My girlfriend kept asking me this morning what this news was about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I have to admit I was completely stunned when I watched the newscasts covering this story. For a guy who' s only been in office 9 months that's quite an astonishing feat! That puts him in some pretty rarefied company.

Now, I know these GOP Obama haters will be falling all over themselves today on the wing-nut media circuits claiming how Obama "apologizing" to the world is what won him this distinguished honor. For sure, Beck & Limbaugh & Hannity & O'Reilly are all "in studio" right now preparing the right swing smear spin on this shocking news! I would have paid good money to see the looks on their faces when they heard about this!

But frankly, I am willing to accept The Nobel Committee at its word when they say Mr. Obama was awarded this humble honor because: of the changes in the global mood that have occurred because of President Obama's calls for peace and international cooperation while admitting to initiatives that have not yet proven they will work, such as trying to reduce the world stock of nuclear arms, and mitigating American conflicts with Muslim nations and fighting climate control change.

Still, this has got to raise the war mongering hairs on the necks of a lot of Republicans and Neo-Cons. This Obama feller is becoming their biggest worstest nightmare ever! They must be asking, "can his ego even fit on Air Force One anymore?"

But Obama winning this highly coveted prize once again creates a stark comparison between his agenda and that of our former President - George W. Bush. Frankly, I rather liked Bush and his folksy expressions. But he left some really bad stuff behind him.

You could not find one single American who was against the US retaliating and bombing the crap out of Afghanistan in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01. Every American, regardless of political party, race, ethnicity, or philosophy supported Mr Bush as we set out to destroy The Taliban, capture Bin Laden, and eradicate Al Quaeda.

The problem is we have failed at all 3 - primarily because the Neo-Cons were never really interested in Afghanistan per se. They saw going into Afghanistan as a prelude to the real prize - Iraq! Today most Americans want us out of Afghanistan.

Here we are nearly nine years later, mired in what has degenerated into the longest war in US history. Nearly 5,000 of our brave troops have died for this nonsense. I keep asking myself: with all this Neo-Con love for wars and spreading "freedom" - how come the US military needs so many more troops? You would think they would've all signed up by now!

I often wonder what would have happened if Bush & the Neo-Cons had kept their eye on the ball and went into Afghanistan with "overwhelming force" as Powell and General Shenshecki advised? It's a bit ironic that Powell resigned and Shenshecki got fired. Would we still be there if we had followed that advice? Would we have captured Bin Laden? We will never know. But I do know that is what we should have tried to do from day one but we didn't and so here we are today.

I don't know if President Obama "deserves" The Nobel Peace Prize - that's not my line of work. But I do know that no more drastic picture could ever be painted when comparing the former and the current American administrations. I will never forget this day. Neither will Limbaugh, and the rest of the Obama hating media nuts!

So let's just sit back today, kick up our feet and enjoy the right wing Obama hating media nut-rage circus that is surely to unfold! Popcorn anyone?

Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Myers came home from Afghanistan yesterday. Sadly, there were no family members waving tiny American flags and choking back tears of excitement at the much overdue sight of the man who stood at the center of their universe. No, Sgt Myers came home from war in a box.

It was a coffin to be exact. A flag draped coffin, moved about and handled with all the reverence and solemn ceremony only those who've worn the uniform could provide. Brothers and sisters all... tasked with a duty, a solemn trust that no one should be asked to endure. Yet they did so with pride and honor, knowing full well that, but for the grace of God....

He is a brother, after all.

Dover Air Force Base is a place of great sadness and joy, a paradox if you will. I've stepped onto it's tarmac more times than I care to remember. I have seen grown women and men, overcome with the joy of being home, kneel down and give thanks for the American soil beneath their feet. Home. A home they they sometimes doubted they would ever set foot on again... I've done so myself.

Sgt. Myers didn't have the chance to kneel and smile at the silliness the rest of us engaged in. He gave his all for his country. I hope his widow is comforted in the knowledge that the eight brothers and sisters who welcomed him home treated him with the utmost honor and respect...

He is a brother, after all.

I never met Sgt. Myers. He and I... his war and mine... are separated by a generation. I know of Sgt Myers for one reason only, I saw his flag draped coffin being solemnly brought home on the evening news. Eighteen years ago, President George H. W. Bush decided that we good citizens of America should be shielded from the true cost of war. He alone decided that an American citizen who had paid the ultimate price for their country, would be shielded from the public view.

Why? That's for the good Mr. Bush to answer. George Sr. has been to war. He knows well the cost.
I have my opinions as to why, but I'll keep them to myself if it's all the same to you.

President Clinton never saw fit to change this policy, and neither did Bush the younger... I never really understood the reluctance to show the world the respect we accord our fallen men and women. We spoke of honoring their sacrifice, yet refused to let the American public share in that moment of honor and grief... Why?

He is a brother, after all.

Our new president has saw fit to repeal the idiotic rules that forbade our public displays of grief and honor. To my mind, that's a good start to understanding war... and it's true cost.... the young who will be our future.

Vade in pace Phillip. Go in peace my brother....

Hidden away in the basement of a bank building on Broad Street here, there is a bank of computer servers containing all the evidence Congress and the courts need to investigate and prosecute all the crimes of the Bush years. That includes the mysteriously missing e-mail messages sent by Karl Rove from his White House office through the Republican National Committee e-mail addresses from his special Blackberry reserved for political activities.

Keith debunks the talking points memo put out by the Bush administration trying to rewrite his legacy.

Bush started his second term in 2004 by making the use of the biggest, least fuel efficient SUVS as business vehicles financially easy with more of his misdirected tax breaks and delaying progress on energy self-suffiency, vehicle efficiency (and preventing the collapse of Ford/FM/Chrysler?). This was payback from the old boys club for industrial support for the conservative agenda. This was denial. This was corruption. His legacy will resonate for years. http://4wheeldrive.about.com/cs/drivingtipssafety/a/aa041603a.htm is an old link on some of this. The seeded item lists Bush's major environmental "sins" and what Obama may be able to do about them.

WASHINGTON—The Bush administration has abruptly halted a government program that tests the levels of pesticides in fruits, vegetables and field crops, arguing that the $8 million-a-year program is too expensive—a decision critics say could make it harder to protect consumers from toxins in their food.

Data from the 18-year-old Agricultural Chemical Usage Program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture were collected until this year, and the Environmental Protection Agency used the data to set safe levels of pesticides in food.

The information was also widely used by university and food industry researchers, including a University of Illinois program to help farmers reduce the amount of pesticides they use.

The program was launched in 1990 to answer congressional concerns over the use of the chemical daminozide, or Alar, on apples. But now USDA contends the program is too expensive.

We can't afford to have protection from toxic corporate activity, that's what we reward!

"They are bogged down big-time or there would be some indictments by now," said a recently retired bureau official who played a pivotal role in setting FBI policy after 9/ 11.

The FBI's response to the meltdown stands in sharp contrast to past financial crises, he said. "There are three comparable things ... the S&L crisis, corporate fraud like Enron and health care fraud. There was a clear, well-delineated effort there. I don't see it here."

The administration -- in reinventing the FBI after the 2001 terrorist attacks -- shifted about 2,400 agents from traditional crime-fighting squads to counterterrorism units, according to a Seattle P-I analysis of FBI data. At least 1,700 of those agents haven't been replaced, and the latest Bush budget continues that trend.

Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM), challenged to provide evidence that Barack Obama is unpatriotic, offered that fact that "He's been critical not only of the President but of American policy and hence has kind of a negative view of America in the world."

So criticizing the failed policies of the last eight years is unAmerican, is it? Well, since Bush's approval rating hovers around 25%, it logically follows that the other 75% of us are radical, communist-loving, Islamic terrorists.

No word from the phenomenally stupid Congresswoman on whether or not the GOP leaders who delighted in criticizing Bill Clinton for eight years are also unpatriotic.

Treasury has proposed a $700 billion taxpayer funded (through issuance of debt) purchase program to acquire real estate assets from the financial industry. This has been coming for a long time, and goes all the way back to the failed Super SIV that was being discussed last Fall. Of course, the numbers have grown from what was a $70 - $100 billion plan to the current $700 billion plus plan, and this plan has the taxpayers purchasing the bad assets directly. The accounting issues of valuation, however, have not changed. What has changed is that the crisis has become so bad we are probably willing to throw out the rules to save the game.

The plan is essentially a $700 billion revolving line to acquire real estate assets at whatever prices and from whatever sellers Treasury wants. There is no protection for taxpayers in Treasury's proposal, and I can only assume Treasury has left this aspect of the plan for Congress to address. If this isn't ringing alarm bells all over Washington and Main Street I don't know what will.

Treasury Secretary Paulson has submitted a very broad plan that gives him extraordinary discretion and prohibits any agency or judicial review. You can see a copy of what was submitted in this CNN article and read a description of the plan at the Treasury's website. The submission raises many questions, three of which I will discuss:

1. There is no provision for protection of taxpayers. As written, it seems that Treasury will simply purchase, at whatever price Treasury determines,

Mortgage-Related Assets.--The term "mortgage-related assets" means residential or commercial mortgages and any securities, obligations, or other instruments that are based on or related to such mortgages, that in each case was originated or issued on or before September 17, 2008.

The big question – at what price? If Treasury purchases securities at current market prices it doesn't necessarily help the financial institutions that own them. Right now losses that would occur at market prices are being deferred through secured lending by the Federal Reserve, but this is obviously insufficient. If these assets are in addition to those pledged to the Fed, then this is a multi-trillion dollar problem. If Treasury pays more than current market prices, then how is the taxpayer protected? Not to get off on a rant here, but it seems to me that any financial institution that sells securities to taxpayers pursuant to this program should, at a minimum, direct all dividends to the Treasury until taxpayers have been fully repaid, at which time they can have the balance of the securities returned. It really irks me to think that financial institutions could sell the crap they profited from so handsomely over the past decade to taxpayers, letting us assume the risk, while the owners continue to collect dividends. Absolutely horrible result that I truly hope Congress will address. Some may argue that this would make it difficult for these institutions to raise capital, but that should be irrelevant now since the taxpayers are providing the capital if we pay above market prices for their securities. Another point – why are we purchasing commercial real estate assets and what are the limitations on commercial vs. residential?

2. I think there is a lack of transparency. The current proposal provides for a report to Congress three months after the program begins and then every six months. As a taxpayer whose money is being spent on these assets I want to know every week how much, who, when, and so on. I want to know which institutions are benefiting, how we are getting compensated for it, what is the asset rated, what is the mark-to-market value, and so on. Without full disclosure this plan is ripe for abuse and all purchases need to be fully disclosed. I suppose there is an argument that disclosing which institutions are selling assets to taxpayers could jeopardize the institutions, but since they would be receiving a capital infusion from the purchase this should not be an issue. Poor disclosure is one of the issues that got us here in the first place and any plan to address this crisis must include full disclosure.

3. The amount of this bailout is unclear. It specifies that:

The Secretary's authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time

This means we could be purchasing a lot more than $700 billion worth of this stuff, we just will not own more than $700 billion at any one time. How do we account for the value of these assets? If Treasury purchases an asset for $1 million and receives principal payments that reduce the face amount of the asset, do those payments reduce the $700 billion even though we may still take a loss on the balance of the $1 million we paid? If so, this is more likely a $1 trillion plan (or more).

In other bailout news (post AIG taxpayer bailout), the Fed established a line of credit that is reportedly $230 billion to purchase asset-backed commercial paper on a non-recourse basis (meaning the Fed will own the stuff). Asset backed commercial paper was at the heart of this crisis to begin with and is where funding dried up last week. What does this commercial paper fund? Everything, including auto loans, credit cards, and so on. If this market freezes your credit card may not work, and the resulting panic could be devastating. Think how you would react if told you could not charge your groceries on your credit card because Citibank doesn't have the money to lend you. In addition, companies could find it impossible to fund payrolls causing more panic. This is one of the reasons Treasury acted on its plan – justified fear. (For a good explanation about how asset backed commercial paper works see this fitch report).

So what happened in the commercial paper market? In general, money market investors put money into money market mutual funds that then use the money to purchase assets including asset-backed commercial paper. But when a large money market mutual fund reported that it took a loss and that investors would lose money, money market mutual funds in general received calls for redemptions from investors who feared losing their money – a run on money market mutual funds. As night follows day, the mutual funds stopped purchasing commercial paper and put their liquidity into Treasury securities, driving the interest rate on short term Treasuries to negative on at least one issue and the interest rate on commercial paper way up. This is a clear dislocation in the credit markets and the Fed jumped in to provide liquidity for commercial paper. In addition to the Fed's new plan to purchase commercial paper, Treasury reached back to a depression era law to insure money market mutual funds. Funds can buy into the plan that will insure investors against losses. This has irked some banks that believe this places them at a competitive disadvantage to insured money market mutual funds and could cause their funding to dry up – more unintended consequences (do I hear whack-a-mole?).

One more item on the list of things being done to avoid a total meltdown – relaxation of regulations on financial firms. Since these firms cannot raise any capital because their business models are in question regulators have relaxed capital requirements – temporarily, of course. Another thing regulators did was relax the restriction on using commercial bank deposits to fund investment bank operations. After the great crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression, Congress split up the investment banks and commercial banks because investments made by investment banks in equities were too prone to value fluctuation that could wipe out depositor funds. The FDIC was established to insure deposits and banks were limited as to what they could do with those deposits (to protect the taxpayers from having to bail out excessive risk taking). The law that kept investment and commercial banks separated was repealed in 1999 (corrected), but there was regulation in place that prohibited these new combined banks from transferring commercial bank deposits to investment bank affiliates. Some of this regulation is currently being relaxed so that investment banks that are affiliated with commercial banks can get access to the stable deposit based funds of the commercial banks. The result is that to some extend the FDIC and taxpayer are now behind assets of the investment banking affiliates of the large commercial banks that have such affiliates. We have gone backwards (I bet Merrill Lynch and Bank of America appreciated this change that occurred the same time they merged).

For a time I was keeping tabs on the total cost of this credit implosion and the risk to taxpayers but the numbers are getting hard to follow. Based on current media reports the Fed is now up to $700 - $800 billion in credit and commitments, Treasury is asking for a $700 billion revolving credit facility from the taxpayers that is likely to be more than $700 billion in aggregate purchases, and so far the Federal Home Loan banks have issued some $250 - $300 billion in new taxpayer guaranteed debt to lend to banks against mortgage collateral. Oh yes, FHA has approximately $100 billion in new loan guarantees from FHA Secure and has another $300 billion authorized guarantee capacity to refinance defaulted mortgages. Are we at $2 trillion yet? If not, just add the GSE loans and MBS purchases Treasury plans (there are no limits on the amounts here) and whatever funds the GSEs need to stay solvent, and we have taxpayer exposure of well over $2 trillion even before the federal guarantees of the GSEs' debt. These numbers don't include losses that banks have reported on write-downs of securities. The result so far - Treasury has asked for an increase in the debt ceiling twice, this time to $11.3 Trillion (approximately 80% of GDP). One more point. If the total of all residential mortgages in The United States is in the $10.6 trillion range, and taxpayers now explicitly guarantee $5.5 trillion through Fannie and Freddie and are or will be at risk for say $2.5 trillion through all of the interventions noted above, then taxpayers could ultimately be on the hook (either through guarantees or ownership) for some 75 - 80% of the entire outstanding amount of residential mortgages in The United States. I find that staggering.

A couple of nits that I have:

1. Too bad Treasury didn't go out and raise the money last week when interest rates on Treasuries were at historic lows. Probably would have saved a lot in interest.

2. CNBC should stop praising Jim Cramer as though he is some sort of visionary for talking about a bailout plan like this one. Everyone has always known that the government could step in and get behind lots of private debt to shore up the markets. In fact, everyone has been talking about it for some time. Treasury just didn't until it was necessary because if it did it wouldn't get approval for it. No great vision here. When Cramer comes up with a way to protect taxpayers that Congress will pass and that will resolve the credit crisis call me.

3. If there was ever a time to fix the unfair and disproportionate tax treatment for hedge fund and private equity managers (the 15% rate on "carried interest"), now would be it. In fact, several years ago would have been better. When this was in the public discourse several months back industry pundits argued that if you taxed hedge funds you would get less of them. Right now that sounds like a good idea. Fewer hedge funds, fewer credit default swaps, less systemic risk.

4. Like many of the talking heads on television, I am angered by all of the blatently excessive amounts of compensation paid to Wall Street bankers and executives over the past six years or so that is ultimately proving to be gains from the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world. There should be some recourse, though I don't claim to know how that could work.

5. With absolutely no proof that trickle down Reagan/Bush-onomics has ever worked, an exploding national debt, an exploding national deficit, and the impending baby boom retirement isn't it time to stop talking about tax cuts for the investor class?

6. And finally, when will we, as a taxpaying and voting public, stop allowing the politicians to distract us with witch hunts for evil short sellers from the real issues – the fact that the political system has been for sale to the highest bidder and the highest bidder often turns out to be Wall Street and Wall Street.

PS - there are other developments, such as the Fed now accepting equities as collateral for certain loans under the Primary Dealer Credit Facility. To find out more about what the Fed is up to you can go to its website and click around the press releases.

This letter was sent to Congress on Wed Sept 24 2008 regarding the Treasury plan as outlined on that date. It does not reflect all signatories views on subesquent plans or modifications of the bill, although some of the economists on this list added their names as recently as the 27th.

To the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate:

As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:

1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers' expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.

3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, America's dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.

For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.

