The New York Times
The Capitol's Revolting Door
A Senate hearing has provided a rarefied look at Washington's ever-whirring carousel for business lobbyists and government appointees, who spin back and forth between the private and public sectors in a blur of opportunism. The Interior Department's former deputy secretary, Steven Griles - who had been tapped for that job by the Bush administration when he worked as a lobbyist for the mining industry - was accused of using his government post to carry out the bidding of Jack Abramoff, the indicted power lobbyist who sought favorable Interior rulings for Indian-tribe clients vying for casinos.
A former counsel at the department testified that Mr. Griles had meddled aggressively in decisions affecting Abramoff clients. And Senator John McCain produced e-mail about Mr. Abramoff's trying to woo the deputy secretary's favor by offering a lucrative job in - where else? - lobbying.
Mr. Griles denied any inside favoritism and said the job offer had surprised him enough to refer it to ethics officials. This had to be bemusing to Capitol veterans, who are aware that lobbyists are subjected to some of the flimsiest rules in Washington.
As the hearing went forward, it was hard to tell where lobbying ends and public service begins. Mr. Griles turned out to have met Mr. Abramoff by way of a political friend of Interior Secretary Gale Norton. That friend, Italia Federici, is the head of a conservative environmental lobbying group that received Abramoff donations. Senator McCain, saying she seemed to be valued for having "juice" at Interior, is seeking her testimony.
Then there were side tales of Ralph Reed, once the boy-wonder promoter of moral values at the Christian Coalition, and his lobbying ties to Mr. Abramoff's casino dealings.
Stay tuned, but don't ask where it will end, because lobbying is a $3-billion-a-year Capitol institution these days. The hearings have established that for all the election-winning talk of big government as the problem, it can also provide a sweet perch for the victors. Mr. Griles, incidentally, left public service after four years and has returned to the private sector. He is a lobbyist.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Defending Imperial Nudity
New York Times
Defending Imperial Nudity
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Hans Christian Andersen understood bad rulers. "The Emperor's New
Suit" doesn't end with everyone acclaiming the little boy for telling
the truth. It ends with the emperor and his officials refusing to
admit their mistake.
I've laid my hands on additional material, which Andersen failed to
publish, describing what happened after the imperial procession was
over.
The talk-show host Bill O'Reilly yelled, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"
at the little boy. Calling the boy a nut, he threatened to go to the
boy's house and "surprise" him.
Fox News repeatedly played up possible finds of imperial clothing,
then buried reports discrediting these stories. Months after the
naked procession, a poll found that many of those getting most of
their news from Fox believed that the emperor had in fact been clothed.
Imperial officials eventually admitted that they couldn't find any
evidence that the suit ever existed, or that there had even been an
effort to produce a suit. They insisted, however, that they had found
evidence of wardrobe-manufacturing-and-distribution-related program
activities.
After the naked procession, pro-wardrobe pundits denied that the
emperor was at fault. The blame, they said, rested with the C.I.A.,
which had provided the emperor with bad intelligence about the
potential for a suit.
Even a quick Web search shows that before the procession, those same
pundits had written articles attacking C.I.A. analysts because those
analysts had refused to support strong administration assertions
about the invisible suit.
Although the imperial administration was conservative, its wardrobe
plans drew crucial support from a group of liberal pundits. After the
emperor's nakedness was revealed, the online magazine Slate held a
symposium in which eight of these pundits were asked whether the fact
that there was no suit had led them to reconsider their views. Only
one admitted that he had been wrong - and he had changed his mind
about the suit before the procession.
Helen Thomas, the veteran palace correspondent, opposed the suit
project from the beginning. When she pointed out that the emperor's
clothes had turned out not to exist, the imperial press secretary
accused her of being "opposed to the broader war on nakedness."
Even though skeptics about the emperor's suit had been vindicated, TV
news programs continued to portray those skeptics as crazy people.
For example, the news networks showed, over and over, a clip of the
little boy shouting at a party. The clip was deeply misleading: he
had been shouting to be heard over background noise, which the
ambient microphone didn't pick up. Nonetheless, "the scream" became a
staple of political discourse.
The emperor gave many speeches in which he declared that his wardrobe
was the "central front" in the war on nakedness.
The editor of one liberal but pro-wardrobe magazine admitted that he
had known from the beginning that there were good reasons to doubt
the emperor's trustworthiness. But he said that he had put those
doubts aside because doing so made him "feel superior to the
Democrats." Unabashed, he continued to denounce those who had opposed
the suit as soft on sartorial security.
At the Radio and Television Correspondents' annual dinner, the
emperor entertained the assembled journalists with a bit of humor: he
showed slides of himself looking under furniture in his office,
searching for the nonexistent suit. Some of the guests were aghast,
but most of the audience roared with laughter.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee oversaw an inquiry
into how the government had come to believe in a nonexistent suit.
The first part focused on the mistakes made by career government
tailors. But the second part of the inquiry, on the role of the
imperial administration in promoting faulty tailoring, appeared to
vanish from the agenda.
Two and a half years after the emperor's naked procession, a majority
of citizens believed that the imperial administration had
deliberately misled the country. Several former officials had gone
public with tales of an administration obsessed with its wardrobe
from Day 1.
But apologists for the emperor continued to dismiss any suggestion
that officials had lied to the nation. It was, they said, a crazy
conspiracy theory. After all, back in 1998 Bill Clinton thought there
was a suit.
And they all lived happily ever after - in the story. Here in
reality, a large and growing number are being killed by roadside bombs.
Defending Imperial Nudity
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Hans Christian Andersen understood bad rulers. "The Emperor's New
Suit" doesn't end with everyone acclaiming the little boy for telling
the truth. It ends with the emperor and his officials refusing to
admit their mistake.
I've laid my hands on additional material, which Andersen failed to
publish, describing what happened after the imperial procession was
over.
The talk-show host Bill O'Reilly yelled, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"
at the little boy. Calling the boy a nut, he threatened to go to the
boy's house and "surprise" him.
Fox News repeatedly played up possible finds of imperial clothing,
then buried reports discrediting these stories. Months after the
naked procession, a poll found that many of those getting most of
their news from Fox believed that the emperor had in fact been clothed.
Imperial officials eventually admitted that they couldn't find any
evidence that the suit ever existed, or that there had even been an
effort to produce a suit. They insisted, however, that they had found
evidence of wardrobe-manufacturing-and-distribution-related program
activities.
After the naked procession, pro-wardrobe pundits denied that the
emperor was at fault. The blame, they said, rested with the C.I.A.,
which had provided the emperor with bad intelligence about the
potential for a suit.
Even a quick Web search shows that before the procession, those same
pundits had written articles attacking C.I.A. analysts because those
analysts had refused to support strong administration assertions
about the invisible suit.
Although the imperial administration was conservative, its wardrobe
plans drew crucial support from a group of liberal pundits. After the
emperor's nakedness was revealed, the online magazine Slate held a
symposium in which eight of these pundits were asked whether the fact
that there was no suit had led them to reconsider their views. Only
one admitted that he had been wrong - and he had changed his mind
about the suit before the procession.
Helen Thomas, the veteran palace correspondent, opposed the suit
project from the beginning. When she pointed out that the emperor's
clothes had turned out not to exist, the imperial press secretary
accused her of being "opposed to the broader war on nakedness."
Even though skeptics about the emperor's suit had been vindicated, TV
news programs continued to portray those skeptics as crazy people.
For example, the news networks showed, over and over, a clip of the
little boy shouting at a party. The clip was deeply misleading: he
had been shouting to be heard over background noise, which the
ambient microphone didn't pick up. Nonetheless, "the scream" became a
staple of political discourse.
The emperor gave many speeches in which he declared that his wardrobe
was the "central front" in the war on nakedness.
The editor of one liberal but pro-wardrobe magazine admitted that he
had known from the beginning that there were good reasons to doubt
the emperor's trustworthiness. But he said that he had put those
doubts aside because doing so made him "feel superior to the
Democrats." Unabashed, he continued to denounce those who had opposed
the suit as soft on sartorial security.
At the Radio and Television Correspondents' annual dinner, the
emperor entertained the assembled journalists with a bit of humor: he
showed slides of himself looking under furniture in his office,
searching for the nonexistent suit. Some of the guests were aghast,
but most of the audience roared with laughter.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee oversaw an inquiry
into how the government had come to believe in a nonexistent suit.
The first part focused on the mistakes made by career government
tailors. But the second part of the inquiry, on the role of the
imperial administration in promoting faulty tailoring, appeared to
vanish from the agenda.
Two and a half years after the emperor's naked procession, a majority
of citizens believed that the imperial administration had
deliberately misled the country. Several former officials had gone
public with tales of an administration obsessed with its wardrobe
from Day 1.
But apologists for the emperor continued to dismiss any suggestion
that officials had lied to the nation. It was, they said, a crazy
conspiracy theory. After all, back in 1998 Bill Clinton thought there
was a suit.
And they all lived happily ever after - in the story. Here in
reality, a large and growing number are being killed by roadside bombs.
Senate approves billions in spending cuts
Reuters
Senate approves billions in spending cuts
By Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Thursday approved around $36 billion in net spending cuts over five years in a first step toward slowing the explosive growth of popular programs that help the poor and the elderly as well as students, farmers and others.
The partisan 52-47 vote came as Democrats mostly boycotted the initiative and argued that even more onerous cuts on the poor being advanced by the House of Representatives would end up in the final version of legislation.
Republicans touted the spending-cut bill, the first of its kind since 1997, as an "aggressive proposal" to bring mandatory programs under control. Even so, the estimated $36 billion in savings would be dwarfed by the $13.8 trillion the government is expected to spend over the next five years under a Republican budget plan approved in April.
"Today, the Senate took an important step forward in cutting the deficit. I commend Senate leadership and the other senators who supported this spending-reduction legislation," President George W. Bush said in a statement.
"Congress needs to send me a spending-reduction package this year to keep us on track to cutting the deficit in half by 2009," he said.
Democrats ridiculed the effort, saying the Republican-named "Deficit Reduction Act of 2005" would, in the words of Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, be more aptly called the "Moral Disaster of Monumental Proportion Reconciliation Act."
Democrats say the bill would actually achieve no deficit-reduction if Republicans also succeed with plans to pass additional tax cuts for the wealthy and others.
With a $70 billion price tag, the tax bill would add $34 billion to U.S. deficits after counting the spending cuts.
GRAB-BAG OF CUTS
Besides saving about $10 billion over five years by restructuring some Medicare and Medicaid health programs for the elderly and poor, the Senate plan is a grab-bag of spending reductions, including nearly $1.3 billion over five years on farm subsidies and $5.4 billion in higher premiums companies would pay to a federally backed pension fund.
Also as part of the bill, big oil won a victory with narrow approval of a controversial plan to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
Gulf Coast states, devastated by Hurricane Katrina last summer, would get nearly $3 billion in new funds to help restore coastal areas and aid schools.
The bill also provides an $11.4 billion blueprint for funding Amtrak operations and capital needs. The plan includes proposals to competitively bid some routes and reform business practices of Amtrak, the federally subsidized railroad.
While the Bush administration supports the spending-cut goals of the Senate and House, it has warned senators that it could veto the bill. It objected to a provision that deletes a Medicare fund the White House believes ensures that private health-care plans take part in the federal health care program.
Across Capitol Hill, the House Budget Committee, on a nearly party-line 21-17 vote, approved a Republican plan to cut a net $54 billion from mandatory programs over five years.
The proposal includes $844 million in food stamp cuts for the poor by tightening some eligibility requirements and cutting programs related to child support and child welfare.
Senate approves billions in spending cuts
By Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Thursday approved around $36 billion in net spending cuts over five years in a first step toward slowing the explosive growth of popular programs that help the poor and the elderly as well as students, farmers and others.
The partisan 52-47 vote came as Democrats mostly boycotted the initiative and argued that even more onerous cuts on the poor being advanced by the House of Representatives would end up in the final version of legislation.
Republicans touted the spending-cut bill, the first of its kind since 1997, as an "aggressive proposal" to bring mandatory programs under control. Even so, the estimated $36 billion in savings would be dwarfed by the $13.8 trillion the government is expected to spend over the next five years under a Republican budget plan approved in April.
"Today, the Senate took an important step forward in cutting the deficit. I commend Senate leadership and the other senators who supported this spending-reduction legislation," President George W. Bush said in a statement.
"Congress needs to send me a spending-reduction package this year to keep us on track to cutting the deficit in half by 2009," he said.
Democrats ridiculed the effort, saying the Republican-named "Deficit Reduction Act of 2005" would, in the words of Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, be more aptly called the "Moral Disaster of Monumental Proportion Reconciliation Act."
Democrats say the bill would actually achieve no deficit-reduction if Republicans also succeed with plans to pass additional tax cuts for the wealthy and others.
With a $70 billion price tag, the tax bill would add $34 billion to U.S. deficits after counting the spending cuts.
GRAB-BAG OF CUTS
Besides saving about $10 billion over five years by restructuring some Medicare and Medicaid health programs for the elderly and poor, the Senate plan is a grab-bag of spending reductions, including nearly $1.3 billion over five years on farm subsidies and $5.4 billion in higher premiums companies would pay to a federally backed pension fund.
Also as part of the bill, big oil won a victory with narrow approval of a controversial plan to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
Gulf Coast states, devastated by Hurricane Katrina last summer, would get nearly $3 billion in new funds to help restore coastal areas and aid schools.
The bill also provides an $11.4 billion blueprint for funding Amtrak operations and capital needs. The plan includes proposals to competitively bid some routes and reform business practices of Amtrak, the federally subsidized railroad.
While the Bush administration supports the spending-cut goals of the Senate and House, it has warned senators that it could veto the bill. It objected to a provision that deletes a Medicare fund the White House believes ensures that private health-care plans take part in the federal health care program.
Across Capitol Hill, the House Budget Committee, on a nearly party-line 21-17 vote, approved a Republican plan to cut a net $54 billion from mandatory programs over five years.
The proposal includes $844 million in food stamp cuts for the poor by tightening some eligibility requirements and cutting programs related to child support and child welfare.
Senate backs oil drilling in Alaskan refuge
Reuters
Senate backs oil drilling in Alaskan refuge
By Tom Doggett
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), narrowly rejecting a Democratic attempt to strike the plan from a budget bill.
Drilling supporters said developing the refuge's 10.4 billion barrels of crude would raise $2.4 billion in leasing fees for the government, reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil imports and create thousands of American jobs.
However, it remains far from clear whether a final version of a federal budget-cutting package can be approved by both chambers of Congress. The U.S. House of Representatives plan would open ANWR to drilling, but also aims to cut politically sensitive programs such as food stamps and Medicaid.
"This vote today sends a signal to OPEC and the rest of the world that America is serious about meeting more of its own energy needs. America will not let our consumers or our economy be held hostage to runaway global oil prices," said Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
U.S. President George W. Bush hailed the Senate for passing legislation that sets out a "common sense approach" to improving the U.S. energy situation.
"We can and should produce more crude oil here at home in environmentally responsible ways. The most promising site for oil in America is a 2,000 acre site in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and thanks to technology, we can reach this energy with little impact on the land or wildlife," Bush said in a statement issued in Mar del Plata, Argentina, where he was attending a 34-nation Summit of the Americas.
The United States has to import almost three out of every five barrels of oil it consumes, with total demand averaging about 20.5 million barrels a day this year.
ANWR is "the nation's single greatest prospect for future oil," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee.
Opponents said there was not enough oil in the refuge to lower gasoline prices by more than a penny per gallon, and what crude is there would not get to the market for at least a decade. They also warned drilling would threaten ANWR's habitat for migratory birds, polar bears, caribou and other animals.
"America wants a better energy plan than putting a sweetheart deal (for oil companies) in the budget," said Democrat Maria Cantwell of Washington, who was the main sponsor of the amendment to strike the drilling language.
"Let's not pollute one of the last great remaining wildlife refuges in America," she said, referring to more than 500 oil spills that occur annually on the nearby Alaskan North Slope.
The Senate voted 48 (yes) to 51 (no) on her amendment to remove the ANWR provision from the budget bill.
Lawmakers also voted, 83 to 16, to ban ANWR oil from being exported to China and other countries to ensure the crude stays in the U.S. market.
"There is no assurance that even one drop of Alaskan oil will get to hurting Americans," said Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, who opposed ANWR drilling but co-sponsored the oil export ban amendment.
The Senate also rejected, 48 to 51, another Cantwell amendment to stop ANWR oil production if the Alaskan government sued to get a bigger share of the leasing revenue, which the drilling plan splits 50-50 with the federal government.
When Alaska became a state, it kept 90 percent of the lease revenue from oil production and the government received 10 percent. Alaska's legislature has indicated it may sue to maintain the 90-10 split with the ANWR revenue.
Domenici said Cantwell's revenue-sharing amendment was a "back door attempt to kill ANWR" drilling.
ANWR sprawls across 19 million acres, about the size of South Carolina. Republicans have sought to pry open the refuge to energy exploration for more than two decades, while Democrats and environmental groups have argued that Congress should focus on stricter energy conservation measures.
