Saturday, April 23, 2005

Kurds' Leaders Said to Attempt to Block Shiite

The New York Times
April 23, 2005
Kurds' Leaders Said to Attempt to Block Shiite
By ROBERT F. WORTH and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 22 - Some leading Kurdish political figures are trying to stall the formation of a new Iraqi government in an effort to force out Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite chosen two weeks ago as prime minister, Iraqi and Western officials said.

Such an effort could further delay forming a government at a sensitive time. The past week has seen a sharp increase in insurgent violence, including the downing Thursday of a commercial helicopter that left 11 people dead. One of the victims was apparently executed by the attackers.

American officials say the continuing failure to form a new government - almost three months after elections - could be contributing to the resurgent violence.

The political momentum generated by the elections has "worn off a bit," an American official here said Friday, and that "has given the insurgents new hope. The best thing to undermine the insurgency is to maintain momentum on the political process."

A spokesman for the Kurdish alliance denied Friday evening that there was any effort to unseat Dr. Jaafari. But Kurdish leaders have never been comfortable with religious figures like Dr. Jaafari, the leader of one of Iraq's best-known Shiite religious parties. Any successful campaign against him could derail the pact between the Shiite and Kurdish alliances that emerged two months ago, opening the possibility of a new alignment that would favor more secular figures like the departing prime minister, Ayad Allawi.

The American official said Friday that he expected that a new government would be formed within the next week with Dr. Jaafari as prime minister.

But several Iraqi political figures said they doubted that would happen. They cited strong opposition to Dr. Jaafari in the Kurdish alliance, which has agreed to form a coalition government with the Shiite majority. Under Iraq's transitional law, Mr. Jaafari will automatically lose his position if he does not name a cabinet by May 7, a month after his appointment.

"The Kurds are intent on delaying the government so that Jaafari will fall," said Sami al-Askari, a member of the Shiite alliance. A Western diplomat in Baghdad confirmed the effort to "filibuster" the negotiations.

Shiite officials say Kurds who oppose Dr. Jaafari offer several reasons, including a growing conviction that he does not favor the kind of federal arrangement that would allow for strong Kurdish autonomy.

If Dr. Jaafari is displaced, Iraq's new president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and his deputies would then be forced to choose a new prime minister, the most powerful job in the government.

That would be a significant setback for the national assembly, which took more than two months just to agree on a new leadership. The delay sowed deep anger and disillusionment among ordinary Iraqis, who risked their lives to vote.

A further delay would stir more public rancor, and would further complicate efforts to meet the Aug. 15 deadline for drafting a new constitution.

Already, American officials say, the continuing absence of a new government may be strengthening the hands of insurgents, who launched more deadly attacks on Friday, including a car bombing outside a Shiite mosque in southern Baghdad that killed at least 9 Iraqis and wounded 26.

With the interim government led by Dr. Allawi in limbo, Iraq is suffering from something of a political vacuum. Local governments in several areas are showing signs of disorder, with some police officials acting independently of the federal government, the American official said.

Dr. Jaafari has always had some opponents among the Shiites.

But it is mostly Kurds who have led the new effort to oust him from the prime minister's seat, Shiite officials say. Late last month, Massoud Barzani, the leader of one of the two major Kurdish parties, made clear that he was deeply opposed to having Dr. Jaafari as prime minister, said a Shiite official.

"We cannot trust this man," Mr. Barzani said of Dr. Jaafari, according to the Shiite official.

The Kurdish opposition stems in part from a perception that Dr. Jaafari favors a strong centralized government and might not allow the Kurds the kind of regional autonomy they have enjoyed since 1991, Shiite leaders say.

It is true that last year, as a member of the American-appointed Iraqi governing council, Dr. Jaafari was one of several Shiite leaders who initially refused to sign Iraq's transitional constitution, saying he opposed a provision that would allow a two-thirds majority in any 3 of Iraq's 18 provinces to nullify the document in a referendum later this year. Dr. Jaafari, charged that the measure was undemocratic. Shiites represent 60 percent of Iraq's population.

He eventually signed, but said he might lead an effort to reverse the provision. That alarmed some groups here, including the Kurds.

Kurdish political figures, who tend to be secular, generally view Shiite religious groups such as Dr. Jaafari's Dawa Party with deep distrust, fearing that they will bring aspects of Islamic law into Iraq's legal code.

One important element has been the party of Dr. Allawi, which won 40 of the 275 seats in Iraq's national assembly in January.

The Shiite and Kurdish alliances agreed to try to include Dr. Allawi's party in the new government. But he has been insisting on four cabinet posts, including key positions such as the Defense or Oil ministries. He has also demanded a deputy prime ministerial position.

Shiite officials say Dr. Jaafari cannot offer that much to Dr. Allawi without facing a rebellion among the Shiites. But the Kurdish leadership insists that Dr. Allawi be accommodated, said Salam al-Maliki, a member of the Shiite alliance.

Shiite leaders believe the Kurdish alliance is using Dr. Allawi's party as a wedge to prevent the formation of a government, said Mr. Askari, the Shiite politician.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 10:37 AM

Cheney Backs End of Filibustering

The New York Times
April 23, 2005
Cheney Backs End of Filibustering
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, April 22 - Vice President Dick Cheney plunged the White House into the judicial confirmation battle on Friday by saying he supported changing the Senate rules to stop the Democrats from blocking judicial nominees and would, if needed, provide the tie-breaking vote.

In addition on Friday, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority Republican whip, asserted that Republicans would have the votes needed to execute that change.

"There is no justification for allowing the blocking of nominees who are well qualified and broadly supported," Mr. Cheney told a gathering of the Republican National Lawyers Association. "The tactics of the last few years, I believe, are inexcusable.

"If the Senate majority decides to move forward and if the issue is presented to me in my elected office as president of the Senate and presiding officer, I will support bringing those nominations to the floor for an up-or-down vote," he said. "On the merits, this should not be a difficult call to make."

Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, responded by accusing Mr. McConnell of bluffing and President Bush of lying.

"Last week, I met with the president and was encouraged when he told me he would not become involved in Republican efforts to break the Senate rules," Mr. Reid said in a statement, referring to a breakfast held between President Bush and Congressional leaders. "Now it appears he was not being honest, and that the White House is encouraging this raw abuse of power."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Mr. Cheney's comments showed that the White House had "stepped over the line by interfering with the Senate to reduce checks and balances," adding, "The White House has always wanted to reduce the Senate's power."

The statements by Mr. Cheney and Mr. McConnell redoubled the Republican commitment to making good on their threat. Senate Republican leaders have faced advertisements from liberal interest groups attacking the move, internal polls showing the public is of two minds about the issue, a chilly response from business-group lobbying allies and several expressions of reluctance from a handful of Republican senators.

Senate aides say that Senator Bill Frist, the Republican majority leader, has decided to defer a fight over the rule change until at least after the May recess, postponing a confrontation that many had expected as early as next week.

Many in the party are pushing Dr. Frist to try to settle the rule change before the end of the Supreme Court term in June - a time when retiring justices typically announce their departures - but he has never set a timetable. On Friday, his spokesman, Bob Stevenson, said Dr. Frist still intended to offer the Democrats a compromise, although he has said any proposal would still entail confirming the nominees.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee is continuing to set the stage for a possible showdown. Next week, the committee plans to send to the floor at least two more appeals court nominees over Democratic opposition, bringing the number of nominees on deck for approval to six.

The Democrats have indicated they plan to block four of those by employing a filibuster, a parliamentary tactic used by Congressional minorities to hold up a vote.

Senate rules require 60 votes to close debate on a confirmation, allowing Democrats to thwart the action by mustering 41 votes.

Republicans, who have a 55-member majority, are threatening to lower the threshold for closing debate on all nominations to a simple majority. They say they need only 50 votes plus Vice President Cheney to make the change. Democrats call this the nuclear option, and say they will use other parliamentary rules to bring the Senate to a virtual standstill if Republicans use it.

Democrats have blocked about 10 of Mr. Bush's roughly 50 appellate court nominees, although that is only a small percentage of the more than 200 total judges that have been confirmed.

One of those scheduled for approval by the committee is Judge William H. Pryor Jr., a Catholic and opponent of abortion rights whose previously blocked nomination has become a favorite cause of the party's Christian conservative wing. Republican strategists, however, said Friday that Judge Priscilla R. Owen, a friend of the president from Texas, was favored as the poster nominee for the filibuster fight, and that it could occur as early as the second week of May, when the Senate returns from recess.

But Republicans did not persuade some of their closest allies.

On Thursday afternoon, Dr. Frist convened a meeting with top officials of major business groups, including the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, to enlist their support for the fight, officials of the groups said.

But the business groups pointedly declined to back him, these officials said, in part because in response Democrats have threatened to tie the Senate in knots that would block the group's legislative priorities like the energy bill and tort reform. The next morning, Tom Donohue, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, told a gathering of journalists that the group had no interest in supporting the fight over the confirmation rules.

Some Republican senators continue to express reservations. Two, John McCain of Arizona and Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, have said they oppose the move.

On Wednesday, Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, warned that the parties were headed for "mutually assured destruction."

"At certain junctures of American history," Mr. Specter said in a speech on the floor, "the fate of our system of government has rested on the ability of members of this body to transcend party loyalty for national interest," he said. "I believe the Senate currently faces such a challenge between party-line voting on filibusters and potential voting on the 'constitutional or so-called nuclear' option."

Internal polls conducted for Senate Republicans by the Winston Group show they have their work cut out for them, said a person familiar with the results. Asked about the plan to end the Democrats judicial filibusters, 51 percent of respondents oppose the idea and 37 percent support it. But 80 percent believed that nominees deserve a yes-or-no vote, this person said.

Several conservative groups, including the anti-union National Right to Work Committee, the Gun Owners of America and the National Pro Life Alliance, oppose the change, arguing that conservatives have often relied on filibusters too.

Theodore B. Olson, President Bush's former solicitor general, wrote in an op-ed article published Thursday in The Wall Street Journal that both parties should "stop using judicial appointments to excite special interest constituencies and political fund-raising."

