Gonzales Not Sworn In During Wiretap Hearings (UPDATED)

This independent voter has the same reaction as our reader "Elrod" who left a comment under another post and says it better than we could:

Just curious but why did [Senator Arlen] Specter insist that [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzalez not be sworn in? I know that lying to Congress is illegal in its own rights, but Janet Reno was told to swear in when she testified, and Gonzalez indicated that he had no objections to it. After the controversy over the oil execs who lied to Congress about meeting with Cheney's energy task force, why wouldn't Specter just let Gonzalez swear in and move on from there?

Yes, you'd think that there would be every possible effort made so that administration officials appear credible. TMV raised an eyebrow as well. Gonzales was wise in offering to be sworn in but something like this leaves all but true-blue GOP partisans thinking that if Gonzales isn't sworn in and the GOP doesn't want him to be sworn in there's a reason for it. And that reason doesn't increase credibility one iota.

We're going to wait until the day is over before we digest the testimony. The non-swearing in has given us a bit of early indigestion.

Here's VIDEO of the refusal to swear him in.

Read On

GOP senator calls spying reasons 'unrealistic'

WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ explanations so far for the Bush administration’s failure to obtain warrants for its domestic surveillance program are “strained” and “unrealistic,” the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman said Sunday.

Sen. Arlen Specter, whose committee has scheduled hearings Monday on the National Security Agency program, said he believes the administration violated a 1978 law specifically calling for a secretive court to consider and approve such monitoring.

Specter, R-Pa., said he might consider subpoenas for administration documents that would detail its legal justification for the program.

Read On:

That is not good enough, Senator!

Might?

Might consider?

Subpeona anyone or anything you have to!

Put witnesses under oath!

If you cannot do that, then go home, and buy your own healthcare.

You're Fired!

LIAR, LIAR......

Pants On Fire

The CIA Leak: Plame Was Still Covert om

So, now, we do, in fact, have a case for treason. Is that still against the law?

Feb. 13, 2006 issue - Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case. Lawyers for Libby, and White House allies, have repeatedly questioned whether Plame, the wife of White House critic Joe Wilson, really had covert status when she was outed to the media in July 2003. But special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done "covert work overseas" on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA "was making specific efforts to conceal" her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge's opinion. (A CIA spokesman at the time is quoted as saying Plame was "unlikely" to take further trips overseas, though.) Fitzgerald concluded he could not charge Libby for violating a 1982 law banning the outing of a covert CIA agent; apparently he lacked proof Libby was aware of her covert status when he talked about her three times with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Fitzgerald did consider charging Libby with violating the so-called Espionage Act, which prohibits the disclosure of "national defense information," the papers show; he ended up indicting Libby for lying about when and from whom he learned about Plame.

Full article

"Not that anybody would know it.

The Judiciary Committee did, indeed, hold about an 8 hour Hearing today on the Bushites spy program, featuring Alberto Gonzales as the only witness. I must admit it was a little hard to stay awake...

 

So, why the hell wasn't Little Bertie sworn in?

 

From now on, I will consider no Hearing legal, unless people who testify are sworn. (Like those goddamned, jackass oil- CEOs, for example)

 

Nevertheless, I believe that it is still against the law to lie to Congress whether you take the oath or not.

 

Of course, the Bushites are currently re-interpreting every law on the books, so who knows?

Seeking Truth On Wiretaps

Today, neither Congress nor the American public has sufficient evidence to make an informed judgment about the NSA’s activities on either count. Early signs, to be sure, bode ill. Newsweek has reported that the NSA shared intercepts on Americans with now-U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.  Walter Pincus of The Washington Post has revealed that the Army’s Counterintelligence Field Activities, a sister agency of the NSA, has been collecting and labeling information about Quaker meetings and law school students’ campaigning as “threats” to the military.  Ominous echoes resound of FBI and CIA domestic surveillance programs during the Cold War that swept up civil rights leaders (including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), anti-war protesters and women’s rights activists as potential enemies of the state.

Full article

 

...and we never will have the information we need if the Bushites have anything at all to say about it.

Plan creates problems for mentally ill

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 (UPI) -- Confusion over the government's drug prescription plan seems to be particularly hard on the mentally ill, causing them to go without the drugs they need.

Mental health service providers and advocacy groups are worried that scores of the nation's estimated 2 million mentally ill who received both Medicare and Medicaid are at high risk of relapse, reports The Washington Post.

"The continuation of medications is absolutely critical to keep them in community living," Steven Sharfstein, president of the American Psychiatric Association, told The Post. He said

The report said the mentally ill are nearly one-third of the "dual eligibles" who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid because of income and disability or age.

But the new plan often forces beneficiaries to switch from their usual pharmacies to different locations and strange faces. One expert said such changes can have a huge effect on someone with few coping resources. As a result, some patients have found they have no insurance -- and have either run out of pills or rationed their medicine because they feared they would be left without, the report said.

LINK

 

So, OK...here's an idea. Lets load up all the paranoid psychotics, irritable Depressives, manics and such (much more of Bush and there will be enough for a 4 or 5 million nutcase march) and bus them to to Washington D.C. and then let nature take its course.

 

(Please do not be offended. We are nuts too. Most people are. They just haven't been caught yet!)

Democracy and the Untouchables

Published on Monday, February 6, 2006 by the Huffington Post

by Deepak Chopra

A coca farmer has been elected president in Bolivia and a socialist doctor in Chile. Hamas has won majority power in Palestine and a hard-line anti-Zionist leads Iran. These are all democratic outcomes, and in the foreseeable future we can expect more of the same. From the American perspective, it looks like the worst example of getting what you wish for. We stand for democracy, and now we have to hold our ground when democracy doesn't turn out remotely as we would want it to. Observers point out that the last five elections in the Middle East have brought in Islamic fundamentalists or close to it, while almost every election in South America has brought in socialists with an animus against the U.S., or close to it. As the world's leading democracy, it's ironic that we have been so afraid of it elsewhere, supporting reactionary royal families and dictatorships in country after country, although capriciously our support of a Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Duvalier, Aristide, Assad, Musharaf, etc. can suddenly sour. We should welcome democracy for the same reason that India learned to accept the rise of the untouchables to power. Historically, it was unthinkable that the most despised and dispossessed people in the country should share in its rule. But no horrors have come to pass, and India's democracy has been strengthened. The factions rising to power in South America and the Middle East are similarly dispossessed and despised. Much as we dislike the religious Shiites who are about to rule Iraq, weren't they the same rebels who tried to rise against Saddam in 1991 and were massacred by the thousands when the U.S failed to help them? Poor, oppressed, ignorant, and rejected people don't behave well; they are often angry and irrational. Whatever anyone may think of them, the dispossessed will only change if they are given a share of power. In Palestine the ruling Fatah party squandered and outright stole billions of dollars in foreign aid, and the leading politicians there have amassed fortunes in Swiss bank accounts while their people starve. The same is true of our favored pols in Iraq. They are prepared to steal billions more as the oil wealth of the country gets divided among the ultra-privileged. In South America a peon class, often made up of indigenous Indians, exists in hopeless degradation while the richest live like colonialists from two centuries ago. These intolerable injustices aren't ours to fix. Each country deserves self-determination. Billions spent to prop up the Shah of Iran did nothing to prevent the rise of democracy there, and it won't anywhere else, not in the long run. America's choice is either to guide this great historical upheaval or be charged with trying to suppress the very people who might have sailed to the New World when we were struggling to be free. Deepak Chopra came to the U.S. in 1970 from his native India to practice medicine, a career that evolved into the field of mind-body medicine. His breakthrough book, "Quantum Healing," brought him public recognition in 1989. Since then he has written more than 42 books and travels worldwide as a spiritual speaker who fuses Western science with Eastern wisdom. He lives in La Jolla with his wife, Rita, and has two grown children and two grandchildren. Dr. Chopra heads the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California, which specializes in many alternative treatment modalities including Ayurveda. © 2006 The Huffington Post

The Hearing

Well, that was all very interesting, but are we better off than we were 8 hours ago?

