Boulevard

ACLU Cites Surveillance of Anti-War Protests

This reminds me of the 60’s when government agents infiltrated anti-war protests, and even encouraged violence, in an effort to discredit The Movement. - J. Boulevard

ACLU Cites Surveillance of Anti-War Groups

Jul 28, 7:25 AM (ET)By SCOTT LINDLAW
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The American Civil Liberties Union released a compilation of covert government surveillance of war protesters and other political activists in California, decrying it as evidence of a "greater expansion of government power and the abuse of power" since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The ACLU's Northern California branch said the findings show oversight of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies is too weak and called for the state to create a new watchdog over their activities.
"We recognize that much of what we've learned, we've learned by chance, and what that tells us is that this report is just the tip of the iceberg," said Dorothy Ehrlich, the group's executive director.
The ACLU cataloged several incidents of surveillance in recent years. Among those involving police infiltration of anti-war groups:
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_Two Oakland police officers posed as demonstrators ahead of a 2003 march and got themselves elected as organizers for the march. The march was meant to protest a clash the previous month in which Oakland police fired non-lethal projectiles at anti-war demonstrators. The infiltrators helped plan the march route, according to the ACLU.
_The Fresno County Sheriff's Department sent a deputy into an anti-war group, Peace Fresno, posing as a fellow activist. "Aaron Stokes," who was actually Deputy Aaron Kilner, had attended rallies with the group and taken minutes at meetings in 2003. Attorney General Bill Lockyer opened an investigation in 2004, and later said he had "serious concerns" about the sheriff's methods, but he has taken no action against the department nor issued a report about the inquiry, which remains open.
_In 2004, union members at a demonstration identified two Contra Costa Sheriff's Department Homeland Security Unit members in attendance. When California Labor Federation leader Art Pulaski confronted the men, they claimed they were there to support the rally.
"Since the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, we have found an even greater expansion of government power and the abuse of power," Ehrlich said Thursday.
California law prohibits law enforcement officers from conducting undercover operations or engaging in surveillance of political activity in the absence of a reasonable suspicion of a crime, according to Lockyer.
The ACLU suggested the attorney general create "specific and direct" guidelines for local law enforcement agencies about the legal limits on collecting information and undercover monitoring of political activities. It also called for legislation to force local law enforcement to report their surveillance activities to the Legislature.
Lockyer spokesman Tom Dresslar said the attorney general had not yet read the report, released Thursday.
"While the AG believes law enforcement has made strides in better protecting civil liberties, he by no means has reached a comfort level," Dresslar said. "There is room for improvement, and we look forward to working with the ACLU and other interested parties to address legitimate issues raised in the report."
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On the Net: http://aclunc.org/surveillance_report

posted by J. Boulevard @ 12:09 PM 0 comments

Clinton Economists: A Storm Is Coming

Clinton Economists: A Storm Is Coming

By William Greider, The Nation
Posted on July 17, 2006, Printed on July 22, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/38981/

