Giuliani vs. Hillary '08!

Giuliani takes first step in presidential bid - Full Story USA Today


WASHINGTON (AP) — Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican moderate who achieved near-mythic popularity for his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks, has taken the first step in a 2008 presidential bid.

The man once dubbed "America's mayor" filed papers Friday in New York to create the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Exploratory Committee Inc. A copy of the document was obtained by The Associated Press.

Building a North American Community - NAU Here we come!

Building a North American Community - CFR Report



Security and Prosperity Partnership Of North America

Department of Homeland Security violated privacy

AP

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted it violated the Privacy Act two years ago by obtaining more commercial data about US airline passengers than it had announced it would.

Seventeen months ago, the government accountability office (GAO), Congress' auditing arm, reached the same conclusion -- the department's transportation security administration (TSA) "did not fully disclose to the public its use of personal information in its fall 2004 privacy notices as required by the Privacy Act."

Even so, in a report on Friday on the testing of TSA's Secure Flight domestic air passenger screening program, the DHS privacy office acknowledged TSA did not comply with the law.

Instead, the privacy office said: "TSA announced one testing program, but conducted an entirely different one."

In a 40-word, separate sentence, the report noted that federal programs that collect personal data that can identify Americans "are required to be announced in Privacy Act system notices and privacy impact assessments."

TSA spokesman Christopher White noted the GAO's earlier conclusions and said: "TSA has already implemented or is in the process of implementing each of the DHS privacy office recommendations."

Friday's report reinforced concerns on Capitol Hill.

"This further documents the cavalier way the Bush administration treats Americans' privacy," said Senator Patrick Leahy, the democrat who is set to become Senate Judiciary Committee chairman next month.

"With this database program, first they ignored the Privacy Act, and now, two years later, they still have a hard time admitting it," he said.

The privacy office said TSA announced in fall 2004 it would acquire passenger name records of people who flew domestically in June 2004. Airline passenger name records include the flyer's name, address, itinerary, form of payment, history of one-way travel, contact phone number, seating location and even requests for special meals.

The public notices said TSA would try to match the passenger names with names on watch lists of terrorists and criminals.

But they also said the passenger records would be compared with unspecified commercial data about Americans in an effort to see if the passenger data was accurate. It assured the public that TSA would not receive commercial data used by contractors to conduct that part of the tests.

But the contractor, EagleForce, used data obtained from commercial data collection companies Acxiom, Insight America and Qsent to fill in missing information in the passenger records and then sent the enhanced records back to TSA on CDs for comparison with watch lists.

Eventually, the three companies supplied EagleForce with 191 million records, though many were duplicates.

This was "contrary to the express statements in the fall privacy notices about the Secure Flight program," the privacy office concluded.

"EagleForce's access to the commercial data amounted to access of the data by TSA," it said.

Somalia's Stability Lies In Ethiopia's Hands

article

As Ethiopian-backed government troops move in to the Somali capital Mogadishu, the anarchic country's fate hangs in the balance and will depend on Ethiopia's post-war strategy.

Ethiopia has said it will withdraw its forces within a few days once its mission - to protect itself and the Somali transitional government from terror attacks - is complete.

In a crisis reminiscent of the US debacle in Iraq, Ethiopia has inserted itself into the conflict with no real plan to return stability to the country it has shaken up over the past week.

The country has definitely proved its military might by sending fighter jets to attack two main airports and sweeping most of the country clear of Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) fighters. But without a clear direction, chaos could ensue.

"As in Iraq, we've seen rapid military success in the early stages but there doesn't seem to be a road map for the post-war phase," said Matt Bryden, a consultant with the International Crisis Group, a Belgium-based conflict analysis think-tank.

"The risk is that if Ethiopia can't consolidate its victory politically, then south Somalia will return to the precarious situation with the same warlordism and anarchy it had in the first place," he said.

