Whatever Happened to Caring About Your Neighbor?

There was a time when I was proud of America's ability to care for those who couldn't care for themselves. That time has past. With Reagan's concept of "deserving poor", swept away is decades of commitment to the disabled and elderly.
On the face of it, it makes sense. Everyone has a birth certificate, right? If they can't produce it, then they must be an illegal alien. The disenfranchised have never had a suburban existance. Old African American women from the rural south were denied access to health facilities for child birth. Their births were not recorded. They don't have a birth certificate. Then there are millions of elderly in nursing homes who are unable to help produce the documents and have no family to help.
In ten years we'll be preventing 35,000 illegal aliens healthcare. In the meantime, 3 million frail Americans will face the same fate unless something is done. Just how does that make sense? Republican lawmakers know the truth. They just don't care. I have to believe the average citizen doesn't know. I hope so.
WaPo

A Medicaid rule takes effect tomorrow that will require more than 50 million poor Americans to prove their citizenship or lose their medical benefits or long-term care. Under the rule, intended to curb fraud by illegal immigrants, such proof as a passport or a birth certificate must be offered at the time a person applies for Medicaid benefits or during annual reenrollment in the state-federal program for the poor and disabled.


Critics fear that the provision will have the unintended consequence of harming several million U.S. citizens who, for a variety of reasons, will not be able to produce the necessary paperwork. They include mentally ill, mentally retarded and homeless people, as well as elderly men and women, especially African Americans born in an era when hospitals in the rural South barred black women from their maternity wards.


[...]On Capitol Hill yesterday, several members of Congress called for a delay in implementation. They said verification will effectively bar some Medicaid recipients from health care. Just how many is unclear. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the requirement would cause 35,000 people, mostly illegal immigrants, to lose coverage by 2015 and lower Medicaid spending by $735 million over 10 years.


But the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured has warned that the benefits of many citizens will be delayed or denied. Cindy Mann, director of the Center for Children and Family at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute, suggested that at least 3 million citizens could be stripped of coverage.


"We are risking people's health care," she said. "And it is a lot of paperwork to solve a problem no one identified."
For the states, administrative costs will be considerable. Maryland and Virginia each have more than 700,000 Medicaid enrollees.

US Troops Have Taken Sides in A Civil War

There can be no doubts anymore. US troops have taken sides in a conflict that looks more and more like a civil war. Coming to the aid of maurading militia bent on revenge for a suicide bomb by shooting up a town is clearly an inappropriate role. There have been rumors of US troops aiding and supporting militias before, but here we have confirmation.
New York Times

Pitched battles erupted Thursday between Sunni Arab fighters and Shiite militiamen in a village north of Baghdad, highlighting the sectarian violence that still plagues the country, even after the installation of a new government. American soldiers were involved in the fighting, but it was unclear what role they played.


One villager, Abdul Hadi al-Dulaimi, said in a telephone interview that the mostly Sunni Arab village of Daliqiya was raided by Shiite policemen working with militiamen to avenge a recent suicide bombing. American troops sided with the Shiites and deployed aircraft and ground troops, he said. As of Thursday night, the fighting was still raging. MORE

BREAKING: Supreme Court Strikes Down Tribunals

In a major victory for rule of law and containing the war powers of a President, the Supreme Court found the military tribunals set up in Gitmo violated military regulations and agreements on prisoners of war. This is a proud day for America. Despite Bush's attempt to stack the Court with cronies, he is not a dictator.
WaPo

The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions are unconstitutional. In a 5-3 decision, the court said the trials were not authorized under U.S. law or the Geneva Conventions. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion in the case, called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. recused himself from the case.


[...]Congress entered the fray in December, passing the Detainee Treatment Act, which stripped federal courts of jurisdiction over Guantanamo detainees' habeas corpus petitions that were "pending on or after" the date of the law's enactment. The act also provided an alternative military process for reviewing the enemy combatant status of detainees and designated the D.C. Circuit appeals court as the sole venue for appeals of military commission verdicts.

BBC NEWS

In its ruling, the court said: "We conclude that the military commission convened to try Hamdan lacks power to proceed because its structure and procedures violate" agreements on prisoners of war, as well as US military rules. Five of the nine justices of the US Supreme Court supported the ruling. Three voted against. Chief Justice John Roberts did not vote because he had judged the case at an earlier stage before joining the Supreme Court.


One of the dissenters, Justice Clarence Thomas, took the unusual step of reading part of his opinion from the bench, saying the decision would "sorely hamper the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy".

CBS News

Pamela Falk, a law professor who has been to the Base, "because the rebuke was on international law and U.S. Law grounds and gives support to the Geneva Conventions in U.S. courts."


[...]Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito also filed dissents.


In his own opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer said, "Congress has not issued the executive a 'blank check.' Indeed, Congress has denied the president the legislative authority to create military commissions of the kind at issue here. Nothing prevents the president from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary," Breyer wrote.

Billionaires Can Be Statesmen Too

Being a billionaire doesn't always make one greedy. Sometimes they stand up for what's right regardless of what it does to their taxes. Such is George Soros. He's interviewed in Newsweek.

George Soros has assigned himself a daunting mission. "Changing the attitude and policies of the United States remains my top priority," he writes in the introduction to his latest book, "The Age of Fallibility" (PublicAffairs 2006). The billionaire investor is set on convincing Americans to renounce the idea of a "war on terror" because he believes that an "endless" war against an invisible enemy is counter-productive and dangerous. He argues that since the attacks of September 11, the Bush administration has suffered from a kind of infallibility complex which impedes progress and obscures reality.


[...]SOROS: "First of all because when you wage war, you inevitably create innocent victims. When you wage war on terrorists who don't announce their whereabouts, the danger of hitting the innocent people is even greater. We abhor terrorists, because they kill innocent people for political goals. But by waging war on terror we are doing the same thing. And the people who are on the receiving end see us in the same light with the same negative attitude as we have towards terrorists. It's also a threat to our democracy. Because when you wage war, the president can appropriate for himself excessive powers. He can call anyone who criticizes his policies unpatriotic. That undermines the critical process of an open society and that is how we made this tremendous blunder of invading Iraq." MORE

Republicans Escalate Their War On the Press

Republicans continue their assault on the freedom of speech by vilifying the NY Times for it's release of details on monitoring of international financial dealings that has been widely known since the Clinton years. The 1996 Economic Espionage Act led to the establishment of a super secret program code-named Echelon which was authorized to collect economic espionage by monitoring financial transations, phone calls, etc. The reason they do it, is it works. It sounds unpatriotic for a news media source to leak secrets. The fact that such monitoring was widely known is buried in the hoopla.
WaPo

President Bush calls the conduct of the New York Times "disgraceful." Vice President Cheney objects to the paper having won a Pulitzer Prize. A Republican congressman wants the Times prosecuted. National Review says its press credentials should be yanked. Radio commentator Tammy Bruce likens the paper to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.


Even by modern standards of media-bashing, the volume of vitriol being heaped upon the editors on Manhattan's West 43rd Street is remarkable -- especially considering that the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal also published accounts Friday of a secret administration program to monitor the financial transactions of terror suspects. So, in its later editions, did The Washington Post.

