The Obfuscation Report

by georgia10

Sat Mar 04, 2006 at 05:59:15 PM PDT

Because the only way this administration can deal with the truth is to stamp it out wherever it may fester:

The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws.

In recent weeks, dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have been interviewed by agents from the FBI's Washington field office, who are investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA's warrantless domestic surveillance program, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the two cases.

The CIA, DOJ, and NSA all received letters forbidding them to speak of the NSA President--this AFTER the President has disclosed more details about the program than were originally disclosed in the New York Times. The campaign to shut down info fed to the media is widespread:

"There's a tone of gleeful relish in the way they talk about dragging reporters before grand juries, their appetite for withholding information, and the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public's business risk being branded traitors," said New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, in a statement responding to questions from The Washington Post. "I don't know how far action will follow rhetoric, but some days it sounds like the administration is declaring war at home on the values it professes to be promoting abroad."

In an administration that prides itself on keeping secret even that which must, in the name of justice and truth, see the light of day, this latest assault against those compelled to disclose the crimes of this administration is yet another evisceration to our democracy. Leaking of classified information is--and should be--a crime. Our national security depends that certain secrets be zealously guarded. However, when the secret being concealed is one about how the government has betrayed its own citizens, when the leak is done in the interest of national security, in the interest of the rights of the citizenry which are being abrogated by the government, then this war against those whistleblowers becomes that much more repulsive. Notice that this campaign to maintain secrecy was not launched in response to the Plame leak, which was a true issue of national security. Rather, it was only after the leaks of the illegal spying program and secret prisons that the Bush administration decided to launch this campaign.

Plugging up the pinpoint rays of light that shine through this administration's black shroud of secrecy is the lastest step in Bush's war against truth. Secrecy such as this, a forced secrecy which conceals the festering sores this administration has wrought upon this nation, has and should be rejected.

As the court in Doe v. Gonzales observed:

In general, as our sunshine laws and judicial doctrine attest, democracy abhors undue secrecy, in recognition that public knowledge secures freedom. Hence, an unlimited government warrant to conceal, effectively a form of secrecy per se, has no place in our open society. Such a claim is especially inimical to democratic values for reasons borne out by painful experience. Under the mantle of secrecy, the self-preservation that ordinarily impels our government to censorship and secrecy may potentially be turned on ourselves as a weapon of self-destruction. When withholding information from disclosure is no longer justified, when it ceases to foster the proper aims that initially may have supported confidentiality, a categorical and uncritical extension of non-disclosure may become the cover for spurious ends that government may then deem too inconvenient, inexpedient, merely embarrassing, or even illicit to ever expose to the light of day. At that point, secrecy's protective shield may serve not as much to secure a safe country as simply to save face.

Saving face, indeed, while our democracy suffers.

Negroponte's 'Serious Setback'
By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 03 March 2006

John Negroponte, the US National Intelligence Director, provided testimony on Tuesday at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on "global threats."

Negroponte, who was the US ambassador to Iraq from June 2004 to April 2005, was immediately promoted to his current position after his presence in Iraq. Ironically, he warned the committee on Tuesday, "If chaos were to descend upon Iraq or the forces of democracy were to be defeated in that country ... this would have implications for the rest of the Middle East region and, indeed, the world."

Warning of the outcome of a possible civil war in Iraq, Negroponte said sectarian civil war in Iraq would be a "serious setback" to the global war on terror. Note - he did not say it would be a "serious setback" to the Iraqi people, over 1,400 of whom have been slaughtered in sectarian violence touched off by the bombing of the Golden Mosque last week in Samarra.

No, the violence and instability in Iraq would be a "serious setback" to the global "war on terror."

But it's interesting for him to continue, "The consequences for the people of Iraq would be catastrophic," whilst feigning his concern. Because generating catastrophic consequences for civilian populations just happens to be his specialty.

If we briefly review the political history of John Negroponte, we find a man who has had a career bent toward generating civilian death and widespread human rights abuses, and promoting sectarian and ethnic violence.

Remember when Negroponte was the US ambassador to Honduras, from 1981 to 1985? While there he earned the distinction of being accused of widespread human rights violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights while he worked as "a tough cold warrior who enthusiastically carried out President Ronald Reagan's strategy," according to cables sent between Negroponte and Washington during his tenure there.

The human rights violations carried out by Negroponte were described as "systematic."

These violations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by operatives trained by the CIA. Records document his "special intelligence units," better known as "death squads," comprised of CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people. Victims also included US missionaries (similar to Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq) who happened to witness many of the atrocities.

Negroponte had full knowledge of these activities, while he made sure US military aid to Honduras increased from $4 million to $77.4 million a year during his tenure, and the tiny country became so jammed with US soldiers it was dubbed the "USS Honduras."

It is also important to remember that Negroponte oversaw construction of the air base where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the US. This air base, El Aguacate, was also used as a secret detention and torture center during his time in Honduras.

While Negroponte was the US ambassador to Honduras, civilian deaths sky-rocketed into the tens of thousands. During his first full year, the local newspapers carried no less than 318 stories of extra-judicial attacks by the military.

He has been described as an "old fashioned imperialist" and got his start during the Vietnam War in the CIA's Phoenix program, which assassinated some 40,000 Vietnamese "subversives."

Negroponte's death squads used electric shock and suffocation devices in interrogations, kept their prisoners naked, and when a prisoner was no longer useful he was brutally executed.

Outraged at the human rights abuses by the Reagan-Bush administration, in 1984 Nicaragua took its case to the World Court in The Hague. The decision of the court was for the Reagan-Bush administration to terminate its "unlawful use of force" in international terrorism and pay substantial reparations to the victims. The White House responded by brushing off the court's findings and vetoed two UN Security Council resolutions that affirmed the judgment that all states must observe international law.

In the middle of Negroponte's tenure in Iraq, the Pentagon (read Donald Rumsfeld) openly considered using assassination and kidnapping teams there, led by the Special Forces.

Referred to not-so-subtly as "the Salvador option," the January 2005 rhetoric from the Pentagon publicized a proposal that would send Special Forces teams to "advise, support and possibly train" Iraqi "squads." Members of these squads would be hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga militia and Shia Badr militiamen used to target Sunni resistance fighters and their sympathizers.

What better man to make this happen than John Negroponte? His experience made him the perfect guy for the job. What a nice coincidence that he just happened to be in Baghdad when the Pentagon/Rumsfeld were discussing "the Salvador option."

Fast forward to present day Iraq, which is a situation described by the Washington Post in this way: "Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday - blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound."

The Independent newspaper from London recently reports that hundreds of Iraqis each month are tortured to death or executed by death squads working out of the Shia-run Ministry of Interior.

During the aforementioned committee hearing, Negroponte said that the US is concerned about the purchasing of arms by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Negroponte accused Chavez of using funds generated from the sale of oil to purchase weaponry, saying, "It's clear that he is spending hundreds of millions, if not more, for his very extravagant foreign policy at the expense of the impoverished Venezuelan population."

Coincidentally, on the exact same day he said this, the US State Department announced that the only new rebuilding money in its latest budget request for Iraq is for prisons.

With no other big building projects scheduled for Iraq in the next year, the State Department coordinator for Iraq is asking Congress for $100 million for prisons, while the Iraqi people languish with 3.2 hours of electricity daily in the average home, staggering unemployment and horrendous security, with most still dependent upon a monthly food ration.

Meanwhile John Pace, the Human Rights Chief for the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq until last month, recently stated that he believes the US has violated the Geneva Conventions in Iraq and is fueling the violence via raiding Iraqi homes and detaining thousands of innocent Iraqis. Pace estimates that between 80-90% of Iraqi detainees are innocent.

During an interview on Democracy Now!, when asked to described the role of the militias in Iraq, Pace said "they first started as a kind of militia, sort of organized armed groups, which were the military wing of various factions. And they have - they had a considerable role to play in the [security] vacuum that was created by the invasion."

