Recent Information Security Breaches Raise Privacy Concerns

CDT POLICY POST Volume 11, Number 6, March 8, 2005

A Briefing On Public Policy Issues Affecting Civil Liberties Online
from The Center For Democracy and Technology

Recent Information Security Breaches Raise Privacy Concerns

(1) Recent Information Security Breaches Raise Privacy Concerns
(2) Congress Considers Range Of Policy Responses
(3) The Overlooked Issue - Government Access and Use
(4) Congressional Hearings Planned
(5) O'Harrow Book Maps Data Landscape

---------------------------
(1) Recent Information Security Breaches Raise Privacy Concerns

Recent stories about security breaches at ChoicePoint and Bank of
America Corp. and about the accessibility of Social Security Numbers
through WestLaw have renewed concerns regarding the privacy of
personal information, producing a flurry of calls for investigations
and legislation at the state and federal level.

Discerning the appropriate policy response requires parsing the
issues involved, including computer security, the privacy issues
associated with data aggregation and sale, and the crime of identity
theft. Perhaps one of the most important issues is in the background
of recent stories: Under what circumstances and for what purposes
does the government access the growing amount of data compiled by
commercial entities?

The issues go well beyond any of the specific companies involved, but
here are the basic facts: Last month, ChoicePoint announced that
thieves posing as legitimate businesses had purchased access to its
vast database of more than 19 billion public records. ChoicePoint, an
information broker that aggregates and sells personal information to
private companies, law enforcement agencies and the US government,
possesses personal information about virtually every US citizen.
ChoicePoint's security breach affected approximately 145,000 people.
California law requires information brokers like ChoicePoint to
notify California citizens whose personal information has been
stolen. No other state has such a law, but ChoicePoint ultimately
notified all those whose data had been fraudulently purchased and
offered them free credit watch services for one year.

Also last month, Bank of America announced that, in December 2004,
someone stole backup tapes of customer data that it was shipping by
commercial aircraft. These backup tapes contained the Social Security
Numbers and other personal financial information of as many as 1.2
million federal employees, including some members of Congress,
rendering these individuals vulnerable to identity theft.

In the wake of these stories, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) publicly
criticized WestLaw for what he called "egregious loopholes" in its
data services that allow subscribers to obtain Social Security
numbers and other personally identifiable information. WestLaw
responded that it has strict policies that limit access to sensitive
personal information and that such information is not available to
the general public.


---------------------------
(2) Congress Considers Range Of Policy Responses

Lawmakers are exploring a range of policy responses to the issues
posed by these recent breaches and to the broader issues associated
with the dramatic expansion over the past decade of the marketplace
for personally identifiable information. Among the ideas being
discussed:


- Federal Security Breach Notification: US Senator Dianne Feinstein
(D-CA) has introduced legislation (S. 115), modeled on the California
disclosure law, that would require data brokers and other holders of
sensitive personal information to notify people whose personal
information might have been stolen. [Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has
drafted similar legislation that requires notice of security breaches
and improper access to, or misuse of, personally identifiable
information.] Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ) is planning to reintroduce
legislation that would require financial institutions to notify
customers, law enforcement agencies and credit agencies in the event
of a security breach that puts customers' data at risk.

Notice aids consumers by allowing them to take protective action when
their data has been compromised and seems to be a step that some in
the information industry would embrace. However, while such
legislation would be helpful in mitigating the damage and might prod
companies to improve security proactively, it would not directly
prevent the theft of personal information nor would it address the
issues associated with government's growing use of commercial data
post 9/11.

- Tighter Controls on Use, and Stiffer Penalties for Misuse, of
Social Security Numbers: The Social Security Number (SSN) has become
a de facto national identifier, serving as the key that unlocks many
corporate and governmental databases. Accordingly, it is a major
facilitator of identity theft. Sen. Feinstein has introduced
legislation (S. 29 and S. 116) that would restrict the display, sale
and purchase of SSNs without consent, limit the circumstances under
which commercial entities could require individuals to provide their
SSNs, and prohibit the use of the numbers on drivers' licenses. Rep.
Ed Markey (D-MA) also has introduced legislation that would make it a
crime to sell or purchase Social Security Numbers. And Rep. Rodney
Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) has introduced similar legislation that
prohibits "interactive computer services," like WestLaw, from
disclosing SSNs to third parties without written consent.

Skeptics worry that such legislation would not be enacted without
numerous exceptions. Moreover, given the ubiquity of Social Security
Numbers in the public domain, criminals could still acquire them from
other sources. Finally, tighter controls on Social Security Numbers
would not prevent identity thieves from acquiring and using other
personal identifiers to perpetrate fraud.

- Extend Fair Credit Reporting Act Concepts to Data Brokers: The
Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) is one of the most important privacy
laws on the books, affording consumers the right to access and
challenge their credit reports and requiring credit reporting
agencies to maintain accurate data. The FCRA is complicated and
always highly contested, so there is little taste for extending the
Act itself to data brokers.

However, Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Congressman Markey have
introduced the Information Protection and Security Act, which would
regulate "information brokers" under a legal framework akin to the
Fair Credit Reporting Act. This bill would subject information
brokers like ChoicePoint to federal regulation by the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC). The FTC would be required to issue new fair
information practice rules that would do the following: (1) require
information brokers to develop procedures to guarantee maximum
possible accuracy of their data, prevent and detect fraudulent,
unlawful or unauthorized use or disclosure of personally identifiable
information and mitigate potential harm to individuals from threats
to privacy and security; (2) allow individuals to access information
about themselves held by data brokers and the identity of each entity
that purchased their personally identifiable information; and (3)
require information brokers to authenticate users before allowing
access to their databases.

- Requiring Data Brokers to Formally Address Security: Pursuant to
the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) financial institutions are already
under information security requirements, and the Health Insurance
Portability and Protection Act (HIPPA) imposes similar requirements
on health care companies. Data brokers similarly could be required to
conduct risk assessments, develop and implement security plans, and
regularly audit their security procedures. Requiring data brokers to
develop and implement security procedures, however, would not limit
the sale of personal data to commercial entities.

- Holding Data Brokers Liable for Security Breaches: Most if not all
of the proposed federal bills contain liability provisions that would
give the FTC and/or the Attorney General enforcement power to bring
actions against violators, and some bills give consumers private
rights of action. A California woman whose personal information was
purchased from ChoicePoint by the fraud artists has filed suit
against ChoicePoint in Los Angeles Superior Court alleging fraud and
negligence. There is, however, no established standard of care for
information security at this time.

- Imposing a "Know Your Customer" Requirement on Data Brokers: Data
brokers are in the best position to verify the identity of their
customers and they could be prohibited from selling information to
customers whom they are unable to verify. The bill proposed by Sen.
Nelson and Rep. Markey requires information brokers to authenticate
purchasers of their data before granting them access. It is unclear,
however, what risk factors data brokers would use to assess potential
customers.

Some solutions pose their own risks to privacy. In the area of
identity fraud, some approaches may require more personal information
to be collected and more authentication to be demanded to prevent
unauthorized access and establishing identity of users.

CDT will track progress of relevant federal bills at its legislative
page: http://www.cdt.org/legislation/109/3


---------------------------
(3) The Overlooked Issue - Government Access and Use

Even before September 11, the federal government was developing and
implementing new ways to use commercially aggregated data. Since
2001, this process has accelerated. The new data environment has two
defining features: the depth and breadth of personally identifiable
information available in commercial databases, and the capacity to
analyze such data and draw from it patterns, inferences, and
knowledge.

This area should not be ignored. By and large, the rules for the
government's use of databases for counterterrorism purposes are
fragmentary and unresponsive to the new kinds of screening
applications that are being developed. The Privacy Act does not apply
when the government subscribes to a commercial database and federal
privacy laws for financial and medical records have broad exemptions
for national security. Consequently, there is no framework addressing
key questions: When should the government access commercial
databases? How will the government use "knowledge" generated by
computerized analysis of data? Could the analysis trigger a criminal
or intelligence investigation? Will it be used for screening
purposes-to trigger a more intensive search of someone seeking to
board an airplane, to keep a person off an airplane, to deny a person
access to a government building, to deny a person a job? What rights
does an individual have in these contexts?

In December 2004, Congress adopted and the President signed the
Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Section
1016 of the Act requires the President to create an "information
sharing environment" for the sharing of terrorism information among
all appropriate Federal, State, local, and tribal entities, and the
private sector. The ISE, as the information sharing environment is
known, is supposed to incorporates protections for individuals'
privacy and civil liberties and strong mechanisms to enhance
accountability and facilitate oversight, including audits,
authentication, and access controls, but so far, those procedures are
unwritten.

The Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the
Information Age and the Defense Secretary's Technology and Privacy
Advisory Committee (TAPAC) recommended some standards, including
senior level and sometimes judicial approval for access, permission
controls on sharing, auditing, and redress.

