Sections on today's Signs Page:
Signs Editorials
Editorial: Wal-Mart's data center remains mystery
By Max McCoy
Globe Investigative Writer
JANE, Mo. - Call it Area 71.
Behind a fence topped with razor wire just off U.S. Highway 71 is a bunker of a building that Wal-Mart considers so secret that it won't even let the county assessor inside without a nondisclosure agreement.
The 125,000-square-foot building, tucked behind a new Wal-Mart Supercenter, is only a stone's throw from the Arkansas line and about 15 miles from corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
There is nothing about the building to give even a hint that Wal-Mart owns it.
Despite the glimpses through the fence of manicured grass and carefully placed trees, the overall impression is that this is a secure site that could withstand just about anything. Earth is packed against the sides. The green roof - meant, perhaps, to blend into the surrounding Ozarks hills - bristles with dish antennas. On one of the heavy steel gates at the guardhouse is a notice that visitors must use the intercom for assistance.
What the building houses is a mystery.
Speculation
Wal-Mart's ability to crunch numbers is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, and its data centers are the corporate counterpart to Area 51 at Groom Lake in the state of Nevada. According to one consumer activist, Katherine Albrecht, even the wildest conspiracy buff might be surprised at just how much Wal-Mart knows about its customers - and how much more it would like to know.
"We were contacted about two years ago by somebody who runs a security company that had been asked in a request for proposals for ways they could link video footage with customers paying for their purchases," Albrecht said. "Wal-Mart would actually be able to view photos and video of customers paying, say, for a pack of gum. At the time, it struck me as unbelievably outlandish because of the amount of data storage required."
But Wal-Mart, according to a 2004 New York Times article, had enough storage capacity to contain twice the amount of all the information available on the Internet. For the technically minded, the exact amount was for 460 terabytes of data. The prefix tera comes from the Greek word for monster, and a terabyte is a trillion bytes, the basic unit of computer storage.
Albrecht, founder of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, said she never could confirm the contractor's story. That is not surprising, since Wal-Mart seldom comments on its data capabilities and operations.
A Globe request for information about the Jane data center was referred at Wal-Mart headquarters to Carrie Thum, a senior information officer and former lobbyist for the retailer.
"This is not something that we discuss publicly," Thum said. "We have no comment. And that's off the record."
Skeleton crew
The Jane data center is an enigmatic icon to the power of data, which has helped Wal-Mart become the largest retailer in the world, and to the corporation's growing secrecy since founder Sam Walton's death in 1992. When Wal-Mart constructed its primary data center at corporate headquarters in 1989, it wasn't much of a secret: It was the largest poured concrete structure in Arkansas at the time, and Walton himself ordered a third story.
"Not only had we completely designed it, we were under construction," said Bill Ferguson, a founder of Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects in Memphis, Tenn. "They were pouring foundations, and Sam walked across the parking lot one Friday at the end of the day and said, 'You know, let's add a third floor and put some people up there.'"
Ferguson said the Bentonville data center is built on bedrock and is designed to withstand most natural and man-made disasters, but is not impregnable. The biggest danger, he said, is the area's frequently violent thunderstorms.
"We studied making it tornado-proof, which is difficult," he said. "We calculated the probability of a category 5 tornado hitting it, which was less likely than an airplane crashing into it head-on. At the time, they decided not to."
Since then, Ferguson said, changes have been made to increase the integrity of the structure. The data center was designed with backup generators, fuel on site, and room and board for a skeleton crew in the event an emergency required an extended stay.
Ferguson said his firm learned to design data centers by working with FedEx, which also is based in Memphis, and that the 1989 Wal-Mart data center was built so that it could communicate via any means available - including copper wire, fiber optics and satellites.
The firm no longer works with Wal-Mart, and Ferguson said he had no knowledge of the design or purpose of the data center in Jane. But he suggested that Jim Liles, a Memphis engineer, might know.
Liles said he was a consultant on the Jane project, and that Crossland Construction was the contractor, but he was reluctant to say much else. "As far as what its purpose is, all that has to come from Wal-Mart," Liles said.
Crossland Construction, based in Columbus, Kan., said Tim Oelke of the company's Rogers, Ark., office had been in charge. Oelke did not return a phone call seeking comment.
'Never saw a plan'
The data center was completed in 2004 and was part of a project that included the Supercenter, which opened early last year, and a warehouse. The resulting economic impact on McDonald County, known for its rolling hills and lazy rivers, is difficult to underestimate, said Rusty Enlow.
"Just a few years ago, one new store would have been a big deal," Enlow said. "And I'm not talking about a Supercenter. Just a gas station would have generated excitement."
Now, Enlow said, the county's tax base has doubled, and land is going for about $2,100 an acre, about twice what it was before the project was announced in 2001.
Enlow is chairman of the county planning commission, a body created by popular vote in 1964 but which had not met until this month. Enlow said he doesn't know why the commission never met, but he believes it was because whatever problem prompted its creation was solved before the board was appointed. He also said he's not sure the planning commission has any real authority, or would want any (there is no zoning in the county), but that he and the other 18 members are eager to bring even more business into the county.
"It seems with the opening of that store there has just been a lot of activity," he said. "McDonald County has always been a poor county, but we are in an excellent position now. We're a friendly place, and we're open to things."
Wal-Mart, Enlow said, had created a business synergy that was helping the county of 22,000 shed its hillbilly stereotype.
Enlow was director of the McDonald County Economic Development Council when Wal-Mart quietly began scouting for land. Only after the land had been bought south of the then-unincorporated community of Jane was it announced that the project was Wal-Mart's, and even then, plans for the data center were closely held.
"I never even saw a plan on it," Enlow said.
But Enlow said he watched during the construction of the data center, and that it appeared to be a single-story building that was built "like a bunker," with mounds of earth piled against the sides. He later was told that it would employ 15 to 20 people, and that the building was for data storage.
To facilitate the project, the Missouri Department of Transportation agreed to widen Highway 71 to four lanes from Jane to the Arkansas line; a grant was used to expand the public water district; and the Army Corps of Engineers approved a request to fill in a small portion of wetland along Bear Hollow Road.
Meanwhile, the village of Jane incorporated.
In April 2005, Wal-Mart used the 160,000-square-foot Supercenter to demonstrate its micro-merchandising capabilities as part of a media conference. Employees demonstrated hand-held Telxon (pronounced Tel-zon) computers, which resemble hand scanners but hold a year's worth of a particular store's sales history on every item. The devices help store managers decide what to stock.
Bananas are Wal-Mart's best-selling produce product nationwide, but at Jane, the top seller was lettuce, Supermarket News reported after the event.
'Secretive'
Bill Wilson, McDonald County presiding commissioner, said he has never been inside the green-roofed data center, and that to his knowledge, only one county official has: Assessor Laura Pope.
"I had to sign a document saying that I wouldn't talk about what's in there," Pope said. "I've never been in a situation to tour anything like that before. I don't want to be secretive about it. Basically, it houses computer equipment."
Pope said she had never been asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement before in her job as assessor, and that she didn't keep a copy. She said she didn't appraise the building and equipment, but rather came to an agreement with Wal-Mart on what it was worth.
They agreed that the data center would be worth $10.7 million at fair market value, she said. The equipment inside the center was judged to be worth nearly three times as much: $31.7 million.
The taxes that Wal-Mart paid last year on the data center totaled just more than $500,000: $128,091 for the real estate and $373,091 for the equipment.
Pope said she did not place a value on the data stored at the building. At an estimated worth of $42.4 million, is the Wal-Mart data center at Jane important enough to the infrastructure of the state - or the country - to be on Missouri's list of critical assets?
Paul Fennewald, Missouri Homeland Security coordinator, said the list is confidential, and that he could neither confirm nor deny that the Jane building is on it. He did say that the list includes 4,000 to 4,500 sites across the state.
'Retail surveillance'
Albrecht, the consumer activist, said that when the contractor came to her with the story about Wal-Mart wanting to biometrically identify customers through video, one of the reasons given was to help law enforcement.
"You could search for all sales of a particular kind of rope and get a photo of who bought it," she said. "On the other end, you could research all of the purchases of a particular individual, even if they paid in cash."
Albrecht is the co-author of "Spychips," about the use of RFID, or radio frequency identification devices, by the government and corporations to track individuals. She lives in Nashua, N.H., and is getting ready to receive a doctorate of education in consumer education.
"To the best of our knowledge, the only consumer-level item that is (RFID) tagged at Wal-Mart are Hewlett-Packard products and some Sanyo television sets," she said. "Now, the privacy implications of that are fairly trivial, because you're not going to be walking down the street carrying your printer box in your back pocket."
But in 2003, she said, Wal-Mart did two experiments using RFID on smaller items: razor blades and lipstick.
At Brockton, Mass., Albrecht said, the company used a surveillance camera on a shelf that was linked to chips in packages of razor blades. When someone picked up a package, she said, the shelf camera would be activated. Another camera would take a mug shot of the customer at the checkout stand.
At Broken Arrow, Okla., she said, the company linked devices in packages of lipstick that triggered a camera that allowed the lipstick manufacturer to watch consumers on live video.
The experiments apparently were aimed at decreasing theft or for use in merchandise research, she said. "Since 1999, I've been working on a phenomenon called retail surveillance, which is a whole panoply of technologies that are being secretly deployed," she said. "I think most people, when they learn about these technologies, are quite disturbed. There's a sense that when you enter a retail space, you should retain some degree of privacy."
But, Albrecht said, there's a push among retailers to collect as much information about their customers as possible - and to keep the lower-profit individuals, known as "barnacles" and "bottom-feeders," away.
"There's a lot of hand-wringing about how we can find out even more about our customers," she said. "And to the extent that Wal-Mart may be creating the ability to monitor consumers by RFID and identify them by video, I'm extremely concerned. ... If that's the case, they would need that kind of data storage."
Wal-Mart's stand on RFID
"Electronic product codes (EPCs) can best be described as the next generation of bar codes. Unlike current bar codes, which only share that a carton contains product XYZ, EPCs can identify one box of product XYZ from another box of product XYZ.
"This is possible because EPCs are powered by radio frequency identification or RFID. EPCs do not track customers. ... EPCs assist retailers in more closely monitoring where products are as they move from manufacturers to warehouses to a store's backroom.
"This helps us do a better job of having the right products on the shelves when you come to buy them."
Source: www.walmart.com
Copyright © 1999-2006 cnhi, inc.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Colombian and Peruvian Elections Prove Stalin Was Right
by Stephen Lendman
June 7, 2006
Joe Stalin wasn't just an ordinary dictator, he was a very savvy one. He had to have been to have held on to power for over 30 years, succeed in outfoxing his rivals, and even be able to break the back of the vaunted Nazi Wehrmacht that turned the tide of the war in Europe and led to Hitler's demise. His political control at home and over his allied Warsaw Pact countries was best explained by the philosophy he reportedly once expressed: "It's not the people who vote that count; it's the people who count the votes."
