Friday, April 04, 2008
Poll: 81 Percent Think US on Wrong Track
NEW YORK (AP) — More than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, according to a new survey.
The CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed 81 percent of respondents said they believed "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." That was up from 69 percent a year ago, and 35 percent in early 2002.
The survey comes as housing turmoil has rocked Wall Street amid an economic downturn. The economy has surpassed the war in Iraq as the dominating issue of the U.S. presidential race, and there is now nearly a national consensus that the United States faces significant problems, the poll found.
A majority of Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school say the United States is headed in the wrong direction, according to the survey, which was published on The New York Times' Web site.
Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was doing better.
The newspaper said Americans are more dissatisfied with the country's direction than at any time since the poll's inception in the early 1990s. Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992. Two in three people said they believed the economy was already in recession.
Still, the approval rating of President George W. Bush did not change since last summer, with 28 percent of respondents saying they approved of the job he was doing.
The poll also found that Americans blame government officials for the housing crisis more than banks or home buyers and other borrowers. Forty percent of respondents said regulators were mostly to blame, while 28 percent named lenders and 14 percent named borrowers.
Americans favored help for people but not for financial institutions in assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis. A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.
Respondents were considerably more open to government help for homeowners at risk of foreclosure. Fifty-three percent said they believed the government should help those whose interest rates were rising, while 41 percent said they opposed such a move.
The nationwide telephone survey of 1,368 adults was conducted from March 28 to April 2. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Economy loses 80,000 jobs
Employers trim jobs for third straight month in March while unemployment jumps to 5.1%, a nearly three-year high.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- U.S. employers slashed jobs on their payrolls for the third straight month in March and unemployment rose to a nearly three-year high, offering the latest signs that the economy has fallen into a recession.
The Labor Department's much anticipated report showed a net loss of 80,000 jobs in the month, marking the longest period of decline since early 2003.
February's loss was revised to 76,000 jobs. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast that payrolls would fall by 50,000 in the latest reading.
The job losses in both January and February were revised sharply higher, adding an additional 67,000 job losses to the previous readings. The Labor Department now estimates that the economy has shed 232,000 jobs in the first three months of this year.
The job losses were widespread, with the battered construction sector losing 51,000 jobs and manufacturing employment falling by 48,000. But there were also losses in key service sector industries. Retail employment dropped by 12,000 jobs, and business and professional service employers cut staff by 35,000.
The unemployment rate jumped from the 4.8% reading in February to 5.1%, the highest level since May 2005. Economists had forecast that unemployment would rise to 5%.
The unemployment rate is based on a separate survey of households, rather than the employer survey that produces the closely watched payroll number.
The household survey gave an even grimmer view of the job losses in the economy, with the number of Americans saying they were unemployed soaring by 434,000, the biggest jump in that reading since October 2001, right after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The job outlook will be a key factor influencing interest rate decisions by the Federal Reserve when it meets on April 29 and 30.
Earlier this week Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made his bleakest and bluntest assessment on the economy's condition. The central bank chief told a joint Congressional committee that a recession is possible in the first half of this year. 
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| Find this article at: http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/04/news/economy/jobs_march/?postversion=2008040409 |
NAFTA Countries to Introduce Simultaneous Legislation to Stop SPP
Dana Gabriel
OpEdNews
April 3, 2008
Elected representatives from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico have agreed to a plan to introduce simultaneous legislation in an effort to stop the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America. This cross border cooperation will go a long way in further exposing the North American Union agenda.
In addition, legislators have agreed to launch a Task Force to renegotiate NAFTA that will be chaired by NDP Trade Critic Peter Julian. It also includes U.S. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the Honourable Yeidckol Polevnsky (Senator of Mexico State and Vice-president of the Mexican Senate) and the Honourable Victor Quintana (Deputy of the State Chihuahua, Mexico). This is all in an effort to overhaul NAFTA and make it a more fair trade deal. Julian will also be working with Kaptur and Mike Michaud (D-ME) to try and defeat the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
Julian said, “The NDP has been campaigning across Canada to expose and stop the SPP. We’ve held over 20 public forums in more than twenty cities and a dozen more are being planned for the spring of 2008. These forums have been held to speak out on the grave concerns surrounding the SPP and to help ensure that Canadians from coast to coast to coast get informed and have their say. This trinational initiative with colleagues from the U.S. and Mexico takes us to a new stage in our fight to stop the SPP.”
Discontent towards NAFTA is festering in Mexico, which has seen huge protests by farmers. Since 1994, one quarter of the rural population of Mexico and two million jobs have left the country. Mexican Senator Polevnsky said, “It is indispensable that legislators from all three North American partner countries work together to design an alternative project that takes into account each nations sovereignty, environmental protection, economic competitiveness, migration, and labor rights.”
With all this talk about renegotiating NAFTA, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins recently acknowledged that he believes that it is too important to do away with or make any dramatic changes to. He pointed to the fact that, regardless who wins the American presidential election, NAFTA will stand. The SPP is an expansion of NAFTA, and is essentially the framework for a North American Union. On the heels of the next SPP Leader Summit that will be held in New Orleans on April 21 and 22, opposition towards a North American Union is growing in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico.