Still, Friday morning, Senator McConnell told the Christian Broadcasting Network that "what Senate Republicans are simply trying to do is get us back to the procedure that operated quite nicely for 214 years" when judicial appointments were voted up or down on the floor.

Mr. McConnell added, "We will have the votes."

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Posted by politicalstuff at 10:35 AM

Four Top Officers Cleared by Army in Prison Abuses

The New York Times
April 23, 2005
Four Top Officers Cleared by Army in Prison Abuses
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, April 22 - A high-level Army investigation has cleared four of the five top Army officers overseeing prison policies and operations in Iraq of responsibility for the abuse of detainees there, Congressional and administration officials said Friday.

Among the officers was Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who was the top commander in Iraq from June 2003 to July 2004. He was the highest-ranking officer to face allegations of leadership failure in connection with the scandal, but he was not accused of criminal misconduct.

Barring new evidence, the inquiry, by the Army's inspector general, effectively closes the Army's book on whether the highest-ranking officers in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal should be held accountable for command failings described in past reviews.

Only one of the top five officers, whose roles the Senate Armed Services Committee had asked the Army to review, has received any punishment. That officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, an Army Reserve officer who commanded the military police unit at the Abu Ghraib prison, was relieved of her command and given a written reprimand. She has repeatedly said she was made the scapegoat for the failures of superiors.

The findings, which provoked outrage from some civil rights groups and Democratic aides, came nearly a year after shocking photographs of American military police officers stacking naked Iraqi prisoners in a human pyramid and of other abuses first telecast nationally. Shortly afterward, an internal Army report chronicled the virtual collapse of the command structure at Abu Ghraib, outside Baghdad, in the fall of 2003.

So far, only a small number of soldiers, mostly from the enlisted ranks, have faced courts-martial for their actions at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Dozens of others have faced administrative discipline for abusing captives at other detention sites and battlefield interrogation stations across Iraq.

An independent panel led by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger concluded last August that General Sanchez had failed to make sure that his staff was dealing with Abu Ghraib's problems. A separate Army investigation, called the Kern-Fay-Jones report, found that at one point General Sanchez approved the use of severe interrogation practices that led indirectly to some of the abuses.

The Schlesinger inquiry last summer also determined that General Sanchez's deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, failed to act quickly enough to make urgent requests to higher levels for more troops at the understaffed prison.

But those inquiries were not empowered to impose any punishments; that was left up to the Army.

The new review, by the Army inspector general, Lt. Gen. Stanley E. Green, exonerated General Sanchez and General Wojdakowski of the allegations that were included in one or more of the 10 major investigations over the past year into detainee abuse.

It also found to be "unsubstantiated" allegations against Maj. Gen. Barbara G. Fast, the former chief intelligence officer in Iraq who oversaw the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib, and Col. Marc Warren, the command's top legal officer. The Schlesinger panel said Colonel Warren had failed to report prisoner abuses witnessed by the Red Cross to his boss for more than a month, and that General Fast had failed to advise General Sanchez properly about the management of interrogations at the prison.

While General Sanchez and the other top officers may not have done everything right, the inquiry said, their failures came as they struggled to combat a fast-growing insurgency and a booming prison population, all with an understaffed headquarters.

But some Democratic aides on Capitol Hill, civil rights groups and lawyers for lower-ranking soldiers who have been disciplined voiced dismay on Friday at the findings, which they said would fuel the perception that the Army was trying to protect its senior leaders at the expense of junior officers and enlisted soldiers.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, denounced the findings and urged the Bush administration to appoint a special independent counsel to look up the military and Pentagon civilian chains of command. "This further underscores the military's inability to look into allegations of torture and abuse," Mr. Romero said in a telephone interview. "It's just another effort to paper over the scandal."

Guy Womack, a lawyer for the Army reservist who the government had called the ringleader in the abuse, Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., said he had interviewed Generals Sanchez and Wojdakowski and agreed with the Army's findings about them. But he said General Fast and Colonel Warren were more directly involved in overseeing detention policy and operations and should have been disciplined. "It's a joke," he said.

Democratic aides, who along with their Republican counterparts were briefed this week on the Army inquiry's findings, said Friday that they disagreed with the conclusions and would review the full investigation before determining their next step.

Army officials defended the investigation as an exhaustive inquiry that included a review of the 10 major inquiries so far, sworn statements from 37 senior officials, including L. Paul Bremer III, the former top civilian administrator in Iraq, as well as information gathered from dozens of criminal investigations and courts-martial.

"The recommendations and decisions are consistent with, and appropriate to, the findings of these very thorough investigations," Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the Army's top spokesman, said in a statement.

Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, declined in a statement to comment directly on the Army's findings, but signaled he would call a hearing on senior officer accountability in the detainee abuse scandal. A spokesman for Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's ranking Democrat, declined to comment.

As a result of the findings of the Schlesinger panel and other military inquiries, Mr. Warner's committee directed the Army in September to review the cases of General Sanchez and at least four other senior officers in Iraq to determine if any should be held accountable and disciplined.

The Army expanded that inquiry to 12 officers of the rank of colonel or higher, including anyone of that rank who was criticized in at least one of the 10 major investigations.

Four senior Defense Department officials, who provided details about the inquiry on the condition of anonymity because several members of Congress had not been fully briefed, declined to identify the officers under scrutiny, although the five whom Congress has focused on were well known. Nor did they say whether any of seven other officers under scrutiny were disciplined. Congressional aides said they had not yet been briefed on those cases.

The 12 officers under scrutiny by the inspector general do not include the top two military intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas M. Pappas and Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan. Senior military officials said they were being examined by separate investigations that could lead to criminal charges.

General Green, the inspector general, has completed his review of allegations against 11 of the 12 officers, officials said. If the allegations were not substantiated, no action was taken. If they were, the files were forwarded to the Army judge advocate general, the senior military lawyer, Maj. Gen. Thomas Romig, who could recommend a wide range of disciplinary options, from no action to counseling to a career-killing reprimand. The 12 officers had the right to respond to the findings before any disciplinary action were taken.

A senior military official said there were no criminal allegations against any of the 12 officers.

General Sanchez, once considered for promotion to be the four-star commander of military operations in Latin America, remains the head of the Army's V Corps, based in Germany. It is unclear whether he will be given a new assignment when his command ends this summer or whether he will retire.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 10:33 AM

Friday, April 22, 2005

Bolton: Outrageous Outtakes

thenation.com
April 22, 2005
Bolton: Outrageous Outtakes
by Ari Berman

** The delay in the John Bolton proceedings may be the first time a Bush Administration confirmation hearing has produced an unexpected result. The unforeseen outcome was all the more amazing considering how Republicans attempted to shove Bolton down the Senate's throat. In a precursor to the brewing battle over judicial nominations, Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist shut down all Senate business on the day of the vote, preventing Democrats from seeking more time. When Senator Barbara Boxer objected, a majority of Republicans overruled her, prompting the Senate to meet that day, confident that only a rushed hearing could give Bush his man at the UN.

** The Senate Foreign Relations Committee didn't get any help from the State Department either. The 17th paragraph of a Washington Post article on Wednesday contained the revelation that "Condoleezza Rice told her senior staff she was disappointed about the stream of allegations and said she did not want any information coming out of the department that could adversely affect the nomination." Condi's gag order may violate 18 U.S.C Section 1505 of US law, which prohibits any threat that results in impediment of an investigation. The penalty? A fine or imprisonment of five years. We prefer the latter.

** What's more, the hearings revealed that Bolton was eavesdropping on confidential National Security Agency intercepts, possibly to gain ammunition to use against his internal State Department enemies, more and more of whom keep turning up. Bolton made ten such demands, but the State Department and NSA still have not provided the intercepts, leaving the committee in the dark about which officials Bolton spied on and why. As Laura Rozen writes, "John Bolton misuses intelligence the way communists use it in police states." And the Bush Administration hides intelligence the same way the Politburo used to.

** Luckily for the country, Republican George Voinovich emerged as the lone voice of Republican opposition. Immediately after his objection derailed a vote, the Republican attack squad went into action. An ad running in Voinovich's home state of Ohio by the anti-UN group Move American Forward takes the form of a folksy husband and wife conversation: "Wife: Shame on Senator Voinovich. After the Democrats smeared Condoleeza Rice for Secretary of State and Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, how could Voinovich side with the Democrats in smearing John Bolton? Husband: It seems like Senator Voinovich has become a traitor to the Republican Party. Wife: Enough's enough." Yes, enough's enough. It's time for Rice and Gonzales to be re-confirmed.

** If the Committee hearings didn't blow to pieces Chairman Richard Lugar's "moderate" cover, his decision last week to support Bill Frist's nuclear option for judicial nominees certainly did. "I would not take a stand against my party's view," Lugar explained. That's clear. But taking a stand for a UN ambassador and right-wing judiciary he so obviously loathes makes Lugar's fealty all the more revolting. Even Bolton's old boss, Colin Powell, long considered the "good soldier," has refused to back his discordant deputy this time around.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 11:11 AM

Iraq Group Threatens to Kill Romania Hostages - TV

Yahoo! News
Reuters
Iraq Group Threatens to Kill Romania Hostages - TV

DUBAI (Reuters) - Insurgents gave Romania four days to withdraw its troops from Iraq in order to save the lives of three Romanian journalists kidnapped last month, Al Jazeera television reported on Friday.

"They gave the Romanian government four days from the date of the videotape to withdraw its forces from Iraq or they would kill them," the Arabic broadcaster said.

It broadcast a new video it had received, showing the two men and a woman who were abducted on March 28 in Baghdad.

"She called on the Romanian people to protest in order to pressure the Romanian government," Al Jazeera said.

The video separately showed a fourth hostage, Mohamad Munaf, the translator for the journalists, who has U.S., Romanian and Iraqi citizenship, as two men pointed guns at his head.

The channel said Munaf called on President Bush to intervene to ensure his release.