 

What I learned from the Hearings:

 

From Senator Sessions of Bible Belt Alabama: There are no civil rights in heaven. I was shocked, I tell you, just shocked.

 

From Alberto; Congress can all go Cheney themselves, because while we might be just slappy-happy to hear their ideas, we really don't give a royal crap (pun intended) what they think. We are gonna do as we damn well please.

 

From 9/11 widow: Osama is going to get us.

 

From several Democrats: The administration is filled to the brim with liars and none of us trust you not to go through our garbage at night.

 

From several Republicans: Well, yeah, the Bushites broke the law, but we will gladly forgive them if they will just get with the program and let us play too.

 

From several other Republicans: The very idea of Osama bin Laden makes us piss our collective pants and want to burn the Constitution if it will keep those scary Muslims away from us.

 

And finally, from Alberto again: No. You can't play. Don't ask us again. You are all irrelevant little piss-ants, unless, of course, we are protecting you, then you are very important little piss-ants, but only then.

 

Since 9/11 we have all been the victims of a huge protection racket. When are people going to wake up and smell the Texas cow shit.

 

 

Paying The Iraq Bill

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is professor of economics at Columbia University and was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Clinton and chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank.

The most important things in life, like life itself, ­are priceless. But that doesn’t mean that issues involving the preservation of life (or a way of life), like defense, should not be subjected to cool, hard economic analysis.

Shortly before the current Iraq war, when Bush administration economist Larry Lindsey suggested that the costs might range between $100 and $200 billion, other officials quickly demurred. For example, Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels put the number at $60 billion. It now appears that Lindsey’s numbers were a gross underestimate.

Concerned that the Bush administration might be misleading everyone about the Iraq war’s costs, just as it had about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda, I teamed up with Linda Bilmes, a budget expert at Harvard, to examine the issue. Even we—opponents of the war—were staggered by what we found, with conservative to moderate estimates ranging from slightly less than a trillion dollars to more than $2 trillion.

Our analysis starts with the $500 billion that the Congressional Budget Office openly talks about, which is still 10 times higher than what the administration said the war would cost. Its estimate falls so far short because the reported numbers do not even include the full budgetary costs to the government. And the budgetary costs are but a fraction of the costs to the economy as a whole.

For example, the Bush administration has been doing everything it can to hide the huge number of returning veterans who are severely wounded—16,000 so far, including roughly 20 percent with serious brain and head injuries. So it is no surprise that its figure of $500 billion ignores the lifetime disability and health care costs that the government will have to pay for years to come.

Nor does the administration want to face up to the military’s recruiting and retention problems. The result is large re-enlistment bonuses, improved benefits and higher recruiting costs—up 20 percent just from 2003 to 2005. Moreover, the war is wearing extremely hard on equipment, some of which will have to be replaced.

These budgetary costs (exclusive of interest) amount to $652 billion in our conservative estimate and $799 billion in our moderate estimate. Arguably, since the government has not reined in other expenditures or increased taxes, the expenditures have been debt financed, and the interest costs on this debt add another $98 billion (conservative) to $385 billion (moderate) to the budgetary costs.

Of course, the brunt of the costs of injury and death is borne by soldiers and their families. But the military pays disability benefits that are markedly lower than the value of lost earnings. Similarly, payments for those who are killed amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death, sometimes referred to as the statistical value of a life ($6.1 to $6.5 million).

But the costs don’t stop there. The Bush administration once claimed that the Iraq war would be good for the economy, with one spokesperson even suggesting that it was the best way to ensure low oil prices. As in so many other ways, things have turned out differently: The oil companies are the big winners, while the American and global economies are losers. Being extremely conservative, we estimate the overall effect on the economy if only $5 or $10 of the increase is attributed to the war.

At the same time, money spent on the war could have been spent elsewhere. We estimate that if a proportion of that money had been allocated to domestic investment in roads, schools, and research, the American economy would have been stimulated more in the short run, and its growth would have been enhanced in the long run.

There are a number of other costs, some potentially quite large, although quantifying them is problematic. For instance, Americans pay some $300 billion annually for the “option value” of military preparedness—being able to fight wherever needed. That Americans are willing to pay this suggests that the option value exceeds the costs. But there is little doubt that the option value has been greatly impaired and will likely remain so for several years.

In short, even our “moderate” estimate may significantly underestimate the cost of America’s involvement in Iraq. And our estimate does not include any of the costs implied by the enormous loss of life and property in Iraq itself.

We do not attempt to explain whether the American people were deliberately misled regarding the war’s costs, or whether the Bush administration’s gross underestimate should be attributed to incompetence, as it vehemently argues is true in the case of weapons of mass destruction.

Nor do we attempt to assess whether there were more cost-effective ways of waging the war. Recent evidence that deaths and injuries would have been greatly reduced had better body armor been provided to troops suggests how short-run frugality can lead to long-run costs. Certainly, when a war’s timing is a matter of choice, as in this case, inadequate preparation is even less justifiable.

But such considerations appear to be beyond the Bush administration’s reckoning. Elaborate cost-benefit analyses of major projects have been standard practice in the defense department and elsewhere in government for almost a half century. The Iraq war was an immense “project.” Yet it now appears that the analysis of its benefits was greatly flawed and that of its costs virtually absent.

One cannot help but wonder: Were there alternative ways of spending a fraction of the war’s $1 to $2 trillion in costs that would have better strengthened security, boosted prosperity and promoted democracy?

Copyright:  Project Syndicate, 2006.

Link

This happy piece of news just scrolled by...

While you are watching or reading about the Gonzales hearing, think about this... the major telephone companies -- some of the very same companies who can't figure out how web-based companies are able to poach your private cell phone records --they're hot on the trail of "terrorists":

The National Security Agency has secured the cooperation of large telecommunications companies, including AT&T, MCI and Sprint, in its efforts to eavesdrop without warrants on international calls by suspected terrorists, according to seven telecommunications executives.

