18
March
2007
Two articles on the recent fiasco at the Justice Department. First they get busted for the FBI abuses of National Security Letters, now they are on the defensive for having fired US Attorneys for political reasons. The man in the middle is the boss, Alberto Gonzales. The White House is saying nothing, claiming that their memory is hazy. The articles below point at the justifications that are being offered to defend the actions taken. Today an editorial states that Gonzales’ loyalty to his boss is higher than the loyalty to the job he is installed to do.
Why are law enforcement officers (the judiciary) appointed by the president (the executive branch of government). Actually the same argument goes for the Supreme Court. If you really want to keep the branches separate, this seems like a backward way to go about it.
But you see what happens. Bush has appointed a lot of long time friends to high political positions. Loyalty matters. Competency may be less so.
By the way, there seems to be a lot of talk about accountability in the government. Saying “I am accountable” is not taking accountability, not by a long shot.
(Originals found here and here.)
The Reno Precedent
President Clinton’s attorney general fired all U.S. attorneys. So why is this different?
Thursday, March 15, 2007
THE LATEST they-do-it-too excuse for the undeniably botched and increasingly suspicious firings of U.S. attorneys involves the 1993 episode in which President Clinton’s new attorney general, Janet Reno, unceremoniously dismissed the first Bush administration’s holdover U.S. attorneys. By comparison with the Reno massacre, we are told, the Bush administration’s canning of eight U.S. attorneys was positively restrained; if you suspect political motives in the current controversy, so the argument goes, consider that when he was ousted by Reno, the U.S. attorney in the District, Jay Stephens, was just weeks away from deciding whether to indict House Ways and Means Chairman Daniel Rostenkowski (D-Ill.). Inconveniently for these conspiracy theorists, Mr. Rostenkowski was in fact indicted and convicted — and, yes, he ultimately was pardoned by President Clinton.
The Reno precedent is a red herring, not a useful comparison. The summary way she announced the move was, indeed, unusual if not unprecedented. But a turnover in the top prosecutorial jobs with a new administration taking power — especially one of a different party — was not. As we wrote at the time, “These are political appointees who owed their jobs to the last administration and have expected to be replaced ever since last November’s election. It would likely have happened earlier had the Clinton administration not made such an adventure out of the appointment of an attorney general.” And so President George W. Bush, properly and unsurprisingly, replaced all but a few U.S. attorneys during his first year in office. Indeed, while it would undoubtedly have been disruptive and unwise, it would not have been illegal or unethical for the president to follow the suggestion of his then-White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, to replace all the prosecutors again in his second term.
The question, then, is what to make of the president’s move to fire several of the prosecutors. This recent group firing, in the midst of a presidential term, is unprecedented; Mr. Bush was simply incorrect yesterday when he described it as “a customary practice by presidents.” But unprecedented doesn’t equal wrong: U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, and he is entitled to have in place prosecutors committed to his law enforcement priorities. (The potential for misusing the newly bestowed interim appointment authority to evade Senate confirmation is a separate, and troubling, concern.)
Internal administration e-mails released Tuesday offer some indications of those sorts of policy-related issues, from references to “woodshedding” the U.S. attorney in San Diego, Carol C. Lam, over immigration cases to complaints about whether Paul K. Charlton in Arizona and Daniel G. Bogden in Nevada were balking at obscenity prosecutions. But there are also ample grounds for suspicion about improper motives, including the involvement of White House political aides and telephone calls from lawmakers to prosecutors about politically sensitive cases. The dishonest conduct of the Justice Department has only served to deepen suspicions, to underscore the importance of figuring out exactly what transpired here and to distinguish this situation from the Reno precedent.
and here is another article with more background
Time to Go, Mr. Gonzales
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
“I believe in accountability,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales proclaimed yesterday at a news conference that was a self-serving masterpiece of passive voice and unpersuasive platitudes. “Like every CEO of a major organization, I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice. I acknowledge that mistakes were made here. I accept that responsibility. And my pledge to the American people is to find out what went wrong here, to access accountability and to make improvements so that the mistakes that occurred in this instance do not occur again in the future.”
Is there anyone left — seriously, is there a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — who has confidence in Gonzales’s capacity to fix this mess? Is there anyone who accepts Gonzales’s CEO analogy — and thinks that a sentient board of directors wouldn’t have fired him long ago?
Let’s assume Gonzales’s good faith: that he truly is upset about what happened on his watch, just as he was upset last week about the FBI’s cavalier mishandling of its authority to issue “national security letters,” and wants to make things right.
There is no reason to believe that he is capable of making a change. The portrait of the Gonzales Justice Department that emerges from the e-mails released yesterday, and from the attorney general’s own comments, is of an agency overseen by an absentee landlord, chronically clueless about what’s happening around him.
This is a man whose memory is so foggy that George W. Bush — not exactly Mr. Detail — has a sharper recollection of their conversations than the attorney general does. The president, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, told Gonzales that Republicans were complaining about prosecutors failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud. Gonzales doesn’t recall the conversation.
I’m sorry, is there somebody he’s paying more attention to than the president of the United States?
At his I’m-accountable-but-I-didn’t-know-anything news conference yesterday, Gonzales said he knew the White House had suggested canning all 93 U.S. attorneys, rejected that idea and then left things to his chief of staff. “I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on,” he said. “That’s basically what I knew as the attorney general.”
How reassuring. But, a reporter asked, how could it be that his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, was figuring out “which U.S. attorneys to . . . let go and you not know?”
Answer: “Well, again as — I accept responsibility for whatever happens here in this department. But I have 110,000 working in the department. Obviously, there are going to be decisions made that I’m not aware of all the time.”