The video showed the hostage-takers' name as the previously unheard-of "Squadrons of Mu'adh bin Jebel," in reference to a figure from early Islamic history.

Romania has 800 troops with the U.S.-led force in Iraq and remains committed despite recent opinion polls showing 55 percent of Romanians want the troops to come home.

Analysts have said if the kidnappers demand a withdrawal, public pressure on the government will increase.

More than 150 foreigners have been seized in Iraq over the past year. Most were freed after negotiations or ransom but about a third were killed. Many more Iraqis have been abducted.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 11:07 AM

Bush Nominates Pace as Top U.S. Military Officer

Yahoo! News
Reuters
Bush Nominates Pace as Top U.S. Military Officer

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush on Friday nominated Marine Gen. Peter Pace, who has played a key role in shaping strategy in the war on terrorism, to serve as chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Bush said Pace "knows the job well" having served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since 2001. "This is a huge task, even in peace time," Bush added.

Once confirmed by the Senate, Pace, 59, would become the first Marine Corps officer to serve as chairman -- the highest ranking U.S. military officer and principal military adviser to the president and defense secretary.

As chairman, Pace will face daunting problems at the Pentagon as U.S. budget deficits clash with the rising cost of warships, fighter jets and other high-tech programs planned to replace aging Cold War weaponry.

"I know the challenges ahead are formidable," Pace said.

Bush also nominated Navy Adm. Edmund Giambastiani Jr., 56, a former senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to replace Pace as vice chairman.

Bush stumbled over Giambastiani's name, and joked that he would henceforth refer to him as "Admiral G."

Pace, seen as closely aligned with Rumsfeld, previously headed Southern Command, responsible for U.S. military operations in Latin America.

As Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, Pace has been involved in overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pace would replace Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, 63, who is set to retire on Sept. 30.

Myers has been the top U.S. military officer since Oct. 1, 2001, just after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Pace, born in Brooklyn and raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy before serving in the Vietnam War, where he led a rifle platoon.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff consists of a chairman and vice chairman as well as the top officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 11:06 AM

Districts and Teachers' Union Sue Over Bush Law

The New York Times

Districts and Teachers' Union Sue Over Bush Law
By SAM DILLON

Opening a new front in the growing rebellion against President Bush's signature education law, the nation's largest teachers' union and eight school districts in Michigan, Texas and Vermont sued the Department of Education yesterday, accusing it of violating a passage in the law that says states cannot be forced to spend their own money to meet federal requirements.

Some legal scholars said that the union, the National Education Association, had assembled a compelling cause of action. Still, they added, since the case has few close precedents, it was difficult to judge the suit's prospects.

But it was clearly another headache for Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education, who is trying to resolve a federal-state conflict over the law, known as No Child Left Behind, that has taken on new forms in recent days. A day before the suit was filed, Utah's Republican-dominated Legislature approved the most far-reaching legislative challenge to the law.

Both the Utah measure, which requires educators there to spend as little state money as possible in carrying out the federal law's requirements, and the union lawsuit rely heavily on the same section of the federal law, which prohibits federal officials from requiring states to allocate their own money to fulfill the law's mandates.

This month, Connecticut's attorney general also announced the intention to sue the department on the same grounds, saying that the testing the law requires costs far more than the money the state is given to pay for it.

"If the facts about educational spending are as the plaintiffs allege, then this lawsuit has good prospects of winning," said David B. Cruz, a constitutional law professor at the University of Southern California. "It is a strong case because the statutory language is clear. The law says nothing in the act shall be interpreted to impose requirements that aren't being funded."

Since Ms. Spellings took office in January, she has pledged to improve relations with the nation's educators, which had frayed partly because of the law's demands for sweeping changes in local education practices.

The law requires that every racial and demographic group in every school must score higher on standardized tests every year. Falling short can bring sanctions, including the closing of schools.

Ms. Spellings has promised more flexibility, but those assurances have failed to blunt resistance to the law, even in strongly Republican states like Texas, which is defying a federal ruling on the testing of disabled children.

"If I were sitting in the White House, I would be concerned about the backlash against the law," said Patricia Sullivan, who tracks education politics closely as director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington group. "It's growing, and it's breaking out in many states."

In Utah yesterday, Tim Bridgewater, an aide to Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., a Republican, said that the governor would sign the bill that was approved on Tuesday. During the debate, several lawmakers protested the growth of federal influence on Utah's schools, asserting that while Washington paid 8 cents of every education dollar in the state, the law had given it virtually total control.

In a statement yesterday, Secretary Spellings said that though most school decisions should be made locally, "the federal government plays an important role" by keeping educators' attention on minority students who lag behind.

"States across the nation who have embraced No Child Left Behind have shown progress," she said. "The same could be true in Utah, whose achievement gap between Hispanics and their peers is the third largest in the nation and has not improved significantly in over a decade."

"Returning to the pre-N.C.L.B. days of fuzzy accountability and hiding children in averages will do nothing" to help Utah students, she added. Ms. Spellings did not comment on the lawsuit filed and financed by the National Education Association, but her spokesman, Susan Aspey, called it "regrettable."

"President Bush and Congress have provided historic funding increases for education, and yet we continue to hear the same weak arguments from the N.E.A.," Ms. Aspey said. "Four separate studies assert that the law is appropriately funded and not a mandate."

The union suit was filed in Federal District Court in Detroit, which has jurisdiction over one of the plaintiff school districts, in Pontiac, Mich., an urban system with 21 schools and 11,000 students, most of them blacks.

Other districts in the suit were Laredo, Tex., a mostly Hispanic district with 23,000 students and 30 schools; and six rural Vermont districts with a total attendance of about 1,500 students, most of them white.

In the complaint, the union argues that the law has already obligated the nation's schools to face "multibillion-dollar national funding shortfalls." The Bush administration contests this assertion, citing significant raises in federal education aid since President Bush took office.

The complaint seeks a court order notifying states and districts that they are not required to spend their own money to comply with the federal requirements.

"The law says that you don't have to do anything it requires unless you receive the federal money to do it," said Robert H. Chanin, the union's lead counsel. "There's a promise in the law, and it is unambiguous."

Robert W. Adler, a University of Utah law professor, said he was skeptical about the suit's prospects, because "generally, the Supreme Court has not been receptive to the unfunded federal mandates argument."

But the wording of the law, Mr. Adler said, might provide the plaintiffs a firmer legal standing than similar cases have enjoyed in the past.

Sylvia Bruni, superintendent of the Laredo schools, which have an annual budget of $170 million, said that her district this year had been obligated to spend $8.2 million of its own funds to comply with the federal law. Mostly, she said, those funds were spent to lengthen the school day and year, and to offer Saturday classes for students who had fallen short on standardized tests.

"It's all focused on passing the tests," she said.

originally published April 21, 2005

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Posted by politicalstuff at 10:58 AM

Powell Playing Quiet Role in Bolton Battle

washingtonpost.com
Powell Playing Quiet Role in Bolton Battle
GOP Senators Sought Views on Nominee

By Jim VandeHei and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers

Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell is emerging as a behind-the-scenes player in the battle over John R. Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the United Nations, privately telling at least two key Republican lawmakers that Bolton is a smart but very problematic government official, according to Republican sources.

Powell spoke in recent days with Sens. Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.) and Chuck Hagel (Neb.), two of three GOP senators on the Foreign Relations Committee who have raised concerns about Bolton's confirmation, the sources said. Powell did not advise the senators to oppose Bolton, but offered a frank assessment of the nominee as a man who was challenging to work with on personnel and policy matters, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

"General Powell has returned calls from senators who wanted to discuss specific questions that have been raised," said Margaret Cifrino, a Powell spokeswoman. "He has not reached out to senators," and considers the discussions private.

A spokesman for Chafee confirmed that at least two conversations took place. Bolton served under Powell as his undersecretary of state for arms control, and the two were known to have serious clashes.

Powell's tenure as secretary of state was often marked by friction with the White House on a range of foreign policy issues, disagreements that both sides worked to keep from surfacing. It is not Powell's style to weigh in strongly against a former colleague, but rather to direct people to what he sees as flaws and potential problems, former associates say. Powell's views are highly influential with many Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Those who know Powell best said two recent events provide insight into his thinking. Powell did not sign a letter from seven other former U.S. secretaries of state or defense supporting Bolton, and his former chief of staff, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, recently told the New York Times that Bolton would be an "abysmal ambassador."

"On two occasions, he has let it be known that the Bolton nomination is a bad one, to put it mildly," a Democratic congressional aide said. "It would be great to have Powell on the record speaking for himself, but he's unlikely to do it."

With a final committee vote delayed until next month, Chafee is studying Bolton's record and withholding judgment, his spokesman said. Chafee told reporters Wednesday he is "much less likely" to support Bolton because of questions about his credibility.

President Bush yesterday accused Democrats of blocking Bolton's nomination for political reasons, as the White House intensified its campaign to confirm Bolton and discredit his critics.

"John's distinguished career and service to our nation demonstrates that he is the right man at the right time for this important assignment," Bush said in a speech to insurance agents. "I urge the Senate to put aside politics and confirm John Bolton to the United Nations."

Yet it was Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) who prevented a final vote in the Foreign Relations Committee this week and called for more time to study Bolton's past. "The senator's motives are to do what is best for the American people," said Marcie Ridgway, Voinovich's spokeswoman.

Chafee and Hagel share Voinovich's concerns. Powell called Hagel, asking the Nebraska Republican if he should return Chafee's call. Hagel said that he should and that he should be frank, the sources said.

"I think it's being held up because Democrats oppose John Bolton, oppose him with passion," said Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), when asked whether politics were to blame for the delay.

Bush entered the increasingly tense showdown over Bolton's nomination as both sides are digging in for a tough fight over the confirmation of the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Democrats are charging that Bolton is a bully with a history of berating people he works with and of seeking to remove those who disagree with him. The White House is accusing Democrats of using "trumped-up" charges to prevent a highly qualified Republican from shaking up the United Nations. The committee yesterday failed to agree on whether Bolton should be called back to answer more questions.