Somalia has been without strong central rule since the 1991 ouster of a dictator plunged the country into lawlessness. Clan-based warlords fought ruthless battles against each other for years, until the UIC came to power this year, bringing some sense of security to the Horn of Africa nation.

According to Bryden, Ethiopia has accomplished the goal it set out for itself.

It has effectively dismantled the UIC, with the Islamist group dissolving itself before the arrival of the joint Ethiopian-Somali government troops and others fleeing to southern Somalia, of which the Islamists retain control.

To that end, Ethiopia has ended a proxy war between it and its foe, neighbouring Eritrea, which has been accused of sending arms and fighters to support the UIC militia. Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a brutal 1998-2000 war over a disputed border region, which is now monitored by a UN force.

And while Ethiopia has no real interest in seeing through a political solution to the instability, Bryden said, the consequences could be serious for its administration and its national security if it doesn't.

Jihadists, some with ties to al-Qaeda, are said to have entered the country, and the leader of the UIC, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, is on a UN and US terrorist list.

While UIC forces have been retreating over the last couple of days, the group has threatened to begin a guerrilla war against Ethiopia which could include suicide bombings.

And if Ethiopia has a premature pull-out, the government forces will have a hard time quelling any violence that flares up.

For now, the government is as powerless as it has been since its creation by the international community in 2004. While the joint Ethiopian-government troops effortlessly regained the country from the Islamists, Bryden said the government soldiers were no more than passengers on Ethiopian vehicles.

"There is a risk that the government will be unable to govern and that there will be instability. That risk is very real," Bryden said.

In order to secure the country's future, the same solution that has been suggested for months remains: the government needs to forge a power-sharing agreement with the Hawiyeh clan, which largely made up the UIC and somehow get credible members into the administration.

"If the transitional government could actually stabilize itself than the Iraq trap would be avoided," Bryden said.

With so many futile attempts at doing so, the Ethiopian intervention seems to be a flawed solution to an ongoing crisis.

Saddam Hussein's Baath party threatens to retaliate if their leader is executed

ap

Saddam Hussein's Baath Party threatened Wednesday to retaliate if the ousted Iraqi leader is executed, warning in an Internet posting it would target U.S. interests anywhere.

The statement appeared on a Web site known to represent the Baath, which was disbanded after U.S.-led forces overthrew Saddam in 2003. The site is believed to be run from Yemen, where a number of exiled members of the party are based.

On Tuesday, Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal against a conviction and death sentence for the killing of 148 people who were detained after an attempt to assassinate in Dujail, northern Iraq, in 1982. The court said the former president should be hanged within 30 days.

"Our party warns again of the consequences of executing Mr. President and his comrades," the statement said.

"The Baath and the resistance are determined to retaliate, with all means and everywhere, to harm America and its interests if it commits this crime," the statement added, referring to Baath fighters as "the resistance."

"The American Administration will be held responsible for any harm inflicted on the president because the United States is the decision-maker (in Iraq) and not the puppet Iraqi government."

The statement said that if the execution takes place, it would be impossible for the Baath to take part in any prospective negotiations with U.S. and Iraqi officials to reduce the violence in Iraq.

Saddam's defense lawyers, who are based in Amman, called on Arab governments and the United Nations to intervene to stop the execution.

"Otherwise, all may be participating in what is going on, either actually or due to their silence in face of the crimes, which are being committed in Iraq in the name of democracy," the lawyers said in a statement in English that was e-mailed to The Associated Press bureau.

The statement, signed by "the Defense Committee for President Saddam Hussein," said the court's rejection of Saddam's appeal was part of the "continued shedding of pure Iraqi blood by the current regime in Iraq, which (is) directly connected with the American occupation."

One of Saddam's counsel, Najib al-Nueimi, a former justice minister in the Gulf state of Qatar, said it was now time for Saddam's family to appeal to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

"The defense team has exhausted all the legal channels to appeal this decision, so it is up to the president's family to present an appeal for clemency to the current president, asking him not to sign the execution papers," al-Nueimi said, speaking in a phone interview from Qatar.