Under both Senate and House drilling plans, the refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain would be opened for energy exploration, but no more than 2,000 acres of the surface area could be covered by production and support facilities, such as airstrips and piers to hold up pipelines.
The close vote in the Senate on striking the ANWR provision may make it difficult for the chamber to accept in a final budget bill the House's proposal to open offshore waters to drilling where energy exploration is now banned.
The Senate is expected to approve its bill cutting federal spending by around $35 billion over five years. The House of Representatives' version seeks to slash more than $50 billion, and a floor vote has not yet been scheduled. The spending cuts are intended to help reduce the federal budget deficit.
Senate backs oil drilling in Alaskan refuge
By Tom Doggett
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), narrowly rejecting a Democratic attempt to strike the plan from a budget bill.
Drilling supporters said developing the refuge's 10.4 billion barrels of crude would raise $2.4 billion in leasing fees for the government, reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil imports and create thousands of American jobs.
However, it remains far from clear whether a final version of a federal budget-cutting package can be approved by both chambers of Congress. The U.S. House of Representatives plan would open ANWR to drilling, but also aims to cut politically sensitive programs such as food stamps and Medicaid.
"This vote today sends a signal to OPEC and the rest of the world that America is serious about meeting more of its own energy needs. America will not let our consumers or our economy be held hostage to runaway global oil prices," said Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
U.S. President George W. Bush hailed the Senate for passing legislation that sets out a "common sense approach" to improving the U.S. energy situation.
"We can and should produce more crude oil here at home in environmentally responsible ways. The most promising site for oil in America is a 2,000 acre site in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and thanks to technology, we can reach this energy with little impact on the land or wildlife," Bush said in a statement issued in Mar del Plata, Argentina, where he was attending a 34-nation Summit of the Americas.
The United States has to import almost three out of every five barrels of oil it consumes, with total demand averaging about 20.5 million barrels a day this year.
ANWR is "the nation's single greatest prospect for future oil," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee.
Opponents said there was not enough oil in the refuge to lower gasoline prices by more than a penny per gallon, and what crude is there would not get to the market for at least a decade. They also warned drilling would threaten ANWR's habitat for migratory birds, polar bears, caribou and other animals.
"America wants a better energy plan than putting a sweetheart deal (for oil companies) in the budget," said Democrat Maria Cantwell of Washington, who was the main sponsor of the amendment to strike the drilling language.
"Let's not pollute one of the last great remaining wildlife refuges in America," she said, referring to more than 500 oil spills that occur annually on the nearby Alaskan North Slope.
The Senate voted 48 (yes) to 51 (no) on her amendment to remove the ANWR provision from the budget bill.
Lawmakers also voted, 83 to 16, to ban ANWR oil from being exported to China and other countries to ensure the crude stays in the U.S. market.
"There is no assurance that even one drop of Alaskan oil will get to hurting Americans," said Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, who opposed ANWR drilling but co-sponsored the oil export ban amendment.
The Senate also rejected, 48 to 51, another Cantwell amendment to stop ANWR oil production if the Alaskan government sued to get a bigger share of the leasing revenue, which the drilling plan splits 50-50 with the federal government.
When Alaska became a state, it kept 90 percent of the lease revenue from oil production and the government received 10 percent. Alaska's legislature has indicated it may sue to maintain the 90-10 split with the ANWR revenue.
Domenici said Cantwell's revenue-sharing amendment was a "back door attempt to kill ANWR" drilling.
ANWR sprawls across 19 million acres, about the size of South Carolina. Republicans have sought to pry open the refuge to energy exploration for more than two decades, while Democrats and environmental groups have argued that Congress should focus on stricter energy conservation measures.
Under both Senate and House drilling plans, the refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain would be opened for energy exploration, but no more than 2,000 acres of the surface area could be covered by production and support facilities, such as airstrips and piers to hold up pipelines.
The close vote in the Senate on striking the ANWR provision may make it difficult for the chamber to accept in a final budget bill the House's proposal to open offshore waters to drilling where energy exploration is now banned.
The Senate is expected to approve its bill cutting federal spending by around $35 billion over five years. The House of Representatives' version seeks to slash more than $50 billion, and a floor vote has not yet been scheduled. The spending cuts are intended to help reduce the federal budget deficit.
DeLay gets Democratic judge in Texas
Reuters
DeLay gets Democratic judge in Texas
By Jeff Franks
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Democratic judge was named on Thursday to preside over the money-laundering and conspiracy case against U.S. Republican Rep. Tom DeLay in an appointment made by the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
Senior Judge Pat Priest of San Antonio will replace state District Judge Robert Perkins, who was forced off the case on Tuesday after DeLay's attorneys complained he was too staunchly Democratic to give their client a fair trial.
Priest was appointed by Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, a Republican endorsed and aided by DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority, or TRMPAC, a political action committee at the center of the criminal charges.
Jefferson made the appointment after a Republican judge in a lower court, B.B. Schraub, recused himself earlier on Thursday after prosecutors charged he was too staunchly Republican to make a fair choice.
The charges of partisanship against Schraub and Perkins were based on contributions they had made to candidates of their respective parties and, in Perkins' case, to liberal group MoveOn.org.
In Texas, judges must run for office in partisan elections and are free to donate to political candidates and causes.
DeLay, who represents a Houston-area district, is accused of laundering $190,000 in corporate campaign contributions gathered by TRMPAC through the Republican National Committee to candidates for the state Legislature in Texas in 2002.
Texas law forbids the use of corporate funds in political campaigns.
TRMPAC's efforts helped Republicans take control of the Texas Legislature for the first time since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.
At DeLay's urging, the Legislature then redrew congressional districts to increase the number of Republicans from Texas in the U.S. House.
DeLay and lawyer Dick DeGuerin have repeatedly accused Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, a Democrat who led the investigation into DeLay's activities, of cooking up the criminal charges as part of a Democratic vendetta for the redistricting.
DeLay was House majority leader, or the second highest- ranking Republican in the House, until his indictment on September 28.
Due to House Republican rules, he was forced to resign his leadership position, but allowed to keep his congressional seat.
Priest was a respected judge in San Antonio for years, but no longer works full time on the bench.
DeLay gets Democratic judge in Texas
By Jeff Franks
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Democratic judge was named on Thursday to preside over the money-laundering and conspiracy case against U.S. Republican Rep. Tom DeLay in an appointment made by the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
Senior Judge Pat Priest of San Antonio will replace state District Judge Robert Perkins, who was forced off the case on Tuesday after DeLay's attorneys complained he was too staunchly Democratic to give their client a fair trial.
Priest was appointed by Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, a Republican endorsed and aided by DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority, or TRMPAC, a political action committee at the center of the criminal charges.
Jefferson made the appointment after a Republican judge in a lower court, B.B. Schraub, recused himself earlier on Thursday after prosecutors charged he was too staunchly Republican to make a fair choice.
The charges of partisanship against Schraub and Perkins were based on contributions they had made to candidates of their respective parties and, in Perkins' case, to liberal group MoveOn.org.
In Texas, judges must run for office in partisan elections and are free to donate to political candidates and causes.
DeLay, who represents a Houston-area district, is accused of laundering $190,000 in corporate campaign contributions gathered by TRMPAC through the Republican National Committee to candidates for the state Legislature in Texas in 2002.
Texas law forbids the use of corporate funds in political campaigns.
TRMPAC's efforts helped Republicans take control of the Texas Legislature for the first time since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.
At DeLay's urging, the Legislature then redrew congressional districts to increase the number of Republicans from Texas in the U.S. House.
DeLay and lawyer Dick DeGuerin have repeatedly accused Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, a Democrat who led the investigation into DeLay's activities, of cooking up the criminal charges as part of a Democratic vendetta for the redistricting.
DeLay was House majority leader, or the second highest- ranking Republican in the House, until his indictment on September 28.
Due to House Republican rules, he was forced to resign his leadership position, but allowed to keep his congressional seat.
Priest was a respected judge in San Antonio for years, but no longer works full time on the bench.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
House Defeats Bill on Political Blogs
Yahoo! News
House Defeats Bill on Political Blogs
By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer
Online political expression should not be exempt from campaign finance law, the House decided Wednesday as lawmakers warned that the Internet has opened up a new loophole for uncontrolled spending on elections.
The House voted 225-182 for a bill that would have excluded blogs, e-mails and other Internet communications from regulation by the Federal Election Commission. That was 47 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed under a procedure that limited debate time and allowed no amendments.
The vote in effect clears the way for the FEC to move ahead with court-mandated rule-making to govern political speech and campaign spending on the Internet.
Opposition was led by Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., who with Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., championed the 2002 campaign finance law that banned unlimited "soft money" contributions that corporations, unions and individuals were making to political parties.
"This is a major unraveling of the law," Meehan said. At a time when Washington is again being tainted by scandal, including the CIA leak case, "it opens up new avenues for corruption to enter the political process."
The bill's sponsor, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, said the federal government should encourage, rather than fetter, a phenomenon that was bringing more Americans into the political process.
"The newest battlefield in the fight to protect the First Amendment is the Internet," he said. "The Internet is the new town square, and campaign finance regulations are not appropriate there."
Without his legislation, Hensarling said, "I fear that bloggers one day could be fined for improperly linking to a campaign Web site, or merely forwarding a candidate's press release to an e-mail list."
Bloggers from liberal and conservative perspectives made similar predictions at a hearing on the subject in September. "Rather than deal with the red tape of regulation and the risk of legal problems, they will fall silent on all issues of politics," said Michael J. Krempasky, director of the Web site RedState.org.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., writing Wednesday on a blog he recently started, said the bill "is about all the folks out in the blogosphere. It's going to protect what you say. It keeps the hand of the federal government out of Internet speech."
But Meehan said no one wants to regulate bloggers. He said he and Shays have an alternative that would protect the free speech rights of bloggers while closing the cyberspace loophole where a lawmaker could vote for a prescription drug bill and then ask pharmaceutical interests to write six-figure checks for campaign ads for them to run on the Internet.
FEC commissioner Scott E. Thomas said at the September hearing that some $14 million was spent on Internet ads in the 2004 campaign.
A federal court last year, amid the escalation of political activity on the Internet, instructed the FEC to draw up regulations that would extend federal campaign finance and spending limits to the Web.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has introduced a companion bill to the Hensarling measure, but the Senate has yet to take it up.
___
The bill is H.R. 1606.
On the Net:
Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/
Federal Election Commission: http://www.fec.gov/
House Defeats Bill on Political Blogs
By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer
Online political expression should not be exempt from campaign finance law, the House decided Wednesday as lawmakers warned that the Internet has opened up a new loophole for uncontrolled spending on elections.
The House voted 225-182 for a bill that would have excluded blogs, e-mails and other Internet communications from regulation by the Federal Election Commission. That was 47 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed under a procedure that limited debate time and allowed no amendments.
The vote in effect clears the way for the FEC to move ahead with court-mandated rule-making to govern political speech and campaign spending on the Internet.
Opposition was led by Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., who with Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., championed the 2002 campaign finance law that banned unlimited "soft money" contributions that corporations, unions and individuals were making to political parties.
"This is a major unraveling of the law," Meehan said. At a time when Washington is again being tainted by scandal, including the CIA leak case, "it opens up new avenues for corruption to enter the political process."
The bill's sponsor, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, said the federal government should encourage, rather than fetter, a phenomenon that was bringing more Americans into the political process.
"The newest battlefield in the fight to protect the First Amendment is the Internet," he said. "The Internet is the new town square, and campaign finance regulations are not appropriate there."
Without his legislation, Hensarling said, "I fear that bloggers one day could be fined for improperly linking to a campaign Web site, or merely forwarding a candidate's press release to an e-mail list."
Bloggers from liberal and conservative perspectives made similar predictions at a hearing on the subject in September. "Rather than deal with the red tape of regulation and the risk of legal problems, they will fall silent on all issues of politics," said Michael J. Krempasky, director of the Web site RedState.org.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., writing Wednesday on a blog he recently started, said the bill "is about all the folks out in the blogosphere. It's going to protect what you say. It keeps the hand of the federal government out of Internet speech."
But Meehan said no one wants to regulate bloggers. He said he and Shays have an alternative that would protect the free speech rights of bloggers while closing the cyberspace loophole where a lawmaker could vote for a prescription drug bill and then ask pharmaceutical interests to write six-figure checks for campaign ads for them to run on the Internet.
FEC commissioner Scott E. Thomas said at the September hearing that some $14 million was spent on Internet ads in the 2004 campaign.
A federal court last year, amid the escalation of political activity on the Internet, instructed the FEC to draw up regulations that would extend federal campaign finance and spending limits to the Web.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has introduced a companion bill to the Hensarling measure, but the Senate has yet to take it up.
___
The bill is H.R. 1606.
On the Net:
Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov/
Federal Election Commission: http://www.fec.gov/
CIA uses secret prisons abroad
Reuters
CIA uses secret prisons abroad: report
By Joanne Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA has been hiding and interrogating al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a covert global prison system that has included sites in eight countries and was set up after the September 11, 2001, attacks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The secret network included "several democracies in Eastern Europe" as well as Thailand and Afghanistan, the newspaper reported, but it did not publish the names of the European countries at the request of senior U.S. officials.
U.S. government officials declined comment on the report, which was likely to stir up fresh criticism of the Bush administration's treatment of prisoners in its declared war on terrorism since the September 11 attacks.
Russia and Bulgaria immediately denied any facility was there. Thailand also denied it was host to such a facility.
U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley would not comment directly, but said President George W. Bush had made clear the United States fought terrorism while respecting the law, and investigated allegations of misconduct.
"While we have to do what is necessary to defend the country against terrorists and to win the war on terror, the president has been very clear that we're going to do that in a way that is consistent with our values and that is why he has been very clear that the United States will not torture," Hadley said.
The newspaper, which said its report was based on information from U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement, said the existence and locations of the facilities were known only to a handful of American officials and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA has not acknowledged the existence of a secret prison network, the newspaper said.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, principal deputy to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, declined to comment when asked about the report at a news conference in San Antonio where he delivered a speech about intelligence reforms.
"I'm not here to talk about that," he said.
TREATMENT OF DETAINEES
The Bush administration's policy toward prisoners taken in Afghanistan and Iraq has come under heavy criticism at home and abroad. Inmate abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison was strongly condemned in the Muslim world and among U.S. allies while many have called for more openness about those being held at a U.S. navy base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The Bush administration also faced problems at home. Last month the Senate approved 90-9 an amendment to regulate the Pentagon's handling of detainees with rules for interrogation and treatment, despite strong White House opposition.
Democrats used the new report to attack Bush's policy toward detainees.
"I'm troubled by it," said Sen. Richard Durbin, the second ranking Democrat in the Senate. "It's another element of this administration's policy and the treatment of detainees and prisoners which I'm afraid will come back to haunt us at a future time."
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have pushed for more than a year for review of CIA detention, interrogation and the practice of "rendition," under which detainees are snatched from countries abroad and delivered to foreign intelligence services. Democrats say their efforts have been stymied by the Republican majority in the Senate.
"This is one more important area where we're lacking in congressional oversight," said Wendy Morigi, spokeswoman for Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the committee.
'BLACK SITES'
According to the Washington Post, the prisons are referred to as "black sites" in classified U.S. documents and virtually nothing is known about who the detainees are, how they are interrogated or how long they will be held.
About 30 major terrorism suspects have been held at black sites while more than 70 other detainees, considered less important, were sent to foreign intelligence services under rendition, the paper said, citing U.S. and foreign intelligence sources.
The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners are isolated from the outside world, have no recognized legal rights and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or see them, the sources told the newspaper.
The Post, citing several former and current intelligence and other U.S. government officials, said the CIA used such detention centers abroad because in the United States it is illegal to hold prisoners in such isolation.
The paper said it was not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program at the request of senior U.S. officials who said disclosure could disrupt counterterrorism efforts or make the host countries targets for retaliation.
The secret detention system was conceived shortly after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, when the assumption was another strike was imminent, the report said.
Russia's FSB security service and Bulgaria's foreign ministry denied such facilities existed on their territory. Thai government spokesman Surapong Suebwonglee said, "There is no fact in the unfounded claims."
(Additional reporting by Trirat Puttajanyawong in Bangkok, David Morgan in San Antonio, Steve Holland in Washington)
CIA uses secret prisons abroad: report
By Joanne Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA has been hiding and interrogating al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a covert global prison system that has included sites in eight countries and was set up after the September 11, 2001, attacks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The secret network included "several democracies in Eastern Europe" as well as Thailand and Afghanistan, the newspaper reported, but it did not publish the names of the European countries at the request of senior U.S. officials.
U.S. government officials declined comment on the report, which was likely to stir up fresh criticism of the Bush administration's treatment of prisoners in its declared war on terrorism since the September 11 attacks.
Russia and Bulgaria immediately denied any facility was there. Thailand also denied it was host to such a facility.
