Robert Fisk: Even I question the ’truth’ about 9/11

Robert Fisk
Bellaciao
September 27 2007

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the “raver”. Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the “raver” is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a “raver”.

His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you’re a free journalist, don’t you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don’t you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don’t you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what “all the world knows” (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the “raver” is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the “truth”; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,” Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer” in Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.” And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

The Third Stage

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the “raver” bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard “explosions” in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let’s claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA’s list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose “Islamic” advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the “Fajr” prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror” which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re an empire now – we create our own reality”. True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

Who Wants To Bomb Iran? Democrats, Not Republicans, Says Seymour Hersh

Jon Weiner
The Huffington Post
October 4, 2007

When George Bush and Dick Cheney talk about their plans to bomb Iran, they are told “You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated”–that’s what a Republican former intelligence official told legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. “But,” the former official went on, “Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

I recently spoke with Hersh, whose new piece, “Target Iran,” is featured in The New Yorker this week.

When I asked Hersh who wants to bomb Iran, he said, “Ironically there is a lot of pressure coming from Democrats. Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all said we cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran. Clearly the pressure from Democrats is a reflection of - we might as well say it - Israeli and Jewish input.” He added the obvious: “a lot of money comes to the Democratic campaigns” from Jewish contributors.

But while Democrats argue that we must “do something” about an Iranian nuclear threat, Hersh says the White House has concluded their own effort to convince Americans that Iran poses an imminent threat has “failed.” Apparently the public that bought the story of WMD in Iraq is now singing the classic Who song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Moreover, Hersh reports, “the general consensus of the American intelligence community is that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb” - so the public is right to be skeptical.

As a result, according to Hersh, the focus of the plans to bomb Iran has shifted from an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities to an emphasis on the famed “surgical strikes” on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere. The White House hopes it can win public support for this kind of campaign by arguing that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is responsible for the deaths of Americans in Iraq.

Why don’t Bush and Cheney “give a rat’s ass” about getting Republicans reelected to the Senate and the House in 2008? “Of course that was hyperbole to make a point,” Hersh said. “When it comes to choice between bombing Iran and taking some political heat, the president will do what he wants. Look, no decision has been made, no order has been given, I’ve never said it’s going to happen. But I had breakfast this morning in Washington with somebody who’s close to a lot of military people, and there’s a sense among them that the president is essentially messianic about this. He sees this as his mission. It could be because God is telling him to do it. It could be because his daddy didn’t do it. It could be because it’s step 13 in a 12-step program he was in. I just don’t know.”

The biggest problem in US relations with Iran, Hersh said, is that Bush refuses to “talk to people he doesn’t like. . . . We dealt with China, we dealt with the Soviet Union in those bad days of Stalin and Mao. But there is no pressure whatsoever” coming from the leading Democratic presidential candidates demanding that Bush negotiate with the Iranians rather than bombing them.

Chertoff’s Creeping Surveillance

Technology’s challenge to privacy
BBC
October 4, 2007

Every autumn the privacy world gather for the most important global privacy conference on the calendar.

The International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioner’s conference brings together hundreds of privacy commissioners, government regulators, business leaders, and privacy advocates who spend three days grappling with emerging issues.

The theme of this year’s conference, held in Montreal, Canada, was “Terra Incognita,” a reference to the unknown lands that typify the fear of the unknown in a world of rapidly changing technologies that challenge the core principles of privacy protection.

Yet despite a dizzying array of panels on new technologies such as ubiquitous computing, radio frequency identification devices (RFID), and nanotechnology, it was a reference by United States Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff to a simple fingerprint that struck the strongest chord.

Privacy threat

Canada last hosted the conference in 1996 and it quickly became apparent that privacy has become virtually unrecognisable in the intervening eleven years.

The technological challenges were on display throughout the event including eye-opening presentations on the privacy impact of popular children’s websites such as Webkinz and Neopets, on genetic innovation that is pushing the boundaries of science without regard for privacy, and on the continual shift toward tiny devices that can be used to collect and disclose personal information.

Prof Michael Geist (Michael Geist)
Chertoff seemed to say there is a known reality about our future course and there is little that the privacy community can do about it.
Michael Geist

The conference placed the spotlight on the growing “toolkit” of responses, including privacy audits of both public and private sector organisations, privacy impact assessments that are used to gauge the effect of new regulations and corporate initiatives, trust seals that include corporate compliance programs, and emphasis on global cooperation in a world where personal data slips effortlessly across borders.

While the effectiveness of these measures has improved in recent years, there remained a pervasive sense that these responses are inadequate.

Part of the unease arises from the growing realisation that the legal foundation of privacy law is being rendered increasingly irrelevant.

Privacy and data protection laws have long relied on the twin pillars of notice and consent whereby consumers are notified of, and consent to, the collection, use, and disclosure of their personal information.

Critics argue that both notice and consent are today little more than legal fictions, as consumers ignore overly complex notices and shrinking technology makes it virtually impossible to obtain informed consumer consent.

Moreover, privacy law has also emphasised the distinction between personally identifiable information - information that can be traced to a particular person and is therefore deserving of legal protection - and non-identifiable information that does not enjoy any legal protection.

Technology threatens the ability to easily distinguish between the two as powerful computers and ever-expanding databases make it easier to identify individuals from what was once thought to be non-identifiable information.

Addressing these legal shortcomings will command the privacy community’s attention for the foreseeable future; however, it was Chertoff’s keynote address that crystallised the challenge to global privacy protection.

‘Chilling future’

In a room full of privacy advocates, Chertoff came not with a peace offering, but rather a confrontational challenge.

He unapologetically made the case for greater surveillance in which governments collect an ever-increasing amount of data about their citizens in the name of security.

For example, in support of his security agenda, he noted that US forces in Iraq once gathered a single fingerprint from a steering wheel of a vehicle that was used in a bombing attack and matched it to one obtained years earlier at a US border crossing.

He added that there was a similar instance in England, where one fingerprint in a London home linked to a bombing was matched to a fingerprint gathered at a US airport (the identified person was actually innocent of wrongdoing, however).

Chertoff explained that in the autumn the US intends to expand its fingerprinting collection program by requiring all non-Canadians entering his country to provide prints of all ten fingers (it currently requires two fingerprints).

In the process, his vision of a broad surveillance society - supported by massive databases of biometric data collected from hundreds of millions of people - presented a chilling future.

Rather than terra incognita, Chertoff seemed to say there is a known reality about our future course and there is little that the privacy community can do about it.

As privacy advocates lamented the remarks, warning of creeping surveillance and urging commissioners to take action, delegates were left to wonder whether the privacy world will again be unrecognisable when the Data Protection and Privacy Commissioner’s conference next convenes in Canada.

Report says war on terror is fuelling al Qaeda

Kate Kelland
Reuters
October 7, 2007

LONDON (Reuters) - Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the “war on terror” is failing and instead fuelling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday.

A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a “fundamental re-think is required” if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective.

“If the al Qaeda movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and systematically undercut,” said Paul Rogers, the report’s author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England.

“Combined with conventional policing and security measures, al Qaeda can be contained and minimized but this will require a change in policy at every level.”

He described the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a “disastrous mistake” which had helped establish a “most valued jihadist combat training zone” for al Qaeda supporters.

The report — Alternatives to the War on Terror — recommended the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq coupled with intensive diplomatic engagement in the region, including with Iran and Syria.

In Afghanistan, Rogers also called for an immediate scaling down of military activities, an injection of more civil aid and negotiations with militia groups aimed at bringing them into the political process.

If such measures were adopted it would still take “at least 10 years to make up for the mistakes made since 9/11.”

“Failure to make the necessary changes could result in the war on terror lasting decades,” the report added.

Rogers also warned of a drift toward conflict with Iran.

“Going to war with Iran”, he said, “will make matters far worse, playing directly into the hands of extreme elements and adding greatly to the violence across the region. Whatever the problems with Iran, war should be avoided at all costs.”

Polio outbreak in Nigeria sparked by vaccine, experts say

The Associated Press

Friday, October 5, 2007

LONDON: (AP)For doctors struggling to eradicate polio, fighting the paralytic disease can mean vaccinating children in war-torn regions, persuading governments to pay attention, and begging donors for money.