That Stalinist wisdom and modus operandi surely applies to the elections just concluded in Colombia and Peru. Both nations have a majority of poor and indigenous people who want no part of a US imposed neoliberal "free market" way of doing things, and in a free and open election would never elect any candidate who did. So how come that's exactly what happened? On May 28, we're supposed to believe the Colombian people rejected a more moderate or democratic alternative and instead chose to reelect right wing hard-liner and close Bush ally Alvaro Uribe Velez who had to arrange for the constitution to be changed to allow him to run in the first place. And on June 4, lightning seemed to strike twice in one week as the people of Peru for some unexplained reason elected former disgraced president and economy-wrecker while he held office Alan Garcia who also happens to support the Washington Consensus and will dutifully surrender his nation's sovereignty to the Bush administration.
I hope readers of this web site don't buy any of this and are savvy enough to understand how smart Joe Stalin was. I'd also like to add my own strong view to what the former Soviet dictator may have said. It's not just who counts the votes that determines an election outcome, it's also who decides who's allowed to vote and who isn't. For many weeks before the Colombian and Peruvian elections, CIA, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), US Agency for International Development (USAID) and International Republican Institute (IRI) operatives were all over both countries setting in place the process needed to assure both their candidates won regardless of whether the majority of people wanted them. They clearly did not, and had they been allowed to vote and do it fairly would have defeated both Washington allied candidates who will do everything they can to support the interests of the US, its giant transnational corporations and their own elite and virtually nothing whatever to serve the needs of their own people.
So what may lie ahead in both countries as two oppressive regimes pursue their Washington-friendly policies and continue to harm the great majority in their own countries. Yesterday on the VHeadline.com web site, Alfredo Bremont wrote that Hugo Chavez "has every reason to be happy that Alan Garcia won in Peru." He went on to explain that "there is no nation on this planet that will succeed as long (as) it follows Washington D.C.'s dictum" as Colombia and Peru have done. Alfredo says they got what they have "chosen." My own view is those in charge of the electoral process, with lots of help from US experts, arranged for and got the outcome they wanted. This is nothing new as the US has a long history of staging "demonstration elections" (as Edward S. Herman brilliantly documented in his book by that title), particularly in Latin America.
But Alfredo and I see a similar future and not just in Colombia and Peru. The spirit and strength of Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution will one day spread throughout the region and eventually displace those alternatives that only serve wealth and power and do it at the expense of the people. The June 6 headline on a page 4 Wall Street Journal story that "In Peru Vote, Biggest Loser is Chavez" will one day prove embarrassingly wrong. But when today's WSJ gloat fades, you won't find that reported on its pages.
No system as corrupted as the US model that needs repression, imperial expansion and militarism to make it work can possibly survive. It's already in decline and will eventually crumble under its own weight. That's the fate of all houses made only of cards and not substance. In the case of Colombia and Peru, justice has only been delayed, not denied. A glorious, shinning day is ahead for all peoples in the Americas and beyond, and when it comes the spirit and legacy of Hugo Chavez and his glorious Bolivarian Revolution will have been vindicated.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Comment on this Editorial
The things I do for my country
RI to Rumsfeld: Let Nations Decide How to Fight Terrorism
The Associated Press
Wednesday 07 June 2006
Jakarta - Indonesia warned US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday that Washington risked triggering a backlash if it tried to force its approach to fighting terrorism on the rest of the world.
Rumsfeld, wrapping up a three nation tour of the region, held talks with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono and other senior government officials.
Topics discussed included improved ties between the two nations' militaries, security in the Malacca Strait and ways to boost cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
Juwono said he told Rumsfeld that, "as the largest Muslim country, we are very aware of the perception ... that the United states is overbearing," and advised against trying to force its tough anti-terror approach on other nations.
"It's best that you leave the main responsibility of anti-terrorist measures to the local government in question and not to be overly insistent about immediate results arriving from your perception of terrorists," he said at a joint news conference.
-------
Comment on this Article
BACK TO THE BUNKER: Bush Reich Going Into Hiding on June 19, Practice Run for WHAT?
By William M. Arkin
Washington Post
June 4, 2006; Page B01
On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The exercise is the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration since 9/11, a focus of enormous and often absurd time, money and effort that has come to echo the worst follies of the Cold War. The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology -- alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA, wireless priority service, video teleconferencing, remote backups -- to ensure that "essential" government functions continue undisrupted should a terrorist's nuclear bomb go off in downtown Washington.
But for all the BlackBerry culture, the outcome is still old-fashioned black and white: We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on alternate facilities, data warehouses and communications, yet no one can really foretell what would happen to the leadership and functioning of the federal government in a catastrophe.
After 9/11, The Washington Post reported that President Bush had set up a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work outside Washington on a rotating basis to ensure the continuity of national security. Since then, a program once focused on presidential succession and civilian control of U.S. nuclear weapons has been expanded to encompass the entire government. From the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration to the National Archives, every department and agency is now required to plan for continuity outside Washington.
Yet according to scores of documents I've obtained and interviews with half a dozen sources, there's no greater confidence today that essential services would be maintained in a disaster. And no one really knows how an evacuation would even be physically possible.
Moreover, since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the definition of what constitutes an "essential" government function has been expanded so ridiculously beyond core national security functions -- do we really need patent and trademark processing in the middle of a nuclear holocaust? -- that the term has become meaningless. The intent of the government effort may be laudable, even necessary, but a hyper-centralized approach based on the Cold War model of evacuations and bunkering makes it practically worthless.
That the continuity program is so poorly conceived, and poorly run, should come as no surprise. That's because the same Federal Emergency Management Agency that failed New Orleans after Katrina, an agency that a Senate investigating committee has pronounced "in shambles and beyond repair," is in charge of this enormous effort to plan for the U.S. government's survival.
Continuity programs began in the early 1950s, when the threat of nuclear war moved the administration of President Harry S. Truman to begin planning for emergency government functions and civil defense. Evacuation bunkers were built, and an incredibly complex and secretive shadow government program was created.
At its height, the grand era of continuity boasted the fully operational Mount Weather, a civilian bunker built along the crest of Virginia's Blue Ridge, to which most agency heads would evacuate; the Greenbrier hotel complex and bunker in West Virginia, where Congress would shelter; and Raven Rock, or Site R, a national security bunker bored into granite along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border near Camp David, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff would command a protracted nuclear war. Special communications networks were built, and evacuation and succession procedures were practiced continually.
When the Soviet Union crumbled, the program became a Cold War curiosity: Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered Raven Rock into caretaker status in 1991. The Greenbrier bunker was shuttered and a 30-year-old special access program was declassified three years later.
Then came the terrorist attacks of the mid-1990s and the looming Y2K rollover, and suddenly continuity wasn't only for nuclear war anymore. On Oct. 21, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 67, "Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations." No longer would only the very few elite leaders responsible for national security be covered. Instead, every single government department and agency was directed to see to it that they could resume critical functions within 12 hours of a warning, and keep their operations running at emergency facilities for up to 30 days. FEMA was put in charge of this broad new program.
On 9/11, the program was put to the test -- and failed. Not on the national security side: Vice President Cheney and others in the national security leadership were smoothly whisked away from the capital following procedures overseen by the Pentagon and the White House Military Office. But like the mass of Washingtonians, officials from other agencies found themselves virtually on their own, unsure of where to go or what to do, or whom to contact for the answers.
In the aftermath, the federal government was told to reinvigorate its continuity efforts. Bush approved lines of succession for civil agencies. Cabinet departments and agencies were assigned specific emergency responsibilities. FEMA issued new preparedness guidelines and oversaw training. A National Capital Region continuity working group established in 1999, comprising six White House groups, 15 departments and 61 agencies, met to coordinate.
But all the frenetic activity did not produce a government prepared for the worst. A year after 9/11, and almost three years after the deadline set in Clinton's 1998 directive, the Government Accounting Office evaluated 38 agencies and found that not one had addressed all the issues it had been ordered to. A 2004 GAO audit of 34 government continuity-of-operations plans found total confusion on the question of essential functions. One unnamed organization listed 399 such functions. A department included providing "speeches and articles for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary" among its essential duties, while neglecting many of its central programs.
The confusion and absurdity have continued, according to documents I've collected over the past few years. In June 2004, FEMA told federal agencies that essential services in a catastrophe would include not only such obvious ones as electric power generation and disaster relief but also patent and trademark processing, student aid and passport processing. A month earlier, FEMA had told states and local communities that library services should be counted as essential along with fire protection and law enforcement.
None of this can be heartening to Americans who want to believe that in a crisis, their government can distinguish between what is truly essential and what isn't -- and provide it.
Just two years ago, an exercise called Forward Challenge '04 pointed up the danger of making everyone and everything essential: Barely an hour after agencies were due to arrive at their relocation sites, the Office of Management and Budget asked the reconstituted government to identify emergency funding requirements.
As one after-action report for the exercise later put it in a classic case of understatement: "It was not clear . . . whether this would be a realistic request at that stage of an emergency."
This year's exercise, Forward Challenge '06, will be the third major interagency continuity exercise since 9/11. Larger than Forward Challenge '04 and the Pinnacle exercise held last year, it requires 31 departments and agencies (including FEMA) to relocate. Fifty to 60 are expected to take part.
According to government sources, the exercise will test the newly created continuity of government alert conditions -- called COGCONs -- that emulate the DEFCONs of the national security community. Forward Challenge will begin with a series of alerts via BlackBerry and pager to key officials. It will test COGCON 1, the highest level of preparedness, in which each department and agency is required to have at least one person in its chain of command and sufficient staffing at alternate operating facilities to perform essential functions.
Though key White House officials and military leadership would be relocated via the Pentagon's Joint Emergency Evacuation Program (JEEP), the civilians are on their own to make it to their designated evacuation points.
But fear not: Each organization's COOP, or continuity of operations plan, details the best routes to the emergency locations. The plans even spell out what evacuees should take with them (recommended items: a combination lock, a flashlight, two towels and a small box of washing powder).
Can such an exercise, announced well in advance, hope to re-create any of the tensions and fears of a real crisis? How do you simulate the experience of driving through blazing, radiated, panic-stricken streets to emergency bunker sites miles away?
As the Energy Department stated in its review of Forward Challenge '04, "a method needs to be devised to realistically test the ability of . . . federal offices to relocate to their COOP sites using a scenario that simulates . . . the monumental challenges that would be involved in evacuating the city."
With its new plans and procedures, Washington may think it has thought of everything to save itself. Forward Challenge will no doubt be deemed a success, and officials will pronounce the continuity-of-government project sound. There will be lessons to be learned that will justify more millions of dollars and more work in the infinite effort to guarantee order out of chaos.
But the main defect -- a bunker mentality that considers too many people and too many jobs "essential" -- will remain unchallenged.
warkin@igc.org
William M. Arkin writes the Early Warning blog for washingtonpost.com and is the author of "Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World" (Steerforth Press).
Comment: Well, maybe they know something they aren't telling?
