Handy having a cousin living in Canada. Great info source. He emails:

You were asking about gas prices. Ours are high and getting higher. Our gas is sold by the litre here in Canada. It used to be sold by the Imperial gallon, and at that time it was priced at .49 cents per gallon. I was in the petrolium business for 17 years, ( hauling bulk fuels) .

Then our damned government at that time introduced the metric sytem here, and every thing went metric. Now all our petrolium products are sold only in Litres.

Our average price of regular gas today in town here is $ 1.089 per litre. Add 5.5 cents for the higher Octane depending on what youre car or truck uses. My car uses the standard octane 87, and it holds 70 litres, so if it's near emty, I'm looking at a 75.00 dollar bill to fill.

Anyway, if you're looking at Imperial gallons at this price, it's $ 1.089 X 4.546 litres = $ 4.95 per gallon. If you're talking U S gallons at the same price it's $ 1.089 X3.785 litres = $ 4.12 per gal.

Wrap....OUCH!!!

From the NY Times:

In Leak Cases, New Pressure on Journalists

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: April 30, 2006

Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.

[Related:
The Nation: There Are Leaks. And Then There Are Leaks. (April 30, 2006) ]

But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.
Such an approach would signal a thorough revision of the informal rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the press and the government for many decades. Leaking in Washington is commonplace and typically entails tolerable risks for government officials and, at worst, the possibility of subpoenas to journalists seeking the identities of sources.
But the Bush administration is putting pressure on the press as never before, and it is operating in a judicial climate that seems increasingly receptive to constraints on journalists.

In the last year alone, a reporter for The New York Times was jailed for refusing to testify about a confidential source; her source, a White House aide, was prosecuted on charges that he lied about his contacts with reporters; a C.I.A. analyst was dismissed for unauthorized contacts with reporters; and a raft of subpoenas to reporters were largely upheld by the courts.

It is not easy to gauge whether the administration will move beyond these efforts to criminal prosecutions of reporters. In public statements and court papers, administration officials have said the law allows such prosecutions and that they will use their prosecutorial discretion in this area judiciously. But there is no indication that a decision to begin such a prosecution has been made. A Justice Department spokeswoman, Tasia Scolinos, declined to comment on Friday.

Because such prosecutions of reporters are unknown, they are widely thought inconceivable. But legal experts say that existing laws may well allow holding the press to account criminally. Should the administration pursue the matter, these experts say, it could gain a tool that would thoroughly alter the balance of power between the government and the press.

The administration and its allies say that all avenues must be explored to ensure that vital national security information does not fall into the hands of the nation's enemies.

In February, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales whether the government's investigation into The Times's disclosure of a National Security Agency eavesdropping program included "any potential violation for publishing that information."

Mr. Gonzales responded: "Obviously, our prosecutors are going to look to see all the laws that have been violated. And if the evidence is there, they're going to prosecute those violations."
Recent articles in conservative opinion magazines have been even more forceful.

"The press can and should be held to account for publishing military secrets in wartime," Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote in Commentary magazine last month.

Surprising Move by F.B.I.

One example of the administration's new approach is the F.B.I.'s recent effort to reclaim classified documents in the files of the late columnist Jack Anderson, a move that legal experts say was surprising if not unheard of.

"Under the law," Bill Carter, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said earlier this month, "no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them."

Critics of the administration position say that altering the conventional understanding between the press and government could have dire consequences.

"Once you make the press the defendant rather than the leaker," said David Rudenstine, the dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and a First Amendment scholar, "you really shut down the flow of information because the government will always know who the defendant is."

The administration's position draws support from an unlikely source — the 1971 Supreme Court decision that refused to block publication by The Times and The Washington Post of the classified history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. The case is generally considered a triumph for the press. But two of the justices in the 6-to-3 majority indicated that there was a basis for after-the-fact prosecution of the newspapers that published the papers under the espionage laws.

Reading of Espionage Laws

Both critics and allies of the administration say that the espionage laws on their face may well be read to forbid possession and publication of classified information by the press. Two provisions are at the heart of the recent debates.

The first, enacted in 1917, is, according to a 2002 report by Susan Buckley, a lawyer who often represents news organizations, "at first blush, pretty much one of the scariest statutes around."
It prohibits anyone with unauthorized access to documents or information concerning the national defense from telling others. The wording of the law is loose, but it seems to contain a further requirement for spoken information. Repeating such information is only a crime, it seems, if the person doing it "has reason to believe" it could be used "to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." That condition does not seem to apply to information from documents.

In the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Byron R. White, joined by Justice Potter Stewart, said "it seems undeniable that a newspaper" can be "vulnerable to prosecution" under the 1917 law.
Indeed, the Nixon administration considered prosecuting The Times even after the government lost the Pentagon Papers case, according to a 1975 memoir by Whitney North Seymour Jr., who was the United States attorney in Manhattan in the early 1970's. Mr. Seymour wrote that Richard G. Kleindienst, a deputy attorney general, suggested convening a grand jury in New York to that end. Mr. Seymour said he refused.

Some experts believe he would not have won. The most authoritative analysis of the 1917 law, by Harold Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt Jr. in the Columbia Law Review in 1973, concluded, based largely on the law's legislative history, that it was not meant to apply to newspapers.
A second law is less ambiguous. Enacted in 1950, it prohibits publication of government codes and other "communications intelligence activities." Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who took part in terrorism investigations in New York after the Sept. 11 attacks, said that both The Times, for its disclosures about the eavesdropping program, and The Post, for an article about secret C.I.A. prisons, had violated the 1917 law. The Times, he added, has also violated the 1950 law.

"It was irresponsible to publish these things," Mr. McCarthy said. "I wouldn't hesitate to prosecute."

The reporters who wrote the two articles recently won Pulitzer Prizes.

Even legal scholars who are sympathetic to the newspapers say the legal questions are not straightforward.

"They are making threats that they may be able to carry out technically, legally," Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the author of "Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime," said of the administration. The law, Professor Stone added, "has always been understood to be about spying, not about newspapers, but read literally it could be applied to both."

Others say the law is unconstitutional as applied to the press under the First Amendment.

"I don't think that anyone believes that statute is constitutional," said James C. Goodale, who was the general counsel of The New York Times Company during the Pentagon Papers litigation. "Literally read, the statute must be violated countless times every year."

Rodney A. Smolla, the dean of the University of Richmond law school, took a middle ground. He said the existing laws were ambiguous but that in theory it could be constitutional to make receiving classified information a crime. However, he continued, the First Amendment may protect newspapers exposing wrongdoing by the government.

The two newspapers contend that their reporting did bring to light important information about potential government misconduct. Representatives of the papers said they had not been contacted by government investigators in connection with the two articles.

That is baffling, Mr. McCarthy said. At a minimum, he said, the reporters involved should be threatened with prosecution in an effort to learn their sources.

"If you think this is a serious offense and you really think national security has been damaged, and I do," he said, "you don't wait five or six months to ask the person who obviously knows the answer."

Case Against 2 Lobbyists

Curiously, perhaps the most threatening pending case for journalist is one brought against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac. The lobbyists, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were indicted in August on charges of violating the 1917 law by receiving and repeating national defense information to foreign officials and reporters.
The lobbyists say the case against them is functionally identical to potential cases against reporters.

"You can't say, 'Well, this is constitutional as applied to lobbyists, but it wouldn't be constitutional if applied to journalists,' " Abbe D. Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Rosen, said at a hearing in the case last month, according to a court transcript.

In court papers filed in January, prosecutors disagreed, saying lobbyist and journalist were different. But they would not rule out the possibility of also charging journalists under the law.
"Prosecution under the espionage laws of an actual member of the press for publishing classified information leaked to it by a government source would raise legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken lightly," the papers said. Indeed, they continued, "the fact that there has never been such a prosecution speaks for itself."

Some First Amendment lawyers suspect that the case against the lobbyists is but a first step.

"From the point of view of the administration expanding its powers, the Aipac case is the perfect case," said Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the First Amendment Center, a nonprofit educational group in Virginia. "It allows them to try to establish the precedent without going after the press."

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From Tom Paine:

Democracy 2.0
Timothy Karr
April 28, 2006

Timothy Karr is campaign director for Free Press , which is coordinating the SavetheInternet.com coalition.

As of this morning , more than 1,500 blogs have taken up a new cause, posting links to SavetheInternet.com and urging their readers to call on members of Congress to stand firm in defense of Internet freedom.

And, for the first time in blogger history, the Hill is hearing it.

The cyberstorm is over “Net Neutrality,” the principle that prevents large telephone and cable companies from controlling what we do, where we go and what we watch online. As part of a vote on new telecommunications legislation on Wednesday, House Energy and Commerce Committee members defeated an amendment by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that would have protected net neutrality by a count of 34-22.

What's remarkable about this result is the shift that occurred on Capitol Hill in the week prior to the vote. An unlikely coalition of political activists from the right and left, consumer groups, bloggers and Internet gurus banded together at SavetheInternet.com and sent more than 250,000 letters to Congress. This sparked an Internet revolt among bloggers who heaped scorn upon any member of the House who dared side with companies like AT&T and Verizon, which are spending millions of dollars in Washington to dismantle the rules that would stop their plans to control Internet content.

When it came time to vote on Markey's amendment, two Democrats on the committee switched their previous votes to favor net neutrality and several others, who had been undecided, also voted for the amendment, citing the explosion of public interest in the issue.

More elected officials on both sides of the aisle, in both the House and the Senate are now monitoring the pulse of the blogosphere as this issue spreads offline.

"We would not have turned the corner in this fight without your blogs, your voices," Congressman Markey said yesterday during a teleconference with bloggers. "We need to put every member of Congress on record on where they stand on the future of the Internet," Markey said. That momentum has shifted in Congress, he continued, "is a reflection of the rumbling in cyberspace about what's going on with this bill."

Bloggers from left, right and center, including DailyKos, BuzzMachine, Atrios, Instapundit and even actress Alyssa Milano, called on their readers to pay very close attention to this issue. They’ve urged everybody to go after any elected representative who ignores the public interest in favor of the well-heeled telephone and cable lobbyists that have swarmed Capitol Hill as representatives attempt to rewrite telecommunications law.

Undaunted by the committee defeat, Markey is now rallying colleagues on the left and the right to support the introduction of his Network Neutrality Amendment onto the full floor of the House next week.

But it's an uphill battle. For the amendment to be voted upon by all members, it has to first get past the House's gatekeepers on the Rules Committee, which Rolling Stone ’s Matt Taibbi calls , "the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination—a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish."

This 13-member committee (nine Republicans and four Democrats) holds the congressional agenda in its grip. If Rules votes down your amendment, your amendment is DOA. Bloggers are banding together to ensure that no member of Congress gets off the hook that easily.
"There's a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill," Matt Stoller said in a post at MyDD . "No one wants to see the telcos make a radical change to the Internet and screw this medium up, except, well, the telcos."

Politicians get scared when they realize the public is paying attention. As the blogosphere catches fire, momentum is shifting in Washington. Whereas before the big telephone companies and their coin-operated lobbyists were confident that Congress would simply roll over and do their bidding, today no member of Congress can vote with the telecom cartel without expecting repercussions.

The public is now watching and, with increasing frequency and volume, the message is getting through to Congress: we will not stand for any law that threatens Internet freedom.

Wrap...

From Secrecy News :

DISFAVORED CIA REPORTS PLACED ONLINE

U.S. News and World Report reported last January that at least three publications of the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, all critical of the agency, had been withheld from the CIA web site ("ATangled Web Woven," by David E. Kaplan, U.S. News, January 30, 2006).

Now two of those disfavored publications are available on the Federation of American Scientists web site. The third will follow."Intelligence for a New Era in American Foreign Policy" is the report of a conference convened by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, published in January 2004 (1.3 MB PDF): http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/newera.pdf"

Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study" is an interesting and unusual effort to assess intelligence analysis from an anthropological viewpoint, published in 2005. See(184 pages, 8 MB): http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/analytic.pdf

It is a small irony of the Information Age that by attempting to selectively withhold these publications from the web, the CIA has practically guaranteed that more people will read them than would have otherwise done so. But CIA seems to have little understanding of that fact, and the Agency's efforts to suppress criticism are as relentless as they are self-defeating."

The CIA has imposed new and tighter restrictions on the books, articles, and opinion pieces published by former employees who are still contractors with the intelligence agency," writes Shane Harris. See "Silencing the Squeaky Wheel" by Shane Harris, National Journal, April 27: http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0427nj1.htm

See also "Excessive Secrecy Hurting CIA Studies" by Shaun Waterman, UPI,April 27: http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi/20060420-121533-2221r.htm

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From sfgate.com :

Let Us Now Spit Upon The Earth You can do it the old way, or you can do it like Bush -- with smirks, mountain bikes and oil
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, April 28, 2006

Look, see those tire marks? That ungainly footprint? Feel that breath of humid doom upon your skin? Yes, the president was just here. Up in Napa Valley, riding his official Trek Mountain Bike One over the rocks and down the trails and through the cool California mud, a small army of handlers and Secret Service agents and emergency medical personnel by his side and/or rumbling along behind him in big black SUVs. It was very cute, in a fingernail-yanked-with-pliers sort of way.

It was Earth Day weekend. The president talked about how mountain biking helped him "settle his soul" and "burn off excess energy when you're living life to its fullest," which apparently means blindly running your nation into a bloody flaming wall at full speed like a drunk NASCAR driver on Ambien. He talked about how he enjoyed mountain biking because it had such minimal impact on the pristine, wild surroundings. Shockingly, lightning did not strike him dead on the spot.

Later on, the prez talked up the need for wildly implausible hydrogen-powered cars to the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a group who, if they had a drop of integrity and brains among them, didn't believe a single word he said.

Bush on Earth Day. It's like Satan talking up the joys of Easter. It's like Paris Hilton chatting about treading the planet with humility and grace. It's like Jerry Falwell gushing about his love of Brokeback Mountain, Eli Lilly extolling the virtues of meditation and green tea. It is, in a word, embarrassing. Humiliating. Intellectually bludgeoning. And hypocritical in a way, and at a depth, that is as nauseating to stomach as the testosterone levels at a Duke lacrosse frat party.
This much we know: Bush is, it has been widely noted, the worst environmental president in modern America history. He has done more to eliminate protections and pollute the air, sell off national forests, whore the waterways, drill for oil and eviscerate pollution regulation than any president on the books. His environmental record is abysmal, shameful, and includes installing two of the worst secretaries of the interior in history, the abominable Gale Norton and now her male counterpart Dirk Kempthorne, who have turned around and reduced protections and sold off more forestland to private concerns -- oil, timber, coal, you name it -- since the Harding administration.

And of course, we are the only "enlightened" nation in the world to publicly spit upon the Kyoto Treaty, a landmark global pact to reduce CO2 emissions that is still only considered the first baby step in tackling the very, very dire problem of global warming.

Bush is, after all, a failed oilman. He has done all he can to ensure we will be dependent on the black death for the next two decades, minimum, which is, not surprisingly, the average remaining life span of his favoritest CEO cronies in the oil business. Serve the masters first, the Saudi sheiks second, the American people about, oh, 157th. It is the BushCo way.

No matter. Up in Napa, the president talked about connecting with nature, about getting his heart rate up by getting out there and challenging himself against the rugged terrain. Nature, of course, was unimpressed, sort of neutral on the whole thing, Bush just another animal scratching tracks on her incredibly resilient skin. Nature has a Zen-like quality about such things -- or perhaps more like Vishnu-Brahma-Shiva, creator and preserver and destroyer, watching it all, shrugging, sighing, taking the long view. If nature could talk, she would tell Bush he will be worm food very soon, and by the way, the worms are furious. She would then go back to watching the baby giraffes play in Africa.

There is no beauty in American political policy toward the Earth. There is no poetry or grace or true heart in how politicians -- especially Republican politicians -- view our natural commodities, no respect unless it is based on fear, unless it is begrudging and resentful, like when a hurricane makes a mockery of the president's feeble and unconvincing attempts to prove he cares. Has it always been this way? Maybe. But some leaders are far, far worse than others.

This is perhaps the most frightening thing about the Bush visit, about him having the nerve, the sheer vulgar gall to discuss the quality of his soul while biking through a natural habitat his administration so violently works to defile. It is this: He actually meant it. Bush was probably genuinely heartfelt about enjoying his ride through our troubled trees. He thinks he is attuned and connected. He thinks nature is nifty and calming. And, simply put, there is no more dangerous a leader on the face of the earth who, in every policy and every law and every action, abuses and distorts and molests the world around him, and yet who can turn on an ideological dime and calmly glorify that very thing which he helps destroy.

Recall former Spokane Mayor Jim West, big scandal just recently, an outspoken and homophobic über-Republican on the outside, a guy who helped pass anti-gay legislation in Washington state and railed against gay rights in public, but who happily turned around and for over 20 years solicited 18-year-old boys in gay chat rooms at night and offered them free candy, T-shirts, sex, jobs. Bush is just like that. Abuse your issue openly during the day, screw it at night. And worst of all, give not a single thought to the brutal dichotomy.

Are there levels to hypocrisy? Degrees? Rings of hypocritical hell? It would appear so. After all, there are the common varieties of minor hypocrisies most of us live with every day, like claiming a deep concern for the planet but still using plastic bags and shopping at Target and enjoying a long summer drive. Like swooning over super-cute animals but never considering giving up our cool leather jackets and smokin' snakeskin boots. Like loathing obnoxious cell phone users but never thinking we might actually, you know, be one.

Hypocrisy is, verily, the American national pastime. It is part of our national character. But there is a point where hypocrisy takes a turn toward the abusive, toward the spiritually debilitating. It becomes less like livable hypocrisy and more like a mental condition, a barely functional psychosis.

And right now, we are, it seems, living smack in the middle of a decade of just such madness, led by a bumbling and confused, tepid little devil himself, happily biking through the trees as the forest groans.

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From Raw Story.org :

Bush okays Dubai military deal
RAW STORY
Published: Thursday April 27, 2006
Print This Email This

President Bush is expected on Friday to announce his approval of a deal under which a Dubai-owned company would take control of nine plants in the United States that manufacture parts for American military vehicles and aircraft, say two administration officials familiar with the terms of the deal, the NEW YORK TIMES will report Friday. Excerpts:
#
The officials, who were granted anonymity so they could speak freely about something the president had not yet announced, said that the final details had not yet been set and that Bush might put conditions on the transaction to keep military technology in the United States.

But his action is almost certain to attract scrutiny in Congress, because of the political furor that erupted over the administration’s approval of a deal earlier this spring that would have given another Dubai-owned company, Dubai Ports World, leases to operate several American port terminals through its acquisition of a British company, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co.

In this case, the plants in question are owned by Doncasters Group Ltd., a British company that is being purchased for $1.2 billion from the Royal Bank of Scotland Group by Dubai International Capital, which is owned by the United Arab Emirate government.

FULL RESTRICTED VERSION HERE

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From truthout.org :

Immigration Flood Unleashed by NAFTA
By Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Thursday 27 April 2006

The recent ferment on immigration policy has been so narrow that it has excluded the real issue: family-sustaining wages for workers both north and south of the border. The role of the North American Free Trade Agreement and misnamed "free trade" has been scarcely mentioned in the increasingly bitter debate over the fate of America's 11 to 12 million illegal aliens.

NAFTA was sold to the American public as the magic formula that would improve the American economy at the same time as it would raise up the impoverished Mexican economy. The time has come to look at the failures of this type of trade agreement before we engage in more, and further lower the economic prospects of all workers affected. While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA's ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:

NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven Mexican farmers off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder so many Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their "death warrant.")

NAFTA's service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.

Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the government-sponsored crushing of union organization, has resulted in sweatshop pay along the border where wages now typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

So rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have actually fallen since NAFTA. The initial growth in the number of jobs has leveled off, with China's even more repressive labor system luring US firms to locate there instead.

But Mexicans must still contend with the results of the American-owned "maquiladora" sweatshops: subsistence-level wages, pollution, congestion, horrible living conditions (cardboard shacks and open sewers), and a lack of resources (for streetlights and police) to deal with a wave of violence against vulnerable young women working in the factories. The survival (or less)-level wages coupled with harsh working conditions have not been the great answer to Mexican poverty, while they have temporarily been the answer to Corporate America's demand for low wages.

With US firms unwilling to pay even minimal taxes, NAFTA has hardly produced the promised uplift in the lives of Mexicans. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Gustavo Elizondo, whose city is crammed with US-owned low-wage plants, expressed it plainly: "We have no way to provide water, sewage, and sanitation workers. Every year, we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and more wealth."

Falling industrial wages, peasants forced off the land, small businesses liquidated, growing poverty: these are direct consequences of NAFTA. This harsh suffering explains why so many desperate Mexicans lured to the border area in the false hope that they could find dignity in the US-owned maquiladoras - are willing to risk their lives to cross the border to provide for their families. There were 2.5 million Mexican illegals in 1995; 8 million have crossed the border since then. In 2005, some 400 desperate Mexicans died trying to enter the US.

NAFTA failed to curb illegal immigration precisely because it was never designed as a genuine development program crafted to promote rising living standards, health care, environmental cleanup, and worker rights in Mexico. The wholesale surge of Mexicans across the border dramatically illustrates that NAFTA was no attempt at a broad uplift of living conditions and democracy in Mexico, but a formula for government-sanctioned corporate plunder benefiting elites on both sides of the border.

NAFTA essentially annexed Mexico as a low-wage industrial suburb of the US and opened Mexican markets to heavily-subsidized US agribusiness products, blowing away local producers. Capital could flow freely across the border freely to low-wage factories and Wal-mart-type retailers, but the same standard of free access would be denied to Mexican workers.

Meanwhile, with the planned Central American Free Trade Agreement with five Central American nations coming up, we can anticipate even greater pressure on our borders as agricultural workers are pushed off the land without positive, alternative employment opportunities. People from Guatemala and Honduras will soon learn that they can't compete for industrial jobs with the most oppressed people in say, China, by agreeing to lowering their wages even more. Further, impoverished Central American countries don't have the resources to deal with the pollution and crime that results from moving people from rural areas to the city, often without their families.

Thus far, we have been presented with a narrow range of options to cope with the tide of illegal immigrants living fearfully in the shadows of American life. Should they simply be walled off and criminalized, as Sensenbrenner and House Republicans suggest? The Sensenbrenner option seeks to exploit the sentiment that illegal immigrants entering the US rather than US corporation exiting the US for Mexico and China are the primary cause of falling wages for most Americans.

The Bush version is only slightly different, envisioning the illegal immigrants as part of a vast disposable pool of cheap labor with no meaningful rights on the job or even the right to vote, to be returned to Mexico upon the whim of their employers.

Yet there is another well-known path of economic and social integration that has been ignored in the debates over immigration in the US: the one followed by the European Union and their social charter calling for decent wages, health care, and extensive retraining in all nations. Before then-impoverished nations like Spain, Greece and Portugal were admitted, they received massive EU investments in roads, health care, clean water, and education. The implementation of democracy, including worker rights, was an equally vital pre-condition for entry into the EU.

The underlying concept: the entire reason for trade is to provide improved lives across borders, not to exploit the cheapest labor and weakest environmental rules. We need to question the widely-held assumption that what benefits American corporations benefits Mexican workers and American workers. An authentic plan for growth and development isn't about further enriching Wall Street, major corporations, and a handful of Mexican billionaires; it is about the creation of family-supporting jobs. It is also about a healthy environment, healthy workers, good education, and ordinary people being able to achieve their dreams.

The massive tide of illegal immigration from Mexico is merely one symptom of an economic arrangement where human needs, not maximum profits - are not the ultimate goal but a subject of neglect. Neither a massive, shameful barrier at the border nor a disposable guest-worker program will address the problems ignited by NAFTA.

Programs providing stable, decent employment, modern transportation, clean water, and environmental cleanup are needed to take the place of the immense NAFTA failure and allow Mexicans to live decent, hopeful lives in their native land. But such an effort is imaginable only if the aim is truly mutual uplift for all citizens in both nations, instead of the NAFTA-fueled race to the bottom.

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From TomDispatch :

Tomgram:
Judith Coburn, Caring for Veterans on the Cheap

Can anyone be surprised any longer when FEMA reneges on its promise of a year's free housing to Hurricane Katrina evacuees? Or that, in once can-do America, the devastated southeastern coast from which those residents fled in such confusion remains almost singularly unreconstructed as the next hurricane season approaches? Or that the only ones likely to receive relief at the gas pump this summer are the oil companies? Or that the Bush administration is incapable of running a new Medicare drug program as anything other than an experience in chaos? Or that so many functions that once mad! e civil government seem in any way civil are simply disappearing and others are being rebuilt on a military model?

Typically, a Senate report on dismantling FEMA suggests replacing it with "a new National Preparedness and Response Authority whose head would... serve as the president's top adviser for national emergency management, akin to the military role served by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It would reunify disaster preparedness and response activities that [Department of Homeland Security head Michael] Chertoff decoupled, and restore grant-making authority taken away by Congress in redefining a stronger national preparedness system with regional coordinators, a larger role for the National Guard and the Defense Department and more money for training, planning and exercises."

None of this should surprise anyone all these years into the Bush presidency. But if you really want a benchmark of where we're heading, consider the Veterans Administration as the gasping canary in the American mineshaft of civility. And think of the matter this way: While President Dwight Eisenhower warned of a "military-industrial complex" in his 1961 farewell address to the American people ("In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex..."), we have never had a president who was so determined to turn more of what once passed for civil government over to the Pentagon, an organization seemingly intent on proving in Iraq and elsewhere that reconstruction and civil governance are nowhere in its bag of tricks.

Yet from avian-flu defense to catastrophe relief, from civil reconstruction to global diplomacy and domestic intelligence-gathering, the Pentagon, whose budget dwarfs all else, is the preeminent institution in this country today, shouldering ever more of the burden ever more poorly.

So when what is most "civil" in the military starts to falter as well, all of us should take note. In this case, as Judith Coburn reports below, the health-care and disability system for American veterans -- the very men and women this administration so cavalierly sent off to its war of choice in Iraq -- is in a state of increasing disarray and faces a wounded administration that secretly likes to think of the medical care of veterans as another form of welfare to be slashed.

Tom

Coming Home from War on the Cheap
Shortchanging the Wounded
By Judith Coburn

On the eve of his Marine unit's assault on Falluja in November, 2004, Blake Miller read to his men from the Bible (John 14:2-3): "In my father's house, there are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I leave this place and go there to prepare a place for you, so that where I may be, you may be also."

A photograph of Miller's blood smeared, filthy face, so reminiscent of David Douglas Duncan's photos of war weary Marines in Vietnam, is one of the Iraq War's iconic images. Over a hundred newspapers ran it. But as the San Francisco Chronicle reported recently, Miller, a decorated war hero, has been shattered psychologically by Iraq. Disabled by flashbacks and nightmares, he continues to pay daily and dearly for his service there.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.

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[Note: I commend Commander Coye (ret) for speaking out on the outrageous treatment of some of our honorable and courageous military. The wasteful, hurtful "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy should have been discarded long ago. We don't have so much brainpower and talent that we can afford to waste any of it due to ignorance and bias. My thanks to the Commander for allowing this posting. ]

The Honorable Susan Davis
4305 University Avenue Suite 515
San Diego, CA 92105

Dear Representative Davis:

I write as a retired naval officer who happens to be a lesbian. I was told by Jeri Dilno, one of your constituents, that you’re interested in hearing from female naval officers about the “ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT)” gay ban to help you make a decision regarding co-sponsoring HR1059.
I write not only as a naval officer, but as a native-born San Diegan who grew up in the Navy. (My dad, Rear Admiral Jack Coye, was a famous WWII submariner). My parents retired to Coronado in 1968. I served my last seven years in San Diego and after retirement taught Political Science at Mesa College, San Diego State and University of San Diego. San Diego is my hometown.

During my active duty service, 1960-80, I helped enhance the career opportunities for Navy women as described in My Navy Too (enclosed), a creative memoir. This memoir details my trials and tribulations as a female naval officer when we had so few women, juxtaposed with the superb opportunities serving in our United States Navy. My primary struggles centered around being someone who discovered she was a lesbian while on active duty and the need to cope with living two separate lives, while simultaneously handling significant billets, including three intelligence tours and ultimately, as a commanding officer.

For you to truly understand the dilemmas of being a lesbian in the military I will invoke the personal: As Commanding Officer, PSA, NTC, my duties forced me to discharge 8-10 young men and women for the sole reason of homosexuality. Their excellent performance ratings and abilities were not considered. These actions were a final straw — my integrity told me I could no longer continue to live a lie, serving an organization that was (and still is) so blatantly discriminatory towards me and other homosexuals.

I understand that you want to be seen as neutral on the gay ban. I’m sad you feel your taking a positive stand for military gays and lesbians would lessen your ability to work with active duty and retired Navy constituents. This stance in some way reminds me of my dad. I had finished writing My Navy Too and asked him for emotional support and an “okay” to publish the manuscript. He was adamantly against its publication. He said, “What would our friends think of your lifestyle and of the Coye family?” Most of my parents’ friends were retired admirals and captains. I replied, “Dad, you might be surprised how they react. From my
discussions with straight Navy friends about the manuscript, they still respect me for who I am and what I accomplished in the Navy, and they support the idea of publication.”

After awhile Dad changed his mind. He said, “I have come to understand that you had no choice as to your sexuality.” His realization came from reading his daughter’s book, from self-education. To his surprise, after the book’s publication most of his friends were very supportive of me and “the Coye family.” It didn’t matter that I was a lesbian. They said, “You must be very proud of Beth and her accomplishments.”

For you to change your neutral position regarding cosponsoring HR 1059 would take a paradigm shift. It would be similar to what I wrote about through the character of Commander Tucker Fairfield — whose professional life almost matched mine — on page 247 of My Navy Too. You would have to be willing to take a leap and metaphorically come out of the shadowy illusions of Plato’s Cave and experience a path less traveled, a different reality about military gays and lesbians. I know you would gain support from straight retirees and active duty personnel. You would be surprised, as was my dad, at their responses.

I imagine you feel that co-sponsoring HR 1059 might jeopardize your working relationships and that “national security” issues must take precedence over softer, people issues, especially gay and lesbian people. I also know, however, that human resources issues in the long haul are more important than hardware and technology issues. For instance, how many fine young gays and lesbians are refusing to serve because of our inane DADT policy? What about the 65,000 military gays and lesbians on active duty striving to lead two lives and to live a lie, as I did for 20 years? To go against your conscience because of others’ unenlightened views, to me, is to be on an untenable and unhealthy path.....yet only you can choose your path.

May I suggest that you and others on the Committee consider ways to truly educate military and legislative leaders regarding the effects of the DADT policy upon not only the institution, but those most affected by this policy, a policy doomed from its beginnings. To this end, I would be pleased to forward copies of My Navy Too — in which both sides are argued — to anyone on your staff or to Committee members who might benefit from its reading. .

Thank you for being open to hearing from retired military gays and lesbians. If you would care to speak to a group of us, I’d be happy to arrange a meeting. I’m planning to join Service Members Legal Defense Network’s Lobby Days , May 15-16.

Warm regards,
Beth F. Coye, Commander, U.S. Navy (ret.) 541.482.6833, coyebf@mind.net
(Still a San Diegan at heart)

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From Strategic Forecasting Inc :

Combat Season and the Human Intelligence Front
By Fred Burton

There has been an upsurge of activity -- both by coalition military forces and jihadists -- along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent days. This is partly due to the spring thaws, which traditionally mark the beginning of the combat season in the region -- and indeed, U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan have launched a fresh offensive, Operation Mountain Lion, in Afghanistan's Kunar province.

But more seems to be afoot in the region than the anticipated military offensives. Specifically, several men have been murdered recently -- at least four of them beheaded -- on the belief that they were collaborating with the Americans, and some of the bodies had notes pinned to their clothing labeling them as American spies.

On the whole, the rhythm of activity this year seems to have a different beat; a sense of pressure is building for combatants on both sides of the U.S.-jihadist war, and this pressure seems to be coming from a variety of sources. Warfare, of course, is an evolutionary process.

The United States entered the war -- and Afghanistan -- in 2001 with a heavy reliance on signals intelligence, surveillance and some military forces. These certainly have had their uses, but the jihadists have been able to adapt to the known risks. For example, following Osama bin Laden's narrow escape at Tora Bora in late 2001, there were revelations in the press that his location had been tracked from signals sent by his satellite phone; it is believed that he may have escaped capture by sending the phone with a bodyguard who traveled in the opposite direction from bin Laden.