U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley would not comment directly, but said President George W. Bush had made clear the United States fought terrorism while respecting the law, and investigated allegations of misconduct.
"While we have to do what is necessary to defend the country against terrorists and to win the war on terror, the president has been very clear that we're going to do that in a way that is consistent with our values and that is why he has been very clear that the United States will not torture," Hadley said.
The newspaper, which said its report was based on information from U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement, said the existence and locations of the facilities were known only to a handful of American officials and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA has not acknowledged the existence of a secret prison network, the newspaper said.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, principal deputy to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, declined to comment when asked about the report at a news conference in San Antonio where he delivered a speech about intelligence reforms.
"I'm not here to talk about that," he said.
TREATMENT OF DETAINEES
The Bush administration's policy toward prisoners taken in Afghanistan and Iraq has come under heavy criticism at home and abroad. Inmate abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison was strongly condemned in the Muslim world and among U.S. allies while many have called for more openness about those being held at a U.S. navy base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The Bush administration also faced problems at home. Last month the Senate approved 90-9 an amendment to regulate the Pentagon's handling of detainees with rules for interrogation and treatment, despite strong White House opposition.
Democrats used the new report to attack Bush's policy toward detainees.
"I'm troubled by it," said Sen. Richard Durbin, the second ranking Democrat in the Senate. "It's another element of this administration's policy and the treatment of detainees and prisoners which I'm afraid will come back to haunt us at a future time."
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have pushed for more than a year for review of CIA detention, interrogation and the practice of "rendition," under which detainees are snatched from countries abroad and delivered to foreign intelligence services. Democrats say their efforts have been stymied by the Republican majority in the Senate.
"This is one more important area where we're lacking in congressional oversight," said Wendy Morigi, spokeswoman for Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the committee.
'BLACK SITES'
According to the Washington Post, the prisons are referred to as "black sites" in classified U.S. documents and virtually nothing is known about who the detainees are, how they are interrogated or how long they will be held.
About 30 major terrorism suspects have been held at black sites while more than 70 other detainees, considered less important, were sent to foreign intelligence services under rendition, the paper said, citing U.S. and foreign intelligence sources.
The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners are isolated from the outside world, have no recognized legal rights and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or see them, the sources told the newspaper.
The Post, citing several former and current intelligence and other U.S. government officials, said the CIA used such detention centers abroad because in the United States it is illegal to hold prisoners in such isolation.
The paper said it was not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program at the request of senior U.S. officials who said disclosure could disrupt counterterrorism efforts or make the host countries targets for retaliation.
The secret detention system was conceived shortly after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, when the assumption was another strike was imminent, the report said.
Russia's FSB security service and Bulgaria's foreign ministry denied such facilities existed on their territory. Thai government spokesman Surapong Suebwonglee said, "There is no fact in the unfounded claims."
(Additional reporting by Trirat Puttajanyawong in Bangkok, David Morgan in San Antonio, Steve Holland in Washington)
A Formidable Hawk Goes Down
ipsnews.net
A Formidable Hawk Goes Down
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 28 (IPS) - Losing I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, perhaps the most influential national security official without a formal cabinet rank, marks a serious blow to the George W. Bush administration and particularly to the hawks who led the drive to war in Iraq.
Like his boss Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, Libby, who was indicted Friday for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements in connection with leaking the identity of a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been by all accounts a formidable bureaucratic operator who used the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to push U.S. foreign policy hard in a unilateralist, if not neo-imperial, direction.
That skill, coupled with the enormous size of Cheney's national security staff, and the vice president's unprecedented influence on foreign policy-making, led one former National Security Council aide to observe to IPS in late 2003 that Libby "is able to run circles around Condi", a reference to Bush's own national security adviser at the time and the present secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
Libby's ties to Cheney go back to when the vice president served as defence secretary during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. A constant companion of Cheney and a frequent guest at Cheney's Rocky Mountain retreat, their closeness raises the question of whether Libby, in exposing Valerie Plame's identity, was acting at his boss's behest -- a question that remains unanswered by Friday's indictment.
With a family and a maximum 30-year possible prison sentence hanging over his head, a major question is whether Libby might yet implicate Cheney in any plea bargain.
A protégé of former Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who was his teacher at Yale University in the 1970s and then hired him onto the policy-planning staff of the State Department under former President Ronald Reagan, Libby, a well-heeled Washington attorney by profession, served Cheney as both chief of staff and his principal national security adviser. He was also linked directly to Bush as an "Assistant to the President."
His next stint in government came during Cheney's tenure at the Pentagon, when Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defence for policy, recruited him for top Pentagon posts under Bush I, the last as Wolfowitz's principal deputy.
After the first Gulf War, Cheney tasked Wolfowitz and Libby with developing the Defence Planning Guidance (DPG), a document designed to map out global U.S. strategy over a five- to 10-year period. When a draft of the document was leaked to the New York Times, its ambition and grandiosity so embarrassed the Bush administration that the two were almost fired from their posts.
The draft called for a world order based on U.S. military power rather than collective security mechanisms like the United Nations. It called for the U.S. to prevent the emergence of any possible global or even regional rival either through co-optation or confrontation, and defined the U.S. objective in the Middle East as "remain(ing) the predominant outside power in the region".
It also called for pre-emptive or even preventive military action against rogue states seeking nuclear weapons and the development of new nuclear weapons, and the use of "ad hoc assemblies", rather than alliances, such as NATO, in taking military action. It predicted that U.S. military intervention in maintaining order around the world would become a "constant fixture" of the new order.
While rejected by the realists who dominated the Bush I administration, this vision of a unipolar, U.S.-dominated world was explicitly endorsed in 1997 in the founding charter of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was signed by 25 prominent hawks who would go on to take top positions under Bush II, including Cheney himself, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, neo-conservative major-domo Richard Perle, as well as Libby himself.
At the time, Libby was back in private law practice representing, among others, Marc Rich, the fugitive Swiss-Israeli businessman and financier, whose renunciation of his U.S. citizenship and receipt of an eleventh-hour pardon by Bill Clinton in 2001 caused a major storm in Congress.
Many of the middlemen who profited from oil sales by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Oil-for-Food programme were closely tied to Rich, according to a recent investigation by Business Week magazine.
In the late 1990s, Libby also served as general counsel to the so-called Cox Committee, a Congressional inquiry into alleged military and nuclear espionage conducted by China against the United States.
Its final report in 1999, which, among other conclusions, found that Beijing's military spending was twice as much as CIA estimates, was widely denounced by experts as filled with speculation, unproven assumptions and outright errors apparently designed to promote both new military spending by the U.S. and a more confrontational policy toward China.
Libby returned to public life when Cheney appointed him to head his staff in that same year, and, by all accounts, played critical roles not only in ensuring that the DPG's main points were incorporated into the National Security Strategy of the United States in December 2002, but also in the march to war against Iraq.
In particular, Libby reportedly played a critical role in circumventing the formal intelligence review process that is designed to ensure that intelligence reports are carefully screened and vetted by professional analysts in the CIA, the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency, and elsewhere before they make their way to policy-makers in the White House.
Thus, when the Pentagon established at least two offices to gather and review "raw intelligence" regarding Iraq's alleged ties to al Qaeda and its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes, their findings were reported directly to Libby, according to at least one first-hand observer, ret. Lt. Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who would presumably pass them along to Cheney and the White House.
Libby and Cheney, who both were known to be contemptuous of the CIA in part because it had failed to uncover Iraq's nuclear programme before the 1991 Gulf War, also made frequent visits to CIA headquarters to quiz officers about specific intelligence reports and press them to follow up.
A number of veteran intelligence officers have claimed that this kind of pressure, as well as the informal flow of reports from the Pentagon to the White House, essentially "corrupted" the process.
Indeed, Cheney was the first senior official to claim that Iraq had indeed re-activated its nuclear weapons programme -- in a series of television appearances in March 2002, a full year before the U.S. invasion. The CIA and other intelligence agencies were much more circumspect about the question at the time.
Libby also prepared a draft of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's Feb. 7, 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's alleged WMD programmes.
"This is bullshit," Powell reportedly shouted in anger and frustration while throwing the draft papers up in the air after reviewing it with CIA and State Department analysts on the eve of his U.N. appearance.
The night that Baghdad fell to U.S. forces two months later, Libby celebrated with a quiet, intimate dinner at the vice president's residence with the Cheneys, Wolfowitz, and Defence Policy Board member and war booster, Ken Adelman, and his wife, Carol, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
Asked by Lynne Cheney what he thought of the war's outcome, Libby quietly said, "Wonderful." (END/2005)
A Formidable Hawk Goes Down
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 28 (IPS) - Losing I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, perhaps the most influential national security official without a formal cabinet rank, marks a serious blow to the George W. Bush administration and particularly to the hawks who led the drive to war in Iraq.
Like his boss Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, Libby, who was indicted Friday for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements in connection with leaking the identity of a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been by all accounts a formidable bureaucratic operator who used the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to push U.S. foreign policy hard in a unilateralist, if not neo-imperial, direction.
That skill, coupled with the enormous size of Cheney's national security staff, and the vice president's unprecedented influence on foreign policy-making, led one former National Security Council aide to observe to IPS in late 2003 that Libby "is able to run circles around Condi", a reference to Bush's own national security adviser at the time and the present secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
Libby's ties to Cheney go back to when the vice president served as defence secretary during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. A constant companion of Cheney and a frequent guest at Cheney's Rocky Mountain retreat, their closeness raises the question of whether Libby, in exposing Valerie Plame's identity, was acting at his boss's behest -- a question that remains unanswered by Friday's indictment.
With a family and a maximum 30-year possible prison sentence hanging over his head, a major question is whether Libby might yet implicate Cheney in any plea bargain.
A protégé of former Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who was his teacher at Yale University in the 1970s and then hired him onto the policy-planning staff of the State Department under former President Ronald Reagan, Libby, a well-heeled Washington attorney by profession, served Cheney as both chief of staff and his principal national security adviser. He was also linked directly to Bush as an "Assistant to the President."
His next stint in government came during Cheney's tenure at the Pentagon, when Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of defence for policy, recruited him for top Pentagon posts under Bush I, the last as Wolfowitz's principal deputy.
After the first Gulf War, Cheney tasked Wolfowitz and Libby with developing the Defence Planning Guidance (DPG), a document designed to map out global U.S. strategy over a five- to 10-year period. When a draft of the document was leaked to the New York Times, its ambition and grandiosity so embarrassed the Bush administration that the two were almost fired from their posts.
The draft called for a world order based on U.S. military power rather than collective security mechanisms like the United Nations. It called for the U.S. to prevent the emergence of any possible global or even regional rival either through co-optation or confrontation, and defined the U.S. objective in the Middle East as "remain(ing) the predominant outside power in the region".
It also called for pre-emptive or even preventive military action against rogue states seeking nuclear weapons and the development of new nuclear weapons, and the use of "ad hoc assemblies", rather than alliances, such as NATO, in taking military action. It predicted that U.S. military intervention in maintaining order around the world would become a "constant fixture" of the new order.
While rejected by the realists who dominated the Bush I administration, this vision of a unipolar, U.S.-dominated world was explicitly endorsed in 1997 in the founding charter of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was signed by 25 prominent hawks who would go on to take top positions under Bush II, including Cheney himself, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, neo-conservative major-domo Richard Perle, as well as Libby himself.
At the time, Libby was back in private law practice representing, among others, Marc Rich, the fugitive Swiss-Israeli businessman and financier, whose renunciation of his U.S. citizenship and receipt of an eleventh-hour pardon by Bill Clinton in 2001 caused a major storm in Congress.
Many of the middlemen who profited from oil sales by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Oil-for-Food programme were closely tied to Rich, according to a recent investigation by Business Week magazine.
In the late 1990s, Libby also served as general counsel to the so-called Cox Committee, a Congressional inquiry into alleged military and nuclear espionage conducted by China against the United States.
Its final report in 1999, which, among other conclusions, found that Beijing's military spending was twice as much as CIA estimates, was widely denounced by experts as filled with speculation, unproven assumptions and outright errors apparently designed to promote both new military spending by the U.S. and a more confrontational policy toward China.
Libby returned to public life when Cheney appointed him to head his staff in that same year, and, by all accounts, played critical roles not only in ensuring that the DPG's main points were incorporated into the National Security Strategy of the United States in December 2002, but also in the march to war against Iraq.
In particular, Libby reportedly played a critical role in circumventing the formal intelligence review process that is designed to ensure that intelligence reports are carefully screened and vetted by professional analysts in the CIA, the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency, and elsewhere before they make their way to policy-makers in the White House.
Thus, when the Pentagon established at least two offices to gather and review "raw intelligence" regarding Iraq's alleged ties to al Qaeda and its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes, their findings were reported directly to Libby, according to at least one first-hand observer, ret. Lt. Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who would presumably pass them along to Cheney and the White House.
Libby and Cheney, who both were known to be contemptuous of the CIA in part because it had failed to uncover Iraq's nuclear programme before the 1991 Gulf War, also made frequent visits to CIA headquarters to quiz officers about specific intelligence reports and press them to follow up.
A number of veteran intelligence officers have claimed that this kind of pressure, as well as the informal flow of reports from the Pentagon to the White House, essentially "corrupted" the process.
Indeed, Cheney was the first senior official to claim that Iraq had indeed re-activated its nuclear weapons programme -- in a series of television appearances in March 2002, a full year before the U.S. invasion. The CIA and other intelligence agencies were much more circumspect about the question at the time.
Libby also prepared a draft of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's Feb. 7, 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's alleged WMD programmes.
"This is bullshit," Powell reportedly shouted in anger and frustration while throwing the draft papers up in the air after reviewing it with CIA and State Department analysts on the eve of his U.N. appearance.
The night that Baghdad fell to U.S. forces two months later, Libby celebrated with a quiet, intimate dinner at the vice president's residence with the Cheneys, Wolfowitz, and Defence Policy Board member and war booster, Ken Adelman, and his wife, Carol, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
Asked by Lynne Cheney what he thought of the war's outcome, Libby quietly said, "Wonderful." (END/2005)
Cheney Circles the Wagons
ipsnews.net
Cheney Circles the Wagons
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 1 (IPS) - With his closest aide for the past five years facing arraignment in federal court Thursday on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be hunkering down with a familiar cast of faces.
His choices to replace his now indicted former chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, suggest a determination to stay the course despite calls from various quarters that his office, as well as the White House itself, for new blood, if not a complete overhaul.
Libby's two positions will now be shared by different people, both attorneys. His hard-line legal counsel, David Addington, is taking over the chief-of-staff post, while John P. Hannah, who served as Libby's deputy in the national security position, will move up the advisor's spot.
Staff changes in the vice president's office would not normally attract much notice -- indeed, scarcely anyone noticed when Libby was first appointed in January 2001 -- but Cheney's status as the most powerful vice president in U.S. history and a key architect of U.S. policy in the run-up to the Iraq war has brought the post far more attention.
Addington has served the vice president in a variety of posts, dating all the way back to the mid-1980s when Cheney was a member of the Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives defending then-President Ronald Reagan over the Iran-Contra affair.
He has reportedly been a strong proponent of both unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy and of sweeping presidential power, particularly in time of war. A close associate of U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, Addington, who almost obsessively shuns the public spotlight, also regards international law with undisguised contempt.
Addington has been accused by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of being among the strongest advocates within the administration for exempting detainees taken in the "war on terror" of any constitutional due process rights or of the protections of the Geneva Convention.
According to the National Journal, he has also argued aggressively and so far successfully -- even over the objections of President George W. Bush's legal counsel and political aides -- for refusing to turn over critical documents concerning the White House's treatment of pre-Iraq war intelligence to the Congressional Intelligence committees.
Hannah, who was hired by Libby in 2001, has a much shorter history with Cheney and spent two years working as a senior advisor to Bill Clinton's first secretary of state, Warren Christopher.
But he, too, is seen widely seen as a hard-liner who, according to published records, acted as the main White House contact for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group led by Ahmad Chalabi, that provided "defectors" and other intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 invasion that later turned out to be bogus.
Hannah has also worked particularly closely with the INC's main Pentagon contact, Harold Rhode, a Middle East specialist and close collaborator of a group of hard-line neo-conservatives based mainly at the American Enterprise Institute who have urged confrontation with Syria, Iran and even Saudi Arabia.
Hannah also served two stints, in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, as senior fellow and deputy director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank established in the mid-1980s by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group.
Two of AIPAC's former senior staff members were indicted earlier this summer in connection with classified information provided to them by a Pentagon official who had worked with Rhode on Iran policy.
The two appointments defy growing public and Democratic calls for the Bush administration, and particularly Cheney, to both overhaul their top staffs and to disclose all they know both about the case that led to Libby's indictment -- which involved his "outing" of a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative whose husband-diplomat had publicly accused the administration of going to war under false pretences -- and about their handling of the pre-war intelligence.
Democrats took their boldest step yet Tuesday by abruptly forcing the Senate into executive session to discuss the Intelligence Committee's stonewalling of an investigation into the possible abuse of pre-war intelligence in which Cheney's office, along with political appointees in the Pentagon, is widely believed to have played the leading role.