A recent polio outbreak in Nigeria revealed another potential problem: the vaccine commonly used against it. Last week, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported that since 2005, 69 Nigerian children have been paralyzed by a polio virus derived from the oral vaccine. Two other cases made it to Niger.

Such cases are not unknown, but the continuing Nigerian outbreak is the biggest ever, and follows a boycott of the vaccination campaign in Africa's most populous country because of unfounded fears the vaccine was a Western plot to sterilize Muslims.

Officials now worry that the latest Nigerian outbreak traced to the vaccine could trigger another vaccine scare.

"This is the oral polio vaccine paradox," said Olen Kew, a virologist at the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "This vaccine is the most effective tool we have against the virus, but it's like fighting fire with fire."

What's needed to stop Nigeria's outbreak is more of the same vaccine that caused it.

The oral polio vaccine contains a weakened version of polio virus. Children who have been vaccinated pass the virus into the water supply. Other children who then play in or drink that water pick up the vaccine's virus, which gives them some protection against polio.

But in very rare instances, as the virus passes through unimmunized children, it can mutate into a form that is dangerous enough to spark new outbreaks.

That happened for the first time in 2001, when 22 children were paralyzed in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Subsequent vaccine-caused polio outbreaks have occurred in the Philippines, Madagascar, China and Indonesia.

Experts say these types of outbreaks only happen when not enough children are vaccinated. In northern Nigeria, only about 39 percent of children are fully protected against polio.

In the West, an injectable polio vaccine with inactivated virus is used, to avoid the problems with the oral vaccine. But the oral vaccine used in the developing world is much cheaper than the injectable vaccine, and can be given to children by volunteers with little training.

The latest outbreak linked to the vaccine comes "in the wake of all the other problems they've had in Nigeria," said Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who led WHO's smallpox eradication campaign in the 1970s.

In 2003, politicians in northern Nigeria canceled vaccination campaigns for nearly a year, claiming the vaccine was a Western plot to sterilize Muslims. That led to an explosion of polio, and the virus jumped to approximately two dozen countries worldwide.

Now, health officials' decision to keep quiet about the outbreak linked to the vaccine for so long — WHO and CDC have known about the Nigerian outbreak since last year — may look suspicious.

Dr. David Heymann, WHO's top polio official, said that because WHO considered the Nigerian outbreak to be an "operational" issue, it was unnecessary to share the information beyond its scientific committees.

CDC's Kew said added: "The people who are against immunization may seize on anything that could strengthen their position, even if it's scientifically untenable."

Rumors are still rife among Nigerians that the vaccine is unsafe, and several religious leaders continue to lecture on its dangers. If there is another mass vaccine boycott that unleashes the virus further, that could derail the global eradication effort for good.

Nigerian health officials contacted by AP declined to comment on the situation.

"Convincing the Nigerians to take even more of this vaccine will be a tough sell," said Dr. Samuel Katz, an infectious diseases specialist at Duke University and co-inventor of the measles vaccine.

The delayed reporting of the Nigeria situation may also have delayed the scientific response. If WHO had shared information sooner, "the global research community could have started its laboratory and epidemiological studies earlier," said Dr. Isao Arita, of the Agency for Cooperation in International Health in Japan.

Scientists are still learning how the oral polio vaccine behaves, and need details when problems arise to determine how to avoid similar outbreaks in the future.

More than 10 billion doses have been given to children worldwide, and the vaccine has been credited with cutting polio incidence by more than 99 percent since 1988. Many more children are still paralyzed by the wild polio virus as compared to the virus in the vaccine.

But no vaccine is risk-free.

WHO said that changing the vaccination strategy is unnecessary. "It would be nice if we had a more stable oral polio vaccine, but that's not the way it is today," Heymann said. "We will continue working the way we have been working because we don't want children to be paralyzed anywhere."

Chicago Residents Claim Police Abuse

CBS2 Chicago
October 5, 2007

(CBS) CHICAGO Misconduct allegations are being leveled against the Chicago Police Department in a class action lawsuit. As CBS 2’s Suzanne Le Mignot reports, officers are accused of illegally searching residents at a Chicago Housing Authority complex.

“He fondled my breasts and other parts of my body that men are not supposed to touch without my permission,” said Harold Ickes Homes resident Taneysha Bass.

Others claim friends were arrested for trespassing, while just trying to visit them at their home.

“These people were waiting for me in their car,” said Ickes resident Aaron Boys. “On my way down to get into the car, they’re already arrested.”

Others say they have been harassed and cursed at by Chicago police while trying to capture what they say is police misconduct.

“I was arrested for having a camcorder, by videotaping them and all the obscene things they have been doing outside our community,” said Ickes resident Marie Battle.

Bass, Boyd and Battle are among the Chicago Housing Authority residents claiming Chicago police carry out home invasions, unlawful arrests, steal cash from residents and do illegal strip searches.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson says he wants to bring attention to what residents say is happening here.

“Denying people access to their parents’ homes is irrational and of course, police operating Gestapo-style must end, for it is illegal,” he said Friday.

Jackson says some residents even put cameras in trees to document what they call police misconduct.

“We have to uphold every citizen’s right to live the way they want to live, where they want to live and how they want to live,” said 3rd Ward Ald. Pat Dowell.

“I don’t believe that Rambos have the right to come in and usurp people in their natural habitat,” said Rep. Danny Davis.

Meantime, Chicago police issued a statement which says in part, the crime rate is down significantly, and that has been “…accomplished by removing dangerous offenders from communities.”

Police also say they encourage those who feel their rights have been violated to file a complaint.

USA Today: Meet Weather Modification Inc.

Source: USA Today - Maria Sudekum Fisher, Associated Press Writer

LAKIN, Kan. — Water is prized in western Kansas, where aquifers are suffering and farms are miles wide and generations deep; a scant half inch of rain can mean the difference between a successful season and a failed one.

But when it comes in the form of fist-sized balls of ice known as hail, water's more than a menace. It can damage and even destroy crops.

That's where the Western Kansas Weather Modification Program and other cloud-seeding operations across the western U.S. come in. The WKWMP is among about 10 programs that tinker with the weather — either by trying to cut the size of hail or boost rainfall and snowpack. They do it largely by shooting up storm clouds with silver iodide or dry ice mixtures.

PHOTO GALLERY: Fly with a cloud seeding mission

Other countries also have used or considered using weather modification. The United Arab Emirates has investigated cloud seeding to help increase rainfall. China has announced plans to use cloud seeding to manage rainfall during the 2008 Olympics, and Indonesia has used it to try to fight fires.

Cloud seeding has a host of critics, from those who say there is no good science to support claims that it works to others who raise concerns about the possibility that it actually may cause less rain and harm the environment.

But as water supplies show signs of stress around the globe and insurance companies add up hail damage payouts, weather modification programs persist.

"What's beginning to happen is that worldwide, people are realizing that water, especially fresh water, is a very precious resource, and we need to do what we can to increase the availability of that resource," said Bruce Boe, director of meteorology for Weather Modification Inc., a Fargo, N.D.,-based company that has been seeding clouds since the 1960s. Weather Modification Inc. has contracts in the U.S., Africa, southeast Asia and Canada, where Weather Modification Inc. does business with insurance companies.

"They'll say, 'We paid out $500, $600 million in claims on hail damage, and the forecast is for more hail storms, so we want you to come in for a couple million dollars and take care of the hail,"' Boe said.

Cloud seeding was developed after World War II to try to increase rainfall. The theory is that the silver iodide, which has a structure that resembles ice, creates raindrops in the clouds, increasing precipitation and reducing moisture for hail formation.

In the U.S., weather modification programs are largely run by individual states and counties. But a measure before the U.S. Senate would allocate $10 million a year to establish the Weather Mitigation Advisory and Research Board, which would develop policy and research weather modification programs.

Kansas started its program in 1975. The Western Kansas Weather Modification Program now covers about 8,000 miles and is used about 85% of the time for hail reduction. The program, which receives state and local funding, was briefly extended into northwest Kansas in the late 1990s. But residents became concerned that cloud seeding may have been reducing their rainfall amounts and voted the program out.

