Question of the day

Former CIA Analyst: Western Intelligence May Be Behind Mosque Bombing
Former CIA analyst a and presidential advisor Ray McGovern does not rule out Western involvement in this week's Askariya mosque bombing in light of previous false flag operations that have advanced hidden agendas of the ruling elite. McGovern firstly suggested that Posse Comitatus, the law that forbids the military to take on a policing role within the US, is being systematically overthrown.
"Not only have the top ranks of the intelligence community been politicized and corrupted, so has the army. The military establishment is goose stepping around, saluting the President and saying whatever the President wants them to."
A former officer himself, McGovern declared that the unprecedented movement towards a martial law mentality within government and military is a deeply unsettling one and that the US is hurtling toward a dictatorship.
"As I look at the top Pentagon brass, I have to conclude that unlike my days as a US army officer, those folks have been so politicized that if the US President told them to go ahead and exercise police functions in this country they would go ahead and salute and they would do it, and that's really scary."
Moving on to the "war on terror" (now known as "The Long War"), 27 year veteran McGovern concurred that staged terror has long been used by our governments in order to forward their own agendas at home and elsewhere:
"There's lots of evidence that the government in the past has used these things for its own purposes, for overthrowing governments, as it did in Iran in 1953, and in Guatemala in 1954, the Gulf of Tonkin was a little different...LBJ did deceive Congress and the war went on for seven years."
Concerning 9/11 McGovern declared that although he is still in two minds, he is deeply suspicious of the official version of events and "there is certainly a cover up." The amount of unanswered questions and blatant lies told by Cheney and the NeoCons makes it very easy for him to believe the government was involved.
Moving on to the recent Askariya mosque bombing in Samarra, Iraq McGovern commented;
"The main question is Qui Bono? Who benefits from this kind of thing? You don't have to be very conspiratorial or even paranoid to suggest that there are a whole bunch of likely suspects out there and not only the Sunnis. You know, the British officers were arrested, dressed up in Arab garb, riding around in a car (with bombs in the trunk), so this stuff goes on."

Verizon Faces New $20 Billion Suit over NSA Spying Complicity
Upping the ante in what may be a high-stakes legal battle, an Upstate New York lawyer filed a $20 billion class-action lawsuit against Verizon last week, charging that the company violated customer confidentiality in aiding warrantless eavesdropping by a federal spy agency.

Witnesses say they illegally funneled donations to Bush
H. Douglas Talbott told investigators last summer that he and Doug Moormann took part in Mr. Noe’s alleged scheme in October, 2003, to illegally funnel money into the President’s campaign. As a reward for their fund-raising efforts, Mr. Noe gained the elite fund-raising status and an invitation to a White House Christmas party, and Mr. Talbott had his photo taken with the President, Mr. Talbott said.

MI5 rebels expose Tube bomb cover-up
MI5 is facing an internal revolt by officers alarmed about intelligence failures. To illustrate their concern, agents have leaked more topsecret documents to The Sunday Times because they want a public inquiry into the “missed intelligence” leading up to the July attacks in London. They believe ministers have withheld information from the public about what the security services knew about the suspects before the bombing of July 7 and the abortive attacks of July 21.

FBI memos reveal allegations of abusive interrogation techniques
Military interrogators posing as FBI agents at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, wrapped terrorism suspects in an Israeli flag and forced them to watch homosexual pornography under strobe lights during interrogation sessions that lasted as long as 18 hours, according to one of a batch of FBI memos released Thursday.
The Marquis de Sade would be proud.

Telegraph | News | US-run jail in Afghanistan 'worse than Guantanamo'
An American-run prison for terrorist suspects in Afghanistan has grown to rival and even eclipse Guantanamo Bay with hundreds of inmates in legal limbo, it was disclosed yesterday. Away from the spotlight focused on the more notorious detention camp in Cuba, Bagram, a US base north of Kabul, now houses about 500 detainees, claimed the New York Times. The situation there resembles the "legal void" that led to the Supreme Court ruling in 2004 giving Guantanamo prisoners the right to challenge their detention in US courts, Bush administration officials told the paper. Conditions at Bagram have improved since the violent deaths of two inmates in late 2002 but they remain harsher than at Guantanamo.

Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | U.S. Defends Conditions at Bagram Prison
The Times report described conditions as "primitive." It cited military figures as saying numbers of detainees at Bagram had risen from about 100 at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year. It said the increase was in part a result of decision by the U.S. government to shut off the flow of detainees to Guantanamo after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The report said the question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.
The U.S. military on Sunday defended its detention of about 500 inmates at its main base in Afghanistan, saying they are treated humanely and provided the "best possible living conditions."
The New York Times on Sunday reported that inmates are held by the dozen in wire cages at the Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul - some for as long as two or three years without access to lawyers or the chance to hear the allegations against them. The report, citing unnamed military officials and former detainees, said that inmate numbers had grown sharply, partly because "enemy combatants" caught during the hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban militants in Afghanistan were no longer being transferred to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Col. James Yonts, the U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, would not confirm or deny whether inmates are held for up to three years, saying the secretary of defense sets the criteria for detention. Yonts confirmed about 500 people are currently held at Bagram, and said they were treated humanely and "provided the best possible living conditions and medical care in accordance with the principals of the Geneva Convention."
The U.S. military maintains that "enemy combatants" are not covered by the Geneva Conventions (???) on the treatment of prisoners of war. The military has not allowed Afghan and international human rights groups access to the Bagram Detention Facility, although it does allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit the prisoners. (Good example of NEWSSPEAK--do they or don't they qualify for Geneva Conventions??????)

Is used nuclear reactor fuel headed for the reservation?

The radioactive waste, eventually slated for permanent storage at a still unfinished site in Nevada, has been piling up, mostly at the nation's 65 commercial nuclear power plants. Late Tuesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gave its blessing to a solution: a storage site on a barren patch of a reservation in Utah that's home to some 25 native Americans, next to a proving ground for chemical and biological weapons, and near an Air Force bombing range.
(Why waste it--make it into tank-piercing DU weapons instead!)

The Queen's Death Star
Depleted uranium from weapons used in the Middle East has been detectable in the air over Great Britain for some time now, but the air monitoring laboratory, OPERATED BY HALLIBURTON, refused to release the data as required by law. So, take a deep breath, Brits. That faint metallic taste is your future of cancer, leukemia, and major birth defects for generations to come. And Americans? You're next. If the DU has been in England for years, it's already in America as well; A gift that keeps on giving courtesy of the Neocon war machine.

Harper's Calls For Impeachment
“To take away the excuse,” he said, “that we didn't know.” So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that “somehow it escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

Ohio voting fraud
In the 2004 presidential election, an electronic voting machine (manufacturer: ES&S) in Youngstown, Ohio (Mahoning County) recorded NEGATIVE 25 MILLION votes for Kerry. (A Pre-Set?)

Defeat is victory. Death is life
Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli.

Moussa and other Arab Parliamentarians call for Arab solidarity
United States of Islam?
Speaking at the inauguration of the Arab Parliamentary Union's 12th Conference in the Jordanian part of the Dead Sea, Moussa emphasized the fact that the conference was taking place in unfavorable circumstances. He slammed Israel for possessing nuclear weapons and called on the international community to pave the way for approving the setting up of a nuclear-free Middle East zone.

Bush's 'fine' economy sees millions go hungry

The reduction was due mainly to a sharp rise in household debt -- particularly home mortgage debt -- and a decline in real wages. Adjusted for inflation, wages have actually fallen 6.2 per cent.

Event at historic Grand Lake Theatre asks serious questions about what really happened on Sept. 11, 2001
For the approximately 500 people who streamed into the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland last Thursday it was at night at the movies with a twist. The requisite popcorn, soda and hot dogs were there as usual but so too were the unexpected—the activists selling books, videos and stickers questioning the official story of 9/11, and hundreds of curious truth seekers leafing through them, chatting and buying the items.

Where was Rumsfeld During the 9/11 Attacks?
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction CJCSI 3610.01A (dated 1 June 2001) changed the protocol so that any requests for "potentially lethal support" had to come explicitly from the secretary of defense, leaving commanders in the field unable to respond to hijackings in any meaningful fashion.

The 9/11 US Air Force Stand Down
Flight 11 had crashed into World Trade Center 1, and Flight 175 was hijacked and heading toward New York. Fighter jets were ordered to stay in a holding pattern off Long Island. Why weren't they ordered to protect New York?

Village Voice -- 9/11 Truth Movement: Alternative Theories
Operation Northwoods
This 1962 white paper from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested possible justifications for a war against Cuba, including a never executed idea in which the CIA would detonate a drone aircraft to make it look like Fidel Castro had shot down an American passenger plane. Theorists see the proposal as evidence that the U.S. government had contemplated faking air disasters as a pretext for military action.
Project for the New American Century
As evidence of the motives behind a government-planned 9-11, theorists point to one 28-word passage in a September 2000 PANC report written with help from the likes of Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfo-witz: "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." Bush and his cronies, the argument goes, were looking for that event, and they got it on 9-11.
War games
Truth movement members who believe the military was "neutralized" or told to "stand down" on 9-11 find it very suspicious that U.S. air defense units that day were supposed to play the war game Vigilant Guardian (guess who was in charge of these war games? Dick Cheney), a simulation of a Russian bomber attack, while simultaneously monitoring Russian exercises in the Arctic.
The Pentagon
Some alternative theorists say the hole in the Pentagon was too small to have been made by a 757, and too deep to have been made by anything but a cruise missile. They also cite the lack of significant wreckage or skid marks near the building. The dearth of surveillance footage of the attack arouses further suspicion. Among the alternate explanations: a truck bomb, a missile, or a drone.
The twin towers
Early on, skeptics raised questions about how two 110-story steel-framed skyscrapers built to withstand airplane impacts not only collapsed, but did so suddenly, totally, and apparently straight down, possibly for the first time in history. The skeptics suggested that the buildings collapsed in a controlled demolition, a theory that has only gained strength in the past four years. The official explanation shifted—first blaming pancaking floor trusses, then warped steel columns transferring weight where it couldn't be held—and never detailed the exact sequence of the entire collapse. Alternative theorists point to sounds and witnesses' reports of explosions, little puffs of smoke, steel beams ejected outward, the rapid crumbling of the superstructure, and even the pyroclastic flow of dust as evidence that the buildings had to have been destroyed by explosives. Some theorists also believe the aircraft that hit the buildings were carrying pods on their underbellies and may have fired missiles that account for a bright flash that occurs before the collisions. Others claim the planes were remote controlled, were military aircraft, or did not exist at all.
World Trade Center 7
This building—the last to fall on 9-11—is key to all controlled-demolition theories. Its sudden fall onto its own footprint, and developer Larry Silverstein's reference on TV to telling the FDNY to "pull it," are seen as evidence that WTC7 was rigged to fall. Meanwhile, a convincing official explanation hasn't exactly been forthcoming: FEMA punted on figuring out why building seven, which was not struck by an airplane, collapsed; NIST has postponed its verdict several times.
While it might seem odd that the government would destroy a building most people had never heard of, theorists cite the tenants of WTC7 (the SEC (which stored files for over 4,000 upcoming SEC violation cases), Secret Service, CIA, and Mayor Giuliani's emergency bunker) as hints of a motive for its demolition. The speculation is that the building was taken out to cover up financial crimes or to destroy the mechanisms of the twin towers' demise: control boards for the supposed demolition charges or remote-control consoles to guide the airliners to their targets.
Flight 93
The mystery over exactly what happened during the passenger revolt on United Airlines Flight 93 has puzzled even mainstream researchers. Alternative theorists ask different questions. Pointing to press reports filed on 9-11, many suspect that the plane actually landed in Cleveland. Others believe the aircraft was shot down by U.S. military aircraft.

Katrina Evacuees Blocked From Voting at Out-of-State Satellite Polling Sites
In news on Hurricane Katrina, a federal judge has ruled against a request for the state of Louisiana to create out-of-state satellite polling places for evacuees temporarily living outside of Louisiana. New Orleans is scheduled to hold a primary election on April 22. The Washington-based Advancement Project called the ruling a blow for Katrina survivors. In a statement the group said "The effect of this adverse ruling means that more than 100,000 people, predominantly people of color, will have to use absentee ballots... With evacuees being forced to move from location to location the likelihood that an absentee ballot will even reach them is dramatically reduced."