The citizens of all three NAFTA countries must demand more transparency in regards to the SPP. Some believe that it might be better to scrap NAFTA and just start from scratch. The reality remains the same - in a North American Union, Canada, the U.S., and Mexico would cease to exist as sovereign nations. This is a decision that should not be left up to corporate elites, bureaucrats or politicians, but to the will of the people.
Individual bankruptcy filings up 27%
CNNMoney
April 3, 2008
NEW YORK — The number of individuals filing for bankruptcy surged during the first-quarter as American households struggled to stay on top of debt, according to a report released Wednesday.
The American Bankruptcy Institute said that consumer bankruptcy filings increased 27% nationwide in the first three months of the year, compared with the same period last year. In March alone, 86,165 individuals filed for consumer bankruptcy - a 13% increase over the 76,120 cases filed in February.
“Bankruptcies are rising due to the heavy burden of household debt and growing mortgage problems,” said ABI Executive Director Samuel J. Gerdano. “We expect this trend to continue through 2008.”
Another KBR Rape Case
Karen Houppert
The Nation
April 3, 2008
Editor’s Note: Lisa Smith is a pseudonym used on request. Additional reporting by Te-Ping Chen. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.
Houston
It was an early January morning in 2008 when 42-year-old Lisa Smith*, a paramedic for a defense contractor in southern Iraq, woke up to find her entire room shaking. The shipping container that served as her living quarters was reverberating from nearby rocket attacks, and she was jolted awake to discover an awful reality. “Right then my whole life was turned upside down,” she says.
What follows is the story she told me in a lengthy, painful on-the-record interview, conducted in a lawyer’s office in Houston, Texas, while she was back from Iraq on a brief leave.
That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand–but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.
Over the next few weeks Smith would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp’s military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. “Because then, all of a sudden, if you’ve done exactly what you’ve been instructed not to do–tell somebody–then you’re in danger,” Smith says.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Paul Lectures Bernanke: U.S. Moving Towards Fascism
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, April 3, 2008
The Federal Reserve’s insistence on rewarding its own failures by granting itself new powers was harshly rebuked by Congressman Ron Paul during yesterday’s Joint Economic Committee meeting, as Paul all but accused Ben Bernanke of contributing economicallly to a broader move towards fascism in America.
"There’s a political philosophy that advocates merging together the interests of business and government at the same time with a loss of civil liberties of the people and I’m afraid we’re moving in that direction," said the Congressman, citing warrantless searches, lack of medical, Internet and financial privacy as well as the loss of habeas corpus since 9/11.
"I see….the proposal by the Treasury as a massive move to a lot closer association of business and government," said Paul, adding that a military-industrial complex, a medical-industrial complex and a media-industrial complex were already in place.
Paul was refering to the Treasury Department’s recent proposal to give the Fed, "Broad new authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system," as the New York Times reported.
"We should be regulating the government - when you think of the authority you as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve can do, it really goes unaudited and very little oversight," said Paul, adding that the creation of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets meant that "we had really given up on the Republic, freedom, the marketplace and sound money".
"It looks like this is a massive increase in the combination of government and big business," said the Congressman.
VIDEO: Fmr. Gov. Jesse Ventura on the Alex Jones Show
JonesReport.com | April 2, 2008
The former Minnesota Governor and uniquely-multifaceted icon Jesse Ventura appears on the Alex Jones Show - April 2, 2008.
In this segment, he discusses his thoughts on 9/11 after looking at the evidence in depth.
PART ONE
A Submarine to Fight al-Qaida’s Navy
Robert Scheer
Truthdig
April 3, 2008
A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and soon you’re talking real money. But when it comes to reporting on what the Bush war legacy has cost American taxpayers, the media have been shockingly indifferent to the highest run-up in military spending since World War II. Even the devastating defense spending audit released Monday by the Government Accountability Office documenting the enormous waste in every single U.S. advanced weapons system failed to provoke the outrage it, and five equally scathing previous annual audits, deserved.
This is not about the waste of taxpayer dollars—already pushing a trillion—in funding the Iraq war, which, while reprehensible enough, pales in comparison to the big-ticket military systems purchased in the wake of 9/11. In the horror of that moment, the floodgates were lifted and the peace dividend promised with the end of the Cold War was washed away by a doubling of spending on ultra-complex military equipment originally designed to defeat a Soviet enemy that no longer exists, equipment that has no plausible connection with fighting stateless terrorists. Example: the $81-billion submarine pushed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, presumably to fight al-Qaida’s navy.
That’s the huge scandal the media and politicians from both parties have studiously avoided. But as the GAO’s authoritative audit details, the costs are astronomical. The explosion of spending on expensive weaponry after 9/11 had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks of that day. The high-tech planes and ships commissioned for trillions of dollars to defeat an enemy with no navy, air force or army, and using $3 knives as its weapons arsenal, were gifts to the military-industrial complex that will go on giving for decades to come.