The WKWMP operates from April through September with four planes. Program manager Walt Geiger monitors the weather from a radar station at the tiny Kearny County airport in Lakin. When he sees a storm developing, one with "lots of strong vertical action" that could be a hail producer, Geiger notifies the pilots, who then head into the storms in their single-engine planes, armed with nerves and bayonet-sized canisters of silver iodide.

A 1998-1999 study of the WKWMP found that while there was a statistically significant reduction in hail that year, there was no evidence to support the program's attempts to increase rainfall.

The science behind cloud seeding, while "excellent at the microscopic level," doesn't translate too well outside the lab, says Terry Kastens, professor of agriculture economy at Kansas State University, which conducted the study.

"The practicality of whether you can actually get enough of the iodide in the air is a really big question," says Kastens. "A lot of time we joke it's like shooting a pea shooter at the clouds."

David Brenn, WKWMP's director, discounts naysayers. He says he has seen the benefits of hail reduction efforts. He also says at least one insurance company has expressed interest in partnering with WKWMP.

But Mike Standley, whose family has farmed in southwest Kansas for about a century, says he's concerned that cloud seeding may be costing him some precious rain. It has been a long time since he has seen regular summer afternoon thunderstorms on his land, says Standley, 30.

"Now the day when we have one little storm popping up, they'll be flying up and around it, and it just seems to fizzle out," he says.

Standley says he would like to see solid proof that cloud seeding works. With 14 to 19 inches of precipitation a year, he just can't spare the moisture.

"I can raise crops with hail," he said. "But I can't raise crops with no moisture."

CIA still operates ‘black sites’ overseas, senior counterterrorism official says

Raw Story
October 5, 2007

The secret CIA overseas detention program first exposed by the Washington Post remains active, according to a senior US counterterrorism official who went on the record in Thursday’s New York Times.

Little attention has been paid to the revelation, aside from a Reuters story late Thursday.

The Central Intelligence Agency, through a spokesman, refused to comment on the report.

“We do not comment on this question as a matter of course,” CIA spokesman George Little told reporters. “The agency’s terrorist detention and interrogation program has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review.”

On Friday, at a hastily called Oval Office meeting with reporters, President Bush said, “This government does not torture people.”

“When we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we’re going to detain them, and you bet we’re going to question them,” he added. “The American people expect us to find out information, actionable intelligence so we can help protect them. That’s our job.”

RAW STORY’s Larisa Alexandrovna revealed the exact location of a CIA black site in Poland in February of this year.

Intelligence officials identified the site as a component of a Polish intelligence training school outside the northern Polish village of Stare Kiejkuty. While previously suspected, the facility had never been conclusively identified as being part of the CIA’s secret rendition and detention program.

Only the Polish prime minister and top Polish intelligence brass were told of the plan, in which agents of the United States quietly shuttled detainees from other holding facilities around the globe for stopovers and short-term interrogation in Poland between late 2002 and 2004.

According to a confidential British intelligence memo shown to RAW STORY, Prime Minister Tony Blair told Poland’s then-Prime Minister Leszek Miller to keep the information secret, even from his own government.

“Miller was asked to keep it as tight as possible,” the memo said.
‘We don’t put out a press release’

The agency continues to hold suspects overseas, Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003, told the Times. Possible sites have been suggested in Thailand and Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the United States was holding prisoners at “black sites” overseas, even after President Bush said all prisoners had been moved out of secret sites.

A U.S. counterterrorism official told the paper: “In late 2006, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a high-ranking al Qaeda terrorist who planned and conducted attacks against U.S. military forces, was captured and held in CIA custody.”

The White House dodged the question in Thursday’s briefing.

“We haven’t been in the habit of doing a press release every time we have a prisoner,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

The Times also revealed that a secret memo endorsed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales authorized the use of “harsh interrogation” techniques even after the Senate passed a ban on torture that President Bush signed into law.

The opinion “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,” the paper said.

Unemployment Edges Up Despite New Jobs

WASHINGTON (AP) — Fears that the country could slide into a recession eased in September as employers created the most jobs in four months and workers’ wages grew solidly. The unemployment rate crept up to 4.7 percent, the highest in over a year but still low by historical standards.

Wall Street breathed a sigh of relief. The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 91.70 points. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, the measure most closely followed by market watchers, reached a new closing high of 1,557.59.

The tally of 110,000 net new jobs generated in September clearly heartened investors and analysts. Yet what they really took comfort in was the revelation that the job market — a main pillar for the economy — didn’t crack under the pressure of a painful credit crunch and housing slump in August after all.

The Labor Department’s fresh snapshot of employment conditions around the country released Friday showed that the economy actually created 89,000 jobs in August.

That was a huge and crucial turnaround from the loss of 4,000 jobs — the first decline in four years — reported a month before. At the time, that news had sent Wall Street into a nosedive, stoked fears the economy was heading toward recession and was seen as cementing the Federal Reserve’s decision to lower interest rates.

To be sure, the ill effects of the housing and credit problems have hurt some employers, slowing national job growth this year. But the situation is nowhere near as dire as many were led to believe from the initial August employment report.

“We are on much sounder footing,” said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at LaSalle Bank. “To be fair, it is clear the pace of monthly job creation has slowed and the unemployment rate is creeping higher but neither measure is indicative of an imminent recession, which was the scenario on everyone’s lips just a month ago.”

The main reason behind the turnaround in the August payroll figure? A big gain in government employment, especially in hiring teachers at local schools.

The bump up in the unemployment rate from 4.6 percent in August came as hundreds of thousands of people — perhaps feeling better about their prospects — resumed job searches.

The new rate of 4.7 percent, the highest since the summer of 2006, is still considered low by historical standards. After the country’s last recession, in 2001, the unemployment rate peaked at 6.3 percent. More than two decades ago, for example, civilian unemployment went over 10 percent as the economy suffered through deep downturns.

President Bush, coping with record-low approval ratings for his handling of the economy, welcomed the new employment figures.

“I am really pleased with the economic news, but I don’t take good news for granted,” Bush said. “I understand that people are worried about their mortgage payments, or concerned about sending their child to college. I know that people are concerned whether or not they’re going to have enough money to meet their needs,” he said. Bush called on Congress to keep taxes low.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., countered that the Bush administration needs to “spend more time putting the conditions in place for good-paying job creation and shoring up our battered housing market.”

The strain from housing and credit woes was clearly evident in some industries. Construction companies, financial firms, factories and retailers cut jobs last month. However, gains in education and health services, professional services, leisure and hospitality, and in government work more than offset those losses, leading to a net gain in new jobs in September.

Those with jobs saw fatter paychecks.

Average hourly earnings rose to $17.57 in September, up 4.1 percent over the past 12 months. It was the highest annual gain since February. Wage growth is the fuel for consumer spending, a major contributor to national economic growth.

Continued solid wage growth should help cushion people from the negative forces arising from the worst housing slump in 16 years and a jarring credit crunch, analysts said. That should lessen the odds consumers might clam up and send the economy into a tailspin, some said.

To cushion the economy from those negative forces, the Federal Reserve last month sliced a key interest rate by one-half percentage point to 4.75 percent. It was the first rate cut in more than four years.

Looking ahead, some economists said the new employment figures cast doubt on whether the Fed will cut rates again at its next meeting Oct. 30-31. Others, however, continued to predict that rates will go down.

Economic growth, which clocked in at a brisk 3.8 percent pace in the spring, is believed to have slowed to a subpar pace of under 3 percent in the just ended July-to-September quarter. Some believe that growth will be weaker in the final three months of this year.

Job growth has slowed. The economy created an average of 97,000 jobs a month during the third quarter. That was down from an average 126,000 a month in the second quarter and below an average of 142,000 in the first three months of this year.

“There is still a certain amount of caution on the part of companies’ human resources departments. The economy is still in slowdown mode and not fully back to health. But it is not in the intensive care unit,” said Ken Mayland of ClearView Economics.

The unemployment rate is expected to climb to close to 5 percent by the end of the year.