This 12-Step Program Can Break U.S. Oil

Published on Monday, February 6, 2006 by the Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)

by Michael Brune

Our president almost came clean in his State of the Union speech last week when he finally admitted that "America is addicted to oil." That addiction threatens our national security, our environmental health and our way of life. It is true that our leaders are exhibiting the classic signs of an addiction denial, aggression, avoidance, blaming others and as a country we are falling far short of reaching our full potential. America's stubborn dependence on oil erodes our bedrock values. For it, we will go to war, support unstable and undemocratic regimes, destabilize our climate, decimate our forests and parks, threaten the health of our children, and weaken our economy. The president admitted to a national problem, but stopped well short of committing our country to a full recovery program. We already have the technology. What we desperately need is the courage to act now. It is time for nothing short of a national intervention, and a 12-step program to break America's oil addiction. Here's how: • Step 1: Let's admit that we have a problem, and commit deeply and truthfully to a national recovery program to break our oil addiction. Transitioning to a clean energy economy will create millions of jobs, clean our air, protect our water supplies, our forests and our climate, and will help to build a safer and more secure world for us all. But breaking our addiction requires humility and an unwavering commitment to change at every level of society. No one gets a free ride anymore. • Step 2: Separate oil and state. Every year, oil companies "invest" millions of dollars in political candidates. In turn, elected officials dole out more than $20 billion a year to prop up fossil fuel projects internationally. We must reduce the oil industry's influence over public governance and eliminate government handouts for dirty oil. • Steps 3-6: Jump-start Detroit and redesign American mobility. The transportation sector accounts for more than two-thirds of all oil consumption in the U.S. Our passenger train system scrounges for funding in Washington while one out of every seven barrels of oil in the world is consumed on America's highways alone. Led by Ford Motor Co., the American automobile industry is driving in reverse. The average Ford vehicle gets worse gas mileage than the Model T did almost 100 years ago. Thomas Friedman is right the stability and very existence of the American automotive industry depends upon American automakers building affordable, fuel-efficient cars that all patriotic Americans can support. Pioneering engineers have already built plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and new companies are inventing super-efficient biofuels made from agricultural waste with no help from Detroit or Washington. • Steps 7-8: Start a rooftop revolution and green the grid. California is enacting regulations to build one million homes with rooftop solar power, generating 3,000 megawatts of power. Studies show that solar energy supports up to 10 times more jobs than dirty fossil fuel energy. A green grid powered by the wind and the sun can recharge car batteries and help us kick our transportation oil habit. • Steps 9-10: Wean to green and fund the future. Capital investment from the world's largest banks is the fuel in the engine, so to speak, of the oil-based economy. Through their investment decisions, large banks can either help to keep us hooked on oil, or rapidly steer us toward a clean energy future. Some banks, including Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs, are leading the way, proving that it is indeed possible to do well by doing good. • Step 11: Adopt a "low-carb" energy diet. Any comprehensive strategy to break our oil addiction must include aggressive measures to reduce energy consumption. A low-carbon energy diet will reduce energy costs and increase competitiveness for American businesses, lower emissions, and produce clean jobs for workers. Efficiency improvements in the last 30 years have doubled the amount of work we get from each barrel of oil. According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, current proven technologies can double oil efficiency again, for less money than would be required to buy the oil we save. • Step 12: Vote. Could it be any clearer that we need responsible and visionary leaders at all levels of government? Like a smoker who says he's going to quit someday even as he lights up another cigarette, the president offered little hope that he would actually break our country's oil addiction. It will take a lot more than a speech and a few research dollars to set us free from oil. Let's get to work. Michael Brune is the executive director of Rainforest Action Network and serves as a founding board member of Oil Change International. © 2006 The Capital Times

Senator Graham gave Alberto a hard time

by John in DC - 2/06/2006 04:05:00 PM

From ThinkProgress:

Lindsey Graham (R-SC) explains the danger of the administration’s legal position:

All I’m saying is the inherent authority argument in its application to me seems to have no boundaries when it comes to executive decisions in a time of war, it deals the Congress and courts out, Mr. Attorney General.

The problem isn’t that the administration is monitoring communications with al Qaeda. That is not only appropriate, it’s essential. The problem is that the legal underpinnings of this particular program, if accepted, would allow for unchecked executive authority.

No president should have unchecked authority, especially not this one.

LINK

....Gonzo Hearings.

Feinstein was very good.

More on that later.

Now we have Sessions of Alabama. Speechifying, as usual:

Ranting about how these hearings are being seen world-wide, and that it makes us look bad that Gonzo and Der Monkey are being called liars.

Fool! If anything it might just make us seem a little more sane.

What John says, and Senator Sessions is a low-life SOB

How low can the Republicans go? Pretty low. Sessions and Cornyn are holding a press event with a family members of the pilot of the American Airlines jet that flew into the Pentagon. And Sessions literally said that there are 3,000 Americans who no longer have civil rights. So, that means, we throw everybody else's civil rights out the window? I can't believe we're being lectured to about civil rights from two Southern Republicans. Astounding.

And, interestingly, the co-pilot of that flight didn't have civil rights when he was alive - he was gay - I'm guessing Sessions and Cornyn aren't too worried about him.

 

LINK

 

Alberto continues to be a led witness.

 

Just now he is talking about all the presidents who broke the FISA laws, before they were even in existence.

 

Historians have come out, over the weekend, and said that most of what Alberto is saying is a crock.

 

Surprise! Surprise!

 

Why can't someone advise Alberto that the fact is: We, the people, do not trust this administration to spy on anyone in the U.S.

 

When you lie to us, over and over, we tend to lose faith in you; all of you.

Hearings.........

We are waiting with baited breath for Fiengold......

 

In the mean time, we suffer through mountains of bullshit...

 

Typical Bushite B.S.:

 

Why did you not ask for the FISA law to be changed (in the days after 9/11, they could have suspended the entire Constitution).

 

We believe we were following the law.

 

What? That is bullshit!!!!!

 

Now, Gonzo is saying that they don't want Congress to act on the FISA laws because the preznit does not want to be limited by anything Congress might legislate.

 

That is about as close to the truth as we are going to get.

 

 

Ongoing Hearing commentary

Kyle is a freakin' fear-monger and and ass.

 

Why aren't Al Qaeda member within the U.S. being monitored?

 

Good grief! Why the hell haven't they been arrested?

 

It would certainly make sense to out-law Al Qaeda in the U.S..

 

Suspending the civil rights, including privacy, of Americans, wholesale? Not so much.

Bush Seeks to Increase Health Savings Accounts

In other words, Bush is proposing more of his owner-ship society scam and other such Ponzi schemes, which will, inevitably, put more money in the hands of the few, while making life insufferable for the rest of us.

 

By Christopher Lee

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 6, 2006; Page A13

In his State of the Union speech last week, President Bush gave short shrift -- just 165 words -- to the subject of health care. Still, administration officials say finding an antidote to rising costs will be a priority for the White House this year.

Bush's prescription includes promoting health savings accounts (HSAs) and "consumer-driven" health plans that he says will trim expenses by prodding Americans to assume greater responsibility for their health care choices.

Read On

Those tax cuts are a real piece of work

Jonathan Chait

February 5, 2006

'UNFORTUNATELY, just as we are seeing how our tax cuts have created jobs and opportunity, some in Washington want to repeal the tax relief," President Bush says in one of his standard speech lines.

Actually, lots of people outside Washington want to repeal the tax cuts as well. But because I happen to live in Washington and want to repeal the tax cuts, maybe I should explain our thinking to the president.