He went on to describe their actions: "So you have these militias now with police gear and under police insignia basically carrying out an agenda which really is not in the interest of the country as a whole. They have roadblocks in Baghdad and other areas, they would kidnap other people. They have been very closely linked with numerous mass executions ..."

Pace, when asked if there were death squads in Iraq, replied, "I would say yes, there are death squads," and "my observations would confirm that at least at a certain point last year and in 2005, we saw numerous instances where the behavior of death squads was very similar, uncannily similar to that we had observed in other countries, including El Salvador."

What we're witnessing in Iraq now with these death squads and escalating sectarian violence is the product of policies implemented by Negroponte when he was the US Ambassador in Iraq.

But let us remove the covert operations factor for a moment.

For over a year now, Shia death squads have been killing Sunni en masse.

Thus, at first glance, the bombing of the Golden Mosque last week as Sunni retaliation makes sense.

However, what doesn't make sense is the immediate showing of solidarity between Shia and Sunni clerics following the bombing.

Let us now reinsert the covert operations factor into this equation.

Along with the showing of religious solidarity, there is widespread belief by Shiite religious clerics both in and outside Iraq, as well as belief in the Arab media, that US covert operations were behind the bombing:

* Shiite Cleric Muqtada Al Sadr blamed the United States occupation for the current violence. He recently stated, "My message to the Iraqi people is to stand united and bonded, and not to fall into the Western trap. The West is trying to divide the Iraqi people. As God is my witness, I hereby demand an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the occupation forces from Iraq."

* In another interview, Sadr stated, "We say that the occupiers are responsible for such crisis [Golden Mosque bombing] ... there is only one enemy. The occupier."

* Adel Abdul Mehdi, the Iraqi Vice President, held the American Ambassador [Zalmay Khalilzad] responsible for the bombing of the Golden Mosque, "especially since occupation forces did not comply with curfew orders imposed by the Iraqi government."

He added, "Evidence indicates that the occupation may be trying to undermine and weaken the Iraqi government."
* At a major demonstration in Beirut, prominent Lebanese Shiite cleric and Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, said America and Israel are to blame for the sectarian divisions in Iraq, claiming that the violence will offer further justifications for maintaining the occupation of Iraq.

* According to the Saudi-based Arab News editorial, a civil-war scenario may serve the interests of the Bush administration: "This may in the end be what Washington wants, because if Iraq plunges into chaos, it could be the Bush ticket out of the Iraq debacle, albeit paid for in rivers of Iraqi blood as well the utter humiliation of the president's administration and its neo-con agenda."

* Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, urged Iraqi Shia not to seek revenge against Sunni Muslims, saying there were definite plots "to force the Shia to attack the mosques and other properties respected by the Sunni," and blamed the intelligence services of the US and Israel for being responsible for the bombing of the Golden Mosque.

* Hoseyn Shari'atmadarit wrote in the Keyhan newspaper of Iran on February 25 of several instances of documented covert operations carried out by occupation forces in Iraq, including: "In Shahrivar two British intelligence officers were arrested [in September 2005] at an inspection post while carrying a considerable amount of explosives, detonators and other equipment necessary to build a bomb. This event certainly shows the direct involvement of the English intelligence service in the bombings in Iraq ... The commander of the English military deployed in Basra [then] issued an order to attack the police centre and release two English saboteurs."

In the recent committee meeting, Negroponte told US senators he was seeing progress in Iraq. He said, "And if we continue to make that kind of progress, yes, we can win in Iraq."

Evidently the kind of progress John Negroponte sees in Iraq is not the kind that benefits the Iraqi people. Because the only progress in Iraq, apart from building prisons, is for the situation to continue growing progressively worse by deepening sectarian divides, despite the best efforts of religious leaders to create peace and unity.

Would civil war in Iraq be a "serious setback" for John Negroponte? Because the sectarian violence happening in Iraq right now is already a "serious setback" for the Iraqi people.

Thus, does Negroponte really care if there is civil war? Does he really concern himself with the wellbeing of the Iraqi people? Or is his main concern creating the catastrophe which keeps them divided?

--------

Weary of the overall failure of the US media to accurately report on the realities of the war in Iraq for the Iraqi people and US soldiers, Dahr Jamail went to Iraq to report on the war himself. Dahr has spent a total of 8 months in occupied Iraq as one of only a few independent US journalists in the country. To read more of his reporting from Iraq go to www.dahrjamailiraq.com.

Today, the Obfuscation Report released it's findings after and exhaustive study of modern american journalists. The Conclusion: They're fucking idiots.

For example: When the President is caught in a bold faced lie, modern journalists fall for ANY explanation proffered by the White House. I'll show you how it works.

Step One, Bush says something incredibly stupid like: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." In response to a question as to why the governments reaction to Hurricane Katrina was so poor.

Video Comes Out Showing That Bush Was In Fact Warned That The Levees Would Be Breached, 4 days before he said "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Modern Day Moronic Journalist Asks the White House to Explain the Obvious Disconnect Between REALITY and the PRESIDENTS STATEMENT.

The White House Response is that the President was saying that "I don't think anyone anticipated that a category 3 storm would breach the levees."

Modern Day Moronic Journalist Reports This As Fact, Failing to Note that hours before the storm Katrina was a category 5 storm, and was downgraded to a category 4 storm as it struck the coast.

Modern Day Moronic Journalist Also Fails to Note that the White House Response is in fact A. Not What The President Said; and B. An Obvious Lie Itself Made Up After The Fact because the storm wasn't downgraded to a category 3 until months after the Hurricane Hit.

The White House Response is in fact saying that 4 days after the President was told that the levees could be breached; he knew MONTHS BEFORE ANYONE ELSE that it was only a category 3 storm and that a category 3 storm wouldn't breach the levees.

Again, even if you accepted it as fact that the president knew before anyone else in America that the storm was making landfall as a category 3 storm, it would still be bullshit because studies had shown that even a category 3 storm with enough storm surge, WOULD HAVE BREACHED THE LEVEES!

Once again, the Moronic Modern Day Journalist is distracted by the shiney object waved by the White House, and they fail to call Bullshit Bullshit. No wonder the Bush Administration thinks that if you're caught in a lie, just tell a bigger one. Modern American Journalists Are Too Fucking Stupid To Figure It Out.

The Onion

February 27, 2006 | Issue 42•09

WASHINGTON, DC—In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction.

"We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. "It will take some doing, but we're in this for the long and pointless haul."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reaffirms the Democratic Party’s promise to remain marginalized.

"We can lose this," Reid added. "All it takes is a little lack of backbone."

Despite plummeting poll numbers for the G.O.P nationwide and an upcoming election in which all House seats and 33 Senate seats are up for contention, Democrats pledged to maintain their party's sheepish resignation.

"In times like these, when the American public is palpably dismayed with the political status quo, it is crucial that Democrats remain unfocused and defer to the larger, smarter, and better-equipped Republican machine," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said. "If we play our cards right, we will be intimidated to the point of total paralysis."

Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) cited the Bush Administration's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina as a model for Democrats.

"Grandmothers drowning in nursing homes, families losing everything, communities torn apart—and the ruling party just sat and watched," Lieberman said. "I'm here to promise that we Democrats will find a way to let you down just like that."

According to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Democrats are not willing to sacrifice their core values—indecision, incoherence, and disorganization—for the sake of short-term electoral gain.

"Don't lose faithlessness, Democrats," Kennedy said. "The next election is ours to lose. To those who say we can't, I say: Remember Michael Dukakis. Remember Al Gore. Remember John Kerry."

Kennedy said that, even if the Democrats were to regain the upper hand in the midterm elections, they would still need to agree on a platform and chart a legislative agenda—an obstacle he called "insurmountable."