In September, the jobless rate for blacks jumped to 8.1 percent, from 7.7 percent in August. The unemployment rate for Hispanics climbed to 5.7 percent from 5.5 percent.

A meltdown in the housing and mortgage markets this year has clobbered some homeowners, driving foreclosures to record-high levels. Lenders have been forced out of business. And, investors in mortgage-backed securities have taken huge losses. A spreading credit crunch took a turn for the worse in August, unhinging Wall Street. There have been some signs that the financial turmoil has calmed down, although the situation remains delicate.

Nigel Gault, economist at Global Insight, cautioned: “We are not out of the woods yet.”

Is the credit crisis over? Not so fast

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The audacious rise in the Dow industrials to a record will do little to prevent the millions of new “For Sale” signs likely to dot U.S. lawns soon.

Fears of mounting foreclosures and predictions of a lackluster holiday season remain even in the face of Dow 14,000, which has removed some, but not all, uncertainty about the faltering U.S. housing market.

At the root of investors’ anxiety are so-called subprime loans made to borrowers with shaky credit. Delinquencies are rising on subprime mortgages and defaults are piling up at record rates as home prices sink, pressuring consumers’ desire to spend.

The ripple effect from the slump in housing doesn’t stop there. Strains still exist in the U.S. credit markets even though there are signs of easing in the global liquidity squeeze, which was triggered by a lack of confidence in financial markets as subprime mortgage defaults soared.

Already, the housing slowdown has subtracted about 1 percentage point from growth in inflation-adjusted gross domestic product so far this year.

“I don’t think the worst is over,” said Robert Arnott, chairman of Research Affiliates LLC, a Pasadena, California-based investment management firm.

“We are coming off the greatest lending bubble — not housing bubble! — in U.S. history. We will feel its impact for a very long time.” For more investor comments see (ID:nN02411723: Quote, Profile, Research)

Falling home prices are leaving subprime borrowers who took out adjustable-rate mortgages with a major dilemma. Millions with subprime mortgages, which go to borrowers with checkered credit histories, are faced with negative equity in their homes that could make it increasingly unlikely they will qualify for new mortgages in an environment of tighter lending standards.

At current home prices, about $693 billion in ARMs are “already under water,” according to Stephanie Pomboy, financial economist at MacroMavens in New York.

TWIST OF THE ARMs

That’s frightening news for banks that already have absorbed losses on their balance sheets due to delinquent subprime borrowers. The losses so far amount to about 10 percent of the forecast of $100 billion in losses.

“The disturbing number here isn’t 10 percent … but the $100 billion,” Pomboy said.

With nearly $700 billion in ARMs in negative equity facing interest-rate resets, “depending on how much lenders can ultimately recover, this implies (bank) losses will be more like $210 billion to $346 billion,” she said.

“And that’s assuming the situation doesn’t get worse.”

In July, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had estimated the losses at $100 billion at the most.

But it appears Bernanke had underestimated those figures and their effects on the consumer.

In September, the Fed took the benchmark federal funds rate, which governs overnight loans between banks, down an aggressive half-percentage point to 4.75 percent, its lowest since May of last year. The Fed also cut the discount rate it charges for direct loans to banks by a half-percentage point to 5.25 percent.

“With the reset wave about to gather intensity and ‘For Sale’ signs dotting the lawns of 5.1 million homes across the country, the credit hit parade has only just begun,” Pomboy added.

Aside from the resetting of interest rates on home mortgages and falling home prices, both leading to a slowdown in consumer spending, Arnott of Research Affiliates is concerned about slumping home construction.

That, he said, was 5-plus percent of Gross Domestic Product at the latest housing peak. He puts the odds of recession around 60 percent.

TIGHT CREDIT HANGOVER

Indeed, September was a record month for investment-grade issuance of about $100 billion, but that came as conditions in the commercial paper market remained tight.

Since August, U.S. commercial paper outstanding shrank by $370 billion, with commercial and industrial loans also helping to pick up some of the slack. Now, those loans are growing at the fastest rate in more than 20 years, Goldman Sachs’ chief U.S. economist Jan Hatzius wrote in a research report published late on Monday.

All told, the stock market is underpinned by powerful factors. U.S. equities appear cheap relative to many asset classes, especially since Wall Street has been a laggard in the global equity rally over the last several years. And now that many oil-exporting countries are flush with cash, they’ve been putting that surplus money to work in higher-yield securities in the United States.

“Investors with new money to put into the marketplace probably will be less interested in certain other real asset classes, like houses, because the luster has come off the sector,” said Keith Wirtz, president and chief investment officer at Fifth Third Asset Management in Cincinnati.

Ironically, equity markets have created the least amount of “grief” for investors in this cycle, he added.

Climate change disaster is upon us, warns UN

Julian Borger
The Guardian
October 5 2007

A record number of floods, droughts and storms around the world this year amount to a climate change “mega disaster”, the United Nation’s emergency relief coordinator, Sir John Holmes, has warned.

Sir John, a British diplomat who is also known as the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said dire predictions about the impact of global warming on humanity were already coming true.

“We are seeing the effects of climate change. Any year can be a freak but the pattern looks pretty clear to be honest. That’s why we’re trying … to say, of course you’ve got to deal with mitigation of emissions, but this is here and now, this is with us already,” he said.

As a measure of the worsening situation, Ocha, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - part of the UN secretariat that employs Sir John - has issued 13 emergency “flash” appeals so far this year. The number is three more than in 2005, which held the previous record.

Two years ago only half the international disasters dealt with by Ocha had anything to do with the climate; this year all but one of the 13 emergency appeals is climate-related. “And 2007 is not finished. We will certainly have more by the end of the year, I fear,” added Sir John, who is in charge of channelling international relief efforts to disaster areas.

More appeals were likely in the coming weeks, as floods hit west Africa. “All these events on their own didn’t have massive death tolls, but if you add all these little disasters together you get a mega disaster,” he said.

The only one of this year’s emergency appeals not connected to the climate was an earthquake in Peru, in August. The others arose after an unprecedented string of catastrophic floods across much of Africa, south Asia and North Korea, and followed severe drought in southern Africa, Nicaragua’s category-five hurricane, and extreme climate conditions in Bolivia, which brought both drought and floods.

The Ocha appeals represent the tip of an iceberg since they are launched only with the agreement of the affected country. India was badly affected by floods that hit the rest of the Asian region in July. But unlike its neighbour, Pakistan, India did not call on the UN for help.

Ocha believes that 66 million people were made homeless or were otherwise affected across south Asia. The lives of several million more people were turned upside down across Africa. Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, Zambia and Uganda experienced disastrous floods, and Swaziland and Lesotho declared emergencies because of severe drought that reduced harvests by half.

The latest appeal from Ocha was launched yesterday, to try to raise emergency relief funds for Ghana, where more than 400,000 people are reported to be homeless as a result of flooding. Appeals may also be started for Togo and Burkina Faso.

“The flooding in Africa just now is the worst anyone can remember,” Sir John said, expressing frustration at how little media attention in the west was being devoted to what he terms creeping climatic catastrophe.

Flooding is likely to be common for a warming planet, and climate change has a double effect - causing an increase in the frequency of storms, while higher atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide curb the ability of plants to draw groundwater.

A climate-change summit is to be held in Bali in December, with the aim of agreeing the principles of a new international treaty to replace Kyoto, the accord that expires in 2012. But the talks face determined US opposition to mandatory emissions targets, and most climate negotiators doubt a real breakthrough can be achieved before the Bush government leaves office in 2009.

Sir John argues that whatever is done on greenhouse gas emissions, money has to be spent now on mitigating the impact that climate change is already having. “You can’t actually stop disasters happening but you can do a lot to reduce their impact and reduce people’s vulnerability to them by making sure people don’t live on the coast or river plains, and that roads are raised and dams are in reasonable shape.”

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is leading research on the issue, global warming will disrupt and potentially devastate the lives of billions of people.

And, just as global warming starts to make itself felt, there are signs that “donor fatigue” has set in. Of about $338m (£166m) requested for Ocha’s 13 flash appeals this year, only $114m has so far come from donors.