Translation: “I’m going to tell you I’m responsible, because that’s what they tell me I have to say. But of course I’m not. It’s all Kyle Sampson’s fault. I’m hoping that if I say I’m accountable often enough, no one will actually hold me accountable.”
Ousting a group of top federal prosecutors isn’t some minor, inconsequential act. It’s the sort of thing that a responsible attorney general would be deeply immersed in. Gonzales’s depiction of his own marginality is the most damning evidence of his unfitness for the job.
The precise non-mistake mistake that Gonzales copped to yesterday was sharing “incomplete” — this is Gonzales-speak for wrong — information with Congress. Think about this: Gonzales first testified about the U.S. attorney firings on Jan. 19. His No. 2, Paul McNulty, testified on Feb. 6. Assistant Attorney General William Moschella testified March 6.
And it wasn’t until this week that Justice finally figured out it hadn’t figured out the whole story? If that’s true — and I’m not sure which would be worse — why should anyone believe this crowd is capable of getting its congressional story straight in the future?
Meantime, the pages of e-mails released yesterday show how — while Gonzales hummed happily above the fray — his lieutenants carefully choreographed the firings, down to making sure that the relevant senators were called at precisely the same time the ousted prosecutors were to be informed of their fates, and delaying the moment of truth until they left a meeting of federal prosecutors “to reduce chatter.”
When Arkansas senators balked at installing Karl Rove protege Tim Griffin in the U.S. attorney’s job there, Sampson recommended that the department “gum this to death.” If the senators ultimately balk, he said, “then we can tell them we’ll look for other candidates . . . and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in ‘good faith’ of course.” Of course.
In his now famous “overblown personnel matter” column in USA Today last week, Gonzales wrote, “While I am grateful for the public service of these seven U.S. attorneys, they simply lost my confidence.” (Or did he mean Kyle Sampson’s confidence?)
It’s time — past time — for the president to say the same, perhaps more quietly and more politely, about his friend, his counselor and his failed attorney general.
Posted: social/culture, politics
18
March
2007
Here is a short article how the FDA operates, what it can and cannot do, and how we may be legally introducing drugs into the sytem that may come back to bite us later on. There seems quite a bit of risk here that the FDA, as currently practicing, may not be able to mitigate.
(Original found here.)
EVER SINCE Ernst Chain and Howard Florey isolated penicillin in 1939, inaugurating the era of antibiotics, harmful microbes have steadily developed resistance to even the most robust bacteria killers. The more often a particular antibiotic is administered, the more likely that bacteria will adapt. So, along with the continual development of new antibiotics, the best way to preserve the efficacy of medications that treat dangerous infections is to use them as sparingly as possible. That’s why your doctor might not prescribe a course of amoxycillin for your sniffles.
But The Post’s Rick Weiss reported last week that the Food and Drug Administration might do the exact opposite. The FDA is considering approval of cefquinome, a powerful antibiotic, to treat a common bovine infection. Never mind that there are already 12 medications on the market to treat the illness, bovine respiratory disease, or that it would be more effective to simply house cows in more sanitary conditions. FDA officials are not supposed to discriminate against drugs because their purposes might overlap with others. Nor can they tell farmers how to raise their livestock.
What the FDA can do, however, is alter its self-imposed rules that prevent the agency from fully considering the public health risks of approving this antibiotic for use in animals. The FDA’s current rules say that the agency can deny approval if giving the medication to livestock would threaten the efficacy of a major antibiotic in the treatment of food-borne illnesses in humans.
But overusing cefquinome might undermine a similar antibiotic for humans, cefepime, that is an essential medication for treating many infections that are not classified as food-borne but are nevertheless very dangerous. James E. Leggett Jr., an infectious-disease specialist whom the FDA brought in to advise on the cefquinome issue, points out that risk analyses compiled according to FDA guidelines do not consider whether giving cefquinome to cows would encourage resistance to it and other valuable antibiotics in some of the bacteria that live in — and are excreted from — the bovine gut, such as E. coli.
Instead of ignoring these risks, the FDA should adopt the more sensible standard that the World Health Organization recommends, which would allow the FDA to reject drugs that might undermine an antibiotic important in fighting “serious human disease,” food-borne or not. With a fuller picture of how dangerous widespread use of cefquinome in cows might be, the FDA can make a better decision.
Posted: politics, health
18
March
2007
The voices are getting louder, yet we still don’t get the full story. Here is a letter submitted by a local resident about the Iraqi Government signing away its fortune to US oil interests. Why would they do this? Why would they be the only country in the Middle East signing up for this? Why is the press not reporting this?
I’ve read about the PSAs for the oil production in the former Soviet Republics, but they’re right, this sounds rather aggressive and tragic.
Since the beginning all foreign media and foreign countries that suggested that this war could be about oil, were ridiculed. Ah well. Guess who has pie in their face now?
(Original found here.)
Iraq legislation
The war was all about oil
For those who may have wondered whether oil was the reason we invaded Iraq, a new oil law just passed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi Council of Ministers, and probably soon to be passed by the Iraqi Parliament, should answer that question.
This law, which was planned in the U.S. before the invasion and has since been promoted by J. Paul Bremer and his successors, will legalize Production Service Agreements (PSAs) with oil companies from outside of Iraq, such as Exxon Mobil, BP, and Shell.
These contracts will provide these companies with lengthy contracts (up to 30 years) to extract Iraqi oil and reap up to 75 percent of the profits. It also allows for oil company representatives to sit on the Iraqi Oil Council which determines Iraqi oil policy.
No other Middle Eastern country currently uses PSAs and where they have been used in the past (e.g. for technological expertise); they have been written for much shorter periods, like five years.