The Iraq war may end someday, but rest assured that major weapons systems, once commissioned, have a life-support system unmatched in any other sector of public spending. Rarely does the plug get pulled on even the most irrelevant and expensive war toy. Not while both Democratic and Republican politicians feed at the same trough, and when so much is at stake in the way of jobs and profit.
Just how expensive and wasteful this is was marked in the GAO’s audit: “Since 2000, the Department of Defense (DOD) has roughly doubled its planned investment in new systems from $790 billion to $1.6 trillion in 2007, but acquisition outcomes in terms of cost and schedule have not improved.” Pentagon cost overruns, always a huge problem, have mushroomed. As the GAO reported, “Total acquisition costs for major defense programs in the fiscal year 2007 portfolio have increased 26 percent from first estimates, compared with 6 percent in 2000.”
I know eyes glaze when government budgets are discussed, but keep in mind that defense spending accounts for more than half of all the federal government’s discretionary spending. In short, funding for all the other stuff we argue about—science research, education, Arabic translators, insuring uninsured children—is minor compared to the waste on these military boondoggles that go unexamined.
Yet nothing else the federal government does involves such waste because we are talking about weapons systems shrouded in secrecy and protected from unwelcome scrutiny by the Teflon coating of “national defense.” Credit the GAO for providing a rare glimpse into the most egregious waste of taxpayer dollars, concluding in its exhaustive, 205-page report:
“Of the 72 programs GAO assessed this year, none of them had proceeded through system development meeting the best-practice standards for mature technologies, stable design, or mature production processes by critical junctures of the program, each of which are essential for achieving planned cost, schedule, and performance outcomes.”
That’s a grade of zero for every major weapons system. Let’s take just one, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a program estimated to be worth $300 billion in sales to its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, the nation’s biggest defense contractor and most generous donor to lobbyists and politicians’ campaigns. The program to build what Lockheed boasts is “the most complex fighter ever built” is also the most expensive, with estimated acquisition costs having increased a whopping $55 billion in just the last three years.
Lockheed need not worry about future profits, because the procurement schedule on this troubled plane has been stretched out to the year 2034. As the GAO says, “currently unproven processes and a lack of flight testing could mean future changes to design and manufacturing processes.” Hey, no problem, Lockheed will just add that to the taxpayer tab. Maybe by 2034, the plane will be ready to go take out Osama bin Laden. Or not.
More remarks on the depopulation of the Green Zone
Missing Links
April 3, 2008
The lead editorial in AlQuds alArabi this morning lists a number of reasons why Bush’s "good-news honeymoon" in Iraq is ending, including the sudden increase in deaths in the statistics for the month of March, the failure of Maliki to weaken the Sadrists, and what the editorialist calls the danger of a split in the Sadrist ranks, with one group devoting itself to combating the occupation forces. Then the editorialist says this:
But the most important phenomenon, which overshadows most of the other developments in Iraq, is the exposure of the Green Zone, the most secure location in Iraq, to daily rocket bombardments, something that has motivated many diplomats and journalists and parliamentarians who went there seeking safety, to flee from the Green Zone to outside of Iraq, following the fall of a large number of injured persons in this attack.
Note that this is a little different from the news reports in AlArab and AlQuds AlArabi itself, which talked about moving to safer locations within Iraq (the AlQuds news report referred to moves by American Embassy people to the big American base at the Baghdad Airport), not moving out of the country altogether.
In any event, the editorialist doesn’t get into the question who is responsible for the rocket and mortar attacks on the Green Zone, but he does note the following:
The Maliki government is now fighting against two fronts: A Shiite resistance front represented by the Sadrist trend, and the Sunni resistance front, grouped around a number of banners, including Islamist and nationalist organizations. And there is AlQaeda among them. What this means is that it [the Maliki government] has suddenly lost its reason for being.
The latter remark meaning: The government not only doesn’t have Sunni support, but now it has forfeited the supposed majority Shiite support that was its reason for being, and instead it now faces a double-barreled resistance, from both sides.
Arab reports on the Green Zone exodus so far:
AlArab on Monday and Tuesday March 31 and April 1, noted here, and here.
AlQuds alArabi front page today Wednesday April 2, noted here.
And this AlQuds AlArabi editorial, also today, noted above.
English language mentions of this, including by those who, in good times, aren’t shy about using their excellent Washington contacts:
Zero
AOL News Networking Website Bans Prison Planet
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
AOL-Time Warner’s popular social networking website Propeller.com has banned submission of all Prison Planet.com material - citing Prison Planet’s "inflammatory" articles about 9/11 as its justification.
We were alerted to the ban by a reader who attempted to submit one of our articles today and sent us the following screenshot.
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AOL-Time Warner’s popular social networking website Propeller.com has banned submission of all Prison Planet.com material - citing Prison Planet’s "inflammatory" articles about 9/11 as its justification.
We were alerted to the ban by a reader who attempted to submit one of our articles today and sent us the following screenshot.