Signed (updated at 9/27/2008 6:00PM CT)

Acemoglu Daron (Massachussets Institute of Technology)
Ackerberg Daniel (UCLA)
Adler Michael (Columbia University)
Admati Anat R. (Stanford University)
Ales Laurence (Carnegie Mellon University)
Alexis Marcus (Northwestern University)
Alvarez Fernando (University of Chicago)
Andersen Torben (Northwestern University)
Baliga Sandeep (Northwestern University)
Banerjee Abhijit V. (Massachussets Institute of Technology)
Barankay Iwan (University of Pennsylvania)
Barry Brian (University of Chicago)
Bartkus James R. (Xavier University of Louisiana)
Becker Charles M. (Duke University)
Becker Robert A. (Indiana University)
Beim David (Columbia University)
Berk Jonathan (Stanford University)
Bisin Alberto (New York University)
Bittlingmayer George (University of Kansas)
Blank Emily (Howard University)
Boldrin Michele (Washington University)
Bollinger, Christopher R. (University of Kentucky)
Bossi, Luca (University of Miami)
Brooks Taggert J. (University of Wisconsin)
Brynjolfsson Erik (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Buera Francisco J.(UCLA)
Cabral Luis (New York University)
Camp Mary Elizabeth (Indiana University)
Carmel Jonathan (University of Michigan)
Carroll Christopher (Johns Hopkins University)
Cassar Gavin (University of Pennsylvania)
Chaney Thomas (University of Chicago)
Chari Varadarajan V. (University of Minnesota)
Chauvin Keith W. (University of Kansas)
Chintagunta Pradeep K. (University of Chicago)
Christiano Lawrence J. (Northwestern University)
Clementi, Gian Luca (New York University)
Cochrane John (University of Chicago)
Coleman John (Duke University)
Constantinides George M. (University of Chicago)
Cooley, Thomas (New York University)
Crain Robert (UC Berkeley)
Culp Christopher (University of Chicago)
Da Zhi (University of Notre Dame)
Darity, William (Duke University)
Davis Morris (University of Wisconsin)
De Marzo Peter (Stanford University)
Dubé Jean-Pierre H. (University of Chicago)
Edlin Aaron (UC Berkeley)
Eichenbaum Martin (Northwestern University)
Ely Jeffrey (Northwestern University)
Eraslan Hülya K. K.(Johns Hopkins University)
Fair Ray (Yale University)
Faulhaber Gerald (University of Pennsylvania)
Feldmann Sven (University of Melbourne)
Fernandez, Raquel (New York University)
Fernandez-Villaverde Jesus (University of Pennsylvania)
Fohlin Caroline (Johns Hopkins University)
Fox Jeremy T. (University of Chicago)
Frank Murray Z.(University of Minnesota)
Frenzen Jonathan (University of Chicago)
Fuchs William (University of Chicago)
Fudenberg Drew (Harvard University)
Gabaix Xavier (New York University)
Gao Paul (Notre Dame University)
Garicano Luis (University of Chicago)
Gerakos Joseph J. (University of Chicago)
Gibbs Michael (University of Chicago)
Glomm Gerhard (Indiana University)
Goettler Ron (University of Chicago)
Goldin Claudia (Harvard University)
Gordon Robert J. (Northwestern University)
Greenstone Michael (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Gregory, Karl D. (Oakland University)
Guadalupe Maria (Columbia University)
Guerrieri Veronica (University of Chicago)
Hagerty Kathleen (Northwestern University)
Hamada Robert S. (University of Chicago)
Hansen Lars (University of Chicago)
Harris Milton (University of Chicago)
Hart Oliver (Harvard University)
Hazlett Thomas W. (George Mason University)
Heaton John (University of Chicago)
Heckman James (University of Chicago - Nobel Laureate)
Henderson David R. (Hoover Institution)
Henisz, Witold (University of Pennsylvania)
Hertzberg Andrew (Columbia University)
Hite Gailen (Columbia University)
Hitsch Günter J. (University of Chicago)
Hodrick Robert J. (Columbia University)
Hollifield Burton (Carnegie Mellon University)
Hopenhayn Hugo (UCLA)
Hurst Erik (University of Chicago)
Imrohoroglu Ayse (University of Southern California)
Isakson Hans (University of Northern Iowa)
Israel Ronen (London Business School)
Jaffee Dwight M. (UC Berkeley)
Jagannathan Ravi (Northwestern University)
Jenter Dirk (Stanford University)
Jones Charles M. (Columbia Business School)
Jovanovic Boyan (New York University)
Kaboski Joseph P. (Ohio State University)
Kahn Matthew (UCLA)
Kaplan Ethan (Stockholm University)
Karaivanov Alexander (Simon Fraser University)
Karolyi, Andrew (Ohio State University)
Kashyap Anil (University of Chicago)
Keim Donald B (University of Pennsylvania)
Ketkar Suhas L (Vanderbilt University)
Kiesling Lynne (Northwestern University)
Klenow Pete (Stanford University)
Koch Paul (University of Kansas)
Kocherlakota Narayana (University of Minnesota)
Koijen Ralph S.J. (University of Chicago)
Kondo Jiro (Northwestern University)
Korteweg Arthur (Stanford University)
Kortum Samuel (University of Chicago)
Krueger Dirk (University of Pennsylvania)
Ledesma Patricia (Northwestern University)
Lee Lung-fei (Ohio State University)
Leeper Eric M. (Indiana University)
Letson David (University of Miami)
Leuz Christian (University of Chicago)
Levine David I.(UC Berkeley)
Levine David K.(Washington University)
Levy David M. (George Mason University)
Linnainmaa Juhani (University of Chicago)
Lott John R. Jr. (University of Maryland)
Lucas Robert (University of Chicago - Nobel Laureate)
Ludvigson, Sydney C. (New York University)
Luttmer Erzo G.J. (University of Minnesota)
Manski Charles F. (Northwestern University)
Martin Ian (Stanford University)
Mayer Christopher (Columbia University)
Mazzeo Michael (Northwestern University)
McDonald Robert (Northwestern University)
Meadow Scott F. (University of Chicago)
Meeropol, Michael (Western New England College)
Mehra Rajnish (UC Santa Barbara)
Mian Atif (University of Chicago)
Middlebrook Art (University of Chicago)
Miguel Edward (UC Berkeley)
Miravete Eugenio J. (University of Texas at Austin)
Miron Jeffrey (Harvard University)
Moeller, Thomas (Texas Christian University)
Moretti Enrico (UC Berkeley)
Moriguchi Chiaki (Northwestern University)
Moro Andrea (Vanderbilt University)
Morse Adair (University of Chicago)
Mortensen Dale T. (Northwestern University)
Mortimer Julie Holland (Harvard University)
Moskowitz, Tobias J. (University of Chicago)
Munger Michael C. (Duke University)
Muralidharan Karthik (UC San Diego)
Nair Harikesh (Stanford University)
Nanda Dhananjay (University of Miami)
Nevo Aviv (Northwestern University)
Ohanian Lee (UCLA)
Pagliari Joseph (University of Chicago)
Papanikolaou Dimitris (Northwestern University)
Parker Jonathan (Northwestern University)
Paul Evans (Ohio State University)
Pearce David (New York University)
Pejovich Svetozar (Steve) (Texas A&M University)
Peltzman Sam (University of Chicago)
Perri Fabrizio (University of Minnesota)
Phelan Christopher (University of Minnesota)
Piazzesi Monika (Stanford University)
Pippenger, Michael K. (University of Alaska)
Piskorski Tomasz (Columbia University)
Platt Brennan C. (Brigham Young University)
Rampini Adriano (Duke University)
Ray, Debraj (New York University)
Reagan Patricia (Ohio State University)
Reich Michael (UC Berkeley)
Reuben Ernesto (Northwestern University)
Rizzo, Mario (New York University)
Roberts Michael (University of Pennsylvania)
Robinson David (Duke University)
Rogers Michele (Northwestern University)
Rotella Elyce (Indiana University)
Roussanov Nikolai (University of Pennsylvania)
Routledge Bryan R. (Carnegie Mellon University)
Ruud Paul (Vassar College)
Safford Sean (University of Chicago)
Samaniego Roberto (George Washington University)
Sandbu Martin E. (University of Pennsylvania)
Sapienza Paola (Northwestern University)
Savor Pavel (University of Pennsylvania)
Schaniel William C. (University of West Georgia)
Scharfstein David (Harvard University)
Seim Katja (University of Pennsylvania)
Seru Amit (University of Chicago)
Shang-Jin Wei (Columbia University)
Shimer Robert (University of Chicago)
Shore Stephen H. (Johns Hopkins University)
Siegel Ron (Northwestern University)
Smith David C. (University of Virginia)
Smith Vernon L.(Chapman University- Nobel Laureate)
Sorensen Morten (Columbia University)
Spatt Chester (Carnegie Mellon University)
Spear Stephen (Carnegie Mellon University)
Stevenson Betsey (University of Pennsylvania)
Stokey Nancy (University of Chicago)
Strahan Philip (Boston College)
Strebulaev Ilya (Stanford University)
Sufi Amir (University of Chicago)
Tabarrok Alex (George Mason University)
Taylor Alan M. (UC Davis)
Thompson Tim (Northwestern University)
Troske Kenneth (University of Kentucky)
Tschoegl Adrian E. (University of Pennsylvania)
Uhlig Harald (University of Chicago)
Ulrich, Maxim (Columbia University)
Van Buskirk Andrew (University of Chicago)
Vargas Hernan (University of Phoenix)
Veronesi Pietro (University of Chicago)
Vissing-Jorgensen Annette (Northwestern University)
Wacziarg Romain (UCLA)
Walker Douglas O. (Regent University)
Walker, Todd (Indiana University)
Weill Pierre-Olivier (UCLA)
Williamson Samuel H. (Miami University)
Witte Mark (Northwestern University)
Wolfenzon, Daniel (Columbia University)
Wolfers Justin (University of Pennsylvania)
Woutersen Tiemen (Johns Hopkins University)
Wu Yangru (Rutgers University)
Yue Vivian Z. (New York University)
Zingales Luigi (University of Chicago)
Zitzewitz Eric (Dartmouth College)

Professor Stiglitz: "The administration is once again holding a gun at our head, saying, "My way or the highway." We have been bamboozled before by this tactic. We should not let it happen to us again. There are alternatives."

Posted by George Washington - Friday, September 26, 2008

I previously pointed out that when the Japanese government threw cash at their big banks in the 90's, the banks just horded the money instead of using it to restore "liquidity".

Well, a professor of economics and an expert in liquidity now hints that the entire liquidity "crisis" might be a hoax.

Bloomberg quotes the good professor:

"I suspect that part of what we're seeing in the freezing up of lending markets is strategic behavior on the part of big financial players who stand to benefit from the bailout,'' said David K. Levine, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies liquidity constraints and game theory.

Are the big banks faking a liquidity crisis because they know that if they act like the financial system is drying up, they'll get a big bailout?

Like a kid who pretends he's sick so he can play hookie from school, are the big players pretending they are financially "sick" so that they can play hookie from the free market?

President Bush said Thursday that history will look back at America's response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and conclude that "we did not tire, we did not falter and we did not fail."

Bush marked the seventh anniversary of the deadliest attack on U.S. soil with a moment of silence at the White House at 8:46 a.m. EDT, precisely the moment when terrorists crashed a hijacked airliner into the World Trade Center in New York. A second plane struck the trade center shortly thereafter. Another was flown into the Pentagon and still another crashed in a field at Shanksville, Pa.

Bush also helped dedicate a memorial at the Pentagon honoring those who died there. He said the terrorists could not break the resolve of the U.S. armed forces.

He said that "since 9/11, our troops have taken the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home." Bush added: "Thanks to the brave men and women, and all those who work to keep us safe, there has not been another attack on our soil in 2,557 days."

The Pentagon Memorial, built at a cost of $22 million, contains 184 benches that will glow with light in the night, as well as trees and trickling water. Each bench is dedicated to an individual victim, and the structures are organized as a timeline of the victims' ages, moving from the youngest, 3-year-old Dana Falkenberg to the oldest, John D. Yamnicky, 71. Nearly 3,000 flags are arrayed in a Pentagon parking lot.

Bea Woolen of Atlanta, whose sister Tamara C. Thurman died in the attack, said she had liked the designs of the memorial she had seen, but viewing it in person exceeded her expectations. "Generations from now, even when I'm gone, it'll still be here and they'll remember," she said.

Rebecca L. Lightbourn of Capitol Heights, Md., said the memorial is a fitting remembrance for her daughter Samantha L. Lightbourn-Allen. She said she appreciated how the dedication service honored each victim individually. "A few days after 9/11, flags were flying and everyone was friends. That has left us," she said. "I guess people forget about it."

Bush, who led a large throng on the White House South Lawn earlier in observing a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m. EDT, the time of the initial attack on the World Trade Center in New York, called the Pentagon memorial a place of learning for future generations.

"The day will come when most Americans have no living memory of the events of September the 11th. When they visit this memorial, they will learn that the 21st century began with a great struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror," he said. "They will learn that this generation of Americans met its duty: We did not tire, we did not falter, and we did not fail."

His comment recalled his promise to the nation on Oct. 7, 2001, when the United States launched its strike against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Bush said at the time: "The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail."

Security was tight throughout the ceremony and spotters were perched on the Pentagon's roof, watching the skies.

There was sort of a political time out on the campaign trail as Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain agreed to appear together at ground zero in New York for a somber, silent wreath-laying there. They also suspended TV ads critical of each other.

Obama called on Americans to renew "that spirit of service and that sense of common purpose" that followed the terrorist assaults that killed nearly 3,000 people. McCain, in Shanksville, Pa., the site of a crashed plane, asked every person "to be as good an American" as the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93 after they rose up against the hijackers.

Said Defense Secretary Robert Gates: "This memorial tells the story to future generations. They won't directly feel the heat, smell the smoke or know the horror of that day, but they will know, as the inscription says, that we claim this ground."

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked of the horrific events that caused the lives of Pentagon workers and airplane passengers to confluence on that day.

He mourned those who "one morning kissed their loved ones goodbye, went off to work and never came home" and the airline passengers "who in the last moments made phone calls to loved ones and prayed to the Almighty before their journey ended not far from where it began."

"It was here that their fates were truly merged forever," Rumsfeld said. "They fell side by side as Americans and make no mistake, it was because they were Americans that they were killed here in this place."

The Pentagon memorial features 184 benches over small reflecting pools, representing each life lost when American Airlines Flight 77 flew into the symbol of U.S. military might on that clear and sunny September morning.

The Pentagon ceremony included wreath laying, music and the reading of the names those who perished on American Airlines Flight 77 and inside the building. The Pentagon Memorial was built on a 1.9-acre parcel of land adjacent to the Pentagon and within view of the crash site.

Bush announced this week that he was sending a Marine battalion to Afghanistan in November and an Army brigade there by January. U.S. commanders in Afghanistan say they need another 10,000 troops — about three times as many as they will receive this winter under the troop deployment plan Bush announced. The commanders also urge more nonmilitary aid and say the Afghan government must perform better.

Bush and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke via secure video on Thursday morning. "The prime minister offered his thoughts and prayers to the president and the American people on the anniversary of Sept. 11," said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe. Bush thanked Brown for Britain's steadfast support in the war against terror. "The two leaders discussed the need to remain committed to the fight against extremists," Johndroe said.

___

On the Net:

Pentagon Memorial Fund: http://www.pentagonmemorial.net/

___

Associated Press reporters Jennifer Loven, Lolita C. Baldor and Matt Barakat contributed to this story.

McCain's top campaign advisors are directly involved with the ENRON scandal and the high price for gas. Everyone must see this and pass it along.

Thomas Frank, a Kansas boy who once followed conservatism deep into his home state and now writes op-eds that probably drive the readers of the Wall Street Journal crazy, has had a front seat at the Washington spectacle these last years as the Bush administration applied its "enhanced interrogation techniques" to the Federal government. In his latest must-read book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, Frank offers nothing short of a how-to history of the conservative era -- specifically how to destroy a government, leave Americans in the lurch, and enrich yourselves all at the same time.

A blockbuster new book from investigative journalist Ron Suskind adds another revelation to the growing canon demonstrating the lengths to which President Bush and members of his administration lied, misled and deceived the American people to pursue its invasion of Iraq.

It isn't breaking news this week but it is always nice to go straight to the source and since it's a source searching weekend for me, here's to sharing for reference if not more.

Documents Released by the CIA and Justice Department in Response to the ACLU's Torture FOIA (7/24/2008)

Memo Dated January 28, 2003, from CIA to OLC
Contains "communications from the CIA to OLC on a matter in which the CIA requested legal advice from OLC" and shows that CIA interrogators were permitted to use both "Standard Techniques" and "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" and that in each CIA interrogation session in which an Enhanced Technique was employed, a "contemporaneous record" was created setting forth, among other things, "the nature and duration of each such technique employed" and "the identities of those present."

Memo Dated August 4, 2004, from CIA to OLC
Contains "communications from the CIA to OLC on a matter in which the CIA requested legal advice from OLC" and shows that CIA interrogators were told that the Justice Department had concluded that certain interrogation techniques, "including the waterboard," did not violate the torture statute. The document also indicates that CIA interrogators were told to take into account the possibility that their actions would ultimately be subject to judicial review.

Memo Dated August 1, 2002, from OLC to CIA
Memo "advising the CIA regarding interrogation methods it may use against al Qaeda members," and includes information "regarding potential interrogation methods and the context in which their use was contemplated." The document also discusses "alternative interrogation methods," a phrase that was echoed by President Bush in a September 2006 speech promoting the Military Commissions Act.

Though heavily redacted, the document shows that the Justice Department authorized alternative interrogation methods after concluding that "those carrying out these procedures would not have the specific intent to inflict severe physical pain or suffering" or "to cause severe mental pain or suffering."

The memo explains: "Prolonged mental harm is substantial mental harm of sustained duration, e.g. harm lasting months or even years after the acts were inflicted upon the prisoner." The memo also includes this sentence: "Your review of the literature uncovered no empirical data on the use of these procedures, with the exception [redacted]." The memo is signed by Jay Bybee, who also signed the "organ failure" memo issued to the CIA the same day, and who is now a federal appellate judge.

For five years a lawsuit has dragged on in an Ecuadorean courtroom. It was brought by US trial lawyers on behalf of the poor, indigenous Indian peasants. The suit accuses Chevron of dumping billions of gallons of toxic oil waste into area rivers. The disaster, called an Amazon Chernobyl, caused an expert to recommend that Chevron be fined between $8-$16 BILLION to clean up the damage.
So now Chevron is pressuring the Bush administration to yank special trade preferences for Ecuador if they do not drop the lawsuit.

Chevron's powerhouse team includes former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, former Democratic senator John Breaux and Wayne Berman, a top fund-raiser for John McCain—all with access to Washington's top decision makers.

And Chevron claims the Ecuadorean court is corrupt.

In Iraq, some prisoners/detainees are kept in wooden crates known as "prisoner boxes," so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Central Command asking for the following:

"Vanity Fair (Feb 2005 issue) has reported the existence of wood "prisoner boxes" being used by the US military in facilities in and around Baghdad. They are used to hold individual prisoners and detainees.

"I hereby request all photographs of these boxes, including empty boxes as well as boxes holding prisoners and detainees."

Around nine and a half months later, CentCom responded by sending the three photographs on this page.

You are seeing the photos exactly as they were sent to me - as black and white printouts on standard printer paper, with creases from being folded into thirds. Two of the photos are extremely blurry and pixelated.

Considering that the average summer temperature in Baghdad is 111 F, and that temps can easily go above 120 F [source], it's hard to imagine what it's like to be inside these boxes.

The review of the book from Wikipedia, the attorney who prosecuted Charles Manson makes the the most compelling case in his shocking Congressional testimony. You must watch it!!

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder is a 2008 book by former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. It argues that George W. Bush took the United States into the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses and should be tried for murder for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq when he leaves office in 2009. The book was virtually ignored by the mainstream media but still sold over 130,000 copies within its first three months of release.

Bugliosi argues that Bush intentionally misled Congress and the American people about the evidence that he said mandated going into Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Therefore, Bugliosi argues, the deaths of over 4,000 American soldiers and 100,000 Iraqi civilians since hostilities began (as of spring 2008) amount to murder. He further states that any of the 50 state attorneys general, as well as any district attorney in the United States, has ample grounds to indict Bush for the murder of any soldier or soldiers who live in their state or county.[2] Bugliosi says that if he was prosecuting the case, he would seek imposition of the death penalty, and that impeachment alone would be "a joke", considering the magnitude of Bush's alleged crimes

Karl Rove has threatened a GOP high-tech guru and his wife, if he does not "'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio," according to a letter sent this morning to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, by Ohio election attorney Cliff Arnebeck.

The email, posted in full below, details threats against Mike Connell of the Republican firm New Media Communications, which describes itself on its website as "a powerhouse in the field of Republican website development and Internet services" and having "played a strategic role in helping the GOP expand its technological supremacy."

Connell was described in a recent interview with the plaintiff's attorneys in Ohio as a "high IQ Forrest Gump" for his appearance "at the scene of every [GOP] crime" from Florida 2000 to Ohio 2004 to the RNC email system to the installation of the currently-used Congressional computer network firewall.

With each passing day it seems my greatest fears about the destruction of the American Dream come to pass. Any hope we may have held for the criminal regime to reverse course with the election of more Democrats to Congress has been shattered.

Even the glimmer of hope that came in the eaqrly part of the Presidential primary with voices of change has evaporated as McCain offers more of the same and Obama shifts to be more about hype than hope with votes like retroactive immunity for the telecoms.

We have a President and Administration whose crimes are public knowledge for any who look beyond corporate media for their news and a Congress who refuses to hold them to the rule of law.

We have an economy in shambles and debt that will take generations to reverse yet earmarks and pet pork barrel spending continues as if Washington seeks nothing more than to squeeze the last dollars that hold value into their offshore accounts and those of the banksters who were partners in the mortgage collapse.

We have fires and floods of epic proportions yet the response by Washington is to weaken the agencies doing oversight and erase the evidence by having lobbyists and lawyers edit the official versions.

We are working harder for less and the public servants have become an elite ruling class. We are spied on and robbed and the corporate media seems unwilling to tackle mre than the medicated fix of the week.

Our farmland is seeded with experimental, fee based faux-food that carries unknown dangers for human health and the environment yet no one will talk about the fact that this free country doesn't even provide the freedom to refuse to swallow what supports the Agent Orange Gang who never cleaned up their superfund sites.

We find our elections are riddled with fraud as the electronic machines were tampered with and the results are nothing resembling a democracy. Isn't it bad enough that special interests fund the campaigns and hand pick the candidates that serve corporate agendas.

