerns about how much personal information the government should be entitled to.

Congress is holding hearings early next month over whether President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering warrantless domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency as part of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, war on terror. Lawmakers, meanwhile, are also considering an administration request to extend the Patriot Act, which sharply expanded the government's ability to obtain private data on individuals.

Both the NSA eavesdropping and the demands for information on Internet consumer searches "are assertions of substantial powers that conflict with civil liberties," said I.M. Destler, a University of Maryland professor of public service who specializes in homeland security.

The White House has mounted an aggressive campaign to defend itself.

Bush will visit the NSA on Wednesday to underscore his claim that he has the constitutional authority to let intelligence officials listen in on international phone calls of Americans with suspected ties to terrorists. "The American people want us to do everything in our power to prevent attacks," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Friday.

Gonzales and deputy national intelligence director Michael Hayden also have speeches planned for next week. And Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday told a conservative think tank in New York that the surveillance program was an essential tool in monitoring al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations.

A majority of people — 56 percent — said the Bush administration should be required to get a warrant before monitoring phone conversations and Internet communications between American citizens and suspected terrorists, according to an AP-Ipsos poll earlier this month.

But when people have been asked in other polls to balance their worries about terrorist threats against their worries about intrusions on privacy, fighting terror is the higher priority.

"I think people are always in favor of civil liberties in the abstract. But in specific cases, they're more free to barter those freedoms away," said Neil M. Richards, an associate law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

In the domestic eavesdropping case, "even if it's legal, it's a really bad idea. This sort of scrutiny really does raise the specter of Big Brother," Richards said.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Tom Raum has covered national and international affairs for The Associated Press since 1973.



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.

Analysts Search Bin Laden Tape for Clues Forbes
Osama bin Laden's warning this week about an upcoming attack on the United States answered at least one question about the al-Qaida leader: He is still alive, or at least was until very recently. But it opened a new inquiry by counterterror officials who are analyzing the bin Laden audiotape for clues about when and where it was made - and, most importantly, whether it sends a signal to carry out his threat. Intelligence analysts were scrutinizing the recording for any clues - including certain words and phrases - that might be a signal for the terror network's members or followers. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. The Homeland Security Department said it had no plans to raise the nation's terror threat-alert level and no reason to believe an attack was imminent. "We, of course, have been very concerned about the threat of terrorism, generally, since the attacks of 9/11," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said. "And obviously we expect the American people to live their lives as normally as possible." The audio recording was the first public statement by bin Laden since December 2004. That is the longest stretch the terror leader has been publicly quiet since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Authorities would not say whether the recording indicates anything about bin Laden's whereabouts or health. A counterterror official said analysts believe the tape appears to have been recorded since December, although it was not clear how recently - or if it was in response to U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan last week that Pakistani authorities said killed four senior al-Qaida operatives. The Arab television network Al-Jazeera, which released the tape Thursday, initially reported it was made in December but corrected itself later to say it was recorded this month. Editors at the station said they could not comment on how they knew when it was made. John Rollins, a former Homeland Security intelligence official, said the timeline is important because terror threats can lose credibility as time goes on without an attack. "If you can date it back as being from weeks or months ago, and he's saying then that he's getting close to operation readiness, this gives you an indication that it's bravado," said Rollins, now a terrorism specialist at the Congressional Research Service. But if the threats were recorded very recently, "then that does raise the bar to more concerns that the timing of the tape may coincide with actual plans that are under way," Rollins said. An analysis by the IntelCenter, a contractor working with U.S. intelligence agencies, highlighted language in bin Laden's statement that it said could be part of a warning cycle for Americans. In his most recent recording, bin Laden began his statement by saying, "Peace be upon those who follow guidance." That language, the analysis concluded, closely matches a pattern seen before the bombings in London last July 7. Bin Laden used almost identical greetings in statements directed to Europeans in April 2004 and to Americans in October 2004. "We believe that this signifies this is a warning message, and they feel they're obligated (to give) in the run-up to an attack," said Ben Venzke, chief executive at the IntelCenter. The government's counterterror officials declined to comment on the analysis. The tape came days before a planned weekend training exercise in which military aircraft are to conduct patrols over the nation's capital to intercept and divert planes that appear to pose a threat. But Michael Kucharek, a spokesman for the U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for the defense of U.S. territory, said there have been no changes to the systematic air patrolling of U.S. airspace. The threat on the bin Laden audio tape "means nothing to us," the spokesman said. He said the training was planned well before the tape's release and was just the latest in a series of such exercises. AP Military Writer Robert Burns contributed to this report.
Bin Laden Tape Scrutinized Bayou Buzz
Analysts seeking date, language of bin Laden tape for clues Hindu
Washington Post - Calgary Sun - Indianapolis Star - Indian Express - all 2,373 related »

Increased pressure for Iraqi hostage release Aljazeera.net
A US Muslim advocacy group has arrived in Baghdad to plead for the release of American hostage Jill Carroll. As the group arrived a senior Iraqi politician urged US forces to free Iraqi women in detention in a bid to save the journalist. The deadline set by Carroll's kidnappers, who have threatened to kill her unless American forces release all Iraqi women in military custody, passed on Friday and no word has been heard on her fate since. The 28-year-old was abducted on 7 January in west Baghdad. A delegation from the Council on American-Islamic Relations flew to Baghdad from neighbouring Jordan in a bid to increase momentum towards Carroll's release.
Deadline to kill US journalist passes with no news on her fate Khaleej Times
Deadline passes with no word on fate of US hostage Reuters AlertNet
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Frist calls Alito Democrats' "nightmare"


Email this Story

Jan 20, 8:32 PM (ET)


By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told Republican Party activists on Friday night that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito was the "worst nightmare of liberal Democrats."

Frist, a Tennessee Republican, made the remark to fellow Republicans during a private tour he gave them of the Senate chamber when the Senate was not in session.

Frist was not available for comment following his remarks.

Asked about the senator's remark, Frist spokesman Bob Stevenson said that Alito "is a thoughtful mainstream conservative jurist who is well respected by his peers, by Democrats and Republicans alike."

Stevenson added, "There are liberals, many of them represented by the outside groups, who will do anything to kill any nominee put forward by this administration."

Democrats have expressed concerns the conservative Alito would push the nation's highest court to the right in areas such as abortion rights, civil rights and presidential powers.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Tuesday on the Alito nomination and the full Senate intends to debate it next week.

Three top Democrats announced this week they would vote against sending Alito to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. They are Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Dick Durbin of Illinois.

No Democrat so far has said he or she would try to block a Senate floor vote on Alito through a procedure known as a filibuster.

The Republican National Committee was holding a winter meeting in Washington this week, and the 50 or so party activists from across the United States were invited by Frist to tour the Senate chamber.

Lessons Learned in Iraq Show Up in Army Classes
Culture Shifts to Counterinsurgency

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 21, 2006; A01



FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. -- A fundamental change overtaking the Army is on display in classrooms across this base above the Missouri River. After decades of being told that their job was to close in on and destroy the enemy, officers are being taught that sometimes the best thing might be not to attack but to co-opt the enemy, perhaps by employing him, or encouraging him to desert, or by drawing him into local or national politics.

It is a new focus devoted to one overarching topic: counterinsurgency, putting down an armed and political campaign against a government, the U.S. military's imperative in Iraq.

Officers studying at the Army's Command and General Staff College here are flocking to elective courses on the subject, with three times as many enrolled this year as last. Soon the Army will require a block of instruction in counterinsurgency for all of the 1,000 or so majors who attend the college each year.

In an adjacent institution, the elite School of Advanced Military Studies, where the Army trains what are known colloquially as its "Jedi knight" planners, 31 of 78 student monographs this year were devoted to counterinsurgency or "stability operations," compared with "only a couple" two years ago, said Col. Kevin Benson, the school's director. In the college bookstore, copies of a 1964 book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice" by David Galula, a French army officer who fought in North Africa, are piled on a cart and selling swiftly.

There is an air of urgency to this redirection.

"It's a survival thing for us," said Maj. Scott Sonsalla, who served in Kosovo and was an aide to the deputy secretary of defense. This year, he said, he is taking courses on counterinsurgency, terrorism, strategy, intelligence and defeating roadside bombs.

"I'm going to go" to Iraq to lead "600 or so soldiers," he said. "If I do something wrong, that affects a lot of soldiers -- and a lot of families."

The new emphasis on studying how to respond to guerrilla-like campaigns underscores how the Army has been tempered, even chastened, by three years of fighting an unexpectedly difficult war in Iraq.

The air of hubris that some Army officers displayed just a few years ago, after victories in Panama, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan (and an outcome in Somalia that they blamed on their civilian overseers in the Clinton administration) has dissipated, replaced by a sense that they have a lot to learn about how to operate effectively in Iraq, and about the cultures and languages there and in other likely hot spots.

"Yes, they had the great run to Baghdad, but since then they've had losses," said Stuart Lyon, who teaches a seminar on counterinsurgency here. "And they know that when they go back, they've got to be smarter about it."

"It's a vastly different Army from 2003," said Lawrence T. Di Rita, an aide to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld who until recently was the chief Pentagon spokesman. "It's impressive."

Di Rita's comments are noteworthy given the history of antagonism between the Army's leadership and Rumsfeld's office. An Army chief of staff and the service's civilian secretary left the Pentagon bitterly critical of how Rumsfeld and his associates handled the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

Officers here said they see a strong cultural shift at work for the Army, whose self-image still sometimes seems based on charging across Europe toward Berlin in 1944 and blasting Saddam Hussein's tanks in the Arabian Desert 47 years later.

"What we're trying to do is change the culture, to modify that culture, that solving the problem isn't just a tactical problem of guns and bombs and maneuver," said retired Army Col. Clinton J. Ancker III, director of the "doctrine"-writing office here that defines how the Army does what it does. He is involved in an effort to restructure the Army's "interim" manual on insurgency, which some insiders see as a mediocre stopgap.

Unusually, the Army and the Marines are collaborating on the new manual and also asking for input from the British army, which has had centuries of experience in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Conscious that it largely walked away from counterinsurgency after the Vietnam War -- the subject was not mentioned in the mid-1970s version of the Army's key fighting manual -- the service now is trying to ensure that the mistake is not repeated. Spearheading that effort is Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, whose doctoral dissertation at Princeton was on the Vietnam War and who later commanded the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. "I think the changes are very broad," Petraeus said. He oversees several of the Army's training bases and schools" with his new job here.

"This is about institutional change, and the whole Army is included. It is kind of a generational change," he said. Indeed, in the next few years, officers who joined the Army after the end of the Cold War will begin to take command of battalions.

The new approach can also be seen in the field, where the Army trains soldiers to fight. The biggest change there has been the admission that counterinsurgency is exceedingly difficult, and that the Army has not been preparing its people well for it, officials said.

"We used to say that if you could do the war fighting, the other stuff was a 'lesser included case,' " said Dennis Tighe, deputy director of an office here that manages Army training. "What we've learned the hard way is that the other stuff is much more difficult."

Also, other Army experts add, because Army commanders lacked the expertise to conduct counterinsurgency campaigns, in 2003 and 2004 they often employed inappropriate tactics, such as big "cordon and sweep" operations that detained thousands of neutral Iraqis and proved to be counterproductive.