This privatization of its oil industry will deprive Iraq of much-needed revenue to rebuild and sustain its country which has been severely damaged as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation and will transfer that money to the pockets of outside interests.
So, at last, we know what George Bush means when he speaks of “victory” in Iraq and why Dick Cheney can say, “Things are going well in Iraq.”
Among the beneficiaries of the invasion will be the big oil companies who will now be able to continue supplying us with gasoline at exorbitant prices.
One might only mention also the contracting firms (like Halliburton) and arms merchants for whom the Iraq invasion is a bonanza.
On the other side of the ledger are the American military and their families, countless Iraqi children, women, and men, dead, wounded and fled, and the American taxpayers of today and years to come.
In addition, a plundered U.S. treasury that cannot provide for education, health care, Katrina recovery, development of alternative energy sources and the basic infrastructure here at home. These are the casualties of this disastrous war for oil, all for an agenda of the few.
Tragic.
See more details at http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2132569.ece
T.B., Waimea
Posted: politics, media
11
March
2007
One warning shot to government to do something or face more business-as-usual. There are some common sense messages in here of things we all already know. The counter-argument is still “well, you’ll just want to pull them out but you don’t really offer a solution.” At this point it may be senseless for us to come up with that solution. Cut your losses and leave with your tail between your legs.
Now the impacts of that decision will be enormous - mentally, economically, politically. It’s definitely counter-message. But for years and years we’ve gotten emails of how “the tide is turning,” “shut up and see how many good things we’ve accomplished.” And yet, the tunnel gets deeper and deeper and deeper
(Original found here.)
DEMOCRATS: YOU WERE ELECTED TO END THIS WAR
Richard Reeves
03/09/2007
WASHINGTON — There were folks who joked or argued before last year’s congressional election that winning would be the worst thing that could happen to Democrats. Joking or not, they seem to have been right.
The Democrats have to bite the bullet on Iraq, American bullets. They can hold all the hearings and propose multiple all-things-to-all-Democrats resolutions they want — like the one House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “unveiled” on Thursday — but if they keep that up, they will own a half-share of Bush’s war by the 2008 elections.
Democrats were elected to end the war, not to debate it. The American people, enough of them, are past debate. The war was a mistake. The government lied. The war is lost. It does not matter when we leave; the same horrific things will happen in Iraq no matter when we leave. The only difference to us now is how many more Americans (and Iraqis) will be killed or maimed or ruined — for no good reason.
Quoting an editorial on cutting off funding for the war, written more than 500 miles from this hermetic capital, in the Buffalo (N.Y.) News:
“The argument made by Bush partisans that limiting the war equates to a lack of support for our troops is similar to the argument made by the drunken brother-in-law that cutting off his liquor supply means you don’t love him. The difference being, of course, that while the nation’s leaders are the ones with the denial problem, it is the soldiers and their families who suffer …”
Americans know all this already. Even the press, which failed miserably before the war and during most of it, has finally figured out how to get the real story out: Think small! Both television and newspapers around the country are covering the small, tragic stories of individual American (and Iraqi) families being destroyed in the name of … what? Those “little” stories, which include the reporting on the scandals of military medical care, are having more impact now than anything said in Congress or at the White House.
But in Washington, they still think they can talk their way out of the chaos we have wrought. This paragraph is from The New York Times last Thursday, covering still another hearing: “‘You have to protect the (Iraqi) people long enough to get economic assistance to them and change their attitude and change their behavior,’ said Jack Keane, the retired vice chief of staff of the Army, who has argued that the troop buildup should last 12 to 18 months. ‘You cannot do that in weeks. It takes months to do that. The problem with the short-term surge is that the enemy can wait you out.’”
Wait us out? Of course they will wait us out. They live there. We don’t. They have been there for thousands of years. They will be there for thousands more. We are leaving; it is only a matter of when.
After all their hearings and conferences, the Democrats, at least in the House, came out with their plan to leave in the fall of 2008. The plan includes giving the president “waivers,” which means there is no deadline and there is no plan. The best analysis of what the Democrats are doing now came from a Republican, House Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam: “The Democrats are making it complicated to pacify the third of their caucus who want to immediately cut off funds to the troops, the third of their caucus who would like to cut off funds for the troops but don’t want credit for it, and the third of their caucus that ran as Republicans and are running away from the other two-thirds of their colleagues.”
That’s exactly right, and those complications could destroy the victors of 2006 when they go back to the voters in 2008. One Democrat, an unelected one, Terry Michael, former press secretary of the Democratic National Committee, gave his party some uncomplicated advice in a sort of open letter to Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, published in The Washington Times: “You rise on the Senate floor. You say you were out of your mind to write a blank check for this hideous abuse of American military power. And then you propose an immediate withdrawal, just slow enough to maximize the safety of the 135,000 young men and women you helped put in harm’s way by your collusion with this elective war.”
Posted: politics
11
March
2007
Two global trade articles back to back. The first talks about an ongoing NAFTA problem where Mexican trucks aren’t allowed freely to drive across US Highways. Just imagine that in Europe - there are trucks from all kinds of countries crossing back and forth. But in the US we have to block that through a variety of maneuvers thereby adding to the cost of products, which is what NAFTA was supposed to help to improve. So you end up with a situation of “no jobs for US workers ” and “still expensive products.” Great.
So now the President is in Brazil talking to President Lula da Silva about Ethanol production. There were some issues about CAFTA and even more concern about Mercosur and rival trade agreements being set up in South America. But isn’t da Silva one of the biggest supporters of the block of non-aligned nations fighting the west?