Bolton has been accused of mistreating subordinates, including threatening a female former government contractor and misleading members about the handling of classified materials. Initially, Democrats opposed Bolton because of his negative comments about the United Nations. Their attack now centers on his character and temperament. "I do not believe that's a convincing case," Lugar said.

Former State Department official Carl W. Ford Jr. told the committee last week that in 2002 Bolton sought to remove two intelligence analysts who refused to endorse a speech he was preparing on Cuba's weapons capability.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), ranking Democrat on the committee, last week released a letter from Melody Townsel, a former subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kyrgyzstan, charging that Bolton harassed her over work-related matters more than a decade ago. Since then, at least two people have denied Townsel's charges.

Democratic committee sources said Biden and others are opening new lines of inquiry, including looking into a report posted yesterday on Newsweek's Web site that Bolton twice clashed angrily with Thomas Hubbard, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea.

Hubbard, who was appointed by Bush, has discussed his concerns about Bolton's credibility with committee members. Hubbard also challenged Bolton's testimony to the committee that he had praised Bolton for a 2003 speech denouncing Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea, as a "tyrannical dictator."

White House officials are moving quickly to address concerns among Republicans. Matthew R. Kirk, the president's liaison to the Senate, grabbed Voinovich shortly after this week's hearing to tell him the White House stands ready to provide him any information he wants, GOP sources said.

"John Bolton is someone who has a long record of getting things done, and sometimes that's going to make people mad," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

The White House also helped organize Republicans to speak out in favor of Bolton yesterday. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on the Senate floor that Bolton's temper should not disqualify him. "I believe John Bolton could provide the medicine the United Nations needs," he said.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 12:17 AM

Senate Passes $81 Billion War Spending Bill

Yahoo! News
Reuters
Senate Passes $81 Billion War Spending Bill

Thu Apr 21, 6:52 PM ET

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Thursday passed an $81.3 billion spending bill to keep U.S. combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan running and to provide additional help to last December's tsunami victims.

By a vote of 99-0, the Senate passed the emergency spending bill that also funds some new domestic security measures, including the hiring of additional border agents.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican, said the bill would "continue to support the additional funding that's needed for this fiscal year for our troops in the field, for those who are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world." The fiscal year ends at the end of September.

Last month, the House of Representatives passed its own measure to speed delivery of funds President Bush sought for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The two chambers will try to work out their differences quickly and send the legislation to Bush for signing.

One major area of disagreement is over the administration's plans to build a new embassy in Baghdad. The House deleted money for the construction project, largely due to concerns about record U.S. budget deficits.

The Senate has included $592 million for the project, which would be the largest U.S. embassy in the world.

There are also differences over immigration reform, including new hurdles for foreigners seeking asylum and prohibitions on driver's licenses for illegal aliens which were embraced by the House.

IMMIGRATION REFORM

The Senate sidestepped a broad immigration reform debate but did approve an amendment to temporarily lift the cap on foreign workers doing seasonal work in low-paying U.S. jobs.

Pentagon planners say they need an infusion of about $75 billion by next month to ensure the timely delivery of combat materials, including weapons, medical supplies and body armor. The legislation also provides bigger death benefits to families of soldiers killed in combat.

Once the spending bill is enacted, the running tally on Iraq and Afghanistan war costs for the United States would rise to nearly $300 billion, with about two-thirds of that total dedicated to the fighting in Iraq.

Before passing the bill, senators agreed to add $213 million to buy more armor-protected "Humvee" military vehicles through the end of this year.

Late last year, the Pentagon scurried to procure more armored Humvees after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld heard soldier complaints that troops in Iraq had to forage for scrap metal to protect their vehicles from insurgent attacks.

The House bill contains $185 billion in added funding for Humvees.

The Bush administration has not provided Congress with long-term estimates of Iraq war costs, which has rankled some lawmakers. In response, the Senate used the emergency spending bill to call on the White House to do a better job of estimating those costs in upcoming budget documents.

Related to December's Indian Ocean tsunami, the Senate provided about $907 billion in additional funding, slightly below Bush's request.

The money would be used to reimburse the U.S. military for some of its emergency relief efforts and to provide about $656 million for a tsunami recovery and reconstruction fund, as well as money for improving a U.S. early warning system for detecting tsunamis.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 12:14 AM

Sept. 11 Suspects Go on Trial In Madrid

washingtonpost.com
Sept. 11 Suspects Go on Trial In Madrid
Case Caps Probe of Al Qaeda in Spain

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 22, 2005; Page A01

MADRID, April 21 -- Two weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a Syrian immigrant in Spain received a phone call from London. The caller reported that he had "entered the field of aviation" and that "classes were going well." He added, mysteriously, that "the throat of the bird has been slit."

The call was recorded by Spanish police as part of a long-term investigation into a suspected network of Islamic radicals, but it was weeks before the possible significance of the conversation was understood. Prosecutors here now say they believe "the bird" was a symbolic reference to the American bald eagle and that the caller was sending a message that the Sept. 11 hijackings were ready to proceed.

The wiretap will be a key piece of evidence against the Syrian, Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, and two other men suspected of being al Qaeda members who go on trial in Madrid on Friday after a 3 1/2 -year investigation into the role Spain may have played as a staging ground for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Each is charged with nearly 3,000 counts of accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organization. Yarkas, who has been in jail since November 2001, denies the charges against him, as do the two other men.

The defendants face charges that they knowingly helped in the hijackings by providing money and cover to two of the plot's ringleaders during a rendezvous in a Spanish coastal town two months before the attacks. The trial will include 21 other defendants charged with terrorism-related crimes, making it the largest criminal prosecution in Europe aimed at al Qaeda.

No one has been successfully prosecuted for playing a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. German courts have tried two accused members of the Hamburg cell that oversaw the hijackings, but one defendant's conviction was overturned and the other man was found not guilty.

In Alexandria, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen, is scheduled to plead guilty Friday in federal court to participating in the plot. While such a plea would represent a breakthrough for U.S. prosecutors, there are doubts about Moussaoui's mental competency and uncertainty about what role he will admit to playing in the conspiracy.

More than 43 months after the hijackings, considerable gaps remain in investigators' understanding of how the plot was carried out. One concerns a 12-day period in July 2001 after the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, flew from Florida to Spain for a meeting with Ramzi Binalshibh, a key conspirator and friend of Atta's from Germany.

U.S. and European officials have concluded that the meeting was called to set a date for the hijackings and was prompted by al Qaeda's founder, Osama bin Laden, who was growing impatient with the pace of preparations.

In recently filed court papers, Spanish prosecutors said they had new evidence that Atta and Binalshibh met in the coastal town of Tarragona on July 16, 2001, with Mohamed Belfatmi, an Algerian, to discuss final arrangements for the hijackings.

The meeting, according to the court documents, was organized by Belfatmi and three other al Qaeda members in Spain who also knew about the plot. But for five of the 12 days Atta and Binalshibh were in Spain, investigators have no idea where the pair were or what they were doing.

Starting two weeks before the attacks, Binalshibh, Belfatmi and two other members of the Hamburg cell left Europe for Pakistan, investigators have concluded. At least three of the men took connecting flights through Spain.

Prosecutors are expected to introduce new evidence during the trial, but so far, little has emerged publicly that directly shows the defendants were willing, knowing participants in the Sept. 11 conspiracy. In the German trials, the two defendants successfully argued that they were merely doing favors for fellow Muslims and knew nothing of the plot.

"The proof we have against the people here is legally quite weak," said Rafael L. Bardaji, who was strategic adviser on security issues to Jose Maria Aznar, Spain's prime minister at the time of the attacks. "I'm convinced they were in on the plot. But we have a tremendous gap between what we think they did and the ability to prove them guilty."

"They are really only accused of playing a logistical role," said Antonio Remiro, a professor of international relations and law at Autonoma University in Madrid. "The prosecutor is going to have to prove that they knew what those meetings were all about. Otherwise, there is only evidence that they were part of a terrorist group but had no link to September 11."

U.S. counterterrorism officials have said they remain keenly interested in the Spanish connection to Sept. 11 but have learned little from their interrogations of al Qaeda members, including Binalshibh, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and is in U.S. custody at a secret location.

Dietrich Snell, a staff lawyer for the Sept. 11 commission, which issued its final report on the hijackings last year, told a German court last month that Binalshibh has offered his interrogators no real explanation for why he met Atta in Spain.

Snell said the commission was "very interested particularly in finding if there was a connection between al Qaeda elements in Spain and the attacks on Sept. 11" but was unable to come up with any new information on its own.
A Staging Ground

In 1996, five years before al Qaeda grabbed the world's attention with the Sept. 11 attacks, Spanish authorities opened a major investigation into the emerging presence of Islamic radicals on their soil.

Led by Baltasar Garzon, an investigative magistrate in Madrid known for his attempted prosecution of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and other notable cases, Spanish officials uncovered a network of religious extremists that raised money and found recruits to fight in Bosnia and Afghanistan.

Several members were kept under surveillance, but none was arrested until November 2001, when investigators realized that al Qaeda had used Spain as a staging ground for the attacks in the United States.

Garzon released a 700-page indictment in September 2003, charging 35 people -- including bin Laden -- with terrorism and other crimes. The number of defendants was later expanded to 41. Two dozen are in Spanish custody and will go on trial Friday, while the remainder are at large or awaiting extradition.

In court papers, Garzon stated that Yarkas, the Syrian who moved to Madrid in the early 1980s, was instrumental in creating a network of Islamic radicals in Spain that later gave money and support to al Qaeda as part of the Sept. 11 conspiracy. Garzon concluded that it was "crystal clear" that Yarkas knew details about the hijackings in advance.

According to a superseding indictment filed in February, Yarkas and three other suspects "gave logistical support as well as protection" to Atta and Binalshibh when the two conspirators flew to Spain in July 2001. Prosecutors allege that Yarkas was in repeated phone contact with the Algerian al Qaeda member who was present at the July 16 meeting between Atta and Binalshibh, and that Yarkas's phone number was found in an apartment in Germany used by the Hamburg cell.