We know there's little hope that average, honest citizens could raise the capital to seek office. Can't we even have our votes to freely choose between the equally bad, millionaire options on the ballot?

How much are we supposed to take before we the people get something more than lip service? When is the time when those who have platforms for speaking out stand up and call the crimes intolerable?

Where are the true Patriots? What happened to the American Dream where we were the land of the free and truth and justice defined the American way?

When we are bankrupt and governed by a police state, our Constitution in tatters and our resources polluted and plundered, why do we fear terrorists? We have more people homeless, more living in poverty, more sick and dying from preventable illness and an epidemic of illness among our children.

The children are the future and they carry the dream. What is left of that dream when our children are burdened from the earliest days of their lives? What do we teach them about carrying the torch of Democracy when Washington limps along with criminal acts unchallenged and unpunished?

If the fear was that terrorists would destroy our way of life as free people hasn't the last eight years destroyed enough of that to leave the job the terrorists may have wanted to do completed?

Even Newsvine, this little corner of freedom has been gobbled up by a corporate news service whose own stories dominate us in triplicate, stifling those who fight for the flame of hope to stay lit?

Where do we go from here to save our dream from an ecomaginary reincarnation that requires medication to enjoy? How do we make revolution so the nightmare ends? Sign me up; I'm more than ready.

WASHINGTON: The White House has reportedly buried a report prepared by scientists which detailed a rising death toll from heat waves, fires, disease and smog.
Environmental advocates have accused the Bush Administration of delaying the release of the 149-page report so that it could avoid regulating greenhouse gases.
They claimed that the Bush Administration has worked to discourage a link between public health and climate change, fearing this would compel the government to regulate greenhouse gases

Interrogators were told: 'If a detainee dies, you're doing it wrong.'
By Nat Hentoff
Wednesday, July 9th 2008

In October 2002, 10 Defense Department lawyers and officials met at Guantánamo to figure out which interrogation techniques would finally extract information from the hard-shelled terrorism suspects there. Also in attendance was a CIA counterterrorism lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, who revealed a way that exceptionally aggressive methods could be used that would not amount to the U.S. being charged with torture.

Said Fredman: "Torture is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong." A military lawyer at Guantánamo, Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, apprehensively noted: "We will need documentation to protect us."

The helpful CIA lawyer, agreeing, acknowledged that "if someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental."

That documentation was indeed provided by other high-level administration lawyers—most crucially at the Justice Department, where, inspired by John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel, the word went out that interrogators in the field could inflict cumulatively intense pain as long as it stopped short of "organ failure" or "death." Any coercive technique up to that decisive point—having been authorized secretly by the Justice Department—did not violate international laws against torture and would not lead to prosecution of the interrogators.

World oil prices have risen by nearly 50 percent since the beginning of 2008 and nearly doubled over the past year. Analysts have argued over how much of that increase is due to structural factors in the world economy—such as growing demand in middle-income countries and the depreciating dollar that would tend to make the price increase permanent—and how much is related to worries about possible supply disruptions arising from the kind of conflict that has plagued the Niger Delta region in Nigeria, terrorist attacks by al Qaeda in the Gulf, economic or other sanctions against key oil producers, or war.

The latter risk factors, according to some analysts in the United States, could account for as much as $50 of the total current price, although most believe that the figure is about half that.

How much is due to the uncertainty about Iran is also a matter of considerable debate. Many point to the unprecedented $11 dollar one-day spike in oil prices—from $128 to $139 a barrel—that took place June 6 after Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz warned that an Israeli attack on Tehran's nuclear facilities was "unavoidable" if international pressure did not succeed in persuading it to freeze its uranium enrichment program.

While that incident offered the most spectacular suggestion of a relationship between threats against Iran and the price of oil, most analysts believe the effect is somewhat more modest, albeit still quite real.

Grappling with a record death toll in an overshadowed war, President Bush promised Wednesday to send more U.S. troops into Afghanistan by year's end. He conceded that June was a "tough month" in the nearly seven-year-old war.

In fact, it was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the conflict began.

"One reason why there have been more deaths is because our troops are taking the fight to a tough enemy, an enemy who doesn't like our presence there because they don't like the idea of America denying safe haven (to terrorists)," Bush told reporters. "Of course there's going to be resistance."

Bush said it was a tough month too for the Taliban. But the once-toppled Islamist regime in Afghanistan has now rebounded with deadly force.

More U.S. and NATO troops have died in the past two months in Afghanistan than in Iraq, a place with triple the number of U.S. and coalition forces.

In June, 28 U.S. troops died in Afghanistan. That was the highest monthly total of the entire war, which began in October 2001.

For the full U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan the death toll was 46, also the highest of the war.

Bush confronted the grim direction of the Afghanistan conflict during a sun-splashed Rose Garden appearance. The president used the event to tout his agenda for an upcoming Group of Eight meeting in Japan with world leaders, then addressed Iran, climate change and gasoline prices in a short Q&A session with reporters.

The Pentagon predicts the pace of attacks in Afghanistan by a resurgent Taliban is likely to rise this year, despite U.S.-led efforts to capture key leaders.

"We're going to increase troops by 2009," Bush said, without offering details about exactly when or how many.

It amounted to a reiteration of a promised buildup of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by Bush. He said coalition forces have doubled in size over two years, and pledged that the twin strategy of fighting extremists and supporting Afghanistan's civil development "is going to work."

The Pentagon's top military officer said Wednesday that if security continues to improve in Iraq he is hopeful he will begin to have troops available to shift to Afghanistan by the end of this year. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said more troops are essential to stem the violence.

"The Taliban and their supporters have, without question, grown more effective and more aggressive in recent weeks, and as the casualty figures clearly demonstrate," Mullen said. He added that "there's no easy solution, and there will be no quick fix."

In terms of public attention, the war in Afghanistan has been obscured by the far costlier and deadlier one in Iraq.

But it is a matter of consensus within the Bush administration, and between the U.S. and key allies, that there are far too few troops in Afghanistan to fight the accelerating Taliban and to train Afghan soldiers and police.

Overall, roughly 32,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, including 14,000 serving with NATO forces and 18,000 conducting training and counterinsurgency.

That's the largest U.S. presence since the war began.

Afghanistan, not Iraq, was the original target after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The United States led the ouster of the hardline Taliban regime in late 2001 for providing haven to terrorists, including al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

The latest assessment from the Pentagon, released last week, describes a dual terror threat in Afghanistan: the Taliban in the south, and "a more complex, adaptive insurgency" in the east, made up of groups ranging from al-Qaida and Afghan warlords to Pakistani militants.

Military officials say security has deteriorated in large part because of the lawless, tribal border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Bush said he will seek to remind his peers at the G-8 summit that the battle against violent extremists goes on.

"The temptation is to kind of say, well, maybe this isn't really a war, maybe this is just a bunch of disgruntled folks that occasionally come and hurt us," Bush said. "You know, that's not the way I feel about it. This is an ongoing, constant struggle to defend our own security."

The other G-8 nations are Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. The summit will be the last of Bush's presidency.

On other topics:

— Bush said he wants a multi-country diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff with Iran, but will not remove the option of a military strike. Asked directly about the possibility of an Israeli strike against Iran, "I have made it very clear to all parties that the first option ought to be solve this problem diplomatically."

In an interview later at the White House with Japanese journalists, Bush said the U.S. won't take the military option off the table on North Korea any more than it would on Iran.

"I have always said that diplomacy has got to be the first choice of solving any of these problems," Bush said referring to Iran, North Korea and Iraq. "But military options remain on the table, and they remain on the table for these three issues."

— The president blasted the Democratic-led Congress for not advancing his energy proposals, including lifting a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling. The president even went so far as to ask Americans to get involved in a lobbying effort. "They ought to be writing their Congress people about it," he said.

— Bush said he hoped the G-8 leaders would come to terms on long-range goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He said that should come first, before an attempted agreement on shorter-range goals for cutting emissions, a matter of higher priority for many European nations.

— Bush said he will urge other nations to make good on earlier pledges to help alleviate malaria, HIV-AIDS and other diseases in the developing world. "We need people who not only make promises, but write checks, for the sake of human rights and human dignity, and for the sake of peace," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Robert Burns and Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains a nationwide network of 27 libraries that provide critical scientific information on human health and environmental protection, not only to EPA scientists, but also to other researchers and the general public. But now some of those libraries are being shut down and some of the scientific information they house is being sequestered or destroyed.

The libraries represent an invaluable source of scientific knowledge on issues from hazardous waste to pollution control. To make the best scientific determinations, scientists need access to this information. In 2005, EPA's dedicated library staff fielded more than 134,000 database and reference questions from agency scientists and the public.

In February 2006, under the guise of cutting costs, the Bush Administration proposed cutting $2 million out of the $2.5 million library services budget for fiscal year 2007. Such a drastic cut would ensure the closing of most of the library network, but would hardly register as a cost savings in the $8 billion EPA budget.

The Honorable John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is the keynote speaker at the National Lawyers Guild National Convention held October 31 - November 4 in Washington, D.C. The National Lawyers Guild on Friday unanimously and enthusiastically passed a resolution supporting the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency's conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.'s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

Americans have had a long love affair with carbon burning (burning of vegetation, wood, coal, gas and oil). It can be estimated that about 1 million Americans die each year from carbon burning and related violence.

Decent Americans who believe that "all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and that "you cannot walk by on the other side" have an obligation to ACT, to do something as good citizens about this catastrophe befalling about 1 million of their countrymen every year. In doing so they can save themselves from carbon burning, Zionism and war - and also help save the world from the currently acute nuclear, greenhouse and poverty threats. I have indeed illustrated this article with my painting "Terra" (for further amplification of the image and the discussion see "War on Terra, Climate Criminals. "Terra" painting" : http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15671/42/ )

The breakdown of this carbon-burning, Zionism and imperialism-driven American Holocaust (with documentation) is as follows:

1. Smoking

Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Cigarette smoking causes an estimated 438,000 deaths, or about 1 of every 5 deaths, each year. This estimate includes approximately 38,000 deaths from second hand smoke exposure, and one must note that the death toll will go on for decades to come (see: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/Factsheets/tobacco_related_mortality.htm ).

2. Particulate pollution

Back in 1991 it was estimated that 60,000 Americans died annually from particulate pollution from carbon burning (see: http://www.burningissues.org/tables/mortalitytable.html ). People with diabetes, heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis are at increased risk of death when they are exposed to particulate air pollution (soot).

A 2000 study looked at hospital discharges for people with these four types of diseases living in 34 cities between 1985 and 1999 and found that for an increase of 10 micrograms/per cubic meter of PM10 (10 micron diameter particulates) over two years, the risk of dying was increased by 32% for people with diabetes, 28% for people with COPD, 27% in people with congestive heart failure and 22% for people with inflammatory disease such as rheumatoid arthritis or lupus (see: http://www.burningissues.org/soot-death-risk-diseases.html ). However more recent European data (2005) (see: http://www.burningissues.org/bbc-2-2005air-pollution-dea.htm ) indicates that 310,000 people of the European Union (2005 population ) and 33,000 in the UK (2005 population 59.6 million) die each year from particulates, from which one can estimate that for the US (2005 population 300 million) about 300 x 33,000/59.6 = 166,000 Americans die each year from particulate pollutants.

3. Fossil fuel- and coal-based electricity generation

Pollutants from fossil fuel-based electricity generation (as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, particulates, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, volatile organic components and heavy metals, notably mercury (Hg) ; see: http://dar.csiro.au/…/urbanpollution.html ) kill 170,000 people world-wide each year and cause about 49,000 [2006] "annual coal-based electricity deaths" in the US as compared to 72,000 "total annual fossil fuel-based electricity deaths"in the US (see: http://green-blog.org/2008/06/14/pollutants-from-coal-based-electricity-generation-kill-170000-people-annually/ ). Of course this category may overlap to some extent with that of the "deaths from particulates" item #2.

4. Motor vehicle accidents

Motor vehicle accidents killed 43,354 Americans in 2002 (see Center for Disease Control data: http://www.the-eggman.com/writings/death_stats.html ), noting that motor vehicles are overwhelmingly fossil fuel-dependent. Further, of the only about 15% of fuel burning energy that actually drives a car (the rest being lost as heat), for a 70 kg driver and a 2,000 kg vehicle, only 70/2,000 is used to transport the human being, the overall energy efficiency being 70 x 15%/2,000 = 0.5%. Public transport is vastly more efficient.

5. Domestic American deaths from US-backed Zionist colonization of the Middle East and US Oil Wars

According to outstanding American scholar Professor Noam Chomsky (2007) from the 63-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (see: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0607nc.htm ) : "The area of greatest concern is the Middle East. There is nothing novel about that. I often have to arrange talks years in advance. If I am asked for a title, I suggest "The Current Crisis in the Middle East." It has yet to fail. There's a good reason: the huge energy resources of the region were recognized by Washington sixty years ago as a "stupendous source of strategic power," the "strategically most important area of the world," and "one of the greatest material prizes in world history." Control over this stupendous prize has been a primary goal of U.S. policy ever since, and threats to it have naturally aroused enormous concern."

This primary goal of US foreign policy has been subverted by the Zionists to the point that outstanding Jewish American investor, philanthropist, Holocaust hero and Holocaust survivor George Soros has criticized the negative effects of the Israel Lobby on US interests (see: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20030 ). Thus Zionist policy has been, in harsh reality, conquest, invasion and domination whereas wiser counsel says that peace, equality and good relations represent a wiser, more humane and better course. According to George Soros (2007) : "I am not sufficiently engaged in Jewish affairs to be involved in the reform of AIPAC; but I must speak out in favor of the critical process that is at the heart of our open society. I believe that a much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can't make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Some leaders of the Democratic Party have promised to bring about a change of direction but they cannot deliver on that promise until they are able to resist the dictates of AIPAC."

According to top UK MP Michael Meacher (a former Minister in the UK Blair Labor Government) in a must-read analysis entitled "This war on Terrorism is Bogus" (see: http://www.ukwatch.net/article/this_war_on_terrorism_is_bogus ) : "The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course."

American scholars and military experts now seriously question the "official Bush version" of the 9/11 atrocity (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/23294/42/ ) and 2 top Swiss professors, recently reported in the highest circulation Swiss newspaper "Blick", have given equal credence to the three major hypotheses for who was responsible for the 9/11 atrocity, specifically (1) Muslims in caves, (2) US complicity and (3) US responsibility for 9/11 (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/22944/26/ ).

Indeed the former 7-year president of Italy, senator for life, intelligence intimate and law professor Francesco Cossiga, reported in a top Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera (2007) asserts that the US CIA and Israeli Mossad did 9/11 to enhance US and Zionist hegemony and that major intelligence agencies were well aware of this (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18569/26/ ).

At all events, the oil- abd carbon-burning-linked, US-backed Zionist colonization in the Middle East has cost the US taxpayer $3 trillion (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/533/26/ ) and the Zionist-backed Bush War on Terror has cost a further $3 trillion in accrual cost for the Iraqi Genocide alone ( 2 million post-invasion excess deaths, 4.5 million refugees). 4,000 US servicemen have been in killed Iraq and 500 killed in Afghanistan (with 30,000 and about 2,500 wounded, respectively, and hundreds of thousands psychologically scarred) (see: http://icasualties.org/oif/ and http://icasualties.org/oef/ ).

According to 2001 Economics Nobel Laureate, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the Iraq War has "bankrupted" America (see: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s2236161.htm ) with huge COST implications for preventing death through medical services and preventive medicine in metropolitan America. Thus it has been estimated that 20,000 under-5 year old American infants die avoidably each year http://mwcnews.net/content/view/7102/26/ ); 18,000 Americans die because they lack medical insurance; and according to the US Center for Disease Control in 2004 there were 2.4 million substantially addressable and potentially avoidable deaths of Americans from life style-related disease and violence (see: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hestats/finaldeaths04/finaldeaths04_tables.pdf#2 ) – if 10% could have been saved annually through preventive medicine programs or expert medical intervention then that's 240,000 lines saved each year. .

Summary

An upper estimate from the above items #1-#5 (and ignoring overlaps) is that a deadly combination of Carbon burning, Zionism, Bushism and Mainstream media and political cowardice kills about 438,000 + 166,000 + 72,000 + 43,000 + 240,000 + 1,000 US soldiers = 960,000 or roughly 1 MILLION AMERICANS ANNUALLY.

And yet best American scientific advice from NASA's Dr Hansen and colleagues at NASA's GISS, New York, is to STOP carbon burning - to adopt a policy of "negative CO2 emissions " in response to the current Climate Emergency and to return the atmospheric CO2 from a current dangerous and deadly 385 ppm to no more than 350 ppm (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/23119/42/ ).

And the UN Charter, International Laws, International Humanitarian Conventions, the American Declaration of Independence all declare in effect: that "all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and that invasion, occupation, devastation, dispossession, disempowerment and ethnic cleansing of foreign countries is utterly evil, racist and wrong.

Wake up Americans – save yourselves and in so doing save the World.

Until now, administration officials have insisted to other congressional panels that the government approved the use of "harsh" interrogation methods only after the military commanders at Guantanamo asked for permission to get tough with recalcitrant prisoners and only after serious soul searching.

As the Washington Post reported Tuesday, however, documents and e-mails collected by investigators for the Armed Services Committee show that officials working for then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld began their research into waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices as far back as July 2002, months before military commanders began asking for permission.

In fact, a full month before those requests came up the chain of command, former Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II and David S. Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, flew to Guantanamo to discuss the interrogation of prisoners.

That's significant because Jack Goldsmith, former assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel, has written that Addington was Cheney's point man on torture and other draconian "anti-terrorist" initiatives. (Goldsmith lost his job as the executive branch's chief lawyer because, among other things, he overturned his predecessor John Yoo's convoluted legal opinions approving torture.)

"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, in the 5-4 ruling that gives prisoners at Guantanamo Bay the legal right to challenge their detentions.

"Liberty and security can be reconciled," Kennedy continued, "and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law."

The Bush administration has had trouble grasping that concept.

In 1935 the most decorated Marine in American History, Smedley Butler, charged a cadre of Wall Street insiders of conspiracy. What Butler could not have known was that they were members of Yale's Skull and Bones, headquartered at Brown Brothers Harriamn where the secret society would morph into the OSS and CIA.

This White Paper was done in 1991 and we have had decades with two Bonesman in Chief following this publication. It is well done and adds a new dimension to the current crime spree for those unfamiliar with Bonesy BS!

[The following is from a "white paper" written for Japanese readership. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of ctrl.org or its editors]

George Bush, Skull & Bones and the New World Order

Paul Goldstein

Jeffrey Steinberg

George Bush, Skull & Bones and the New World Order

A New American View -- International Edition White Paper

April 1991

This special report is intended to assist the Japanese audience in more fully understanding the present policies of the United States under the administration of President George Bush. It explains the thinking behind America's military adventure in the Persian Gulf and its current attitudes toward the Middle East region.

In so doing, we provide a glimpse into the most powerful organization in America--the Order of Skull & Bones. This secret fraternity is based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where many of the leading members of the U.S. government and the American intelligence community received their formal education. The Order, as it is referred to by its members, is a bastion of White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture, which is at the core of the American 20th century outlook.

The reader will learn that President George Herbert Walker Bush's concept of the New World Order is an old idea, one which has its origins in the philosophy and beliefs of the secret Skull & Bones fraternity. Today in particular, this is the prevailing outlook of the U.S. government, many of whose most influential members, like the president himself, are part of the Skull & Bones network. These men seek to recreate the American imperium of the immediate post-World War II period, an era which President Bush frequently refers to as "the American Century."

The powerful men of Skull & Bones genuinely believe that they have a strategic and moral "right" to control world affairs. Consequently, they take upon themselves the authority to crush any rivalrous threat to U.S. imperial leadership, whether by current allies, such as Japan, Germany or Great Britain, or by Cold War adversaries, like the Soviet Union. The members of the Order, due to their narrow WASP upbringing, view with particular suspicion the maneuverings of Zionist Israel and its affluent, influential lobby in the United States.