However, Digg and other user-driven information websites like Wikipedia have consistently been caught letting organized armies of trolls "game" their content by voting down or outright deleting legitimate content in an organized manner.
Last year we exposed how perfectly factual, documented and legitimate Wikipedia content such as "Republican sex scandals" was being deep-sixed by an organized army of Neo-Con trolls who also make it their 24/7 mission to delete and unfairly edit content about questions surrounding 9/11 and smear members of the 9/11 truth movement.
Wikipedia also did nothing to prevent government agencies and large corporations literally craft their own reality by altering unfavorable information about themselves.
Digg was embroiled in a controversy last year when it emerged that a "bury brigade" had been afforded privileges over and above normal users to aggressively dictate content on the Digg website, including censoring Ron Paul stories - a ploy that completely contradicts Digg’s claim that it is a "digital democracy".
Under these circumstances, for Propeller.com to claim that alternative news content is being gamed is completely hypocritical.
Propeller.com is ranked at 2,334 by Alexa, putting it well behind Digg in popularity but still bigger than most news websites. As its website states, Propeller.com is part of the AOL Network owned and operated by AOL LLC, a Time-Warner company.
Digg.com banned all Prison Planet material in late 2006 but were forced to withdraw the ban after an outcry.
AOL-Time Warner has previously shut down access to our websites for their Internet subscribers on a whim, claiming they were "hate material" but in most cases quickly restored them after receiving complaints.
We are encouraging readers to e mail Propeller.com’s Director Tom Drapeau at tom@propeller.com and politely remind him that censorship of a legitimate alternative news website that outranks most medium-sized newspapers in traffic is not a sensible policy.
In addition, if "inflammatory" news articles about September 11th are so offensive then why do the majority of Americans doubt the official 9/11 story?
Of course, it’s far likelier that our articles about 9/11 are offensive not to the majority of Propeller.com’s readers, but to the corporate behemoth that is AOL-Time Warner.
States Push Fluoride Programs for Kids
School Fluoride Program: Ensuring a Lasting Smile
The Self-Applied Fluoride and Education Rinsing Program (SAFER) is a preventive serve that has been successfully implemented in many New York State schools for over 20 years. Participating children, age 6 and older, use 10ml or 5ml of 0.2% sodium fluoride solution, to rinse for one minute in the classroom.
Participating children too young to rinse and are in Head Start Programs or kindergarten chew a daily fluoride tablet or use daily fluoride drops for the prevention of tooth decay.
The program targets children who do not have access to community water fluoridation, who do not have access to dental care, who live in rural areas, who live at or below the poverty level. The supplements are free to schools and Head Start Programs that enroll.
School districts or public health professionals interested in the program should contact the department’s Bureau of Dental Health to determine if they qualify.
For more information, contact Elisabeth Whitman, RN, Public Health Program Nurse, Bureau of Dental Health, (518) 474-1961 emw04@health.state.ny.us.
Posted by the New York Department of Health (sic)
Another example:
Chinese Spy 'Slept' In U.S. for 2 Decades
Espionage Network Said to Be Growing
By Joby Warrick and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, April 3, 2008; A01
Prosecutors called Chi Mak the "perfect sleeper agent," though he hardly looked the part. For two decades, the bespectacled Chinese-born engineer lived quietly with his wife in a Los Angeles suburb, buying a house and holding a steady job with a U.S. defense contractor, which rewarded him with promotions and a security clearance. Colleagues remembered him as a hard worker who often took paperwork home at night.
Eventually, Mak's job gave him access to sensitive plans for Navy ships, submarines and weapons. These he secretly copied and sent via courier to China -- fulfilling a mission that U.S. officials say he had been planning since the 1970s.
Mak was sentenced last week to 24 1/2 years in prison by a federal judge who described the lengthy term as a warning to China not to "send agents here to steal America's military secrets." But it may already be too late: According to U.S. intelligence and Justice Department officials, the Mak case represents only a small facet of an intelligence-gathering operation that has long been in place and is growing in size and sophistication.
The Chinese government, in an enterprise that one senior official likened to an "intellectual vacuum cleaner," has deployed a diverse network of professional spies, students, scientists and others to systematically collect U.S. know-how, the officials said. Some are trained in modern electronic techniques for snooping on wireless computer transactions. Others, such as Mak, are technical experts who have been in place for years and have blended into their communities.
"Chi Mak acknowledged that he had been placed in the United States more than 20 years earlier, in order to burrow into the defense-industrial establishment to steal secrets," Joel Brenner, the head of counterintelligence for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview. "It speaks of deep patience," he said, and is part of a pattern.
Other recent prosecutions illustrate the scale of the problem. Mak, whose sentence capped an 18-month criminal probe, was the second U.S. citizen in the past two weeks to stand before a federal judge after being found guilty on espionage-related charges.
On Monday, former Defense Department analyst Gregg W. Bergersen pleaded guilty in Alexandria to charges that he gave classified information on U.S. weapons sales to a businessman who shared the data with a Chinese official.
In March, the Reston company WaveLab pleaded guilty to violating export laws when it shipped militarily sensitive power amplifiers to China, according to court papers. A lawyer for the company said it neglected to get proper licenses and did not engage in "underhanded" behavior.