Comment on this Article
Anti-Gay Amendment Reveals President Bush's Is Naked
Steve Sabludowsky
6/7/2006
What does it tell you when the President Bush pulls a surprise with his Marriage Protection Amendment barring same-sex marriages and he can't muster the votes in the U.S. Senate. Looks like its time to clean his government once again for such a lame brain trick and perhaps he should send Karl Rove to Siberia to check on the Arctic melting.
The invincible armor once worn by President Bush is gone. He is politically naked and it shows.
Should the bill die a natural death, it would not mean that Americans do not agree with President Bush about the value of traditional marriages and their discomfort with gay marriages. The lack of ground swell support on the issue is that Americans feel duped by President Bush on Iraq, that they see him as gay bashing for political purposes, they don't like amending the Constitution and finally, they have real business upon which they want the President, Congress and America to focus.
Real business such as energy prices, Iran, terror, global warming and preparing for hurricane season. Many of the issues relate to hurricane preparedness require federal remedies and Americans feel that Bush is really super "bush league" in dealing with the tragedies.
Case in point. New Orleans is still waiting for a real signal and push from the President about additional funding for housing and infrastructure. The longer they wait, the more difficult it will be to attract former residents. This summer is a window of opportunity for many to decide whether to repopulate the City or keep their families in communities and schools elsewhere.
These former residents and many of them are middle class citizens who would very easily vote Republicans during the upcoming mid-term election want solutions to the most basic problems of their lives-shelter and jobs. Senator Frist has pointed out that Republicans have a good record of accomplishments to run on.
The Katrina and Iraq debacles are not in that number. Americans might be stupid sometimes, but in the case of playing around with very "hot button" social issues right in time of elections might be great morals but it smacks of political chicanery and even Americans who have been duped by this Administration are not going to fall for the emotional flagellation right now.
Nope, they want real answers to real questions. They want food, shelter, protection and certainty. Now, if he found bin Laden-dead or alive, now we might be talking, but until then, just fix our problems as mortals , don't play God. Your right flank might love you now Mr. President, but, the rest of us see you have no clothing.
Comment on this Article
U.S. puts patrols at Canadian border on 'high alert'
Last Updated Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:55:10 EDT
CBC News
The United States is beefing up traffic checks along the Canada-U.S. border following the arrests of 17 Canadians accused of plotting to bomb targets in Ontario.
U.S. Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar said Monday that patrol stations, particularly those along the border with Ontario, are on high alert.
Agents deployed along the 6,400-kilometre border will work overtime checking traffic coming into the U.S. from Canada, he said.
Other agents will be moved to crossings around southern Ontario, he said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Kristi Clemens said traffic entering the U.S. through 89 ports of entry will undergo tougher procedures.
The agency has added "enforcement capabilities," she said, but didn't provide any further details.
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day spoke with U.S. Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff on Saturday, said a representative for Day, who didn't reveal what the two spoke about.
Day's office wouldn't comment on the increased security at the border.
About 1,000 border patrol agents work along the U.S.-Canada border, which is often called the world's longest undefended border.
Comment: Gosh, now the US will need to "secure" its southern and northern border...
Comment on this Article
Senators Seek Answers in Probe of Reporter
The Associated Press
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Washington - In a new jab at the Bush administration over its use of executive power, the Senate Judiciary Committee is demanding that the Justice Department explain the agency's investigations of journalists who publish classified information.
Specifically, Republicans and Democrats want to know more about the FBI's effort to obtain a half-century's worth of papers kept by columnist Jack Anderson - a member of President Nixon's "enemies list" - who died in December at 83.
Matthew Friedrich, the Justice Department's criminal division chief of staff, is facing a skeptical panel at a hearing Tuesday.
Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has chafed for months over President Bush's secretive domestic wiretapping and phonetapping programs, and maintained that national security may not justify such uses of executive power. He personally told President Bush earlier this year that "the president doesn't have a blank check."
Now, with the administration considering prosecuting journalists who publish classified information and refuse to reveal their sources, Specter wants the full story of the Anderson search.
Scheduled to testify Tuesday were Friedrich, Anderson's son Kevin and Mark Feldstein, a former investigative reporter who is writing a book about Anderson.
Feldstein says two FBI agents showed up at his home March 3 seeking the roughly 200 boxes of Anderson's papers that the family had granted him access for the book. The agents, Feldstein has said, cited national security concerns.
Members of the Judiciary Committee don't buy the explanation.
"I fail to see what possible national security interest is served by the FBI rummaging through Mr. Anderson's files many years after he published articles about these matters," ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in prepared remarks.
The FBI has said that if the papers contain classified information, they belong to the government.
The FBI had long sought Anderson's papers after he published stories exposing the Keating Five, a CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro and details of the Iran-Contra affair.
Anderson's son said the FBI contacted his mother shortly after his father's funeral, expressing interest in documents that would aid the government's case against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who have been charged with disclosing classified information.
In addition, the agents told the family they planned to remove from the columnist's archive - which had yet to be catalogued - any document they came across that was stamped "secret" or "confidential," or was otherwise classified.
The family refused.
The younger Anderson's account is similar to that of Feldstein, a George Washington University journalism professor and Anderson biographer, who said he was visited by two agents at his Washington-area home in March.
"They flashed their badges and said they needed access to the papers," said Feldstein. Anderson donated his papers to the university, but the family had not yet formally signed them over.
FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko, a spokesman in Washington, said in an interview that the bureau wants to search the Anderson archive and remove classified materials before they are made available to the public. "It has been determined that, among the papers, there are a number of U.S. government documents containing classified information," Kolko said, declining to say how the FBI knows.
The documents contain information about sources and methods used by U.S. intelligence agencies, he said.
Comment on this Article
Nearly 600 Iraqi prisoners released
By PATRICK QUINN
Associated Press
7 June 06
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki released nearly 600 detainees Wednesday, making good on a pledge intended to ease feuding between Sunni Arabs and Shiites.
The detainees were the first of 2,000 prisoners whom al-Maliki promised would be freed from Iraq's most notorious prisons in an apparent effort to ease anger among minority Sunnis over allegations of arbitrary detentions and mistreatment of prisoners.
Sectarian tensions surged with Monday's abductions of 50 people in downtown Baghdad by gunmen wearing police uniforms and the shooting deaths of 21 Shiites north of the capital, including students pulled from their minivans.
Police said Wednesday that 15 of the kidnapped people had been released, some with signs of torture, but provided no details on their identities.
Al-Maliki, a Shiite who took office two weeks ago, has made security and reconciliation among Sunnis and Shiites a priority of his government. He has stressed, however that the detainee release plan excludes loyalists of ousted leader Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated Baath Party, as well as "terrorists whose hands are stained with the blood of the Iraqi people."
The government said 2,000 detainees whose cases have been reviewed will be released in the coming days in batches of about 500. The first 594 were released Wednesday from U.S.- and Iraqi-run prisons around Iraq, including
Abu Ghraib.
Released inmates dropped off at a bus station in Baghdad kissed the ground and sat down and cheered. One man used crutches for support.
"I was arrested from my home on Dec. 19, 2004, so I was accused of kidnapping people working for Iraqna mobile company," said one released prisoner, Mohammed Jassim.
Al-Maliki said Tuesday 2,500 would be released, but changed that number to 2,000 Wednesday.
Iraqi officials have said there is an agreement to release up to 14,000 detainees once their cases have been reviewed. A U.N. report last month said there were 28,700 detainees in Iraq.
Omar al-Jubori, a member of the Iraq Islamic Party, the largest Sunni Arab group in the governing coalition, said the agreement came after negotiations with U.S. Embassy and military officials, as well as street protests.
The releases will "give happiness and hope to every detainee and every oppressed person in this country," al-Jubori said.
Italy's foreign minister, meanwhile, said Italy will not withdraw all its troops from Iraq until the end of the year, sticking to a timeline set by former Premier Silvio Berlusconi even after the election of a new center-left government.
But Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema, who was in Baghdad to discuss the plans with Iraqi leaders, said Italy would begin reducing the number of Italian troops in Iraq this month.
The announcement came two days after an attack on an Italian military convoy in southern Iraq killed a soldier and wounded four others. Premier Romano Prodi said Tuesday that the attack would not hasten Italy's withdrawal from the country.
D'Alema's announcement was the first indication by the new government of the timing of the complete pullout of Italy's 2,700 troops from Iraq - the fourth-largest foreign contingent after the United States, Britain and
South Korea.
Italy follows Spain, Bulgaria and other U.S. allies that have either withdrawn or reduced their troops in Iraq. Of the 150,000 foreign troops in Iraq, 130,000 are U.S. soldiers.
Al-Maliki has announced he wants to take over security from U.S.-led forces within 18 months, starting with four southern provinces by the end of the year. The plan would put American and international forces in a supervisory role, part of an exit strategy that will eventually allow the troops to go home.
But it remains doubtful whether al-Maliki's national unity government will be able to end Iraq's chaos.
On Wednesday, four police officers were killed in a shootout with gunmen in cars in Baghdad's upscale al-Mansour district. Five minutes later, a roadside bomb detonated in the same place, injuring a police officer.
In northern Kirkuk, gunmen shot and killed a Sunni Arab cleric and member of the local Association of Muslim Clerics.
Just before dawn, three rockets landed on a house, killing a man and wounding his two brothers in Baghdad. The men had been sleeping on their roof in an effort to say cool in temperatures hovering around 116 degrees. It was unclear who the target was.
A roadside bomb killed two police officers and wounded two others near a passport office in eastern Baghdad, police 1st. Lt. Ahmed Muhammad Ali said.
Al-Maliki has blamed a desire by insurgents to cripple the political process for the spike in violence since he took office just over two weeks ago.
The Iraqi Islamic Party blamed the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry for Monday's kidnappings. The ministry, which oversees police, denied its forces were behind the abduction.
Suspicion has fallen on militias, which are believed to have infiltrated police forces and have killed hundreds in sectarian violence, personal vendettas and kidnappings for ransom.
Comment on this Article
Scientist Wins Suit Against Gov For Invasion of Privacy: Awarded over One Million Media Ordered to Pay Up or Go to Jail for Supporting Gov Line and Failing to Investigate
By ADAM LIPTAK
NY Times
June 3, 2006
Wen Ho Lee, an atomic scientist once suspected of espionage, yesterday settled an invasion of privacy lawsuit against the government for $1,645,000.
Five news organizations are paying almost half that sum to avoid contempt sanctions against their reporters.
In the suit, Dr. Lee said the government had violated privacy laws by telling reporters about his employment history, finances, travels and polygraph tests. The settlement followed seven months of unusual negotiations among Dr. Lee, the government and lawyers for the news organizations.
The five reporters were not defendants, but had been held in contempt of court for refusing to testify and ordered to pay fines of $500 a day for refusing to disclose the identities of their confidential sources.
The news organizations - ABC News, part of the Walt Disney Company; The Associated Press; The Los Angeles Times, part of the Tribune Company; The New York Times; and The Washington Post - agreed to contribute $750,000 to the settlement.