When Robert Rubin speaks his mind, his thoughts on economic policy are the gold standard for the Democratic Party. The former Treasury Secretary, now executive co-chair of Citigroup, captured the party's allegiance in the 1990s as principal architect of Bill Clinton's governing strategy, the conservative approach known as "Rubinomics" (or less often "Clintonomics"). Balancing the budget and aggressively pushing trade liberalization went hard against liberal intentions and the party's working-class base. But when Clinton's second term ended in booming prosperity, full employment and rising wages, most Democrats told themselves, Listen to Bob Rubin and good things happen.
So it's a big deal when Robert Rubin changes the subject and begins to talk about income inequality as "a deeply troubling fact of American economic life" that threatens the trading system, even the stability of "capitalist, democratic society." More startling, Rubin now freely acknowledges what the American establishment for many years denied or dismissed as inconsequential--globalization's role in generating the thirty-year stagnation of US wages, squeezing middle-class families and below, while directing income growth mainly to the upper brackets. A lot of Americans already knew this. Critics of "free trade" have been saying as much for years. But when Bob Rubin says it, his words can move politicians, if not financial markets.
Rubin has launched the Hamilton Project, a policy group of like-minded economists and financiers who are developing ameliorative measures to aid the threatened workforce and, he hopes, to create a broader political constituency that will defend the trading system against popular backlash. A strategy paper Rubin co-wrote defines the core problem: "Prosperity has neither trickled down nor rippled outward. Between 1973 and 2003, real GDP per capita in the United States increased 73 percent, while real median hourly compensation rose only 13 percent."
A storm is coming, Rubin fears. He wants a new national debate around these facts. In an interview, he explains the danger he foresees for global trade: "Where there's a great deal of insecurity, where median real wages are, roughly speaking, stagnant...where a recent Pew poll showed 55 percent of the American people think their kids will be worse off than they are, I think there is a real danger of heightened difficulty around issues that are already difficult, like trade.... Look at the difficulty around immigration." Princeton economist Alan Blinder, a Hamilton participant and Federal Reserve vice chair in the Clinton years, describes the "difficulty" in more ominous terms: "I think the prospects for the liberal trade order are not great," he says. "There's a whole class of people who are smart, well educated and articulate, and politically involved who will not just sit there and take it" when their jobs are moved offshore. He thinks CNN commentator Lou Dobbs, who has built a populist following by attacking globalization and immigration, "is just the beginning -- nothing compared to what's going to happen in the future."
What should we make of Rubin's heightened concern for the "losers" who, he now recognizes, include a vast portion of the populace? Many view the Hamilton Project as just more talk-talk. I regard it as an important event -- a "course correction" in elite thinking that, given Rubin's influence, may reshape the familiar trade debate, at least among Democrats. Rubin's central objective, however, is to control the terms of debate: to address the economic disparities globalization has generated but without disturbing anything fundamental in the global system itself.
His program consists mostly of familiar ideas that might soften the pain for displaced workers. But I doubt the Hamilton proposals will do much, if anything, to reduce the global forces that are depressing incomes for half or more of the American workforce. Even Rubin is uncertain. When I ask if his agenda will have any effect at all on the global convergence of wages -- the top falling gradually toward the rising bottom -- he says: "Well, I think that's a question to which nobody knows the answer. I think the proposals and approach we are proposing are the way to get the best possible outcome for the United States in a complicated world. ... But whether that's going to stop the global convergence of wages, I don't know the answer to that. I would guess the answer is no."
Despite my skepticism about his policy ideas, I think Rubin is providing a significant opening for the opposition -- a new chance for labor-liberal reformers to make themselves heard with a more fundamental critique of globalization. Up to now, the standard trade debate has been utterly simple-minded -- "free trade good, no trade bad" -- and anyone who opposes trade agreements or WTO rules is dismissed as a backward "protectionist." The enlightened position, as major media always explain, is to support the "win-win" promise of globalization.
Only Rubin is departing a bit from that script, effectively accepting the opposition's central complaint that "win-win" is a cruel distortion of what's happening. If so many Americans are actually losing ground, Rubin asks, shouldn't government do something about that? Yes, certainly, but that admission invites a different question: Are his establishment proposals actually likely to improve the American condition, or does the wage deterioration require more aggressive reforms?
Ideas do matter. My hope for more complex and honest debate may sound too wishful, but I was struck in our lengthy interview by Rubin's willingness to discuss contrary propositions, and by his disarmingly self-effacing and reflective manner. Several times, I was taken aback when his comments made tentative concessions to the opposition's argument. He even endorsed, though only in broad principle, some objectives for reforming global trade that his critics have long advocated.
I suggest that reformers test his sincerity. In the same spirit, they might try to initiate a conversation about what Rubin calls the "conceptual framework" for reform. He says he would welcome the discussion.
The Hamilton Project's early policy output, I concede, doesn't encourage a belief that reasoned dialogue with dissenters is what Rubin has in mind. Advisory board members see themselves as progressive-minded, but they do not stray from the mainstream's conventional wisdom -- lots of Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley, no one from the ranks of "free trade" skeptics. The twenty-five-member board includes thirteen investment bankers, venture capitalists and hedge-fund managers from Wall Street and the West Coast -- guys who, like Rubin, do the investment deals at home and abroad.
There's already a warm political glow. At the Hamilton launch in April, Senator Barack Obama hailed the group as "some of the most innovative, thoughtful policy-makers... the sort of breath of fresh air that I think this town needs." Senator Hillary Clinton's recent economic speeches are, not surprisingly, a good fit with Rubin's thinking, since the pair's political closeness is well-known. Washington's Clintonistas-in-waiting embrace and amplify Rubin's ideas. He helps them arrange financing for new projects, like John Podesta's Center for American Progress. Democratic candidates seeking Wall Street campaign money hope for Rubin's blessing, a seal of approval that can open checkbooks.
The "soft" ideas in the Hamilton Project playbook are mostly old ideas -- improve education and retraining, provide "wage insurance" payments to dislocated workers, increase public investment in industrial development and infrastructure. All are worthy things to do, but they seem like tinkering around the edges. Ron Blackwell, chief economist of the AFL-CIO, observes, "What they've got going are these little ideas that sound like they are forward-looking and respond to the problem of living standards, but they don't speak to power."
The right-of-center tilt of Rubin's group is reflected in some secondary proposals that are sure to rattle Democratic constituencies: Reform education by weakening teacher tenure, linking it to student performance; reform the system for tort litigation to eliminate what Rubin describes as "vast excess today" (his own firm suffered from tort litigation when it had to pay billions to settle investor lawsuits for Citigroup's role in the financial fraud at Enron and other corporate scandals).
The "hard" economic propositions in Rubin's agenda are essentially the same ones he pushed successfully in the Clinton Administration: Balance the budget to boost national savings and thereby (Rubin assumes) reduce the country's horrendous trade deficits and enormous capital borrowing from abroad, where the creditors are led by China and Japan; advance more trade agreements if possible, but don't tamper with the trading rules or international institutions that currently govern the system.
In other words, born-again Rubinomics. Peter Orszag, the young economist who is Hamilton's director, doesn't quarrel with the label, saying, "This is almost like Clintonomics 2.0." Rubin says, "The basic principles of sound economic policy I don't think change." The script sounds a lot like the "putting people first" platform Bill Clinton ran on back in 1992, though in office he abandoned most public investment in favor of deficit reduction.
Orszag calls it a "warm-hearted but cool-headed" agenda. But will it work? That's the question I would like to hear debated among Dems before they sign up for more Rubin magic. Clinton's second-term boom did temporarily reverse the downward wage trends, though economists still argue over the cause and effect. But balancing the budget again is unlikely to produce the same results, for lots of reasons. While increasing national savings is a very important goal, the world is now awash in surplus capital. And the United States is in a much deeper hole, borrowing $700 billion a year from abroad to sustain the domestic economy.
More to the point, Rubinomics in the 1990s did not reverse the long-term trend of rising trade deficits in goods and services or the deepening current-account deficits in capital borrowing from abroad, which could bring on a crisis if foreign lenders decide to pull the plug. In fact, both capital and trade deficits exploded at the very moment Clinton's budget was coming into balance. As the budget moved from deficit to surplus, the US current-account deficit nearly tripled, from 1.6 to 4.2 percent of GDP (it is now around 7 percent).
Rubin is sticking to his convictions, though respected conservative economists no longer believe in the "twin deficit" relationship. Studies by the Federal Reserve and the IMF found the relationship too weak to matter much. The IMF estimates that balancing the budget now would reduce the current-account deficit only slightly, while the required fiscal austerity would produce a five-year loss of more than $300 billion in economic output. Rubin defends his thesis by blaming the rising trade deficit on inflexible currency exchange with China and other Asian nations. Correct that and everything will be fine, he says. Further, he explains that the capital deficits in the Clinton years were actually a good thing because the high-tech investment boom was drawing in more foreign investors. He neglects to mention that the boom included the high-tech stock-market "bubble" that collapsed a year later on George W. Bush's watch, with $6 trillion in losses for investors.
In any case, Rubin sees nothing in the trading system itself that needs fixing. "Maybe I'm missing something," he says, "but I don't think there's anything in the design of the system we would have done differently."
Another debatable tenet in Rubin's thinking is the familiar mantra that more education will save us in the long run--that is, improving Americans' skills and knowledge will offset the low-wage competition. Rubin's tone is sympathetic to workers, but some acolytes pushing this logic sound like they are "blaming the victim." US educational attainment levels, after all, rose robustly during the last generation with no effect on job losses or wage stagnation. "I actually think education is key," Rubin insists. "I'm granting I think your point is right--the cost gap," the cheaper labor abroad, which may pull down US wages for another generation. But to some extent, he says, "the cost gap will, over time actually, probably get partially solved by their increasing wages [in China and India], hopefully with as little as possible our wages coming down. ... The more productive we are, the better we can compete with them."
There's one large and looming problem with that logic: The number of "losers" whose jobs are outsourced to foreign labor markets is getting much larger than the establishment had envisioned, and the job losses are creeping up the income ladder to undermine people in well-educated, highly paid occupations. In a startling Foreign Affairs essay, Alan Blinder warned that "tens of millions" of job losses are ahead from outsourcing, not for the already decimated blue-collar workers in manufacturing but for accountants, software designers and other high-status professions. These are people who presumably did the "right thing" by getting advanced educations. How, I ask Blinder, does educational improvement help them, since they are already well educated? "I wish I knew the answer to that," Blinder replies. "On balance, more education is better than less education, but it's not a panacea." He talks vaguely of changing the style of American schooling.
Blinder's ominous forecast for high-skilled jobs is another belated recognition by establishment authorities that they were wrong, since the process of moving engineering work to Asia, where they could hire cheaper engineers, started two decades ago. Free-trade advocates like Blinder are complacent about the loss of manufacturing jobs, comparing it to the technological changes that wiped out agricultural employment a century ago. "It's pretty inevitable," he says. They seem more worried now that white-collar jobs are being wiped out. But they think it would be a big mistake to interfere. "It's like global warming," he explains. "If there is severe global warming, you may have to change the preparations for bad weather." But Blinder's "global warming" metaphor actually expresses the viewpoint of the other side. Like global warming, the trading system is not an act of nature. It is a set of man-made rules -- protecting capital and ignoring labor. Finance and industry persuaded government to adopt these terms. But they can be altered, just as government can order industry to reform itself to curb the dangers of global warming. That difference -- deference to the status quo versus a vision for reform -- is the nut of the argument between the two sides.
When I asked Rubin to consider labor's critique and its argument for global labor standards, I was pleasantly surprised that he did not brush off the question. Instead, we had an engaging back and forth.
Without global rights for workers to organize and some version of a minimum wage pegged to each country's economic conditions, the "race to the bottom" is sure to continue, I suggest. When workers start mobilizing for higher wages, multinationals counter by moving production to the next available cheap labor market. Middle-class wages fall at the top, but the bottom does not rise as rapidly as it should. "But it's a complicated question," Rubin responds. Improving the distribution of incomes in poorer countries "is in everybody's interest," he agrees. "On the other hand, I've had exposure to people who make that argument, and I think they make it as a way to prevent trade liberalization. ... The one hope some of these countries have to take people out of abject poverty is that their labor-cost advantage will result in a shift of production to their countries. ... Would you say the people of Sri Lanka have to stay in abject poverty to keep that from happening?"
Labor rights, I counter, do not prevent the very poorest countries from developing on the advantage of their cheap labor, but reform would require all developing countries to operate so that wage levels can rise proportionate to the economy's rising productivity and profit, however that is measured. "Something like that ought to be an objective of the global system," Rubin agrees. But he says he has never seen a convincing model of how this might work. He remains skeptical. He admits it is disturbing that economic advances in some countries "still have had very little effect on the poverty rate, and middle-income people haven't done all that well either. So the political economic elites had all this economic benefit, and they were indifferent to poverty, to the poor."
The global system, I point out, protects capital by imposing dense rules on how a developing nation must treat investment capital, banking, patents and intellectual property rights. If a poor country doesn't accept the rules for capital, it doesn't get to play in the global system. Yet when organized labor seeks basic rights for working people around the world to organize unions and bargain collectively, they are denounced as "protectionist" and denied any recognition. Is that fair? "Well, I guess it's true," Rubin says hesitantly. "You can say, Why distinguish between those [rules for capital] and labor conditions?" Perhaps it is justified, he says, because labor and especially environmental rights are "a bit further removed" from trade. "I think it's the right objective," Rubin says. "But I still think it's a very complicated question whether you put labor conditions in an agreement. I would not hold back from going ahead on a trade agreement because another country refused to accept labor standards."
To my surprise, Rubin next recalls the work of John Kenneth Galbraith and his famous concept of "countervailing powers." Market-based capitalism, Rubin explains, is kept stable, broadly prosperous and equitable because its excesses are checked by labor unions, government and other institutions with countervailing power. "If you have a big company negotiate with its workers and the workers aren't organized, it isn't real negotiations," he says, adding, "If one side has no negotiating power, that isn't really a market-based system. It's an imposition of one on the other." This is a startling statement: The man from Citigroup has articulated the essential reasoning that makes the case for including labor rights in the global trading system. That conversation has convinced me that outgunned reformers ought to make use of Rubin's musings.
Knock on his door and try to initiate a dialogue. If the critics come forward and offer their ideas on a "conceptual framework" for reform, I ask, would the Hamilton Project be willing to discuss them? Rubin reiterates his doubts and reservations. "But the answer is yes," he says. "The answer is absolutely yes." Skeptical friends and kindred spirits will probably say to me, You have been conned. I would say back to them, What have you got to lose by talking to the man?
The Hamilton Project is a sophisticated example of what I call "deep lobbying" -- developing well in advance of the 2008 presidential election an agenda that safely avoids critical challenges to the global system and defines the terms of debate in very limiting ways. Democratic hopefuls who sign on can gain the cover of Rubin's respectability. Long before voters even know who the candidates are, the party's debate might be over before it begins.
Given this prospect for premature consensus, it might be a good idea to start the debate right now.
In some ways, Robert Rubin reminds me of the original Progressives of the early twentieth century, reformers drawn from the emerging middle class of managerial and professional people. They tried in various ways to reconcile the tumultuous conflicts between capital and labor but without getting blood on their hands. They were horrified by the greed and inhumanity of industrial capitalism but also wished to keep their distance from Socialists and the struggling labor movement.
Rubin is a "nice guy" -- even adversaries say so -- and I suspect he feels similar tensions. He sincerely would like to work things out -- find some kind of reasonable balance -- but without interrupting the creative destruction under way in the global system. The big difference separating him from the Progressives is that Rubin and his investment-banking colleagues are men of capital. At Goldman Sachs, Rubin was doing major deals in Mexico before he came to Washington to push NAFTA and balanced budgets. At Citigroup he travels to Beijing and Shanghai, promoting client interests. I don't question his sincerity. But as a reformer, he has competing demands on his loyalty.
My hunch is that Rubin won't succeed any more than the original Progressives in reconciling the competing forces (the New Deal eventually did). The tumult most likely will grow louder and possibly violent before reformers gain the political power to accomplish their serious goals.
Meanwhile, if popular anger does erupt here and around the world, there won't be much space left for "nice guys" seeking a reasonable discussion.
William Greider is the author of, most recently, "The Soul of Capitalism" (Simon & Schuster).
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/38981/