What’s going on here. Apparently we have to protect the American corn growers, but want to encourage Brazilian sugar growers to convert sugar into Ethanol. It is not clear why, because it doesn’t seem for our market. In fact, we make it hard for them to come in. Hey, Hawaii used to grow loads of sugar, why not talk to them about ethanol? Would Brazil be chopping down the Amazon rain forest for sugar can production? Are we just showing face to counter Hugo Chavez’s success? Is our generous “benevolence” going to help at all, or just make us look even worse …
This sounds weird … perhaps another trade success will come out of this.
(Originals found here and here.)
NAFTA
Let the Trucks Roll
Is Congress going to apply the brakes to the benefits of U.S.-Mexico trade?
Thursday, March 8, 2007; Page A22
ANOTHER ANTI-NAFTA pile-on is brewing in Washington this week. Even though the United States has gained jobs, wealth and goodwill from the regional trade pact, for years opponents of free trade have tried to persuade American leaders to ditch one of the agreement’s most benign provisions — allowing Mexican freight trucks onto American roads. When the United States signed the treaty in 1993, it promised to allow such trucks in, scheduling implementation for 2000. But lobbying from the Teamsters and others with economic turf to protect have held that up — until now.
Finally, after years of lawsuits, congressional meddling and cross-border negotiation, the Transportation Department and its Mexican counterpart have announced that they will pursue a “demonstration project” allowing trucks from 100 screened Mexican carriers to use American roadways freely. Under the program, U.S. inspectors working in Mexico will thoroughly vet the carriers, including every truck and every driver they send over the border, checking for such things as safety features, U.S.-licensed insurance coverage and knowledge of U.S. traffic signs. After the year-long demonstration phase, the Mexican undersecretary for transportation says, the two governments plan to allow all carriers from both countries access to each other’s highways, and U.S. officials say that the inspection regime will be comparably extensive then.
Such requirements are far more burdensome than what NAFTA and common sense require. Under the treaty, Mexican trucks operating in the United States are subject to American trucking regulations, the enforcement of which should be enough to ensure safety on American roads. The Transportation Department points out that since it increased enforcement in the border zone — a pocket of American territory into which Mexican trucks are currently allowed to travel — Mexican trucks have become just as reliable as American ones, as measured by how many trucks are regularly out of service.
But in 2001, Congress imposed discriminatory requirements for Mexican trucks that went beyond simply enforcing existing trucking regulations. That move was a compromise between the White House, which wanted less regulation, and the House, which wanted to effectively ban Mexican trucks. It is unlikely that Congress would reverse itself now. On the contrary, the Teamsters and other groups are already arguing against even the overly cautious demonstration project, asserting that it is not stringent enough.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on transportation,, will hold hearings today on the issue. We hope that she and her colleagues fully support the demonstration project and its ultimate goal of making cross-border trade more efficient for all Mexican and U.S. carriers. Currently, long-haul trucks in Mexico stop at the border and transfer their goods to short-haul vehicles that cross into the United States and transfer their cargo to American trucks. The process is unnecessarily wasteful and environmentally harmful, and it makes a variety of goods that Americans buy more expensive. After 14 years, it’s time to let Mexican trucks in.
Brazil and Ethanol
Bush’s unpromising Brazil visit
Thanks to an unwise policy on ethanol, the president isn’t likely to get very far on his trip to Latin America.
March 8, 2007
READY FOR YOUR pop quiz about the Americas? Try this: In the run-up to today’s meeting between the leaders of the Western Hemisphere’s two most populous countries, one president spoke movingly of the need to boost Latin America’s struggling trabajadores y campesinos (workers and peasants) while lamenting that U.S. policies have failed to reduce the region’s poverty. The other grumbled about unfair agricultural protectionism. Which is the free-trade conservative president of the United States and which the left-wing populist leader of Brazil?
If you matched Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva with the anti-poverty crusading and George W. Bush with the trade-policy gripe, you lose. This seeming role reversal says a lot about the political pressures on both men, and it suggests why the fence-mending presidential summit is unlikely to accomplish either leader’s primary goals.
Bush is deeply unpopular in most of Latin America — a region he has largely ignored — in part because many feel the U.S. focus on free-trade pacts and drug interdiction may have exacerbated poverty instead of relieving it. Into that breach has stepped autocratic President Hugo Chavez of oil-rich Venezuela, who has backed successful leftist leaders in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. During his trip to Latin America, Bush will try to counter Chavez’s influence by appealing directly to the region’s impoverished underclass and signing energy deals — such as a partnership with Brazil and other ethanol producers — that are designed to wean countries from Venezuela’s cheap oil.
Lula has other priorities. Fearful of seeming too close to Bush, he is under heavy pressure from Brazilian farmers to protest U.S. agricultural supports — especially the 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol. But U.S. officials have flatly stated that they have no intention of seeking a reduction in the ethanol tariff. What Bush has offered instead is a variety of small anti-poverty programs that are dwarfed by Chavez’s initiatives in the region. The “OPEC for ethanol” that the president is expected to create today with Lula won’t actually open the U.S. market to Brazilian ethanol, and as a result it will accomplish little.
Brazil’s sugar-based ethanol is more energy efficient and far cheaper to produce than U.S. corn-based ethanol, yet we impose a steep tariff on the Brazilian product to protect domestic corn growers and ethanol producers. The damage wrought by this policy is enormous. It raises consumer prices for all corn products, sabotages long-overdue attempts to move away from dirty fossil fuels and poisons the U.S. relationship with Latin America.
Bush has never shown the political courage to take on the farm lobby, even though U.S. agricultural subsidies and tariffs undermine his free-trade rhetoric. He’s not going to win many friends in Brazil unless that changes.