Texas Officials Warn Half of Katrina Evacuees Have No Health Insurance
In other Katrina news, officials in Texas are reporting the state is facing a health crisis because nearly half of the 50,000 evacuees living in Houston have no health insurance. Most of the evacuees had been covered by a special Medicaid waiver but that waiver expired at the end of January.

Defense Contractor Admits Giving GOP Congressman $1M in Bribes
In political news, a defense contractor admitted on Friday that he paid former Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California more than one million dollars in bribes. Michael Wade, the former president of the defense contractor MZM, also admitted to making a total of $80,000 in illegal donations to other members of Congress. Press accounts have identified the two as Republicans, Katherine Harris of Florida and Virgil Goode of Virginia. Wade faces up to 20 years in prison.

Army to Allow Halliburton Not to Repay Disputed Costs
The New York Times is reporting the Army has decided to reimburse a Halliburton subsidiary for nearly all of its disputed costs on a $2.4 billion no-bid contract to deliver fuel and repair oil equipment in Iraq. Auditors had recommended the Army withhold $263 million from Kellogg Brown and Root, but the Army decided to withhold just $10 million.
California Congressman Henry Waxman said "Halliburton gouged the taxpayer, government auditors caught the company red-handed, yet the Pentagon ignored the auditors and paid Halliburton hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge bonus."

Excerpt from FRONTLINE: "The Insurgents"
This glared out from the soundtrack of the film:
NARRATOR: The immediate post-war situation was chaotic. Iraq's central nervous system was ripped out when Saddam's Ba'ath Party was taken from power. Tens of thousands of civil servants were fired because of their ties to the former regime. An army almost half a million strong was disbanded. Into this anarchy stepped the first insurgents, mostly professional military men.
Lt. Col. R. BROWN, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment: This area of southern Baghdad was part of the military-industrial complex, so you had a great many folks that now were out of work. And in terms of placement of U.S. forces, we had made the decision, for whatever reason, not to place U.S. forces in this area. So what evolved and what grew was an area that we term a support zone. This is where the enemy did their planning, their preparation, their training for operations that would then occur in Baghdad or elsewhere.
As in the stories about how after the Occupation began, US troops guarded oil facilities and somehow overlooked securing ammunition armories, which were then pillaged by the former Iraqi army members, you've got to wonder, WHY? if not to enable an insurgency to begin & continue to fight US forces....

A cover-up? Imagine that!

DU Scandal Explodes - Horrendous US Casualties
The Preventive Psychiatry Newsletter has written to its subscribers telling them that the real reason the former Veterans Affairs Secretary, Anthony Principi, recently resigned was because he has been involved in a massive scandal covering up the fact that Gulf War Syndrome was caused by the use of depleted uranium, according to the SF Bay View.
In the article Arthur Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law, reportedly wrote that "thousands of our military have suffered and died from, [and depleted uranium] has finally been identified as the cause of this sickness, eliminating the guessing. The terrible truth is now being revealed." Bernklau went on to detail several alarming statistics.
The historical disability rate amongst soldiers last century was about 5 percent, although it approached 10 percent during Vietnam. But due to the use of depleted uranium in the battlefield, 56 percent of the 580,400 solders that served in the first Gulf War were on Permanent Medical Disability by 2000. 11,000 Gulf War veterans are already dead. Now 518,739 Gulf War Veterans, almost all of them, are currently on medical disability.
Principi, under the order of the Bush Administration, had been allegedly covering up the disastrous results of using depleted uranium since 2000. However, with so many soldiers having serious health problems it has become impossible to keep secret.
A few months back there was a hearing in congress on this broadcast on CSPAN2. They were also talking about the current huge amounts of DU being used in Iraq since 2003, & matching birth defects in the children of Iraqis and US GIs returning from action.

FLASHBACK: Israeli agents accused of creating fake al-Qaeda cell
The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, has called Mr Sharon's al-Qaeda claim "a big, big, big lie to cover [his] attacks and his crimes against our people everywhere".
Sound familiar? So when you hear "Al Qaeda" did thus and such and we have to go to war because of it, it may not be the people you are told it is.

The New McCarthyism
Recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy.
"The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6. "I stand by this President's ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don't think you need a warrant to do that," Graham added, volunteering to work with the administration to draft guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat.
"Senator," a smiling Gonzales responded, "the President already said we'd be happy to listen to your ideas."

Secret Service agents say Cheney was drunk when he shot lawyer

A written report from Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago says Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting. Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions, the report said.
Well, that would explain the secrecy & cover-up, wouldn't it?

U.S. Still Planting Stories in Iraq Media - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was mistaken when he said last week that the U.S. military had stopped the controversial practice of paying to plant stories in the Iraqi news media, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday. Bryan Whitman, a senior spokesman, said Rumsfeld had been incorrect in saying during an TV interview Friday that the practice had been halted in the wake of negative publicity in the United States. Rumsfeld made a similar assertion during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations that same day. Whitman noted that Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has said he saw no reason to stop the practice.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Report probes US custody deaths
Almost 100 prisoners have died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, according to US group Human Rights First. The details were first aired on BBC television's Newsnight programme. Of the 98 deaths, at least 34 were suspected or confirmed homicides, the programme said.
The report defines the 34 cases classified as homicides as "caused by intentional or reckless behaviour". It says another 11 cases have been deemed suspicious and that between eight and 12 prisoners were tortured to death. But despite this, charges are rare and sentences are light, the report says. Speaking on the programme, the US ambassador to Iraq said the "overwhelming number" of troops behaved according to the law.

How's Our Driving?

Navy’s Top Attorney Warned Against Administration’s Detainee Policies
The New Yorker magazine has revealed that two years before the Abu Ghraib photos were first published, the Navy’s general counsel, Alberto Mora, began challenging what he described as the administration's "disastrous and unlawful policy of authorizing cruelty toward terror suspects." Mora warned his superiors at the Pentagon about the consequences of President Bush’s decision, in 2002, to circumvent the Geneva conventions. He argued that a refusal to outlaw cruelty toward U.S.-held detainees was an implicit invitation to abuse. Mora also challenged the legal framework that the Bush Administration has constructed to justify an expansion of executive power, in matters ranging from interrogations to wiretapping. He described the novel legal theories granting the President the right to authorize abuse as “unlawful,” “dangerous,” and “erroneous.”

U.S. Used Bogus Call Sign to Hide Secret Flights
The Sunday Times of London is reporting the U.S. military has been operating secretive flights across Europe using a call sign assigned to a civilian airline that they have no legal right to use. This has allowed the U.S. to carry out covert missions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa The Sunday Times reported one flight apparently transported 45 tons of surplus weapons and ammunition to Rwanda in defiance of a UN embargo. In another case, a plane identified with the CIA practice of “extraordinary rendition” left a US air base just after the arrival of an aircraft using the bogus call sign.

U.S. Gov’t Reclassifying Historical Records
The New York Times is reporting the country’s intelligence agencies have been secretly reclassifying thousands of historical documents that had been declassified and available to the public. The program began in 1999 and intensified after President Bush took office. Documents that have been re-classified include a 1948 memo on a CIA scheme to float balloons over Soviet-backed countries and drop propaganda leaflets. It appears another document was reclassified in order to hide a mistake made by the CIA 55 years ago. On October 12 1950 the CIA concluded China would not intervene in the Korean War that year. Two weeks later 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea. Some historians fear they could now be tried under the Espionage Act because they have copies of files that are no longer declassified.
A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Emergency war supplemental hides millions for NSA
Buried in last week's $72.4 billion emergency supplemental appropriation bill for the war on terror is nearly half a billion dollars worth of military construction. The bulk of the $485 million requested will go "to fund various military construction projects to support U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan," according to the supplemental. "The requested funds," the document goes on, "will provide force protection measures, enhanced airfield operations and safety, power distribution, water treatment and distribution infrastructure, operational facilities and improved logistics, and associated planning and design efforts." But the supplemental also includes $35 million new money for the expansion of the National Security Agency's top secret listening post at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, England, and authority to spend $700 million appropriated in previous years for construction or expansion of NSA facilities in Augusta, Ga., and Kunia, Hawaii.

Bush's Mysterious "New Programs"
Given Bush’s now open assertions that he is using his “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as Commander in Chief for the duration of the indefinite War on Terror, Americans can no longer trust that their constitutional rights protect them from government actions.
Plus, there was that curious development in January when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million contract to construct detention centers somewhere in the United States, to deal with “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,” KBR said.Later, the New York Times reported that “KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space.”
Like most news stories on the KBR contract, the Times focused on concerns about Halliburton’s reputation for bilking U.S. taxpayers by overcharging for sub-par services.
In such extraordinary circumstances, the American people might legitimately ask exactly what the Bush administration means by the “rapid development of new programs,” which might require the construction of a new network of detention camps.

There also was another little-noticed item posted at the U.S. Army Web site, about the Pentagon’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program. This program “provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations.”
The Army document, first drafted in 1997, underwent a “rapid action revision” on Jan. 14, 2005. The revision provides a “template for developing agreements” between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations. On its face, the Army’s labor program refers to inmates housed in federal, state and local jails. The Army also cites various federal laws that govern the use of civilian labor and provide for the establishment of prison camps in the United States, including afederal statute that authorizes the Attorney General to “establish, equip, and maintain camps upon sites selected by him” and “make available … the services of United States prisoners” to various government departments, including the Department of Defense.
Is it just me, or does this sound like Nazi Germany, folks?

ACLU Georgia Uncovers FBI Spy Files for Vegans, Protest Medics, & the G8 Protest As first reported in APN, the Pentagon has repeatedly spied upon concerned “peace moms” in Atlanta as well other peace protesters. NBC released pages of a Pentagon spying database late last year. The dots connected locally to a series of protests by the GPJC and “Leave My Child Alone” anti-recruitment campaign.

One Thousand A Month Tortured To Death In Iraq

Proving that Abu Ghraib and Gitmo are the tip of the iceberg, the outgoing UN human rights chief dropped a bombshell when he told an obscure Maltese newspaper that as many as a thousand detainees a month are being tortured to death in Iraq.

Guess who the big loser is under Bush health plan?

Bush's new HSA is actually a rocket-powered tax shelter dressed up as a sweet little program to help the uninsured. It would also undermine the traditional health coverage now offered by employers. And in case anyone still cares about deficits, it would cost the Treasury $156 billion in lost tax revenues over 10 years — more than wiping out any savings Bush hopes to achieve with his cuts in projected Medicare spending. An HSA lets people put pre-tax earnings into a tax-advantaged account to be tapped for medical expenses. They must also buy a high-deductible health insurance policy to pay for big-ticket medical needs.

I confessed to escape Guantanamo torture | the Daily Mail
At Guantanamo, Kiyemba says he had three more visits from MI5 who asked him if he wished to make any changes to his previous statements. He says when he said no, "they left in what seemed like an angry mood". He added: "The American interrogators did not believe my story. Soon they had me standing up for sleep deprivation. They swore that if I did not admit to having planned jihad in Afghanistan, then what lay ahead for me would be far worse."
On one occasion Kiyemba claims he was forced to the ground by guards, bound and soaked with pepper spray. "They then sprayed it on a towel until it was soaked and rubbed the towel in his eyes," his lawyer noted. "He did not know what to do about the pain. He asked a medic, who told him to wash his eyes out with cold water - this made it worse."

US Congress Votes to Provoke Iran

Iran has the high mountains north of the narrow Straits of Hormuz, and if provoked, they can shut off all oil from the Middle East. What do you think that would do to our economy? Naturally, our Congress voted 404 - 4 to refer Iran to the UN Security Council. Are they trying to start a war?

The Memory Hole:
The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
1906, Rockfeller Education Board wrote:

"We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."

Got Pizza Hut? Got Silicone and Formaldeyde!Silicon is not an approved substance for human consumption. Neither is Polydimethylsiloxane, or formaldehyde which results as a byproduct when frozen silicone-sprayed pizza is subjected to heat. Polydimethylsiloxane breaks down into formaldehyde when subjected to heat in excess of 150 degrees centigrade. MMM--good!!

