The Last Roundup

Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?

By Christopher Ketcham

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In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a very sick man," sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and "literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them there.

Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's men. "There"—he pointed weakly to Comey—"is the attorney general." Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey's presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—"without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified.

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as part of planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government."

Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.

Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a "parallel government" that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes," who were to be held at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish "temporary detention and processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be is not specified.

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time."

A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as "warrantless wiretapping."

In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor "huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records." Authorities employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift through the data, searching for "suspicious patterns." In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it's notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. "The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed," the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. "Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach."

The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.

A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used "to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time." Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, "What was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be." A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: "Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that 'Main Core' database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project."

If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. "If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues"—the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws—"so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints." Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. "It's clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear." Giraldi continues, "I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many reasons—quite likely including the two of us."

Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: "In the event of a national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers"—the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example—"if Congress doesn't explicitly prohibit it. It's really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so." Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs in court "when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no notice to persons on the president's 'enemies list.' That means if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president says it is—even in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own favor."

The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey's suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading: "Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence Finding anyway."

But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of concern. "The capacity for future use of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable," the senior government official says.
In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world-renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won't prevent terrorist conspiracies. "Because there is so little historical terrorist event data," Jonas tells Radar, "there is not enough volume to create precise predictions."

The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in postwar American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities, and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding "security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed "subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).

FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans that contained information gleaned from wide-ranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency's secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate."

Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code-named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.

North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS-based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?" Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.

In July 2007 and again last August, Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush administration's Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.

But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are "extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around the same time, he told the Oregonian: "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."

Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrections—as permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807—but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident."

More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."

"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.'"

As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)

These days, it's rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. "The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny," Church pointed out in 1975. "And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know."


UPDATE: Since this article went to press, several documents have emerged to suggest the story has longer legs than we thought. Most troubling among these is an October 2001 Justice Department memo that detailed the extra-constitutional powers the U.S. military might invoke during domestic operations following a terrorist attack. In the memo, John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general, "concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations." (Yoo, as most readers know, is author of the infamous Torture Memo that, in bizarro fashion, rejiggers the definition of "legal" torture to allow pretty much anything short of murder.) In the October 2001 memo, Yoo refers to a classified DOJ document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States." According to the Associated Press, "Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program." Attorney General John Mukasey last month refused to clarify before Congress whether the Yoo memo was still in force.

Meanwhile, congressional sources tell Radar that Congressman Peter DeFazio has apparently abandoned his effort to get to the bottom of the White House COG classified annexes. Penny Dodge, DeFazio's chief of staff, says otherwise. "We will be sending a letter requesting a classified briefing soon," she told Radar this week.

Christopher Ketcham writes for Harper's, GQ, and Mother Jones, among other publications. He splits his time between Utah and Brooklyn, NY.

Consciousness of Guilt: Genocide in Iraq?

By DAVID MODEL

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Despite the precipitous plunge in his popularity and growing criticism of his competency, character, and style, George W. Bush is not really that much different from other presidents with respect to his hegemonic ambitions or his proclivity to use force to achieve foreign policy objectives. Continuing historical patterns, President Bush and all presidents since World War II have committed horrendous crimes against humanity in order to protect and advance American interests under the guise of liberating people from under the jackboot of brutal dictators or communist subversives, bringing democracy to totalitarian states, improving the lives of those who are suffering and eradicating terrorism.

These are laudable goals reflecting prevailing shibboleths domestically. These goals are an alluring mantle for the real paradigm governing foreign policy which is the pursuit of American interests with total indifference to the consequences to people victimized by American “ideals”.

The gaping discrepancy between the stated goals of American foreign policy and its praxis is best exemplified by the apogee of war crimes: genocide. In its pursuit of these lofty goals, the United States has committed genocide in Iraq. Intervention resulting in genocide at the very minimum proves that American government’s professed motives for foreign policy decisions are altogether specious.

Rationalizations for the application of military force have been based on euphemistic doctrines which have no basis in American or international law. George W. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war was not new to foreign and defence policy strategists but can be traced back to Dean Acheson’s doctrine dismissing the applicability of international law to the United States as outlined in a speech to the American Society of International Law in 1963 in which he argued that:

The power, position and prestige of the US had been challenged [Cuban Missile Crisis] by another state and the law does not deal with such questions of ultimate power – power that comes close to the source of sovereignty. [1]

In other words, national interests including meretricious threats to the sovereignty of the American State supersede international law despite the fact the United Nations Charter makes provisions for these exigencies.

The growing appetite for the unilateral application of force resulted in the “humanitarian intervention” or “illegal but legitimate” doctrine during the Clinton and Bush presidencies. This doctrine validated acts of preemption that justified the use of force whenever a threat was neither imminent nor substantial but necessary to defend the security interests of the United States against a perceived threat easily manufactured through the propaganda of fear.

Invading and occupying Iraq under the pretext of a preemptive war, a country already decimated by Dessert Storm, sanctions and no-fly-zones, represents the quintessential tragedy and hypocrisy of American foreign policy. To verify that the American Government is guilty of genocide in Iraq, I will establish a set of criteria based on the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and apply them to Iraq.

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide sets out a number of criteria to evaluate whether or not a war crime attains the magnitude of genocide. These criteria are not without controversy but by examining the scholarly literature on the subject and the judgments of the International Criminal Court, I have established conservative standards to assess whether or not the American Government is responsible for genocide in Iraq.

According to the Convention:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:

a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm;
c) Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Although the phrase “in whole or in part” sounds ambiguous, its ambit has been restricted by judgments of the International Criminal Court. According to the Rapporteur for the Preparatory Commission of the International Criminal Court, “The accused aimed to destroy a large part of the group in a particular area.”

The International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia concluded that “The killing of all members of a group within a small geographical area” was tantamount to genocide.

Notwithstanding the imprecision of these definitions of “part”, the area in Bosnia referred to in the ruling sets a baseline for future cases. The architect of the Convention, Raphael Lemkin, intended to define “in part” as a level of destruction sufficiently substantial to imperil the existence of the group. Shedding even further light on this problem, the Convention itself considers attempted genocide to be punishable under the Convention implying that intent alone is sufficient to establish guilt.

“Intent” is another term in need of clarification. Apart from direct evidence through orders, statements, or coordinated acts, intention can be shown if “Acts of destruction that are not the specific goal but are predictable outcomes or by-products of a policy, which may have been avoided by a change in that policy.” [2]

The Genocide Convention defines two basic levels of guilt: the direct commission of genocide and complicity to commit genocide.

Complicity in genocide must embody:

1. Intentional participation;
2. Knowledge of the genocidal intent of the perpetrators;
3. Organizing, planning, supplying arms, training intelligence, or direct military support.

One example of direct American genocide, Iraq, has suffered massive destruction to its infrastructure, the economy and human life, particularly since the imposition of American sanctions in 1990 and the bombing in 1991. UN Resolution 661 mandated sanctions against Iraq originally to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. The resolution was worded in such a way as to grant the United States a veto over which products could be traded with Iraq. The American government exploited that veto to severely punish the people of Iraq in the hope that they would overthrow Saddam Hussein themselves.

According to a 1993 UNICEF study, “What has become increasingly clear is that no significant movement toward food security can be achieved so long as the embargo remains in place.” [3]

Declassified documents divulge the fact that the Americans were aware of and responsible for a humanitarian crisis caused by the sanctions. A Defense Intelligence Agency report on January 18, 1991 concludes that:

Failing to secure supplies [for Iraq] will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences; if not epidemics of disease…Current public health problems are attributable to the reduction of normal preventative medicine, waste disposal, water purification and distribution electricity, and the decreased ability to control disease outbreaks.[4]

On January 15, 1991, B-52s were flying towards their targets in Iraq and cruise missiles were fired from ships in the Indian Ocean. Iraqi defences were incapable of offering any resistance.

Restricting the bombing to only military targets was not part of the U.S. war plan whereas targets included hospitals, electric utilities, schools, factories, water treatment plants, irrigation systems, food storage facilities and community health centres. Over 200,000 people died, the majority of whom were civilians.

In 2003, George Bush Junior inflicted further atrocities on the devastated people of Iraq and on a country virtually bombed back into pre-industrial times by another so-called war. As of today, Iraq has suffered a further one million casualties and four million refugees.

Whether or not the administrations of Bush Senior, Clinton, and Bush Junior intended to commit genocide in Iraq is irrelevant because the consequences of the bombings and sanctions could have been predicted by any reasonable person. The actions of these administrations clearly resulted in mass killing, serious bodily and mental harm, and the infliction of conditions calculated to bring about Iraq’s physical destruction in whole or in part. Iraq is a clear-cut case of genocide.

The carnage resulting from this genocide clearly exposes the disparity between the professed principles of American foreign policy and its manifest practice. This hypocrisy betrays the indifference of American leaders to basic democratic principles and to respect for both domestic and international law.

David Model is a Professor of Political Science at Seneca College. He is the author of States of Darkness: US Complicity in Genocides Since 1945. He can be reached at: david.model@senecac.on.ca

Notes

[1] Acheson, D. (1968). Dean Acheson’s remark is quoted in Louis Henkin: “How Nations Behave: Law and Foreign Policy.” Columbia University Press. P. 265-266.

[2] Gellately, R., and Kiernan, B. (Eds.). (2003). The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. P. 15.

[3] UNICEF Report. (1993). Children, War, and Sanctions. Cited in Ullrich, G. (1998) “The effects of Sanctions on the Civilian Community of Iraq.”

[4] Defense Intelligence Agency. (1991, January 8). Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities.

Oil Rises Above $133 to Record as Stockpiles Drop

Oil Rises Above $133 on U.S. Supply Drop, Bank Price Forecasts

By Mark Shenk

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Crude oil rose to a record above $133 a barrel as U.S. stockpiles unexpectedly dropped and banks raised price forecasts because of supply constraints and demand growth.

Supplies fell 5.32 million barrels to 320.4 million last week, the biggest drop in four months, the Energy Department said. Oil for December 2016 delivery rose more than $19 a barrel, or 16 percent, after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. on May 16 raised its outlook to $141 a barrel for the second-half of the year.

''What we have here is a situation where essentially higher prices aren't generating any more supply,'' Paul Sankey, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities in New York said in an interview with Bloomberg radio. ''What we have to do is keep pricing the commodity higher until demand starts falling,'' which ''is around $150 a barrel.''

Crude oil for July delivery rose $4.23, or 3.3 percent, to $133.21 a barrel at the 2:30 p.m. close of floor trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after reaching $133.38. Prices have more than doubled from a year ago.

Gasoline and heating-oil futures in New York also climbed to records. Gasoline for June delivery rose 9.19 cents, or 2.8 percent, to $3.3963 a gallon, after touching $3.40. Heating oil for June delivery rose 13.45 cents, or 3.6 percent, to $3.9095 a gallon, after reaching an all-time high of $3.913.

Higher Pump Prices

Pump prices are following futures higher. Regular gasoline, averaged nationwide, rose 0.7 cent to a record $3.807 a gallon, AAA, the nation's largest motorist organization, said today on its Web site.

An inventory increase of 300,000 barrels was forecast, according to the median of responses by 15 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News before the report's release.

The supply decline left inventories 0.9 percent below the five-year average for the week, the Energy Department said. Stockpiles were 0.8 percent above normal a week earlier.

Imports fell 7 percent to 9.24 million barrels a day, the report showed. Imports have averaged 9.86 million barrels a day so far this year, down 0.9 percent from the same period last year, according to department figures.

''In this high-priced environment we are seeing refiners cut back on imports,'' said Antoine Halff, head of energy research at New York-based Newedge USA LLC. ''High prices and credit tightness are making it much harder to build supply.''

Brent crude oil for July settlement rose $4.88, or 3.8 percent, to $132.72 a barrel on London's ICE Futures Europe exchange. The contract touched $132.94 today, the highest since trading began in 1988.

'Well Supplied'

The crude-oil market is ''well supplied,'' Libya's top oil official Shokri Ghanem said today, rejecting calls for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase production to curb prices. OPEC, which pumps more than 40 percent of the world's oil, isn't planning to meet before its next scheduled conference in September to review production, he said.

''OPEC is playing with fire,'' said Rick Mueller, director of oil practice at Energy Security Analysis Inc. in Wakefield, Massachusetts. ''While they may be right from a fundamental standpoint about crude supplies, at this time it will take more than words from them to bring prices down. We will need to see more gestures like the Saudis made, to lower prices.''

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi told reporters on May 16 that the kingdom is planning a 300,000 barrel-a-day output increase, to bring June production to 9.45 million barrels a day.