Similarly, the United States and its coalition partners appear to have had some success in tracing the recordings released by bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri back toward the source -- and the intelligence gleaned from this process may have triggered operations intended to kill or capture al Qaeda leaders. The number and frequency of recordings, particularly by al-Zawahiri (who was targeted in a Hellfire missile strike in Damadola, Pakistan, in January and had been the most often seen face of al Qaeda since 2004) appear to have dropped off dramatically as a result of such operations.

All in all, the evolutionary cycle of measures and countermeasures has forced the United States to rely ever more heavily on human intelligence (humint) -- which historically has been one of the weaknesses of the U.S. intelligence system in fighting a non-state actor. And there clearly have been signs that the humint capabilities of the Americans and their allies are improving.

The First Source of Pressure

The human intelligence battle between the Americans and al Qaeda is not new; it dates back to the days before the "Bin Laden Unit" was established at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. However, for the first several years, human intelligence efforts targeting al Qaeda were far from robust. The 9/11 attacks changed all that. The United States and its allies began serious efforts to develop human sources within or close to al Qaeda, but establishing such a network takes time -- especially when such a difficult target is in question. It is little wonder, then, that the United States relied heavily on technical intelligence methods in the early years of the war, and al Qaeda learned how to counter them. The battle now appears to be joined on the humint front, however.

As American and allied intelligence services have expanded humint networks in the region where al Qaeda's leadership is believed to be hiding, they have begun to offer even larger quantities of cash and visas to potential recruits. (Yes, visas. An opportunity to move one's entire family to the United States, Britain or Australia, with all expenses paid, is a powerful motivator to work for a time as an informant.) As a result, the jihadists now are finding it necessary to counter this new Western "offensive." Judging from the press reports about recent killings of suspected spies, it appears they are following through. Incidents that have surfaced in recent days include the beheading of a villager in North Waziristan agency who supplied food to American forces. The headless body of another man was found in Madakhel -- where Pakistani forces have been fighting with Taliban and al Qaeda supporters -- with a note saying that "all those working as U.S. spies will face the same fate." Perhaps the most widely noted incident, however, was the death of an al Qaeda suspect -- killed in a shootout with Pakistani forces -- in Bajaur agency April 20. Officials said that Marwan Hadid al-Suri, who was wanted by the United States, was an explosives expert who also worked as a "bag man," delivering funds to the families of al Qaeda supporters.

Clearly, both sides have developed their own lists of "most likely suspects" in the humint campaign. As the pressure mounts, the incentives offered for working as a source for the Americans will increase -- as will the penalties for those who are caught or who raise the suspicion of the jihadists.

Politics:

Fueling the PressureFor the United States, the pressure is due in some part to the current political cycle and the state of the presidency. Certainly, the search for bin Laden and al-Zawahiri -- and the failure to locate them -- is not a new theme. But it has been used by the Democrats in criticisms of the Bush administration since the 2004 presidential campaign, and it is beginning to resonate with growing numbers of Americans who have other reasons for turning sour on the president's leadership. One of the tools used to recruit informants is the State Department's "Rewards for Justice" program, which has publicly offered up to $25 million (and relocation) for those providing information that leads to the arrest or death of key al Qaeda figures. The bounty approach has been successful in the past; the U.S. government paid out large rewards to informants in Pakistan who aided in the capture of Mir Amal Kansi and Abdel Basit -- who was snagged for a mere $2 million reward. Despite the dramatic increase in the bounty offer, though, the program has yet to bear fruit in the case of bin Laden or al-Zawahiri.

U.S. forces have gotten close to al-Zawahiri on a few occasions, most recently in Damadola, but when the target is missed, the voting public is not prone to giving the administration credit for the effort. Rather, it prompts al Qaeda's leadership to emerge from the shadows, to prove to both their followers and the United States that they remain alive, well and in command. Within days of the Damadola strike, al-Zawahiri issued another videotape -- taunting the United States for its failure. Indeed, every time al Qaeda leaders issue a statement -- such as the audiotape by bin Laden or the new video featuring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that came out this week -- discussion of the administration and its failure to capture them is turned up a notch.

Within hours of the latest bin Laden airing, for example, U.S. President George W. Bush's critics were on television, charging that the decision to invade Iraq had deflected attention and resources away from the search for al Qaeda's apex leadership.

With his public approval ratings still on the decline and midterm elections looming in the fall, the president is in need of a win. There are other measures at his disposal, but a successful operation resulting in the death of bin Laden or al-Zawahiri obviously would be a major boost. Such a score would be welcomed by the American public at any point, of course, but if the administration is to have a success Republicans can trumpet during the coming election campaign, it will need to act during the dawning combat season.

Al Qaeda: Fighting Attrition and Informants

Of course, the administration is not alone in sensing pressure; al Qaeda's forces have been badly battered during the past four years. Senior operational leaders, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, have been captured; others -- including Mohammed Atef and Abu Hamza Rabia -- have been killed. Regional affiliates have been able to carry out attacks since 9/11, but the core leadership is hiding in isolation and strategic capabilities have been severely degraded.

The military operations in Kunar province are another factor to consider. Past U.S. operations in that province have sparked tenacious resistance by the jihadists, indicating that there might be high-value al Qaeda targets there. The logical safe haven, of course, is on the Pakistan side of the border. The Taliban, al Qaeda and affiliated militias long have used these areas as a rest and refit base, knowing that U.S. forces cannot or will not chase them into Pakistani territory. There are very public Taliban locations here, with large billboards touting Taliban slogans. Moreover, tribal ties and other relationships mean that many of the residents in this region are at least sympathetic toward the Taliban and jihadist cause.

However, Pakistani forces have been continuing operations in the areas corresponding with Kunar province, and there have been a series of strikes involving U.S. Predator drones along the border region as well. The last of these was at Damadola -- which, though it didn't kill al-Zawahiri, did result in the deaths of four others believed to have been al Qaeda operational leaders. The strike likely disrupted al Qaeda plans just preceding Bush's trip to Pakistan on March 4.

Clearly, the challenges for coalition troops in this region are great, but they do not appear to have been insurmountable. Military operations have been designed to ring in and restrict the movements of al Qaeda suspects, and the support of human intelligence sources -- who can provide targeting information -- is key, particularly in such rugged terrain. Thus far, al Qaeda has held its own in the humint war, but the Americans now seem to be gaining ground -- and the jihadists must counter the new threat to their lives with brutal efficiency.

Fear and Psychology

The web of protection that al Qaeda leaders have spun around themselves has varied and nuanced threads. There are shared religious convictions, cultural and religious obligations to protect guests, ties of friendship and intermarriage with locals, and other factors that would make one loathe to betray their locations. But significantly, there is also fear -- a double-edged sword. We cannot know if any or all of the alleged collaborators who have recently been murdered were indeed providing intelligence to the Americans, but their deaths and the warnings sent with them vividly illustrate al Qaeda's reaction to the increasing human intelligence pressure. In essence, they have upped the ante for Americans attempting to recruit sources and the stakes for those who might be tempted to provide information.

However, the very fact that the Americans are attempting to ramp up their humint network also might force al Qaeda to step up operational security measures, and perhaps even instill an added measure of paranoia. Tactically, this could make it somewhat harder for the United States to get a source in close -- something that is already incredibly difficult to accomplish -- but it may also result in the leadership becoming even more isolated and unable to take part in operational planning. Paranoia also adds to the odds that al Qaeda members or sympathizers might target and kill an innocent person -- and in so doing, possibly anger a family member (or clan). Revenge is sometimes a stronger motivator than money, particularly among certain cultures that emphasize the concepts of tribe, family and honor.

We believe, then, that the human intelligence war along the Afghan-Pakistan border will intensify as the year progresses. The Americans need to get to the al Qaeda leadership and -- with their targets leery of U.S. technical intelligence capabilities -- human sources will be the critical factor in success. Al Qaeda, obviously, will move to counter this pressure. More carnage along the border is likely to ensue.

Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.

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From .Voice of San Diego. org:

Don't Ask/Don't Tell of Failure
By KEITH TAYLOR
Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Corey Kepler, president and CEO of The TFS Group on Engineer Road, is the personification of the American success story. Right after he was discharged in 2000, he used some of the skills he had honed in the Army to grab a nice chunk of the computer business. A tad short of Horatio Alger perhaps, but it was the good old can-do spirit we Americans take such pride in.

Working from his apartment in Point Loma, Corey started a business that helped bring 320 tanning salons and/beauty parlors into the cyberspace world, and that's just for starters. So far, he has moved into his own office, hired 14 people, and is looking to expand to the East Coast. San Diego is lucky to have him and his business. Our gain is the Army's loss.

About 10 years ago, enticed by the promise of being part of a hi-tech crew that fired Patriot Missiles, young Kepler joined the Army. Soon his leaders found he had an even more valuable talent. He was one of those guys who recognized the tremendous potential of computers, and how to exploit them.

Soon he was sitting in an air conditioned office designing programs while his buddies were toiling away in the blazing sun of Fort Bliss, Texas, Corey wrote programs from scratch, sometimes integrating two or three existing ones to do a unified task. One, a training program he created several years ago, is still being used -- this in a world where computer programs are generally obsolete as soon as they are completed.

During his three-year hitch, he received the Army Achievement Medal and three personal letters of commendation. Any employer, anywhere, would make every effort to keep such a valuable person. Well, all but one, I guess.

Kepler was gay but discreet. He lived within the constraints of the military's "don't ask/don't tell" rules. For more than two years, most of his fellow soldiers, his noncoms, and his officers had no problems with his being gay. One of the letters of commendation was awarded personally by a major general.

Then he got new battery and battalion commanders, a captain and lieutenant colonel respectively. Things changed. His privileges were curtailed and his work, the sort of things for which he'd been so highly commended, were questioned.

Let me, as a veteran of 23 years, point out that isn't unusual and shouldn't be. New skippers must be sure that their predecessors weren't being snowed by a slick con artist. What was unusual was that his immediate seniors confided in him that his sexual orientation was the cause. They even told him things would be very rough if he decided to stay in the Army.

Again, I can attest that isn't uncommon, but it should be. Many a soldier or sailor has been earmarked as a guy who is "out of step." From that point on, life becomes hell.

espite the misuse of the word, being gay isn't queer, but the way our military handles it is. Take the so-called "don't ask" rule. It was instituted in 1993 to prevent just such things as Kepler went through. It didn't. It didn't even prevent much more egregious, often dangerous violations. Within a year of the inauguration of the program, seven soldiers learning Arabic or Farsi at the Defense Language Institute were kicked out; this at a time when we were told our biggest shortcomings in intelligence was a lack of linguists.

The military and our present administration have stayed the course despite the fact that restrictions against gays serving have been lifted elsewhere, here and abroad. My old outfit, the National Security Agency with all its secrecy has dropped the prohibitions. Likewise the FBI, most armed forces around the world, even the San Diego Police Department have lifted restrictions. Only a couple other countries in NATO still ban gays from their armed services.

I'd say it was time to come up to date on this problem, at least as up to date as we were in the Revolution. We might not even have been a republic if it hadn't been for Baron Frederich von Steuben, a gay officer we borrowed from Prussia to win a war.

Congress hired von Steuben to train the Continental forces stationed at the winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pa. He also wrote the official military guide for our Army. It, like Kepler's training program, stayed around for a while. It was our guide until 1812. Cities, towns or counties are named for von Steuben in Maine, New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio.

The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network was formed about the time "don't ask/don't tell" came out. They are holding a "lobby day" on May 14-16. Their intent is to urge congress to do away this wacko law. I hope congress members pay attention.

Keith Taylor is a retired navy officer living in Chula Vista. He can be reached at KRTaylorxyz@aol.com.

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From Publishers Lunch Weekly:

FICTION/DEBUT:

Former WSJ writer and Columbia MFA grad Jennifer Cody Epstein's IRON ORCHID, an epic historical novel based on the true story of Pan Yuliang, a celebrated and controversial female Chinese painter born into poverty at the turn of the century, who escaped life in a brothel to attend the Shanghai Academy of Art in 1917 and went on to have a flourishing career in Paris, to Jill Bialosky at Norton, in a pre-empt (US), and to Mary Mount at Viking UK, at auction, by Elizabeth Sheinkman at Curtis Brown UK.Elizabeth@curtisbrown.co.uk

Dutch rights to Pieter Swinkels at Bizije Bij, in a pre-empt, with offers in Italy and Germany.Rights: betsy@curtisbrown.co.uk

Sophie Judah's JWALANAGAR STORIES, depicting the shtetl life in a small Indian village among the Bene Israel Jews, to Altie Karper at Schocken Books, in a very nice deal, by Sharon Friedman at Sharon Friedman Literary Agency (World English). sfbooks@netvision.net.il

THRILLER:

Derek Nikitlas's PYRES, about a young girl who witnesses her father's murder during a carjacking which turns out not to be the random act of violence it first seems, to Michael Homler at St. Martin's, in a nice deal, by Jeff Gerecke.

[Note: St Martin's is an excellent publisher!]

GENERAL/OTHER:

Former game show producer Chuck Barris's THE BIG QUESTION, a satire set in the near-future, when a producer discovers the formula for the ultimate reality/game show, where contestants compete for millions of dollars -- and face on-camera execution if they lose, to David Rosenthal at Simon & Schuster, with Sarah Hochman editing, in a very nice deal, for publication in spring 2007, by Jennifer Lyons of Lyons & Pande (world).victoria.meyer@simonandschuster.com

Manette Ansay's THE CONFESSIONS OF JOSEPH FREMANTLE, about a woman in the early 1800s who went to sea as a man, and MY FATHER'S HOUSE, focusing on the love triangle among Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, again to Claire Wachtel at William Morrow, by Deborah Schneider at Gelfman Schneider (NA).

HISTORY/POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS:

Clayton Cramer's ARMED AMERICA, examining the origins and development of America's unique "gun culture" from the earliest settlement to 1840 and proving that our forebearers were armed to the teeth, to Joel Miller at Nelson Current, for publication in fall 2006, by Ed Knappman of New England Publishing Associates (World).ed@nepa.com

HARLEMWORLD author and Duke professor of African-American studies and urban anthropology John L. Jackson, Jr.'s RACIAL PARANOIA: The Paradox at the Heart of Black and White, a look at the historical and contemporary manifestations of racial paranoia in American society, and what this phenomena means for the way we understand race and racial difference in this country, to Ellen Garrison at Basic, at auction, by Andrew Stuart at The Stuart Agency (world). andrew@stuartagency.com

MEMOIR:

Actress Kathleen Turner's TAKE THE LEAD, LADY!, written in collaboration with Gloria Feldt (an author and former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America), covering her path to superstardom and revealing many private struggles and triumphs for the first time, and details on how she persevered in the face of health and family issues, to Karen Murgolo at Springboard Press, for six figures, at auction, by Karen Gantz Zahler at Karen Gantz Literary Management (world).Kgzahler@aol.com matthew.ballast@twbg.com

Marjorie Hart's SUMMER AT TIFFANY, the true story of a University of Iowa Kappa and her best friend, who came to New York during the summer of 1945 where they found positions as pages at Tiffany -- interacting with everyone from Judy Garland on her honeymoon to Old Man Tiffany -- while having misadventures in the city and falling in love, to Jennifer Pooley at William Morrow, for publication in April 2007,jennifer.pooley@harpercollins.com

NARRATIVE:

Kate Braestrup's FINDING THE BODY, about her work as a chaplain working on search-and-rescue missions for the Maine State Warden Service, to Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown, at auction, for publication in 2007, by Sally Wofford-Girand at Brick House (NA).

Playing House and When She Was Bad author Patricia Pearson's SCREAMING LIKE A GIRL: A History of Being Afraid, about the many dangers facing the modern world (avian flu, climate change, terrorism) and what we can do about them (panic); including the psychology, biology, and cultural background behind fear, to Gillian Blake at Bloomsbury, by Paula Balzer at Sarah Lazin Books (World English).

SPORTS:

Golf instructor Jim Hardy's THE PLANE TRUTH FOR GOLFERS MASTER CLASS, the follow up to his The Plane Truth for Golfers, with John Andrisani, to Mark Weinstein at McGraw-Hill, by Farley Chase at the Waxman Literary Agency (NA).

GENERAL/OTHER:

President and CEO of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School and host of the History Channel's Digging for the Truth Josh Bernstein's DIGGING FOR THE TRUTH, weaving history and archaeology with accounts of his travels drawn from his personal journal, including full-color photos, to Jonathan Burnham and Gail Winston at Harper, for publication in January 2007, by Mel Berger at the William Morris Agency.

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From truthout.org :

McCarthyism: Mary and Joe
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Tuesday 25 April 2006

As additional information on the firing of CIA official Mary McCarthy just ten days short of her retirement becomes available, what is afoot is becoming quite clear. We are witnessing a Stalinesque show trial sans the actual trial and inevitable execution. The purpose is intimidation, not extermination. We should be thankful for small favors, I suppose.

There has been no sign they put on the handcuffs as they "escorted" McCarthy out of the office last week. And it appears she will get off relatively lightly - with the character assassination regarded as appropriate for any "traitor" independently in touch with the press. And then there is the stigma that CIA Director Porter Goss, the staffers he brought with him from Congress (not-so-affectionately known as "the gosslings"), and Rush Limbaugh believe should inevitably attach to anyone who gave $2,000 to the Kerry campaign.

Goss and his "independent" Inspector General Danny Kaye - oops, I mean 35-year CIA veteran John Helgersen - are determined to show their patron, Vice President Dick Cheney, some results from the unprecedented rash of "single-issue" polygraph tests now being administered to CIA employees. Beware, all ye who have let the word "media" slip into consciousness. It's sweaty-palms time at CIA headquarters. The Fourth Estate has morphed into a Fifth Column.

The current witch-hunt atmosphere in Langley calls to mind that of February 1973 when James Schlesinger was appointed to replace the not-sufficiently-malleable Richard Helms as President Richard Nixon's CIA director. Watergate was unfolding and Nixon's poll numbers then were about what President George W. Bush's are now. At his first plenary meeting with CIA managers, Schlesinger came on rather strong: "I am here to make sure you guys don't screw Richard Nixon. And, just so you get the picture, I shall be reporting to Bob Haldeman, not to Henry Kissinger." Haldeman was Nixon's chief of staff; Kissinger his national security adviser (the customary contact for a CIA director).

The recent Washington Post report, quoting intelligence officials to the effect that "the White House has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers" is an especially alarming sign. Let all those who gave Kerry $2,000 beware. Goss and gosslings are in position to finish destroying any vestige of non-partisanship and objectivity at the CIA. Who is to stop them? John Negroponte who, as ambassador to Honduras, helped run the Contra war in Nicaragua for CIA Director William Casey and feigned ignorance of the rampant death squads there?

Back to McCarthy (Mary)

Whether or not Mary McCarthy was among the many sources used by Washington Post reporter Dana Priest for her Pulitzer Prize-winning story on the secret prisons run by CIA abroad, the PR folks at Langley have shot themselves in the foot by calling renewed attention to the kidnappings, "extraordinary renditions," and torture which Cheney and the president have had the agency carry out on so grand a scale. And we can rest assured that the hunt for patriotic truth tellers (aka leakers) will continue apace.

But it is also likely that the truth telling will continue. And, in the end, the truth tellers will be glad they did. The years of Bush, Cheney, and Goss are limited, and they will not be able to repeal 18 US Code 2441 (the War Crimes Act of 1996 condemning torture) before going out the door. In addition, potential truth tellers have become increasingly aware of the seldom-mentioned "Nuremberg obligation" to do what one reasonably can to prevent the commission of international crimes like torture.

By conducting these activities overseas, Bush's lawyers thought they might dodge the US criminal statute. Maybe so. But international sanctions also apply. Will Donald Rumsfeld be able to travel to Europe once he loses his Secret Service protection and that afforded by the office of secretary of defense? Will CIA operatives, like the notorious keystone-cops kidnapping crew in Milan, be able to vacation on the Riviera? Interpol knows who they are.

Those inside the government who become privy to - or, worse still, become responsible for - such criminal activity have a legal as well as a moral obligation to blow the whistle. So take heart, past or future truth tellers. With the polygraph, they may eventually track you down. But it is bound to be awkward indeed to take you to court for revealing war crimes. And you will have earned not only a badge of courage but also exculpatory evidence in the event there are prosecutions - here or abroad.

Staying Within "Grievance Channels"

Sunday's Washington Post quoted an unnamed "former senior intelligence official" saying he thought a majority of CIA officers would probably agree with the firing of McCarthy if, as the CIA alleges, she "knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence" with journalists (which she has now denied). "A small number might support her, but the ethic of the business is not to leak," said the former official, adding that one should stay within official grievance channels.

That's what my colleague CIA analyst Sam Adams did 40 years ago - and came to rue the day. Through painstaking research in Washington, combined with imaginative bar-hopping in Vietnam, Adams discovered that Gen. William Westmoreland's staff in Saigon had been ordered to keep Communist force figures artificially low (about half the actual strength), in order to project a picture of progress. When the countrywide offensive at Tet in late-January/early-February 1968 gave the lie to Westmoreland's figures and vindicated Adams, Sam tried manfully to hold the culprits accountable by going to the CIA's and the Pentagon's inspectors general. He got the proverbial run-around, and some 30,000 additional US troops and a million more Vietnamese fell before the war was over six years later. Adams was never able to shake his nagging remorse at the thought that he might have helped prevent further carnage, had he gone out of "official channels" and briefed his findings to the then-free mainstream press. He died at 55 when his heart gave out.

The tragedy of Sam Adams is well known, even to those, like Mary McCarthy, who joined the Agency many years after Sam left. From his present perch, I relish the thought that he is pleased that others may have learned a valuable lesson from the frustration he encountered by "staying within official grievance channels."

Like Sam, Mary McCarthy is an independent thinker, which she proved during her tenure as Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the White House from 1998 to 2001. There she achieved some notoriety for the personal letter she sent President Bill Clinton, criticizing the flimsiness of the "intelligence" that led to the cruise missile strike on the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant that some suggested might be producing chemical warfare agent. She was correct, but then-CIA director George Tenet vouched for the "evidence," testosterone won the day, and they blew the place up.

Torturous Decisions

Those paying attention to the issue of torture by the CIA and the Army will recall the tortured memorandum of January 25, 2002, authored by David Addington (then-counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and now Cheney's chief of staff) and signed by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. That memo argued that "Geneva's strict limitations on questioning enemy prisoners" were "obsolete" in the new war-on-terror paradigm. Still, Addington/Gonzales felt compelled to remind the president that US criminal code, the War Crimes Act (18 USC 2441), with its draconian penalties (including death) could come into play.

That statute pins the "war crime" label on any grave breach of Geneva, like "outrages against personal dignity," regardless of whether the detainee qualifies as a prisoner of war. Addington and Gonzales warned the president of the danger that he could be prosecuted under that law by a future independent counsel, but reassured him that there is a "reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." That was good enough for President Bush, who on February 7, 2002, signed a memorandum saying that detainees should be treated humanely, "as appropriate and consistent with military necessity." And that is the loophole through which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld drove a Mack truck. The "rotten apples" were at the very top of the barrel.

The infamous memorandum of January 25 was leaked to Newsweek, which published it and others like it in May 2004. The tortured reasoning was greeted with widespread scorn by the US legal profession and in August 2004 roundly condemned by the American Bar Association, 12 former federal judges, former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, former FBI Director William Sessions, and many others. The ABA formally condemned the administration's treatment of detainees and called upon it to "comply fully" with the US Constitution and international laws and conventions ratified by the US that outlaw torture. It was that same year, 2004, when the torture of prisoners was depicted in the leaked photos from Abu Ghraib, that Mary McCarthy returned to the CIA from a sabbatical that followed her stint at the White House.

Those who have worked with her testify to her respect for law and regulation. That she had more than passing interest in, and respect for the law is suggested not only by her decision several years ago to attend law school at night, but also by the hackles she reportedly raised among testosterone-laden operatives who saw her in her White House role as an annoying hindrance to aggressive tactics against terrorists.

Back at CIA, Mary McCarthy assumed a position in the office of CIA Inspector General John Helgersen, who is responsible for internal investigations of wrongdoing by the agency and has extraordinary access to secrets deprived to others under the need-to-know principle. It is well known that agency personnel, who witnessed torture by the US military in Guantanamo, for example, complained to superiors and to the White House. It is a safe bet that some agency officers also registered objections to "extraordinary rendition," including kidnapping and transporting "terrorist suspects" to so-called black prison camps for interrogation - "with the gloves off," in the swaggering words of then CIA chief counter-terrorism official Cofer Black (now a vice president with the Defense contractor Blackwater). In addition, some CIA officers may have learned of the warrantless eavesdropping in violation of NSA's "eleventh commandment" - thou shall not spy on Americans. In any event, it is certainly safe to say that Helgersen's IG account had become a growth industry, with a requirement for all the professional help it can muster. When Mary McCarthy came on board, she no doubt gained inside insight into complaints of a variety of abuses.

Departing From Custom

Sadly, common practice in such circumstances for someone at retirement age, as McCarthy was, is to hunker down, retire quietly with a healthy annuity, and then become something of a celebrity by writing a tell-all book and going on "60 Minutes." Not McCarthy. Given the courage and independence she showed in her earlier professional life together with her sensitivity to the law, it is a safe bet she tried hard to get management to address the more egregious abuses - torture and rendition, for example. It is equally likely that she got no help from former director George Tenet or current director Porter Goss, both of them on the end of a tight leash held by Vice President Dick Cheney.

But could she not have turned to her new boss, "independent" Inspector General Helgerson? As statutory IG, Helgerson does enjoy some unique prerogatives and autonomy, should he choose to exercise them. Those familiar with his longstanding penchant for sniffing the breezes from the White House and director's office and trimming his sails accordingly would be shocked to see him actually exercise those prerogatives. Rather, he has obediently acquiesced in denying Congress the particulars of his investigations - the one on the performance of CIA officers before September 11, 2001, for example, which reportedly heaped criticism on Medal of Freedom awardee George Tenet and other senior agency officials. And according to yesterday's New York Times, "independent watchdog" Helgerson recently let himself be talked into submitting to a polygraph exam by those he is supposed to be "watch-dogging." Remarkable.

It seems likely that Mary McCarthy quickly saw the lay of the land and decided the Helgerson-Goss route held no promise for success in addressing the abuses of torture and rendition. Had she any doubts on that score, they presumably were dispelled as she watched Director Porter Goss trot off with Cheney to the office of Sen. John McCain to plead for an exception for the CIA from his draft amendment banning torture. This particular mission was not accomplished, but the president appended a "signing statement" saying, in effect, that he feels free to disregard the McCain amendment banning torture.

Turn to Congress?

Where else to turn? The intelligence committees of Congress? A fool's errand. Indelibly imprinted on my mind is a remark made by CIA darling former Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-Texas) when he took the reins of the House Intelligence Committee during the war with the USSR in Afghanistan. Wilson wrote to his CIA friends, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you like." Some twenty years later, the committee's current chairman, Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), has proven a worthy successor, occasionally sniping - as he did yesterday on TV - at National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, but essentially giving the intelligence agencies free rein as long as they remain harnessed tightly to White House policy.

A recent episode may serve to illustrate this. Late last year, having bowed for over a year to White House pressure to suppress New York Times journalist James Risen's Pulitzer-winning scoop on warrantless wiretapping by NSA, the Times management suddenly awoke to the fact that Risen's book was about to appear. In order to avoid the embarrassment of not having carried such a critical story by one of its own writers, the Times told the White House that the story was about to be published. On December 5, 2005, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman were summoned to an oval office meeting with President Bush, who tried - this time in vain - to dissuade the Times from publishing the warrantless eavesdropping story, which then appeared 11 days later (and six weeks after Dana Priest's expose in the Post regarding secret CIA prisons for interrogating suspected terrorists).

The White House, however, apparently forgot to inform NSA Director, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander that a new die was cast. The next day, December 6, the blindsided Alexander - still following the old talking points - assured visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt (D-NJ) that NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order. When Holt later learned he had been deliberately misled about the NSA eavesdropping program, he wrote a blistering letter to Alexander. Nothing has been heard from Chairman Hoekstra, though, and there is not the slightest sign he cared very much that his colleague was lied to on a key aspect of his oversight responsibilities. So, the director of NSA can lie with impunity to minority members of the House intelligence committee; only the chairman counts.

This fits in well with a pattern long familiar to senior intelligence officers. And, as Mary McCarthy watched this latest charade, she must have felt affirmed in her apparent conviction that turning to the House "oversight" committee would, in present circumstances, be a feckless enterprise. And who better than she could see the high farce attached to Hoekstra's hyperbole yesterday on FOX as he parroted (twice) what were doubtless the "McCarthy talking points" from the White House:

"This person in the CIA thought that they were above the law (sic). They thought that the law did not apply to them. They have put America at risk. They have put our troops on the front lines at risk because they broke the law."

With all due respect, Congressman Hoekstra, if you would exercise your oversight responsibilities, the system of checks and balances could work, and folks like McCarthy would not have to go to the press.

Equally feckless would be recourse to the Senate intelligence committee chaired by Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), patsy for the White House since day one of his tenure. No need to rehearse the evidence here. You may wish, though, to check out Scott Ritter's comments on the Semper Fi senator from Kansas - "Semper Fraud, Senator Roberts" at http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ritter.php?articleid=5537.

Mary's Motivation

And so, assuming there is substance to press allegations that McCarthy has admitted she talked with the press, small wonder. (At the same time, she has now denied disclosing any classified information.) I was intrigued by a remark the press has attributed to former CIA deputy director Dick Kerr: "I have no idea what her motive was." Kerr added that McCarthy was a "good, substantive person." And he was right about that - "good" in the sense that she has that all too uncommon mix of smarts, integrity, and guts.

Well, Dick, it's a no-brainer. Is it not clear that she thought the American people should be given the chance to know of the kidnapping, rendition, torture, and other indignities being carried out in our name? Is it not clear that Mary McCarthy is one of those unusually courageous officers willing to take considerable personal risk in order to help democracy work - information being the oxygen of democracy?

But what about her secrecy agreement? The international Truth-Telling Coalition issued a statement on these difficult decisions on September 9, 2004. Perhaps Mary read it; perhaps now her colleagues will.

I have not spoken with Mary McCarthy in ten years, but it seems clear to me that she and many of her colleagues are confronted by an unwelcome choice between her oath to defend the Constitution of the United States and the secrecy agreement all of us signed when we entered on duty with the CIA. Her entire record shows that she did not take such restrictions lightly. None of us did; none of us do.

But agency alumnae/i, at least those of my vintage, believe we must always give priority to the Constitution - and the "Nuremberg obligation."

Ray McGovern was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years.

About 3 more weeks before I will have this book in my hands. Just take a look:

Title:
The Hard Way
Author: Lee Child
Fiction - Thrillers>
Imprint: Delacorte Press> # of pages: 384 Price: $ 25.00

READ AN EXCERPT:> > CHAPTER 1> >

JACK REACHER ORDERED espresso, double, no peel, no cube, foam cup, no china, and before it arrived at his table he saw a man's life change forever. Not that the waiter was slow. Just that the move was slick. So slick, Reacher had no idea what he was watching. It was just an urban scene, repeated everywhere in the world a billion times a day: A guy unlocked a car and got in and drove away. That was all.> >

But that was enough.> >

The espresso had been close to perfect, so Reacher went back to the same cafe exactly -twenty--four hours later. Two nights in the same place was unusual for Reacher, but he figured great coffee was worth a change in his routine. The cafe was on the west side of Sixth Avenue in New York City, in the middle of the block between Bleecker and Houston. It occupied the ground floor of an undistinguished -four--story building. The upper stories looked like anonymous rental apartments.

The cafe itself looked like a transplant from a back street in Rome. Inside it had low light and scarred wooden walls and a dented chrome machine as hot and long as a locomotive, and a counter. Outside there was a single line of metal tables on the sidewalk behind a low canvas screen.

Reacher took the same end table he had used the night before and chose the same seat. He stretched out and got comfortable and tipped his chair up on two legs. That put his back against the cafe's outside wall and left him looking east, across the sidewalk and the width of the avenue.

He liked to sit outside in the summer, in New York City. Especially at night. He liked the electric darkness and the hot dirty air and the blasts of noise and traffic and the manic barking sirens and the crush of people. It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated both at the same time.

He was served by the same waiter as the night before and ordered the same drink, double espresso in a foam cup, no sugar, no spoon. He paid for it as soon as it arrived and left his change on the table. That way he could leave exactly when he wanted to without insulting the waiter or bilking the owner or stealing the china. Reacher always arranged the smallest details in his life so he could move on at a split second's notice. It was an obsessive habit. He owned nothing and carried nothing. Physically he was a big man, but he cast a small shadow and left very little in his wake.