Posted: politics
11
March
2007
Recently heard the news that Guantanamo is finally set up to accept prosecution of terrorism suspects. Their first case, David Hicks, an Australian. Don’t know exactly what happened, but Dick Cheney was in Australia recently and pestered about Mr. Hicks. So now we have a citizen of our ally having spent 5 years in prison without charges, and we’re trying to keep his lawyer quiet.
… notes that it is a crime under military law for an officer to use “contemptuous words” about high public officials.
It seems that Marine Major Michael Mori is an Australian, but since he is a military guy and this is a military case that military law applies. Military law is apparently very different, because free speech does seem to have higher limits. I wonder if he could defend the person if he wasn’t military.
Now I’m assuming there are many kinds of different laws in this country, or actually even cross-country (like religious laws) and the main problem will be what set of rules you play under. The administration has made it clear that you play under our rules, which means “civilian laws do not apply,” and “we determine what laws we’ll accept.”
So David Hicks (see wikipedia here), is, like John Walker Lindh (see wikipedia here), a white muslim convert who felt strong enough to support a cause he believed in. They both got busted. We haven’t heard from Lindh in a while, but probably because he’s already in jail near Los Angeles.
Nice to see that the administration needs to make its case through intimidation.
(Original found here.)
Guantanamo Intimidation
Lawyers for Terrorism Suspects are Still Being Bullied.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007; A18
CULLY STIMSON may be gone from the Pentagon, but his spirit unfortunately lives on. Mr. Stimson, you may recall, was the Pentagon official in charge of Guantanamo Bay prisoners who had to leave his post after suggesting that private law firms shouldn’t be representing detainees. Now the Pentagon’s chief Guantanamo prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, has gotten into the attack-the-defense-lawyers act, this time complaining about the conduct of a military lawyer assigned to defend Australian David Hicks, who has been accused of terrorism. Mr. Hicks, who has spent five years at Guantanamo after allegedly being caught fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, was charged last week with providing material support for terrorism and is to face trial before a military commission.
Mr. Hicks’s outspoken military lawyer, Marine Maj. Michael Mori, has spent a good deal of time in Australia helping stir up public support for his client, and he has been unsparing in his criticism of the military tribunals, going so far as to call them kangaroo courts. His needling clearly is getting under the prosecution’s skin. “Certainly in the U.S. it would not be tolerated having a U.S. Marine in uniform actively inserting himself into the political process. It is very disappointing to see that happening in Australia, and if that was any of my prosecutors, they would be held accountable,” Col. Davis was quoted as telling The Australian newspaper. Col. Davis, though he later said he wasn’t suggesting a court-martial, noted that it is a crime under military law for an officer to use “contemptuous words” about high public officials.
Col. Davis’s unsubtle effort to quiet Maj. Mori may be even more disturbing than Mr. Stimson’s remarks: It’s not likely that private law firms are going to be intimidated out of representing their clients, but military lawyers who have to fear for their careers might think twice before zealously representing their clients. “Recent statements attributed to both the defense and prosecution in the David Hicks case do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense,” Pentagon press officer Cynthia O. Smith told us when we called for comment. Okay, but it’s the prosecution that really needs reining in.
Posted: politics, legal
10
March
2007
Another article suggesting that the case for war may often be overstated - this time on nuclear weapons development in North Korea. I heard something on the radio where a “senior government official” (or some other lofty title like that) said that it is difficult to know whether the North Koreans really have a large nuclear weapons production facility.
Well … so we’ll go blow them up before we find out. Better safe than sorry, right? Wasn’t that what happened in Iraq?
By the way, somewhat unrelated, but I’m hearing the term Srebenica thrown out, in terms of Genocide, in terms of stopping terrorists, in terms of having to stay in Iraq. Supposedly Srebenica was a giant massacre of 200,000 people, which is “like Holocaust” levels, a government controlled program to eradicate a population. I just came across an article talking about the Milosevic case and what he was accused of, and how nobody these days can actually vouch that more than 8500 people were actually killed. Still that’s a big number, but very, very different from a “genocide of 200,000 people.”
Yet you have to make your case somehow. You can’t just go invade North Korea for no reason - those people are starving. But hey, if they’re the biggest nuclear weapons producer, and if those weapons can already reach Guam and Hawaii, well then of course it’s totally justifiable.
(Original found here.)
Another Intelligence Twist
The CIA may have overstated North Korea’s uranium program. But Pyongyang still must answer for it.
Friday, March 2, 2007; A12
ONCE AGAIN the Bush administration is being accused of exaggerating intelligence to justify an aggressive policy toward a rogue regime, with disastrous results. In October 2002 the State Department announced that North Korea had acknowledged secretly developing a uranium enrichment program. The next month the CIA reported to Congress that it had “recently learned that the North is constructing a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year when fully operational — which could be as soon as mid-decade.” On this basis the administration suspended a deal under which North Korea received fuel oil in exchange for freezing a separate program to produce plutonium. Pyongyang responded by restarting that program and producing enough plutonium for a number of nuclear weapons, one of which it tested last October.
Now administration officials are conceding that outside experts may be right when they say that the North probably never constructed a large uranium-enrichment plant. According to the New York Times, a new intelligence update concludes “with moderate confidence” that the uranium program continues, but it says it’s not known how much progress has been made. Christopher R. Hill, the principal U.S. negotiator with North Korea, told Congress on Wednesday that it’s debatable “whether they’ve actually been able to produce highly enriched uranium.”
Clearly there’s a basis for investigation about whether the 2002 CIA estimate was justified. But it’s also worth underlining that the issue here is not whether North Korea sought a uranium enrichment capacity. The uncertainty is about how far the program advanced. That distinction makes a difference both in reconsidering the Bush administration’s actions in 2002 and judging how the problem should be managed in the new disarmament negotiations with the North beginning next week.