CDT has compiled two charts outlining the patchwork of laws governing
commercial data, one focusing on commercial use and one on
governmental uses: http://www.cdt.org/security/guidelines/

For further information:

- James X. Dempsey and Lara M. Flint, Commercial Data and National
Security, The George Washington Law Review (August 2004):
http://www.cdt.org/publications/200408dempseyflint.pdf

- Markle Task Force on National Security in the Information Age:
http://www.markletaskforce.org/


---------------------------
(4) Congressional Hearings Planned

Members of Congress have responded to the recent spate of security
breaches by preparing for hearings on the subject of data privacy.
The first will be March 10, before the Senate Banking Committee,
chaired by Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL). Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) has announced his intention to also
hold hearings on the issue. Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), Chairman
of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has asked his staff on
the to examine the issue of data storage and privacy. In addition,
several members of Congress are planning to ask the Government
Accountability Office to investigate the US government's contracts
with data brokers.


---------------------------
(5) O'Harrow Book Maps Data Landscape

In "No Place to Hide" (Free Press 2005), Washington Post reporter
Robert O'Harrow, Jr., lays out in extensive detail the post-9/11
marriage of private data companies and government anti-terror
initiatives. Drawing on years of investigation, O'Harrow shows how
the government is using private databases to promote homeland
security and fight the war on terror.

O'Harrow builds his book with stories of key players in this new
world, from software inventors to counterintelligence officials.
While O'Harrow offers few policy recommendations, his book is a
indispensable introduction to the new world of high-tech data
collection and analysis. "More than ever before," O'Harrow concludes,
"the details of our lives are no longer our own. They belong to the
companies that collect them, and the government agencies that buy or
demand them in the name of keeping us safe." He quotes Viet Dinh,
often credited as the author of the PATRIOT Act: "The leap in
technology has not been met with a proportionate response in terms of
how we think of this technology. We need to think more creatively.'"

------------------------------
Detailed information about online civil liberties issues may be
found at http://www.cdt.org/.

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Abortion rights supporters lose a key vote in Senate

Boston.com
The Boston Globe
Abortion rights supporters lose a key vote in Senate

By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | March 9, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The Senate yesterday defeated an effort to stop those who commit abortion-clinic violence from ducking legal judgments through bankruptcy, a setback for abortion rights groups and a display of the increased might of the Republican majority after last year's elections.

A similar measure was part of a bankruptcy bill the Senate passed in 2003, and opposition from House Republican leaders was the only thing that kept it from becoming law then. But Republicans picked up four Senate seats in November and the amendment failed in the Senate, 53-46, in a vote that advocates on both sides consider a harbinger for the prospects of other abortion-related matters in Congress.

''The culture of the Senate probably has changed somewhat to the right on that issue," said Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican who used the abortion issue to help defeat Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, last year. ''Clearly, with the freshman class that came in this year, you gained a number of prolife votes."

The stronger GOP majority could boost several initiatives designed to make abortion rarer. The legislative agenda of abortion opponents includes a federal law against taking a minor across state lines to end a pregnancy, a measure requiring doctors to inform women who are more than 20 weeks pregnant that their fetuses would experience pain during an abortion, and a ban on so-called ''morning after" abortion pills.

''The political landscape has changed significantly, and we expect to take advantage of it," said Jayd Henricks, director of congressional relations for the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group. ''Hopefully this vote sets the tone that we have a prolife majority, to continue to move legislation through."

The defeat of the abortion-clinic amendment removed the last obstacle to the Republican-sponsored bill to overhaul federal bankruptcy laws, making it tougher for consumers to erase their personal debts. In yesterday's session, the Senate voted 69-31 to limit further debate on that bill, clearing the way for its passage by the end of the week.

Republicans have repeatedly introduced the bankruptcy reform measure, sought for years by banks and credit-card companies to stop consumer fraud. In two previous sessions of Congress, Senate Democrats thwarted it by adding on an amendment forbidding violent antiabortion protesters from using bankruptcy to dodge fines and civil judgments against them. Both times, House Republicans chose to scuttle the entire bill rather than vote for legislation they said singled out abortion opponents.

Democrats, who say the GOP bankruptcy changes will unfairly saddle consumers with bills they can't pay, tried the same tactic yesterday This time around, they fell four votes short.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat and the amendment's lead sponsor, acknowledged that the Senate's shift against abortion rights was a factor, but he said supporters of abortion rights are still a formidable force.

Schumer noted that, had four GOP senators switched votes, his amendment would have passed again, and said the fact that four Republican members defied their party leaders to vote for it in defeat was a signal that many in the GOP are uncomfortable with the party's position on abortion. The Republican senators who crossed party lines included three New Englanders -- Olympia J. Snowe and Susan M. Collins of Maine, and Lincoln D. Chafee of Rhode Island.

''We all know, those of us who are prochoice, that we have a rougher row to hoe in this new Congress," Schumer said after the vote. ''But I don't think that this [defeat] was definitive in any way."

In recent years, the House has been more active than the Senate in pushing abortion restrictions. But Republicans now have a 55-45 Senate majority, and yesterday's vote -- while complicated by other factors -- was an early marker in the current term's abortion fight, said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama. ''It shows that the Congress is getting more in synch with the American people, who are less and less enamored with abortion on demand," he said.

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Bankruptcy Bill Set for Passage

The New York Times
March 9, 2005
Bankruptcy Bill Set for Passage
By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON, March 8 - The Senate assured final passage of the first major overhaul of the nation's bankruptcy laws in 27 years on Tuesday, when it took two votes that cleared the remaining political obstacles to a measure that the nation's credit and retail industries have sought for years.

The bill would disqualify many families from taking advantage of the more generous provisions of the current bankruptcy code that permit them to extinguish their debts for a "fresh start." It would also impose significant new costs on those seeking bankruptcy protection and give lenders and businesses new legal tools for recovering debts.

The Senate on Tuesday first defeated an amendment that would have prevented violent protesters at abortion clinics from using the bankruptcy laws to shield themselves from judgments awarded in civil lawsuits. That amendment, which lost by a vote of 53 to 46, had threatened to derail the legislation. The senators then voted 69 to 31 to limit debate and cut off any effort to kill the legislation by filibuster.

Final passage of the measure is now an inevitable formality.

House leaders have said they will quickly approve the legislation once the Senate completes work on it as early as this week. President Bush has said he intends to sign it. His predecessor, President Bill Clinton, killed the measure in his final days in office in 2000 after it had been passed by Congress by declining to sign it at the end of the legislative session, issuing a so-called pocket veto.

The sponsors of the legislation say that it will have the effect of lowering the costs of goods and services for all consumers by making it easier for companies and issuers of credit to collect unpaid debts rather than passing those costs on to everyone else. In the last 30 years, bankruptcy filings have steadily increased, rising eightfold since Congress last rewrote the bankruptcy laws.

But critics said the measure was a thinly disguised gift to banks and credit card companies, which, they contend, are largely responsible for the high rate of bankruptcies because they heavily promote credit cards and loans that often come with large and largely unseen fees for late payments. They said that the measure would impose new obstacles on many middle-income families seeking desperately needed protection from creditors, and that it would take far longer for those families to start over after suffering serious illnesses, unemployment and other calamities.

The votes on Tuesday were the second legislative victory in recent weeks both for Mr. Bush and the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, himself a possible presidential contender in 2008. Mr. Frist nimbly moved both the bankruptcy bill and another bill last month making it more difficult to bring class-action lawsuits through the Senate.

In both cases, he unified the Republicans to beat back every effort by the Democrats to water down or delay the measures. In both cases, he also reached a deal with House leaders in which the Senate blocked any significant changes to the measure in exchange for a commitment from the House that it would adopt unaltered what the Senate approved.

The White House applauded the votes on Tuesday.

"The administration supports the passage of bankruptcy reform because ultimately this will lead to more accessibility to credit for more Americans, particularly lower-income workers," said Trent D. Duffy, a deputy White House spokesman. "The fact that the Senate was able to set aside those issues and move toward passage shows it's another bipartisan accomplishment. Coupled with class actions, it shows we're off to a good start."

The sponsors of the bankruptcy legislation say it is a badly needed measure to curb a growing number of abusive bankruptcy filings by individuals who ought to be able to meet their obligations. Those cases, supporters of the measure say, have added hundreds of dollars in annual costs to other consumers who wind up having to pick up the unpaid debt.

"We are a compassionate nation but we should not be fools," said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican who has fought for the measure for eight years. "We want to give our neighbors who get in over their heads a chance to get out of their financial troubles. But for some it is a way to avoid personal responsibility. There is something inherently unfair about denying full restitution to creditors."

Supporters of the new law point to the rise of bankruptcy filings, from 200,000 in 1978 to 1.6 million last year, as evidence of abuses.

But critics of the measure say that the rise in such filings is not evidence of unfair filings. Rather, they say, it is symptomatic of broader economic problems - the growing distress in families plagued by high health care and education costs. A recent study by bankruptcy and medical experts at Harvard University found that more than half of the 1,771 personal bankruptcy filers in five federal courts cited medical bills as a primary reason they filed.