''Once prices hit $150 or $200 like our friends at Goldman are saying, we are looking at $5 or $6 gasoline, which will really hurt demand and cause a recession,'' Mueller said.

Goldman Forecasts

Goldman analyst Arjun N. Murti said in a May 16 report that ''the possibility of $150-$200 per barrel seems increasingly likely over the next six-24 months.'' Murti first wrote of a ''super spike'' in March 2005, predicting crude may trade between $50 and $105 a barrel through 2009.

U.S. oil-company executives told Congress oil prices should be between $35 and $90 a barrel. Representatives of the five largest publicly traded oil companies appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on record energy prices. Appearing today were representatives of BP Plc, ConocoPhillips, Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc.

The price of oil should be ''somewhere between $35 and $65 a barrel,'' John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., the Houston-based subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, said at the hearing today. Other executives said prices should be as much as $90 a barrel.

Strategic Reserve

Congress last week approved legislation to halt deliveries to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to respond to record prices.

Airlines have been hit by higher jet fuel costs. The price of the fuel, the largest expense at many airlines, has climbed 84 percent in the past year and traded at a record $3.9684 a gallon in New York Harbor today.

AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, the world's largest carrier, will world's largest carrier, said it will cut ''thousands'' of jobs as it responds to high fuel prices and slowing demand.

Bill C51 - How to Slip In CODEX

Please view and MASS FORWARD this You Tube re C-51. Spread the MEME!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbxItUVwyXA

See Most recent Alerts at http://www.ymlp.com/pubarchive.php?jham Top most one was sent TODAY, Urgent Mssg for Americans and Canadians re Health Canada Sneak Attack Launched Late Last Night.

Stakeholder Meeting on C-51 sponsored by Health Canada is being held TODAY in Richmond BC on less than 24 Hrs notice.

IAHF is feverishly sounding an alert across N.America because unless KILLED in Canada, C-51 will NUKE Health Freedom in the USA too. Full explanation in alerts and at http://www.stopc51.com

This is not a drill. The New World Order "elitists" have planned the worldwide food shortage in order to implement their Sustainable Development Treaty goals. (Food control is people control). You can peruse the N.W.O.worldwide population reduction goals by accessing website at: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3304.shtml

If you appreciate IAHF's tireless efforts to monkeywrench the NWOs population control plans and societal control agenda, please let us know via a donation that will help us pay for gas and lodging while sounding an urgent alert all over the metro Vancouver BC Area and the World: Paypal link at http://www.iahf.com/index1.html top left part of page above the word "Contents" or send check to IAHF 556 Boundary Bay Rd., Point Roberts WA 98281 USA

Please mass forward. Thanks! The life you save could be your

Source

Former CIA official indicted anew in bribery case

By MATTHEW BARAKAT

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A new indictment of a former top CIA official alleges that he received bribes in the form of "sexual companionship" in exchange for helping a friend get an edge in landing multimillion-dollar contracts from the agency.

Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., on Tuesday obtained a superseding indictment against Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who as executive director held the CIA's No. 3 rank before leaving in 2006.

The indictment accuses Foggo of accepting tens of thousands of dollars in meals, vacations and other perks in exchange for helping friend Brent Wilkes obtain various contracts with the CIA.

The new indictment also includes an allegation that Foggo received sexual companionship and "enrichment of a mistress," though the allegations are not detailed in the indictment.

Calls and an e-mail sent to Foggo's lawyers were not immediately returned Tuesday.

The sexual companionship allegation may be new to the formal charges against Foggo, but they are a familiar part of the case as a whole. Wilkes has already pleaded guilty to paying bribes to then-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., some of which came in the form of prostitutes.

The superseding indictment also adds new counts of making false statements and conflict of interest against Foggo. Specifically, the indictment accuses him of failing to disclose the various gifts he received from Wilkes on his federal financial disclosure form.

The conflict of interest charges allege, among other things, that Foggo tried to steer to Wilkes a contract worth more than $100 million to provide air support to the CIA, even as Foggo stood to benefit financially.

Generally, though, the new indictment spells out many of the same allegations made previously; prosecutors had said earlier this year that the new indictment would not contain any major surprises for the defense.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said Tuesday that "the CIA has cooperated closely with the investigating agencies and the Department of Justice. That cooperation continues today."

A hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

Wider Antiterror Role for Elite Forces Rejected

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The military’s elite Special Operations Command has quietly stepped back from a controversial plan that gave it the authority to carry out secret counterterrorism missions on its own around the world.

The decision culminates four years of misgivings within the military that the command, with its expertise in commando missions and unconventional war, would use its broader mandate too aggressively, by carrying out operations that had not been reviewed or approved by the regional commanders.

A new Special Operations commander, Adm. Eric T. Olson of the Navy Seals, has now said publicly that he intends to play a different role, and will instead continue the command’s new mission as coordinator of the military’s counterterrorism efforts around the world.

The shift reverses what Donald H. Rumsfeld put in place as defense secretary in 2004, when he said he wanted the Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, Fla., to operate unilaterally; he believed that it would be more aggressive in hunting down terrorists than the regional commanders, who are tied most closely to conventional forces.

Roger D. Carstens, a 20-year veteran of Special Operations missions who is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington policy institute, said the Special Operations Command finally “came to the conclusion that its role is not to be that of a global Lone Ranger who shows up at the last second to dispatch the bad guys.”

“That just can’t be done,” Mr. Carstens said, “or rather it should not be done.”

The change is the latest rejection of initiatives that Mr. Rumsfeld set forth during almost six years as defense secretary, before stepping down in 2006. His successor, Robert M. Gates, has increased the size of the ground forces, a move Mr. Rumsfeld resisted; signed off on a plan to keep more troops in Europe than Mr. Rumsfeld had envisioned; and called for future budgets to focus on the weapons needed to fight insurgents and terrorists today, rather than on investments in next-generation technology advocated by Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Gates, a former director of central intelligence, has also reined in some Pentagon intelligence operations and has otherwise sought to ease tensions caused by what intelligence officials saw as Mr. Rumsfeld’s attempts to give the Pentagon a more dominant role in American spying efforts.

It is not known how Mr. Gates views the decision by the Special Operations Command to back away from Mr. Rumsfeld’s view of its role. Mr. Gates has not discussed it publicly, and senior aides said they were not privy to his thinking on the matter.

But senior Pentagon and military officers made clear that the Special Operations Command was not independently carrying out its own secret counterterrorism missions, but was instead coordinating counterterrorism planning across the military, as well as fulfilling its traditional role of training and equipping Special Operations forces for the armed services.

Mr. Rumsfeld outlined his views in 2004 by advocating what was known as a new Unified Command Plan, one that would have shifted the center of gravity within the military. It declared that the Special Operations Command “leads, plans, synchronizes, and as directed, executes global operations against terrorist networks.” He stressed that his reorganization was intended to permit the command to send out its own small teams to capture or kill terrorists.

But Admiral Olson used a speech in March to the Center for a New American Security to register disagreement with that approach. “There was some sense that from our headquarters in Tampa we were in the business of directing specific activities that were really in the area of operations of other commanders, and we really don’t do that,” he said in the speech. He initially spoke off the record, but under an agreement with his command, the policy institute later posted his remarks on its Web site, www.cnas.org. “What we really do is, we synchronize plans and planning in the global war on terror,” he added.

Counterterrorism missions continue to be carried out under regional commanders, Admiral Olson said. Officers at the Special Operations Command, he said, “receive the plans, review the plans, coordinate the plans, deconflict them.” He also said the command made recommendations to the Joint Chiefs and the defense secretary “on how resources ought to be allocated around the world to match the demands of the global war on terror.”

Senior officials familiar with the admiral’s thinking say his comments reflect the same deliberate approach that his predecessors have adopted in interpreting Mr. Rumsfeld’s directive, and they say it is in keeping with the instruction that the Special Operations Command carry out its own missions only when first directed by the president or the defense secretary. Senior officials said that such missions had rarely, if ever, actually happened.

Mr. Carstens, of the Center for a New American Security, said that when the Unified Command Plan was first approved by Mr. Rumsfeld, many people thought the Special Operations Command would conduct military operations regardless of whether regional commanders had approved the missions. He said the Rumsfeld vision had been rejected. “It is not what we thought it was going to be when we first received the authority,” Mr. Carstens said. The way missions are carried out today, he added, “is not much different than what we have always done.”

In many ways, Mr. Rumsfeld’s goals for the Special Operations Command are being carried out by a subordinate unit, the Joint Special Operations Command.

That command is in charge of the armed forces’ most secretive counterterrorism units, and is credited with capturing or killing many of the most wanted terrorist or insurgent leaders, including Saddam Hussein. This elite command operates in full coordination with the regional commanders in the Middle East, East Asia and other parts of the world.

Veterans Attest to PTSD Neglect by VA

by: Maya Schenwar and Matt Renner

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Recently released documents from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are further proof the VA has failed to adequately address the crisis in veterans' mental health care, according to a former top VA employee turned veterans' advocate.

In March, Norma J. Perez, the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) coordinator at a VA facility in Temple, Texas, wrote an email (PDF) to her subordinates stating: "Given that we have more and more compensation seeking veterans, I'd like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out. Consider a diagnosis of adjustment disorder, R/O [ruling out] PTSD ... we really don't or have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD."

In response, VA secretary James Peake said that the VA is "committed to absolute accuracy in a diagnosis and unwavering in providing any and all earned benefits. PTSD and the mental health arena is no exception." Peake placed the blame on Perez, saying that the memo revealed the mistake of a single employee, not VA policy.

However, the VA has been under fire from Congress and veterans' rights groups for more than a year for allegedly covering up and underreporting the mental health care crisis among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. A lawsuit that is currently awaiting a final ruling seeks to force the VA to move quickly in addressing the mental and physical health needs of veterans.

Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), the veterans' rights organization which brought the lawsuit, said the Perez email exemplifies a larger trend. "The bottom line is that VA under the Bush administration has dropped the ball. The email sent by Perez proves our lawsuit was correct - VA is short staffed for mental health care and VA intentionally misdiagnoses veterans in order to save money. VA was illegally and unconscionably turning away suicidal veterans in need of emergency mental health care. We are asking the court to order VA to stop this outrageous practice," Sullivan said.

New VA documents obtained exclusively by VCS using the Freedom of Information Act indicate the Veterans Administration is only paying disability benefits for PTSD to 33,247 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, although 67,717 have been diagnosed with PTSD. According to Sullivan, VCS is calling for an investigation into this apparent discrepancy.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in September 2007 stated that the VA's "lack of early identification techniques" led to "inconsistent diagnosis and treatment" of PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. According to the GAO, early diagnosis is essential in preventing PTSD's consequences - which could be deadly.

Firsthand Accounts of PTSD Crisis

Kristofer Goldsmith, a former Army sergeant who was forced to stay in the military beyond his contract because of the "stop loss" order given by the president, testified about his experience with mental health care at Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We were told that if we were to seek mental health, we would be locked away and our careers would not advance. If I admitted that I had severe chronic depression, if I thought I had PTSD ... my career could have been ruined," Goldsmith said.

He received an adjustment disorder diagnosis after experiencing a panic attack in March 2007. Because he was not granted the PTSD label - despite displaying many symptoms of the disorder - he was ordered to deploy to Iraq for a second tour.

What Goldsmith described as a "sharp downward spiral" came to a head the day before he was scheduled to ship back to Iraq with his unit.

"The day before I was supposed to deploy, Memorial Day, I went out onto a field in Fort Stewart and tried to take my own life ... I took pills and drank vodka until I couldn't drink anymore. The next thing I knew I was handcuffed to a gurney in the hospital. The cops had found me and literally dragged my body into an ambulance," Goldsmith said in his testimony.

Finally, in October 2007, months after his suicide attempt, Goldsmith received a PTSD diagnosis from the VA.

According to Goldsmith, his experience was far from unique.

"While undergoing psychiatric treatment, I heard of many people being diagnosed with personality disorder and adjustment disorder instead of PTSD," Goldsmith told Truthout. "I believe this is a way for the Army to hide the levels of PTSD among its ranks, through the usage of misdiagnoses."

Suspicions about the VA's motives for misdiagnoses flared up over a year ago, when a series of news reports revealed many of the 22,500 soldiers diagnosed with "personality disorder" since 2001 were actually suffering from PTSD. Taken in conjunction with a rising suicide rate among veterans, the reports sparked a flurry of investigations and Congressional hearings.

"My concern is that this country is regressing and again ignoring legitimate claims of PTSD in favor of the time and money saving diagnosis of personality disorder," said Congressman Bob Filner, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, at a July 27 hearing. "I want to know how the VA deals with veterans who have been labeled with a personality disorder. Does the burden fall on the veteran to prove that he or she doesn't have a personality disorder? Will such a diagnosis prevent the veteran from receiving health care once initial VA coverage ends? What extra barriers does this veteran face?"