Specialists in media law said such a payment by news organizations to avoid a contempt sanction was almost certainly unprecedented. Some called it troubling.
In a joint statement, the five organizations said they made the payment reluctantly.
"We did so," they explained, "to protect our confidential sources, to protect our journalists from further sanction and possible imprisonment and to protect our news organizations from potential exposure."
A senior vice president of ABC, Henry S. Hoberman, said the decision to settle was made after a long, hard legal fight.
"The journalists found themselves between a rock and a hard place after years of seeking relief from the courts and finding none," Mr. Hoberman said. "Given the absence of a federal shield law and the consistently adverse rulings from the federal courts in this case, the only way the journalists could keep their bond with their sources and avoid further sanctions, which might include jail time, was to contribute to a settlement between the government and Wen Ho Lee that would end the case."
Federal courts have been increasingly hostile in recent years to assertions by journalists that they are legally entitled to protect their confidential sources. Last year, Judith Miller, who was a reporter for The New York Times, spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. operative.
Dr. Lee, who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, brought his case against the government in 1999, the year federal investigators accused him of giving nuclear secrets to China.
Dr. Lee spent nine months in solitary confinement awaiting trial. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to one felony count of illegally gathering and retaining national security data, and he received an apology from the judge in the case.
A lawyer for Dr. Lee, Brian A. Sun, said the settlement furthered two goals.
"We wanted to send a message to the government that leaking information protected by law is not justified, even if they think it's politically expedient to do so," Mr. Sun said. "And the fact that the journalists contributed to the settlement recognizes the role they played in the series of unfortunate events that surrounded Dr. Lee's case."
The settlement included an unusual condition, Mr. Sun said.
"The government didn't want any of the money going into his pocket," Mr. Sun said of Dr. Lee.
In the end, Dr. Lee agreed to apply the government's payment to lawyers' fees, litigation costs and taxes. The money from the news organizations was unrestricted.
The fines against the reporters - Robert Drogin of The Los Angeles Times, H. Josef Hebert of The A.P., Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, James Risen of The New York Times and Pierre Thomas, formerly of CNN and now of ABC News - were suspended while they appealed.
The judge in the case, Rosemary M. Collyer of Federal District Court in Washington, vacated the contempt sanctions as part of the settlement. The settlement also moots a pending appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
Though Mr. Thomas covered Dr. Lee for CNN, part of Time Warner, it did not participate in the settlement.
"CNN paid over $1 million toward Pierre's defense in this matter," a spokeswoman, Laurie Goldberg, said. "We parted ways because we had a philosophical disagreement over whether it was appropriate to pay money to Wen Ho Lee or anyone else to get out from under a subpoena."
The five other organizations made roughly similar contributions to the settlement, lawyers in the case said.
The government has settled similar privacy suits in the past. In 2003, it paid Linda R. Tripp, a central figure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, $595,000 to settle a suit that accused it of leaking employment information about her.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she viewed the settlement in Dr. Lee's case with mixed emotions.
"It's a huge disappointment, and it's certainly not an ideal resolution," Ms. Dalglish said. "But it's probably as good as we could have expected under the circumstances."
The New York Times has long maintained that it will not settle libel suits in the United States for money. Its lawyers said the payment to Dr. Lee did not violate the principles behind that policy.
"It's apples and oranges," George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, said. "That principle remains. In libel suits, people aren't sent to jail."
The Times covered the charges against Dr. Lee aggressively. But in September 2000, it published a lengthy note "from the editors" saying that despite "careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking," there were "some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt."
The note said The Times should have pushed harder and sooner "to uncover weaknesses in the F.B.I. case against Dr. Lee" and to assess the scientific, technical and investigative assumptions behind the case.
In their statement yesterday, the news organizations said the settlement was not connected to their coverage of the case against Dr. Lee.
"The journalism in this case - which was not challenged in Lee's lawsuit - reported on a matter of great public interest," the statement said. "And the public could not have been informed about the issues without the information we were able to obtain only from confidential sources."
Jane E. Kirtley, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, said she found the news organizations' decision to participate in the settlement "profoundly disturbing."
"These are very strange times in which we are living," Professor Kirtley said, "and it does appear that sometimes decisions have to be made that would have been unthinkable five years ago. But to make a payment in settlement in this context strikes me as an admission that the media are acting in concert with the government."
Ms. Dalglish of the Reporters Committee disagreed.
"I view it," she said, "purely as, 'What can we do to get the least damaging result?' "
Mr. Freeman, the lawyer for The Times, also rejected Professor Kirtley's characterization.
"We acted in the best interests of our reporters and our news organizations to protect our sources and protect our journalists," he said. "We were not acting in concert with anyone. The three parties managed to resolve the matter."
News media lawyers said they hoped that the settlement would help prompt a change in federal law. The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment offers reporters no protection, at least in the context of grand jury subpoenas.
Though most states have so-called shield laws that protect journalists' confidential sources, those laws are usually irrelevant in cases brought in federal court.
The settlement in Dr. Lee's case, Professor Kirtley said, "certainly underscores the need for meaningful journalists' shield laws, now."
Comment on this Article
Baghdad's mortuary inundated with 6,000 corpses this year
By Jerome Taylor
07 June 2006
The bodies of 6,000 people, many of whom died violently, have been brought to Baghdad's main mortuary this year, officials from Iraq's health ministry said.
In May alone one of the bloodiest months in the city so far this year 1,400 bodies were received by the mortuary.
According to health ministry officials who spoke anonymously to the BBC, the vast majority of victims brought to the morgue were the victims of sectarian killings, which have increased dramatically since the bombing of a Shia shrine earlier in the year.
Yesterday's statistics came just hours after police made the gruesome discovery of nine severed heads which had been stuffed into a cardboard box in a volatile area north of Baghdad.
Police in Baquba said they found the heads in the al-Hadid district, just three days after suspected sectarian attackers beheaded seven cousins from one family and a Sunni Arab imam in the same region.
Baquba, the capital of Diyala province, is a religiously mixed province that has seen large numbers of inhabitants flee the area because of killings and assassinations based solely on ethnicity.
Meanwhile, Iraq's new Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, announced yesterday that he would release 2,500 prisoners, most of them Sunni Arabs, in a move aimed at winning over more Sunnis and undermining support for the insurgency. "Those who will be released will be people who are not Saddam Hussein loyalists or terrorists or anyone who has Iraqi blood on their hands," said Mr Maliki.
Comment: And that's just Baghdad.
Comment on this Article
Facing Waves of Litigation, Invoking Secrets Privilege Becomes a More Popular Legal Tactic by Illegal U.S. Gov
By SCOTT SHANE
NY Times
June 4, 2006
WASHINGTON, June 3 - Facing a wave of litigation challenging its eavesdropping at home and its handling of terror suspects abroad, the Bush administration is increasingly turning to a legal tactic that swiftly torpedoes most lawsuits: the state secrets privilege.
In recent weeks alone, officials have used the privilege to win the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a German man who was abducted and held in Afghanistan for five months and to ask the courts to throw out three legal challenges to the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program.
But civil liberties groups and some scholars say the privilege claim, in which the government says any discussion of a lawsuit's accusations would endanger national security, has short-circuited judicial scrutiny and public debate of some central controversies of the post-9/11 era.
The privilege has been asserted by the Justice Department more frequently under President Bush than under any of his predecessors - in 19 cases, the same number as during the entire eight-year presidency of Ronald Reagan, the previous record holder, according to a count by William G. Weaver, a political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso.
While the privilege, defined by a 1953 Supreme Court ruling, was once used to shield sensitive documents or witnesses from disclosure, it is now often used to try to snuff out lawsuits at their inception, Mr. Weaver and other legal specialists say.
"This is a very powerful weapon for the executive branch," said Mr. Weaver, who has a law degree and is a co-author of one of the few scholarly articles examining the privilege. "Once it's asserted, in almost every instance it stops the case cold."
Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University who is studying the recent use of the privilege, said the administration's legal strategy "raises profound legal and policy questions that will be the subject of intense debate for the foreseeable future."
Some members of Congress also have doubts about the way the privilege has been used. A bill approved by the House Government Reform Committee would limit its use in blocking whistle-blowers' lawsuits.
"If the very people you're suing are the ones who get to use the state secrets privilege, it's a stacked deck," said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, who proposed the measure and has campaigned against excessive government secrecy.
Yet courts have almost always deferred to the secrecy claims; Mr. Weaver said he believed that the last unsuccessful assertion of the privilege was in 1993. Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said, "It's a sign of how potent the national security mantra has become."
Under Mr. Bush, the secrets privilege has been used to block a lawsuit by a translator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sibel Edmonds, who was fired after accusing colleagues of security breaches; to stop a discrimination lawsuit filed by Jeffrey Sterling, a Farsi-speaking, African-American officer at the Central Intelligence Agency; and to derail a patent claim involving a coupler for fiber-optic cable, evidently to guard technical details of government eavesdropping.
Such cases can make for oddities. Mark S. Zaid, who has represented Ms. Edmonds, Mr. Sterling and other clients in privilege cases, said he had seen his legal briefs classified by the government and had been barred from contacting a client because his phone line was not secure.
"In most state secrets cases, the plaintiffs' lawyers don't know what the alleged secrets are," Mr. Zaid said.
More recently the privilege has been wielded against lawsuits challenging broader policies, including the three lawsuits attacking the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program - one against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and two against the federal government by the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.
In a filing in the New York case, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, wrote that allowing the case to proceed would "cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" because it "would enable adversaries of the United States to avoid detection." Mr. Negroponte said he was providing more detail in classified filings.
Those cases are still pending. Two lawsuits challenging the government's practice of rendition, in which terror suspects are seized and delivered to detention centers overseas, were dismissed after the government raised the secrets privilege.
One plaintiff, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained while changing planes in New York and was taken to Syria, where he has said he was held in a tiny cell and beaten with electrical cables. The other, Khaled el-Masri, a German of Kuwaiti origin, was seized in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan, where he has said he was beaten and injected with drugs before being released in Albania.
The United States never made public any evidence linking either man to terrorism, and both cases are widely viewed as mistakes. Mr. Arar's lawsuit was dismissed in February on separate but similar grounds from the secrets privilege, a decision he is appealing. A federal judge in Virginia dismissed Mr. Masri's lawsuit on May 18, accepting the government's secrets claim.
One frustration of the plaintiffs in such cases is that so much information about the ostensible state secrets is already public. Mr. Arar's case has been examined in months of public hearings by a Canadian government commission, and Mr. Masri's story has been confirmed by American and German officials and blamed on a mix-up of similar names. The N.S.A. program has been described and defended in numerous public statements by Mr. Bush and other top officials and in a 42-page Justice Department legal analysis.
In the A.C.L.U. lawsuit charging that the security agency's eavesdropping is illegal, Ann Beeson, the group's associate legal director, acknowledged that some facts might need to remain secret. "But you don't need those facts to hear this case," she said. "All the facts needed to try this case are already public."
Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said he could not discuss any specific case. But he said the state secrets privilege "is well-established in federal law and has been asserted many times in our nation's history to protect our nation's secrets."
Other defenders of the administration's increasing use of the privilege say it merely reflects proliferating lawsuits.
In all of the N.S.A. cases, for instance, "it's the same secret they're trying to protect," said H. Bryan Cunningham, a Denver lawyer who served as a legal adviser to the National Security Council under Mr. Bush. Mr. Cunningham said that under well-established precedent, judges must defer to the executive branch in deciding what secrets must be protected.
But critics of the use of the privilege point out that officials sometimes exaggerate the sensitivities at risk. In fact, documents from the 1953 case that defined the modern privilege, United States v. Reynolds, have been declassified in recent years and suggest that Air Force officials misled the court.
An accident report on a B-29 bomber crash in 1948 was withheld because the Air Force said it included technical details about sensitive intelligence equipment and missions, but it turned out to contain no such information, said Wilson M. Brown III, a lawyer in Philadelphia who represented survivors of those who died in the crash in recent litigation.
"The facts the Supreme Court was relying on in Reynolds were false," Mr. Brown said in an interview. "It shows that if the government is not truthful, plaintiffs will lose and there's very little chance to straighten it out."
Comment on this Article
Dancing Queens of the Stone Age
Abbas extends ultimatum; Gaza fighting intensifies
Haaretz Correspondent and Agencies
By Avi Issacharoff
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas yesterday extended his ultimatum to Hamas, giving it until the weekend to agree to the so-called Prisoners' Document.
Abbas had originally said that he would call a referendum on the document - a blueprint for a national unity government drafted by Palestinians jailed in Israel - if Hamas did not accept it by today. Such a referendum could be viewed as a vote of confidence in the two-month-old Hamas government.
Representatives of Hamas and Abbas's Fatah party left for Yemen yesterday to continue negotiations with the assistance of Yemeni President Abdullah Salah. The Hamas delegation was led by Khaled Meshal, who heads the organization's overseas wing.
Meanwhile, a new poll released yesterday shows that 77 percent of Palestinians support the document, which states that the Palestinian people "desires the liberation of its lands ... including the right to establish an independent state with holy Jerusalem as its capital on all the territories occupied in 1967."
The poll, conducted by Birzeit University in Ramallah, also indicated a dramatic drop in support for Hamas: 37 percent of respondents said they would vote for Hamas if parliamentary elections were held today, compared to 50 percent in April. Some 37 percent said they would vote Fatah.
Abbas agreed to extend his ultimatum during a meeting of the PLO's executive committee in Ramallah yesterday. The committee approved both the extension and his proposal for a referendum.
"Before the end of the week, President Abbas will hold a news conference to announce the holding of the referendum and the beginning of the process for carrying it out," Yasser Abed Rabbo, a PLO Executive Committee official close to Abbas, said.
On Monday night, according to a participant in that night's negotiations with Hamas, Abbas had declared that efforts to get Hamas to support the document had failed, and that he would announce a referendum on the issue today. But Abed Rabbo said that Arab leaders, including Salah, and representatives of the Palestinian prisoners had urged Abbas to grant the extension.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, however, said yesterday the gaps between Abbas and Hamas on the document are too great to be settled in two days. He said negotiations must continue without any time constraints, Israel Radio reported.
Abbas has said repeatedly he will not accept any changes to the plan, which was produced by prisoners from both Fatah and Hamas. But Hamas insists various changes be made. "The approach is to treat this document as a sacred document, and that is something we don't accept," said the Hamas spokesman.
Comment on this Article
"Arab Spring" Fades in the Face of Authoritarian Regimes
By Pierre Prier
Le Figaro
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Leaders are taking back control at the risk of finding themselves alone with the Islamists.
Egyptian opposition figure Mohammed al-Charqaoui was kidnapped in broad daylight by the Cairo police on May 25. According to his lawyer, who was able to see him, "his lips were swollen and bloody, his eyes practically shut and you could see shoeprints on his skin." In a written message, al-Charqaoui relates that he was beaten for over three hours and sodomized with a cardboard tube. He was still in detention yesterday, as were certain other recently arrested militants.
Syrian Michel Kilo is also in prison. A historic opponent to Hafez el-Assad, then to his son Bachar, he was authorized to criticize the regime. That's all over. This 57-year-old political scientist was arrested in his home at dawn on May 14. Accused among other things of "defaming the Head of State," he risks life imprisonment. As do dozens of other intellectuals arrested in recent weeks.
Did the "Arab spring" only last a season? Three years ago, just before the Iraq offensive, George Bush announced his ambition to "spread democratic values" to the Middle East. A new regime in Baghdad would serve as a "powerful example of freedom for the other nations in the region." At first, American pressures falling under the generic heading "Greater Middle East" contributed just about everywhere to democratic advances: the first presidential election with several candidates in Egypt, freedom of speech for the Syrian opposition. "Before, when I was called in by the secret services, I was offered a couple of slaps as I left. Now, I'm offered a cup of coffee," one of them said only a few months ago. In the Gulf, women obtained the right to vote in Kuwait, among other things, and even Saudi women should be able to vote in the next partial municipal elections, inaugurated in 2005.
But three years after Bush's announcement, the dynamism seems to be arrested. Iraq is courting chaos and regimes are hardening up. Egypt has reinstated a state of emergency first established in 1981. Opposition leader Ayman Nour, who came in second place behind Hosni Mubarak in the September presidential election, has been condemned to five years in prison for "falsification of a file." He is also ineligible [as a candidate] for six supplementary years, which would prohibit him from running in 2011. Syria snaps up writers and re-establishes itself in Lebanon. In Saudi Arabia, the palace has specified that a constitutional monarchy is not on the program.
Contradictory Message From the United States
Has the Greater Middle east disappeared in the Iraqi quagmire? Some still want to believe in it. "There's been a slowdown in American pressure on governments for temporary reasons: the war in Iraq, Iran and Palestinian Hamas's victory, but they still think loosening is necessary," assures a high ranking Arab diplomat.
The United States has recently sent contradictory messages to their allies. A State Department spokesperson demanded Ayman Nour's liberation in May and talked about "a reversal for the Egyptian people's democratic aspirations." But, at the same time, Bush received Gamal Mubarak, the president's son and probable dynastic successor.
The American plan has already discovered its limits. Because democratization doesn't go in the right direction? Everywhere, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, timid electoral openings have given victory to movements that assert their links to Islam. To the United States' great displeasure, believes researcher Olivier Roy.* "There's no democracy without political legitimacy and no political legitimacy without taking into account Arab nationalism and Islamism. Now, the United States distrusts Arab nationalism and Islamism.
Authoritarian regimes are betting on a reduction in American and European pressures and play up to the slogan, "It's Islamism or Us." During the World Economic Forum at Sharm el-Sheikh on May 20, Hosni Mubarak claimed he had obtained carte blanche from Condoleezza Rice for the next twenty years: "She understood that democracy in Arab countries takes a generation," he declared to the Egyptian press.
It's not the Islamization of society that bothers these regimes. Most, including Baathist Syria most recently, allow religious institutions to control society in exchange for their benediction. It's only when the Islamists make a show of organizing into parties that they are repressed, just like "secular" political oppositions. For analyst Bassma Kodmani, director of the Arab Reform Initiative, which brings together "liberal" Arab and western study centers, political opening-up is the only solution to settling the limits between religion, politics, and society.
She believes as well that authorizing political parties would also allow the organization of left and liberal currents, counterweights to the Islamists that are growing in power in Arab societies. Thus, in Egypt, the "Kefaya" ("Enough") network is more and more accompanying the struggle of peasants despoiled by big landowners. One of the many signs that political effervescence in the region is not about to die down.
Comment on this Article
Gunmen in Police Uniform Abduct 56 in Iraq
By Nelson Hernandez and Salih Saif Aldin
The Washington Post
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Baghdad - "Turn back," a friend told Haji Abu Shamaa as he walked Monday morning toward his money-changing shop in the Karkh neighborhood of central Baghdad, a mile north of the heavily guarded Green Zone. "The Interior Ministry police are rounding up people."
But Shamaa walked on, right into a swift, coordinated operation unfolding within sight of Iraq's Ministry of Justice. Gunmen in police uniforms and ski masks had cordoned off the street and were swiftly shoving captives, four or five at a time, into a dozen waiting pickup trucks. Fifteen minutes later, the trucks were gone, and so were 56 people.
The roundup displayed all the signs of an unrelenting kidnapping epidemic in Baghdad. Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, more than 400 foreigners have been abducted in Iraq, but thousands more Iraqis have been snatched from the streets, often by people wearing knockoff police uniforms that are easily purchased at local markets.
Many people, like Shamaa's friend, believe the kidnappers are actually police. Usually the hostages are held for ransom. Sometimes they are killed because of their faith or ethnicity.
The fate of the 56 people was unknown Monday night. But the scale and audacity of the operation were unusual even by the capital's lawless standards.
The gunmen seized workers from several bus companies that offer transport to Syria and Jordan, witnesses and police said. Others of those taken were passengers aboard the buses: Syrian businessmen going home, a handful of Palestinians, Iraqis. Many Iraqis are leaving their own country precisely because it is the sort of place where a trip to the bus stop can end with being led away at gunpoint.
Shamaa said he was intent on returning to his office, to rejoin his son, Alaa, and thought the police wouldn't arrest him - he hadn't done anything wrong, he reasoned. Then he saw a dozen pickup trucks, two of them with machine guns mounted in their beds, and none with any license plates.
A man in a camouflage police uniform and a ski mask - an article commonly worn by police in Baghdad- stopped Shamaa, saying he would shoot him if he didn't turn back.
"I haven't done anything," Shamaa recounted explaining to him. "I just want to go to the bank to get some money, and I'll be gone."
The man let him pass. Shamaa went into the bank and watched the scene unfolding through the window. He said he saw gunmen entering the Mohammed Ugaili Transportation Co. across the street. He saw the owner, Jasim Ugaili, and his son being forced into one of the pickup trucks with the butts of rifles. Shamaa saw his own son, Alaa, with them, his hands tied behind his back.
Shamaa rushed outside to save his son. Another man with a rifle blocked his way.
"What, do you want to join him?" the man threatened. Shamaa turned back. And the trucks drove off.
Police Col. Adel Younis said guards at the Ministry of Justice shot at the kidnappers but couldn't stop them. Another witness, Hussein Ali, said he had seen a police car drive up to the scene, only to be driven off by gunfire and shouted warnings from the kidnappers that they were from the Interior Ministry's intelligence section.
Younis said the incident is under investigation. A police major who came on the scene after the attack said the men were not with the Interior Ministry, a witness said.
Raids like this one only increase popular mistrust of the police. Sunni Arabs often accuse the Interior Ministry police, dominated by Shiite Muslims, of conducting a terror campaign against them, or at least looking the other way as Shiite militias associated with political parties do so. But police say the attacks are carried out by criminals wearing police uniforms. At the same time, they counter that Iraq's major insurgent organizations are led by Sunnis and that a tough response is required.
