FEMA Aid Effort Fraught With Fraud; Thousands Received Money Improperly

washingtonpost.com
FEMA Aid Effort Fraught With Fraud
Thousands Received Money Improperly

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tens of thousands of people received aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency using possibly fraudulent identities because the relief effort did not perform routine checks that might have flagged such activity, government investigators said yesterday.

The extent of the fraud in the $6 billion evacuee-assistance effort has not been calculated, but it could reach hundreds of millions of dollars, investigators told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and it appears that the losses were limited only by the thieves' ingenuity.

"It was a mess. It was a system that was wide open to fraud," said Gregory D. Kutz, who led the investigation for the Government Accountability Office. "All you had to do was call FEMA on the telephone and lie and you could get money. It was just a question of how many people were willing to make false statements."

The report came amid a stream of revelations yesterday regarding questionable activity during the relief effort -- including $438-a-night lodging in New York, emergency meals being sold on eBay, and emergency checks being used to buy adult entertainment and weapons.

But the main focus of yesterday's testimony was FEMA's lack of financial controls as it doled out $2,000 checks to people who said they were affected by the storm.

FEMA representatives defended their procedures, saying that the urgency of the situation did not allow for strict identity verification and that they were focused on getting aid to desperate families as quickly as possible.

"It was the right thing to do," FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said. "We helped thousands of families who were forced from their homes without basic necessities. To slow down that process in order to find out who is trying to cheat the system would have hurt those who the system is designed to help.

"In other words, we're not going to let a few bad apples ruin the whole process." She added that FEMA is helping investigators pursue criminal charges against those suspected of fraud. "We are enforcing a zero-tolerance policy," she said.

Investigators, however, concluded that although getting aid to victims quickly is a priority, "more can be done" to check recipients' addresses and Social Security numbers using computers.

People who improperly sought aid over the Internet were sometimes blocked by verification systems, Kutz said, but they were often told to apply by telephone, where no such safeguards were in place.

Investigators said that so far they have learned that about 1,000 people who applied for aid used the Social Security numbers of dead people, 1,000 used numbers that were never issued, and tens of thousands used names, birthdates and Social Security numbers that did not match.

In one case cited by the GAO report, for example, one person used 15 Social Security numbers to submit 15 applications over the phone and received payments totaling $41,000, including 13 emergency-assistance payments, two payments for temporary housing assistance and a payment of $10,500.

Once the money is issued to someone using a false identity, it becomes much more difficult to recover it and prosecute the person, Kutz said.

The GAO report was accompanied by testimony from Richard L. Skinner, the inspector general of the Homeland Security Department. He noted that FEMA may have purchased too many manufactured houses, given the housing needs, and that FEMA is now paying to store and maintain them at various places nationwide. At one site in Hope, Ark., 10,777 manufactured houses are sitting on runways and in fields.

"The homes are sinking in the mud," according to Skinner's testimony.

He also said that in many cases, FEMA was paying relatively reasonable prices to house evacuees in hotels, but some rooms cost more than $150 a night, and as late as December, FEMA was paying $364 per night for a hotel in San Diego and $339 per night for a New Orleans hotel.

Also yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the agency could stop paying directly for hotel rooms for about 12,000 families left homeless by last year's hurricanes, the Associated Press reported.

FEMA promised the evacuees from hurricanes Katrina and Rita that they will still receive federal rent assistance that they can put toward hotel stays or other housing. But the agency will no longer pay for their hotel rooms directly.

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Popular Ohio Democrat Drops Out of Race, and Perhaps Politics

The New York Times
Popular Ohio Democrat Drops Out of Race, and Perhaps Politics
By IAN URBINA

Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and popular Democratic candidate in Ohio's closely watched Senate contest, said yesterday that he was dropping out of the race and leaving politics altogether as a result of pressure from party leaders.

Mr. Hackett said Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Harry Reid of Nevada, the same party leaders who he said persuaded him last August to enter the Senate race, had pushed him to step aside so that Representative Sherrod Brown, a longtime member of Congress, could take on Senator Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent.

Mr. Hackett staged a surprisingly strong Congressional run last year in an overwhelmingly Republican district and gained national prominence for his scathing criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War. It was his performance in the Congressional race that led party leaders to recruit him for the Senate race.

But for the last two weeks, he said, state and national Democratic Party leaders have urged him to drop his Senate campaign and again run for Congress.

"This is an extremely disappointing decision that I feel has been forced on me," said Mr. Hackett, whose announcement comes two days before the state's filing deadline for candidates. He said he was outraged to learn that party leaders were calling his donors and asking them to stop giving and said he would not enter the Second District Congressional race.

"For me, this is a second betrayal," Mr. Hackett said. "First, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me."

Mr. Hackett was the first Iraq war veteran to seek national office, and the decision to steer him away from the Senate race has surprised those who see him as a symbol for Democrats who oppose the war but want to appear strong on national security.

"Alienating Hackett is not just a bad idea for the party, but it also sends a chill through the rest of the 56 or so veterans that we've worked to run for Congress," said Mike Lyon, executive director for the Band of Brothers, a group dedicated to electing Democratic veterans to national office. "Now is a time for Democrats to be courting, not blocking, veterans who want to run."