Misdiagnosed vets are not only often deprived of proper treatment, Filner noted; they also miss out on condition-related benefits and subsidies. PTSD has attracted a lot of legislative attention over the past year, and new funding may soon become available for veterans with that diagnosis. Moreover, special programs geared toward PTSD are already in motion at many VA facilities, and vets without an official diagnosis are not eligible for those treatments.

For Iraq veteran Joe Wheeler, a delayed VA diagnosis meant two years of paying for his psychotropic medications out of pocket, at a time when his tenuous mental health made it tough to hold a job. Wheeler's doctors immediately diagnosed him with PTSD, but without an official VA acknowledgment of his condition, he was left without benefits.

"I was never told why my diagnosis was delayed," Wheeler said. "It's a faceless bureaucracy; most people within the VA don't understand the system themselves. And it's designed to be adversarial. They make it hard so that it costs them less money."

Wheeler no longer seeks treatment at the VA, preferring the financial strain of private treatment to the psychological strain he endured under VA care. With a different doctor - and along with the switch, a new medication - every few months, his experience at the VA was a saga of fits and starts; not exactly a recipe for recovery.

Recent studies back up Goldsmith's and Wheeler's charges of VA negligence in PTSD diagnosis. According to Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Daniel Akaka, the committee has uncovered "widespread inadequate evaluation of veterans claiming service-connection for PTSD due to combat exposure and military sexual trauma."

"Veterans often report to the Committee that during exams they were not asked about their military experience and received superficial evaluations," Akaka wrote in a letter to VA Secretary Peak last week. "Veterans' advocates report the reluctance of some VA examiners to provide a diagnosis of PTSD, even for veterans previously diagnosed with PTSD."

Akaka added that while the VA's own "Best Practice Manual for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Compensation and Pension Examinations" recommends a three-hour evaluation session for every potential PTSD sufferer, average exams clock in at 30 to 35 minutes.

Following the release of the Temple VA memo last week, Akaka requested the Office of the Inspector General begin an investigation into the PTSD diagnosis methods at Temple.

"This incident is both disturbing and disappointing, and provides further evidence that VA's mental health program requires significant attention," Akaka said in a statement on Friday. "Psychological war wounds are difficult to diagnose and harder still to heal, but they are no less real than any other service-connected injury. I continue to be concerned that VA's mental health system is unprepared for the rising demands placed on the system."

FBI "War Crimes" Investigation at Guantanamo Shut Down in 2003

Report Details Dissent on Guantánamo Tactics

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In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo BayFederal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a "war crimes file" to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday. began to mount,

The report, an exhaustive, 437-page review prepared by the Justice Department inspector general, provides the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.

In one of several previously undisclosed episodes, the report found that American military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to disrupt the sleep of Chinese Muslims held there, waking them every 15 minutes the night before their interviews by the Chinese. In another incident, it said, a female interrogator reportedly bent back an inmate's thumbs and squeezed his genitals as he grimaced in pain.

The report describes what one official called "trench warfare" between the F.B.I. and the military over the rough methods being used on detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The report says that the F.B.I. agents took their concerns to higher-ups, but that their concerns often fell on deaf ears: officials at senior levels at the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council were all made aware of the F.B.I. agents' complaints, but little appears to have been done as a result.

The report quotes passionate objections from F.B.I. officials who grew increasingly concerned about the reports of practices like intimidating inmates with snarling dogs, parading them in the nude before female soldiers, or "short-shackling" them to the floor for many hours in extreme heat or cold.

Such tactics, said one F.B.I. agent in an e-mail message to supervisors in November 2002, might violate American law banning torture.

More senior officials, including Spike Bowman, who was then the head of the national security law unit at the F.B.I., tried to sound the alarm as well.

"Beyond any doubt, what they are doing (and I don't know the extent of it) would be unlawful were these enemy prisoners of war," Mr. Bowman wrote in an e-mail message to top F.B.I. officials in July 2003.

Many of the abuses the report describes have previously been disclosed, but it was not known that F.B.I. agents had gone so far as to document accusations of abuse in a "war crimes file" at Guantánamo. The report does not say how many incidents were included in the file after it was started in 2002, but the "war crimes" label showed just how seriously F.B.I. agents took the accusations. Sometime in 2003, however, an F.B.I. official ordered the file closed because "investigating detainee allegations of abuse was not the F.B.I.'s mission," the report said.

The inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, found that in a few instances, F.B.I. agents participated in interrogations using pressure tactics that would not have been permitted inside the United States. But the "vast majority" of agents followed F.B.I. legal guidelines and "separated themselves" from harsh treatment, the report says.

The report says that the F.B.I. "had not provided sufficient guidance to its agents on how to respond when confronted with military interrogators" who used interrogation techniques that were not permitted by the F.B.I., and that fueled confusion and dissension. But it also says that "the F.B.I. should be credited for its conduct and professionalism in detainee interrogations in the military zones."

Jameel Jaffer, who tracks detainee issues for the American Civil Liberties Union, took a more critical stance, saying the report shows "the F.B.I.'s leadership failed to act aggressively to end the abuse." Mr. Jaffer said the report "only underscores the pressing need for an independent and comprehensive investigation of prisoner abuse."

The report documents in greater detail than ever before the conflict between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. over interrogation methods, which began with the capture of Abu Zubaydah, a senior Qaeda figure, in Pakistan in March 2002. F.B.I. agents began the interrogation using traditional rapport-building methods, and one agent even provided personal care for Mr. Zubaydah, who had been shot three times and grievously wounded, "even to the point of cleaning him up after bowel movements."

But C.I.A. personnel who took over the case within a few days began to use harsher methods that one F.B.I. agent described as "borderline torture," and which the C.I.A. has acknowledged included waterboarding, in which water is poured over the prisoner's mouth and nose to create a feeling of suffocation.

The report describes extensive debate inside the F.B.I. over the next six months over whether it should continue to observe or assist the C.I.A. with interrogations using harsh methods it believed were counterproductive.

F.B.I. officials, including Pasquale D'Amuro, then the bureau's top counterterrorism officer, believed the physical pressure being used by the C.I.A. was less effective than traditional noncoercive methods, that it would "taint" any future effort at prosecution, and that it "was wrong and helped Al Qaeda in spreading negative views of the United States," the report says.

After the capture of another Qaeda figure, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, in September 2002, F.B.I. agents again traveled to a secret C.I.A. site where Mr. bin al-Shibh was being questioned. But only in 2003, the report concludes, did the F.B.I. make a "clean break" and choose to have no involvement in the C.I.A.'s harsh interrogations.

The report said several senior Justice Department Criminal Division officials raised concerns with the National Security Council in 2003 about the military's treatment of detainees but saw no changes as a result. One Justice Department official said he believed that John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, had spoken to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, about the department's concerns about interrogation methods being used in late 2002 on Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Qaeda member who was believed to be the so-called 20th hijacker in the attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

But Mr. Ashcroft declined to be interviewed by the inspector general's office of the department he had headed, an unusual refusal and one that hampered investigators' effort to learn of discussions inside the National Security Council , the report says.

A spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft, Mark Corallo, said the former attorney general had not cooperated because "his conversations with the White House and with staff on national security matters are privileged."

The report says that while some Justice Department officials believed that the physical pressure techniques being used by the military were wrong, others merely thought they might be ineffective.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, noted that abuses at Guantánamo were the subject of a 2005 Defense Department investigation that found no evidence of torture, though it did fault some interrogation tactics and called the Qahtani interrogation degrading and abusive.

The Justice Department said it was pleased that the report "credited the F.B.I. for its conduct and professionalism during interrogations."

A C.I.A. spokesman said the harsh methods it used were "found lawful by the Department of Justice itself" and were "employed only when traditional means of questioning — things like rapport-building — were ineffective."

Israel PM calls for naval blockade of Iran

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Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has urged the United States to impose a naval blockade on Iran to pressure it to stop its controversial nuclear programme, the Haaretz daily reported on Wednesday.

Olmert raised the issue during a meeting in Jerusalem on Tuesday with US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the newspaper said.

"The present economic sanctions on Iran have exhausted themselves," Olmert was quoted as telling the California Democrat.

Asked about the report, Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev would say only: "We do not confirm this information."

Rafi Eitan, a member of Olmert's security cabinet, said he also favoured air travel restrictions against Iran.

"A blockade of maritime and air routes against Iran is a good possibility," Eitan, the minister in charge of pensioners' affairs, told public radio.

"There are voices we hear in Washington that indicate the military option remains open," he added.

Israel, the Middle East's sole if undeclared nuclear power, suspects, like Washington, that Tehran's nuclear programme is cover for a drive to develop an atomic bomb, something Iran strongly denies.

2016 Oil Futures Up 14% To $140 on Supply Concerns

Oil for 2016 Delivery Nears $140 on Supply Concern

By Margot Habiby

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Oil prices are heading to almost $140 a barrel in the next eight years, according to futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange, on concern that growth in supply may fail to keep pace with rising demand.

Oil for delivery in December 2016 surged $17.08, or 14 percent, in the past three trading days since Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the world's biggest securities firm by market value, forecast oil would average $141 in the second half of 2008 on constraints in production and a lack of substitutes. Crude for July 2008 climbed 1.9 percent in the same period, and today rose to a record $130.47.

The gain, more than triple the increase in oil for delivery this summer, ‘‘fits in'' with the Goldman forecast which ‘‘talked recently about long-dated crude in particular,'' said Tim Evans, an energy analyst for Citi Futures Perspective in New York.

Oil giants such as Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc, BP Plc, Chevron Corp., Total SA and ConocoPhillips will spend a record $98.7 billion this year on exploration and production, more than quadruple the amount eight years ago. The supplies companies tap from non-OPEC countries will only meet about 20 percent of world demand growth over the next four years.

Earlier this month, UBS AG forecast that Brent crude oil, a benchmark for two-thirds of global supplies, would rise to $200 a barrel by 2015. The increase results from demand outpacing spare supply capacity sometime in 2013 to 2015, according to the May 15 report by UBS economist Jan Stuart.

Saudi Output

The struggle to find oil coincides with a boom in demand from places like China and the Middle East, where it will rise 4.9 percent this year, making up for a drop in demand from North America and Europe, the International Energy Agency said in a report May 13. It cut its forecast for global demand for a fourth month.

‘‘You have had a lot of press, whether from OPEC or other market watchers, calling for significantly higher prices than what we're seeing today,'' said Eric Wittenauer, an energy analyst at Wachovia Securities in St. Louis. ‘‘Those can be proof positive for the higher end of the curve.''

A Saudi Arabian decision last week to increase crude oil output unilaterally in June may not lower prices because speculators are driving the rally, not a supply shortage, Shokri Ghanem, the chairman of Libya's National Oil Corp., and Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani said earlier this week.

The December 2016 futures contract rose $8.40, or 6.5 percent, yesterday to $138.38 a barrel. It was up from $121.30 a barrel on May 15. Goldman raised its oil-price forecast by 32 percent on May 16.

Big Jump

‘‘The move was a big jump in one day for markets that far forward, which also makes it seem as if the markets thin out in those contract months,'' Evans said. Sixty-seven contracts traded, compared with more than 296,000 for the most-active July contract.

Goldman analyst Arjun N. Murti wrote in a report earlier this month that ‘‘the possibility of $150-$200 per barrel seems increasingly likely over the next six-24 months.''

Front-month futures rose above $130 for the first time today after at least five banks raised price forecasts in the past week on expectations supply constraints will persist. Billionaire hedge- fund manager Boone Pickens said yesterday that oil will reach $150 a barrel this year because supply isn't keeping up with demand.

Oil for July delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose as much as $1.16, or 1.5 percent, to $130.47 a barrel, and was trading at $130.33 at 11:41 a.m. London time. Prices are double that of a year ago. A strengthening of the euro against the dollar added to the gains.

White House denies imminent plans to attack Iran

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The White House on Tuesday dismissed an Israeli media report that President Bush intends to attack Iran before his term ends in January.

"An article in today's Jerusalem Post about the president's position on Iran that quotes unnamed sources -- quoting unnamed sources -- is not worth the paper it's written on," the White House said in a statement hours after the Israeli newspaper published the report on its Web site.

The Jerusalem Post article cited an Israeli Army Radio report quoting a "senior official in Jerusalem" that a "senior member of the president's entourage" claimed Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney thought military action was called for against Tehran.

But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were opposed, the official told Army Radio, according to the newspaper.

The White House rejected the report.

"As the president has said, no president of the United States should ever take options off the table, but our preference and our actions for dealing with this matter remain through peaceful diplomatic means. Nothing has changed in that regard," the statement said.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack also called the report "nonsense."