Spanish prosecutors have collected other bits of evidence that al Qaeda drew more support from their country than previously believed. Two suspects, for instance, are accused of providing a stolen Spanish passport to Binalshibh before his trip to Tarragona, an indication that ties between the Hamburg cell and the Spanish network were long-standing.

Another key piece of evidence will be a collection of videotapes showing the World Trade Center, the Golden Gate and Brooklyn bridges and other U.S. landmarks. The videos were recorded in 1997 by one of the defendants, Ghasoub Abrash Ghayoun, who told investigators he was filming on behalf of an architect friend in Madrid. The friend later said he knew nothing about the tapes.

Ghayoun, like Yarkas and several other defendants in the case, is a Syrian native who moved to Spain in the 1980s. Spanish investigators say the Syrian members of the al Qaeda cell are members of the Muslim Brotherhood and used their connections to build the network in Spain and recruit money and fighters for radical Islamic causes.

Manuel Tuero, an attorney for another of the defendants, Mohammed Zouaydi, who is accused of financing terrorism, said prosecutors were stretching their case. "It's based on information that is very circumstantial," he said. "Someone was here in Spain and saw or visited a certain person. Well, just because Americans may have coincidentally been in an establishment with Al Capone does not mean that they were in his gang."

According to prosecutors, the Syrians in Spain were in frequent contact with two fellow Syrians in Germany, Mamoun Darkazanli and Mohammed Zammar, who were also members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

U.S. and European investigators say they believe these two men helped recruit the core Hamburg cell members and may have originally put them in contact with al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan.

Most of the accused Syrians are middle-aged businessmen with worldwide contacts, both in commercial and radical Islamic circles. Yarkas traveled to London on 20 occasions to meet with a leading radical imam and al Qaeda sympathizer known as Abu Qatada, according to Spanish court records.

Special correspondents Pamela Rolfe in Madrid and Shannon Smiley in Hamburg contributed to this report.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 12:12 AM

Thursday, April 21, 2005

A Democratic Dishonor Roll

thenation.com
A Democratic Dishonor Roll
04/21/2005 @ 2:02pm

David Corn

April 13, 2005, was a dark day for Democrats. As House Republicans gleefully passed legislation to repeal the estate tax permanently, 42 Democrats--about one-fifth of the party's caucus in the House--went along for the limo ride. It's true that 160 Democrats did vote against this unjustifiable tax break for the wealthiest of Americans. (Only one GOPer said nay to it.) But the three-and-a-half dozen Democrats who sided with Denny Hastert and Tom DeLay gave ammo to Republicans and their conservative allies in the punditry who were now able to claim the repeal was a bipartisan action that had drawn significant Democratic support. Once again, the Democrats botched an opportunity to signal clearly that there is a sharp difference between Ds and Rs and that the Republicans care more about millionaires than middle- and low-income Americans while Dems do not.

There was no good policy reason for a Democrat to vote to kill the estate tax outright. (Perhaps some of the 42 felt that opposing the estate tax repeal would bring upon them a barrage of ads claiming they support the "death tax.") Under existing law, the estate tax is scheduled to decrease gradually over the next four years and is then repealed totally in 2010 before returning in full force in 2011. The Republicans came up with this nutty schedule several years ago to keep the cost of their tax cuts within agreed upon budget limits. And they wanted to make Bush's tax cuts look less expensive than they were. But that was obviously a ruse at the time. The GOPers were not interested in truly being fiscally responsible. And this repeal will add, according to the Tax Policy Center, $270 billion to the national debt in the next decade. It also will only benefit a very small number of taxpayers--perhaps about 30,000. This is a sop for the super-rich. Estates smaller than $1.5 million (or $3 million a couple) are now exempt from the tax. And when the House Democrats offered to raise the exemption to $3.5 million--which would exempt all but the top .3 percent of estates--the Republicans said no. They wanted the deepest-pocketed Americans--that is, the heirs of these people--to have more in their pockets.

Bush and the Republicans have tossed out phony arguments to grease the way for killing the estate tax. In particular, they have resorted to three-hankies rhetoric in claiming the estate tax causes the sons and daughters of family farmers to sell their farms once their folks pass on. In 2001, when this debate began, the American Farm Bureau could not identify a single farm that had been lost due to the estate tax. And as the Tax Policy Center notes, "In fact, few small farms and businesses appear to be subject to the estate tax, although many families may undergo costly planning to avoid it." Repealing the estate tax is only about making sure the kids of rich people end up wealthier. And if this GOP campaign to comfort the comfortable succeeds, there will be much more pressure to cut the federal budget and chop away at programs that benefit low- and middle-income Americans. This was a vote in favor of class warfare--that is, warfare against those Americans with less.

Which brings us to the Dishonor Roll. Here are the 42 Democrats who collaborated with the GOP's relieve-the-rich effort. Do with this information what you will.

Bud Cramer (AL-5)
Marion Berry (AK-1)
Mike Ross (AK-4)
Sam Farr, (CA-17)
Dennis Cardoza (CA-18)
Jim Costa (CA-20)
Loretta Sanchez (CA-47)
Bob Filner (CA-51)
John Salazar (CO-3)
Sanford Bishop (GA-2)
John Barrow (GA-12)
David Scott (GA-13)
Melissa Bean (IL-8)
Jerry Costello (IL-12)
Leonard Boswell (IA-3)
Ben Chandler (KY-6)
William Jefferson (LA-2)
Charlie Melancon (LA-3)
Dutch Ruppersberger (MD-2)
Albert Wynn (MD-4)
Collin Peterson (MN-7)
William Clay (MO-1)
Ike Skelton (MO-4)
Shelley Berkley (NV-1)
Steve Israel (NY-2)
Carolyn McCarthy (NY-4)
Edolphus Towns (NY-10)
G.K. Butterfield (NC-1)
Mike McIntyre (NC-7)
Tim Ryan (OH-17)
Dan Boren (OK-2)
Darlene Hooley (OR-5)
Lincoln Davis (TN-4)
Bart Gordon (TN-6)
Ruben Hinojosa (TX-15)
Chet Edwards (TX-17)
Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18)
Henry Cuellar (TX-28)
Jim Matheson (UT-2)
Rick Boucher (VA-9)
Rick Larsen (WA-2)
Nick Rahall (WV-3)

*******************

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Posted by politicalstuff at 11:56 PM

Yahoo will give family slain Marine's e-mail account

USA TODAY

Yahoo will give family slain Marine's e-mail account

WIXOM, Mich. (AP) — E-mail provider Yahoo has pledged to give the family of a Marine killed in Iraq full access to their son's e-mail account, ending a court battle that began after his parents sought messages he wrote before his death.

By Paul Sancya, AP

An Oakland County probate judge signed an order Wednesday directing Yahoo Inc. to provide the contents of the e-mail account used by Lance Cpl. Justin M. Ellsworth, 20, who was killed Nov. 13 while inspecting a bomb in Al Anbar province.

Yahoo, which originally refused the family's request to hand over the account, did not fight the order and gave the family a CD containing more than 10,000 pages of material.

But John Ellsworth, Justin's father, said he found only e-mails his son received and nothing he had written, even e-mails the younger Ellsworth had sent home.

"Maybe that's all he had ... Maybe that's all he did," John Ellsworth said. "I'm not sure what I've got in front of me."

The family found only their own messages to Justin Ellsworth, as well as spam and a few e-mails from people they had never heard of.

A spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo said the CD should have contained the Marine's outgoing as well as his incoming e-mail messages.

"We will do whatever it takes to help Mr. Ellsworth access all of the files on the disc," Mary Osako told The Associated Press on Thursday. She said Yahoo would deliver a paper copy of the contents to the family early next week.

Justin Ellsworth's job was to locate and destroy hidden bombs. He discovered one while on patrol and noticed the device lacked wires, suggesting it was remote-controlled. He warned fellow Marines to clear the area but was caught by the blast.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 11:50 PM

One (Especially) Sad Death in Iraq

thenation.com
One (Especially) Sad Death in Iraq
by David Corn

Marla Ruzicka deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Unlike Paul Wolfowitz or George Tenet, she shouldn't get it for botching the job in Iraq. No, she ought to receive it for trying damn hard to make America live up to its ideals in Iraq and elsewhere. But the medal would have to be awarded posthumously--because on Saturday, Marla, an irrepressible 28-year-old from California, was killed by a bomb when a suicide bomber, who was apparently trying to strike a US convoy on the highway to Baghdad International Airport, pulled up alongside her car pulled and detonated the explosives. Faiz Ali Salaam, her 43-year-old associate and the father of a two-month-old daughter, was also killed.

I met Marla several years ago. During the early months of the (still unfinished) war in Afghanistan, I became obsessed with the idea of providing compensation for the civilians killed or injured in Afghanistan as the result of the US military action. Few others--in the media, on Capitol Hill, in the foreign policy community--shared my concern, which rose from both a humanitarian sentiment and a sense of national self-interest. If the United States was killing and maiming civilians in Afghanistan to protect ourselves--even if inadvertently--it seemed to me Washington should do whatever it could not to piss off further the people in Afghanistan (and other countries) by ignoring the plight of the noncombatants. Soon after writing about this, I was contacted by Marla. She had been in Kabul, where she had conducted surveys to assess the extent of civilian casualties, and she was now in Washington pressing for US assistance to the families harmed. She had been doing the hard--and dangerous--on-the-ground work.

I was much impressed by her, as were others in Washington. She was a passionate, facts-driven advocate who cared about the individual lives of victims so often kept out of our collective conscience by being described as "collateral damage." No, she urged, they count, too. As much as our fallen neighbors struck down on September 11. And she meant that quite literally. She argued that these people ought to be counted; their deaths should be recorded by someone, especially since the Bush administration showed a particular disinterest in mounting such calculations or even acknowledging the damage done to civilians. Marla wanted to chronicle the truth and aid the afflicted. She was brave. She was concerned. She was a hero.