Bush, his fellow Bonesmen and their like-thinking elitist allies in the American Establishment see themselves as New World Order warriors, an American samurai caste of sorts, whose mission is restoring American greatness. They intend to utilize the institutional networks of the U.S. government and key private agencies, such as the New York Council on Foreign Relations, to advance their purpose.

The Skull & Bones members believe in the idea of "constructive chaos." By keeping their true policy intentions secret, by constantly sending out mixed signals on all critical policy issues, they consciously seek to sow confusion among both their nominal "friends" and "enemies" alike.

The fulcrum for the policy of constructive chaos is, at present, the Middle East situation. Although U.S. military action in the region has for the time being subsided, America's military power will remain a critical determinant in the future of that vital zone of conflict. American military power is aimed at securing undisputed control over the vast reservoir of oil -- not at necessarily fostering any permanent alignment of local states or combinations of regional interests.

If President George Bush and his fellow true believers are successful, the United States will be first among equals in the New World Order. This is their goal. It is also the quest of the Bonesmen of the Order of Skull & Bones -- America's warrior aristocracy.

The Neocon Series is a Newsvine exclusive.

Thirteenth in a Series.

Phase One of the Neocon series returns with the reptilian overlord of Neocon finance, Paul Wolfowitz.

Since there is nothing I could write about this guy that wouldn't result in me being on the wrong end of a lawsuit, I give you this excerpt from Wikipedia:

Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, working on issues of international economic development, Africa and public-private partnerships.[6] On January 24, 2008, he was named chairman of a high-level advisory panel on arms control and disarmament at the State Department.[7] A former academic, diplomat, political and military strategist and policymaker, and former American government official, most recently, he served as president of the World Bank Group for two years. As U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Presidency of George W. Bush, he was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and, within the Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate" (Boyer 1).[8][9][10][11] He resigned as president of the World Bank Group as a result of an investigation by its board of executive directors, "ending a protracted and tumultuous battle over his stewardship, sparked by a promotion he arranged for his companion."[2][3]

Charming, huh?

Wolfowitz. 50 cm x 70 cm. Acrylic on Canvas. 2007. Dennis P. McCann, Paper Dragon Studios.

Previously in the Neocon Series:

Neocon Series: Rumsfeld. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Cheney. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Rice. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Bush. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Rove. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Ashcroft. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Ridge. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series: Coulter. A One Day Painting.

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Justify (September 11th).

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Invade

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Entrench

Neocon Series - Phase Two: Profit

ARTgallery: Get SmARTer Here!

By Gareth Porter

Three weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime by force, but also overturning the regimes in Iran, Syria, and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively by former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith in his recently published account of Iraq War decisions.

Feith's retelling further indicates that this aggressive U.S. aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders.

Feith's book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, released in April, provides excerpts of a paper that Rumsfeld sent to President George W. Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, but rather on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states by "aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism."

Quoting that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase "some other states" in brackets. In a related Pentagon "campaign plan" document, the Taliban and Iraq are listed as "state regimes" against which "plans and operations" might be mounted, yet the names of four other states are blacked out "for security reasons."

In his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars, Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded the NATO bombing campaign in the Kosovo War, recalled being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that states that Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia.

Clark wrote that the list also included Lebanon, and now Feith reveals that Rumsfeld's paper called for getting "Syria out of Lebanon" as a major goal of U.S. policy.

This site turned up in a search for some other aviation records and they make a very organized approach to breaking down the arguments by testing each different hypothesis.

It's a good way to see some of the discussion points that weave through these topics in a more orderly way.

SIX POSSIBILITIES

This page is what I call "thinking out loud". There are a limited number of possibilities for what did or did not happen at the Pentagon. It gets even narrower when you add an aircraft to the scenario. A plane, a missile, explosives and purposeful human deception are all possible considerations.

I believe understanding the pros and cons of each major possibility before diving into the evidence creates a framework for interpreting what we see. Somewhere in the descriptions below IS the truth of what happened. It doesn't mean it was one or the other. A classic sign of misinformation is to have two separate but probable causes embedded into the same situation.

The sidebar contains background information on the various considerations. To fully understand the implications of flying a 757 for the first time, the one entitled "Amateur Pilot" is recommended.

PROS & CONS

1) Hani Hanjour Flew the Aircraft Per the Official Story.

This theory just says what we were told is what happened.

Pro: This means the official story was correct and our government didn't lie to us.

Con:

*cough*

While the mainstream, corporate American media continues to ignore Monsanto, their takeover of the food supply and their influence in our diets and our our economy their critics continue to lose the platforms to speak.

22 Corporate Crime Reporter 18, April 30, 2008

If you have heard of Learfield Communications, it is probably from listening to college football and basketball games.

The Jefferson City, Missouri based Learfield is one of the nation's largest broadcasters of college sports.

But it also produces news programming heard throughout the farm belt.

Learfield was started 35 years ago by Clyde Lear and Derry Brownfield.

Lear went on to be the chairman of the company. He bought out his friend and partner Brownfield in 1985.

Brownfield went on to do market news reports for the Learfield news division until 1997 or so, when he started broadcasting a daily call-in show called The Common Sense Coalition.

Derry Brownfield would broadcast The Common Sense Coalition from the studios of Learfield Communications.

Learfield would subsidize the program and allow Brownfield to use its studios and satellite hook-up.

Monsanto happens to be a big advertiser of the Learfield news division – to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Brownfield happens to think that Monsanto is an evil corporation.

Therein lies the rub.

For weeks, Brownfield had been ripping Monsanto on air for its policies of enforcing its seed patents against farmers.

On the April 16 show, Brownfield's topic was seed industry concentration in America.

His guests were Fred Stokes, president of the Organization for Competitive Markets, and Michael Stumo, general counsel of the group.

Stokes and Stumo were promoting a new project to study corporate concentration in the seed industry.

Monsanto is the dominant player in the global seed industry and has a reputation for playing rough.

On air, Brownfield quoted from a newly published Vanity Fair article titled "Monsanto's Harvest of Fear" by Donald Barlett and James Steele.

"Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country," Barlett and Steele write. "They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops, infiltrate community meetings, and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the 'seed police' and use words such as 'Gestapo' and 'Mafia' to describe their tactics."

After reading from the Vanity Fair article, Brownfield then begins to riff on the Mafia theme.

"Multinational corporations are doing everything possible to change agriculture – and not for the better," Brownfield says on the show. "I know a little bit about this – not a lot, just a little bit – but Monsanto literally they have Mafia goons out, do they not? They show up on farmers' property, they try and harass them, they say if you don't sign this, we are going to take you to court. They have literally tried to destroy agriculture as we know it. They have a goon squad. Maybe that's not what they like to be called. But if it was the Mafia, we would call them the goon squad."

Calling Monsanto's patent enforcers goons was apparently the straw that broke this camel's back.

Brownfield's stint at Dearfield was about to end.

April 24, 2008 - MSNBC Keith Olbermann

COVER UP! U.S. VETERANS SUICIDE RATE HIT 1000 PER MONTH!

President Bush's helicopter landed practically at the doorstep of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's estate on Friday, bringing the president to help raise money for GOP congressional candidate David Cappiello.

About 400 people attended the $1,000-a-person fundraiser, where for $10,000 attendees got their picture taken with the president.

An official for Cappiello's campaign said more than $750,000 was raised for the state senator from Danbury. The money will help fund his campaign to unseat Rep. Christopher Murphy, a first-term Democrat. Some of the proceeds also will go to the Republican party in Connecticut.

Bush earlier visited the Northwest Boys and Girls Club in Hartford to highlight the club's efforts to fight malaria.

The organization, which began in Hartford, has raised about $25,000 to buy more than 2,500 bed nets for families in Africa. More than 150 of these clubs have joined the campaign to raise funds and spread awareness about malaria.

With bake sales, car washes and school dances, Bush said U.S. citizens are responding to the worldwide battle to fight malaria. The disease kills more than 1 million infants and children under the age of five each year in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2005, Bush launched an initiative to combat malaria in the hardest-hit nations in Africa. The initiative is spending $1.2 billion over five years to reduce malaria deaths by 50 percent in 15 African countries.

"In just two years, the initiative has helped provide bed nets and anti-malarial medicine, insecticide sprays and prenatal drugs to an estimated 25 million people in sub-Sahara Africa," Bush said. "Behind these numbers are whole communities looking to the future with renewed hope."

(This version SUBS grafs 2-4 to UPDATE attendance figure to 'about' sted 'more than;' UPDATE sourcing and amount raised, and CORRECT that some proceeds will go to the state's Republican party, sted Republican National Committee.))

President Bush said Saturday he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks.

"The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror," Bush said in his weekly radio address taped for broadcast Saturday. "So today I vetoed it," Bush said. The bill provides guidelines for intelligence activities for the year and includes the interrogation requirement. It passed the House in December and the Senate last month.

"This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe," the president said.

Supporters of the legislation say it would preserve the United States' ability to collect critical intelligence and raise country's moral standing abroad.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Congress would work to override Bush's veto next week. "In the final analysis, our ability to lead the world will depend not only on our military might, but on our moral authority," said Pelosi, D-Calif.

But based on the margin of passage in each chamber, it would be difficult for the Democratic-controlled Congress to turn back the veto. It takes a two-thirds majority, and the House vote was 222-199 and the Senate's was 51-45.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Bush often warns against ignoring the advice of U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq. Yet the president has rejected the Army Field Manual, which recognizes that harsh interrogation tactics elicit unreliable information, said Reid, D-Nev.

"Democrats will continue working to reverse the damage President Bush has caused to our standing in the world," Reid said.

Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, said Bush "will go down in history as the torture president" for defying Congress and allowing the CIA to use interrogation techniques "that any reasonable observer would call torture."

"The Bush administration continues to insist that CIA and other nonmilitary interrogators are not bound by the military rules and has reportedly given CIA interrogators the green light to use a range of so-called 'enhanced' interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, and exposure to extreme cold," Daskal said. "Although waterboarding is not currently approved for use by the CIA, Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to take it off the table for the future."

The intelligence bill would limit CIA interrogators to the 19 techniques allowed for use by military questioners. The Army field manual in 2006 banned using methods such as waterboarding or sensory deprivation on uncooperative prisoners.

Bush said the CIA must retain use of "specialized interrogation procedures" that the military does not need. The military methods are designed for questioning "lawful combatants captured on the battlefield," while intelligence professionals are dealing with "hardened terrorists" who have been trained to resist the techniques in the Army manual, the president said.

"We created alternative procedures to question the most dangerous al-Qaida operatives, particularly those who might have knowledge of attacks planned on our homeland," Bush said. "If we were to shut down this program and restrict the CIA to methods in the field manual, we could lose vital information from senior al-Qaida terrorists, and that could cost American lives."

The 19 interrogation techniques include the "good cop/bad cop" routine; making prisoners think they are in another country's custody; and separating a prisoner from others for up to 30 days.

Among the techniques the field manual prohibits are:

_hooding prisoners or putting duct tape across their eyes.

_stripping prisoners naked.

_forcing prisoners to perform or mimic sexual acts.

_beating, burning or physically hurting them in other ways.

_subjecting prisoners to hypothermia or mock executions.

It does not allow food, water and medical treatment to be withheld. Dogs may not be used in any aspect of interrogation.

But waterboarding is the most high-profile and contentious method in question.

It involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years to the Spanish Inquisition and is condemned by nations around the world and human rights organizations as torture.

The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 includes a provision barring cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for all detainees, including CIA prisoners, in U.S. custody. Many people believe that covers waterboarding.

There are concerns that the use of waterboarding would undermine the U.S. human rights efforts overseas and could place Americans at greater risk of being tortured when captured.

The military specifically prohibited waterboarding in 2006. The CIA also prohibited the practice in 2006 and says it has not been used since three prisoners encountered it in 2003.

But the administration has refused to rule definitively on whether it is torture. Bush has said many times that his administration does not torture.

The White House says waterboarding remains among the interrogation methods potentially available to the CIA.

"Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists," Bush said.

Thanks to Bush's new cuts on public funding for land-grant schools, agribusiness is gaining a huge foothold in the future of our food.

I've startled a bug scientist. "Yeah, now I'm nervous," said Mike Hoffmann, a Cornell University entomologist and crop specialist who spends his days with cucumber beetles and small wasps. But he's also in charge of keeping the research funding flowing at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. What have I done to alarm him? I've drawn his attention to the newly released FY 2009 Presidential Budget.

Like more than a hundred public institutions of higher learning, Cornell is what's known as a "land grant." Dotting the United States from Ithaca, N.Y., to Pullman, Wash., such schools were established by a Civil War-era act of Congress to provide universities centered around, "the agriculture and mechanic arts." Congress handed each U.S. state a chunk of federal land to be sold for start-up monies, and for the last 150 years, it has funded ground-breaking research on all things agriculture, from dirt to crops to cattle.

The land-grant system has been, in short, a high-yield investment. The scientific research that has come out of land-grant labs and fields have aided millions of farmers and fed millions of Americans. And the land-grant reach doesn't stop at ocean's edge. Oklahoma State, the Sooner State's land grant, says that the public funding of land-grant research "has benefited every man, woman and child in the United States and much of the world."

That was until America's land-grant system met George W. Bush.

WASHINGTON — Broad spying powers temporarily approved by Congress in August appear likely to lapse this week after a day long game of chicken on Wednesday between the White House and House Democrats produced no clear resolution.

At a morning appearance in the Oval Office, President Bush pressed the House to adopt quickly a plan that the Senate approved on Tuesday to broaden the government's spying powers and give legal immunity to telephone companies.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft on Saturday defended President George W. Bush's electronic surveillance program, saying it was far less intrusive than similar surveillance in World Wars I and II.

Bush has been using security measures to protect freedoms, not to curb freedom, Ashcroft said in a speech to hundreds of Missouri Republicans attending the party's statewide Lincoln Days festivities this weekend.

"The president of the United States has been among the most respectful of all leaders ever engaged in the responsibility of fighting for freedom,'' Ashcroft said, and has been "most respectful in terms of respecting the civil liberties and rights of individuals while engaged in the important task of fighting for freedom."

"If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Mitt Romney concession speech.

Let's get a few things straight here Mitt... I'm a Democrat and I support Mr. Obama. I'm also an American who wore a uniform (proudly) for twenty two years and served in the first war against Iraq. You sir, just said that I'm a party to surrendering my country to the terrorists. You have no idea how much that pissed me off. Right now our country is divided, and blanket statements that denigrate and belittle a large part of our citizenry as cowards who would "surrender" our country to the terrorists, does nothing to further our common goal of protecting America from those who would attack us.

Thanks to the missteps and failings of those who've held the reigns these past seven years, we have much to do in the fight against terrorism. Afghanistan is far from being secured from terrorist threats, Pakistan is a gathering threat, and Iraq is a quagmire that has no end in sight. I would add that Iraq has cost us dearly in treasure and lives, has bogged our military down in a role (an occupation force) they were never intended to assume, and has caused great harm to our status as leaders of the free world. It has divided our country much as the Vietnam war did a generation ago. What we need right now are suggestions, solutions, and an honest dialog on the most prudent course of action in this fight against those who would harm us. What we don't need is more of the same asinine vitriolic rhetoric that got us where we are today.


You sir, are worse than the coward you make us out to be... You use the fight against terrorism as a club to beat those who disagree with your party... as a spiteful campaign slogan to rally your conservative base.... you sir, would use the lives of 4000 brave Americans as a political football for the good of your party.

Mr. Romney, as an American, you disgust me beyond words. For nothing more than political gain, you've accused me of cowardice and surrender. After much thought and careful deliberation, my response to you sir is f*ck you and the horse that rode you off into the sunset!

Yours truly, with as much disrespect as I can humanly muster,

Master Sergeant Jim Dent USAF (ret.)

The President's attack on the Freedom of Information Act is his latest attempt to preserve state secrecy.

In 2002, President Bush announced the creation of the Millennium Challenge Account to "expand our fight against AIDS" and aid democracy in developing nations. He promised that the program would receive $5 billion a year beginning in FY 2006 and beyond.

Since 2002, Bush has consistently touted this program, most recently in his State of the Union address:

America is leading the fight against global poverty, with strong education initiatives and humanitarian assistance. We've also changed the way we deliver aid by launching the Millennium Challenge Account. This program strengthens democracy, transparency, and the rule of law in developing nations, and I ask you to fully fund this important initiative.

Yet just a week after this speech, Bush released his FY 2009 budget that requests a funding cut for the program. Although Congress has repeatedly underfunded the program, Bush's requests for the program have never come close to $5 billion. Funding levels for FY 2009, however, fall to a new low:

Because the US media does not report on the biotech crops and agribusiness most Americans are unaware of the systematic destruction of the farming communities here. Now the target is Mexico where dumping cheap US corn with drive record numbers into bankruptcy.

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CNN) -- Hundreds of thousands of farmers clogged central Mexico City Thursday with their slow-moving tractors, protesting the entry of cheap imported corn from the United States and Canada.

On January 1 Mexico repealed all tariffs on corn imported from north of the border as part of a 14-year phaseout under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

The farmers want the government to renegotiate the 1994 free trade agreement, which removed most trade barriers among Mexico, Canada, and the United States, saying livelihoods are at stake.

"NAFTA is very bad, very bad for Mexican consumers and for Mexican producers," said Victor Quintana, head of Democratic Farmers Front, which organized the protest.

The farmers complain that U.S. and Canadian grains are heavily subsidized and therefore undermine Mexican products.

"The NAFTA agreement is in place and that's that," said farmer Armando del Valle. "But all producers should be under equal conditions, and as Mexicans, we are not working under the same terms as our neighbors up north." Video Watch a tractor go up in smoke, as farmers plead their case »

Ramon Garcia, who grows corn just outside Mexico City, said he couldn't afford to fertilize his crop this year and had to rent a tractor to till his field. The work is too much work for too little return, he said.

"Corn is too cheap," Garcia said. "For me to make a profit, it has to bring in 15 pesos ($1.4) a kilo, and I can barely get 10."

The farmers say their pleas have fallen on deaf ears in the Mexican government, forcing them to take their protests to the streets.

I smell a rodent. ABC News is quoting WashingtonDeCoded's Max Holland about a soon to be released book that exposes the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission as a Bush White House insider.

9/11 Commission co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton hired former Condoleezza Rice aide Philip Zelikow to be executive director, (sic) Zelikow failed to tell them about his role helping Rice set up President George W. Bush's National Security Council in early 2001 – and that he was "instrumental" in demoting Richard Clarke, the onetime White House counterterrorism czar…

"[Zelikow] had laid the groundwork for much of what went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know that?" ["The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation author Philip] Shenon writes, according to Holland.

Zelikow denied that was the case. "It was very well-known I had served on this transition team and had declined to go into the administration. I worked there for a total of one month. I had interviewed Sandy Berger, Dick Clarke and most of the NSC staff." He noted he recused himself from working on the section of the panel's report addressing the NSC transition, and that other staffers had held conflicting positions in the Clinton administration.

Did you get that? Clinton, Clinton, Clinton!

Following up on my post from a little while back discussing Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell's desire to police the Internet, the Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima confirmed last weekend that the Decider had signed a classified directive authorizing the NSA to more expansively monitor intrusions on federal networks for signs of cyberattacks:

Until now, the government's efforts to protect itself from cyber-attacks — which run the gamut from hackers to organized crime to foreign governments trying to steal sensitive data — have been piecemeal. Under the new initiative, a task force headed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will coordinate efforts to identify the source of cyber-attacks against government computer systems. As part of that effort, the Department of Homeland Security will work to protect the systems and the Pentagon will devise strategies for counterattacks against th

Congress is passing a bill giving Bush retroactive immunity for warcrimes.

Short clip.

I think it is fascinating that, upon taking office, the Bush White House apparently learned nothing from the headaches that the Clinton Administration went through in 2000 regarding e-mail back-up. A cynical person might think that they were, instead, remembering Iran-Contra (pdf):

The relevance of e-mail evidence had been established several years earlier in a case from the Iran-Contra scandal. Oliver North and John Poindexter unsuccessfully argued that their e-mail correspondence should not be admitted into evidence. They had deleted their e-mail, but the messages were preserved on backup tapes—a situation strikingly similar to [the Clinton] case.