Katie Couric Didn't Get Undressed

Giving Them What They Want - New York Times
''We have to break the mold in news,'' Moonves had told me. ''We don't have a choice.'' Moonves has expressed his frustration about the news division to friends and colleagues -- sometimes with intentional hyperbole. ''I want to bomb the whole building'' is one phrase he has used. Moonves genuinely likes and respects Heyward, but has said to colleagues that Heyward may not be able to ''lead a revolution.''
It might seem surprising that Moonves, given his approach to the genre of TV drama, is so taken with reinventing the news. But then he is, as usual, following his sense of what the viewers want. The audience, he imagines, would like its news to be more like his entertainment shows: better stories told by attractive personalities in exciting ways. To this end, Moonves requested in June that Heyward shoot some prototypes of nightly news shows using alternative formats. There were more than 10 meetings that followed in which Moonves pushed Heyward to be less conservative in his thinking. ''The news anchor Andrew wants to use is not surprising,'' Moonves had told me, referring to John Roberts, the chief White House correspondent for CBS and one of Heyward's leading choices. ''That's bothering me. On the one hand, we could have a newscast like 'The Big Breakfast' in England, where women give the news in lingerie. Or there's 'Naked News,' which is on cable in England. I saw a clip of it. It's a woman giving the news as she's getting undressed. And then, on the other hand, you could have two boring people behind a desk. Our newscast has to be somewhere in between.''
CBS News, ABC News and the Lone Assassin Theory
While Dan Rather made his farewells as chief anchorman of CBS News, CBS again touted his legacy — and its own — in reporting on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But the decades-long saga of CBS's involvement with this story makes the recent "MemoGate" scandal that deposed him look like a tempest in a tea cup by comparison, and may well supply a valuable perspective to Rather's longevity as CBS's number one star, despite a persistent decline in his ratings.
Internal documents from CBS News, shown publicly here for the first time, reveal that:
(1) CBS's longtime endorsement of the Warren Commission Report grew out of a conflict within CBS News's top executive echelon in 1966 over whether to present an even-handed debate or its own editorial opinions on the case. Senior Vice President for News Gordon Manning and Executive Producer Leslie Midgley urged an even-handed, two-sided debate and appeared, at least temporarily, to have won the assent of legendary CBS News President Richard S. Salant. What was originally intended as a "trial of the Warren Report," however, immediately became a defense brief once Richard Salant requested air time from his superiors in CBS corporate management. They included Frank Stanton, president of CBS and a close friend of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
(2) Once the decision was made that CBS would defend the Warren Report in the guise of an independent investigation, Dick Salant began to engage his subordinates in a secret, behind-the-scenes collaboration with a former member of the Warren Commission, John J. McCloy — a collaboration that both men later falsely denied until their flat-out lie was exposed by documentary proof.
(3) Les Midgley, the Executive Producer nominally in charge of CBS's Warren Report broadcasts, never accepted the official lone assassin theory. He may have been induced to acquiesce in conclusions mandated from above by Lyndon Johnson's appointment of his fiancee, former actress Betty Furness, as a White House special assistant for consumer affairs. How Furness won the job that revived her moribund career in the face of widespread skepticism has never been explained.
(4) CBS suppressed startling information, since corroborated by several named witnesses, that went to the very heart of the JFK assassination controversy during its peak in the Sixties and may have forced the U.S. Government to reopen the assassination investigation at an early point.
(5) CBS skewered the results of pseudo-scientific tests to make the lone assassin conclusion seem more plausible.
FindLaw for Legal Professionals - Case Law, Federal and State Resources, Forms, and Code
accusing Mr. Feinman of knowingly making several false accusations against a judge and taking action which served merely to harass or maliciously injure

The Best Counter-Terrorism in the US is Social Justice

Much has been made of the arrests in Miami of seven would-be terrorists. Gonzales is grandstanding his success and some pundits are calling this a pre-election stunt.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

When a grand jury indicted seven men who pledged allegiance to al-Qaida, federal officials claimed a victory against homegrown terrorism. "They were persons who for whatever reason came to view their home country as the enemy," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday.
Relying on a confidential informant, authorities snared the loosely organized group of wayward men -- five U.S. citizens, one legal resident from Haiti and one Haitian illegal immigrant. The Justice Department made it clear that it is determined to stop people from following the model of al-Qaida, the international terrorist organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

However, very little information has supported the idea that these obviously disturbed poverty stricken young men had any capability of doing what they talked about.
Duluth News Tribune

Even as Justice Department officials trumpeted the arrests of seven Florida men accused of planning to wage a "full ground war against the United States," they acknowledged the group did not have the means to carry out the plan. The Justice Department unveiled the arrests with an orchestrated series of news conferences in two cities, but the severity of the charges compared with the seemingly amateurish nature of the group raised concerns among civil libertarians. "We're as puzzled as everyone else," said Howard Simon, the director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "There's no weapons, no explosives, but this major announcement."

In fact the ring leader appears to be mentally ill.
New York Daily News

The father of the accused ringleader of a wacky terrorist cell said yesterday he can't understand how a son who went to church every Sunday and attended Catholic schools could end up charged with plotting to wreak havoc on America's tallest building. "My son wasn't raised this way. He needs psychiatric help," Narcisse Batiste, 72, told the Daily News yesterday from his home in Bunkie, La. "I disagree with wrongdoing, and I don't believe in trashing the country where you live. If he made statements like that, he definitely needs some psychiatric treatment."


Prosecutors say Narseal Batiste, 32, led a bizarre group of ragtag renegades in Florida who wanted to launch a holy war by bombing the Miami FBI office and Chicago's Sears Tower - the tallest building in North America and a fixture of the skyline in the city where Narseal Batiste was raised.


Narcisse Batiste said his son was arrested in 1993 for breaking a car window. Something happened the next year, the dad said. A charismatic man - who wore a black robe and carried a walking stick, and whose identity he did not know - converted his son to a sect that mixed Islam, Christianity, Judaism and martial arts.

I haven't quoted Juan Cole in a while since he usually talks about Iraq. I'm pretty sick of writing about that hell hole. But I tripped over some comments he made about the Miami terrorist cell that seems to put them in proper perspective.
Informed Comment

The other thing to say is that American law is soft on cultic practices, of dirty tricks against and smearing of critics, enforced third-party shunning, manipulation, and group coercion. These things are not protected by the First Amendment and I think one part of our counter-terrorism strategy must be to develop legal strategies to make it easier to disrupt the workings of cults before they accumulate a critical mass for violent action. The practice of just letting the head of the Internal Revenue Service decide if a group is a tax-free religion should also be revisited. In the past, some IRS heads appear to have been blackmailed by cults into granting them that status, which allows them to accumulate more wealth.


Whereas most terrorism is a form of educated, middle class politics, this particular group clearly grew out of the grievances and resentments of race and class inequality in the United States.


The sister of one was just on MSNBC saying that he deeply resented Bush spending money to drop bombs on poor people who could not defend themselves, while depriving the poor in the United States of any support. "We are not capable," she said. This is a theory of class war, connecting the poor of Kut with the poor of Miami's inner city. The city, by the way, has horrific levels of unemployment.


The position of the poor and workers in particular is deteriorating in the US, as more and more of the privately held wealth is concentrated in the hands of a white, privileged, few. The unions have been gutted, the minimum wage is inadequate, and racist attitudes are reemerging on a worrisome scale. Cities such as Detroit, New Orleans and Miami continue to witness enormous strains coming mainly from racist attitudes. In this case, the best counter-terrorism would be more social justice.

The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer. We are creating the kind of conditions in America where terrorism appears to be a way to express frustration, take on a mission albeit self-destructive, and do some damage on the way out. The kind of dispareties that create seething anger is what is the seed of terrorism, in the world and stateside. We are in a war about the hearts and minds and pocket books of the world's poorest. While we can't hope to solve the problem of dispareties any time soon, we certainly are making things worse by creating greater distance between the rich and poor.

Bush Just Don't Get No Respect

Doublethink Dubya has acquired the credibility of Rodney Dangerfield. While Rice's changes to operations of the Department of State has remade the effectiveness of US foreign policy, it has no better credibility. The problem is whatever Bush says, you can bet he's behaving just the opposite. So the changes are due to the US being bogged down in Iraq, not because of any real change of heart. Doublethink Dubya's magic just isn't working anymore.
Newsweek

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has engineered a broad shift in American diplomacy over the last year, moving policy toward greater multilateralism, cooperation and common sense on Iran, North Korea and Iraq, and several other issues. And yet it hasn't produced a change in attitudes toward the United States. The recent Pew global survey documents a further drop in America's poor image abroad. President Bush tried to be conciliatory while visiting Europe last week but confronted an angry public. A poll published in the Financial Times on the eve of his visit showed that across the continent, the United States was considered a greater threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea.


[...]Rice and her team are clearly in charge—and extremely capable—but they operate within fairly tight constraints. The result is that the new approach retains many elements of the old: hectoring rhetoric, constant conditions and stiff demands. U.S. negotiators can talk to the North Koreans, but only on certain subjects in limited ways. For example, the North Korea talks have gone nowhere for some months in part because the United States has suddenly decided that Pyongyang's counterfeiting of currency is a dealbreaker and must stop before any further progress can be achieved. Memo to Washington: get your priorities right. The urgent problem right now is not that North Korea can make fake dollars but that it can make genuine nukes.


On Iran, Rice has won a broader reversal of policy by personally making her case to the president. But even there, the offer of talks is tightly conditional. She does not appear to have the flexibility and scope to really explore the diplomatic option. No one in the administration seems able to really take a fresh look. The entire approach of isolating, shunning and sanctioning regimes as a way of changing them or their behavior has been an unmitigated failure from Cuba (boycotted since 1960) to Iran (since 1979). Meanwhile, the regimes we have talked to and thus had influence with—in China, Vietnam, Libya—are evolving. In Washington, it's still more important to look tough than be effective.


But the main reason the Bush administration's overtures aren't having the effect that might have been expected is that they have come about under duress. "You're bogged down in Iraq, and so you need us to help you," said a senior European politician who declined to be named because he didn't want to add to transatlantic tensions. "It's not a real conversion. It's a product of failure. The administration tried unilateralism and, when it failed, went for a multilateral approach."