Impeachment--a cause worth fighting for

Impeaching Bush Is 'Cause Worth Fighting for,' Actor Says

Richard Dreyfuss, the actor who starred in movies ranging from "Jaws" to "Mr. Holland's Opus," told an audience in Washington, D.C., on Thursday that "there are causes worth fighting for," and one of those is the impeachment of President George W. Bush.

"Unless you are willing to accept torture as part of a normal American political lexicon, unless you are willing to accept that leaving the Geneva Convention is fine and dandy, if you accept the expansion of wiretapping as business as usual, the only way to express this now is to embrace the difficult and perhaps embarrassing process of impeachment."

The real reason Plame was exposed
The big news is that the Justice Department probe into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by Scooter Libby and his cohorts has taken a new and very interesting turn, one that perhaps sheds new light on a key aspect of the case: the motivation of Libby and his co-conspirators. As Raw Story reporter Larisa Alexandrovna reveals in the first really substantive addition to the story since Libby's indictment, Plame's highly sensitive work for the CIA – involving nuclear proliferation issues – had a very specific focus at the time of her outing:

"According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran. Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program."

The exposure of Plame and her entire operation – Brewster Jennings & Associates, the CIA front company that cloaked this super-secret tracking program – effectively blinded the U.S. to the evolution of Iran's nuclear program. Not long after the outing of Plame – and just after a grand jury began hearing testimony in the Fitzgerald investigation – another security breach involving Iran made headlines: the Iranians had been alerted to the fact that the U.S. had broken the code governing their internal government communications, with the chief suspects being Ahmed Chalabi, and his Iraqi National Congress, the source of much of the phony pre-invasion "intelligence" about Iraq. The truth about Iran's WMD (or lack of same) was rendered inaccessible, leaving the field open for the neocons and their foreign operatives to move into the vacuum and keep their very effective lie factory working overtime.
At the same time, the chief analyst at the Pentagon's Iran desk, Larry Franklin, a committed neoconservative, was making contact with two officials of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the heavy-hitting Washington lobby, feeding them information that they subsequently passed on to Israeli embassy officials, including Naor Gilon, the embassy's chief of political affairs, and another yet-to-be-named official (who some speculate may be Danny Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to the U.S.). The focus of the Franklin-AIPAC spy cabal: U.S. intelligence on Iran.
And that's not all. More interesting reportage by Alexandrovna points to a third prong of this disabling operation aimed at U.S. surveillance of Iran:

"Several U.S. and foreign intelligence sources, along with investigators, say an Iranian exile with ties to Iran-Contra peddled a bizarre tale of stolen uranium to governments on both sides of the Atlantic in the spring and summer of 2003. The story that was peddled – which detailed how an Iranian intelligence team infiltrated Iraq prior to the start of the war in March of 2003, and stole enriched uranium to use in their own nuclear weapons program – was part of an attempt to implicate both countries in a WMD plot."

A familiar cast of characters stars in this tale of intrigue and disinformation: Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian arms merchant and master of deception, who, along with neoconservative guru Michael Ledeen – another player in this drama – was entangled in the Iran-Contra affair. Larry Franklin makes a guest appearance at a meeting in Rome where the plot was reportedly hatched. Oh, and a mysterious Iranian named "Ali," who, it turns out, is the pseudonym for Fereidoun Mahdavi, a former minister under the Shah, now a secretary to Ghorbanifar. It would have been Plame's job to debunk Ali's tall tales. Knocking her and Brewster Jennings out of the running was necessarily a top priority for those with an interest in targeting Iran. There is a lot more here than has come to the attention of the "mainstream" media, and, again, Alexandrovna is digging where others fear to tread.
All indications are that an active campaign to set up Iran for attack was going full gear even as George W. Bush was declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq. As we look at the different pieces of the puzzle, a definite picture begins to emerge: what we are seeing are the outlines of a coordinated covert action, engineered by neoconservative ideologues in and around the Pentagon and Dick Cheney's office, and carried out in cooperation with the Israelis. Their objective: gin up a war with Iran, even as we marched into Iraq. A one-two punch that will speed the forces of "democratization" and visit upon the region what Ledeen lauds as "creative destruction."
It is commonly assumed that the outing of Plame was retaliation for her husband's vocal opposition to the war and his debunking of the myth that Saddam sought uranium in the African nation of Niger with which to make a nuclear bomb. Yet this explanation was never really very satisfactory: it assumed an extraordinary amount of self-indulgent pettiness on the part of the leakers in the White House, and a level of vindictiveness bordering on stupidity.
As we begin to understand the nature of Plame's work, her exposure takes on new significance: the War Party was intent on blindfolding U.S. policymakers by ensuring that no one with any expertise or interest in debunking their lies would remain standing. Spared the sight of reality – which is that Iran is at least 10 years away from building a viable nuclear weapon – U.S. officials would then be free to do what they did in the case of Iraq: make it up as they go along. Libby has already been indicted, but others, as we have seen, are knee-deep in this quagmire. As the investigation deepens and broadens, and the trial date (a year from now) approaches, the twists and turns of the scandal – which ought to go down in history as Neocongate – will be mapped by the meticulous Fitzgerald, as the story of how we were lied into war is laid bare.

China Rushes to Complete $100B Deal With Iran

The completion of the agreement would advance China's global quest for new stocks of energy. It could also undermine U.S. and European initiatives to halt Tehran's nuclear plans, muddling Beijing's relations with outside powers. Caijing, a respected financial magazine based in Beijing, reported on its Web site Thursday that a Chinese delegation comprised of officials from the National Development and Reform Commission -- a top economic policy body -- intends to visit Iran as early as next month to conclude an agreement. The deal would clear China Petrochemical Corp., also known as Sinopec, to develop Iran's Yadavaran oil field. Analysts assume that the Iranian field could produce as much as 300,000 barrels of oil per day, making it one of the larger overseas operations for a Chinese company. Sinopec would hold a 51 percent stake in the Yadavaran project, according to the Caijing report, while India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp. would hold 29 percent. The rest of the venture would be divided among Iranian companies and perhaps other outside investors.

WWIII or Bust: Implications of a US Attack on Iran

Witnessing the Bush administration’s drive for an attack on Iran is like being a passenger in a car with a raving drunk at the wheel. Reports of impending doom surfaced a year ago, but now it’s official: under orders from Vice President Cheney’s office, the Pentagon has developed "last resort" aerial-assault plans using long-distance B2 bombers and submarine-launched ballistic missiles with both conventional and nuclear weapons. How ironic that the Pentagon proposes using nuclear weapons on the pretext of protecting the world from nuclear weapons. Ironic also that Iran has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, allowing inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything," yet those pushing for an attack, the USA and Israel, have not.

Losing our values in the war on terror

"I never imagined I would live to see the day... One cannot find strong enough words to condemn what Britain and the United States have accepted... habeas corpus is part of our freedom..."

The Truth about Torture

You may wonder how our policy of torture began and developed. Well it was born out of the bloodlust of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. It's called an SAP (Special Access Plan.) In order to know what the plan is, you have to have special access. The `need to know' is very small. It's all about plausible deniability, don't you know. The plan was put into action after witnessing the efficacy of torture by certain "allies" in the Middle East and South Asia. You see, we didn't always torture, but it did begin quickly after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Within a few weeks of the invasion of Afghanistan, the US and allied troops were overwhelmed with prisoners. "We exceeded our capacity for interrogation and detention," the former intelligence official said. "Our allies would tell us," the former official recalled, "`we pulled out teeth and fingernails from prisoners, but we got some good shit. He's dead now, but we don't care.'" The former official recounted, "The line gets blurred between using liaison officers to bust heads and getting American guys to do it." The tough tactics appealed to Rumsfeld and his senior civilian aides, however.
Archbishop of York: Take legal action against Gitmo

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has launched a passionate attack on President George Bush, saying his administration's refusal to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay camp reflected "a society that is heading towards George Orwell's Animal Farm". Dr Sentamu, the Church of England's second in command, urged the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) to take legal action against the US - through the US courts or the International Court of Justice at The Hague - should it fail to respond to a report, by five UN inspectors, advising that Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay should be shut immediately because prisoners there are being tortured.

Rumsfeld Says Extremists Winning Media War

What is quite revealing about this statement is the prior assumption that if one spends enough money on lies, one will ultimately be believed. This is, of course, a fallacy. The US Government and mainstream media have spent incredible fortunes on their lies and propaganda. TV shows, movies, newscasts, all of these involve investments in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet blogs running on spare change are getting the truth out, and the reason is simple, because we ARE telling the truth, and the truth is what the people are starting to realize they must have.

Harvard study blasts Bush education policy
Jason Szep - Collective Bellaciao

Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act was meant to introduce national standards to an education system where only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school, a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics. But instead of uniform standards, the policy has allowed various states to negotiate treaties and bargains to reduce the number of schools and districts identified as failing, said the study by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project. "There’s a very uneven effect. There are no clear uniform standards that are governing No Child Left Behind. If one state gets one thing, another state can do something else," the study’s lead author, Gail Sunderman, said in an interview.

BUSH LAND SALE PROPOSED TO SELL 50 MILES (34,000) IN KLAMATH NATIONAL FOREST
The Bush administration shocked Americans this week by proposing to sell of 200,000 acres of public lands to pay for rural schools in his budget. The Klamath National Forest would be the hardest hit in the national with about 50 square miles to be sold from the Klamath River. Under Bush's plan, the Forest Service would sell 200,000 acres of public lands, including 85,465 acres in California.
This plan calls for halving the amount of money going to rural communities under the County Payments program, and re-linking the money to logging on public lands. The Bush proposal calls for selling off approximately $800 million worth of America's forestlands-lands that were set aside as a legacy for our children and grandchildren.

37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty - Forums powered by Reason and Principle

A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown. Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages. Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956. The gap between the haves and the have-nots looms wider than ever. Faced with rising poverty rates, Bush's trillion-dollar federal budget recently raised massive amounts of defence spending for the war in Iraq and slashed billions from welfare programmes.

Let’s indeed talk about Iraq losing its innocents

The UNICEF study have suggested that nearly 500.000 child under the age 5 have died from 1991-1996 from bad and deteriorating health, sanitary and food conditions due to the sanctions imposed on Iraq. That is an average of 100,000 children under the age of 5 a year!!! With worse conditions now than any time in the past, one could safely assume that at least 100.000, if not more, children under 5 are dying every year because of the "liberation"!!! That alone would mean nearly 300.000 child in 3 years!! I know that will shock the conscience of Americans but these are facts that Mr. Bush doesn't want Americans to know.
And no one is even factoring in the mass poisoning caused by Depleted Uranium weapons.

Palestinians ordered to return US aid

The United States has asked the Palestinian Authority to return $50 million in US aid because Washington does not want a Hamas-led government to have the funds.