Monday's kidnappings did not appear to be motivated by sectarian rivalry, a witness said. "Among the passengers were Syrian businessmen, about five or six of them," Hasan Falah said. "There were also some passengers from Diwaniyah" - a predominantly Shiite city south of Baghdad- "and other parts of Iraq. There was no question of Shiite or Sunni because it was a whole mixture."
That suggested that the people were simply taken for ransom, a lucrative business that has grown rapidly since U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein's government in 2003.
A group of Shiite students in a neighborhood of southern Baghdad, kidnapped in another roundup on Monday, did not have the option of paying their way out.
In Abu Dashir, a Shiite neighborhood south of Dora, the volatile southern section of Baghdad, gunmen posing as drivers lined up a set of minibuses as if to offer rides to central Baghdad, a police officer said. Fifteen students from Abu Dashir got aboard.
The drivers and their accomplices killed them - where the murders happened is unclear - and threw their bodies off the side of the Dora highway.
Abduction statistics are unreliable because many families do not report crimes, fearing the police as much as they do the kidnapping gangs.
But every so often, kidnappers are brought to justice. On Monday, an Iraqi court sentenced an Iraqi man to life imprisonment in connection with the killing of Margaret Hassan, an Iraqi-British aid worker kidnapped in 2004. It is believed to be Iraq's first trial of a suspect accused of the abduction or murder of a foreign-born civilian since the U.S.-led invasion.
Mustafa Salman, charged with aiding and abetting the abductors, received the sentence a few hours after his trial started, the Reuters news service reported. Two other defendants in the case were freed.
Hassan, originally from Ireland, married an Iraqi engineer and lived in Iraq for more than three decades before becoming an Iraqi citizen. At the time of her kidnapping in October 2004, she headed Iraqi operations for the CARE International charity. She was abducted on her way to work in Baghdad. She was presumed murdered about a month later, after her captors released video messages of her appealing for the withdrawal of British forces from Iraq. Her body has not been found.
Also in Baghdad on Monday, the defense team in the trial of Saddam Hussein protested the arrest of four of its witnesses. Defense attorneys charged that some of them were beaten by Iraqi guards.
The chief judge said they were jailed on suspicion of perjury last week after testifying that they had seen the chief prosecutor offering money and unspecified fake documents in exchange for testimony. One of the witnesses also claimed that some of the 148 Shiites from the town of Dujail who were allegedly killed on Hussein's orders were still alive.
Comment: "...often by people wearing knockoff police uniforms that are easily purchased at local markets."
Huh! Can we please see a picture of these markets with stacks of police uniforms?
Comment on this Article
Palestine: It's All Over
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
June 5, 2006
The first item I ever wrote about Palestinians was around 1973, when I was just starting a press column for a New York weekly called the Village Voice. It concerned a story in the New York Times about a "retaliatory" raid by the Israeli air force, after a couple of Al Fatah guerillas had fired on an IDF unit. I'm not sure whether there any fatalities. The planes flew north and dumped high explosive on a refugee camp in Lebanon, killing a dozen or so men, women and children.
I wrote a little commentary, noting the usual lack of moral disquiet in the Times' story about this lethal retaliation inflicted on innocent refugees. Dan Wolf, the Voice's editor, called me in and suggested I might want to reconsider. I think, that first time, the item got dropped. But Dan's unwonted act of censorship riled me and I started writing a fair amount about the lot of the Palestinians.
These were the days when Palestinians carried far less news value for editors than Furbish's lousewort, and no politician ever held that this beleagured plant didn't actually exist as a species, which is what Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister said of Palestinians.
Back then you had to dig a little harder to excavate what Jewish Israelis were actually doing to Palestinians. Lay out the facts about institutionalized racism, land confiscations, torture and a hail of abuse would pour through the mailbox, as when I published a long interview in the Voice in 1980 with the late Israel Shahak, the intrepid professor from Hebrew University.
It's slightly eerie now to look at what Shahak was saying back then and at the accuracy of his analysis and predictions: "The basic trends were established in '74 and '75, including settler organizations, mystical ideology, and the great financial support of the United States to Israel. Between summer '74 and summer '75 the key decisions were taken, and from that time it's a straight line." Among these decisions, said Shahak, was "to keep the occupied territories of Palestine," a detailed development of much older designs consummated in 1967.
Gradually, through the 1980s, very often in the translations from the Hebrew language press that Shahak used to send, the contours of the Israeli plan emerged, like the keel and ribs and timbers of an old ship: a road system that would bypass Palestinian towns and villages and link the Jewish settlements and military posts; ever-expanding clusters of settlements; a master plan for control of the whole region's water.
It wasn't hard to get vivid descriptions of the increasingly intolerable conditions of life for Palestinians: the torture of prisoners, the barriers to the simplest trip, the harassment of farmers and school children, the house demolitions. Plenty of people came back from Israel and the territories with harrowing accounts, though few ever made the journey into a major newspaper or onto national tv.
And even in the testimonies that did get published here, what was missing was any acknowledgement of the long-term plan to wipe the record clean of all troublesome U.N. resolutions, crush Palestinian national aspirations, steal their land and water, cram them into ever smaller enclaves, ultimately balkanize them with the Wall, which was on the drawing board many years ago. Indeed to write about any sort of master plan was to incur further torrents of abuse for one's supposedly "paranoid" fantasies about Israel' bad faith, with much pious invocation of the "peace process".
But successive Israeli governments did have a long-term plan. No matter who was in power, the roads got built, the water stolen, the olive and fruit trees cut down (a million) the houses knocked over (12,000), the settlements imposed (300) the shameless protestations of good faith issued to the US press (beyond computation).
As the new millennium shambled forward, surely it became impossible to believe any Israeli claim to be bargaining, or even to wish to bargain in good faith. By now the "facts of the ground" in Israel and the territories were as sharply in focus as one of Dali's surrealist paintings.
In May of this year the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, comes to Washington and addresses a joint session of Congress in which he declares: "I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land." In other words he doesn't recognize the right of Palestinians to even the wretched cantons currently envisaged in his "realignment". Why should Hamas believe a syllable of Olmert's poppycock? When Arafat and the PLO gave worrisome signs of being eager for an accommodation Israel's reply was to invade Lebanon.
In Olmert's "realignment plan the "Separation Barrier," now scheduled to be Israel's permanent "demographic border," annexes 10 per cent of the West Bank, while melding into Israel vast settlements and half a million settlers. The Palestinians lose their best agricultural land and the water. Israel's greater Jerusalem finishes off all possible viability for a viable, separate Palestinian state. This Palestinian mini-archipelago of cantons is shuttered to the east by Israel's security border in the Jordan Valley.
The press here, timid and ignorant, greets Olmert's "realignment" with tranquil respect. In the meantime a frightful historical tragedy is in its final chapters. With the connivance of what is sometimes laughably referred to as the "world community"--notably the US and EU, Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians into submission as the reward for having democratically elected the party of their choice. Whole communities are on the edge of starvation, cut off by Israel from food and medicines. The World Bank predicts a poverty rate of over 67 percent later this year. A UN Report issued in Geneva on May 30 says that four out of 10 Palestinians in the territories live under the official poverty line of less than $2.10 a day. The ILO estimates the jobless rate to be 40.7 percent of the Palestinian labor force.
The end of the story? I'd say the basic strategy is what it was in 1948: population transfer, to be achieved by making life so awful for Palestinians that most of them will depart, leaving a few bankrupt ghettoes behind as memorials to all those foolish hopes of a sovereign Palestinian state.
Comment on this Article
Bodman says U.S. not worrying about oil disruption
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 02:37:01
WASHINGTON, June 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said on Tuesday that he doesn't anticipate an oil supply disruption and U.S consumers wouldn't suffer undue hardships in the event Iran disrupts Gulf oil supplies.
Bodman told local reporters that the U.S. government would tap its strategic oil reserve in the event of oil disruption because the Bush administration has a plan "if push were to come to shove."
"We certainly can handle it for a while," he said. "There is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and we have other approaches."
Bodman also said that he is convinced oil producers want "to keep the market well supplied. It's in their interest as well as the interest of consumers."
Comment on this Article
Italian troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by end of 2006
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-07 16:29:49
BAGHDAD, June 7 (Xinhua) -- Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema said here on Wednesday that his country would pull out its troops from Iraq by the end of this year.
"We think that the Italian mission in Iraq is moving toward its end and we will begin reducing the number of Italian troops in Iraq this month and during the coming months, military forces will return to their country," D'Alema told reporters at a news conference with his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari.
"We think that by the end of this year our military mission will end in Iraq," he added.
For his part, Zebari said that the visit of the Italian foreign minister was also aimed at congratulating the new Iraqi government for its formal inauguration on May 20 as well as "holding talks on the withdrawal of the Italian troops, which we want to be a gradual pullout."
Italy has maintained about 3,000 troops in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, the fourth largest contingent after the U.S., Britain and South Korea.
Comment on this Article
Thousands take to streets in Mogadishu
Last Updated Tue, 06 Jun 2006 22:04:39 EDT
CBC News
Thousands rallied in the streets of Mogadishu on Tuesday in support of militia members of a group called the Islamic Courts Union.
The group, which has claimed control of the Somalian capital, is thought to have some sort of tie to al-Qaeda, and there are fears the country could fall under its sway.
Answering reporters' questions in Laredo, Texas, U.S. President George W. Bush said he was "concerned" about the situation.
"Obviously when there's instability anywhere in the world we're concerned. There is instability in Somalia," Bush said.
"[The] first concern, of course, would be to make sure that Somalia does not become an al-Qaeda safe haven, doesn't become a place from which terrorists plot and plan, so we're watching very carefully developments there," he said.
The Courts Union will have to negotiate with clan leaders who have been running the city for more than a decade.
The largest such clan drew 3,000 demonstrators calling for peace into the streets.
The Courts Union says the secular warlords are puppets of Washington who work for the CIA.
Comment on this Article
With a little help from the outside
10:24 04/06/2006
By Gideon Levy
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
The laugh of fate: The state waging a broad international campaign for a boycott is simultaneously waging a parallel campaign, no less determined, against a boycott. A boycott that seriously harms the lives of millions of people is legitimate in its eyes because it is directed against those defined as its enemies, while a boycott that is liable to hurt its academic ivory tower is illegitimate in its eyes only because it is aimed against itself. This is a moral double standard. Why is the boycott campaign against the Palestinian Authority, including blocking essential economic aid and boycotting leaders elected in democratic and legal elections, a permissible measure in Israel's eyes and the boycott of its universities is forbidden?
Israel cannot claim the boycott weapon is illegitimate. It makes extensive use of this weapon itself, and its victims are suffering under severe conditions of deprivation, from Rafah to Jenin. In the past, Israel called upon the world to boycott Yasser Arafat, and now it is calling for a boycott of the Hamas government ? and via this government, all of the Palestinians in the territories. And Israel does not regard this as an ethical problem. Tens of thousands have not received their salaries for four months due to the boycott, but when there is a call to boycott Israeli universities, the boycott suddenly becomes an illegitimate weapon.