An international diplomat, who was revealing a private conversation, went further, saying that the Iranians remain suspicious because they are themselves wary of greater engagement with the West but also because they suspect Washington's motives. "An Iranian diplomat told me that Tehran believes Washington's change of heart has come only because it is in trouble in Iraq," he said. "If the situation in Iraq stabilizes, their attitude will instantly harden."


And you know what? The Iranians might be right. The Bush administration has moved to be more conciliatory, more multilateral and more sensible. But it's done this because its preferred approach failed, most spectacularly in Iraq.


As if to remind us of its preferred option, John Bolton has remained largely unreformed at the United Nations. Taking on the politically easy task of U.N.-bashing, his style has alienated almost every other country, resulting in failure after failure, most notably the breakdown of a reform program that met many of the United States' demands. His latest salvo was a crude, bullying message to Secretary-General Kofi Annan—that he expected U.N. officials to speak only in glowing terms of the United States (even as he constantly bashes the U.N.). In five minutes of posturing in front of a microphone, Bolton undoes five months of careful work by his boss, the secretary of State.


If the Bush administration wants to gain the benefits of a new and different foreign policy, it needs to actually have a new and different foreign policy—without rogue officials' constantly undermining it. And it has to convince the world that this new policy is the product of a change of heart, not a change of circumstance.

Bush Just Don't Get No Respect

Doublethink Dubya has acquired the credibility of Rodney Dangerfield. While Rice's changes to operations of the Department of State has remade the effectiveness of US foreign policy, it has no better credibility. The problem is whatever Bush says, you can bet he's behaving just the opposite. So the changes are due to the US being bogged down in Iraq, not because of any real change of heart. Doublethink Dubya's magic just isn't working anymore.
Newsweek

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has engineered a broad shift in American diplomacy over the last year, moving policy toward greater multilateralism, cooperation and common sense on Iran, North Korea and Iraq, and several other issues. And yet it hasn't produced a change in attitudes toward the United States. The recent Pew global survey documents a further drop in America's poor image abroad. President Bush tried to be conciliatory while visiting Europe last week but confronted an angry public. A poll published in the Financial Times on the eve of his visit showed that across the continent, the United States was considered a greater threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea.


[...]Rice and her team are clearly in charge—and extremely capable—but they operate within fairly tight constraints. The result is that the new approach retains many elements of the old: hectoring rhetoric, constant conditions and stiff demands. U.S. negotiators can talk to the North Koreans, but only on certain subjects in limited ways. For example, the North Korea talks have gone nowhere for some months in part because the United States has suddenly decided that Pyongyang's counterfeiting of currency is a dealbreaker and must stop before any further progress can be achieved. Memo to Washington: get your priorities right. The urgent problem right now is not that North Korea can make fake dollars but that it can make genuine nukes.


On Iran, Rice has won a broader reversal of policy by personally making her case to the president. But even there, the offer of talks is tightly conditional. She does not appear to have the flexibility and scope to really explore the diplomatic option. No one in the administration seems able to really take a fresh look. The entire approach of isolating, shunning and sanctioning regimes as a way of changing them or their behavior has been an unmitigated failure from Cuba (boycotted since 1960) to Iran (since 1979). Meanwhile, the regimes we have talked to and thus had influence with—in China, Vietnam, Libya—are evolving. In Washington, it's still more important to look tough than be effective.


But the main reason the Bush administration's overtures aren't having the effect that might have been expected is that they have come about under duress. "You're bogged down in Iraq, and so you need us to help you," said a senior European politician who declined to be named because he didn't want to add to transatlantic tensions. "It's not a real conversion. It's a product of failure. The administration tried unilateralism and, when it failed, went for a multilateral approach."


An international diplomat, who was revealing a private conversation, went further, saying that the Iranians remain suspicious because they are themselves wary of greater engagement with the West but also because they suspect Washington's motives. "An Iranian diplomat told me that Tehran believes Washington's change of heart has come only because it is in trouble in Iraq," he said. "If the situation in Iraq stabilizes, their attitude will instantly harden."


And you know what? The Iranians might be right. The Bush administration has moved to be more conciliatory, more multilateral and more sensible. But it's done this because its preferred approach failed, most spectacularly in Iraq.


As if to remind us of its preferred option, John Bolton has remained largely unreformed at the United Nations. Taking on the politically easy task of U.N.-bashing, his style has alienated almost every other country, resulting in failure after failure, most notably the breakdown of a reform program that met many of the United States' demands. His latest salvo was a crude, bullying message to Secretary-General Kofi Annan—that he expected U.N. officials to speak only in glowing terms of the United States (even as he constantly bashes the U.N.). In five minutes of posturing in front of a microphone, Bolton undoes five months of careful work by his boss, the secretary of State.


If the Bush administration wants to gain the benefits of a new and different foreign policy, it needs to actually have a new and different foreign policy—without rogue officials' constantly undermining it. And it has to convince the world that this new policy is the product of a change of heart, not a change of circumstance.

Freedom In America Is In Danger

If you don't see the pattern, you are not paying attention. The cornerstone of our liberty is our freedom of speech and access to information. Our right to choose and form our own opinions is under grave threat.
1. Journalists from unpopular publications are harassed.

2. All press kicked out of Gitmo except Fox.

3. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin -- backed by the biggest media giants -- is angling to eliminate the newspaper-broadcast "cross-ownership" ban that prevents a single conglomerate from owning the major daily newspaper as well as radio and TV stations in a single market. And he wants to lift local ownership caps on how many TV stations one company can own in your town.

4. A handful of conglomerates control virtually all of our mainstream news.

5. AT&T, Verizon and Comcast lobbying for a law that would abandon the Internet's First Amendment -- a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you -- based on what site pays them the most. A very damaging bill has passed the House.

6. The Bush Administration regularly intimidates the press in a systematic attack on it's credibility.

7. The Bush Administration regularly muzzles and harasses whistle-blowers in a systematic undermining of laws protecting us from government excess.

8. The Bush Administration uses priviledged media plants to taint news coverage.
Because of the loss of newspaper readership, media outlets now controlled by conglomerates with a political agenda are closing off our access to free information, threatening to hollow out our Democracy. If we have access only to propaganda from billionaires, how are we to provide advise and consent to Congress as require under the Constitution?
Listen to an interview with Walter Cronkite on this topic with a rousing debate between media experts.
Take action now to protect our last free access to information: the Internet.

ATT: Your Phone Calls and Internet Records Are Not Yours

ATT asserts that everything you do on their extensive telcom network belongs to them. They claim that phone calls and internet behavior can be shared within their company or with the government at their discretion because it belongs to them.
This assertion has staggering implications. This has been one of the fears of the lack of legislated Net Neutrality. The Broadband providers could claim ownership of your choices, and your behavior. You would no longer have privacy or freedom of choice on the Internet. If people don't wake up to the call, we will no longer have a free society!
WaPo

Consumer advocates said yesterday that a new privacy policy from AT&T Inc. marks the first time a major telecom company has asserted that customer calling and Internet records are corporate property and raises concerns about how the company tracks consumer behavior and shares data with government and law enforcement agencies.


The new privacy policy is scheduled for release today on the company's Web site. AT&T said it does not share the data with third-party marketing firms, but it cites circumstances under which it shares customer information with the government and law enforcement. For its broadband Internet customers, the company also makes clear that it will collect information about which Web pages its customers view, how much time is spent on each page and what links are clicked on.


"While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T," the new policy states. "As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process."

The Chasm Between Cultures

Just when the solidarity of humanity would make a difference for the world, differences are growing due to the intransigence on both sides of the chasm.
International Herald Tribune

Westerners and Muslims around the world have radically different views of world events, and each group tends to view the other as violent, intolerant, and lacking respect for women, according to a new international survey of more than 14,000 people in 13 nations.


In what the Pew Global Attitudes Project called one of the survey's most striking findings, majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, and Turkey - Muslims countries with fairly strong ties to the United States - said, for example, that they did not believe that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.


This was just one finding illustrating the chasm in beliefs between the two groups following another year of violence and tension centered around that divide. The past 12 months saw terrorist bombings in London, riots in France by unemployed youths, many of them Muslim, a global uproar over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and no letup to the war in Iraq.


This led majorities in the United States and in countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East to describe relations as generally bad, Pew found.


Muslims worldwide, including the large Islamic communities in Britain, France, Germany and Spain, broadly blamed the West, while Westerners tended to blame Muslims. Muslims in the Middle East and Asia depicted Westerners as immoral and selfish, while Westerners saw Muslims as fanatical. MORE

Morality In War

Many finding the two words "morality" and "war" in the same sentance will see it as an oxymoron. I won't go into the morality of the war in Israel-Palestine. My views are there for all to see in this blog.
However, there is an issue discussed in this article in a particularly effective and artistic way. How much risk must a soldier take to protect non-combatants? With the perpetual war in Israel-Palestine, there comes a time where every culture is tempted to make moral adjustments to prevent casualties in their soldiers. Is this wise? Is this moral. Watzman makes a point from a perspective of having been there.
New York Times

Sometime during the years that followed, the pointer and roadblock clearers evolved into something even more questionable: the human shield. Soldiers who had to raid a house or patrol a dangerous stretch of road would grab a nearby civilian and place him in front of them. Unlike the pointer, this civilian had no function other than to protect Israeli soldiers.