Rather than an act of commission (a decision to recycle -- ie, not maintain -- back-up tapes), as is the case with the Bush White House, the Clinton White House problem resulted from an act of omission (a system failure) in its Automated Records Management System (ARMS).

Flashback to 2000
In March 2000, Republican leadership in the House called for a special counsel to investigate missing White House e-mail. Justice said Robert Ray, who picked up where Ken Starr left off, was doing just that.

Note: it's important to remember that e-mail was a new way of working in the 1990s. And in the early-90s, e-mail was a walled garden: you could only communicate with people who had the same e-mail service. This was also the dawn of the Web.

Three contract employees charged that they had been threatened with firing and jail if they told anyone about the problem. The White House e-mail administrator subsequently denied that charge, under oath, and also said he had not advised the President of the extent of the problem.

Betty Lambuth, a whistleblower, discovered in 1998 that about 100,000 emails had not been preserved by the sophisticated back-up system, ARMS, which was designed to store all email in a single, searchable database. Later investigation revealed the system was missing mail from about 500 White House officials. In October 1988, the White House "solicited a proposal from Northrop Grumman in October 1998 to 'recover the missing records'," but recovery did not begin until 2000. (pdf)

Note: The Clinton White House used Lotus Notes system, an IBM product; the Bush White House switched to Microsoft Outlook. This tech author argues that it wasn't the conversion that caused the Bush White House problem -- one of the first defenses offered by Dana Perino. The current explanation is that recycling back-up tapes is standard business practice.

In July 2000, the White House began copying about 3,400 tapes back-up tapes for analysis; the FBI had to approve this forensic process.

Note: The Bush White House has made this possibility -- recover missing e-mail from back-up tapes -- more expensive and less probable by recycling (ie, overwriting) the tapes.

A key player in the investigation in 2000 was Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group. A key player in 2008 is CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

What, Exactly, Happened in The Clinton White House?
Starting in August 1996, ARMS did not archive email from one mail server. This server handled mail for about 500 White House officials. It was human error: improper naming. (The problem was a case-sensitive name; it makes me wonder if the culprit was a Windows person, since all other systems at that time were case-sensitive, I think.) A different problem meant that from 1994-2000, mail in the office of the vice president was improperly archived. (pdf)

So here we are, with politicians willfully ignoring the Presidential Records Act in an era with ever increasing use of electronic communication. And where is Judicial Watch on the subject that they were so incensed about in 2000? Silent. As for CREW, there's no mention of the Clinton White House problem, only its solution, in this 2007 summary of the Bush problem.

Color me disappointed. Not surprised, just disappointed.

Congress -- and we the people -- have to make it crystal clear that the Presidential Records Act covers all electronic communication: email, IM, text and, yes, records of Skype and cell phone calls. Failure to comply -- when the lack of compliance is something other than human error -- should be a felony. And the designated jailee? The highest ranking official: the President. Only with accountability (ie, culpability) will we get responsibility.

^{Originally published at US Politics@About.com with a poll}

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Wednesday endorsed U.S. hopes for an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan this year and said he will work hand in hand with the United States and other nations to make it happen.

President Bush, closing his eight-day trip to the Mideast, said "nations in the neighborhood" are willing to help Israelis and Palestinians reach a Mideast peace deal.

Bush said he'll remain engaged in Mideast peacemaking, and return to the region.

"When I say I'm coming back to stay engaged, I mean it," Bush said. "When I say I'm optimistic we can get a deal done, I mean what I'm saying."

Mubarak said he stressed in his talks with Bush that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is at the core of problems and turmoil in the Middle East. Bush has expressed a desire to reach an agreement before he leaves office in January 2009.

"I also said that I wish that he will reach a peace agreement before the end of his term," Mubarak said, through a translator.

"We are keen on supporting peace efforts," Mubarak said. "We are ready, hand-in-hand with the United States of America," and others to work for the "sake of a comprehensive and just peace, to put an end to this Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to open new horizons for the Middle East for a more peaceful and secure future."

Bush said he is convinced that leaders in both Israel and the West Bank are committed to a two-state solution.

"I know nations in the neighborhood are willing to help, particularly yourself," Bush told Mubarak.

Standing alongside Mubarak, Bush urged greater political openness in Egypt, but did not directly criticize the Egyptian government for what the U.S. sees as a lack of political freedoms. Bush praised Egypt for taking some steps toward democratic reform, but said more was needed.

"I'm absolutely confident that people in the Middle East are working on building a society based on justice," Bush said.

Wrapping up his journey, which included a side trip to Baghdad by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush said the fragile Iraqi government was making progress on political reconciliation.

"The government isn't perfect, but nevertheless, progress is being made," he said.

"Normal life is coming back, and political life is moving," Bush said, offering an upbeat take on a war that has drained public patience back home.

"The United States will continue to help the Iraqi people secure their democracy," Bush said.

Bush, who left Egypt after his remarks to return to Washington, also expressed support for the weak U.S.-backed government in Lebanon, and called on Syria and Iran to stop interfering in Beirut.

"We agreed it's important for nations in this region to support Prime Minister Fuad Saniora," Bush said. "It's important to encourage the holding of immediate, unconditional presidential elections according to the Lebanese constitution, and to make it clear to Syria, Iran and their allies they must end their interference and efforts to undermine the process."

The Arab population is unlikely to be won over by the words about democracy, human rights and the rule of law coming from the man who is responsible for the bloodshed in Iraq, the lawlessness at the Abu Graib jail in Iraq or the Guantanamo prison.

President Bush, on his first visit to this oil-rich kingdom, delivered a major arms sale Monday to a key ally in a region where the U.S. casts neighboring Iran as a menace to stability.

Bush's talks with Saudi King Abdullah, which began over dinner and were continuing with late-night meetings, also were expected to cover peace between Israelis and Palestinians and democracy in the Middle East.

Coinciding with Bush's trip, the Bush administration in Washington notified Congress on Monday that it will offer Saudi Arabia the chance to buy sophisticated Joint Direct Attack Munitions — or "smart bomb" — technology and related equipment, the State Department said. The administration envisions the transfer of 900 of the precision-guided bomb kits, worth $123 million, that would give the kingdom's armed forces highly accurate targeting abilities.

The proposed deal follows notification of five other packages to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, bringing to $11.5 billion the amount of advanced U.S. weaponry, including Patriot missiles, that the administration has announced it will provide to friendly Arab nations, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. Administration officials say the total amount of eventual sales as part of the Gulf Security Dialogue is estimated at $20 billion, a figure subject to actual purchases.

The arms packages are an important part of the U.S. strategy to bolster the defenses of oil-producing Gulf nations, such as Saudi Arabia, against threats from Iran. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, which have majority Sunni Muslim populations, harbor deep suspicions about Shiite Iran's apparent designs to establish itself as a major power.

Congress already has been briefed on all the packages, which also include the sale of the Navy's Littoral Combat system. Lawmakers mostly see the deals as critical to maintaining relations with war-on-terror allies. Some are opposed to the JDAMs portion out of concern that it gives Saudi Arabia the ability to attack Israel, but are unlikely to muster the two-thirds majority needed, within an allowed 30-day period, to block the sales.

The administration has assured lawmakers in closed briefings in recent months that there would be proper restrictions on the JDAMs sales to ensure they would not threaten to Israel. Israel, which has been sold JDAMs technology by the U.S. as well, also has said it does not oppose the deal.

White House counselor Ed Gillespie said he did not know if the president and the king had discussed rising oil prices, but he said the subject has come up on this trip, particularly in terms of Bush's goals for developing alternate fuels and sources of energy, including nuclear power. The Saudis are responsible for almost one-third of OPEC's total output. Gillespie said Mideast leaders "talked about the nature of the market and the vast demand that's on the world market today for oil," something he called "a legitimate and accurate point."

Another item for possible discussion were the democratic principles Bush has promoted during his trip. While Abdullah has tried to push some reforms on education and women's rights and there have been limited municipal council elections, the king has been cautious and limited in his efforts. He apparently has been hampered by others in the royal family worried that fast changes could upset the country's conservative clerics and citizens.

After arriving Monday afternoon in Riyadh from Dubai, Bush expected to hear Abdullah urge him to keep up the pressure on Israel to halt settlements in Palestinian territories. The administration was able to persuade the Saudis to participate in the U.S.-sponsored Mideast peace conference in Annapolis, Md., in November.

Bush enjoyed a warm embrace from Abdullah. He was staying a night at the monarch's ranch — a rare show of hospitality to a visiting dignitary that reflects Bush's hosting of Abdullah twice at his own ranch in Crawford, Texas.

And the king greeted Bush at the base of the steps of Air Force One — a gesture the president never affords foreign leaders visiting the U.S. A band played each country's national anthem as the leaders walked on a red carpet behind a high-stepping uniformed officer carrying a gold sword.

After dinner in the King's Palace, Bush and Abdullah walked through a large central atrium and picked up cups of Arabic coffee to take into their meetings. Sitting side by side in chairs, Abdullah presented Bush with a gold necklace adorned with a large medallion — the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit, the country's highest honor, named after the founder of the modern Saudi state.

The award was placed around Bush's neck and the two exchanged the region's traditional double kiss. "I am honored," Bush said.

The hospitality masked Bush's deep unpopularity among ordinary Saudis.

A recent poll conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow, a bipartisan group whose goal is undermining world support for terrorism, found only 12 percent here view Bush positively — lower than Iran's president or even al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden — and more think warmly toward Iran than America. Top among the reasons are the chaos in Iraq that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and the widespread Arab feeling that the United States is biased toward Israel and not serious in seeking Mideast peace.

A rare cold front brought clouds and rain to Riyadh for the visit. Tight security was evident: Hundreds of police cars have deployed along major roads and sharpshooters are on some rooftops. In one neighborhood, police using loudspeakers demanded that cars be removed from some streets as two helicopters hovered overhead.

Earlier in Dubai, Bush got a flavor of the cosmopolitan banking and business hub, whose glass skyscrapers and booming construction have turned it into the capital of Middle East hustle. The soaring Persian Gulf city-state was Bush's second stop in the seven-state United Arab Emirates federation. On the first, in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, he delivered a gentle lecture on democracy to authoritarian Arab allies and attended an opulent picnic at a desert horse camp.

Bush engaged in a day of cultural diplomacy in Dubai. He stopped at the historic home of the city-state's former ruler, now a museum, where a group of girls performed to Arabic music.He had lunch on cushions set in a circle with students of the Dubai School of Government. And he attended a gathering of a young leaders' group, in a conference room atop one of Dubai's signature buildings, the luxury hotel Burj Al Arab that is shaped like a tall ship sail.

Dubai is caught in the middle of the West's efforts to crack down on business in and out of Iran to protest its nuclear ambitions. Dubai, with a powerful Iranian business community, is eager to maintain its lucrative financial ties with Tehran, but wary of angering the United States and the United Nations.

___

Associated Press writers Donna Abu-Nasr in Riyadh and Anne Flaherty and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this story.

Anthropogenic global warming driven by Bush-ite American, Canadian and Australian greed threatens the world's coral reefs – wonders that took millions of years to grow will finally perish at 500 ppm atmospheric CO2.

This impact is illustrated here as artist and Newsviner Gideon Polya walks along the beach in his painting of a scene near Korolevu, Viti Levu, the Fiji Islands. You can see a Mother and Child near the house, or "bure", in the distance, the coconut palm trees, tropical flowers, and the turquoise lagoon sheltered from the Pacific Ocean by a coral reef (where the waves are breaking). This overall composition including the artist in his own painting could be called "On the Beach" as in the book and the film about the end of the world set in Melbourne (where the painting is located).

According to the latest Summary of the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Synthesis Report, the worst scenario (and we are on track for the worst scenario) will involve sea level rises of (see a Summary of the Summary: http://green-blog.org/2007/11/21/summary-of-the-summary-of-the-2007-ipcc-ar4-synthesis-report/ ) as high as 3.5 metres at long-term stabilization.

In Scenario Category VI (and current global Greenhouse gas, GHG, pollution EXCEEDS that specified in this worst-case scenario) involves stabilization at 660-790 ppm CO2 (twice today's level of 379 ppm) , 4.9-6.1 degrees centigrade temperature rise above the pre-industrial (4-5 degrees above today's) and 1.0-3.7 metres sea level above pre-industrial sea level or about 0.8-3.5 metres above today's).

However it gets even worse for this Viti Levu idyll.

As reported on the prestigious ABC Radio National Science Show, a 10-year study on coral reefs has concluded and been published as a cover-story in the latest edition of the top US and World scientific journal Science. It demonstrates that global warming and ocean acidification are acutely threatening world coral reefs that have been around for tens of millions of years.

Coral reefs require carbonate ions present in the water at the right concentrations and this only happens with carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere at levels under 450 parts per million. As atmospheric CO2 rises, more CO2 dissolves in the ocean and causes the ocean to become more ACIDIC (higher concentrations of protons, H+).

Other organisms will be affected as carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere. Crustaceans such as crabs and lobsters are already developing diseases as the result of poor calcification of their shells (see: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2007/2115399.htm ).

At about 450 ppm atmospheric CO2 corals become sick but survive. Between 450-500 ppm corals become very sick. Above 500 ppm the world corals are heading for extinction.

According to Professsor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, professor in marine science at the University of Queensland, Australia and a lead author of the study: "We need rapid reductions in carbon dioxide levels. The impact of climate change on coral reefs is much closer than we appreciated. It's just around the corner. If you take the extinction event that happened 65 million years ago, it took five to 10 million years for coral reefs to come back in any way shape or form. Now you ask any tour operator if he's willing to wait around five million years for the coral to come back." (see: http://abc.com.au/news/stories/2007/12/14/2118585.htm ).

According to the UK Stern Report , perhaps the best the world could hope for is about 500 ppm – but that we now know is too much for coral. 500 ppm is too much for other organisms as well – thus according to Professor James Lovelock FRS in "The Revenge of Gaia" at 500 ppm the phytoplankton of the ocean (crucial for planetary temperature balance or homeostasis as well as for food chains) go into crisis and the Greenland ice sheet goes with massive sea level rises.

Will this happen? We are on track for the worst case scenario of the latest IPCC Report. Atmospheric CO2 is presently at 383 ppm and it is rising at 2.5 ppm every year. Key data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (see: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ ) the atmospheric CO2 is rising at a steady rate that will yield 450 ppm by 2035 (in 28 years) and 550 ppm (catastrophe) by 2075 (68 years).

To put that in context, a child born now might be married at 28 (massive damage to coral reefs by 2035) and might retire from work at 68 (coral reefs dying, huge sea level rises, deltaic regions inundated, mass oceanic extinctions due to phytoplankton collapse by 2075).

We have just seen the fiasco at Bali in which the main perpetrators, the rogue developed nations with the highest annual per capita fossil fuel-derived greenhouse gas pollution – America, Canada and Australia – variously ganged up to obfuscate and block a strong Bali Consensus recommended by the SCIENTISTS for a developed country greenhouse gas reduction target of 25-40% by 2020.

Consult data from the US Energy Information Administration and you will discover that this climate criminal trio are the worst developed country CO2 polluters on a per capita basis (see: http://www.eia.doe.gov/ ) .

The newly-elected Rudd Labor Government was applauded at Bali for signing the Kyoto Protocol (10 years late for Australia but Bush still refuses). However the Rudd Government then caused dismay by its ignorant, selfish, irresponsible refusal to back specific targets, claiming that it is waiting for an expert Report on economic impact, the Garnaut Report due in final form in late 2008.

On a per capita basis and including our fossil fuel exports, Australia is the developed country with the highest greenhouse gas pollution. Thus 2004 data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reveal that "annual per capita fossil fuel-derived CO2 pollution" in tonnes CO2/person is 19.2 (for Australia; 40 if you include Australia's coal exports), 19.7 (the US), 18.4 (Canada), 9.9 (Japan), 4.2 (the World), 3.6 (China), 1.0 ( India) and 0.25 (for Bangladesh).

The Rudd Labor commitment to "20% renewables by 2020″, "60% reduction on 2000 greenhouse gas pollution by 2050″ and no constraint on fossil fuel extraction for export ACTUALLY means (based on EIA data, assuming current constant coal, gas and CO2 pollution growth rates, constant population and including Australia's fossil fuel EXPORTS) "annual per capita fossil fuel-derived CO2 emission in tonnes per person per year" of 43 (2007), 56 (2020) and 65 (2050) (see: http://green-blog.org/2007/12/14/climate-criminal-bali-wrecker-rudd-australia-faces-world-sanctions/ ) .

It is extraordinary that climate criminal Australia – whether under the Bush-ite Coalition or the neo-Bush-ite Rudd Labor Government - is fouling its own nest, and is set to destroy ITS OWN iconic Great Barrier Reef in the coming decades through a combination of greed, racism, incompetence and cowardice.

I am an agnostic humanist but a word one can sensibly apply to what these climate criminals are doing to these wonders of nature is BLASPHEMY.

Bush America, Bush-ite Canada and neo-Bush-ite Australia have succeeded in wrecking the Bali Conference which has only been able to merely agree to negotiate further about targets for the 2009 Copenhagen Conference.

However it is not too late to save Australia's Great Barrier Reef, and indeed coral reefs around the world from the Caribbean to the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean.

Politicians have failed at Bali and will surely fail again under pressure from Bush-ites and neo-Bush-ites – but decent folk around the world can ACT NOW by instituting or advocating personal, collective, government, non-government, national and international Sanctions, Boycotts, Green Tariffs and Reparations Demands against those people, corporations and countries involved in climate criminality, climate genocide and terracide (see "Climate criminal Australia" : http://open.newmatilda.com/crosswire/?m=200712 and "War on Terra, Climate Criminals": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15671/42/ ). Save our coral reefs!

President Bush on Monday tried to reassure an edgy public that the economy is "pretty good" despite the dreary mix of a failing housing market, a national credit crunch and surging energy costs.

"There's definitely some storm clouds and concerns, but the underpinning is good," Bush said at a Rotary Club meeting, an informal setting chosen to show the president engaged with local communities. "We'll work our way through this period."

The nation is in a sour mood this holiday season, with consumer confidence hovering near a two-year low. As a wide-open field of candidates vies to replace Bush in the White House, the economy has zoomed to the forefront of public priorities, often ahead of Iraq.

Bush's appearance reflects the administration's push to show that the president is actively trying to solve the problems — and ready as ever to blame Congress for moving too slowly to help him.

"We've had a pretty good economic run here in the country," Bush said, citing high productivity and consistent job growth. As for the collapse of the housing market and the severe credit crunch that threaten to drag the country into a recession, Bush acknowledged "there are some challenges."

"The Congress cannot take economic vitality for granted," Bush said. "There are some positive things Congress can do to make sure that the economy continues to grow and people are working and realizing dreams, and there's some negative things they can do. And the most negative thing the Congress can do in the face of some economic uncertainty is to raise taxes on the American people."

Democratic leaders responded that Bush is in denial.

"What world is President Bush living in to be so out of touch with the economic realities families and markets are facing?" said Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, chairman of Congress' Joint Economic Committee.

No matter what the debate over economic indicators, many people are enduring financial stress and struggling to pay the mortgage. Alan Greenspan, the respected former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has agreed with other experts who see prospects for a recession at about 50-50.

"Instead of taking action, President Bush says the economy is safe and sound," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel. "Middle-class Americans and economic experts all agree on something the president still refuses to admit: the economy is struggling and families need real help."

Bush and Congress, stuck in a budget stalemate for months, have blamed each other for not acting fast enough to help families. In his comments Monday, Bush said lawmakers could help ease the burden by passing measures to expand the energy supply and make health care more flexible and affordable.

The audience of about 80 people listened with respectful silence. Yet a line that normally gets Bush applause — "I'll veto any tax increase" — drew none.

The White House, eager to put Bush in a community environment, chose the Yak-A-Doo's restaurant in a Holiday Inn (where the marquee advertised karaoke night on Wednesdays and live bands on the weekend). Inside gathered the members of the Rotary Club of Stafford, the Fredericksburg Rotary Club, the Rappahannock Rotary Club and the Fredericksburg Regional Chamber of Commerce.