The critics - including consumer groups, Democrats and more than 100 bankruptcy law professors - say that the legislation's supporters have significantly exaggerated the problem with the current bankruptcy laws. They say the legislation will do far more damage than good by hitting middle-income families, women and the elderly who have used bankruptcy protection in growing numbers to protect themselves.

"This bankruptcy bill is mean-spirited and unfair," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "In anything like its present form, it should and will be an embarrassment to anyone who votes for it. It's a bonanza for the credit card companies, which made $30 billion in profits last year, and a nightmare for the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak."

In a letter to Congress two weeks ago, 104 bankruptcy law professors predicted that "the deepest hardship" would "be felt in the heartland," where the filing rates are highest - Utah, Tennessee, Georgia, Nevada, Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Ohio, Mississippi and Idaho.

Critics also said the measure fails to do anything to curb abusive bankruptcy practices by wealthy families, who can create special trusts to shelter their assets, and by corrupt companies like Enron and WorldCom, which were able to find favorable bankruptcy courts and deprive many of their employees and retired employees of benefits. The Senate defeated a series of amendments proposed by Democrats that sought to address those issues.

"The bill has a real bias," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, whose proposal to close a loophole that permits wealthy people to shelter assets through a special trust was defeated last week. "It deals with abuses in bankruptcy by one group but not with another group."

The lobbying money for the legislation, which has come close to passage several times in the eight years since it was introduced, has been lopsided.

The main lobbying forces for the bill - a coalition that included Visa, MasterCard, the American Bankers Association, MBNA America, Capital One, Citicorp, the Ford Motor Credit Company and the General Motors Acceptance Corporation - spent more than $40 million in political fund-raising efforts and many millions more on lobbying efforts since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization that studies the role of money in the political process. By definition, the critics of the legislation had limited lobbying resources.

The foundation of the legislation is a provision that would limit access by individuals to Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code. It enables individuals to sharply limit payments on their obligations and get a "fresh start."

The bill would instead impose a means test that would prompt many people to file for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 13, which requires a repayment plan. The means test would not be applied to debtors who earn less than the median income in their state. Those who earn more than that and can pay at least $6,000 over five years would have to seek protection under Chapter 13.

The median income for a family of four in 2003 was $65,093, ranging from $45,867 in New Mexico to $82,561 in Massachusetts, according to the United States Census Bureau.

The bill would also increase the costs of bankruptcy by increasing the amount of paperwork filed and force people in bankruptcy to pay for counseling about the way they use credit. It would also make it more difficult for some people to try to shelter their assets through the purchase of expensive homes in states like Florida and Texas, which have homestead exemptions. To shelter more than $125,000 in assets, homes must have been purchased at least three and a third years before a bankruptcy filing.

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Bankruptcy Bill Set for Passage

The New York Times
March 9, 2005
Bankruptcy Bill Set for Passage; Victory for Bush
By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON, March 8 - The Senate assured final passage of the first major overhaul of the nation's bankruptcy laws in 27 years on Tuesday, when it took two votes that cleared the remaining political obstacles to a measure that the nation's credit and retail industries have sought for years.

The bill would disqualify many families from taking advantage of the more generous provisions of the current bankruptcy code that permit them to extinguish their debts for a "fresh start." It would also impose significant new costs on those seeking bankruptcy protection and give lenders and businesses new legal tools for recovering debts.

The Senate on Tuesday first defeated an amendment that would have prevented violent protesters at abortion clinics from using the bankruptcy laws to shield themselves from judgments awarded in civil lawsuits. That amendment, which lost by a vote of 53 to 46, had threatened to derail the legislation. The senators then voted 69 to 31 to limit debate and cut off any effort to kill the legislation by filibuster.

Final passage of the measure is now an inevitable formality.

House leaders have said they will quickly approve the legislation once the Senate completes work on it as early as this week. President Bush has said he intends to sign it. His predecessor, President Bill Clinton, killed the measure in his final days in office in 2000 after it had been passed by Congress by declining to sign it at the end of the legislative session, issuing a so-called pocket veto.

The sponsors of the legislation say that it will have the effect of lowering the costs of goods and services for all consumers by making it easier for companies and issuers of credit to collect unpaid debts rather than passing those costs on to everyone else. In the last 30 years, bankruptcy filings have steadily increased, rising eightfold since Congress last rewrote the bankruptcy laws.

But critics said the measure was a thinly disguised gift to banks and credit card companies, which, they contend, are largely responsible for the high rate of bankruptcies because they heavily promote credit cards and loans that often come with large and largely unseen fees for late payments. They said that the measure would impose new obstacles on many middle-income families seeking desperately needed protection from creditors, and that it would take far longer for those families to start over after suffering serious illnesses, unemployment and other calamities.

The votes on Tuesday were the second legislative victory in recent weeks both for Mr. Bush and the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, himself a possible presidential contender in 2008. Mr. Frist nimbly moved both the bankruptcy bill and another bill last month making it more difficult to bring class-action lawsuits through the Senate.

In both cases, he unified the Republicans to beat back every effort by the Democrats to water down or delay the measures. In both cases, he also reached a deal with House leaders in which the Senate blocked any significant changes to the measure in exchange for a commitment from the House that it would adopt unaltered what the Senate approved.

The White House applauded the votes on Tuesday.

"The administration supports the passage of bankruptcy reform because ultimately this will lead to more accessibility to credit for more Americans, particularly lower-income workers," said Trent D. Duffy, a deputy White House spokesman. "The fact that the Senate was able to set aside those issues and move toward passage shows it's another bipartisan accomplishment. Coupled with class actions, it shows we're off to a good start."

The sponsors of the bankruptcy legislation say it is a badly needed measure to curb a growing number of abusive bankruptcy filings by individuals who ought to be able to meet their obligations. Those cases, supporters of the measure say, have added hundreds of dollars in annual costs to other consumers who wind up having to pick up the unpaid debt.

"We are a compassionate nation but we should not be fools," said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican who has fought for the measure for eight years. "We want to give our neighbors who get in over their heads a chance to get out of their financial troubles. But for some it is a way to avoid personal responsibility. There is something inherently unfair about denying full restitution to creditors."

Supporters of the new law point to the rise of bankruptcy filings, from 200,000 in 1978 to 1.6 million last year, as evidence of abuses.

But critics of the measure say that the rise in such filings is not evidence of unfair filings. Rather, they say, it is symptomatic of broader economic problems - the growing distress in families plagued by high health care and education costs. A recent study by bankruptcy and medical experts at Harvard University found that more than half of the 1,771 personal bankruptcy filers in five federal courts cited medical bills as a primary reason they filed.

The critics - including consumer groups, Democrats and more than 100 bankruptcy law professors - say that the legislation's supporters have significantly exaggerated the problem with the current bankruptcy laws. They say the legislation will do far more damage than good by hitting middle-income families, women and the elderly who have used bankruptcy protection in growing numbers to protect themselves.

"This bankruptcy bill is mean-spirited and unfair," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "In anything like its present form, it should and will be an embarrassment to anyone who votes for it. It's a bonanza for the credit card companies, which made $30 billion in profits last year, and a nightmare for the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak."

In a letter to Congress two weeks ago, 104 bankruptcy law professors predicted that "the deepest hardship" would "be felt in the heartland," where the filing rates are highest - Utah, Tennessee, Georgia, Nevada, Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Ohio, Mississippi and Idaho.

Critics also said the measure fails to do anything to curb abusive bankruptcy practices by wealthy families, who can create special trusts to shelter their assets, and by corrupt companies like Enron and WorldCom, which were able to find favorable bankruptcy courts and deprive many of their employees and retired employees of benefits. The Senate defeated a series of amendments proposed by Democrats that sought to address those issues.

"The bill has a real bias," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, whose proposal to close a loophole that permits wealthy people to shelter assets through a special trust was defeated last week. "It deals with abuses in bankruptcy by one group but not with another group."

The lobbying money for the legislation, which has come close to passage several times in the eight years since it was introduced, has been lopsided.

The main lobbying forces for the bill - a coalition that included Visa, MasterCard, the American Bankers Association, MBNA America, Capital One, Citicorp, the Ford Motor Credit Company and the General Motors Acceptance Corporation - spent more than $40 million in political fund-raising efforts and many millions more on lobbying efforts since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization that studies the role of money in the political process. By definition, the critics of the legislation had limited lobbying resources.

The foundation of the legislation is a provision that would limit access by individuals to Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code. It enables individuals to sharply limit payments on their obligations and get a "fresh start."

The bill would instead impose a means test that would prompt many people to file for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 13, which requires a repayment plan. The means test would not be applied to debtors who earn less than the median income in their state. Those who earn more than that and can pay at least $6,000 over five years would have to seek protection under Chapter 13.

The median income for a family of four in 2003 was $65,093, ranging from $45,867 in New Mexico to $82,561 in Massachusetts, according to the United States Census Bureau.