"Universal health care, the war in Iraq, civil liberties, a living wage, gun control—we're not even close to a consensus within our own ranks," Kennedy said. "And even if we were, we wouldn't know how to implement that consensus."

Democratic Party faithful cheer on their leaders’ resolutely defeatist agenda.

"Some rising stars with leadership potential like [Sen. Barack] Obama (D-IL) and [New York State Attorney General Eliot] Spitzer have emerged, but don't worry: We've still got some infight left in us," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said. "Over the last decade, we've found a reliably losing formula, and we're sticking with it."

Dean reminded Democratic candidates to "stay on our unclear message, maintain a defensive, reactive posture, and keep an elitist distance from voters."

Political consultant and Democratic operative James Carville said that, if properly disseminated, the message of hopelessness could be the Democrats' most effective in more than a decade.

"For the first time in a long time, we're really connecting with the American people, who are also feeling hopeless," Carville said. "If we can harness that and run on it in '06, I believe we can finish a strong second."

Ethics Office for Hill Rejected
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
The Washington Post

Friday 03 March 2006

Bipartisan defeat for independent lobbying overseer.

A Senate committee yesterday rejected a bipartisan proposal to establish an independent office to oversee the enforcement of congressional ethics and lobbying laws, signaling a reluctance in Congress to beef up the enforcement of its rules on lobbying.

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs voted 11 to 5 to defeat a proposal by its chairman, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), and its ranking Democrat, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), that would have created an office of public integrity to toughen enforcement and combat the loss of reputation Congress has suffered after the guilty plea in January of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Democrats joined Republicans in killing the measure.

The vote was described by government watchdog groups and several lawmakers as the latest example of Congress's waning interest in stringent lobbying reform. After starting the year with bold talk about banning privately paid meals and travel, lawmakers are moving toward producing a bill that would ban few of their activities and would rely mostly on stepped-up disclosure and reporting requirements as their lobbying changes.

"Lobbying reform is going more the enforcement route," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "What's that going to do? Nothing much."

Yesterday, the governmental affairs panel spent most of its three-hour drafting session debating the Collins-Lieberman proposal. Collins argued that by hiring professionals to oversee lobbying reports and the investigation of ethics complaints, Congress would improve its credibility by ending the appearance of conflict-of-interest created by the self-policing of its ethics committees.

"The current system of reviewing lobbyists' public reports is a joke," she added.

But Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), chairman of the Senate's Select Committee on Ethics and a member of Collins's panel, said the ethics panel does not need any help because it is already doing a thorough job of enforcing the chamber's rules. Speaking of the audits and investigations that the office of public integrity would undertake, Voinovich said: "The ethics committee is already doing those things."

With the backing of current and past ethics panel members in attendance, Voinovich proposed, and the governmental affairs committee adopted, an amendment that would strike the new office from the committee's bill while requiring more openness in the now secretive ethics panel. An annual report would list the number of alleged rule violations that are reported or otherwise dealt with by the House and Senate ethics committees.

Watchdog groups reacted angrily. "The cutting out of the office of public integrity really undermines this whole effort," said Joan Claybrook, president of the liberal group Public Citizen. Lieberman said he will try to get the integrity office approved next week when lobbying legislation is scheduled for action on the Senate floor. He said that he will be joined by other senators in a variety of efforts to get the lobbying bill back in the direction it was headed at the beginning of the year.

In January, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was joined by leaders of both parties in calling for bans or severe restrictions on gifts, meals and travel provided by private groups. The proposed stiff limitations were the initial reaction to the political scandals involving Abramoff and members of Congress and their staffs.

But as the legislation has evolved and Abramoff has faded from the headlines, calls for bans have grown scarce, and expanded disclosure has become the centerpiece of the efforts underway. Two Senate committees this week have largely left undiminished lawmakers' ability to accept meals and travel, and the House appears headed in the same direction.

"Disclosure, transparency and oversight systems are the tenets we're interested in implementing," said Kevin Madden, spokesman for House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). Boehner succeeded Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), who was forced to step down as leader last year after he was indicted in Texas on campaign-money laundering charges.

"We're focusing on more disclosure, transparency," agreed Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which approved its own disclosure bill Tuesday. The measure will be considered by the full Senate next week.

Some of the disclosure proposals are significant. The governmental affairs committee agreed for the first time to require professional grass-roots lobbying firms to report publicly how much they spend to influence government actions. Currently, only people who are paid to directly lobby lawmakers and their staffs must disclose their activities. Grass-roots lobbying is indirect lobbying to try to galvanize voters back home.

The bill would also require lobbyists to file quarterly reports, rather than the current biannual ones, on their activities, as well as a new, annual disclosure that would detail their donations to federal candidates, officeholders and political parties. In addition, lobbyists would have to disclose all the travel they arrange for lawmakers and all the gifts worth more than $20 that they give to them.

Lobbying reports would be filed electronically and would be accessible via the Internet, something that is not always true today.

On Tuesday, the rules committee approved its own set of extra disclosures. Its bill would require that meals accepted by senators and their aides be reported online within 15 days. That bill would also require that senators get approval in advance from the Senate Select Committee on Ethics for any privately financed travel that they accept. The trips and their main details would have to be disclosed rapidly, including the names of the people who come along on private aircraft.

So far, only one outright ban has been approved. The rules committee decided to prohibit lawmakers from accepting gifts other than meals from registered lobbyists and foreign agents. That would include such benefits as tickets to sporting events and the theater. House Republican leaders have not endorsed a similar ban.

Another serious restriction, approved by the governmental affairs committee, would slow what has been called the revolving door between government and the K Street lobbying industry. The provision would double to two years the time during which former lawmakers and former top executive branch officials would be barred from lobbying their ex-colleagues. It would also ban - for a year after leaving their Capitol Hill jobs - former senior congressional staffers from lobbying anyone in the chamber in which they had worked. Currently, staff members are prohibited from lobbying only their former offices during their one-year "cooling-off period."

But Lieberman said he wants to do more. He said he will try to curtail corporate-plane travel by forcing lawmakers to pay charter fares for their private airplane trips rather than the first-class rates that are allowed under current law.

This restriction was proposed during a debate in the rules committee earlier in the week but was defeated.

Amy Ephron - The Huffington Post

How come whenever there's a big deal, one of them owns the company, or used to own the company, or used to run the company that owns the company, or used to run the company that sold part of the company to the company that's making the deal? And probably owns a lot of stock in the company (or the parent company or the company that invested in the company)? And we don't? And it's a company we never heard of before? Like CSX or Dubai Ports World.

In case you haven't been following this, Treasury Secretary John Snow used to be the CEO of a company called CSX, an international transportation company, which sold its international terminal business to Dubai Ports World in 2003, the same Dubai Ports World that's buying Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation (P&O) which is how they're going to end up managing all those U.S. Ports...

Anyway, I looked up John Snow's financial disclosure statement and, let me tell you, the Secretary of the Treasury is a seriously rich fellow. There are all these boxes that you check that define how much of a stock you might own, $5000-$10,000, $50,000-$100,000, 1,000,000-5,000,000 and there's a box that's $25,000,000-$50,000,000 and Secretary Snow has checked it more than once. And, in one instance, that little $25,000,000-$50,000,000 box is checked in relation to CSX. I've never checked that box. I didn't even know that box existed.

Now, John Snow's right-hand man at CSX was a fellow called David Sanborn who then went to work as a senior executive at Dubai Ports World until a month ago when (this deal was surely already afoot) President Bush nominated him to be the new U.S. Maritime Administrator.

So, when Treasury Secretary John Snow (who in addition to being Treasury Secretary is the head of the "Committee on Foreign Investment, the committee that vets and signed off on this deal to begin with) said two weeks ago, that he didn't know anything about the Dubai Ports World deal until he heard about it in the press, I didn't believe him. Is Secretary Snow so out of touch with his old colleagues (nobody even gossips with him) and his own staff that he didn't know anything about a 6.8 billion dollar deal (involving a company he has intimate knowledge of), which even by John Snow's standards is a pretty big deal? I don't believe it. So, why is he saying that he didn't know? Is there something about it that would seem improper?