Rice, Gates and Bush "are all on the same page regarding Iran," he said.

McCormack said the three all "support the efforts to find a diplomatic resolution to all the various issues involving Iran in the international system."

At a Senate panel hearing Tuesday, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, pressed Gates about whether it would be "appeasement" to talk to Iran, as Bush seemed to suggest last week in a speech to the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

Gates refused to be pinned down, saying, "I believe he said that it was appeasement to talk to terrorists -- to negotiate with terrorists."

Bushsparked a political firestorm with his speech using the highly charged word. Watch more on Bush's comments in Israel »

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," said Bush, who visited Israel during its 60th anniversary celebration.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," he said. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

White House officials privately indicated Bush's remarks were aimed at Democrats, including Sen. Barack Obama, the front-runner for his party's presidential nomination, and former President Carter, who recently held talks with Hamas.

Specter told Gates that talking to Iran "is not appeasement."

The analogy to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who is most associated with the strategy of yielding to Hitler's demands in the days before World War II, is wrong, Specter said.

"I think there is an opportunity for dialogue" with Iran, he said. "But we have to be a little courageous, because the alternatives are very bleak."

At several points on his Mideast tour last week, Bush reiterated his call to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

"Every peaceful nation in the region has an interest in opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions," Bush said.

"To allow the world's leading sponsor of terror to gain the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations," he said Sunday at the World Economic Forum meeting in Egypt.

Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Senate committee passes pro-business housing bill amidst foreclosure crisis

By Joe Kay

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A key US Senate committee passed bipartisan-supported legislation Tuesday that will provide meager relief to homeowners while allowing banks and mortgage companies to receive government backing for some failing loans.

The bill, passed by the Senate Banking Committee, follows on the heels of a similar measure passed by the House of Representatives earlier this month. It modifies an earlier Senate version that did not include the loan provision, but did contain tens of billions in tax breaks for corporations.

The committee passed the proposed bill by a vote of 19 to 2, with the support of committee chairman Christopher Dodd (Dem.-Connecticut) and ranking minority member Richard Shelby (Rep.-Alabama). President George W. Bush on Monday called the discussions in the Senate “progress,” indicating he might sign the bill. Bush had pledged to veto the House version.

The bill has the broad support of the financial industry, which is facing tens of billions of dollars in losses from the housing market decline and the broader credit crisis.

Coming in an election year, the legislation is a gesture at aiding distressed homeowners, but it will do nothing for most of those affected by the collapse of housing prices and the rise in foreclosures. Its principal aim is to stem the losses suffered by banks and other financial institutions as a result of the chaos in the mortgage-backed securities market.

The main provision in both the House and Senate versions is the creation of a fund under the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) that would allow homeowners with good credit who have fallen behind on their payments to negotiate with their lenders a reduction in the outstanding principal. The FHA would then guarantee the loan under a new, fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage. The bill provides for a fund to cover up to $300 billion in loans.

Since the plan is entirely voluntary, it would allow the banks to modify a given loan only when it considered that option more profitable than risking default under the old terms. At the same time, any losses from defaults on the new mortgages would be covered by the government.

Only a small minority of distressed borrowers are expected to benefit from the new fund. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that a maximum of 500,000 homeowners would qualify. In contrast, some 1.5 million families are already in foreclosure, and another 2.8 million are expected to file over the next four years.

There are about 8,000 new foreclosures every day throughout the country. US foreclosure filings in April were 65 percent higher than a year before.

In a sign of its wholly inadequate character, the Banking Committee estimates that the fund would cost about $500 million over three years, while the House estimated that its slightly different version would cost $1.7 billion over five years.

In comparison, the Iraq war costs about $341 million every day. In March, the Federal Reserve put up $29 billion of its own funds to underwrite the takeover of investment bank Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase.

Bush threatened to veto the House bill primarily because of the $1.7 billion cost. To avert this threat, the Senate agreed to fund it by diverting money from a new affordable housing trust fund to be set up under mortgage enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Shelby said after the vote on Tuesday, “I don’t believe the president will veto this—I hope not—there’s no taxpayer money involved here.”

Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Finance Committee, however, has trumpeted precisely that very limited affordable housing provision as one of the most important aspects of the House bill. On Tuesday, Frank declared, “A fight is brewing on the affordable housing trust fund,” but he indicated that a deal was likely in the end.

The paltry funds involved mean that the housing bill, provided that it eventually passes, will do next to nothing to affect the decline in home prices. Financial Times columnist John Dizard remarked in a column published on Tuesday, “As far as I can tell the intent [of the legislation] is to do nothing to commit the federal government to any dramatic increase in spending on support to the housing market.”

Another major provision in the Senate bill would tighten regulation over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are known as government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) because they have the financial backing of the US Treasury.

Earlier this year, the government loosened some restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to facilitate their growing role in the mortgage market. In the first quarter of this year, the two enterprises handled more than 80 percent of mortgages, more than double their share in 2006. This is because many banks and financial institutions have been scaling back their mortgage businesses in response to the housing crisis.

Over the past several months, the two GSEs have reported billions of dollars in losses. Their assets of $83 billion cover a massive $5 trillion in debts and other obligations.

Shelby told the Hill in an interview last week, “If they failed, why, Bear Stearns and all the others, they’d be like little grocery stores compared to the risk that they would have to the system.”

While the details have yet to be released, the Senate legislation would create a GSE regulator that would have the power to mandate increases in their capital reserves.

Credit crisis

The housing bill takes place within the context of a financial and economic crisis for which the American ruling elite has no solution. Over the past several years, a small layer of the population has made billions through various means of financial speculation, including in the housing market. As the housing market soared, millions of Americans were able to afford homes only through the accumulation of unsustainable levels of debt.

There were several signs early this week that the credit crisis extending throughout the economy is far from over.

Analysts at Oppenheimer investment funds released a report on Tuesday that declared, “We believe the real harrowing days of the credit crisis are still in front of us and will prove more widespread in effect than anything yet seen.”

“Our view is that the credit crisis will extend well into 2009 and perhaps beyond, and although the complexion will change, the net effect will be the same: three years of multibillion-dollar revenue reversals,” the analysts wrote. “Multitrillion dollars of loans were underwritten with the false assumption that home prices would go up in perpetuity on a national basis.”

The credit crunch has seized up derivative credit markets, including the credit default swaps (CDS) market. A CDS is a contract between two parties in which one party provides payments to another in return for insurance against the default of a third party (e.g., a bank or corporation). The unregulated CDS market currently protects an estimated $62 trillion in debt. More than half of all CDSs are tied to asset-backed securities, including those backed by mortgages.

An article on the Bloomberg new service Tuesday quoted billionaire investor George Soros as noting that the CDS market “is a Damocles sword waiting to fall” and could trigger the next global financial crisis.

Banks and other institutions have been scrambling to increase their cash reserves to cover credit defaults. On Tuesday, American International Group, an insurance giant, said it was seeking to raise $20 billion in new capital, 60 percent more than announced earlier. Last week AIG reported first-quarter losses of $7.8 billion, following over $15 billion in write-downs for CDS and mortgage securities.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 200 points on Tuesday on investor concerns about inflation, consumer spending and the credit crisis. The financial markets have been buoyed in recent weeks by the assumption that Washington would move to bail out any serious problem to hit Wall Street.

As this process unwinds, the main aim of the government has been to engineer a more orderly deflation of the market and “deleveraging” of the financial system, allowing banks and corporations to place the burden of the crisis on working people through wage and job cuts.

Israeli press reports US pledge of war on Iran—is Bush preparing an October Surprise?

By Bill Van Auken

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An Israeli press report that US President George W. Bush intends to launch a military attack on Iran before he leaves office at the beginning of next year prompted a heated denial from the White House Tuesday.

The article, which appeared in Tuesday’s Jerusalem Post, cited a report on Israeli Army Radio, quoting Israeli officials who had met with Bush and his delegation during their visit to Israel last week.

“A senior member of the president’s entourage said during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action was called for,” the article quoted an Israel official as saying.

The report cited the US official as stating that “the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice” had delayed a decision on military action against Iran.

The recent crisis in Lebanon and the evident ease with which the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement seized control of Beirut, according to the report, had placed a US attack on the Islamic Republic back on the front burner.

Bush expressed the opinion that “the disease must be treated, not the symptoms,” according to the Israeli officials.

The White House denial—issued within hours of the story appearing on the Jerusalem Post’s web site—was notably harsh in its tone. “An article in today’s Jerusalem Post about the president’s position on Iran that quotes unnamed sources—quoting unnamed sources—is not worth the paper it’s written on,” read the statement.

Later on Tuesday, however, Bush’s spokesperson Dana Perino was pressed by several reporters, who expressed skepticism in regard to the denial. “Do the President and the Vice President feel that an attack is called for—whether someone said that in Israel, or not?” asked one.

Dana Perino refused to answer, reiterating the official position that Washington is working to resolve its confrontation with Iran “diplomatically” but that it would not take any “options off the table.”

In reality, the Jerusalem Post story is hardly the only indication that the Bush administration is preparing for a military attack on Iran.

Ample physical evidence exists in the stepped up US military deployments in the region, with the Navy once again having two aircraft carrier battle groups—the USS Lincoln and the USS Harry S. Truman—within striking distance of Iran.

Meanwhile, the flagship of the 6th Fleet, the USS Mount Whitney, has been deployed off the coast of Lebanon, in what the Navy has described as an “unscheduled mission.” The ship is the Navy’s most advanced command, control and intelligence vessel, capable of coordinating a major attack over a wide region. It joined the USS Cole, a missile destroyer, already there.

In Washington, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared before a Senate committee Tuesday to reiterate the Pentagon’s unsubstantiated charges that Iran is responsible for violence in Iraq. The lack of a US military response thus far, he stressed, “does not signal lack of resolve or capability to defend ourselves against threats.”

In his speech before the Israeli Knesset last week, Bush placed Iran at the center of his pledge of unconditional support for Israel. “America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions,” he said. “Permitting the world’s leading sponsor of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

After Bush’s visit, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the press that Olmert and Bush had agreed on the need for “tangible action” to thwart Iran’s supposed drive to develop a nuclear weapon.

“We are on the same page. We both see the threat.... And we both understand that tangible action is required to prevent the Iranians from moving forward on a nuclear weapon,” Olmert spokesman Mark Regev told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.

Referring to diplomatic efforts to exert pressure on Iran, Regev added, “It is clearly not sufficient, and it’s clear that additional steps will have to be taken.”

Even as the US and Israel stepped up the drumbeat about an alleged Iranian nuclear threat, Mohammad El-Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spoke before a World Economic Forum session in Egypt Monday, declaring that the UN nuclear watchdog agency has no evidence that Iran is building a bomb.

Well before the story appeared in the Jerusalem Post, Ha’aretz reported that “Iran’s nuclear program has held center stage” in the talks between Bush and Olmert. Israeli officials, the paper reported, presented Bush with intelligence data that supposedly contradicted the National Intelligence Estimate produced by US spy agencies last year, which concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

“Will this be enough to alter the position of the administration on the possibility of a US strike of the nuclear installations in Iran? It is not clear,” the paper reported. It added, however, that the Israeli government is insisting that Iran is approaching the “point of no return,” and immediate action is required.

As for Bush, it commented, the closer he “comes to the end of his tenure, he is certainly thinking about the legacy of his presidency, beyond the contentious war in Iraq.”

The suggestion being made is that one way to change the subject from the disastrous legacy embodied in the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the launching of yet another act of military aggression, one which would undoubtedly throw the entire region into chaos.

One clue to the political thinking within the top echelons of the Bush administration came in the form of an audiotape. The tape was part of the material the Pentagon turned over recently to the New York Times in response to a Freedom of Information Act request for its article exposing the Defense Department’s relationship to a group of retired officers who regularly appeared on television news, promoting the administration’s line on Iraq.

The tape was of a December 2006 luncheon meeting between then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a group of these “military analysts”—referred to by the Pentagon itself as “message force multipliers.”

The mood at the meeting was clearly one of dismay and even anger over the results of the 2006 midterm election, in which a wave of popular antiwar sentiment delivered control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael Delong is heard noting to Rumsfeld that with the new political configuration on Capitol Hill, “you’re not going to have a lot of sympathetic ears up there until it [a terrorist attack] happens.”

Rumsfeld agreed, responding: “We haven’t had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it’s not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment ... The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack. And when that happens, then everyone gets energized for another [inaudible] and it’s a shame we don’t have the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats...the lethality, the carnage, that can be imposed on our society is so real and so present and so serious that you’d think we’d be able to understand it...”