During one of our conversations after the major fighting was done in Afghanistan, we discussed her future. She was not finished with her Afghanistan work, but she sensed there was a bigger issue afoot: the general attitude toward civilian victims of war. She was right. We both saw that a war in Iraq was on its way. There will be antiwar activists raising hell, I told her, and Marla easily could be one of their leaders. But she had identified and filled a crucial need overlooked by so many others in the antiwar movement. She had made herself indispensable to the cause of social justice, and she had, in a way, transcended the typical ideological and policy disputes. I encouraged her to continue and expand her efforts.

Marla did engage in organizing against the war in Iraq, but once Bush launched the invasion, she created a small, nonprofit outfit called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC). Shortly after the invasion, she quickly organized a team of 160 Iraqis to conduct a survey. These researchers interviewed thousands and documented nearly 2,000 civilian deaths from the start of the invasion to May 1, 2003--the day Bush prematurely declared the end of major military operations in Iraq. "The purpose of the survey is not to quantify the total humanitarian impact of the war in Iraq, but rather to identify victims and families of those in need of recognition and assistance," CIVIC later noted. "... Each death, injury and house that was destroyed represents a story and a need." After her death, Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, told the Associated Press that it had been Ruzicka's idea to create a special fund in last year's multibillion-dollar foreign aid bill to help Iraqis whose businesses had been damaged by US bombs.

The innocent casualties of war were too real for Marla. In November 2003, she sent an email to Alternet in which she described one small tragedy in Iraq:

Friends:

As terrorists wreak havoc on life in Baghdad, innocent families are getting caught in the crossfire.

On the 24th of October, former teacher Mohammad Kadhum Mansoor, 59, and his wife, Hamdia Radhi Kadhum, 45, were traveling with their three daughters -- Beraa, 21, Fatima, 8, and Ayat, 5 years old -- when they were tragically run over by an American tank.

A small grenade was thrown at the tank, causing it to loose control and veer onto the highway, over the family's small Volkswagen. Mohammad and Hamdia were killed instantly, orphaning the three girls in the backseat. The girls survived, but with broken and fractured bodies. We are not sure of Ayat's fate; her backbone is broken.

CIVIC staff member Faiz Al Salaam monitors the girls' condition each day. Nobody in the military or the U.S. Army has visited them, nor has anyone offered to help this very poor family.

The only assistance from U.S. forces in Iraq is via the neighborhood Central Military Operations Center (CMOC). If the girls can get to their offices, their case will be filed and heard via a town council. This offers little hope for these girls, who are faced with immediate needs and a broken future.

The U.S. needs to have a clear procedure to respond to cases like Ayat's. CIVIC is working to try to establish such a system of assistance, but for now, the very least we can do to show our sympathy is to help Ayat and her sisters ourselves.

Thank you, and let's hope and pray for a peaceful Iraq.

--Marla

The task that Marla had assumed for herself was to make America better--even when she disagreed with the government. She opposed the war in Iraq. But once the United States began killing people in Iraq, she wanted this mission conducted with true concern for those errantly harmed. In December 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle published an accurate profile of her. It noted:

Marla Ruzicka's life is driven by numbers. The numbers of Iraqi civilians dead, the numbers of the wounded. How many of their homes have been destroyed?

As founder of CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), Ruzicka works 15-hour days in the thick of the war zone, going door to door to assess the harm done to innocent Iraqis caught in the line of fire. Ruzicka then uses that information to lobby the U.S. government for assistance....

While the Defense Department keeps official records of U.S. troops killed and wounded (440 and 2,470 as of Dec. 1), no one has stepped forward to do the same for Iraqi civilians but Ruzicka, the self-appointed watchdog of civilians harmed in recent Middle East conflicts....

An unofficial survey she undertook in Afghanistan confirmed 824 dead. Returning to the United States, she lobbied Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to insert language in an appropriations bill that would provide $3.75 million to help victims. In July, the money started trickling in to the devastated country....

"Marla is an exceptionally determined, energetic and brave young woman who has traveled to the front lines to focus attention on an issue that too often gets ignored," he said. "Civilians bear the brunt of the suffering in wars today, but there is no policy to help them. Marla and her organization have helped put a human face on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by identifying the victims and their needs, and by lobbying for assistance."

...Would she ever consider doing something a little ... safer?

"To have a job where you can make things better for people? That's a blessing," she said. "Why would I do anything else?"

Author Peter Bergen, a friend of hers, noted yesterday,

One really interesting thing is that Marla was very opposed to the Iraq war before it began, but once the war started I never heard her express any opinion about the war itself. Once the war started she just wanted to help people who were hurt, not engage in a debate about the merits of the war. Beneath her Californian happy-go-luck demeanor Marla was a very hardheaded realist about what needed to be done. The war happened. People were hurt. She wanted to help them. And an example of her realistic approach is how she worked in Afghanistan and Iraq compensating the families who died. Marla had no patience for people who demonstrated against the war, and did nothing else.

Marla told one interviewer, "My long-term goal is to get a desk at the State Department that looks at civilian casualties." It seems like that would be a natural. Shouldn't a nation keep track of and be concerned about the damage done to civilians when it engages in military actions? Yet what a dream that was--and remains.

There will be memorials for Marla Ruzicka. Senators Patrick Leahy and Barbara Boxer have said they will offer tributes to her on the Senate floor. Last night after I heard the news of her death, I looked in on my two daughters--age four and five-and-a-half. Thinking of Marla's parents, Nancy and Clifford Ruzicka, I imagined how proud I will be if my children grow up to be women who have the sort of strength and conviction Marla possessed. And how scared I will be.

CIVIC was the brainchild of one helluva woman. But the idea, the simple idea--that we care about the innocent people killed in our name--was much larger than one person. Or it should be. Unlike the leaders of the US government, Marla knew that America--for humanitarian and security reasons--had an obligation to help noncombatants injured by US forces. Marla deserved many more years. And the people she helped and tried to help deserved more assistance from this idealistic American.

She will, of course, not be receiving the Medal of Freedom from a president who leads an administration that has said it does not bother to collect data on civilians killed or injured by its military and that has been tremendously slow to compensate the innocent Afghan and Iraqi civilians who have lost loved ones, limbs, homes and businesses due to US military actions. In fact, according to an article in The Washington Post, Marla had "stayed in Baghdad longer than she had planned because she believed she had found the key to establishing that the U.S. military kept records of its civilian victims, despite its official statements otherwise, colleagues said."

In the years I have written this column I don't think I have ever asked a reader to make a donation to an organization. But please consider contributing to CIVIC. You can do so by clicking here:
https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/civic/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=284
It won't be just for Marla. It will be for the people she lived and died for--and for a principle that all Americans ought to consider seriously: when we fight a war, we are responsible for the triumphs and for the costs.

Originally published 04/18/2005

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:09 PM

Ethics Chairman Proposes Probe of Delay

ABC News
Ethics Chairman Proposes Probe of Delay
Ethics Chairman Proposes Investigation of DeLay; Hastert Says Democrats Face Scrutiny
By LARRY MARGASAK
The Associated Press

Apr. 21, 2005 - In an ethics stalemate that is rivaling the most partisan legislative struggles, House Republicans are proposing an investigation of Majority Leader Tom DeLay while threatening to put several Democrats under scrutiny as well.

Republicans made their second attempt in two weeks Wednesday to get a deadlocked House ethics committee functioning again, adding the new proposal to blunt Democratic demands for an investigation of DeLay. Some House Republicans have acknowledged the steady Democratic attacks have made them nervous.

Democrats gave no ground. They said they wouldn't allow the evenly divided committee to conduct investigations unless Republicans reversed a rule providing for automatic dismissal of cases.

The ethics committee's Republican chairman, Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington state, made the surprising offer to investigate DeLay, R-Texas. The proposal will go nowhere unless the Democrats provide votes to allow the committee to conduct business.

Democrats have criticized DeLay for taking foreign trips that may have been financed by clients of a lobbyist.

Lawmakers cannot accept trips from lobbyists, but DeLay has said he believed a nonprofit organization financed the travel as permitted under House rules.

Hastings proposed the DeLay investigation at a news conference flanked by three of the four other Republicans on the ethics panel. The committee also has five Democrats.

Senior committee Democrat Alan Mollohan of West Virginia quickly rejected the offer, saying his party would continue blocking the panel unless a bipartisan task force was appointed to write new rules for investigating lawmakers.

"The first principle in doing it right is that it be bipartisan," said Mollohan. "That's a beginning point for me."

Mollohan would not say whether he supported an investigation of DeLay, commenting that his effort to change the rules is "totally independent from any specific case."

Democrats want to revert to a rule in effect until last January, which provided for an automatic investigation if no action was taken on a complaint of wrongdoing. The new rules provide for automatic dismissal if the committee doesn't act within 45 days a period that can be doubled if necessary.

While Democrats have kept up a stream of accusations of unethical conduct against DeLay, they also have attempted to gain political mileage by attacking the Republican rules.

While Mollohan and Hastings spoke at dueling news conferences, Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., warned Democrats that Republicans are ready to investigate allegations of Democratic wrongdoing.

In a radio interview with broadcaster Sean Hannity, Hastert said there were "four or five cases out there dealing with top level Democrats." He did not name them.

"There's a reason they don't want to go to the ethics process. As long as they can keep somebody dangling out there like they have with Tom DeLay, they take great glee in that," Hastert said.

DeLay has offered to appear before the committee to defend himself and repeated his request after Hastings' announcement.

"I've sent letters to the committee asking to appear before the chairman and ranking member to discuss matters," he said. "And for more than a month I've said I hope for a fair process that will afford me the opportunity to get the facts out and set the record straight. I welcome the opportunity to address this with the committee."

The second-ranking House Democrat, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, called Hastings' offer "an absolute nonstarter with Democrats" and an "attempt to divert attention from the fact that the Republican majority has neutered the ethics committee in the House by imposing partisan rules." Democratic leaders have said the automatic dismissal rule was designed to protect DeLay.

The Republicans were "prepared to vote at the earliest opportunity to empanel an investigations subcommittee to review various allegations concerning travel and other actions" by DeLay, Hastings said.