"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions," charged Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in an unusually direct attack on the Committee chair, Sen. Pat Roberts, who reportedly has close ties to Cheney and Addington.
According to the special prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald, Libby had repeatedly lied to the FBI and a federal grand jury about his role in telling selected journalists that ret. Amb. Joseph Wilson had been sent to Niger in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium yellowcake there at the suggestion of his wife, Valerie Plame, who was then serving as a covert operative.
The leak was apparently intended to discredit Wilson's claim, published by the New York Times on Jul. 6, 2003, that the administration knew that the reports were false and yet used them anyway in its campaign to rally the public behind the support the war..
In his indictment, Fitzgerald disclosed that Cheney himself was informed of Wilson's relationship with Plame by then-CIA director George Tenet and that he then informed Libby. The unusually close working relationship between Cheney and Libby -- they rode together most mornings on the way to the office, and Libby was a frequent guest at Cheney's Wyoming ranch -- has raised questions about whether Cheney authorised or knew about Libby's subsequent leaking.
Some observers, notably Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, have noted Fitgerald's finding that the two men discussed the Plame affair on Jul. 12 while on board Air Force 2, immediately after which Libby told two reporters about Plame's identity.
Fitzgerald so far has declined all comment on whether Cheney knew about or authorised the leaking. Cheney's office, citing the fact that Fitzgerald's investigation has not yet concluded, has refused all comment on the case, including what Hannah or Addington, who have testified before Fizgerald's grand jury, may have known about Libby's role in outing Plame. Separately, Hannah's attorney has claimed that his client played no role at all.
All of these developments come amid a series of statements by former high-level officials about Cheney that have added to the drama around the vice president. Two weeks ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, accused Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld of leading a "secretive, little-known cabal" that effectively ran U.S. foreign policy for much of Bush's first term.
Rumsfeld Tuesday dismissed that charge, insisting he had never met Wilkerson and did not know what position he held under Powell.
Last week, The New Yorker published an interview with former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who worked closely with Cheney both under the Gerald Ford administration in the mid-1970s (when Cheney was chief of staff) and under George H.W. Bush whom Cheney served as secretary of defence.
"I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for 30 years," Scowcroft said. "But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." (END/2005)
Cheney Circles the Wagons
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 1 (IPS) - With his closest aide for the past five years facing arraignment in federal court Thursday on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be hunkering down with a familiar cast of faces.
His choices to replace his now indicted former chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, suggest a determination to stay the course despite calls from various quarters that his office, as well as the White House itself, for new blood, if not a complete overhaul.
Libby's two positions will now be shared by different people, both attorneys. His hard-line legal counsel, David Addington, is taking over the chief-of-staff post, while John P. Hannah, who served as Libby's deputy in the national security position, will move up the advisor's spot.
Staff changes in the vice president's office would not normally attract much notice -- indeed, scarcely anyone noticed when Libby was first appointed in January 2001 -- but Cheney's status as the most powerful vice president in U.S. history and a key architect of U.S. policy in the run-up to the Iraq war has brought the post far more attention.
Addington has served the vice president in a variety of posts, dating all the way back to the mid-1980s when Cheney was a member of the Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives defending then-President Ronald Reagan over the Iran-Contra affair.
He has reportedly been a strong proponent of both unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy and of sweeping presidential power, particularly in time of war. A close associate of U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, Addington, who almost obsessively shuns the public spotlight, also regards international law with undisguised contempt.
Addington has been accused by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of being among the strongest advocates within the administration for exempting detainees taken in the "war on terror" of any constitutional due process rights or of the protections of the Geneva Convention.
According to the National Journal, he has also argued aggressively and so far successfully -- even over the objections of President George W. Bush's legal counsel and political aides -- for refusing to turn over critical documents concerning the White House's treatment of pre-Iraq war intelligence to the Congressional Intelligence committees.
Hannah, who was hired by Libby in 2001, has a much shorter history with Cheney and spent two years working as a senior advisor to Bill Clinton's first secretary of state, Warren Christopher.
But he, too, is seen widely seen as a hard-liner who, according to published records, acted as the main White House contact for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group led by Ahmad Chalabi, that provided "defectors" and other intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 invasion that later turned out to be bogus.
Hannah has also worked particularly closely with the INC's main Pentagon contact, Harold Rhode, a Middle East specialist and close collaborator of a group of hard-line neo-conservatives based mainly at the American Enterprise Institute who have urged confrontation with Syria, Iran and even Saudi Arabia.
Hannah also served two stints, in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, as senior fellow and deputy director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank established in the mid-1980s by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group.
Two of AIPAC's former senior staff members were indicted earlier this summer in connection with classified information provided to them by a Pentagon official who had worked with Rhode on Iran policy.
The two appointments defy growing public and Democratic calls for the Bush administration, and particularly Cheney, to both overhaul their top staffs and to disclose all they know both about the case that led to Libby's indictment -- which involved his "outing" of a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative whose husband-diplomat had publicly accused the administration of going to war under false pretences -- and about their handling of the pre-war intelligence.
Democrats took their boldest step yet Tuesday by abruptly forcing the Senate into executive session to discuss the Intelligence Committee's stonewalling of an investigation into the possible abuse of pre-war intelligence in which Cheney's office, along with political appointees in the Pentagon, is widely believed to have played the leading role.
"The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions," charged Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in an unusually direct attack on the Committee chair, Sen. Pat Roberts, who reportedly has close ties to Cheney and Addington.
According to the special prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald, Libby had repeatedly lied to the FBI and a federal grand jury about his role in telling selected journalists that ret. Amb. Joseph Wilson had been sent to Niger in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium yellowcake there at the suggestion of his wife, Valerie Plame, who was then serving as a covert operative.
The leak was apparently intended to discredit Wilson's claim, published by the New York Times on Jul. 6, 2003, that the administration knew that the reports were false and yet used them anyway in its campaign to rally the public behind the support the war..
In his indictment, Fitzgerald disclosed that Cheney himself was informed of Wilson's relationship with Plame by then-CIA director George Tenet and that he then informed Libby. The unusually close working relationship between Cheney and Libby -- they rode together most mornings on the way to the office, and Libby was a frequent guest at Cheney's Wyoming ranch -- has raised questions about whether Cheney authorised or knew about Libby's subsequent leaking.
Some observers, notably Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, have noted Fitgerald's finding that the two men discussed the Plame affair on Jul. 12 while on board Air Force 2, immediately after which Libby told two reporters about Plame's identity.
Fitzgerald so far has declined all comment on whether Cheney knew about or authorised the leaking. Cheney's office, citing the fact that Fitzgerald's investigation has not yet concluded, has refused all comment on the case, including what Hannah or Addington, who have testified before Fizgerald's grand jury, may have known about Libby's role in outing Plame. Separately, Hannah's attorney has claimed that his client played no role at all.
All of these developments come amid a series of statements by former high-level officials about Cheney that have added to the drama around the vice president. Two weeks ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, accused Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld of leading a "secretive, little-known cabal" that effectively ran U.S. foreign policy for much of Bush's first term.
Rumsfeld Tuesday dismissed that charge, insisting he had never met Wilkerson and did not know what position he held under Powell.
Last week, The New Yorker published an interview with former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who worked closely with Cheney both under the Gerald Ford administration in the mid-1970s (when Cheney was chief of staff) and under George H.W. Bush whom Cheney served as secretary of defence.
"I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for 30 years," Scowcroft said. "But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." (END/2005)
Rumsfeld Rejects U.N. Access to Guantanamo
ipsnews.net
Rumsfeld Rejects U.N. Access to Guantanamo
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 2 (IPS) - Amid growing concern over the fate and conditions of inmates engaged in a lengthy hunger strike at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday said he would not permit U.N. investigators to interview detainees there.
Rumsfeld depicted the strike, in which about half of the estimated 540 detainees at the prison have so far reportedly taken part since July, as a deliberate effort to attract media attention. He stressed that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will continue to have unlimited access to the prisoners, some of whom have been held for four years without trial.
"(T)here are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point, and then they rotate and other people do that," Rumsfeld told reporters during a press conference at the Pentagon. "So it's clearly a technique to try to the get the attention of you folks, and they're successful," he added.
International pressure to open the camp to U.N. investigators has intensified due to reports by some detainees' lawyers of protracted hunger strikes sparked by the failure of prison authorities to follow through on alleged commitments to improve camp conditions. These include complying with Geneva Convention standards and implementing a 16-month-old ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to permit inmates to appeal their status to an independent court that is not under the Pentagon's control.
The prison authorities have reportedly responded to the strikes by force-feeding weakened inmates by strapping them to tables and inserting long tubes through their nasal passages.
According to recently declassified statements by detainees to their attorneys, feeding procedures amount to torture and are being carried out in a sadistic manner.
A U.S. federal judge, Gladys Kessler, last week said the statements that had been submitted to her were "deeply troubling" and ordered the government to turn over the medical records of those detainees who are being force-fed.
On Oct. 27, the Pentagon invited three U.N. experts -- special rapporteurs on torture, religious freedom, and arbitrary detentions -- to visit Guantanamo, but added that they would not be permitted to meet with detainees. The three experts, as well as several other U.N. investigators, had repeatedly sought access since early 2002.
On Monday, the Special Rapporteur on Torture said he could not accept the invitation under those circumstances. "It makes no sense (to go)," said Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on Torture. "You cannot do a fact-finding mission without talking to the detainees."
"They said they have nothing to hide," he told the Washington Post. "If they have nothing to hide, why should we not be able to talk to the detainees in private?"
That question was echoed by human rights activists here Tuesday.
"Denying international human rights experts visits with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay continues the cloaking of detention practices in secrecy, only begging more questions about what is being hidden there and eroding the United States' standing with much of the world community," noted Avi Cover, a senior associate at Human Rights First (HRF), a lawyers' human rights organisation.
"There's not much of a point to the U.N. rapporteurs' conducting an investigation into treatment of detainees if they are simply provided a Pentagon-censored tour without meeting prisoners and hearing their accounts," he added.
In a letter to Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, six other religious and human rights groups, including Amnesty International, called on the Justice Department and Pentagon to take specific steps, including permitting access to the detainees by independent investigators as well as to the federal courts "to bring torture, abuse and inhumane treatment to an end at Guantanamo".
The groups announced a nationwide "Fast for Justice", timed to coincide with the end of Ramadan and the ongoing hunger strike, to press their demands. "There is a desperate situation in Guatanamo," said Tina Foster, an attorney with the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represents a large number of detainees. "Men are near death."
In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay was not outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. law, as the Bush administration had contended, and that detainees held there, some of whom arrived at the base almost four years ago, were entitled to appeal their status to an independent tribunal under a habeas corpus proceeding.
So far, however, the Pentagon has only afforded the detainees review hearings before a panel of military officers in proceedings that denied them access to classified information and representation at the hearings by a lawyer. Nonetheless, dozens of detainees were returned to their home countries after the hearings.
Meanwhile, a series of controversial incidents -- some involving reports of beatings and the desecration of a Koran -- sparked hunger strikes in which, according to the detainees' advocates, more than half the camp's total population has participated in one degree or another.
The Pentagon said Tuesday that 24 detainees are being force fed and strongly denied that any of them have suffered abuse.
But the lawyers' accounts of interviews with their clients paint a harrowing picture, with one detainee named Abdul Rahman complaining that "one Navy doctor had put the tube in his nose and down his throat and just kept moving the tube up and down, until finally Abdul-Rahman started violently throwing up blood."
Another account described the feeding tubes -- "the thickness of a finger" -- being "forcibly shoved up the detainees' noses and down into the stomachs (without any) anesthesia or sedative" provided.
Yet another said that the tubes were used on different detainees "with no sanitisation whoatsoever. àWhen these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from other detainees remaining on the tubes."
Publication of these accounts by CCR coincided Tuesday with a harrowing front-page story in the Washington Post of an eyewitness account by his lawyer of a suicide attempt by hanging two weeks ago by one of the detainees, Jumah Dossari, who was arrested in Pakistan in December 2001.
Dossari, who told his attorney he had been beaten and threatened by U.S. personnel both in Afghanistan, where he was taken after his arrest, and at Guantanamo, had tried to commit suicide before.
The Pentagon has said there have been 36 suicide attempts by 22 different detainees since suspected terrorists first arrived at Guantanamo, but that none has succeeded due to rapid intervention by the camp's guards. (END/2005)
Rumsfeld Rejects U.N. Access to Guantanamo
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 2 (IPS) - Amid growing concern over the fate and conditions of inmates engaged in a lengthy hunger strike at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday said he would not permit U.N. investigators to interview detainees there.
Rumsfeld depicted the strike, in which about half of the estimated 540 detainees at the prison have so far reportedly taken part since July, as a deliberate effort to attract media attention. He stressed that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will continue to have unlimited access to the prisoners, some of whom have been held for four years without trial.
"(T)here are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point, and then they rotate and other people do that," Rumsfeld told reporters during a press conference at the Pentagon. "So it's clearly a technique to try to the get the attention of you folks, and they're successful," he added.
International pressure to open the camp to U.N. investigators has intensified due to reports by some detainees' lawyers of protracted hunger strikes sparked by the failure of prison authorities to follow through on alleged commitments to improve camp conditions. These include complying with Geneva Convention standards and implementing a 16-month-old ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to permit inmates to appeal their status to an independent court that is not under the Pentagon's control.
The prison authorities have reportedly responded to the strikes by force-feeding weakened inmates by strapping them to tables and inserting long tubes through their nasal passages.
According to recently declassified statements by detainees to their attorneys, feeding procedures amount to torture and are being carried out in a sadistic manner.
A U.S. federal judge, Gladys Kessler, last week said the statements that had been submitted to her were "deeply troubling" and ordered the government to turn over the medical records of those detainees who are being force-fed.
On Oct. 27, the Pentagon invited three U.N. experts -- special rapporteurs on torture, religious freedom, and arbitrary detentions -- to visit Guantanamo, but added that they would not be permitted to meet with detainees. The three experts, as well as several other U.N. investigators, had repeatedly sought access since early 2002.
On Monday, the Special Rapporteur on Torture said he could not accept the invitation under those circumstances. "It makes no sense (to go)," said Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on Torture. "You cannot do a fact-finding mission without talking to the detainees."
"They said they have nothing to hide," he told the Washington Post. "If they have nothing to hide, why should we not be able to talk to the detainees in private?"
That question was echoed by human rights activists here Tuesday.
"Denying international human rights experts visits with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay continues the cloaking of detention practices in secrecy, only begging more questions about what is being hidden there and eroding the United States' standing with much of the world community," noted Avi Cover, a senior associate at Human Rights First (HRF), a lawyers' human rights organisation.
"There's not much of a point to the U.N. rapporteurs' conducting an investigation into treatment of detainees if they are simply provided a Pentagon-censored tour without meeting prisoners and hearing their accounts," he added.
In a letter to Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, six other religious and human rights groups, including Amnesty International, called on the Justice Department and Pentagon to take specific steps, including permitting access to the detainees by independent investigators as well as to the federal courts "to bring torture, abuse and inhumane treatment to an end at Guantanamo".
The groups announced a nationwide "Fast for Justice", timed to coincide with the end of Ramadan and the ongoing hunger strike, to press their demands. "There is a desperate situation in Guatanamo," said Tina Foster, an attorney with the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represents a large number of detainees. "Men are near death."
In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay was not outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. law, as the Bush administration had contended, and that detainees held there, some of whom arrived at the base almost four years ago, were entitled to appeal their status to an independent tribunal under a habeas corpus proceeding.
So far, however, the Pentagon has only afforded the detainees review hearings before a panel of military officers in proceedings that denied them access to classified information and representation at the hearings by a lawyer. Nonetheless, dozens of detainees were returned to their home countries after the hearings.
Meanwhile, a series of controversial incidents -- some involving reports of beatings and the desecration of a Koran -- sparked hunger strikes in which, according to the detainees' advocates, more than half the camp's total population has participated in one degree or another.
The Pentagon said Tuesday that 24 detainees are being force fed and strongly denied that any of them have suffered abuse.
But the lawyers' accounts of interviews with their clients paint a harrowing picture, with one detainee named Abdul Rahman complaining that "one Navy doctor had put the tube in his nose and down his throat and just kept moving the tube up and down, until finally Abdul-Rahman started violently throwing up blood."
Another account described the feeding tubes -- "the thickness of a finger" -- being "forcibly shoved up the detainees' noses and down into the stomachs (without any) anesthesia or sedative" provided.
Yet another said that the tubes were used on different detainees "with no sanitisation whoatsoever. àWhen these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from other detainees remaining on the tubes."
Publication of these accounts by CCR coincided Tuesday with a harrowing front-page story in the Washington Post of an eyewitness account by his lawyer of a suicide attempt by hanging two weeks ago by one of the detainees, Jumah Dossari, who was arrested in Pakistan in December 2001.