The “correction” for the failure of the American people to support the war in Iraq and the global eruption of American militarism under the mantle of the “war on terrorism” is, in Rumsfeld’s view, another “attack,” along the lines of September 11, 2001. Clearly, the conception is that another round of “lethality” and “carnage” would serve to stun the public and create conditions for the administration to impose its political will by extraordinary means.

Certainly, one means of making such an attack all the more likely would be the launching of a military strike against Iran.

The reports from Israel and the military buildup in the region raise an obvious question: With the approach of the 2008 elections, are elements within the Bush administration preparing an “October Surprise” in the form of an unprovoked attack on Iran?

How the Government Is Passing Secret Laws

By Sean Gonsalves

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Once upon a time, a team of federal attorneys went before the Supreme Court only to discover that their entire case was based on a revoked executive order and therefore moot.

True story. Look it up. Panama Refining Company v. Ryan. The revoked presidential order was understandably missed by the attorneys. The revocation had never been made public -- an example of what legal scholars refer to as "secret law."

Cases like that caused Congress, in the '30s and '40s, to pen legislation aimed at bringing order to the dissemination of vital government information, amid the chaotic complexity of state administrative laws and downright shoddy record-keeping. Congress also established statutes to keep a growing body of secret law in check.

That's how we got the Federal Register Act of 1935, the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 and the golden key to open government (and investigative reporting) -- the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Those legislative acts exemplify one of the defining features of American government -- the publicizing of laws and regulations. The political philosophy isn't hard to understand. Secret laws are the antithesis of a free and open society, which explains why the first U.S. Congress mandated that every "law, order, resolution, and vote (shall) be published in at least three of the public newspapers printing within the United States."

But, never mind -- for the moment -- the decline of newspapers, and the harmful implications it has for democratic governance. Even more alarming is the underreported increase of unpublicized "secret laws," clandestinely cultivated in recent years.

We're talking everything from secret interpretations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to secret Presidential directives and transportation security orders.

And don't let the word "opinion" throw you off. If, for example, they're "opinions" issued by the OLC -- like the now infamous Yoo torture memos -- those kind of "opinions" are binding on the executive branch.

So, while the Washington press heavy-hitters were analyzing flag pins and pastors, a Judiciary subcommittee hearing was held on "Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government".

Among the half-dozen or so witnesses to testify was the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, Steven Aftergood -- one of the nation's preeminent authorities on secret law. What should have been a top-story across the country was rendered invisible by a tsunami of triviality.

Here's some testimony you probably missed:

"There has been a discernible increase in secret law and regulation in recent years" to the point where "legislative intervention" is required to "reverse the growth."

Unsurprisingly, secret law really became entwined with the government during the Cold War. But today, "secrecy not only persists, it is growing. Worse, it is implicated in fundamental political controversies over domestic surveillance, torture, and many other issues directly affecting the lives and interests of Americans."

The law that governs espionage activity has been re-interpreted by the FISA Court, the specific nature of which has not been disclosed to the public?

In August 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union petitioned the court on First Amendment grounds to make public those legal rulings, after redacting classified information. The court denied the ACLU petition, claiming it didn't have the expertise to decide what information should be redacted.

The denial was issued despite it being evident "that there is a body of common law derived from the decisions of the (FISA court) that potentially implicates the privacy interests of all Americans. Yet knowledge of that law is deliberately withheld from the public. In this way, secret law has been normalized to a previously unknown extent and to the detriment, I believe, of American democracy," Aftergood testified.

Other areas of concern: "there appears to be a precipitous decline in publication of OLC opinions in recent years ... In 1995, there were 30 published opinions, but in 2005 there were 13. In 1996, there were 48 published opinions, but in 2006 only 1. And in 1997 there were 29 published opinions, but only 9 in 2007."

"One secret OLC opinion of particular significance, identified last year by Sen. Whitehouse, holds that executive orders, which are binding on executive branch agencies and are published in the Federal Register, can be unilaterally abrogated by the President without public notice."

Such orders mean "Congress is left with no opportunity to respond to the change and to exercise its own authority as it sees fit. Worse, the OLC policy ... implies a right to actively mislead Congress and the public."

Here's something else that's been waaaay underreported. As of January 2008, the Bush administration has issued 56 National Security Presidential Directives on a range of national security issues. Most of those directives have not been disclosed. "Texts of the directives or descriptive fact sheets have been obtained for about a third of them (19)," Aftergood testified. Only the titles have been obtained on 8 of the directives and absolutely no information is available for 10.

Congress has also gotten in on the action, having "participated in the propagation of secret law through the adoption of classified annexes to intelligence authorization of bills, for example."

Aftergood concluded his testimony, rightly observing that "it should be possible to identify a consensual middle ground that preserves the security of genuinely sensitive national security information while reversing the growth of secret laws."

That's why he's pushing for the passage of the State Secrets Protection Act -- S. 2533 -- which aims to balance conflicting interests of secrecy and public disclosure.

"The rule of law, after all, is one of the fundamental principles that unites us all, and one of the things we are committed to protect. Secret law is inconsistent with that commitment."

Of course, whenever someone points out how civil liberties have taken a back-seat in the name of "national security" under Bush, what's the typical response of true believers?

They call talk radio, blog and write letters-to-the-editor about how "liberals" and "leftists" aid and abet terrorists with a naive insistence that America's political leaders adhere to quaint luxuries like long-established Constitutional freedoms.

The old saw -- "loose lips sinks ships" -- has been replaced by another now familiar brain-dead mantra: "if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about." But the metastasizing growth of secret law pulls the rug out from underneath that flimsy argument. And for obvious reason: you can't know what you don't know.

More Americans Fear Losing Their Health Insurance Than Being in a Terrorist Attack

By Ezra Klein

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If health insurance were cheap, we could all buy it. If universal health care could get 60 votes in the Senate, we'd all have it. But these two imperatives -- the need to control costs and the need to attract the 60 Senate votes required to overcome a filibuster -- point in opposite directions. This is the central paradox of health reform.

The most intractable policy problem is not, fundamentally, the 47 million uninsured or the fact that insurers have a business model right out of Dickens. It's cost. In 2006, the average family policy cost $13,600. This is why one out of six Americans are uninsured; they can't afford the premiums. An October 2007 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that more Americans were "very worried" about being priced out of their health insurance than feared losing their job, their house, or being in a terrorist attack. And with good reason: Premiums have gone up 98 percent since 2000. Wages have not.

Corporate America's outlook is similarly grim. Better Health Care Together, a health-reform coalition that includes Intel, Wal-Mart, and General Mills, recently issued a report, Health-Cost Crossroad: Why American Businesses Urgently Need Health Care Reform. The paper warns that "health care cost growth threatens businesses, workers, and the overall health of the American economy," and frets that "if trends continue, health benefit costs will exceed profits in Fortune 500 companies in 2008."

Likewise government. Absent reform, government health spending would be 37 percent of gross domestic product by 2050. (The entire federal government now consumes about 20 percent of GDP.) David Walker, the U.S comptroller general, warns that "we have been diagnosed with fiscal cancer, and we need to start treating it." At the Congressional Budget Office, the normally staid Peter Orszag gives an Al Gore-esque slideshow on the looming threat of health costs that risk bankrupting government finances.

The question, then, is how to limit heath-care costs while still surviving the legislative process. A single-payer system would increase efficiencies, but critics fear that it would control costs excessively, limiting care. Politically, single-payer would mean restructuring about 17 percent of our economy and eliminating multibillion-dollar industries that provide tens of thousands of jobs. It would have to be legislated over the fierce objections of the Republican Party and all conservative Democrats. Conversely, many Republicans, John McCain included, advocate a radical shift of costs onto individuals, controlling spending by pricing care out of reach for tens of millions. Few Democrats or moderate Republicans -- or voters -- favor this course.

Kids First?

Looking at this blockage, many observers instinctively grope toward a political stopgap -- starting with kids, a very attractive and cheap-to-insure part of the population. Coverage for all kids, they theorize, could make it through the Senate. Once accomplished, the rest of the country would view that success and green-light full reform of the health-care system. The logic of this strategy fails on two counts. First, as George W. Bush's obstinance on the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) has shown, many Republicans view health-care expansions the way the National Rifle Association looks at gun control -- there's no such thing as a little bit. Second, both the Republicans and the Democrats who see S-CHIP as the road to socialism are wrong. Medicare, despite its popularity, hasn't advanced the single-payer movement. It just took seniors out of the constituency for reform. And S-CHIP hasn't even led to its own successful expansion, much less that of the whole health system.

Moreover, covering kids is just covering kids; it does nothing to reform the system. Universal coverage of children, grafted onto the existing system, could actually exacerbate problems of inefficiency and cost. Worse, politicians could posture as if they had made major progress on the health-care crisis, while in fact they would be letting it deteriorate.

Single-Payer by Stealth

Another strategy would incrementally move toward single-payer, alert to the electorate's fear of change. That's one lesson many reformers learned from 1994 -- know your audience. Among those reformers was Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, whose book on the failure of the Clinton proposal, The Road to Nowhere, concludes that President Clinton had built a plan for wonks, not voters. Cost containment was front-loaded (global budgets, managed care) and required total restructuring of the system. Clinton's plan scared people, introducing unfamiliar and untested concepts like "managed competition" and changing current health arrangements. "They couldn't defend it in simple terms," Hacker says, "because it actually meant a complex set of changes for most Americans."

Following his book, Hacker devised a plan to avoid these pitfalls. His final proposal was embraced last year by the Economic Policy Institute and the Campaign for America's Future, the latter of which worked hard to push it to the candidates. The final plans from Clinton, Obama, and Edwards all looked a lot like the Hacker plan, with some crucial and perhaps fatal political compromises thrown in. More on that in a moment.

Hacker's plan works on a few basic principles. First, no one loses what they already have. You like your current insurance? Keep it, unless your employer kicks you off. Second, a new group market is created (the Health Care for America market, henceforth HCA), where insurers can compete for the business of individuals and employers (who can buy their employees in for 6 percent of payroll). Third, the group market contains a strong public insurer modeled on Medicare, creating competition between private insurance companies and the public offering. The hope is that the public insurer, which will not need to turn a profit and will be free of some of the perversities of private insurance, will prove the most cost-effective and attractive option, leading individuals and businesses alike to gravitate toward it. Over time, it would evolve into something approaching a single-payer system.

The Lewin Group, currently the gold standard in health-care consulting, has analyzed the Hacker plan and estimated that it will save about $1.04 trillion over 10 years. Some of these savings will come through basic efficiencies, both administrative and technological. But the savings depend heavily on the quiet cost controls built into the HCA. There, spending per enrollee will only be allowed to increase at a fixed rate of that year's GDP growth plus a half percent. Basically, the government mandates spending growth at a far slower rate than that of the private marketplace.

If it works, this has two effects: First, it saves money by mandating that a portion of the system -- the HCA -- spends less money. This, in effect, is the same way single-payer saves money. It simply caps spending and induces providers to use available funds more cost-effectively. But it also makes the most cost-effective HCA a progressively better deal for businesses to buy into, thus expanding it. Over time, more Americans end up within the cost-controlled structure. According to Lewin's estimates, the HCA would have an initial enrollment of 128.6 million enrollees (mostly individuals and small businesses), while 122 million Americans would remain in private, mostly employer-provided insurance. By 2017, the HCA would have 177.4 million members, while private insurance would be down to 93.5 million. Under these assumptions, the slower spending in the HCA alone would result in $1 trillion in savings.

Can It Work?

But therein lies the danger for the plan. The HCA is created to compete with the traditional private market. With its more attractive terms, the hope is that the HCA will largely overwhelm the private market, becoming a sort of de facto single-payer plan. Indeed, the Lewin analysis factors in this competition, and the brutal effect it will have on the private market, explicitly. "The combined effect of increased market share and a constrained rate of growth in Health Care for America spending would result in pressure on providers to shift costs to the private insurance market," Lewin says, "which will increase private insurance premiums and generate an even larger difference in premiums between HCA and the private insurance market."

But it isn't a single-payer plan. There's still a large private market to contend with, one that won't appreciate being knocked around this way. Private insurers outside the HCA will presumably compete in kind, only in the opposite direction. They'll attempt to cost-shift onto the HCA by insuring healthy, young firms that still offer private insurance at advantageous prices, and pressuring sicker, older companies and individuals into the government options. If they succeed, the risk pool in the HCA will grow expensive, the premiums will grow inordinately pricey, and cost savings won't be realized without cutting care, no matter what the government mandates.

Politically, a robust version of the Hacker plan remains a huge reach. Democrats weren't even able to attract 60 votes to allow Medicare Part D to bargain down drug prices, much less set them centrally. Even with a Democratic president embracing some version of Hacker, and a pickup of several Senate seats, many Democrats remain skeptical of price controls by government diktat.