The bill would also increase the costs of bankruptcy by increasing the amount of paperwork filed and force people in bankruptcy to pay for counseling about the way they use credit. It would also make it more difficult for some people to try to shelter their assets through the purchase of expensive homes in states like Florida and Texas, which have homestead exemptions. To shelter more than $125,000 in assets, homes must have been purchased at least three and a third years before a bankruptcy filing.

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The Debt-Peonage Society

The New York Times
March 8, 2005

The Debt-Peonage Society
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Today the Senate is expected to vote to limit debate on a bill that toughens the existing bankruptcy law, probably ensuring the bill's passage. A solid bloc of Republican senators, assisted by some Democrats, has already voted down a series of amendments that would either have closed loopholes for the rich or provided protection for some poor and middle-class families.

The bankruptcy bill was written by and for credit card companies, and the industry's political muscle is the reason it seems unstoppable. But the bill also fits into the broader context of what Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, calls "risk privatization": a steady erosion of the protection the government provides against personal misfortune, even as ordinary families face ever-growing economic insecurity.

The bill would make it much harder for families in distress to write off their debts and make a fresh start. Instead, many debtors would find themselves on an endless treadmill of payments.

The credit card companies say this is needed because people have been abusing the bankruptcy law, borrowing irresponsibly and walking away from debts. The facts say otherwise.

A vast majority of personal bankruptcies in the United States are the result of severe misfortune. One recent study found that more than half of bankruptcies are the result of medical emergencies. The rest are overwhelmingly the result either of job loss or of divorce.

To the extent that there is significant abuse of the system, it's concentrated among the wealthy - including corporate executives found guilty of misleading investors - who can exploit loopholes in the law to protect their wealth, no matter how ill-gotten.

One increasingly popular loophole is the creation of an "asset protection trust," which is worth doing only for the wealthy. Senator Charles Schumer introduced an amendment that would have limited the exemption on such trusts, but apparently it's O.K. to game the system if you're rich: 54 Republicans and 2 Democrats voted against the Schumer amendment.

Other amendments were aimed at protecting families and individuals who have clearly been forced into bankruptcy by events, or who would face extreme hardship in repaying debts. Ted Kennedy introduced an exemption for cases of medical bankruptcy. Russ Feingold introduced an amendment protecting the homes of the elderly. Dick Durbin asked for protection for armed services members and veterans. All were rejected.

None of this should come as a surprise: it's all part of the pattern.

As Mr. Hacker and others have documented, over the past three decades the lives of ordinary Americans have become steadily less secure, and their chances of plunging from the middle class into acute poverty ever larger. Job stability has declined; spells of unemployment, when they happen, last longer; fewer workers receive health insurance from their employers; fewer workers have guaranteed pensions.

Some of these changes are the result of a changing economy. But the underlying economic trends have been reinforced by an ideologically driven effort to strip away the protections the government used to provide. For example, long-term unemployment has become much more common, but unemployment benefits expire sooner. Health insurance coverage is declining, but new initiatives like health savings accounts (introduced in the 2003 Medicare bill), rather than discouraging that trend, further undermine the incentives of employers to provide coverage.

Above all, of course, at a time when ever-fewer workers can count on pensions from their employers, the current administration wants to phase out Social Security.

The bankruptcy bill fits right into this picture. When everything else goes wrong, Americans can still get a measure of relief by filing for bankruptcy - and rising insecurity means that they are forced to do this more often than in the past. But Congress is now poised to make bankruptcy law harsher, too.

Warren Buffett recently made headlines by saying America is more likely to turn into a "sharecroppers' society" than an "ownership society." But I think the right term is a "debt peonage" society - after the system, prevalent in the post-Civil War South, in which debtors were forced to work for their creditors. The bankruptcy bill won't get us back to those bad old days all by itself, but it's a significant step in that direction.

And any senator who votes for the bill should be ashamed.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

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Terror Suspects Buying Firearms, U.S. Report Finds

The New York Times
March 8, 2005
Terror Suspects Buying Firearms, U.S. Report Finds
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, March 7 - Dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year, according to a Congressional investigation that points up major vulnerabilities in federal gun laws.

People suspected of being members of a terrorist group are not automatically barred from legally buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, indicated that people with clear links to terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this gap.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials and gun control groups have voiced increasing concern about the prospect of a terrorist walking into a gun shop, legally buying an assault rifle or other type of weapon and using it in an attack.

The G.A.O. study offers the first full-scale examination of the possible dangers posed by gaps in the law, Congressional officials said, and it concludes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation "could better manage" its gun-buying records in matching them against lists of suspected terrorists.

F.B.I. officials maintain that they are hamstrung by laws and policies restricting the use of gun-buying records because of concerns over the privacy rights of gun owners.

At least 44 times from February 2004 to June, people whom the F.B.I. regards as known or suspected members of terrorist groups sought permission to buy or carry a gun, the investigation found.

In all but nine cases, the F.B.I. or state authorities who handled the requests allowed the applications to proceed because a check of the would-be buyer found no automatic disqualification like being a felon, an illegal immigrant or someone deemed "mentally defective," the report found.

In the four months after the formal study ended, the authorities received an additional 14 gun applications from terror suspects, and all but 2 of those were cleared to proceed, the investigation found. In all, officials approved 47 of 58 gun applications from terror suspects over a nine-month period last year, it found.

The gun buyers came up as positive matches on a classified internal F.B.I. watch list that includes thousands of terrorist suspects, many of whom are being monitored, trailed or sought for questioning as part of terrorism investigations into Islamic-based, militia-style and other groups, official said. G.A.O. investigators were not given access to the identities of the gun buyers because of those investigations.

The report is to be released on Tuesday, and an advance copy was provided to The New York Times.

Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, who requested the study, plans to introduce legislation to address the problem in part by requiring federal officials to keep records of gun purchases by terror suspects for a minimum of 10 years. Such records must now be destroyed within 24 hours as a result of a change ordered by Congress last year. Mr. Lautenberg maintains that the new policy has hindered terrorism investigations by eliminating the paper trail on gun purchases.

"Destroying these records in 24 hours is senseless and will only help terrorists cover their tracks," Mr. Lautenberg said Monday. "It's an absurd policy."

He blamed what he called the Bush administration's "twisted allegiances" to the National Rifle Association for the situation.

The N.R.A. and gun rights supporters in Congress have fought - successfully, for the most part - to limit the use of the F.B.I.'s national gun-buying database as a tool for law enforcement investigators, saying the database would amount to an illegal registry of gun owners nationwide.

The legal debate over how gun records are used became particularly contentious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, when it was disclosed that the Justice Department and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, had blocked the F.B.I. from using the gun-buying records to match against some 1,200 suspects who were detained as part of the Sept. 11 investigation. Mr. Ashcroft maintained that using the records in a criminal investigation would violate the federal law that created the system for instant background gun checks, but Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the issue said they saw no such prohibition.

In response to the report, Mr. Lautenberg also plans to ask Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to assess whether people listed on the F.B.I.'s terror watch list should be automatically barred from buying a gun. Such a policy would require a change in federal law.

F.B.I. officials acknowledge shortcomings in the current approach to using gun-buying records in terror cases, but they say they are somewhat constrained by gun laws as established by Congress and interpreted by the Justice Department.

"We're in a tough position," said an F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has not been formally released. "Obviously, we want to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, but we also have to be mindful of privacy and civil rights concerns, and we can't do anything beyond what the law allows us to do."

After initial reluctance from Mr. Ashcroft over Second Amendment concerns, the Justice Department changed its policy in February 2004 to allow the F.B.I. to do more cross-checking between gun-buying records and terrorist intelligence.

Under the new policy, millions of gun applications are run against the F.B.I.'s internal terrorist watch list, and if there is a match, bureau field agents or other counterterrorism personnel are to be contacted to determine whether they have any information about the terror suspect.

In some cases, the extra review allowed the F.B.I. to block a gun purchase by a suspected terrorist that might otherwise have proceeded because of a lag time in putting information into the database, the accountability office's report said.

In one instance last year, follow-up information provided by F.B.I. field agents revealed that someone on a terror watch list was deemed "mentally defective," even though that information had not yet made its way into the gun database. In a second case, field agents disclosed that an applicant was in the country illegally. Both applications were denied.

Even so, the report concluded that the Justice Department should clarify what information could and could not be shared between gun-buying administrators and terrorism investigators. It also concluded that the F.B.I. should keep closer track of the performance of state officials who handle gun background checks in lieu of the F.B.I.

"Given that these background checks involve known or suspected terrorists who could pose homeland security risks," the report said, "more frequent F.B.I. oversight or centralized management would help ensure that suspected terrorists who have disqualifying factors do not obtain firearms in violation of the law."

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Donors' Influence on Schwarzenegger Is an Issue

The New York Times
March 7, 2005
Donors' Influence on Schwarzenegger Is an Issue
By DEAN E. MURPHY

SAN FRANCISCO, March 6 - Arnold Schwarzenegger scoffs at the suggestion that he could be bought by political donors, like the Wall Street financiers, corporate executives and entertainers who will pay thousands of dollars on Monday to have dinner with him at the "21" Club in Manhattan.