'Amero coming within decade'

Strategist expects currency changes as Canadian dollar matches greenback

---

Posted: October 5, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

A commemorative amero coin

BankIntroductions.com, a Canadian company that specializes in global banking strategies and currency consulting, is advising clients that the amero may be the currency of North America within the next 10 years.

"The amero would compete against other regional currency blocks," BankIntroductions.com says. "At present, with the Canadian dollar approaching par, more talk for an amero currency unit will become popular in Canada."

The company says that with the successful implementation of NAFTA, "the one dragging component for the amero will be Mexico, but in time this will change."

"Implementation of the amero currency may actually give Mexico an economic boost, thus helping to alleviate Mexican immigration pressures into the United States for those Mexicans seeking financial gain," BankIntroductions.com advises.

"The amero one day may well be circulating throughout North America."

Matt Bell, president of BankIntroductions.com, told WND in an e-mail to "feel free to quote our currency research on Canada. Our general opinion on the amero stands as stated."

As WND reported, coin designer Daniel Carr has issued for sale a series of private-issue fantasy pattern amero coins that have drawn attention on the Internet.

WND also reported the African Union is moving down the path of regional economic integration, with the African Central Bank planning to create the "Gold Mandela" as a single African continental currency by 2010.

The Council on Foreign Relations also has supported regional and global currencies designed to replace nationally issued currencies.

In an article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, entitled "The End of National Currency," CFR economist Benn Steil asserted the dollar is a temporary currency.

Steil concluded "countries should abandon monetary nationalism," moving to adopt regional currencies, on the road to a global "one world currency."

WND previously reported Steve Previs, a vice president at Jeffries International Ltd. in London, said the amero "is the proposed new currency for the North American Community which is being developed right now between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico."

A video clip of the CNBC interview in November with Jeffries is now available at YouTube.com.

WND also has reported a continued slide in the value of the dollar on world currency markets could set up conditions in which the adoption of the amero as a North American currency gains momentum.

Police shot wrong suspect, court told

Herald Sun
Friday October 05, 2007

POLICE commanders twice changed their minds over the arrest of Jean Charles de Menezes in the moments before he was shot dead, a UK court heard yesterday.

As he approached Stockwell Tube station in London they decided surveillance officers should detain the man they thought was a suicide bomber before he entered it, as a specialist firearms team had yet to arrive.

But almost immediately after issuing the order, Scotland Yard commanders were told the elite armed SO19 squad was in a position to make the arrest, the Old Bailey was told.

Commander Cressida Dick then ordered the officers on the ground that SO19 would detain the suspect, senior anti-terrorist officer Detective Superintendent Jon Boutcher told the court.

The next information to come through to the control room was that the man they thought was attempted bomber Hussain Osman was descending the escalator to the station platform, Boutcher said. As police followed him underground, the control room lost radio contact with them, he told the court.

Boutcher, who was "silver" commander of the anti-terrorist operation that day, said the next thing they heard was that "the subject has been shot".

Jurors have been told that Menezes, an innocent 27-year-old Brazilian, was shot seven times in the head on July 22 2005.

The Metropolitan Police is on trial over claims a "catastrophic" series of errors in planning led to his death. The force denies the prosecution charge, which is being brought under health and safety law.

Menezes was followed from a block of flats in Scotia Road, Tulse Hill, south London, which police had under surveillance as it was linked to Osman.

As he made his way there, Boutcher said it was first believed he was not, and then that he was, the suspect Osman.

When he arrived at Stockwell, SO19 officers were still not there, but Menezes was being tailed by Special Branch (SO12) surveillance officers.

Boutcher said: "I informed Commander Dick that she should instruct the SO12 surveillance team to detain the subject.

"The SO12 officers are not trained for armed intervention. They carry firearms merely for self-protection.

"But in my judgment this was potentially Hussain Osman and a reasonable and balanced decision would be to stop the subject with the surveillance team before he was able to get into the Underground.

"She did indeed instruct the SO12 officers were to stop the subject."

But Boutcher said that "almost immediately" the operations room learned from Trojan 80, the senior firearms tactical adviser there "that the SO19 team were now in position to arrest the subject".

"Commander Dick then instructed that the SO19 officers would now conduct the arrest because they were in position to do so," he added.

He said he expected the arrest to take place in an "open plan" area before the suspect went through the barriers and down into the station, but soon learned he was making his way down the escalator.

"The effect of going underground then stopped radio transmissions," he added.

Later, he said: "Trojan 80, who was the senior tactical adviser in the room, informed us that the subject had been shot."

Qatar & Vietnam ditch the dollar

Announcements on Thursday from the Qatari and Vietnamese governments that they are rapidly divesting in dollar denominated securities will not come as good news to the US government. Overseas investors hold half of America’s $4,400bn of marketable government debt, up from a third in 2001 according to the US Treasury department.

Qatari Prime Minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani said on US TV that the government-backed $50bn Qatari Investment Authority (QIA) now had less than 40 per cent of its investments in dollars, down from a high two years ago of 99 per cent.

Given that the Emirate’s oil and gas revenue is in dollars, the latest troubles in the US economy have accelerated the need to diversify investments into non-dollar markets. Currencies such as the Euro, the British Pound and the Swiss Frank, are all looking far more stable as investments for the QIA, said Sheikh Hamad.

Such was the Qatari PM’s concern about the sliding dollar, that he even said an oil price of $125 per barrel would not be unreasonable.

On Thursday, the State Bank of Vietnam quietly let slip it would be ending its dollar purchase schemes, which it has been using to hold down the Vietnamese currency. Although it only has middling dollar reserves of $40bn, Vietnam is widely regarded as a barometer for economic sentiment among other, bigger, regional dollar sinks like China, Taiwan, Korea or Singapore. Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas, told the Telegraph:

Vietnam is a relatively small country but it is symptomatic of Asia. The entire region is seeing inflation move up as a result of mercantilist policies of holding down their currencies with ‘dirty floats’, which are designed to help their export sectors. They need to change monetary policy.

Cue dollar sale.

Asian investors have already pulled out of US Treasuries - as FT Alphaville reported in September, foreign government holdings of T-Bills fell 3.8 per cent in August.

Japanese investors in particular, reports Bloomberg, are anticipating another rate cut from the Fed. The world’s second largest actively run bond fund, Japan’s Kokusai Global Sovereign is staying away from US Treasuries. According to Masataka Horii, who oversees $47.6bn:

The US dollar will go weaker because the market expects that interest rates will be cut and the economy will slow down… Another rate cut will make the economy stabilize. Maybe early next year, weakness in the US dollar will stop.

The problem for the US is that foreign appetite for debt has become an important prop for the economy. A 2006 study by Federal Reserve economists concluded that foreign investment in the US economy has been a liquidity support keeping long-term interest rates 90 basis points below where they should be.

The Constitution in Peril

Christopher Dickey
Newsweek

Oct. 8, 2007 issue - A slew of recent books about the Bush administration’s wars (at home as well as abroad) might leave you wondering if President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are their own Axis of Evil. In excruciating detail, these tomes tell of torture and warrantless wiretaps; they show a relentless arrogation of power and abrogation of what were thought to be solid constitutional principles. In these books, apocalyptic delusions got us into Iraq and misjudgments have helped keep us there. The picture that emerges is so bleak that even serious journalists and scholars sometimes veer toward conspiracy theories.

Consider, for instance, the lurid title of an otherwise scrupulously researched book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage: “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.”

The administration’s impassioned defenders, meanwhile, grow strident. Norman Podhoretz, the dean of neoconservatives, writes in “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” that the Bush administration is up against “a domestic insurgency” led by “journalistic devotees of the Vietnam syndrome,” isolationists, “liberal internationalists” and (heaven forbid) “realists.”

In fact, the situation is far from a”civil war,” as Podhoretz (an adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani) would have us believe. But this is a good moment to take stock of the more subtle narrative in these books: stories of score-settling at home, a new kind of enemy abroad, righteous intentions, grand visions and bad information. And if there is a recurrent theme, it’s that this administration set out to create its own reality, whether approaching the Bill of Rights like a classified document to be redacted or girding itself for war in Iraq with a steady diet of dubious intelligence.