Now, in addition to teaching how to fight battles, the Army's training centers teach commanders how to deal with crowds, how to negotiate with local political figures, how to speak through an interpreter, how to oversee the emergency distribution of food.

Earlier this month, 19 officers pondered such questions in Lyon's seminar. Most were Iraq veterans.

When the military detains civilians, they agreed, it is important to treat them well. When addressing a problem, try to go with an Iraqi's solution, not yours. "Put an Iraqi face on it," summarized one major.

And because insurgencies are always political, politics can be more important than combat. "We can go in and kill insurgents, but it's the political piece that will bite you on the butt," noted another officer.

Most of all, they said, the key to victory is not defeating the enemy but winning the support of Iraqis and making the insurgents irrelevant. "When the people start ratting out the insurgents, that's a quantifiable way of measuring your support," said a third officer.

Petraeus said he thinks that the younger officers studying here this year are being given the tools to make a difference in the war next year.

"What we hope to have in Iraq is guys going over there with the broad skill sets to do everything from encouraging a sheik to participate in the political process to economic development to elections, to still being able to go out and get the bad guys, but in a way that is precise and exploits intelligence, and is sensitive to the culture," he said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Search Engines' Trustworthiness Shaken By Government Data Gathering By Antone Gonsalves
TechWeb.com
Fri Jan 20, 6:36 PM ET

The attention that has been drawn to the major search engines that handed over anonymous search results subpoenaed by the U.S. Justice Department has brought into question whether the Internet businesses can be trusted with people's private information.

On Thursday, America Online Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Google Inc. acknowledged that they received subpoenas from government prosecutors trying to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo acknowledged handing over search data to the government; Google has refused and intends to fight, saying the Bush administration's requests are too broad.

Search terms plugged into Google and the rest can give lots of clues on people. For example the terms could indicate a person has a medical condition, an unfaithful spouse, concerns over sexual orientation, or many other issues that most people would prefer to keep private.

In addition, many people sign in with user name and password as a requirement to use other services, such as Web mail, instant messaging and blogging, creating an even tighter connection between a person and his use of a search engine's offerings.

The amount of data gathered by search engines already rankles some people. So the disclosure that three out of four major search engines would give up data without a fight, even though the information could not identify a person, is sure to intensify some people's feelings about data-gathering on the Web.

"My approach to sites asking for too much personal information is to simply lie," Ned of Oklahoma City, who asked that his last name be withheld, said in an email. "Even if I don't mind telling them things like my date of birth, I lie on the principle of it and to screw up their data."

In providing information, AOL, Yahoo and MSN did tarnish their trustworthiness, one expert believes.

"AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo did not violate the privacy of any user by handing over this information. No private data was revealed," Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch said Friday in his blog. "Nevertheless, by not pushing back against such a bad request for data, it leaves open the real fear that they might not push back if the US government decided to go on a real fishing expedition in the future. Privacy may not have been lost but trust was."

A lack of trust is one reason behind the Electronic Freedom Foundation's recommendation that people use software that hides their computer's Internet address while surfing the Web or using search engines. As long as a person doesn't enter a site with a user name and password, then he can wander the Web almost anonymously.

"We don't believe anybody should be keeping all this information," Rebecca Jeschke, spokeswoman for the privacy group, said of data gathering by search engines. "The government wouldn't be able to get this information, if it wasn't there."

The EFF is a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging COPA, which was meant to shield minors from Web sites that offer sexually explicit content. The high court struck down provisions that required sites to offer such content only to registered users or people who sign-in first, saying that filtering software is sufficient to keep the content away from children.

In seeking the search data, government lawyers are hoping to show a federal court in Pennsylvania that sexually explicit material is easily accessible through search engines and is not adequately blocked by filters.

To Andrew B. Serwin, a partner in the San Diego law firm Foley & Lardner LLP and a consultant on privacy issues to Internet companies, trust and privacy are "two sides of the same coin."

"Whether you put it in terms of trust or privacy, the concern is that the government could use non-personal information as a basis for a warrant to get personal information," Serwin said.

Once government prosecutors get non-identifiable information, they could see patterns that they decide are suspicious, and then go back to subpoena specific data that could identify people whose searches fell within those patterns.

"It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the government would say, 'we know these searches occurred, so lets have more information,'" Serwin said.

There is no indication that the Justice Department is heading in that direction in the current case, but providing such large amounts of data could be the beginnings of a trend, the lawyer said.

The issues in the current case also have no implications for national security and fighting terrorism, Serwin said. Such issues are handled through the Patriot Act, which gives federal law enforcement the right to demand information in secrecy.

"We're not dealing with a Patriot Act request, in which case we wouldn't have heard about it," Serwin said. "This is not a national security issue."

The question of trust and Internet businesses has spread beyond U.S. borders to places with less political freedom. Microsoft this month was criticized for taking down from its blog-hosting service MSN Spaces, the blog of an outspoken Chinese journalist Zhao Jing. The company said it was complying with Chinese laws.

In September, Yahoo gave information about journalist Shi Tao's personal email account to Beijing, which later jailed him for 10 years on charges of divulging state secrets.



Copyright © 2006 CMP Media LLC.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Filibuster Alito?
Jan 21, 2006
by Robert Novak ( bio | archive )

Email to a friend Print this page Text size: A A WASHINGTON -- Pressure from liberal activists to oppose confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court has been so intense that Democratic senators may be trapped into a filibuster that they do not want to wage.

Despite the consensus that Alito performed well in his confirmation hearings, leaders of liberal organizations opposing him -- Ralph Neas, Nan Aron and Wade Henderson -- demand that Democrats vote against him. Consequently, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska is the only Democrat at this writing who has announced in Alito's favor.

That means the number of senators voting "no" will be well over the 41 needed to prevent cloture. Pressure groups then could ask why no filibuster had been launched. But Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid may not want to risk causing Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist to set a precedent by using the "nuclear" option: to end a filibuster by simple majority vote.

January 22, 2006
Army Interrogator Found Guilty in Iraqi's Death
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:40 a.m. ET

FORT CARSON, Colo. (AP) -- An Army interrogator committed negligent homicide when he put a sleeping bag over an Iraqi general's head and sat on his chest as the man suffocated, a military jury found.

Attorneys for Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr. said he believed the general had information that would ''break the back of the whole insurgency'' at a time when soldiers were being killed in an increasingly lethal and bold resistance.

But prosecutor Maj. Tiernan Dolan maintained that Welshofer tortured Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush at a detention camp in 2003, treating him ''worse than you would treat a dog.''

After six hours of deliberations, the panel of six Army officers spared Welshofer on the more serious charge of murder -- which carries a potential life sentence -- instead convicting him late Saturday of negligent homicide and negligent dereliction of duty. He was acquitted of assault.

Welshofer stood silently and showed no reaction when the verdict was announced. He could be dishonorably discharged and sentenced to a maximum three years and three months in prison at a Monday hearing.

Defense attorney Frank Spinner said he would decide after sentencing whether to appeal.

''The verdict recognizes the context in which these events took place,'' he said. ''It was a very difficult time in Iraq. There was confusion, and they were not getting clear guidance from headquarters.''

Welshofer and prosecutors left without commenting.

During the trial, prosecutors described a rogue interrogator who became frustrated with Mowhoush's refusal to answer questions and escalated his techniques from simple interviews to beatings to simulating drowning, and finally, to death.

Welshofer used his sleeping bag technique in the presence of lower ranking soldiers, but never in the presence of officers with the authority to stop him, Dolan said.

The treatment of the Iraqi general ''could fairly be described as torture,'' Dolan said.

In an e-mail to a commander, Dolan said, Welshofer wrote that restrictions on interrogation techniques were impeding the Army's ability to gather intelligence. Welshofer wrote that authorized techniques came from Cold War-era doctrine that did not apply in Iraq, Dolan said.

''Our enemy understands force, not psychological mind games,'' Dolan quoted from Welshofer's message. Dolan said an officer responded by telling Welshofer to ''take a deep breath and remember who we are.''

The defense had argued a heart condition caused Mowhoush's death, and that Welshofer's commanders had approved the interrogation technique.

''What he was doing he was doing in the open, and he was doing it because he believed the information in fact would save lives,'' Spinner said.

He asked jurors to consider deadly conditions in Iraq at the time of the interrogation. Welshofer had to make some decisions on his own because guidance was lacking and other techniques weren't working, Spinner said.

Officials believed Mowhoush had information that would ''break the back of the whole insurgency,'' said defense attorney Capt. Ryan Rosauer. They also thought Mowhoush helping to bring foreign fighters into Iraq from across the Syrian border, he said.

Several prosecution witnesses, including one whose identity is classified and who testified in a closed session, had been granted immunity in exchange for their cooperation, Spinner noted. Two soldiers who were initially charged with murder in the case also were given immunity.



Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

January 22, 2006
The Wounded
Struggling Back From War's Once-Deadly Wounds
By DENISE GRADY
PALO ALTO, Calif. - It has taken hundreds of hours of therapy, but Jason Poole, a 23-year old Marine corporal, has learned all over again to speak and to walk. At times, though, words still elude him. He can read barely 16 words a minute. His memory can be fickle, his thinking delayed. Injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, he is blind in his left eye, deaf in his left ear, weak on his right side and still getting used to his new face, which was rebuilt with skin and bone grafts and 75 to 100 titanium screws and plates.

Even so, those who know Corporal Poole say his personality - gregarious, kind and funny - has remained intact. Wounded on patrol near the Syrian border on June 30, 2004, he considers himself lucky to be alive. So do his doctors. "Basically I want to get my life back," he said. "I'm really trying."

But he knows the life ahead of him is unlikely to match the one he had planned, in which he was going to attend college and become a teacher, get married and have children. Now, he hopes to volunteer in a school. His girlfriend from before he went to war is now just a friend. Before he left, they had agreed they might talk about getting married when he got back.

"But I didn't come back," he said.

Men and women like Corporal Poole, with multiple devastating injuries, are the new face of the wounded, a singular legacy of the war in Iraq. Many suffered wounds that would have been fatal in earlier wars but were saved by helmets, body armor, advances in battlefield medicine and swift evacuation to hospitals. As a result, the survival rate among Americans hurt in Iraq is higher than in any previous war - seven to eight survivors for every death, compared with just two per death in World War II.

But that triumph is also an enduring hardship of the war. Survivors are coming home with grave injuries, often from roadside bombs, that will transform their lives: combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress.

Dr. Alexander Stojadinovic, the vice chairman of surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, said, "The wounding patterns we see are similar to, say, what Israel will see with terrorist bombings - multiple complex woundings, not just a single body site."

[American deaths in Iraq numbered 2,225 as of Jan. 20. Of 16,472 wounded, 7,625 were listed as unable to return to duty within 72 hours. As of Jan. 14, the Defense Department reported, 11,852 members of the military had been wounded in explosions - from so-called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, mortars, bombs and grenades.]

So many who survive explosions - more than half - sustain head injuries that doctors say anyone exposed to a blast should be checked for neurological problems. Brain damage, sometimes caused by skull-penetrating fragments, sometimes by shock waves or blows to the head, is a recurring theme.

More than 1,700 of those wounded in Iraq are known to have brain injuries, half of which are severe enough that they may permanently impair thinking, memory, mood, behavior and the ability to work.

Medical treatment for brain injuries from the Iraq war will cost the government at least $14 billion over the next 20 years, according to a recent study by researchers at Harvard and Columbia.