"I don't need any money; I have plenty," Mr. Schwarzenegger, the millionaire governor of California, said in a recent interview when asked about his approach to fund-raising. "This is why it is easier for me to take this money. I don't even know who is giving me the money in the first place, and I don't even care. No one can buy me."

As governor for 16 months, Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has made raising money from big corporations and wealthy businesspeople a mainstay in his drive for political change, which in California's unusual ballot-box approach to governing has focused on winning the backing of voters on measures relating to health care, government borrowing and crime.

Now as Mr. Schwarzenegger pursues his most aggressive program yet to overhaul California government - which he says needs to be rid of moneyed "special interests" that act as "ghostwriters" for lawmakers - some Democrats, independent watchdog groups and scholars are raising questions about the influence of money on Mr. Schwarzenegger himself.

This week the governor is scheduled to be in Manhattan and in Washington collecting checks from lobbyists, businesspeople and other Republicans for a possible re-election campaign in 2006. He will also be rounding up financial support for his "Year of Reform" agenda, which calls for changing the way legislative districts are drawn, teachers are paid, state pensions are managed and the budget is balanced.

Mr. Schwarzenegger's stated goal is to raise $50 million this year to ensure that the proposals become law, more than double the $23 million he raised last year and about three times what he raised in 2003, when he was elected governor as Gray Davis was recalled. Invitations to events featuring Mr. Schwarzenegger across California in the coming weeks include a category for $100,000 donors.

"The amount of fund-raising is unprecedented," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who is an expert on the state's election and campaign finance laws. Professor Hasen described Mr. Schwarzenegger as "a poster child" for the need to impose limits on fund-raising by candidates for ballot measures, the main focus of Mr. Schwarzenegger's solicitations and a favorite policy tool of many California governors before him.

California Common Cause, which is a major backer of one of Mr. Schwarzenegger's most significant initiatives, the bid to have the boundaries of legislative districts decided by a panel of retired judges rather than elected officials, is among the groups expressing alarm at the fund-raising.

Kathay Feng, the newly named executive director of the group, said that no matter how laudable some of his proposals may be, Mr. Schwarzenegger's reliance on big contributors gives wealthy interests undue access to him.

"Part of the problem is that there is a common perception that Mr. Schwarzenegger is not an inside-the-Beltway kind of politician because we know him as an actor and a lot of other roles," Ms. Feng said. "But the concern is once you get into politics and you start playing by the old machine rules, and you raise money from special interests in exorbitant amounts, that you may no longer be representing the public as you espouse."

A nonpartisan group in Sacramento, TheRestofUs.org, which monitors the role of money in politics, filed a complaint last month with the California Fair Political Practices Commission, accusing Mr. Schwarzenegger of violating a state regulation that places limits on raising money through committees controlled by candidates.

The group leading the effort to collect signatures to qualify some of Mr. Schwarzenegger's proposals for a possible statewide vote in November, Citizens to Save California, was formed by the California Chamber of Commerce in January. Though not formally associated with the group, Mr. Schwarzenegger spent much of last week making appearances on its behalf. TheRestofUs.org asserts the committee is effectively a Schwarzenegger fund-raising tool.

"He has the potential to be a Teddy Roosevelt reformer," said Derek Cressman, director of TheRestofUs.org. "It is disappointing to see him turn around and raise money hand over fist."

The Fair Political Practices Commission has not ruled on the complaint, which if successful would limit donors to the committee to $22,300 instead of the unlimited amount now in place. In what they describe as a pre-emptive strike, lawyers for Citizens to Save California have filed a lawsuit in Sacramento challenging the state regulation as unconstitutional.

One of the lawyers, Steven A. Merksamer, said supporters of the governor feared the complaint would "chill our contributor base" by creating the impression that the committee was doing something illegal, which he said it was not.

"We felt that we had better take the bull by the horn and go to the court and deal with this quickly," Mr. Merksamer said. The regulation "would have a chilling effect on the First Amendment association rights of not only people who want to support our measures, but also candidates, including potentially the governor and legislators, who want to support our measures."

Ms. Feng of Common Cause said the group's board recently voted to side with TheRestofUs.org in the dispute. She said Mr. Schwarzenegger's fund-raising was unduly dependent on large donors, which "drowns out the voices of the general public."

Last year, contributors to Mr. Schwarzenegger's ballot measure committees included Henry Nicholas, a billionaire in Orange County who gave $1.5 million, and the Ameriquest Capital Corporation of Long Beach, which gave $1 million. Other major donors were A. Jerrold Perenchio, the chairman of Univision Communications, who contributed $750,000, and Alex G. Spanos, owner of the San Diego Chargers, who gave a total of $750,000 personally and through his real estate company.

On his current fund-raising trip, which began on Friday in Cincinnati, Mr. Schwarzenegger will be in the company of other prominent supporters. The hosts at the events include Gov. George E. Pataki, in New York; Carl H. Lindner, owner of the Cincinnati Reds and a former chief executive at Chiquita Brands International, in Cincinnati; and W. Howard Lester, chairman of the retailer Williams-Sonoma, in Palm Desert, Calif.

"I think the contributors are very responsive to the governor's message and they believe wholeheartedly in what he is trying to do to turn the state around," said Martin Wilson, a consultant who is Mr. Schwarzenegger's chief fund-raiser. "It doesn't hurt that he is also a much sought after celebrity figure they like to have their photos taken with."

Allan Zaremberg, president of the Chamber of Commerce and co-chairman of Citizens to Save California, said raising big sums of money in a short amount of time was a fact of life in California.

Mr. Zaremberg said it would cost about $13 million just to collect the signatures required to qualify the various ballot measures Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed.

Inevitably, he said, that means turning to wealthy donors. Last Wednesday, Mr. Perenchio of Univision gave $1.5 million.

An invitation to a fund-raising event sponsored by Citizens to Save California on March 22 in Irvine, Calif., lists ticket prices starting at $1,000. The top donation of $100,000 includes dinner for two at Mr. Schwarzenegger's table and three photographs with him.

The speaker of the California Assembly, Fabian Núñez, Democrat of Los Angeles, said Mr. Schwarzenegger's pursuit of political contributions had become a serious impediment to his dealings with Democrats in the Legislature.

"There is a time to be in a campaign mode, but you can't govern if you are in a campaign mode 120 percent of the time," Mr. Núñez said. "It is clouding his ability to sit down and negotiate in a thoughtful way with the Legislature."

Mr. Schwarzenegger told the state Republican convention last month that he needed to raise $50 million because his opponents were determined to raise four times that amount. "This is going to be a great battle," he predicted.

In the interview he said, "My money is all for selling and promoting our initiatives to make this state better."

"The only reason why I get away with it is because I am real," Mr. Schwarzenegger said. "You see, I am honest."

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China Questions U.S. Data on North Korea

The New York Times
March 7, 2005
China Questions U.S. Data on North Korea
By JOSEPH KAHN

BEIJING, March 6 - The Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, expressed doubt on Sunday about the quality of American intelligence on North Korea's nuclear program and said the United States would have to talk to North Korea one-on-one to resolve the standoff.

Mr. Li's assessment, made at an extended news conference during China's annual legislative meeting, amounted to a double slap at the United States. Washington has repeatedly sounded the alarm about North Korea's nuclear efforts and has pressed China, North Korea's only significant ally, to be more active in seeking seek a solution.

President Bush last month sent a high-level envoy to Beijing to present fresh intelligence data that the Bush administration contends shows that North Korea's nuclear program is more advanced than previously thought and that it has been selling nuclear materials around the world.

One task of the envoy, Michael Green, the official handling Asian affairs at the National Security Council, was to dispel Chinese skepticism about the quality of American intelligence, administration officials and Asian diplomats said at the time.

But when asked by a Japanese journalist on Sunday to describe China's understanding of North Korea's nuclear program, including whether the country had produced nuclear fuel from enriched uranium as well as plutonium, Mr. Li answered pointedly and with a hint of sarcasm.

"Concerning whether North Korea already has nuclear weapons or anything about the question of uranium enrichment, I think that here you may know more than I do," Mr. Li said. "Or to put it another way, I definitely don't know any more than you do."

Mr. Li's comments suggest that since the Bush administration accused North Korea of violating a bilateral agreement on its nuclear arms program more than three years ago, China has come no closer to accepting Washington's contentions that North Korea already has as many as eight or nine plutonium-based nuclear bombs and is aggressively pursuing a second, less easily monitored method of producing nuclear fuel through enriching uranium.

China has more economic and political leverage over North Korea than any other nation and had agreed to be the host for several rounds of multination talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear program. But China has rejected the Bush administration's appeals to press North Korea to dismantle any nuclear bombs and its infrastructure for producing nuclear fuel.

China's reluctance to do more creates a problem for the Bush administration because Chinese support - or, at a minimum, acquiescence - is essential to any expanded international response, including United Nations sanctions, a trade embargo or military action.