What the administration knew in 2002 — and what remains uncontested now — is that North Korea secretly obtained 20 centrifuges for uranium enrichment from Pakistan and purchased other equipment needed to construct a large-scale enrichment facility. When U.S. officials confronted the North Koreans at a bilateral negotiation session, members of a U.S. diplomatic team received what they believed was a defiant confirmation. That tipped an internal administration debate toward hard-liners who all along had wanted to renounce the Clinton administration’s “agreed framework” with Pyongyang.
No doubt those hard-liners made use of the CIA’s conclusions about a factory under construction. Yet even without that intelligence some action would have been warranted. The United States and its allies were supplying Pyongyang with food and energy on the assumption that its nuclear program was frozen, only to discover that it had covertly begun work in another area. It would have been foolish to ignore such activity by a criminal regime.
Similarly, the weakening of the intelligence about an ongoing uranium program does not mean that the United States can drop the issue in the next phase of negotiations. On the contrary, a crucial test of the diplomatic process will be whether the North will reveal what it did with the centrifuges and other materials it is known to have acquired. Pyongyang’s response will show whether it, like the Bush administration, is more inclined to conduct serious negotiations than it was four years ago.
Posted: politics
10
March
2007
Another set of articles happening within days leading to confusion (see nutrition article previous to this one). So on Tuesday we get an article that the white house says the surveillance programs are ok. On Saturday we have an article when the two top policemen in the country, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Muller, state that the FBI broke the law with their misuses of national security letters.
“People have to believe in what we say,” Gonzales said. … We have some work to do to reassure … the American people that we are serious about being responsible in the exercise of these authorities.”
How can we be reassured if only days after trumpeting that you think things are legal, you get blown out of the water. You give the FBI some questionable authority, they abuse it. Whose fault is that? You opened the door, against everybody else’s warnings … That’s why you need to have oversight and debate in government.
(Originals found here and here).
First the “it’s OK” message (by the way, is it strange that the White House sets up a board who researches an issue to determine that it’s own program is cleared?)
Privacy Board Clears U.S. Spy Programs
By HOPE YEN
The Associated Press
Monday, March 5, 2007; 9:13 PM
WASHINGTON — A White House privacy board is giving its stamp of approval to two of the Bush administration’s controversial surveillance programs _ electronic eavesdropping and financial tracking _ and says they do not violate citizens’ civil liberties.
Democrats newly in charge of Congress quickly criticized the findings, which they said were questionable given some of the board members’ close ties with the Bush administration.
“Their current findings and any additional conclusions they reach will be taken with a grain of salt until they become fully independent,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee.
After operating mostly in secret for a year, the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Board is preparing to release its first report to Congress next week.
The report finds that both the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program and the Treasury Department’s monitoring of international banking transactions have sufficient privacy protections, three board members told The Associated Press in telephone interviews.
Both programs have multiple layers of review before sensitive information is accessed, they said.
“We looked at the program, we visited NSA and met with the top people all the way down to those doing the hands-on work,” said Carol Dinkins, a Houston lawyer and former Reagan administration assistant attorney general who chairs the board.
“The program is structured and implemented in a way that is properly protective and attentive to civil liberties,” she said.
Some board members were troubled by the Homeland Security Department’s error-ridden no-fly lists, which critics say use subjective or inconclusive data to flag suspect travelers.
One area the board will focus on in its report is the computerized anti-terrorism screening system recently announced by DHS and used for years without travelers’ knowledge to assign risk assessments to millions of Americans who fly abroad.
“That’s a place where there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement,” Dinkins said.
Lanny Davis, a former Clinton White House counsel and the lone Democrat on the panel, described the board’s first report to Congress as modest. He said most of the work in the past year was spent being briefed on the administration’s surveillance programs.
“We felt reassured regarding the checks-and-balance concerns,” Davis said. He said that after several classified briefings, members were impressed by the multiple layers of review, which included audit trails to track whoever has access to the data.
Still, Davis said he anticipated the board will continue to monitor the program as needed. “It would be a mistake if that was the end of the review,” he said.
The board’s initial findings come as Congress is moving forward on measures to give the board more authority and make it more independent of the president. Created in late 2004, the panel was established as a compromise between Congress and the White House after a recommendation by the Sept. 11 commission.
Both conservative and liberal civil liberties groups have urged the members to aggressively review the eavesdropping program and have questioned whether board members would stand up to the president if he were flouting the law.
In recent weeks, the administration has agreed to let a secret but independent panel of judges oversee the program. But many lawmakers and civil libertarians have remained skeptical about its legality, and the Justice Department’s inspector general is investigating whether the agency used any of the information improperly.
The warrantless program monitors phone calls and e-mails between the United States and other countries that are suspected to be linked to agents of al-Qaida. A federal judge in Detroit last August declared the program unconstitutional. Government attorneys have since asked a Cincinnati-based appeals court to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing the case is moot because the surveillance is now monitored by a secret court.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called it absurd that the White House board effectively gave the eavesdropping program its stamp of approval even before the administration was forced to backtrack and submit it to court oversight.
“I have no confidence in the current board in its ability to provide meaningful evaluation of important programs such as the no-fly lists, based on its work on the domestic surveillance program,” he said. “It is critical that Congress make the civil liberties board independent of the executive branch.”
The board does not have subpoena power, and the White House can change its annual reports before they go to Congress. The members serve at the pleasure of Bush, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has final say over whether officials must comply with the board’s recommendations.
Separate House and Senate measures would require that the entire board _ not just the chairman and vice chairman _ be confirmed by the Senate.