He drank his coffee slowly and felt the night heat come up off the sidewalk. He watched cars and people. Watched taxis flow north and garbage trucks pause at the curbs. Saw knots of strange young people heading for clubs. Watched girls who had once been boys totter south. Saw a blue German sedan park on the block. Watched a compact man in a gray suit get out and walk north. Watched him thread between two sidewalk tables and head inside to where the cafe staff was clustered in back. Watched him ask them questions.

The guy was medium height, not young, not old, too solid to be called wiry, too slight to be called heavy. His hair was gray at the temples and cut short and neat. He kept himself balanced on the balls of his feet. His mouth didn't move much as he talked. But his eyes did. They flicked left and right tirelessly. The guy was about forty, Reacher guessed, and furthermore Reacher guessed he had gotten to be about forty by staying relentlessly aware of everything that was happening around him. Reacher had seen the same look in elite infantry veterans who had survived long jungle tours.

Then Reacher's waiter turned suddenly and pointed straight at him. The compact man in the gray suit stared over. Reacher stared back, over his shoulder, through the window. Eye contact was made. Without breaking it the man in the suit mouthed thank you to the waiter and started back out the way he had entered. He stepped through the door and made a right inside the low canvas screen and threaded his way down to Reacher's table. Reacher let him stand there mute for a moment while he made up his mind. Then he said "Yes," to him, like an answer, not a question.

"Yes what?" the guy said back.

"Yes whatever," Reacher said. "Yes I'm having a pleasant evening, yes you can join me, yes you can ask me whatever it is you want to ask me."

The guy scraped a chair out and sat down, his back to the river of traffic, blocking Reacher's view.

"Actually I do have a question," he said.

"I know," Reacher said. "About last night."

"How did you know that?" The guy's voice was low and quiet and his accent was flat and clipped and British.

"The waiter pointed me out," Reacher said. "And the only thing that distinguishes me from his other customers is that I was here last night and they weren't."

"You're certain about that?"

"Turn your head away," Reacher said. "Watch the traffic."

The guy turned his head away. Watched the traffic.

"Now tell me what I'm wearing," Reacher said.

"Green shirt," the British guy said. "Cotton, baggy, cheap, doesn't look new, sleeves rolled to the elbow, over a green T-shirt, also cheap and not new, a little tight, untucked over -flat--front khaki chinos, no socks, English shoes, pebbled leather, brown, not new, but not very old either, probably expensive. Frayed laces, like you pull on them too hard when you tie them. Maybe indicative of a -self--discipline obsession."

"OK," Reacher said.

"OK what?"

"You notice things," Reacher said. "And I notice things. We're two of a kind. We're peas in a pod. I'm the only customer here now who was also here last night. I'm certain of that. And that's what you asked the staff. Had to be. That's the only reason the waiter would have pointed me out."

The guy turned back.

"Did you see a car last night?" he asked.

"I saw plenty of cars last night," Reacher said. "This is Sixth Avenue."

"A Mercedes Benz. Parked over there." The guy twisted again and pointed on a slight diagonal at a length of empty curb by a fire hydrant on the other side of the street.

Reacher said, "Silver, four-door sedan, an S-420, New York vanity plates starting OSC, a lot of city miles on it. Dirty paint, scuffed tires, dinged rims, dents and scrapes on both bumpers."

The guy turned back again.

"You saw it," he said.

"It was right there," Reacher said. "Obviously I saw it."

"Did you see it leave?"

Reacher nodded. "Just before eleven -forty--five a guy got in and drove it away."

"You're not wearing a watch."

"I always know what time it is."

"It must have been closer to midnight"

"Maybe," Reacher said. "Whatever."

"Did you get a look at the driver?"

"I told you, I saw him get in and drive away."

The guy stood up.

"I need you to come with me," he said. Then he put his hand in his pocket. "I'll buy your coffee."

"I already paid for it."

"So let's go."

"Where?"

"To see my boss."

"Who's your boss?"

"A man called Lane."

"You're not a cop," Reacher said. "That's my guess. Based on observation."

"Of what?"

"Your accent. You're not American. You're British. The NYPD isn't that desperate."

"Most of us are Americans," the British guy said. "But you're right, we're not cops. We're private citizens."

"What kind?"

"The kind that will make it worth your while if you give them a description of the individual who drove that car away."

"Worth my while how?"

"Financially," the guy said. "Is there any other way?"

"Lots of other ways," Reacher said. "I think I'll stay right here."

"This is very serious."

"How?"

The guy in the suit sat down again.

"I can't tell you that," he said.

"Goodbye," Reacher said.

"Not my choice," the guy said. "Mr. Lane made it -mission--critical that nobody knows. For very good reasons."

Reacher tilted his cup and checked the contents. Nearly gone.

"You got a name?" he asked.

"Do you?"

"You first."

In response the guy stuck a thumb into the breast pocket of his suit coat and slid out a black leather business card holder. He opened it up and used the same thumb to slide out a single card. He passed it across the table. It was a handsome item. Heavy linen stock, raised lettering, ink that still looked wet. At the top it said: Operational Security Consultants.

"OSC," Reacher said. "Like the license plate."

The British guy said nothing.

Reacher smiled. "You're security consultants and you got your car stolen? I can see how that could be embarrassing."

The guy said, "It's not the car we're worried about."

Lower down on the business card was a name: John Gregory. Under the name was a subscript: British Army, Retired. Then a job title: Executive Vice President.

"How long have you been out?" Reacher asked.

"Of the British Army?" the guy called Gregory said. "Seven years."

"Unit?"

"SAS."

"You've still got the look."

"You too," Gregory said. "How long have you been out?

"Seven years," Reacher said.

"Unit?"

"U.S. Army CID, mostly."

Gregory looked up. Interested. "Investigator?"

"Mostly."

"Rank?"

"I don't remember," Reacher said. "I've been a civilian seven years."

"Don't be shy," Gregory said. "You were probably a lieutenant colonel at least."

"Major," Reacher said. "That's as far as I got."

"Career problems?"

"I had my share."


"You got a name?"

"Most people do."

"What is it?"

"Reacher."

"What are you doing now?"

"I'm trying to get a quiet cup of coffee."

"You need work?"

"No," Reacher said. "I don't."

"I was a sergeant," Gregory said.

Reacher nodded. "I figured. SAS guys usually are. And you've got the look."

"So will you come with me and talk to Mr. Lane?"

"I told you what I saw. You can pass it on."

"Mr. Lane will want to hear it direct."

Reacher checked his cup again. "Where is he?"

"Not far. Ten minutes."

"I don't know," Reacher said. "I'm enjoying my espresso."

"Bring it with you. It's in a foam cup."

"I prefer peace and quiet."

"All I want is ten minutes."

"Seems like a lot of fuss over a stolen car, even if it was a Mercedes Benz."

"This is not about the car."

"So what is it about?"

"Life and death," Gregory said. "Right now more likely death than life."

Reacher checked his cup again. There was less than a lukewarm -eighth--inch left, thick and scummy with espresso mud. That was all. He put the cup down.

"OK," he said. "So let's go.

Excerpted from The Hard Way by Lee Child

> Copyright (c) 2005 by Lee Child.

Wrap...

From American Progress:

Think Fast

With little more than a month left until hurricane season begins, the levees in New Orleans remain "flawed." "Flood walls are too weak in some places; earthen levees are too short in others. Locals say the only thing that will save the low-lying region from more flooding this summer is not getting hit with a strong storm."

A review of "at least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers, most of them run by Iraq's Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry," found evidence of prisoner abuse at all of them. Some of the abuse was "severe," including cigarette burns and missing toenails, but unlike in the past, abused detainees were not removed from the centers, "prompting concerns that they could be victims again."

$2.91: The national average gas price for self-serve regular. Gas prices have shot up nearly 25 cents per gallon over the past two weeks. As crude oil hovers around $75 per barrel, Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Nuaimi said, “You know and I know that the reason for the price being where it is not shortages of supply.” Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) explained that oil companies "get together, reduce the supply of oil, and that drives up prices."

"House Republican leaders have stripped out language" from the ethics bill "forcing lobbyists to provide detailed disclosure of fundraising activities and contacts with lawmakers," Roll Call reports.

2,000. Estimated number of Iraqi women who have been victims of sex trafficking since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., noted presidential historian and former adviser to President John F. Kennedy, warns of the final thousand days of Bush’s presidency - “days filled with ominous preparations for and dark rumors of a preventive war against Iran.”

No excuse for media's failure to cover genocidal violence in Chad. The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof: "[Unlike in Sudan,] we can get visas to Chad, and now there are more than 200,000 people who have fled Darfur and are in Chad and are telling their stories to anybody who will talk to them. I must say that newspapers and magazines, I think, have done a better job in covering this. The people who have really dropped the ball, frankly, is television."

After almost two years of reports of human-trafficking by contractors of foreign workers on U.S. bases, the U.S. military has ordered changes. Among other reforms, contractors can no longer confiscate worker passports and must provide workers with a signed copy of their employment contract.

A medical services company headed by former Bush Veteran Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi "could receive fees exceeding $1 billion from the Veterans Administration, much of it on contracts approved and amended while he ran the government agency."

And finally: Political polarization seeps into the last bastion of "bipartisan civility" - the Congressional Softball League. Conservative teams have accused the league commissioner "of running a socialist year-end playoff system that gives below-average teams an unfair chance to win the championship," and have started their own league. Teams include the "traditional Republican powerhouse Fat, Drunk & Awesome from the House Homeland Security Committee" and Moderately Sober from Rep. Sherwood Boehlert's (R-NY) office.

Wrap...

From Information Clearing House:

California Becomes Second State to Introduce Bush Impeachment
By David Swanson
04/24/06

Joining Illinois, California has become the second state in which a proposal to impeach President Bush has been introduced in the state legislature. And this one includes Cheney as well.

California Assemblyman Paul Koretz of Los Angeles (where the LA Times has now called for Cheney's resignation) has submitted amendments to Assembly Joint Resolution No. 39, calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney. The amendments reference Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature.

The resolution, in the words of Koretz's press release, "bases the call for impeachment upon the Bush Administration intentionally misleading the Congress and the American people regarding the threat from Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives and casualties; exceeding constitutional authority to wage war by invading Iraq; exceeding constitutional authority by Federalizing the National Guard; conspiring to torture prisoners in violation of the 'Federal Torture Act' and indicating intent to continue such actions; spying on American citizens in violation of the 1978 Foreign Agency Surveillance Act; leaking and covering up the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, and holding American citizens without charge or trial."

Koretz submitted amendments gutting AJR No. 39, a resolution unrelated to impeachment, to the Assembly Rules Committee. The Rules Committee may take up the bill this week for referral, allowing him to formally introduce the amended resolution.

AJR 39 is a bill introduced in January by Koretz calling for a moratorium on depleted uranium:http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/bill/asm/ab_0001-0050/ajr_39_bill_20060104_introduced.html

"At both the state and national levels," Koretz said, "we will be paying for the Bush Administration's illegal actions and terrible lack of judgment and competence for decades—not only in the billions of dollars wasted on the war and welfare for the rich, but in the worldwide loss of respect for America and Americans. Bush and Cheney must be impeached and removed from office before they undertake even deadlier misdeeds, such as the use of nuclear weapons. There are no bounds to their willingness to ignore the Constitution and world opinion—we can't afford to wait for the next disaster and hope that we can survive it."

For more information and to thank this American hero, contact Paul Michael Neuman in Koretz's District Office: (310) 285-5490 paul.neuman@asm.ca.gov or go here: http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/a42/Contact.htm

Here is a kit to help with promoting this resolution and with passing others in your towns and cities and states. Also on this page is information on activities in other states and localities:
http://www.impeachpac.org/resolutions

Get organized in California to pass this bill!
http://pdamerica.org/statecaucus.php?s=CA

Illinois Legislators Were First to Introduce Bill for Bush Impeachment

Three members of the Illinois General Assembly have introduced a bill that urges the General Assembly to submit charges to the U. S. House of Representatives to initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States, George W. Bush, for willfully violating his Oath of Office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and if found guilty urges his removal from office and disqualification to hold any other office in the United States.

The Jefferson Manual of rules for the U.S. House of Representatives makes clear that impeachment proceedings can be initiated by a state legislature submitting charges. The state of Illinois is on its way toward forcing on the House what not a single one of its members has yet had the courage to propose: Articles of Impeachment.

The text of the Illinois bill and information on its status are available here: http://tinyurl.com/nhs3r

The bill takes up the issues of illegal spying, torture, detentions without charge or trial, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, and the leaking of classified information.

Please thank these sponsors of the bill:
Rep. Karen A. Yarbrough, phone (217) 782-8120 or (708) 615-1747; fax (708) 615-1745
Rep Sara Feigenholtz , phone (217) 782-8062 or (773) 296-4141; fax (217) 557-7203 or (773) 296-0993
Rep. Eddie Washington phone (217) 558-1012 or (847) 623-0060, fax (847) 623-6078

Here is a kit to help with promoting this resolution and with passing others in your towns and cities. Also on this page is information on activities in other states and localities: http://www.impeachpac.org/resolutions

Get organized in Illinois to pass this bill! http://pdamerica.org/statecaucus.php?s=IL

Wrap...

From The Sun.co.uk :


Mick beats George to suite
Forty licks ... Jagger refuses to give up room for Bush
REUTERS
FULL NEWS INDEX
By THOMAS WHITAKER
Showbiz Reporter

PRESIDENT George Bush can’t get no satisfaction — after Mick Jagger grabbed his hotel room.
The Rolling Stone splashed out £3,600 a night for the suite days before the US leader tried to book it.

Now Mick, 62, who has been a fierce critic of the Bush-led war in Iraq, is refusing to give it up.
The veteran rocker hired the luxury Royal Suite at the five-star Imperial Hotel in Vienna, Austria, for June when the Stones are due to play a gig in the city.

Bush’s aides then tried to book it to tie in with a summit meeting.

But Mick put his foot down and insisted he was keeping the booking.

A source close to the millionaire singer said last night: “White House officials had wanted to reserve the suite and all the other rooms on the first floor.

“But Mick and the Stones had already booked every one of them.

“Bush’s people seemed to be under the impression that they would just hand over the suites but there was no way Mick was going to do that.”

The classically-designed suite is said to be among the top 100 hotel rooms in the world. It boasts a 7ft 4in bed, chandeliers and oil paintings.

Former presidents Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy and George Bush Sr all stayed there while they were in office.

The hotel last night admitted US secret service agents vetted the accommodation — and confirmed that Bush would no longer be staying there.

An American Embassy official refused to say where he was now staying for “security reasons”.

Mick takes a swipe at Bush, 59, on the latest Stones album A Bigger Bang, savaging his Iraq War policy.

Wrap...

As readers of this blog know, I pre-ordered TJ Waters' book, Class 11, wherein he writes about the first CIA class held/formed after 9/11....last October 1st....and it's publication been postponed more than once. Now I've learned what's been going on, and I am totally torqued.

From the New York Times, an excerpt wherein TJ's book is discussed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/washington/24leak.html?hp&ex=1145851200&en

The renewed emphasis on the culture of secrecy has included a tightening of the review process for books and articles by former agency employees, said Mark S. Zaid, a lawyer who represents many authors who once worked for the C.I.A.

Authors say the agency's Publications Review Board has been removing material that would easily have been approved before. While the board in the past has generally worked with retirees to make manuscripts publishable, it now more often appears to be trying to block publication, the authors say. And reprimands for violations have become more stern, including letters warning of possible Justice Department investigations.

A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, denied that the Publications Review Board's standards had changed.

"The only rule is that they are not allowed to have classified information in their manuscripts," Ms. Millerwise Dyck said.

But Mr. Zaid said: "There's been a fundamental shift in practice at the Publications Review Board. There's literally been a reinstitution of the 1950's attitude that what happens at C.I.A. stays at C.I.A."
Mr. Zaid said the shift in the agency's approach to publications under Mr. Goss was most clearly illustrated by its handling of a book by Thomas Waters Jr., who wrote about his experiences as a recent agency recruit.

He said the manuscript of Mr. Waters's book, titled "Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class," was approved by the Publications Review Board in September 2004 with several modest changes. Mr. Waters then sold the book to Dutton, made the changes and submitted the galleys for a final review.

In February, Mr. Zaid said, the board returned the galleys with nearly half their contents marked as classified and not approved for publication. Mr. Waters, who left the agency after two years for family reasons, has sued the agency to permit publication, and the case is pending.
"What's ironic is that it's a very positive book," Mr. Zaid said. "He had a great experience and he thought this book would be a great recruiting tool."

In other cases, Mr. Zaid said, an acquaintance was recently refused permission to publish an op-ed article that drew on material from the agency's Web site. Another client's book was turned down because, the author was told, even though no single chapter was classified, the whole manuscript revealed enough information that it had to be classified. This so-called mosaic theory of classification, Mr. Zaid said, is being used more often to prevent publication.

Another former employee with long experience having publications approved agreed that reviews had become tougher. "It takes longer and there's a much more conservative approach," the former employee said, adding that he believed that some of the deletions had crossed the admittedly fuzzy boundary between protecting classified information and censoring personal opinions.

Another retiree agreed, saying he believed the agency had begun pressing authors to excise some unclassified material from manuscripts. "It's a more complex process than it used to be," he said. "Now, they question a lot more things."

Yet another agency retiree, who has in the past received warning letters from the C.I.A. after occasionally publishing articles without seeking approval, said he had recently gotten a far more strongly worded letter. This one informed him that a file had been opened to document his transgressions that could be forwarded to the Justice Department, he said.

Mr. Goss's effort to lower the profile of the agency has apparently been extended to the Web site of its Center for the Study of Intelligence, which for years has carried unclassified articles about the history and practice of spying from the in-house journal Studies in Intelligence.

Max Holland, who has written two articles for the C.I.A. journal, recently reported in The American Spectator that the online posting of unclassified excerpts from an agency review of the failure to assess Iraq's unconventional weapons accurately had been delayed for seven months. The last issue represented on the C.I.A. Web site is from mid-2005.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042306A.shtml

Deadlines and Dissent
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Sunday 23 April 2006

[excerpt: the interview]

The following interview was conducted via telephone on Saturday evening.

PITT: Are there other Senators who will sign on or have signed on to your May 15th deadline you have put forward?

KERRY: I think we have a few, but I haven't gotten the latest word from the staff down in Washington. I don't know yet what the final number is going to be. We've been out on the Easter break for the last two weeks, so my colleagues have been sort of moving around.

One of the problems is that I proposed the May 15th date about three or four weeks ago, so there would be a six-week period of time where the ultimatum could be given. The president hasn't publicly, and as far as we know, hasn't privately given them an ultimatum. So some colleagues will say, oh God, it's only two weeks from now, how do we do that?

The point is not the date, so much as it is giving them the ultimatum of about four weeks or five weeks, and tell them they've got to do this or else. That's really the key.

PITT: How do you respond to those who say a US withdrawal from Iraq under any circumstances will cause that nation to collapse into chaos?

KERRY: There is no military resolution, anyway, so they have to stand up for themselves. You're in a civil war. The fact is that 242,000 members of the security forces have been trained, according to the administration. If 242,000 have been trained, and the basis for this policy is that we will stand down as soon as they stand up, their target goal for the full stand-up was 270,000. So we're only 30,000 away from where they supposedly said was our final security goal, and we haven't been standing down at all.

I'm not suggesting that, if they form the government, we're out of there overnight. We're out of there over the course of a year. A year is enough time for them to stand up and take control. Moreover, I've said we will maintain an "over-the-horizon" capability, precisely to avoid having al Qaeda and chaos to take over.

I think it's a red-herring argument, it's a phony argument, it doesn't recognize the realities of what they said their own policy is.

PITT: 60 Minutes is going to report Sunday night that the CIA informed both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that Iraq was not in possession of weapons of mass destruction a full six months before the invasion took place, and that both Bush and Cheney dismissed their analysis because the decision for regime change had already been made. What is your response to this revelation?

KERRY: If it is true, it confirms more and more of what we've heard from the British memos, from the Downing Street memo, from different statements by people in the administration and out, that they had made up their mind to go to war, and that they misled the Congress and the American people.

PITT: How do you see the odds of the Democrats retaking one or both chambers of Congress?

KERRY: I think we have a shot. I can't predict. I know that if the real issues are on the table, and I hope they will be and that's what we'll be fighting for, I think there's a terrific chance. Most of my focus is going into that. I've helped over 140 different candidates around the country in 33 states. I'm working very hard on '06, because I believe '06 is the real battle.

PITT: You have said that no decision on a 2008 presidential run will be forthcoming soon, and that you are looking hard at the possibility. My question, therefore, is this: if you do decide to run again, what if anything will you do differently in this campaign?

ERRY: Let me just say that I learned a lot of lessons, and we made some mistakes, which I completely take responsibility for. I learned what we have to do, and if I decide to run, I'm going to do it, and I will know how to win.

But I'm not going to get into all of that at this point in time. I'll go into those things if and when the time comes. The bottom line is that we came within 60,000 votes, and I think I know how to cure the issues that were not properly addressed in the course of the campaign.


William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

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From http://www.mykeru.com/weekly/2006_0416_0422.html#ahole_listers

[an excerpt]:

Problem is that Wang also said, in Mandarin, "Chairman Hu, your days are not many".

Yes, it's stupid to consider that as a threat, because telling someone that "their days are numbered", as it would be phrased in English, can be taken more than one way. However, when bloggers either don't know, or don't care through some form of ethnocentrism, what was also said in another language they are, in practice, engaging in a sort of cherry picking. Or, more likely, saying Wang is being charged with intimidation for making an English-phrased clarion call for freedom and tolerance, rather than including a phrase that could be taken by idiots as a threat, makes for better outrage. In which case, the people doing the picking don't give a shit about some language like Mandarin that only a handful of people speak. If, by "handful" you mean "the plurality of people on the planet". *

Even ABC News was more accurate:

Wang did not break the law when she yelled "Stop oppressing the Falun Gong" at Hu or even when she unfurled a red-and-yellow banner of the Falun Gong, a religious movement banned in China. Wang broke the law — crossing from First Amendment protected speech to criminality — according to government prosecutor Angela George, when she yelled "Your time is running out," to Hu, and later, when she screamed "Anything you have done will come back to you in this life."

Considering that intimidation is idiotic. Any number of wingnut bloggers and talk radio whores make more overt threats on a daily basis. But the phrasing has to be acknowledged.

Characterizing the entirety of Wang's remarks as "Stop him from killing" is simply ignorance or selectivity.

Also, acknowledging what Wang said in Mandarin raises an interesting question of translation. According to media reports, the Secret Service claims Wang said to Hu "Your time is running out" when, in fact, she said "Hu Zhu xi ni de rizi bu duo le" which transliterates as "Hu Chairman your days not many", Chinese and English being similar in syntax.

What Wang said would commonly be understood in Chinese, as well as English, as "your days are numbered" in the same way the days of the lame duck Bush presidency are "numbered".

The Secret Service translation seems to be oddly just a little more threatening than the phrase would normally be rendered. Claiming that Wang said "Your time is running out" isn't translation, it's literary license.

I'll even break it down: "Hu (his name) Zhu Xi (Chairman) ni de (your) rizi (days) bu (not) duo le (many)".

"Your time is running out" isn't even close.

Read the full WaPo article on the charges against Wang for some, well, interesting and trite legalese pseudo-reasoning:

During yesterday's court hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Angela George argued that Wang's statements were not protected by the First Amendment.

"She was yelling at the president," George said. "You can't walk into a theater and yell 'Fire!' The First Amendment does not permit her to engage in criminal conduct.

She was yelling at the president, which is ostensibly criminal. However, the charges were brought against Wang based on what she said in Chinese. President Bush is barely articulate in English. I doubt he speaks Chinese.

[Read whole post at link on top]

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From NoQuarter.typepad.com :

April 22, 2006
The Firing of Mary McCarthy
byLarry C Johnson

The case against the CIA Intelligence Officer, Mary McCarthy, fired for her alleged role in leaking information about secret prisons to the Washington Post's Dana Priest smells a little fishy. Let me state at the outset that the officer in question, Mary McCarthy, is an old acquaintance. I hasten to add that I do not consider her a friend. She was my immediate boss in 1988-89 and was instrumental in my decision to leave the CIA and take a job at the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism. Mary, in my experience, was a terrible manager. I left the CIA in 1989 despite having received two exceptional performance awards during my last eight months on the job because I could not stand working under her.

That said, I take no delight in the news that she was fired. In fact, there are some things about the case that puzzle me. For starters, Mary never worked on the Operations side of the house. In other words, she never worked a job where she would have had first hand operational knowledge about secret prisons. She worked the analytical side of the CIA and served with the National Intelligence Council. According to press reports, she subsequently worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 2001 thru 2005. That is a type of academic/policy wonk position and, again, would not put her in a position to know anything first hand about secret prisons.

Sometime within the last year she returned to CIA on a terminal assignment. I've heard through the grapevine that she was attending the seminar for officers who are retiring while working with the Inspector General (IG). Now things get interesting. She could find out about secret prisons if Intelligence Officers involved with that program had filed a complaint with the IG or if there was some incident that compelled senior CIA officials to determine an investigation was warranted. In other words, this program did not come to Mary's attention (if the allegations are true) because she worked on it as an ops officer. Instead, it appears an investigation of the practice had been proposed or was underway. That's another story reporters probably ought to be tracking down.

I am struck by the irony that Mary McCarthy may have been fired for blowing the whistle and ensuring that the truth about an abuse was told to the American people. There is something potentially honorable in that action; particularly when you consider that George Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak misleading information for the purpose of deceiving the American people about the grounds for going to war in Iraq. While I'm neither a fan nor friend of Mary's, she may have done a service for her country. She was a lousy manager in my experience, but she is not a traitor and has not betrayed the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. That dirty work was done by the minions of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It is important to keep that fact in the forefront as the judgment on Mary McCarthy's acts is rendered.

Posted by Larry Johnson on April 22, 2006 at 08:07 AM

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From truthout.org :

Patriotism Is Truth, Today as in Vietnam
By John F. Kerry
The Boston Globe
Saturday 22 April 2006

Thirty-five years ago today, I testified before the United States Senate. I was a 27-year-old Vietnam veteran who believed the war had to come to an end.

It was 1971.

Three years earlier, Richard Nixon had been elected president with a secret plan for peace - a plan he kept secret from the American people as young Americans continued to die for a mission high-ranking officials of two administrations had decided was unwinnable.

We would watch the Nixon administration lie, break the law, and work overtime to squash dissent - all the while claiming absurdly they were prolonging war to protect our troops as they withdrew. We were a country deeply divided. World War II fathers split with Vietnam generation sons over a war that was tearing us apart - and split, particularly, over our responsibilities during a time of war.

Many people did not understand or agree with my act of public dissent. To them, supporting the troops meant continuing to support the war, or at least keeping my mouth shut.

But I couldn't remain silent. I felt compelled to speak out about what was happening in Vietnam, where the children of America were pulled from front porches and living rooms and plunged almost overnight into a world of sniper fire, ambushes, rockets, booby traps, body bags, explosions, sleeplessness, and the confusion created by an enemy who was sometimes invisible and firing at us, and sometimes right next to us and smiling. It was clear that thousands of Americans were losing their lives in Vietnam while politicians in Washington schemed to save their political reputations.

Thirty-five years later, in another war gone off course, I see history repeating itself. It is both a right and an obligation for Americans today to disagree with a president who is wrong, a policy that is wrong, and a course in Iraq that weakens the nation. Again, we must refuse to sit quietly and watch our troops sacrificed for a policy that isn't working while Americans who dissent and ask tough questions are branded unpatriotic.

Just as it was in 1971, it is again right to make clear that the best way to support the troops is to oppose a course that squanders their lives, dishonors their sacrifice, and disserves the American people and our principles.

True patriots must defend the right of dissent and listen to the dissenters. Dissenters are not always right, but it is always a warning sign when they are accused of unpatriotic sentiments by politicians trying to avoid accountability or debate on their own policies. We should know by now that those who are right should never fear scrutiny of their policy and thorough debate.

In World War I, America's values were degraded, not defended, when dissenters were jailed and the teaching of German was banned in some public schools. It was panic and prejudice, not true patriotism, that brought the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II, a measure upheld by Supreme Court justices who did not uphold their oaths to defend the Constitution. We are stronger today because no less a rock-ribbed conservative than Robert Taft stood up at the height of World War II and asserted, "The maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur."

In recent weeks, a number of retired high-ranking military leaders have publicly called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And from the ranks of this administration and its conservative surrogates, we've heard these calls dismissed as acts of disloyalty or as a threat to civilian control of the armed forces. We have even heard accusations that this dissent gives aid and comfort to the enemy. That line of attack is shameful, especially coming from those who have never worn the uniform.

Generals and others who call for recognizing the facts on the ground in Iraq are not defeatists, they are patriots. At a time when mistake after mistake is being compounded by the very civilian leadership in the Pentagon that ignored expert military advice in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, those who understand the price being paid for each mistake by our troops, our country, and Iraq itself must be heard. At a time when our nation is imprisoned in a failed policy and we are being told once again that admitting the mistakes, not the mistakes themselves, will provide our enemies with an intolerable propaganda victory, that we literally have no choice but to stay the course even to a bitter end, those who seek to reclaim America's true sovereignty and freedom of action must be respected.

Iraq is not Vietnam, and the war on terrorism is not the Cold War. But the threat of jihadist extremism is another "long, twilight struggle," as President Kennedy said in his inaugural, and the threat is very real, but we will never defeat terrorists by trampling our own freedom and democracy. The Swift Boat-style attacks that have been aimed at dissenters from Gold Star mothers to decorated veterans like Jack Murtha hurt our democracy even more than they wound their target.

I still believe as strongly as I did 35 years ago that the most important way to support our troops is to tell the truth. Patriotism does not belong to those who defend a president's position - it belongs to those who defend our country, in battle and in dissent. That is a lesson of Vietnam worth remembering today.

John F. Kerry is speaking at Faneuil Hall today on the 35th anniversary of his Senate testimony on the Vietnam War.

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From Information Clearing House:

1 Million Dead Iranians
By Chris Floyd
04/21/06
"ICH"

Twelve hours. One circuit of the sun from horizon to horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the infliction of mass annihilation halfway around the world.

Twelve hours is the maximum time necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack -- a Pearl Harbor in reverse -- against Iran, The Washington Post reports. The plan for this "global strike," which includes a very viable "nuclear option," was approved months ago and is now in operation. The planes are already on continuous alert, making "nuclear delivery" practice runs along the Iranian border, The New Yorker reports, and waiting only for the signal from President George W. Bush to drop their payloads of conventional and nuclear weapons on some 400 targets throughout the condemned land.

And when this attack comes -- either as a stand-alone "knock-out blow" or as the precursor to a full-scale, regime-changing invasion, like the earlier aggression in Iraq -- there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no congressional hearings, no public debate. The already-issued orders governing the operation put the decision solely in the hands of the president. He picks up the phone, he says, "Go," and in 12 hours' time, up to 1 million Iranians will be dead.

This potential death toll is not pacifist hyperbole; it comes from a National Academy of Sciences study sponsored by the Pentagon itself, as The Progressive reports. The NAS study calculated the kill rate from "bunker-busting" tactical nukes used to take out underground facilities -- such as those housing much of Iran's nuclear power program.

Another simulation using Pentagon software was even more specific, measuring the aftermath from a "limited" nuclear attack on the main Iranian underground site in Esfahan. The result? Three million people killed by radiation in just two weeks.

Bush now has about 50 nuclear "earth-penetrating weapons" at his disposal.

Nor is the idea of a nuclear strike on Iran mere "liberal paranoia." Bush himself has made the use of nuclear weapons a centerpiece of his "National Security Strategy of the United States," issued last month, The Progressive notes. While reaffirming the criminal principle of "pre-emptive" attacks on perceived enemies who may or may not be threatening America with weapons they may or may not possess, Bush declared that "safe, credible and reliable nuclear forces continue to play a critical role" in the "offensive strike systems" that are now a key part of America's "deterrence."

In the depraved jargon of atomic warmongering, a "credible" nuclear force is one that can and will be used in the course of ordinary military operations. It is no longer to be regarded as a sacred taboo.

This has long been the dream of the Pentagon's nuclear priesthood and its acolytes, going back to the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For decades, a strong faction within the U.S. power structure has been afflicted with a perverted craving to unleash these weapons once more. An almost sexual frustration can be discerned in their laments as time and again, in crisis after crisis, their counsels for "going nuclear" were rejected -- often at the very last moment.

They have relentlessly demonized an ever-changing array of "enemies," painting each one as an imminent, overwhelming threat, led by "madmen" in thrall to pure evil, impervious to reason, fit only for destruction. Evidence for the threat is exaggerated, manipulated, even manufactured; this ritual cycle has been enacted over and over, leading to many wars but never to that ultimate, orgasmic release.