Saddam's wife, Sajda, lives in Qatar, and his daughter Raghad, who has supervised his defense team, lives in Amman.

Asked whether the family would appeal to Talabani, al-Nueimi would only say: "It's up to them."

Courts Side With NSA On Wiretaps

new york sun

Defense lawyers who had hoped that the public disclosure a year ago of the National Security Agency's wiretapping program would yield information favorable to their clients are being rebuffed by the federal judiciary, which in a series of unusually consistent rulings has rejected efforts by terrorism suspects to access the records.

In at least 17 criminal cases, federal district judges nominated to the federal bench by presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush have ruled against requests to force the government to tell defendants, most accused of terrorism-related crimes, whether the NSA eavesdropped on them without a court warrant.

The rulings indicate that even as public support for the war in Iraq has eroded in polls and as the NSA program has come under criticism from congressional Democrats, and even some Republicans, federal judges may be a bulwark that the Bush administration can rely on to defer to at least some aspects of its wartime policies.

The judges' decisions have come after defense attorneys filed motions requesting access to relevant surveillance intercepts that the government obtained without a warrant. Defense attorneys claim they are entitled to such information and that evidence obtained from warrantless wiretaps is tainted and inadmissible at trial. In many, but not all instances, the motions were filed after a conviction.

Individually, the judges' orders, often very brief and rarely providing explanations, indicate little. Taken together, however, they signal that the judges are unwilling to permit defense attorneys to use prosecutions to force disclosures about the program.

The legality of the NSA program is being litigated in several civil lawsuits across the country. In one case, a district judge in Detroit, Anna Diggs Taylor, ruled in August that the program was unconstitutional, a decision that the government has appealed. Legal observers dispute whether even a ruling by the Supreme Court that the program is unconstitutional would lead to the overturning of criminal convictions in which the program played a role in securing evidence or targeting the defendants.

In every instance, the Justice Department's policy is to refuse to say publicly whether the NSA program was involved in a case, because denying its role in one case but refusing to deny its role elsewhere could disclose classified information, according to public government court filings. Rather, in response to defense motions, the Justice Department has filed secret documents with the court that are not supplied to defense lawyers.

"There is a veil of secrecy over these parts of the proceedings," said one attorney, Marvin Miller, who filed such a motion on behalf of Ali Asad Chandia, who was convicted in Alexandria, Va., of aiding a terrorist organization in Pakistan.

Defense attorneys say they are frustrated that judges are accepting these secret briefs from the government.

"Whatever the government is saying in these secret ex parte in camera filings, it is sure clamming up a lot of judges," said attorney Jeanne Baker, who represents Adham Amin Hassoun, a co-defendant of "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla.

Speculation abounds among attorneys over just what the Justice Department is saying in the secret briefs.

Some defense attorneys suggest that the government's ex parte briefs may contain a simple yes-or-no answer as to whether a specific defendant was targeted by the NSA program. Another defense attorney, Jill Shellow-Lavine, speculates that the size of the program may prevent the government from stating whether a particular defendant was the subject of the surveillance.

A former Justice Department official says that the government probably declines to give any answers in its secret filings.

"There is no basis to assume than the government is making defendant-specific disclosures," David Rivkin, who served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, said. "The far more likely scenario is that the government is telling the relevant judges that the classified program has nothing to do with this prosecution."

Defense attorneys say the willingness of judges to accept secret briefings puts them in an unfair position.

"It short-circuits the adversary system, and it prevents the issues from being litigated," a lawyer who has filed a motion for disclosure regarding the NSA program, Malick Ghachem, said. "I haven't found a single judge so far who has been willing to take a serious look at this or at least let the defendants know they are taking a serious look at it."

Defense attorneys acknowledge that these motions for disclosure are made routinely, even without any evidence to suggest that their clients were targeted by the NSA program.