Jill Gandolfi, a co-director of the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, where Corporal Poole is being treated, said, "We are looking at an epidemic of brain injuries."

The consequences of brain injury are enormous. Penetrating injuries can knock out specific functions like vision and speech, and may eventually cause epilepsy and increase the risk of dementia. What doctors call "closed-head injuries," from blows to the head or blasts, are more likely to have diffuse effects throughout the brain, particularly on the frontal lobes, which control the ability to pay attention, make plans, manage time and solve problems.

Because of their problems with memory, emotion and thinking, brain-injured patients run a high risk of falling through the cracks in the health care system, particularly when they leave structured environments like the military, said Dr. Deborah Warden, national director of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a government program created in 1992 to develop treatment standards for the military and veterans.

So many military men and women are returning with head injuries combined with other wounds that the government has designated four Veterans Affairs hospitals as "polytrauma rehabilitation centers" to take care of them. The Palo Alto hospital where Corporal Poole is being treated is one.

"In Vietnam, they'd bring in a soldier with two legs blown off by a mine, but he wouldn't have the head injuries," said Dr. Thomas E. Bowen, a retired Army general who was a surgeon in the Vietnam War and who is now chief of staff at the veterans hospital in Tampa, Fla., another polytrauma center. "Some of the patients we have here now, they can't swallow, they can't talk, they're paralyzed and blind," he said.

Other soldiers have been sent home unconscious with such hopeless brain injuries that their families have made the anguished decision to take them off life support, said Dr. Andrew Shorr, who saw several such patients at Walter Reed.

Amputations are a feature of war, but the number from Iraq - 345 as of Jan. 3, including 59 who had lost more than one limb - led the Army to open a new amputation center at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio in addition to the existing center at Walter Reed. Amputees get the latest technology, including $50,000 prosthetic limbs with microchips.

Dr. Mark R. Bagg, head of orthopedic surgery at Brooke, said, "The complexity of the injuries has been challenging - horrific blast injuries to extremities, with tremendous bone loss and joint, bone, nerve, arterial and soft tissue injuries."

It is common for wounded men and women to need months of rehabilitation in the hospital. Some, like Corporal Poole, need well over a year, and will require continuing help as outpatients. Because many of these veterans are in their 20's or 30's, they will live with their disabilities for decades. "They have to reinvent who they are," said Dr. Harriet Zeiner, a neuropsychologist at the Palo Alto veterans center.

No Memory of the Blast

Corporal Poole has no memory of the explosion or even the days before it, although he has had a recurring dream of being in Iraq and seeing the sky suddenly turn red.

Other marines have told him he was on a foot patrol when the bomb went off. Three others in the patrol - two Iraqi soldiers and an interpreter - were killed. Shrapnel tore into the left side of Corporal Poole's face and flew out from under his right eye. Metal fragments and the force of the blast fractured his skull in multiple places and injured his brain, one of its major arteries, and his left eye and ear. Every bone in his face was broken. Some, including his nose and portions of his eye sockets, were shattered. Part of his jawbone was pulverized.

"He could easily have died," said Dr. Henry L. Lew, an expert on brain injury and the medical director of the rehabilitation center at the Palo Alto veterans hospital. Bleeding, infection, swelling of the brain - any or all could have killed someone with such a severe head injury, Dr. Lew said.

Corporal Poole was taken by helicopter to a military hospital in Iraq and then flown to one in Germany, where surgeons cut a plug of fat from his abdomen and mixed it with other materials to seal an opening in the floor of his skull.

He was then taken to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. His parents, who are divorced, were flown there to meet him - his father, Stephen, from San Jose, Calif., and his mother, Trudie, from Bristol, England, where Jason was born. Jason, his twin sister, Lisa, and a younger brother, David, moved to Cupertino, Calif., with their father when Jason was 12.

His interest in the Marine Corps started in high school, where he was an athlete and an actor, a popular young man with lots of friends. He played football and won gold medals in track, and had parts in school plays. When Marine recruiters came to the school and offered weekend outings with a chance to play sports, Corporal Poole happily took part. He enlisted after graduating in 2000.

"We talked about the possibility of war, but none of us thought it was really going to happen," said his father, who had to sign the enlistment papers because his son was only 17. Jason Poole hoped the Marines would help pay for college.

His unit was among the first to invade Iraq. He was on his third tour of duty there, just 10 days from coming home and leaving the Marines, when he was wounded in the explosion.

A week later, he was transferred to Bethesda, still in a coma, and his parents were told he might never wake up.

"I was unconscious for two months," Corporal Poole said in a recent interview at the V.A. center in Palo Alto. "One month and 23 days, really. Then I woke up and came here."

He has been a patient at the center since September 2004, mostly in the brain injury rehabilitation unit. He arrived unable to speak or walk, drooling, with the left side of his face caved in, his left eye blind and sunken, a feeding tube in his stomach and an opening in his neck to help him breathe.

"He was very hard of hearing, and sometimes he didn't even know you were in the room," said Debbie Pitsch, his physical therapist.

Damage to the left side of his brain had left him weak on the right, and he tended not to notice things to his right, even though his vision in that eye was good. He had lost his sense of smell. The left side of the brain is also the home of language, and it was hard for him to talk or comprehend speech. "He would shake his head no when he meant yes," said Dr. Zeiner, the neuropsychologist. But he could communicate by pointing. His mind was working, but the thoughts were trapped inside his head.

An array of therapists - speech, physical, occupational and others - began working with him for hours every day. He needed an ankle brace and a walker just to stand at first. His balance was way off and, because of the brain injury, he could not tell where his right foot was unless he could see it. He often would just drag it behind him. His right arm would fall from the walker and hang by his side, and he would not even notice. He would bump into things to his right. Nonetheless, on his second day in Palo Alto, he managed to walk a few steps.

"He was extremely motivated, and he pushed himself to the limit, being a marine," Ms. Pitsch said. He was so driven, in fact, that at first his therapists had to strap him into a wheelchair to keep him from trying to get up and walk without help.

By the last week of September, he was beginning to climb stairs. He graduated from a walker to a cane to walking on his own. By January he was running and lifting weights.

"It's not his physical recovery that's amazing," his father said. "It's not his mental recovery. It's his attitude. He's always positive. He very rarely gets low. If it was me I'd fall apart. We think of how he was and what he's had taken from him."

Corporal Poole is philosophical. "Even when I do get low it's just for 5 or 10 minutes," he said. "I'm just a happy guy. I mean, like, it sucks, basically, but it happened to me and I'm still alive."

A New Face

"Jason was definitely a ladies' man," said Zillah Hodgkins, who has been a friend for nine years.

In pictures from before he was hurt, he had a strikingly handsome face and a powerful build. Even in still photographs he seems animated, and people around him - other marines, Iraqi civilians - are always grinning, apparently at his antics.

But the explosion shattered the face in the pictures and left him with another one. In his first weeks at Palo Alto, he hid behind sunglasses and, even though the weather was hot, ski caps and high turtlenecks.

"We said, 'Jason, you're sweating. You have to get used to how you look,' " Dr. Zeiner said.

"He was an incredibly handsome guy," she said. "His twin sister is a beautiful woman. He was the life of the party. He was funny. He could have had any woman, and he comes back and feels like now he's a monster."

Gradually, he came out of wraps and tried to make peace with the image in the mirror. But his real hope was that somehow his face could be repaired.

Reconstructive surgery should have been done soon after the explosion, before broken bones could knit improperly. But the blast had caused an artery in Corporal Poole's skull to balloon into an aneurysm, and an operation could have ruptured it and killed him. By November 2004, however, the aneurysm had gone away.

Dr. H. Peter Lorenz, a plastic surgeon at Stanford University Medical Center, planned several operations to repair the damage after studying pictures of Corporal Poole before he was injured. "You could say every bone in his face was fractured," Dr. Lorenz said.

The first operation took 14 hours. Dr. Lorenz started by making a cut in Corporal Poole's scalp, across the top of his head from ear to ear, and peeling the flesh down over his nose to expose the bones. To get at more bone, he made another slit inside Corporal Poole's mouth, between his upper lip and his teeth, and slipped in tools to lift the tissue.

Many bones had healed incorrectly and had to be sawed apart, repositioned and then joined with titanium pins and plates. Parts of his eye sockets had to be replaced with bone carved from the back of his skull. Bone grafts helped to reposition Corporal Poole's eyes, which had sunk in the damaged sockets.

Operations in March and July repaired his broken and dislocated jaw, his nose and damaged eyelids and tear ducts. He could not see for a week after one of the operations because his right eye had been sewn shut, and he spent several weeks unable to eat because his jaws had been wired together.

Dr. Lorenz also repaired Corporal Poole's caved-in left cheek and forehead by implanting a protein made from human skin that would act as a scaffolding and be filled in by Corporal Poole's own cells.

Later, he was fitted with a false eye to fill out the socket where his left eye had shriveled.

Some facial scars remain, the false eye sometimes looks slightly larger than the real one, and because of a damaged tear duct, Corporal Poole's right eye is often watery. But his smile is still brilliant.

In a recent conversation, he acknowledged that the results of the surgery were a big improvement. When asked how he felt about his appearance, he shrugged and said, "I'm not good-looking but I'm still Jason Poole, so let's go."

But he catches people looking at him as if he is a "weird freak," he said, mimicking their reactions: a wide eyed stare, then the eyes averted. It makes him angry.

"I wish they would ask me what happened," he said. "I would tell them."

Learning to Speak

Evi Klein, a speech therapist in Palo Alto, said that when they met in September 2004 Corporal Poole could name only about half the objects in his room.

"He had words, but he couldn't pull together language to express his thoughts," Ms. Klein said. "To answer a question with more than one or two words was beyond his capabilities."

Ms. Klein began with basics. She would point to items in the room. What's this called? What's that? She would show him a picture, have him say the word and write it. He would have to name five types of transportation. She would read a paragraph or play a phone message and ask him questions about it. Very gradually, he began to speak. But it was not until February that he could string together enough words for anyone to hear that he still had traces of an English accent.

Today, he is fluent enough that most people would not guess how impaired he was. When he has trouble finding the right word or loses the thread of a conversation, he collects himself and starts again. More than most people, he fills in the gaps with expressions like "basically" and "blah, blah, blah."

"I thought he would do well," Ms. Klein said. "I didn't think he'd do as well as he is doing. I expect measurable gains over the next year or so."

With months of therapy, his reading ability has gone from zero to a level somewhere between second and third grade. He has to focus on one word at a time, he said. A page of print almost overwhelms him. His auditory comprehension is slow as well.

"It will take a bit of time," Corporal Poole said, "but basically I'm going to get there."

One evening over dinner, he said: "I feel so old." Not physically, he said, but mentally and emotionally.

On a recent morning, Ms. Gandolfi of the brain injury unit conducted an exercise in thinking and verbal skills with a group of patients. She handed Corporal Poole a sheet of paper that said, "Dogs can be taught how to talk." A series of questions followed. What would be the benefits? Why could it be a problem? What would you do about it?

Corporal Poole hunched over the paper, pen in hand. He looked up. "I have no clue," he said softly.

"Let's ask this one another way," Ms. Gandolfi said. "What would be cool about it?"

He began to write with a ballpoint pen, slowly forming faint letters. "I would talk to him and listen to him," he wrote.