Now this paranoid sect has at last seized the commanding heights of power. Two of its most venerable and faithful adherents are central players in the court of the Crawford Caligula: Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon warlord Donald Rumsfeld, and they've found an eager disciple in the peevish dullard strutting in the Oval Office.

Under their tutelage, Bush has eviscerated 40 years' worth of arms control treaties; officially "normalized" the use of nuclear weapons, even against non-nuclear states; and rewarded outlaw proliferators like India, Israel and Pakistan. Now, he is destroying the last, most effective restraint on the spread of nuclear weapons: the Nonproliferation Treaty.

The treaty guarantees its signatories, such as Iran, the right to establish nuclear power programs in exchange for rigorous international inspections. But Bush has arbitrarily decided that Iran -- whose nuclear program has been subjected to perhaps the most extensive inspection process in history -- must end its lawful activities. Why? Because the country is led by "madmen" in thrall to pure evil, impervious to reason, who one day may or may not threaten America with weapons they may or may not have.

So the treaty is dead.

Like the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, it now means only what Bush says it means. Force of arms, not rule of law, is the new world order. The attack on Iran is coming. And Bush insists that the nuclear option remain in the war plans, despite resistance from top military officers, The New Yorker reports.

The obvious, murderous insanity of such a move in no way precludes its implementation by this gang -- as their invasion of Iraq clearly shows.The nuclear sectarians have waited decades for this moment. Such a chance may never come again. Will they let it pass, when with just a word, in just 12 hours, they can see their god rising in a pillar of fire over Persia?

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From truthout.org :

Louisiana Committee OKs Ban on Most Abortions

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042106T.shtml

Senate Bill 33 by Senator Ben Nevers, D-Bogalusa, cleared the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare after the provision was added. The bill is expected on the Senate floor next week and would allow abortions only to save the life of the mother.

But Senator Diana Bajoie, D-New Orleans, said she wanted to "make it more pro-life" by not allowing any exceptions.

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Note: I'm thinking that they're thinking that soldiers are dispensible but giving $$$$ to corporate cronies isn't.

From military.com :

Bill Shorts Gear for Troops
Associated Press
April 21, 2006

WASHINGTON - A Senate measure to fund the war in Iraq would chop money for troops' night vision equipment and new battle vehicles but add $230 million for a tilt-rotor aircraft that has already cost $18 billion and is still facing safety questions.

President Bush's request for the emergency appropriations to cover costs of the continuing war and Hurricane Katrina recovery operations included no money for the troubled V-22 Osprey, which takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like a plane.

The Marine Corps, however, followed up with a letter to lawmakers endorsing additional V-22s, noting that it is the only active production line capable of replacing four Vietnam War-era CH-46 choppers lost since Sept. 11, 2001.

Critics maintain that it's still a curious choice to be funded in a bill whose defining purpose is to replace equipment worn out or destroyed in Iraq.

The Osprey, manufactured by Bell Helicopter, a subsidiary of Textron Inc., has been in development since the 1980s and has cost the government $18 billion so far. It has suffered numerous setbacks over the years, including two crashes in 2000 that killed 23 people.

The Marine Corps says the program has gotten back on track since then despite an incident last month in which a V-22 momentarily took flight on its own.

To pay for the Ospreys, the Senate Appropriations Committee - guided by the Corps - cut into funding for night vision goggles, equipment for destroying mines and explosives, fire suppression systems for light armored vehicles and new vehicles that can be transported into battle inside the V-22.

The panel insists the equipment cuts won't affect readiness. [to which I say BULLSHIT!]

Vice President Cheney, as secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, tried to kill the V-22, to no avail. The aircraft is popular with lawmakers, especially those from Pennsylvania and Texas, which host the manufacturing plants.

"They've hijacked the bill to spend money on their toys," said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. "You have the V-22, which isn't even ready for fielding and it's getting money in the supplemental."

The V-22 is but one example of the Pentagon and lawmakers using the mammoth bill to skirt limits on the already rapidly growing defense budget.

For example, there's more than $3 billion in funding for an ongoing overhaul of the Army that the Pentagon admits isn't directly related to fighting the war.

Meanwhile, senators have added $228 million to procure seven C-17 Air Force cargo planes that can't be completed until 2008 at the earliest - and would eventually cost a total of almost $2 billion.

The C-17 cargo plane is manufactured in Long Beach, Calif., by Boeing Co. The line there is now slated to close in 2008 with the completion of a 180-plane inventory. Instead, the $228 million would purchase parts as a downpayment for building seven more planes. It would take at least another $1.6 billion to finish the job.

"If it goes through, you basically force the Air Force to buy another seven planes," said a lobbyist for a rival defense contractor.

The Senate will take up the $106.5 billion Iraq funding bill - which includes $27.2 billion for additional hurricane relief along the Gulf Coast - on April 25. The House passed a companion $92 billion measure last month.

Generally speaking, emergency war funding bills get less scrutiny than the Pentagon's regular budget. And since they provide crucial funding for U.S. troops and equipment, most lawmakers are reluctant to criticize the bills.

However, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., is taking aim at $3.5 billion the Army requested for creating smaller, independent fighting units. Gregg wants to use some of the money to finance border security initiatives and the Coast Guard's ongoing upgrade of ships, planes and helicopters.

"There's a fair amount of money in this supplemental that is not an emergency. It's essentially an attempt to pick up operational and core needs outside the usual budgeting process," Gregg said. "It's certainly in the multiple billions."

The Pentagon says restructuring the Army belongs in the Iraq spending because it would accelerate transforming 5,000-man brigades into independently functioning units and facilitate troop rotations in and out of Iraq.

But Gregg and others say the Army restructuring should be part of the regular budget and the Pentagon tacitly agrees; next year it will be funded that way.

For now, the inclusion of the expensive restructuring project in the war funding bill is a way to avoid cutting other defense programs.

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From www.davidbrin.blogspot.com :

THE HISTORIC IMPORTANCE OF THE U.S. OFFICER CORPS

Few civilians can appreciate how difficult this step has been for military men who spent their professional lives steeped in a tradition of stoical, apolitical silence and submission to civilian authority. Reluctance to interfere in the nation’s political affairs. That tradition, virtually unprecedented in the history of armies and nations, should be revered and respected.

It OUGHT to be hard for officers to do what these generals have done. That alone explains why their agonized decision took so long in coming.It also explains why their focus has been so specific, targeted singly and narrowly at Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. By aiming their bullets only at him, the generals are saying “we choose the monster who is closest to us in the chain of command.”

True, they are perfectly aware that any damage to Rumsfeld will carry through, politically, to Bush and Cheney and the GOP. But this approach maintains, to the maximum degree possible, an appearance of veneration to civilian authority. It also expresses a moderate and restrained will toward using “minimum effective force.”

Again, this should be understood and respected. (Indeed, military men are painfully aware of something never mentioned in the press, that Donald Rumsfeld occupied the exact same office thirty years ago, the LAST time we were humiliated in an ill-conceived ground war-of-attrition in Asia. A startling historical coincidence whose relevance is limited. Yet, it is chilling, just the same.)

If we were to pay attention to these senior military men, we might even learn a thing or two.

For example, would it surprise most liberals to realize that the U.S. Officer Corps is, in fact, the 3rd best-educated clade in America today, just after college professors and medical doctors? These senior leaders know an awful lot about history, about the world and its dangers. Would it hurt to listen?

For example, their complaints don’t ONLY have to do with the tactical conduct of the Iraq War, as blithering and imbecilic as that ill-conceived adventure has been, featuring micromanagement by petty armchair Napoleans that would “make Robert MacNamara look like a hands-off kind of guy.” There are other issues afoot, some that cut even deeper, such as the demolition of America’s alliances, the misuse of our reserves, and an incredible, almost unprecedented decline in our actual readiness to respond to any kind of large scale surprise.

Click the link on top to continue reading Brin's post.

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From Harper's.org :

The CIA “Wehrmacht”
Posted on Wednesday, April 19, 2006.
By Ken Silverstein.

With the war in Iraq an utter debacle and public opinion turned against the White House, anger within the armed forces towards Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Administration is growing, and the Pentagon is fighting back (see “Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics” in the April 16 New York Times). But what's been little noted thus far is what looks to be a similar revolt brewing at the CIA.

An ex-senior agency officer who keeps in contact with his former peers told me that there is a “a big swing” in anti-Bush sentiment at Langley. “I've been stunned by what I'm hearing,” he said. “There are people who fear that indictments and subpoenas could be coming down, and they don't want to get caught up in it.”

This former senior officer said there “seems to be a quiet conspiracy by rational people” at the agency to avoid involvement in some of the particularly nasty tactics being employed by the administration, especially “renditions”—the practice whereby the CIA sends terrorist suspects abroad to be questioned in Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, and other nations where the regimes are not squeamish about torturing detainees.

My source, hardly a softie on the topic of terrorism, said of the split at the CIA: “There's an SS group within the agency that's willing to do anything and there's a Wehrmacht group that is saying, 'I'm not gonna touch this stuff'.”

Scott Horton, a human rights activist who has become a principal spokesman for the New York City Bar Association in evaluating the Bush Administration's tactics, said that he's also hearing stories of growing dissent at the CIA. “When the shit hits the fan,” he explained, “the administration scapegoats lower-level people. It doesn't do a lot in terms of inspiring confidence.”

The expanding revolt against Rumsfeld is nothing new. I received a note way back on June 22, 2004 from a source at the Naval War College that put the situation in sharp perspective:

From my vantage point...cracks definitely have developed in the Administration's relationship with the Armed Forces. Most recently, several active duty senior commanders who spoke on the record at the “Current Strategy Forum” that ended here last week were critical to a point that walked a fine constitutional line of disloyalty to the political leadership. It was clear that many of the officers in the audience agreed with them and admired them for telling it like it is...[W]hat I think is going on here is serious concern among officers to protect the integrity of the institution. After unquestionably following policy, as we would expect, the increasing strains on the military plus the devolution in Iraq seem to have retrieved a collective wisdom from the shadow of Vietnam.

Other signs of serious military anger toward the administration were apparent by the spring of 2004 when a group of very senior officers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps, the legal arm of the U.S. armed forces, were so upset about the administration's loosening of rules against torture that they complained in private to Horton, who was then a committee chair at the New York City Bar Association. Horton and the Bar subsequently prepared a groundbreaking report on U.S. interrogation tactics, “Human Rights Standards Applicable to the United States' Interrogation of Detainees,” which challenged the Pentagon's actions. Horton and the Bar also were involved in publishing the “torture memoranda” and used them to disprove Rumsfeld's claims that the abuses at Abu Ghraib resulted from a few low-ranking “bad apples” (to use the administration's phrase).

Today's “Wehrmacht” officers at the CIA are right to be worried about subpoenas: a legal analysis prepared by a senior FBI attorney in 2002 deemed that renditions to countries that torture detainees were illegal. The attorney concluded that such actions were designed to circumvent American laws against torture and that anyone even discussing such a plan could be found criminally liable. If the political winds shift, some “bad apples” in the CIA could find themselves indicted for torture.

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From American Progress:

RELIGION -- FAITH-BASED DIRECTOR LEAVES AN OFFICE THAT SERVED POLITICS OVER POLICY:

While the White House shake-up stories in the press this week have focused largely on Karl Rove, Scott McClellan, and new chief of staff Josh Bolten, a less-noticed departure was that of Jim Towey, the outgoing White House director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly writes, "Towey was a good man...[but] he always chose to mouth the Bush administration's fiction that government discriminated against faith-based groups until George W. Bush came to save them."

John DiIulio, the director of the faith-based office who preceded Towey, proclaimed that the White House focus on faith-based issues was more driven by a concern for politics. "It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis," declared DiIulio of the White House political operation.

Towey's former deputy at the White House, David Kuo, similarly said there was "minimal commitment" from the White House on the faith-based agenda. Kuo argued the White House never really wanted the "poor people stuff."

Loyal conservative allies of the administration have declared the faith-based agenda little more than a political showpiece. Towey's departure shifts the focus from him, who was personally well-liked by the religious community, to "the White House's actual faith-based accomplishments, which are few and far between."

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From the NY Times via Publishers Lunch...

Charles Frazier, Still Writing

The Cold Mountain author is close to finishing revisions for his second novel THIRTEEN MOONS, which Random House has announced for an October 3 pub date. The house is announcing a planned first printing of 750,000 copies. As today's NYT piece notes, though Grove/Atlantic was a couple of million dollars short in the bidding for the book in 2002, their paperback license with Vintage for Cold Mountain has expired, and they will issue a new paperback edition in September.NYT

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From: Dept of Defense :

TRANSCRIPT from the United States Department of Defense DoD News Briefing
Radio Interview with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Mullen on the G. Gordon Liddy Show
Wednesday, April, 19, 2006 - 00:00 AM EDT

LIDDY: Admiral Mike Mullen, he is the Chief of Naval Operations, and as you might imagine he is a Naval Academy Graduate -- of the music -- and admiral, thanks so much for joining us.

ADM. MULLEN: How are you?

LIDDY: Well, thank you, and I've got a question for you.

ADM. MULLEN: Sure.

LIDDY: Last year in the Pentagon, my son, Commander Jim Liddy retired. He was at the time assigned working with the Assistant SECDEF for counter terrorism and low intensity warfare. So I knew he was doing that, but for the 20 years prior to that as a SEAL he was in 37 different countries, and all he will tell me is that he was working in the war on terror. Will you please tell me what you were doing with my son for 15 years?

ADM. MULLEN: Well, I can say that your son served exceptionally well and he served in a wonderful part of our Navy with our Navy SEALs who are heavily involved -- one of the parts of the Navy they're heavily involved in, the current effort of what we call the long war, this global war on terror, and they're having a great impact. So I'm proud to say that I am able to associate myself with young men and women like your son.

LIDDY: Well, thank you, sir. Now I was last on extended active duty in the army, sorry about that, but 53 years ago, so I'm not really up to speed on what you all are doing these days, especially in the Navy, but I understand that you have ordered the establishment of a new Riverine Force for the Navy, and I know that in Vietnam those people played a very vital role.Can you tell us what these days you can use that force for?

ADM. MULLEN: Yes, sir, I can. Actually, we have put in place a newRiverine Force to initially, to actually create a squadron that will go to Iraq and relieve the Marines in a critical dam there called Haditha Dam, but that'll be the initial squadron that will go out in about a year. They will be part of what is today, almost 4,000 Sailors that we have on the ground in Iraq and in that theater what we call the CENTCOM theater that we've got almost 10,000 Sailors on the ground throughout the theater, including the 4,000 that I mentioned in Iraq. So in the Riverine Force that will be an initial place that we'll go, but down the road it will not be unlike the force that we had in Vietnam. It's to provide the kind of security and capability in the rivers and in the waters close to shore, in ports and harbors and countries all over the world with whom we think we need to engage both, in particular, in a friendly way.

LIDDY: Well, Admiral Mullen, I remember the Second World War very, very well because I was 15 when it ended, and I know what a huge Navy we had at that time. The Navy's down to 281 ships right now, which I think is far too few, although nobody has actually said in the White House. I thought that Reagan's idea of a 600 ship Navy was about right these days. Are there plans or do you have plans to seek more ships for the Navy, which I think you really need?

ADM. MULLEN: Well, actually I do have plans to do that. I've been in this job since last July, and as I returned I went on a tour over in Europe for only about 7 months, but as I returned to Washington our Navy was down, as you said to 281 ships, and I think that is too small. I've actually submitted a plan to Congress to bring that number up to 313 and we're headed in that direction. My goal is to create some stability in how we build ships and really how we build fleets. I also remember the goal of a 600-ship Navy. We don't need that many ships right now. In fact, the ships that we're building and the airplanes that we're building are much more capable than the ships that we had back in the 1980s or were thinking about in the 1980s. That said, we do have to have enough and we have a global responsibility, and we have relationships all over the world that we have to sustain. And it takes a certain number of ships to do that. So we need to get the number back up above 300 and we need support from Congress, we need support from our industry, but most of all this is the American people's Navy, and we need support out there for this approach.

LIDDY: But Admiral, speaking of this being the American people's Navy, it is now, as are all our military forces, a very highly selective all volunteer force. How is the Navy doing on recruiting? Are you meeting your goals? Are you getting the quality of people that is necessary to operate all this gee-whiz high tech stuff that you've got?

ADM. MULLEN: Well, I know you said it's been a long time since you've been in. I've actually been in myself since the late sixties, so I came up through Vietnam and then through the establishment of the all-volunteer force. I think that was an incredibly important decision that this country made, and I support it fully. The quality of the young men and women that are in the United States Navy today are the best I've ever seen. They are, and our recruiting numbers right now, are very, very good. They've stayed good. Our retention numbers well over half of those who come in decide to make to basically reenlist or stay in after their first hitch, which is a significant achievement, and those numbers are staying up. I was aboard one of our aircraft carriers about a month ago, and in walking around the carrier talking to young Sailors, the number of young Sailors that ask me how they could -- cause they know we're sending Sailors to Iraq and Afghanistan -- how could they volunteer and get in the queue to go do that, because that's where they know the need is, that really buoyed my spirits in terms of the kind of young people that we have and the recognition of what they have to do and where the fight is and their eagerness to contribute to it. So right now we're in great shape and these things change over time, but it's a very positive environment in the Navy right now.

LIDDY: Okay, thank you. I was just recently over in Iraq and I was discussing the standing up of the Iraqi army, and one of the problems that we have with the Iraqis there is they have really no concept of a non-commissioned officer corps. I think you'll agree with me and everyone who's ever been an officer will agree that it's the non-coms that really run the services and they just let the officers think that they do. How has the Navy's non-commissioned officer corps, the chiefs and what have you?

ADM. MULLEN: Well, I grew up -- as you certainly stated -- I grew up and I was trained by the chiefs that I was working with, and while theoretically they were working for me, in the end I was really working for them. I'm very fond of saying that in the Navy the chiefs run the Navy and they do. They are not in charge of it, but they make it run. That has been true for almost four decades that I've been in the Navy, and it continues to be true today. I'm heartened by what I see. They are dedicated, outstanding professionals, and they are incredibly well supported by their families, not just the chiefs -- but all our families support our Sailors which is really critical in these times. I'm fond of saying that overall readiness is tied directly to our family readiness and I've put a lot of emphasis on making sure our families are in good shape. But the chiefs, our non-coms, are in great shape, and they're running it.

LIDDY: But Admiral, all on the Quadrennial Defense Review, which is called for by Congress, calls for the Navy to shift some of your submarine force and other forces to the Pacific, and I wonder if you care to comment if that has anything to do with the perceived threat proposed by the big military buildup of China? Are they thinking long term?

ADM. MULLEN: I think that's a fair question, and it's a concern that we all have. Clearly, the Pacific is a vital part of our future, an awful lot of trade. Over 90 percent of our trade comes in and out of this country by the sea. So having a secure environment at sea is really critical and the stability in that part of the world, the Western Pacific, is also critical. And China has clearly invested heavily. They've got an economy, which is booming. They've also invested heavily on the military side, so we're watching both. We would certainly welcome a China that is economically sound would be a very positive addition to the world economy and peace and stability. On the other hand, if there are other motivations there, that certainly would be a concern, and it's those motivations that I think we need to understand for the Navy because it's such a heavily maritime area. There's so much water out there. That theater is a big theater for the Navy. ThePacific Ocean is big, as I'm sure you know, and getting from point A to point B takes time, and you have to have the assets, the ships and airplanes out there to be able to do that. So that's the reason for the shift.

LIDDY: Admiral, one last question. It's a technical one, like one reads about a number of different navies fielding, these are electric submarines these days.

ADM. MULLEN: Right.

LIDDY: Are there advantages to those or are they just cheaper?

ADM. MULLEN: Well, they are clearly less expensive. My position with our own Navy is that we stay in nuclear powered submarines and it's tied to sustaining it. It's tied to you know we are a maritime nation and we are around the world, and having the kind of sustained capability that nuclear power gives you in a submarine is a great advantage to us. That said, other nations who develop diesel submarines develop them for their own reasons and they're very good submarines. They just don't have some of the assets that our submarines have, so that, as far as our future is concerned, I would continue to expect us to stay in the nuclear world.

LIDDY: Admiral, well, thank you so much for joining me. I know you're an extremely busy man. We are really grateful that you chose to give us some of your (inaudible).

ADM. MULLEN: Thank you, Mr. Liddy. I appreciate the time.

LIDDY: Thank you, sir.

Wrap....

From The Village Voice:

The Interview
There Had to Be a Fall GuyBut it was a woman: An interview with the only senior officer blamed for Abu Ghraib
by Michael Roston
April 13th, 2006 3:33 PM

Janis Karpinski was the senior most female officer in the Iraq war, commanding the 800th Military Police brigade and 17 prisons, including Abu Ghraib. After those infamous photos were released, President Bush ordered Karpinski's demotion, and she later retired from service. She is still the only senior officer held to account for what happened at Abu Ghraib, a fact she will likely discuss on Friday when she addresses "Torture on Trial," a symposium organized by students of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and Law School.

The Interview:

Do you think the military is over the hump with its detainees problems in Iraq?

I don't think we're any closer today to resolving it. The people at the highest levels still have taken no responsibility but they're certainly putting the policies in place to allow it to happen.

Senator McCain thinks he can improve the military's treatment of detainees with clearer instructions and a new Field Manual.

No, no. Military Police personnel, in the Reserves and the National Guard, understand the Geneva Conventions, and they understand the appropriate treatment of prisoners. McCain can be anybody's hero because he was a prisoner of war himself but nothing's changed. What I'm trying to say is that the rules were always in place.

Were any lives saved because of interrogations at Abu Ghraib?

It was not unusual at Abu Ghraib, I'd have people speaking perfectly good English to me, they were doctors trained in the United States or Germany or England, lawyers, teachers, students, and pleading, holding onto this concertina wire, saying please general, please we're not guilty of anything. [Major General Barbara Fast, senior military intelligence officer's] real fear was she did not want to release the next Osama Bin Laden.

Was there any change in your relationship with the soldiers under your command after the Abu Ghraib investigation began?

They knew the truth and I knew the truth and because we haven't gotten to the point of having this resolved yet, I think some of it was their fear that they would have to go back again and have to be placed in a similar situation.

Did you have people [worrying] that they were going to get in trouble soon?

Soldiers asked, do you think we're being set up? Then the word came that they were going to be extended, and in the process, they sat together and if they were going to be sent back up to Abu Ghraib for four months, what they believed, whether it was based on logic or anything else, [is] they were going to be housed in one building, and somehow it would be blown up, and that's how they would be silenced. In the course of the investigation, from the first time I saw the photographs, General Sanchez ordered me—ordered me—not to discuss it with anyone.

How did you come to the decision to leave the military?

It was very clear to me when I got out of Iraq, there was no plan for nation-building, no plan for sustainment operations, no plan for securing peace so Iraqis could get back to building the country the way they felt was appropriate. There was absolutely no support for me or my soldiers. And it starts with the chief of the army reserve, a three star, he never spoke to me, not one minute of conversation, not once, no one in the chain of command above me so much as called me, notified me, or had a discussion with me. It was an absolute abandonment by my so-called leaders. I said I cannot serve in a military like this anymore. I can do a better job on the outside.

What do you think of all the Iraq war veterans who are now running for office?

I say it's about time, we need to have more people who are coming back from this, if we hope to get to the truth, or if we hope to prevent it from happening like this ever again, we need people who were on the ground, who learned lessons the hard way.

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From ABQJournal via Lanl-the-real-story blog:

LANL Changes Lead to Lawsuit
By John Arnold
Journal Staff Writer

LOS ALAMOS— The current and incoming Los Alamos National Laboratory managers are forcing lab workers "to make truly impossible and coerced" decisions about their future at the lab, a LANL labor union is alleging.

The University Professional and Technical Employees union, along with four individual lab employees, filed a class-action lawsuit in California Superior Court Tuesday challenging the legality of the ongoing management transition at the lab.

The lab's current contractor, the University of California, is scheduled to hand over management duties June 1 to Los Alamos National Security— a private company whose partners include engineering giant Bechtel National, UC, Washington Group International and BWX Technologies.

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From The Australian:

Lock him away to stop the next war

With his presidency reduced to a mess, George W. Bush may just decide to lash out wildly at Iran
By Phillip Adams
04/18/06
"The Australian "

WE cannot wait any longer for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Far more efficient to have Bush certified. There is no need for further debate on his mental state. The US President is bonkers.

Having turned the White House into a madhouse, having taken more lunatic positions on more issues than any head of state since GeorgeIII (are they, perchance, related?). GWB needs a long rest and a change of medication. And it shouldn't be too hard to guide him into a padded cell. Just tell him it's the presidential bomb shelter. Let's examine the symptoms of his mental decline.

First, Bush convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. This is something the poor fool might have believed, given a tenuous grasp of geography, history and political reality. He then began to hallucinate about weapons of mass destruction, despite the evidence of Hans Blix and a multitude of others that there weren't any. And he finally organised a tatty little alliance to join him in the silliest war since Vietnam, one guaranteed to recruit terrorists in unprecedented numbers.

Like Vietnam, the Iraq war was launched with presidential lies. Like Vietnam, the Iraq war descended into a moral and military quagmire. And if Iraq seems to be less of a stuff-up, consider this fact: it's taken just three years in Iraq for US deaths to equal the body count after six years in Vietnam.

Little wonder six retired senior generals have joined ranks with the American public in condemning the war, or that the guru of neo-conservatism, Francis Fukuyama, has broken ranks with the likes of Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol in denouncing it. Or that many in the Republican hierarchy have joined left-wing critics denouncing the invasion as a mistake and a failure, calling for immediate withdrawal.

When Bush was re-elected in 2004, this column suggested the President would go on to blast Iran or have the job done by Israeli surrogates. Both scenarios were dismissed as absurd and alarmist. Now journalist Seymour Hersh's revelations of a US plan to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, perhaps with nuclear bunker-blasters, are causing national and international dismay.

They've also provoked anger among the Pentagon's highest-ranking officers already enraged by Donald Rumsfeld's stewardship of the Iraq invasion and occupation. Given Rumsfeld's clear contempt for their opinions, they might well feel mutinous should he and the Commander-in-Chief show further signs of strategic insanity.

But would that prevent air strikes by the Israelis? Given the sabre-rattling by that ratbag in Tehran, what could hold Israel back?

Bush is attempting to hose things down, but the world recalls his endlessly repeated mantra before the invasion of Iraq. Military intervention wasn't inevitable, just an option. Now bleeding in the polls with mid-term elections looming, isn't it possible that Bush might go for broke? Double or nothing? A final, desperate throw of the dice?

Condoleezza Rice might join the Pentagon in trying to talk him down. So, one hopes, would Tony Blair and John Howard. But did Bush listen to reasoned argument last time? With a reckless, irrational President, you've the perfect set-up for the tail to wag the dog. As with 9/11, here's an opportunity for reality to follow a Hollywood script.

Last week I discussed this scenario with Fukuyama. His initial response was that Bush's political situation is too perilous for such a tactic, that the US public and its media wouldn't tolerate another Iraq. But bombing Iran's nuclear facilities could be characterised as surgical. It might not need troops on the ground and would certainly seem more relevant to the war on terror than the neo-con adventure in Iraq. Fukuyama conceded that such a strategy was possible.

And that possibility is more than enough. A lame-duck President with the eagle as his symbol once again takes the role of hawk. With his presidency a total mess, what's there to lose? So it's time to certify the President. Yes, you'd have to certify his equally deranged Vice-President as well. And toss in Rumsfeld to keep them company. Along with anyone else in the administration, the Congress, the Senate or the Australian parliament mad enough to think Iraq a sane decision.

© The Australian

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From Alternet.org via truthout.org :

Rev. Moon's Conjugal Visitations
By John Gorenfeld
AlterNet.org
Monday 17 April 2006

We all know the religious Right wants to tell us what we can't do in the bedroom, but no one asks what they want us to do instead.

Among the trendier gripes about why liberals lack power in American politics is that there isn't enough tolerance for America's faithful. A big problem, Rabbi Michael Lerner recently sighed, is that "the Left's hostility to religion and spirituality has become such a major stumbling block to the chances that progressive forces will ever win enough power" to make a difference. So the new advice, from Hillary Clinton to the New Republic's Gregg Easterbrook, is: Stop making snickering remarks at Jerry Falwell's expense. Cheer the innovation of $2 billion in federal tax money carted off to religious groups last year. Drag the "Left Behind" series into your Amazon shopping cart.

And listen, I should add, to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, owner of the conservative mouthpiece the Washington Times and self-proclaimed Messiah. Moon's warning to America is that we must have sex the way he entreats us, in the positions he has designated, or else forfeit our "love organs," as he dubs them, to the dark lord Satan.

We all know the Right wants to decide what we can't do in the bedroom. But no one ever seems to ask what the Right wants us to do instead.

"After the act of love," read the instructions from the Rev. Moon's conservative Family Federation, "both spouses should wipe their sexual areas with the Holy Handkerchief. Hang the handkerchief[s] to dry naturally and keep them eternally. They must be kept individually labeled and should never be laundered and mixed up."

Maybe the best explanation of our widespread ignorance of the Washington Times owner's sex rites is liberal squeamishness. For those of you who suckled on secular humanism and feminist tracts (which Moon calls Satanic, by the way), these prescriptions from God might seem as off-putting as a Castro Street postcard storefront to Dr. James Dobson.

But in order to usher in a national dialogue on faith in the public square, it's important to look beyond stereotypes of the Right to understand the diverse philosophies behind public movements for state-enforced morality.

Rev. Moon, whose Washington Times is a crown jewel of the conservative media Death Star, offers the essential lessons. He's the last man most Americans would associate with Republican power circles, but is in his own secretive way as important a figure in the Christian Right as Jerry Falwell, who's still in business thanks to a $3.5 million bailout from Moon in 1995, or Tim LaHaye of the Council For National Policy, who took money to serve on the board of a group rehabilitating Moon's image, and once wrote a letter addressing Moon as "the Master."

Just how big is Moon's standing in the Right? The "Republican Noise Machine" is a mighty edifice built with $3 billion in gifts from various right-wing philanthropists. Moon's gift of the Washington Times to the conservative cause alone places him in the club as a charter member; the paper owes its existence to a staggering figure of over $2,000,000,000 since 1982 in donations in Moon's mystery money.

Moon also also controls United Press International, one of the world's largest wire news services. In addition to having a hand in the creation of modern-day Christian Right politics, Moon has given huge sums to Richard Viguerie, the "founding funder" of the Reagan revolution; Terry Dolan, the pioneer of the "liberal bias" attack; and George W. Bush, who received $250,000 from Moon in 2004.

By 1989, US News & World Report was reporting Moon had built "a network of affiliated organizations and connections in almost every conservative organization in Washington, including the Heritage Foundation," but that "conservatives ... fear repercussions if they expose the church's role." In 2004, a veteran Christian Right lobbyist, Gary Jarmin, arranged to have Moon coronated the "King of Peace" in a kitschy ceremony on Capitol Hill in which he wore a glittering crown and royal robes.

Moon, the first President Bush said, while touring South America with the True Father in 1996, is "the man with the vision" whose newspaper "restores sanity to Washington." So why must the gatekeepers of the mainstream media bar his ideas from the public debate on morality? Why does his own employee, Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley, whose paper Moon says he mainly established to "tell the world about God," hold back from telling the McLaughlin Group about the greatness of Rev. Moon's plans for society?

In the interest of healthy public discourse, it bears upon us instead to consider the philosophy fueling Moon, who has long acted on his professed longing to see gays and "free sex" banished from America. Moon's Federation offers an instruction manual explaining, among other things, on which occasions the man should be on top, how Satan can be banished with the spank of a wooden paddle and franker lessons still.

Recipe for Love

There is, as Moon sees it, a profound sex crisis in America. "Satan," the Times publisher said in 2004, "is clinging to our sexual organs." Women are a "line of prostitutes," who should be punished for selfishness. "The concave organ [vagina] should be sealed with concrete."

"The women are the problem in history," he said in 2004. "Women who don't want to have children should cut away their breasts, bottoms and love organ because the purpose for those was first for the children. If they don't fulfill that purpose, then they are not needed."

"Woman's sexual organ is like the open mouth of a snake filled with poison," he said in 1996. Men don't get off any easier. Keep pliers in your pocket, he says, "and when you go to the bathroom, once a day, pinch your love organ. Cut the skin a little bit as a warning."

Moon has even a darker vision for gay men. Moon told an audience he'd like to see them removed in a "purge on God's orders.... Gays will be eliminated, the three Israels will unite. If not, then they will be burned. We do not know what kind of world God will bring, but this is what happens. It will be greater than the Communist purge but at God's orders." (No wonder the Times style guide puts "gay" in quotes.)