According to Btselem, the Israel Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, the practice was not a grassroots initiative. It was an army policy, handed down to soldiers by their superior officers. The routine became much more widespread in April 2002, when Israel reoccupied the West Bank in response to a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings and other acts of violence against Israeli civilians.


In August of that year, a Palestinian man, Nidal Abu Mohsen, was killed while serving as a human shield. Israeli human rights organizations filed suit to halt the practice, and last October, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling banning its use.


Many in the army were upset. They felt they had been robbed of a tool that made their jobs safer, and which helped the commanders protect the lives of their soldiers.


But morality in combat is not just an abstract principle. It is an element of an army's strength. It is also essential to the society that sends the army into battle. If the safety of soldiers becomes the standard according to which an army designs its missions, the army will not have the courage to take risks. An army that does not take risks will be easily beaten by an opponent that does.


So it's not unreasonable — in fact, it's essential — for a society to demand that its army observe moral standards, even if the price to be paid is that more soldiers will be killed.


But sometimes eliminating one morally questionable practice opens the door to others. Once the Israeli Army banned the use of human shields, it had to come up with another way of extracting the Palestinian guerrillas from their hideouts. Hence the bulldozer. Of course, this method is much more dangerous for the family inside.


Israel can't stop hunting down its enemies. As long as there is no peace agreement with the Palestinians, the Jewish state must protect itself and its civilians. Can it do so without bulldozing houses that harbor terrorists?


Certainly it can. Raiding a house is a dangerous operation, but good intelligence, proper planning and careful execution can, in most cases, reduce the risk to a reasonable level. Commanders must be prepared to adapt their tactics to a range of constraints: terrain, weather, the training and equipment of their troops, and the enemy's positions, to name a few.


In some cases, the risk may be too great and the operation may be canceled or postponed until the next opportunity comes around. Good commanders don't give the enemy quarter, but they also don't send the Light Brigade charging unprotected at the enemy's guns.


Laws and moral rules are another set of constraints. Soldiers sometimes chafe at them because, unlike hills and bullets, they seem like artificial and unnecessary barriers. In a purely military sense, armies could better do their jobs if they could ignore the civilians on the battlefield. But we don't allow them to ignore civilians. And truth be told, I've never met a soldier who thinks armies ought to be able to maim and kill civilians with impunity.


When the Supreme Court banned the use of human shields, army commanders looked for another way to succeed with minimum risk. They decided on the bulldozer. Getting rid of the bulldozer may well mean that some terrorists will get away, and sadly, that more soldiers will die.


But in the final analysis, Israel and its soldiers will not be less secure. They will occupy the high ground, and that is the most secure place to be. MORE

The CIA and the Bush White House: Ordained Scapegoat

'The One Percent Doctrine,' by Ron Suskind is a new book reviewed by the New York Times today. Suskind outlines how foreign policy was actually run by the Vice Presidents office. Key especially controversial and contradictory information was diverted from the President to the VP, obstensively to give Bush "plausible deniability". In other words, Bush may not have known about the ambivalence within the CIA about WMDs in Iraq.

During a November 2001 session with the president, Mr. Suskind recounts, a C.I.A. briefer realized that the Pentagon had not told Mr. Bush of the C.I.A.'s urgent concern that Osama bin Laden might escape from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan (as he indeed later did) if United States reinforcements were not promptly sent in. And several months later, he says, attendees at a meeting between Mr. Bush and the Saudis discovered after the fact that an important packet laying out the Saudis' views about the Israeli-Palestinian situation had been diverted to the vice president's office and never reached the president.


Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush "plausible deniability" from Mr. Cheney's point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief's own impatience with policy details. Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes: "Keeping certain knowledge from Bush — much of it shrouded, as well, by classification — meant that the president, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed. He could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements."

Cheney ensured the CIA was going to have to take the responsibility by allowing a Clinton hold over, George Tenet, to continue as CIA Director. Tenet was completely loyal to Bush. This loyalty enabled Cheney to manipulate his nemisis into the line of fire by selectively withhold key contradictory information from the President.

As for Mr. Tenet, this book provides a nuanced portrait of a man with "colliding loyalties — to the president, who could have fired him after 9/11 but didn't; and to his analysts, whom he was institutionally and emotionally committed to defend." It would become an increasingly untenable position, as the White House grew more and more impatient with the C.I.A.'s reluctance to supply readily the sort of intelligence it wanted. (A Pentagon unit headed by Douglas Feith was set up as an alternative to the C.I.A., to provide, in Mr. Suskind's words, "intelligence on demand" to both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the office of the vice president.)


While many C.I.A. analysts were deeply skeptical of the imminent danger posed by Mr. Hussein and simultaneously worried about the fallout of a possible invasion, the C.I.A., paradoxically enough, would become a favorite scapegoat for the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq, thanks in no small measure to Mr. Tenet's remark (quoted in Bob Woodward's 2004 book "Plan of Attack") that the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk." In this volume Mr. Suskind reports that Mr. Tenet says he does not remember uttering those famous words: "Doesn't dispute it. Just doesn't remember it."


Mr. Suskind credits Mr. Tenet with deftly using his personal bonds with "key conditional partners" in the war on terror, from President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. He depicts the former C.I.A. director as frequently being made by the White House "to take the fall" for his superiors, on matters including the administration's handling of prewar intelligence to the 16 disputed words in the president's State of the Union address, regarding Iraq's supposed efforts to obtain uranium from Africa. Because it was Mr. Tenet "who brought analysis up the chain from the C.I.A.," Mr. Suskind writes, he "was best positioned to assume blame. And Rice was adept at laying it on Tenet."


At the same time, Mr. Suskind suggests that Mr. Tenet acted as a kind of White House enabler: he writes that in the wake of 9/11, Mr. Tenet felt a "mix of insecurity and gratitude" vis-à-vis George W. Bush, and that eager to please his boss, he repeatedly pushed C.I.A. staff members to come up with evidence that might support the president's public statements.


In the days after 9/11 Mr. Bush defended the embattled C.I.A. chief to angry congressmen, and at that point, Mr. Suskind writes: "George Tenet would do anything his President asked. Anything. And George W. Bush knew it." MORE

The Bush Administration Continues to Blunder Through Iran

As is typical, while North Korea develops it's intercontinental ballistic missiles unimpeded, China and Russia are position to corner the Iranian market on oil and gas. We've already seen how Russia plans to use it's huge gas reserves as a means for political coersion.
Read how Bush is blowing his chance as a player in the future of Iranian oil and gas.
New York Times

Together, Russia and Iran control almost half of the world's proven reserves of natural gas. If they coordinated their production and marketing decisions, these two countries could be twice as dominant in international gas markets as Saudi Arabia is in the global oil market.


And as China looks to deepen its own involvement in Iran, there would be opportunities for Chinese-Russian cooperation in developing Iranian resources, and collaborating against what both Beijing and Moscow see as excessive United States unilateralism in world affairs. By working together, Russia and China would further establish themselves as rising players in the Persian Gulf, where America has grown used to something like hegemonic status.


Against this backdrop, the Bush administration's approach to nuclear diplomacy with Iran is strategically shallow. The decision to encourage direct talks with Tehran generated many headlines but was really only a limited tactical adjustment to forestall an embarrassing collapse in coordination with America's key international partners.


By continuing to reject a grand bargain with Tehran, the Bush administration has done nothing to increase the chances that Iran will accept meaningful long-term restraints on its nuclear activities. It has also done nothing to ensure that the United States wins the longer-term struggle for Iran. Such a grand bargain is precisely what is required, not only to forestall Iran's effective nuclearization in the next three to five years, but also to position the United States for continued leadership in the Middle East for the next decade and beyond. MORE

The Bush Administration Continues to Blunder Through Iran

As is typical, while North Korea develops it's intercontinental ballistic missiles unimpeded, China and Russia are position to corner the Iranian market on oil and gas. We've already seen how Russia plans to use it's huge gas reserves as a means for political coersion.
Read how Bush is blowing his chance as a player in the future of Iranian oil and gas.
New York Times

Together, Russia and Iran control almost half of the world's proven reserves of natural gas. If they coordinated their production and marketing decisions, these two countries could be twice as dominant in international gas markets as Saudi Arabia is in the global oil market.


And as China looks to deepen its own involvement in Iran, there would be opportunities for Chinese-Russian cooperation in developing Iranian resources, and collaborating against what both Beijing and Moscow see as excessive United States unilateralism in world affairs. By working together, Russia and China would further establish themselves as rising players in the Persian Gulf, where America has grown used to something like hegemonic status.