Those calling for a boycott of Israel are also tainted with a moral double standard. The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education ?(NATFHE?) in Britain and the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Ontario, which have both decided to boycott Israel, did not act similarly to protest their own countries' war crimes and occupations ? the British army in Iraq and the Canadian army in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the handful of human rights advocates and opponents of the occupation in Israel should thank these two organizations for the step they have taken, despite their flawed double standards.
It would have been preferable had the opponents of the occupation in Israel not needed the intervention of external groups to fight the occupation. It is not easy to call upon the world to boycott your own country. It would have been better had there been no need for Rachel Corrie, James Miller and Tom Hurndall, bold people of conscience who paid with their lives after standing in front of the destructive bulldozers in Rafah. These young foreigners did the dangerous and vital work that Israelis should have done.
The same is true for the few peace activists who still manage to roam the territories, to protest and offer assistance to the victims of the occupation in the framework of organizations like the International Solidarity Movement ?(ISM?) ? which Israel fights ? preventing its members from entering its borders. It would be better if Israelis mobilized to fight instead of them. But except for a few modest groups, there is no protest in Israel and no real mobilization. Thus, it only remains to hope for the world's help.
The world can help save Israel from itself in limited ways. In a situation in which the governments of the West effectively support the continuation of the occupation, even if they declare their opposition to it, this role moves to civil organizations. When a group of American attorneys, including Jews, calls for a boycott of the Caterpillar company, whose bulldozers razed complete neighborhoods in Khan Yunis and Rafah, it should be thanked for this. The same applies to the boycott of the universities: When an association of British university lecturers boycotts Israeli colleagues who are not prepared to at least declare their opposition to the occupation, we should appreciate it. Each group in its field, and perhaps this will someday also include tourism officials, business people, artists and athletes. If all these boycott Israel, perhaps Israelis will begin to understand, albeit the hard way, that there is a price to pay for the occupation ? a price in their pockets and in their status.
The occupation is not just the domain of the government, army and security organizations. Everything is tainted: institutions of justice and law, the physicians who remain silent while medical treatment is prevented in the territories, the teachers who do not protest against the closing of educational institutions and the prevention of free movement of their peers, the journalists who do not report, the writers and artists who remain mum, the architects and engineers who lend a hand to the occupation's enterprises ? the settlements and the fence, the barriers and bypass roads and also the university lecturers, who do nothing for their imprisoned colleagues in the territories, but conduct special study programs for the security forces. If all these boycotted the occupation, there would be no need for an international boycott.
The world sees a great and ongoing injustice. Should it remain silent? It is not, of course, the only injustice in the world. Nor is it the most terrible. But does this make it any less necessary to act against it?
It is easy to exempt ourselves from our moral responsibility and attribute, as usual, any criticism to anti-Semitism. There may indeed be some elements of anti-Semitism among those calling for the boycott. But also among them are groups and individuals, including quite a few Jews, for whom Israel is close to their hearts. They want a just Israel. They see an Israel that occupies and is clearly unjust, and they believe they should do something. We should thank them for this from the bottom of our hearts.
Comment on this Article
Feel the Noiz
Europe colluded in CIA prisoner "spider's web"
By Jon Boyle
Reuters
7 June 06
PARIS - More than 20 states, mostly in Europe, colluded in a "global spider's web" of secret CIA prisons and transfers of terrorism suspects, a European rights watchdog said in a report released on Wednesday.
Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations played a role in the network run by the U.S.Central Intelligence Agency and European governments were aware or participated in the operation, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe said.
"It is now clear -- although we are still far from having established the whole truth -- that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities," Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty said.
"Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know," he said in the conclusions of the 65-page report released on the body's Web site.
While the report admits it has "no formal evidence" of secret CIA detention centers it said a number of states had clearly colluded with the system of CIA secret flights and secret transfers known as renditions.
Among the charges:-
* Poland and Romania ran secret detention centers
* Germany, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus and Azerbaijan were "staging points" for flights involving the unlawful transfer of detainees
* Ireland, Britain, Portugal, Greece and Italy were "stopovers" for flights involving the unlawful transfer of detainees
* Sweden, Bosnia, Britain, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, Germany and Turkey handed over suspects
* Cairo, Amman, Islamabad, Rabat, Kabul, Guantanamo Bay, Tashkent, Algiers and Baghdad served as detainee transfer/drop-off points
SLANDEROUS
Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said the report was false but many other governments have greeted the report with silence.
"These accusations are slanderous ... They are not based on any facts and that is all I know and all I have to say," Marcinkiewicz told reporters in parliament.
Despite the lack of "smoking gun" evidence, Marty said there were "a number of coherent and converging elements (that) indicated that secret detention centers have indeed existed and unlawful inter-state transfers have taken place in Europe."
Flight data provided in January and February from Eurocontrol helped uncover the web of flights, detention centers and stop-off points used in the U.S.-devised system.
Marty said 10 cases involving 17 individuals had come to light but many of the Council of Europe's 46 member states had been reluctant to provide information. More cases could follow.
EU investigators said last month they believed 30 to 50 people had been handed over to countries where they might face torture by the United States since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
While the suspects' treatment "does not appear to reach the threshold for torture, it may well be considered as inhuman or degrading," Marty's report added.
The pan-European rights body can name and shame countries but cannot launch legal proceedings.
The allegations of CIA abuses, first made by newspapers and human rights groups late last year, fanned concerns in Europe about U.S. anti-terror tactics. But European governments are now under scrutiny due to mounting evidence they at best turned a blind eye to illegal activities.
Washington insists it acted with the full knowledge of the governments concerned, acknowledges the secret transfer of some terrorist suspects between countries and denies any wrongdoing.
Comment on this Article
Secret CIA flights stopped in 2 countries: Poland, Romania
By JAN SLIVA
Associated Press
7 June 06
PARIS - The head of an investigation into alleged
CIA secret prisons in Europe said Wednesday that evidence suggests planes carrying terror suspects stopped in Romania and Poland and likely dropped off detainees there.
Swiss Sen. Dick Marty's final report, however, offered no clear, direct proof that CIA detention centers were set up in Europe - an allegation made by a human rights group last year.
Marty said Romania was part of what he called a "renditions circuit" and was used as a stopover by CIA-linked planes carrying terror suspects. He also said an airport in Poland was likely used as a detainee drop-off point, and accused a total of 14 European countries, including Britain, Italy and Germany, of violating human rights in connection with CIA activities.
"We believe we are in a position to state that successive CIA rendition operations have taken place in the course of the same, single flight circuit," Marty said in a report commissioned by the Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights watchdog.
The report is addressed to the 46 Council of Europe member states and will likely be used by the group to put pressure on the countries implicated in it to investigate the allegations.
The report relied mostly on flight logs provided by the
European Union's air traffic agency, Eurocontrol, witness statements gathered from people who said they had been abducted by U.S. intelligence agents, and judicial and parliamentary inquiries in various countries.
In his report, Marty put airports in Timisoara, Romania, and Szymany, Poland, in a "detainee transfer/drop-off point" category, together with eight airports outside Europe.
Marty analyzed a flight pattern of a plane with tail number N313P. He said the plane arrived in Timisoara from Kabul,
Afghanistan, on the night of Jan. 25, 2004, after having transported Khaled El-Masri, a German who said he had been abducted by foreign intelligence agents in Macedonia, to the Afghan capital. El-Masri claims he was imprisoned for five months and tortured there.
Marty said the plane with the crew that accompanied El-Masri stayed in Timisoara for 72 minutes before leaving for Palma de Mallorca in the Mediterranean Sea.
"Having eliminated other explanations - including that of a simple logistics flight - the most likely hypothesis of the purpose of this flight was to transport one or several detainees from Kabul to Romania," Marty said in the report without elaborating.
Marty said that based on the information at his disposal, he deduced the Szymany airport in northeastern Poland was used for a rendition flight in September 2003.
Neither country offered immediate comment, but both have denied involvement in the past.
Marty's investigation runs parallel to one by the European Parliament, which has said that data from Eurocontrol shows there have been more than 1,000 clandestine CIA flights stopping on European territory since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
But officials said the data does not make clear if there were detainees were on board the flights, nor does it shed any light on allegations of CIA secret prisons.
Allegations that CIA agents shipped prisoners through European airports to secret detention centers, including compounds in Eastern Europe, were first reported in November by The Washington Post. Human Rights Watch later identified air bases in Poland and Romania as possible locations of the alleged secret prisons, but both countries have denied involvement.
Clandestine prisons and secret flights via Europe to countries where suspects could face torture would breach the continent's human rights treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council of Europe, the guardian of the treaty, has no power to punish countries for breaching it, other than terminating their membership in the organization.
The European Union could theoretically suspend the voting rights of a country found to have breached the convention, however the evidence would likely have to be proved in court.
In his report, Marty said that most European government "did not seem particularly eager to establish the alleged facts."
Comment on this Article
Trip Study Finds More Was Spent on Aides Than Lawmakers
By Kate Phillips
The New York Times
Tuesday 06 June 2006
Washington - Congressional aides took $30 million in trips paid for by private groups from 2000 through mid-2005, surpassing the privately sponsored travel of their bosses by nearly $10 million over the same time, according to a new analysis of publicly disclosed travel expenses.
Together, aides and members of the House and Senate filed 23,000 public disclosure forms on their individual trips, the survey found, for an estimated price tag of about $50 million. Among the most popular destinations were Paris (at least 200 times), Hawaii (150) and Italy (140).
Congressional travel paid for by outside organizations like trade groups and corporations has been under intense scrutiny following scandals involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. While much attention has been focused on elected officials and corporate jet travel with lobbyists, the new study, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, Medill News Service of Northwestern University and American Public Media programs, is the most extensive in recent years because it tallied the costs, purpose and destinations of trips by Congressional aides and politicians.
The study concluded that about 90 of the trips were paid for by lobbyists, which is an ethical violation, during the five and a half years examined. About 500 trips cost $10,000 or more each, and 16 cost $25,000 or more apiece, the study showed. About $20 million was spent on overseas travel.
Wendell Rawls, acting executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan group that has conducted many investigations of money and politics over the years, said Monday that some trips could be considered legitimate for educational purposes. But he pointed out that the study found multiple ethics violations from members of both political parties, and that many trips were paid for by corporations that had business interests before Congress.
Mr. Rawls also questioned the amount of spending on some trips. For example, he said, former Representative Thomas Bliley, Republican of Virginia, and his wife went to London at a cost of $31,171 for four days in July 2000. Their air travel tickets were valued at $11,938.49 each, and were paid for by the Brown and Williamson tobacco company. The former congressman's public filings listed the purpose of the trip as meetings with officials from British American Tobacco and other trade officials.