Far from being confined to his church, his philosophy has fueled years of voter mobilization drives, state and local candidacies and public campaigns opposing sexual liberties for nonmembers - such as birth control, sex education, gay rights. There have been Moon-sponsored rallies for "pure sex" in the streets of Chicago, featuring mascots dressed up as gonorrhea bacteria. So don't mistake his sexual beliefs for a party to which you aren't invited. "By 2004, we have to reach the level of Jesus occupying Rome," he said in 2001, speaking of his American ambitions. "Invite me as master and owner, or it all will fade away and be broken. The Capitol Hill, the UN - I should be the king."

The goal of getting involved in politics and social services, say his clerics, is to cleanse Satan from humanity's bloodline. Meanwhile, under George W. Bush's Healthy Marriage Initiative and abstinence-only grants, his pastors have won nearly $1 million in public funding. Moon's abstinence-only education group Free Teens USA, funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, instructs school kids in New Jersey: "It's not just your body, it's your whole lineage forever." In a lesson plan featured online, a "family tree" exercise appears to be inspired by Moon's teachings. And to teach that loving carelessly is vile, youths are asked to drink from a cup of spit, according to a lesson plan featured online.

Conjugal Visitation

So let's say you've married a spouse chosen for you by the creator of the Washington Times at one of his 2,000-couple stadium weddings. You've gone through a Moon-ordained period of sexlessness, but now the time has come to get down to business for the first time with your new husband or wife.

Not so fast. At some date prior to the lovemaking, Moon's "indemnity stick ceremony" is used to paddle Satan's spirit from your lover-to-be. The evil spirit is present, according to one church testimony, because "men and women misused each other's sexual parts, for selfish purposes, [and] it gave birth to this resentment ... So we receive three hits of the stick."

According to the Family Federation website, Satan will not be purged until newlyweds carry out his "Three Day Ceremony" in specified sex positions, in Holy Gowns, in front of his photograph. You're to meet at a location that's "as holy a place as possible" - one of Moon's churches is OK. You should have a number of items on hand, according to the instructions available online, including a Holy Handkerchief, a church-supplied cloth, and a photo of the Washington Times publisher and conservative benefactor with his wife, Hak Ja Moon. By now you have embraced them as your True Parents, maybe even replacing your biological mom and dad. Next the room must be sanctified to ward off any potential Satanic comeback, with prayers, a candle and the sprinkling of holy salt.

Over three nights, there must be three acts of sex. The first night, the woman is on top. The second night proceeds much the same as the first. But this time there is emphasis on the idea the man-on-bottom has progressed to "Growth Stage Adam."

Night three: time for the "man to restore dominion." Missionary position.

Moon appears to recognize that not all men will be able to sustain an erection during this procedure.

"The act of love should be a complete act (penetration and ejaculation)," the anonymous authors make clear. "In the event that it is difficult to achieve this, strive to achieve as much penetration as possible and continue with the remainder of the ceremony.

"For the act of love, it is all right to caress each other. Insertion must be accomplished. The couple should continue the act of love until ejaculation, but if it is difficult to reach ejaculation, the act may be stopped at that point. However, insertion itself must be accomplished. If insertion is not possible because the husband does not have an erection, the wife must take her husband's sexual organ in her hand and guide it into her sexual part in order to successfully do the ceremony. If the act of love is not fulfilled and it is delayed, it must be fulfilled within 24 hours starting from the beginning of the ceremony. It is not permitted to use a condom or any other apparatus during the act of love."

In an America where the separation of church and state have widely come to be seen as an urban legend, these ideas deserve as much consideration as the Silver Ring Thing, until recently the inspiration for a $1 million grant in Pittsburgh to push someone else's religious crusade: "to saturate the United States," as the mission statement said, "with a generation of young people who have taken a vow of sexual abstinence until marriage and put on the silver ring. This mission can only be achieved by offering a personal relationship with Jesus Christ ..."

And this is the risk of inviting God into the public square. One man's Silver Ring Thing is another man's Holy Handkerchief.

Wrap...

From The Washington Times:

CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 19, 2006

President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said.

The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content, said OSC Director Douglas J. Naquin.

"A lot of blogs now have become very big on the Internet, and we're getting a lot of rich information on blogs that are telling us a lot about social perspectives and everything from what the general feeling is to ... people putting information on there that doesn't exist anywhere else," Mr. Naquin told The Washington Times.

Eliot A. Jardines, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for open source, said the amount of unclassified intelligence reaching Mr. Bush and senior policy-makers has increased as a result of the center's creation in November.

"We're certainly scoring a number of wins with our ultimate customer," said Mr. Jardines, who became the first high-level official in charge of the government's nonsecret intelligence in December.

"I can't get into detail of what, but I'll just say the amount of open source reporting that goes into the president's daily brief has gone up rather significantly," Mr. Jardines said. "There has been a real interest at the highest levels of our government, and we've been able to consistently deliver products that are on par with the rest of the intelligence community."

Mr. Naquin said recent OSC successes have included the discovery of a technology advance in a foreign country. Also, most data on avian flu outbreaks come from open sources, he said.

"Have we got coups out of it? Close to it," Mr. Naquin said. "But certainly we've had more insight than we've ever had before."

The OSC uses powerful computers and software technology to "sift" the Internet for valuable intelligence. It also buys information from commercial databases.

In the past, open-source reports were used mainly by intelligence analysts.

"But now our customer base literally ranges from the president to local police departments," Mr. Naquin said. The Fairfax County police use OSC products, as do police departments in San Diego, New York and Baltimore. The center also provides support to the U.S. military.

A Defense Department official said Chinese military bloggers have become a valuable source of intelligence on Beijing's secret military buildup. For example, China built its first Yuan-class attack submarine at an underground factory that was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a photo of the submarine appeared on the Internet in 2004.

The center took over the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, known as FBIS, that was formed in 1941 to translate foreign broadcasts.

The OSC is doubling its staff and bringing in material from 32 government agencies that also produce unclassified reports, Mr. Jardines said.

Wrap...

From ThinkProgress.com :

ThinkProgress put together a list of all the key players in the Bush administration's war of choice. The list is somewhat similar to TomPaine.com's graphic published last fall, Dick and Don's Cabal, that illustrated the special relationships involved in the campaign to invade Iraq, WMD or no WMD.

Among other things, the ThinkProgress feature includes an entertaining "key quote" for each person. My favorite is Richard Perle's: [more]

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From Secrecy News:

CIA EXPANDS OPERATIONAL FILE SECRECY

The Central Intelligence Agency conducted a review of its"operational files" last year, as it is required to do every ten years under the CIA Information Act of 1984, to see if any such files could have their "operational" designation rescinded, making them subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

But instead of removing any files from operational status, as contemplated by the 1984 Act, the CIA added nearly two dozen new categories of files that will now be exempt from search and review under the FOIA, according to a newly disclosed report to Congress.

Remarkably, the CIA report to Congress misstated the requirements ofthe 1984 law. The CIA told Congress that: "The CIA Information Act... required that not less than once every ten years, the DCI review the operational files exemptions then in force to determine whether such exemptions could be removed from any category of exempted files or portion of those files, and whether any new categories of files should be designated as exempt."

Only the first half of that sentence is true.The statute that governs these reviews -- 50 U.S.C. 432 -- refers only to the removal of the operational file exemption based on"historical value or other public interest." It says nothing about adding new designations.

Having misstated the law, CIA proceeded to implement its own misrepresentation.The Agency did not remove any operational file exemptions at all. Instead, it added twenty three new file category exemptions.

The CIA has the legal authority under the 1984 CIA Information Act to create new operational file designations at any time. But that is not the purpose of the decennial reviews, which were established by Congress specifically to correct and curtail prior designations that were no longer necessary or appropriate.

In this case, the corrective mechanism designed by Congress was defeated by CIA.The Report of the Second Decennial Review of CIA Operational File Exemptions was transmitted to Congress on June 28, 2005. It was publicly released this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act appeal from the Federation of American Scientists.

See:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/ciaopf2.html

In the first decennial review in 1995, the operational file exemption was removed from four file categories and they were opened to FOIA requests. See the report of the first decennial review here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/ciaopf.html

If rigid and arbitrary secrecy were preconditions for a superior intelligence product, then advocates of greater openness would confront a dilemma. But we know that is not the case. CIA secrecy policy as it exists today is not a sign of vigor but of decay. In the latest sign of institutional turmoil at the Agency, the editor of the somewhat respected CIA journal Studies in Intelligence has resigned, and so has the chairman of its Editorial Board.

"The most chilling aspect is that there are newly established editorial hurdles at the journal. Merit is no longer the sole criterion governing publication," wrote Max Holland, a sometime contributor to Studies. He reported on the resignations in a new article in WashingtonSpectator, "Lessons Not Learned," April 15:

http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20060415lessons_1.cfm

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From NoQuarter.typepad.com :

April 18, 2006
The State INR Memo on Plame
byLarry C Johnson

If you have not seen the copy of the State Department memo detailing what State knew (or did not know) about Joe Wilson's efforts to determine if Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger, check it out. Those not familiar with the format should pay attention to some particulars:

1. A paragraph is classified based on the information it contains. For example, if it is "Official" information but not classified the author could label it "FOUO" (which means, For Official Use Only) or "LOU" (Limited Official Use).

2. When a paragraph is labeled S/NF (Secret/No Forn) that means the information is SECRET and not to be shared with foreigners. The mere mention of Valerie Wilson's name required that the paragraph be classified. If she was not undercover, the paragraph could have (and should have) been classified as LOU or FOUO. The New York Sun editors are morons. They don't even understand this basic point.

3. On the second page of the State Department memo we encounter a blacked out section in the third paragraph from the top. Looks like the words, "Exlusive Dissemination" were excised. I would also note that the term, "ORCON", means "Originator Controlled". In other words, the person who wrote the intel controls the classificaion of it as well as its dissemination.

4. The last paragraph on page four indicates that the forged documents were brought to the United States through Defense Department (not State Department) channels. This helps explain how the documents found their way into the Office of the Vice President.

5. The really explosive news are the six documents listed as "Attachments". This provides the first comprehensive list of the different documents that discounted attempts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger. Remember, Joe Wilson said in his op-ed from July 2003 that there were at least four documents that dealt with this issue. Once again, Joe is wrong. THERE WERE SIX!

This memo is one more nail in the coffin containing the lies Bush told to take us to war. The memo vindicates Joe Wilson and should remind the public that his wife's identity was a SECRET. That is why the paragraphs with her name and/or identity are classified as SECRET.

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From Publishers Lunch Weekly:

MYSTERY/CRIME:

A.W. Hill's THE LAST DAYS OF MADAME REY, Hollywood noir with a post-modern bite and a mystical aura, reminding us that the gumshoes of old were really Grail knights in brown fedoras, to Philip Turner at Carroll & Graf, in a nice deal, by Kimberley Cameron at Reece Halsey Paris (NA). bookgir2@comcast.net

THRILLER:

Charles Cumming's A SPY BY NATURE, THE HIDDEN MAN, THE SPANISH GAME, to Diane Reverand at St. Martin's, by Luke Janklow at Janklow & Nesbit. melissa.contreras@stmartins.com

GENERAL/OTHER:

Whitbread and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jim Crace's THE PESTHOUSE, to Nan Talese at Nan A. Talese, for publication in May 2007, plus two more novels, by David Godwin at David Godwin Associates.ndewey@randomhouse.com

Death of an Ordinary Man and I, Lucifer author Glen Duncan's THE BLOODSTONE PAPERS, in which an Anglo-Indian family carries its history, certain mysteries, and unresolved passions from the last days of the Raj to modern day London, to Dan Halpern and Millicent Bennett of Ecco, in a two-book deal, by Jane Gelfman of Gelfman Schneider, on behalf of Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown London (NA).jane@gelfmanschneider.com

Lynn York's second novel, a follow up to her debut The Piano Teacher, to Trena Keating at Plume, in a very nice deal, by Suzanne Gluck at the William Morris Agency (NA).

CHILDREN'S/MIDDLE GRADE:

MY BIG SISTER IS SO BOSSY SHE SAYS YOU CAN'T READ THIS BOOK author Mary Hershey's STUMP, a darkly humorous coming-of-age story about the relationship between a teen boy, who calls himself Stump to draw shocked attention to his missing leg, and his dad, who left the family after the accident that caused the amputation five years earlier, to Liesa Abrams at Razorbill, in a nice deal, by Erin Murphy of Erin Murphy Literary Agency (world). kitohana@earthlink.net

FILM:

Rights to Laura Lippman's EVERY SECRET THING, about two young women and what happens to them after seven years in juvenile prison for a crime committed when they were eleven, optioned to Frances McDormand, by Justin Manask at IPG on behalf of Vicky Bijur at the Vicky Bijur Literary Agency.

John Connolly's BAD MEN, on the run from a ruthless ex-husband a woman and her young son settle on a desolate and secluded island, to Sobini Films, in a good deal, by Steve Fisher, working on behalf of the Darley Anderson. Screenwriter Steve Susco ("The Grudge") is adapting. sfisher@apa-agency.com

BUSINESS/INVESTING/FINANCE:

John Connolly's BAD MEN, on the run from a ruthless ex-husband a woman and her young son settle on a desolate and secluded island, to Sobini Films, in a good deal, by Steve Fisher, working on behalf of the Darley Anderson. Screenwriter Steve Susco ("The Grudge") is adapting. sfisher@apa-agency.com

HISTORY/POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS:

Historian Alexander Rose's AMERICAN RIFLE, an examination of the relationship between American culture and gun technology from the Revolution to the present and AMERICAN SOLDIER, which explores the question of what it's really like being in battle from the perspective of a common soldier, to John Flicker at Bantam Dell, by Emma Parry at Fletcher & Parry.

Vincent DiGirolamo's CRYING THE NEWS: A History of America's Newsboys, exploring how these resourceful and ambitious child workers came to personify the spirit of capitalism in America, to Susan Ferber at Oxford University Press, by Brettne Bloom at Kneerim & Williams (world).bloom@fr.com

MEMOIR:

Sarah Goodall's THE PALACE DIARIES, The True Story of Life Behind the Palace Gates, described as Bridget Jones meets Paul Burrell, life behind the scenes of the Royal Establishment by a young woman who bumbled her way into a job working for Prince Charles and remained with him for 12 years, to Jackie Cantor for Berkley, for publication in hardback and trade paperback by NAL and Signet for mass market, in a very nice deal, by Fiona Brownlee at Mainstream (NA). fiona.brownlee@mainstreampublishing.com

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg's DRUNKARD, illuminating the quiet desperation of a functioning alcoholic, to Trena Keating for Dutton/Plume, in a very nice deal, by Susan Raihofer at David Black Literary Agency (NA).

Anti-terrorism consultant for the FBI Daveed Gartenstein-Ross's MY YEAR IN RADICAL ISLAM, in which the author tells of converting to Islam as a college student and working for the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a charity dedicated to fostering Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia's austere form of Islam that serves as a theological inspiration for many terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, to Sara Carder at Tarcher, in a very nice deal, by Gary Morris at the David Black Literary Agency.

Federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert's THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, about his kidnapping in Manhattan just before his 38th birthday, the intense psychological duel with his captors that eventually set him free, and the investigation that led to their arrests, to Neil Nyren at Putnam, in a pre-empt, for publication in early 2007, by Ronald Goldfarb (world).
SCIENCE:

Microbiologist Anne Maczulak's THE MICROBES WHO LIVE WITH YOU, a guide to the applications of microbiology from bioterrorism and health hazards in schools, hospitals, and nursing homes to household cleaning detergents, money handling, and food preservatives, to John Oakes at Thunder's Mouth, in a nice deal, by Jodie Rhodes (World).jrhodes1@san.rr.com

GENERAL/OTHER:

English travel writer and author of THE CALIPH'S HOUSE Tahir Shah's IN ARABIAN NIGHTS, about the traditions of Moroccan storytelling, the idea that every soul has its own story, and the author's own family legacy of storytelling, again to Philip Rappaport at Bantam Dell, by Emma Parry of Fletcher & Parry. UK/translation: Patrick Walsh at Conville and Walsh

Wrap....

From SCOTUSblog:

Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Tomorrow's Argument in Clark v. Arizona
05:41 PM
Kimberley Morris

Since John Hinckley shot President Reagan, the country has hosted a lively debate on the place of the insanity defense and evidence of mental illness in the criminal courtroom. On Wednesday, the Court will hear arguments in No. 05-5966, Clark v. Arizona, a case that squarely revives these considerations.

The case poses two questions: (1) whether a state criminal law that permits the fact-finder to ignore evidence of mental illness when deciding if a defendant acted with the requisite mens rea of a crime violates due process; and (2) whether a state’s standard for a defense of mental insanity violates due process if it does not follow the M’Naghten Rule, which permits a defense of insanity both when the defendant was suffering from a mental illness that made him unable to appreciate the “nature and quality” of his acts and when he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.

David Goldberg of Flagstaff, Arizona, will argue on behalf of the petitioner, Eric Michael Clark. Randall M. Howe will argue on behalf of the respondent, the State of Arizona, and Solicitor General Paul Clement will argue on behalf of the United States as an amicus curiae in support of the respondent.

The parties' briefs are available here. The brief for the United States may be found here.

Continue reading "Tomorrow's Argument in Clark v. Arizona" »

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From Lanl-the-real-story blog:

PRESS RELEASE ** PRESS RELEASE ** PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release: April 18, 2006

Contacts:
Los Alamos, NM: Manuel Trujillo (505) 927-3883
Livermore, CA: Jeff Colvin (925) 449-4846
Washington DC: Candice Johnson (202) 434-1168

Los Alamos National Laboratory
Privatization of Employees’ Pensions
Endangers National Security

As a result of the privatization of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Department of Energy and the University of California will transfer all 10,000 employees at the nation’s largest and most prestigious nuclear weapons research facility from university employment to private employment controlled by a consortium of defense contractors and the University of California. This move jeopardizes decades of accrued pension benefits and any future job security for the thousands of professionals and employees who have made the work of Los Alamos so highly regarded. After years of security and safety incidents that focused congressional and media attention on the Los Alamos Lab, these changes will make a difficult situation worse.

On March 15, the University of California and LANS, LLC (the new private company controlled by UC and Bechtel) notified employees that they must forfeit further accrual of their University of California pensions if they want to keep their jobs with the privatized Los Alamos National Security, LLC.

The Department of Energy has already begun the privatization of the other nuclear weapons research facility run by UC, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Legislators and DOE officials anticipate that the thousands of LLNL employees also to be privatized by October 2007.

The Los Alamos and Livermore Lab employees are members of Communications Workers of America Local 9119, University Professional and Technical Employees.

The typical and appropriate solution to this type of transition would involve establishing "reciprocity”, whereby employees could retain their vested benefits under the University’s retirement plan while accruing added service credit and added benefits at LANS. Instead, employees are faced with a Catch-22 dilemma: they must either transfer all of their vested assets into the new and untested LANS plan, which provides far less retirement security than the University’s plan, or freeze their University pensions and be punished by being placed in a radically diminished LANS plan.

Further, employees who select to freeze their current pension and keep those funds with UC have grave concerns about UC’s statements that it plans to spin off this portion of the retirement plan. This could lead to chronic under-funding of this pension plan unless UC resolves its current conflict with the Department of Energy as to which entity is responsible for the viability of such a spin off fund. Adding insult to injury, employees are being required to make their impossible choice immediately, before UC decides whether to go through with the spin-off.

Thousands of employees have begun the process of retiring rather than lose their pensions. After years of mismanagement that led to security breaches and financial malfeasance, employees have lost their commitment to the mission of the national lab. This drain of talented professionals puts the mission of the Los Alamos program – and national security – at great risk. ”Employees are being coerced into making decisions that will cause irreparable harm,” warns Manny Trujillo, UPTE/LANL President. “Employees are being spoon fed little to no information that is often erroneous, causing confusion and frustration,” he added.

CWA and UPTE-CWA members are very concerned that this move is causing irreparable harm to the Department of Energy laboratory that plays such a pivotal role in national security. Employees at Los Alamos Lab perform countless critical tasks, such as keeping the U.S. nuclear stockpile safe, detecting nuclear threats from oil fields in Iraq to airports in Belarus, and computing for the human genome project.

UPTE-CWA is filing a lawsuit today challenging the legality of forcing current UC employees to make the truly impossible and coerced pension decisions described above.
We will be having a Press Conference tomorrow at 11:30 AM on south side of Ashley Pond in Los Alamos NM. Lawrence Livermore National laboratory (LLNL) will have theirs half an hour later and there is also one planned in Washington DC.

Wrap...

From The Guardian via American Progress :

Ignore bloggers at your peril, say researchers
· Online pundits 'influence businesses and opinion'
· Companies are falling foul of negative net buzz
Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
Tuesday April 18, 2006
The Guardian

Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a "disproportionately large influence" on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although "active" web users make up only a small proportion of Europe's online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

More than half of the internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23% only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net - through messageboards, websites and blogs - are helping change the national conversation, say researchers.

"We're seeing this growing," said Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter Research and author of the report. "The strongest part of their influence is on the media: if something online suddenly becomes a story in the local press, then it matters."

Although unprompted contributors are generally younger and more vocal than the wider online population, they are increasingly important as opinion formers and trend-setters. Mr Smith says businesses, media organisations and advertisers reading blogs should be wary of making assumptions about their wider significance, but that their muscle cannot be ignored.

"They're not representative of the larger audience, but what they're saying does matter," he said. "It's a good straw poll - a snapshot of the verbal conversations going on that we can't measure."

"That's exactly right," said Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids, which explores the explosion in web punditry. "Bloggers and blog-readers are 'influentials' - the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed."

There are now more than 35m blogs around the world, according to search engine Technorati. While most bloggers only write for small audiences, they can sometimes achieve wider fame or become the focus of consumer campaigns.

Companies like McDonald's, lock manufacturer Kryptonite and computer firm Dell have all fallen foul of internet buzz in recent years. Because search engines like Google can allow grassroots campaigns to become highly visible, industry insiders agree decisions can be shaped by a small number of activists.

"It's always been the case that vocal minorities are listened to by media organisations, brands, advertisers and marketers - normally because they're thought to represent a wider swath of opinion," said Tom Coates, a technologist with Yahoo! and prominent blogger.

"TV and radio programmes are censored or pulled on the green-inked letters of a few hundred people, products removed from shelves because of less than 100 complaints.

"On that basis, these figures start to sound like a pretty large number of people, and probably a much more representative sample than perhaps before."

Mr Reynolds admits the idea of small groups being able to pressurise wider decisions is nothing new, but those who ignore online buzz do so at their peril: "You can bury your head in the sand, but very quickly you'll look like a very old-fashioned company."

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From Vanity Fair via truthout.org

Senate Hearings on Bush, Now
By Carl Bernstein
Vanity Fair
Monday 17 April 2006

In this VF.com exclusive, a Watergate veteran and Vanity Fair contributor calls for bipartisan hearings investigating the Bush presidency. Should Republicans on the Hill take the high road and save themselves come November?

Worse than Watergate? High crimes and misdemeanors justifying the impeachment of George W. Bush, as increasing numbers of Democrats in Washington hope, and, sotto voce, increasing numbers of Republicans - including some of the president's top lieutenants - now fear? Leaders of both parties are acutely aware of the vehemence of anti-Bush sentiment in the country, expressed especially in the increasing number of Americans - nearing fifty percent in some polls - who say they would favor impeachment if the president were proved to have deliberately lied to justify going to war in Iraq.

John Dean, the Watergate conspirator who ultimately shattered the Watergate conspiracy, rendered his precipitous (or perhaps prescient) impeachment verdict on Bush two years ago in the affirmative, without so much as a question mark in choosing the title of his book Worse than Watergate. On March 31, some three decades after he testified at the seminal hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee, Dean reiterated his dark view of Bush's presidency in a congressional hearing that shed more noise than light, and more partisan rancor than genuine inquiry. The ostensible subject: whether Bush should be censured for unconstitutional conduct in ordering electronic surveillance of Americans without a warrant.

Raising the worse-than-Watergate question and demanding unequivocally that Congress seek to answer it is, in fact, overdue and more than justified by ample evidence stacked up from Baghdad back to New Orleans and, of increasing relevance, inside a special prosecutor's office in downtown Washington.

In terms of imminent, meaningful action by the Congress, however, the question of whether the president should be impeached (or, less severely, censured) remains premature. More important, it is essential that the Senate vote - hopefully before the November elections, and with overwhelming support from both parties - to undertake a full investigation of the conduct of the presidency of George W. Bush, along the lines of the Senate Watergate Committee's investigation during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.

How much evidence is there to justify such action?

Certainly enough to form a consensus around a national imperative: to learn what this president and his vice president knew and when they knew it; to determine what the Bush administration has done under the guise of national security; and to find out who did what, whether legal or illegal, unconstitutional or merely under the wire, in ignorance or incompetence or with good reason, while the administration barricaded itself behind the most Draconian secrecy and disingenuous information policies of the modern presidential era.

"We ought to get to the bottom of it so it can be evaluated, again, by the American people," said Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on April 9. "[T]he President of the United States owes a specific explanation to the American people … about exactly what he did." Specter was speaking specifically about a special prosecutor's assertion that Bush selectively declassified information (of dubious accuracy) and instructed the vice president to leak it to reporters to undermine criticism of the decision to go to war in Iraq. But the senator's comments would be even more appropriately directed at far more pervasive and darker questions that must be answered if the American political system is to acquit itself in the Bush era, as it did in Nixon's.

Perhaps there are facts or mitigating circumstances, given the extraordinary nature of conceiving and fighting a war on terror, that justify some of the more questionable policies and conduct of this presidency, even those that turned a natural disaster in New Orleans into a catastrophe of incompetence and neglect. But the truth is we have no trustworthy official record of what has occurred in almost any aspect of this administration, how decisions were reached, and even what the actual policies promulgated and approved by the president are. Nor will we, until the subpoena powers of the Congress are used (as in Watergate) to find out the facts - not just about the war in Iraq, almost every aspect of it, beginning with the road to war, but other essential elements of Bush's presidency, particularly the routine disregard for truthfulness in the dissemination of information to the American people and Congress.

The first fundamental question that needs to be answered by and about the president, the vice president, and their political and national-security aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Condoleezza Rice, to Karl Rove, to Michael Chertoff, to Colin Powell, to George Tenet, to Paul Wolfowitz, to Andrew Card (and a dozen others), is whether lying, disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation of information have been a basic matter of policy - used to overwhelm dissent; to hide troublesome truths and inconvenient data from the press, public, and Congress; and to defend the president and his actions when he and they have gone awry or utterly failed.

Most of what we have learned about the reality of this administration - and the disconcerting mind-set and decision-making process of President Bush himself - has come not from the White House or the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security or the Treasury Department, but from insider accounts by disaffected members of the administration after their departure, and from distinguished journalists, and, in the case of a skeletal but hugely significant body of information, from a special prosecutor. And also, of late, from an aide-de-camp to the British prime minister. Almost invariably, their accounts have revealed what the president and those serving him have deliberately concealed - torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and its apparent authorization by presidential fiat; wholesale N.S.A. domestic wiretapping in contravention of specific prohibitive law; brutal interrogations of prisoners shipped secretly by the C.I.A. and U.S. military to Third World gulags; the nonexistence of W.M.D. in Iraq; the role of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff in divulging the name of an undercover C.I.A. employee; the non-role of Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the events of 9/11; the death by friendly fire of Pat Tillman (whose mother, Mary Tillman, told journalist Robert Scheer, "The administration tried to attach themselves to his virtue and then they wiped their feet with him"); the lack of a coherent post-invasion strategy for Iraq, with all its consequent tragedy and loss and destabilizing global implications; the failure to coordinate economic policies for America's long-term financial health (including the misguided tax cuts) with funding a war that will drive the national debt above a trillion dollars; the assurance of Wolfowitz (since rewarded by Bush with the presidency of the World Bank) that Iraq's oil reserves would pay for the war within two to three years after the invasion; and Bush's like-minded confidence, expressed to Blair, that serious internecine strife in Iraq would be unlikely after the invasion.

But most grievous and momentous is the willingness - even enthusiasm, confirmed by the so-called Downing Street Memo and the contemporaneous notes of the chief foreign-policy adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair - to invent almost any justification for going to war in Iraq (including sending up an American U-2 plane painted with U.N. markings to be deliberately shot down by Saddam Hussein's air force, a plan hatched while the president, the vice president, and Blair insisted to the world that war would be initiated "only as a last resort"). Attending the meeting between Bush and Blair where such duplicity was discussed unabashedly ("intelligence and facts" would be jiggered as necessary and "fixed around the policy," wrote the dutiful aide to the prime minister) were Ms. Rice, then national-security adviser to the president, and Andrew Card, the recently departed White House chief of staff.

As with Watergate, the investigation of George W. Bush and his presidency needs to start from a shared premise and set of principles that can be embraced by Democrats and Republicans, by liberals and centrists and conservatives, and by opponents of the war and its advocates: that the president of the United States and members of his administration must defend the requirements of the Constitution, obey the law, demonstrate common sense, and tell the truth. Obviously there will be disagreements, even fierce ones, along the way. Here again the Nixon example is useful: Republicans on the Senate Watergate Committee, including its vice chairman, Howard Baker of Tennessee ("What did the president know and when did he know it?"), began the investigation as defenders of Nixon. By its end, only one was willing to make any defense of Nixon's actions.

The Senate Watergate Committee was created (by a 77-0 vote of the Senate) with the formal task of investigating illegal political-campaign activities. Its seven members were chosen by the leadership of each party, three from the minority, four from the majority. (The Democratic majority leader of the Senate, Mike Mansfield, insisted that none of the Democrats be high-profile senators with presidential aspirations.) One of the crucial tasks of any committee charged with investigating the Bush presidency will be to delineate the scope of inquiry. It must not be a fishing expedition - and not only because the pond is so loaded with fish. The lines ought to be drawn so that the hearings themselves do not become the occasion for the ultimate battle of the culture wars. This investigation should be seen as an opportunity to at last rise above the culture wars and, as in Watergate, learn whether the actions of the president and his deputies have been consistent with constitutional principles, the law, and the truth.

Karl Rove and other White House strategists are betting (with odds in their favor) that Republicans on Capitol Hill are extremely unlikely to take the high road before November and endorse any kind of serious investigation into Bush's presidency - a gamble that may increase the risk of losing Republican majorities in either or both houses of Congress, and even further undermine the future of the Bush presidency. Already in the White House, there is talk of a nightmare scenario in which the Democrats successfully make the November congressional elections a referendum on impeachment - and win back a majority in the House, and maybe the Senate too.

But voting now to create a Senate investigation - chaired by a Republican - could work to the advantage both of the truth and of Republican candidates eager to put distance between themselves and the White House.

The calculations of politicians about their electoral futures should pale in comparison to the urgency of examining perhaps the most disastrous five years of decision-making of any modern American presidency.

Cont: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041806Z.shtml

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From the New York Times via truthout.org :

Bombs That Would Backfire
By Richard Clarke and Steven Simon
The New York Times
Sunday 16 April 2006

White House spokesmen have played down press reports that the Pentagon has accelerated planning to bomb Iran. We would like to believe that the administration is not intent on starting another war, because a conflict with Iran could be even more damaging to our interests than the current struggle in Iraq has been. A brief look at history shows why.

Reports by the journalist Seymour Hersh and others suggest that the United States is contemplating bombing a dozen or more nuclear sites, many of them buried, around Iran. In the event, scores of air bases, radar installations and land missiles would also be hit to suppress air defenses. Navy bases and coastal missile sites would be struck to prevent Iranian retaliation against the American fleet and Persian Gulf shipping. Iran's long-range missile installations could also be targets of the initial American air campaign.

These contingencies seem familiar to us because we faced a similar situation as National Security Council staff members in the mid-1990's. American frustrations with Iran were growing, and in early 1996 the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, publicly called for the overthrow of the Iranian government. He and the C.I.A. put together an $18 million package to undertake it.

The Iranian legislature responded with a $20 million initiative for its intelligence organizations to counter American influence in the region. Iranian agents began casing American embassies and other targets around the world. In June 1996, the Qods Force, the covert-action arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, arranged the bombing of an apartment building used by our Air Force in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans.

At that point, the Clinton administration and the Pentagon considered a bombing campaign. But after long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favorably for the United States.

While the full scope of what America did do remains classified, published reports suggest that the United States responded with a chilling threat to the Tehran government and conducted a global operation that immobilized Iran's intelligence service. Iranian terrorism against the United States ceased.

In essence, both sides looked down the road of conflict and chose to avoid further hostilities. And then the election of the reformist Mohammad Khatami as president of Iran in 1997 gave Washington and Tehran the cover they needed to walk back from the precipice.