Dongfan Chung, a Boeing engineer arrested in February for allegedly passing classified space shuttle and rocket documents to Chinese officials, was accused in court documents of responding to orders from Beijing as long ago as 1979 -- making him a second alleged longtime agent.
Yesterday, federal prosecutors in Chicago indicted a software engineer for allegedly stealing business trade secrets and trying to take more than 1,000 paper and electronic documents from a telecommunications company on a one-way trip to China last year.
The cases are among at least a dozen investigations of Chinese espionage that have yielded criminal charges or guilty pleas in the past year. Since 2000, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have launched more than 540 investigations of illegal technology exports to China.
The FBI recently heightened its counterintelligence operations against Chinese activities in the United States after Director Robert S. Mueller III cited "substantial concern" about aggressive attempts to use students, scientists and "front companies" to acquire military secrets.
Recent prosecutions indicate that Chinese agents have infiltrated sensitive military programs pertaining to nuclear missiles, submarine propulsion technology, night-vision capabilities and fighter pilot training -- all of which could help China modernize its programs while developing countermeasures against advanced weapons systems used by the United States and its allies.
"The intelligence services of the People's Republic of China pose a significant threat both to the national security and to the compromise of U.S. critical national assets," said William Carter, an FBI spokesman. "The PRC will remain a significant threat for a long time as they attempt to develop their military capabilities and to develop their economy in order to compete in today's world economy."
While military technology appears to be the top prize, the Chinese effort is also aimed at commercial and industrial technologies, which often are poorly protected, several officials said. "Espionage used to be a problem for the FBI, CIA and military, but now it's a problem for corporations," Brenner said. "It's no longer a cloak-and-dagger thing. It's about computer architecture and the soundness of electronic systems."
Calls placed to the Chinese Embassy in Washington requesting comment on recent spy cases were not returned. But Chinese officials have repeatedly denied that their country is stealing military technology. "We have reiterated many times that allegations that China stole U.S. military secrets are groundless and made out of ulterior motives," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a recent news conference in Beijing, commenting on the Mak case.
But U.S. intelligence and defense officials say China has been able to use technology of U.S. origin in a new generation of advanced naval destroyers and quiet-running, stealthy submarines.
Some of those secrets may have been obtained with the help of Mak, a 67-year-old electrical engineer who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985 along with his wife, Rebecca Chiu Mak. The two settled in Southern California, where Mak eventually accepted a job with Power Paragon, a defense contractor that specialized in advanced naval propulsion technology. In 1996, Mak was given a security clearance at the "secret" level, which gave him access to sensitive engineering details for U.S. ships and submarines.
In 2003, Mak became the subject of an intensive federal investigation that included court-ordered wiretaps, secret property searches and the clandestine installation of a video camera inside his home. Through surveillance, FBI agents discovered that Mak was in the process of copying thousands of pages of technical documents onto computer disks, which he arranged to send to China using his brother and sister-in-law as couriers.
According to court documents, the Maks encrypted the disks to avoid detection and used coded words to arrange a drop-off of the disks to a Chinese intelligence operative. In one phone conversation, the brother, Tai Wang Mak, intimated that he would be traveling with his wife and a third companion he described as his "assistant" -- a reference, prosecutors said, to the disks, hidden in his luggage.
The plan was foiled on Oct. 28, 2005, when agents arrested Tai Wang Mak as he was preparing to board a plane at Los Angeles International Airport. Chi Mak and his wife were arrested at their home the same day.
A key piece of evidence was a to-do list of apparent intelligence targets, written in Chinese script. The note, which had been shredded, was retrieved from Chi Mak's garbage and painstakingly reassembled to reveal what prosecutors said were instructions from Beijing on the kinds of technology Mak should seek to acquire.
Mak, who testified in his defense at his six-week trial, denied he was a spy and said the information he copied was available from nonclassified sources on the Internet. Defense witnesses said that much, if not all, of the documents acquired by Mak were not officially classified, though transmitting them to China was prohibited under U.S. export laws. Mak's attorney, Ronald O. Kaye, said his client was a scapegoat for other U.S. intelligence failures and a "symbol of the government's cold war against the Chinese."
In another recent case, former Northrop Grumman scientist Noshir Gowadia, who helped build the B-2 bomber, was indicted last fall for allegedly sharing cruise missile data with the Chinese government during a half-dozen trips to China. He is scheduled to go on trial in October.
A defense lawyer for Gowadia did not return calls, but Gowadia's family in Hawaii has told local journalists that the charges stem from a misunderstanding.
Robert Clifton Burns, a Washington lawyer who specializes in export cases, said the Chinese acquisition of sophisticated U.S. technology "is fast coming out from under the radar" as authorities crack down on such shipments to foreign powers. But Burns, who closely tracks prosecutions in the area, said the government sometimes overstates the risks of exporting U.S. items.
"People who violate export laws should be thrown in jail, no question about it," Burns said. But he added that there are also people "who would be better addressed by . . . a civil result where they get a small fine."