posted by J. Boulevard @ 7:19 AM 0 comments

They Don't Call It the White House for Nothing

They Don't Call It the White House for Nothing

By Greg Palast, GregPalast.com.
Posted July 22, 2006.

God lost this time. I counted: Bush mentioned God only six times in his speech to the NAACP yesterday. The winner was "faith" -- which got seven mentions, though if you count "The Creator" as God, well, then the Lord tied it.
Coming in right behind God and Faith, other big mentions in the First Home Boy's rap included: The Voting Rights Act, his family's "commitment to civil rights," the "death tax," rebuilding New Orleans, "public school choice" and "soft bigotry."
As the philosopher Aretha Franklin once said, "Who's zoomin' who?"
Let's take it one point at a time.
Voting Rights Act -- This was a big applause line. Bush gloated about his convincing the White Sheets Caucus of the Republican Party to go along with the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. But he forgot to mention the fine print. The Southern GOP only went along with renewing the law on the understanding that the law would never be enforced.
Think I'm kidding? Check this: in July 2004, the US Civil Rights Commission voted to open a civil and criminal investigation of his brother's Administration in Florida for knowingly conducting a racially-biased scrub of voter rolls. In April 2004, Governor Jeb Bush, of the "family committed to civil rights," personally ordered this new purge of "felons" from voter rolls, despite promising never to repeat the infamous scrub of 2000. The new purge violated a settlement he signed with the, uh, the NAACP.
It also violated the Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Commission turned the case over to the US Justice Department which, two years on, has yet to begin the investigation. That's not to say President Bush did nothing. He swiftly removed every member of the Commission who voted to investigate his brother.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 6:51 AM 0 comments

Court Tells Bush: Can't 'Sacrifice Liberty'

Court tells Bush: Can't 'Sacrifice Liberty'
By Evan Derkacz

Posted on July 21, 2006, Printed on July 21, 2006http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/39307/

Despite the Bush administration's defense that even to acknowledge the existence of its AT&T-assisted eavesdropping program (well, we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you...) would jeopardize national security secrets the Bush Sr.-appointed judge said: ah-ah... no dice.
Here's a description of the suit from the good folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
EFF filed the class-action suit against AT&T in January, alleging that the telecommunications company has given the National Security Agency (NSA) secret, direct access to the phone calls and emails going over its network and has been handing over communications logs detailing the activities of millions of ordinary Americans.
According to Glenn Greenwald, the court's decision to let the case go forward (both against the admin and AT&T) was partly based on the recent Hamdi case which limited Bush's "wartime" powers, "yet another reminder that the Bush administration's claims of unlimited presidential power have no place in our system of government..."
From the ruling:
"Even the state secrets privilege has its limit. While the court recognizes and respects the executive's constitutional duty to protect the nation from threats, the court also takes seriously its constitutional duty to adjudicate the disputes that come before it."
Greenwald notes that not only will this decision be almost immediately appealed but that pending legislation threatens to remove all NSA cases to the secret FISA court system displacing the traditional courts.
But then: "Those caveats to the side, the importance of this victory cannot be overstated."
One final note of Bush admin irony. The Justice Dept was originally investigating the legality of the NSA program but Bush halted it on the grounds that while the AT&T employees in the know had the security clearance to assess the situation, our Justice Dept's lawyers, umm, didn't. (UnclaimedTerritory, Balkinization)
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Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 12:01 PM 0 comments

Dont Let the Neocons Frame a War on Terror

Don't Let the Neocons Call It a 'War on Terror'
By Joshua Holland,

AlterNetPosted on July 21, 2006, Printed on July 21, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/39235/