Dossari, who told his attorney he had been beaten and threatened by U.S. personnel both in Afghanistan, where he was taken after his arrest, and at Guantanamo, had tried to commit suicide before.
The Pentagon has said there have been 36 suicide attempts by 22 different detainees since suspected terrorists first arrived at Guantanamo, but that none has succeeded due to rapid intervention by the camp's guards. (END/2005)
Major Firms Named in Iraq Oil for Food Scandal
ipsnews.net
Major Firms Named in Iraq Oil for Food Scandal
Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 27 (IPS) - Some of the world's richest nations have come under fire from a leading corruption watchdog group for failing to take action against the companies that illegally profited from a United Nations-sponsored humanitarian programme in Iraq.
"It is sheer hypocrisy if high-income countries demand stringent accountability conditions from low-income countries in development cooperation without holding their companies to those same standards," said Peter Eigen, chairman of Transparency International, an independent group that tracks corrupt practices by government officials and private firms worldwide.
His harsh remarks came hours after independent investigators revealed Thursday that more than 2,000 companies were involved in bribes and surcharges to the Iraqi government during the time the U.N. ran its Oil for Food Programme.
A staggering 50 percent of the 4,500 companies involved are being investigated for making an illegal payment under the programme, according to the Independent Inquiry Committee's 623-page report.
The committee, led by Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, said it discovered nearly two billion dollars in bribes from prominent companies, including German manufacturing giant Siemens and the German-U.S. carmaker Daimler Chrysler.
Volcker, however, made it clear at a news conference Thursday that the "identification of a particular company's contract does not necessarily mean that company made, authorised or even knew about the illicit payment."
In their previous reports, investigators reprimanded U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, other U.N. officials and the Security Council for mishandling the 62-billion-dollar programme, which was set up to minimise the impact of harsh sanctions imposed on Iraq as a punishment for attacking neighbouring Kuwait in 1990 and for trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Under the programme, which began in 1996, Saddam Hussein's government sold Iraqi oil worth over 64 billion dollars to 248 companies. In turn, more than 3,600 companies sold over 34 billion dollars of humanitarian goods to Iraq, according to the Volcker committee.
The investigators said they found that companies purchasing the oil at reduced prices would funnel extra money to Iraq through "surcharges", while those receiving money from Iraq for humanitarian goods and services would return a part of the kickbacks.
Noting that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is bound by a treaty obligation that prohibits the bribing of foreign nationals, Transparency International says there is no excuse for the behaviour of companies from the wealthiest countries.
"We thought that the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention represented a watershed," Eigen said, "but we must sadly conclude that there is still a very long way to go."
Reacting to the findings of the report, a spokesperson for Annan told reporters that the U.N. chief would like to see governments take action against companies falling within their jurisdiction and adopt measures to prevent such lapses in the future.
Though supportive of the U.N. call for action, Eigen and others wonder if governments will demonstrate the necessary political will.
"With all the recriminations flying," said Cobus de Swardt, Transparency's director of global programmes, "it should not be forgotten that the Oil for Food Programme was meant to feed hungry children and prevent needless deaths."
"Punitive sanctions will not undo the human suffering that has been caused," de Swardt added.
In the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died from disease and malnutrition caused by shortages of food and medicine resulting from the economic sanctions.
Volcker said he and his colleagues were not in the business of "law enforcement", but that they would provide information to countries interested in taking legal action against companies or individuals named in the report.
While a response from other governments is still awaited, Switzerland's economic ministry has declared its readiness to launch criminal proceedings against four people in connection with the Volcker report.
For its part, Transparency International suggests that countries employ "the full arsenal" of punitive measures at their disposal to ensure that bribery "does not pay" for companies. Such measures can include financial penalties and debarment from public contracting.
"There is a great deal of scepticism as to whether prosecutions will actually follow," said Eigen. "But we and other civil society voices will not let the transgressions of these companies be forgotten, nor will we let national governments back away from the promises they have made."
(END/IPS/WD/MM/IK/IP/IF/CU/HR/KS/05 (END/2005)
Major Firms Named in Iraq Oil for Food Scandal
Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 27 (IPS) - Some of the world's richest nations have come under fire from a leading corruption watchdog group for failing to take action against the companies that illegally profited from a United Nations-sponsored humanitarian programme in Iraq.
"It is sheer hypocrisy if high-income countries demand stringent accountability conditions from low-income countries in development cooperation without holding their companies to those same standards," said Peter Eigen, chairman of Transparency International, an independent group that tracks corrupt practices by government officials and private firms worldwide.
His harsh remarks came hours after independent investigators revealed Thursday that more than 2,000 companies were involved in bribes and surcharges to the Iraqi government during the time the U.N. ran its Oil for Food Programme.
A staggering 50 percent of the 4,500 companies involved are being investigated for making an illegal payment under the programme, according to the Independent Inquiry Committee's 623-page report.
The committee, led by Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, said it discovered nearly two billion dollars in bribes from prominent companies, including German manufacturing giant Siemens and the German-U.S. carmaker Daimler Chrysler.
Volcker, however, made it clear at a news conference Thursday that the "identification of a particular company's contract does not necessarily mean that company made, authorised or even knew about the illicit payment."
In their previous reports, investigators reprimanded U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, other U.N. officials and the Security Council for mishandling the 62-billion-dollar programme, which was set up to minimise the impact of harsh sanctions imposed on Iraq as a punishment for attacking neighbouring Kuwait in 1990 and for trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Under the programme, which began in 1996, Saddam Hussein's government sold Iraqi oil worth over 64 billion dollars to 248 companies. In turn, more than 3,600 companies sold over 34 billion dollars of humanitarian goods to Iraq, according to the Volcker committee.
The investigators said they found that companies purchasing the oil at reduced prices would funnel extra money to Iraq through "surcharges", while those receiving money from Iraq for humanitarian goods and services would return a part of the kickbacks.
Noting that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is bound by a treaty obligation that prohibits the bribing of foreign nationals, Transparency International says there is no excuse for the behaviour of companies from the wealthiest countries.
"We thought that the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention represented a watershed," Eigen said, "but we must sadly conclude that there is still a very long way to go."
Reacting to the findings of the report, a spokesperson for Annan told reporters that the U.N. chief would like to see governments take action against companies falling within their jurisdiction and adopt measures to prevent such lapses in the future.
Though supportive of the U.N. call for action, Eigen and others wonder if governments will demonstrate the necessary political will.
"With all the recriminations flying," said Cobus de Swardt, Transparency's director of global programmes, "it should not be forgotten that the Oil for Food Programme was meant to feed hungry children and prevent needless deaths."
"Punitive sanctions will not undo the human suffering that has been caused," de Swardt added.
In the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died from disease and malnutrition caused by shortages of food and medicine resulting from the economic sanctions.
Volcker said he and his colleagues were not in the business of "law enforcement", but that they would provide information to countries interested in taking legal action against companies or individuals named in the report.
While a response from other governments is still awaited, Switzerland's economic ministry has declared its readiness to launch criminal proceedings against four people in connection with the Volcker report.
For its part, Transparency International suggests that countries employ "the full arsenal" of punitive measures at their disposal to ensure that bribery "does not pay" for companies. Such measures can include financial penalties and debarment from public contracting.
"There is a great deal of scepticism as to whether prosecutions will actually follow," said Eigen. "But we and other civil society voices will not let the transgressions of these companies be forgotten, nor will we let national governments back away from the promises they have made."
(END/IPS/WD/MM/IK/IP/IF/CU/HR/KS/05 (END/2005)
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Some conservatives question Rove's future
Reuters
Some conservatives question Rove's future
By Adam Entous
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Breaking with the White House and fellow conservatives, Republican Sen. Trent Lott and the head of the Cato Institute questioned on Tuesday whether top White House adviser Karl Rove, who remains in legal jeopardy in a CIA-leak probe, should keep his policy-making job.
Rove was not indicted on Friday along with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. But lawyers involved in the case said Rove, President George W. Bush's top political adviser and deputy chief of staff, remains under investigation and may still be charged by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
The identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame was leaked to the media in July 2003 after her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Despite initial White House denials, Fitzgerald's investigation shows that both Rove and Libby spoke to reporters about Wilson's wife.
Lott of Mississippi and William Niskanen of the libertarian Cato Institute both echoed Democratic calls for a White House shake-up.
"He (Rove) has been very successful, very effective in the political arena. The question is, should he be the deputy chief of staff for policy under the current circumstances?" Lott told MSNBC's "Hardball."
"Most presidents in recent years have a political adviser in the White House. The question is, should they be, you know, making policy decisions. That's the question you've got to evaluate," the former Senate Republican leader added.
Lott went further than he did on Sunday, when he urged Bush to be on the lookout for "new blood, new energy, qualified staff."
Niskanen, who served as a top economic adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, said, "Bush is going to have to sacrifice people who have worked with him to regain some initiative."
Niskanen said any White House shake-up should "start" with Rove because of his association with the leak case.
"He's provided good political judgment on campaigns, but not good political judgment on getting legislation through," Niskanen told Reuters.
So far, the White House has rebuffed calls for an overhaul in response to Libby's indictment. "Karl Rove continues to do his duties," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
When asked if Bush retained confidence in Rove, McClellan said on Monday: "People who work here at the White House have the confidence of the president."
A Republican strategist with ties to the White House said any personnel changes would be gradual to avoid the appearance that the White House was panicking.
Libby is expected to plead innocent to charges of obstructing justice, perjury and lying when he is arraigned on Thursday.
Fitzgerald was expected to decide within weeks whether to bring charges against Rove. Lawyers involved in the case said Rove provided new information last week to Fitzgerald that prompted him to reconsider charging Bush's top political adviser with making false statements.
Some conservatives question Rove's future
By Adam Entous
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Breaking with the White House and fellow conservatives, Republican Sen. Trent Lott and the head of the Cato Institute questioned on Tuesday whether top White House adviser Karl Rove, who remains in legal jeopardy in a CIA-leak probe, should keep his policy-making job.
Rove was not indicted on Friday along with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. But lawyers involved in the case said Rove, President George W. Bush's top political adviser and deputy chief of staff, remains under investigation and may still be charged by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
The identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame was leaked to the media in July 2003 after her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Despite initial White House denials, Fitzgerald's investigation shows that both Rove and Libby spoke to reporters about Wilson's wife.
Lott of Mississippi and William Niskanen of the libertarian Cato Institute both echoed Democratic calls for a White House shake-up.
"He (Rove) has been very successful, very effective in the political arena. The question is, should he be the deputy chief of staff for policy under the current circumstances?" Lott told MSNBC's "Hardball."
"Most presidents in recent years have a political adviser in the White House. The question is, should they be, you know, making policy decisions. That's the question you've got to evaluate," the former Senate Republican leader added.
Lott went further than he did on Sunday, when he urged Bush to be on the lookout for "new blood, new energy, qualified staff."
Niskanen, who served as a top economic adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, said, "Bush is going to have to sacrifice people who have worked with him to regain some initiative."
Niskanen said any White House shake-up should "start" with Rove because of his association with the leak case.
"He's provided good political judgment on campaigns, but not good political judgment on getting legislation through," Niskanen told Reuters.
So far, the White House has rebuffed calls for an overhaul in response to Libby's indictment. "Karl Rove continues to do his duties," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
When asked if Bush retained confidence in Rove, McClellan said on Monday: "People who work here at the White House have the confidence of the president."
A Republican strategist with ties to the White House said any personnel changes would be gradual to avoid the appearance that the White House was panicking.
Libby is expected to plead innocent to charges of obstructing justice, perjury and lying when he is arraigned on Thursday.
Fitzgerald was expected to decide within weeks whether to bring charges against Rove. Lawyers involved in the case said Rove provided new information last week to Fitzgerald that prompted him to reconsider charging Bush's top political adviser with making false statements.
Some conservatives question Rove's future
Reuters
Some conservatives question Rove's future
By Adam Entous
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Breaking with the White House and fellow conservatives, Republican Sen. Trent Lott and the head of the Cato Institute questioned on Tuesday whether top White House adviser Karl Rove, who remains in legal jeopardy in a CIA-leak probe, should keep his policy-making job.
Rove was not indicted on Friday along with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. But lawyers involved in the case said Rove, President George W. Bush's top political adviser and deputy chief of staff, remains under investigation and may still be charged by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
The identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame was leaked to the media in July 2003 after her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Despite initial White House denials, Fitzgerald's investigation shows that both Rove and Libby spoke to reporters about Wilson's wife.
Lott of Mississippi and William Niskanen of the libertarian Cato Institute both echoed Democratic calls for a White House shake-up.
"He (Rove) has been very successful, very effective in the political arena. The question is, should he be the deputy chief of staff for policy under the current circumstances?" Lott told MSNBC's "Hardball."
"Most presidents in recent years have a political adviser in the White House. The question is, should they be, you know, making policy decisions. That's the question you've got to evaluate," the former Senate Republican leader added.
Lott went further than he did on Sunday, when he urged Bush to be on the lookout for "new blood, new energy, qualified staff."
Niskanen, who served as a top economic adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, said, "Bush is going to have to sacrifice people who have worked with him to regain some initiative."
Niskanen said any White House shake-up should "start" with Rove because of his association with the leak case.
"He's provided good political judgment on campaigns, but not good political judgment on getting legislation through," Niskanen told Reuters.
So far, the White House has rebuffed calls for an overhaul in response to Libby's indictment. "Karl Rove continues to do his duties," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
When asked if Bush retained confidence in Rove, McClellan said on Monday: "People who work here at the White House have the confidence of the president."
A Republican strategist with ties to the White House said any personnel changes would be gradual to avoid the appearance that the White House was panicking.
Libby is expected to plead innocent to charges of obstructing justice, perjury and lying when he is arraigned on Thursday.
Fitzgerald was expected to decide within weeks whether to bring charges against Rove. Lawyers involved in the case said Rove provided new information last week to Fitzgerald that prompted him to reconsider charging Bush's top political adviser with making false statements.
Some conservatives question Rove's future
By Adam Entous
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Breaking with the White House and fellow conservatives, Republican Sen. Trent Lott and the head of the Cato Institute questioned on Tuesday whether top White House adviser Karl Rove, who remains in legal jeopardy in a CIA-leak probe, should keep his policy-making job.
Rove was not indicted on Friday along with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. But lawyers involved in the case said Rove, President George W. Bush's top political adviser and deputy chief of staff, remains under investigation and may still be charged by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
The identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame was leaked to the media in July 2003 after her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Despite initial White House denials, Fitzgerald's investigation shows that both Rove and Libby spoke to reporters about Wilson's wife.
Lott of Mississippi and William Niskanen of the libertarian Cato Institute both echoed Democratic calls for a White House shake-up.
"He (Rove) has been very successful, very effective in the political arena. The question is, should he be the deputy chief of staff for policy under the current circumstances?" Lott told MSNBC's "Hardball."
"Most presidents in recent years have a political adviser in the White House. The question is, should they be, you know, making policy decisions. That's the question you've got to evaluate," the former Senate Republican leader added.
Lott went further than he did on Sunday, when he urged Bush to be on the lookout for "new blood, new energy, qualified staff."
Niskanen, who served as a top economic adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, said, "Bush is going to have to sacrifice people who have worked with him to regain some initiative."
Niskanen said any White House shake-up should "start" with Rove because of his association with the leak case.
"He's provided good political judgment on campaigns, but not good political judgment on getting legislation through," Niskanen told Reuters.
So far, the White House has rebuffed calls for an overhaul in response to Libby's indictment. "Karl Rove continues to do his duties," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
When asked if Bush retained confidence in Rove, McClellan said on Monday: "People who work here at the White House have the confidence of the president."
A Republican strategist with ties to the White House said any personnel changes would be gradual to avoid the appearance that the White House was panicking.
Libby is expected to plead innocent to charges of obstructing justice, perjury and lying when he is arraigned on Thursday.
Fitzgerald was expected to decide within weeks whether to bring charges against Rove. Lawyers involved in the case said Rove provided new information last week to Fitzgerald that prompted him to reconsider charging Bush's top political adviser with making false statements.
Some conservatives question Rove's future
Reuters
Some conservatives question Rove's future
By Adam Entous
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Breaking with the White House and fellow conservatives, Republican Sen. Trent Lott and the head of the Cato Institute questioned on Tuesday whether top White House adviser Karl Rove, who remains in legal jeopardy in a CIA-leak probe, should keep his policy-making job.
Rove was not indicted on Friday along with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. But lawyers involved in the case said Rove, President George W. Bush's top political adviser and deputy chief of staff, remains under investigation and may still be charged by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
The identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame was leaked to the media in July 2003 after her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Despite initial White House denials, Fitzgerald's investigation shows that both Rove and Libby spoke to reporters about Wilson's wife.
Lott of Mississippi and William Niskanen of the libertarian Cato Institute both echoed Democratic calls for a White House shake-up.
"He (Rove) has been very successful, very effective in the political arena. The question is, should he be the deputy chief of staff for policy under the current circumstances?" Lott told MSNBC's "Hardball."