To keep an authentic setting without upstaging the locals, Bush's team put up no banners or backdrop this time. Gone was the usual announcement of the president's presence over the public address system. He just seemed to show up, prompting some surprised applause.

After the meeting began with the normal business routine of the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer, Bush was introduced as the guest speaker. Yet even that was a bit hard to hear, because someone forgot to turn off the Christmas music for a couple minutes. It did not resume again until the president finished speaking and taking questions from the crowd. He headed out of the room to the tune of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

No, I'm not kidding.

In 2000, the feds spent $452,807 to make unpleasant truths go away; by 2006, the "Cheney Effect" had bumped that number up to $2.9 million. And by halfway through 2007, the feds almost matched that number, with $2.7 million and counting. Pretty much says it all.

Recently, there has been an increasing amount of talk centering on the possibility (or even probability) that President Bush and his administration are going to declare martial law and bring around a new fascist state. There has been a lot of predictable nodding and hand-wringing on one side, and just as equally predictable laughter and dismissal on the other. What we're going to do here is take a serious look at the situation, what is, and then outline one simple path for what could be, and then explore what can be done about it.

First, some background

Here's a round up of some of the relevant documents and actions of the last seven years or so, all in one place:

• The Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) Act of 2001: Sweeping legislation, which simply hands over to the President the power to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons. President Bush has used AUMF to justify everything from warrantless wiretapping to indefinite detainment and "special" interrogation techniques used on "enemy combatants". And well he might. As written, it's entirely up to him to decide what might be needed to pursue and take down the terrorists, whoever and wherever they are.
• The Patriot Act: One of the most controversial pieces of legislation to be passed in our time, debated back and forth all over the Internet, academic circles, and occasionally even by politicians. I went into a fairly extensive analysis of the worrisome aspects of this bill way back when, but for those who want the Cliff's Notes version the problems with the damned thing are that it extended surveillance powers of the government in a way which was in direct conflict with civil liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, and it enabled the relabeling of a vast number of activities as potentially criminal and specifically "terrorist activities", effectively pulling those so accused out of the normal legal system (and, apparently, outside the Geneva Conventions as well). While the principle matters a great deal, the practical application to anyone this one man deems a "terrorist" means that there are no assurances that those being surveilled and detained have actually done anything wrong. That should be of immediate concern to everyone.
• Warrantless Wiretapping: Justified by President Bush under the AUMF act and discussed in the previous link, as well as here and here. Where are we with that situation now? Well, in August, Congress went ahead and said they didn't see a problem with President Bush's policy, and in fact tried to make things a little more comfortable for him, though with the caveat that the provision would expire in six months. They're now looking at new legislation which will address wiretapping more permanently. The bill proposed by President Bush's administration would continue the broad powers of surveillance, while also granting immunity to all telecommunications companies which have previously handed over information on their clients to the government. If this legislation is passed, we will probably never know the breadth and depth of the warrantless surveillance which has been carried out, but that's OK, since it's all legal now, anyway.
• The Homeland Security Act of 2002: This bill created the Department of Homeland Security (which has since absorbed the Immigration and Natural Services agency, among many others), the Homeland Security Advisory system (adjustment of which has been questioned even by it's former director), and contained the peculiar "Eli Lilly Rider" which sent suits against the vaccine manufacturer off into a "special court".
• The Military Commissions Act of 2006: This bill confirmed that those declared "enemy combatants" under the powers granted by AUMF and The Patriot Act could be held indefinitely, allows "coerced" evidence to be submitted if and when they are tried, and establishes a "special court" (military commission) which operates under different rules than other criminal courts. Thus far, only about fifteen of the original 700+ have seen a trial.
• E.O.: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq: Executive orders are so fun. They don't have the hassle of having to be approved by Congress, and they often just pass under the radar. What this one does is say that the United States can freeze the assets of any person which is determined (by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense) to be or possibly be doing anything or helping anyone who might be doing anything to undermine stability in Iraq. It also makes the point that folks being penalized under this E.O. shall not be notified before having their assets frozen.
• E.O.: Blocking Property of Persons Undermining the Sovereignty of Lebanon or Its Democratic Processes and Institutions: This one is a lot like the one above, except that this one specifically extends its powers to cover the family and associates of anyone already taken down by the order.
• E.O.: Blocking Property and Prohibiting Certain Transactions Related to Burma: Um, yeah. Just like above, but Burma this time.
• The National Counterterrorism Center: Established by E.O. 13354, the center is designed to amalgamate all terrorism-related data in one place and make recommendations to the administration on how to address it. Among other activities, the NCC has accumulated a list of over 300,000 names which it considers terrorists or potential terrorists, and provides this list to the Transportation Security Administration for "no-fly" lists and and other agencies.
• Executive Directive 51: The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, signed by President Bush in May of 2007, sets up the structure of government in the case of a "catastrophic emergency", which situation would be determined by the President. The emergency government would include all three branches of government, but would be "coordinated" by the President, leaving us to wonder how the checks and balances would work, then. Even more disturbing is the fact that only part of the document has been made public, and even members of Congress on the Homeland Security Committee have not been allowed to examine the classified portions.
• Free Speech Zones: The places you get to protest now. Such segregation of protesters has been used in the past, but never to the extent it has today, and the justifications given for its use are often ludicrous.
• Pending Stuff: Other items of note coming down the line include: The Iran Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007 (which, among other things requires the President to determine whether the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization); Halliburton presumably continuing to build massive detention centers for someone or other out in the midwest; H.R. 1995, currently still sitting in a Senate committee, which is at least capable of setting up McCarthy-esque hearings to ferret out "homegrown terrorists" in our midst; The National Applications Office, a program which enables the use of spy satellite information about American citizens to track us within our own borders, ostensibly still held up by Congressional concerns (though, as it was not instituted by Congress in the first place, there appears to be no guarantee of that).
• There may well be more, but this is at least what is lying on the surface.

So Why Are We Not All In Detention Centers?

Given all the legislation just listed, plus certain policies** put in place (and never revoked) by Presidents Kennedy through Reagan, one would think dissenters would already be rounded up and carted off to federal detention centers where "terrorists" could be properly dealt with. And yet I am still here, rambling on about what I disapprove of in this administration, and so are you. How can this be?

There are only two reasonable possibilities. Either: A) Our government has no interest in asserting increasing levels of power over its constituents, or B) Our government realizes that, for all the "legal" protections put in place, it cannot pull off a massive power grab in one fell swoop. The former would be unprecedented, historically, and also contradictory to the experiences of those who have been associated with recent administrations (which does not make it impossible). If it's the latter, however...

How Will They Create A More Imperfect Union?

The single most common response I hear when I begin listing all the unconstitutional and threatening new policies implemented in the last six years is "Name one way in which this has affected you". Yes, though these laws are hanging over our heads we are all still here to gripe about it if we so choose. What must be considered, however, is that with many of our government's new powers you wouldn't know if you were being affected because it is written into all new surveillance policies that they don't have to tell you. Which is not a problem if you are doing nothing wrong, right? Perhaps, but it also sets in place a system wherein you may well never have any evidence that any of this directly affected you until there is nothing at all you can do about it. What is core to this issue is not whether it is going to happen, but rather the very fact that it legally could.

If this administration wanted to bypass the whole democracy thing and be able to herd the cats more effectively (even for "good" reasons like a looming economic crisis requiring drastic measures to avert, or because they had intelligence about a genuine internal terrorist threat), how would they do it? We are the strongest democracy in the world. This is what we are taught from the time we are children, right along with how we need to cheer at pep rallies just because it's "our" school. We're a democracy, all right, after a fashion, and we have done all right, more or less, over the years. But that does not make us invulnerable to corruption from within, as the Founding Fathers well knew when they included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights and Article 2, Section 4 in the Constitution. It couldn't happen here. Well, there's no particular reason it couldn't. These lines of thought are the greatest allies of any administration wishing to seize power in the United States. All that is required from here is to slowly assert more control in the name of freedom and democracy. At first, you have some rounding up of illegal (or possibly legal) immigrants to be interred in those Haliburton centers. Then you have the people helping them. Next, you can include some "cyber-terrorists" who have been seizing government information or inciting anti-American sentiments, folks who have donated to blacklisted Islamic charities, and "violent radicals" who keep calling the acts of this administration "unconstitutional"...if you work in small batches, giving seemingly legitimate reasons for the arrests and touting them as triumphs in the War on Terror, most folks will not put two and two together to tally up how many people are going down. As long as you keep the pace slow and steady, you can avoid the tripwires that set off the folks with rifles stashed in their closets.

Still, it's an unassailable fact that there are more citizens than government employees, and they simply do not have the means to arrest everyone. To actually engage a complete lockdown on the freedoms we take for granted, a crisis is required. It would have to be a devastating one, given how many people have predicted it over the last few years. Something that would bypass all logic and cut right to our emotional centers. Plus which, it needs to efficiently demonstrate that anyone within our own borders could be a terrorist. Unfortunately, such a thing becomes more likely as the government asserts more control, due to a slowly building unease and agitation as more people find the government pushing past their limits of what is "reasonable". If, eventually, an agitated group within our borders decides violent action is required in order to "wake up" the rest of America, the government would have the blessings of most citizens in instituting martial law. Imagine the worst, something like the targeting of a school or multiple schools. We would all gratefully submit to curfews, street patrols, and just about anything else to make it stop. From there, everyone is a suspect. From there, even massive sacrifices of our freedoms seem like small change in the effort to keep our children safe. Anyone dissenting will be seen as willing to simply hand over our children to the terrorists, and the terrorists will be everyone you see.

The Buck Stops Here

Clearly, the above scenario is a nightmarish "what if", and it would require some significant events for us to get there. But even lesser, milder scenarios are unacceptable, and unfortunately we are seeing some of them happen right now. In the current climate of fear we are ignoring the rights of our citizens. Legal immigrants are dying in jail, and their cases are not being investigated. We are willing to be watched and recorded in case someone is doing something bad, and long ago dismissed with silly notions such as "innocent until proven guilty". Our first priority should be getting the legislation which makes it possible reversed, but that is simply not going to happen if all we are willing to do as citizens is sit around and bitch.

This bill, for example, seeks to challenge the direction this administration has taken. While it does not address all of the items in the list above, it does tackle the Military Commissions Act and warrantless wiretapping, so it's a damned good start. Take a moment and write to your House Representative and encourage them to support H.R. 3835. Write open letters to both your House and Senate representatives, telling them that you expect action immediately to roll back the legislation which has undermined the checks and balances of our government. Remind them that we the people instituted a massive turnover in the last election because we expected change, and that if we don't see it, we can and will vote them right back out again. Protests do not seem to capture the attention of the government, anymore, but they are still worth attending for the purpose of attracting the attention of more citizens, who may not realize the legal position we are now in. We must keep getting the information out there until enough people are writing and calling and showing up that our representatives cannot ignore us.

And most importantly, we must not allow ourselves to be afraid. We cannot afford to look at our neighbors and fellow travelers and wonder if they are planning to kill us. We must not be afraid to speak our beliefs and our ideas our in public, on the internet, or in company where we are not sure of the response. We cannot despair and say to ourselves that there is nothing we can do. We must all do exactly what we believe would bring about positive change if everyone else did it too, in the hopes that they will. This is our country, and the government is made up of our employees, and if we do not step up and take responsibility for change, no one will.

**Please note: this site is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an unbiased site, and I find their analysis rather alarmist. However, it works as a short reference list to various Executive Orders, which can then easily be plugged into Google to search for the original documents. I looked for a non-biased site which listed the Executive Orders in question (those which handed organizational power in times of emergency over to FEMA), but was unable to find one. Please contact me if you know of a reasonable replacement.

The chief counsel for a private watchdog group which recently scored a legal victory over the Bush administration on its improper records archiving said that the number of e-mails missing from the White House archives was far greater than previously reported.

"I will tell you, by the way, that it's way higher than five million. It's more than 10 million," said Anne Weismann, a former Justice Department attorney who now serves as chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Held for 18 months without charge Mr Hussein is guilty of Doing Journalism in Anbar province Iraq.

The Pentagon says additional evidence has come to light proving Bilal Hussein is a "terrorist media operative" who infiltrated the news agency.

The US media Ranked 50 for freedom in the world just before Bulgaria, haS been activly increasing the level of censorship in the USA this year. The main target of this censorship has been the internet. The mist common way of censoring has now become a sustained effort to make sure that the information never makes it to the web, or onto American TV at all.

It's genuinely hard to believe that the writers of George Bush's speech last night to the Federalist Society weren't knowingly satirizing him. They actually had him say this:

When the Founders drafted the Constitution, they had a clear understanding of tyranny. They also had a clear idea about how to prevent it from ever taking root in America. Their solution was to separate the government's powers into three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Each of these branches plays a vital role in our free society. Each serves as a check on the others. And to preserve our liberty, each must meet its responsibilities -- and resist the temptation to encroach on the powers the Constitution accords to others.

Then they went even further and this came out:

The President's oath of office commits him to do his best to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." I take these words seriously. I believe these words mean what they say.

Almost from the moment the Nisour Square shootings happened, the State Department has taken actions that give the impression of trying to cover up the incident. The department's initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on official US government stationery. The FBI was not dispatched to investigate the case until two weeks after the shootings, meaning that the initial investigation was in the hands of a non-law enforcement agency, the State Department, that just happens to be Blackwater's employer.

His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.

"What the heck is the NSA doing here?" Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.

A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.

Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts.

The plain-spoken, bespectacled Klein, 62, said he may be the only person in the country in a position to discuss firsthand knowledge of an important aspect of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) filed a report today holding that two White House officials are in contempt of Congress for their continued refusal to honor subpoenas in connection with the controversial firing of US attorneys last year -- but he's offering one last chance to make a deal.

On Halloween, Pres. Bush nominated Edward Schafer for the post of Agriculture Secretary. Schafer is a two-time North Dakota governor and former co-chairman of the Governors Biotechnology Partnership. While the White House is highlighting Schafer's experience at directing emergency aid to the 1997 flooding disaster, voters and the Senate would do well to consider his role in shielding the biotech industry from consumer product labeling laws.

According to an online search, Ed Schafer was the former co-chairman of the Governors Biotechnology Partnership. He was instrumental in getting former Pres. Clinton to back off of requirements that GM modified foods be labeled as such. See the article from The Guardian in May of 2000, titled, "Clinton bows to food producers."

There was quite a flurry of press about Mr. Schafer in 2000. You might like to look up the Salon article from its archive, "Stalking the wild Frankensalmon," from May 5, 2000. Quote:

On Wednesday, 13 governors joined forces with the biotech industry to try to persuade American consumers to become more enthusiastic consumers of engineered food. "It makes sense to say that this isn't just the big, bad chemical companies trying to engineer something to jam down your throats," said North Dakota Gov. Ed Schafer… How political is the coalition? Consider that two of the group's three Democratic governors are from states housing the headquarters of biotech gorillas Monsanto and DuPont.

And an editorial and letter to editor in Gentech, also from May 2000, has even more of his own words about the 'promised land' of GM foods...

"In 1998, the Governor let his constituents know his innermost feelings
about the "new" agriculture. In his State of the State address, he said:
"...today different winds blow across our fields of waving wheat.
Washington has changed the rules on...agriculture."
His 1999 address included a commercial for Monsanto's pesticide:
"Every day I read about a new innovation...Roundup-ready crops..."
This year, the governor made no mistake about his intentions:
"Genetic engineering will make farms smaller, more specialized and more
profitable."
This ill-informed politician is the chief executive of an agricultural
state, North Dakota, which produces enormous surpluses. Farmers in his
state are paid subsidies not to grow corn and soybeans, yet the governor
believes that genetically modified foods are the keys to easing world
hunger."

A 1994 story in the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis' webpage has this about then-Governor Schafer's benefiting from the bank's writeoffs of loans to his tilapia farm, Fish 'N Dakota. The story is from here: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/pubs/region/94-03/reg943c.cfm

Recently, a political sideshow, of sorts, has embroiled the Industrial Commission as Ed Schafer, North Dakota's governor, has seen his company's financial woes played out on the front pages of the state's newspapers. As chairman of the Industrial Commission, Schafer abstained on a December 1993 charge-off vote of $326,204 against Fish 'N Dakota, a fish farm of which he is president. The charge-off is part of a $1.45 million loan arranged by Norwest Bank, of which $500,000 is held by the Bank of North Dakota; the loan originated before Schafer was elected governor.
While Schafer says his company will pay its debts and his counterparts on the Industrial Commission insist the governor has received no special treatment, the BND charge-off has become a political thorn in Schafer's side and has focused attention on the otherwise more mundane affairs of the BND's board of directors. Charge-offs at BND are made on loans that are more than 120 days overdue and are considered potentially uncollectible; BND charged off 21 loans totaling $534,243 in December 1993.

What is also interesting about the tilapia business is that it is dependent on hormone treatment of the young fish in order to convert them all to male tilapia. Male tilapia grow to 250-300 grams at the age of 6 months, while females weigh only a third to about half that. So the fish are treated for about three weeks with hormones (17-alfa methyl testosterone hormone with fish feed) in order to convert them to all males. The hormone is most often supplied from the Philippines and Canada. The application of the hormone must be strictly controlled because people have become ill from fish that has an excess of the hormone. See "Tilapia farming with hormone poses health hazard" from New Age Business Daily at http://www.newagebd.com/2006/jun/24/busi.html.

While we have no hard evidence of the use of hormones to raise the tilapia at Fish 'N Dakota, it seems to be the modus operandi to bring them to a marketable size. From the webpage on 'Tilapia Raising' at TechRef.mass mind.org http://techref.massmind.org/techref/other/pond/TilapiaRaising.htm

Now even the US government supports the use of reversal techniques by allowing all of the tilapia hatcheries who wish it to participate in what is known as an INAD. This basically means they have the right to put chemicals into the food of the fish that are not yet cleared as being safe, as long as they send results in to the government.
Almost every tilapia grower now uses hormone-treated fingerling tilapia. This basically reduces the time it takes to get the tilapia through the growing stage and hopefully allows for slightly higher profits from the sale of the fish since a farmer can grow more each year.

The drug used to treat the fish, 17-alfa methyl testosterone hormone, is an anabolic steroid.

That the government allows these chemicals to be put in the food supply without informing consumers is not acceptable. And Mr. Schafer's past efforts to keep consumers in the dark about the hormones in the milk supply does not bode well for his agenda as Agriculture Secretary. Consumers have every right to know what is in their food supply and to have the option of making informed choices at the grocery store.

Nestled in the hills of Potrero, California in a box canyon typical of the border region near San Diego is a former chicken ranch that is as innocuous as just about any other stretch of this largely scruffy rural area. Innocuous, that is, except for its planned use by Blackwater USA, the domestic arm of the "global stability solutions" provider best known today for their controversial security details deployed in Iraq. According to details of Blackwater's plans made available this facility is to provide military training, weapons and ammunition storage and other related security services for up to 700 people. This is a small facility, though, compared to the 7,000 acre spread that Blackwater uses in North Carolina to train people for their global security services. Who is Blackwater, and where to they fit into the greater scheme of things?

Turn back the hands of time to 1991, when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense under then-President George HW Bush. Annoyed with the "gnats" of Congress and in love with his perceptions of corporate efficiencies he commissions a study to enable the privatization of many military functions, including security, logistical support, construction and other non-combat functions. Within a few short years Cheney found himself CEO of Halliburton, the beneficiary of many such privatization contracts. With a Republican Congress in place the privatization of the military proceeded apace, Blackwater USA being one of several private military contractors specializing in security functions. Interestingly, Erik Prince, one of the founders of Blackwater USA, was the son of a rich industrialist, an intern in George H.W. Bush's White House and a financial supporter of Republican Party causes and candidates, including Gary Bauer and other religious right figures. Cofer Black, Blackwater USA's current vice chairman, was Director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (CTC) at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

This is more than friends helping friends: this is an intertwining of politics, policies, national security and military contracting to a degree unprecedented in the history of America. There have always been close ties between private security agencies and the national government - the Pinkerton's agency in the 19th century held enormous power in many strategic arenas - and in some instances allowing trained combat troops to focus on crucial missions no doubt serves a purpose. But as outlined in a 2004 conference sponsored by former Secretary of State George Schultz' Princeton Project on National Security the goal of these corporate militarists is nothing less than the privatization of the national security of the U.S. Having spent decades shuttling in and out of government service, America's corporate militarists have decided to avoid the onerous burdens of government salaries, government oversight and public records keeping and to create a military that can respond to the interests of global corporations without any fear of reprisal from American citizens - yet paid for in full by the American taxpayers.