Post-9/11 Memo Indicates View Around Constitution
Associated Press
Thursday, April 3, 2008; A04
For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration argued that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil did not apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.
That view was expressed in a secret Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration stressed yesterday that it now disavows that view.
The October 2001 memo was written at the White House's request by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel. The37-page memo has not been released.
Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret Justice Department memo, dated March 14, 2003, that discussed the legality of various interrogation techniques. It was released by the Pentagon in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
"Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," the footnote in that memo states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States."
Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Bernanke gloomier about near-term prospects
U.S. economy could even contract in the first half, Fed chief says
Last update: 2:24 p.m. EDT April 2, 2008
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The outlook for U.S. economic growth has worsened since January and the possibility of a recession can't be ruled out, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday.
"It now appears likely that real gross domestic product will not grow much, if at all, over the first half of 2008 and could even contract slightly," Bernanke said in testimony prepared for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.
"Clearly, the U.S. economy is going through a very difficult period," he said. Real GDP measures the value of all final goods and services produced by a country, adjusted for the rate of inflation.
Bernanke clung to the distinction that the "contraction" may not turn into a "recession." But economists said this was exceedingly rare.
The rule of thumb is that a recession is two quarters of negative real GDP growth. But the National Bureau of Economic Research has the formal role of naming a recession and their deliberations are more technical, elaborate, and, consequently, slow.
The financial markets' turmoil is already dampening growth, Bernanke said, leading the central bank to cut its near-term forecast once again. The Fed has been steadily reducing its outlook for growth this year. The current forecast is growth in a range of 1.3% to 2.0% over the four quarters of the year.
In light of the markets' recent turbulence," the uncertainty of this new gloomier forecast is quite high and risks remain to the downside," Bernanke said.
In spite of the Fed's string of interest-rate cuts and extraordinary efforts to push cash out to commercial and investment banks, "financial markets remain under considerable stress," he said.
His statement supports the view that the Fed is not done cutting interest rates. The central bank has lowered its target overnight lending rate to 2.25% from 5.25% last fall, the largest percentage decline on record.
Despite the new forecast, Bernanke's language suggested the U.S. central bank wants to slow down the pace of its rate cuts.
"Much necessary economic and financial adjustment has already taken place, and monetary and fiscal policies are in train that should support a return to growth in the second half of this year and next year," he said.
Bernanke did not back away from the view that the economy would pick up in the second half of this year. Growth could even expand at a faster pace than trend growth in 2009, he said. Trend growth is the rate the economy can grow without fueling inflation pressures. Economists generally put this rate around a 2.75% growth rate.
It is also important what Bernanke did not say.
He failed to repeat the key dovish statement that the FOMC would "act in a timely manner" to support growth.
Another factor arguing for a slower pace of rate cuts is inflation: Bernanke said that rising prices remain a concern.
More importantly, the public seems to be expecting prices to continue to rise in coming months. This has been a key focus of monetary policy. They have said that once consumers expect rising prices to continue, these higher prices tend to stick.
Defense of Bear Stearns bailout
On another important subject, Bernanke defended the Fed and Treasury Department's bailout of Bear Stearns Cos. before the lawmakers. Bernanke disclosed publicly for the first time that Bear Stearns advised the Fed and Treasury on March 13 that its liquidity position had so deteriorated that it would have to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy the next day unless alternative sources of funds become available.
On March 14, the Fed stepped in and effectively put a force field around Bear Stearns' assets, preventing a fire sale. The following weekend, the Treasury and Fed engineered the sale of Bear Stearns to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. , one of the nation's largest institutions.
On March 14, the Fed stepped in and effectively put a force field around Bear Stearns' assets, preventing a fire sale. The following weekend, the Treasury and Fed engineered the sale of Bear Stearns to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. , one of the nation's largest institutions.
Bernanke said the prospect of Bear Stearns having to declare bankruptcy was untenable.
"With financial conditions fragile, the sudden failure of Bear Stearns likely would have led to a chaotic unwinding of positions in those markets and could have severely shaken confidence. The company's failure could also have cast doubt on the financial positions of some of Bear Stearns' thousands of counterparties and perhaps of companies with similar businesses," he said.
The Fed didn't receive any early-warning notice that Bear Stearns was teetering on the brink of collapse until the company disclosed to the government that it would be forced to file for bankruptcy in 24 hours, Bernanke said.
The Fed had relied on the Securities and Exchange Commission's finding that Bear Stearns had adequate capital, he said.
Bernanke said the short notice of possible bankruptcy was not normal.
"Normally, we would have more warning and we would have more time to develop a more effective response," Bernanke said.
The collateral that the Fed accepted from Bear Stearns in return for a $29 billion loan could be sold to recover the full amount of the loan, according to Blackrock Inc. , the asset manager hired by the Fed to control those assets, Bernanke said.
Members of the committee were generally supportive of the Fed and Treasury decision to save Bear Stearns from bankruptcy. But they called for similar help for "Main Street" as opposed to "Wall Street."