"Most presidents in recent years have a political adviser in the White House. The question is, should they be, you know, making policy decisions. That's the question you've got to evaluate," the former Senate Republican leader added.
Lott went further than he did on Sunday, when he urged Bush to be on the lookout for "new blood, new energy, qualified staff."
Niskanen, who served as a top economic adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, said, "Bush is going to have to sacrifice people who have worked with him to regain some initiative."
Niskanen said any White House shake-up should "start" with Rove because of his association with the leak case.
"He's provided good political judgment on campaigns, but not good political judgment on getting legislation through," Niskanen told Reuters.
So far, the White House has rebuffed calls for an overhaul in response to Libby's indictment. "Karl Rove continues to do his duties," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
When asked if Bush retained confidence in Rove, McClellan said on Monday: "People who work here at the White House have the confidence of the president."
A Republican strategist with ties to the White House said any personnel changes would be gradual to avoid the appearance that the White House was panicking.
Libby is expected to plead innocent to charges of obstructing justice, perjury and lying when he is arraigned on Thursday.
Fitzgerald was expected to decide within weeks whether to bring charges against Rove. Lawyers involved in the case said Rove provided new information last week to Fitzgerald that prompted him to reconsider charging Bush's top political adviser with making false statements.
Some conservatives question Rove's future
By Adam Entous
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Breaking with the White House and fellow conservatives, Republican Sen. Trent Lott and the head of the Cato Institute questioned on Tuesday whether top White House adviser Karl Rove, who remains in legal jeopardy in a CIA-leak probe, should keep his policy-making job.
Rove was not indicted on Friday along with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. But lawyers involved in the case said Rove, President George W. Bush's top political adviser and deputy chief of staff, remains under investigation and may still be charged by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
The identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame was leaked to the media in July 2003 after her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Despite initial White House denials, Fitzgerald's investigation shows that both Rove and Libby spoke to reporters about Wilson's wife.
Lott of Mississippi and William Niskanen of the libertarian Cato Institute both echoed Democratic calls for a White House shake-up.
"He (Rove) has been very successful, very effective in the political arena. The question is, should he be the deputy chief of staff for policy under the current circumstances?" Lott told MSNBC's "Hardball."
"Most presidents in recent years have a political adviser in the White House. The question is, should they be, you know, making policy decisions. That's the question you've got to evaluate," the former Senate Republican leader added.
Lott went further than he did on Sunday, when he urged Bush to be on the lookout for "new blood, new energy, qualified staff."
Niskanen, who served as a top economic adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, said, "Bush is going to have to sacrifice people who have worked with him to regain some initiative."
Niskanen said any White House shake-up should "start" with Rove because of his association with the leak case.
"He's provided good political judgment on campaigns, but not good political judgment on getting legislation through," Niskanen told Reuters.
So far, the White House has rebuffed calls for an overhaul in response to Libby's indictment. "Karl Rove continues to do his duties," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
When asked if Bush retained confidence in Rove, McClellan said on Monday: "People who work here at the White House have the confidence of the president."
A Republican strategist with ties to the White House said any personnel changes would be gradual to avoid the appearance that the White House was panicking.
Libby is expected to plead innocent to charges of obstructing justice, perjury and lying when he is arraigned on Thursday.
Fitzgerald was expected to decide within weeks whether to bring charges against Rove. Lawyers involved in the case said Rove provided new information last week to Fitzgerald that prompted him to reconsider charging Bush's top political adviser with making false statements.
DeLay gets new judge in Texas case
Reuters
DeLay gets new judge in Texas case
By Jeff Franks
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A judge presiding over the money laundering and conspiracy case involving U.S. Republican Rep. Tom DeLay, one of America's most powerful politicians, was ordered to step aside on Tuesday after DeLay's attorneys said the judge was too staunchly Democrat to give a fair trial.
State District Judge Bob Perkins will be replaced by another judge to be named by a regional administrator without input from either side in the politically charged case.
Visiting Judge C.W. Duncan granted a defense motion to recuse Perkins without explanation after a hearing in which DeLay's lawyer Dick DeGuerin complained that Perkins had given money to candidates and organizations, especially liberal activist group MoveOn.org, opposed to DeLay and could not be impartial.
"We're not saying that Judge Perkins is a bad judge or an unfair judge. What we are saying is this is the wrong case for him to judge," DeGuerin said.
Perkins had refused to recuse himself from it, but asked that the decision be made by another judge.
DeLay attended the hearing and left smiling, but made no comment.
In Texas, judges must run for office in partisan elections and are free to donate to political candidates and causes. Perkins is a Democrat, as are all but one of the district judges in Travis County, where Austin is located.
DeGuerin also has asked for a change of venue to move the case to another county, but that has not been ruled on.
He and DeLay have repeatedly charged that the former U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader is the victim of a Democratic plot to oust him because of his success in advancing Republican causes and that this is nothing but a "political case." DeLay was forced by House Republican rules to resign his leadership post after he was indicted in September.
Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, who has led the investigation against DeLay, argued that Perkins should be allowed to stay on the case and disagreed that the case is political.
"This is not a political case. This is a criminal case in which Mr DeLay stands charged with a felony," he said.
"There is no basis, no precedent for recusal based on a judge's political contributions," said Earle, who is a Democrat.
DeLay is accused of laundering $190,000 in corporate campaign contributions gathered by his Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee through the Republican National Committee to candidates for the state legislature in Texas in 2002.
Texas law forbids the use of corporate funds in political campaigns.
His efforts contributed to Republicans taking control of the Texas Legislature for the first time since the Reconstruction era after the U.S. Civil War, and then remapping congressional districts to increase the number of Republicans in the U.S. House.
Earle said the several thousand dollars Perkins had given Democrats over the years was "paltry" in comparison to how much money DeLay has raised and in some cases, used in "intimidating judges with whom he disagreed."
Earle also accused DeLay, through partisan zeal, of fomenting divisions within U.S. society that could lead to Americans becoming like "Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds" in deeply divided Iraq.
"We may be Republicans or Democrats, but we are all Americans and we believe in equal justice under the law," he said.
DeLay, sitting beside his wife, Christine, smiled broadly at Earle's comments.
DeLay gets new judge in Texas case
By Jeff Franks
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A judge presiding over the money laundering and conspiracy case involving U.S. Republican Rep. Tom DeLay, one of America's most powerful politicians, was ordered to step aside on Tuesday after DeLay's attorneys said the judge was too staunchly Democrat to give a fair trial.
State District Judge Bob Perkins will be replaced by another judge to be named by a regional administrator without input from either side in the politically charged case.
Visiting Judge C.W. Duncan granted a defense motion to recuse Perkins without explanation after a hearing in which DeLay's lawyer Dick DeGuerin complained that Perkins had given money to candidates and organizations, especially liberal activist group MoveOn.org, opposed to DeLay and could not be impartial.
"We're not saying that Judge Perkins is a bad judge or an unfair judge. What we are saying is this is the wrong case for him to judge," DeGuerin said.
Perkins had refused to recuse himself from it, but asked that the decision be made by another judge.
DeLay attended the hearing and left smiling, but made no comment.
In Texas, judges must run for office in partisan elections and are free to donate to political candidates and causes. Perkins is a Democrat, as are all but one of the district judges in Travis County, where Austin is located.
DeGuerin also has asked for a change of venue to move the case to another county, but that has not been ruled on.
He and DeLay have repeatedly charged that the former U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader is the victim of a Democratic plot to oust him because of his success in advancing Republican causes and that this is nothing but a "political case." DeLay was forced by House Republican rules to resign his leadership post after he was indicted in September.
Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, who has led the investigation against DeLay, argued that Perkins should be allowed to stay on the case and disagreed that the case is political.
"This is not a political case. This is a criminal case in which Mr DeLay stands charged with a felony," he said.
"There is no basis, no precedent for recusal based on a judge's political contributions," said Earle, who is a Democrat.
DeLay is accused of laundering $190,000 in corporate campaign contributions gathered by his Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee through the Republican National Committee to candidates for the state legislature in Texas in 2002.
Texas law forbids the use of corporate funds in political campaigns.
His efforts contributed to Republicans taking control of the Texas Legislature for the first time since the Reconstruction era after the U.S. Civil War, and then remapping congressional districts to increase the number of Republicans in the U.S. House.
Earle said the several thousand dollars Perkins had given Democrats over the years was "paltry" in comparison to how much money DeLay has raised and in some cases, used in "intimidating judges with whom he disagreed."
Earle also accused DeLay, through partisan zeal, of fomenting divisions within U.S. society that could lead to Americans becoming like "Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds" in deeply divided Iraq.
"We may be Republicans or Democrats, but we are all Americans and we believe in equal justice under the law," he said.
DeLay, sitting beside his wife, Christine, smiled broadly at Earle's comments.
Rumsfeld says no U.N. access to Guantanamo inmates
Reuters
Rumsfeld says no U.N. access to Guantanamo inmates
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Spurning a request by U.N. human rights investigators, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday the United States will not allow them to meet with detainees at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects.
Rumsfeld also told a Pentagon news conference that prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were staging a hunger strike that began in early August as a successful ploy to attract media attention.
The three U.N. investigators, including one who focuses on torture, said on Monday they would turn down an invitation extended by the Pentagon on Friday to visit Guantanamo unless they were permitted to interview the detainees. The invitation came nearly four years after the visits were first requested.
Rumsfeld said the U.S. government will not change its policy of giving such access to detainees only to the International Committee of the Red Cross, a neutral body that keeps its findings confidential.
"There's got to be a limit to how one does that," Rumsfeld said of providing access to detainees.
"And the ICRC has been doing it for a great many years and has had complete and total access ever since Guantanamo was opened. And so we're not inclined to add (to) the number of people that would be given that extensive access."
The invitations went to Austria's Manfred Nowak, special investigator on torture, Pakistan's Asma Jahangir, who focuses on religious freedom, and Algeria's Leila Zerrougui, who looks into arbitrary detention.
27 DETAINEES ENGAGED IN HUNGER STRIKE
Human rights activists have criticized the United States for the indefinite detention of the roughly 505 detainees held at Guantanamo. Former prisoners have stated they were tortured there, and the ICRC last year accused the U.S. military of using tactics "tantamount to torture" on Guantanamo prisoners. The military has denied torture has occurred.
The U.N. investigators said they proposed a December 6 visit but would go only if permitted to talk to the prisoners.
Zerrougui said on Monday the U.N. investigators had never agreed to visit a place where they would not have full access to all detainees, and asked the United States to provide such access "in the spirit of compromise."
The military said on Tuesday 27 detainees currently were engaging in the hunger strike, including 24 receiving forced-feedings. Detainees' lawyers estimated that about 200 are taking part. These lawyers said the strike was a protest of the prisoners' conditions and lack of legal rights.
Asked about the motivation of the hunger strikers, Rumsfeld said, "Well, I suppose that what they're trying to do is to capture press attention, obviously, and they've succeeded."
He added, "There are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point. And then they rotate and other people do that."
U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler last week ordered the government to provide medical records on Guantanamo prisoners who are being force-fed and to notify their lawyers about forced feedings.
The judge said detainees' lawyers had presented "deeply troubling" allegations of U.S. personnel violently shoving feeding tubes as thick as a finger through the men's noses and into their stomachs without anesthesia or sedatives, with detainees vomiting blood as U.S. personnel mocked them.
Rumsfeld appeared to distance himself from the decision to force-feed detainees.
"I'm not a doctor and I'm not the kind of a person who would be in a position to approve or disapprove. It seems to me, looking at it from this distance, is that the responsible people are the combatant commanders. And the Army is the executive agent for detainees," Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld says no U.N. access to Guantanamo inmates
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Spurning a request by U.N. human rights investigators, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday the United States will not allow them to meet with detainees at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects.
Rumsfeld also told a Pentagon news conference that prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were staging a hunger strike that began in early August as a successful ploy to attract media attention.
The three U.N. investigators, including one who focuses on torture, said on Monday they would turn down an invitation extended by the Pentagon on Friday to visit Guantanamo unless they were permitted to interview the detainees. The invitation came nearly four years after the visits were first requested.
Rumsfeld said the U.S. government will not change its policy of giving such access to detainees only to the International Committee of the Red Cross, a neutral body that keeps its findings confidential.
"There's got to be a limit to how one does that," Rumsfeld said of providing access to detainees.
"And the ICRC has been doing it for a great many years and has had complete and total access ever since Guantanamo was opened. And so we're not inclined to add (to) the number of people that would be given that extensive access."
The invitations went to Austria's Manfred Nowak, special investigator on torture, Pakistan's Asma Jahangir, who focuses on religious freedom, and Algeria's Leila Zerrougui, who looks into arbitrary detention.
27 DETAINEES ENGAGED IN HUNGER STRIKE
Human rights activists have criticized the United States for the indefinite detention of the roughly 505 detainees held at Guantanamo. Former prisoners have stated they were tortured there, and the ICRC last year accused the U.S. military of using tactics "tantamount to torture" on Guantanamo prisoners. The military has denied torture has occurred.
The U.N. investigators said they proposed a December 6 visit but would go only if permitted to talk to the prisoners.
Zerrougui said on Monday the U.N. investigators had never agreed to visit a place where they would not have full access to all detainees, and asked the United States to provide such access "in the spirit of compromise."
The military said on Tuesday 27 detainees currently were engaging in the hunger strike, including 24 receiving forced-feedings. Detainees' lawyers estimated that about 200 are taking part. These lawyers said the strike was a protest of the prisoners' conditions and lack of legal rights.
Asked about the motivation of the hunger strikers, Rumsfeld said, "Well, I suppose that what they're trying to do is to capture press attention, obviously, and they've succeeded."
He added, "There are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point. And then they rotate and other people do that."
U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler last week ordered the government to provide medical records on Guantanamo prisoners who are being force-fed and to notify their lawyers about forced feedings.
The judge said detainees' lawyers had presented "deeply troubling" allegations of U.S. personnel violently shoving feeding tubes as thick as a finger through the men's noses and into their stomachs without anesthesia or sedatives, with detainees vomiting blood as U.S. personnel mocked them.
Rumsfeld appeared to distance himself from the decision to force-feed detainees.
"I'm not a doctor and I'm not the kind of a person who would be in a position to approve or disapprove. It seems to me, looking at it from this distance, is that the responsible people are the combatant commanders. And the Army is the executive agent for detainees," Rumsfeld said.
Chalabi, Libby, and Miller: Together Again?
The Huffington Post
Chalabi, Libby, and Miller: Together Again?
Arianna Huffington
It looks like Judy Miller isn't the only discredited war instigator who might be making a comeback.
Ahmad Chalabi, the eocon-darling-turned-persona-non-grata-turned-Iraqi-Deputy-Prime-Minister, is coming to Washington this month -- his first visit to DC since the White House soured on him back in May 2004 and those Pentagon checks stopped coming.
For his comeback tour, Chalabi has lined up meetings with Condi Rice, John Snow, and national security advisor Stephen Hadley (no word on whether he and Hadley will have a friendly showdown to see who helped pass along the most bogus pre-war intel. I can see Chalabi offering up Curveball only to have Hadley top him with the phony yellowcake info he passed along).
And no word on whether Chalabi will be calling on his old pal Scooter Libby, to whom he turned when the CIA stopped buying his bull, and who gave him a direct line to the White House. Just as he once convinced Libby that American troops would be greeted as liberators, Chalabi could now convince him there is light at the end of the indictment tunnel: "Trust me, Scooter, I've been through much worse. You just gotta put your head down and keep scheming!"
Chalabi's visit is the political version of getting the band back together.
And, having orchestrated the greatest career makeover since Paris Hilton went from Internet porn curiosity to Vanity Fair cover girl, Chalabi has now set his sights on becoming Iraq's new prime minister following the next round of voting on Dec. 15.
Not bad for a guy who, less than two years ago, was being accused by the Bush administration of passing intelligence to Iran that could 'get people killed.'
But, apparently, now that Chalabi is a power player in Iraq, all appears forgiven. At least around the White House. The rest of us, on the other hand, would do well to remember that this is still the guy who:
* was a prime source of trumped up claims about Saddam's WMD
* bamboozled the Bushies while pocketing $340,000 a month from the US government
* tried to sabotage the UN's efforts to put in place an interim government in Iraq
* helped the White House Iraq Group sell the war by regularly passing faulty intel to Judy Miller
* introduced Curveball, another bogus source on WMD, to the intelligence community
* was accused of spying for the Iranians
* controlled a group of thugs accused of fraud, torture, kidnapping, and misuse of U.S. funds
* was convicted in abstentia of embezzling millions of dollars in Jordan in the 1980s
No word on whether Chalabi and Miller are going to get together to discuss old times while he's here. Although it probably won't be as exciting as the time Judy stopped by Ahmad's compound in Iraq while she was embedded with the MET Alpha unit, which, in a show of hospitality, was given custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Sultan. Miller was even allowed to sit in on the initial questioning of Sultan. Misty water-colored memories...