21st Century Techniques

AMY GOODMAN: A new expose gives an account of the C.I.A.'s secret efforts to develop new forms of torture, spanning half a century. It reveals how the C.I.A. perfected its methods, distributing them across the world, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals. The book is called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and we're joined by its author, Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Give us a history lesson.
ALFRED McCOY: Well, if you look at the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, okay? In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A. torture. It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental C.I.A. techniques, developed at enormous cost.From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation.They tried LSD, mescaline, all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol. None of it worked. What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale and McGill -- and the first breakthrough came at McGill; Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours.
It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown. And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their head. If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb's original cubicle.
Now, then the second major breakthrough that the C.I.A. had came here in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand -- okay, you're not beating them, they have no resentment -- you tell them, "You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down." And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they separate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down. Now, if you look at the other aspect of those photos, you'll see that they're short-shackled -- okay? -- that they're long-shackled, that they're made -- several of those photos you just showed, one of them with a man with a bag on his arm, his arms are straight in front of him, people are standing with their arms extended, that's self-inflicted pain. And the combination of those two techniques -- sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain -- is the basis of the C.I.A.'s technique.
AMY GOODMAN: Who has pioneered this at the C.I.A.?
ALFRED McCOY: This was done by Technical Services Division. Most of the in-house research involved drugs and all of the LSD experiments that we heard about for years, but ultimately they were a negative result. When you have any large massive research project, you get -- you hit dead ends, you hit brick walls, you get negative results. All the drugs didn't work. What did work was this.
AMY GOODMAN: But when you talk about the 'everyone knows the LSD experiments,' I don't think everyone knows. In fact, I would conjecture that more than 90% of Americans don't know that the C.I.A. was involved with LSD experiments on unwitting Americans. Can you explain what they did? ALFRED McCOY: Oh, sure. As a part of this comprehensive survey of human consciousness, the C.I.A. tried every possible techniques. And one of the things that they -- at the time that this research started in the 1940s, a Swiss pharmaceutical company developed LSD. Dr. Hoffman there was the man who developed it. The C.I.A. bought substantial doses, and they conducted experiments. One of the most notorious experiments was that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, inside the agency, spiked the drinks of his co-workers, and one of those co-workers suffered a breakdown, Dr. Frank Olson, and he either was -- I don't know whether he was pushed or jumped from a hotel here in New York City -- his son Eric Olson insists that his father was murdered by the C.I.A. Eric Olson believes that his father did a tour of Europe, and he visited the ultimate Anglo-American test site, black site near Frankfurt, where they were doing lethal experiments, fatal experiments, on double agents and suspected double agents, and that his father returned enormously upset by the discovery that this research was actually killing people, and that, therefore, Eric Olson argues his father was killed by the C.I.A., that he was pushed.They were running all of these experiments, okay? They did that on Army soldiers through the Army Chemical Warfare Division. Again, they gave them LSD and other drugs to see what effect they would have.What they found time and time again is that electroshock didn't work, and sodium pentathol didn't work, LSD certainly didn't work. You scramble the brain. You got unreliable information. But what did work was the combination of these two rather boring, rather mundane behavioral techniques: sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain.And in 1963, the C.I.A. codified these results in the so-called KUBARK Counterintelligence Manual. If you just type the word "KUBARK" into Google, you will get the manual, an actual copy of it, on your computer screen, and you can read the techniques
Read the report.
But if you do, read the footnotes, because that's where the behavioral research is. Now, this produced a distinctively American form of torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, psychological torture, and it's the one that's with us today, and it's proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm.
But the paradigm has proved to be quite adaptable. Now, one of the things that Donald Rumsfeld did, he appointed General Geoffrey Miller to be chief at Guantanamo, alright, because the previous commanders at Guantanamo were too soft on the detainees, and General Miller turned Guantanamo into a de facto behavioral research laboratory, a kind of torture research laboratory. And under General Miller at Guantanamo, they perfected the C.I.A. torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the original research. They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity. And then they went further still. Under General Miller, they created these things called "Biscuit" teams, behavioral science consultation teams, and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation, and these psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to mother, and by the time we're done, by 2003, under General Miller, Guantanamo had perfected the C.I.A. paradigm, and it had a three-fold total assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.
AMY GOODMAN: And then they sent General Miller to, quote, "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib.
ALFRED McCOY: In mid-2003, when the Iraqi resistance erupted, the United States found it had no intelligence assets; it had no way to contain the insurgency, and they -- the U.S. military was in a state of panic. And at that moment, they began sweeping across Iraq, rounding up thousands of Iraqi suspects, putting many of them in Abu Ghraib prison. At that point, in late August 2003, General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, and he brought his techniques with him. He brought a CD, and he brought a manual of his techniques. He gave them to the M.P. officers, the Military Intelligence officers and to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. Commander in Iraq. In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army Field Manual 3452, and if you look at those techniques, what he's ordering, in essence, is a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions and sensory disorientation, and if you look at the 1963 C.I.A. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, you look at the 1983 C.I.A. Interrogation Training Manual that they used in Honduras for training Honduran officers in torture and interrogation, and then twenty years later, you look at General Sanchez's 2003 orders, there's a striking continuity across this forty-year span, in both the general principles, this total assault on the existential platforms of human identity and existence, okay? And the specific techniques, the way of achieving that, through the attack on these sensory receptors. Now, one of the problems beyond the details of these orders is torture is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. There's an absolute ban on torture for a very good reason. Torture taps into the deepest recesses, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist, and it has a powerful perverse appeal, and once it starts, both the perpetrators and the powerful who order them, let it spread, and it spreads out of control.So, I think when the Bush administration gave those orders for, basically, techniques tantamount to torture at the start of the war on terror, I think it was probably their intention that these be limited to top al-Qaeda suspects, but within months, we were torturing hundreds of Afghanis at Bagram near Kabul, and a few months later in 2003, through these techniques, we were torturing literally thousands of Iraqis. And you can see in those photos, beyond the details of the techniques that we've described, you can see how that once it starts, it becomes this Dantesque hell, this kind of play palace of the darkest recesses of human consciousness. That's why it's necessary to maintain an absolute prohibition on torture. There is no such thing as a little bit of torture. The whole myth of scientific surgical torture, that torture advocates, academic advocates in this country came up with, that's impossible. That cannot operate. It will inevitably spread.
AMY GOODMAN: So when, Professor McCoy, you started seeing these images, the first photos that came out at Abu Ghraib, the pictures we showed of the, you know, hooded man, electrodes coming out of his fingers, standing on the box, your response?
ALFRED McCOY: Oh, I mean, the reason I wrote this book is when that photo came out in April 2004 on CBS news, at the Times, William Safire, for example, writing in the New York Times said this was the work of creeps. Later on, Defense Secretary Schlesinger said that this was just abuse by a few people on the night shift. There was another phrase: "Recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland." In other words, this was the bad apple thesis. We could blame these bad apples .I looked at those photos, I didn't see individual abuse. What I saw was two textbook trademark C.I.A. psychological interrogation techniques: self-inflicted pain and sensory disorientation.The U.N. convention bars – defines torture as the infliction of severe psychological or physical pain. The U.N. convention which bans torture in 1984 gives equal weight to psychological and physical techniques. We alone as a society somehow exempt all of these psychological techniques.
That dates back, of course, to the way we ratified the convention in the first place. The United States Congress ratified the treaty, but basically we outlawed only physical torture. Those photographs of reservation are carefully written to avoid one word in the 26 printed pages of the U.N. convention. That word is "mental." Basically, we exempted psychological torture. Now, another problem for the United States, as well, wa the U.S. Army re-wrote the Army Field Manual in 1992, with the intention of strictly observing the letter and the spirit of the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention and other similar treaties.
So what happened is that when the Defense Department gave orders for extreme techniques, when General Sanchez gave orders for his techniques beyond the Army Field Manual, what that meant is when the soldiers were actually investigated, they had committed crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They would be prosecuted, and they're all being sent to jail.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor McCoy, you wrote a piece, "Why the McCain Torture Ban Won't Work: The Bush Legacy of Legalized Torture."
ALFRED McCOY: Basically what happened is, through the process, they introduced loopholes. The Justice Department did it by crafting three very controversial legal principles. One, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties. Two, that there was a possible defense for C.I.A. interrogators who engage in torture, and the defenses were of two kinds. First of all, they played around with the word "severe," that torture is the infliction of severe pain. Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said, "'severe' means equivalent to organ failure," in other words, right up to the point of death. The other thing was that they came up with the idea of intentionality. If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty. The third principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo is not part of the United States; it is exempt from the writ of U.S. courts. The White House had Senator Lindsey Graham amend McCain's amendment by inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory, and last month, the Bush administration has gone to federal courts and said, "Drop all of your habeas corpus suits from Guantanamo." There are 160 of them. They've gone to the Supreme Court and said, "Drop your Guantanamo case." They have, in fact, used that law to quash legal oversight of their actions.

Newspeak updated

Chertoff's Sweetheart Deal For Israeli-Owned Carnival Cruise Cruise Line

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, through a hastily arranged deal with Carnival Cruise Lines, $236 million from U.S. taxpayers will flow to a tax exempt Israeli-founded corporation registered in Panama. Before federal assistance even reached the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Carnival Cruise Lines had received a profitable deal to provide three ships to house evacuees from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The deal, reached on Sept. 2, 2005, will pay Carnival some $236 million for the use of 7,100 berths for six months.

Orwell wrote Bush's script
by Ryan Blethen
The resemblance grows between the Bush administration and the sinister, monolithic political party INGSOC, from George Orwell's novel "1984," with every twisted and evasive defense for the violation of American civil rights. Bush and Co.'s battle against terrorism has turned into a power grab and a war on Americans. Fear and contorted language are the weapons of choice. The administration's assertive actions after 9/11 might have made sense in the raw aftermath of nearly 3,000 dead. With time and distance comes perspective. Those new presidential controls awarded to help ensure the safety of Americans now look more like the political clubs wielded by INGSOC.
Orwell might have got the year wrong, but his nightmarish vision of a super-nation at perpetual war, dominated by a government only concerned about control and party preservation, could gain purchase in 2006. I hear more of Newspeak, the restrictive language created by INGSOC, with every presidential explanation as to why the government feels compelled to spy on Americans. Orwell wrote that the idea of Newspeak was to restrict the language to the point that people would have to think in the limited language of the party. In true INGSOC fashion, the administration has used Bushspeak to spin a story broken by The New York Times about a domestic-spying program run by the National Security Agency and approved by executive order soon after 9/11 into a necessary program needed to weed out the deeply integrated terrorists living next door. The timing was curious when, last week, Bush revealed that a terrorist plot was thwarted in 2002. Bush talked about the plot the same day stories surfaced about the doubts a secret surveillance court judge had about the legality of domestic spying. Of course, an administration spokesperson danced around the question of whether the NSA program was involved in stopping the terrorist plot.
The use of powerful and well-placed words and images worked for INGSOC. Its slogan — war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength — fits like a truncheon in the cradle of shattered bone with Bush's recent State of the Union address:
War is peace "There is no peace in retreat."
Freedom is slavery "The terrorist surveillance program has helped prevent terrorist attacks. It remains essential to the security of America."
Ignorance is strength "... We have benefited from responsible criticism and counsel offered by members of Congress of both parties ... Yet, there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success, and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure."

Political doublespeak is nothing new, but has become a real threat to democracy in the hands of this administration. Bush has taken communication strategy to new heights, said David Domke, associate professor of communications at the University of Washington. "This administration has become preeminent in crafting messages for political gain," Domke said.
The Republicans have made no secret about what they will run on this year. A recent Pew poll showed that Americans believe the Democrats could lead the nation better on every issue except national security. Bush aide Karl Rove has given speeches about national security and the president skips across the nation talking about the importance of spying on Americans to keep us safe. This strategy works only if the electorate is fearful that a hostile world is ready to overrun America. Bush's fear-mongering resembles a version of INGSOC's Two Minutes (of) Hate, in which party members watch a video of legions of the enemy army marching behind a bleating political enemy.
American democracy has buckled under the weight of Americans voting scared, a weak press diluted because of consolidation by mega-public companies, and no real political alternative.
It does not matter that the administration and, by extension, the Republican Party are only doing what is needed to hold on in November and again in the 2008 presidential election. Their actions are beginning to eclipse our civil rights, potentially reducing freedom to a dim flicker.

Ryan Blethen's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times.

UN: Shut down GITMO

UN Investigators Call on U.S. to Close Guantanamo
United Nations investigators have called on the Bush administration to immediately close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. The UN report urges the US government to "refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The report goes on to state "In the case of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, the U.S. executive operates as judge, as prosecutor, and as defense council: this constitutes serious violations of various guarantees of the right to a fair trial before an independent tribunal.” About 500 men are being held at the site. Charges have never been filed against most of them. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack dismissed the report. He said the U.N. information was based on "hearsay." Yeah, the word is out-- the entire world knows our shame.

CNN Blames the Photos, Not the Torture - by Jeremy Scahill
Here I thought the "scandal" was that the U.S. military was systematically abusing prisoners. These new photos, with their documentation of violently inflicted, open wounds, obliterate any notion that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was anything short of torture by all accepted definitions of the term. They reveal some horrifying scenes of naked, humiliated, bloodied prisoners, some with apparent gunshot wounds. But, according to CNN's Starr, the real transgression was that some soldiers documented the torture in violation of "U.S. military law and practice." In a report later in the morning, Starr returned to her outrageous characterization of the "scandal."