Still, even in cases in which the NSA program is believed to have played a role, it is not clear that judges would rule any differently. Officials in the Bush administration have credited the NSA program with helping uncover the terrorist plot of an Ohio truck driver, Iyman Faris, to topple the Brooklyn Bridge, according to a New York Times report. In October a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., Leonie Brinkema, declined Faris's request for government documents about the NSA program's role in the case. Last month, Judge Brinkema upheld Faris's guilty plea from 2003, ruling that Faris did not have standing to bring his challenge even if "electronic surveillance" had first led the government to him.

In only one case has a federal appeals court looked at the relationship of the NSA program to criminal prosecutions. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., in April remanded a separate case to Judge Brinkema, questioning whether the government possessed "undisclosed intercepts" that should have been turned over. The case involved a Muslim cleric, Ali al-Timimi, who was found guilty last year of encouraging Muslims to join the Taliban's war efforts.

Timimi's attorney, Jonathan Turley, said he believes that NSA intercepts may contain exculpatory evidence that could have benefited Timimi, rather than incriminating evidence used to target him.

A court filing by the Justice Department in the case against Lynne Stewart, the New York lawyer who was convicted of criminally helping her terrorist client communicate with his followers, listed 17 criminal cases in which judges have denied motions for disclosure about the NSA program. The New York Sun reviewed 14 of them. In those orders, the judges, excluding Judge Brinkema, did not state any reason for denying the defense motions, except to indicate that they had considered the secret briefs of the government. In one written order, a judge implied that his willingness to sentence a defendant without further hearings was on the condition that the government's secret brief said no evidence came from the NSA program.

Iran has ‘appropriate tools’ to confront Western pressure (Roundup)

m&c news

Tehran - Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani said Wednesday that Iran had the ‘appropriate tools’ to confront Western pressure in the dispute over its nuclear programme.

‘If they (Western countries) think they can put pressure on us, then they should know that other countries also have appropriate tools to confront such pressures,’ said Larijani, who is also secretary of the National Security Council, in remarks reported by ISNA news agency.

Larijani did not evaluate further but Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri- Hamaneh had said Tuesday that Iran would not rule out using oil as a weapon following a recent decision by the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on the Islamic state over its nuclear programmes.

On accelerating work on nuclear programmes as called for in a parliamentary bill approved earlier Wednesday, Larijani said that if Iran’s right to civilian nuclear energy was not recognized, Tehran would continue its work.

‘The IAEA has already been informed of our operations and nothing has been concealed,’ the nuclear chief said referring to Iran’s announcement that it would soon install 3000 centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

The UN resolution was approved because the United States wanted to humiliate Iran, Larijani said, adding that ‘contrary to the US aim, such moves have just made us stronger.’

On the parliament’s nuclear bill, he said the National Security Council had formed a committee to study the course to be taken.

The Iranian parliament unanimously approved a bill on revising cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and to accelerate work on nuclear energy projects.

Detailed evaluation of the issue is to be left however to the National Security Council.

According to the Iranian constitution, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has the final say on all state affairs, including the nuclear issue, and can overrule governmental and parliamentary decisions.

Observers consider the bill as a more a symbolic than a binding gesture as the nuclear issue is regarded in Iran as a ’state matter’, that is decided at the highest level in line with national interests.

The Iranian legislation came after the UN Security Council on December 23 passed a resolution calling on governments to ‘prevent the supply, sale or transfer, directly or indirectly from their territories … of all items, materials, equipment, goods and technology which could contribute to Iran’s enrichment-related, reprocessing or heavy water-related activities, or to the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems.’

Long fuse of dollar crisis will be lit in 2007

Guardian Unlimited Business

In January 1985 the pound was plunging towards one dollar and the British prime minister telephoned her friend President Reagan for support.

Margaret Thatcher may have believed that "you can't buck the market" but when she saw the pound threatening to fall below $1 her eyes did not focus on the greenback. She saw red.

Thanks to a concerted effort by central banks to prop up the British currency, the pound was kept above that politically humiliating level.

The Iron Lady knew a virility symbol when she saw one, and Reagan helped her to preserve it.