We're running deficits of more than $300 billion even at the peak of an economic expansion. The Republicans have no plans to cut spending anywhere close to the level we would need to make a dent in that figure. If we can't end tax cuts now, when can we? We couldn't cancel the tax cuts three years ago because the economy was in a recession. Now we can't cancel them because the economy is growing. I'm starting to suspect there's never going to be a good time.

Bush's trump card here is his claim that the tax cuts have created jobs. How can us hard-hearted Washington denizens think of reducing the deficit if it's going to cost hard-working Americans their jobs? (At which point, I guess, they would no longer be hard-working.)

So the question becomes whether Bush's tax cuts have really created new jobs.

The White house and its allies like to focus on the approximately 4 million jobs that have appeared since the 2003 tax cut. If the year 2003 sounds suspicious, it ought to. Bush first promised that his 2001 tax cuts would create jobs, and then he promised the same thing with a new round in 2002. Instead, the job market kept shrinking. Bush cut taxes again in 2003, and this time jobs came back.

Of course, the job market was bound to bounce back sometime, so if you keep cutting taxes every year, you can just point to your last one and say it did the trick. (Or else all those previous tax cuts failed utterly, in which case we ought to repeal them.)

Read On

Major Alarm Bells; Is this the end of the Internat

By Jeffrey Chester, The Nation
Posted on February 6, 2006, Printed on February 6, 2006

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency.

According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets -- corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers -- would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us -- from content providers to individual users -- would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.

The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than the cable industry about its strategy for the Internet's future. Senior phone executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies. As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

The phone industry has marshaled its political allies to help win the freedom to impose this new broadband business model. At a recent conference held by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank funded by Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other media companies, there was much discussion of a plan for phone companies to impose fees on a sliding scale, charging content providers different levels of service. "Price discrimination," noted PFF's resident media expert Adam Thierer, "drives the market-based capitalist economy."

Net Neutrality

To ward off the prospect of virtual toll booths on the information highway, some new media companies and public-interest groups are calling for new federal policies requiring "network neutrality" on the Internet. Common Cause, Amazon, Google, Free Press, Media Access Project and Consumers Union, among others, have proposed that broadband providers would be prohibited from discriminating against all forms of digital content. For example, phone or cable companies would not be allowed to slow down competing or undesirable content.

Without proactive intervention, the values and issues that we care about -- civil rights, economic justice, the environment and fair elections -- will be further threatened by this push for corporate control. Imagine how the next presidential election would unfold if major political advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast so that ads from Democratic and Republican candidates were more visible and user-friendly than ads of third-party candidates with less funds.

Consider what would happen if an online advertisement promoting nuclear power prominently popped up on a cable broadband page, while a competing message from an environmental group was relegated to the margins. It is possible that all forms of civic and noncommercial online programming would be pushed to the end of a commercial digital queue.

But such "neutrality" safeguards are inadequate to address more fundamental changes the Bells and cable monopolies are seeking in their quest to monetize the Internet. If we permit the Internet to become a medium designed primarily to serve the interests of marketing and personal consumption, rather than global civic-related communications, we will face the political consequences for decades to come. Unless we push back, the "brandwashing" of America will permeate not only our information infrastructure but global society and culture as well.

Why are the Bells and cable companies aggressively advancing such plans? With the arrival of the long-awaited "convergence" of communications, our media system is undergoing a major transformation. Telephone and cable giants envision a potential lucrative "triple play," as they impose near-monopoly control over the residential broadband services that send video, voice and data communications flowing into our televisions, home computers, cell phones and iPods. All of these many billions of bits will be delivered over the telephone and cable lines.

Video programming is of foremost interest to both the phone and cable companies. The telephone industry, like its cable rival, is now in the TV and media business, offering customers television channels, on-demand videos and games. Online advertising is increasingly integrating multimedia (such as animation and full-motion video) in its pitches. Since video-driven material requires a great deal of Internet bandwidth as it travels online, phone and cable companies want to make sure their television "applications" receive preferential treatment on the networks they operate. And their overall influence over the stream of information coming into your home (or mobile device) gives them the leverage to determine how the broadband business evolves.

Mining Your Data

At the core of the new power held by phone and cable companies are tools delivering what is known as "deep packet inspection." With these tools, AT&T and others can readily know the packets of information you are receiving online -- from e-mail, to websites, to sharing of music, video and software downloads.

These "deep packet inspection" technologies are partly designed to make sure that the Internet pipeline doesn't become so congested it chokes off the delivery of timely communications. Such products have already been sold to universities and large businesses that want to more economically manage their Internet services. They are also being used to limit some peer-to-peer downloading, especially for music.

But these tools are also being promoted as ways that companies, such as Comcast and Bell South, can simply grab greater control over the Internet. For example, in a series of recent white papers, Internet technology giant Cisco urges these companies to "meter individual subscriber usage by application," as individuals' online travels are "tracked" and "integrated with billing systems." Such tracking and billing is made possible because they will know "the identity and profile of the individual subscriber," "what the subscriber is doing" and "where the subscriber resides."

Will Google, Amazon and the other companies successfully fight the plans of the Bells and cable companies? Ultimately, they are likely to cut a deal because they, too, are interested in monetizing our online activities. After all, as Cisco notes, content companies and network providers will need to "cooperate with each other to leverage their value proposition." They will be drawn by the ability of cable and phone companies to track "content usage…by subscriber," and where their online services can be "protected from piracy, metered, and appropriately valued."

Our Digital Destiny

It was former FCC chairman Michael Powell, with the support of then-commissioner and current chair Kevin Martin, who permitted phone and cable giants to have greater control over broadband. Powell and his GOP majority eliminated longstanding regulatory safeguards requiring phone companies to operate as nondiscriminatory networks (technically known as "common carriers"). He refused to require that cable companies, when providing Internet access, also operate in a similar nondiscriminatory manner. As Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig has long noted, it is government regulation of the phone lines that helped make the Internet today's vibrant, diverse and democratic medium.

But now, the phone companies are lobbying Washington to kill off what's left of "common carrier" policy. They wish to operate their Internet services as fully "private" networks. Phone and cable companies claim that the government shouldn't play a role in broadband regulation: Instead of the free and open network that offers equal access to all, they want to reduce the Internet to a series of business decisions between consumers and providers.

Besides their business interests, telephone and cable companies also have a larger political agenda. Both industries oppose giving local communities the right to create their own local Internet wireless or wi-fi networks. They also want to eliminate the last vestige of local oversight from electronic media -- the ability of city or county government, for example, to require telecommunications companies to serve the public interest with, for example, public-access TV channels. The Bells also want to further reduce the ability of the FCC to oversee communications policy. They hope that both the FCC and Congress -- via a new Communications Act -- will back these proposals.

The future of the online media in the United States will ultimately depend on whether the Bells and cable companies are allowed to determine the country's "digital destiny." So before there are any policy decisions, a national debate should begin about how the Internet should serve the public. We must insure that phone and cable companies operate their Internet services in the public interest -- as stewards for a vital medium for free expression.