There's never been a global war on terror. It's a sham, a ruse. The conflict that's broken out between Israel and Hezbollah shows us, again, how important it is to articulate that. It's a real war, and it has both neocons and Islamic extremists praying that it will escalate into the global Clash of Civilizations that they've long lusted after.
Bush and Congress gave Israel the green light to pummel Lebanon for a while because "Israel is fighting a brave battle in a dangerous front in the War on Terror." And what can we, as Americans, really say about that? After all, we accepted the idea (some of us grudgingly) that there was a global "War on Terror" ourselves -- why shouldn't Lebanon be the next front?
When the media and our political class accepted the war frame, the hawks got a blank check. Everything that followed -- invasions, illegal surveillance and prisoners held in limbo, are all expected during times of war. Once we went to "war," resisting those policies became an uphill fight. War talk justifies powerful states responding to terrorist or insurgent attacks with disproportionate force. That makes the hawks feel macho and will likely create a whole new generation of potentially violent radicals who hate our guts.
We should have fought the "War on Terror" narrative from the beginning. Calling it a "war" is a numerical error, not an ideological difference. There are a few tens of thousands of potentially violent extremists dispersed around the world. They're not gathered in large groups, and you can't distinguish them from ordinary civilians. That makes it fundamentally an intelligence and law enforcement problem (which may require some military support).
But it goes further than that. There's no global war between East and West because there are no discrete sides. First of all, there's no 'Us.' The Western democracies agree that terrorism is a problem, but they are perfectly divided about how to address it. The United States and Israel stand alone in their "wars," the Russians have their "war" with the Chechens and the rest of the world does what simple logic dictates: investigate terror cells and arrest the participants. Sometimes security forces kill them. They've had quite a bit of success.
What's more, we don't really care about Islamic extremism per se. We are no more allied with the Russians in their war with Chechen separatists than we have been with the Chinese as they've cracked down on Islamic groups in Xinjiang. Where U.S. "interests" aren't involved, we're indifferent.
Much more important -- and so many Americans don't get this -- there's no "them." The image of a well-organized global Islamic insurgency is a fantasy. Al Qaeda was one of a dozen Islamic extremist groups that emerged in the 1990s, and Bin Laden was one of a few dozen influential and charismatic militant leaders. Individual groups were fighting separate, distinctly domestic battles; Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya opposed the Egyptian government, Hezbollah was formed to beat back the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, the Group Islamique Armé rose up to topple Algeria's government, and so on.
All of those conflicts had their own unique contexts and histories, and almost all of those movements had legitimate gripes with some rather unsavory governments. Most Americans couldn't tell you what the struggle between the Philippine government and Abu Sayyaf is all about, and why should they? That battle has little to do with us, as so many of them don't. Some of these "terror groups," remember, were called "freedom fighters" when they were pointed at the Soviets or their client states.
In that landscape, Al Qaeda was unique in one important way: Bin Laden, like his neocon counterparts, saw the world gripped in an existential struggle between East and West. He was jockeying for position with dozens of other movements, none of which were based on a broad, global effort against the United States and its allies. Bin Laden focused on US support for the Saudi government, for Israel, for Egypt's repressive regime (a government that imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of political Islamists) and he preached that the United States was the head of the snake. First defeat America, and then all those individual, national and very particular battles could be won.
This was not an easy sell. Messing with the U.S., it was widely acknowledged, was not a terribly smart course of action, and many militants had a narrowly focused hatred of their own domestic ideological opponents. It also didn't sit well with Bin Laden's hosts. As Jason Burke writes in his excellent book, Al Qaeda, "it is important to recognize that [Islamist movements] in Yemen and Afghanistan, and the regime in the Sudan, have roots in local contingencies that pre-date Bin Laden." They used the sheik and allowed themselves to be used by him, but their conflicts, too, were domestic in nature. In early 1996, the Sudanese government approached the United States and Saudi Arabia and offered to turn Bin Laden over to their security services. They refused. In May of that year, he returned to Afghanistan, where he had developed a reputation fighting the Soviets.
Here we come to a crucial part of the story of the rise of international Islamism -- a narrative the American media has been criminally complicit in ignoring. In August of 1998, independent groups loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda attacked U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Rather than treating the attacks as a security problem that cried out for better intelligence, Bill Clinton reacted by using the tools of war, launching over a hundred cruise missiles at Sudan and Afghanistan in Operation Shortsighted Violence ("Infinite Reach"). The missiles were primarily for domestic consumption -- to deflect attention from Monica's cum-stained dress and to assuage the bloodthirsty right -- and had little effect on violent extremists. But they did knock out Sudan's only pharmaceutical plant, precipitating a disease epidemic that killed tens of thousands of people -- a story ignored by the Western press.
Meanwhile, the Taliban had grown weary of Bin Laden's shtick. They were sick of his public attacks against the "crusaders and Zionists," and while the Taliban's leaders were terribly provincial, they understood that the heat Bin Laden was bringing down on them wasn't helping their cause. Remember, this was a group that was negotiating with Texas oilmen from Unocal to install a major pipeline in Afghanistan; they wanted foreign investment and recognition.
In mid-1998, the Taliban, like the Sudanese before them, cut a deal to turn Bin laden over to Saudi Arabia, where he would be tried for treason and in all likelihood executed. All that the Taliban asked in return was for a group of religious authorities loyal to the Saudi government to issue a statement justifying the move under Islamic law -- a mere technicality.
In July of that year, the deal was confirmed and, in early September, two planes landed in Kandahar carrying Prince Turki and a group of Saudi commandos to collect Bin Laden. But the deal had run into a snag three weeks earlier, when the United States had launched its cruise missiles. The Saudis arrived only to be told the deal was off and to be dressed down by Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The strikes had changed everything.
The missile attack was a disaster with far-reaching consequences. Those Tomahawks validated all of Bin Laden's claims. The United States, it seemed, really was unconcerned with the deaths of thousands of innocent Muslims. Hundreds of extremists who had come to Afghanistan to train for their local fights in Kashmir or the Philippines or wherever suddenly flocked to Al Qaeda, convinced that Bin Laden's epic struggle against the West was their own.
They didn't necessarily share his priorities, but our military response showed he had gotten to us, and he became a hero. It was the beginning of of a trend that continues today: the United States, where political leaders explain complex geopolitical issues in simple binaries (freedom-loving/terror-loving) and are unable to differentiate between a war and a law enforcement problem, stumbles blindly into a full-blown attack on a sovereign country -- pressed ever forward by its psychotic and racist right wing -- with disastrous and unintended consequences. Iraq wasn't the first, and Bush didn't start it -- Clinton did.
9/11 was destined to happen one way or another, even if Bush had paid attention to that famous briefing at his ranch in Crawford. That's because the fuse that set off 9/11 was laid out decades ago in the Reagan era. His administration joined the Saudi regime (and Pakistani intelligence) in promoting an extremist form of Islamic fundamentalism to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Pan-Arabists in the Gulf -- and it was lit by Clinton's fireworks display.
After 9/11, we could have knocked the hell out of Al Qaeda and fractured the delicate coalition that Bin Laden had managed to cobble together after the East Africa bombings. Instead, we launched a "war" on terror, and we again proved to a receptive audience that we're the enemy they should focus on. Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Gitmo -- these are recruiting posters for global Jihad.
We may yet end up with a unified opponent against whom we can fight a global war. But if we do, it will be one of our own making. It'll be because we didn't nip the war talk in the bud.
An earlier version of this article first appeared in The Mix. Read the original here.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/39235/

posted by J. Boulevard @ 5:59 AM 0 comments

RFK Jr Blows the Whistle on Diebold

RFK Jr. Blows the Whistle on Diebold
By John Ireland, In These Times

Posted on July 21, 2006, Printed on July 21, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/39152/

On July 13, the Pensacola, Fla.-based law firm of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed a "qui tam" lawsuit in U.S. District Court, alleging that Diebold and other electronic voting machine (EVM) companies fraudulently represented to state election boards and the federal government that their products were "unhackable."
Kennedy claims to have witnesses "centrally located, deep within the corporations," who will confirm that company officials withheld their knowledge of problems with accuracy, reliability and security of EVMs in order to procure government contracts. Since going into service, many of these machines have been linked to allegations of election fraud.
In the wake of alleged vote count inconsistencies and the "hanging chad" debacle of 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. HAVA appropriated $3 billion to replace voting equipment and make other improvements in election administration. Diebold, Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Systems secured the lion's share of nearly half that sum in contracts to purchase EVMs. All 50 states have received funds and many are hurriedly spending it on replacing lever and punch card machines in time for November.
According to the Election Assistance Commission, more than 61 percent of votes in the 2004 presidential election were cast and/or tallied by EVMs. Election Data Services, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, estimates that the figure will jump to 80 percent by November, which will see elections for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives.
Matt Schultz, an attorney with Kennedy's law firm, Levin Papantonio, describes the process of competition for HAVA's $300 million of contractor funds as "a race to the bottom." "There is no question in my mind that these companies sacrificed security and accuracy, mass-producing a cheap product to cash in on tons of federal money," Schultz says. "It's an industry-wide problem."
Qui tam lawsuits stem from a provision in the Civil False Claims Act, which Congress passed in 1863 at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln to respond to price gouging, use of defective products and substitution of inferior material by contractors supplying the Union Army. The provision allows private citizens to file a suit in the name of the U.S. government charging fraud by government contractors and other entities that receive or use government funds.
Long known as "Lincoln's Law," it is now commonly referred to as the "Whistleblower Law." Since the mid-'80s, qui tam recoveries have exceeded $1 billion, mostly after exposing medical and defense overcharging.
Mike Papantonio, partner in the law firm and co-host with Kennedy on "Ring of Fire," a weekly radio show on the Air America Network, explains the value of the qui tam approach. "The problem with injunctive relief, or [a writ of] mandamus, or prohibition-type writs, is it all comes down to politics. ... How do you bring injunctive relief with [Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth] Blackwell? How do you get [Florida Governor] Jeb Bush to do anything? They won't. You have to move outside of that political realm."
In 2004, Blackwell was in charge of implementing state and federal election laws, while, at the same time, co-chairing the state's 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign. Under his watch, election officials neglected to process registration cards from Democratic voter drives, purged tens of thousands of voter registrations and distributed EVMs unevenly, leaving some voters waiting up to 12 hours. According to Kennedy, "at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted." Ohio was decided by 118,601 votes.
The contents of the suit could be under judicial seal for at least 60 days while the U.S. Department of Justice considers whether or not to join the suit. If U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales decides not to join the suit, Levin Papantonio may approach individual state attorneys general. If no one joins, the firm is free to, as Papantonio puts it, "stand in the shoes of the Attorney General and fight on behalf of the taxpayers and the nation."
"The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system," warns Kennedy. "Whoever controls the voting machines can control who wins the votes."
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/39152/