The Bush and Cheney who emerge from these pages cherish secrecy, they deplore constraint and they sneer at dissent, so nothing and nobody can dissuade them from their chosen course. Reality checks are not allowed. “Democracies die behind closed doors,” federal appeals court Judge Damon Keith said in 2002. “The Framers of the First Amendment did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us. They protected the people against secret government.”

Jack Goldsmith, who served briefly in 2003 and 2004 as head of the Office of Legal Counsel—a key position because it determines for the government what is legal and what’s not—suggests that the “strange and unattractive views on presidential power” held by Bush and Cheney will create a backlash compromising future presidents. That may be, but for now, in many respects, the Bush-Cheney vision has triumphed. Savage concludes that Cheney and Bush will leave presidential powers enhanced at the expense of Congress and the courts, to the detriment of the checks and balances essential to our constitutional system. (Savage suggests there’s already some nervousness among Republicans fearful that Hillary Clinton will reap the benefits. No president will want to see his or her imperial authority eroded.) “The expansive presidential powers claimed and exercised by the Bush-Cheney White House are now an immutable part of American history—not controversies, but facts,” says Savage. The worldwide war with terrorists that is so important to the arguments for that presidential power, including the occupation of Iraq, will go on as well. Last week all the leading Democratic presidential candidates admitted as much. What might have seemed farfetched political and military fantasies seven years ago are inescapable realities today.

To tell the story of how this happened, it’s useful to start, as Savage does, by following Cheney’s career. Cheney was chief of staff in the Gerald Ford White House, fighting a rear-guard action to protect presidential power from a vindictive and meddlesome Congress in the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate and public scandals about the CIA’s secret operations. Later, serving in Congress himself, Cheney remained a passionate defender of the executive, arguing that the legislative branch had no right to rein in the secret presidential activities that led to the Iran-contra scandal. As secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush in 1991, Cheney insisted that approval from Congress wasn’t needed for a war against Saddam Hussein. The elder Bush overruled him. But when Cheney became vice president 10 years later, the veteran Washington infighter was paired with the younger Bush, George W., who was, as Savage puts it, “one of the least experienced presidents ever to take the oath.” Cheney and his staff, particularly his longtime aide David Addington, soon came to dominate almost every debate over constitutional issues that touched on national security and executive authority. Goldsmith remembers how they addressed all laws they didn’t like: “They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations.”

From the beginning Bush’s staff, guided by Cheney’s, “hoped to enlarge the zone of secrecy around the executive branch, to reduce the power of Congress to restrict presidential action, to undermine limits imposed by international treaties, to nominate judges who favored a stronger president and to impose greater White House control over the permanent workings of the government,” writes Savage. Then 9/11 happened and suddenly “the war on terrorism’s climate of perpetual emergency provided a vehicle for turning [Cheney’s] vision of an unfettered commander in chief into a reality.”

Goldsmith, a conservative academic and generally a supporter of a strong executive, argues in his book “The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration” that much of what was done in the early days after 9/11 is perfectly understandable. Threats seemed to be everywhere. A second wave of attacks appeared imminent and all but inevitable. “The President had to do what he had to do to protect the country,” writes Goldsmith. “And the lawyers had to find some way to make what he did legal.” But unlike previous war presidents—Lincoln, FDR—who bent the Constitution in order to save it, and took responsibility for doing so, the Bush administration stonewalled, as if public ignorance were the best way, in many cases, to give the president the powers he needed.

It was the administration’s ignorance of the enemy that it now confronted that led it, in part, to resort to extreme tactics. Al Qaeda had emerged as a major threat in the late 1990s. Ever since the end of the cold war, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and more than a dozen other intelligence organizations that answer to the president had been struggling to adapt their sources and methods to the new menace. As Amy B. Zegart argues in “Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11,” they just weren’t up to the job. “With FBI agents keeping case files in shoe boxes rather than putting them into computers, with CIA operatives clinging to old systems designed for recruiting Soviet officials at cocktail parties rather than Jihadists in caves … the U.S. Intelligence Community did not have a fighting chance against Al Qaeda,” Zegart writes. The intelligence community was well aware of the threat. It had given Bush a daily brief in August 2001 with the heading “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” But the paper was full of old news, and the various agencies failed to act on the new information that they actually had in hand about some of the 9/11 terrorists living in the United States. Zegart, blaming institutional inertia more than individuals, counts more than 20 specific instances where the CIA or the FBI missed chances to stop the 9/11 attacks.

Problems that ran so deep were not going to be changed in time to meet the clear and present danger that now faced the country. As the United States launched a war in Afghanistan (and planned for one in Iraq), the administration needed a lot more information about Al Qaeda than was available. “Really, they did not have anything very useful,” says Karen Greenberg, head of New York University’s Center on Law and Security. “It was worse than you can imagine.” One answer to the problem: the use of extreme and painful methods to make captured members of Al Qaeda and other suspects tell everything they knew—and sometimes more than they knew. “The most advanced nation in the world was relying on 14th-century torture techniques,” says Greenberg. (The same problem arose in 2003, when U.S. forces in Iraq discovered they knew next to nothing about the insurgents attacking them. The resulting abuses at Abu Ghraib were partly born of desperation.) Suspected Qaeda prisoners were taken to secret sites, or to Guantánamo, or grabbed by “rendition” teams who took them to countries where interrogators had long experience with torture, or simply held incommunicado in American military prisons. Still another measure: dispensing with warrants when tapping into phone conversations between the United States and suspected terrorists or their contacts in the rest of the world.

To a layman’s eyes, all these measures would seem to violate the Bill of Rights (and in some cases the Geneva Conventions). The pervasive secrecy threatened the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. The wiretaps flew in the face of Fourth Amendment guarantees that no warrants for searches (or, by extension, surveillance) would be issued without probable cause and specific details. The detentions, especially of American citizens designated “enemy combatants,” defied the Sixth Amendment rights to a speedy trial, to be confronted with witnesses and to have legal counsel. And the interrogation techniques certainly were cruel and unusual punishments of a kind you’d think is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Indeed, these issues continue to be fought ferociously in the courts and debated in Congress. But the president’s positions have been hard to roll back.

The reading of the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, international treaties and congressional laws on torture by the administration’s smart and highly ideological lawyers was quite different from a layman’s. In a series of opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel that were written by conservative zealot John Yoo but signed by his superiors, conventional understandings about the meaning of the Constitution were turned on their heads. In an August 2002 opinion, Yoo defined torture as “only extreme acts” of the kind that might “cause death or organ failure.” This was to be part of the guidance used by American interrogators, who wanted to make sure they couldn’t be prosecuted later for what the administration approved today. It told them a whole world of pain and suffering could be inflicted so long as the subject didn’t expire. For example, such techniques as “waterboarding” might make a suspect fear he was on the brink of drowning.

“The message,” says Goldsmith, “was indeed clear: violent acts aren’t necessarily torture; if you do torture, you probably have a defense; and even if you don’t have a defense, the torture law doesn’t apply if you act under color of presidential authority.” Goldsmith revised some of the legal reasoning of the August 2002 opinion in late 2004. But by then most of the key leaders of Al Qaeda responsible for September 11 had been captured (apart from bin Laden and his colleague Ayman Al-Zawahiri), and they had already been squeezed for months or years to extract whatever tales they might tell to stop the pain. (There was some measure of vengeance, in fact. According to a CIA officer privy to high-level discussions at the agency who did not want to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the press, there was internal opposition to having the CIA hold these suspects at secret sites after they’d told what they could about imminent attacks. But others argued that “these people were just scum and they wanted to waterboard them every day forever,” the officer told NEWSWEEK. The waterboarders won until 14 of the prisoners held at secret sites were finally transferred to Guantánamo last year.)

Meanwhile, as we now know, the bush administration had begun preparing for an attack on Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein even before the war in Afghanistan was over. The potential dangers to the United States posed by Saddam’s erratic behavior and longstanding desire to have weapons of mass destruction were a major preoccupation for many in the administration, especially those around Cheney. Containment wouldn’t be enough. A new war was needed that would “shock and awe” America’s enemies, and possibly even open the way for new democratic regimes throughout the region. It would also continue the sense of emergency that helped shore up presidential power in Washington.