If Americans are to succeed in designing an equitable digital destiny for themselves, they must mount an intensive opposition similar to the successful challenges to the FCC's media ownership rules in 2003. Without such a public outcry to rein in the GOP's corporate-driven agenda, it is likely that even many of the Democrats who rallied against further consolidation will be "tamed" by the well-funded lobbying campaigns of the powerful phone and cable industry.

Jeffrey Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy (www.democraticmedia.org).

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/31753/

Nitpicker: It would be funny, if...

It would be funny, if...

Remember these widely repeated talking points?

If indeed Plame was a covert agent, why wouldn't the CIA take "affirmative measures to conceal" her identity? The answer may turn on the legal definition of covert. As we also noted in October, an employee is a "covert agent" for the purposes of the statute if and only if he "is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States." - James Taranto, OpinionJournal, July 12, 2004

In the end, we will learn that Rove was not Bob Novak's source, Plame was not covert, and Joe Wilson remains a liar. - Mark Levin, The Corner, October 29, 2005

Plame was working a desk job at CIA headquarters. Furthermore, never mind that the secret identities of CIA covert agents are, in my experience as a foreign reporter, one and the same as the secret identities of Superman, Batman, and Robin: Everybody knows except for a few designated comic book characters. - P.J. O'Rourke, The Weekly Standard, July 9, 2005

Read On

The MySpace horror site of the gay club axe maniac

 

Take a gander at the this little horror site.

 

Bush or no Bush, we apparently have to live with sickos like this, until they freak out the police, who are otherwise occupied with busting pot heads. 

Ambassador de Sade; ought to be hung by his thumbs

Seems the Rethugs of today are some really sick bastards; a danger to us all.

They should be locked up for the benefit of society

By John Gorenfeld, AlterNet

Posted on November 8, 2005, Printed on February 6, 2006

Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian. Unlike the FEMA chief, who had real responsibilities, Sembler sometimes found himself a fifth wheel around his own embassy. As the Washington Monthly has reported, the scandal that claimed Scooter Libby's job last month may have sprung from secret Rome meetings between neocons, an Iran-Contra figure and an Italian intelligence boss who later pushed phony WMD documents -- all behind Sembler's back.

But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this year about overcoming beatings, rape by a counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them take my mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years to overcome.

"It sticks inside you," she told Williams, "it eats at your soul." She told AlterNet that she was committed at 12, in 1980, for nothing more than being caught with a mini-bar-sized liquor bottle, handed out by a classmate whose mother was a flight attendant. Samantha's mother suspected more, and a STRAIGHT expert reassured her fears. The small blonde junior high-schooler was tricked into being taken to the warehouse-like STRAIGHT building. Her mother, told by counselors that her daughter was a liar, was encouraged to trick the girl for her own good.

Overcome by dread in the lobby, Samantha tried to run but was hauled into the back by older girls. Inside, as was standard operating procedure, she began the atonement process that cost over $12,000 a year: all-day re-education rituals in which flapping the arms ("motivating") and chanting signaled submission to "staying straight." She was coerced, she says, into confessing to being a "druggie whore" who went down on truckers for drugs. "You're forced to confess crimes you never committed." (Some survivors call it extortion.)

Melvin Sembler stepped down earlier this year as Our Man In Rome -- he also served under the first Bush as Ambassador to Australia. Were Monroe's story unique, his STRAIGHT clinics might still be in business. Instead, his creation, which he stubbornly defends, closed under a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by 1993, ranging from sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for hours while being spat upon -- humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.

Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked it dry, and state health officials yanked its licenses after media reports of teen torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped punishment. As one of the preeminent and hardest-working GOP fundraisers, Sembler has received the honor of living during the George W. Bush presidency at the Villa Taverna, the official residence for the U.S. ambassador, which has the largest private garden in Rome. One night in May at "The Magic Kingdom" (as Mel and Betty call it), the dining room filled with smoke from fine cigars, as the ambassador entertained Bush Sr. and an entourage -- until Betty complained that the old friends were stinking up "my house," the Washington Post reported.

He's come home, but still wafting across national drug policy is the influence of his STRAIGHT, which has legally changed its identity to the Drug Free America Foundation (director Calvina Fay denies it's the same organization but the name change is listed in Florida corporate filings). Subsidized by tax dollars, it lobbies for severe narcotics policies and workplace drug testing, with an advisory board that includes the like of Gov. Jeb Bush and his wife Columba, and Homeland Security Director of Public Safety Christy McCampbell. A more pressing issue is that former overseers of Sembler's company, true believers in the STRAIGHT model, are still running spin-off businesses that treat teens with the old methods.

Starting out STRAIGHT

The story begins in 1976 when Sembler, who'd made his fortune in Florida real estate, founded STRAIGHT from the ashes of The Seed -- an earlier program suspended by the U.S. Senate for tactics reminiscent, said a senator, of Communist POW camps. But as the Reagan years rolled into view, and a climate of fear nurtured a Shock and Awe approach to teens, the Semblers found a new world of acceptance for an anything-goes treatment business, meting out punishment in privately run warehouses. Endorsers from Nancy Reagan to George H.W. Bush lent their names to the program, celebrating a role model weapon in the "war on drugs."

Nine years before the elder Bush took office, Sembler was a faithful political supporter, and raising millions beginning in '79 for the Bushes' clash with Reagan for the Republican nomination. In 1988, as Bush finally accepted the GOP's nomination for president, Sembler sat in the front row. With his man in the White House, STRAIGHT would become a vehicle for purchasing eminence as a Drug War thinker. By 1988, Sembler wasn't just running the Vice President's "Team 100" soft money campaign and enjoying steak dinners with him -- he was sojourning in George and Barbara Bush's living room, briefing the candidate on drug policy. As a token of his friendship, he gave Bush a new tennis racket, receiving this note in return: "Maybe we can play at Camp David someday."

And Sembler's success grew and grew as the Clinton era spooled out. The slickly dressed go-getter smashed records as RNC Finance Chairman from 1997 to 2000, chairing the "Regents" club that accommodated such super donors as Enron's Ken Lay to fund George W. Bush's campaign machine.

Meanwhile, a coast-to-coast trail of human wreckage had ensued during STRAIGHT's reign from 1976 to 1993 -- its survivors claimed physical, sexual and psychological trauma. The Web sites Fornits.com and TheStraights.com have collected many of their stories. Posts Kelly Caputo, an '88 alumna: "I don't think I will ever be the same. My every thought has been violated, confused, degraded and warped."

"My best guess is that at least half of the kids were abused," says Dr. Arnold Trebach, a professor emeritus at American University who created the Drug Policy Foundation to find alternatives to harsh laws. He has singled out STRAIGHT in his book "The Great Drug War" as among drug warriors' worst mistakes.

But today, Sembler's trail of purchased political friendships has led him through the opulent doors of the $83 million "Mel Sembler Building" in Rome, christened this year with help from a longtime ally in Congress, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-FL). Not the palace where Sembler worked as ambassador, but another of the Eternal City's architectural treasures, built in 1927 and now dedicated as an annex to the U.S. Embassy in a $30 million renovation at taxpayer expense. "Narcissus is now Greek and Roman," said the Washington Post of the monument. No one could remember any other diplomat receiving such honors, not even Benjamin Franklin.