Bernanke said the Fed's decision to open its key lending window to investment banks and other steps have helped address some of the strains in financial markets.
Downturn's attendant woes
In his discussion of the economy, Bernanke said the U.S. unemployment rate is likely to rise in coming months as companies cut back their hiring plans.
At the same time, he said, there's been no sign of a bottom in the housing market's downturn, with construction expected to fall further.
Hopes that major trading partners will be able to keep the U.S. economy afloat have faded a bit, as Bernanke said the outlook for foreign economic growth has diminished somewhat in recent months.
Congress could help rescue the housing sector by repairing the mortgage market and not just focusing on keeping existing home loans from going bad, Bernanke said.
"Going forward, for the housing market to recover, it would be helpful for the mortgage markets to be working more effectively and more efficiently," Bernanke said.
The depressed housing market remains at the center of the U.S. economy's current difficulties and some of the "worst problems" are in the mortgage area, Bernanke said.
In particular, the nonconforming segment of the mortgage market "continues to function poorly," he said.
Bernanke also said that reform of Fannie Mae ) and Freddie Mac would be a good step and that these two firms should raise additional capital. FBI Focusing on 'About Four' Suspects in 2001 Anthrax Attacks
Friday, March 28, 2008
WASHINGTON — The FBI has narrowed its focus to "about four" suspects in the 6 1/2-year investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, and at least three of those suspects are linked to the Army’s bioweapons research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, FOX News has learned.
Among the pool of suspects are three scientists — a former deputy commander, a leading anthrax scientist and a microbiologist — linked to the research facility, known as USAMRIID.
The FBI has collected writing samples from the three scientists in an effort to match them to the writer of anthrax-laced letters that were mailed to two U.S. senators and at least two news outlets in the fall of 2001, a law enforcement source confirmed.
The anthrax attacks began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, further alarming a nation already reeling from the deaths of 3,000 Americans. Five people were killed and more than a dozen others were infected by the deadly spores in the fall of 2001.
A leading theory is that the anthrax was stolen from Fort Detrick and then sealed inside the letters. A law enforcement source said the FBI is essentially engaged in a process of elimination.
Much of the early public focus fell on a Fort Detrick scientist named Steven Hatfill, who is suing federal authorities for identifying him as a person of interest. Now the FBI is focusing on other scientists at the facility.
"Fort Detrick is run by the United States Army. It's the most secure biological warfare research center in the United States," a bioterrorism expert told FOX News.
Asked to comment on the likelihood that the anthrax originated at the facility, the expert said:
"It's not suprising, except that it would underscore that there was serious security deficiencies that existed at one time at Fort Detrick — the ability of researchers to smuggle out some type of very sophisticated anthrax weapon and in some quantity. And, nevertheless, it was possible."
In December 2001, an Army commander tried to dispel the possibility of a connection to Fort Detrick by taking the media on a rare tour of the base. The commander said the Army used only liquid anthrax, not powder, for its experiments.
"I would say that it does not come from our stocks, because we do not use that dry material," Maj. Gen. John Parker said. The letters that were mailed to the media and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy all contained powdered anthrax.
But in an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.
"Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared ... to duplicate the letter material," the e-mail reads. "Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, 'But I told the General we didn't make spore powder!'"
Asked for comment, an Army spokeswoman referred all calls to the FBI. The FBI would not comment about the pool of suspects, but a spokeswoman said the investigation clearly remains a priority.
Pentagon Releases Declassified Memo Justifying Harsh Interrogation Tactics
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon made public a now-defunct legal memo that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President Bush's wartime authority trumps any international ban on torture.
The Justice Department memo, dated March 14, 2003, outlines legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al-Qaida and Taliban detainees overseas - so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captives.
Even so, the memo noted, the president's wartime power as commander in chief would not be limited by the U.N. treaties against torture.
"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.
The memo also offered a defense in case any interrogator was charged with violating U.S. or international laws.
"Finally, even if the criminal prohibitions outlined above applied, and an interrogation method might violate those prohibitions, necessity or self-defense could provide justifications for any criminal liability," the memo concluded.
The memo was rescinded in December 2003, a mere nine months after Yoo sent it to the Pentagon's top lawyer, William J. Haynes. Though its existence has been known for years, its release Tuesday marked the first time its contents in full have been made public.
Haynes, the Defense Department's longest-serving general counsel, resigned in late February to return to the private sector. He has been hotly criticized for his role in crafting Bush administration policies for detaining and trying suspected terrorists that some argue led to prisoner abuses at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Yoo's memo became part of a debate among the Pentagon's civilian and military leaders about what interrogation tactics to allow at overseas facilities and whether U.S. troops might face legal problems domestically or in international courts.
Also of concern was whether techniques used by U.S. interrogators might someday be used as justification for harsh treatment of Americans captured by opposing forces.
The Justice Department has opened an internal investigation into whether its top officials improperly authorized or reviewed the CIA's use of waterboarding, which simulates drowning, when interrogating terror suspects. It was unclear whether the Yoo memo, which focuses only on military interrogators, will be part of that inquiry.