In any event, Treasury Secretary Snow's financial disclosure statements are only available on-line for the years 2002, 2003 (has he forgotten to file them?) but as soon as he posts the new ones, I'm looking them up and I'm calling my broker.

by Paul Krugman

Iraqi insurgents, hurricanes and low-income Medicare recipients have three things in common. Each has been at the center of a policy disaster. In each case experts warned about the impending disaster. And in each case — well, let's look at what happened.

Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that from 2003 on, intelligence agencies "repeatedly warned the White House" that "the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war." But senior administration officials insisted that the insurgents were a mix of dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line were attacked for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief was to remark, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees.

But what's really striking, given the gravity of the warnings, is the lack of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in responding to the storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of misery at the Superdome and wondered why help hadn't arrived. But as Newsweek reports, for several days nobody was willing to tell Mr. Bush, who "equates disagreement with disloyalty," how badly things were going. "For most of those first few days," Newsweek says, "Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing."

Now for one you may not have heard about. The new Medicare drug program got off to a disastrous start: "Low-income Medicare beneficiaries around the country were often overcharged, and some were turned away from pharmacies without getting their medications, in the first week of Medicare's new drug benefit," The New York Times reported.

How did this happen? The same way the other disasters happened: experts who warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.

We can get a sense of what went on by looking at a 2005 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office on potential problems with the drug program. Included with the report is a letter from Mark McClellan, the Medicare administrator. Rather than taking the concerns of the G.A.O. seriously, he tried to bully it into changing its conclusions. He demanded that the report say that the administration had "established effective contingency plans" — which it hadn't — and that it drop the assertion that some people would encounter difficulties obtaining necessary drugs, which is exactly what happened.

Experts within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must have faced similar bullying. And unlike experts at the independent G.A.O., they were not in a position to stand up for what they knew to be true.

In short, our country is being run by people who assume that things will turn out the way they want. And if someone warns of problems, they shoot the messenger.

Some commentators speak of the series of disasters now afflicting the Bush administration — there seems to be a new one every week — as if it were just a string of bad luck. But it isn't.

If good luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, bad luck is what happens when lack of preparation meets a challenge. And our leaders, who think they can govern through a mix of wishful thinking and intimidation, are never, ever prepared.

McCain Law May Not Apply to Cuba Prison

By Josh White and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 3, 2006; A04

Bush administration lawyers, fighting a claim of torture by a Guantanamo Bay detainee, yesterday argued that the new law that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to people held at the military prison.

In federal court yesterday and in legal filings, Justice Department lawyers contended that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, cannot use legislation drafted by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to challenge treatment that the detainee's lawyers described as "systematic torture."

Government lawyers have argued that another portion of that same law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, removes general access to U.S. courts for all Guantanamo Bay captives. Therefore, they said, Mohammed Bawazir, a Yemeni national held since May 2002, cannot claim protection under the anti-torture provisions.

Bawazir's attorneys contend that "extremely painful" new tactics used by the government to force-feed him and end his hunger strike amount to torture.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler said in a hearing yesterday that she found allegations of aggressive U.S. military tactics used to break the detainee hunger strike "extremely disturbing" and possibly against U.S. and international law. But Justice Department lawyers argued that even if the tactics were considered in violation of McCain's language, detainees at Guantanamo would have no recourse to challenge them in court.

In Bawazir's case, the government claims that it had to forcefully intervene in a hunger strike that was causing his weight to drop dangerously. In January, officials strapped Bawazir into a special chair, put a larger tube than they had previously used through his nose and kept him restrained for nearly two hours at a time to make sure he did not purge the food he was being given, the government and Bawazir's attorneys said.

Richard Murphy Jr., Bawazir's attorney, said his client gave in to the new techniques and began eating solid food days after the first use of the restraint chair. Murphy said the military deliberately made the process painful and embarrassing, noting that Bawazir soiled himself because of the approach.

Kessler said getting to the root of the allegations is an "urgent matter."

"These allegations . . . describe disgusting treatment, that if proven, is treatment that is cruel, profoundly disturbing and violative of" U.S. and foreign treaties banning torture, Kessler told the government's lawyers. She said she needs more information, but made clear she is considering banning the use of larger nasal-gastric tubes and the restraint chair.

In court filings, the Justice Department lawyers argued that language in the law written by Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) gives Guantanamo Bay detainees access to the courts only to appeal their enemy combatant status determinations and convictions by military commissions.

"Unfortunately, I think the government's right; it's a correct reading of the law," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "The law says you can't torture detainees at Guantanamo, but it also says you can't enforce that law in the courts."

Thomas Wilner, a lawyer representing several detainees at Guantanamo, agreed that the law cannot be enforced. "This is what Guantanamo was about to begin with, a place to keep detainees out of the U.S. precisely so they can say they can't go to court," Wilner said.

A spokeswoman for McCain's office did not respond to questions yesterday.

Murphy told the judge the military's claims that it switched tactics to protect Bawazir should not be believed. He noted that on Jan. 11 -- days after the new law passed -- the Defense Department made the identical health determination for about 20 other detainees, all of whom had been engaged in the hunger strike.

Guantanamo Bay officials deny that the tactics constitute torture. They wrote in sworn statements that they are necessary efforts to ensure detainee health. Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the facility's commander, wrote that Bawazir's claims of abuse are "patently false."

"In short, he is a trained al Qaida terrorist, who has been taught to claim torture, abuse, and medical mistreatment if captured," Hood wrote. He added that Bawazir allegedly went to Afghanistan to train for jihad and ultimately fought with the Taliban against U.S. troops.

Navy Capt. Stephen G. Hooker, who runs the prison's detention hospital, noted that the hunger strike began on Aug. 8, reached a peak of 131 participants on Sept. 11, and dropped to 84 on Christmas Day. After use of the restraint chair began, only five captives continued not eating.

Hooker wrote that he suspected Bawazir was purging his food after feedings. Bawazir weighed 130 pounds in late 2002, according to Hooker, but 97 pounds on the day he was first strapped to the chair. As of Sunday, his weight was back to 137 pounds, the government said.

Kessler noted with irritation that Hood and Hooker made largely general claims about the group of detainees on the hunger strike in defending the switch to the new force-feeding procedures used on Bawazir.

"I know it's a sad day when a federal judge has to ask a DOJ attorney this, but I'm asking you -- why should I believe them?" Kessler asked Justice Department attorney Terry Henry.

Henry said he would attempt to gather more information from the officials but said there was no legal basis for the court to intervene. Bawazir's weight is back to normal, his health is "robust" and he is no longer on a hunger strike, Henry said.

In January 2005, Newsweek reported that the Bush Administration was considering using the “Salvador option” against insurgents in Iraq:

[T]he Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.

It should come as no surprise, then, that sectarian death squads tied directly to the Iraqi Interior Ministry are running rampant in Iraq. Today we learned that the head of the Baghdad morgue has fled the country in fear for his life after reporting that the units have killed more than 7,000 people since last summer. The death squads operate so openly that an American military official in Iraq said, “the amazing this is…they tell you exactly what they are going to do.”

In a desperate bid to rescue a failed policy in Iraq, the Bush administration may have given the green light to a strategy that ends any hope of national reconciliation and finally tears Iraq apart along sectarian and ethnic lines.

– Ken Gude

Scandalous State of Affairs at Gitmo

By Thomas P. Sullivan
Published March 1, 2006

by BooMan23

Thu Mar 02, 2006 at 11:40:06 AM PDT

[front-paged at Booman Tribune]

Let's pretend for a moment that George W. Bush is not our President. Instead, let's posit some hypothetical President in his stead. How would a mature person go about determining whether a country like Iraq might pose an imminent threat to the security of America?