posted by J. Boulevard @ 5:47 AM 0 comments

Judge Declines to Dismiss Privacy Suit Against AT&T

July 21, 2006, The New York Times

Judge Declines to Dismiss Privacy Suit Against AT&T
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, July 20 — A federal judge on Thursday rejected a motion by the Bush administration to dismiss a lawsuit against AT&T over its cooperation with a government surveillance program, ruling that state secrets would not be at risk if the suit proceeded.
The case was filed in February by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, and alleged that AT&T was collaborating with the National Security Agency in a surveillance program tracking the domestic and foreign communications of millions of Americans.
In rejecting the motion brought by the Justice Department, Vaughn R. Walker, chief judge of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, ruled that the government had already disclosed in broad terms whose communications it monitored, and that it was generally interested in calls between the United States and other countries.
“The government has opened the door for judicial inquiry by publicly confirming and denying material information about its monitoring of communications content,” Judge Walker wrote.
“Because of the public disclosures by the government and AT&T,’’ he added, “the court cannot conclude that merely maintaining this action creates a ‘reasonable danger’ of harming national security.”
The judge also rejected a separate motion to dismiss by AT&T, which had argued that its relationship with the government made it immune from prosecution.
Judge Walker noted that his ruling should not be interpreted as an indication that his review of classified material presented by the government confirmed the accusations in the suit.
The government’s surveillance of telephone and Internet activity as part of its effort to track terrorists was disclosed in an article in The New York Times last December. In filing its lawsuit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation cited the testimony of a former AT&T technician who disclosed technical documents about the installation of monitoring equipment at an AT&T Internet switching center in San Francisco.
“This cases arises against the backdrop of the accountability of the government as it pursues its surveillance program,” said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group based in Washington. “This is a significant victory for the principle of government accountability.”
Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the lawsuit was one of about 35 filed in different states in response to disclosures about the surveillance program, which the Bush administration has acknowledged. Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, has introduced legislation to consolidate those cases before a special court that had previously been established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to deal with such issues.
Separately, at the request of AT&T, Verizon and the government, a federal court in Chicago has begun to consider whether the cases should be consolidated or heard before separate federal courts.
An AT&T spokesman, Walt Sharp, said the company was evaluating its options in light of the judge’s ruling. Mr. Sharp emphasized that the company was committed to protecting the privacy rights of its customers.
A Justice Department spokesman did not return telephone calls seeking comment.
In a separate lawsuit filed before a federal court in Detroit, the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the National Security Agency over the surveillance program.
Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said they assumed the government would appeal the ruling, and said the next phase of the case would deal with whether the judge would permit the discovery phase of the trial to continue during the appeal process.
“Everyone expects the government to appeal, and that could take some time,” said Robert D. Fram, a partner at Heller Ehrman, the San Francisco firm representing the foundation in the case.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 5:27 AM 0 comments

The US Descends on Paraguay

The U.S. Descends on Paraguay
By Benjamin Dangl, The Nation

Posted on July 20, 2006, Printed on July 20, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/39283/

While hitchhiking across Paraguay a few years ago, I met welcoming farmers who let me camp in their backyards. I eventually arrived in Ciudad del Este, known for its black markets and loose borders. Now the city and farmers I met are caught in the crossfire of the US military's "war on terror."
On May 26, 2005, the Paraguayan Senate allowed US troops to train their Paraguayan counterparts until December 2006, when the Paraguayan Senate can vote to extend the troops' stay. The United States had threatened to cut off millions in aid to the country if Paraguay did not grant the troops entry. In July 2005 hundreds of US soldiers arrived with planes, weapons and ammunition. Washington's funding for counterterrorism efforts in Paraguay soon doubled, and protests against the military presence hit the streets.
Some activists, military analysts and politicians in the region believe the operations could be part of a plan to overthrow the left-leaning government of Evo Morales in neighboring Bolivia and take control of the area's vast gas and water reserves. Human rights reports from Paraguay suggest the US military presence is, at the very least, heightening tensions in the country.
Paraguay is the fourth-largest producer of soy in the world. As this industry has expanded, an estimated 90,000 poor families have been forced off their land. Campesinos have organized protests, road blockades and land occupations against displacement and have faced subsequent repression from military and paramilitary forces. According to Servicio, Paz y Justicia (Serpaj), an international human rights group that has a chapter in Paraguay, one method used to force farmers off their land is to spray toxic pesticides around communities until sickness forces residents to leave.
GRR said Cabrera was killed by paramilitaries connected to large landowners and soy producers, who are expanding their holdings. The paramilitaries pursue farm leaders who are organizing against the occupation of their land. Investigations by Serpaj demonstrate that the worst cases of repression against farmers have taken place in areas with the highest concentration of US troops. Serpaj reported that in the department of San Pedro, where five US military exercises took place, there have been eighteen farmer deaths from repression, in an area with many farmer organizations. In the department of Concepcion there have been eleven deaths and three US military exercises. Near the Triple Border, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, there were twelve deaths and three exercises.
"The US military is advising the Paraguayan police and military about how to deal with these farmer groups.... They are teaching theory as well as technical skills to Paraguayan police and military. These new forms of combat have been used internally," Orlando Castillo of Serpaj told me over the phone. "The US troops talk with the farmers and get to know their leaders and which groups, organizations, are working there, then establish the plans and actions to control the farmer movement and advise the Paraguayan military and police on how to proceed.... The numbers from our study show what this US presence is doing. US troops form part of a security plan to repress the social movement in Paraguay. A lot of repression has happened in the name of security and against 'terrorism.' "
Tomas Palau, a Paraguayan sociologist at BASE-IS, a Paraguayan social research institute, and the editor of a recent book on the militarization of Latin America, said, "The US conducts training and classes for the Paraguayan troops. These classes are led by North Americans, who answer to Southern Command, the branch of the US military for South America."
Like Castillo, Palau said there is an association between the US military presence and the increased violence against campesinos. "They are teaching counterinsurgency classes, preparing the Paraguayan troops to fight internal enemies," he told me.
The US Embassy in Asuncion rejects all claims that the US military is linked to the increased repression against campesino and protest groups, either through exercises or instruction. In an e-mail response to the charges, Bruce Kleiner of the Embassy's Office of Public Affairs writes that "the U.S. military is not monitoring protest groups in Paraguay" and that "the U.S. military personnel and Paraguayan armed forces have trained together during medical readiness training exercises (MEDRETEs) to provide humanitarian service to some of Paraguay's most disadvantaged citizens." However, the deputy speaker of the Paraguayan parliament, Alejandro Velazquez Ugarte, said that of the thirteen exercises going on in the country, only two are of a civilian nature.
According to BASE-IS, Paraguayan officials have recently used the threat of terrorism to justify their aggression against campesino leaders. One group, the Campesino Organization of the North, has been accused of receiving instructions from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), that country's largest leftist guerrilla movement. The FARC has also been accused of colluding in the kidnapping and murder of the daughter of former Paraguayan President Raul Cubas Grau last year. A June 23 report from the Chinese news service Xinhua said that Colombia's defense minister, Camilo Ospina, spoke with Paraguay's attorney general, Ruben Candia, about the presence of the FARC in Paraguay. Ospina said the FARC was consulting organized crime groups and "giving criminals advice on explosives" in Paraguay.
The Association of Farmers of Alto Parana (ASAGRAPA), a campesino group near the Triple Border, reported that a local politician offered one of the organization's leaders a sum of money equivalent to a monthly salary, in return for which the ASAGRAPA member was told to announce that other leaders in the organization were building a terrorist group and receiving training from the FARC. BASE-IS reports suggest that this type of bribery and disinformation is part of an effort to guarantee the "national security of the US" and "justify, continue and expand the North American military presence."
"All of these activities coincide with the presence of the US troops," Palau explained about the violence against farmers. "The CIA and FBI are also working here. It's likely they are generating these plans for fabricating lies about guerrilla and terrorist activities. They need to find terrorists to use as an excuse for militarization." Last October the Cuban media outlet Prensa Latina reported that FBI director Robert Mueller arrived in Paraguay to "check on preparations for the installation of a permanent FBI office in Asuncion...to cooperate with security organizations to fight international crime, drug traffic and kidnapping."
Journalist Hugo Olazar of the Argentine paper Clarin reported last September that US troops were operating from an air base in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay. He visited the base last year and said it had an air-traffic control tower, a military encampment and was capable of handling large aircraft. Though the United States denies it is operating at the base, it used the same rhetoric when first discussing its actions in Manta, Ecuador, which is currently home to an $80 million US military base. The base there was first described in 1999 as an archaic "dirt strip" used only for weather monitoring. Days later, the Pentagon said it would be utilized for security-related missions.
Other indications that the US military might be settling into Paraguay come from the right-wing Paraguayan government. Current President Nicanor Duarte Frutos is a member of the Colorado party, which has ruled the country for more than fifty years. It was this party that established the thirty-five-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. Soon after his election in 2003, Duarte became the first Paraguayan president to be received at the White House. Last August Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew to Paraguay. Shortly afterward, Dick Cheney met with Paraguay's vice president.
Last year, Argentine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel commented on the situation in Paraguay, "Once the United States arrives, it takes it a long time to leave. And that really frightens me."
Counterfeit Rolling Papers and Viagra
Washington has justified its military presence in Paraguay by stating that the Triple Border area at Ciudad del Este is a base for Islamist terrorist funding. In a June 3, 2006, Associated Press report, Western intelligence officials, speaking anonymously, claimed that if Iran is cornered by the United States, it could direct the international network of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah to assist in terrorist attacks. The Justice Department has indicted nineteen people this year for sending the profits from the sale of counterfeit rolling papers and Viagra to Hezbollah. "Extensive operations have been uncovered in South America," the AP article states, "where Hezbollah is well connected to the drug trade, particularly in the region where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet."
Other claims about terrorist networks said to be operating in the Triple Border region include a poster of Iguacu Falls, a tourist destination near Ciudad del Este, discovered by US troops on the wall of an Al Qaeda operative's home in Kabul, Afghanistan, shortly after 9/11. Aside from this, however, the US Southern Command and the State Department report that no "credible information" exists confirming that "Islamic terrorist cells are planning attacks in Latin America."
Luiz Moniz Bandeira, who holds a chair in history at the University of Brasilia and writes about US-Brazilian relations, was quoted in the Washington Times as saying, "I wouldn't dismiss the hypothesis that US agents plant stories in the media about Arab terrorists in the Triple Frontier to provoke terrorism and justify their military presence."
Throughout the cold war, the US government used the threat of communism as an excuse for its military adventures in Latin America. Now, as leaders such as Bolivia's Evo Morales and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez move further outside the sphere of Washington's interests, the United States is using terrorism as an alibi for its military presence. As Greg Grandin pointed out, the Pentagon now has more resources and money directed to Latin America than the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce and Treasury combined. Before 9/11 the annual US military aid to the region was around $400 million. It's now nearly $1 billion. Much of this goes to training troops.
Making wild allegations about Paraguayan farmers being terrorists is one way to justify the increased spending and military presence in the region. "The US government is lying about the terrorist funding in the Triple Border, just like they did about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," said an exasperated Castillo of Serpaj. Indeed, the street markets I walked through in Ciudad del Este, and the farmers I met along the way, seemed to pose as much of a threat to US security as a pirated Tom Petty CD or a bottle of counterfeit whiskey.
Benjamin Dangl is the editor of Upside Down World, an online magazine uncovering activism and politics in Latin America. Email ben(at)upsidedownworld.org
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/39283/