But, again, the intelligence community was disappointing the Bush administration. Leads in the supposedly slam-dunk case against Saddam kept losing their bounce. So the administration and the top CIA leadership put increasing faith in an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, who supposedly had worked as a chemical engineer in Saddam’s biological-weapons program, and claimed to have seen what could be mobile bioweapons factories mounted on trucks. Los Angeles Times correspondent Bob Drogin lays out the whole sorry tale in his forthcoming book, “Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War.” The defector was in German hands, and was never interviewed by the Americans before the invasion. The Germans had warned that Curveball might be making up all or most of his story—and he was. He had never worked in the biological program; he’d been a taxi driver before heading to Germany to seek asylum. There were no mobile labs. The Bush administration had believed what it wanted to believe.

“President Bush launched the wrong war,” writes Philip H. Gordon in a book titled, as it happens, “Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World,” an argument for combating terrorism with more than military might. Bush “hyped the terrorist threat as a means of winning political support,” says Gordon, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “And while he talked of a war that challenged the nation’s very existence, he fought it on the cheap, as if he knew that Americans would not have been onboard had they been told what the war would entail.”

Today, of course, those costs are no secret. And the Bush administration’s very special vision of a powerful president waging endless war, which once would have seemed fantastical, has become the painful reality that Americans may be living for generations to come.

Who Loves Real ID? AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo Do.

Who Loves Real ID? AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo Do.: “The federal Real ID Act doesn’t have many friends these days. Eighteen states have passed legislation rejecting the law, Congress has refused to put any money into implementing it, and just this week New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer announced he, not the Feds, would determine New York’s drivers license policy, with officials in his administration indicating the state might opt out of the Real ID program altogether.

The few remaining cheerleaders for this national ID system, which promises to be a nightmare for privacy and identity security, have resorted to classic doublespeak to try to salvage Real ID’s reputation. On the Department of Homeland Security blog Wednesday, Secretary Michael Chertoff claims Real ID would actually protect privacy. (‘War is Peace’ and ‘Freedom is Slavery’ will be the subjects of future blogs.)

Chertoff isn’t completely alone though. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) sent a letter to Congress this week begging for more federal funding for Real ID. Why would an organization, whose membership includes AOL, Microsoft, Verizon and Yahoo, support a national ID card? For the answer, let’s employ that fundamental adage of Washington politics: Follow the money.

Also included in the ITAA membership list are Digimarc and Northrop Grumman, companies that specialize in creating high-tech ID cards, as well as Choicepoint and LexisNexis, data brokers that make their money selling personal information about you to advertisers and the government. These companies stand to make millions in contracts from states who are struggling with a federal mandate to overhaul their licensing systems and share more data by the May 2008 deadline (now widely viewed as impossible to meet).

But there’s one small problem: The American people don’t want a national ID card, and polling has shown they don’t trust the private sector not to harvest their data once it’s collected in a national database. So what are the Department of Homeland Security and the ITAA to do?

Well, Digimarc invited a group of state DMV bureaucrats to Washington this week (as Jim Harper pointed out, that’s a good way to get around those pesky elected officials who oppose Real ID) in order to answer that very question. Their answer? It’s all about PR, baby. In a panel on ‘Bringing Your Public On Board,’ participants discussed how to give Real ID a facelift. According to CNET’s News.com, one panelist even suggested that states use their homeland security grants — the ones that are supposed to go to counterterrorism, disaster response and infrastructure (read: bridge) safety — to take out paid advertising.

Real ID is so unpopular because in addition to being a $23 billion unfunded mandate, it will build a vast national database of personal information, expose us to a greater risk of identity theft, and move us ever closer to a total surveillance society. Spending our homeland security money on spin definitely isn’t the way to fix it.

Instead Congress should scrap Real ID altogether and replace it with a real plan for identity security that protects privacy. And if you don’t like companies you do business with pushing a national ID and increased identity theft, pick up the phone and let them know.”

Ed and Elaine Brown Reported Arrested

The Guardian reports:

Convicted tax evaders Ed and Elaine Brown have been arrested at their Plainfield home without incident, the U.S. Marshal’s office in New Hampshire said Thursday.

The couple had been convicted on federal tax charges in January. They refused to turn themselves in to authorities when they were sentenced in April and had been holed up in their rural, fortress-like home since. It was not immediately clear how they were taken into custody.

“The Browns may now begin serving their 63-month federal prison terms,” U.S. Marshal Stephen Monier said. “High profile situations like this are always difficult, but they don’t have to be tragic. I’m glad no one was injured, and that the community remained safe throughout the operation.”

The Browns have claimed the federal income tax is not legitimate.

Earlier this year, officials cut power and telephone service in an effort to ratchet up pressure on the couple convicted of scheming to avoid federal income taxes by hiding $1.9 million of income between 1996 and 2003.

After abandoning his federal trial and retreating to his home, Ed Brown repeatedly said that any attempts to arrest him would result in a violent confrontation.

Fox News reports:

It was not clear how the couple were arrested. A team of deputy marshals took them into custody at about 7:45 p.m.

Report from WMUR 9 in New Hampshire:

The New Hampshire Union Leader reports:

“We had no indication that the Browns intended to voluntarily surrender, so we had to move forward with an operation that promised the safest possible outcome. That day was today, U.S. Marshal Stephen Monier said in a written statement.

The Browns were taken into custody by a team of deputy marshals, Monier said.

He said marshals moved “forward with an operation that promised the safest possible outcome” but did not provide details. The two did not surrender, he said.

A news briefing is scheduled for 10 a.m. today at the U.S. District Courthouse in Concord.

TruthNews, Infowars, and Prison Planet will report details as they are made available.

Abu Ghraib prisoners accuse US companies of torture

Fanny Carrier
Agence France Press
October 2, 2007

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Two US Army subcontractors accused of torturing prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail go to court Wednesday in a case that highlights the murky legal status of private US companies in Iraq.

Titan and CACI International were hired by the Army to provide interrogators and interpreters at the notorious prison, the scene of well-documented abuses of detainees following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

One former Iraqi prisoner now living in Sweden says that under the companies’ watch, he was sodomized, nearly strangled with a belt, tied by his genitals to other detainees, and given repeated electric shocks.

“This is probably the most important case still standing against Abu Ghraib because the cases against the government have essentially failed so far,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

“This case represents our last hope for getting some accountability for the torture in Iraq and getting any compensation for the victims,” said Ratner, whose group has fielded lawyers to assist in the lawsuit.

The case was filed in 2004 by a dozen former prisoners and the family of a man who died in detention, accusing Titan and CACI of conspiring with US officials “to humiliate, torture and abuse persons” at Abu Ghraib.

But US security companies in Iraq occupy a legal gray area, as highlighted by the case of Blackwater USA, which according to a new Congress report has been involved in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005.

The report was issued by a House of Representatives committee as congressmen convened hearings following a September 16 shooting in a crowded Baghdad square involving Blackwater guards that killed at least 10 Iraqis.

Under an order passed by the US occupation authority in 2004, security contractors hired by the Pentagon and State Department enjoy immunity from arrest under Iraqi law for acts related to their contracts.

After the Baghdad shootings, the Iraqi government said it was preparing a new law to control the operations of the private companies, but has backed off initial demands for Blackwater to be thrown out of Iraq.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Titan and CACI were to ask Washington federal judge James Robertson to dismiss the case.

The companies argue that they cannot be tried as they were under the control of the Army, which in turn says it can only prosecute its own personnel, not civilians.

Other US judges have refused to hear cases brought by former Iraqi prisoners, arguing that they have no jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed against foreigners in a third country.

But in one case brought by a federal prosecutor in North Carolina, former CIA agent David Passaro was jailed for more than eight years in February for beating an Afghan prisoner who died of his injuries in 2003.

Detroit-based lawyer Shereef Akeel, who is representing some of the Abu Ghraib plaintiffs, is confident that the case will proceed.