The ethics committee has authority to start an investigation based on information it receives "through public and other sources," he added.

The ethics committee admonished DeLay last year on three separate issues but did not find that he violated House rules. A district attorney in Texas is investigating potentially illegal corporate contributions to a Texas political committee started by DeLay.

Hastings was joined at the news conference by Reps. Judy Biggert of Illinois, Melissa Hart of Pennsylvania and Tom Cole of Oklahoma.

Republican Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas did not attend. Hart would lead any investigation of DeLay, Hastings said.

Hastings would not comment on whether he had spoken to DeLay about the proposal but he did say he could not speak with a member "about matters that may or may not come before the ethics committee."

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:09 PM

Sexual Abuse Allegations Against a Top Catholic Re-examined

ABC News

Sexual Abuse Allegations Against a Top Catholic Re-examined
Seven Years of Silence May Come to an End

Apr. 21, 2005 - An investigation into the sexual abuse allegations against a high-ranking priest of the Roman Catholic Church has been reopened, seven years after the formal complaint was first filed with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, according to people familiar with the case.

Ratzinger's office ordered the case against the Rev. Marcial Maciel reopened in December, around the time there was growing speculation Ratzinger was a leading candidate to be the next pope. In fact, a Vatican investigator began taking sworn statements from the alleged victims just two weeks ago in New York, the day Pope John Paul II died, according to sources close to the case.

The men who brought the allegations against Maciel had thought their case was dead, having heard nothing but silence in the seven years since they brought the allegations to the attention of Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

"They knelt and kissed his ring, filing these charges in his tribunal, and after that it was simply stuffed, it was shelved," said Jason Berry, co-author with Gerald Renner of a book on the case, "Vows of Silence."

"This pope is at a crossroads. He has to resolve the Maciel case or it will stalk him like a shadow in the sun."

The charges against Maciel, the founder of a well-connected and well-financed order called the Legion of Christ, a conservative sect of the Catholic Church, date back to the 1950s. Eight men allege that Maciel sexually abused them as young seminarians in Rome, something Maciel has always strongly denied.

Unspoken Truths?

Juan Vaca, now a college professor in New York, told ABC News in 2002 that he reluctantly brought the charges as a way to get over the trauma he says he suffered.

"I was the one who called them from their bedrooms to go to see Maciel," he said. "In some instances, two were together with him, myself and another one."

The men making the allegations have been told they cannot talk about the case now that it has been reopened.

Maciel, now 84, resigned as head of the legion in January. But as recently as late last year, he was praised by Pope John Paul II for his "intense, generous and fruitful priestly ministry" during the 60th anniversary celebration of Maciel's ordination.

Ratzinger repeatedly refused to discuss what happened to the Maciel case, and when ABC News attempted to ask him about the allegations outside the Vatican three years ago, he became upset and slapped the hand of the ABC News correspondent on scene.

"You come to me when the moment is given," Ratzinger said. "Not yet."

'Temptation Is Natural, Even for the Priest'

As head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger was put in charge of dealing with the church's worldwide sexual abuse scandal. But he was at first slow to act and downplayed the scandal as part of a campaign to discredit the church.

"In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type," Ratzinger said in a rare interview in 2002. "The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information nor to the statistical objectivity of the facts. Therefore, one comes to the conclusion that it is intentional, manipulated, that there is a desire to discredit the church."

Ratzinger was also surprisingly forgiving of priests guilty of sexual abuse.

"Never will it end," he said. "Temptation is natural, even for the priest. So we have to accept that."

Berry said that Ratzinger made grave mistakes in his treatment of the Catholic church's sexual abuse scandal.

"He made a series of terrible blunders in the 1990s and well into 2002," Berry said. "He made statements that were inaccurate and terribly misleading."

But some, including Berry, see the reopened Maciel case as a hopeful sign. "If he removes Maciel, he makes a statement that he is serious about a crackdown on this world abuse scandal," Berry said of Ratzinger. "If he doesn't remove Maciel, then the pope himself is part of the problem."

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:08 PM

1 in 5 Teens Abused Prescription Drugs

Yahoo! News
AP

1 in 5 Teens Abused Prescription Drugs

Thu Apr 21, 7:00 AM ET

By LARRY McSHANE, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - The nation's teenagers are increasingly trying prescription drugs such as Vicodin and OxyContin to get high, with the pill-popping members of "Generation Rx" often raiding their parents' medicine cabinets, according to the latest national study by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

The 17th annual study on teen drug abuse, released Thursday morning, found that about one in five teenagers has abused a prescription painkiller — more than have experimented with either Ecstasy, cocaine, crack or LSD. One in 11 teens had abused over-the-counter products such as cough medicine, the study reported.

"For the first time, our national study finds that today's teens are more likely to have abused a prescription painkiller to get high than they are to have experimented with a variety of illegal drugs," said partnership Chairman Roy Bostock. "In other words, Generation Rx has arrived."

According to the survey, the most popular prescription drug abused by teens was Vicodin, with 18 percent — or about 4.3 million youths — reporting they had used it to get high. OxyContin and drugs for attention-deficit disorder such as Ritalin/Adderall followed with one in 10 teens reporting they had tried them.

Fewer than half the teens — 48 percent — said they saw "great risk" in experimenting with prescription medicines. "Ease of access" was cited as a major factor in trying the medications, with medicine cabinets at home or at friends' homes a likely source, the survey found.

It was only the second year that the survey had studied abuse of legal drugs. For the first time, the survey included a question about the use of over-the-counter products to get high. Nine percent, or about 2.2 million teens, had experimented with cough syrup and other such products, the survey reported.

The number of teens reporting marijuana use declined to 37 percent last year, compared with 42 percent a half-dozen years earlier. Over the same amount of time, ecstasy use declined from 12 percent to 9 percent, while methamphetamine trial dropped from 12 percent to 8 percent.

The 2004 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study surveyed more than 7,300 teens, the largest ongoing analysis of teen drug-related attitudes toward drugs in the country. Its margin of error is plus or minus 1.5 percent.

The nonprofit Partnership for a Drug-Free America, launched in 1987, is a coalition of communications professionals aimed at reducing the demand for illegal drugs.

___

On the Net:

Partnership for Drug Free America: http://www.drugfree.org

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:08 PM

U.N. Rejects Bid to Probe Gitmo Treatment

Yahoo! News
AP

U.N. Rejects Bid to Probe Gitmo Treatment

By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer

GENEVA - The U.N. Human Rights Commission rejected Cuba's attempt Thursday to force an investigation into the treatment of detainees at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay.

The vote on Cuba's resolution was 22-8, with 23 other nations abstaining. The other nations supporting the failed effort by Cuba were China, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Sudan, Malaysia, Guatemala and Mexico.

The resolution, which noted the "serious concern" expressed by U.N. experts about the conditions for terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo, would have asked the United States "to authorize an impartial and independent fact-finding mission" to the center.

Cuba introduced the resolution after the commission approved a resolution to continue reporting on the human rights situation in the communist island nation.

The European Union already said it planned to oppose the Cuban bid, which effectively would have been a reprimand to the United States.

Juan Antonio Fernandez, the Cuban delegate who presented the resolution, expressed disappointment in the EU members.

"Not even one of them dared to challenge the threat of the hegemonic superpower," Fernandez said.

Former Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, head of the U.S. delegation, welcomed the vote.

"Many of our friends here recognized that the United States is a leader in human rights," Boschwitz said. "We were very satisfied that those who supported our position talked about our judiciary and the independence of our judiciary."

Peruvian Ambassador Elizabeth Astete Rodriguez said she thought the resolution was not needed because actions by the U.S. courts and others had led to "measures to improve the situation."

"The case is already being addressed," she said, adding that the improvements were not reflected in the Cuban proposal.

Supporters of the United States also noted it has been regularly permitting visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to check on the condition of the detainees.

___

Associated Press writer Bradley S. Klapper contributed to this report.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:07 PM

Passenger Lists Sought For Flights Over U.S.

Yahoo! News

Passenger Lists Sought For Flights Over U.S.

By Sara Kehaulani Goo, Washington Post Staff Writer

The U.S. government plans to force foreign airlines flying over American soil to turn over the names of passengers on board or check the names against U.S. government watch lists in an effort to prevent terrorists from entering U.S. airspace.

Under current rules, overseas carriers are required to provide passenger manifests to U.S. officials within 15 minutes of takeoff if they are to land in the United States, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Officials have been concerned that terrorists may try to hijack a plane over the United States and crash it into a building, as occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. Officials acknowledge, however, that no credible intelligence exists indicating such a plot.

"We are currently considering a measure that would require foreign carriers to vet their passenger manifests against the 'no-fly' list and 'selectee' lists on overflights," said TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark. The no-fly list is a secret list of thousands of names of known or suspected terrorists who may pose a threat to U.S. aviation. The selectee list contains the names of individuals who are not known terrorists but present a possible threat to the airplane.

The proposal has angered European, Mexican and Canadian airlines, which operate most of the 500 estimated daily overflights. If foreign airlines do not comply with the order, which is expected to be issued in coming weeks, they could have to reroute flights, adding time and cost to the journeys. At least one carrier, Aeromexico, claims the rule would violate international aviation agreements.

The TSA's proposal, discussed in recent days with foreign leaders, was prompted by a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Mexico on April 8 that was prohibited from flying over American airspace because two passengers were found to be on the U.S. government's no-fly list.

The KLM flight, a specially configured 747 with 278 passengers and 15 horses on board, was five hours into its journey when Mexican authorities alerted U.S. officials about two Saudi passengers on board. TSA officials decided not to allow the plane to continue on its usual route over the United States.

The Canadian government offered the plane an option to land on its territory if the aircraft did not have enough fuel for a return trip, a Canadian official said. But KLM decided to turn the plane around for the five-hour flight back to Amsterdam out "of interest to the passengers and animals," KLM spokesman Hugo Baas said in an e-mail. "The assigned airport was not suitable for handling a 747 in this configuration." KLM is a leading air transporter of horses and operates an animal hospital at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.