Iraqis Outraged Over New Abu Ghraib Photos
In Iraq, the publication of new photographs showing Iraqi detainees being tortured inside the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison is being met by outrage. The Australian broadcaster SBS first aired the photographs on Wednesday and many of the images have been reprinted in Iraqi newspapers and aired on television. One Iraqi citizen, Abd Al-Awadh, says the photos proved the United States was acting in violation of international law.
"We saw humiliation to the Iraqis and we saw that there is no respect to the dignity of the Iraqi people in this country, the country where we were masters we are now slaves and the masters come from abroad. In addition to Abu Ghraib abuse photos, we saw Iraqis being beaten in Basra by the British forces. This is a violation of international laws, which they used as a pretext to invade Iraq. We feel sorry that such acts are being repeated on a daily basis at the Iraqi streets. There is unjustified killings by the U.S. force. The public opinion is misled and regrettably enough the Iraqi prisoner was treated in a barbaric and savage way at the hands of the American forces."

To date, no CIA officers have been prosecuted for any crimes that occurred within the prison, despite the death of at least one Iraqi during a CIA interrogation there. On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and other groups called for a truly independent investigation to look at all levels of the military chain of command, as well as involvement from other government agencies like the CIA and private military contractors who have been implicated in abuses.

U.S. Government Criticizes Release of New Photographs
Meanwhile the U.S. government is criticizing publication of the new photographs. Mike Carey, the executive producer of the Australian program Dateline, defended the broadcast of the images. "Well, we thought this was new examples of abuse, criminal abuse potentially, lots of corpses with no explanation why they were there. We thought we had a responsibility to broadcast those to show the real horror of what happened in Abu Ghraib,” Carey said. "We actually did not broadcast some of the photographs because we thought they were too extreme. We got lots more photographs with the DVD's--particularly some show sex acts between the guards at Abu Ghraib, apparently dressed in fatigues, probably occurring in Abu Ghraib. Lots of stuff like that we could have shown, we didn't."

Gonzales Withholding Plame Emails
Sources close to the investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson have revealed this week that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has not turned over emails to the special prosecutor's office that may incriminate Vice President Dick Cheney, his aides, and other White House officials who allegedly played an active role in unmasking Plame Wilson's identity to reporters.

Whistleblower says NSA violations bigger
Russell D. Tice told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations he has concerns about a "special access" electronic surveillance program that he characterized as far more wide-ranging than the warrentless wiretapping recently exposed by the New York Times but he is forbidden from discussing the program with Congress.

RUSSELL TICE: Well, as far as an intelligence officer, especially a SIGINT officer at N.S.A., we're taught from very early on in our careers that you just do not do this. This is probably the number one commandment of the SIGINT Ten Commandments as a SIGINT officer. You will not spy on Americans. It is drilled into our head over and over and over again in security briefings, at least twice a year, where you ultimately have to sign a paper that says you have gotten the briefing. Everyone at N.S.A. who’s a SIGINT officer knows that you do not do this. Ultimately, so do the leaders of N.S.A., and apparently the leaders of N.S.A. have decided that they were just going to go against the tenets of something that’s a gospel to a SIGINT officer.

Laughing stock

SBS broadcasts graphic Abu Ghraib images
Australian television has broadcast previously unpublished graphic images of the alleged physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. SBS television's Dateline program screened video and still images of the wounds allegedly inflicted on the Iraqis by their American captors.
The pictures show a man with his throat slit, another with massive head injuries and a third covered in what appears to be feces. SBS reported: "The extent of the abuse shown in the photos suggests that the torture and abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib in 2004 is much worse than is currently understood." They included photographs of blood-soaked Iraqi prisoners who had been tortured or shot dead, footage of a prisoner repeatedly slamming his head into a metal door, and a film of naked male prisoners being forced to masturbate in front of the camera.

The Bush administration is reportedly attempting to prevent release of the images in the US, arguing that their publication could provoke antagonism towards the US. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been granted access to the images under Freedom of Information, but the US government is appealing the decision. George Negus, host of Wednesday's Dateline program, told SBS viewers it was important to televise the images to make the public aware of what taken place at Abu Ghraib prison.
"Despite the currently overheated international climate, we're showing them because they show the extent of the horror that occurred at Abu Ghraib," Negus said.
The program reported that some prisoners at Abu Ghraib were killed when US soldiers ran out of rubber bullets trying to quell a riot at the jail and resorted to using live rounds.
ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh told Dateline the images were evidence of "systemic and widespread abuse" of prisoners by US soldiers.


Los Angeles Times: Army Accepting More Recruits With Criminal, Drug Histories

In all, the Army granted waivers to 11,018 recruits in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, 2005, or 15% of those accepted into the service that year. Those figures are up from 2004, when 9,300 waivers were granted, or 12% of those joining the Army. The Army provided the recruiting figures to the Baltimore Sun on Monday after the newspaper obtained partial statistics. Despite the increase in the proportion of those accepted with problems in their background, the Army failed to meet its recruiting target. A total of 73,000 men and women joined the Army in 2005, down from 77,000 in 2004. There was a significant increase in the number of recruits with what the Army terms "serious criminal misconduct" in their background.


BBC NEWS: "Hotel Anthrax" The hidden history of US germ testing

Biological pathogens they developed were tested on volunteers from a pacifist church and were also released in public places. In the 1950s, the Seventh-day Adventist Church struck an extraordinary deal with the US Army. It would provide test subjects for experiments on biological weapons at the Fort Detrick research centre near Washington DC. The volunteers were conscientious objectors who agreed to be infected with debilitating pathogens. In return, they were exempted from frontline warfare.
Hear part 1 of Hotel Anthrax at Radio 4's Listen again page.
Part 2 is on Monday, 20 February, 2006 at 2000 GMT.

Congressional Probe of NSA Spying Is in Doubt

Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.

Secret Service stalls and delays for Cheney
The only way that birdshot could have possibly penetrated into Whittington's heart, given the minimal force impact capacity of the shot is if he was shot from incredibly close range. This then means that the whole event requires a greater level of scrutiny. If they lied about the distance of the shot, its probably one of many lies.

Iraq: "Back to the Future"

Baghdad - which accounts for 25% of the country's population - has virtually no water or electricity. The Americans for their part may have become more "invisible", retreating from main urban centers, but their air war is even more devastating. The White House/Pentagon policy is now a "back to the future" of turning Iraq into Afghanistan, where warlords, religious or secular, and tribal sheikhs defend their mini-states armed to their teeth, and criminal gangs run parallel to death squads. There isn't a remote possibility of forging a government of national unity under these circumstances. Which suits Washington fine. The only way for the United States to prolong its Iraqi adventure is to perpetuate chaos; Iraq as the new Afghanistan. Few dispute that the US invaded Iraq for its oil resources, mostly untapped, and that it's located in the heart of the world's energy system. Thus, if the US controls Iraq, it extends its strategic power.


MSNBC Scrubbing Cheney Alcohol Connection?
References to beer preceding the shooting are being removed from the mainstream media coverage of the shooting. Criticism has come from all quarters. Former press secretary Ari Fleischer said, "It could have and should have been handled differently." And Marlin Fitzwater, former press secretary to Bush’s father and Reagan said Cheney had "ignored his responsibility to the American people" by failing to disclose the accident.Cheney’s hunting party included Harry Whittington, Katharine Armstrong, a lobbyist for many companies including Lockheed Martin, and Pamela Pitzer Willeford, the former ambassador to Switzerland and Lichenstein.

AMY GOODMAN: But the idea that the only thing we know about actually what happened, obviously, is being filtered through the White House or the owner of the ranch, Katharine Armstrong.
ROBERT BRYCE: Exactly. And Katharine Armstrong has every reason to try and protect Cheney, not Whittington. You know, and the other part that really sticks in my mind on this whole thing is, you know, that Katharine Armstrong is part of the Republican political aristocracy here in Texas. And NBC just reported last night that Katharine Armstrong has, in fact, lobbied the White House. She was paid $160,000 and was doing that legal -- that lobby work for Baker Botts. Well, you know, the other part that really is amazing here is just how small the world of Dick Cheney and Baker Botts and Halliburton is. Baker Botts is a very powerful Texas law firm. James A. Baker III is Of Counsel to the firm. It was founded by his great-grandfather. Baker Botts represents Halliburton. Baker Botts’s lawyer William Jeffress also represents “Scooter” Libby in the criminal charges in Plamegate scandal. Baker Botts is, you know, perhaps the law firm with the closest ties to the Bush administration, and here is Katharine Armstrong hosting Cheney and having lobbied the White House directly on behalf of Baker Botts. The part that’s the most, I think, is the most stunning is Armstrong nor Baker Botts will disclose for whom she was lobbying the White House for Baker Botts.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Katharine Armstrong and her business partner also – or her business partner represents Lockheed Martin?
ROBERT BRYCE: Karen Johnson is her business partner, and she has apparently very close ties to Karl Rove. She lobbies for Lockheed Martin and has a number of other lobby contracts. You know, she has -- her profile has grown, particularly here in the last couple of years, because of her associations with Rove, but also just her close ties to the administration more generally.
If I can just jump back to Armstrong real briefly, the other connection with Rove here is that Armstrong's parents, Anne Armstrong and the late Tobin Armstrong were the people who originally backed Rove as a political consultant back in the early 1980s. When Karl Rove started Rove & Company, the capital that he needed to start that business came from the Armstrongs. Further, Rove now has an office in the White House. The office that he occupies used to be occupied by Anne Armstrong. She was a leading figure in the Nixon White House, and so she had an office in the Nixon White House and was one of the people, in fact, allegedly, who helped to convince Nixon to resign after the Watergate scandal.
So, you know, the Armstrong Republican connection here in Texas are long and deep. And the fact that this is happening on the Armstrong ranch, where Rove has hunted many times and big shot Republicans have been hunting for years is, I think, just another indicator of this Republican elite, you know, political elite that exists here in Texas, and hunting is what they do when they want to get together.
AMY GOODMAN: Anne Armstrong was a director of Halliburton when the board chose Dick Cheney to be the C.E.O.?
ROBERT BRYCE: She was. And the other thing that I find interesting about her and about the Halliburton connection is that for many years, while she was on the Halliburton board, she was also on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Well, why is that interesting? Well, because the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board has access to America's most secret secrets. And there's another connection that exists even today with Halliburton on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and that is that Ray Hunt, who is another -- has close ties to the Bush White House, is also on the -- sits on the board of Halliburton and sits on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board simultaneously, which was the case that Anne Armstrong had for many years. She sat on both the PFIAB and the Halliburton board at the same time.

A la carte democracy

Judge: FEMA Can Halt Direct Hotel Payments
NEW ORLEANS - A judge let the federal government Monday drop some 12,000 families made homeless by last year's hurricanes from a program that has put them up at hotels nationwide. (Which judge?) FEMA has promised the evacuees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita that they will still receive federal assistance that they can use toward hotel stays or fixing their ruined homes, although the agency will no longer pay for the hotels directly.

The Trust Gap
NY Times editorial
We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less. This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.
DOMESTIC SPYING
After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it. According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn't work that way. It's not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last year, he dismissed as "hypothetical" a question about whether he believed the president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr. Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White House counsel.
THE PRISON CAMPS
It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal illuminated the violence, illegal detentions and other abuses at United States military prison camps. There have been Congressional hearings, court rulings imposing normal judicial procedures on the camps, and a law requiring prisoners to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. Mr. Bush also made it clear that he intends to follow the new law on the treatment of prisoners when his internal moral compass tells him it is the right thing to do. On Thursday, Tim Golden of The Times reported that United States military authorities had taken to tying up and force-feeding the prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes by the dozens at Guantánamo Bay to protest being held without any semblance of justice. The article said administration officials were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism of Gitmo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the world.
According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Gitmo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The National Journal reported last week that many were handed over to the American forces for bounties by Pakistani and Afghan warlords. Others were just swept up. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism. Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham proceedings. And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president's whim who is to be jailed without charges, and to insist that Gitmo is filled with dangerous terrorists.
THE WAR IN IRAQ
One of Mr. Bush's biggest "trust me" moments was when he told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies. But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war. When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before.
Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.

SOLDIER'S VICIOUS FILM VOICEOVER:
'Oh yes, oh yes, you're gonna get it. Naughty little boys.
You little f***ers, you little f***. DIE'

BULLIES: Troops dwarf victim
New Video Shows British Troops Beating Iraqi Youths
An investigation by the British tabloid News of the World has revealed British troops beat young Iraqi prisoners after a protest in Southern Iraq in early 2004. A videotape released by the newspaper shows soldiers pulling four young protesters off a street and into an army compound where they are punched, kicked and hit with batons. An off-camera voice can also be heard praising the attacks. The video was leaked by a whistleblower after it was shown on the troops’ military base.