“This is for the sake of who we are (as Americans). And if we don’t understand the principals at stake here — if we let them lay low — we have done a disservice to our founding fathers,” he said.

“I have this vision of the Iraqis coming here… of putting them in a hotel in Washington, DC right across the street from the people who make the decisions… so they can have their day in court,” Akeel added.

The sole US officer charged over the Abu Ghraib abuses, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, escaped with just a reprimand at his court martial in late August.

Eleven junior soldiers are serving varying sentences but no senior Pentagon official was ever charged in the scandal, which President George W. Bush has described as the “biggest mistake” made by the United States in Iraq.

U.S. protests shrink while antiwar sentiment grows

Andy Sullivan
Reuters
October 3, 2007

Crowds at antiwar rallies in Washington have dwindled even as U.S. opinion has turned against the war in Iraq, as organizers feud and participants question the effectiveness of the street protests.

Rival antiwar groups, which in years past jointly sponsored massive rallies on the National Mall, have promoted separate protests recently or decided to steer clear of the capital altogether.

The thinning crowds stand in contrast to the antiwar protests of the Vietnam era, which grew as the war progressed.

Activists and experts say divisions among peace groups, along with other factors like the lack of a draft, fatigue about the war and the rise of the Internet, have all contributed to the declining turnout.

Sparse turnout — fewer than 1,000 at a rally on Saturday, according to local media reports — could undermine the goal of forcing an end to U.S. involvement in Iraq, participants say.

“When you have demonstrations in which the turnout is not terribly impressive, that gives politicians the sense that people may oppose the war but nobody’s really going to pay a price,” said Peter Kuznik, an American University history professor and antiwar protester.

Antiwar rallies drew hundreds of thousands of people at the war’s start in 2003, although only 23 percent of Americans then said the invasion was a mistake, according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll. That figure is now 58 percent.

Frustration about the war has driven down President George W. Bush’s approval ratings and helped Democrats win control of Congress last year. But since 2005, antiwar groups have opted to promote separate events rather than work together.

Saturday’s protest, sponsored by the Troops Out Now Coalition, came two weeks after an antiwar event sponsored by the ANSWER Coalition, which drew roughly 10,000 people. ANSWER also sponsored a rally in March.

The groups’ agendas are similar, opposing what they call “imperialist” U.S. policy not only in Iraq but toward countries like Cuba and Iran — which has alienated some supporters.

“There’s all of these peripheral issues that you’re going to be associated with, whether you want to or not,” said Hamilton College history professor Maurice Isserman.

SPLINTER GROUP

Both groups’ leaders were associated with the Workers World Party, which advocates a shift toward a Soviet-style planned economy. But a 2004 dispute prompted some members to form the splinter Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Members of the splinter group stayed active in the ANSWER Coalition, and the remaining members of the Workers World Party formed the Troops Out Now Coalition, Troops Out Now spokesman Dustin Langley said.

Another antiwar group, United for Peace and Justice, has refused to work with ANSWER since a joint rally in 2005. The event drew well over 100,000 people, media reports said, but the two groups clashed over speaking time and other issues.

United for Peace and Justice, which has tried to focus on ending the Iraq war, drew 100,000 people to a January protest. The group plans 11 regional demonstrations later this month, but none in Washington.

“The base that we work with was saying to us, ‘We’ve been to Washington a lot in the last four years, we don’t want to go to Washington again,”‘ national coordinator Leslie Kagan said.

ANSWER has called for antiwar groups to join forces for a large rally in the spring, but Kagan and Langley said their groups have not decided whether to participate.

Antiwar leaders say recent smaller protests reflect new tactics, not disorganization. Smaller activist groups like Code Pink have been a colorful, disruptive presence at congressional hearings and appearances by Bush administration officials.

“There’s times when we’ve had half a million people out in the streets, and there’s times when it’s important just to be there,” Langley said.

But others said it is less likely they’ll head to Washington at all. “People are tired, they are frustrated because they didn’t expect this to go on so long,” said Laura Bonham, a spokeswoman for Progressive Democrats of America, which lobbies lawmakers to support a withdrawal. “It’s like, well, we can stay home.”

Largely absent from the actions are young people, who were the majority of Vietnam-era protesters — perhaps because they do not risk being drafted into the military or from a sense that they can express their opposition to the war on the Internet, rather than on the streets, Isserman said.

Weak dollar prompts record foreign buyouts of U.S. companies

Robert Weisman
The Boston Globe
Tuesday, October 2, 2007

BOSTON: European, Asian and Canadian companies are taking advantage of the weaker dollar to buy their U.S. counterparts at a record pace, increasing investment in the United States but also raising fears about a potential loss of jobs and autonomy.

“We could be looking at the world’s largest tag sale if we continue to see declines in the dollar,” said Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist at DataCore Partners.

In the latest large deal aided by a weak dollar, Commerce Bancorp, which is based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, agreed Tuesday to be acquired by Toronto-Dominion Bank of Canada in a cash-and-shares deal valued at $8.5 billion.

Nationally, the value of purchases of companies by non-U.S. buyers so far this year totaled $257.4 billion - more than in any full year since 2000, the height of the technology boom, according to Thomson Financial, a research firm in New York.

The buyouts are sparking anxiety in the United States, though their impact is complex. Foreign owners typically use acquisitions as an entry into the U.S. market and thus may be more willing than American buyers to invest in their new holdings, some economists say. But the risk is that they might also be quicker to cut back or consolidate U.S. operations when times get tough.

“Quite naturally, foreign companies want to play in this market,” said Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a trade group for small and midsize manufacturers. “They want leading-edge technology, and the United States is still the technology leader. But when they buy these companies, they’re acquiring control over the most dynamic pieces of the American economy, and they’re acquiring control over America’s future.”

Corporate deals are just one way the dollar’s falling value is having an impact. The weaker dollar has also drawn European, Asian and Canadian tourists, made it more expensive for Americans to travel abroad, and bolstered the exports of U.S. companies that sell high-technology equipment or medical gear overseas. But foreign acquisitions could become the sagging dollar’s most lasting legacy.

In New England, one of the regions heavily affected, 69 companies have been sold to foreign buyers in the first nine months of 2007 for a total of $30.8 billion - also a seven-year high.

In June, Philips Electronics of the Netherlands snapped up Color Kinetics, a maker of lighting systems, for $714 million. Last month, Analog Devices agreed to sell a pair of cellular product lines to MediaTek of Taiwan for $350 million. And last week, United Group of Australia completed a $411 million purchase of Unicco Service, which sells cleaning services for office buildings.

Some see the takeovers as inevitable in a global economy where geographic borders are no match for increasingly multinational companies.

“It’s part of the overall global economic climate,” said Brian Bethune, an economist for Global Insight, who said the acquisitions should be judged case by case. “Foreign companies are trying to get access to the U.S. market, and generally that’s positive. European and Asian companies tend to take a longer view and could be more patient investors than U.S. hedge funds.”

For now, many of the overseas buyers are promising to invest in their acquired properties. The new management team at Sabic Innovative Plastics, the former GE Plastics, plans to add 75 to 100 employees to its 425-person work force in New England.

“We’re really lucky it wasn’t bought by a Dow or a DuPont, because they might have moved the work from here to another one of their U.S. facilities,” said Alfred Shogry, president of the Berkshire Central Labor Council in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

A spokeswoman at Color Kinetics said, “Philips is looking at us to be their global research and development center for LED-based lighting fixtures,” referring to the company’s patented light-emitting diode technology. “We’re absolutely hiring and growing right now.”

But that is not always the case with foreign takeovers. The French telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel, which bought its U.S. rival, Lucent Technologies, last year, said last month that it would cut thousands of jobs. The outsourcing provider Caritor, which has corporate offices in California but almost all its employees and operations in India, recently said it planned to eliminate more than a quarter of the 350 jobs at the Boston headquarters of the technology services company Keane, which it purchased in June.

Klepper-Smith said he feared the effect of foreign deals on workers and communities if decisions on jobs and plant locations are made in Europe, Asia or the Middle East. “It raises some red flags and some real questions about our independence,” he said.