I suppose he would call a meeting and ask his intelligence chiefs to do an assessment of the country's intentions and capabilities. And then, I suppose, he would call another meeting or ask for a report to be drawn up that would present the conclusions of our various intelligence agencies.

Well, as Murray Wass reports, that is exactly what Bush did. He just decided to ignore their assessments and do the one thing that they said might turn Iraq into a threat. And, oh yeah, he repeatedly lied to the American people, too.

The second classified report, delivered to Bush in early January 2003, was also a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, this one focusing on whether Saddam would launch an unprovoked attack on the United States, either directly, or indirectly by working with terrorists.

The report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that it was unlikely that Saddam would try to attack the United States -- except if "ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his regime" or if he intended to "extract revenge" for such an assault, according to records and sources.

The single dissent in the report again came from State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, which believed that the Iraqi leader was "unlikely to conduct clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland even if [his] regime's demise is imminent" as the result of a U.S. invasion.

On at least four earlier occasions, beginning in the spring of 2002, according to the same records and sources, the president was informed during his morning intelligence briefing that U.S. intelligence agencies believed it was unlikely that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States.

However, in the months leading up to the war, Bush, Cheney, and Cabinet members repeatedly asserted that Saddam was likely to use chemical or biological weapons against the United States or to provide such weapons to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group.

I don't think we even need to complicate things by going deeper into this. The plain facts are that the intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that Iraq posed no threat to the homeland. They also unanimously agreed that Saddam Hussein had no role in 9/11 and that he had no working relationship with al-Qaeda. The Bush administration and sympathetic reporters told the American people the opposite. And then they launched an attack on Iraq which the intelligence agencies had said was the only thing they could conceive of that might lead Iraq to attack America.

Is that keeping us safe?

In some ways this is old news. What makes it new is Murray Waas has gained access to some of the most sensitive documents of the government: Presidential intelligence summaries. And they show that the President was well informed on both the view that Iraq posed no threat and that there was strong dissent over whether the famous aluminium tubes were thought to be for uranium enrichment. Until now, the administration has either denied knowledge of these facts or has sought to spin them.

The summaries stated that both the Energy and State departments dissented on the aluminum tubes question. This is the first evidence that Bush was aware of the intense debate within the government during the time that he, Cheney, and members of the Cabinet were citing the procurement of the tubes as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program.

In his address to the U.N. General Assembly on September 12, 2002, the president asserted, "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon."

On October 7, 2002, less than a week after Bush was given the summary, he said in a speech in Cincinnati: "Evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahedeen' -- his nuclear holy warriors.... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

On numerous other occasions, Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and then-U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte cited Iraq's procurement of aluminum tubes without disclosing that the intelligence community was split as to their end use. The fact that the president was informed of the dissents by Energy and State is also significant because Rice and other administration officials have said that Bush did not know about those dissenting views when he made claims about the purported uses for the tubes.

On July 11, 2003, aboard Air Force One during a presidential trip to Africa, Rice was asked about the National Intelligence Estimate and whether the president knew of the dissenting views among intelligence agencies regarding Iraq's procurement of the aluminum tubes.

Months earlier, disagreement existed within the administration over how to characterize the aluminum tubes in a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the U.N. on February 5, 2003. Breaking ranks with others in the administration, Powell decided to refer to the internal debate among government agencies over Iraq's intended use of the tubes.

Asked about this by a reporter on Air Force One, Rice said: "I'm saying that when we put [Powell's speech] together... the secretary decided that he would caveat the aluminum tubes, which he did.... The secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to hold that view."

Rice added, "Now, if there were any doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or to me."

Yes. Except that they were...and now we have proof.

the one-page summary, several senior government officials said in interviews, was written specifically for Bush, was handed to the president by then-CIA Director George Tenet, and was read in Tenet's presence.

In addition, Rice, Cheney, and dozens of other high-level Bush administration policy makers received a highly classified intelligence assessment, known as a Senior Executive Memorandum, on the aluminum tubes issue. Circulated on January 10, 2003, the memo was titled "Questions on Why Iraq Is Procuring Aluminum Tubes and What the IAEA Has Found to Date."

The paper included discussion regarding the fact that the INR, Energy, and the United Nations atomic energy watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, all believed that Iraq was using the aluminum tubes for conventional weapons programs.

This is what 'fixing the facts around the policy' looks like. And, I might add, that half the intelligence the Bush administration relied on, rather than ignoring, was absolute crap. So, they fed bad intelligence into the system through people like Ahmed Chalabi and the Niger forgerist, and when they still didn't get the casus belli they needed for war, they just lied about or distorted what the intelligence services had advised them.

Add it all up, and add up all the death, injury, misery, ill-will, and expense that resulted from Bush's decision to go to war. How could anyone not call for his impeachment?

Video shows Bush got explicit Katrina warning
President, Chertoff were clearly told of storm’s dangers numerous times
The Associated Press
Updated: 11:01 a.m. ET March 2, 2006

WASHINGTON - In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”

The footage — along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press — show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Linked by video, Bush’s confidence on Aug. 28 starkly contrasts with the dire warnings his disaster chief and a cacophony of federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.

Brown’s fears voiced

A top hurricane expert voiced “grave concerns” about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren’t enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, a critic of the administration’s Katrina response, said, “You know, from this tape it looks like everybody was fully aware.”

Some of the footage and transcripts from briefings on Aug. 25-31 conflict with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response:

Homeland Security officials have said the “fog of war” blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. “I’m sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done,” the National Hurricane Center’s Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.

“I don’t buy the ‘fog of war’ defense,” Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. “It was a fog of bureaucracy.”

Bush declared four days after the storm, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” that gushed deadly floodwaters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility — and Bush was worried too.

White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Brown discussed fears of a levee breach the day the storm hit.

“I talked to the president twice today, once in Crawford and then again on Air Force One,” Brown said. “He’s obviously watching the television a lot, and he had some questions about the Dome, he’s asking questions about reports of breaches.”

Louisiana officials angrily blamed the federal government for not being prepared, but the transcripts show they were still praising FEMA as the storm roared toward the Gulf Coast and even two days afterward. “I think a lot of the planning FEMA has done with us the past year has really paid off,” Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana’s emergency preparedness deputy director, said during the Aug. 28 briefing.

It wasn’t long before Smith and other state officials sounded overwhelmed.

“We appreciate everything that you all are doing for us, and all I would ask is that you realize that what’s going on and the sense of urgency needs to be ratcheted up,” Smith said Aug. 30.

Pleas for help in Mississippi

Mississippi begged for more attention in that same briefing.

“We know that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana that need to be rescued, but we would just ask you, we desperately need to get our share of assets because we’ll have people dying — not because of water coming up, but because we can’t get them medical treatment in our affected counties,” said a Mississippi state official whose name was not mentioned on the tape.

Video footage of the Aug. 28 briefing, the final one before Katrina struck, showed an intense Brown voicing concerns from the government’s disaster operation center and imploring colleagues to do whatever was necessary to help victims.

“We’re going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event,” Brown warned. He called the storm “a bad one, a big one” and implored federal agencies to cut through red tape to help people, bending rules if necessary.

Brown: ‘Just let them yell at me’

“Go ahead and do it,” Brown said. “I’ll figure out some way to justify it. ... Just let them yell at me.”

Bush appeared from a narrow, windowless room at his vacation ranch in Texas, with his elbows on a table. Hagin was sitting alongside him. Neither asked questions in the Aug. 28 briefing.

“I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm,” the president said.

A relaxed Chertoff, sporting a polo shirt, weighed in from Washington at Homeland Security’s operations center. He would later fly to Atlanta, outside of Katrina’s reach, for a bird flu event.

Missed opportunity seen on tape

One snippet captures a missed opportunity on Aug. 28 for the government to have dispatched active-duty military troops to the region to augment the National Guard.

Chertoff: “Are there any DOD assets that might be available? Have we reached out to them?”