In another space, he wrote: "lonely the dog happy." But what he had actually said to Ms. Gandolfi was: "I could be really lonely and this dog would talk to me."

Some of his responses were illegible. He left one question blank. But he was performing much better than he did a year ago.

He hopes to be able to work with children, maybe those with disabilities. But, Dr. Zeiner said, "He is not competitively employable."

His memory, verbal ability and reading are too impaired. He may eventually read well enough to take courses at a community college, but, she said, "It's years away."

Someday, he might be able to become a teacher's aide, she said. But he may have to work just as a volunteer and get by on his military benefits of about $2,400 a month. He will also receive a $100,000 insurance payment from the government.

"People whose brains are shattered, it's incredible how resilient they are," Dr. Zeiner said. "They keep trying. They don't collapse in despair."

Back in the World

In mid-December, Corporal Poole was finally well enough to leave the hospital. With a roommate, he moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, the town where Corporal Poole grew up. His share of the rent is $800 a month. But he had not lived outside a hospital in 18 months, and it was unclear how he would fare on his own.

"If he's not able to cope with the outside world, is there anywhere for him to go, anyone there to support him if it doesn't go well?" asked his mother, who still lives in Bristol, where she is raising her three younger children. "I think of people from Vietnam who wound up on the streets, or mental patients, or in prison."

He still needs therapy - speech and other types - several times a week at Palo Alto and that requires taking three city buses twice a day. The trip takes more than an hour, and he has to decipher schedules and cross hair-raising intersections on boulevards with few pedestrians. It is an enormous step, not without risk: people with a brain injury have increased odds of sustaining another one, from a fall or an accident brought about by impaired judgment, balance or senses.

In December, Corporal Poole practiced riding the buses to the hospital with Paul Johnson, a co-director of the brain injury unit. As they crossed a busy street, Mr. Johnson gently reminded him, several times, to turn and look back over his left shoulder - the side on which he is blind - for cars turning right.

After Corporal Poole and Mr. Johnson had waited for a few minutes at the stop, a bus zoomed up, and Corporal Poole ambled toward the door.

"Come on!" the driver snapped.

Corporal Poole watched intently for buildings and gas stations he had picked as landmarks so he would know when to signal for his stop.

"I'm a little nervous, but I'll get the hang of it," he said.

He was delighted to move into his new apartment, pick a paint color, buy a couch, a bed and a set of dishes, and eat something besides hospital food. With help from his therapists in Palo Alto, he hopes to take a class at a nearby community college, not an actual course, but a class to help him to learn to study and prepare for real academic work. Teaching, art therapy, children's theater and social work all appeal to him, even if he can only volunteer.

Awaiting his formal release from the military, Corporal Poole still hopes to get married and have children.

That hope is not unrealistic, Dr. Zeiner said. Brain injuries can cause people to lose their ability to empathize, she said, and that kills relationships. But Corporal Poole has not lost empathy, she said. "That's why I think he will find a partner."

Corporal Poole said: "I think something really good is going to happen to me."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

January 22, 2006
Competing Plans to Repair New Orleans Flood Protection
BY JOHN SCHWARTZ
At the halfway mark between the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina last year and the beginning of the 2006 hurricane season on June 1, the Army Corps of Engineers has completed only 16 percent of its planned repairs to New Orleans's battered flood protection system, according to corps representatives.

The corps says its work is on track for restoring the system to its pre-hurricane strength by the June 1 deadline, but in the meantime many groups that have studied the disaster are coming up with proposals of their own that they say could be cheaper, faster or stronger.

The Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the group formed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin to produce a blueprint for the city's recovery, issued a proposal on Wednesday to upgrade hurricane protection with measures beyond what the corps has called for. To prevent storm surges from pushing into the city's drainage canals, the commission proposed a series of jetties to stand in front of the three canals, which it says could be built quickly and cheaply and provide New Orleans with some much-needed peace of mind.

"There is, very much, a tension between things that can be done quickly versus those that might take a little longer," Lawrence Roth, deputy executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said in a telephone interview on Friday. His group has weighed in with far-reaching recommendations, and other groups are preparing proposals of their own.

The mayor's commission also proposed a network of dams that would block or slow the opening between the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal and Lake Pontchartrain, and block storm surges from flowing up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation channel that has been blamed for a storm surge funnel effect that increased the damage to eastern New Orleans.

The group is also calling for long-term flood-control structures that would block or slow surges at the two passes between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico.

The fast-track structures would cost $100 million to $170 million, according to the commission's estimates, a fraction of the $3.1 billion the federal government has proposed spending on flood control measures in the area. The commission said its proposals would not interfere with any of the corps's plans, but would be add-ons that complement the current plans.

The proposals have not yet found broad support among other engineering experts who have been working on strengthening New Orleans's storm defenses, but Dan Hitchings, the director of the corps's Task Force Hope, which is coordinating the hurricane response in Louisiana and Mississippi, said the plans were welcome and would be examined.

Mr. Roth, of the Society of Civil Engineers, said there would always be competing ideas about how to improve flood protection. The idea of jetties, he said, might be made moot by closing off the canals and putting in new pumping stations at the lake, as the corps has planned.

"Many different people can look at a problem and come up with many different solutions, all with tradeoffs," he said. "Which would be better - jetties or a pump station? You might never get an answer to that."

Meanwhile, the corps's work to restore flood protection to its pre-hurricane levels continues around the clock. This month the corps solicited bids for building temporary closures and pumps at the mouths of the city's three drainage canals, and it is rebuilding long stretches of levee in St. Bernard Parish and along the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal.

The corps is looking to measures that will further strengthen the flood protection system, including restoring levees to their originally designed heights. These measures can be in place by September 2007, according to the corps.

Beyond that, the corps has embarked on a two-year, $8 million study to determine how to strengthen the hurricane protection system for New Orleans and southern Louisiana. A preliminary version of that report is due in June.

While the Bush administration's top official on Gulf Coast reconstruction, Donald Powell, has said the government will build a system that is "better and stronger" than what was there before, the administration has not committed to what the people of New Orleans desperately want: protection from Category 5 storms, the toughest that nature can dish out.

Mr. Hitchings said that the corps was slightly behind schedule but that he expected things to move quickly. "It's not linear," he said, because the "gear-up time" to get contractors in place and to make materials like the enormous quantities of soil available was so great.

Now "they're really moving out," he said. The corps built 30 days of weather delays into the schedule, he said, and with a little help from favorable weather, "I'm very optimistic that they will regain their schedule and in the end get it all finished with plenty of time."

The corps's long-term study, he said, would probably have a lot in common with the outside proposals that are beginning to flow in, but "right now, we're focused on the very near term."

The engineering society is investigating the failure of the levees and is working with the groups that will monitor the corps's progress. Its recommendations include "armoring" the dry side of levees so they are not eroded away from underneath if water spills over the top. Without armoring, Mr. Roth said, "failure is catastrophic because it causes the wall to fail."

The corps has said that the armoring process, like other projects that would go beyond the restoration of the levees to pre-hurricane strength, will have to be approved by Congress.

"It's going to take people being willing to take a chance, to be bold, to sort out Louisiana's levee problems," said Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center and a member of Team Louisiana, the group formed by the state to investigate the causes of the levee failures. His group, too, will be making proposals for upgrading protection for the region.

"We may get lucky," he said. "Nature may give us another 10 years before we get another Katrina, or maybe not. But we've got to seize the moment or we're going to lose coastal Louisiana."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

January 22, 2006
Political Memo
Clinton Fires. Bush Replies. Guess Why.
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - In the past week, the Bush and Clinton camps have traded nasty words and asides in a series of exchanges that had the faint echoes of their open warfare during the 1992 presidential campaign.

On the surface, the skirmishing seemed to stem from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's assertion that Republicans are running Congress like a plantation, and that the Bush administration is one of the "worst in history." But strategists in both parties say the hostilities were more likely the opening shots of the 2008 presidential campaign season.

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, said he thought national Republicans felt the need to engage Mrs. Clinton now that she faces no major challenge for her Senate seat and is free to lay the groundwork for a national candidacy.

"She is the leading candidate for 2008, and you can't give her a clear run," he said. "There is no one holding her accountable, and so the national party figured it had to."

Chris Lehane, a Democratic operative who has worked on several presidential campaigns, said, "There is no question that this was about 2008 and not about any particular event in January 2006."

"There is a basic principle in politics that you ignore anyone who is criticizing you unless they are actually a threat and scoring points against you," Mr. Lehane continued. "Republicans are making the very safe assumption that she will be the Democratic nominee in 2008 and it scares them. So they are beginning to engage her."

The battle between the Bush and Clinton camps has been building for weeks.

In late December, people close to the senator were struck when the president himself took a shot at Mrs. Clinton and her New York colleague, Senator Charles E. Schumer, for blocking the renewal of the Patriot Act, saying that the two owed an explanation to voters in New York, a prime target of terrorists.

Not long after, Mrs. Clinton struck back, calling the Bush administration's efforts to protect troops in Iraq "incompetent" and saying that what she called the lack of adequate body armor for those troops was "unforgivable."

But things did not heat up until Monday, when the senator, speaking at a ceremony in Harlem honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said that Republicans ran the House of Representatives "like a plantation" in which dissent was not tolerated. Mrs. Clinton also attacked the Bush administration in that same speech as potentially being "the worst" in the nation's history.

The Republican National Committee responded within hours, accusing the senator of using divisive and racially charged language on a day devoted to national reconciliation. Then, two days later, the national party sent reporters an Internet video of her speech included in an e-mail message titled "Hillary's Back," in an apparent effort to conjure up an image of her that she has tried to largely shed: shrill leftist partisan.

The message accused Mrs. Clinton, among other things, of failing to attend an Armed Services Committee hearing that looked into body armor for troops.

"Senator Clinton repeatedly attacked the Bush administration over body armor, called for hearings, and then didn't bother to show up," said the statement. (Mrs. Clinton's spokesman responded that the briefing was called on short notice and that the senator already had a full day of events scheduled with constituents in New York and sent an aide in her place; her spokesman added that only one Republican attended the special briefing.)

And if that were not enough, the White House's chief spokesman criticized Mrs. Clinton, as did Laura Bush. "I think it's a ridiculous comment," Mrs. Bush told reporters on Wednesday, two days after Mrs. Clinton made the remarks. "It's a ridiculous comment - that's what I think."

The attacks by the White House and their Republican allies put the Clinton camp in a state of high alert, with the senator's advisers enlisting prominent black Democrats to come to her defense. In the meantime, Mrs. Clinton's advisers did a little research and came up with a similar plantation quote from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich that they, in turn, sent to reporters.

Some of Mrs. Clinton's closest allies do not think that the Republican assault is entirely bad for her.

The attacks may help energize her network of financial supporters at a time when she faces no serious opposition in her re-election bid this year in New York. But perhaps more important, the Republican attacks are already leading Democrats to rally around her, at a time when the senator is facing criticism from pockets on the left on several issues, chiefly her support for the war in Iraq. "If a person is defined by their friends and their enemies, she has all the right enemies," said one Democrat who is close to Mrs. Clinton.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

I'm a big Duke Fan, but couldn't help posting this.


January 21, 2006
Georgetown 87, Duke 84

The Duke Express Runs Into a Pothole
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
John Thompson III got an embrace from his Hall of Fame father yesterday as fans stormed the court, madly celebrating the first Georgetown victory over a No. 1 team in 21 years.