posted by J. Boulevard @ 6:13 PM 0 comments

Wiretapping Review Is Criticized

July 15, 2006, The New York Times

Wiretapping Review Is Criticized
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, July 14 — Critics of the Bush administration’s program for wiretapping without warrants said Friday that they would fight a new White House agreement to let a secret court decide the constitutionality of the operation, and the compromise plan failed to deter lawmakers from offering up competing proposals of their own.
The agreement, completed Thursday by Senator Arlen Specter after negotiations with the White House, drew immediate scrutiny in Washington, as politicians, national security lawyers and civil rights advocates debated its impact and legal nuances.
The plan would allow the secret court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which normally issues wiretapping warrants in terror and spying cases, to review the program and decide on its legality. The proposal would have to be approved by Congress.
Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has been critical of the National Security Agency wiretapping program, said in an interview Friday that he saw the White House-Specter proposal as “a further abdication” of the role of Congress in setting rules for federal surveillance and wiretapping.
“We’re going to let a secret court decide for us what to do?” Mr. Schiff asked. “I think it’s a cop-out.”
Mr. Schiff and three other lawmakers, including one Republican, introduced an amendment last month to the Defense Department appropriations bill seeking to block the use of any money on the N.S.A. program unless intelligence warrants are used. The amendment failed, but it drew 23 Republican supporters, an increase from four Republicans in an earlier vote.
“The momentum is clearly moving in the direction of reining in the program,” Mr. Schiff said.
He said he planned to introduce the de-financing proposal again and would also pursue a separate bipartisan bill proposed this year affirming that the government must obtain a court warrant for eavesdropping.
Meanwhile, Representative Heather A. Wilson, the New Mexico Republican who leads the intelligence subcommittee with oversight of the N.S.A., proposed legislation Friday that she said would strengthen Congressional oversight of the surveillance program and “modernize” intelligence-gathering techniques. Among other provisions, Ms. Wilson’s bill would allow the government to monitor the communications of suspected terrorist targets without a court order “for a period not to exceed 45 days following a terrorist attack” and require Congressional certification for any extensions.
“We can gather intelligence about terrorist organizations and prevent them from attacking us while also protecting civil liberties,” Ms. Wilson said in a telephone interview Friday, “and you do that by dividing power among the three branches of government.”
She said that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was ill-suited to rule on the constitutionality of the wiretapping program and that Mr. Specter’s agreement with the White House seemed “a little odd to me.”
Civil rights advocates attacked the Specter plan in even stronger terms.
“Senator Specter has sold out his committee by caving to everything the White House requested to continue illegal, warrantless spying on American citizens,” Shayana Kadidal, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which is suing the government over the N.S.A. program, said Friday. “This is not a compromise. It is a sellout.”
Civil rights groups and privacy advocates said they were concerned not only that the secret intelligence court would rule on the constitutionality of the security agency’s program, but also by the fact that Mr. Specter’s proposal would consolidate all the legal challenges to the program now pending in federal courts around the country and allow the intelligence court to hear all those challenges. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing the government in federal court in California over the wiretapping program, called the proposal “a rubber stamp” for spying programs.
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, noted that the only ruling ever issued by the intelligence court’s appellate panel, in 2002, cited “the president’s inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance.”
“I think the government clearly expects that if these challenges are transferred to the FISA court, their chances of winning are greatly increased,” Ms. Martin said.
Mr. Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview Friday that he was surprised by the strong attacks on his proposal, which was developed after three weeks of talks between him and White House officials, including President Bush.
The senator said civil rights advocates should take some satisfaction from the idea that the intelligence court would be allowed to rule on the program’s legitimacy.
“I can understand if they’d like more, but this is an important step,” Mr. Specter said. “I want to know whether the program is unconstitutional. The question is whether you’re going to have some sort of court review or nothing.”

posted by J. Boulevard @ 7:53 AM 0 comments

Bush Would Let Secret Court Sift Wiretaps

July 14, 2006, The New York Times

Bush Would Let Secret Court Sift Wiretap Process
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, July 13 — After months of resistance, the White House agreed Thursday to allow a secret intelligence court to review the legality of the National Security Agency’s program to conduct wiretaps without warrants on Americans suspected of having ties to terrorists.
If approved by Congress, the deal would put the court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in the unusual position of deciding whether the wiretapping program is a legitimate use of the president’s power to fight terrorism. The aim of the plan, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told reporters, would be to “test the constitutionality” of the program.
The plan, brokered over the last three weeks in negotiations between Senator Arlen Specter and senior White House officials, including President Bush himself, would apparently leave the secretive intelligence court free to consider the case in closed proceedings, without the kind of briefs and oral arguments that are usually part of federal court consideration of constitutional issues. The court’s ruling in the matter could also remain secret.
The court would be able to determine whether the program is “reasonably designed” to focus on the communications of actual terrorism suspects and people in the United States who communicate with them. That determination is now left entirely in the hands of the security agency under an internal checklist.
If the court were to rule the program unconstitutional, the attorney general could refine and resubmit it or, conversely, appeal the decision to the FISA appellate court and ultimately perhaps the Supreme Court, officials said.
Mr. Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, predicted that the proposal, with the White House’s backing, would win approval in the Senate and the House. But it met with some immediate skepticism on Thursday from both Republicans and Democrats over whether it went far enough — or too far — in checking the president’s authority.
The proposed legislation represents a middle-ground approach among the myriad proposals in Congress for dealing with the wiretapping controversy, which has allowed the security agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mail of thousands of people in the United States with ties to terrorism suspects.
Some Democratic critics of the program have proposed that it effectively be banned and that all wiretapping should have to be approved by the intelligence court. Some Republican supporters have sought to sanction its continued use without any judicial oversight at all.
By giving the intelligence court a clear role in the program, Mr. Specter said, the proposal seeks to create balance between giving the president the powers he needs to fight terrorism and ensuring some measure of judicial oversight to guard against abuses.
“It’s an acknowledgment to the president that he can fight terrorism and still have the court review his program,” Mr. Specter said. “And I think it allays a lot of concerns.”
The Bush administration had argued since the program’s disclosure last December that no Congressional or judicial oversight was needed because the surveillance fell within the president’s constitutional authority.
Some critics of the program saw the White House’s reversal on that issue as a significant concession. But Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico, who leads the intelligence subcommittee that oversees the National Security Agency, said Thursday in an interview that she found the idea of the court ruling on the legality of the entire program “a little odd.”
“That to me is not what the FISA court is set up to do,” she said. “The judges approve warrants — they’re not there to rule on matters of constitutionality.”
Ms. Wilson plans to announce a legislative proposal of her own on Friday that will seek to toughen Congressional oversight of the program and “modernize” electronic surveillance tools.
In a separate interview, Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said she saw the Specter-White House agreement as an “end run” around the FISA law requiring the approval of individual wiretapping warrants.
“I have great respect for this guy,” she said of Mr. Specter, “but he hasn’t been briefed on this program, and he’s giving away in this legislation a core Fourth Amendment protection by basically saying that the FISA court has permission to bless the entire program, which will abandon as best I can tell the requirement of individualized warrants.”
Ms. Harman, who has introduced legislation of her own to restrict the program, said, “If we want to abandon a core Fourth Amendment protection, we should get on the Specter train, and I don’t plan to get on that train.” Similarly, the American Civil Liberties Union called the agreement a “sham” that was “nothing short of a capitulation by Chairman Specter to the White House.”
Mr. Specter, however, saw the deal as an effective compromise that would bring needed judicial oversight to the program. “I think we’ve got a result which is really good for the country,” he said.
The deal was a result of more than three weeks of intense discussions between his staff and the White House, Mr. Specter said. The discussions followed a public flare-up between him and Vice President Dick Cheney over what the senator saw as the vice president’s meddling in his efforts to subpoena telephone company executives to appear before his committee about their role in the security agency activities.
After an exchange of tense letters on the issue, Mr. Cheney indicated in a phone conversation with Mr. Specter that “the White House was serious on negotiating” about the possibility of having the FISA court review the security agency program, the senator told reporters.
The White House has said for months that while it was open to listening to ideas from Congress on the program, it saw no need for Congress or the courts to intervene. Mr. Cheney said in a television interview in February, for instance, that he was confident “we have all the legal authority we need” and that “legislation would not be helpful.”
But in the recent discussions the White House, which has come under fire even from some Republicans over the program, agreed to support the FISA court’s review. The White House insisted that the language of Mr. Specter’s proposal make it optional, rather than mandatory, for the administration to submit the program to the court because Mr. Bush was concerned about lessening “the institutional authority of his office,” Mr. Specter said.
Nonetheless, Mr. Bush committed to taking the program before the court if the legislation was enacted as now drafted, Mr. Specter and administration officials said.
But there is no assurance that any determination by the FISA court on the program will ever be made public. Mr. Specter said he hoped that such a decision would become public, but he acknowledged that the decision was up to the court. The court, whose 11 members are appointed by the chief justice of the United States, operates in secret, and while the FISA appellate panel did issue one public ruling in 2002, the court itself has never publicly issued a decision.
While some critics brand the FISA court as a “rubber stamp” for government wiretapping, the judge who leads the court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, is known to have voiced strong concerns about aspects of the security agency program while it was still secret. After it was publicly disclosed last December, another member of the court, Judge James Robertson, resigned in apparent protest over the fact that the full court had never been informed of the program.
The proposal does include some concessions sought by the White House. In a bow to the president’s inherent authority as commander in chief, the measure states that it “does not unconstitutionally retract any constitutional authority the president has” to collect information from foreign nations and their agents.
It would also give the Justice Department greater flexibility to impose “emergency” wiretaps with a retroactive court order and to conduct “roving” wiretaps and use other technology in surveillance, and it would allow the FISA court to hear all challenges to the program, including several civil suits pending in the federal courts by the A.C.L.U. and other groups. Some critics of the program said the consolidation of the civil suits before the secret court could effectively derail them.
“This is the president and the Congress coming together to codify the capacity for future presidents to take actions to protect the country,” said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 10:37 AM 0 comments