Brown: “We have DOD assets over here at EOC (emergency operations center). They are fully engaged. And we are having those discussions with them now.”

Chertoff: “Good job.”

In fact, active duty troops weren’t dispatched until days after the storm. And many states’ National Guards had yet to be deployed to the region despite offers of assistance, and it took days before the Pentagon deployed active-duty personnel to help overwhelmed Guardsmen.

The National Hurricane Center’s Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun.

“I don’t think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern,” Mayfield told the briefing.

Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.

“They’re not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners out of prisons and they’re leaving hotels open in downtown New Orleans. So I’m very concerned about that,” Brown said.

Despite the concerns, it ultimately took days for search and rescue teams to reach some hospitals and nursing homes.

Brown questioned Superdome safety

Brown also told colleagues one of his top concerns was whether evacuees who went to the New Orleans Superdome — which became a symbol of the failed Katrina response — would be safe and have adequate medical care.

“The Superdome is about 12 feet below sea level.... I don’t know whether the roof is designed to stand, withstand a Category Five hurricane,” he said.

Brown also wanted to know whether there were enough federal medical teams in place to treat evacuees and the dead in the Superdome.

“Not to be (missing) kind of gross here,” Brown interjected, “but I’m concerned” about the medical and mortuary resources “and their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe.”

March 2, 2006
U.S. Is Reducing Safety Penalties for Mine Flaws
By IAN URBINA and ANDREW W. LEHREN

CRAIGSVILLE, W.Va. — In its drive to foster a more cooperative relationship with mining companies, the Bush administration has decreased major fines for safety violations since 2001, and in nearly half the cases, it has not collected the fines, according to a data analysis by The New York Times.

Federal records also show that in the last two years the federal mine safety agency has failed to hand over any delinquent cases to the Treasury Department for further collection efforts, as is supposed to occur after 180 days.

With the deaths of 24 miners in accidents in 2006, the enforcement record of the Mine Safety and Health Administration has come under sharp scrutiny, and the agency is likely to face tough questions about its performance at a Senate oversight hearing on Thursday.

"The Bush administration ushered in this desire to develop cooperative ties between regulators and the mining industry," said Tony Oppegard, a top official at the agency in the Clinton administration. "Safety has certainly suffered as a result."

A spokesman for the agency, Dirk Fillpot, defended its record, pointing out that last year the coal industry had 22 fatalities, the lowest number in its history.

"Safety is definitely improving," Mr. Fillpot said.

A spokeswoman for the National Mining Association, Carol Raulston, agreed.

"The agency realized in recent years that you can't browbeat operators into improved safety, and this general approach has worked," Ms. Raulston said. "The tragic events of this year have given everyone pause. But I don't think it means we want to abandon what we have found works."

Federal records show that fatalities across all types of mining have stayed relatively stable. In each of the last three years, 55 to 57 miners have died in all areas of mining. Experts say a long-term decline in coal mine fatalities is in part a result of growing mechanization.

Mr. Fillpot also said delinquent cases had not moved to the Treasury Department since 2003 because of computer problems. He could not say when the problems would be corrected. "Referrals from M.S.H.A. to the Treasury Department have been impacted by technical issues on both ends, which we are working to resolve while maintaining an aggressive record on enforcement and collections," he said.

Although the agency has recently trumpeted Congressional plans to raise the maximum penalties, federal records indicate that few major fines are issued at the maximum level. In 2004, the number of major fines issued at maximum level was one in 10, down from one in 5 in 2003.

Since 2001, the median for penalties that exceed $10,000, described as "major fines," has dropped 13 percent, to $21,800 from $25,000.

Also troubling, critics say, is that fines are regularly reduced in negotiations between mine operators and the agency. From 2001 to 2003, more than two-thirds of all major fines were cut from the original amount that the agency proposed. Most of the more recent cases are enmeshed in appeals, so it is impossible to know whether that trend has continued.

"The agency keeps talking about issuing more fines, but it doesn't matter much," said Bruce Dial, a former inspector for the mine safety agency. "The number of citations means nothing when the citations are small, negotiable and most often uncollected."

Before the January disaster at the Sago Mine near here, where 12 miners died, the operator had been cited 273 times since 2004. None of the fines exceeded $460, roughly one-thousandth of 1 percent of the $110 million net profit reported last year by the current owner of the mine, the International Coal Group.

[At a House oversight hearing on Wednesday, agency officials repeatedly cited the frequency of fines against Sago in the year before the accident as proof of aggressive enforcement. Exasperated, Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, replied that maybe those fines had little effect because many were for $60. That point set off applause from audience members.]

"Most fines are so small that they are seen not as deterrents but as the cost of doing business," said Wes Addington, a lawyer with the Appalachian Citizens Law Center in Prestonsburg, Ky., which handles mine safety cases. Using federal records, Mr. Addington released a study in January indicating that since 1995 nearly a third of the active underground mines in Kentucky had failed to pay their fines.

"Operators know that it's cheaper to pay the fine than to fix the problem," Mr. Addington said. "But they also know the cheapest of all routes is to not pay at all. It's pretty galling."

Larry Williams, who now lives in Craigsville, 50 miles east of Charleston, knows this frustration well. In 2002, he was working with a fellow miner, Gary Martin, in a deep mine near Rupert, 25 miles south of here, when the roof collapsed on them. Mr. Martin died instantly, and Mr. Williams was trapped for more than four hours under several thousand pounds of rock that crushed his pelvis and both legs.

The men had been pillaring, or second mining, which involves extracting the last remaining coal in tunnels by scraping it from the coal pillars used to hold up the roof. This method is considered extremely dangerous. Federal regulations aim to reduce the risk.

In this case, federal investigators found that the regulations were not followed. The operators were fined $165,000. Those fines have not been paid, even though the mine owner, Midland Trail Resources, which did not reply to requests for comment, remains in business, according to state records.

"It makes me mad," said Mr. Williams, 50, who is paralyzed through much of his right side. "One dead and another man's life ruined, and they pay nothing? It just doesn't make sense."

On Feb. 14, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, introduced a measure to raise the maximum penalty that the mine safety agency can assess for failing to eliminate violations that cause death or serious injury, to $500,000, from the current $60,000.

The law would also prohibit administrative law judges from reducing fines for violations deemed flagrant or habitual.

Ellen Smith, editor of Mine Safety and Health News, an independent newsletter that covers the industry, said that although the law was a positive step, one regulation that continued to need attention allowed fines to be lowered for smaller or financially troubled mines.

"The result of that provision is that it helps keep some habitual offenders in business," Ms. Smith said.

Cecil E. Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said changes in the law were vital but so were changes in the agency. "If you don't have enforcement along with a strong law, then you don't have a law," Mr. Roberts said. "The current agency mentality is to cooperate with mine operators rather than watchdog them, and safety suffers as a result."

Even when Congress passes strong safety laws, the agency can write regulations that work around them. In 2004, for example, after years of pressure from mine operators, regulators wrote a rule that let mines use conveyor belts not just for moving coal but also to draw in fresh air from outside. A law already existed preventing such safety regulations because of concerns that in the event of a fire, the belts would carry flames and deadly gases directly to the work area or vital evacuation routes.

Though the investigation is not complete, many experts say this is probably what occurred at the Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine in Logan County, W.Va., where a fire left two miners dead on Jan 21.

Mr. Fillpot said his agency was revising the regulations on imposing penalties. He also pointed to civil suits filed by the agency in what he said was an increasing effort to force operators to pay millions of dollars in unpaid penalties.

"You can expect to see more of these types of efforts from us in the coming months," Mr. Fillpot said.

Mr. Williams, the miner who is partly paralyzed, remains skeptical.

"All I know is the roof collapsed only days after a federal inspector looked right at those pillars and saw that the operator was having us do illegal things," he said. "In these mines, laws don't matter."