Senior Bush administration officials dealing with the North Korean issue have said that Chinese officials, perhaps to smooth their sometimes rocky relationship with North Korea, have tended to take a softer line toward it in public than they do in private.

During the presidential debates last year, Mr. Bush extolled China as the linchpin of his strategy for addressing North Korea, implying that he felt confident that China shared his sense of urgency about the issue.

But China's enthusiasm for the American position often seems confined to private sessions with American officials.

Last June, Zhou Wenzhong, one of Mr. Li's top deputies at the Foreign Ministry, said in an interview with The New York Times that he questioned the validity of American intelligence and criticized the United States' strategy for dealing with the Korean issue. Several senior administration officials later told reporters that the Times report of the interview was inaccurate and that the Chinese had assured them it did not reflect their views.

Mr. Li's comments on Sunday were nearly identical to Mr. Zhou's last June.

One Chinese political analyst said that the ambiguous stance might underscore that China was neither ready nor willing to play a more assertive role in confronting its neighbor.

China's oft-repeated line, used again on Sunday by Mr. Li, is that it wants a "nuclear free" Korean peninsula. If it were to accept as valid American intelligence that North Korea already has at least one or two and perhaps eight or nine nuclear bombs, North Korea would have already crossed that line, potentially compelling China to adopt a tougher position, said the Chinese analyst, who asked not to be identified.

Mr. Li has also consistently said that China aims to maintain "peace and stability" on the Korean peninsula. Analysts say China may well view stability on its northeastern border to be of greater importance than the possibility that North Korea has a small and so far untested nuclear arsenal.

China has sought to arrange new negotiations about North Korea's nuclear program since the last round of six-nation talks, involving Japan, South Korea, Russia, the United States, North Korea and China, broke off inconclusively last summer.

Mr. Li said the North Koreans, after having made contradictory statements about whether they would take part in the talks, had assured China that they intended to press on.

"There is some news I can announce, which is that the North Korean side indicated that it remains willing to continue participating in the six-party talks and that the respective sides can demonstrate sufficient sincerity," he said.

But he also implied that China's role was limited to arranging the talks. A real solution to the standoff, he said, requires direct, bilateral negotiations between the United States and North Korea.

Mr. Bush has repeatedly rejected holding bilateral talks with North Korea, contending that the problem requires a regional, multiparty settlement.

"These are both sovereign countries," Mr. Li said. "They are the two major parties concerned. So it is for those two countries to increase trust and build mutual understanding."

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Is the US media too political?

BBC NEWS
Is the US media too political?

By Jamie Coomarasamy
BBC Washington correspondent

The American media are well known for having journalists who are open about their political allegiance.

But recent cases have opened the debate on whether partisanship in the media is going too far.

The Bush administration has already come under fire for paying commentators to espouse its views.

And now journalists themselves are questioning whether their profession is being undermined.

Sex, lies and the press corps

One of the battles began when bloggers went after a conservative journalist for lobbing what they thought was a soft and leading question to President Bush during a press conference.

"Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the US economy," said Jeff Gannon, correspondent for the web-based Talon News.

"How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?" he asked President Bush.

What began as an innocuous question at a presidential news conference ended with a journalist nailing his political colours to the mast.

And soon there were more revelations.

It emerged that Jeff Gannon, the reporter with the forthright views who had been a regular of the White House press corps, was in fact called James Guckert and worked not for the established media but for a partisan website staffed mainly by republican activists.

There have since been allegations linking him to a gay pornographic website.

But it was not a crack investigative team at the Washington Post or CBS's 60 Minutes that uncovered the dirt but rather left-leaning bloggers who thought Mr Guckert was helping Mr Bush get away from answering hard questions.

"Not only does Gannon toss softballs, but he serves the purpose of changing the course of questioning when things get too hot for Bush," said blogger Mark Maynard.

And the blogger Daily Kos rallied his readers to fan out and dig into Mr Guckert's past.

According to Matthew Cooper, the White House correspondent for Time Magazine, Washington has been lapping up this case of sex and subterfuge in the city.

"It's got everything that gets gossip going. It's got sex, it's got national security, how did he get so close to the president? The pseudonym, it's got intrigue, so it's the kind of thing that gets people talking," Mr Cooper said.

Paying for pundits

And what was the hard line of questioning that Mr Gannon/Guckert helped Mr Bush escape?

They were already talking about things being not quite as they seem in the media. Rewind that presidential news conference for a minute or so and you'll find this exchange.

"President, do you think it's a proper use of government funds to pay commentators to promote your policies," asked one of the members of the White House press corps.

The question referred to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative media commentator whose public relations company has been paid $240,000 by the Bush administration to promote its "No Child Left Behind" education reform.

President Bush has denied all knowledge of the arrangement.

Mr Williams believes that he and his views are being unfairly singled out.

"Are you assuming that conservatives the only ones involved in these type of situations?" Mr Williams said.

"Obviously I think there are people who are still chewing their tongue and biting their lip over the fact that Bush won in 2004, and they want to do anything they can to embarrass the president and this administration," he added.

He thinks the controversy has less to do with him and more to do with Democrats' anger with Mr Bush.

"But had he done anything wrong?" I asked him

Yes, he admitted, he had overstepped the mark, but in the American media that mark is often blurred.

"I did not disclose to the Tribune media, the syndicate of my column, that 'No Child Left Behind' through the department of education was a paid advertiser. But it was clearly disclosed on radio and television," Mr Williams said.

"But if I had to do it all over again I wouldn't because the lines are too blurred and I will always weigh on the side of the integrity of the institution of journalism," he added.

The people's (mis)trust

So what sort of effect are these scandals having on the perception on the mainstream media here? Time White House correspondent Matthew Cooper fears a negative one.

"I am concerned that the public may start to wonder: 'Well what is a journalist and isn't it all kind of a scam somewhere on the payroll, some seem to work for partisan organisations.'

"I fear they may question all of journalism, it's kind of a con game and a sham and that would be unfortunate," Mr Cooper said.

But is he being too pessimistic? To find out I spoke to commuters at Union Station just across the road from Armstrong Williams's office.

One man said: "I'm from Ohio so I go back and when I listen to people, the blue collar type person, they take it for the gospel and so that is sad because they're trusting the media to give them the straight answer and then they just say well the media said it, it's got to be true and that's not necessarily the case."

Another woman said: "By and large we all trust the media. The media is our voice between the White House and the rest of the people in the country."

But was she ever concerned that she wasn't getting an objective view?

"No, I think we receive an objective view most of the time," she said.

And for those who do not agree with her, there is always the new media of blogs and websites.

After all the fake White House reporter was rumbled not by the mainstream press but by bloggers.

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Proof Bush is a War President

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Iraq Behind Us

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Coalition of the Chilling

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Human Rights

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The Senate on the Brink

The New York Times
March 6, 2005

The Senate on the Brink

The White House's insistence on choosing only far-right judicial nominees has already damaged the federal courts. Now it threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress. The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. Republicans and Democrats should tone down their rhetoric, then sit down and negotiate.

President Bush likes to complain about the divisive atmosphere in Washington. But he has contributed to it mightily by choosing federal judges from the far right of the ideological spectrum. He started his second term with a particularly aggressive move: resubmitting seven nominees whom the Democrats blocked last year by filibuster.

The Senate has confirmed the vast majority of President Bush's choices. But Democrats have rightly balked at a handful. One of the seven renominated judges is William Myers, a former lobbyist for the mining and ranching industries who demonstrated at his hearing last week that he is an antienvironmental extremist who lacks the evenhandedness necessary to be a federal judge. Another is Janice Rogers Brown, who has disparaged the New Deal as "our socialist revolution."

To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. Republican leaders now claim that judicial nominees are entitled to an up-or-down vote. This is rank hypocrisy. When the tables were turned, Republicans filibustered President Bill Clinton's choice for surgeon general, forcing him to choose another. And Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, who now finds judicial filibusters so offensive, himself joined one against Richard Paez, a Clinton appeals court nominee.

Yet these very same Republicans are threatening to have Vice President Dick Cheney rule from the chair that a simple majority can confirm a judicial nominee rather than the 60 votes necessary to stop a filibuster. This is known as the "nuclear option" because in all likelihood it would blow up the Senate's operations. The Senate does much of its work by unanimous consent, which keeps things moving along and prevents ordinary day-to-day business from drowning in procedural votes. But if Republicans change the filibuster rules, Democrats could respond by ignoring the tradition of unanimous consent and making it difficult if not impossible to get anything done. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has warned that "the Senate will be in turmoil and the Judiciary Committee will be hell."

Despite his party's Senate majority, however, Mr. Frist may not have the votes to go nuclear. A sizable number of Republicans - including John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lincoln Chafee and John Warner - could break away. For them, the value of confirming a few extreme nominees may be outweighed by the lasting damage to the Senate. Besides, majorities are temporary, and they may want to filibuster one day.