PRISONER 1 is hauled in wearing a dark blue T-shirt, blue jeans and white trainers—the only victim not in bare feet. His captor releases the headlock, stands him up and—with combat helmet on and visor down—lands a crushing head butt. He rips the youngster's T-shirt over his head and smashes his right fist twice into his kidneys and once into his head. In panic the terrified captive desperately clings to the lanyard of the soldier's baton in an attempt to stop it being used on him. His pitiful cries of "No! Please!" are clearly heard. But the mocking commentator merely puts on a childlike voice and mimics his Iraqi accent: "No, pleeese—don't hurt me." Another soldier grabs the lad by the neck and hurls him to the floor to be kicked and beaten again. The head-butt soldier then raises his baton and brings it crashing down on him.

Enron execs face the music
Just over four years after Enron Corp. collapsed in a multibillion-dollar heap, a detailed post-mortem is unfolding in the Houston federal courtroom where its top two captains are on trial. A jury is hearing testimony alleging fraud and conspiracy by former chairman Kenneth Lay and retired chief executive officer Jeffrey Skilling. Barring a plea bargain, jurors will decide whether they were out-and-out crooks or incredibly unlucky and incompetent managers who drove a $101 billion-a-year darling of Wall Street over a fiscal cliff.
From a high of $90 a share in August 2000, Enron's stock plunged to 36 cents a share before the Houston-based company filed bankruptcy in December 2001, wiping out more than $60 billion in shareholder value and the jobs and retirement savings of thousands of Enron employees.
Sixteen former Enron executives already have pleaded guilty, including investor relations chief Mark Koenig, who described a corporate culture obsessed with boosting Enron's stock price no matter what - even to the point of "adjusting" 1999 fourth-quarter earnings per share upward by a penny to match analysts' projections. "The tone we would have set by missing earnings would have been very negative," Koenig testified. (Though surely not as negative as the bankruptcy that followed.)
"We think the company's on solid footing," Kenneth Lay told analysts in August 2001 in a tape played in court. Meanwhile, top Enron execs had been unloading their shares for tens of millions of dollars.
Lay faces 11 counts and Skilling 35.
Nonetheless, Stacy noted, "It'll be hard for Skilling and Lay to convince a jury of ordinary people with common sense that they were who they are and didn't know what was going on." Peters pointed out that "juries have to feel that something was morally wrong. Juries are not always persuaded that bad business is criminal."
Mere bad business, though, is seldom as catastrophic as the Enron debacle. The trial will be a test of the government's ability to hold corporate executives accountable.

US Aiding Construction of Morocco Prison
The London Times is reporting the US is helping Morocco build a new prison for terror suspects near the capital of Rabat. The prison would be run by the Moroccan secret police, the Direction for Security of the Territory – known as DST. Several human rights groups have accused the DST of torture. Morocco is thought to be one of the key partners in the CIA’s rendition of detainees.

Peace Group Charged Over Gitmo Vigil
US government has served legal papers to seven members of Witness Against Torture, which held a five-day march to the prison in December. The seven members each face up to 10 years in prison or a $250,000 dollar fine. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights said: "I find it extremely hypocritical that Washington is investigating this group for the 'crime' of traveling to Cuba. The U.S. government is flagrantly violating even the most basic norms of human rights – such as indefinite detention without charges, denial of fair trials and, most importantly, torture."

UN inquiry demands immediate closure of Guantanamo

A United Nations inquiry has called for the immediate closure of America's Guantanamo Bay detention centre and the prosecution of officers and politicians "up to the highest level" who are accused of torturing detainees. The UN Human Rights Commission report, due to be published this week, concludes that Washington should put the 520 detainees on trial or release them.

Ex-CIA Officials Say US Threats Helped Drive Iran Nuclear Program
Two high-level former CIA officials say the intelligence community has believed that fear of a US attack has been a principal factor in Iran’s motives to pursue nuclear weapons. The officials made the comments in separate interviews with the Interpress News Service. Paul Pillar, the former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, who oversaw all National Intelligence Estimates on Iran from 2000 to 2005, said: "Iranian perceptions of threat, especially from the United States and Israel, were not the only factor, but were in our judgment part of what drove whatever effort they were making to build nuclear weapons."

Vermont Resolution Would Bar Warrantless Eavesdropping
In Vermont, legislators have introduced a resolution that criticizes President Bush’s domestic spying program and bars eavesdropping without a court order in the state.

GOP Report Faults Bush, Chertoff on Katrina
A forthcoming Republican-authored congressional report lays considerable blame for the government’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina from President Bush down. The report, disclosed in Sunday’s Washington Post, singles out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff for being detached from events on the ground and responding: “late, ineffectively or not at all.” The report concludes: “Blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror.'' The 600-page report will be released Wednesday.

Katrina Evacuees Seek Halt to 40,000 Hotel Evictions
Lawyers acting on behalf of about 40,000 Katrina evacuees have asked for a temporary restraining order against the government’s plans to evict them from hotels across the country. The evictions are scheduled for today. Last week, occupants of more than 4500 rooms were ordered to leave their hotels in New Orleans. Bill Quigley, a New Orleans attorney who helped file the motion, said: "We think FEMA is just trying to clear the books and not taking a careful or compassionate look at these people."

Valerie Plame was working on Iran
Rawstory.com
According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran. Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame's work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in "severe" damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA's ability to monitor nuclear proliferation. (Well, that would come in handy if they're going to be making up WMD stories about Iran now, wouldn't it?)


Top two Republicans in Congress caught in an outright lie
A Republican staffer has named Frist and Hastert as the two lawmakers that added the vaccine makers liability protection to the defense bill-- after the committee had met several times that day, and Dems even asked Alaska Senator Ted Stevens if the language was in the bill, and he told them it wasn't.

About 10 or 10:30 p.m., Democratic staff members were handed the language and told it was now in the bill, Obey said. He took to the House floor in a rage. He called Frist and Hastert “a couple of musclemen in Congress who think they have a right to tell everybody else that they have to do their bidding.”

Frist and Stevens deny this charge saying the language was in the bill when the conferees voted on it.Frist has received $271,523 in campaign donations from the pharmaceutical and health products industry since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group. Remember how Frist slipped this exact same lawsuit protection into the Patriot Act?

Even Brownie suggesting someone blew 17th St Canal Levee!

Ex-FEMA Chief Suggests Extent of Testimony Conditioned on White House Support
Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown has indicated he’s prepared to reveal his full correspondence with the Bush administration unless the White House forbids him to do so and offers legal support. Brown’s attorneys say the White House has not responded to the demand, which had a deadline of Wednesday night. Brown is expected to testify today before a Senate inquiry into the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.


Ex-FEMA Chief Shifts Katrina Blame to DHS
Former federal disaster chief Michael Brown testified Friday that he notified top White House and Homeland Security officials on the day that Hurricane Katrina roared ashore that "we were realizing our worst nightmare" and that New Orleans was seriously flooding. He dismissed as "just baloney" and "a little disingenuous" claims by agency officials that they didn't know about the severity of the damage until the next day.
Testifying before a Senate committee, Brown said he agreed with members who characterized him as a scapegoat. "I feel somewhat abandoned," said Brown, who quit under fire as chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency just days after the storm ravaged much of the Gulf Coast of the United States.Brown suggested the administration's fixation with fighting terrorism may have been to blame, in part, for the slow government response.Because of a focus on terrorism, natural disasters "had become the stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security," he said. Had there been a report that "a terrorist had blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that," Brown added.
Brown said he spoke by phone to a top White House official — he said he believed it was Joe Hagin — "on at least two occasions on that day to inform him of what was going on." Hagin was with the president, who was vacationing on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, at the time, while Brown was in Baton Rouge, La. "I think I told him that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true," Brown said. He said he made similar comments in an e-mail message to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. In an appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee that was at turns both cooperative and confrontational, Brown went far further than he had previously in blaming other elements of the Bush administration for the government's halting reaction to the massive storm.
Brown, who is widely viewed as the public face of the government's missteps during and after the storm, staunchly defended his role and appeared eager to answer any questions — particularly those that shifted the blame elsewhere. He insisted he provided information to White House and Homeland Security officials the day of the storm. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said he did not know the levees were breached until the following day. Brown said several times he could not clearly recall what was said in some of those conversations. Brown's appearance in front of the Senate investigative panel came as new documents reveal that 28 federal, state and local agencies — including the White House — reported levee failures on Aug. 29, according to a timeline of e-mails, situation updates and weather reports. That litany was at odds with the administration's contention that it didn't know the extent of the problem until much later. At the time, President Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
At the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said Friday that there were conflicting reports about the levees in the immediate aftermath of the storm. "Some were saying it was over top, some were saying it was breached," he said. "We knew of the flooding that was going on," McClellan said. "That's why our top priority was focused on saving lives. The cause of the flooding was secondary to that top priority and that's the way it should be," the spokesman said at an occasionally contentious briefing.

WhiteHouse knew of flooding night of Katrina
FEMA knew it that morning
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Numerous witness accounts of the New Orleans flooding, including from federal officials, reached Washington the night before the White House has said it learned of the disaster, congressional investigators said.
A Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman sent an e-mail at 9:29 p.m. on Monday, August 29, the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall and broke the levees protecting New Orleans, to John Wood, the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The e-mail, obtained by Reuters on Friday, said conditions "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought -- also a number of fires," the e-mail said. At 8:30 a.m. on August 29, Col. Terry Ebbert, New Orleans homeland security director, cited a 20-foot (6 meter) tidal surge during a conference call with FEMA, the American Red Cross, the National Weather Service and Louisiana emergency officials.
"The tidal surge came up and breached the levee system in the canal, so we're faced with major flooding both in the east, East New Orleans, and then out on the lakefront," he said. according to documents compiled by congressional investigators. There was no immediate comment from the White House.
White House officials have told congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, The New York Times reported on Friday. The newspaper said White House spokesman Trent Duffy acknowledged that in an interview this week, but he said there were conflicting reports. However, U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the committee holding Katrina hearings, said its investigation had uncovered nearly 30 communications to and from state, local, federal and private sources throughout the day on August 29 saying the levees had breached or that massive flooding had forced people onto rooftops.
"The first communication came at 8:30 a.m. So it is inexplicable to me how those responsible for the federal response could have woken up Tuesday morning unaware of this obviously catastrophic situation," Lieberman said in a statement.
Furthermore, Michael Brown, director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on September 12, told the Times on Thursday that, learning of the FEMA spokesman's report, he notified the White House of the news that night. Brown is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday. The Times said he was expected to confirm that he notified the White House the night of August 29 the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.
"There is no question in my mind, that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Brown told the newspaper.
Congressional committees have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews that pinpoint fundamental errors and oversights that helped lead to "what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history," the Times said. Investigators have questioned why President George W. Bush and Chertoff said the levee break did not happen until Tuesday, August 30. The two said they believed initially the storm had passed without a catastrophe. In their defense, the newspaper said, Chertoff and White House officials have said they were referring to official confirmation the levee had broken, which they received on Tuesday morning from the Army Corp of Engineers.

FLASHBACK:
Dept. of Homeland Security trucks seen around levees 9 months prior Katrina floods, Corps of Engineers warned residents to leave before levees "blown"
By Greg Szymanski, Arctic Beacon
More information and stories are rolling in, ignored by the media and scoffed at by conservative radio hosts, suggesting government operatives purposely detonated and blew the New Orleans levees to racially cleanse the city making way for a huge land grab by rich developers. Major media outlets have ignored numerous eye witness accounts, accounts telling about huge explosions heard prior to levees breaking at the Industrial Canal, as well as at the 17th St. Canal.
Terry Adams, a lower 9th Ward resident living a block away from the Industrial Canal, reported hearing a huge explosion just before the levee gave-way and he floated downstream to safety on his rooftop. Besides Adams, New Orleans bus driver, Ryan Washington, recently said he has heard numerous other stories just like the Adams account, recalling a massive explosion prior to a "three football field long hole" in the caused massive flooding, resulting in death and destruction throughout New Orleans said another local resident, Michael Night, heard the same explosion but was unavailable for comment.
Chuck, the long time New Orleans resident, added some very information background information as well as further accounts about the levee breaks from other New Orleans citizens.