Against this backdrop, the Bush administration's approach to nuclear diplomacy with Iran is strategically shallow. The decision to encourage direct talks with Tehran generated many headlines but was really only a limited tactical adjustment to forestall an embarrassing collapse in coordination with America's key international partners.


By continuing to reject a grand bargain with Tehran, the Bush administration has done nothing to increase the chances that Iran will accept meaningful long-term restraints on its nuclear activities. It has also done nothing to ensure that the United States wins the longer-term struggle for Iran. Such a grand bargain is precisely what is required, not only to forestall Iran's effective nuclearization in the next three to five years, but also to position the United States for continued leadership in the Middle East for the next decade and beyond. MORE

THE NEW CLASS WARFARE

Since disappearing behind the "Select" firewall at NY Times, I haven't had the pleasure of reading much of Paul Krugman. Here is a excerpt from a speech he gave recently on a topic I've written on a lot.

And the standard of living of the typical American family is -- well, is it higher or lower than it was 30 years ago? You know, we can ask that question, but the fact that you even have to ask is telling you something. It's close enough. Consumption of material goods seems a little bit higher, but job security is clearly a lot less. People are working longer hours. The risk of losing health insurance is much greater. The difficulty of getting your kids into a decent school is much harder. So it's a mixed picture, but certainly not the -- if you had asked in 1973, “Are people better off than they were in 1947?” people would have had -- there was no question. Enormous progress. If you ask that now about 30 years ago, it's not at all clear what the answer is. It's only the top few percent of the population that have had enormous gain. So that's one thing. We've had an economic growth, but it hasn't been broadly shared.


[...]Periods, the Gilded Age, the ‘20s, were periods of grotesque abuse of cultural issues, anything to smear people who might suggest things like, you know, progressive taxation. And times when those kinds of views, when everyone had more or less accepted the existence of the New Deal institutions, were quite calm. So that same Time magazine article in 1953 is saying Republicans and Democrats have a surprising sameness of outlook and political thinking, and that makes a big point about how Eisenhower had made it clear that he was not going to try to roll back the New Deal. Well, that's why we -- that's a consequence of being a relatively equal society. And the ugliness and the viciousness of our political scene right now, I think, are in fact largely a consequence of the gross inequalities that have emerged.


Why? How did we -- what happened? There's a tendency to say, well, it's, you know, it's these impersonal market forces, or maybe it’s globalization requires inequality, or just technology. There's always some truth to that kind of thing, but much less than you might imagine. I've already mentioned a little bit about education. We keep on hearing that technology creates this premium for the education for the creative classes, whatever it might be. It turns out that that's really -- put it this way, the median college-educated American has, unlike the median non-college-educated American, actually seen some gains in income over the past 25 years. But they're tiny. It was less than one percent a year on average and, in fact, over the past five years, college-educated workers, most college-educated workers, have actually seen their incomes fall, once you adjust for inflation. It's not actually true that a college education is the key to being successful. It's being part of the tiny magic circle of the economic elite that gets you ahead. So it really isn't about education. It isn't about skills.


A little bit of it is about, you know, we like to talk about human capital being what matters. If you actually look at the last five years, human capital has been losing, but good old capital capital has actually been doing extremely well. Share of profits in national income is at its highest level since 1929. But it's not at least that particular impersonal market force. And a lot of it looks like it's -- in fact, it's the political process does a lot to drive the distribution of income, partly, of course, taxes -- there’s taxes which tax the rich and provide benefits to everyone at large -- but also other things, whether you have a political environment that basically assures workers of the right to organize or one that basically is sympathetic with employers who try to break unions, whether you have a general set of political pressure that says, that fairness is a good thing or that says that greed is good.MORE

Palestinian Chaos Spreads

Will civil war erupt in Palestine? Hamas and Fatah are at each other's throats. Deaths are daily. One high ranking leader's assassination could spark a unstoppable conflagration. Again, this is a situation that Israel created by working to destroy the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, they strengthened the credibility of Hamas. The result could be a major set back for peace and a new front for Al Qaeda.
Newsweek

Fatah and Hamas are still engaged in talks to avert a civil war and reach an agreement on how to deal with Israel on terms that will satisfy the international community. Popular sentiment is behind that process, and many in Gaza believe that tribal and family ties will help prevent a full-blown conflagration. Khaled Abu Hilal, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, insists that "every family has members of both Fatah and Hamas." Yet Abu Hilal also keeps a 9mm Smith & Wesson in his desk drawer—just in case. And a Palestinian arms dealer in Ramallah, who wished to remain anonymous as he offered to sell NEWSWEEK an unsolicited MP5 submachine gun, says that the price of a U.S.-made M-16 on the black market has doubled, from $5,000 to $10,000, since Hamas took power. "Hamas is buying like crazy," the dealer says.


[...]By the time Gdeih finished telling his story to a NEWSWEEK reporter, a crowd of several dozen relatives had gathered to listen. A discussion broke out about Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, killed that morning in Iraq. The family patriarch, 58-year-old Abdullah Gdeih, denounced the Qaeda leader, criticizing the terrorist for killing fellow Muslims. But then a younger man poked his head into the room. Twenty-three-year-old Fadi Gdeih said he disagreed with the older man. "We need somebody like that here," Fadi said of Zarqawi. "Somebody who slits throats." There are some who think that a Hamas-led government is as bad as it gets. They might want to think again. MORE

Not News: War On Terror Is a Failure

It's no surprise to me that the so called "War on Terror" that Bush has focused on the Iraq invasion is a failure. The Bush Administration has single-handedly set back the credibility of the world''s sole super-power and kick started it's decline to a second rate power by running up record deficits. Finally, six years into this Administration, after the damage is done, the press and foreign policy experts are speaking out.
I think the experts that have been silent until now are equally responsible for the Bush debacle.
TheStar.com

Washington is failing to make progress in the global war on terror and the next 9/11-style attack is not a question of if, but when. That is the scathing conclusion of a survey of 100 leading American foreign-policy analysts. In its first "Terrorism Index," released yesterday, the influential journal Foreign Policy found surprising consensus among the bipartisan experts. Some 86 per cent of them said the world has grown more, not less, dangerous, despite President George W. Bush's claims that the U.S. is winning the war on terror.


The main reasons for the decline in security, they said, were the war in Iraq, the detention of terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, U.S. policy towards Iran and U.S. energy policy.


The surveys participants included an ex-secretary of state and former heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, along with prominent members of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. The majority served in previous administrations or in senior military ranks.


"When you strip away the politics, the experts, almost to a person, are very worried about the administration," says Joe Cirincione, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, the Washington think-tank which co-sponsored the survey.


[...]Almost 80 per cent of the analysts said widespread rejection of radical Islamic ideologies is crucial if terrorism is to be eradicated, but that goal requires "a much higher emphasis on its non-military tools." Across the board, they rated Washington's diplomatic efforts as abysmal, with a median score of 1.8 out of 10. 62% of those polled identify Saudi Arabia as the premier incubator for terrorists
More than two-thirds said the United Nations and other multilateral institutions must be strengthened.


In the surveys accompanying report, Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said policy analysts have never been in such agreement. "The reason is that it's clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force." Some 82 per cent of participants said a pressing priority for the U.S. is to end its dependence on foreign oil.

Genocide in Darfur

When the Bush Administration shamelessly walked away from the plight of the Muslim Africans in Darfur, and worked to settle the conflict between Muslim and Christian in the southern part of Sudan, they demonstrated their racist point of view. Black Muslims are not work saving in the Administrations view. Arab Muslims killing African Muslims was not worth their time. Now we have evidence that the carnage in Sudan has been similar to Rwanda. The US and the EU have repeated inaction on a grand scale again.
IPS News

The chief prosecutor of the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) told the U.N. Security Council Wednesday that investigators have uncovered evidence of "large-scale massacres" in Darfur, Sudan, but stopped short of labeling the situation there "genocide".


Attacks on villages and refugee camps by Khartoum-backed Arab militias, or Janjaweed, have killed as many as 400,000 people over the past three years, and left another 700,000 homeless and without access to humanitarian relief.

Shiite Militias Control Iraqi Prisons

Shiite Militias control Iraqi Prisons still in Iraqi hands apparently due to the past dominance of the Interior Ministry by Badr Corps militiamen. This is a compelling sign that civii war has engulfed the country and the government has little hope of curtailing it. The militias and the insurgents run the country outside of the Green Zone.
WaPo

Iraq's prison system is overrun with Shiite Muslim militiamen who have freed fellow militia members convicted of major crimes and executed Sunni Arab inmates, the country's deputy justice minister said in an interview this week.