"I would ask if every constituent for Representative Bliley had the same access as the people at Brown, Williamson," Mr. Rawls said of the former chairman of the House Commerce Committee. Mr. Bliley could not be reached for comment.
The study turned up other interesting educational travel and irregularities. Congressman Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, has amended his forms for a trip in 2000 to Cuba, where he met with Fidel Castro. He first violated ethics rules by accepting travel expenses for his son and his wife, on a trip that was supposed to address the plight of endangered birds. But confronted with the center's findings, Mr. Rangel recently reimbursed and identified additional sponsors for his son's travel and for the trip; the sponsors included one of his longtime fund-raisers, John Catsimatidis of Gristede's Foods in New York, and the Cuban government. George A. Dalley, Mr. Rangel's chief of staff, said he erred in not knowing the reporting rules.
The study singled out General Atomics, a company based in San Diego that developed the Predator, the unmanned spy plane, because it spent more - $660,000 - on Congressional travel than any other corporation on lone-sponsor trips. The study noted that General Atomics seemed to favor trips for Congressional staff members and aides. Among those on trips to Turkey in 2004 or to Australia in 2005 were aides to Representative Randy Cunningham, a California Republican who has since been convicted of bribery and other crimes, and an aide to Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is minority leader.
The study said that some aides sat in on sales meetings that company officials held with foreign government officials, although the aides later told the survey's interviewers that they did not engage in sales pitches.
Gary Hopper, a vice president for General Atomics' Washington offices, said: "We wouldn't mix any kind of sales situation with Congressional staff there. I know that's a bone of contention with a lot of people out there but there was not in any way a quid pro quo."
Democrats, Republicans and lobbying associations all say that travel has slowed since the scandals over the Scotland golfing trips by Representative Tom DeLay received headlines last year and put a spotlight on Congressional travel.
Paul A. Miller, the president of the American League of Lobbyists, defended travel by lobbyists and elected officials. "Since the scandal, a lot of the travel has ceased to exist or members of Congress have been very diligent by what trips we go on," Mr. Miller said. "These trips are valuable experiences for members of Congress and their staffs. If the public doesn't pay for it and the private sector doesn't pay for it, the government isn't going to pick up the tab for it."
The House and Senate have passed legislation that would require additional disclosure for lobbying, but neither bill would place a permanent ban on privately sponsored travel. It is unclear what will emerge from a House-Senate conference committee.
The Center for Public Integrity was forced last year to withdraw a study it conducted on White House travel because of a flawed database that inflated the amount of money spent as well as the number of staff members. To avoid such errors this time, Mr. Rawls said the center pored over the 26,000 pages of travel documents individually, hired outside consultants to comb the data and the findings, and made conservative estimates of the data tallies.
Comment on this Article
Pardon Me, Mr. President! Libby's Difficult Defense
By Anna Schneider-Mayerson
New York Observer
Hours after I. Lewis Libby resigned from the White House last October, federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald broke the seal on an indictment charging him with five felonies.
Now, as the pre-trial jousting in Mr. Libby's case picks up momentum, the onetime loyal West Wing confidant-Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney-will have to choose between protecting himself and protecting the White House. Specifically, insiders say, he will have to choose between a not-guilty verdict and a Presidential pardon.
"It does put him in this difficult situation of putting the administration on trial," said a lawyer in the case. "Things are coming out that would never have come out, solely because he's going to fight the charges."
As Mr. Libby's lawyers serve demand after demand for evidence that they hope will exculpate their client, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald rallies back with briefs seeded with less-than-flattering assertions about Mr. Libby's bosses.
Responding to Mr. Libby's lawyers in a May 12 filing, for example, Mr. Fitzgerald included what many considered to be a shocking and revealing document: a copy of The New York Times Op-Ed column "What I Didn't Find in Africa," written by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and calling into question some of the Bush administration's claims regarding Iraq's nuclear-weapons program, annotated in Mr. Cheney's script with the question: "[D]id his wife send him on a junket?"
On Friday, Mr. Libby's lawyers filed a response with the court, saying their client hadn't seen the clipping until the F.B.I. showed him a copy-an argument that served to distance himself from the Vice President, if not exactly contradicting him.
But more importantly, this exhibit painted a picture of a Vice President angered by the column, and with clear knowledge of the relationship between Mr. Wilson, his wife and the circumstances of his trip to Niger.
This is the second time that Mr. Libby's lawyers have been slapped in the face with information that they themselves requested to aid in his defense.
In a letter in January, and then in a filing with more detail last month, Mr. Fitzgerald reported that the President allowed Mr. Cheney to authorize selective leaking of a classified National Intelligence Estimate report to counter administration critics on Iraq. The leak prompted outrage from Democrats, who saw a contradiction in Mr. Bush's insistence that leaks were indefensible, and led Representative Jane Harman to crown him the "leaker-in-chief."
"In defending himself, he's already had to reveal the degree to which the Vice President, the President and others have approved and/or directed the leaking of what might be classified information," said a defense lawyer who has handled government clients. It's "exposed the inner workings of what they may have preferred to keep private. His defense keeps the spotlight on the workings of the White House, which have proved to be sometimes embarrassing."
As in many discovery processes, the prosecutor wants to minimize the amount of material provided to the defense, and the defense wants to maximize their haul.
"Fitzgerald puts this stuff out to raise the cost to Libby, because he knows Libby doesn't want this stuff out there," suggested one lawyer familiar with the investigation. "Every time Libby punishes him on discovery, he'll punish the guy that Libby lied to protect .... There's certainly tension, and [Fitzgerald] obviously perceives that pushing on this stuff is going to cause [Libby] a great deal of pain."
Others rejected that theory. "Fitzgerald is the straightest-shooting prosecutor in the country. He's not playing any kind of game or retaliating. He's just showing the court what he needs," said a lawyer familiar with the case. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, Randall Samborn, declined to respond.
One former administration official downplayed the significance of Mr. Fitzgerald's findings.
"Would they rather not have had to deal with it? Sure. Did it flip everybody's views on Scooter? Probably not." And, in fact, many of the Republican faithful-including former Cheney advisor Mary Matalin-have joined the advisory committee of the Libby Legal Defense Trust in a show of support. Of course, many others have not.
"From the administration's view, the not-flattering stuff tends to be the not-flattering debates that already happened," said the official.
Mr. Libby discussed portions of the National Intelligence Estimate used to make the case for the Iraq war, and whose credibility has since been seriously undermined.
"Why you get defensive on it is that it highlights that subsequent events have proven that to be an inaccurate assessment," the official added.
In a key document request in March, the defense wrote: "The actions of government officials from the White House, the State Department and the CIA-and the documents they generated-are part and parcel of this story."
Telling that story is their job. Keeping that story under wraps is the White House's.
Mr. Libby's sprawling legal-defense team-which includes lawyers from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York; Baker Botts in Washington, D.C.; Jones Day in California; and Dechert in Philadelphia-declined to comment on how Mr. Libby's loyalty to the administration has shaped his defense strategy.
(Last month, D.C. District Court Judge Reggie Walton threatened to issue a gag order to lawyers in the case after reporters were informed of a filing in the case before it was filed with the court.)
Mr. Libby is accused of obstructing justice, making false statements and perjury coming out of his testimony in an investigation into the possibly illegal disclosure of a C.I.A. operative's identity. The charges are based on alleged contradictions between statements Mr. Libby made to the F.B.I. and a grand jury and his conversations with reporters in the summer of 2003.
Based on the court's filings and conversations with lawyers familiar with the case, Mr. Libby's team appears to be conducting a broad and vigorous defense.
Their basic claim is that Mr. Libby was so busy he lost track of whom he talked to, which helps to explain why he didn't remember where he had learned of Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. operative whose leaked identity is at the center of the present inquiry, nor whom he talked to about her.
So they've requested an avalanche of information that would seem to convey exactly what that was like-among them the President's daily intelligence briefings, as well as notes and drafts of stories from reporters. They've argued that Ms. Plame's C.I.A. affiliation was not a closely held secret, and questioned the authority of Mr. Fitzgerald to bring his charges.
Lawyers said that the goal seemed to be to offer enough diversions from the narrow questions of who originally told Mr. Libby that Ms. Plame was a C.I.A. operative, and what his state of mind was when he talked to F.B.I. agents and the grand jury before his indictment.
They described it as a typical defense strategy of providing a broad and sometimes confusing story in place of the prosecutor's focused and narrow one.
"I'm not hearing that the basic charges are false with the discussion that's been going on in the court papers," said a lawyer familiar with the case.
But if the facts of the case are not in question, Mr. Libby has nevertheless pleaded not guilty. So his defense must rest in the interpretation of those facts, and the environment in which these facts emerged.
The tension between a defendant and his or her employer-whether in the case of a C.E.O. and a company or a Congressional staffer and a Congressional office-always exists, argued Abbe Lowell, a prominent D.C. defense attorney. "What's uncommon is that it's one of the highest-ranking government officials' highest-ranking deputy," he said.
One obvious tactic for defendants is to argue that they were simply executing orders. Yet Mr. Libby's team is taking a more nuanced approach, trying to strike a balance between painting a portrait of Mr. Libby as charged with massive responsibilities in his role as Mr. Cheney's deputy, and not pointing the finger at his boss. In other words, a consistent defense that is still not embarrassing to the White House.
Lawyers said it was impossible to know whether there were lines of inquiry that the defense was not pursuing at the behest of Mr. Libby.
"There are some times people might go down and say, 'I'm not going to raise this, I'm not going to do this'-friendship, family, employers, it could be a whole host of facts that could enter into a decision," explained a lawyer with a small involvement in the case.
But some with experience in these types of fraught situations said that while clients will typically comply with their lawyers' suggestions, sometimes that resolution is hard-won.
"There is a real tension there, because you're doing your utmost to defend your client, who has extreme loyalty," said a Washington lawyer familiar with independent-counsel investigations. "It takes a lot of convincing with a client to let you do your job to complete the defense."
The lawyer added: "It's going to be very, very difficult to get Libby to point the finger to one or two above him-if that, in fact, occurred."
But in a move that seemed to favor Mr. Libby's White House associates, his lawyers seemed quite willing to finger the leaker. In a hearing held to debate subpoenas issued to reporters and media outlets, William Jeffress, one of Mr. Libby's lead attorneys, strongly hinted that at an alibi source for former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, and possibly for Robert Novak and Bob Woodward (two of the other journalists embroiled in the case) as well: someone "maybe [in the] State Department."
"Your honor, we respectfully would submit that we think the source for Mr. Novak and Mr. Woodward, who wasn't even in the White House-we think the fact that what he knew, which is certainly as much or more than Mr. Libby knew about Ms. Wilson, convinced him that there was nothing wrong with disclosing her name to a reporter. That she was not covert. She was not classified."
For observers, this raises questions about whether the defense strategy is designed to get Mr. Libby off, or to try to get gratitude from the administration.
"I just don't think that folks in the administration are saying that Libby should fall on his sword so as not to embarrass people," said a lawyer familiar with the investigation. "He crossed that bridge when he decided to defend the case."