The expanding combat role of Blackwater operatives in Iraq and their bloody exploits point to what a private army can do without the moral and legal framework of a government-managed military. Considering themselves above both US law and the law of host countries, units such as Blackwater are designed to serve and to destroy whatever pleases their corporate masters. While the Blackwater West unit planned for Potrero is being positioned ostensibly for contracts to deal with illegal alien incursions, the greater question in light of Blackwater's Iraq support of global oil corporations should be: what do corporations serve to gain by Blackwater's border presence? With billions of dollars of illegal drug traffic passing through this region and plans for corporations to erase the financial borders between the U.S., Canada and Mexico without government oversight it's more likely that the long-term goal of Blackwater in this region will be more to facilitate the dissolution of border enforcement rather to enhance it.

What we are seeing is the creation of a global governmental structure created strictly by, of and for corporate power. With large portions of the US military having become alienated by the blatantly corporate goals of the Iraq invasion and occupation global corporations cannot afford to be stymied by truly patriotic governmental military leaders. Values such as democracy, justice and accountability simply get in their way. If this sounds rather extreme or even impossible to you, let's not forget that this model has already been proven to work for some period of time - in Nazi Germany.

Having recognized that the SA "brownshirts" of the early Nazi movement had questionable loyalties Adolph Hitler supported the creation of the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the Schutzstaffel, Hitler's most loyal forces. Bypassing both the SA and the traditional German military elite, the SS was Hitler's most terrifying military force in Hitler's rise to power and WWII. Initially, like Blackwater, the SS were supposed to be just security and paramilitary forces, but their ability to bypass established military commands at the will of Hitler and his operatives made them the most dangerous and sadistic elements of Hitler's death machine - including their institution of concentration work camps that oversaw the deaths of millions of people in Germany and Poland.

While it's unclear that Blackwater is ready to undertake similar roles any time soon, it's clear that they are operating with little control from the US military and having very close political ties to the Bush administration. It's also interesting to note that George W Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was at one point in charge of German industrial operations that used concentration camp labor, camps that were managed by the SS. Could there be in the Bush dynasty an inherent belief that Hitler's methods were sound and worthy of emulation for building up a base of power that is beyond the control of a democratic government and dedicated to the goals of an elite focused on global domination and engorging themselves at the expense of most people's misery?

Obviously we lack many details to answer such a question authoritatively at this time. But it's worth noting that with the continuing string of global and domestic security crises, some of which many would argue were staged specifically to intimidate and wear down the will of a free people, American democracy and the people willing to defend it are being whittled away day by day. The efforts of Hitler's SS were judged to be criminal at the end of World War II: some would say that there is ample evidence of rampant criminal activity in our current private military contracting schemes, evidence that is being compiled and examined by the government today. Let's hope that any real or potential corruption and questionable management can be rooted out of Blackwater USA and other similar private military organizations as soon as possible. Keep alert to the current and potential dangers of military privatization. We need to have a military whose loyalties are first and foremost to the Constitution of the United States of America - that "piece of paper" that is our only frail and venerable hope for a sane and safe America.

President Bush, Press Conference 10/17/2004:

But this -- we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.

Preview of the 60 Minutes interview with Valerie Plame Wilson, October 18, 2007

Plame Wilson's 20 years at the CIA put her in touch with many individuals with whom she linked up secretly while pursuing intelligence on her mission to keep rogue nations from obtaining nuclear weapons. Did she ever hear if any of these individuals suffered because of the leak of her identity? "Yes I have. That's all I can say," she tells Couric, who then asks if it was bad news. "I have heard -- I have had some news," she replies.

Think Progress, 10/20/2007

Plame's CIA job was to stop Iran from obtaining nukes.

In her first interview since Bush administration officials outed her as a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson reveals to CBS 60 Minutes that she was involved in preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In the interview to be aired this Sunday, CBS reports that she was "involved in one highly classified mission to deliver fake nuclear weapons blueprints to Tehran."

Transcript:

KATIE COURIC: This Sunday on 60 Minutes, Valerie Plame Wilson gives her first interview since top Bush administration officials exposed her role as an undercover CIA agent four years ago. CBS News has learned she was involved in operations to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In the interview, we talked about what it meant to have her identity revealed.

[BEGIN 60 MINUTES CLIP]

COURIC: What went through your mind when you saw your name in print?

PLAME: Oh, it was horrifying, absolutely horrifying.

COURIC: She served 20 years in the CIA, many undercover in the agency's counterproliferation division, rising to top positions and confronting one of the most ominous threats of our time.

PLAME: Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons.

COURIC: When senior administration officials leaked her name to reporters, they may have exposed other spies and damaged operations targeting Iran. CBS News has learned that she was involved in one highly classified mission to deliver fake nuclear weapons blueprints to Tehran. It was called Operation Merlin, and it was first revealed in a book by investigative reporter James Risen.

COURIC: Are you familiar with that?

PLAME: I don't think I can tell you.

COURIC: He said the idea was to give the Iranians blueprints for the bomb that were seriously flawed to set them back. Does that sound like something the counter-proliferation division would do?

PLAME: I think I can say it sounds like a good idea.

COURIC: Were you surprised to read about Operation Merlin in the press?

PLAME: Indeed.

COURIC: Is that problematic for the CIA?

PLAME: Leaks are always bad news.

COURIC: She should know, revealing for the first time that the leak of her name had serious repercussions.

PLAME: I can tell you all the intelligence services in the world were running my name through their databases to see did anyone by this name come in the country? When? Do we know anything about it? Where did she stay? Who did she see?

COURIC: And what would be the ramifications of that?

PLAME: Well, it was very serious. It puts in danger, if not shuts down, the operations that I had worked on.

The Raw Story, "Outed CIA officer was working on Iran, intelligence sources say," February 13, 2006:

[...] While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan's nuclear "father," A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.

[...]Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame's work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in "severe" damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA's ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.

[...]Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.

Several intelligence officials described the damage in terms of how long it would take for the agency to recover. According to their own assessment, the CIA would be impaired for up to "ten years" in its capacity to adequately monitor nuclear proliferation on the level of efficiency and accuracy it had prior to the White House leak of Plame Wilson's identity.

Three points:

1. Double check the date on that last set of quotes. The article was written over 18 months ago, in February of 2006. Even before then - but especially since - we've been hearing the ever loudening beat of the war drums as Bush and the neocons. Yet, no candidate, political activist group, op-ed commentators or major bloggers have either paid attention to the heinously hypocritical stance of Bush and the neocons, or - if they have paid it any attention - they've been unable to get this story the kind of attention it deserves.
2. Bush's comment during the press conference apparently means that he's not intrested in preventing World War III since he obviously doesn't give a damn about preventing the Iranians to get a hold of the knowledge necessary to make an atomic weapon.
3. Some politician - preferably a Democratic Presidential front runner - or some pundit (I'm looking your way, Mr. Olbermann!) needs to start making a regular practice of making a big deal of bringing up Bush's comments about preventing World War III by keeping Iran from getting the knowledge to make nuclear weapons, followed by Mrs. Plame Wilson's comments that her work as part of the CIA's counterproliferation team was to prevent Iran from getting the knowledge to make nuclear weapons, and that damage to our ability to do just that, has - as a direct result of her being outed as a CIA agent to punish her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson - been severely damaged.

Tens of thousands of Medicare recipients have been victims of deceptive sales tactics and had claims improperly denied by private insurers that run the system's huge new drug benefit program and offer other private insurance options encouraged by the Bush administration, a review of scores of federal audits has found.

The problems, described in 91 audit reports reviewed by The New York Times, include the improper termination of coverage for people with H.I.V. and AIDS, huge backlogs of claims and complaints, and a failure to answer telephone calls from consumers, doctors and drugstores.

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,--very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. - Thomas Carlyle 1840

The democracies of the west and the great human project of freedom and respect for life, which began with the enlightenment, depend upon individuals having access to good information about the actions of their governments. If information is curtailed by censorship and manipulated by propaganda then no one can vote in their own best interest and democracy becomes a sham. Governments can exercise power unchecked by either the prospect of losing a future election or even the ability of the people to march and protest and demand change.

Every illegitimate government understands this and is frightened of its own people. In Burma the generals closed down six of the seven newspapers which existed before their coup and heavily censor the remaining one. During the recent protests they repeatedly severed internet connection to that country. More importantly SLORC conducts a campaign of misinformation and propaganda, and plants spies and agent provocateurs in what has become a land of Orwellian doublespeak.

Such cautionary tales highlight the importance of something we take for granted - that the mainstream media (MSM) accurately reflects the truth about our government and about the world. Or rather, that it at least gives us enough information that with a bit of reading between the lines an intelligent person has a clear picture of what is going on.

So is this confidence justified in the case of Rupert Murdoch's media empire?

Fox News is a contentious example, of course, but I'm not interested in bias. (By the way I've also not seen Outfoxed) That's not to say that the editorial slant a news organisation takes is not important, but there's a difference between that and failing to report certain information which might reflect badly on government policy, or even worse lying about events or reporting false information. In this article I want to see whether there is systematic censorship, misinformation, or propaganda. I take that last to mean reporting things which may or may not be true for the purpose of engendering a particular action or psychological response in the public. Because if influential parts of the MSM engage in these practises then we do not have the fourth estate we need so as to allow a functioning democracy.

Murdoch is a big target, and there have been quite a few questions raised, big and small.

• Chris Patton, former governor of Hong Kong, had his book East and West dropped by publisher HarperCollins because the content offended Beijing. Murdoch, who has business interests in China, suspended the editor in charge of the manuscript (Stuart Proffitt) when he refused requests to end the project. HarperCollins was later forced to pay compensation and issue an apology.
• MySpace began automatically deleting links and even discussion about YouTube in 2006, but was forced to end this policy when a revolt began amongst users.
• A popular blogger, Tim Dunlop, writing for one Murdoch paper in Australia, had columns critical of another Murdoch owned paper deleted from the site. This has happened to other respected journalists employed by Murdoch papers including Margo Kingston. It's hard to get clear examples from the newspapers or the television news because editors act as gatekeepers to publication.
• Mr Gay, a United Church Minister employed as a religious columnist for the Times in London, resigned after a dispute with his editor over an opinion piece he wrote critical of Murdoch's monopolistic practices.

There's little doubt that Murdoch is a 'hands on' media owner. Harold Evans, the outgoing editor of The Times in London had this to say:

[Murdoch guaranteed that] "the editors would have control of the political policy of their newspapers" [and] "not be subject to instruction from either the proprietor or management on the selection and balance of news and opinion." [however] "In my year as editor of the Times, Murdoch broke all these guarantees"

It's telling that Evans mentions selection as well as balance of news. Other editors have been more charitable. This may be because Murdoch is one of the major employers in the industry, but it's more likely because he chooses editors who share his politics unprompted and are respectful of his business interests. Andrew Neil puts it this way:

He is quite interventionist but he gives more latitude to his quality newspapers than his tabloids. He realizes for quality newspapers you can't just hire people you boss around. To survive, you have to be on the same planet as Rupert but you don't have to be on the same continent.

So let's take this more limited view of Murdoch's direct influence. It's effects are nevertheless far reaching, for reasons which become obvious when the psychology of the editor's job is considered. Murdoch will clearly pick up the phone when his personal or business interests are threatened by a story. He expects these interests to be put ahead of the newsworthiness of the story, as is shown by the Patton case, and ahead of the sales implications for any particular business, as is shown by both the Patton and Dunlop examples. So without ever having to lean on an editor Murdoch's shadow looms large over each of his publications. How much does anyone want to offend their employer? How much less when your contract is up for renewal in a year or two and that same employer owns a lot of the other media in town?

This relates to editorial slant and choice of story. Here is Margo Kingston again, talking about Australia's media culture, and Fairfax, one of it's biggest newspaper groups:

In my twenty years in journalism, I have witnessed the decay and near annihilation of a strong, confident journalistic culture in Fairfax based on scepticism of the powerful and sustained scrutiny of the actions of the powerful and the underlying reasons for those actions whatever their political colour business type. I have seen public debate degenerate into endless name calling by scream, and a systematic play by neo-liberals and their henchmen paid to win the ideological battle to dismember any sense of shared values or common cause in shaping our future. It is in the interests of those who would control us for their profit and power to do so. I have seen the disintegration of the concept of "public interest" in the big issues of our time political, economic, social and personal. Instead, fear and 'us and them' rules, deliberately designed, it seems to me, to compel people to serve only their individual, short term interests because no one else will give a damn if they fall over.

Margo is biased, of course. She's a long standing and well respected journalist but she's left-of-centre in a country moving rapidly to the right. She addresses the question of whether the media properly performs its role as the Fourth Estate, but not whether it becomes a tool of oppression. Does the situation ever reach the level of outright censorship, misinformation, or propaganda?

A leaked document showing that British MI6 believed the Bush administration manipulated intelligence in support of the case for war against Iraq surfaced in 2005. Mediamatters looked at coverage of the story:

In the five weeks following its disclosure, both newspapers and the broadcast media in the United States largely ignored the Downing Street memo, a secret British intelligence document indicating that British intelligence officials believed the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to support its case for war in Iraq.

News coverage of the memo exploded after Bush and Blair were asked about it during their June 7 joint press conference. Numerous stories reported Bush's and Blair's denials of the memo's central allegations -- that the United States had decided to go to war as early as July 2002 and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" -- but only one included new reporting about the content of the memo and the events surrounding its creation in July 2002.

Of the papers covering the Downing Street memo following the Sunday Times and the Knight Ridder stories, Media Matters identified only three -- the May 12 Los Angeles Times, the May 13 Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the June 12 Philadelphia Inquirer -- that provided new information concerning the memo's content, authenticity, or events surrounding its creation. Of these, only the Los Angeles Times' story reflected any effort to consult with British sources -- with Michael Smith, the Sunday Times reporter who broke the original story.

Because it's not usually censorship. That would be impossible without taking Burma's approach and "accidentally" cutting off internet access. Once an important story gets into the news, it does get reported. It rarely gets investigated and until it's "out there" it may be either ignored or relegated to the back pages. Paul Krugman points out that in the first quarter of 2007 Fox News devoted only 6% of their time to the Iraq war compared with around 20% at MSNBC and CNN. In contrast 17% of the Fox's bulletins in that period were about a large-busted actress who died of a drug overdose. As for misinformation, he puts it like this:

Now, Mr. Murdochs people rarely make flatly false claims. Instead, they usually convey misinformation through innuendo. During the early months of the Iraq occupation, for example, Fox gave breathless coverage to each report of possible W.M.D.s, with little or no coverage of the subsequent discovery that it was a false alarm. No wonder, then, that many Fox viewers got the impression that W.M.D.s had been found.

That's the thing about democracies. You don't have to fool all the people all the time, you only have to fool most of the people around election time. There are dissenting voices out there. So long as they are sidelined by the media as unimportant, and so long as they remain a few voices here and there, they will never shape policy or public discourse. When more people get the truth from the internet than the television, then the MSM will change or simply become irrelevant. Until then it will represent the views of its owners rather than serving the needs of its readers. Not quite propaganda, but close.

And perhaps a bit closer than you'd think. Robert Parry:

[In the] 1980s when the Reagan-Bush administration began collaborating secretly with conservative media tycoons to promote propaganda strategies aimed at the American people. In 1983, a plan, hatched by CIA Director William J. Casey, called for raising private money to sell the administrations Central American policies to the American public through an outreach program designed to look independent but which was secretly managed by Reagan-Bush officials.

The project was implemented by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who had been moved to the National Security Council staff and put in charge of a perception management campaign that had both international and domestic objectives. In one initiative, Raymond arranged to have Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch chip in money for ostensibly private groups that would back Reagan-Bush policies. [...]

At the time, a Reagan-Bush National Security Council official told me that the administrations domestic propaganda campaign was modeled after CIA psychological operations abroad where information is manipulated to bring a population into line with a desired political position. They were trying to manipulate [U.S.] public opinion using the tools of Walt Raymonds tradecraft which he learned from his career in the CIA covert operations shop, the official said.

The question is, are we being set up for another round of the same? Here is the New Yorker Magazine from August 31 this year.

They [the sources institution] have instructions (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained.

Honestly, I don't know if this is possible. I wish I could sincerely believe that it was impossible, however, and it clearly is not.

This article is written in part to address the Ideas for Peace group's topic on "Transparency and truth in politics".

Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.

While incomes have been on the rise since 2002, the average income in 2005 was $55,238, still nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, analysis of new tax statistics show.

The combined income of all Americans in 2005 was slightly larger than it was in 2000, but because more people were dividing up the national income pie, the average remained smaller. Total adjusted gross income in 2005 was $7.43 billion, up 3.1 percent from 2000 and 5.8 percent from 2004.

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

By SCOTT SHANE, DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
Published: October 4, 2007

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on "combined effects" over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion's overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be "ashamed" when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush's second term and Mr. Gonzales's tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, "We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law" and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was "a place of inspiration" that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney's counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department's independence.

The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office's tradition of avoiding political advocacy."

Saddam Hussein offered to step down and go into exile one month before the invasion of Iraq, it was claimed last night.
Fearing defeat, Saddam was prepared to go peacefully in return for £500million ($1billion).
The extraordinary offer was revealed yesterday in a transcript of talks in February 2003 between George Bush and the then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar at the President's Texas ranch.
The White House refused to comment on the report last night.

President Bush on Saturday signed a bill to prevent a government shutdown, but not without complaint. Bush lambasted the Democrats who control Congress for sending him the stopgap measure while they continue to work on more than a dozen spending bills funding the day-to-day operations of 15 Cabinet departments.

"Congress failed in its most basic responsibility," the president said in his weekly radio address.

The bills are tied up because Democrats want to add $23 billion for domestic programs to Bush's $933 billion request for the approximately one-third of the federal budget funded by the yearly spending bills. Bush has threatened vetoes on most of the bills, eager to re-establish his party's reputation as the place to go for fiscal discipline.

The president said Democrats are planning the "biggest tax increase in American history" to pay for the new spending.

"Earlier this year congressional leaders promised to show that they could be responsible with the people's money," he said. "Unfortunately they seem to have chosen the path of higher spending."

Democrats say their spending add-ons are relatively modest given the overall size of the budget and in comparison with Bush's pending $189 billion request for Pentagon operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008. And most of the additional money, Democrats say, simply restores cuts proposed by Bush to popular programs such as community development grants, health research and anti-crime initiatives.

The new fiscal year begins Monday, and something had to be done before then or the government's authority to spend money would run out.

While calling this situation "disappointing," Bush extended a bit of an olive branch to Congress. He expressed his thanks that lawmakers passed a clean temporary measure with no new spending or policies, and that the measure does the same for a popular health insurance program covering children from low-income families. That program also is the subject of veto showdown between the president and the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill.

The stopgap spending bill will keep Cabinet departments running at current levels through mid-November, extend financing for the children's insurance program, and dip deeply into a $70 billion fund for Pentagon operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Such stopgap funding bills are routine and have been needed every year since 1994. But for the first time in five years, not one of the 12 annual appropriations bills have become law by the Oct. 1 deadline.

The children's insurance program now covers 6.6 million children from modest-income families not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Democrats, with significant support from Republicans, want to expand it. Their plan would add $35 billion, funded by new tobacco taxes.

Analysts say the legislation would allow about 4 million of the estimated 9 million uninsured children in the United States gain coverage.

Democrats enlisted a 12-year-old boy to promote the program during the party's weekly radio address Saturday.

Graeme Frost, of Baltimore, suffered severe brain damage in a car accident three years ago. He said the children's insurance program allowed him to get the medical help he needed.