"We cannot control the prisons. It's as simple as that," said the deputy minister, Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, an ethnic Kurd. "Our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad."
U.S. officials said months ago that they planned to turn over Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and three other American-run facilities to the Iraqi government, but the handoff has been repeatedly pushed back. Gardner has said he will not authorize the transfers until he is convinced that standards of inmate treatment and security match those maintained in U.S.-run facilities.


"We will not transfer the facilities and legal custody of the detainees until each respective facility and the Iraqi Corrections system have demonstrated the ability to maintain the required standards, especially in the areas of care and custody," Gardner said in a written response to questions. "We fully recognize that there are significant challenges that must be overcome but believe that we will be able to address these as we move through 2006 into 2007."

The Government is Searching Your Credit Card Records

The government is compiling your credit card, credit history and buy habits to scrutinize for suspicious patterns. Is anyone listening? I find this very disturbing. They are collecting every record there is of us.
WaPo

The Pentagon pays a private company to compile data on teenagers it can recruit to the military. The Homeland Security Department buys consumer information to help screen people at borders and detect immigration fraud. As federal agencies delve into the vast commercial market for consumer information, such as buying habits and financial records, they are tapping into data that would be difficult for the government to accumulate but that has become a booming business for private companies.


Industry executives, analysts and watchdog groups say the federal government has significantly increased what it spends to buy personal data from the private sector, along with the software to make sense of it, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They expect the sums to keep rising far into the future.


Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more scrutiny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit the government's collection and use of personal data. Critics acknowledge that such data can be vital to law enforcement or intelligence investigations of specific targets but question the usefulness of "data-mining" software that combs huge amounts of information in the hopes of finding links and patterns that might pick someone out as suspicious.


[...]The system, originally called CAPPS II, sought to comb airline passenger records and verify information that fliers provided about themselves with information provided by companies that aggregate data about consumers. The problem, according to several officials who worked closely on the program but declined to speak publicly about it, was that the information about consumers was never proved to be effective in evaluating the risk posed by an airline passenger.


At first, officials sought to identify passengers who were not "deeply rooted" in a community and, for example, moved often and did not have an established credit history. But the system always ended up scoring too many people as "risky" who really posed little threat. "I am just not prepared to say that because someone can't get a mortgage, they are a terrorist threat to an airplane," said a former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the program. "These data aggregator products are used today in the financial world to identify certain things, and they're not designed to identify potential terrorist threats."

Free the Innocent, Punish the Guilty

While I have resisted posting past claims by "enemy combatants" because of the evident propaganda value their statements made, this one provides only one plaintive cry from an apologetic young Muslim. "Free the Innocent, Punish the Guilty". Here is an except.
New York Times

I WAS released from the United States military's prison camp at Guantamo Bay, Cuba, in July 2004. As I was about to board a plane that would take me home to France, the last detainee I saw was a young Yemeni. He was overwhelmed by emotion. "In your country, Mourad, there are rights, human rights, and they mean something," he said. "In mine they mean nothing, and no one cares. So when you're free, don't forget what you've been through. Tell people that we are here."


I now know that this Yemeni was not among the three prisoners who committed suicide at Guantᮡmo last weekend, but since then his words have been echoing in my head. Although I'm now a free man, the shared pain endlessly takes me back to the camp.


In the early summer of 2001, when I was 19, I made the mistake of listening to my older brother and going to Afghanistan on what I thought was a dream vacation. His friends, he said, were going to look after me. They did — channeling me to what turned out to be a Qaeda training camp. For two months, I was there, trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my own stupidity.


[...]I remember once an interrogator warming me up during several sessions for a polygraph test I was going to take, that was, according to him, infallible. After I took the test, I was left alone in the interrogation room; an hour later, the interrogator returned. "Congratulations," he said grimly. "You have passed the test." And he gave me a box of candy.


In the outside world, I thought, the difference between telling the truth and lying, between committing a crime and not committing it, is the difference between being in jail and being free. In Guantánamo, it is a box of candy.


I was eventually released and I will go on trial next month in Paris to face charges that I've never denied, that I spent two months in the Qaeda camp. I have a court date, I'm facing a judge, and I have a lawyer, unimaginable luxuries in Guantánamo. I didn't know the three detainees who died, but it is easy for me to see how this daily despair and uncertainty could lead to suicide.


[...]I am a quiet Muslim — I've never waged war, let alone an asymmetrical one. I wasn't anti-American before and, miraculously, I haven't become anti-American since. In Guantánamo, I did see some people for whom jihad is life itself, people whose minds are distorted by extremism and whose souls are full of hatred. But the huge majority of the faces I remember — the ones that haunt my nights — are of desperation, suffering, incomprehension turned into silent madness.


I believe that a small number of the detainees at Guantánamo are guilty of criminal acts, but as analysis of the military's documents on the prisoners has shown, there is no evidence that most of the 465 or so men there have committed hostile acts against the United States or its allies. Even so, what I heard so many times resounding from cage to cage, what I said myself so many times in my moments of complete despondency, was not, "Free us, we are innocent!" but "Judge us for whatever we've done!" There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty. MORE

A 15 Year Old Campaign Video Guru?

New York Times

Daily Kos's convention — the in-person gathering of the nation's most-read online political blog — was practically carpeted with presidential candidates. But perhaps the most notable presentation came from Ava Lowery, a 15-year-old from rural Alabama, whose homemade video was shown at the convention on jumbo television screens.

Will blogging be the Dem's secret weapon for 2006? Lets hope so. If our leaders can find their courage. Gore and Kerry are looking better everyday.

The Death Toll for 9/11 Continues Upward

The death toll for 9/11 continues to rise. The environmental hazards of the disaster appear to be causing cancers in workers millions of times more frequently than chance. Emergency responders daily face a high risk of hazards. Lets hope that there is some help for the families of the responders to 9/11.
New York Post

World Trade Center rescue and recovery workers have been diagnosed with cancer, and 33 of them have died of cancer, says a lawyer for the ailing responders.


David Worby, a lawyer for 8,000 World Trade Center responders, including cops, firefighters and construction workers, said the cases include blood-cell cancers such as leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's and myeloma.


Doctors say the cancers can strike three to five years after exposure to toxins such as benzene, a cancer-causing chemical that permeated the WTC site from burning jet fuel.


"One in 150,000 white males under 40 would normally get the type of acute white blood-cell cancer that strikes a healthy detective," said Worby, whose first client was NYPD narcotics cop John Walcott, now 41. Walcott spent months at Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills landfill. The father of three is fighting leukemia.


"We have nearly 35 of these cancers in the family of 50,000 Ground Zero workers. The odds of that occurring are one in hundreds of millions," Worby said.


Others suffer tumors of the tongue, throat, testicles, breast, bladder, kidney, colon, intestines, and lung....

China's Move Into Latin America

China plays a patient game. While the Bush Administration burns bridges and bullies it's allies repeatedly shooting himself in the foot, China walks behind and calmly charms those feeling abused by America. What is the Chinese intent? How does this play into their long range geopolitical objectives? Is China a real threat to America?
That question is answered in the first bullet point of this excerpt from an article from PINR.

China's activities in Latin America are part and parcel of its long-term grand strategy. The key elements of Beijing's grand strategy can be identified as follows:

• Focus on "comprehensive national power" essential to achieving the status of a "global great power that is second to none" by 2049;


• Seek energy security and gain access to natural resources, raw materials and overseas markets to sustain China's economic expansion;


• Pursue the "three Ms": military build-up (including military presence along the vital sea lanes of communication and maritime chokepoints), multilateralism, and multipolarity so as to counter the containment of China's regional and global aspirations by the United States and its friends and allies;


• Build a network of Beijing's friends and allies through China's "soft power" and diplomatic charm offensive, trade and economic dependencies via closer economic integration (free trade agreements), and mutual security pacts, intelligence cooperation and arms sales.

First and foremost is the Chinese strategic objective of limiting U.S. dominance worldwide. The world's rising superpower, China, has long viewed the world's reigning superpower, the United States, as its major global strategic rival that needs to be contained and balanced. Notwithstanding Beijing's rhetoric of "peace and development," China's strategic posture is based on the realist paradigm of "comprehensive national power" with which it seeks to defend its interests and intimidate, aggrandize, and support the enemies of its enemies. Faced with a dramatic expansion of U.S. military power ("hard power") all around China's periphery after the September 11 attacks, Beijing responded by unveiling its "soft power" strategy in the form of a diplomatic "charm offensive," the notion of "China's peaceful rise," and laid greater emphasis on multilateralism and economic integration.


[...]Beijing's growing role in Latin America has also coincided with elections that have brought populists and leftists to power in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia. In particular, Brazil, Cuba, and Venezuela have made no secret of their game plan to play "the China card" to offset U.S. influence and trade dominance. In most country cases, when the U.S. withdraws or is negligent militarily, politically or economically, the Chinese move in.