While there are differences between the health-care plans of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- notably, the much discussed individual mandate -- they are both based on structure similar to Hacker's. However, while both include his new, "Medicare-like" group market, neither uses the group market to set cost controls. Given that this is the prime source of $1 trillion of Hacker's $1.1 trillion in savings, it's hard to see how the Obama or Clinton plans will adequately control costs. They will see some savings from administrative efficiencies and more cost-effective care, but these will be comparatively minor. Nor are Obama or Clinton clear about what employers would have to pay. So they have basically embraced the politically savvy part of Hacker's plan while leaving out the cost controls -- and that's before the insurance industry and Congress get into the act. We could be left with a system very much like the current one, just with more subsidies for coverage and more clearly structured insurance choices, but with relentless cost increases that translate into reduced actual care.

Bipartisan Reform?

Hacker, it should be said, is not the only game in town. While versions of his plan are getting the most attention at the presidential level, in Congress, the action is around the Healthy Americans Act sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. Along with Sen. Robert Bennett of Utah, Wyden has attracted 12 more colleagues, six Democrats and six Republicans, as co-sponsors. Given that any health-care bill will likely need Republican Senate votes, it's the closest thing to a viable legislative process currently in existence.

Wyden's plan differs from Hacker's in two key ways. First, it lacks a public insurer, meaning that there won't be public-private competition. But it compensates for that absence with much more radical system integration. Hacker's plan creates a new group market with about 44 percent of the population, leaving the existing private market with 41 percent or so and most of the remainder in Medicare. The success or failure of the plan will depend on which market can most effectively undercut the other. Wyden's plan, by contrast, does away with employer health coverage almost entirely. Rather than encouraging employers to transition to a single group market, as Hacker's does, Wyden's forces them to redirect all the money they were spending on employee insurance into paychecks. At the same time, it creates "Health Help Agencies," one in each state, which act much like Hacker's group market -- they're regulated structures where various insurers compete for business. No cherry-picking, no high premiums or denials of coverage for pre-existing conditions. Everyone pays the same price, but everyone has to buy insurance that's at least as comprehensive as the current Blue Cross-Blue Shield Standard Plan. There are subsidies for those with low incomes, and penalties for those who don't buy in. Medicare still exists for the elderly.

The Lewin Group also evaluated Wyden's proposal, and they see the possibility for even more drastic savings: $1.48 trillion over 10 years. In Wyden's case, the savings don't come from explicit spending caps in the group market, but because consumers who now see exactly how much they're spending on health care (before, their costs were obscured because employers paid most of the bill) will become more price-sensitive and choose cheaper options. Namely, HMOs. In other words, rather than asking the government to cap spending, as Hacker's plan does, Wyden's plan pushes individuals to do it. Lewin estimates that under Wyden's plan, HMO enrollment will jump from 30 percent to 70 percent, which will bring large cost savings, as HMO enrollment did in the mid-1990s.

As a contingency, Wyden sets up future cost controls if needed. Currently, it's impossible to impose targeted cost reforms because there's no system to impose reforms on. We have a health sector, composed of thousands of self-contained private insurers routed through myriad employers, not a health system. If the system is entirely under one roof, as it is in Wyden's plan, and as it comes closer to being in Hacker's plan, implementing cost controls becomes much easier. A public insurer could be the benchmark, and there could be better incentives to adopt best practices, with smart forms of cost sharing and incentives to only offer cost-effective treatments.

Overcoming the Blockage

But where the basics of Hacker's structure have a reformist political logic, Wyden's risks running into the same fears that detonated the efforts in 1994. By blowing up the employer-based system, Wyden's risks triggering the natural status quo bias of voters and insurers. In Hacker's plan, the majority of the country sees no change unless they volunteer for it. With Wyden's, the majority needs to buy new insurance. The question is whether Wyden's plan can compensate for that political risk by attracting more support from stakeholders -- employers who no longer want to run health-care businesses on the side and insured individuals worried about losing what they have. Also, to realize cost containment, Wyden's state agencies would need to define, which is to say, regulate, qualified plans -- a sensible policy that led the insurance industry to oppose a similar idea under a different name when Clinton proposed managed competition in 1993.

Moreover, both of these plans are in their idealized forms. Neither has been through the legislative process, or vetted by a White House, or larded up by special interests, or subjected to attack ads. Hacker's plan would face serious trouble attracting Republican votes. Wyden's plan would require a Democratic president's strong support to attract liberals, and it would have to persuade voters to let go of their present coverage.

Either way, it will be a tough road. But look at the numbers. One way or another, reform must come. We really don't have any choice.

Reprinted with permission from Ezra Klein, "The Elusive Politics of Reform," The American Prospect, Volume 19, Number 5: May 07, 2008. The American Prospect, 2000 L Street, Suite 717, Washington, DC 20036. All Rights Reserved.

Homeland Security's Emerging Immigration Police State

By Joshua Holland

Go To Original

Note: AlterNet just launched a new Special Coverage area focusing on immigration issues -- our 14th in all. Sign up today for our free immigration newsletter, and we'll bring you the latest news and some lively debates on the issue each week.

*****

Last week, hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, flanked by helicopters, a trail of SUVs and a convoy of buses, descended on the tiny town of Postville, Iowa. They set up a perimeter around the 60-acre kosher meat-processing plant operated by the global giant Agriprocessors, Inc. and conducted the largest workplace raid in U.S. history. Around 400 people were arrested -- most from Mexico, Eastern Europe and Guatemala -- representing 40 percent of the plant's workers and 17 percent of the town's population. Warrants for another 300 were issued.

Some would call it a victory for law and order. But a closer look at the showy example of "getting tough on illegals" offers some insight into what immigration restrictionists are really asking for when they call for more immigration enforcement.

During a similar sweep last year, ICE generated some bad publicity when reporters found that a number of young children had been left unattended when their parents were arrested. So 56 of those arrested last week -- mostly mothers of small kids -- were released on "humanitarian grounds." Nonetheless, a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of dozens of the Postville detainees "noted that a number of immigrant workers' children have been stranded with baby sitters and other caretakers as a result of the raid."

The suit charges that some of the detained workers are victims of crimes by Agriprocessors, Inc., which may entitle them to a visa, and accuses the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of arbitrary and indefinite detention and violating the workers' constitutional rights.

According to the Associated Press, an attorney who interviewed some of those swept up in the raid said that the company itself "obtained false identification for immigrant workers." But in the overwhelming majority of these raids -- 98 percent, according to the Washington Post -- the only people to pay any penalty are poor people trying to earn a substandard wage working in America's growing unregulated economy.

Meanwhile, ICE charged many of the detained with "identity theft" for those faked papers, effectively giving immigration hard-liners what Congress hasn't granted them through the legislative process: serious criminal charges for what have always been misdemeanor immigration violations at most.

In this case, as in many others like it, many of the workers appear to have been seriously exploited. The AP reported that the plant's management "improperly withheld money from employees' paychecks for 'immigration fees,' didn't allow workers to use the restroom during 10-hour shifts, physically abused workers and didn't compensate them for overtime work."

According to MSNBC, workers at the plant were routinely started at $5 per hour for their first three or four months on the job and then raised to $6, still well below Iowa's minimum wage of $7.25.

Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil confirmed to the Des Moines Register that Agriprocessors was being investigated by the state on suspicion of wage violations, paying people off the books and hiring underage workers. A copy of the federal warrant obtained by the Register described an incident in which "a supervisor covered the eyes of an employee with duct tape and struck him with a meat hook."

It's unclear what the raids' impact will be on the ongoing investigations into the company's workplace violations. With hundreds of workers -- and potential witnesses -- carted away, Jill Cashen, a spokesperson for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), asked: "how can justice ever be served on these exploitation issues?"

Agriprocessor's management must have been pleased with the timing of the raid. Not only did it put at least a crimp in the ongoing investigations of serious allegations of abuse by the company, it also derailed an effort by UFCW to organize the plants' workers and give them a shot at bargaining with management for better working conditions.

There have been widespread reports of ICE raids coming during sensitive phases of union organizing drives. After rumors of an imminent raid emerged last month, UFCW's Mark Lauritsen wrote ICE officials urging them to follow their own guidelines by suspending "any potentially existing enforcement efforts and refus[ing] to be involved in this labor dispute." Lauritsen told the Des Moines Register that employers at other firms where UFCW had been organizing called in ICE raids themselves to intimidate employees before a union vote, and more generally, to associate union organizing with actions by La Migra in the minds of immigrant workers at other plants.

According to The Washington Post, Agirprocessors, Inc. argued in April that it could ignore a vote by workers at its Brooklyn distribution center to unionize because there were illegal immigrants at the facility who were not entitled to federal labor protections.

Sholom Rubashkin, whose family owns the company and who is described as a "top official" at the Postville plant, is a major Republican political donor, supporting the kind of politicos who champion these kinds of immigration crackdowns.

But Rubashkin is unlikely to be troubled by the action. After the raid gave his firm at least temporary relief from U.S. labor laws and pesky union organizers, the plant opened up the next morning ready for business -- it lost less than a single day's revenues. If recent history is any guide, Agriprocessors, Inc. won't even be fined. Despite the fact that 80 percent of its workforce was undocumented, the company is claiming that it had no knowledge of the violations. Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, released a statement noting that in 2007, DHS "fined only 17 employers for hiring undocumented workers." He added: "At least 7 million immigrants in the U.S. are employed illegally by a total of 6 million U.S. businesses, and DHS can find only 17 companies to fine?"

Enthusiasts of these kinds of crackdowns argue that they'll shrink the labor pool and help American workers. But the hundreds who continue working in the Postville plant today remain unprotected and are much further away from the kind of union representation that might have led to some decent pay, some dignity. And it's hard to imagine an experience that could give Agriprocessors more incentive to keep hiring "illegals."

That's what makes the approach so fruitless. Cesar Jochol, a native of Guatemala who runs a small market in Postville, told the Post, "You take away a hundred people. A couple hundred more will come tomorrow."

That's what workplace-based immigration enforcement without deeper reform looks like.

Postsville and the Politics of Distraction

The Postville raid came at an opportune time not only for the plant's owners, but also for the Bush administration. The same week, a series of high-profile media reports by 60 Minutes and the Washington Post -- as well as the New York Times -- began focusing public attention on America's nightmarish system of immigration "detention centers."

Two weeks earlier, as the New York Times' Nina Bernstein reported, a group of former detainees had sued Michael Chertoff for putting "hundreds of thousands of people a year in substandard and inconsistent conditions while the government decides whether to deport them, leaving them subject to inadequate medical care and abuse."

Activists charged that the Bush administration staged the raid to draw attention from those stories, a strategy it is well known to employ when critical attention threatens its policies.

It's impossible to know whether that was the case, but clearly DHS and the administration would prefer to have eyes trained on images of ICE agents "enforcing the law" than on the investigation into America's detention practices conducted by the Washington Post and 60 Minutes.

The investigation uncovered "life, death and often shabby medical care within an unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees across the country," as health care was routinely denied to immigrants being held by ICE. "The medical neglect they endure," wrote Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein in The Post, "is part of the hidden human cost of increasingly strict policies in the post-Sept. 11 United States and a lack of preparation for the impact of those policies."

The reporters -- the same team that uncovered the shabby care that veterans face at Walter Reed Medical Center -- unearthed internal documents showing that ICE officials have "a tendency to conceal the truth by withholding complete medical records or by offering misleading public explanations." The documents they found revealed a pattern of what can only be called grievous human rights violations. (The U.N. has condemned the United States' immigrant detention system, saying that it "denies migrants basic due process and human rights, and violates international law.")

Among the cases intentionally covered up by ICE officials was that of Francisco Castaneda, who arrived in the United States as a refugee from El Salvador when he was 10 years old. Before his mother could get legal papers for her son, she died of cancer. Castaneda had lived in the United States for 24 years when he was detained by ICE.

When he was taken into custody, Castaneda had a bleeding lesion on his penis, which medical personnel suspected to be cancer. They requested a biopsy, "but the Division of Immigration Health Services headquarters in Washington denied the procedure for 10 months." During that time, Castaneda was given ibuprofen to deal with the growing lesion. "I am in a considerable amount of pain and I am in desperate need of medical attention," he wrote in June of 2006. After pressure from the ACLU, the agency finally scheduled a biopsy for February of 2007, but Castaneda was suddenly released just "days before the surgery, sparing the agency the cost." Shortly thereafter, Castaneda's penis was amputated. Despite undergoing chemotherapy, he died a year later.

According to the Los Angeles Times, a federal judge ruled that Castaneda's treatment was "beyond cruel and unusual" punishment. Timothy T. Shack, head of health care for ICE, said, "In my opinion, the care provided to this detainee was ... timely and appropriate."