There have been no corresponding telephone calls from Tony Blair to George Bush recently as the pound has approached, but not quite reached, $2.

A $2 pound is not an obvious embarrassment to Britain. Indeed, a $2 pound is, superficially (as often happens in the macho world) one hell of a virility symbol - for the UK, that is; not so much for the US.

Financial markets will no doubt quieten down over the holidays, as the key decision-makers take a break - although in the world of the BlackBerry one can never be quite sure.

But 2007 is surely going to be the year when the long fuse of the dollar crisis is finally lit, and people wake up to the implications of the necessary "rebalancing" of the world economy.

Or, rather, to what I suspect may be a very distorted movement in exchange rates which could lead not so much to rebalancing as to a different form of imbalance.

Indeed the beginnings of new distortions are already with us.

Behind the government of Thailand's attempt to impose financial sanctions on inflows of foreign currencies last week lay understandable concern at the impact the falling dollar was having on the Thai baht, which was manifesting the kind of virility referred to above.

A strong currency in fact signifies weakness for the competitiveness of exports, via its impact on prices or profits or both.

For despite all the publicity given to the supposedly low-profile efforts of Washington to induce a serious revaluation of the Chinese yuan, the adjustment promises to be a characteristically long Chinese march.

The yuan remains seriously undervalued, thereby helping to foment protectionist sentiment in the US and elsewhere, while the Japanese yen has been hitting new lows against the euro.

The real pasting of the dollar's recent decline has been taken by the smaller Asian currencies such as the Thai baht.

It is no wonder the Thai government and central bank are worried.

The outcry, and impact on the stock market, have forced them to back-pedal, as if they were outcasts.

Yet the principle of what they were trying to do resembles what the Swiss, those paragons of financial rectitude, were forced to resort to occasionally in the late 1960s and early 1970s - that is, attempting to discourage unwanted inflows via financial disincentives.

Those were in the far off days of the Bretton Woods system. In a speech in Australia Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England repeated his criticisms of the inadequacy of the Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund in circumstances such as these, when the US has been running current balance of payments deficits of more than 3% (and now 7%) since 1999 and "imbalances can apparently persist almost indefinitely".

Mr King's reminders also evoke memories of the 1970s with his point that the combined trade surplus of Opec, thanks to the oil price bonanza (in part caused by Chinese demand) is likely, at some $400bn, to be well over twice the estimated Chinese trade surplus of $150bn this year.

Mr King has also complained about the inadequacy of the Group of Seven, something of which he has first hand experience, since he is one of the G7 central bankers.

He says: "The inability of the G7 to deal with the major spill-over effects in the world economy has become more and more evident.

"Adding new members, even if they were willing to join, is not the answer." (This is an ex cathedra statement; the governor does not say why it is not the answer).

The answer, he tells us, is "to use the IMF as [a] flexible forum to bring the relevant group of countries together to handle issues as and when they arise".

Mr King also argues that the IMF should concentrate on macroeconomic issues and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on micro ones. But this would surely be a pity.

The OECD has a good record at macroeconomic analysis, and Mr King's own criticism of recent IMF macroeconomic analysis (that institution's apparent failure to stress the importance of the impact of Chinese demand on the price of oil) suggests that the continuation of competition in analysis from the OECD might not be a bad thing.

The thing about the G7 (or an expanded version) is that it has, or could have, potential political clout.

The IMF is a collection of bureaucrats, with little political authority.

But it is good that Mr King is stirring up the debate, and it is interesting that some observers believe he sees himself as the natural man to run a beefed up IMF when his term at the Bank of England (as a member of an ineffective G7!) comes to end.

Meanwhile, my bet is that with so many holders of dollars getting worried (they only have to stop accumulating them to cause mayhem in the markets) 2007 is going to be an interesting year for the European Central Bank, as it decides how to cope if the euro, like the Thai baht, but on a much bigger scale, is driven too high for comfort.

It could, to coin a phrase, be "brutal".