There is one way to avert a showdown. The White House should meet with Senate leaders of both parties and come up with a list of nominees who will not be filibustered. This means that Mr. Bush - like Presidents Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush before him - would agree to submit nominees from the broad mainstream of legal thought, with a commitment to judging cases, not promoting a political agenda.

The Bush administration likes to call itself "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.

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Rule Change Lets C.I.A. Freely Send Suspects Abroad to Jails

The New York Times
March 6, 2005

Rule Change Lets C.I.A. Freely Send Suspects Abroad to Jails
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, March 5 - The Bush administration's secret program to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogation has been carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency under broad authority that has allowed it to act without case-by-case approval from the White House or the State or Justice Departments, according to current and former government officials.

The unusually expansive authority for the C.I.A. to operate independently was provided by the White House under a still-classified directive signed by President Bush within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the officials said.

The process, known as rendition, has been central in the government's efforts to disrupt terrorism, but has been bitterly criticized by human rights groups on grounds that the practice has violated the Bush administration's public pledge to provide safeguards against torture.

In providing a detailed description of the program, a senior United States official said that it had been aimed only at those suspected of knowing about terrorist operations, and emphasized that the C.I.A. had gone to great lengths to ensure that they were detained under humane conditions and not tortured.

The official would not discuss any legal directive under which the agency operated, but said that the "C.I.A. has existing authorities to lawfully conduct these operations."

The official declined to be named but agreed to discuss the program to rebut the assertions that the United States used the program to secretly send people to other countries for the purpose of torture. The transfers were portrayed as an alternative to what American officials have said is the costly, manpower-intensive process of housing them in the United States or in American-run facilities in other countries.

In recent weeks, several former detainees have described being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and brutal treatment during months spent in detention under the program in Egypt and other countries. The official would not discuss specific cases, but did not dispute that there had been instances in which prisoners were mistreated. The official said none had died.

The official said the C.I.A.'s inspector general was reviewing the rendition program as one of at least a half-dozen inquiries within the agency of possible misconduct involving the detention, interrogation and rendition of suspected terrorists.

In public, the Bush administration has refused to confirm that the rendition program exists, saying only in response to questions about it that the United States did not hand over people to face torture. The official refused to say how many prisoners had been transferred as part of the program. But former government officials say that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the C.I.A. has flown 100 to 150 suspected terrorists from one foreign country to another, including to Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan.

Each of those countries has been identified by the State Department as habitually using torture in its prisons. But the official said that guidelines enforced within the C.I.A. require that no transfer take place before the receiving country provides assurances that the prisoner will be treated humanely, and that United States personnel are assigned to monitor compliance.

"We get assurances, we check on those assurances, and we double-check on these assurances to make sure that people are being handled properly in respect to human rights," the official said. The official said that compliance had been "very high" but added, "Nothing is 100 percent unless we're sitting there staring at them 24 hours a day."

It has long been known that the C.I.A. has held a small group of high-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in secret sites overseas, and that the United States military continues to detain hundreds of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan. The rendition program was intended to augment those operations, according to former government officials, by allowing the United States to gain intelligence from the interrogations of the prisoners, most of whom were sent to their countries of birth or citizenship.

Before Sept. 11, the C.I.A. had been authorized by presidential directives to carry out renditions, but under much more restrictive rules. In most instances in the past, the transfers of individual prisoners required review and approval by interagency groups led by the White House, and were usually authorized to bring prisoners to the United States or to other countries to face criminal charges.

As part of its broad new latitude, current and former government officials say, the C.I.A. has been authorized to transfer prisoners to other countries solely for the purpose of detention and interrogation.

The covert transfers by the C.I.A. have faced sharp criticism, in part because of the accounts provided by former prisoners who say they were beaten, shackled, humiliated, subjected to electric shocks, and otherwise mistreated during their long detention in foreign prisons before being released without being charged. Those accounts include cases like the following:

¶Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, who was detained at Kennedy Airport two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks and transported to Syria, where he said he was subjected to beatings. A year later he was released without being charged with any crime.

¶Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German who was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border in December 2003 and flown to Afghanistan, where he said he was beaten and drugged. He was released five months later without being charged with a crime.

¶Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian who was arrested in Pakistan several weeks after the 2001 attacks. He was moved to Egypt, Afghanistan and finally Guantánamo. During his detention, Mr. Habib said he was beaten, humiliated and subjected to electric shocks. He was released after 40 months without being charged.

In the most explicit statement of the administration's policies, Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, said in written Congressional testimony in January that "the policy of the United States is not to transfer individuals to countries where we believe they likely will be tortured, whether those individuals are being transferred from inside or outside the United States." Mr. Gonzales said then that he was "not aware of anyone in the executive branch authorizing any transfer of a detainee in violation of that policy."

Administration officials have said that approach is consistent with American obligations under the Convention Against Torture, the international agreement that bars signatories from engaging in extreme interrogation techniques. But in interviews, a half-dozen current and former government officials said they believed that, in practice, the administration's approach may have involved turning a blind eye to torture. One former senior government official who was assured that no one was being mistreated said that accumulation of abuse accounts was disturbing. "I really wonder what they were doing, and I am no longer sure what I believe," said the official, who was briefed periodically about the rendition program.

In Congressional testimony last month, the director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, acknowledged that the United States had only a limited capacity to enforce promises that detainees would be treated humanely. "We have a responsibility of trying to ensure that they are properly treated, and we try and do the best we can to guarantee that," Mr. Goss said of the prisoners that the United States had transferred to the custody of other countries. "But of course once they're out of our control, there's only so much we can do. But we do have an accountability program for those situations."

The practice of transporting a prisoner from one country to another, without formal extradition proceedings, has been used by the government for years. George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has testified that there were 70 cases before the Sept. 11 attacks, authorized by the White House. About 20 of those cases involved people brought to the United States to stand trial under informal arrangements with the country in which the suspects were captured.

Since Sept. 11, however, it has been used much more widely and has had more expansive guidelines, because of the broad authorizations that the White House has granted to the C.I.A. under legal opinions and a series of amendments to Presidential Decision Directives that remain classified. The officials said that most of the people subject to rendition were regarded by counterterrorism experts as less significant than people held under direct American control, including the estimated three dozen high ranking operatives of Al Qaeda who are confined at secret sites around the world.

The Pentagon has also transferred some prisoners to foreign custody, handing over 62 prisoners to Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, among other countries, from the American prison in Guantánamo Bay, in actions that it has publicly acknowledged. In some of those cases, a senior Defense Department official said in an interview on Friday, the transfers were for the purpose of prosecution and trials, but others were intended solely for the purpose of detention. Those four countries, as well Egypt, Jordan and Syria, were among those identified in a State Department human rights report released last week as practicing torture in their prisons.

In an interview, the senior official defended renditions as one among several important tools in counterterrorism efforts. "The intelligence obtained by those rendered, detained and interrogated have disrupted terrorist operations," the official said. "It has saved lives in the United States and abroad, and it has resulted in the capture of other terrorists."

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As Through a Glass Darkly

latimes.com

As Through a Glass Darkly
Michael Kinsley

March 6, 2005

One day last week, four different stories on the front page of the Los Angeles Times were about efforts to shape public perceptions.

There was a report about how the worst techniques of modern election campaigns are being adopted by interest groups in legislative battles. For example, a conservative group has been spreading word that AARP's opposition to Social Security reform is part of a secret agenda including gay marriage.

Another article described how movie studios spend millions of dollars attempting to influence the Academy Awards.

A third article was about the makeover of Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, following his unfortunate remarks about women and science. There is a Groundhog Day aspect to this story: Summers the Tiger has hung up his fangs and discovered his inner pussycat more than once before. But repetition doesn't make the tale any less enjoyable.

And, like every media outlet in the world, The Times had the story of Martha Stewart's triumphant positioning of her release from prison: thinner, richer and humbler too, a walking embodiment of that old joke, "I used to be conceited, but now I'm perfect."

It's an old story that the news and our understanding of it are affected — or afflicted — by "spin," meaning efforts by partisans to make us see things their way. But this treatment of the mechanics of spin as news in its own right seems more recent. And so does the spread of spin and the awareness of its mechanics to areas far beyond politics.

Spin is not just a technique. It is not just a political phenomenon. It permeates our culture and our daily life. And it's an industry — almost a sector of the economy. That one day's articles quoted lobbyists, public relations specialists, professional "damage control" experts. If computers and communications go by the acronym IT, for information technology, the perceptual industry might be MT, for misinformation technology.

The business of MT isn't lying. It's shaping perceptions irrespective of the truth. Reality is a consideration, of course. But if reality were sufficient, we wouldn't need spin — would we?

Of those four front-page articles, only one — the Social Security piece — had the slightest tone of disapproval. To disapprove of spin is like disapproving of rain. What's the point? If anything, there was sympathy and admiration for Summers and Stewart. Good spin is an essential life skill and business technique. Bad spin is worthy of criticism. No spin is un-American.