The Post also told the story of Joseph Dantica, a Baptist minister from Haiti who fled the country after receiving death threats from a local gang. Dantica, 81 years old, entered the United States with a valid visa and applied for asylum. ICE detained him along with his son, pending the resolution of their cases. Sickly and speaking through a voice box, Dantica complained of ill health, but ICE officials said he was "faking his symptoms." The minister was denied visits by family members, who begged ICE officials to give him the medicine he required. He died five days after landing in Miami, in an infamous immigration prison in Florida.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post featured stories in recent weeks about dozens of deaths in ICE custody. The Times’ Nina Bernstein told the story of Boubacar Bah, "a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa" and subsequently died in ICE custody. His relatives "never saw the internal records labeled 'proprietary information -- not for distribution' by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government," Bernstein wrote. "The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth."

The Post's investigative team also found that the "U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country." Involuntary drugging of "detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes," the Post noted.

Taken together, these and other reports paint a picture of a system that treats immigrants to the United States -- and not just "illegal" immigrants -- as subhuman. That's what enforcement absent real reform looks like.

This is part one of a two-part series. Be sure to read the second installment tomorrow.

C-51 Red Alert! Health Canada Holding Stealth Mtg Today 4PM

An hour ago I read an email from Lance Hill from Health Canada in which he has just announced a "Stakeholder meeting" to be held on bill C-51 TODAY, Wednesday, May 21 at 4 PM at the Best Western Richmond Hotel and Convention Centre, 7551 Westminster Hwy, Richmond, BC Canada.

(The public can attend, but you must register in advance by emailing Mr.Hill at lance_hill@hc-sc.gc.ca with your full contact information. No videotaping will be allowed.

Well I am seething with rage about this. They're trying to SPRING this meeting on us with DELIBERATE SHORT NOTICE in the hope that NO ONE will show up.

Well I emailed him to let him know I'm with the Press and I want to interview them all about this horrible bill, and I let him know that I am onto them- that I recognize this as an effort to harmonize Canada to Australia's incredibly harsh regulatory scheme, and that I know the health freedom fighters of New Zealand beat an identical effort to try to force THEM to harmonize to Australia- see: http://www.nzhealthtrust.co.nz/news_stories/ANZTPA_consultations_suspended.html

WHY HEALTH CANADA IS HOLDING THIS MTG ON SHORT NOTICE

They're runnin' SCARED, thats why! They REALIZE the vitamin consumers of Canada and the US are onto them, so they're hoping NO ONE will show up at this meeting, and they're not allowing videotaping because they're like a bunch of cock roaches that run from the light when the refridgerator door is opened in the middle of the night.

They realize that MILLIONS of Canadians and Americans are visiting http://www.stopc51.com and they HATE that!

They realize we've gotten the jump on them, and that we've had a TON of mainstream news coverage which has HELPED us get the jump on them (see urls below and please forward widely) and now the Harper government is running SCARED, in fact they're TERRIFIED that they won't be able to succeed in fast tracking this police state bill from hell through as planned!

Well on Thursday (tomorrow), I'll be attending a Town Meeting in Langley, BC Canada because Rob Goulding on the IAHF list lit a fire under the butts of so many people in his area that they scared the HELL out of their MP, and he decided he'd better rush back to BC from Ottawa to try to put out the FIRE!!!

(If you want to attend THAT meeting, let me know, give me your phone number and email address, we need to coordinate in advance.)

Look at all the Press we're getting on this issue folks- this is HUGE and it doesn't just impact Canadians, as I've explained many times if we FAIL to kill this bill in Canada, its coming to the USA next via the mechanism of FDA's Trilateral Cooperation Charter, but IAHF is gonna monkeywrench their plans with YOUR help!!!

Please see the media links below on this issue, & please keep those donations coming, I need money for gas and lodging to get all over the metro Vancouver area to sound the alarm on C-51 to all the health food stores, naturopaths, green grocers, massage places, fitness centers, anywhere that people go who can join our HEALTH FREEDOM ARMY!

See paypal link at http://www.iahf.com/index1.html left side of page, just above "Contents" You can also send a check to IAHF 556 Boundary Bay Rd., Point Roberts WA 98281

Gas costs about $6./ gallon in Canada, so please help out and please see the TV coverage below of our Demonstrations Across Canada on this!

I was a speaker at the recent rally in Vancouver re C-51 (see photos, info at http://www.ymlp65.com/pubarchive_show_message.php?jham+980

See previous alerts I sent out on this issue at http://www.ymlp65.com/pubarchive_show_message.php?jham+948
http://www.ymlp65.com/pubarchive_show_message.php?jham+941

See Documentary Film I am in Re Codex Vitamin Issue, Film is Narrated by Dame Judi Dench, the British Actress:
http://www.welltv.com "We Become Silent" (C-51 would usher Codex into N.America, Via FDA's Trilateral Cooperation Charter, see my alerts)

PRINT MEDIA ARTICLES RE C-51
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/05/09/bill-c51.html?ref=rss
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=26c86ac7-da26-4537-9a67-bc1d151f9ee7
http://www.canada.com/globaltv/national/story.html?id=11dd2aa6-e95a-47c3-859e-7c0105a1b564
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=8bad5ec9-0dda-4ae1-b081-af2707a89d65
http://www.muskoka-news.com/muskokanews/article/104249
http://commonground.ca/iss/202/cg202_bill_C-51.shtml
http://www.straight.com/article-144802/natural-health-crackdown
http://www.capebretonpost.com/index.cfm?sid=135876&sc=145
http://www.hour.ca/news/news.aspx?iIDArticle=14607

TV VIDEO FOOTAGE RE C-51 & Re Abuses of Health Canada Against Natural Health Products

Bill C-51 is Treason.... Please Forward this You Tube http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=iarPlT6nK5w Helps promote www.stopc51.com

Global News: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=DIyqrUmIUXw&feature=related Shows Anti C-51 Rally in Toronto

Global News: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qCsAe5bvI8U&feature=related Shows Anti C51 Rally in Edmonton

City TV: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=dAHvcN_ddXc&feature=related Shows Anti C51 Rally in Calgary

C-51 is happening due to TrueHope Inc. beating Health Canada in Court to Protect Empower Plus: See:

CTV http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=1cOc4EmbS1I&feature=related MP James Lunney Discusses Abuse By Health Canada re Raid Against Truehope Inc.

CTV http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=d8-Pts5OfZs&feature=related Truehope Sues Health Canada

Global TV http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=EYp4iaQ4Kos&feature=related Autumn Stringham cures her Bipolar Disorder With Empower Plus

Discovery Health Channel http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=2G6dWIvxlhw&feature=related Medial Wonders: Truehope Bipolar Impossible Cures
Discovery Channel Pt. 1

Discovery Health Channel http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=UJcnLypiR0o&feature=related Medical Wonders: Truehope Bipolar Impossible Cures Discovery Channel Part 2

Discovery Health Channel http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=aA5pbJ-sA5k&feature=related Medical Wonders: Truehope Bipolar Impossible Cures Discovery Channel Part 3

Discovery Health Channel http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qAUwei2St8Q&feature=related Medical Wonders: Truehope Bipolar Impossible Cures Discovery Channel Part 4

Discovery Health Channel http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=AtWMIN132CA&feature=related Medical Wonders: Truehope Bipolar Impossible Cures Discovery Channel http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=2p8iiyy0RFA&feature=relatedPart 5

EMPOWER PLUS - NATURAL MOOD STABILIZER FOR CHILDREN

Please Forward to More People after remembering to delete the unsubscribe link at the bottom so no one will click on it !! CANADIANS!! Please Attend the Stakeholder Meeting in Richmond at 4PM, see address at top of this Alert. If you live in Langley and can come to the Town Meeting tomorrow, please email me your phone number and let me know you're coming, we need to coordinate.

Remember to please donate- this is WAR folks, this will be a historic victory for health freedom IF we all pull together!!

See paypal link at http://www.iahf.com/index1.html left side of page, just above "Contents" You can also send a check to IAHF 556 Boundary Bay Rd., Point Roberts WA 98281

For Health Freedom, John C. Hammell, President International Advocates for Health Freedom 556 Boundary Bay Road Point Roberts, WA 98281-8702 USA http://www.iahf.com jham@iahf.com 800-333-2553 N.America 360-945-0352 World

Young Workers, Positive About Unions, Face Economic Squeeze

By James Parks

Go to Original

Two new reports show today's young workers are being squeezed by high costs of living and low or stagnant wages and they want the government to do more to solve this nation's economic mess.

The Economic State of Young America by Demos presents a statistical study of the economic condition of young workers, and The Progressive Generation: How Young Adults Think About the Economy by the Center for American Progress (CAP) analyzes public polling of young workers. Click here for a copy of the Demos report and here for the CAP report.

The two reports paint a picture of young workers who are faced with a combination of declining incomes, growing debt, high costs of education, homeownership and health care. In fact, say the reports' authors, this generation of young workers could be the first not to surpass the living standards of their parents.

One key finding is that young workers understand the role of unions in building economic and political strength to make changes in public policies and the workplace. In the CAP study, young workers gave unions an average ranking of 60 on a 0-to-100 scale (with 0 indicating a negative view and 100 being a positive view), the second-highest level of support of any age group in the more than 40 years the question has been asked.

The authors of the two reports say the problems of young workers will have an impact on public policy for years to come. Tamara Draut, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos, says:
Young people today are being hit with a one-two economic punch. For this generation of young workers, the economy no longer generates widespread opportunity and security, and our public policies haven't evolved to pick up any of the slack. In fact, many of the problems we see today are a direct result of a disinvestment in the policies meant to ensure that the opportunity ladder is firmly in place.

David Madland, director of CAP's American Worker Project, says:

Young adults today think that the government can be a force for good in the economy, and that increased investments in healthcare, education, and other areas are necessary to ensure strong and sustainable economic growth. The progressive economic views of this large and politically active generation of young adults is likely to have a profound impact in 2008 and into the future.

Here is a snapshot of young workers culled from both reports:

No matter what their level of education, incomes have declined for most young workers. The only young workers whose income rose between 1975 and 2005 were women with a college degree. Their incomes rose 10 percent, while incomes in all other education groups fell or remained stagnant.
Even though their wages are declining, young workers' debts are rising. The average college graduate has a nearly $20,000 debt; average credit card debt has increased 47 percent between 1989 and 2004 for 25- to 34-year-olds and 11 percent for 18- to 24-year olds.

Although more than half of women with a child under age one are in the labor force (up from 31 percent in 1976), public policy supports for young families are still lacking. Only 39 percent of women received paid maternity leave. Child care is expensive. Full-time care for a toddler ranges from $3,794 to $10,920 annually, while full-time care for an infant rages from $4,388 to $14,647 annually. In every region of the country, child care for two children exceeds the median rent and is as high or higher than the median monthly mortgage payment.

Not surprisingly, young workers are more likely to support universal health coverage than any age group in the 30 previous years the question has been asked, with 57 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds saying that health insurance should come from a government insurance plan.

Another 87 percent think the government should spend more money on health care even if a tax increase is required to pay for it, the highest level of support in the question's 20-year history.
An overwhelming 95 percent think education spending should be increased even if a tax increase is required to pay for it, the highest level ever recorded on this question in the 20 years it has been asked.

And 61 percent say the government should provide more services, the most support of any age group in any of the previous 20 years the question has been asked.

Let's Be Serious

By Bob Herbert

Go to Original

The general election is about to unfold and we'll soon see how smart or how foolish Americans really are. The U.S. may be the richest country on earth, but the economy is tanking, its working families are in trouble, it is bogged down in a multitrillion-dollar war of its own making and the price of gasoline has nitwits siphoning supplies from the cars and trucks of strangers.

Four of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction, which makes this presidential election, potentially, one of the most pivotal since World War II.

And yet there's growing evidence that despite the plethora of important issues, the election may yet be undermined by the usual madness - fear-mongering, bogus arguments over who really loves America, race-baiting, gay-baiting (Ohmigod! They're getting married!) and the wholesale trivialization of matters that are not just important, but extremely complex.

In his book, "Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?," Jared Bernstein reminds us that the economic expansion from 2000 to 2006 was something less than nirvana for working people. The economy grew by 15 percent during that period, and the official rates of joblessness and inflation were low. But as most of us know, the benefits of that expansion were skewed to the high end of the economic ladder.

Mr. Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, writes: "Over the course of this highly touted economic expansion, poverty is up, working families' real incomes are down and some key prices are growing a lot faster than the average."