The two Saudi passengers on the KLM flight were men who trained at the same Arizona flight school as Sept. 11 hijacker Hani Hanjour, according a law enforcement source. The men, according to aviation sources, were questioned by Dutch officials and eventually allowed to fly back to Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials did not interview the men, according to law enforcement and Homeland Security sources.

A Homeland Security official familiar with the proposed rules said U.S. and foreign officials are negotiating over whether airlines or the U.S. government would check passenger names against the watch lists. If any names match those on the lists, airlines would have to undertake new security measures.

For example, if a flight from Canada to Mexico were to have a passenger whose name matched one on the no-fly list, the flight would not be allowed into U.S. airspace. The passenger would have to be removed from the flight, or if the plane happened to already be in the air, it would have to fly around the United States to reach its destination, according to officials familiar with the plans. Similarly, if a passenger's name were to match one on the selectee list, the passenger would have to undergo more thorough security screening before boarding the plane, the sourcesaid.

Aeromexico, which has 18 weekly flights from Mexico City that cross U.S. airspace on their way to Europe, said that the U.S. proposal might violate international transit agreements and that it is consulting with the Mexican transportation department to "present our legal position for this potential requirement."

"This potential directive will restrict our privilege to fly across U.S. territory without landing, and to land for non-traffic purposes," said Fernando Ceballos, Aeromexico's assistant director for airport operations, in an e-mailed statement. If the TSA issues the requirement, he said, it would not be practical to fly around the U.S. coast. "Flying over water along the coast is not an option for Aeromexico as increased flight times would be prohibitive given the type of aircraft we use, our slots and crew requirements."

TSA's spokesman Clark said, "We are working with our international partners to give thoughtful consideration to all aspects of the impact of this measure."

The rule change would affect many of Canada's estimated 1,000 weekly overflights, including domestic flights such as Montreal to Toronto, which fly over the United States because of geography and weather patterns. "We're currently gathering information from air carriers to evaluate the impact that the proposed amendment would have," said Vanessa Vermette, spokeswoman for Transport Canada.

KLM said that it is now checking its passenger lists against U.S. watch lists for its overflights, following the recent incident.

"It is not up to an airline to judge the security measures of individual countries," KLM spokesman Baas said. "However, it is up to the responsible authorities of each country to safeguard that measures do not have negative counter effects on the daily operation of the airlines."

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:07 PM

Greenspan Warns Deficits Endanger Economy

Yahoo! News
Reuters
Greenspan Warns Deficits Endanger Economy

By Glenn Somerville

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned on Thursday that unless lawmakers come to grips with spiraling U.S. deficits, the economy was at risk of stagnation "or worse."

"Under existing tax rates and reasonable assumptions about other spending ... projections make clear that the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, in which large deficits result in rising interest rates and ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years," Greenspan said in testimony prepared for a Senate Budget Committee hearing.

He said the danger was that deficits would keep rising as a percentage of total national output.

"Unless that trend is reversed, at some point these deficits would cause the economy to stagnate or worse."

Much of Greenspan's testimony echoed prior cautions he has made to Capitol Hill lawmakers and he stressed that steps to fix the problem were essential.

"As the latest projections from the (Bush) administration and the Congressional Budget Office suggest, our budget position is unlikely to improve substantially in the coming years unless major deficit-reducing actions are taken," the Fed chief said.

Greenspan reiterated his call for some type of automatic government spending controls.

"In my judgment, the necessary choices will be especially difficult to implement without the restoration of a set of procedural restraints on the budget-making process," he said.

Bush has pledged to cut the budget gap in half by 2009. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the 2005 budget shortfall will be around $400 billion, including funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Fed chief has long urged renewing so-called pay-go provisions that compel lawmakers to show how they will fund any spending initiatives or tax cuts.

Greenspan said the approaching surge of American retirees was adding urgency to the need to deal with budget constraints in light of uncertainty about the scale of looming medical and retirement costs.

"These uncertainties -- especially our inability to identify the upper bound of future demands for medical care -- counsel significant prudence in policy-making," Greenspan said, adding that policy-makers "need to err on the side of prudence when considering new budget initiatives."

He repeated that the United States may already be in a position where it cannot meet commitments made to the baby boom generation and urged benefit cuts, if needed, be made as soon as possible.

"If existing promises need to be changed, those changes should be made sooner rather than later," he said.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:06 PM

Judge to allow 9/11 guilty plea

BBC NEWS
Judge to allow 9/11 guilty plea
A judge has ruled that Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in the US charged over the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, can plead guilty.

Judge Leonie Brinkema has scheduled a Friday hearing at Alexandria district court, in the state of Virginia, a statement by the court said.

Judge Brinkema apparently made the decision after meeting Mr Moussaoui and his lawyers on Wednesday.

Mr Moussaoui faces a number of charges relating to the attacks.

He could face the death penalty if convicted.

The judge's ruling was said to hinge on whether the accused was considered competent to make the plea.

However, it is not clear to which charges he will plead guilty.

Trial delays

Mr Moussaoui - a French citizen of Moroccan origin - tried to plead guilty in 2002 but retracted the plea a week later.

The US government says he was a full member of the original team involved in the 2001 attacks when hijackers took over four passenger planes and deliberately crashed them.

Mr Moussaoui has also accused his court-appointed lawyers of wanting to have him executed and fired them.

But Judge Brinkema revoked Mr Moussaoui's right to defend himself.

His lawyers have argued against the death penalty, and are likely to oppose the guilty plea, if it means he could be sentenced to death.

The trial has been beset by delays.

In March, the US Supreme Court refused to examine an appeal by his team for access to US al-Qaeda suspects on security grounds.

Last year, federal judges barred Mr Moussaoui from calling people held at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as witnesses.

The court said the accused could only use government-prepared summaries of the interrogation statements from al-Qaeda suspects in Guantanamo.

The three judges also overruled a lower court decision by deciding that the death penalty could be used if there was a guilty verdict.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 10:36 AM

Bankruptcy bill signed by Bush

amNewYork

Bankruptcy bill signed by Bush

WASHINGTON President Bush signed a bill yesterday that will make it harder for debt-ridden people to wipe clean their financial slates by declaring bankruptcy. The legislation was strongly opposed by consumer rights activists who said it would prevent
vulnerable Americans from getting the fresh start they need. But Bush said the law was “restoring integrity to the bankruptcy process.”

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:13 AM

No Child Left Behind challenged

amNewYork

No Child Left Behind challenged

WASHINGTON — The nation’s largest teachers union and school districts in three states sued the Bush administration yesterday over the No Child Left Behind law, aiming to free schools from complying with any part not paid for by the federal government.

The lawsuit, filed in Michigan, is the first major challenge to President Bush’s education policy. The outcome would apply directly to the districts in the case, but it could affect how the law is enforced in schools across the country.

Leading the fight is the National Education Association, a union of 2.7 million members and a political adversary of the administration. The other plaintiffs are nine school districts in Michigan, Vermont and Texas, plus 10 NEA chapters in those states and seven other states. (AP)

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:12 AM

Gun law debated in Capitol

amNewYork

Gun law debated in Capitol

BY CHUCK BENNETT - amNewYork Staff Writer

Some members of Congress marked the sixth anniversary of the Columbine massacre by debating a bill that would shield the gun industry from lawsuits. “A total of 15 people died on that tragic day, including 13 students, yet today we’re here to debate a bill that immunizes those who help contribute to such acts,” said Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Michigan), minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee. Called the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” the bill will forbid cities and individuals from suing gun manufacturers for marketing to criminals. New York City is presently suing the gun industry. “Congress is taking the side of the NRA against the victims of gun violence. It is a shame,” Rep. Anthony Weiner (DBrooklyn/ Queens) told amNewYork. The committee debated the bill yesterday but did not vote on it. Congressional staffers said the timing of the debate with the anniversary of the 1999 Colorado high school massacre was a coincidence. “The timing is in exceptionally bad taste,” said Michael Barnes, of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. A committee vote is expected today or next week and the bill is expected to easily pass the Republican-controlled House.

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Posted by politicalstuff at 1:05 AM

200,000 Ameritrade Client Files Lost

Yahoo! News
AP
200,000 Ameritrade Client Files Lost

Apr 20, 5:43 PM ET

By EMILY FREDRIX, Associated Press Writer

OMAHA, Neb. - Leading online discount broker Ameritrade Holding Corp. said Tuesday it has informed about 200,000 current and former customers that a backup computer tape containing their personal information has been lost.

The Omaha-based company mailed the notices to its clients last week, spokeswoman Donna Kush said.

The company realized the tape was missing in February, when the package it was in was damaged during shipping between vendors, Kush said. Of the four backup tapes in the package, three were found, but the fourth is still missing, she said.

Information on the tape was for people nationwide who may have been Ameritrade customers from 2000-2003, she said. The data was different for each client and may have included their Social Security numbers, among other information, Kush said.

The tapes were not marked and unless special equipment was used, the compressed data could not be extracted.

Kush said she has not heard of any misuse of the information.

"We are very confident that no harm has been done to any clients, to their accounts, to their information," Kush said.

Kush said Ameritrade did not lose the information, but rather, a third party vendor did.

The news comes as several companies have experienced their own database violations, and some thefts.

Database giant LexisNexis on Monday announced it had started alerting about 280,000 people that their personal information may have been accessed by unauthorized individuals who were using stolen passwords and IDs.

On Monday, Columbus, Ohio-based DSW Shoe Warehouse said that thieves had accessed a database with credit card records on about 1.4 million customers. The company said it has contact information for about half of those people and started sending letters notifying them of the thefts, which happened at 108 stores in 25 states between November and February.

Data broker ChoicePoint Inc., based in suburban Atlanta, said in February that information on some 145,000 consumers nationwide was taken by thieves who opened up dozens of accounts and went undetected for more than a year.

___

On the Net:

Ameritrade: http://www.ameritrade.com

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Posted by politicalstuff at 12:42 AM

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