Now, as in the mid-90's, any United States bombing campaign would simply begin a multi-move, escalatory process. Iran could respond three ways. First, it could attack Persian Gulf oil facilities and tankers - as it did in the mid-1980's - which could cause oil prices to spike above $80 dollars a barrel.

Second and more likely, Iran could use its terrorist network to strike American targets around the world, including inside the United States. Iran has forces at its command that are far superior to anything Al Qaeda was ever able to field. The Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah has a global reach, and has served in the past as an instrument of Iran. We might hope that Hezbollah, now a political party, would decide that it has too much to lose by joining a war against the United States. But this would be a dangerous bet.

Third, Iran is in a position to make our situation in Iraq far more difficult than it already is. The Badr Brigade and other Shiite militias in Iraq could launch a more deadly campaign against British and American troops. There is every reason to believe that Iran has such a retaliatory shock wave planned and ready.

No matter how Iran responded, the question that would face American planners would be, "What's our next move?" How do we achieve so-called escalation dominance, the condition in which the other side fears responding because they know that the next round of American attacks would be too lethal for the regime to survive?

Bloodied by Iranian retaliation, President Bush would most likely authorize wider and more intensive bombing. Non-military Iranian government targets would probably be struck in a vain hope that the Iranian people would seize the opportunity to overthrow the government. More likely, the American war against Iran would guarantee the regime decades more of control.

So how would bombing Iran serve American interests? In over a decade of looking at the question, no one has ever been able to provide a persuasive answer. The president assures us he will seek a diplomatic solution to the Iranian crisis. And there is a role for threats of force to back up diplomacy and help concentrate the minds of our allies. But the current level of activity in the Pentagon suggests more than just standard contingency planning or tactical saber-rattling.

The parallels to the run-up to to war with Iraq are all too striking: remember that in May 2002 President Bush declared that there was "no war plan on my desk" despite having actually spent months working on detailed plans for the Iraq invasion. Congress did not ask the hard questions then. It must not permit the administration to launch another war whose outcome cannot be known, or worse, known all too well.

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From Press Service:

By Elaine Wilson
Special to American Forces Press Service
FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas
April 17, 2006

The first joint interrogation and debriefing battalion in the Army stood up April 12 during a ceremony here.

Army leaders are taking lessons learned from the 2003 Abu Ghraib detainee abuse incidents in Iraq to revamp the intelligence field. Changes include the activation of dedicated interrogation battalions and a new joint training center for the intelligence career field.

The 201st Military Intelligence Battalion is the first of four joint interrogation battalions -- two active and two reserve -- to be activated in the next several years. Its mission is to conduct detainee screening and interrogation missions in support of military operations throughout the world, such as Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.

"Being the first dedicated interrogation battalion in the Army, the spotlight is on these fine soldiers and their leadership," said Col. Richard Saddler, commander of the 470th Military Intelligence Brigade and keynote speaker at the ceremony. "Fortunately, they are the finest our nation has to offer, and they will do well in their upcoming missions."

The 201st Military Intelligence Battalion comprises 147 active duty soldiers, all specializing in interrogation and intelligence.The concept for the battalions came about, in part, as a result of a 2004 investigation led by Maj. Gen. George Fay into the Abu Ghraib abuse of detainees.

"The Department of the Army, based on the Fay report and other weaknesses in how we conducted intelligence operations, recognized the need for dedicated interrogation battalions," Saddler said."Prior to this, the command and control stopped at the company level.

The Army needed the command and control a battalion structure can provide," explained Lt. Col. John Strycula, battalion commander, who previously served as chief of intelligence operations for U.S. Army Europe and 7th Army in Heidelberg, Germany. Also, soldiers were in smaller elements embedded in units throughout the world instead of consolidated into "highly trained units."While the Army will retain oversight and provide the manpower in theater, the battalion can plug in other services and agencies as needed, Strycula said."We can bring on Air Force, Marines, Navy, whatever the mission calls for," he said.

Strycula said he is looking forward to the challenge of commanding the first-of-its-kind battalion."I'm honored and excited about commanding this battalion," Strycula said. "There's a lot to do, but this battalion will not fail."This battalion will succeed because of the competency, motivation and professionalism of the soldiers you see standing before you," he added. "They are that impressive, and I am honored to serve with them."

Along with the new battalion, plans for a new joint training center at nearby Camp Bullis are in the works.

"This interrogation center of excellence will feature a (major training) event that all interrogation units will rotate through to ensure they are battle ready on all interrogation and warrior tasks before they go to war," Saddler said.A timeline hasn't been set, but Army leaders are taking the fast track on the initiative, Saddler said. "They are committed to improving capabilities, and doing it quickly."

(Elaine Wilson is editor of the Fort Sam Houston News Leader.)

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From Lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com :

A word of warning
Submitted by Anonymous:

A word of warning to those LANL staff who still feel the need to express themselves by writing scathing letters to the LANL NewsBulletin: you are about to become "at-will" employees.

If you thought there was an atmosphere of intimidation and retaliation under Nanos, then you need to realize that under LANS, LLC you will truly put your remaining careers at LANL at risk by writing letters to the NewsBulletin that are critical of LANS, DOE, NNSA, UC, BWXT, or anything LANL-related.

You will probably be safe ranting about those favorite NewsBulletin topics involving bad drivers, bicycle safety, and parking problems. However, you may rest assured that criticisms of the new LANL management will not go unnoticed. Authors of such letters will find themselves "at-risk".

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From Japan Times:

U.S. aims to up nuclear warhead production capability to 250 a year
WASHINGTON (Kyodo)

The United States envisions a plan to establish an annual production capability of 250 nuclear warheads in a bid to be prepared for possible contingencies in the future, a senior U.S. administration official said.

The plan also calls for promoting development of new types of warheads in a five-year cycle to continuously replace existing ones, the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) official said on condition of anonymity.

The official also said the new type, called the reliable replacement warhead, or RRW, which is now being studied for submarine-launched ballistic missiles in place of the current W-76 warhead, could also be used for intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The move shows that the NNSA is contemplating twice the contingency production capability more than what it has publicly stated.

In a congressional hearing early this month, NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Thomas D'Agostino said the agency plans a "baseline production capacity of 125 (plutonium) pits per year to the stockpile by 2022."

The five-year development cycle means the administration will continue to develop new types of RRW after it successfully produces the one for replacing the W-76 warhead.

The NNSA official said, "Every five years we would go through a cycle . . . research, development, production, retirement, dismantlement."

The Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are expected to "establish technical feasibility" of developing the RRW without the resumption of nuclear tests, he said.

The Japan Times: Sunday, April 16, 2006
(C) All rights reserved

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From The Huffington Post...an excerpt:

by James Pinkerton:

One particular cloud on the horizon might be no bigger than a fist right now, but everyone in the Pentagon knows that this cloud could explode with reputation-shattering thunder and lightning. That cloud has a name: H.R. McMaster.

On PBS' "Washington Week in Review" show earlier this evening, John Hendren, military correspondent for NPR, was asked about the "generals' revolt" against Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

You know, the six retired generals whose picture appeared on the front page of Friday's New York Times: all have criticized Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq war and called for his resignation. Hendren and the other panelists speculated that additional generals might soon be climbing on the anti-Rumsfeld bandwagon. But why now? Why speak up more than three years after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom? Hendren said that one reason the top brass might be positioning themselves against Rumsfeld is that they're worried that H.R. McMaster is writing another book.

H.R. who? He's not exactly a household name, but it's safe to say that every senior officer in the US Army, and probably in the entire Defense Department, knows exactly who H.R. McMaster is. He is the author of a 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. Zeroing on 1965, the hinge year of escalation for the Vietnam War, McMaster wrote in his conclusion, "Lyndon Johnson, with the assistance of Robert S. McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had set the stage for America's disaster in Vietnam."

Hot stuff, especially since "dereliction of duty" rings bells inside the armed services; it is, after all, a specific term of legal art, punishable according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The book was one long indictment. It had zero legal force, but maximum moral force.

Even hotter was the identity of McMaster. He was no college professor or foreign service officer. A 1984 graduate of West Point, he held a combat command in the 1991 Gulf War and, at the time of his authorship, was an active-duty Army officer. [and he still is, in Iraq now]

Continued at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-pinkerton/a-new-storm-on-the-pentag_b_19161.html

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Had a question cross my mind today: What is Bush gonna do with himself once he's out of office?

Asked a writer friend what she thought and she said: "I think for the rest of his life, twig is gonna have to just putter on his acerage. Unless it's repugs, I can't imagine anyone wanting to pay him to speak, nor any foreign country wanting to host him. We'll all just have to keep making do with Clinton and Carter."

Consider former Presidents Clinton and Carter...welcomed wherever they go. Respected wherever they go. Traveling out in the world doing good things. Writing books that are very well received.

There's no way, with half the nation and most of the world hating his guts, that Bush could do the same. I can't see him traveling...somebody would shoot his ass. He's certainly not going to be respected...not with the evil he's caused. He can't even get out a decent sentence. No way he could write a book, and if he did, how many people would want to pay their hard-earned money for it?

The world is not going to want to see his face or hear his voice ever again.

So the question remains...what's he gonna do? And where?

Will he try to bull his way back into DC under some pretext? I don't think people would rush to entertain him or seek his advice. In fact, because of who he is and what he's done, I'd be very surprised if anyone would even want to be seen in his company.

Who would come to the opening celebration of a library of his? In Texas? In Midland?

Maybe the oil corporations' big wheels. But why? Out of office, he'd be no use to them.

Wherever is he going to find a stage to strut and preen and muscle his way onto?

My sympathy goes to the Secret Service people who'd be stuck with him for years.

Bottom line: I'm very grateful that I am not him.

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From News for Real via truthout.org :

Permission to Speak Freely, Sir
By Stephen Pizzo
News for Real
Saturday 15 April 2006

I am sorry that high school and college kids no longer have to face a couple of years of mandatory military service. That may be a strange thing to say for a guy who protested the draft back in the '60s. Maybe it's the inevitable aging process. Or maybe it's the perspective you get from the higher altitude of experience.

What got me thinking about this were the extraordinary statements being made by recently retired U.S. generals. Those who have never served in the military don't understand how extraordinary it is for career military officers to say the things these guys are saying about their former civilian superiors.

I hit Marine Corps bootcamp on July 7, 1965, a wimpy kid from suburbia. The first thing we were told was that we were the lowest forms of life on earth - and that meant lower than civilians. I was to learn as time went on that this was not just drill instructor blather. It was a genuine, deeply ingrained belief that permeated the highest ranks of the military for civilian control. We were repeatedly told that the lowest civilian we met on the street outranked the highest grade military officer. And that was not show. They believed it, not just as a principle, but a sacred trust.

Those who never served will likely see that as corny, empty rhetoric, window dressing, quaint - at best. But those who did serve know of what I speak. We get it. That's one reason I bemoan that two generations of kids have since been spared a stint in uniform. It changed my life in ways I now understand and appreciate in ways I could not back then.

This is not a column about reinstituting the draft. I just want to make the case that you pay close and respectful attention to the recent statements by retired top Pentagon brass. Because never in my life did I ever expect to hear these kinds of things coming out of the mouths of such men. Never.

Here's a sampler:

"[Donald Rumsfeld] has proved himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically. Mr. Rumsfeld must step down."-General Paul Eaton, who oversaw training of Iraqi army troops, 2003-2004

"I really believe that we need a new secretary of defense because Secretary Rumsfeld carries way too much baggage with him. Specifically, I feel he has micromanaged the generals who are leading our forces there."-retired Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.

"I think we need a fresh start … We need leadership up there (the Pentagon) that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them."-Maj. Gen. John Batiste, commander 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, 2004-2005

We won't get fooled again … Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach should be replaced."-Marines Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, director of operations of Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2000-2002

"The problem is that we've wasted three years … absolutely, Rumsfeld should resign."-Marines Gen. Anthony Zinni, former chief of U.S. Central Command

"A lot of them [other generals] are hugely frustrated. Rumsfeld gave the impression that military advice was neither required nor desired" in the planning for the Iraq war.-Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson, former commander of Marines forces in the Pacific Theater

"Everyone pretty much thinks Rumsfeld and the bunch around him should be cleared out. [Rumsfeld and his advisers have] made fools of themselves, and totally underestimated what would be needed for a sustained conflict."-Army Maj. Gen. John Riggs

The administration is trying to counter these devastating statements by noting that none of the generals voiced such reservations during the lead-up to the war. And, because so many Americans now lack any direct experience with the military, the tactic may just work. After all, it's easy to dismiss these retired generals just that easily. "So, where were your qualms when we really need them, general?"

I know the answer to that question - and it's not the answer the Bushies want you to get.

When an officer has a particularly sticky problem with the actions or orders of a superior officer, s/he can "request permission to speak freely, sir."

Well, that was tried, by Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was promptly and unceremoniously "shit-canned." (Another term my fellow vets may find familiar.)

The Pentagon's civilian leaders sent a clear message to the rest of the Pentagon brass: "Do what we want, or we'll find a junior officer who will."

With the "permission to speak freely" option off the table, the brass was left only with their prime directive: Civilians rule.

So, their silence leading up to war was not cowardice or careerism, as some have suggested. It was instead the manifestation of that deeply ingrained principle that civilians not only outrank them, but that the most dangerous thing that can happen in a democracy is for the military to start preempting civilian leadership.

We can quibble over that notion, of course. We can wave around the Nuremberg principle that "just following orders" is no defense for wrongdoing. I agree. But let me tell you, my experience in the military left me with a deep respect for the way the American military views its place in our democracy. They really do believe civilians rule. I would have it no other way. And neither should you.

Which is why we old vets understand better than most how gut-wrenching it must have been for these recently retired officers to go public. I am certain it was not the way they wanted to end their lifetimes of service to their country. Because, as far as these men are concerned, under normal circumstances, such behavior smacks of treason.

Retired two-star Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the Big Red One (the Army's 1st Infantry Division) in Iraq until November, said Rumsfeld must go for ignoring and intimidating career officers. "You know, it speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defense. (Full Story)

So, no one should take their statements lightly. This is serious business … especially at the very moment these same civilian leaders are grunting eagerly over satellite images of Iran.
--------
Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, which was nominated for a Pulitzer.

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From Salon.com :

What Rumsfeld knew

Interviews with high-ranking military officials shed new light on the role Rumsfeld played in the harsh treatment of a Guantánamo detainee.
By Michael Scherer and Mark Benjamin
April 14, 2006

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in the late 2002 interrogation of a high-value al-Qaida detainee known in intelligence circles as "the 20th hijacker." He also communicated weekly with the man in charge of the interrogation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the controversial commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center.

During the same period, detainee Mohammed al-Kahtani suffered from what Army investigators have called "degrading and abusive" treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan Rumsfeld had approved. Kahtani was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, and was forced to wear women's underwear and to perform "dog tricks" on a leash. He received 18-to-20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days.

Little more than two years later, during an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, Rumsfeld expressed puzzlement at the notion that his policies had caused the abuse. "He was going, 'My God, you know, did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy's head?'" recalled Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, an investigator who interviewed Rumsfeld twice in early 2005.

These disclosures are contained in a Dec. 20, 2005, Army inspector general's report on Miller's conduct, which was obtained this week by Salon through the Freedom of Information Act. The 391-page document -- which has long passages blacked out by the government -- concludes that Miller should not be punished for his oversight role in detainee operations, a fact that was reported last month by Time magazine. But the never-before-released full report also includes the transcripts of interviews with high-ranking military officials that shed new light on the role that Rumsfeld and Miller played in the harsh treatment of Kahtani, who had met with Osama bin Laden on several occasions and received terrorist training in al-Qaida camps.

In a sworn statement to the inspector general, Schmidt described Rumsfeld as "personally involved" in the interrogation and said that the defense secretary was "talking weekly" with Miller. Schmidt said he concluded that Rumsfeld did not specifically prescribe the more "creative" interrogation methods used on Kahtani. But he added that the open-ended policies Rumsfeld approved, and that the apparent lack of supervision of day-to-day interrogations permitted the abusive conduct to take place. "Where is the throttle on this stuff?" asked Schmidt, an Air Force fighter pilot, who said in his interview under oath with the inspector general that he had concerns about the length and repetition of the harsh interrogation methods. "There were no limits."

Schmidt also saw close parallels between the interrogations at Guantánamo, and the photographic evidence of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "Just for the lack of a camera, it would sure look like Abu Ghraib," Schmidt told the inspector general, in the interview that was conducted in August 2005. At the direction of Pentagon officials, Miller led a mission to Iraq in August 2003 to review detainee operations at Abu Ghraib -- a visit that critics say precipitated the abuse of prisoners there.

In April 2005, Schmidt completed his report on detainee abuse at Guantánamo, which he co-authored with Brig. Gen. John T. Furlow. They recommended that Miller be "admonished" and "held accountable" for the alleged abuse of Kahtani. But that recommendation was rejected by Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, the current head of the Southern Command, who said Miller had not violated any law or policy.

On Dec. 2, 2002, Rumsfeld approved 16 harsher interrogation strategies for use against Kahtani, including the use of forced nudity, stress positions and the removal of religious items. In public statements, however, Rumsfeld has maintained that none of the policies at Guantánamo led to "inhumane" treatment of detainees. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, told Salon Thursday that Kahtani was an al-Qaida terrorist who provided a "treasure trove" of still-classified information during his interrogation. "Al-Kahtani's interrogation was guided by a very detailed plan, conducted by trained professionals in a controlled environment, and with active supervision and oversight," Gordon said in an e-mail statement. "Nothing was done randomly."

Miller -- who has invoked his right against self-incrimination in courts-martial of Abu Ghraib soldiers -- said that he did not know all the details of Kahtani's interrogation. But Schmidt told the inspector general that he found that claim "hard to believe" in light of Miller's knowledge of Rumsfeld's continuing interest in Kahtani. "The secretary of defense is personally involved in the interrogation of one person, and the entire General Counsel system of all the departments of the military," Schmidt said. "There is just not a too-busy alibi there for that."

The harsh interrogation of Kahtani came to an abrupt end in mid-January 2003. Gen. James T. Hill, Craddock's predecessor as the head of Southern Command, recalled in his interview with the inspector general that he received a call from Rumsfeld on a January weekend asking about the progress of Kahtani's interrogation. "Someone had come to him and suggested that it needed to be looked at," Hill said of Rumsfeld. "He said, 'What do you think?' And I said, 'Why don't [you] let me call General Miller.'"

According to Hill's account of that call, Miller advised that the harsh interrogation of Kahtani should continue, using the techniques Rumsfeld had previously approved. "We think we're right on the verge of making a breakthrough," Hill remembered Miller saying. Hill said he called Rumsfeld back with the news. "The secretary said, 'Fine,'" Hill remembered.

Nonetheless, several days later Rumsfeld revoked the harsher interrogation methods, apparently responding to military lawyers who had raised concerns that they may constitute cruel and unusual punishment or torture.

"My attitude on that was, 'Great!'" said Hill. The general recalled thinking about Rumsfeld and the decision to halt the harsh interrogation, "All I'm trying to do is what you want us to do in the first place and doing it the right way."

The harsher methods were not approved again.

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From Daily Docket blog...an excerpt:

Four years before President Harry Truman issued the first executive order on classified information, he signed into law the National Security Act of 1947, which "realigned and reorganized the United States' armed forces, foreign policy, and intelligence community apparatus in the aftermath of World War II." This act remains in force today, as amended, and provides for general Congressional oversight of current and planned intelligence activities, § 413, and a presidential duty to keep [the entire membership of] congressional intelligence committees fully and currently informed of all covert actions, § 413b.

Subsection (c)(2) of 413b is where we find the President, "to meet extraordinary circumstances affecting vital interests of the United States," can limit access to the required written intelligence "findings" to the "Gang of Eight." (Sections 421, 422, and 426 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 codified nearby are the provisions providing criminal penalties for disclosing the identity of a covert agent.)

Requirements of the 1947 Act were referenced in the Truman and Eisenhower executive orders on classified information linked above; and the Clinton and Bush orders both contain identical language in (now) Section 6.2, General Provisions:

(a) Nothing in this order shall supersede any requirement made by or under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, or the National Security Act of 1947, as amended.And yet, on October 5, 2001, Bush issued this order to the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense, the Attorney General, and the Directors of the CIA and the FBI:

The only Members of Congress whom you or your expressly designated officers may brief regarding classified or sensitive law enforcement information are the Speaker of the House, the House Minority Leader, the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, and the Chairs and Ranking Members of the Intelligence Committees in the House and Senate.The strategy ever since 9/11 seems to be to use § 413b(c)(2) to limit the entire Congressional intelligence oversight process to the Gang of Eight, under a purportedly continuous state of "extraordinary circumstances affecting vital interests of the United States."

And the Congress we have now is rolling over for it.

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From West Point Graduates Against the War:

The Lies of the Leadership [all Clinton's fault...right? Ugh!]

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
- Dick Cheney, August 26 2002

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
- George W. Bush, September 12 2002

"If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world."
- Ari Fleischer, December 2 2002

"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
- Ari Fleischer, January 9 2003

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
- George W. Bush, State of the Union address, January 28 2003

"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more."
- Colin Powell, February 5 2003

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons."
- George Bush, February 8 2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
- George Bush, March 17 2003

"Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes."
- Ari Fleischer, March 21 2003

"There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them."
- Gen. Tommy Franks, March 22 2003

"We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."
- Donald Rumsfeld, March 30 2003.

"Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
- Bush in October 2002.

"Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda."
- Bush in January 2003 State of the Union address.

"Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training."
- Bush in February 2003.

"… sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al-Qaeda terrorist network."
Powell in his U.N. speech prior to the Iraq War.

"We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda."
Bush in May 2003.

Stated that the Iraqis were "providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the Al Qaeda organization."
- Cheney in September 2003.

"Saddam had an established relationship with Al Qaeda, providing training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons, gases, making conventional weapons."
- Cheney in October 2003.

Cheney said Saddam "had long established ties with Al Qaeda."
- June 14, 2004.

Bush said, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda."
- June 17, 2004.

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From West Point Graduates Against the War via beckperson's blog:

Atten-HUT!

Well, you know you've gone over the edge when the military starts turning against you. First, it's the generals, now it's West Point graduates.

From the military academy graduates...this will just give you chills:

"Instilled by the Cadet Honor System with a fundamental, longstanding respect for truth, we graduates of the United States Military Academy believe that honor is a basic attribute of character.

That we are no longer cadets is irrelevant.

We stand appalled by the deceitful behavior of the government of the United States and, in particular, its widely known malefactors. Lying, cheating, stealing, delivering evasive statements and quibbling not only has demeaned these deceivers and the United States of America, but has placed vast numbers of innocent people in deadly peril. We will not serve the lies.

The war in Iraq was launched illegally. It has since killed tens of thousands of innocents, causing incalculable damage to Iraq and the Iraqi people, as well as the reputation of the United States of America. We will not serve the lies.

When we West Point graduates took our commissioning oath of office one past June morning, we swore to protect our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The deceitful connivances of the current administration have resulted in a war catastrophic to our nation’s interests: politically, economically, militarily, and morally. We now stand to protect our nation from these deceivers. We will not serve their lies.

We seek justice for all victims of this illegal war, both servicemen and servicewomen, and the citizens of Iraq. To our purpose we invoke the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence whereby we too “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, & our sacred Honor.”

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From Creators Syndicate:

Molly Ivins
AUSTIN, Texas

We need to keep up with the daily drip, that endless succession of special favors for special interests performed by Congress, or we'll never figure out how we got so far behind the eight ball. While the top Bushies lunge about test-driving new wars (great idea -- the one we're having is a bummer, so let's start another!), Congress just keeps right on cranking out those corporate goodies.

Earlier this month, the House effectively repealed more than 200 state food safety and public health protections. Say, when was the last time you enjoyed a little touch of food poisoning? Coming soon to a stomach near you.

What was really impressive about H.R. 4167, the "National Uniformity for Food Act," is that it was passed without a public hearing.

"The House is trampling crucial health safeguards in every state without so much as a single public hearing," said Erik Olson, attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "This just proves the old adage, 'Money talks.' The food industry spared no expense to ensure passage."

Thirty-nine attorneys general, plus health, consumer and environmental groups, are opposing the law. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the food industry has spent more than $81 million on campaign contributions to members of Congress since 2000.

The bill would automatically override any state measure that is stronger than federal law, the opposite of what a sensible law would do.

The NRDC says state laws protecting consumers from chemical additives, bacteria and ingredients that can trigger allergic reactions would be barred, and that includes alerts about chemical contamination in fish, health protection standards for milk and eggs, and warnings about chemicals or toxins such as arsenic, mercury and lead. Happy eating, all.

Here's another little gem, one of those "it was after midnight and everyone wanted to go home" deals. Just a no-cost sweetener to encourage oil and gas companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico -- and who needs more encouragement these days than the oil companies? The poor things are making hardly any money at all. Just have the federal government waive the royalty rights for drilling in the publicly owned waters. Turns out this waiver will cost the government at least $7 billion over the next five years.

I roared with laughter upon reading that Texas Rep. Joe Barton had assured his colleagues the provision of energy bill was "so non-controversial" that senior House and Senate negotiators had not even discussed it.

That's one of the oldest ploys in the Texas handbook of sneaky tricks and has been successfully used to pass many a sweet deal for the oil industry. "The big lie about this whole program is that it doesn't cost anything," Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey told The New York Times. "Taxpayers are being asked to provide huge subsidies to oil companies to produce oil -- it's like subsidizing a fish to swim."

Then there are daily drips so strange it's hard to tell if members of Congress are clear on what they're doing. You may have heard that more and more corporations are backing out of their pension obligations and dumping the responsibility on an under-funded federal agency.

So the push is on to get companies to pony up for the pension agency. According to the Financial Times: "Employers will be able to slash their contributions to under-funded pension schemes by tens of billions of dollars over the next five years under proposed legislation before Congress that was expected to have the opposite effect.

"The legislation was proposed by the White House last year to lessen the risk of a taxpayer bailout of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a federal safety net for pension schemes." Brilliant.

Anyone know how the White House went from protecting the Benefit Guaranty Corp. to slashing corporate contributions by tens of billions? Did they send Michael "Brownie" Brown to do the job?

Long ago, Abraham Lincoln wrote, "Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in few hands and the republic is destroyed."

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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From The Seattle Times:

Coming home — disillusioned
By Christopher H. Sheppard
04/14/06
"Seattle Times"

Three years ago, I was a Marine Corps captain on the Iraqi/Kuwaiti border, participating in the invasion of Iraq. Awestruck, I heard our howitzers thunder and watched artillery rockets rise into the night sky and streak toward Iraq — their light bathing the desert moonscape like giant arc welders.

As I watched the Iraq war begin, I completely trusted the Bush administration. I thought we were going to prove all of the left-wing antiwar protesters and dissenters wrong. I thought we were going to make America safer. Regrettably, I acknowledge that it was I who was wrong.

I believed the Bush administration when it said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

I believed its assertion that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa and refine it into weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb.

I believed its claim Iraq had vast quantities of biological and chemical agents. After years of thorough inspections, all of these claims have been disproved.

I believed the administration when it claimed there was overwhelming evidence Iraq was in cahoots with al-Qaida. In January 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that there was no concrete evidence linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

I believed the administration when it grandly proclaimed we were going to bring a stable, Western-style liberal democracy to Iraq, complete with religious tolerance and the rule of law.
We never had enough troops in Iraq to restore civil order and the rule of law. The Iraqi elections have produced a ruling majority of Shiite fundamentalists and marginalized the seething Sunni minority. Iraq dangerously teeters on the brink of civil war. We have emboldened Iran and destabilized the entire Middle East.

I believed the administration when it claimed the war could be done quickly and cheaply. It said the war would cost only between $50 billion and $60 billion. It said that Iraqi oil revenue would fund the country's reconstruction.

I believed President Bush when he landed on the USS Lincoln and said "major combat operations have ended."The war has cost the American taxpayers $250 billion and counting. The vast majority — 94 percent — of the more than 2,300 United States service members killed in Iraq have occurred since Bush's "Top Gun" proclamation. The cost in men and materiel has been far beyond what we were led to believe.

I volunteered to go back to Iraq for the fall and winter of 2004-2005. I went back out of frustration and guilt; frustration from watching Iraq unravel on the news and guilt that I wasn't there trying to stop it. Many fine Marines from my reserve battalion felt the same and volunteered to go back. I buried my mounting suspicions and mustered enough trust and faith in my civilian leadership to go back.

I returned disillusioned by what I saw. I participated in the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004. We crushed the insurgents in the city, but we only ended up scattering them throughout the province. The dumb ones stayed and died. The smart ones left town before the battle, to garner more recruits and fight another day. We were simply the little Dutch boy with our finger in the dike. In retrospect, we never had enough troops to firmly control the region; we had just enough to maintain a tenuous equilibrium.

I now know I wrongfully placed my faith and trust in a presidential administration hopelessly mired in incompetence, hubris and a lack of accountability. It planned a war based on false intelligence and unrealistic assumptions. It has strategically surrendered the condition of victory in Iraq to people who do not share our vision, values or interests. The Bush administration has proven successful at only one thing in Iraq — painting us into a corner with no feasible exit.

I will never trust any of them again.

Christopher H. Sheppard is a former Marine captain who served two tours of duty in Iraq as a combat engineer. He currently is finishing his master's degree in mass communication and lives in Marysville.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

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From Boston.IndyMedia.org :

Young Boston Jews support Palestinian rights, challenge AIPAC and JCRC by holding seder outside their offices

On Tuesday, April 11, at 5:00 pm, 20 young Jewish people gathered for a seder (traditional celebration of Passover) outside 126 High Street in Boston, the building that houses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Boston's Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC).

The group expressed their support for Palestinian human rights and opposition to AIPAC’s and JCRC’s unquestioning support for Israel and its governmental policies. With a banner that read “Passover means liberation for all. Justice for Palestine,” they conveyed the message to the organizations inside and to the media that AIPAC and JCRC do not speak for all Jews.

The group set up a seder table and recited Passover's traditional four questions, with newly written answers that included facts about Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes, confiscation and destruction of Palestine's land resources for the expansion of settlements and the Separation Wall, and malnutrition and poverty in Palestine caused by Israeli closure and movement restrictions. (supplement attached)

According to Marjorie Kent, one of the organizers of the seder “During Passover, every generation of Jewish people is commanded to remember that we were slaves and to tell the story of the Exodus so that we can recognize oppression that happens today and work to stop it. Today we committed ourselves to this task.”

AIPAC pushes the US government to support Israeli policies which result in the brutal oppression of Palestinian people and denial of their internationally recognized human rights.

JCRC, while claiming to speak for all Jews, invests enormous time and energy suppressing any voice of opposition to Israeli policies, especially Jewish voices.

"Our generation has had enough of AIPAC’s and JCRC's complicity in Israel's human rights abuses of Palestinians," said Hannah Mermelstein, another seder organizer. “Their support of these policies betray the libratory message of Passover.” The group called on people leaving the building to take the message of “liberation for all” home with them this Passover. They handed out supplements for people to add to their traditional Passover seders. The text of the supplement follows.

As the group left, the police arrived with specific instructions to arrest them.

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I find this very very interesting. When the music people join with the Generals, many writers, many bloggers, and a public slowly but surely getting more torqued by the minute, it's the music--especially the lyrics-- to which the nation begins to react... Stand by, then:

From JamBase:

As Harp Magazine recently reported, Neil Young has announced a new album... and it's already finished!

The news that Neil Young has a complete album in the bag shocked all of us at JamBase. On the heels of his very successful 2005 release, Prairie Wind and with his award-winning documentary Neil Young: Heart of Gold in theatres now, no one saw this coming.

Filmmaker Jonathan Demme (who filmed Neil Young: Heart of Gold) recently sent an email stating; "Neil just finished writing and recording – with no warning – a new album called Living With War. It all happened in three days."

Young has long worked under the "strike while the iron is hot" mentality, often working in creative spurts and never forcing it. Well, it seems the iron must have been burning bright for him to create a complete album in three days!

As Katherine Silkaitis at Harp reported, Demme went on to say, "It is a brilliant electric assault, accompanied by a 100-voice choir, on Bush and the war in Iraq... Truly mind blowing. Will be in stores soon."

Details are sketchy at best, but the featured song, "Impeach the President" contains Bush's voice accompanied by a choir chanting "flip/flop."

Stay tuned as JamBase will be sure to report as details unfold.