House Approves Voting Rights Act

July 14, 2006, The New York Times

After Challenges, House Approves Renewal of Voting Act
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ

WASHINGTON, July 13 — The House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to renew expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act after supporters of it defeated challenges mounted by conservative opponents.
The 390-to-33 vote on the landmark civil rights act capped a day of impassioned debate that heightened the politically charged atmosphere surrounding race and ethnicity, already aggravated by the recent fight in Congress over immigration.
In urging adoption of the act, Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, recalled marching on Bloody Sunday, a turning point in the movement for black voting rights in 1965, when the police in Selma, Ala., beat 600 civil rights demonstrators.
“I gave blood,” Mr. Lewis said, his voice rising, as he stood alongside photographs of the clash. “Some of my colleagues gave their very lives.”
“Yes, we’ve made some progress; we have come a distance,” he added. “The sad truth is, discrimination still exists. That’s why we still need the Voting Rights Act, and we must not go back to the dark past.”
For weeks, the outcome of the battle to extend the act had been in doubt. Republican leaders had planned a vote in June. But they abruptly canceled it after conservative lawmakers objected to several provisions of the act, including one that requires the Justice Department to review any proposed changes to voting procedures in states covered by the law, most of them in the South. They said the provisions were unnecessary.
The rebellion was an embarrassment for the Republican leadership. In early May, House and Senate leaders of both parties assembled on the steps of the Capitol to pledge their support for the act and celebrate what they described as its imminent approval. President Bush had also thrown his support behind it.
To mollify those conservatives, House leaders agreed to allow them to offer four amendments on Thursday, including one that would have required the Justice Department to demonstrate why the voting procedures in certain states should still be under federal oversight.
Representative Phil Gingrey, Republican of Georgia, argued that his state, for one, had made great strides in voting rights for minorities. “A lot has changed in 40-plus years,” Mr. Gingrey said. “We should have a law that fits the world in 2006.”
But in the end, Republicans joined with Democrats to defeat the amendments, allowing both parties to cast themselves as champions of minority voters.
“This legislation proves our unbending commitment to voting rights,” said Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
The focus now shifts to the Senate, where the Judiciary Committee is expected to take up the Voting Rights Act next week.
Senate Democrats urged quick passage.
“For two months, we have wasted precious time as the Republican leadership played to its conservative base,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. “There are only 21 legislative days left in this Congress, and the time to act is now.”‘
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in August 1965 after a string of violence in Southern states surrounding efforts to ensure that blacks were afforded full rights to vote.
The law instituted a nationwide prohibition against voting discrimination based on race, eliminated poll taxes and literacy tests and put added safeguards in regions where discrimination had been especially pronounced.
Those included the requirement for the Justice Department to review any proposed changes to voting procedures to determine whether they would be discriminatory. That “preclearance” requirement would be retained for the nine states entirely covered by the law, most of them in the South, and parts of seven others.
While critics of that requirement say it is now outdated, supporters of the act said the history of discrimination in those particular states justified their status. Beyond that, they argued that leaders who believed their states or localities should be exempt from the requirements could apply to “bail out” through a federal review.
On the floor Thursday, many Democrats, as well as Republicans, denounced the amendments offered by conservatives as an effort to derail renewal of the act. Democrats had warned from the start that they would vote against the act if any of the amendments were tacked on to it.
“Their goal has been one thing and one thing only: to kill the Voting Rights Act,” said Representative David Scott, Democrat of Georgia.
Another provision of the act that drew fire from conservatives requires bilingual ballots in political jurisdictions with a high number of citizens who have difficulty with English. Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, offered an amendment that would have eliminated it.
Mr. King and his supporters argued that naturalized citizens should have had to prove English proficiency as part of their citizenship test. In the end the amendment, which would have allowed local voting officials to provide language assistance at the polls, was defeated 238 to 185.
“This is multiculturalism at its worst,” Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, said, referring to bilingual ballots. “When we come from various ethnic groups and races, what unites us? It’s our language, the English language. We’re hurting America by making it easier for people not to learn English.”

posted by J. Boulevard @ 10:33 AM 0 comments

USA Could Be Going Bankrupt

USA could be going bankrupt
By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor, The Telegraph Filed: 14/07/2006

The United States is heading for bankruptcy, according to an extraordinary paper published by one of the key members of the country's central bank.A ballooning budget deficit and a pensions and welfare timebomb could send the economic superpower into insolvency, according to research by Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve.Prof Kotlikoff said that, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt. "To paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary, is the United States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bare, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors," he asked.According to his central analysis, "the US government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds''Prof Kotlikoff, who teaches at Boston University, says: "The proper way to consider a country's solvency is to examine the lifetime fiscal burdens facing current and future generations. If these burdens exceed the resources of those generations, get close to doing so, or simply get so high as to preclude their full collection, the country's policy will be unsustainable and can constitute or lead to national bankruptcy."Does the United States fit this bill? No one knows for sure, but there are strong reasons to believe the United States may be going broke."Experts have calculated that the country's long-term "fiscal gap" between all future government spending and all future receipts will widen immensely as the Baby Boomer generation retires, and as the amount the state will have to spend on healthcare and pensions soars. The total fiscal gap could be an almost incomprehensible $65.9 trillion, according to a study by Professors Gokhale and Smetters.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/07/14/cnusa14.xml

posted by J. Boulevard @ 10:20 AM 0 comments

Instructor's Job Threatened Over 911 Comments

Instructor's Job Threatened Over 9/11 Comments
by Matthew Rothschild

Published on Monday, July 10, 2006 by The Progressive

Kevin Barrett is an instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on occasion. But after he talked about his 9/11 views on radio recently, a state legislator called for his immediate firing, and the governor of Wisconsin called into question his fitness to teach. Barrett, who has been a lecturer in Arabic language and in folklore, is scheduled to be a lecturer in Islamic studies in the fall. During that class, he was planning on discussing differing views of what happened on 9/11. Barrett has strong feelings on the subject. As he said on the radio show, he believes it was "an inside job." So he may not get to teach that course.