"We don't do that, do we?" George W. Bush reportedly told the congressman, according to Congressman C.W. Bill Young 's (R-Florida) speech during the ceremony. "We don't name buildings for ambassadors where they have served."

"Mr. President," the politician replied, "I introduced the bill and you signed it." Bush may have missed the Sembler Building provision, tucked as it was into an appropriations bill. But he owed much to the longtime family friend, whom he thanked on "The Jim Lehrer Report" [RealAudio] in 2000 for raising $21.3 million at a single dinner in April, a new record. Asked what favors the money paid for, Bush professed wonderment at the premise: "I know there's this kind of sentiment now -- I heard it during the primaries ... [that] if someone contributes to a person's campaign, there's this great sense of being beholden."

At the Sembler Building, visitors can stroll among the Italian frescoes of cherubs and heavens, and marvel at the spoils of Bush family loyalty, and meditate on the human costs that made Sembler's paradise possible.

STRAIGHT's practices

Melvin Sembler's Jekyll-and-Hyde empire appealed to parents with cheery pamphlets bearing pictures of happy and reunited families that had put their horrible pasts behind them.

Even Princess Diana had graced the clinics with a visit, celebrating STRAIGHT as a humanitarian institution. George H.W. Bush named the program among his "thousand points of light." But many called it Hell.

Taking in new kids without much discrimination -- many addiction-free -- STRAIGHT staff assured parents that a variety of troubled teens could benefit from their brand of discipline.

Vanished from home and school, the newcomer would enter the care of a "host home" overseen, at night, by the same counselors up in her face by day. Over the months, patients like Samantha Monroe earned back basic privileges like speaking or, in the distant future, going to the bathroom alone, without an ever-present minder's thumb in the belt loop -- literally. The counselors were themselves STRAIGHT kids, who had been molded into drug warriors in the heat of humiliation. They'd learned to play along and join the winning side, becoming the hall monitors and the muscle that enforced the rules.

From the outset, STRAIGHT's method was on thin ice with regulators. The underpinnings had long struck critics as more Pyongyang than Pinellas County. Sembler took his blueprint from another St. Petersburg program, The Seed, in which his son had enrolled in the 1970s. The Senate was less impressed than Sembler with The Seed. Senator Sam Ervin, who'd brought down Richard Nixon, killed the program's federal subsidies for funding a method "similar to the highly refined 'brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans." Ervin's 1974 probe into the rise of treatment abuse articulated an admirable American ideal: that "if our society is to remain free, one man must not be empowered to change another's personality and dictate the values, thoughts and feelings of another." Sembler had other ideals in mind, as hundreds of STRAIGHT victims would later attest.

Finally, one by one, the 12 clinics, which had once formed a nine-state empire, went dark. Much of the money was lost in settlements, but jury verdicts offered a peek into the regularity of the abuses. Florida patient Karen Norton was awarded $721,000 by a jury after being thrown against a wall in 1982 by the Semblers' treatment guru of choice: Dr. Miller Newton, whose unaccredited Ph.D was in public administration, but was tapped by the Semblers as STRAIGHT National Clinical Director. He's emblematic of how the creature Sembler built just won't stop sprouting heads, having personally launched spinoff businesses with names like KIDS. As a result, Newton has paid out over $12 million to his victims. Having moved back to Florida, he now calls himself "Friar Cassian," a priest in the non-Catholic Antiochian Orthodox church.

But just last month, Betty Sembler testified in a case against a STRAIGHT critic that Miller Newton, the dark cleric of rehab, is "a very close and dear friend and a valued one," and an "outstanding individual." Had he committed outrageous acts? "Absolutely not," she said, adding that it was incomprehensible that ex-STRAIGHT teen Richard Bradbury was picketing Newton. Thanks to her judgment of character, Newton has been given a voice in national drug policy, listed as a participant in a Drug Free America Foundation "International Scientific and Medical Forum."

From the beginning, critics were shocked to find that the keepers freely acknowledged many of the tactics -- yet insisted they were necessary. Mel Sembler even seems to have been emboldened by painful questions about his clinics. "We've got nothing to hide -- we're saving lives," he said in 1977 after six directors quit over practices that included kicking a restrained youth. He remained closely involved in personnel management. Almost two decades later, recalling how the ACLU was furious about STRAIGHT's practices, Sembler told Florida Trend Magazine in 1997 -- "with a grin," the reporter wrote -- that "it just shows that we must have been doing things right."

And rather than clean up Florida's program, he apparently leaned on health inspectors in 1989 to go easy on it. Reports of a cover-up wouldn't emerge for four more years -- long years, for the teenagers committed to a program that wouldn't lose its license until 1993. STRAIGHT foe Bradbury, believing he'd been "brainwashed" into becoming an abusive counselor, brought the clinics to the attention of the state after years of protest. Inspector Lowell Clary of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services found that reports of illegally restrained and stomped-on teens had been swept under the rug, likely with help from Republican state senators, who went unnamed, but made phone calls urging the clinic stayed open. A "persistent foul odor" hung over this use of power, said a St. Petersburg Times Op-Ed applauding the death of STRAIGHT.

"While at the facility," wrote Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services Acting Inspector General Lowell Clary on May 19, 1993, "the team [of inspectors in 1989] received a phone call informing them that no matter what they found, STRAIGHT would receive their license." "If you do anything other than what I tell you on this issue, I will fire you on the spot," an HRS official was told. Clary wasn't positive, but evidence suggested that "pressure may have been generated by Ambassador Sembler and other state senators."

By now, Clinton was in office. Four years earlier, while young "druggies" were still being restrained to chairs for 12 hours, denied medication and sent to the hospital with injuries, the 1989 report would have tarnished President George H.W. Bush's "points of light." Bush had designated STRAIGHT an American treasure. On that fragile premise, not one but two STRAIGHT presidents had been named ambassadors in 1989, the year of the Florida inspection. Sembler got the Australian assignment. The other post sent co-founder Joseph Zappala to Spain armed for diplomacy with a high school education. The two were mocked in People as "too hick to hack it." They'd clowned around during the nomination process, turning in nearly identical answers on Senate disclosure forms. In the "languages spoken" box Sembler had written, humorously, "English (fluent)."

That took real cheek. These two pranksters had been leaders of a group characterized as a destructive cult by top authorities on cult abuse ranging from Steve Hassan of the Freedom Of Mind Center to the late Dr. Margaret Singer of UC Berkeley, an expert on the abuse of American servicemen in the Korean War whose expert testimony was used to close a facility in Cincinnati. Bradbury, the whistleblower, concurs, saying the program modified his personality into something monstrous. Bradbury attended the St. Petersburg, Florida clinic. "You don't understand what they did to these kids," Bradbury told AlterNet. "They put stuff up my butt."

But you wouldn't know from Sembler's State Department biography that his claim to fame has such a shoddy legal record. The program has the honor of being described as a "remarkable program" in his bio, and it credits STRAIGHT with saving 12,000 kids. The ambassador did not return attempts to contact him during the reporting for this story, and declined the author's interview requests last year through a U.S. Embassy spokesman.