"After all he's had to go through, he deserves this," the elder Thompson said.

The Hoyas finally have a signature victory in the new Thompson era, an 87-84 upset of top-ranked Duke in Washington.

Backdoor layups and stubborn defense produced a 16-point second-half lead, and the Hoyas withstood a furious late rally.

"We've come close, we've been there, we've been at the other end of some lopsided defeats," said Thompson III, in his second season since replacing Craig Esherick as the Hoyas' coach.

The Blue Devils (17-1) had matched their best start, but their bid to extend it was thwarted by a Hoyas team that shot 61 percent and held Shelden Williams to a season-low 4 points.

"We've been in the penthouse all season, having room service," Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "Somebody jammed up the elevator today."

With Duke going down, No. 9 Pittsburgh losing to St. John's and No. 2 Florida falling at Tennessee, a day that began with three unbeaten Division I teams ended with none.

J. J. Redick matched his career high with 41 points, but he was mostly a one-man show.

"When we don't match another team's intensity - that doesn't happen very often - then all of a sudden we do 'J. J.-watching,' where we're watching J. J. play," Krzyzewski said. "We might as well get tickets and sit behind the bench. No one is doing anything out there."

Brandon Bowman scored 23 points, and Jeff Green had 18 for the Hoyas (12-4), who had not beaten a No. 1 team since the Sweater Game against St. John's on Feb. 27, 1985. The elder Thompson wore a striped sweater to match the lucky sweater worn by Lou Carnesecca, the St. John's coach, and the Hoyas won, 85-69.

The younger Thompson was at that game, "second-guessing his father," according to the elder Thompson.

But Thompson III got all the credit for this one.

"Coach Thompson has been preaching since he got the job that with hard work, anything can happen," said Darrel Owens, who scored 13 points on 6-for-8 shooting. "And I think today you saw that hard work pay off."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Bush and Reid spar over health care and taxes
By Jeremy Pelofsky

President George W. Bush pledged to fight soaring health care costs in a preview on Saturday of his election-year State of the Union address, while a leading Democrat blamed Republicans for problems in a new prescription-drug program and recent corruption scandals.

Bush and Sen. Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record), a Nevada Democrat, dueled in radio addresses over health care, tax cuts and recent lobbying scandals in Congress. Republicans, nervous about the scandals and public doubts over the Iraq war, are seeking to keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate in the November midterm elections.

Bush said he would push to limit health-care costs by expanding tax-free "Health Savings Accounts," which let people set aside money for routine medical expenses.

"This year, I will ask Congress to take steps to make these accounts more available, more affordable and more portable," Bush said. Small businesses should be able to pool their risk so they can get discounts on health insurance, he said.

"For the sake of America's small businesses, workers and families, we must ... make health care more affordable and accessible," Bush said in his weekly radio broadcast.

Bush on January 31 will deliver to Congress his State of the Union address laying out his agenda for the year. Several Republicans have said they expect the health-care initiative to be cited in that speech.

Reid, in the Democrats' response to Bush's radio address, highlighted problems in a new prescription-drug benefit under the Medicare health program for elderly and disabled people.

Since the benefit was launched on January 1, many eligible patients have been hit by administrative problems that have made it difficult to get their prescription costs covered. About half of the states intervened to pay for drugs for people who had problems obtaining coverage.

"The state of the union today is that we have low-income Americans begging for their prescription drugs, and seniors going without any coverage," Reid said.

Reid also urged Bush to use his State of the Union speech to address recent corruption scandals, such as one involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty in a bribery investigation implicating at least one Republican congressman.

"The American people need to hear him (Bush) denounce the Republican culture of corruption, and tell us how he is going to reform our nation's capital," Reid said.

Bush and Reid also argued over recent tax cuts and efforts by the president to make them permanent. Bush said those who oppose the extension want to "raise your taxes."

But Reid accused the Republicans of using "doublespeak" in promoting tax breaks as part of a deficit-reduction effort, when the breaks would actually increase the federal budget deficit.

(additional reporting by Caren Bohan and Donna Smith in Washington.)




Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

The Other Big Brother
The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program. Even its leaders say the outfit may have gone too far.

Jan. 30, 2006 issue - The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin says.

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.

A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention—although organizer Parkin had previously been arrested while demonstrating at ExxonMobil headquarters (the charges were dropped). But there are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

CIFA's activities are the latest in a series of disclosures about secret government programs that spy on Americans in the name of national security. In December, the ACLU obtained documents showing the FBI had investigated several activist groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Greenpeace, supposedly in an effort to discover possible ecoterror connections. At the same time, the White House has spent weeks in damage-control mode, defending the controversial program that allowed the National Security Agency to monitor the telephone conversations of U.S. persons suspected of terror links, without obtaining warrants.

Last Thursday, Cheney called the program "vital" to the country's defense against Al Qaeda. "Either we are serious about fighting this war on terror or not," he said in a speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. But as the new information about CIFA shows, the scope of the U.S. government's spying on Americans may be far more extensive than the public realizes.

It isn't clear how many groups and individuals were snagged by CIFA's dragnet. Details about the program, including its size and budget, are classified. In December, NBC News obtained a 400-page compilation of reports that detailed a portion of TALON's surveillance efforts. It showed the unit had collected information on nearly four dozen antiwar meetings or protests, including one at a Quaker meetinghouse in Lake Worth, Fla., and a Students Against War demonstration at a military recruiting fair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Pentagon spokesman declined to say why a private company like Halliburton would be deserving of CIFA's protection. But in the past, Defense Department officials have said that the "force protection" mission includes military contractors since soldiers and Defense employees work closely with them and therefore could be in danger.






CIFA researchers apparently cast a wide net and had a number of surveillance methods—both secretive and mundane—at their disposal. An internal CIFA PowerPoint slide presentation recently obtained by William Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who writes widely about military affairs, gives some idea how the group operated. The presentation, which Arkin provided to NEWSWEEK, shows that CIFA analysts had access to law-enforcement reports and sensitive military and U.S. intelligence documents. (The group's motto appears at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide: "Counterintelligence 'to the Edge'.") But the organization also gleaned data from "open source Internet monitoring." In other words, they surfed the Web.

That may have been how the Pentagon came to be so interested in a small gathering outside Halliburton. On June 23, 2004, a few days before the Halliburton protest, an ad for the event appeared on houston.indymedia.org, a Web site for lefty Texas activists. "Stop the war profiteers," read the posting. "Bring out the kids, relatives, Dick Cheney, and your favorite corporate pigs at the trough as we will provide food for free."

Four months later, on Oct. 25, the TALON team reported another possible threat to national security. The source: a Miami antiwar Web page. "Website advertises protest planned at local military recruitment facility," the internal report warns. The database entry refers to plans by a south Florida group called the Broward Anti-War Coalition to protest outside a strip-mall recruiting office in Lauderhill, Fla. The TALON entry lists the upcoming protest as a "credible" threat. As it turned out, the entire event consisted of 15 to 20 activists waving a giant BUSH LIED sign. No one was arrested. "It's very interesting that the U.S. military sees a domestic peace group as a threat," says Paul Lefrak, a librarian who organized the protest.

Arkin says a close reading of internal CIFA documents suggests the agency may be expanding its Internet monitoring, and wants to be as surreptitious as possible. CIFA has contracted to buy "identity masking" software that would allow the agency to create phony Web identities and let them appear to be located in foreign countries, according to a copy of the contract with Computer Sciences Corp. (The firm declined to comment.)

Pentagon officials have broadly defended CIFA as a legitimate response to the domestic terror threat. But at the same time, they acknowledge that an internal Pentagon review has found that CIFA's database contained some information that may have violated regulations. The department is not allowed to retain information about U.S. citizens for more than 90 days—unless they are "reasonably believed" to have some link to terrorism, criminal wrongdoing or foreign intelligence. There was information that was "improperly stored," says a Pentagon spokesman who was authorized to talk about the program (but not to give his name). "It was an oversight." In a memo last week, obtained by NEWSWEEK, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered CIFA to purge such information from its files—and directed that all Defense Department intelligence personnel receive "refresher training" on department policies.

That's not likely to stop the questions. Last week Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee pushed for an inquiry into CIFA's activities and who it's watching. "This is a significant Pandora's box [Pentagon officials] don't want opened," says Arkin. "What we're looking at is hints of what they're doing." As far as the Pentagon is concerned, that means we've already seen too much.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

Search engines vs. the DOJ: The aftermath Seattle Post Intelligencer
In a post Friday evening on the MSN Search blog, GM Ken Moss offers an explanation and more details about Microsoft's compliance with the Justice Department's controversial request for data about search queries:Moss goes on to describe what can -- and can't -- be determined by the Justice Department from the data the company turned over. In the comments below his post, the reactions are starting to come in.
Internet privacy in China and the US MarketWatch
The Day After: Points In The Search Trust Sweepstakes Search Engine Watch
Washington Post - Guardian Unlimited - Scotsman - PC World - all 727 related »

Glance at coal mining disasters in US Seattle Post Intelligencer
Some of the deadliest mine disasters in the United States:
-1907: Monongah, W.Va., 362 miners killed in deadliest mining accident in nation's history.
-1947: Centralia No. 5 mine in Illinois, 111 people killed when blasting charge intended to loosen coal ignited airborne coal dust 545 feet below surface.
-1968: Consolidation Coal Co.'s No. 9 mine at Farmington, W.Va., 78 miners killed, 19 of whom remain entombed there. Twenty major explosions and many minor ones rocked 100 miles of tunnels for nine days. Disaster led to landmark Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969.
2 Missing Workers Are Found Dead in West Virginia Mine New York Times
Miners safety on the line Newsday
ABC News - Billings Gazette - London Free Press - San Diego Union Tribune - all 2,576 related »

"Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office," :

Inspired by Mossad, Feith's rogue intelligence cell appears to have solicited, reexamined, digested and regurgitated evidence from the programmed liars put forward by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress - evidence that the Intelligence Community already had considered, before dismissing as unreliable
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11631.htm

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Rove: GOP to Use Terror As Campaign Issue :

Embattled White House adviser Karl Rove vowed Friday to make the war on terrorism a central campaign issue in November. He also said Democratic senators looked "mean-spirited and small-minded" in questioning Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.
http://tinyurl.com/9pze9

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Manufacturing Fear : .

Bush benefits from the presence of bin Laden whenever events become too overwhelming for him. In the climate of moral degeneracy that is so rampant in the Bush cabal, bin Laden can easily be trotted out onto the stage and presented as an imminent threat to America.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11639.htm

Bush Leads Defense of NSA Domestic Spying :

The Bush administration is opening a campaign to push back against criticism of its domestic spying program, ahead of congressional hearings into whether President Bush has the legal authority to eavesdrop on Americans.
http://tinyurl.com/87gcw

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Kennedy resolution demands Bush wiretap probe:

"If President Bush can make his own rules for domestic surveillance, Big Brother has run amok," Kennedy said yesterday. "We need a thorough investigation of these activities. Congress and the American people deserve answers, and they deserve answers now."
http://www.lowellsun.com/local/ci_3424691

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The War on Dissent Gets Creepy:

"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience...Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/ferner5.html

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U.S. accused of spying on those who disagree with Bush policies:

"Agents rummaged through the trash, snooped into e-mails, packed Web sites and listened in on phone conversations," Hersh charged. "We know that address books and activist meeting lists have disappeared."
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/new...cs/13675006.htm

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Belafonte: Bush administration backs Gestapo tactics:

"We've come to this dark time in which the Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended," Belafonte told thousands of people at the annual meeting of the Arts Presenters Members Conference.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/new...0,2415767.story

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The Other Big Brother:

The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program. Even its leaders say the outfit may have gone too far.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965509/site/newsweek

January 23, 2006
News Analysis
Delicate Dance for Bush in Depicting Spy Program as Asset
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 - With a campaign of high-profile national security events set for the next three days, following Karl Rove's blistering speech to Republicans on Friday, the White House has effectively declared that it views its controversial secret surveillance program not as a political liability but as an asset, a way to attack Democrats and re-establish President Bush's standing after a difficult year.