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From the Information Clearing House....a couple of pertinent quotes from people who know:

Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else:
Bill Moyers - PBS Commentator

=The principal power in Washington is no longer the government of the people it represents. It is the Money Power. Under the deceptive cloak of campaign contributions, access and influence, votes and amendments are bought and sold. Money established priorities of action, holds down federal revenues, revises federal legislation, shifts income from the middle class to the very rich. Money restrains the enforcement of laws written to protect the country from abuses of wealth--laws that mandate environmental protection, antitrust laws, laws to protect the consumer against fraud, laws that safeguard the securities markets, and many more:

Richard N. Goodwin - Speechwriter for John F. Kennedy

="Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.": Mussolini

[There's no argument there. Just look around.]

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Had an email from this author whose work I do admire. He's really delighted with the review Publisher's Weekly---one tough set of reviewers, lemme tell you--gave his new mystery, as well he should be. Thought I'd just post that review so mystery loving readers can grab it up as soon as it hits the shelves in June:


Impulse
Ramsay, Frederick (Author)
ISBN: 1590582837
Poisoned Pen Press
Published 2006-06
Hardcover , $24.95 (225p)
Fiction Mystery & Detective - GeneralAges
Reviewed 2006-04-17

At the start of Ramsey's superb, perfectly paced stand-alone, Phoenix mystery writer Frank Smith heads for his 50th prep school reunion-at Scott Academy, near Baltimore-anxious about all the attendant grudges, passions, jealousies and nostalgia.

More seriously, Smith must contend with the suicide of his brother, Jack, 50 years earlier; the disappearance of four teenage schoolboys during the 1980s; and, back home in Arizona, the relatively recent murder of his wife, Sandy, a crime for which he's now the chief suspect.

Ramsey (Artscape andSecrets ) treats these traumas in a manner at once intriguing and believable yet somehow breezy and joyous. Seldom in crime fiction does one meet lead characters as likable as Smith and his long-lost friend/new love interest, Rosemary Mitchell.

Both are "pushing seventy" but try to solve the various mysteries with the style, audacity and intelligence of a Sun City version of Nick and Nora Charles. Their senior viewpoint with commentary on various generations-"Greatest," Boomers, Xers-makes for a perspective that's at once tart, worldly and compassionate and that nicely balances the genuine evil in the air.(June)

[NOTE: You all see that? "Superb, perfectly paced"? Hah! Not come by easily, as any writer can tell you. Color me green. :)) ]

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From The Guardian:

Desert Rats Leave The Sinking Ship
Why Rumsfeld Should Not Resign
The Guardian
Comment
Friday, April 14, 2006
By Greg Palast

Well, here they come: the wannabe Rommels, the gaggle of generals, safely retired, to lay siege to Donald Rumsfeld. This week, six of them have called for the Secretary of Defense's resignation. Well, according to my watch, they're about four years too late -- and they still don't get it.

I know that most of my readers will be tickled pink that the bemedalled boys in crew cuts are finally ready to kick Rummy in the rump, in public. But to me, it just shows me that these boys still can't shoot straight. It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who stood up in front of the UN and identified two mobile latrines as biological weapons labs, was it, General Powell? It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who told us our next warning from Saddam could be a mushroom cloud, was it Condoleezza? It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who declared that Al Qaeda and Saddam were going steady, was it, Mr. Cheney?

Yes, Rumsfeld is a swaggering bag of mendacious arrogance, a duplicitous chicken-hawk, yellow-bellied bully-boy and Tinker-Toy Napoleon -- but he didn't appoint himself Secretary of Defense.

Let me tell you a story about the Secretary of Defense you didn't read in the New York Times, related to me by General Jay Garner, the man our president placed in Baghdad as the US' first post-invasion viceroy.

Garner arrived in Kuwait City in March 2003 working under the mistaken notion that when George Bush called for democracy in Iraq, the President meant the Iraqis could choose their own government. Misunderstanding the President's true mission, General Garner called for Iraqis to hold elections within 90 days and for the U.S. to quickly pull troops out of the cities to a desert base. "It's their country," the General told me of the Iraqis. "And," he added, most ominously, "their oil."

Let's not forget: it's all about the oil. I showed Garner a 101-page plan for Iraq's economy drafted secretly by neo-cons at the State Department, Treasury and the Pentagon, calling for "privatization" (i.e. the sale) of "all state assets ... especially in the oil and oil-supporting industries."

The General knew of the plans and he intended to shove it where the Iraqi sun don't shine. Garner planned what he called a "Big Tent" meeting of Iraqi tribal leaders to plan elections. By helping Iraqis establish their own multi-ethnic government -- and this was back when Sunnis, Shias and Kurds were on talking terms -- knew he could get the nation on its feet peacefully before a welcomed "liberation" turned into a hated "occupation." But, Garner knew, a freely chosen coalition government would mean the death-knell for the neo-con oil-and-assets privatization grab.

On April 21, 2003, three years ago this month, the very night General Garner arrived in Baghdad, he got a call from Washington. It was Rumsfeld on the line. He told Garner, in so many words, "Don't unpack, Jack, you're fired." Rummy replaced Garner, a man with years of on-the-ground experience in Iraq, with green-boots Paul Bremer, the Managing Director of Kissinger Associates.

Bremer cancelled the Big Tent meeting of Iraqis and postponed elections for a year; then he issued 100 orders, like some tin-pot pasha, selling off Iraq's economy to U.S. and foreign operators, just as Rumsfeld's neo-con clique had desired.

Reading this, it sounds like I should applaud the six generals' call for Rumfeld's ouster. Forget it. For a bunch of military hotshots, they sure can't shoot straight. They're wasting all their bullets on the decoy. They've gunned down the puppet instead of the puppeteers.

There's no way that Rumsfeld could have yanked General Garner from Baghdad without the word from The Bunker. Nothing moves or breathes or spits in the Bush Administration without Darth Cheney's growl of approval. And ultimately, it's the Commander-in-Chief who's chiefly in command.

Even the generals' complaint -- that Rumsfeld didn't give them enough troops -- was ultimately a decision of the cowboy from Crawford. (And by the way, the problem was not that we lacked troops -- the problem was that we lacked moral authority to occupy this nation. A million troops would not be enough -- the insurgents would just have more targets.) President Bush is one lucky fella. I can imagine him today on the intercom with Cheney: "Well, pardner, looks like the game's up." And Cheney replies, "Hey, just hang the Rumsfeld dummy out the window until he's taken all their ammo."

When Bush and Cheney read about the call for Rumsfeld's resignation today, I can just hear George saying to Dick, "Mission Accomplished." Generals, let me give you a bit of advice about choosing a target: It's the President, stupid.

********** Read more about the untold story of General Garner and the secret war plans in ARMED MADHOUSE, by Greg Palast, to be released June 6 (US) and July 6 (UK). View Palast's interview with Garner for BBC Television at www.GregPalast.com

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From Newsweek via truthout.org :

America's Secret Police?
By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Thursday 12 April 2006

Intelligence experts warn that a proposal to merge two Pentagon intelligence units could create an ominous new agency.

A threatened turf grab by a controversial Pentagon intelligence unit is causing concern among both privacy experts and some of the Defense Department's own personnel.

An informal panel of senior Pentagon officials has been holding a series of unannounced private meetings during the past several weeks about how to proceed with a possible merger between the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), a post-9/11 Pentagon creation that has been accused of domestic spying, and the Defense Security Service (DSS), a well-established older agency responsible for inspecting the security arrangements of defense contractors. DSS also maintains millions of confidential files containing the results of background investigations on defense contractors' employees.

The merger was initially suggested by a government commission set up to recommend military base closures last year. The commission said that the Pentagon could achieve some savings by relocating both CIFA, now housed in a building near Washington's Reagan National Airport and DSS, headquartered in nearby Alexandria, Va. The panel suggested moving the two agencies to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., where FBI training and laboratory facilities are also based.

The Base Realignment and Closure Commission also suggested that the Pentagon could "disestablish" CIFA and DSS and "consolidate their components into the Department of Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency."

Pentagon officials began discussions about merging the two after the commission issued its recommendations. An initial round of meetings about the merger, however, failed to come up with a plan. In the meantime, CIFA, a mysterious and secretive unit created in 2002 and charged with making Defense counterintelligence efforts more effective, became the subject of two public controversies.

The first erupted late in 2005 when documents surfaced indicating that CIFA (whose mission, according to its own officials, is supposed to be limited to analysis of counterintelligence data produced by other agencies) was discovered to have put together a database that included reports on anti-administration demonstrators, including peace activists protesting alleged "war profiteering." (NEWSWEEK's Michael Isikoff reported on this in depth earlier this year in this story.) CIFA and Pentagon officials subsequently assured Congress in writing that CIFA's activities would be more carefully focused in the future on genuine potential terror threats to defense facilities and personnel and that data collected on legitimate peaceful protestors would be destroyed.

Another controversy over CIFA took hold during the corruption scandal surrounding former San Diego congressman Randall (Duke) Cunningham, who before he resigned in disgrace earlier this year, had been a member of both the House Intelligence Committee and the Armed Services Committee. Federal prosecutors alleged Cunningham used his congressional influence to direct CIFA to grant defense contracts to a company called MZM. Earlier this year, Cunningham and MZM's former president, Mitchell Wade, both pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. (The CIFA contracting probe has been covered in depth by investigative blogs Warandpiece.com and TPMMuckracker.com, as well as The Washington Post.) Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Gregory Hicks said the CIFA contracting issue was the focus of a continuing "review by appropriate organizations within the Department [of Defense] and it would be premature to discuss any possible outcomes of that review."

As stories about the CIFA scandals circulated earlier this year, talk about merging the controversial unit with the less controversial DSS appeared to stall. But in the past few weeks, Pentagon officials said, such discussions have regained momentum, with an informal committee led by Robert Rogalski, a deputy to Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of Defense for intelligence, meeting regularly to discuss the agencies' consolidation.

But both Pentagon insiders and administration critics remain queasy about the merger idea. Some veteran officials recall that DSS itself became the subject of unwelcome public attention during the Clinton administration when political appointees in the Pentagon press office got hold of the DSS security file on Linda Tripp, the disgruntled bureaucrat who blew the whistle on President Clinton's relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The file contained reports about an embarrassing incident from Tripp's past that were leaked to the media. The Pentagon Inspector General investigated, and security procedures surrounding the security files supposedly were improved.

Both Pentagon insiders and privacy experts fear that if CIFA merges with, or, in effect, takes over DSS, there would be a weakening of the safeguards that are supposed to regulate the release of the estimated 4.5 million security files on defense-contractor employees currently controlled by DSS. Those files are stored in a disused mine in western Pennsylvania.

According to one knowledgeable official, who asked for anonymity because of the extreme sensitivity of the subject, since its creation CIFA has on at least a handful of occasions requested access to the secret files stored in the mine without adequate explanation. As a result, the source said, DSS rejected the requests. A merger between CIFA and DSS would weaken those internal controls, the source said.

A CIFA merger with DSS could also alter the job responsibilities of the 280 inspectors employed by DSS to inspect security arrangements and procedures at defense contractors' offices. According to the official source, these inspectors are responsible for making sure that contractors have taken proper measures to protect classified information. But if DSS merges with CIFA, there are fears that CIFA will pressure the DSS inspectors to expand their mandate to include inspecting contractors to see if they are protecting information that could be considered "sensitive but unclassified" - a term the Bush administration has tried to use to expand restrictions on access to government records. Security professionals regard that expansion as too elastic and open to misinterpretation. By acquiring control of the DSS inspector force, a merged CIFA-DSS would also have something that CIFA at the moment claims not to have, which is a force of field investigators. Today CIFA has to rely for raw field reports on other defense and military intelligence agencies, such as branches of Army, Navy and Air Force intelligence.

Defense analyst and Washington Post blogger Bill Arkin, who first brought allegations about CIFA's domestic spying to light, says that in its efforts to trying eliminate waste and better coordinate intelligence activities, "we are creating an American military secret police that is clearly acquiring way too much information and way too much power."

But Cindy McGovern, a spokeswoman for DSS, maintains that even if CIFA does merge with DSS, officials will not be able to get access to secret security files unless they have a "legitimate need and we verify that ... People who have access to these records need to have a verified need, a legitimate bona fide need." Asked how many times CIFA requests for access to DSS files were turned down because of lack of adequate justification, McGovern said she did not have that information at hand. Hicks, the Pentagon spokesman, said there was "no clear answer" to this question, adding: "There are protocols in place to request information that CIFA follows, but there is no quick grasp as to how many times or instances that has been sought."

In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, Hicks added: "The Defense Security Service takes the release of personnel files and the information contained therein very seriously ... For the purposes of disclosure and disclosure accounting, the Department of Defense is considered a single agency. Notwithstanding, disclosures of DSS records within DOD are only authorized when a justifiable official need for the information exists. These same safeguards would apply in the event of a merger with CIFA."

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From Seattle Post Intelligencer via truthout.org :

Decorated Air Force Nurse, Barred Over Lesbianism, Sues
By Mike Barber
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Thursday 13 April 2006

In 1993, Maj. Margaret Witt was a poster woman for the Air Force's flight nurse recruiting program.

In her career of 18-plus years, the decorated operating room and flight nurse from McChord Air Force Base earned stellar reviews for her work, which included helping to evacuate the nation's wounded troops and humanitarian missions to aid civilians.

In 2003, President Bush awarded her the Air Medal for her Middle East deployment and, later, the Air Force Commendation Medal, for saving the life of a Defense Department worker.

Less than a year later, after an Air Force investigation, Witt, a reservist, was drummed out.

Her offense: a committed relationship, but with another woman, a civilian, from 1997 to 2003.

On Wednesday, Witt, 42, challenged her forced discharge in a lawsuit filed in US District Court in Tacoma against Air Force officials and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The lawsuit, filed with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, seeks to prevent Witt's discharge, citing her First and Fifth amendment protections of free speech and due process.

"I've been a proud Air Force nurse and officer for the past 19 years" mostly with the 446th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron at McChord, Witt said, appearing in uniform in Seattle. She was flanked by her lawyers, ACLU staff attorney Aaron Caplan, and Jim Lobsenz, an ACLU volunteer lawyer from the Seattle firm Carney Badley Spellman.

"My objective is to go back to my unit and serve my country and help the injured troops - who need me at this time," Witt said, her major's oak leaves, blue and white chief flight-nurse wings displayed on her uniform, along with a small insignia on her left sleeve that read "Sept. 11, 2001."

Lobsenz in 1990 successfully took the case of openly homosexual Army Staff Sgt. Perry Watkins of Tacoma to the US Supreme Court, forcing the Army to re-enlist Watkins. He said he is optimistic about Witt's case.

An Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon said Wednesday that the service could not comment on the lawsuit.

In general, though, Congress created the law upon which the policy is based and would have to change it to alter the Defense Department's policies, the spokesman said.

"A service member's sexuality is considered a personal and private matter. We expect all service members to be treated with dignity and respect. We conduct extensive, recurring training to eliminate harassment of all types," the spokesman said in a printed statement.

Overall discharge rates for homosexual conduct in all branches of the military have declined from 0.6 percent in 1998, or 1,145 of 192,382 discharges, to 0.3 percent in 2004, or 653 of 196,993 discharges, according to Pentagon figures.

No one has a definitive reason for the decrease, the spokesman said.

Air Force Instruction No. 36-3209, section 2.20, says service members "shall be discharged" if they "engaged in, attempted to engage in or solicited another to engage in a homosexual act or acts" or "made a statement that he or she is homosexual or bisexual."

Congress, in enacting the 1993 law that President Clinton called the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, claimed that gay and lesbian service members would hurt unit cohesiveness and readiness.

However, 24 other nations allow openly gay soldiers, including such close US allies as Australia, Israel and Britain, as well as other NATO nations, Lobsenz said. US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan routinely serve with those nation's gay troops, he said.

Witt had kept her private life private. Or so she thought.

"Some allegations were made and an investigation was started," Witt said flatly. "I certainly didn't tell them."

Witt, who in civilian life works as a physical therapist, nurse and volunteer firefighter, said she was stunned when suddenly confronted in November 2004 following an Air Force investigation begun that summer into her relationship.

The officer who was ordered to tell her broke down and cried, she said. Witt was ordered to go, keep quiet and not tell anyone why.

"I couldn't even say goodbye," she said.

After 18 years of service, Witt was told she could no longer report for duty, no longer be paid and no longer earn points toward retirement. Her promotion to lieutenant colonel was moot.

Last month, the Air Force, which has unfilled positions of flight nurses, sent her final discharge papers.

All that, court papers say, despite performance reviews that lauded how she stepped up to many and new responsibilities and was an excellent mentor often sought out by students and peers.

One review called her an "outstanding squadron and Air Force representative - hand-picked to coordinate humanitarian mission and patient transport with multiple civilian, military, government and DOD agencies assuring continuity of care."

Her citation for the Air Medal, signed by Bush, notes that "her commitment to mission readiness and unrivaled clinical skills ensured the delivery of outstanding medical care to 140 patients during 18 sorties on C-130, KC-135 and C-17 aircraft while operating in an austere, hostile environment."

In 1993, the Air Force used her photograph in brochures used to recruit nurses.

Caplan, her lawyer, said indications are that many of Witt's troops are with her still.

"We know from people we have talked to in her unit that she is known as a superb officer, nurse and leader," Caplan said. "Even if she had to wear a patch saying her sexual orientation to get back in, they want her back."

Witt said she never wanted this attention but decided to sue after receiving her discharge letter March 6.

"I'm a very private person. I did my job to the best of my ability. I did it well. I don't think of the big picture," she said.

"It's just a waste of a good nurse, particularly now."

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Do go to David Jebb's website--link below--and read the rave reviews.

http://thethirteenthtimezone.blogspot.com/

And don't forget to read his profile! He's a man of many parts.

Here's a short description of his book:

Former Police Sergeant just published his action-adventure novel THE THIRTEENTH TIME ZONE. The Thirteenth Time Zone tells the story of one man’s search for peace and enlightenment after serving as a rogue cop in San Diego’s worst gang-infested neighborhoods. Exhausted, conflicted and with a contract on his life, Owen “Blue” Drew impulsively takes a leave of absence, and begins a journey around the world, transforming his heart and changing him forever.

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From Strategic Forecasting, Inc :

Framing the 'Sleeper Cell' Argument
By Fred Burton

Sleeper cell.The very phrase conjures up an image of evil plotters burrowing deep into the fabric of a society, hiding under deep cover until they are called upon to strike at an unsuspecting host. Because it is a "sexy" phrase that arouses deep emotions and commands attention, it is frequently used in the public sphere. In fact, it has so much currency that Showtime even created a dramatic series called "Sleeper Cell" -- and you knew people would watch it on the strength of its name alone.

Psychologically, it is the word "sleeper" that arouses the greatest angst in the post-9/11 context -- the world by now has grown familiar with the concept of "terrorist cell," and that phrase no longer carries the emotional impact that the word "sleeper" does. As a result, the term not only is used frequently, but also often is used incorrectly -- not only by reporters and academics, but even at times by senior officials with agencies like the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, in testimony before the U.S. Congress and in other public statements.

The issue is not one of mere semantics; the overuse of the phrase "sleeper cell" tends to blur important distinctions and contribute to general confusion about the nature of the jihadist threat the United States is fighting. Precise language is needed both for clear-eyed analysis and more effective defense and counterterrorism efforts.

Defining a 'Sleeper'

In simple terms, a sleeper is an operative that is infiltrated into the society, or even into the government, of a targeted country -- there to remain dormant ("sleep") until being activated, perhaps by a prearranged signal or a certain chain of events.

The concept of a sleeper operative dates back to the Cold War. In that context, a sleeper would be an officer working with a foreign intelligence service -- which would exercise maximum care in infiltrating him into the target country, to avoid detection by counterintelligence and security forces. The operative could be tasked with carrying out acts of sabotage if war should break out between the country that deployed him and the target country, but barring that, his job was to do nothing but blend into society, until the time came to act.

A sleeper differs from what the Soviets (and now the Russians) would refer to as an "illegal", or what the CIA calls a "NOC" (an officer under "non-official cover"), in that a sleeper is not to take immediate operational activity, but rather must remain dormant until activated.

There are great dangers in submerging a sleeper operative for long periods in a target society, so intelligence agencies are very particular about what kinds of people are selected for such assignments. Such operatives must be mentally prepared for the stress they will endure in infiltrating the country, as well as capable of enduring the monotony of being in place for years without engaging in operational acts and without betraying their true identity or purpose. Only highly disciplined people qualify for such assignments.

Moreover, extensive training in operational tradecraft is needed; any contact between the operative and deploying government is extremely risky for the mission, so a highly sophisticated command-and-control system is needed for communication. This requirement would be multiplied in the case of a sleeper cell, given the need to avoid rousing suspicions or linking members of a cell together.

In short, an operation involving a sleeper must be -- by definition -- a long-term, strategic project that may take years or even decades to reach fruition. Great vision, sophisticated planning and deep reservoirs of patience are required of the government or group that prepares and deploys such agents, which are assets to be held in reserve until a time of great need. In the Cold War context, sleeper operatives were a fallback or redundant intelligence network that could be activated in a crisis situation -- for example, if both the primary intelligence network (consisting of diplomats) and the secondary network (NOCs or illegal intelligence officers) were rolled up, leaving the deploying government blind. Sleeper officers would be the safety net to ensure that the sponsoring agency could still gather intelligence about what was happening in the targeted country.

Al Qaeda and Covert Operatives

Given this definition, we are not aware of any jihadist organization -- including al Qaeda -- that has ever created and run a true sleeper operation or cell. Perhaps the most significant reason for this is that an organization with limited resources would find it difficult to afford an operative who sits in place and does nothing. As the 9/11 attacks and other operations have made clear, al Qaeda and other jihadist groups certainly have used clandestine operatives in the past. However, it is important to note that simply because an operative is hidden does not mean he is a sleeper.

Consider the 9/11 operatives as an example. The men were divided into two groups -- the pilots and those who might be termed the "muscle hijackers," who wielded box cutters while the al Qaeda pilots took control in the cockpit. Some in the media have equated the pilots with sleeper operatives because they began to arrive in the United States in early 2000, long before their planned attack, but this would be a misnomer. After arriving, these men quickly engaged in operational activities, such as attending English classes and enrolling in flight schools. The 9/11 pilots clearly were sent to the United States with a mission, which they began pursuing shortly after arriving.

The same holds true for the muscle hijackers, who began arriving in the country by July 2001. Rather than trying to embed themselves in American society, they remained more or less aloof; they kept to themselves, lifted weights and waited for the green light from an operational commander -- in this case, Mohammed Atta -- to execute their mission.

One of the key aspects to consider in any discussion of al Qaeda -- and one that often is overlooked -- is that al Qaeda is a nonstate entity. That means not only that it is a network set up to carry out attacks, but also that it must sustain itself; it has nodes dedicated to fundraising, recruitment, and logistics and training activities. Examples of such nodes can be clearly seen in a historical review of al Qaeda's activities, and at times these can confuse the sleeper cell discourse.

In the mid-1990s, al Qaeda established a node in East Africa -- with headquarters in Nairobi -- that opened a charity called Help Africa People, as well as a gem-trading business, a fishing business and a branch of Osama bin Laden's Taba Investment Company. Alongside these non-terrorist activities, the Nairobi cell was busy with operational planning -- having surveilled the U.S. embassy in Nairobi as early as 1993. The group's planning activities (and its connection to al Qaeda) attracted so much attention that in August 1997, Kenyan and U.S. authorities visited the home of cell leader Wadih El-Hage, seized his computer and other evidence, and strongly suggested that he leave the country.

Thus, even though the East Africa cell was present and active for several years before the 1998 attacks at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, it could not correctly be categorized as a sleeper cell, given its open relationship with al Qaeda and recruiting and fundraising operations.

Grassroots Groups and Sleepers

Since 1979, thousands of Muslim men have fought jihad in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and, most recently, Iraq. These men, along with others who have never been to jihad, have left their home countries or place of residence to attend training camps in places like Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan -- where they also were ideologically indoctrinated. During the jihad in Afghanistan and Bosnia, many of these men were recruited by Muslim "charities" associated with the Maktab al-Khidmat, or MAK -- known in English as the Afghan Services Bureau -- and many even had their travel expenses paid in whole or in part by these charities. These men eventually returned to their home countries but retained their paramilitary skills, their radical mindsets and their relationships with the men with whom they had fought and trained.

Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups have used such networks to their advantage. When Abdel Basit (perhaps more widely known as Ramzi Yousef) arrived in the United States in September 1992, he was able to use contacts at Brooklyn's Alkifah Refugee Center -- which was one of the U.S. branches of the MAK -- to quickly cobble together a team that helped him plan and execute the first World Trade Center bombing. In that case, Basit was not a sleeper because he came to the United States with a mission in mind and quickly got to work on it. Nor would the others arrested in connection with that case fit the definition of sleeper operatives; though they were living in the United States and were, to some degree, embedded in society, they were not deployed for that purpose by al Qaeda but rather came to the country of their own accord.

Mahmoud Abouhalima, Mohammed Salameh and their colleagues were what might be termed "grassroots" operatives who were organized by an operational commander (Basit), who was dispatched to the United States from "the base" in Afghanistan. The grassroots pattern has been used by al Qaeda far more often than the 9/11 model, in which all the operatives were sent into the United States from overseas. As al Qaeda's evolution from an organization to a movement continues, the odds of another centrally planned, funded and executed attack like 9/11 will grow ever more remote.

Instead, it is the combination of operational planners and grassroots cells that will continue to pose the most significant and most persistent threat. This is the model that was evident in the Madrid and London attacks. Grassroots cells lack the strategic reach and punch demonstrated by the 9/11 cell, but they will continue to pose a tactical threat in their areas of operation for the foreseeable future.

Again, it is critical to distinguish between grassroots militants or supporters of jihadist causes and sleeper operatives. If al Qaeda or any other transnational organization were to demonstrate the strategic reach and capabilities necessary for deploying true sleepers, there would be far-reaching implications for the war against terrorism -- ranging from U.S. counterintelligence policy all the way down to how immigration laws are written and enforced.

The Weight of the Evidence

Now, having said all of those things, it is quite interesting that Osama bin Laden, in the videotape issued in January 2006, implied that al Qaeda operatives are today present within the continental United States, and there have been media reports that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is in U.S. custody, discussed the existence of sleeper cells in the country. At the very least, it is logical to assume that the issue would have been near the top of the list of questions posed by interrogators during his debriefing.

Al Qaeda leaders of such high rank do command a certain amount of credibility, particularly when it comes to threatening and then carrying out specific attacks, and it would be foolish to dismiss their claims out of hand. But it also is important to note that they have strong incentives to spread disinformation, so as to confuse counterterrorism efforts in the United States and elsewhere. Moreover, it is difficult to know how al Qaeda itself defines concepts such as a "sleeper" -- and it is entirely possible that their definition differs from that used by state intelligence organizations.

Thus, while there is strong evidence that al Qaeda has contacts within the United States, the only answer to the question of whether it has sleeper agents in place is that we cannot know for sure. However, we tend to discount the possibility for several reasons.

For one thing, as previously discussed, the deployment of sleeper operatives is a strategic capability that takes a great deal of planning, coordination and training. And since 9/11, al Qaeda's strategic capabilities have been seriously degraded; the U.S.-led counteroffensive has denied the organization places to train, plan and operate, and has inflicted serious damage to its financial and communications networks. As a result, the operational tradecraft of al Qaeda field operatives has degraded to a level below that prior to the 9/11 attacks.

It follows, then, that even if al Qaeda possesses the strategic vision and patience necessary to embed sleeper operatives in the United States, the organization no longer would be capable of training the personnel or coordinating such an operation today. If there is a bona fide threat of al Qaeda sleepers in the United States, it would mean they were present in the country prior to 9/11.

Now, while the leadership of al Qaeda certainly has an attention span and takes a view of history longer than that of many Americans, there is evidence that it also has a relatively short planning cycle. History has shown that key planners and operatives frequently were engaged with more than one operation at a time. In other words, it is not sufficient to use successful al Qaeda attacks to extrapolate a planning cycle; this model does not take into account failed or foiled attempts, such as the shoe bomber plot and other planned spectaculars, that also were being implemented during the same time frame.

When one also factors in the large number of senior al Qaeda planners who have been captured or killed since 9/11, it is clear that the organization is under enormous pressure.The question, then, is this: How much longer could al Qaeda wait before activating any sleeper cells it might have? Logic would argue that any sleeper operatives still out in the cold either must be getting exceedingly nervous at this point or they do not exist. If they do exist, the ability to remain hidden so long after 9/11 implies that they possess a degree of professionalism on par with that of the KGB -- and far exceeding anything exhibited by al Qaeda operatives to date.

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From Rolling Stone:

God's Senator
Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback

Nobody in this little church just off Times Square in Manhattan thinks of themselves as political. They're spiritual -- actors and athletes and pretty young things who believe that every word of the Bible is inerrant dictation from God. They look down from the balcony of the Morning Star, swaying and smiling at the screen that tells them how to sing along. Nail-pierced hands, a wounded side. This is love, this is love! But on this evening in January, politics and all its worldly machinations have entered their church.

Sitting in the darkness of the front row is Sam Brownback, the Republican senator from Kansas. And hunched over on the stage in a red leather chair is an old man named Harald Bredesen, who has come to anoint Brownback as the Christian right's next candidate for president.

Over the last six decades, Bredesen has prayed with so many presidents and prime ministers and kings that he can barely remember their names. He's the spiritual father of Pat Robertson, the man behind the preacher's vast media empire. He was one of three pastors who laid hands on Ronald Reagan in 1970 and heard the Pasadena Prophecy: the moment when God told Reagan that he would one day occupy the White House. And he recently dispatched one of his proteges to remind George W. Bush of the divine will -- and evangelical power -- behind his presidency.

Tonight, Bredesen has come to breathe that power into Brownback's presidential campaign. After little more than a decade in Washington, Brownback has managed to position himself at the very center of the Christian conservative uprising that is transforming American politics.

Just six years ago, winning the evangelical vote required only a veneer of bland normalcy, nothing more than George Bush's vague assurance that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Now, Brownback seeks something far more radical: not faith-based politics but faith in place of politics. In his dream America, the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all.

Continued at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator?rnd=1144873465234&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.872

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From Capitol Hill Blue

The Rant
Lies, damn lies and George W. Bush
By DOUG THOMPSON
Apr 12, 2006, 06:25

No doubt about it. George W. Bush's lying, rotten, putrid, soulless destruction of a once-great nation called America is now open for all to see.

Bush is not just a liar. He's a serial liar who avoids truth at all costs because facts don't' support his perverted, twisted view of the world. Truth exposes his corrupt administration and lays bare his many crimes against the American people and the Constitution of the United States.

Impeachment? Nah. Too good for this lowlife. Arrest the son-of-a-bitch, lead him from the White House in chains, parade him down Pennsylvania Avenue and then lock him in stocks on the Washington Mall so everyone can see what happens when anyone thinks they are above the law of the land.

Today's Washington Post lays out yet another example of how Bush lied to the American people, detailing a deliberate White House pattern of misinformation on the so-called "biological warfare" trailers captured soon after American troops invaded Iraq.

Turns out the trailers had nothing to do with biological warfare. Intelligence officers in the field knew it. They told the White House. Yet Bush ignored the truth and went before the American people to claim otherwise, trumpeting the trailers as "proof" that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"I hate to admit it but it appears clear the President of the United States is a pathological liar," says political scientist George Harleigh, who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administration. "His pattern of deception exceeds anything we saw in the Nixon era."

Members of Congress - Republican and Democrat - admit the same thing, shaking their heads in disbelief while talking privately with supporters and political strategists.

"The biggest threat any Republican running for election or re-election this year faces is not from the Democrats but from the President," says a GOP political consultant who, for obvious reasons, begs for anonymity. "George W. Bush is a major liability to Republicans in the mid-term elections."

When news broke last week that Bush personally authorized a White House campaign of leaks aimed at discrediting Ambassador Joseph Wilson - a campaign that led to the "outing" of Wilson's wife, a covert CIA operative - Republicans scrambled for cover. Sunday talk show producers tried without success to find a Republican willing to go on the air and defend the President.

The only Republican who did appear - maverick Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter - didn't defend Bush's actions but called instead on both the President and the Vice President to come clean about their roles in the CIA leak debacle.

"Bush's actions clearly have left Republicans in uncomfortable, and untenable, positions," Harleigh says. "They don't want to alienate voters by aligning themselves too closely with an increasingly unpopular President but they also have to be careful not to alienate their GOP base."

Polls, however, shows the GOP base dwindling as more and more Republicans realize they've been had by the charlatan-in-chief.

Even die-hard Republicans find it harder and harder to defend their corrupt and morally-bankrupt leader, admitting privately that the Presidency of George W. Bush will go down in history as a monumental failure, surpassing the dark days of Richard M. Nixon.

"The Nixon administration has, for 30 years now, been the baseline to measure failure in the Republican Party," says Harleigh. "No more. George W. Bush has lowered the bar."

© Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue

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From Publishers Lunch Weekly:

FICTION/DEBUT:
Altaf Tyrewala's NO GOD IN SIGHT, about present-day Bombay told through a series of linked vignettes, to Karan Mahajan at MacAdam/Cage, for publication in fall 2005, in a nice deal, by Penguin India.

MYSTERY/CRIME:

Dick Francis's first novel in six years, UNDER ORDERS, to Ivan Held at Putnam, with Christine Pepe editing, for publication in September 2006, by Sterling Lord of Sterling Lord Literistic (US). UK rights to Tom Weldon at Penguin UK, by Andrew Hewson.

Joseph Wambaugh's HOLLYWOOD STATION, about a police sergeant named the Oracle and his band of cops on the beat, to Judy Clain at Little, Brown and Les Pockell at Warner, at auction, for publication in January 2007, by Nat Sobel at Sobel Weber Associates (NA).

THRILLER:

Stephen J. Cannell's next two books in his series featuring LAPD detective Shane Scully, to Sally Richardson at St. Martin's, by Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media Group (world).
Steve Martini's next two novels in the series featuring defense attorney Paul Madriani, to David Highfill at William Morrow, by Esther Newberg at ICM (NA). david.highfill@harpercollins.com

2006 Edgar Award nominee OFFICER DOWN author Theresa Schwegel's PERSON OF INTEREST, in which an undercover cop's wife invites disaster when she covers up a mistake made by her rebellious daughter, again to Kelley Ragland at St. Martin's Minotaur, in a very nice deal, in a two-book deal, for publication in fall 2007, by David Hale Smith at DHS Literary (NA).david@dhsliterary.com

GENERAL/OTHER:

Jami Attenberg's THE KEPT MAN, about a woman whose husband -- a painter -- is in a coma, a prominent painter, and her discovery of evidence in his art that suggests their marriage was not what she thought it was, to Megan Lynch at Riverhead, for publication in 2007, by Doug Stewart at Sterling Lord Literistic (NA).

Elizabeth Hand's GENERATION LOSS, the story of a photographer from the post-Factory/Andy Warhol days who runs into some very scary business when she attempts to revitalize her career by interviewing another well-known artist, by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant at Small Beer Press, for hardcover publication in spring 2007, and Tina Pohlman at Harvest, for paperback publication in spring 2008, by Martha Millard at Martha Millard Literary Agency.

CHILDREN'S/FANTASY:

French historical thriller writer Guillaume Prevost's first YA books, THE BOOK OF TIME, translated by William Rodarmor, a fantasy adventure trilogy billed as "one part Da Vinci Code, one part Dracula, and one part The Time-Traveler's Wife," about a 14-year-old boy whose quest to find his father takes him through time to ancient Egypt, Viking England, Dracula's castle, and beyond, beginning with THE STONE STATUE, published in France in February, to Arthur Levine at Scholastic and Elaine McQuade at Scholastic UK, in a pre-empt, for publication beginning in fall 2007, by Gallimard Jeunesse.cmeloto@scholastic.com aprice@scholastic.co.uk

UK:

Ivo Stourton's THE NIGHT CLIMBERS, about a group of Cambridge students who commit an art fraud: a cross between "Brideshead Revisited" and "The Secret History," to Jane Lawson at Doubleday UK, in a very nice deal, in a two-book deal, by Peter Buckman at The Ampersand Agency (World English).peter@theampersandagency.co.uk

FOREIGN:

German rights to Karyn Bosnak's TWENTY TIMES A LADY, to Droemer, by Regina Wegmann at the Michael Meller Agency, on behalf of RLR Associates.Rights have also been sold to Transworld, Luitingh-Sijthoff in Holland, and Edizione Piemme in Italy.junter@rlrassociates.net

Spanish rights to Wendy French's SMOTHERING, about a girl trying to re-invent herself when her mother unexpectedly lands on her doorstep, mysteriously travelling solo and with enough Weekender Wear to make anyone nervous, to Grupo Anaya, by Alexandre Civico of Agence Litteraire Lora Fountain, on behalf of Sally Harding at The Harding Agency.reception@thehardingagency.com

FILM:

Rights to Dean Koontz's forthcoming THE HUSBAND (from Bantam), about an ordinary working man whose love for his wife is put to a harrowing series of tests over a sixty-hour period, beginning when his peaceful workday is shattered by a phone call from a stranger, to Focus Features and Random House Films for their new filmmaking partnership, for immediate development, by Richard Heller of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz.

BIOGRAPHY:

Let Them Call Me Rebel author Sanford D. Horwitt's untitled biography of Senator Russ Feingold, the leading progressive candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, with numerous interviews from a broad range of sources, including Senator Feingold who has imposed no conditions on this independent project, to Alice Mayhew of Simon & Schuster, in a pre-empt, by Mary Evans at Mary Evans (World).Merrylit@aol.com

HISTORY/POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS:

Commander Richard Jadick's A DOCTOR'S WAR, his account of emergency medicine and battlefield triage in the Iraqi war, to Mark Chait at Caliber, by Rafe Sagalyn at The Sagalyn Agency.info@sagalyn.com Film rights: macendejas@lynnpleshetteagency.com

MEMOIR:

Phoebe Damrosch's SERVICE INCLUDED, a "Kitchen Confidential meets Sex And The City" memoir which offers a glimpse into the author's experience as the only female captain while at her first year at the renowned Per Se restaurant, to Carolyn Marino at William Morrow, by Paul Cirone at the Aaron Priest Agency (NA). pcirone@aaronpriest.com

Blogger Melissa Plaut's NEW YORK HACK, about the author's years driving a New York City yellow medallion cab -- a career change she made after having decided at the age of twenty-nine to become "the driver of my own life," to Bruce Tracy at Villard, in a pre-empt, by Erin Hosier at The Gernert Company (world).Film/television rights: Brooke Ehrlich for Rabineau Wachter & Sanford

NARRATIVE:

Magazine reporter and veteran of the "disaster beat" Amanda Ripley's DANGER: Surviving the Unthinkable, looking at epic calamities around the world to show exactly what happens to the human brain in extremis, using interviews with those who "made it out," analysis of after-action reports, and participatory journalism, to explain why some of us seem hard-wired for survival -- and others for failure, while sharing the lessons needed to make the right survival decisions, to Rick Horgan at Crown, in a pre-empt, for publication in 2008, by Esmond Harmsworth of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency (world).Rights: LKaplan@randomhouse.com

AMERICAN NOMAD author Richard Grant's GOD'S MIDDLE FINGER: Adventures in Mexico's Wild West, set in the largely unknown world of the Sierra Madre mountains, a land of anarchy, isolation, and tribal ritual where few outsiders venture and fewer live to tell the tale, to Wylie O'Sullivan at Free Press, for publication in March 2008, by Britt Carlson at Gelfman Schneider (US).

SCIENCE:

UC Berkeley researcher Dacher Keltner's BORN TO BE GOOD: The Biology of Peace and Wellbeing, which shows through studies of facial expression and body language how the "ethical emotions," such as awe and gratitude, tell an untold story of human evolution, how benevolence is our basic nature, to Maria Guarnaschelli at Norton, by Linda Loewenthal at the David Black Literary Agency (World). laeliseo@dblackagency.com

UK:

Marina Nemat's THE MARTYR'S PRISONER, a memoir set against the backdrop of revolutionary Iran, to Eleanor Birne at John Murray, in a pre-empt, by David Grossman, acting on behalf of Beverley Slopen.Eleanor.birne@johnmurrays.co.uk

FOREIGN:

Canadian rights to Reuters environmental reporter Alanna Mitchell's THE DEEPS, examining the deterioration of the oceans by putting together the scattered pieces of a scientific puzzle, to Susan Renouf at McClelland & Stewart, by Sally Harding at The Harding Agency. reception@thehardingagency.com

Canadian rights to Rory Stewart's THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES, chronicling the author's time spent in the remote marsh regions of Southern Iraq where he spent eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war, to Helen Reeves at Penguin Canada, in a nice deal, by Clare Alexander at Gillon Aitken Associates.harmony.ho@ca.penguingroup.com

Wrap...

From lanl-the-real-story. blogspot.com :

DX is facing another shutdown. There have been three major incidents in DX Division in the past two weeks. One involved a DX manager.

6 weeks ago there was a stop work issued for another operation involving firearms use at DX.

Since Nanos shut down the lab everyone in DX who knew what they were doing has either retired or quit. They are left with inadequate procedures and a workforce that does not have the experience to fill in the gaps. This has led to a very dangerous work environment at DX.

Incident 1-- A firing point worker operating a mobile crane at DARHT failed to obey the signals of the ground crew and removed a counter weight from the crane without ensuring that the hook was directly over the load. This caused the load to swing into the cab damaging the crane. The independent inspector who came out to look over the crane after the incident said that he had seen this type of accident before but usually the cab is crushed and the operator injured or killed.

Incident 2-- An electrical accident placed a DX worker in the hospital due to a 110v shock.

Incident 3-- A DX Division Manager ran a road block during an explosive operation. He ended up at the firing point where the operation was being conducted.

This incident indicates the lack of knowledge that DX managers have regarding the operations they oversee and authorize. There are virtually no managers left in DX that have experience in explosive operations.

Work Stoppage – A stop work was issued for a test involving a firearm at DX. When the operation was reviewed by the Firearms Safety Committee it was found that DX procedures were woefully inadequate and the firearms were in a state of dangerous disrepair. When asked why this situation existed DX said that the person who used to do this work had retired.

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So Randy Cunningham's voters in the wealthy, North County, heavily Republican, 50th District voted today. Polls have been closed for an hour and a half now, and so far, Dem Francine Busby has the most votes...but will she get 51%? Be very hard, with 17 candidates running against her.

Just saw the results of Monday's questionnaire 17 of the 18 candidates answered for the paper....the San Diego Union-Tribune. It had 7 questions dealing with Bush's taxes, abortion, gay marriage, gun control, immigration, stem cell research and whether Bush was right to invade Iraq. Not trusting electronic voting machines, I voted for Busby via mail in ballot.

Knowing what I think about each of the seven queries, I checked to see which candidate agreed with me. Was very surprised to find that two agreed with me on five of the seven. One was Busby, the other was a Republican...one Chris Young, a retired bank officer. If it weren't that the Dems really really need a majority in either or both of the House or Senate, I would have been fine if Republican Young should win Cunningham's seat. But that ain't the case. Under the current circumstances, the Repub majority has to go.

So I'll be checking online at www.nbcsandiego.com on and off for the rest of the evening to learn if Busby will win outright or if there will be a run-off and we'll vote again in November.

Wrap...

Wal-Mart and its Washington, D.C., lobbyist, the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), have systematically undermined America’s security by working to defeat or weaken new rules to make America’s seaports and supply chains safe from terrorist attacks.

A new report by the AFL-CIO’s Jason Judd, Unchecked: How Wal-Mart Uses Its Might to Block Port Security, documents the company's efforts since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to ensure that “security requirements should not become a barrier to trade.”
Click here to read the report (PDF).

Unchecked: How Wal-Mart Uses Its Might to Block Port Security shows how Wal-Mart and RILA have lobbied in Congress against increased inspections of containers and other new rules to keep our ports safe.

With $11.2 billion in profits last year, Wal-Mart is the most powerful member of RILA, which has used its influence to thwart important requirements for “smart containers” and electronic seals on cargo coming into the United States.

RILA also has lobbied against independent and regular examinations of supply chain security practices, container-handling fees to finance port security and requirements that would let Customs and Border Protection know what’s being shipped and where it’s coming from.

These are all measures that would help protect us against terrorism, and Wal-Mart and its Washington lobbyists are standing in the way. Read our full report to learn more, and please help us spread the word by passing this email to your friends and family.
Click here to read the report (PDF).

Wrap...

From www.voiceofsandiego.org :

Ghostwriting the Airport's Story
By ROB DAVIS
Voice Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006

A lot of work went into Midge Costanza's opinion piece that appeared Dec. 23 in The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The staff at GCS Public Relations spent 16-and-a-half hours researching, editing and polishing the article, titled "Who will lead on our airport issue?" Costanza, president of the Midge Costanza Institute, a non-partisan public policy group, met twice with Rick Cook, a partner at GCS. They worked to make Costanza's words more conversational. They discussed a submission strategy. Cook twice spoke with Bernie Jones, the Union-Tribune's opinion page editor, and kept him updated on the article's status.

The bill for GCS's work came to $3,140, according to invoices. The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority paid it.

But anyone reading the article would have had no idea that the authority's public relations team had shaped Costanza's words. She does not work for the authority, and the opinion piece did not divulge the authority's role in drafting it. It appeared to be one person's concerned opinion, not part of an orchestrated campaign by a public organization.

GCS, which signed a lucrative $3.8 million public outreach contract in Nov. 2004, is a vital tool in the airport authority's effort to educate the public about the need for a new airport and the process to find a place to put it. And, along the way, they have enlisted the help of Costanza and other opinion leaders to do it.

Costanza's editorial struck a dire tone, and implored the area's elected officials to lead the quest to find Lindbergh Field's replacement. She recited what has become a familiar battle cry for airport authority officials: Lindbergh Field is 661 acres, one-fourth the size of airports in comparable cities. Its lone runway is just 9,400 feet long. Ten years from now, demand could outstrip capacity.

"Ordinary citizens understand that if we fail to address the airport issue this time," she wrote, "we are playing Russian roulette with our future, as well as our children's and our grandchildren's."

As the authority argues its case for building a new international airport in San Diego, Costanza's op-ed piece is just one example of the behind-the-scenes work that the public body has undertaken to manage public opinion. A review of nearly two years of GCS invoices obtained by voiceofsandiego.org through a California Public Records Act request opens a window into the effort that, according to polls, appears to be working.

Costanza, who didn't return a call for comment, isn't alone in lending her name to the cause. According to GCS invoices, the public relations firm also penned an opinion piece for Marion Blakey, the Federal Aviation Administration's chief.

GCS staffers -- led by partners Rick Cook and Jon Schmid -- have offered to write opinion pieces for others in the community, leaving few stones unturned as the authority's board moves toward a November ballot initiative that could relocate the region's main airport.

The effort is also raising concerns, even from one board member who said she was unaware of the project. Critics question whether the campaign is an appropriate use of federal funds and say the outreach has crossed the line from education to advocacy. The airport authority is forbidden by law from advocating for specific sites.

Told about the extent of ghostwriting, authority board member Mary Teresa Sessom was aghast.

"We shouldn't be doing that," Sessom said. "We should be using that money for education. That's not education. I'm appalled. I'm not surprised, but I'm appalled."

Cook and others who work in public relations say the tactic is common. Opinion leaders want to lend their names and support, they say, but are often too busy to write the pieces themselves.
Public relations professionals say GCS's other tactics are also tools of the trade. GCS ghostwrites opinion pieces and letters to the editor for authority board members. They prepare speaking points when major issues arise. They write speeches and hire pollsters. And they recruit opinion leaders to endorse the authority's strategy.

According to its contract, GCS is also required to maintain "coalition as well as opposition databases." Though his firm named it, Cook said the opposition database is a misnomer and does not track individuals or groups who object to a Lindbergh replacement.

Angela Shafer-Payne, the authority's vice president of strategic planning, said the overall effort, funded by the Federal Aviation Administration, is a necessary tool to keep the public educated about a technical process.

Soliciting Opinions

Steve Erie, a professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, said GCS's Jon Schmid contacted him about three weeks ago, soliciting an opinion piece. Erie, director of the university's Urban Studies and Planning Program, has followed the airport issue and authored several Southern California airport studies.

When Schmid called, UCSD economics professor Richard Carson was in the news, questioning the airport authority's economic analysis. Carson objected to the authority's assertion that the area will lose $94 billion in gross regional product if a new airport isn't built. Erie said Schmid wanted to know if he and another prominent airport forecasting expert would respond to debunk Carson.

"They didn't want to do the research to see whether Carson was right or not," Erie said. "They just wanted us to write the piece. Or if we didn't, they'd write it for us."

Erie turned down the offer, even though he thinks both Carson and the authority have incorrectly analyzed the airport's economic impact.

"It's not my job to write a solicited opinion piece," Erie said. "… I was a little put off. This is not the way the big kids play."

Erie has long been a GCS target, according to invoices. Eight days after Erie penned a Jan. 2005 column in the North County Times calling for a replacement to Lindbergh Field, Schmid and other GCS staffers discussed him as a potential champion for the project. Schmid and Cook each attended a book talk Erie made later that month. Erie remembered Schmid introducing himself, but couldn't recall the conversation. (Schmid and Cook billed the authority approximately $800 for attending the two-hour event.)

Cook characterized the recent contact with Erie as a "very general conversation to determine whether he'd be interested in expressing an opinion."

Not all of GCS's efforts happen behind the scenes. The public relations firm has pitched speaking opportunities to groups ranging from the Black Contractors Association of San Diego to the Borrego Springs Republican Women Federated. Staff members have e-mailed every Rotary Club in San Diego County. They convinced Vista school officials to allow students to earn credit for attending a local town hall meeting.

Airport officials and authority board members typically attend the meetings and hold question-and-answer sessions. The town halls feature a three-minute, 40-second video that explains the need for a new airport.

The video, which cost about $40,000 to produce, is also replayed on televisions throughout the airport -- among the many banners, fliers and signs found in the terminals. In discussing the future, it shows a narrow picture of the present: crowded runways, full waiting areas, bustling ticket check-ins and traffic jams outside the terminals. When it displays projected annual passengers, it uses the highest figure available (33 million) and does not mention the lowest (27 million).

"What's the worst thing that we could do?" the video's voice-over asks. "Ignore the inevitable. A solution must be found now."

With calm music jingling in the background, the voice-over parrots language found in Costanza's December opinion piece -- both in content and sentence structure: "At 661 acres, San Diego's airport is one-quarter the size of those at comparable metro areas."

Costanza wrote: "At 661 acres, San Diego International Airport is one-fourth the size of airports in comparable cities."

As the video concludes, a message pops up: "Make a well-informed decision in November 2006."
Critics say voters won't be able to make an educated decision unless they hear both sides of the debate -- something they say hasn't yet happened.

Lani Lutar, president and CEO of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association, a non-partisan fiscal watchdog, said federal tax dollars are being spent on one-sided outreach that doesn't leave room for anything except replacing Lindbergh Field.

"Our concern is that they've now crossed the line into advocacy," Lutar said. "Organizations and individuals with opposing viewpoints should be given an equal opportunity to share their views.

So far we haven't seen that."

Sessom, Lemon Grove's mayor and an authority board member, acknowledged the outreach campaign has done a good job educating the public about the technical aspects of the authority's site selection search.

But she said she worries the outreach campaign has wrongly shaped the public's perception of Lindbergh Field's capacity to handle future demands.

"That concerns me," she said, "because that immediately puts it into the public mindset that there's nothing we can do at Lindbergh -- and I don't think we've fully explored Lindbergh."

She also questions whether a majority of town hall meetings have avoided areas around Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, one site being considered for the new airport's home.

"I'm concerned that there is the appearance that we may have carried it a little too far in terms of advocacy," said Sessom, who has criticized the site-selection process for being too focused on Miramar.

Fellow board member Paul G. Nieto disagrees with his colleague. The promotional materials aren't advocacy, he said, unless they are lobbying for a specific site or a position the airport authority has taken. An attorney vets the authority's outreach.

"I think they've done a good job on focusing on the educational aspects of this," he said. "We just need to be squeaky clean."

Who Are They?

The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority was formed by state legislation in 2003. The law requires the authority, once run by the Unified Port of San Diego, to select a site to replace Lindbergh Field and place it on November's ballot for voters' consideration.

A new airport, which would cost billions of dollars, has been called one of the largest public projects in the region's history.

The authority formally hired GCS in Nov. 2004, restructuring the contract last October. That boosted the maximum payment from $2.25 million to $3.8 million, while prohibiting coordination of efforts with ASAP-21, a local alliance of groups that support a new airport site.
Tom Gable, Rick Cook and Jon Schmid formed GCS in 2001.

Cook, who bills the authority $200 hourly for his work, has worked in public relations for more than 20 years, on projects ranging from the expansion of Louisville, Ky.'s airport to PNC Bank's marketing.

Schmid also bills $200 hourly and is a San Diego native. He was twice nominated for Pulitzer Prizes while a Chicago Sun-Times reporter. While working on this campaign, he won a Bronze Anvil, a Public Relations Society of America prize that recognizes "outstanding public relations tactics," for producing a four-page airport insert that ran in local newspapers.

Others are involved in the process. New West Public Relations of Louisville has been focused on developing the outreach's strategy. Roz Winstead, who runs a San Diego-based public relations firm, focuses on community involvement. GCS has performed the work's majority.

When New West CEO Becky Simpson makes monthly trips to San Diego from Kentucky, the public relations teams often strategize over lunch and dinner, occasionally bringing in other airport political consultants. They've spent at least $4,100 on meals that way since May 2004, according to reimbursement reports.

Since GCS took the reigns of the public outreach program, more people are aware of the site selection process and the November ballot initiative, according to a Sept. 2005 poll.

Those polls also check to see how many voters would support a new site. The Sept. 2005 figures showed 66 percent of voters saying they'd vote for a new airport site, up 13 percent from the outset of the campaign.

In late 2005, Cook valued the media coverage resulting from GCS's work at more than $3 million dollars.

The contract runs through June 2007. Cook said GCS will continue public outreach once the authority board selects a site, educating community members about the board's recommendation -- scheduled for May -- and the reasons behind it.

Please contact Rob Davis directly at rob.davis@voiceofsandiego.orgwith your thoughts, ideas, personal stories or tips.

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From Buzzflash :

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT
A LEAKY PRESIDENT RUNS AFOUL OF 'LITTLE RICO'
Buzzflash
by Greg Palast
Sunday, April 9, 2006

It's a crime. No kidding. But the media has it all wrong. As usual.

'Scooter' Libby finally outed 'Mr. Big,' the perpetrator of the heinous disclosure of the name of secret agent Valerie Plame. It was the President of United States himself -- in conspiracy with his Vice-President.

Now the pundits are arguing over whether our war-a-holic President had the legal right to leak this national security information. But, that's a fake debate meant to distract you.

OK, let's accept the White House alibi that releasing Plame's identity was no crime. But if that's true, they've committed a BIGGER crime: Bush and Cheney knowingly withheld vital information from a grand jury investigation, a multimillion dollar inquiry the perps themselves authorized. That's akin to calling in a false fire alarm or calling the cops for a burglary that never happened -- but far, far worse.

Let's not forget that in the hunt for the perpetrator of this non-crime, reporter Judith Miller went to jail. Think about that. While Miller sat in a prison cell, Bush and Cheney were laughing their sick heads off, knowing the grand jury testimony, the special prosecutor's subpoenas and the FBI's terrorizing newsrooms were nothing but fake props in Bush's elaborate charade, Cheney's Big Con.

On February 10, 2004, our not-so-dumb-as-he-sounds President stated, "Listen, I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing. ...And if people have got solid information, please come forward with it."

Notice Bush's cleverly crafted words. He says he can't name anyone who leaked this "classified" info -- knowing full well he'd de-classified it. Far from letting Bush off the hook, it worsens the crime.

For years, I worked as a government investigator and, let me tell you, Bush and Cheney withholding material information from the grand jury is a felony. Several felonies, actually: abuse of legal process, fraud, racketeering and, that old standby, obstruction of justice.

If you or I had manipulated the legal system this way, we'd be breaking rocks on a chain gang. We wouldn't even get a trial -- most judges would consider this a "fraud upon the court" and send us to the slammer in minutes using the bench's power to administer instant punishment for contempt of the judicial system.

Why'd they do it? The White House junta did the deed for the most evil of motives: to hoodwink the public during the 2004 election campaign, to pretend that evil anti-Bush elements were undermining the Republic, when it was the Bush element itself at the center of the conspiracy. (Notably, elections trickery also motivated Richard Nixon's "plumbers" to break into the Watergate, then the Democratic Party campaign headquarters.)

Let me draft the indictment for you as I would have were I still a government gumshoe:

"Perpetrator Lewis Libby (alias, 'Scooter') contacted Miller; while John Doe 1 contacted perpetrators' shill at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, in furtherance of a scheme directed by George Bush (alias 'The POTUS') and Dick Cheney (alias, 'The Veep') to release intelligence information fraudulently proffered as 'classified,' and thereinafter, knowingly withheld material evidence from a grand jury empanelled to investigate said disclosure. Furthermore, perpetrator 'The POTUS' made material statements designed to deceive investigators and knowingly misrepresent his state of knowledge of the facts."

Statements aimed at misleading grand jury investigators are hard-time offenses. It doesn't matter that Bush's too-clever little quip was made to the press and not under oath. I've cited press releases and comments in the New York Times in court as evidence of fraud. By not swearing to his disingenuous statement, Bush gets off the perjury hook, but he committed a crime nonetheless, "deliberate concealment."

Here's how the law works (and hopefully, it will). The Bush gang's use of the telephone in this con game constituted wire fraud. Furthermore, while presidents may leak ("declassify") intelligence information, they may not obstruct justice; that is, send a grand jury on a wild goose chase.

Under the 'RICO' statute (named after the Edward G. Robinson movie mobster, 'Little Rico'), the combination of these crimes makes the Bush executive branch a "racketeering enterprise."

So, book'm, Dan-o. Time to read The POTUS and The Veep their rights. After setting their bail (following the impeachments and removals, of course), a judge will have a more intriguing matter to address. The RICO law requires the Feds to seize all "ill-gotten gains" of a racketeering enterprise, even before trial. Usually we're talking fast cars and diamond bling. But in this case, the conspirators' purloined booty includes a stolen election and a fraudulently obtained authorization for war.

I see no reason why a judge could not impound the 82d Airborne as "fruits of the fraud " -- lock, stock and gun barrels -- and bring the boys home. And if justice is to be done we will will also have to run yellow tape across the gates at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- "CRIME SCENE - DO NOT ENTER" -- and return the White House to its rightful owners, the American people, the victims of this gangster government.

**********

Former racketeering investigator Greg Palast is author of "ARMED MADHOUSE: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War," to be released in June. Subscribe to the new podcast of our columns at www.GregPalast.com

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From Seattlepi.nwsource.com :

Sunday, April 9, 2006
Want more Bush? Elect McCain
By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON -- In his bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Sen. John McCain is moving to the right.

The Arizona Republican, who failed to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, is the most visible Republican on television, outside the White House, and seems to never pass up an opportunity to appear on Sunday talk shows.

All this appears to be part of his effort to transform his image as a maverick independent so that he can make his pitch to the conservative Republican base that will vote in the party's primaries and caucuses two years hence.

McCain's focus is on Southern states where he will have to show his dedication to the conservatives who dominate the GOP. He was scheduled to be the main speaker at the Lincoln Day dinner in Lakeland, Fla., on Saturday. Later this spring, he will deliver the commencement address at Liberty University at Lynchburg, Va., the school founded by evangelical leader Jerry Falwell.

Falwell has indicated there are still some bridges to mend with McCain, who had called Falwell "an agent of intolerance" in his first bid for the presidency in 2000.

Although Falwell has not endorsed McCain, he has said that the senator "could be the GOP's best hope" if Sen. Hillary Clinton is nominated to head the Democratic ticket in 2008.

Falwell also says McCain is in the process of "healing the breach with evangelical groups."

Asked to explain his change of attitude toward the evangelist on "Meet the Press" Sunday, McCain said: "I believe that the Christian right has a major role to play in the Republican Party. One reason (that) is so is because they're so active and their followers are. And I believe they have a right to be part of our party."

McCain also has gone out of his way to cozy up to President Bush after their bitter rift in the 2000 presidential campaign. McCain has said he does not look back in anger at old political battles. That's wise -- he's going to need Bush's backing in a presidential bid.

McCain also has taken other stands that should put him in good with Southern conservatives. Hailing from a military family -- his father and grandfather were admirals in the Navy -- he is a strong supporter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and believes the number of U.S. troops there should be beefed up.

He is against abortion rights and gun-control laws and believes students should be taught the religion-oriented "intelligent design" theory of creation as well as the theory of scientific evolution.

His painful experience as a POW during the Vietnam War led him to buck the White House on the question of using torture to interrogate detainees and prisoners of war. Despite White House opposition, he triumphed with a 90-9 Senate vote on his anti-torture amendment to the defense appropriations bill.

Well, almost.

In signing the bill, the president issued a statement that under his constitutional authority as commander in chief, he did not have to abide by the anti-torture amendment. This is a dubious claim of presidential power that should be challenged.

McCain's political record is not entirely pristine. He was a member of the so-called Keating Five -- five senators linked to Charles Keating in the savings and loan scandals in 1991. But a special investigator found that McCain had not been substantially involved in influence peddling but criticized him and three others for "questionable conduct."

That searing experience may explain why McCain has been an avid advocate of campaign finance reform.

With his "hail fellow well met" persona and tendency to jaw with the media and pundits in the back of the campaign bus, he has created the impression in some quarters that he is a "moderate."

Forget it. His voting record speaks for itself.

McCain is working hard to prove his staunch conservative credentials as he woos the far right in his party.

If he wins the presidency, the country can expect a continuation of Bush's aggressive foreign policy and ultra-right domestic programs.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2006 Hearst Newspapers.

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From truthout.org :

Vermont Democrats Call for Bush Impeachment

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040906B.shtml

Democratic Party leaders in Vermont on Saturday passed a motion asking Congress to immediately begin impeachment proceedings against George Bush.

Note: Democratic state committees in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Nevada and North Carolina have taken similar steps.

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From San Diego Union-Tribune :

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL
Mess gets worse
Leak order another black eye for Bush
April 8, 2006

The reports Thursday – uncontradicted by the White House – that former White House aide Lewis Libby testified he had divulged details of a secret National Intelligence Estimate to New York Times reporter Judith Miller at the behest of President Bush is inescapably embarrassing for this administration.

Yes, there is a case to be made that this didn't involve illegal leaking, since the president arguably can declassify what he wants.

Yes, the White House had cause to leak – to counter the deceptive claims of former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush team lied about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.

Yes, there is no evidence Bush authorized the outing of Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, which prompted the hiring of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

But none of this can rationalize the hypocrisy evident in the White House's long-standing claim to be appalled by any leaks involving national security, whether they dealt with Plame, Iraq, Iran, Israel, you name it.

The parsing has already begun – some Republicans note the president only decried the leaking of “classified” information. If that's the best they can do, they should give up. Bush was being asked about Plame. If he avoided giving revealing answers by using the smarmy tactics of his predecessor, that is nothing to crow about.

What's baffling is that if the administration had hard proof of Wilson's deceptions – which were later confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee – why didn't it just say so on the record? Using Libby didn't work. Remember, Judith Miller never wrote a story about his disclosures.

The last thing George W. Bush needs is new doubts about his administration's honesty. But now there are new doubts – and he has only himself to blame.

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From San Francisco Chronicle:

Web site exposes Air Force One defenses
Paul J. Caffera
Saturday, April 8, 2006

Whenever the president travels, security is a prime consideration. Motorcade routes are kept secret, and premature release of information about a presidential trip aboard one of the twin Air Force One planes can result in the Secret Service canceling a visit.

Thus, the Air Force reacted with alarm last week after The Chronicle told the Secret Service that a government document containing specific information about the anti-missile defenses on Air Force One and detailed interior maps of the two planes -- including the location of Secret Service agents within the planes -- was posted on the Web site of an Air Force base.

The document also shows the location where a terrorist armed with a high-caliber sniper rifle could detonate the tanks that supply oxygen to Air Force One's medical facility.

As of Friday, the document was still posted online. The Secret Service refused to comment on the document's release.

"It is not a good thing" for that information to be in the public domain, said Lt. Col Bruce Alexander, director of public affairs for the Air Mobility Command's 89th Airlift Wing, Andrews Air Force Base, which operates the presidential air transport fleet. "We are concerned with how it got there and how we can get it out. This affects operational security."

Information about Air Force One's anti-missile systems is considered particularly sensitive.

"Having information about a target's countermeasures does two things," said Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute. "It gives you an opportunity to choose a different weapon and to choose a different attack style ... perhaps choosing to launch a salvo attack, or choose a missile that uses an active beam."

"It is tough enough for the Secret Service to do its job without this," said Leon Panetta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, who now runs a public policy study center at California State University at Monterey Bay. "If I were still chief of staff, I would order the damned site (to) pull it down."

Page A - 4 URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/04/08/MNGESI5U6C1.DTL

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From The Guardian via Information Clearing House...

Silence in class :

University professors denounced for anti-Americanism; schoolteachers suspended for their politics; students encouraged to report on their tutors.

Are US campuses in the grip of a witch-hunt of progressives, or is academic life just too liberal?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1746227,00.html

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