In addition to receiving a second Ambassadorship from the second Bush president, his Governor Jeb Bush named August 8, 2000, "Betty Sembler Day" for her "work protecting children from the dangers of drugs," labeling her "ambassadorable." The next year, at a drug policy conference in Florida, a writer from the Canadian legalization magazine Cannibis Culture asked her about the STRAIGHT victims. "They should get a life," he quotes her as replying. "There's nothing to apologize for. The [drug] legalizers are the ones who should be apologizing."

The ambassador's wife is an outspoken critic of what she calls "medical excuse marijuana," and serves on the boards of such mighty anti-legalization campaigns as the International Task Force On Strategic Drug Policy, which works with Latin American countries to lobby for harsh drug laws. Mel himself used his Rome ambassadorial pulpit for a global conference in 2003, appealing to the "moral imperatives" of the drug war and urging a "culture of disapproval of drug abuse." DFAF, founded by the Semblers, receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the Small Business Association to advance workplace drug testing in businesses -- for example, a handout in 2000 of $314,000. Betty Sembler is president and Melvin has served as chairman.

STRAIGHT's Spin-offs

Though Sembler's clinics were shuttered, the spirit of STRAIGHT lives on as a flourishing model for drug rehabilitation. That includes offshoots run by former STRAIGHT staff, such as the Orlando STRAIGHT spin-off, SAFE, which was described by 16-year-old Leah Marchessault in 2000 as "something from the Twilight Zone" in a report by Florida's WAMI TV station.

Leah had gone to visit her sister, in for heroin abuse, only to be told she herself was a "druggie" -- sound familiar? And when Leah fled, she was pinned against a wall and assaulted by a pack of nine women members who forced her to undergo a full-body search. Another girl told WAMI of being "forced to stand for about an hour and a half, the attention being focused on me, and about every 10 minutes I was told how I was full of crap, how I needed to be flushed out."

Despite their cheery names -- SAFE in Orlando, Florida; Kids Helping Kids of Cincinnati, Ohio; Growing Together of Lake Worth, Florida -- these barely regulated warehouses cry out for oversight. Hungry for recruits, they appeal to the fears of parents by warning a child will die on the streets if uncorrected by their methods.

In the TV report, the presence of a spokeswoman named Loretta Parrish was evidence that SAFE was the child of STRAIGHT -- she'd been the local STRAIGHT's marketing director until 1992, when the old company closed under state scrutiny, and SAFE, a new company, almost immediately sprang up to replace it. A new head for the hydra: Parrish didn't dispute the visiting sister's horrifying experience, but called it necessary, as if explaining something something obvious to her since the '80s.

"Yes we do require that," said Parrish. "And if they don't, then they have to remove the other child. This is a family treatment program. And unless the entire family is in treatment, it doesn't work."

"We do not do a strip search that is different from any other treatment program," she adds, and later described the teens and moms attacking SAFE as "a coalition of cockroaches." Gov. Jeb Bush even endorsed SAFE in a letter he wrote as "a valuable tool."

And so with the former STRAIGHT bosses rich in Republican honors, and insulated in a political Xanadu not unlike the alternate reality field engulfing the White House, a new generation of teenagers is going under the hammer, as an old generation of victims finds cold comfort for their own suffering. If this is the compassionate kind of conservatism, how harsh the other variety must be.

John Gorenfeld, a freelance writer in San Francisco, will be blogging further details of this story at gorenfeld.net/john.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/27725/

Papers show Bush may have been briefed on Joe Wilson

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, Patrick Fitzgerald, has indicated in correspondence unsealed in federal court in recent days that President Bush might have been briefed regarding former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s February 2002 CIA-sponsored mission to Niger during regular morning intelligence briefing.

The information provided to Bush occurred in the form of one of the “President’s Daily Briefs,” a typically 30-to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. They are a compiliation of that day's most closely held and highly classified intelligence-- and written specifically for the "First Customer", meaning the President of the United States. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services.

The information about Bush having been briefed about Wilson’s mission to Niger is contained in court papers filed in federal court. Attorneys for I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, President Bush’s former chief of staff and national security advisors, were seeking information about presidential PDBs from the special prosecutor, as part of a discovery effort to defend their client.

Read On

 

Oh, by all means, brief the preznit on that notorious and dangerous ex-diplomat, who worked for Bush I.

 

The Bush administration is only interested in Intelligence on anyone who might do them damage. The country? Not so much.

Are all those religious, nutcase, homophobes really as.....

....shall we say, gay as a flock of geese in a closet? Feb 5 2006

By Peter Tatchell, The Sunday Sun

Research by an acclaimed US psychologist suggests that 80 per cent of men who are homophobic have secret homosexual feelings. This finding lends scientific support to the long-standing speculation that those who shout the loudest against homosexuality have something to hide. The research results were published in the prestigious Journal of Abnormal Psychology, with the backing of the American Psychological Association. In tests conducted by Prof. Henry E Adams of the University of Georgia, homophobic men who said they were exclusively heterosexual were shown gay sex videos. Four out of five became sexually aroused by the homoerotic imagery, as recorded by a plethysmograph . . . a calibrated band fitted around the penis, which measures any enlargement. Story continues Is Dobson's head exploding yet?

Bushwhacked in Bushworld

"Beam Me Up, Scottie!"

By Tom Engelhardt

Just in case you hadn't noticed, we're in a Bushworld too absurd for words. But that hasn't stopped this administration from yakking its collective head off.

Over the last week: The President came out for an ethanol-powered globe -- that's corn on the cob to you, buddy -- while his Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld announced that our poor planet had somehow gotten more terroristically dangerous since George took the helm. (No fault of his, natch.) Last Tuesday night, of course, the Great Helmsman stood on the congressional deck of state -- perhaps confusing it with the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln (Didn't anyone hear me? Mission accomplished!) -- and declared that we were on nothing less than the "road to victory" in Iraq. (Unfortunately, the message seems not to have gotten through to Iraqis lining that road with IEDs, possibly due to power outages in that country.) Intelligence "Tsar" John Negroponte visited Congress to deliver the news that Earth was virtually swarming with terrorist groups which already had their hands on WMD. (Sleep well, Virginia.) At the same time, multitasking like mad, the administration continued its noble war on T-shirts; the Pentagon put political cartoonists on notice that the military high command wasn't going to take a pen jab lying down (no sir!); and KBR, one of two subsidiaries of the Halliburton Corporation (the other being the U.S. government), received an almost $400 million dollar contract to build emergency "detention facilities" in the homeland (after much practice at Guantanamo). Oh yes, and in their spare time, the President and his closest advisors happily continued to exercise another of those handy prerogatives of the Commander-in-Chief in wartime by essentially amending the Constitution to wipe out the odd check or balance.

Am I going too fast for you? Then, take a breath, buckle on your seatbelt, put on your helmet, check your oxygen gauge, and then let me beam these stories up to you one at a time (along with a few other gems stored in the Mother Ship of my brain).

George's Half-Step Program to Energy Independence So this was the year that the President of Oil discovered we were "addicted" to the stuff and, worse yet, that it came from "unstable parts of the world" -- hold on a sec, while I fill my gas tank -- but he also came up with a solution! Thanks to his Advanced Energy Initiative, ethanol, essentially a corn product, would power us into the future along with hybrid car engines and the odd nuclear power plant. Twenty years from now, he assured us in his State of the Union Address, we more or less won't know the Middle East exists.