Whether the White House can succeed depends very much, members of both parties say, on its success in framing a complicated debate when the country is torn between its historic aversion to governmental intrusion and its recent fear of terrorist attacks at home.

Polls suggest that Americans are divided over whether Mr. Bush has the authority to order the searches without warrants that critics say violate the law and that the president says are legal and critical to the nation's security.

But as the White House and Democrats are well aware, the issue can draw very different reactions depending on how it is presented. These next few days could prove critical, as both Mr. Bush and Congressional Democrats move aggressively to define what is at stake.

Americans may be willing to support extraordinary measures - perhaps extralegal ones - if they are posed in the starkest terms of protecting the nation from another calamitous attack. They are less likely to be supportive, members of both parties say, if the question is presented as a president breaking the law to spy on the nation's own citizens.

Viewed from the perspective of the battles over the Homeland Security Act or the USA Patriot Act, this White House holds a tactical edge; it has repeatedly proved highly effective in defining complicated debates against the Democratic Party. Applying the campaign lessons of simplicity and repetition, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove, his chief political adviser, have systematically presented arguments in accessible if sometimes exaggerated terms, and they have regularly returned to the theme of terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Rove's speech on Friday to the Republican National Committee was a classic example. "Let me be as clear as I can be: President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," Mr. Rove said. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Democrats - and, though Mr. Rove made no mention of this Friday, some Republicans, too - have indeed challenged the administration for eavesdropping without obtaining warrants. They argue, among other points, that the White House is bypassing legal mechanisms established in 1978 that already allow law enforcement agencies to move rapidly to monitor communications that might involve terrorists. Yet it is difficult to think of a Democrat who has actually argued that it is not "in our national security interest" to track Qaeda calls to the United States, as Mr. Rove contested; he did not offer any examples of whom he had in mind.

Beyond that tactical edge, the White House enjoys the advantage of its platform. The sheer crush of news media attention to a rare public speech by Mr. Rove could not have been lost on Democrats.

By contrast, there is no single Democrat who stands as the voice of opposition. That difference is likely to become particularly glaring this week, with a speech on Monday by Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency; a legal defense of the spying program on Tuesday by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales; and a visit by Mr. Bush to N.S.A. headquarters on Wednesday. This orchestrated campaign is the work of the same White House that initially offered a crouched, guarded response to the disclosure of the eavesdropping program last month.

Still, in many significant ways the task the White House faces now may prove more daunting than the battles it has waged on this terrain before.

A number of Republicans have joined Democrats in challenging the surveillance program, pointedly reminding the administration that precedents established today will be in place whenever a Democrat returns to power.

"A lot of Democrats?" said one prominent Republican supporter of Mr. Bush, who did not want to be identified while being critical of a White House that famously does not brook criticism. "Democrats, Karl? Republicans, too."

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said: "A lot of conservatives are very skeptical about it. It is not as clean-cut a political win as the administration thinks that it is."

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is planning hearings on the surveillance program. And in an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said he did not think the president had the legal authority for this operation, adding that the White House should seek Congressional approval to alter the 1978 provisions if it thinks they are not working now.

Mr. McCain also came to the defense of Democrats in response to Mr. Rove's suggestion that they were not committed to the nation's security. "Do I think that the president's leadership has been worthy of support of our party and our leadership?" he said. "Yes. But there's too many good Democrats over there who are as concerned about national security and work just as hard as I do."

Beyond that, one Republican analyst who is skeptical about the White House strategy said Mr. Bush's position was hardly helped by the fact that his credibility numbers have dropped along with his popularity since his re-election. Mr. Bush may find that, as some Democrats have suggested, the invocations of Sept. 11 do not have the force they once had.

For their part, Democrats said they have learned from their repeated defeats by this White House. The Democratic presidential candidate of 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Rove and the White House were willfully distorting the Democratic position.

"He's playing an old game," Mr. Kerry said. "Every time they have a problem, they play the 9/11 card."

"We all support surveillance - that's where they are playing word games again," Mr. Kerry said. "You can protect the safety of the American people and you can protect the Constitution."

The political complexity of the issue was reflected in remarks by Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican, who, like Mr. Kerry, is considering a run for president. Speaking by telephone on a trip to Iowa, Mr. Romney at first offered full support for the president's surveillance program.

"The eavesdropping is a big matter on the coasts for people who are inclined to dislike the president," Mr. Romney said. "The great majority of Americans think it is the president's first responsibility to protect the lives of the American citizens in an urgent setting where there is a threat of terrorism."

But Mr. Romney called back a few moments later to make clear that he would have a different view if the program were found to be unlawful.

"I would never suggest that the president should break the law," he said. "My guess is, my assumption is, he did not break the law. The president has a responsibility to follow the law, which I believe is likely to be found, but he also has a primary responsibility to protect the American people."

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting for this article.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

January 23, 2006
Held in 9/11 Net, Muslims Return to Accuse U.S.
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Hundreds of noncitizens were swept up on visa violations in the weeks after 9/11, held for months in a much-criticized federal detention center in Brooklyn as "persons of interest" to terror investigators, and then deported. This week, one of them is back in New York and another is due today - the first to return to the United States.

They are no longer the accused but the accusers, among six former detainees who are coming back to give depositions in their federal lawsuits against top government officials and detention guards, at a time when the constitutionality of part of the government's counterterrorism offensive is under new scrutiny.

As in the cases of all the Muslim immigrants rounded up in the New York area after the terror attacks, the six were never accused of a crime related to 9/11; officials eventually cleared all of them of links to terrorism. A report by the inspector general of the Justice Department found systemic problems with immigrant detentions and widespread abuse at the federal detention center where the six had been held; several guards have since been disciplined.

But as the six return to the city - four of them from Egypt, one from Pakistan, one from London - the conditions imposed by the United States government include the requirement that they be in the constant custody of federal marshals.

They are barred from calling anyone during their weeklong stays at an undisclosed New York hotel, where 12 days of closed depositions are to begin today. They can expect hours of questioning by lawyers representing at least 31 defendants in the lawsuits, including John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.

The first returning detainees, Yasser and Hany Ibrahim, who are brothers, say that putting themselves back in the hands of the government they are suing is an act of faith in America. In recent telephone interviews from Alexandria, Egypt, the two described themselves as frightened but resolute in pressing a 2002 class-action lawsuit charging that they were abused and deprived of due process because of their religion or national origin.

"I'm seeking justice," said Yasser, 33, who had a Web site design business in Brooklyn before he and Hany, 29, a deli worker, were delivered in shackles to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn 19 days after 9/11. "It's from the same system that did us injustice before. But I have faith in this system. I know what happened before was a mistake."

Charles S. Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said officials would not comment on any aspect of the case, including the conditions of the men's return to the city and their allegations. But in court papers, the defendants deny wrongdoing, and department lawyers argue in part that the Sept. 11 attacks created "special factors" - including the need to detect and deter future terrorist attacks - that outweigh the plaintiffs' right to sue for damages for any constitutional violations.

The detainees' lawyers say that what happened at the Brooklyn detention center can be recognized four years later as the template for many of the counterterrorism measures now being fiercely challenged.

"The post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps were the first example of the Bush administration's willingness to ignore the law and hold people outside the judicial system," said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the Ibrahim brothers. "The kind of torture, interrogation and arbitrary detention that we now associate with Guantánamo and secret C.I.A. facilities really started right here, in Brooklyn."

Richard Peter Caro, a lawyer for Stuart Pray, the lieutenant who oversaw the detainees' arrival at the detention center, said yesterday: "We're glad that they're coming in to be deposed so we can really get at the facts and finally see what the evidence shows. I'm confident that my client will be found to have committed no wrongdoing at all."

Last week, the center filed a class-action suit against President Bush and other administration officials over the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping without warrants. Ms. Meeropol is one of the plaintiffs, contending that her communications with clients like the Ibrahims may have been monitored illegally. The government says the surveillance program is a legal and valuable tool in the war on terror.

Illegal recording of lawyer-client conversations was one of the abuses documented at the Brooklyn detention center in a scathing 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general. The report also found a pattern of physical abuse, some of it caught on prison videotape, including beatings and sexual humiliations like those described by the Ibrahim brothers or other former detainees. The report said it was Mr. Ashcroft's policy to hold detainees on any legal pretext until the F.B.I. cleared them, even though such clearances took months and many detainees were immigrants picked up by chance.

At the time, Mr. Ashcroft said he made "no apologies" for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public. Nonetheless, officials pledged to work on getting kinks out of the system, and said abuses would be punished.

Critics charge that the authority that Mr. Ashcroft asserted after 9/11 - to detain any noncitizen considered a "person of interest" secretly and indefinitely - is unconstitutional. Government officials argue that secrecy is needed to keep terrorists in the dark.

Mr. Ashcroft has sought to have the two lawsuits brought by the detainees dismissed. But in a decision appealed by the government, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled in September that he and other defendants would have to answer questions, at a later deposition, in one of the suits: a 2004 complaint by another two of the six returning detainees.

Those two men, in their late 30's, are Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian immigrant who ran a restaurant near Times Square, and Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani immigrant whose Long Island customers knew him as "the cable guy."

"I am not afraid," Mr. Iqbal wrote last week in an e-mail message about his scheduled return. "I am also sure that justice will be served because peoples of U.S.A. are justice-loving people regardless of race and religion."

The Ibrahim brothers are more fearful. They say that their parents begged them not to return to the country where they were held in maximum security without charges for eight months and, the brothers charge, beaten and tormented by guards. "Part of my motivation is to make sure that what happened to us doesn't happen to more people in the future," said Yasser, who was due to arrive in New York today, joining his brother, who came on Friday.

Both spoke with nostalgia of the three or four years they lived in New York, on and off, before 9/11. When they were not working, they said, they hung out together in Greenwich Village, browsed electronics stores near Times Square and took friends on the rides at Coney Island. Hany proudly recalled how he worked his way up from stock boy to grill man and then manager of a deli in Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn. "The best I lived in my life was in New York," he said.

Right after the World Trade Center attack, they said, their parents urged them to come home. "We assured them," Yasser recalled: " 'This is the United States. They don't arrest people for no charges. We didn't do anything, so nothing's going to happen to us.' "

But at 2 p.m. on Sept. 30, 2001, the lawsuit says, a dozen terrorism investigators from the F.B.I., the police and immigration services knocked at the door of the Ocean Parkway apartment that the brothers shared with several Egyptian and Moroccan friends. After questioning everybody, the investigators took away Yasser, Hany and another man, all of whose tourist visas had expired.