Steven Greenhouse, the labor correspondent for The Times, has also written a book that examines, among other things, the imbalance in the way the benefits from the expansion have been distributed. In "The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker," he says:

"This is a decade during which the American economy has thrived by many measures, with corporate profits and C.E.O. salaries soaring, yet wages have languished for most workers, and health and pension coverage has grown worse."

Let the candidates wrestle with this issue of increasing economic inequality, rather than President Bush's spurious and deeply offensive rant comparing advocates of international diplomacy with those who appeased Hitler and the Nazis.

Let the candidates wrestle with the war without end in Iraq that is not just destroying lives but is taking a toll on this nation's soul. The war is sapping the resources and energy needed for the hard work of putting the U.S. back on a sound socioeconomic footing.

And the way we are treating the troops belies the pretty words that never get farther than a bumper sticker.

The country that professes to be so proud of its men and women in uniform is playing Russian roulette with their lives by sending them into the war zone for three, four and even more tours. Stop-loss, the involuntary extension of an individual's term in the military (making them subject to still more combat duty), is another dangerous affront to those who have already given so much.

The Houston Chronicle did a long takeout on Sunday on the suicide in March 2007 of an Army recruiting sergeant, Nils Aron Andersson - just one day after his marriage to Carry Walton. Sgt. Andersson, 25, had spoken of the many horrors that he had encountered in Iraq and was deeply depressed. He shot himself while sitting in his pickup in a parking garage. Distraught, Ms. Walton bought a 9-millimeter handgun at a sporting goods store the next day and killed herself.

Suicides have become a big problem for the military. Combat does terrible things to people. An independent study by the RAND Corporation found that nearly 20 percent of the troops who returned from tours in Iraq or Afghanistan reported symptoms of major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Let the candidates talk about these things. Let them talk about the fact that the Bush administration, which has pushed the troops so unmercifully, opposes a bill (sponsored by Senator Jim Webb and widely supported in Congress) that would expand the education benefits of veterans who have served since Sept. 11, 2001.

Let them talk about health coverage, which is a scandal, and the vanishing American pension. Let them offer competing plans for rebuilding the American infrastructure and creating real employment opportunities for the newest generation of workers. Let them go at it over energy policy.

Forget the foolishness for a change. No Willie Hortons this year. No Swift boats. No attacks on John McCain like the mugging he endured at the hands of the Bush crowd in South Carolina some years ago.

For once, let the election be serious. Show the hacks and the hypocrites the door. Argue substance. And then let the people decide.

Bush's Endless Hypocrisy on Terror

By Robert Parry

Go To Original

Is a government guilty of terrorism if it harbors known terrorists? What should one say about a country that permits open fund-raising on behalf of a terrorist implicated in the mass killing of civilians?

What about a government that secretly arms a guerrilla army that wantonly kills and abuses civilians while seeking to overthrow an elected government?

If your answer to those questions is to recite George W. Bush’s dictum that a government that harbors or helps terrorists should be punished just like the terrorists, then you must turn your wrath on the U.S. government and the Bush family -- guilty on all the above points.

But the U.S. political/media system continues to view the world through a cracked lens that focuses outrage on “enemy” regimes while refracting away a comparable fury from similar actions by U.S. officials.

So, while President Bush ponders whether to add Venezuela to the terrorist list – because of a captured Colombian guerrilla computer that appears to implicate Hugo Chavez’s government in weapons smuggling – Bush would broach no criticism of Ronald Reagan who armed Nicaraguan contra guerrillas in the 1980s.

Reagan continued that covert war even after the ruling Sandinistas won an election in 1984 that most outside observers praised as free and fair and even after the facts of the contras’ human rights abuses – kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians – became widely known and were acknowledged by some senior contra leaders.

Though Reagan was well aware of the contras’ cruelty (he privately called them “vandals”), he hailed them publicly as “freedom fighters” and equated them with America’s “Founding Fathers.”

Reagan kept arming the contras even after Congress ordered him to stop and the World Court ruled against the CIA’s secret mining of Nicaragua’s harbors.

Reagan also backed vicious rebel forces in Angola and Afghanistan (including foreign Islamic fundamentalists who later coalesced into al-Qaeda) and supported state terror against civilian populations in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands.

By any stretch of the imagination – if any other country had so brazenly violated international law and human rights standards – that government would be condemned by civilized nations and would be treated as a terrorist pariah.

However, the vast majority of Republicans and many Democrats view Reagan as a political icon deserving of honors, such as having Washington’s National Airport renamed Ronald Reagan National Airport.

To suggest that the late President was a war criminal or a sponsor of terrorism is unthinkable within the U.S. political mainstream. [For details on Reagan’s war crimes, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

Bush Family Terrorism

Similarly, it is unacceptable to note how the Bush family has protected Cuban-American terrorists – from 1976 when George H.W. Bush ran the CIA to the present when George W. Bush balks at an extradition request for Luis Posada Carriles, wanted on Venezuelan terrorism charges for blowing up a Cubana airliner and killing 73 people in 1976.

On May 2, 2008, more than six years into President Bush’s “global war on terror,” there was a remarkable scene in Miami as Posada, now 80, was feted at a gala fundraising dinner. Some 500 supporters chipped in to his legal defense fund as he remains free facing half-hearted U.S. government litigation on a minor immigration charge.

Posada, who has had plastic surgery to repair damage to his face from a shooting in the late 1980s, arrived to thundering applause. Then, in a bristling speech against the Castro regime in Cuba, Posada told his supporters, “We ask God to sharpen our machetes.”

Venezuela’s Ambassador the United States, Bernardo Alvarez, protested the Bush administration’s tolerance of the dinner. “This is outrageous, particularly because he kept talking about [more] violence,” the ambassador said.

Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan citizen who worked for Venezuela’s intelligence agency in the 1970s, masterminded the 1976 Cubana airline bombing, according to evidence compiled by the U.S. government and in South America.

Despite Posada’s record – and despite the strong evidence against him in U.S. government files – Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made little effort to capture Posada when he sneaked into Miami in 2005. Posada was detained only after he held a news conference.

Then, instead of extraditing Posada to Venezuela, the Bush administration engaged in a lackadaisical effort to have him deported for lying on an immigration form.

During a 2007 court hearing in Texas, Bush administration lawyers allowed to go unchallenged testimony from a Posada friend that Posada would face torture if he were returned to Venezuela. The judge, therefore, barred Posada from being deported there.

After that ruling, Ambassador Alvarez accused the Bush administration of applying “a cynical double standard” in the “war on terror.” As for the claim that Venezuela practices torture, Alvarez said, “There isn’t a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela.”

Different Standards

The kid-glove treatment of Posada and other right-wing Cubans stands in marked contrast to President Bush’s tough handling of Islamic militants. While Posada is afforded all U.S. legal protections and then some, suspected Islamic terrorists are locked away without trial at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and face “alternative interrogation techniques.”

On May 15 in a speech to the Israeli Knesset, Bush even denounced Western political leaders who advocate negotiations with “terrorists and radicals,” likening the idea to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

But Bush’s hard-line stance doesn’t apply to terrorism that’s in line with U.S. foreign policy or that connects to Bush’s family. In those cases, opposite standards apply.

For instance, even as Posada’s record for terrorism was relevant to his immigration case, the Bush administration sat on evidence implicating him in a series of 1997 hotel bombings in Havana that killed an Italian tourist.

The Associated Press reported that an FBI document, belatedly filed with the court, revealed that a confidential source had planted a listening device in a Guatemalan utility company office, picking up conversations about smuggling a “putty-like explosive” into Cuba in the shoes of operatives posing as tourists.

The source added that another employee of the utility company found 22 plastic tubes in a closet in August 1997 labeled "high-powered explosives, extremely dangerous." The explosives were being mixed into shampoo bottles, the employee said.

According to the AP, the confidential source provided the FBI with a fax about wire transfers from individuals in New Jersey that was signed Solo, one of Posada’s aliases.

The FBI concluded that at least $19,000 in wire transfers connected to the hotel bombings were sent from the United States to El Salvador and Guatemala to a "Ramon Medina," the code name used by Posada in the 1980s when he worked on Oliver North’s operations. [AP, May 4, 2007]

In 1998, in interviews with a New York Times reporter, Posada admitted a role in the Havana bombings, citing a goal of frightening tourists away from Cuba.

But Posada later denied making the admissions. He also has denied masterminding the 1976 airliner bombing in collusion with another notorious Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch, who moved to Miami, too, with the help and protection of the Bush family.

Not only did the Bush administration take a dive during Posada’s deportation hearing by letting the Venezuela torture claim go unchallenged, but also it ignored Bosch’s statement a year earlier, when he justified the 1976 mid-air bombing in a TV interview with reporter Manuel Cao on Miami’s Channel 41.

When Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the Cubana plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, "In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

“But don’t you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?” Cao asked.

“Who was on board that plane?” Bosch responded. “Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese.” [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]

Bosch added, “Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies…”

“And the fencers?” Cao asked about Cuba’s amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. “The young people on board?”

Bosch replied, “I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. … She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.

“We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny.” [The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976 and which involved a CIA undercover asset.]

“If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn’t you think it difficult?” Cao asked.

“No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba,” Bosch answered.

Venezuela Case

Beyond Bosch’s incriminating statements about the Cubana Airlines bombing, other evidence of his and Posada’s guilt is overwhelming.

Declassified U.S. documents show that soon after the Cubana Airlines plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the bombing.

But in fall 1976, Bush’s boss, President Gerald Ford, was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Still, inside the U.S. government, the facts were known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in anti-communist Cuban extremists Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP.

The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said.

“Following the 6 October Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

In South America, police began rounding up suspects. Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack.

A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez.

After President Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush took power in Washington in 1981, the momentum for fully unraveling the mysteries of anti-communist terrorist plots dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism.

Iran-Contra Role

In 1985, Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison, reportedly with the help of Cuban exiles. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Miami-based Cuban activist Jorge Mas Canosa for providing the $25,000 that was used to bribe guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison.

Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to Vice President Bush. Rodriguez was handling secret supply shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, a pet project of President Reagan.

After fleeing Venezuela, Posada joined Rodriguez in Central America and began using the code name “Ramon Medina.” Posada was assigned the job of paymaster for pilots in the White House-run contra-supply operation.

When one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada alerted U.S. officials and shut down the operation’s safe houses in El Salvador. Even after the exposure of Posada’s role in the contra-supply operation, the U.S. government made no effort to bring the accused terrorist to justice.

By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch also was out of Venezuela’s jails and back in Miami. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by U.S. officials who warned that Washington couldn’t credibly lecture other countries about terrorism while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.

But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when Jeb's dad, President George H.W. Bush, blocked proceedings against Bosch, letting the unapologetic terrorist stay in the United States.

In 1992, also during the first Bush presidency, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 ½ hours at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras. Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush’s vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush’s national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.

“Posada … recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg,” the FBI summary said. “Posada knows this because he’s the one who paid Rodriguez’ phone bill.” After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry’s Lost History.]

More Plotting

Posada soon returned to his anti-Castro plotting.

In 1994, Posada set out to kill Fidel Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot, according to a Miami Herald account. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]

The Herald also described Posada’s role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States.

“This afternoon you will receive via Western Union four transfers of $800 each … from New Jersey,” said one fax signed by SOLO, a Posada alias.

Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama.

Panamanian authorities arrested Posada and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety.

Four months after the sentencing, however, lame-duck Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso – who had a home in Key Biscayne, Florida, and had close ties to President George W. Bush’s administration – pardoned the convicts.

Just two months before Election 2004, three of Posada’s co-conspirators – Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez – arrived in Miami to a hero’s welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters.

While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men – also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida – alight on U.S. soil.

Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons that “there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11 (2001), fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets.” [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004]

Posada reportedly sneaked into the United States in early 2005 and his presence was an open secret in Miami for weeks before U.S. authorities did anything. The New York Times summed up Bush’s dilemma if Posada decided to seek U.S. asylum.

“A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists,” the Times wrote. “But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother, Jeb.” [NYT, May 9, 2005]

Only after Posada called a news conference to announce his presence was the Bush administration shamed into arresting him. But even then, the administration balked at sending Posada back to Venezuela where the Chavez government – unlike some of its predecessors – was eager to prosecute.

The next Bush move was to bungle the immigration case and thus let Posada live out his golden years as a hero in Miami.

The handling of the Posada-Bosch cases – when they are put next to Bush’s tough-guy attitude toward Islamic terrorism – point to one unavoidable and unpleasant conclusion: that the Bush family regards terrorism – defined as killing civilians for a political reason – as justified or at least tolerable in cases when their interests match those of the terrorists.

A principled rejection of terrorism only applies to the other guys.

[For more on how the senior George Bush looked the other way on Chile’s international terrorism, see Consortiumnews.com’s “When the Terrorists Were Our Guys.”]