Reporters, whose job is to describe reality, rightly regard spin as an important part of the reality they are supposed to report. Good reporters describe both the real reality and the alternative reality. But even good ones often show no hint of preference as between the stage set and the real thing. If they did, that might be considered bias, I suppose.

It takes real excess of spin — such as the president putting a practicing pundit on the payroll (recite that aloud five times), or the governor of California sending a fake newscast to real TV stations — to generate much outrage in the press. Who knows what level of artifice is needed to offend the general population, many of whom assume the news is made up anyway.

All this sits oddly with the concurrent fashion for "transparency." The word is everywhere. It means what used to be called "truth" (look it up) and also openness.

"Transparency" is one of the blessings of democracy that President Bush is proud of having brought to Iraq — right up there with voting and somewhat less torture than before. Corporate reforms following the accounting scandals are supposed to make the books of public companies "transparent."

A San Francisco foundation (the Wall Street Journal reports) has decorated its boardroom with glass because, its chief administrative officer says, "One of our values is transparency." Transparency is a value? Five years ago, that idea would have been incomprehensible, like saying, "One of our values is suede." The transparency metaphor is inexact. It is not that people should be able to see right through you. It is that they should be able to see through to the real you.

But how do we resolve the apparent contradiction between our desire for transparency everywhere and our tolerance or even approval of spin? The whole point of spin is opacity: a no-see-through skin of your own design between the real you and the outside world.

The solution, of course, is to spin your transparency. Make it look as if you're transparent. And no doubt there are transparency consultants who will, for a fee, advise you about how to create an appearance of transparency so opaque that no one can see through it (like the tunnel that Roadrunner paints on a mountainside so that Wile E. Coyote will slam into the rock).

The sociologist Erving Goffman used to write essays and books with titles such as "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life," arguing that we are all actors in a play of our own devising. All sincerity is calculation, as Goffman saw it, and every statement or gesture is layered with strategy. A famous review of one of his books compared Goffman to Kafka, for undermining our confidence that the sea we're swimming in is like the sea we think we are swimming in.

Goffman died in 1982 at age 60. He had no idea.

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The Idiot Defense

latimes.com

The Idiot Defense

March 6, 2005

Kenneth L. Lay, Richard Scrushy and Bernard J. Ebbers are singing that they don't know much about accounting tricks, don't know much about financial fraud, don't know much about anything. What a wonderful world it must have been, then, to simply show up on Fridays to pocket the paychecks.

And what good Fridays they were, at least until the financial foundations of their respective companies were crushed by dishonest accounting schemes that pumped up executive pay and incinerated billions in investor money. Prosecutors say Scrushy, the former HealthSouth Corp. chief executive, enjoyed $279 million in ill-gotten salary, bonuses and stock options. Lay, the former Enron chairman, collected $103.6 million in payments during the calendar year before his company imploded. And in the days before WorldCom crashed into bankruptcy, the personal fortune of former Chief Executive Ebbers was estimated at $1.4 billion.

Lay, whose criminal trial will begin next year, unveiled his "I knew nothing" defense last summer after federal prosecutors outlined their case against him in a 65-page criminal indictment. Lay claimed ignorance — though incompetence might have been more believable — when it came to the massive fraud that toppled Enron. Lay blames subordinates who kept him in the dark.

Ebbers, whose trial in U.S. District Court in New York on charges of securities fraud and conspiracy went to the jury on Friday, kicked Lay's "idiot defense" up a notch, testifying that he was simply a former milkman who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Though he built one of the nation's largest telecom companies, Ebbers stated, "I don't know about technology, and I don't know about finance and accounting."

Playing dumb could prove more difficult for Scrushy because more than a dozen former executives already have testified that he knew what was going on. But Scrushy's attorneys are painting them as liars.

Assume for a moment that Ebbers, Lay and Scrushy are innocent, and that other men and women in pinstripes left them holding the bag. The question then becomes: What was this confederacy of dunces doing to earn its massive paydays?

And if a cadre of high-ranking subordinates already has pleaded guilty to white-collar crimes, what would exoneration of the three men say about where the buck really stops in corporate America?

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Who Now Will Read to the President in the Morning?

Who Now Will Read to the President in the Morning?

By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Senate skids have been greased for John Negroponte to be confirmed as the first director of national intelligence. Never mind that he deliberately misled Congress about serious human rights abuses in Honduras where he was ambassador from 1981 to 1985.

That dissembling enabled the White House to circumvent the congressional restrictions that would have denied use of Honduras as the primary base for the "Contras"-the counterrevolutionaries organized and armed by the US to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.

Negroponte's opposite number in Washington during those rogue-elephant, Iran-Contra days, then-Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, was convicted for lying to Congress but then promptly pardoned by George H. W. Bush, who explained that Abrams was motivated by "patriotism." No less "patriotic," Negroponte had simply been luckier, in that he was not required to testify as frequently to Congress.

Abrams is now deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs, and it is a safe bet he had a hand in recruiting his erstwhile partner-in-crime, so to speak- for the top intelligence job. On the day Negroponte was nominated, Fox News Channel commentator Charles Krauthammer noted that Negroponte "was ambassador to Honduras during the Contra War...and he didn't end up in jail, which is a pretty good attribute for him. A lot of others practically did."

Mornings With Bush

That our supine Senators should choose to ignore all this is scary enough. But it is the scene visualized by President Bush for his morning briefing routine, once Negroponte is confirmed, that stands my hair on end. And White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has said that Negroponte's portfolio will include responsibility for producing, as well as briefing, the President's Daily Brief. At the announcement of Negroponte's nomination, the president made it clear that Negroponte would control who and what gets to the president, adding:

"He will have access on a daily basis in that he'll be my primary briefer. In other words, when the intelligence briefings start in the morning, John will be here. And John and I will work to determine how much exposure the CIA will have in the Oval Office. I would hope more rather than less."

Bush did some backtracking yesterday during his visit to CIA headquarters, saying "Porter Goss comes every morning with the CIA briefer to deliver the briefing. And that, of course, will go on." But the president then immediately noted that Negroponte had not been confirmed yet, raising once again the question as to how much longer the CIA director will have daily access to the Oval Office.

Small wonder that Goss allowed himself just the day before to complain publicly that the intelligence reform rushed to passage by Congress in December has "a huge amount of ambiguity in it," and that he was not sure what his relationship with Negroponte is supposed to be. The president's remarks have not been much help. He may be waiting for Vice President Dick Cheney to tell him how to sort this all out.

The President's Daily Brief

Until now the PDB has been not only CIA's premier intelligence publication, but also its best assurance of access to the White House. That entree gave intelligence officers unique, first-hand insight into the most pressing foreign policy concerns of senior US policymakers and made it possible for those concerns to drive both collection and analysis.

I did such morning briefings for the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Assistant from 1981 to 1985, each of them one-on-one-a procedure begun under President Ronald Reagan at the suggestion of then-Vice President (and earlier CIA director) George H. W. Bush. Our small team of briefers was comprised of senior analysts who had been around long enough to earn respect and trust. We had the full confidence of the CIA director, who, though himself very opinionated, rarely inserted himself into the PDB process.

When I first learned that former director George Tenet had chosen to piggyback on those briefings, hitching a ride to the oval office with the morning briefer, I asked myself, "What is that all about?" The last thing we briefers needed was the director breathing down our necks. And besides, didn't he have other things to do in the morning?

We were there to tell it like it is and, perhaps best of all, in those days we had career protection for doing so. And so we did. If, for example, one of those senior officials asked if there was good evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we knew that professional analysts we trusted thought not, we would say "No sir."

But, you ask, "Even if the director had said it was a 'slam dunk?'" Yes. Even after the director had said it was a slam dunk. But bear in mind that in those days the task was not so heroic. We did not have the director looking over our shoulder.

The president's assertion that his "primary briefer" will be Negroponte-the man farthest removed from substantive intelligence analysis, not to mention from the sourcing and other peculiarities of the PDB articles chosen for a given day-is cause for concern. Is the director of national intelligence to be super-analyst as well as intelligence czar reigning over 15 intelligence agencies? Will he not have other things to do in the morning?

President Bush reportedly does not read the President's Daily Brief, but rather has it read to him. Will Negroponte choose which items to read on a given day? Who will do the actual reading? Will Goss be there? Does he, too, not have other things to do in the morning? Will there be a senior analyst there, with career protection, should it be necessary to correct Negroponte when he attempts to answer the president's questions?

And, with Negroponte as gatekeeper, who else will get an early-bird crack at the president? Is it likely that courtiers/partisans like Elliot Abrams will be there to "help" at the PDB briefings? And who is the president more likely to listen to concerning, say, the status of Iran's nuclear program?

It is impossible to overstate how much rides on the answers to those questions. Someone should tell President Bush to listen to what his earthly father has to say on all this. He knows.

Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Originally an analyst of Soviet foreign policy, he spent several years preparing and briefing the President's Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates.

This article appeared in abbreviated form as an op-ed in Friday's Miami Herald.

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