The declassified memo was released as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to force the Bush administration to turn over documents about the government's war on terror. The document also was turned over to lawmakers.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said its release "represents an accommodation of Congress' oversight interest in the area of wartime interrogations."
Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's national security project, said Yoo's legal reasoning puts "literally no limit at all to the kinds of interrogation methods that the president can authorize."
"The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority," Jaffer said. "The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did."
The 81-page legal analysis largely centers on whether interrogators can be held responsible for torture if torture is not the intent of the questioning. And it defines torture as the intended sum of a variety of acts, which could include acid scalding, severe mental pain and suffering, threat of imminent death and physical pain resulting in impaired body functions, organ failure or death.
The "definition of torture must be read as a sum of these component parts," the memo said.
The memo also includes past legal defenses of interrogations that Yoo wrote are not considered torture, such as sleep deprivation, hooding detainees and "frog crouching," which forces prisoners to crouch while standing on the tips of their toes.
"This standard permits some physical contact," the memo said. "Employing a shove or slap as part of an interrogation would not run afoul of this standard."
The memo concludes that foreign enemy combatants held overseas do not have defendants' rights or protections from cruel and unusual punishment that U.S. citizens have under the Constitution. It also says that Congress "cannot interfere with the president's exercise of his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war."
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the memo "reflects the expansive view of executive power that has been the hallmark of this administration." He called for its release four months ago.
"It is no wonder that this memo ... could not withstand scrutiny and had to be withdrawn," said Leahy, D-Vt. "This memo seeks to find ways to avoid legal restrictions and accountability on torture and threatens our country's status as a beacon of human rights around the world."
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Arlen Specter Discusses Able Danger, the Anthrax Attacks and the Patriot Act
NOTE: At the end of the video, Arlen Specter claims that the Patriot Act wasn’t passed until 2006 when it was actually passed October 29, 2001.
Questions posed by members of Philly 9/11 Truth to Senator Arlen Specter about the pre-9/11 military intelligence program Able Danger and the post-9/11 anthrax attacks were responded to with a fair degree of candidacy.
The Warren Commission member asserted that as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into the US military SOCOM program Able Danger that the inquiry, “like the song Oklahoma, we went about as far as we could go.” Perhaps he meant to say, “like Oklahoma City in 1995, we went about as far as we could go” before his handlers tightened his leash.
Unexpectedly, when questioned about the anthrax attacks, Specter conceded that al Qaeda was not responsible. “Coincidentally”, a few days after this event and a follow up by We Are CHANGE NYC stories such as the following began to appear in the media ( http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342852,00.html ). Perhaps we are being preempted so that this condemning piece of evidence loses its potency in the mind of the public.
Poll: Iran, Iraq, China Top US Enemies
WASHINGTON (AP) - China has replaced North Korea as one of the top three U.S. enemies, according to a poll of Americans.
Iran topped the list, with 25 percent naming it when asked which country is the greatest U.S. enemy, according to the Gallup Poll. Iraq came next at 22 percent, then China with 14 percent.
North Korea was named by 9 percent - half the number who cited it a year earlier. Pyongyang agreed last year to disable its nuclear facilities in exchange for aid, though disputes have continued over implementing the deal.
China, a growing economic rival of the U.S., was cited by 11 percent as top enemy a year ago.
Gallup first asked the question in early 2001, before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. At the time, Iraq was seen as the biggest foe, followed by China and Iran.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Defense employee guilty of spying for China
- Story Highlights
- Policy expert at U.S. Defense Department pleads guilty to espionage
- William Bergersen, 51, charged with conspiracy to give defense info to China
- Bergersen allegedly got gifts, cash and money for gambling
- Espionage charges pending against alleged co-conspirators
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A weapons policy expert at the U.S. Defense Department pleaded guilty Monday to an espionage charge involving disclosing national defense information to China, federal officials said.
William Bergersen, 51, of Alexandria, Virginia, was arrested in February and charged with conspiracy to illegally disclose national defense information to unauthorized individuals.
Bergersen was a weapons systems policy analyst at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, a Defense Department agency in Arlington, Virginia.
"Every day, dedicated men and women throughout government serve our nation with honor and dignity. Mr. Bergersen chose a different path -- a path of dishonor -- that is deeply disappointing," said U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg.
Espionage charges are pending against alleged co-conspirators Tai Shen Kuo, 58, and Yu Xin Kang, 33, both of whom remain held without bond.
According to court filings, Bergersen provided national defense information on numerous occasions between March 2007 and February 2008 to Kuo, a New Orleans, Louisiana, businessman.
Much of the information involved U.S. military sales to Taiwan and was classified at the "secret" level, authorities said. During the course of the conspiracy, Kuo allegedly cultivated a friendship with Bergersen, giving him gifts, cash, dinners and money for gambling during trips to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Kuo allegedly passed the information along to a Chinese government official without Bergersen's knowledge, authorities said.
In some of his meetings with Kuo, Bergersen cautioned the information he was providing was classified, authorities said.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/03/31/espionage.plea/
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