The House version would also remove the board from the executive office of the president but keep it within the executive branch and give it subpoena power. The Senate version would keep the board within the executive office and allow it to ask the attorney general to issue subpoenas, with notice to Congress required if a subpoena request was refused or modified.
The privacy board members declined to comment on the proposed legislation. But they have made it clear they believe the board works effectively in its current structure and that it could alienate the president if members took on a more openly adversarial role.
Bush appointed Dinkins, a Republican, to chair the board. A longtime friend of the Bush family, she was treasurer of Bush’s first campaign for governor of Texas, and she is a longtime partner in the law firm of Vinson & Elkins, where Gonzales was once a partner.
The panel’s other GOP members are vice chairman Alan Raul, a Washington attorney, and former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson. Former Ambassador Francis Taylor is an independent.
On the Net:
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board: http://www.whitehouse.gov/privacyboard/
then the “busted” message
Gonzales, Mueller Admit FBI Broke Law
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The nation’s top two law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out personal information about Americans. They apologized and vowed to prevent further illegal intrusions.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales left open the possibility of pursuing criminal charges against FBI agents or lawyers who improperly used the USA Patriot Act in pursuit of suspected terrorists and spies.
The FBI’s transgressions were spelled out in a damning 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. He found that agents sometimes demanded personal data on people without official authorization, and in other cases improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.
The audit also concluded that the FBI for three years underreported to Congress how often it used national security letters to ask businesses to turn over customer data. The letters are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge’s approval.
“People have to believe in what we say,” Gonzales said. “And so I think this was very upsetting to me. And it’s frustrating.”
“We have some work to do to reassure members of Congress and the American people that we are serious about being responsible in the exercise of these authorities,” he said.
Under the Patriot Act, the national security letters give the FBI authority to demand that telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses produce personal records about their customers or subscribers. About three-fourths of the letters issued between 2003 and 2005 involved counterterror cases, with the rest for espionage investigations, the audit reported.
Shoddy record-keeping and human error were to blame for the bulk of the problems, said Justice auditors, who were careful to note they found no indication of criminal misconduct.
Still, “we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities,” the audit concluded.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller said many of the problems were being fixed, including by building a better internal data collection system and training employees on the limits of their authority. The FBI has also scrapped the use of “exigent letters,” which were used to gather information without the signed permission of an authorized official.
“But the question should and must be asked: How could this happen? Who is accountable?” Mueller said. “And the answer to that is, I am to be held accountable.”
Mueller said he had not been asked to resign, nor had he discussed doing so with other officials. He said employees would probably face disciplinary actions, not criminal charges, following an internal investigation of how the violations occurred.
The audit incensed lawmakers in Congress already seething over the recent dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys. Democrats who lead House and Senate judiciary and intelligence oversight panels promised hearings on the findings. Several lawmakers , Republicans and Democrats alike , raised the possibility of scaling back the FBI’s authority.
Click Here!
“It’s up to Congress to end these abuses as soon as possible,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The Patriot Act was never intended to allow the Bush administration to violate fundamental constitutional rights.”
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the audit shows “a major failure by Justice to uphold the law.”
“If the Justice Department is going to enforce the law, it must follow it as well,” said Hoekstra, of Michigan.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the audit proves Congress must amend the Patriot Act to require judicial approval anytime the FBI wants access to sensitive personal information.
“The attorney general and the FBI are part of the problem, and they cannot be trusted to be part of the solution,” said ACLU’s executive director, Anthony D. Romero.
Both Gonzales and Mueller called the national security letters vital tools in pursuing terrorists and spies in the United States. “They are the bread and butter of our investigations,” Mueller said.
Gonzales asked the inspector general to issue a follow-up audit in July on whether the FBI had followed recommendations to fix the problems.
Fine’s annual review is required by Congress, over the objections of the Bush administration. It concluded that the number of national security letters requested by the FBI skyrocketed in the years after the Patriot Act became law. Each letter issued may contain several requests.
In 2000, for example, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 requests. That number peaked in 2004 with 56,000. Overall, the FBI reported issuing 143,074 requests in national security letters between 2003 and 2005.
But that did not include an additional 8,850 requests that were never recorded in the FBI’s database, the audit found. A sample review of 77 case files at four FBI field offices showed that agents had underreported the number of national security letter requests by about 22 percent.
Additionally, the audit found, the FBI identified 26 possible violations in its use of the letters, including failing to get proper authorization, making improper requests under the law and unauthorized collection of telephone or Internet e-mail records.
The FBI also used exigent letters to quickly get information , sometimes in non-emergency situations , without going through proper channels. In at least 700 cases, these letters were sent to three telephone companies to get billing records and subscriber information, the audit found.
On the Net:
The report is at: http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/FBI/index.ht
Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov
FBI: http://www.fbi.gov
Posted: politics, legal
8
March
2007
Had this strange thought on the ride home today: whatever happened to Tariq Aziz?
He was the foreign minister and deputy prime minister and basically the face of Iraq before the war started. You saw quite a bit of him on TV while the US provided lip service to diplomacy. He seemed diplomatic, intelligent, and reasonable - not at all the crazy madman out to destroy the Zionists plotting to create undue influence in the region, ready to strike back in a seconds notice with Weapons of Mass Destruction. In a nation of muslims, in a political party of a specific sect, he was a Christian. I thought that could have been an asset. Last thing I remember, is that sometimes after the invasion started, he turned himself in to the US Authorities in Iraq. He wasn’t hunted down, he actually went to them.
That was years ago. What has happened since then? Is he still in some jail? Or in exile? Are Iraqis guarding him, or is he in U.S. custody? Was he tortured for inside information (he should have had lots), or was he treated with respect as a former senior government official - like “diplomatic immunity”? Saddam is dead now, so what happens to the rest of the former Iraq government? Remember the deck of cards with the 50 plus top officials they were looking for right at the invasion? What happened to all of them?