I'm not sure what this all proves. You can't keep a good double-agent down? Nasty guys finish first? There is no God?
So what's next for these would-be Comeback Kids? Who knows, maybe six months down the road, we'll see Chalabi as the new top dog in Iraq and Judy as the chief of the Times' new Tikrit bureau.
Chalabi, Libby, and Miller: Together Again?
Arianna Huffington
It looks like Judy Miller isn't the only discredited war instigator who might be making a comeback.
Ahmad Chalabi, the eocon-darling-turned-persona-non-grata-turned-Iraqi-Deputy-Prime-Minister, is coming to Washington this month -- his first visit to DC since the White House soured on him back in May 2004 and those Pentagon checks stopped coming.
For his comeback tour, Chalabi has lined up meetings with Condi Rice, John Snow, and national security advisor Stephen Hadley (no word on whether he and Hadley will have a friendly showdown to see who helped pass along the most bogus pre-war intel. I can see Chalabi offering up Curveball only to have Hadley top him with the phony yellowcake info he passed along).
And no word on whether Chalabi will be calling on his old pal Scooter Libby, to whom he turned when the CIA stopped buying his bull, and who gave him a direct line to the White House. Just as he once convinced Libby that American troops would be greeted as liberators, Chalabi could now convince him there is light at the end of the indictment tunnel: "Trust me, Scooter, I've been through much worse. You just gotta put your head down and keep scheming!"
Chalabi's visit is the political version of getting the band back together.
And, having orchestrated the greatest career makeover since Paris Hilton went from Internet porn curiosity to Vanity Fair cover girl, Chalabi has now set his sights on becoming Iraq's new prime minister following the next round of voting on Dec. 15.
Not bad for a guy who, less than two years ago, was being accused by the Bush administration of passing intelligence to Iran that could 'get people killed.'
But, apparently, now that Chalabi is a power player in Iraq, all appears forgiven. At least around the White House. The rest of us, on the other hand, would do well to remember that this is still the guy who:
* was a prime source of trumped up claims about Saddam's WMD
* bamboozled the Bushies while pocketing $340,000 a month from the US government
* tried to sabotage the UN's efforts to put in place an interim government in Iraq
* helped the White House Iraq Group sell the war by regularly passing faulty intel to Judy Miller
* introduced Curveball, another bogus source on WMD, to the intelligence community
* was accused of spying for the Iranians
* controlled a group of thugs accused of fraud, torture, kidnapping, and misuse of U.S. funds
* was convicted in abstentia of embezzling millions of dollars in Jordan in the 1980s
No word on whether Chalabi and Miller are going to get together to discuss old times while he's here. Although it probably won't be as exciting as the time Judy stopped by Ahmad's compound in Iraq while she was embedded with the MET Alpha unit, which, in a show of hospitality, was given custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Sultan. Miller was even allowed to sit in on the initial questioning of Sultan. Misty water-colored memories...
I'm not sure what this all proves. You can't keep a good double-agent down? Nasty guys finish first? There is no God?
So what's next for these would-be Comeback Kids? Who knows, maybe six months down the road, we'll see Chalabi as the new top dog in Iraq and Judy as the chief of the Times' new Tikrit bureau.
Senators to Probe Lobbyist's Activities
The Wall Street Journal
Senators to Probe Lobbyist's Activities
Hearing Will Focus on Whether Abramoff
Tried to Sway Decision About New Casino
By BRODY MULLINS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- A Senate investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff that has drawn attention to his ties to members of President Bush's inner circle of advisers is set to open a new line of inquiry in its hearing today.
A Senate committee will hear testimony on whether Mr. Abramoff sought to influence Interior Secretary Gale Norton by directing one of his clients to donate money to a nonprofit group Ms. Norton founded before joining the Bush administration. The panel also will look into whether Mr. Abramoff sought help for his clients from Ms. Norton's deputy at the Interior Department, Steven Griles, by offering Mr. Griles a lobbying job.
Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee that has conducted the yearlong inquiry into Mr. Abramoff's lobbying on behalf of Indian tribes, emphasized that his panel has found "no connection" between Mr. Abramoff and Ms. Norton. He said the hearing will focus on two of her associates.
The Senate panel's inquiry has focused on Mr. Abramoff's lobbying for a handful of Native American tribes. Mr. Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, earned more than $80 million over four years from the tribes.
Today's hearing is set to look at how Mr. Abramoff may have sought to influence the Interior Department -- the Cabinet agency that handles matters affecting tribal affairs, such as recognizing tribes and approving gambling agreements between states and tribes.
At the hearing, the panel is expected to release copies of emails between Mr. Abramoff and his clients and administration officials. According to people who have read them, the emails document that the lobbyist sought to have his American Indian clients make donations to Ms. Norton's former organization in an attempt to influence the Interior Department. The emails are said to show how the current head of the organization -- the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy -- relayed information about decision-making on the proposed casino between Mr. Abramoff and senior Interior Department officials. The council is a business-backed Republican group that works on conservative solutions to environmental issues. The council once launched a pricey campaign to defeat legislation offered by Mr. McCain to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses.
The hearing comes at a time when Republicans are facing several probes. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, stepped down after being indicted in the CIA-leak investigation. Securities regulators and the Justice Department are looking into Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's sale of HCA Corp. shares days before discouraging news for the company; House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R., Texas) has stepped aside as he faces money-laundering charges related to a political campaign in his home state.
Senators are expected to ask witnesses, including the current and former elected leaders of a former Abramoff client, the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana, if the lobbyist tried to use financial contributions and connections at the Interior Department in an attempt to block construction of another tribe's casino that would have competed with the Coushatta gambling operations. The Coushatta tribe paid Mr. Abramoff and his partner Mr. Scanlon $30 million over three years to block the rival casino.
To help persuade the Interior Department, Mr. Abramoff asked the Coushatta tribe to make donations to the council, which Ms. Norton, a conservative activist and former attorney general of Colorado, helped organize in 1997. The Coushatta tribe gave the group a total of $150,000, according to Jimmy R. Faircloth Jr., a lawyer for the tribe.
After initially siding with Mr. Abramoff's client in 2002, the Interior Department reversed course in December 2003 to endorse the new casino. Last year, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco blocked the rival casino because she is opposed to expanding gambling in Louisiana.
When asked this week by a reporter about Ms. Norton's interaction with the Abramoff investigation, a spokesman said, "the ultimate decision here was not favorable" to Mr. Abramoff and his client.
Ms. Norton has had no role in the council since she entered Mr. Bush's cabinet. The organization is run by Italia Federici, who worked on Ms. Norton's failed 1996 campaign for a Senate seat from Colorado.
Emails that will be released at the hearing indicate that Ms. Federici helped transmit information about the department's decisions on casinos between Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Griles. When Mr. Abramoff helped stir up opposition to the new casino from conservative activists, for example, Ms. Federici warned Interior officials that influential Republicans opposed the plan.
Ms. Federici also helped arrange a meeting between the Coushatta chief and Ms. Norton after the Coushatta tribe donated $50,000 to the council. Sen. McCain asked Ms. Federici to appear at today's hearing, but she will be traveling. Ms. Federici declined to comment.
The Senate panel will also question Mr. Griles, Ms. Norton's former deputy at the Interior Department. In the past year, Mr. Griles left the administration to join the Washington firm of Lundquist, Nethercutt & Griles as a lobbyist.
According to lobbyists at Mr. Abramoff's former Washington firm, Greenberg Traurig, Mr. Abramoff offered Mr. Griles a job in late 2003 when Mr. Griles was still at the Interior Department. Lawyers for Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Griles declined to comment.
Write to Brody Mullins at brody.mullins@wsj.com1
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113089552683385879.html
Senators to Probe Lobbyist's Activities
Hearing Will Focus on Whether Abramoff
Tried to Sway Decision About New Casino
By BRODY MULLINS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- A Senate investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff that has drawn attention to his ties to members of President Bush's inner circle of advisers is set to open a new line of inquiry in its hearing today.
A Senate committee will hear testimony on whether Mr. Abramoff sought to influence Interior Secretary Gale Norton by directing one of his clients to donate money to a nonprofit group Ms. Norton founded before joining the Bush administration. The panel also will look into whether Mr. Abramoff sought help for his clients from Ms. Norton's deputy at the Interior Department, Steven Griles, by offering Mr. Griles a lobbying job.
Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee that has conducted the yearlong inquiry into Mr. Abramoff's lobbying on behalf of Indian tribes, emphasized that his panel has found "no connection" between Mr. Abramoff and Ms. Norton. He said the hearing will focus on two of her associates.
The Senate panel's inquiry has focused on Mr. Abramoff's lobbying for a handful of Native American tribes. Mr. Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, earned more than $80 million over four years from the tribes.
Today's hearing is set to look at how Mr. Abramoff may have sought to influence the Interior Department -- the Cabinet agency that handles matters affecting tribal affairs, such as recognizing tribes and approving gambling agreements between states and tribes.
At the hearing, the panel is expected to release copies of emails between Mr. Abramoff and his clients and administration officials. According to people who have read them, the emails document that the lobbyist sought to have his American Indian clients make donations to Ms. Norton's former organization in an attempt to influence the Interior Department. The emails are said to show how the current head of the organization -- the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy -- relayed information about decision-making on the proposed casino between Mr. Abramoff and senior Interior Department officials. The council is a business-backed Republican group that works on conservative solutions to environmental issues. The council once launched a pricey campaign to defeat legislation offered by Mr. McCain to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses.
The hearing comes at a time when Republicans are facing several probes. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, stepped down after being indicted in the CIA-leak investigation. Securities regulators and the Justice Department are looking into Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's sale of HCA Corp. shares days before discouraging news for the company; House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R., Texas) has stepped aside as he faces money-laundering charges related to a political campaign in his home state.
Senators are expected to ask witnesses, including the current and former elected leaders of a former Abramoff client, the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana, if the lobbyist tried to use financial contributions and connections at the Interior Department in an attempt to block construction of another tribe's casino that would have competed with the Coushatta gambling operations. The Coushatta tribe paid Mr. Abramoff and his partner Mr. Scanlon $30 million over three years to block the rival casino.
To help persuade the Interior Department, Mr. Abramoff asked the Coushatta tribe to make donations to the council, which Ms. Norton, a conservative activist and former attorney general of Colorado, helped organize in 1997. The Coushatta tribe gave the group a total of $150,000, according to Jimmy R. Faircloth Jr., a lawyer for the tribe.
After initially siding with Mr. Abramoff's client in 2002, the Interior Department reversed course in December 2003 to endorse the new casino. Last year, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco blocked the rival casino because she is opposed to expanding gambling in Louisiana.
When asked this week by a reporter about Ms. Norton's interaction with the Abramoff investigation, a spokesman said, "the ultimate decision here was not favorable" to Mr. Abramoff and his client.
Ms. Norton has had no role in the council since she entered Mr. Bush's cabinet. The organization is run by Italia Federici, who worked on Ms. Norton's failed 1996 campaign for a Senate seat from Colorado.
Emails that will be released at the hearing indicate that Ms. Federici helped transmit information about the department's decisions on casinos between Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Griles. When Mr. Abramoff helped stir up opposition to the new casino from conservative activists, for example, Ms. Federici warned Interior officials that influential Republicans opposed the plan.
Ms. Federici also helped arrange a meeting between the Coushatta chief and Ms. Norton after the Coushatta tribe donated $50,000 to the council. Sen. McCain asked Ms. Federici to appear at today's hearing, but she will be traveling. Ms. Federici declined to comment.
The Senate panel will also question Mr. Griles, Ms. Norton's former deputy at the Interior Department. In the past year, Mr. Griles left the administration to join the Washington firm of Lundquist, Nethercutt & Griles as a lobbyist.
According to lobbyists at Mr. Abramoff's former Washington firm, Greenberg Traurig, Mr. Abramoff offered Mr. Griles a job in late 2003 when Mr. Griles was still at the Interior Department. Lawyers for Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Griles declined to comment.
Write to Brody Mullins at brody.mullins@wsj.com1
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113089552683385879.html
Let the Apologies Begin
The Huffington Post
Let the Apologies Begin
Michelle Pilecki
Or continue, as the case may be. The Milwaukee Journal has offered its own apology for "promulgating the administration's now patently false claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." Editorial page editor O. Ricardo Pimentel notes that his 10-person editorial board didn't have the influence of The New York Times, the resources of the United Nations nor access to secret US intelligence.
His board believed the claims and wrote accordingly. "Like you, we read voraciously on the topic and made the best editorial decisions we thought we could. There was countervailing evidence even back then, of course, but the overwhelming weight of the evidence available to us [emphasis in original] was that Hussein did indeed have WMD."
Now, of course, we discover much evidence that the intelligence fed the public, including us, was "cooked" or "fixed" -- choose your favorite description -- around what the administration viewed as its most salable argument.... [C]ount us as among the many who were duped. We should have been more skeptical. For that lack of skepticism and the failure to include the proper caveats to the WMD claim, we apologize, though I would note that, ultimately, we didn't believe that the president's central WMD argument warranted war. Not then and especially not now.
Give Mr. Pimentel credit for not using the "everybody thought there were WMDs" excuse. Too many of the "watchdogs" of the press too easily accepted the claims of "weapons of mass destruction" and ignored the skeptics like Scott Ritter. The former chief weapons inspector wrote a July 20, 2002, op-ed in The Boston Globe -- months before the war -- "In direct contrast to [his inspection team's] findings, the Bush administration provides only speculation, failing to detail any factually based information to bolster its claims concerning Iraq's continued possession of or ongoing efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
Yes, there was a lot of "countervailing evidence" before the invasion, and the media ducked their responsibility to examine it.
Let the Apologies Begin
Michelle Pilecki
Or continue, as the case may be. The Milwaukee Journal has offered its own apology for "promulgating the administration's now patently false claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." Editorial page editor O. Ricardo Pimentel notes that his 10-person editorial board didn't have the influence of The New York Times, the resources of the United Nations nor access to secret US intelligence.
His board believed the claims and wrote accordingly. "Like you, we read voraciously on the topic and made the best editorial decisions we thought we could. There was countervailing evidence even back then, of course, but the overwhelming weight of the evidence available to us [emphasis in original] was that Hussein did indeed have WMD."
Now, of course, we discover much evidence that the intelligence fed the public, including us, was "cooked" or "fixed" -- choose your favorite description -- around what the administration viewed as its most salable argument.... [C]ount us as among the many who were duped. We should have been more skeptical. For that lack of skepticism and the failure to include the proper caveats to the WMD claim, we apologize, though I would note that, ultimately, we didn't believe that the president's central WMD argument warranted war. Not then and especially not now.
Give Mr. Pimentel credit for not using the "everybody thought there were WMDs" excuse. Too many of the "watchdogs" of the press too easily accepted the claims of "weapons of mass destruction" and ignored the skeptics like Scott Ritter. The former chief weapons inspector wrote a July 20, 2002, op-ed in The Boston Globe -- months before the war -- "In direct contrast to [his inspection team's] findings, the Bush administration provides only speculation, failing to detail any factually based information to bolster its claims concerning Iraq's continued possession of or ongoing efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
Yes, there was a lot of "countervailing evidence" before the invasion, and the media ducked their responsibility to examine it.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
The True Cost of War
The Huffington Post
The True Cost of War
Cindy Sheehan
This immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq has cost the world so much. George and his reckless war of choice have cost the American taxpayers billions of dollars that could be better spent at home. Judging from Katrina, Iraq has cost our country much of its security. It has cost the US any good standing we enjoyed in the world community.
It cost America the post 9/11 good will from almost the entire world. We Americans are the laughingstock of the world community. Not only is our callous and careless leadership disdained, but we the people are scorned because we "re"-elected George for a 2nd term and not only that, we are allowing him to continue to mis-lead our country into ruin.
The price many of us are paying is so much costlier than the mere monetary expense or loss of reputation. Over 2,000 American families have paid the price of our dear loved ones to the insanity. Over 15,000 of our young people are wounded with 400 of those being amputees. The Veterans Administration estimates that over 1/4 of our children will come home with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I believe that number is higher, because I know of many cases where the military refuses to allow soldiers to seek treatment for PTSD. Many of them are sent back to battle if they even dare suggest they may be suffering from PTSD. Even if they are not wounded emotionally or physically, or killed, our soldiers will not come home entirely whole.
I was standing in front of the White House the other day when the indictments against Scooter were handed down. I was helping to hold a banner that said: Support our Troops: Bring Them Home Now.
When we received word of the indictments, many of us protestors outside the White House were cheering with happiness and relief. At last, someone could be held accountable for the lies that led our country into a disastrous invasion of Iraq. But I wasn't cheering. I put down my end of the banner and sat down on the curb and cried.
Scooter is just a lap dog for Cheney. He and this administration don't do anything unless the dirty deed is analyzed and planned for maximum damage to the offending party and minimum harm to Bush and Co. The criminals in power meant to hurt Joe Wilson and his family because Joe had the temerity and the audacity to call them liars: and to do it with such intelligence and alacrity was too much for the crooks to bear. If this crooked administration let Joe Wilson get away with telling the truth and calling them liars, then who would be next? Colin Powell? Judith Miller? The main stream media? (It could happen).