Ian Urbina reported from Craigsville, W.Va., and Andrew W. Lehren from New York.

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."

The footage — along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press — show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Linked by secure video, Bush's confidence on Aug. 28 starkly contrasts with the dire warnings his disaster chief and a cacophony of federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.

A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

"I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

Some of the footage and transcripts from briefings Aug. 25-31 conflicts with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response:

_Homeland Security officials have said the "fog of war" blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. "I'm sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done," National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.

"I don't buy the `fog of war' defense," Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. "It was a fog of bureaucracy."

_Bush declared four days after the storm, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility — and Bush was worried too.

White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Brown discussed fears of a levee breach the day the storm hit.

"I talked to the president twice today, once in Crawford and then again on Air Force One," Brown said. "He's obviously watching the television a lot, and he had some questions about the Dome, he's asking questions about reports of breaches."

_Louisiana officials angrily blamed the federal government for not being prepared but the transcripts shows they were still praising FEMA as the storm roared toward the Gulf Coast and even two days afterward. "I think a lot of the planning FEMA has done with us the past year has really paid off," Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness deputy director, said during the Aug. 28 briefing.

It wasn't long before Smith and other state officials sounded overwhelmed.

"We appreciate everything that you all are doing for us, and all I would ask is that you realize that what's going on and the sense of urgency needs to be ratcheted up," Smith said Aug. 30.

Mississippi begged for more attention in that same briefing.

"We know that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana that need to be rescued, but we would just ask you, we desperately need to get our share of assets because we'll have people dying — not because of water coming up, but because we can't get them medical treatment in our affected counties," said a Mississippi state official whose name was not mentioned on the tape.

Video footage of the Aug. 28 briefing, the final one before Katrina struck, showed an intense Brown voicing concerns from the government's disaster operation center and imploring colleagues to do whatever was necessary to help victims.

"We're going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event," Brown warned. He called the storm "a bad one, a big one" and implored federal agencies to cut through red tape to help people, bending rules if necessary.

"Go ahead and do it," Brown said. "I'll figure out some way to justify it. ... Just let them yell at me."

Bush appeared from a narrow, windowless room at his vacation ranch in Texas, with his elbows on a table. Hagin was sitting alongside him. Neither asked questions in the Aug. 28 briefing.

"I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm," the president said.

A relaxed Chertoff, sporting a polo shirt, weighed in from Washington at Homeland Security's operations center. He would later fly to Atlanta, outside of Katrina's reach, for a bird flu event.

One snippet captures a missed opportunity on Aug. 28 for the government to have dispatched active-duty military troops to the region to augment the National Guard.

Chertoff: "Are there any DOD assets that might be available? Have we reached out to them?"

Brown: "We have DOD assets over here at EOC (emergency operations center). They are fully engaged. And we are having those discussions with them now."

Chertoff: "Good job."

In fact, active duty troops weren't dispatched until days after the storm. And many states' National Guards had yet to be deployed to the region despite offers of assistance, and it took days before the Pentagon deployed active-duty personnel to help overwhelmed Guardsmen.

The National Hurricane Center's Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun.

"I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern," Mayfield told the briefing.

Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.

"They're not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners out of prisons and they're leaving hotels open in downtown New Orleans. So I'm very concerned about that," Brown said.

Despite the concerns, it ultimately took days for search and rescue teams to reach some hospitals and nursing homes.

Brown also told colleagues one of his top concerns was whether evacuees who went to the New Orleans Superdome — which became a symbol of the failed Katrina response — would be safe and have adequate medical care.

"The Superdome is about 12 feet below sea level.... I don't know whether the roof is designed to stand, withstand a Category Five hurricane," he said.

Brown also wanted to know whether there were enough federal medical teams in place to treat evacuees and the dead in the Superdome.

"Not to be (missing) kind of gross here," Brown interjected, "but I'm concerned" about the medical and mortuary resources "and their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe."

Anyone who thought this "traditional family values" garbage was only focusing on gays, well, get ready because you're next.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Olivia Shelltrack finally has her dream home. Her family moved into the five-bedroom, three-bath frame house in Black Jack last month. But now she fears she and her fiance face uprooting their children because of a city ordinance that says her household fails to meet Black Jack's definition of a family.

Shelltrack and Fondray Loving, her boyfriend of 13 years, were denied an occupancy permit because of an ordinance forbidding three or more individuals from living together if they are not related by "blood, marriage or adoption." The couple have three children, ages 8, 10 and 15, although Loving is not the biological father of the oldest child.

"I was basically told, you can have one child living in your house if you're not married, but more than that, you can't," she said.

And here's an interesting Washington Post article about how this is constitutionally questionable. Then again, this is probably allowed under the Iraq war resolution.

US Is Settling Detainee's Suit in 9/11 Sweep
By Nina Bernstein
The New York Times

Tuesday 28 February 2006

The federal government has agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by an Egyptian who was among dozens of Muslim men swept up in the New York area after 9/11, held for months in a federal detention center in Brooklyn and deported after being cleared of links to terrorism.

The settlement, filed in federal court late yesterday, is the first the government has made in a number of lawsuits charging that noncitizens were abused and their constitutional rights violated in detentions after the terror attacks.

It removes one of two plaintiffs from a case in which a federal judge ruled last fall that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other top government officials must answer questions under oath. Government lawyers filed an appeal of that ruling on Friday.

In the settlement agreement, which requires approval by a federal judge in Brooklyn, lawyers for the government said that the officials were not admitting any liability or fault. In court papers they have said that the 9/11 attacks created "special factors," including the need to deter future terrorism, that outweighed the plaintiffs' right to sue.

"A settlement like this is not a precedent, but it's a form of accountability," said Gerald L. Neuman, a law professor at Columbia University who is an expert in human rights law and was not involved in the case. "When the government finds it necessary to settle, that changes the government's incentives. It doesn't mean the government will settle future cases that it makes different calculations about," like another lawsuit, brought as a class action on behalf of hundreds of detainees, that is pending before the same judge.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said officials would not comment on the agreement. But lawyers who represent both the Egyptian, Ehab Elmaghraby, who used to run a restaurant near Times Square, and the second plaintiff, a Pakistani who is still pursuing the lawsuit, described the outcome as significant.

"This is a substantial settlement and shows for the first time that the government can be held accountable for the abuses that have occurred in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and in prisons right here in the United States," said one of the lawyers, Alexander A. Reinert of Koob & Magoolaghan.

The lawsuit accuses Mr. Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, of personally conspiring to violate the rights of Muslim immigrant detainees on the basis of their race, religion and national origin, and names a score of other defendants, including Bureau of Prison officials and guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

A 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general found widespread abuse of the noncitizen detainees at the Brooklyn center after 9/11, and in recent months, 10 of the center's guards and supervisors have been disciplined.

Mr. Elmaghraby, who spent nearly a year in detention, and the Pakistani man, Javaid Iqbal, held for nine months, charged that while shackled they were kicked and punched until they bled. Their lawsuit said they were cursed as terrorists and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one in which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed.

In a telephone interview from his home in Alexandria, Egypt, Mr. Elmaghraby, 38, said he had reluctantly decided to settle because he is ill, in debt and about to have surgery for a thyroid ailment aggravated by his treatment in the detention center.

"I wish I come to New York, to stay in the court face to face with these people," he said in imperfect English, adding that he had always expected the courts to uphold his claim. "I lived 13 years in New York, I see a lot of big cases on TV. I think the judges is fair."

The government had argued that the lawsuits should be dismissed without testimony because the extraordinary circumstances of the terror attacks justified extraordinary measures to confine noncitizens who fell under suspicion, and because top officials need governmental immunity to combat future threats to national security without fear of being sued.

The federal judge, John Gleeson of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, disagreed, writing in his decision last September, "Our nation's unique and complex law enforcement and security challenges in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do not warrant the elimination of remedies for the constitutional violations alleged here."