"One more thing. I passed by the 17th Street levee everyday before the storm. As far back as 9 months before Katrina hit, I saw Homeland Security vehicles riding up and down the street alongside the levee," he said."I knew that they were Homeland Security vehicles because they were all white with tinted windows and had 'Government DHS' on their license plates. I couldn't figure out what they were doing there but now I think I know. Again, difficult to prove, but they were probably wiring the levee. Something else of interest, I recently met a young nurse on an airplane to Houston who is from here New Orleans and is married to an engineer. She told me her husband conducted a job interview with a guy who lived right on the 17th Street canal. The guy he interviewed told him that the day after the storm someone from the Corps of Engineers knocked on his door and told him he had to leave because they were going to blow the levee. I personally believe that the London Ave and the 17 the street levees were blown."

L.A. Mayor Blindsided by Terror Info

President Bush's disclosure of new details about a foiled 2002 terrorist plan to destroy the city's tallest building has strained relations between the White House and the mayor, who accused the Bush administration of taking too long to tell him of the new information. (Hey, they only made it up the night before!)

Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

Rove Threatens GOP Senate Judiciary Members Over Spy Program

Meanwhile, the conservative publication Insight on the News is reporting White House deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove is threatening any Republican Senate Judiciary members who challenge the White House on the domestic surveillance program. According to Insight, “Sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November.” A senior Republican aide told the publication: "It's hardball all the way.”

White House Agrees to Brief Congressional Intel Committees On Spy Program
In the United States, the Bush administration has backed down under bi-partisan pressure and agreed to brief congressional committees on some details of its warrantless domestic spying program. On Wednesday, White House officials briefed members of the House Intelligence committee, and said it would do the same for the Senate committee. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Arlen Specter said he was sponsoring a measure that would hand authority over the spy program to national security FISA courts. Specter said: "The president should have all the tools he needs to fight terrorism, but we also want to maintain our civil liberties."

E-Mails Say Abramoff Has Met Bush “In Almost a Dozen Settings”
In other news, recent e-mails from indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff indicate his ties to the White House are far greater than President Bush has admitted to. Excerpts from the e-mails were published on ThinkProgress.org. In one message to Kim Eisler, national editor of the Washingtonian magazine, Abramoff writes he was personally invited to Bush’s Crawford ranch for a fundraising event, but could not attend. At a January 26 thpress conference, President Bush said “You know, I, frankly, don’t even remember having my picture taken with the guy. I don’t know him.” But in the e-mails, Abramoff wrote quote: “The guy saw me in almost a dozen settings, and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids. Perhaps he has forgotten everything. Who knows.”

Report: Hunger-Striking Gitmo Detainees Strapped Down, Forced-Fed
The New York Times is reporting authorities at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have resorted to a series of tough measures to force-feed hunger-striking detainees. Dozens of detainees have held the fasts to protest their prison conditions. Prison guards have strapped detainees into “restraint chairs” for hours and force-fed them with tubes down their throat. The Times says over two dozen detainees quit their hunger strikes after "having their feeding tubes inserted and removed so violently that some bled or fainted." Thomas Wilner, a lawyer for several detainees said: "It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment.”
The news comes as a new study based entirely on Pentagon data shows that of 500 Guantanamo detainees whose cases were reviewed, fewer than half of them have been accused of committing violent acts against the United States or its allies. The study, carried out by lawyers for two detainees, found that the government has identified only 8% of the detainees as al Qaeda fighters. Of the rest, the study found that 40% have no connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban. Meanwhile, 60% of the 500 detainees have been detained “merely because they are 'associated with' a group or groups the US government asserts are terrorist organizations.”

WTO Rules Against European GMO Ban
Washington Post is reporting the World Trade Organization has ruled against a six-year European ban on genetically engineered crops, saying it violates international trade rules. The ban was challenged by the United States, Canada and Argentina and opposed by numerous farming and agricultural companies. Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, denounced the WTO for attempting to: "force Frankenfoods on the rest of the world regardless of what consumers and their elected representatives say."
Meanwhile, one of the world’s most famous critics of corporate globalization and bio-technology – French farmer Jose Bove – has been barred from entering the United States. He was detained last night by U.S. officials after flying into Kennedy Airport in New York and then sent back to France. It remains unclear why Bove was denied entry. Bove was scheduled to speak at a conference in New York put on in part by Cornell University and the Rockefeller Foundation called "Global Companies -- Global Unions, Global Research -- Global Campaigns.” In 2002 Bove made international headlines when he helped destroy a McDonald’s under construction in France to protest trade policies that hurt small farmers. He has also been a leading opponent of genetically modified crops.

FEMA Halts Payments for 4500 Hotel Rooms of Katrina Evacuees
In New Orleans, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has begun evicting thousands of Katrina evacuees from government-paid hotel rooms. On Tuesday, occupants of more than 4500 rooms were ordered to leave their hotels. FEMA officials say the agency will continue to pay for another 20,000 rooms until March 1st. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco criticized the evictions, stating: "I am troubled that FEMA has continued to reject the state's request for solutions, particularly in light of its failure to deliver temporary housing options to meet the needs of our Louisiana citizens."

Thousands of Evacuee Trailer Requests Unmet
The New York Times is reporting that of 135,000 requests for trailers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has received from displaced families, slightly more than half have been filled. The news comes one day after the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered the evictions of thousands of people from government-paid hotel rooms.

Soldier pays for armor
In military news, the Charlestown Gazette is reporting a West Virginia soldier injured in a roadside bombing in Iraq has been forced to pay for the body armor that was removed from him while he was being treated. Last week, 1st Lt. William “Eddie” Rebrook IV was forced to pay $700 dollars after he was told the army had no record the armor was taken from him. Rebrook said: “If a soldier’s stuff is hit by enemy fire, he shouldn’t have to pay for it… There’s a complete lack of empathy from senior officers who don’t know what it’s like to be a combat soldier on the ground.”
The last time 1st Lt. William “Eddie” Rebrook IV saw his body armor, he was lying on a stretcher in Iraq, his arm shattered and covered in blood. A field medic tied a tourniquet around Rebrook’s right arm to stanch the bleeding from shrapnel wounds. Soldiers yanked off his blood-soaked body armor. He never saw it again. But last week, Rebrook was forced to pay $700 for that body armor, blown up by a roadside bomb more than a year ago.

Young and old losers in President's budget

The US President's $2.8 trillion 2007 budget, proposed to Congress on Monday, would increase military spending by 4.8 per cent to $439 billion, while cutting 141 government programs. Education, Medicare and the prescription drug program for pensioners are among the areas facing cuts. The military spending does not include the cost of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which Mr Bush has asked for an extra $50 billion.

Bush NASA Appointee Resigns Over Resume Fabrication
A presidential appointee at NASA’s public affairs department has resigned following the disclosure he fabricated parts of his resumé. George Deutsch, who was appointed last year after working on President Bush’s re-election campaign and inauguration, wrongly claimed he had graduated with a journalism degree from Texas A & M University. Deutsh is one of several NASA officials accused by agency scientists of attempting to silence their warnings over the threats posed by global warming.

Report: Bush Admin. Sidelining Arms Control Experts
Knight Ridder is reporting the White House has conducted a major reorganization of the State Department that has marginalized several career international weapons experts in favor of “less experienced political operatives who share the White House and Pentagon's distrust of international negotiations and treaties.” According to current and former officials interviewed by Knight Ridder, the reorganizing has led to “an exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters.” In a joint letter, a group of State weapons experts said: "The process has been gravely flawed from the outset, and smacks plainly of a political vendetta against career Foreign Service and Civil Service (personnel) by political appointees."
In one case, the new Office of Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism circulated a job posting that listed loyalty to the priorities of President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice as a job qualification. Some weapons analysts said the exodus is especially worrisome because of the pending expiration of the 1991 START I treaty -- the only mechanism for verifying U.S. and Russian nuclear arms cuts.

Women soldiers died from dehydration

These women were so afraid of sexual assault, after dark in Iraq, that they refused to drink liquids in the afternoon, because they might have to urinate during the night. The horror on top of this horror is that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez ordered that the cause of their deaths be covered up.

Flu Shots and Alzheimer's

According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD, the world's leading immunogeneticist and 13th most quoted biologist of our times (nearly 850 papers in peer review journals): If an individual has had 5 consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980 (the years studied) his/her chances of getting Alzheimer's Disease is 10 times higher than if he/she had one, 2 or no shots.

Cartoon about Abramoff crony Ralph Reed's political downfall in Georgia:

State of Dis-Union

Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson was wounded in Iraq and then went without pay for four months. The Army says he was overpaid while he was in the hospital.
'Nightline' Investigation:
Wounded Soldiers Told They Owe Money to Army
Troops Face Financial Crises After Learning Army Overpaid Them During Hospitalization
By BRIAN ROSS
It was one of the thousands of roadside bombs in Iraq that paralyzed Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson.
"My first instinct was to jump farther back into the Humvee, you know, for protection," Simpson said. "But in doing that, I opened my back up to all the scrap metal and debris, which hit my spine and severed my spine, paralyzing me."
He was soon on a plane home. Fast-working, skilled Army doctors saved his life, as they have so many. Slow, bumbling Army bureaucrats would make his life miserable, as they have so many. It started with a phone call from his wife, home with their four children. She didn't have enough money to pay the bills. And until "Nightline" inquired at the Pentagon, Simpson said he could not find out what happened. It turns out the Army had mistakenly continued to pay Simpson a combat duty bonus while he was in the hospital. He had been overpaid thousands of dollars, and the Army wanted the money back.
"By law, he's not entitled to the money," said Col. Ricard Shrank, "so he must pay it back." Shrank said although that is the law, soldiers can apply for debt forgiveness if they believe the debt is a mistake. So far, more than 800 soldiers have done so. More than 600 of those requests have been granted, amounting to more than $600,000.
So, the Army said it withheld the paralyzed soldier's pay until it got back the amount he owed — with no advance notice, Simpson said. "Four months," he said. "I didn't get paid for four months."
Simpson is not the only one. A study commissioned by the First Infantry Division estimated that eight out of 10 of its wounded soldiers from Iraq have gone through the same or a similar ordeal. Capt. Michael Hurst, now out of the Army, conducted the study.
"You have to understand that these soldiers are suffering from incredible injuries, some of them have lost limbs, some of them may never walk again," Hurst said. "And in the midst of that struggle, to then get a paycheck for nothing really hurts morale." And the Army can play tough to get its money back. In the case of Sgt. Ryan Kelly, who lost his leg in Iraq, he had just finished going through rehabilitation when the Army sent a letter threatening to ruin his credit and call in debt collectors.
He had been overpaid by $2,200 while in the hospital, but, like most, never realized it. It took Kelly almost a year to cut through the red tape and get the debt forgiven.
Shrank said for those like Simpson, "I would tell those soldiers that I care about them," he said, adding, "And I want to see that they received their proper pay." In fact, he told "Nightline," he wants soldiers in this situation to call him. "Yes," Shrank said. "If that's what it takes, yes."