"I just hope the president will listen to my story and help other kids be as lucky as me," Graeme said.

Bush wants a $5 billion increase in the program, and took a fresh dig at the Democrats on the issue.

"Congressional leaders have put forward an irresponsible plan that would dramatically expand this program beyond its original intent," he said. "And they know I will veto it."

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 (IPS) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon took the industrialised countries to task here Monday for their failure to take drastic actions against climate change.

"Fifteen years have passed since the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was finalised," he told an international gathering of heads of state. "Yet, the industrialised country emissions are (still) rising."

Noting that their per capita level of carbon emissions remains "unacceptably high", he urged industrialised nations to assume an "enhanced" leadership role in tackling climate change and to support poor countries in expanding the use of clean energy.

Ban, who sees climate change as "a serious threat to development", convened the meeting of the heads of state Monday amid hopes that it might help produce meaningful results at the next round of global talks climate change agreement in Bali, Indonesia, due in December.

Not surprisingly, U.S. President George W. Bush decided not to attend the one-day conference, although his country is known to be the largest polluter of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.

In criticising industrialised nations for their relative inaction on emission cuts, Ban did not specifically mention the U.S. role, but in a veiled reference to Washington's isolationist approach and its reluctance to join global efforts, he did express his sense of disapproval.

"Given the nature and magnitude of the challenge, national action is insufficient," Ban said. "No nation can address this challenge alone. No region can insulate itself from climate change."

Last month, just before leaving for August recess, Congress caved to White House pressure and passed a revision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), known as the Protect America Act, which "they may not have fully understood" and "may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought." Due to ambiguous language, the new legislation may allow, without court approval, certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans' business records. Additionally, the legislation trampled warrant requirements by broadly redefining "electronic surveillance" while shifting significant oversight responsibility for the surveillance from the FISA court to the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence.

Perhaps one of the real benefits of my wee hours babysitting chores is my unrestricted access to the C-SPAN rebroadcast of Committee Hearings. This morning I watched a doosey - The House Committee on Homeland Security . You can link to the video on this page.

Beginning in October 2007 the Department of Homeland Security will open a new office called the National Applications Office (NAO) charged with civil/domestic intelligence gathering.

This new division of Homeland Security was conceived entirely by the Executive Branch, with no Congressional input, and will serve as a clearinghouse for requests to access the data provided by military spy satellites, with a resolution of inches, to view the territorial United States. During the hearing Charles Allen, Assistant Secretary for Intelligence & Analysis told Chairman Bennie Thompson that their legal and civil rights oversite concerns were misplaced.

The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call and e-mail patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their "community of interest" — the network of people that the target in turn was in contact with. The bureau recently stopped the practice in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said Friday after being asked about it.

The community of interest data sought by the F.B.I. is central to a data-mining technique intelligence officials call link analysis. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American counterterrorism officials have turned more frequently to the technique, using communications patterns and other data to identify suspects who may not have any other known links to extremists.

The concept has strong government proponents who see it as a vital tool in predicting and preventing attacks, and it is also thought to have helped the National Security Agency identify targets for its domestic eavesdropping program. But privacy advocates, civil rights leaders and even some counterterrorism officials warn that link analysis can be misused to establish tenuous links to people who have no real connection to terrorism but may be drawn into an investigation nonetheless.

Typically, community of interest data might include an analysis of which people the targets called most frequently, how long they generally talked and at what times of day, sudden fluctuations in activity, geographic regions that were called, and other data, law enforcement and industry officials said.

The F.B.I. declined to say exactly what data had been turned over. It was limited to people, phone numbers and e-mail "once removed" from the actual target of the national security letters, said a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a continuing review by the Justice Department.

The scope of the demands for information could be seen, for instance, in an August 2005 letter seeking the call records for particular phone numbers that had come under suspicion. The letter closed by saying: "Additionally, please provide a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list."

The requests for such data showed up a dozen times, using nearly identical language, in records from one six-month period in 2005 obtained by a nonprofit advocacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it brought against the government. The F.B.I. recently turned over 2,500 pages of documents to the group. The boilerplate language suggests the requests may have been used in many of more than 700 emergency or "exigent" national security letters. Earlier this year, the bureau banned the use of the exigent letters because they had never been authorized by law.

It is worth noting that Buchanan was Nixon's speech writer and longstanding Washington conservative who is saying this, not some wild eyed "liberal" who "hates" the GOP.

Those who hoped that — with the victory of the antiwar party in 2006, the departure of Rumsfeld and the neocons from the Pentagon, the rise of Condi and the eclipse of Cheney — America was headed out of Iraq got a rude awakening. They are about to get another.

Today, the United States has 30,000 more troops in Iraq than on the day America repudiated the Bush war policy and voted the GOP out of power. And President Bush, self-confidence surging, is now employing against Iran a bellicosity redolent of the days just prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

What gives Bush his new cockiness? The total collapse of the antiwar coalition on Capitol Hill and the breaking of the Congress.

Last spring, Bush vetoed the congressional deadlines for troop withdrawals, then rubbed Congress' nose in its defeat by demanding and getting $100 billion to support the surge and continue the war.

Before the August recess, Democrats broke again and voted to give Bush the warrantless wiretap authority many among them had said was an unconstitutional and impeachable usurpation of power. They are a broken and frightened lot.

Comes now evidence congressional Democrats have not only lost the pro-victory vote, but forfeited the peace vote, as well.

According to a Zogby poll the last week in August, just two weeks before Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker report, Americans, by 45 percent to 20 percent, give this Democratic Congress lower grades on handling the war than the Republican Congress it replaced.

Fifty-four percent of the nation believes, contra Harry Reid, the war is not lost. That is twice the support that Bush enjoys for his war leadership, a paltry 27 percent. But, by nine to one, Bush's leadership on the war is preferred to that of the Congress of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Incredibly, only 3 percent of the nation gives Congress a positive rating on its handling of the war. Congress has lost the hawks, and the owls, and the doves. No one trusts its leadership on the war.

And George W. smells it. He no longer fears the power of Congress, and his rhetoric suggests he is contemptuous of it. He is brimming with self-assurance that he can break any Democratic attempt to impose deadlines for troop withdrawal and force Congress to cough up all the funds he demands.

Confident of victory this fall on the Hill, Bush is now moving into Phase III in his War on Terror: First, Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Iran.

Do not take this writer's word for it. Hearken to the astonishing rhetoric Bush used at the American Legion Convention in Las Vegas against Tehran:

ADRIAN HAMILTON

One explanation for President Bush's rant against Iran last week, following his extraordinary speech comparing Iraq with Vietnam the week before, is that the pressure is finally getting to him. Presidential history, from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan by way of FDR, is replete with presidents who on grounds of failing powers shouldn't really have been allowed to go on. Besieged by events, cast down by the opinion polls, isolated by the loss of his closest advisers, it would not be surprising if this particular president was now losing it.

It's unnerving for the rest of the world, of course, as Bush's finger is still on the nuclear button, raising the terrifying prospect that his vision of nuclear holocaust in the Middle East could be set off not by Tehran but the U.S. president himself launching an attack on Iran, which then involved Israel with all its nuclear weaponry. It's unlikely, I know, but it's not something that can absolutely be ruled out, given the way the White House is now ramping up the confrontation with Iran.

The more likely explanation for Bush's increasingly apocalyptic tone, however, is in some ways more worrying. It is that all eyes in Washington are now exclusively directed to the domestic audience with the added sting that the White House is under the control of a president who does not need to seek re-election and has the will to go down like a western hero, all guns blazing.

Raising the specter of Vietnam to an audience of veterans as Bush did clothes him in a patriotic flag, alongside those on the right who have always believed that Vietnam was a self-inflicted defeat, not a disastrous war from the start.

When you bring in Iran, you enter even more fertile territory for a president trying to paint himself as a lone ranger and paint his opponents into a corner. There may be few in the U.S., and even fewer now in Congress, who want the U.S. to launch a new Middle East invasion after the disaster of the last, but most Americans believe Iran is a threat to world peace, intent on developing nuclear weapons and ripe for regime change. Playing the Iran card wrong-foots your opponents (look at the problems Barack Obama got into when he urged direct talks with Tehran) and (theoretically) garners domestic support in reaction to foreign threat.

As Congress prepares to receive reports on Iraq from General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and readies for a debate on George W. Bush's latest funding request of $50 billion for the Iraq war, the performance of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has become a central and contentious issue. But according to the working draft of a secret document prepared by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, the Maliki government has failed in one significant area: corruption. Maliki's government is "not capable of even rudimentary enforcement of anticorruption laws," the report says, and, perhaps worse, the report notes that Maliki's office has impeded investigations of fraud and crime within the government.

The draft--over 70 pages long--was obtained by The Nation, and it reviews the work (or attempted work) of the Commission on Public Integrity (CPI), an independent Iraqi institution, and other anticorruption agencies within the Iraqi government. Labeled "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED/Not for distribution to personnel outside of the US Embassy in Baghdad," the study details a situation in which there is little, if any, prosecution of government theft and sleaze. Moreover, it concludes that corruption is "the norm in many ministries."

The report depicts the Iraqi government as riddled with corruption and criminals--and beyond the reach of anticorruption investigators. It also maintains that the extensive corruption within the Iraqi government has strategic consequences by decreasing public support for the U.S.-backed government and by providing a source of funding for Iraqi insurgents and militias.

The report, which was drafted by a team of U.S. embassy officials, surveys the various Iraqi ministries. "The Ministry of Interior is seen by Iraqis as untouchable by the anticorruption enforcement infrastructure of Iraq," it says. "Corruption investigations in Ministry of Defense are judged to be ineffectual." The study reports that the Ministry of Trade is "widely recognized as a troubled ministry" and that of 196 corruption complaints involving this ministry merely eight have made it to court, with only one person convicted.

The Ministry of Health, according to the report, "is a sore point; corruption is actually affecting its ability to deliver services and threatens the support of the government." Investigations involving the Ministry of Oil have been manipulated, the study says, and the "CPI and the [Inspector General of the ministry] are completely ill-equipped to handle oil theft cases." There is no accurate accounting of oil production and transportation within the ministry, the report explains, because organized crime groups are stealing oil "for the benefit of militias/insurgents, corrupt public officials and foreign buyers."

And so he is back from his annual surprise gratuitous photo-op in Iraq, and what a sorry spectacle it was. But it was nothing compared to the spectacle of one unfiltered, unguarded, horrifying quotation in the new biography to which Mr. Bush has consented.

As he deceived the troops at Al-Asad Air Base yesterday with the tantalizing prospect that some of them might not have to risk being killed and might get to go home, Mr. Bush probably did not know that, with his own words, he had already proved that he had been lying, is lying and will be lying about Iraq.

So claims the Pentagon. Must be true, right? The President says it... hell, McClatchy News Service ran this headline yesterday.... "Combat deaths in Iraq decline; reasons aren't clear." The Chicago Tribune even jumped on the bandwagon yesterday... "U.S. combat deaths drop by HALF during 'surge'." Sweet Jesus... thats the best damn news I've heard in over four years... the only problem is it just ain't true...

I've been taking a hiatus from Newsvine these past three months, but after reading those two articles yesterday, I have to vent somehow... so here I am.

I'm reminded of the 2000 Presidential debates when schrub accused Gore of using "fuzzy math." Well, it don't get much fuzzier than this.
Let's put some perspective on the figures being flaunted by our fearless leaders... First, the whole world runs in cycles. You know, like spring, summer, fall and winter. This affects us all in ways that are hard to explain, but they affect us none the less. The war in Iraq is no exception. Since it began, American deaths have always been lower in the summer months than any other. It's friggin hot there in the summer! Hell, even the Iraq politicians take time off during the summer. Our very own Congress takes August off, after all, it's hot!

Think the war is any different? Think again. As you can see from the graph, deaths fluctuate by seasons... even terrorists are less active when it's hot.
In June 2006, 54 American soldiers were killed in combat (not total deaths, just the combat related ones). In June of this year, during the "surge," we had 89 combat deaths. July last year saw 35 of our troops killed in combat, July this year was 68 combat deaths. August last year claimed 55 lives due to combat. Last month we lost 56.

Now, explain to me how the Pentagon, shrub, or any other idiot can claim that combat deaths have declined.... or as the Chicago tribune claimed, been cut in half... And while your pondering that dilemma, explain to me why the MSM is buying this "fuzzy math" hook line and sinker. Have they learned nothing from the past five years....

Although anyone with a lick of sense has assumed that that report to be made in September would be heavily influenced by the Bush administration, it's confirmed in this article in today's LA Times, titled "Top general may propose pullbacks." The article is full of interesting tidbits about what General Petraeus might or might not recommend in September, the telling portion is located on the second page, here:

Administration and military officials acknowledge that the September report will not show any significant progress on the political benchmarks laid out by Congress. How to deal in the report with the lack of national reconciliation between Iraq's warring sects has created some tension within the White House.

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.

So, the report won't show any significant political progress (even though the stated purpose of Bush's escalation was to "create the conditions" in which political progress could be made), but it will be written by the Bush administration, who will then proceed to interpret the report's data and make determinations regarding further action based on that interpretation. Anyone else see anything wrong with this picture?

BAGHDAD (AP) - Four suicide bombers hit Kurdish Yazidi communities with nearly simultaneous attacks on Tuesday, killing at least 175 people and wounding 200 others, said Iraqi military and local officials in northwest Iraq.

The death toll was the highest in a concerted attack since Nov. 23, when 215 people were killed by mortar fire and five car bombs in Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City.

The bombs tore through the districts near Qahataniya, 75 miles west of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, said Abdul-Rahman al-Shimiri, the top government official in the area, and Iraq army Capt. Mohammed Ahmed.

Rove is leaving, "for the sake of his family."

Rove predicted that Hillary Clinton will be the next President.

We can only wonder what criminal damage control is going on with the passage of the criminal wiretaps, still missing e-mails, Rummy fading with Scooter and Karl hot on their heels on the way out.

It's so soon after Karl skipped out of the charges for the Plame scandal, gee wiz. The old sinking ship theory; soon it will be Dubbya and Barney to heel for Dick.

So why hasn't Iran started by wiping its own Jews off the map?

By Jonathan Cook

08/03/07 "ICH" -- - -- Iran is the new Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler. Or so Israeli officials have been declaring for months as they and their American allies try to persuade the doubters in Washington that an attack on Tehran is essential. And if the latest media reports are to be trusted, it looks like they may again be winning the battle for hearts and minds: Vice-President Dick Cheney is said to be diverting the White House back on track to launch a military strike.

Earlier this year Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's opposition leader and the man who appears to be styling himself scaremonger-in-chief, told us: "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs." Of Ahmadinejad, he said: "He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state."

A few weeks ago, as Israel's military intelligence claimed -- as it has been doing regularly since the early 1990s -- that Iran is only a year or so away from the "point of no return" on developing a nuclear warhead, Netanyahu was at it again. "Iran could be the first undeterrable nuclear power," he warned, adding: "This is a Jewish problem like Hitler was a Jewish problem … The future of the Jewish people depends on the future of Israel."

But Netanyahu has been far from alone in making extravagant claims about a looming genocide from Iran. Israel's new president, Shimon Peres, has compared an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration camp." And the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told a German newspaper last year: "[Ahmadinejad] speaks as Hitler did in his time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation."

There is an interesting problem with selling the "Iran as Nazi Germany" line. If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel's Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave despite repeated enticements from Israel and American Jews?

What is the basis for Israel's dire forecasts -- the ideological scaffolding being erected, presumably, to justify an attack on Iran? Helpfully, as George Bush defended his Iraq policies last month, he reminded us yet again of the menace Iran supposedly poses: it is "threatening to wipe Israel off the map".

This myth has been endlessly recycled since a translating error was made of a speech Ahmadinejad delivered nearly two years ago. Farsi experts have verified that the Iranian president, far from threatening to destroy Israel, was quoting from an earlier speech by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in which he reassured supporters of the Palestinians that "the Zionist regime in Jerusalem" would "vanish from the page of time".

Afghanistan will produce another record poppy harvest this year that cements its status as the world's near-sole supplier of the heroin source, yet a furious debate over how to reverse the trend is stalling proposals to cut the crop, U.S. officials say.

As President Bush prepares for weekend talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, divisions within the U.S. administration and among NATO allies have delayed release of a $475 million counternarcotics program for Afghanistan, where intelligence officials see growing links between drugs and the Taliban, the officials said.

U.N. figures to be released in September are expected to show that Afghanistan's poppy production has risen up to 15 percent since 2006 and that the country now accounts for 95 percent of the world's crop, 3 percentage points more than last year, officials familiar with preliminary statistics told The Associated Press.

But counterdrug proposals by some U.S. officials have met fierce resistance, including boosting the amount of forcible poppy field destruction in provinces that grow the most, officials said. The approach also would link millions of dollars in development aid to benchmarks on eradication; arrests and prosecutions of narcotraders, corrupt officials; and on alternative crop production.

Those ideas represent what proponents call an "enhanced carrot-and-stick approach" to supplement existing anti-drug efforts. They are the focus of the new $475 million program outlined in a 995-page report, the release of which has been postponed twice and may be again delayed due to disagreements, officials said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because parts of the report remain classified.

Counternarcotics agents at the State Department had wanted to release a 123-page summary of the strategy last month and then again last week, but were forced to hold off because of concerns it may not be feasible, the officials said.

Now, even as Bush sees Karzai on Sunday and Monday at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Md., a tentative release date of Aug. 9, timed to follow the meetings, appears in jeopardy. Some in the administration, along with NATO allies Britain and Canada, seek revisions that could delay it until at least Aug. 13, the officials said.

The program represents a 13 percent increase over the $420 million in U.S. counternarcotics aid to Afghanistan last year. It would adopt a bold new approach to "coercive eradication" and set out criteria for local officials to receive development assistance based on their cooperation, the officials said.

Although the existing aid, supplemented mainly by Britain and Canada and supported by the NATO force in Afghanistan, has achieved some results — notably an expected rise in the number of "poppy-free" provinces from six to at least 12 and possibly 16, mainly in the north — production elsewhere has soared, they said.

"Afghanistan is providing close to 95 percent of the world's heroin," the State Department's top counternarcotics official, Tom Schweich, said at a recent conference. "That makes it almost a sole-source supplier" and presents a situation "unique in world history."

Almost all the heroin from Afghanistan makes its way to Europe; most of the heroin in the U.S. comes from Latin America.

Afghanistan last year accounted for 92 percent of global opium production, compared with 70 percent in 2000 and 52 percent a decade earlier. The higher yields in Afghanistan brought world production to a record high of 7,286 tons in 2006, 43 percent more than in 2005.

A State Department inspector general's report released Friday noted that the counternarcotics assistance is dwarfed by the estimated $38 billion "street value" of Afghanistan's poppy crop, if all is converted to heroin, and said eradication goals were "not realistic."

Schweich, an advocate of the now-stalled plan, has argued for more vigorous eradication efforts, particularly in southern Helmand province, responsible for some 80 percent of Afghanistan's poppy production. It is where, he says, growers must be punished for ignoring good-faith appeals to switch to alternative, but less lucrative, crops.

"They need to be dealt with in a more severe way," he said at the conference sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There needs to be a coercive element, that's something we're not going to back away from or shy away from."

But, in fact, many question whether this is the right approach with Afghanistan mired in poverty and in the throes of an insurgency run by the Taliban and residual al-Qaida forces.

Along with Britain, whose troops patrol Helmand, elements in the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, the Defense Department and White House Office of National Drug Control Policy have expressed concern, saying that more raids will drive farmers with no other income to join extremists.

There is also skepticism about the incentives in the new strategy from those who believe development assistance should not be denied to local communities because of poppy growth, officials said.

Opponents argue that the benefits of such aid, new roads and other infrastructure, schools and hospitals, will themselves be powerful tools to combat the narcotrade once constructed.

One U.S. official said the plan was a good one but might take another year or two before it can be effectively introduced.

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On the Net:

White House Office of National Drug Control Policy: http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/

State Department Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs: http://www.state.gov/p/inl/

Audio link to comments on new strategy by acting Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Thomas Schweich at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_events/task,view/id,1350/

U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/index.html