[...]Beijing's customary denials notwithstanding, "the successful Chinese model" of "development-minus-democracy" or "development before democracy" is being sold to the developing world as an alternative model for ending poverty, and it resonates well across the world. The pitch is certainly winning an audience in Africa and Latin America. This "contest of ideas" further opens the door for Beijing to position itself to play the role of balancer and neutralizer right in Washington's backyard.

[...]China's increasing influence in the region is an emerging dynamic that can't be ignored. China needs to protect its access to food, energy, raw materials, and export markets. This has forced a change in its military strategy, to promote a power-projection military, capable of securing lanes and protecting its growing economic interests abroad.

Beijing is training increasing numbers of Latin American military personnel, taking advantage of a void created by a 2002 U.S. law barring military training and aid to a dozen Latin countries -- Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay and Venezuela -- that refuse to exempt U.S. citizens from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. These countries had, in the past, received U.S. training and aid.


[...]China also has had exchanges of senior defense officials with Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile and provided military aid and training to Jamaica and Venezuela. In addition to its growing commercial prowess in Caribbean ports such as the Bahamas, Beijing has been operating two intelligence stations out of Cuba since 1999. Media reports speak of cooperation among the Chinese, Cuban and Venezuelan intelligence agencies. In August 2005, Venezuela decided to buy the Chinese JYL-1 mobile air defense radar and surveillance system. In his testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Roger Pardo-Maurer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs, said that the United States needs "to be alert to rapidly advancing Chinese capabilities, particularly in the fields of intelligence, communications and cyber-warfare, and their possible application in the region. We would encourage other nations in the hemisphere to take a close look at how such activities could possibly be used against them or the United States."


[...]Beijing's primary interest in infrastructure projects that would improve access to, and transportation of, resources, raw materials and commodities (as in Myanmar, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Central Asia) to fuel China's economic expansion causes unease in the region. Many Latin American economists and analysts warn against falling into the trap of being a supplier of commodities for China's value-added manufacturing enterprises, and thus assume the posture of a Chinese colony or economic dependency like Myanmar.


[...]Furthermore, with so much foreign investment going to China, Latin America is finding it difficult to obtain the capital it needs to finance its own growth. Finally, despite the proliferation in the number of Chinese language classes, the cultural barriers that separate China and Latin America remain formidable. Geography, history, culture and values inextricably tie Latin America's present and future to the United States.


In short, Beijing's relations with Latin America are neither too cozy nor frictionless. Different countries and sectors in Latin America benefit differentially from economic ties with China. While labor-intensive manufacturers (in Brazil, Mexico and Central America) are losers, energy and resource extractors and high-tech goods suppliers (in Venezuela, Uruguay, Peru, Argentina and Chile) are winners. Nonetheless, the point is that for Latin America and the Caribbean countries, China is no longer a distant Asian power, but a mighty rival, indispensable partner, potential investor, as well as a great power friend and counterweight to the United States, and, above all, a global power that needs to be handled with care.


[...]Beijing calculates that one of the consequences of the burgeoning Sino-Latin American trade and resource dependency will be a widening of the gap between U.S. and Latin American interests. As U.S. Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Pardo-Maurer points out: "China has its own set of political, economic and military interests, requiring us to carefully distinguish between legitimate commercial initiatives and the possibility of political or diplomatic efforts to weaken the democratic alliances we have forged."


While Beijing's forays do not indicate a seismic change in the balance of power within Latin America, the very presence of China does make U.S. diplomacy difficult. Increasingly, "the China option" affords Latin American countries greater room for maneuver and an additional source of leverage vis-à-vis Washington. While the Chinese may not want to be drawn into Venezuela, Brazil or Cuba's problems with the United States, that does not mean that these countries will not play "the China card" in their relations with the United States.


[...]China's increasing imprint on the economic, political and strategic character of its region makes it important for Washington to seek a mutually beneficial accommodation with its new neighbor. Washington welcomes China's trade and economic ties with Latin America, seeing it as a means to reduce pressure on the United States to underwrite regional economic development. A test of whether China is a stakeholder or just a seeker of the continent's natural resources and markets would be its commitment to developing some rules and common objectives whereby Latin America gains as much from its economic engagement as China without undermining transparency, growth, stability and democracy in the region. To this end, Beijing would need to invest not just in oilfields and mines, but in other sectors that would contribute to Latin American growth and development.


China's influence in Latin America cannot supersede that of the United States. U.S. trade and investment in Latin America not only dwarfs that of China, but its economic engagement is also qualitatively different from that of China -- as a provider of high-tech and knowledge-based goods and services. The enormous power asymmetry between China and the United States, and Beijing's domestic development priorities, ensure that the Chinese leadership will continue to steer clear of direct confrontation with Washington. MORE

Clearly the Chinese are content to watch America destroy itself on debt, domestic labor dissent, and declining infrastructure. However, come 20 years from now, China will be positioned to challenge the US in every way. They expect the US to decline by some means within 40 years.

Three Suicides in Guantanamo

The sad thing is, we'll never know the truth. The Bush Administration has demonstrated to anyone whose watching that they will lie about anything and everything, whenever they wish, regardless of the importance of the truth.
WaPo

Three detainees at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, hanged themselves in their cells yesterday morning, the first inmates to die at the remote island prison since it opened in early 2002, according to military officials.


Guards found the three men unresponsive and not breathing in their separate cells in Camp 1 shortly after midnight yesterday, according to Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, who heads the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, and Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., who commands the Guantanamo Bay prison. The detainees had apparently used their clothing and sheets to fashion makeshift nooses in what military officials believe was a coordinated suicide pact. All left suicide notes written in Arabic, the officers said.


Military officials were not releasing the names of the detainees yesterday, but said two were Saudi Arabian nationals and one was a Yemeni national. Harris described them as having close ties to terrorist organizations in the Middle East and said their suicides were "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

So, if these guys were in fact carrying out a political attack by suicide, they have been empowered by the lack of credibility of the Bush Administration to be highly effective in their move.

Faked Evidence Was Used to Justify Iraqi War

Cheney has been implicated in the Niger yellow cake story since mid-last year. It has smelled like a fabrication or exaggeration of evidence by the Bush Administration since I first heard of it. I've never believed Iraq was about WMDs, but rather an ideological and personal vendetta for Bush to right his father's mistake. The evidence has been leaking out all along, even before the indictment of Libby for outing Plame.
The most recent issue of Vanity Fair has a detailed review of the allegation that Sadaam was trying to buy yellow cake Uranium from Niger. One key tidbit was the Sadaam already had yellow cake and didn't need any more. He lacked the knowledge to enrich it into weapons grade uranium. Niger couldn't help him with that. The story links the absurdity of the allegation, the Vice President's conflict with the CIA, and Plamegate. It's a nice review of the evidence complete with new information. Here is a summarizing excerpt. The whole story is a good read, though a bit convoluted. They include a dubious subplot about Michael Ledeen who the article eventually admits may or may not have been a player in the plot.

For more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success—specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States.


[...]In recent months, it has emerged that the forged Niger documents went through the hands of the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), or operatives close to it, and that neoconservative policymakers helped bring them to the attention of the White House. Even after information in the Niger documents was repeatedly rejected by the C.I.A. and the State Department, hawkish neocons managed to circumvent seasoned intelligence analysts and insert the Niger claims into Bush's State of the Union address.


By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, in March 2003, this apparent black-propaganda operation had helped convince more than 90 percent of the American people that a brutal dictator was developing W.M.D.—and had led us into war.


To trace the path of the documents from their fabrication to their inclusion in Bush's infamous speech, Vanity Fair has interviewed a number of former intelligence and military analysts who have served in the C.I.A., the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.), and the Pentagon. Some of them refer to the Niger documents as "a disinformation operation," others as "black propaganda," "black ops," or "a classic psy-ops [psychological-operations] campaign." But whatever term they use, at least nine of these officials believe that the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public.


The officials are Bearden; Colonel W. Patrick Lang, who served as the D.I.A.'s defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism; Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Melvin Goodman, a former division chief and senior analyst at the C.I.A. and the State Department; Ray McGovern, a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years; Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia division in 2002 and 2003; Larry C. Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who was deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993; former C.I.A. official Philip Giraldi; and Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of operations of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.


In addition, Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy—only to be rebuffed by Bush-administration officials who wanted to use the material. "They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique—ruthless relentlessness."


All of which flies in the face of a campaign by senior Republicans including Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to blame the C.I.A. for the faulty pre-war intelligence on W.M.D. Indeed, the accounts put forth by Wilkerson and his colleagues strongly suggest that the C.I.A. is under siege not because it was wrong but because it was right. Agency analysts were not serving the White House's agenda.