Why investigators showed up is unclear, said their lawyer, Ms. Meeropol. But she noted that some interrogations were prompted by anonymous tips about "suspicious-looking" foreign men. Federal officials have contended that at a time when a second terror attack seemed imminent, all tips had to be checked. As a practical matter, once the brothers were labeled "of interest" to investigators, they were destined for the maximum-security unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Physical abuse, the lawsuit says, began the moment they arrived, chained and shackled. As Yasser described it, guards supervised by Lieutenant Pray slammed his brother face-first into a wall where an American flag T-shirt had been taped, then did the same to him.

Pain became part of the brothers' daily routine, the lawsuit charges. Escort teams cursing them as Muslims and terrorists slammed them into every available wall when they were taken from their cells, twisted their wrists and fingers, and stepped on their leg chains so that they fell, their ankles bruised and bloody, according to the suit.

But worse than physical or verbal abuse, Yasser said, was "the feeling that we are being hidden from the outside world, and nobody knows in the outside world that we are arrested and in this place." Hany, who says he suffered a nervous breakdown when he finally returned to Egypt, recalled that guards and lieutenants terrified him by saying, "You're going to stay here the rest of your life."

At a closed immigration hearing on Nov. 20, three weeks after their arrest, the brothers agreed to immediate deportation. By Dec. 7, the lawsuit says, F.B.I. memos stated that clearance checks on the Ibrahims had shown no links to terrorism. But they were held six more months - Hany until May 29, 2002, and Yasser until June 6.

The suit asks the court to declare that all the detentions were unjustified and illegal, to award compensatory and punitive damages, and to order the government to return personal property it confiscated.

To prevent unnecessary detentions and abuses of noncitizens in the event of a new national emergency, the Justice Department's inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, in 2003 recommended changes in counterterrorism policy as well as disciplinary action against at least 10 guards and supervisors. In his last report to Congress, in August 2005, Mr. Fine said that many of his recommendations had been acted upon but that formal policy changes were still being negotiated.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has fired two detention officers, suspended two for 30 days and demoted one in connection with the Brooklyn inquiry, said Traci Billingsley, a bureau spokeswoman.

The Ibrahim brothers say that when they finally reached home, they found that the presumption of guilt had followed them into an Egyptian secret service dossier that made them unemployable. Yasser, now married with a 2-year-old son, said he and Hany were eking out a living in a small jewelry business.

"It's going to be very difficult for me to go back for just a week and not to be able to see the places that I loved before," he said of his return. "America's the land of the free."



Copyright 2006The New York Times

January 22, 2006
Eavesdropping Leaps Into 21st Century
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:46 p.m. ET

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- In the past, intercepting communications meant just that -- copying a telegram mid-route, steaming open an envelope or attaching alligator clips to the copper wires that connected every telephone in the world.

But the old ways of communicating are heading into the sunset like the Pony Express and being replaced by phone calls, instant messages, e-mail and more that are converted into digital data before they gallop across the Internet and other advanced networks.

This constant interchange of massive amounts of data, converging into speeding bitstreams on common pipes, is both a blessing and a curse for eavesdroppers.

It's easier than ever to access wholesale feeds of data. But such work is also more controversial than traditional wiretapping, as seen in objections to post-9/11 warrantless domestic surveillance and to regulatory moves to require networks to be tap-friendly.

Critics question whether safeguards put in place a quarter century ago following FBI wiretapping misconduct are strong enough to prevent abuse in the 21st century. Others fear the information superhighway is turning out to be a fast path to mass surveillance.

''The thing that really should worry people is that once the capability is there, people will abuse it,'' said Jennifer Granick, executive director of Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society. ''The opportunity for abuse is so much greater, because so much more of our private information is transmitted over the network.''

Always a hot topic, the debate over wiretapping is further fueled today not only by the knowledge of what's possible but also by a dearth of details of what's actually happening.

What makes the White House surveillance program -- acknowledged after The New York Times disclosed it in December -- a cause of such concern is that it skirts existing laws and employs techniques resembling a wide-mouthed vacuum before the fine-toothed combs can be wielded.

It's being performed by the ultra-secret National Security Agency, which is believed to have the most advanced information vacuuming technology available. The NSA did not return telephone calls seeking comment on its methods.

The agency's efforts are reported to enjoy the cooperation of telecommunications companies, which run the major backbones and junctions where data -- phone calls and Internet traffic -- is exchanged between carriers' networks. Those companies have refused to confirm or deny to The Associated Press whether they've cooperated with the program, which the White House says began in 2002 with the aim of preventing terrorist attacks.

But they could be helping in a number of ways to provide information on who's talking to whom, when, how long the communication lasts and, ultimately, the content itself. Under the laws bypassed by the Bush administration, warrants for wiretaps require some evidence of wrongdoing.

Given the huge amount of data that traverses networks, it's likely that one element of the program involves analyzing traffic to single out anyone who communicates with people in suspicious locations. Data accumulated for phone billing could be one of the sources.

Modern networks can yield such information not just for phone calls but also for any other type of communication that passes through. When the data is converted to packets, as in the Internet, each one contains a header with the origin and destination.

Even without support from a carrier, the NSA could be sniffing communication as it traverses the airwaves or passes through the millions of miles of fiber optic cable that are buried underground or beneath oceans.

The technical problem is in the fire hose of information involved, said Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department computer crimes prosecutor.

''The idea that the NSA could be sitting on every call going internationally, listening in on every possible language, for the words al-Qaida,' 'terrorist' or 'bombs' is just fallacy,'' he said. ''Computers capable of doing that simply don't exist and hopefully never will.''

But the technology does exist to quickly read just the destination or origin information.

That sort of monitoring, if done on a wide scale, creates thorny moral, ethical and legal problems because those channels are much more likely to contain the chatter of innocents than the machinations of terrorists. And it raises the question of how that traffic is used.

''The thing about traffic analysis is you can mine that to any depth you want,'' said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc.

In domestic criminal cases, law enforcement officials who want simply to know who is talking to whom -- excluding content -- need only tell a court it's important to a case. But that low burden of proof was established with the belief that only one line would be monitored.

When such surveillance is done on all outbound international calls, the law is not clear.

''I would say the Fourth Amendment (guaranteeing protection against unreasonable searches) is the Fourth Amendment, and the fact that you're invading the privacy of millions as opposed to dozens should make it worse, not better,'' said Rasch, who is now chief security counsel at Solutionary Inc., a security risk management firm.

It's believed that once the traffic analysis identifies ''people of interest,'' they are then targeted for further surveillance and, possibly, full-content monitoring. Then, the NSA could simply mirror the data going to or coming from a target. It could even set up a parallel phone company or its own Internet Service Provider that would be invisible to its targets, Rasch said.

Critics note that the White House could easily have used the secret court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to get approval for such wiretaps, but chose instead to bypass it.

As it is, the FISA court has been criticized for rubber stamping requests.

''During the Clinton years, we were fighting that kangaroo court -- they never said no,'' Schneier said. ''Here we are now wishing for the little oversight that the court had.''

The NSA surveillance also raises questions about wiretapping in investigations unrelated to national security.

Responding to complaints by law enforcers that such digital communications as Internet telephony can stymie their eavesdropping, the FCC decided last year decided that the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act should be extended next year to apply to some broadband Internet access providers and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) companies.

CALEA compels those companies to proactively build out that capability, and network equipment vendors are starting to building surveillance tools into their gear in anticipation of compliance.

Some companies, such as VeriSign Inc. and NeuStar Inc., offer an all-in-one service for carriers and service providers, which some federal agencies have argued will actually enhance privacy for people not under investigation.

But critics say that rather than laying the groundwork for privacy, new regulations will more likely enable greater misuse.

''There's no question in my mind that once we make the networks less secure because of CALEA, we will exploit that lack of security to intercept communications under every legal authority asserted by the government,'' Rasch said.



Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

Deaths add urgency for mine safety USA Today
A broad spectrum of government and industry officials are calling for prompt action in improving mine safety, spurred by West Virginia's second fatal coal mining accident in less than three weeks.

West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, left, and Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., speak Friday about the state's latest mining disaster.
Gov. Joe Manchin said he would propose legislation today that could improve miners' chances for survival in case of an accident. He said he's optimistic it will be approved tonight. (Related: Two miners found dead)
Deaths Push Calls for Mine Safety Overhaul ABC News
Glance at coal mining disasters in US Seattle Post Intelligencer
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A protest to note abortion anniversary Newsday
Holding gruesome photographs of aborted fetuses and signs that read "Planned Parenthood, Planned Murder," more than 100 opponents of abortion gathered in East Meadow yesterday to protest the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark case legalizing abortion 33 years ago. Members of the Long Island Coalition for Life fanned out along Hempstead Turnpike in front of Nassau University Medical Center, a location they selected because they said the hospital performed 605 induced abortions in 2004, which they said was more than any other hospital on Long Island that year. An NUMC spokeswoman declined to comment. That number could not be independently verified yesterday. "We have lost so many beautiful, beautiful American people," said Florence Brady, 82, of Floral Park, who held a large photograph of a fetus in the womb that read, "Is this is a Choice or a Child?"
Demonstrators mark Roe v. Wade anniversary San Jose Mercury News
Where The Real Action Is... TIME
ABC News - Miami Herald - Journal Times Online - Voice of America - all 523 related »

Mayor Sticks to His Guns on Alleged Fare Thefts Los Angeles Times
Mayor Gavin Newsom wants cable car crews to know he doesn't think all of them are lining their pockets with pilfered fares. The mayor met privately with union leaders and workers Friday to take some of the sting out of his comments earlier in the week that he was convinced some cable car operators were stealing money that should have gone into the public till. Those who went into the closed-door meeting hoping for a mea culpa were disappointed. "There are so many operators doing incredible work [who] feel that because of my comments, their good reputation has been affected," Newsom said. "That being said, I cannot in good conscience retract the statements that I made, because they are the truth," the mayor added.
Newsom reaches out to insulted cable car drivers KESQ
SF Mayor Meets with Cable Car Operators CBS 5
abc7news.com - NBC11.com - San Francisco Examiner - WXXA - all 62 related »

Google's reputation at stake in fight with government USA Today
Google, facing its biggest public relations battle yet, has more at stake than competitors as it fights a federal government demand for data on how millions of users search the Internet. (Related item: Google battles government over porn investigation) As the No. 1 online search company, Google has the highest profile, and a brand built on a "don't be evil" motto that it must defend as it expands further into search-related ventures. "That is their motto and their ambition, and they need to be true to that," says Denise Garcia, an analyst who follows Google at W.R. Hambrecht. Google's stance will likely burnish its image as a search engine industry leader that can be trusted to guard its users' data, Garcia says.
Online privacy is a fragile shield San Jose Mercury News
Subpoena of search engine records irks users Computerworld New Zealand
Los Angeles Times - Newsday - Austin American-Statesman (subscription) - Carlisle Sentinel - all 526 related »

Turning a page on literacy gap Rocky Mountain News
The recent proposal floated by House Speaker Andrew Romanoff to require a student to have English proficiency to earn a high school diploma is, without doubt, an important way to start closing language gaps among immigrants - legal and illegal - in Colorado. But it also has another benefit: It addresses a massive literacy gap that a recent national study shows is blunting Colorado's, and the nation's, economic competitiveness. The speaker's solid proposal should become one part of an overall bipartisan focus on boosting literacy rates as a catalyst toward job creation and stronger economic growth. Buried amid the distractions and Christmas wrappings was news of a major new study, by the federal government's National Center for Education Statistics, that showed 30 million Americans have woefully inadequate literacy skills - with 7 million of them ranked as nonliterate in English. Another 60 million Americans have only basic literacy skills. Consider the practical facts behind these numbers.