Out of jail, into the Army
Facing an enlistment crisis, the Army is granting "waivers" to an increasingly high percentage of recruits with criminal records -- and trying to hide it.
By Mark Benjamin, Salon.com

We're transforming our military. The things I look for are the following: morale, retention, and recruitment. And retention is high, recruitment is meeting goals, and people are feeling strong about the mission.
-- George W. Bush, in a Jan. 26 press conference

It was about 10 p.m. on Sept. 1, 2002, when a drug deal was arranged in the parking lot of a mini-mall in Newark, Del. The car with the drugs, driven by a man who would become a recruit for the Delaware Air National Guard, pulled up next to a parked car that was waiting for the exchange. Everything was going smoothly until the cops arrived.
"I parked and walked over to his car and got in and we were talking," the future Air Guardsman later wrote. "He asked if I had any marijuana and I said yes, that I bought some in Wilmington, Del., earlier that day. He said he wanted some." The drug dealer went on to recount in a Jan. 11, 2005, statement written to win admission into the military, "I walked back to my car [and] as soon as I got in my car an officer put his flashlight in the window and arrested me."
Under Air National Guard rules, the dealer had committed a "major offense" that would bar him from military service. Air National Guard recruits, like other members of the military, cannot have drug convictions on their record. But on Feb. 2, 2005, the applicant who had been arrested in the mini-mall was admitted into the Delaware Air National Guard. How? Through the use of a little-known, but increasingly important, escape clause known as a waiver. Waivers, which are generally approved at the Pentagon, allow recruiters to sign up men and women who otherwise would be ineligible for service because of legal convictions, medical problems or other reasons preventing them from meeting minimum standards. The story of that unnamed Air National Guard recruit (whose name is blacked out in his statement) is based on documents obtained by Salon under the Freedom of Information Act. It illustrates one of the tactics that the military is using in its uphill battle to meet recruiting targets during the Iraq war. The personnel problems are acute. The Air National Guard, for example, missed its recruiting target by 14 percent last year. And the regular Army missed its goal by 8 percent, its largest recruiting shortfall since 1979. This is where waivers come in. According to statistics provided to Salon by the office of the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, the Army said that 17 percent (21,880 new soldiers) of its 2005 recruits were admitted under waivers. Put another way, more soldiers than are in an entire infantry division entered the Army in 2005 without meeting normal standards. This use of waivers represents a 42 percent increase since the pre-Iraq year of 2000. (All annual figures used in this article are based on the government's fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. So fiscal year 2006 began Oct. 1, 2005.) In fact, even the already high rate of 17 percent underestimates the use of waivers, as the Pentagon combined the Army's figures with the lower ones for reserve forces to dilute the apparent percentage. Equally significant is the Army's currently liberal use of "moral waivers," which are issued to recruits who have committed what are loosely defined as criminal offenses. Officially, the Pentagon states that most waivers issued on moral grounds are for minor infractions like traffic tickets. Yet documents obtained by Salon show that many of the offenses are more serious and include drunken driving and domestic abuse.
Last year, 37 percent of the Army's waivers (about 8,000 soldiers) were based on moral grounds. Like waivers as a whole, these waivers are proliferating -- they're 32 percent higher than in the prewar year of 2000. As a result, the odds are going up that the soldiers fighting and taking the casualties in Iraq entered the Army with a criminal record.
"The more of those people you take, the more problems you are going to have and the less effective they are going to be," said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan and a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress. "This is another way you are lowering your standards to meet your goals." Retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, who was the Army's chief intelligence officer from 1981 to 1985, also called the increase in waivers "disturbing."
He expressed concern that the lower standards would place a burden on military commanders who have to deal with "more lawbreakers and soldiers with anti-social behavior in their units. (Maybe they'd be better off working for Defense Contractors?) "Even without the waivers, the Army has lowered its standards for enlistees. The Army has eased restrictions on recruiting high school dropouts. It also raised the maximum recruitment age from 35 to 39. Moreover, last fall the Army announced that it would be doubling the number of soldiers that it admits who score near the bottom on a military aptitude test.
In response to inquiries about the number of waivers being used, the Pentagon's assistant secretary for public affairs issued a three-page statement to Salon on Monday, headlined, "Military Recruiting -- High Standards With Limited Waivers." Regarding the use of moral waivers, it argues that "in most cases, the [criminal] charges were from a time when the applicant was young and immature." The Pentagon document contends that many waivers were "simply for an unusual number of traffic violations." It also cites as typical in waiver cases such minor offenses as "curfew violations, littering, disorderly conduct, etc."
Other Pentagon officials, who requested anonymity, cautioned against regarding this statement from the public affairs desk as the definitive word on the waiver question. These personnel experts stressed that the Army has a major problem with its use of exemptions from normal enlistment standards. These sources went on to say that the Army's statistical data appears to have been scrubbed to make its use of waivers look more infrequent than it actually is.
One Pentagon official, whom Salon asked to inspect the Army's official waiver figure, said the Army's claim that it has issued waivers to 17 percent of recruits "is not a correct number." In fact, the percentage should be higher. The Army has made the number appear lower by combining data from Army Reserve forces, including the Army National Guard -- even though the Guard has its own separate recruiting program and (based on information provided to Salon under the FOIA) used waivers in only 6 percent of all cases in 2005.
When pressed, the office of public affairs admitted that it had lumped together data from several military services to derive the official Army waiver number. Lt. Col. Ellen G. Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman in the office of public affairs, confirmed that the data provided to Salon had combined the waivers records of the regular Army, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard into a single entry. She confirmed by e-mail: "Yes, these numbers include the active duty and reserve components."
Krenke referred questions about the Army's actual waiver rate to its Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky. Julia Bobic, an Army spokeswoman there, said her unit had received the document that the Pentagon had provided Salon and was "re-looking" at its own data in light of the follow-up questions. Until that reexamination is complete, Bobic said, the Army would have no additional comment. "The numbers that we have are not releasable," she said. "We are re-looking at these numbers in light of that query."
In short, the military's explanation seems a variant of Catch-22. Officials now admit that the Army waiver data originally given to Salon was contaminated with extraneous numbers, but the Army cannot comment on what its actual waiver percentage might be, since the Pentagon figures are so muddled. When told of these numbers games, Korb said, "I'm sure that somebody on Capitol Hill is going to demand the answers."
It is no secret to Congress that the Army, which is fighting the brunt of the war in Iraq, is facing a severe personnel crisis. A Pentagon-commissioned report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments leaked last week warned that prolonged deployments and recruiting problems were "breaking" the Army. A chapter of that report, titled "A Recruiting and Retention Crisis?" goes so far as to say that the grind of war on the Army -- rather than any political imperatives from Washington -- will accentuate the pace of military withdrawal from Iraq.
Odom offered a similar interpretation: "We will get out this year, not because we want to; we don't have any more troops to send. What we are seeing is the declining capability of the Army caused by the administration's manning and deployment policies.
A contrary, though far from surprising, view was offered by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Asked about the report warning of a broken Army at a press conference last week, Rumsfeld said, "I just can't imagine someone looking at the United States armed forces today and suggesting that they are close to breaking."
This fits with the Pentagon's official response that most Army waivers on moral grounds are for minor infractions like traffic tickets and littering. While there is no way to independently verify those claims regarding the Army, records from another branch of service suggest how recruiting waivers can easily be misused. Under the Freedom of Information Act, Salon obtained copies of a one-inch stack of waivers granted by the Air National Guard from January to July 2005. Many of the offenses excused are significantly more serious than driving with a defective tail light or failing to return overdue library books
Lt. Gen. Daniel James III, the Air National Guard director, told the House Committee on Armed Services last July 19, "The Air National Guard's success is rooted in the quality of our recruits and our ability to retain them. Our people are unequivocally our most valued resource."
Yet according to the waivers, just four days earlier the Air Guard's national headquarters had approved the enlistment of a California recruit who had been charged in October 2003 with "assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury." True, the recruit was a 17-year-old juvenile when he committed the crime for which he was later convicted, but that date was less than two years before he was admitted to the Air Guard.

• Other examples from the Air Guard files suggest a wider problem: After his parents filed a domestic-abuse complaint against him in 2000, a recruit in Rhode Island was sentenced to one year of probation, ordered to have "no contact" with his parents, and required to undergo counseling and to pay court costs. Air National Guard rules say domestic violence convictions make recruits ineligible -- no exceptions granted. But the records show that the recruiter in this case brought the issue to an Air Guard staff judge advocate, who reviewed the file and determined that the offense did not "meet the domestic violence crime criteria." As a result of this waiver, the recruit was admitted to his state's Air Guard on May 3, 2005.
• A recruit with DWI violations in June 2001 and April 2002 received a waiver to enter the Iowa Air National Guard on July 15, 2005. The waiver request from the Iowa Guard to the Pentagon declares that the recruit "realizes that he made the wrong decision to drink and drive."
• Another recruit for the Rhode Island Air National Guard finished five years of probation in 2002 for breaking and entering, apparently into his girlfriend's house. A waiver got him into the Guard in June 2005.
• A recruit convicted in January 2004 for possession of marijuana, drug paraphernalia and stolen license-plate tags got into the Hawaii Air National Guard with a waiver little more than a year later, on March 3, 2005.

Taken together, the troubling statistics from the Army and anecdotal information derived from the files of the Air National Guard raise a warning flag about the extent to which the military is lowering its standards to fight the war in Iraq. The president may be correct in his recent press conference boast that "we're transforming the military." But the abuse of recruiting waivers prompts the question: In what direction is this military transformation headed?

Same old song
Michael Scherer, Salon.com
In his fifth State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Bush delivered a bold statement to the nation: He had nothing new left to say.The hourlong speech he delivered was cut almost entirely from his past congressional and policy addresses. His proposals had already been proposed. His defenses had already been offered. His visionary statements were visionary months or years ago. Rather than the live feed, the networks could have just simulcast tape from 2004 or 2005: With the exception of Bush's opening homage to Coretta Scott King and his defense of warrantless wiretaps, America might not have noticed the difference.
There were no 16 words to haggle over, no new hints at foreign invasions, or calls for sweeping reforms. Though Bush faces some of the lowest polls of his presidency, he did not try to match Bill Clinton's performance in 1998 when Clinton wowed the nation despite news of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Bush appeared to be going through the paces, a lame duck coasting toward the midterm elections. He no longer boasted of vast political capital, piled high after his 2004 reelection. Instead of a Social Security privatization, the hallmark of last year's address, he proposed a bipartisan commission to study the problem.
Almost every line was an echo. In his 2005 State of the Union, Bush called for "expanded Health Savings Accounts." On Tuesday, he announced he would "strengthen Health Savings Accounts." In 2005, he promised to fund green projects, "from hydrogen-fueled cars, to clean coal, to renewable sources such as ethanol." On Tuesday, he pledged to invest in "zero-emission coal-fired power plants ... pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen ... cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol." In 2005, he promised to "ensure that human embryos are not created for experimentation." On Tuesday, he pledged to prohibit "creating or implanting embryos for experiments."
On immigration, Bush offered a "humane guest worker program that rejects amnesty," an echo of his 2004 declaration to "oppose amnesty" in favor of "my temporary worker program." He boldly asked Congress to reauthorize the Ryan White Act, an HIV/AIDS treatment program, repeating almost verbatim the same request from the 2005 State of the Union.
Even the few new proposals seemed simply to have been substituted for previous, ill-fated ideas. Where he once called for a ban on steroids in professional sports, he now called for lobbying and ethics reform. Where he once called for a gang prevention program, he now suggested math and science training for high school teachers. Rather than call for drilling in Alaska, he declared that America was addicted to oil -- but offered no hints that he would support stricter gas mileage regulations.
When it came to the war in Iraq and the war on terror, the president's assertions were a patchwork of familiar arguments. There would be no retreat. America would spread freedom. "We are on the offensive in Iraq, with a clear plan for victory," Bush said, his only response to the 60 percent of Americans who disapprove of his handling of that war. "We will never surrender to evil," he said, evoking the memory of a more memorable speech in 2002 when he took aim at the "axis of evil."
"Nothing new," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, after he left the floor of Congress. "No surprises," commented Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois. They were partisan jabs, but also sounded like an objective report.
Republicans spun the speech by repeating old talking points about Iraq, earmarking, and energy independence, taking comfort in all that the president "reaffirmed." Like the politicians they covered, more than 100 journalists milled about, scribbling in their notebooks.
With so little suspense, lawmakers in the gallery entertained themselves during the speech by focusing on whether to stand or sit during their applause. Democrats stood for any mention of American workers, immigrant labor and Social Security, aiming to rub in their disruption of Bush's speech when he chided Congress for failing to pass his privatization plan in 2005. Republicans stood for tax cuts, the Patriot Act and Samuel Alito, the newest Supreme Court judge, who sat wide-eyed and wooden in the front row. For their part, the military brass walked the thin green line with their cheers. They sat quietly when Bush vowed to keep Iran free of nuclear weapons, but they clapped respectfully when Bush called for a "free and democratic" Iran.
Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter was noticeably slow to rise when the president defended his warrantless wiretap program as constitutional. Arizona Sen. John McCain spastically banged his hands together at the mention of lobbying reform. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was noticeably the first to jump out of his seat when Bush demanded that Hamas, the recent victors in the Palestinian elections, recognize Israel and reject terrorism.