Wikipedia has a short article on him that provides few details. (Wikipedia Article here.) But it really doesn’t offer much of an explanation, or status update. He’s in jail awaiting trial.
So while I’m sitting here watching comedy shows, with life going on as usual, we don’t reflect much on what happens elsewhere? These “things” happen, and then they’re over. The problem is that there are people involved, real people, and all this time while this is out of our minds, there are real people some place in a jail, probably having tried to do the right thing (at least in their mind), now waiting for some trial that may execute them.
I don’t know if he was a good guy or a bad guy, but does it really matter? Whatever did happen to Tariq Aziz? Why don’t we care?
Posted: social/culture, politics
4
March
2007
This is an article detailing how the Federal government is proceeding with a new nuclear weapons design.
So two oppositions:
- Instead of eliminating the stockpile, lets expand Nuclear Production
- While we’re asking others to curtail their Nuclear Production (see Iran, North Korea), we go ahead and do what WE want
We have to keep in mind that the weapons development is a large, ongoing part of our economy, and just how other products go into obsolescence, weapons will to, so it’s counter-business to not let them keep developing new weapons systems. It’s counter-business to not keep expanding the defense budget, whether there’s a need for it or not. Plus there’s the safety scare (or whatever other scare you may come up with to justify it this time).
Globally people may be able to support that if we have been maintaining the moral high ground, but this way we’re just hypocritic.
(Original found here.)
Looking for this article online, I found multiple versions of it, all attributed to the same author. How does that happen? And in our paper, the article was strangely cut short (I’m breaking it where it stopped). It sounded somewhat incomplete.
Govt. picks design for nuclear warhead
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration took a major step Friday toward building a new generation of nuclear warheads, selecting a design that is being touted as safer, more secure and more easily maintained than today’s arsenal.
A team of scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will proceed with the weapons design with an anticipation that the first warheads may be ready by 2012 as a replacement for Trident missiles on submarines.
The new weapons program, which has received cautious support from Congress, was immediately criticized by some nuclear nonproliferation groups as evidence the government wants to expand nuclear weapons production - not move toward eliminating the stockpile.
Critics also maintain that it sends the wrong signal around the world by pushing a new warhead - although characterized as a replacement for existing ones- at a time the United States is trying to curtail nuclear weapons development in North Korea and Iran.
Some lawmakers agreed.
“The minute you begin to put more sophisticated warheads on the existing fleet, you are essentially creating a new nuclear weapon. And it’s just a matter of time before other nation’s do the same,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. “This could serve to encourage the very proliferation we are trying to prevent.”
Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., chair of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, expressed cautious support, but promised “a long evaluation process” in Congress to assure the warhead will do what is promised without future underground testing.
Nuclear underground tests have not been done since a ban in 1992.
and, what was not included
“This is not about starting a new nuclear arms race,” countered Thomas P. D’Agostino, acting head of the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nuclear weapons programs.
Steve Henry, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear matters, said the new design is hoped to lead to fewer warheads being needed. He said it has not changed administration determination to reduce the number of deployed warheads to fewer than 2,000 - the lowest number since the 1950s.
There are believed to be about 6,000 warheads deployed and another 4,000 in reserve.
D’Agostino, briefing reporter on the design decision, said the intent is to develop a safer, more secure warhead to assure increased reliability without the need for underground nuclear tests.
He cautioned that the program remains in the early stages and that in coming months the Livermore team will expand on its design work to give a better estimate on overall costs, the scope of the program and a schedule toward full-scale engineering and production.
The administration is asking for $119 million for the next fiscal year for design work. The officials said they could not say how much the program eventually will cost.
The so-called “reliable replacement warhead” has been the focus of a yearlong, intense design competition between Livermore in California and nuclear scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico - the government’s two premier nuclear weapons labs.
Both of the labs developed proposals and at one point there was discussion to combine the designs into a single program. But that was rejected and D’Agostino made clear Friday the program would be Livermore’s to develop.
The Livermore design was based on an existing warhead that reportedly had been exploded in an underground test in the 1980s, although never actually put into the stockpile. The Los Alamos design was based on a totally fresh approach but without a history of actual testing.
It was this “very robust test pedigree” - as D’Agostino put it - that gave Livermore the upper hand.
“It … gave us the confidence … to certify and go forward without underground testing,” he said, adding that without that assurance “we were not going to go forward.”
Congress authorized design work on the new warhead in 2005, but with a stipulation that its primary goal be to assure the reliability of the nuclear arsenal without resumption of bomb testing, and that it will help in the consolidation of the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons complex.
Some lawmakers have also questioned whether the new warhead is needed, especially in light of a recent finding that the plutonium in the current warheads will last nearly 100 years, twice as long as previously thought.
Some nuclear weapons critics warned the warhead could lead to an increased likelihood of future testing, calling it a ploy to rebuild - not dismantle - the nuclear weapons infrastructure.
“This is a first installment on a plan to develop and produce warheads on an ongoing cyclical basis … similar to what we had during the Cold War,” said Lisbeth Gronlund, a scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear nonproliferation advocacy group.
John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, said there’s no need for a new warhead when “the U.S. nuclear stockpile, based on 50 years of research and over 1,000 underground nuclear tests, has been confirmed safe and reliable for at least another half-century.”
“The bottom line is we’re returning to what we used to do in the Cold War years. That’s the message to the world,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project of the Federation of American Scientists.
Associated Press writer Scott Lindlaw in San Francisco contributed to this story.
Posted: design, politics, science