• The 30 million Americans in the "below basic" category read so poorly that, according to national group ProLiteracy, they couldn't calculate a 5 cent per gallon discount on a home heating bill or fill out a simple medical form - much less a job application.
• The 60 million Americans who scored in the "basic" category lack the ability to adequately evaluate information in legal documents and possess only third- or fourth-grade math skills.

Above all, this literacy gap is a human tragedy because it robs millions of Americans of the chance to lead fuller, more successful and fulfilling lives. But beyond the loss to each individual, this gap is a serious and continuing loss to Colorado's - and the nation's - competitive edge. It is a deep wound to our ability to compete in the world economy since studies show that these literacy rates lag behind those of our key international economic competitors. In fact, there is significant anecdotal evidence that the need for widespread basic skills training was a key reason that Toyota recently decided to locate a manufacturing plant in Canada rather than in the United States. The automaker wanted to avoid the significant training costs its competitors Nissan and Honda were saddled with at their U.S. facilities because of inadequate literacy skills. Equally disturbing is that there has been no improvement in literacy rates since the last study was conducted in the 1990s. This means America's competitiveness has continued to erode. As author and globalization guru Thomas Friedman and others have chronicled in detail, the pace of technological change is so great, and the workplace demands of the high-tech economy have deepened so rapidly, that when we stand still, we're actually falling backward. And while there is, and should be, robust competition among the states - and Colorado is an aggressive and effective competitor - the real challenge comes from other nations. One of our major competitors is India, where companies can find, regrettably, a more literate work force that requires less training - and which they can pay a fraction of what they pay American workers. Recent news reports showed that Indians, who once flocked to the United States for our standard of living and better salaries, are creating American-like suburban communities back home - and taking their skills with them. In fact, recent news reports showed that while Silicon Valley and other American technology hubs, including Colorado, retain a hold on high-end tech jobs, a wide range of lower-level positions, including key research and development work, are shifting to Bangalore, India. This gap also has implications for governments - such as Colorado's - that are trying to survive the one-two punch of declining revenues and rising expenses. Federal statistics show that workers at the lower literacy rates earn, on average, $28,000 less per year than those who score at the "proficient" levels. This, of course, translates into reduced tax receipts. But, at the same time, those with lower literacy rates also are more likely to have higher health care costs, often borne by the government, and higher welfare costs. In fact, in health care alone, those with the lowest literacy rates have health care costs that are quadruple the national average. While some may search for scapegoats, such as the K-12 education system, gaps there don't address the gaps of adults in the work force or adult immigrants with meager or no English skills. That's why the proposal to require English proficiency before graduation is such a positive step forward. The national literacy study showed that, for example, 39 percent of Hispanic adults scored below basic - a rate three times the national average. Ensuring English proficiency upon graduation would reduce that number and expand the fortunes of Hispanic men and women when they enter the work force. The legislature also should review the waterfront of Colorado literacy programs, public and private, to determine their effectiveness and the adequacy of their funding levels and to promote the best practices. An even stronger, incentive-based work force training solution would be the creation of a warranty program where companies that discover their new hires lack basic literacy skills - despite having a high school diploma - could send that worker for the necessary education at the expense of the school that issued the diploma. By taking a serious look at the state of literacy education in Colorado - what's good and what needs some help - policymakers would bolster the ongoing and aggressive efforts of chambers of commerce and economic development leaders to make our state a magnet for family sustaining jobs. Even better, boosting unacceptably low literacy levels shouldn't contain an ounce of partisanship. Republican and Democratic policymakers understand that literacy is the cornerstone of economic development and job creation. Unless we take this competitiveness challenge seriously, we run the risk that while companies want to grow here in America by focusing on R&D, lagging literacy rates will force them to focus first on teaching workers their ABCs.
College grads lag in literacy Tri-Valley Herald
Study: Most College Students Lack Skills ABC News
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Plant Closings, Job Cuts Loom at Ford Forbes
Ford Motor Co. employees are bracing for thousands of jobs cuts in North America as the company embarks on a new restructuring plan. Ford was set to announce details of the plan Monday morning in Dearborn, Mich., home of the 103-year-old automaker's headquarters. Ford has refused to release details of the plan, dubbed the "Way Forward," which is expected to include plant closings, product changes and cuts to Ford's salaried ranks. Ford has approximately 87,000 hourly workers and 35,000 salaried workers in North America. The No. 2 U.S. automaker has been hurt by falling sales of its profitable sport utility vehicles, growing health care and materials costs and labor contracts that have limited its ability to close plants and cut jobs. The United Auto Workers union will have to agree to some of the changes Ford wants to make. "We don't like to see any jobs go away," UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said last week. "We're always in hope that down the road we'll be able to reverse some of those decisions." Ford also has seen its U.S. market share slide as a result of increasing competition from foreign rivals. The company suffered its tenth straight year of market share losses in the United States in 2005, and for the first time in 19 years, Ford lost its crown as America's best-selling brand to General Motors Corp.'s Chevrolet. Ford sold around 2.9 million vehicles for a market share of 17.4 percent in 2005, down from 18.3 percent the year before and 24 percent in 1990. The restructuring is Ford's second in four years. Under the first plan, Ford closed five plants and cut 35,000 jobs, but its North American operations failed to turn around. Ford used just 79 percent of its North American plant capacity in 2005, down from 86 percent in 2004, according to preliminary numbers released last week by Harbour Consulting Inc., a firm that measures plant productivity. By contrast, rival Toyota Motor Corp. was operating at full capacity. States have been scrambling to offer tax credits and other incentives to keep Ford from closing their facilities ever since the automaker said last fall that it was developing a restructuring plan. Earlier this month, Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt and other state officials flew to Ford's headquarters for a one-hour meeting with Ford executives. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm outlined a package of incentives to Ford last week but said she wasn't given any assurance that Michigan plants would be spared.
In the spotlight: Ford Motor's Mark Fields MSNBC
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Associated Press
Iran Sanctions Could Drive Oil Past $100
By BRAD FOSS and GEORGE JAHN , 01.22.2006, 02:46 PM


A surge in oil prices last week to almost $70 a barrel on concerns about the restart of Iran's nuclear program only hints at what may lie ahead. Prices could soar past $100 a barrel, experts say, if the U.N. Security Council authorizes trade sanctions against the Middle Eastern nation, which the West accuses of trying to make nuclear bombs, and Iran curbs oil exports in retaliation. A sharp global economic slowdown could follow.

That's the dilemma the United States and European nations face as they decide whether to act. But Iran would also pay a hefty price if the petro-dollars that now represent 80 percent of export revenues are reduced, potentially stirring civil unrest in a nation with a 14 percent unemployment rate.

"They would shoot themselves in the foot," said Mustafa Alani, director of national security and terrorism studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. "It's one thing to test the market psychology, it's another to take the actual step and stop oil exports."

Bracing for sanctions - U.N. or otherwise - Iran's central bank said on Friday that it is moving its foreign currency reserves out of European banks as a pre-emptive measure.

Iran, the second-largest oil producer within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, exports roughly 2.5 million barrels per day - 1 million barrels more than current excess production capacity worldwide. It also controls the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping lane in the Middle East.

"Even if Iran pulled a small amount of its oil off the market, say it pulled a half million barrels a day, I could see oil prices literally jumping over the $100 per barrel mark," said James Bartis, a senior researcher at Rand Corp.

But other oil analysts say prices would likely not climb much higher than $75 a barrel before strategic reserves would be released and demand would begin to taper off as economic activity slowed around the world.

So who would be hurt more? The United States and other nations say it would be Tehran and argue against succumbing to economic blackmail in any case. "We cannot be intimidated by economic threats from their side," Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss, told CNN.

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that oil exports finance about half of the Iranian government's budget. And while high oil prices have boosted the annual growth rate to about 5 percent, Iran has never really recovered from its 1980-1988 war against Iraq and trade restrictions on sensitive technologies. The Iran Nonproliferation Act, which the U.S. Congress passed in 2000, deters international support for Iran to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and missile-delivery systems.

For weeks, Iran's state television has sought to show a people united behind the leadership, showing passer-by on Tehran city streets expressing their support for the country's strivings for nuclear independence.

Still, Alani of the Gulf Research Center questioned "whether the ordinary citizens will be willing to risk sanctions and endure a lot of suffering like the Iraqis suffered for 13 years" under U.N. sanctions.

Oil consuming nations, meanwhile, have at least one ace up their sleeves - crude reserves. The United States and other members of the International Energy Agency have a combined 1.48 billion barrels of oil in their emergency stocks. That's equivalent to about 600 days of Iran's net oil exports of 2.4 million barrels per day.

OPEC might be able to add 1.5 million barrels per day to world production, mostly from Saudi Arabia. And oil analyst Fadel Gheit at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York said Russia might be able to crank up exports by about 500,000 barrels once its domestic home-heating demand eases.

Gregory L. Schulte, chief U.S. delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, accused Iran last week of deceiving the world about its atomic program, declaring that moves to haul it before the U.N. Security Council were meant to deny "the most deadly of weapons to the most dangerous of countries."

His comments were part of increasing international pressure on Iran since it removed seals from uranium enrichment equipment earlier in the month and said it would start small scale work on the process that can make both fuel and the fissile core of nuclear warheads.

"It's a very difficult situation where you don't know which side is going to blink first," said Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Monterey Institute of International Studies' Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

It's also not clear the United States could win a referral on sanctions at the Security Council, where members Russia and China are Iran's main allies. Both have strong economic and strategic ties to Iran, with China a large oil consumer and drilling partner and Russia a key supplier of arms and nuclear technology and services for what Tehran says is a peaceful program. Additionally, oil-rich Russia would benefit from higher prices and increased demand for its crude if Iran's oil were off the market.

Influential India, which imports 75 percent of the crude it consumes, some from Iran, is a wild card in the referral struggle.

It joined the U.S., Britain, France and Germany in September to back an IAEA resolution that set the stage for reporting Iran for violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But pressure is building on the Indian government not to vote against Iran when the 35-nation IAEA board meets Feb. 2 to consider actual referral.

"India must not allow itself to be dragooned into joining the Washington-led nuclear lynch mob against Iran," The Hindu, one of India's most influential newspapers, cautioned Thursday. "Aside from the lack of any legal basis for threatening Iran with sanctions, India should consider what the U.S. pressure on Tehran will do to international oil prices as well as to the overall security scenario in West Asia."

The United States and its allies are thought to have the majority behind them on any vote for referral. Still they would like to see India, China and Russia on board - all three countries carry weight among other IAEA board nations, and Moscow and Beijing have a vote on the Security Council on what to do about Iran, once it is referred.



Associated Press Writers Alex Nicholson in Moscow, Constant Brand in Brussels, Laurence Frost in Paris, Nirmala George in New Delhi and Ali Akbar Dareini in Tehran contributed to this report. Brad Foss reported from Washington, George Jahn from Vienna, Austria.



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