[...]So far, no one has figured out all the answers. There is even disagreement about why the documents were fabricated. In a story by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, a source suggested that retired and embittered C.I.A. operatives had intentionally put together a lousy forgery in hopes of embarrassing Cheney's hawkish followers. But no evidence has emerged to support this theory, and many intelligence officers embrace a simpler explanation. "They needed this for the case to go to war," says Melvin Goodman, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. "It serves no other purpose."


[...]To many W.M.D. analysts in the C.I.A. and the military, the initial reports sounded ridiculous. "The idea that you could get that much yellowcake out of Niger without the French knowing, that you could have a train big enough to carry it, much less a ship, is absurd," says Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff.


"The reports made no sense on the face of it," says Ray McGovern, the former C.I.A. analyst, who challenged Rumsfeld about the war at a public event this spring. "Most of us knew the Iraqis already had yellowcake. It is a sophisticated process to change it into a very refined state and they didn't have the technology."


"Yellowcake is unprocessed bulk ore," explains Karen Kwiatkowski, who has written extensively about the intelligence fiasco that led to the war. "If Saddam wanted to make nuclear bombs, why would he want unprocessed ore when the best thing to do would be to get processed stuff in the Congo?"


"When it comes to raw reports, all manner of crap comes out of the field," McGovern adds. "The C.I.A. traditionally has had experienced officers…. They are qualified to see if these reports make sense. For some reason, perhaps out of cowardice, these reports were judged to be of such potential significance that no one wanted to sit on it."


[...]A few weeks later, on September 11, 2001, terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The neocons had long said that they needed another Pearl Harbor in order to realize their dreams of regime change in Iraq. Now it had taken place. According to Bob Woodward's Bush at War, C.I.A. director George Tenet reported to the White House within hours that Osama bin Laden was behind the attack. But by midday Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had already raised the question of attacking Saddam. Likewise, four days later, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz advised President Bush not to bother going after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan but to train American guns on Iraq instead.


In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bush's approval ratings soared to 90 percent, the all-time high for any U.S. president. This was the perfect opportunity to go after Saddam, except for one thing: the available intelligence did not support the action. Ten days after the attacks, Bush was told in a classified briefing that there was no credible evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.


[...]In December 2001, Greg Thielmann, director for strategic proliferation and military affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), reviewed Iraq's W.M.D. program for Colin Powell. As for the Niger report, Thielmann said, "A whole lot of things told us that the report was bogus. This wasn't highly contested. There weren't strong advocates on the other side. It was done, shot down."


[...]By early 2002, career military and intelligence professionals had seen the Niger reports repeatedly discredited, and assumed that the issue was dead. But that was not the case.


"These guys in the Office of Special Plans delighted in telling people, 'You don't understand your own data,'" says Patrick Lang. "'We know that Saddam is evil and deceptive, and if you see this piece of data, to say just because it is not well supported it's not true is to be politically naïve.'"


Not everybody in the C.I.A. was of one mind with regard to the alleged Niger deal. As the Senate Intelligence Committee report points out, some analysts at the C.I.A. and other agencies considered the Niger deal to be "possible." In the fall of 2002, the C.I.A. approved language referring to the Niger deal in one speech by the president but vetoed it in another. And in December 2002, analysts at WINPAC, the C.I.A.'s center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control, produced a paper that chided Iraq for not acknowledging its "efforts to procure uranium from Niger."


Nevertheless, the C.I.A. had enough doubts about the Niger claims to initially leave them out of the President's Daily Brief (P.D.B.), the intelligence updates given each morning to President Bush. On February 5, 2002, however, for reasons that remain unclear, the C.I.A. issued a new report on the alleged Niger deal, one that provided significantly more detail, including what was said to be "verbatim text" of the accord between Niger and Iraq. In the State Department, analysts were still suspicious of the reports. But in the Pentagon, the Vulcans pounced on the new material. On February 12, the D.I.A. issued "a finished intelligence product," titled "Niamey Signed an Agreement to Sell 500 Tons of Uranium a Year to Baghdad," and passed it to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.


Cheney gave the Niger claims new life. "The [C.I.A.] briefer came in. Cheney said, 'What about this?,' and the briefer hadn't heard one word, because no one in the agency thought it was of any significance," says Ray McGovern, whose job at the C.I.A. included preparing and delivering the P.D.B. in the Reagan era. "But when a briefer gets a request from the vice president of the United States, he goes back and leaves no stone unturned."


On March 1, the State Department weighed in with another cable, headed "Sale of Niger Uranium to Iraq Unlikely." Citing "unequivocal" control of the mines, the cable asserted that President Tandja of Niger would not want to risk good relations with the U.S. by trading with Iraq, and cited the prohibitive logistical problems in such a transaction.


[...]A few days later, Wilson returned from Niger and told C.I.A. officials that he had found no evidence to support the uranium charges. By now the Niger reports had been discredited more than half a dozen times—by the French in 2001, by the C.I.A. in Rome and in Langley, by the State Department's INR, by some analysts in the Pentagon, by the ambassador to Niger, by Wilson, and yet again by State.


But the top brass at the C.I.A. knew what Cheney wanted. They went back to French intelligence again—twice. According to the Los Angeles Times, the second request that year, in mid-2002, "was more urgent and more specific." The C.I.A. sought confirmation of the alleged agreement by Niger to sell 500 tons of yellowcake to Iraq. Alain Chouet reportedly sent five or six men to Niger and again found the charges to be false. Then his staff noticed that the allegations matched those brought to him by Rocco Martino. "We told the Americans, 'Bullshit. It doesn't make any sense.'"


The C.I.A. faxed a memo to Hadley and the speechwriters telling them to delete the sentence on uranium, "because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory." Iraq's supply of yellowcake dated back to the 1980s, when it had imported hundreds of tons of uranium ore from Niger and mined the rest itself. The C.I.A. felt that if Saddam was trying to revive his nuclear program he would be more likely to use his own stockpile than risk exposure in an illegal international deal.


But the White House refused to let go. Later that day, Hadley's staff sent over another draft of the Cincinnati speech, which stated, "The regime has been caught attempting to purchase substantial amounts of uranium oxide from sources in Africa."


This time, George Tenet himself interceded to keep the president from making false statements. According to his Senate testimony, he told Hadley that the "president should not be a fact witness on this issue," because the "reporting was weak." The C.I.A. even put it in writing and faxed it to the N.S.C.


he neocons were not done yet, however. "That was their favorite technique," says Larry Wilkerson, "stick that baby in there 47 times and on the 47th time it will stay. At every level of the decision-making process you had to have your ax out, ready to chop their fingers off. Sooner or later you would miss one and it would get in there."


For the next two months, December 2002 and January 2003, references to the uranium deal resurfaced again and again in "fact sheets," talking-point memos, and speeches. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice all declared publicly that Iraq had been caught trying to buy uranium from Niger. On December 19, the claim reappeared on a fact sheet published by the State Department. The bureaucratic battle was unending. In light of the many differing viewpoints, the Pentagon asked the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the 15 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, to resolve the matter. According to The Washington Post, in a January 2003 memo the council replied unequivocally that "the Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest." The memo went immediately to Bush and his advisers.


Nevertheless, on January 20, with war imminent, President Bush submitted a report to Congress citing Iraq's attempts "to acquire uranium and the means to enrich it."


[...]The next day, despite countless objections from the C.I.A. and other agencies, Bush cited the charges from the fraudulent Niger documents in his speech. Later that year, Stephen Hadley accepted responsibility for allowing the sentence to remain in the speech. He said he had failed to remember the warnings he'd received about the allegations.


[...]A week after Bush's speech, on February 4, the Bush administration finally forwarded electronic copies of the Niger documents to the I.A.E.A. Astonishingly, a note was attached to the documents which said, "We cannot confirm these reports and have questions regarding some specific claims."


On March 7, the I.A.E.A. publicly exposed the Niger documents as forgeries. Not long afterward, Cheney was asked about it on Meet the Press. He said that the I.A.E.A. was wrong, that it had "consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing." He added, "We know [Saddam] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."


On March 14, Senator Jay Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to F.B.I. chief Robert Mueller asking for an investigation because "the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq." But Senator Pat Roberts, of Kansas, the Republican chair of the committee, declined to co-sign the letter.


Then, on March 19, 2003, the war in Iraq began.


[...]On July 11, 2003, faced with public pressure to investigate the forgeries, Roberts issued a statement blaming the C.I.A. and defending the White House. "So far, I am very disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the C.I.A.," he said.


Under Roberts's aegis, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the Niger affair and came to some extraordinary conclusions. "At the time the President delivered the State of the Union address, no one in the IC [intelligence community] had asked anyone in the White House to remove the sentence from the speech," read the report. It added that "CIA Iraq nuclear analysts … told Committee staff that at the time of the State of the Union, they still believed that Iraq was probably seeking uranium from Africa." MORE