 Read On

Bush's I-Spy Lie

By Glenn Greenwald, AlterNet
Posted on February 6, 2006, Printed on February 6, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/31856/

One of the most significant yet ignored aspects of the growing NSA scandal is the way in which the Bush administration deliberately and repeatedly deceived Congress, from 2001 until the administration's eavesdropping program was disclosed in December. Over the course of those four years, the Bush administration led the Congress, on numerous occasions, to falsely believe that it was eavesdropping only with the judicial oversight and approval required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).

As part of this deceit, the administration even encouraged Congress to engage in the humiliating spectacle of actively debating whether FISA should be amended, to expand the administration's eavesdropping powers, when all the while the administration had secretly decided it had no obligation to comply with that law, and could therefore exercise all of the eavesdropping powers it wanted.

Chief among the critical values at stake in next week's congressional hearings to investigate these actions, is whether Congress, the representative body of the people and the branch designated by the Constitution to make the laws, still has any meaningful role to play in our system of government.

If meaningful hearings cannot be held on this crime, then I see no real point is us continuing to pay Congress and their staffers. It is a waste of money at a time when services to the the people are being cut to the bone.

In June, 2002 -- months after the President ordered eavesdropping to be conducted without FISA warrants -- senators from both parties introduced legislation to liberalize FISA and expand the administration's eavesdropping powers. Sens. Michael DeWine (R-OH), Charles Schumer (D-NY) and John Kyl (R-AZ) all introduced FISA amendments and, in hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee, they repeatedly expressed the belief that amendments to FISA were necessary for fighting terrorism.

The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee held the 2002 hearings on possible FISA amendments proves that the committee members were unaware that the administration was not complying with that law. Senators would not have engaged in the pointless act of introducing amendments to expand surveillance powers if they had known President Bush had already decided he was above the rule of law.

As the Senate Intelligence Committee debated whether to amend FISA, the administration never once advised the committee that such amendments were a waste of time. Instead, President Bush allowed the Senate to go through the absurd spectacle of debating changes to a law which his administration had already secretly circumvented.

Worse still, the administration actively and repeatedly misled the Intelligence Committee, sending representatives of the Justice Department, FBI and CIA to the 2002 hearings in order to support the proposed, bi-partisan amendments to FISA and to make statements which clearly (and falsely) conveyed to the Senators that the administration was still obtaining warrants before eavesdropping.

But as we now know, all of these congressional proceedings regarding FISA were a complete sham. Months earlier, the administration had decided it could engage in warrantless eavesdropping, despite FISA making it a criminal offense to do so. The Bush Justice Department concluded that the president's eavesdropping powers -- even as they pertained to American citizens inside the United States -- could not be limited, even by congressional laws.

A worse institutional humiliation is difficult to imagine. The administration not only permitted but actively encouraged these senators to introduce legislation amending FISA, hold hearings, call witnesses, and make grand statements about how enacting these amendments was of the utmost importance. The fact is that nothing was less important than what Congress did with FISA because the administration had secretly bestowed upon itself unlimited power.

The theories embraced by the Bush Administration are both radical and unprecedented. These theories hold that, with regard to responses to the threat of terrorism both abroad and within the U.S., decisions are "for the President alone to make" and neither the Congress nor the courts can limit the president in any way.

Thus, the question faced by the Congress is whether it will continue to stand by and allow the administration to claim unchecked power and relegate the Congress to an impotent, useless appendage.

The first chance the Congress has to answer that question will be on February 6 when it questions Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and it is not hyperbole to say that what is at stake are the founding and most fundamental principles for how our government operates.

Glenn Greenwald is a New York-based constitutional litigator and author of the political blog, Unclaimed Territory.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/31856/

Connecticut Opens MySpace.Com Probe

February 5, 2006

MySpace.com • Connecticut Opens MySpace.Com Probe • Consumer Complaints

Police in Connecticut say that as many as seven teenage girls may have been sexually assaulted by men they met through MySpace.com. The girls say they were fondled or had sex with men who turned out to be older than they claimed.

Police say one man traveled 1,000 miles to prey on one of the girls he found through the site, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Saying he was "deeply disturbed" by the reports, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said he is investigating whether criminal charges can be brought against the site's operators.

Users of the social networking site create profiles that can include photos, personal information and even cell phone numbers.

"My office has received numerous complaints over the last month that minors can easily post and view inappropriate and sexually suggestive material on Myspace.com, possibly in violation of state law," Blumenthal said.

"My office investigated and confirmed that children can readily view not only inappropriate material, but also obscene images through the site's free and publicly accessible areas. The site posts no warnings that pornography and adult content are present and has no mechanism to prevent minors from viewing obscene material," Blumenthal said.

MySpace is one of the fastest growing websites in the country, collecting more than 50 million members in just two years. But there is a dark side to the site.

"It is a predator's dream come true, this Web site," Middletown, Conn., Police Sgt. Bill McKenna said. "Because not only can you see them, but you can see their friends. You can find out where they go to middle school and high school."

Not many parents are aware of the site but a few are beginning to campaign for tougher enforcement of the site's existing rules.

"Many of the (profiles) are sexual in nature and riddled with profanity, which is not allowed according to their TOC, but they're all up there. Their TOC is bogus. Its just posted to cover them legally. They're clearly not monitoring the activity of their 'members,' said Augustine of Glen Oaks, NY, in a complaint to ConsumerAffairs.Com.

"Kids can easily view the very sexually explicit sites of adults ... and there are plenty. One under-age kid talks about his 'love of his gun' .. well rememeber Columbine?" she asked.

Connecticut's Blumenthal agrees.

"I am shocked and dismayed that the operators of Myspace.com fail to shield minors from pornographic images and that the web site may have been used by sexual predators targeting minors. As a parent, I find it appalling and abhorrent that a web site would so poorly police its pages. This site is a parent's worst nightmare.

"Internet sites have a legal and moral responsibility to protect children from obscene images and inappropriate material. Internet site owners who shirk their legal responsibilities should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

MySpace.com said in a statement that it has a series of initiatives designed to protect its users against inappropriate conduct and content. They include dedicating workers to monitor the site 24 hours a day, reviewing every image hosted by the site and working with law enforcement agencies.

The site prohibits use by anyone younger than 14, though a disclaimer says the site operators can't always tell if users are lying about their ages.

"It is extremely easy for any underage kid to access the site," said Augustine in her complaint. "You don't even have to be a member to access member websites. They're available by just doing a search on Google. They refer to their TOC but naturally it means squat."

Many school districts around the country have blocked the site from their computers.

Murdoch's Plans

Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns Fox Television, bought MySpace.com in July 2005 for $580 million. He recently told investors he had plans to expand the site internationally.

"We're taking it out around the world," he said. "First in Britain, then in Western Europe, and then in other countries."

The site recently began offering free video downloads. It also plans to launch a branded instant messenger client as well as voice communications.

Speaking at the Citigroup Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference, Murdoch discussed morphing MySpace.com into a "next-generation portal."

"Young people today -- who are the great users of the Internet -- know exactly what sites they want to go to and they go there, they don't have to work their way through Yahoo!'s homepage, or MSN," he said.

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