The controversy began with an interview on June 28 on WTMJ, a popular rightwing talk radio station in Milwaukee. Barrett, the coordinator of a group called Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth and a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, was asked to come on Jessica McBride's show. "She called me up and asked me to talk about my activism and was curious about my teaching job and asked for a copy of the syllabus for my fall course, which I proceeded to give her," he tells me. "When I got on hershow, I was kind of surprised to hear her introduction. She introduced me as 'Wisconsin's Ward Churchill,' with ideas even worse than Ward Churchill."

During the interview, Barrett said, "9/11 is an inside job," and "VicePresident Cheney is my prime suspect." He defended many of the claims of the 9/11 conspiracy crowd. He talked about what he called the suspicious collapse not only of the twin towers but of a nearby building. He said there was "very little evidence that foreign terrorists flew planes into buildings," and that "11 of the 19" suspected hijackers are "still alive." He referred to the event as the "9/11 coup d'etat."

McBride asked him about his discussions in class on this subject. "I don't try to inflict my own ideas on the students," Barrett said. The very next day, Republican State Representative Steve Nass called for Barrett to be summarily fired."The fact that Mr. Barrett uses his position at UW-Madison to add credibility to his outlandish claims is an unacceptable embarrassment to the people of Wisconsin and the UW System," Nass said, as first reported in TheMilwaukee Journal-Sentinel."

It was kind of shocking," Barrett says. He says his first reaction was: "Oh, no, here we go, it's going to get crazy, but then maybe this is what we need for people to take a look at this issue. We've been banging our heads against the wall to get the media to pay attention to the falsehoods in the official story of 9/11."

Nass, a Republican, was joined by fellow Republican Mark Green, a member of the Wisconsin delegation to the House of Representatives, who is running for governor against Democrat Jim Doyle. "Not a dime of either taxpayer or tuition dollars should be going to Kevin Barrett so he can tell students that September 11 was a creation of the government, and that the most murdering terrorist organization in the world is a myth created by the CIA," said Green.

Doyle, for his part, said the university should take a "hard look" at "whether he has the capacity to teach students," according to The Capital Times of Madison. Barrett told The Capital Times that Doyle "is making himself into another McCarthyite." Barrett met on July 7 with University of Wisconsin Provost Pat Farrell. It was their second meeting on this issue, Barrett tells me, adding that the university has "behaved very professionally." He says Farrell "made it clearthat their bottom line is concern with the educational experience students are getting, not with my free speech activities outside of class." Farrell did not return a phone call for comment.

Barrett says the university is undergoing a ten-day review process. "I expect that I'll be allowed to teach," he says. "It would be a blatant violation of academic freedom if I were not."

Matthew Rothschild has been with The Progressive since 1983. He keeps a running tally of civil liberties infringements in his "McCarthyism Watch." In the January 2002 issue he writes about The New McCarthyism.
C 2006 The Progressive

posted by J. Boulevard @ 6:04 PM 0 comments

Are We Too Dismissive on Global Warming?

July 10, 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/

Are We Too Dismissive on Global Warming?
by Leonard Pitts Jr.

Observations from the heart of a recent deluge:It rained. Lordy, how it rained. Rained for days and days. Rained cats anddogs, mice and frogs and, yes, the kitchen sink.

The Eastern Seaboard got a big wet kiss from Mom Nature, and your humble correspondent, who spends half his life in airports, got an impromptu tour of the results. Went from Miami, where water topped the sidewalks, to Baltimore, where the news was full of flooding and evacuations, to Philadelphia, where they were tracking airport delays on calendars, not clocks. And I'm saying to myself: Tell me again, skeptics, how greenhouse gases are not screwing up the planet.

I am not saying global warming caused the recent unlikely weather. I'm not sure anyone could make a link with that degree of specificity. What I am saying is that day after day of watching water sluice down from the heavens in biblical torrents has a deleterious effect on one's ability to remain sanguine about doomsday pronouncements.

It makes you think. About Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and its dramatic before and after photos of Mount Kilimanjaro, where the famed snows are melting away. About a recent story in Vanity Fair, with computer-generated images of a future where the oceans have risen and great cities are submerged. About last month's report from the National Academy of Sciences that Earth is hotter than it's been for at least 400 years and maybe for 2,000. About a note I once received from a reader taking me to task for not writing about the environment. The most memorable passage said essentially this: "You are an intelligent man, yet you are not terrified. Therefore, you must not know." The writer went on to sketch out a vision of doomsday not unlike that in Vanity Fair. It stayed with me: "You are an intelligent man, yet you are not terrified."

I'd be the first to admit that the doomsday images feel absurdly alarmist. The ice caps melting? New York underwater? Get real. That's not going to happen, right? But then it occurs to me that I am - we are? - missing the lesson of the signature American disasters of the millennium. We often talk aboutHurricane Katrina and 9/11 in terms of failures: failures of intelligence, failures of planning, failures of communication. But these catastrophes were, first and foremost, failures of imagination. Did we know that a major hurricane could destroy New Orleans? Yes: It was evenpart of the tour guides' spiel. Did we know terrorists wanted to bring downthe World Trade Center towers? Yes: They made a credible attempt in 1993. And what did we do with what we knew? Nothing?

Some disasters, I think, are so big and so awful they are beyond our power to conceive. So we dismiss them, retreat to the "knowledge" that a thing can't happen because, well, it just can't. If the last five years have taught us nothing else, they've taught us there's no such thing as can't. Twice now, that which had seemed impossible, the province of novelists and movie makers, has intruded into real life. Anyone want to go for a third?

As I write, it is sunny, 79 degrees, and easy to be sanguine. Except,sanguinity has come to feel a little like New Orleans before Katrina, or NewYork on Sept. 10. For me, at least, the word can't washed away in the deluge of a day when the rain would not stop.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a Miami Herald columnist.
C 2006 The Philadelphia Inquirer

posted by J. Boulevard @ 2:34 PM 0 comments

Don't Dismantle the Voting Rights Act

July 7, 2006, Op-Ed Contributors, The New York Times

Don't Dismantle the Voting Rights Act
By LUCI BAINES JOHNSON and LYNDA JOHNSON ROBB

THE Voting Rights Act, signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965, by our father, President Lyndon Johnson, opened the political process to millions of Americans. The law was born amid the struggle for voting rights in Selma and Montgomery, Ala., which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called "a shining moment in the conscience of man." By eliminating barriers, including poll taxes and literacy tests, that had long prevented members of minority groups from voting, the act became a keystone of civil rights in the United States.
Now, crucial provisions of this legislation are in jeopardy. Last month, Congress seemed set to renew expiring sections intended to prevent voter discrimination based on race or language proficiency. Instead, a group of House lawmakers opposed to those sections succeeded in derailing their consideration.
The Voting Rights Act prohibits discrimination in voting everywhere in the country. But it has a special provision, Section 5, intended for regions with persistent histories of discrimination. These states and localities must have their election plans approved by the Justice Department.
Since the act was last renewed, in 1982, the federal government has objected to hundreds of proposed changes in state and local voting laws on the basis of their discriminatory impact. In recent years, proposed election changes in Georgia, Texas and other states were blocked because they violated the act.
Yet states and localities are not subject to Section 5 forever. In order to gain exemption, they need only meet a set of clear standards proving that they have been in compliance with the law for 10 years and have not tried to discriminate against minority voters. In Virginia, for example, eight counties and three cities have been exempted from Section 5.
Another section of the act, Section 203, which Congress added in 1975, mandates language assistance in certain jurisdictions to promote voting by citizens with limited proficiency in English. There are now 466 such jurisdictions in 31 states.
No one disputes that our nation has come a long way since the Voting Rights Act was first signed into law. But while it would be nice to think we don't need this legislation anymore, we do. We still struggle with the legacy of institutionalized racism. If either of the act's two sections under attack is weakened or allowed to expire, the door will be opened to a new round of discriminatory practices.
The reauthorization stalled in Congress is called the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006. Were he alive today, we believe President Johnson would be honored to have this bill named after such remarkable women. Its passage would be a fitting tribute to their collective efforts to expand the scope of civil rights and citizenship.
In his own era, our father faced powerful opposition to the Voting Rights Act, including from members of his own party. Nonetheless, he pushed forward with the legislation because he knew it was desperately needed. It was the right thing to do then. It still is.
Luci Baines Johnson and Lynda Johnson Robb are the daughters of President Lyndon Johnson.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 7:37 AM 0 comments