In all, 762 noncitizens were arrested in the weeks after 9/11, mostly on immigration violations, according to government records. Mr. Elmaghraby and Mr. Iqbal were among 184 identified as being "of high interest" to investigators and held in maximum-security conditions, in Brooklyn and elsewhere, until the F.B.I. cleared them of terrorist links. Virtually all were Muslims or from Arab countries.

That in itself is not evidence of discrimination, government lawyers wrote in the brief they filed on Friday with the Appellate Division, Second Department, because "the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the Sept. 11 attacks were Muslims from certain Arab countries" who "viewed themselves as conducting a religious war."

"There were no clear judicial precedents in this extraordinary context," the appeal brief said, calling the policy of holding people until they could be cleared "a bona fide response to a national catastrophe."

Unlike the detainees covered by the class-action lawsuit, who were held on immigration violations alone, Mr. Elmaghraby and Mr. Iqbal eventually pleaded guilty to minor federal criminal charges unrelated to terrorism: Mr. Elmaghraby to credit card fraud, Mr. Iqbal to having false papers and bogus checks. But they maintain that they did so only to escape the abuse. They were deported in 2003 after serving prison terms.

Mr. Iqbal was one of several detainees who returned to New York this year to give depositions in their lawsuits under conditions of extraordinary security, including the requirement that they be in constant custody of federal marshals and not call anybody. Mr. Elmaghraby did not come because of his ill health and because the settlement was close, said one of his lawyers, Haeyoung Yoon of the Urban Justice Center.

"His circumstances made it extremely difficult for him to continue," Ms. Yoon said. "But I also feel this is really the beginning of justice for what happened in New York and the United States after Sept. 11, the mass arrests, detention and basically disappearance of an entire community."

Mr. Elmaghraby, who had a weekend flea market stand at Aqueduct Raceway in Queens, was picked up on Sept. 30, 2001, in his apartment in Maspeth, Queens, when federal agents were investigating his landlord, apparently because years earlier the landlord, also a Muslim, had applied for pilot training. Mr. Elmaghraby says his wife, an American citizen, left him after being threatened with arrest by an F.B.I. agent when she arrived at his first court hearing.

Mr. Iqbal was arrested in his Long Island apartment on Nov. 2 by agents who were apparently following a tip about false identification cards. In his apartment they found a Time magazine showing the World Trade Center towers in flames and paperwork showing that he had been in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, picking up a work permit from immigration services.

The inspector general's report said that little effort was made to distinguish between legitimate terrorism suspects and people picked up by chance, and that clearances took months, not days, because they were a low priority. Among the abuses described in the report - many of them caught on prison videotape - were beatings, sexual humiliations and illegal recording of lawyer-client conversations.

After the report was released, Mr. Ashcroft said he made "no apologies" for finding every legal way to protect the public. Still, officials pledged to improve the system and punish abuses.

Traci L. Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said that its own investigation began in April 2004, after federal officials declined to prosecute.

She would not identify the 10 employees disciplined, but said that two had been fired and two demoted, and that the others had received suspensions ranging from 2 to 30 days. She listed the offenses as "lack of candor, unprofessional conduct, misuse of supervisory authority, conduct unbecoming, inattention to duty, failure to exercise supervisory responsibilities, excessive use of force, and physical and/or verbal abuse."

Because of the secrecy surrounding the cases, however, the taint of suspicion has been almost impossible for former detainees to dispel, their lawyers said. In one of the court hearings leading up to the return of the former detainees for depositions, for example, the federal magistrate asked what made them different from anyone else suing the government, "other than their ethnicity."

Ernesto H. Molina Jr., a Justice Department lawyer representing Mr. Ashcroft, replied, "That they came under the umbrella of a terrorist investigation, your honor."

March 1st, 2006 2:13 pm
Negroponte: Iraq May Spark Regional Fight

By Katherine Shrader / Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A civil war in Iraq could lead to a broader conflict in the Middle East, pitting the region's rival Islamic sects against each other, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in an unusually frank assessment Tuesday.

"If chaos were to descend upon Iraq or the forces of democracy were to be defeated in that country ... this would have implications for the rest of the Middle East region and, indeed, the world," Negroponte said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats.

Negroponte served as U.S. ambassador to Baghdad before taking over as the nation's top intelligence official last April.

Iraqis have faced a chain of attacks and reprisals since bombs destroyed the gold dome of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra last week. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died, including more than 65 who were killed Tuesday by suicide attackers, car bombers and insurgents firing mortars.

President Bush condemned the surge in violence and said Iraqis must make a choice between "a free society or a society dictated ... by evil people who will kill innocents." Later, in an interview with ABC News' "World News Tonight," he said he did not believe the escalation of civil unrest would lead to a general civil war.

Negroponte tried to focus on progress in Iraq, but he acknowledged a civil war would be a "serious setback" to the global war on terror.

"The consequences for the people of Iraq would be catastrophic," he said. "Clearly, it would seriously jeopardize the democratic political process on which they are presently embarked. And one can only begin to imagine what the political outcomes would be."

Saudi Arabia and Jordan could support Iraq's Sunnis, Negroponte said. And Iran, run by a Shiite Islamic theocracy, "has already got quite close ties with some of the extremist elements" inside Iraq, he added.

While Iraq's neighbors "initially might be reluctant" to get involved in a broader Sunni-Shiite conflict, "that might well be a temptation," Negroponte said.

Still, he told senators he is seeing progress in the overall political and security situation in Iraq. "And if we continue to make that kind of progress, yes, we can win in Iraq," he said.

Democrats noted that Negroponte wouldn't go quite as far as Bush did in his January State of the Union address. "We are winning," Bush said then.

James Jeffrey, the State Department coordinator for Iraq, told reporters Tuesday that Iraqi security forces have managed to establish a normal and calm situation — "by Iraq standards." The level of violence, he said, was about the same as before the shrine bombing.

At the Senate hearing, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, painted a similarly stark picture of Afghanistan.

While the government has made progress in disarming private militias, Maples said, his agency estimates that violence from the Taliban and other anti-coalition groups in Afghanistan increased 20 percent last year.

"Insurgents now represent a greater threat to the expansion of Afghan government authority than at any point since late 2001, and will be active this spring," Maples said in his written statement.

Afghan insurgents increased their suicide attacks almost fourfold and more than doubled their use of improvised explosive devices, he said.

by Carnacki

Wed Mar 01, 2006 at 09:48:48 AM PDT

I understand the need for military discipline, but this is ridiculous. The U.S. Marine Corps is blocking access to Internet sites that do not toe the Bush administration's line, news sites, humor sites, and gossip sites, according to an email to Wonkette.

We're talking about Marines, the lean, mean fighting machines. Is the Pentagon afraid of the truth?

Is this America or China?

From Wonkette:

Just to let you know, the US Marines have blocked access to "Wonkette" along with numerous other sites such as personal email (i.e. Yahoo, AT&T, Hotmail, etc), blogs that don't agree with the government point of view, personal websites, and some news organizatons. This has taken effect as of the beginning of February. I have no problem with them blocking porn sites (after all it is a government network), but cutting off access to our email and possibly-not-toeing-the-government-line websites is a bit much.

Initially all web blocking was done locally at the hub sites in Iraq. If you wanted a site "unblocked" you just had to email the local administrator with a reason (like, "I'd like to read my email, please."), and if it wasn't porn or offensive, they'd allow it. Now, all blocking is done by desk-weenies at the USMC Network Operations Center in Quantico, VA, who really don't care if we get our email (or gossip) out here, as they get to go to happy hour after working 9 to 5 and go home to a nice clean, warm home with a real bed! (Sorry, I'm a little peeved.)

I bet that Marine is peeved. The Marines are fighting for freedom from humor? From diverse view points?

What's next for the administration? The Marines will only be able to access Pat Robertson's web site and the GOP's? That's only partially tongue in cheek.