I cried because there are people in this world who have lied about smaller things and have been punished more harshly. I cried because there was a shill of the right near me holding a sign that read "Put Cindy in Abu Ghraib" when there are war criminals and immoral war profiteers running amok in our country. I cried because George, Dick, Condi, Colin, Alberto, Donald, Scooter, Paul, Karl, Judith, O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc., lied about the reasons for invading Iraq and because of their lies, my son, who rarely told anything but the truth, is dead.
The liars and lies that led the US to invade Iraq are legion and well documented. (Once, just for giggles, I put George Bush/Lies in a Google search and 272,000 references came up). The lies to maintain the occupation are the same. The liars are now starting to beat the war drum for invading Syria.
A mom whose son committed "accidental" suicide in Iraq about 7 months ago called me this morning. She is beside herself with grief. I remember that the 7th month to the 9th month is the hardest. I think this is true because the profound shock is starting to wear off and the horrendous pain sets in. I so vividly remember the days where I ached so badly I didn't know what to do with my pain. I was afraid if I started screaming, I wouldn't be able to stop until every blood vessel in my brain burst open. I was afraid if I started to hit something, I wouldn't be able to stop until it was completely destroyed. I was afraid that I would have to live every single day with heartbreak so intense and overpowering that I would eventually wear myself out from it.
The ninth month after Casey was killed was the absolute most devastating for me. I remembered the first nine months of his existence in my womb all warm and protected. How his dad and I anticipated his birth with so much joy and expectation. In contrast, the first nine months he was in the cold, cold womb of our mother earth were so joyless, painful, dark and dismal. Having your child murdered for lies, mistakes, and betrayals is so dark and dismal: no one should have to endure what we are enduring.
I was able to reassure the mom in agony somewhat that if she could get through about two more months, she would be able to breathe a little and maybe smile a little and even mean it once in awhile.
We who have made the "ultimate sacrifice" know the true cost of war.
92 families found out in October, one of the bloodiest months of this war. Seven of our brave troops were killed today and their families will soon know how much pain the Bush administration's lies will cause them and how much peace, sleep, and joy these same lies cost.
For everyone else, this is the true cost of war:
Moms and Dads having their hearts and souls violently ripped out. Overwhelming guilt is felt in relentless and pounding waves.
Husbands and wives sorrowfully and prematurely burying their life partners. Days and nights ahead filled with loneliness and pain.
Brothers and sisters having integral parts of their history seized so cruelly from them. Holidays, birthdays, and other celebrations that will never be the same.
Sons and daughters unjustly denied the basic human right to grow up with both of their parents.
Other family members and friends mourning and missing someone too young to be killed in an occupation in which the war dead were sold the bill of goods that they would be greeted with chocolates and flowers from the Iraqi people as liberators.
A sovereign nation which was no threat to the United States of America lies in ruins and tens of thousands of its innocent citizens have been slaughtered just for the hell of it.
When are we going to stand up as a country and yell a collective: "bull-shit?!!" I have been screaming this until my voice is getting hoarse and people are getting sick of hearing it.
How much and how many more are we going to allow the serial liars to rob from us?
I say not one more.
The True Cost of War
Cindy Sheehan
This immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq has cost the world so much. George and his reckless war of choice have cost the American taxpayers billions of dollars that could be better spent at home. Judging from Katrina, Iraq has cost our country much of its security. It has cost the US any good standing we enjoyed in the world community.
It cost America the post 9/11 good will from almost the entire world. We Americans are the laughingstock of the world community. Not only is our callous and careless leadership disdained, but we the people are scorned because we "re"-elected George for a 2nd term and not only that, we are allowing him to continue to mis-lead our country into ruin.
The price many of us are paying is so much costlier than the mere monetary expense or loss of reputation. Over 2,000 American families have paid the price of our dear loved ones to the insanity. Over 15,000 of our young people are wounded with 400 of those being amputees. The Veterans Administration estimates that over 1/4 of our children will come home with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I believe that number is higher, because I know of many cases where the military refuses to allow soldiers to seek treatment for PTSD. Many of them are sent back to battle if they even dare suggest they may be suffering from PTSD. Even if they are not wounded emotionally or physically, or killed, our soldiers will not come home entirely whole.
I was standing in front of the White House the other day when the indictments against Scooter were handed down. I was helping to hold a banner that said: Support our Troops: Bring Them Home Now.
When we received word of the indictments, many of us protestors outside the White House were cheering with happiness and relief. At last, someone could be held accountable for the lies that led our country into a disastrous invasion of Iraq. But I wasn't cheering. I put down my end of the banner and sat down on the curb and cried.
Scooter is just a lap dog for Cheney. He and this administration don't do anything unless the dirty deed is analyzed and planned for maximum damage to the offending party and minimum harm to Bush and Co. The criminals in power meant to hurt Joe Wilson and his family because Joe had the temerity and the audacity to call them liars: and to do it with such intelligence and alacrity was too much for the crooks to bear. If this crooked administration let Joe Wilson get away with telling the truth and calling them liars, then who would be next? Colin Powell? Judith Miller? The main stream media? (It could happen).
I cried because there are people in this world who have lied about smaller things and have been punished more harshly. I cried because there was a shill of the right near me holding a sign that read "Put Cindy in Abu Ghraib" when there are war criminals and immoral war profiteers running amok in our country. I cried because George, Dick, Condi, Colin, Alberto, Donald, Scooter, Paul, Karl, Judith, O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc., lied about the reasons for invading Iraq and because of their lies, my son, who rarely told anything but the truth, is dead.
The liars and lies that led the US to invade Iraq are legion and well documented. (Once, just for giggles, I put George Bush/Lies in a Google search and 272,000 references came up). The lies to maintain the occupation are the same. The liars are now starting to beat the war drum for invading Syria.
A mom whose son committed "accidental" suicide in Iraq about 7 months ago called me this morning. She is beside herself with grief. I remember that the 7th month to the 9th month is the hardest. I think this is true because the profound shock is starting to wear off and the horrendous pain sets in. I so vividly remember the days where I ached so badly I didn't know what to do with my pain. I was afraid if I started screaming, I wouldn't be able to stop until every blood vessel in my brain burst open. I was afraid if I started to hit something, I wouldn't be able to stop until it was completely destroyed. I was afraid that I would have to live every single day with heartbreak so intense and overpowering that I would eventually wear myself out from it.
The ninth month after Casey was killed was the absolute most devastating for me. I remembered the first nine months of his existence in my womb all warm and protected. How his dad and I anticipated his birth with so much joy and expectation. In contrast, the first nine months he was in the cold, cold womb of our mother earth were so joyless, painful, dark and dismal. Having your child murdered for lies, mistakes, and betrayals is so dark and dismal: no one should have to endure what we are enduring.
I was able to reassure the mom in agony somewhat that if she could get through about two more months, she would be able to breathe a little and maybe smile a little and even mean it once in awhile.
We who have made the "ultimate sacrifice" know the true cost of war.
92 families found out in October, one of the bloodiest months of this war. Seven of our brave troops were killed today and their families will soon know how much pain the Bush administration's lies will cause them and how much peace, sleep, and joy these same lies cost.
For everyone else, this is the true cost of war:
Moms and Dads having their hearts and souls violently ripped out. Overwhelming guilt is felt in relentless and pounding waves.
Husbands and wives sorrowfully and prematurely burying their life partners. Days and nights ahead filled with loneliness and pain.
Brothers and sisters having integral parts of their history seized so cruelly from them. Holidays, birthdays, and other celebrations that will never be the same.
Sons and daughters unjustly denied the basic human right to grow up with both of their parents.
Other family members and friends mourning and missing someone too young to be killed in an occupation in which the war dead were sold the bill of goods that they would be greeted with chocolates and flowers from the Iraqi people as liberators.
A sovereign nation which was no threat to the United States of America lies in ruins and tens of thousands of its innocent citizens have been slaughtered just for the hell of it.
When are we going to stand up as a country and yell a collective: "bull-shit?!!" I have been screaming this until my voice is getting hoarse and people are getting sick of hearing it.
How much and how many more are we going to allow the serial liars to rob from us?
I say not one more.
Here Comes the Judge -- Beyond Roe v. Wade
The Huffington Post
Here Comes the Judge -- Beyond Roe v. Wade
Larry Beinhart
The first question to ask the new nominee to the Supreme Court is: "Will you be an honest judge?"
This is not a question that is normally asked, straight up, to a Supreme Court nominee. But we are asking about something a little more subtle than "would you take a bribe to throw a case?"
In the year 2000 the Supreme Court of the United States stopped the recount of the Florida vote and threw the election to George Bush. This is old news. But judging from the Roberts' hearings and the punditry, the issues have been forgotten. They've faded into the fog.
Ignoring the fact that the man with fewer votes got to be president, what is most notable about the decision was that Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Conner did not vote according to what they believed the law to be. They voted for Bush because they wanted a Republican president.
We can say that because they have a track record and their votes in Bush v. Gore went against their own established principles. If Gore had been ahead and he asked them to stop the recount, on the very same grounds, it is a virtual certainty that those same five judges would have voted the other way.
The justices violated a judicial principle that is even more profound and runs even deeper than the Constitution itself, that the law will be applied fairly.
Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist and O'Connor stopped the recount on the grounds that because different counties would use different standards it would violate equal protection.
But that was already true of the original voting. Machines were different, their maintenance levels were different, the way they were set was different, and ballot designs were different. How could a recount -- a closer examination of flaws -- increase the inequality of protection?
To stop something, the court has to find that there will be harm in letting it go forward. That harm has to be greater than any harm created by stopping the procedure. Preferably, the harm should be otherwise irreparable. In this case the court held that Bush would be harmed because the recount would cast doubt on the legitimacy of his election.
Huh?
Presuming he would have still won after the votes were recounted, that would make the vote seem doubly legitimate, not cast doubts on it. If the recount showed that he lost, surely the harm done to Al Gore, to the voters of Florida, and to the people of the United States -- to be governed by a man who lost the election -- would be greater harm than the doubts that exist anyway about George Bush's election.
It was a laughable decision on the face of it.
But that's not what is important in judging the justices. What is important is that these five had always interpreted the equal protection amendment as narrowly as possible. They were also on record as favoring the power of the individual states rather than extending the power of the federal government. This was a reversal of that stance as well.
As to their attitude about harm, these were justices who had refused to stay the executions of prisoners who had cases on appeal, who were then put to death before their cases could be heard. These are judges who did not consider death a harm irreparable enough to issue a stay.
This was not a situation in which they suddenly woke up and changed judicial philosophies, which might be legitimate. They were changing just for this decision and they intended to change back and they even said the decision was, "limited to the present circumstances ..."
The question to ask the new nominee is if he would give a liberal Democrat equal justice to a conservative Republican?
He will automatically say, "Of course."
The next question is, "The other conservative Republican appointees put party interests ahead of principle, how are you different than they are? Tell us how we are to know that you are better than Scalia?"
This is a very different question than "How will you vote on Roe v. Wade?" A fair portion of the American people -- and possibly even a Republican Senator -- might think fair justice and justice with integrity is more important than any single issue.
The next question is, "Do you believe that the Constitution applies to everyone?"
We now have a class of people -- anyone who is named as an "enemy combatant" or a terrorist -- who can be picked up, carted away, kept in confinement and tortured. They have no right to attorney or to face their accuser or to be a trial. This is fairly extreme given that the constitution says:
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury ..."
"... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ..."
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."
After that, we should ask, "Do you believe that everyone is equal before the law or are there people above the law?"
There is a reason this has to be asked. When this administration decided they wanted to torture people they understood that torture is a crime. It is a common crime and it is a crime in a state of war, both in international law and according to the United States code, specifically sections 2340 and 2340A.
Jay Bybee, when he was at the White House with Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, came up with the theory that when the president is wearing his commander-in-chief outfit, he is above the law. The law against torture doesn't apply to him because it would interfere with his "constitutional power to conduct a military campaign." If anyone committed a war crime under his orders, they too would be protected.
We figure that none of us would ever be called a terrorist or an "enemy combatant" and be stripped of our rights. We're too respectable. We assume that the president would never have one of us, personally, tortured, as he is too respectable. So we don't feel immediately threatened. But there is no technical difference between the way Jose Padilla was treated and the way you and I could be treated tomorrow.
Unless we remember that we had a revolution so that we would not have a king. Then we established a democracy. We wrote a constitution. We put in certain guarantees. We declared ourselves to be a nation of laws. In which no man was above the law. Or beneath it.
It is fair to ask if any judicial nominee understands that and agrees with it.
Here Comes the Judge -- Beyond Roe v. Wade
Larry Beinhart
The first question to ask the new nominee to the Supreme Court is: "Will you be an honest judge?"
This is not a question that is normally asked, straight up, to a Supreme Court nominee. But we are asking about something a little more subtle than "would you take a bribe to throw a case?"
In the year 2000 the Supreme Court of the United States stopped the recount of the Florida vote and threw the election to George Bush. This is old news. But judging from the Roberts' hearings and the punditry, the issues have been forgotten. They've faded into the fog.
Ignoring the fact that the man with fewer votes got to be president, what is most notable about the decision was that Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Conner did not vote according to what they believed the law to be. They voted for Bush because they wanted a Republican president.
We can say that because they have a track record and their votes in Bush v. Gore went against their own established principles. If Gore had been ahead and he asked them to stop the recount, on the very same grounds, it is a virtual certainty that those same five judges would have voted the other way.
The justices violated a judicial principle that is even more profound and runs even deeper than the Constitution itself, that the law will be applied fairly.
Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist and O'Connor stopped the recount on the grounds that because different counties would use different standards it would violate equal protection.
But that was already true of the original voting. Machines were different, their maintenance levels were different, the way they were set was different, and ballot designs were different. How could a recount -- a closer examination of flaws -- increase the inequality of protection?
To stop something, the court has to find that there will be harm in letting it go forward. That harm has to be greater than any harm created by stopping the procedure. Preferably, the harm should be otherwise irreparable. In this case the court held that Bush would be harmed because the recount would cast doubt on the legitimacy of his election.
Huh?
Presuming he would have still won after the votes were recounted, that would make the vote seem doubly legitimate, not cast doubts on it. If the recount showed that he lost, surely the harm done to Al Gore, to the voters of Florida, and to the people of the United States -- to be governed by a man who lost the election -- would be greater harm than the doubts that exist anyway about George Bush's election.
It was a laughable decision on the face of it.
But that's not what is important in judging the justices. What is important is that these five had always interpreted the equal protection amendment as narrowly as possible. They were also on record as favoring the power of the individual states rather than extending the power of the federal government. This was a reversal of that stance as well.
As to their attitude about harm, these were justices who had refused to stay the executions of prisoners who had cases on appeal, who were then put to death before their cases could be heard. These are judges who did not consider death a harm irreparable enough to issue a stay.
This was not a situation in which they suddenly woke up and changed judicial philosophies, which might be legitimate. They were changing just for this decision and they intended to change back and they even said the decision was, "limited to the present circumstances ..."
The question to ask the new nominee is if he would give a liberal Democrat equal justice to a conservative Republican?
He will automatically say, "Of course."
The next question is, "The other conservative Republican appointees put party interests ahead of principle, how are you different than they are? Tell us how we are to know that you are better than Scalia?"
This is a very different question than "How will you vote on Roe v. Wade?" A fair portion of the American people -- and possibly even a Republican Senator -- might think fair justice and justice with integrity is more important than any single issue.
The next question is, "Do you believe that the Constitution applies to everyone?"
We now have a class of people -- anyone who is named as an "enemy combatant" or a terrorist -- who can be picked up, carted away, kept in confinement and tortured. They have no right to attorney or to face their accuser or to be a trial. This is fairly extreme given that the constitution says:
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury ..."
"... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ..."
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."
After that, we should ask, "Do you believe that everyone is equal before the law or are there people above the law?"
There is a reason this has to be asked. When this administration decided they wanted to torture people they understood that torture is a crime. It is a common crime and it is a crime in a state of war, both in international law and according to the United States code, specifically sections 2340 and 2340A.
Jay Bybee, when he was at the White House with Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, came up with the theory that when the president is wearing his commander-in-chief outfit, he is above the law. The law against torture doesn't apply to him because it would interfere with his "constitutional power to conduct a military campaign." If anyone committed a war crime under his orders, they too would be protected.
We figure that none of us would ever be called a terrorist or an "enemy combatant" and be stripped of our rights. We're too respectable. We assume that the president would never have one of us, personally, tortured, as he is too respectable. So we don't feel immediately threatened. But there is no technical difference between the way Jose Padilla was treated and the way you and I could be treated tomorrow.
Unless we remember that we had a revolution so that we would not have a king. Then we established a democracy. We wrote a constitution. We put in certain guarantees. We declared ourselves to be a nation of laws. In which no man was above the law. Or beneath it.
It is fair to ask if any judicial nominee understands that and agrees with it.