But Democratic leaders say Representative Brown, a seven-term incumbent from Avon, has a far better chance of toppling Senator DeWine.

"It boils down to who we think can pull the most votes in November against DeWine," said Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. "And in Ohio, Brown's name is golden. It's just that simple."

Mr. Fern added that Mr. Brown's fund-raising abilities made him the better Senate candidate. By the end of last year, Mr. Brown had already amassed $2.37 million, 10 times what Mr. Hackett had raised.

Senator Reid did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

Asked about Mr. Hackett's contention that he had been pressed to leave the Senate race, a spokesman for Mr. Schumer, Phil Singer, said, "We've told both Sherrod Brown and Paul Hackett that avoiding a primary will make it easier to win the Ohio Senate seat, " but he added, "Obviously, the decision to run is Mr. Hackett's and Mr. Hackett's alone."

Mr. Brown declined to comment on Mr. Hackett's candidacy, saying that he was strictly focused on building his own campaign.

Democrats wanted to avoid a drawn-out primary, especially one that could get bruising with a tough-talking outsider like Mr. Hackett.

The Ohio Senate race is regarded as critical to Democratic aspirations to take back Congress in the fall. Aside from focusing on Senator DeWine, the Democrats also hope to win as many as eight House seats in Ohio and the governorship from the Republicans.

Ohio Democrats are hoping to exploit the larger problems plaguing the Republicans. State Republicans have struggled to distance themselves from Gov. Bob Taft, a Republican who cannot run again because of term limits and who was found guilty last summer of four misdemeanor ethics violations. Representative Bob Ney's still-unfolding role in the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff also looms over the state's Republicans.

Mr. Hackett said he was unwilling to run for the Congressional seat because he had given his word to three Democratic candidates that he would not enter that race.

"The party keeps saying for me not to worry about those promises because in politics they are broken all the time," said Mr. Hackett, who plans to return to his practice as a lawyer in the Cincinnati area. "I don't work that way. My word is my bond."

Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the Cook Political Report, said that part of what made Democratic leaders nervous about Mr. Hackett was what had also made him so popular with voters.

"Hackett is seen by many as a straight talker, and he became an icon to the liberal bloggers because he says exactly what they have wished they would hear from a politician," Ms. Duffy said. "On the other hand, the Senate is still an exclusive club, and the party expects a certain level of decorum that Hackett has not always shown."

Mr. Hackett was widely criticized last year for using indecent language to describe President Bush. Last month, state Republicans attacked Mr. Hackett for saying their party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said "aren't a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden."

Though Republicans called for an apology, Mr. Hackett repeated the mantra of his early campaign: "I said it. I meant it. I stand behind it."

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U.S. Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies

The New York Times
U.S. Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by laws and regulations that date back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and Congress wanted to encourage more exploration and drilling in the high-cost, high-risk deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

"We need to remember the primary reason that incentives are given," said Johnnie M. Burton, director of the federal Minerals Management Service. "It's not to make more money, necessarily. It's to make more oil, more gas, because production of fuel for our nation is essential to our economy and essential to our people."

But what seemed like modest incentives 10 years ago have ballooned to levels that have alarmed even ardent supporters of the oil and gas industry, partly because of added sweeteners approved during the Clinton administration but also because of ambiguities in the law that energy companies have successfully exploited in court.

Short of imposing new taxes on the industry, there may be little Congress can do to reverse its earlier giveaways. The new projections come at a moment when President Bush and Republican leaders are on the defensive about record-high energy prices, soaring profits at major oil companies and big cuts in domestic spending.

Indeed, Mr. Bush and House Republicans are trying to kill a one-year, $5 billion windfall profits tax for oil companies that the Senate passed last fall.

Moreover, the projected largess could be just the start. Last week, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Development, a major industry player, began a brash but utterly serious court challenge that could, if it succeeds, cost the government another $28 billion in royalties over the next five years.

In what administration officials and industry executives alike view as a major test case, Kerr-McGee told the Interior Department last week that it planned to challenge one of the government's biggest limitations on royalty relief if it could not work out an acceptable deal in its favor. If Kerr-McGee is successful, administration projections indicate that about 80 percent of all oil and gas from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico would be royalty-free.

"It's one of the greatest train robberies in the history of the world," said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has fought royalty concessions on oil and gas for more than a decade. "It's the gift that keeps on giving."

Republican lawmakers are also concerned about how the royalty relief program is working out.

"I don't think there is a single member of Congress who thinks you should get royalty relief at $70 a barrel" for oil, said Representative Richard W. Pombo, Republican of California and chairman of the House Resources Committee.

"It was Congress's intent," Mr. Pombo said in an interview on Friday, "that if oil was at $10 a barrel, there should be royalty relief so companies could have some kind of incentive to invest capital. But at $70 a barrel, don't expect royalty relief."

Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said Monday that the giveaways might turn out to be less than the basic forecasts indicate because of "certain variables."

The government does not disclose how much individual companies benefit from the incentives, and most companies refuse to disclose either how much they pay in royalties or how much they are allowed to avoid.

But the benefits are almost entirely for gas and oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico.

The biggest producers include Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobil as well as smaller independent companies like Anadarko and Devon Energy.

Executives at some companies, including Exxon Mobil, said they had already stopped claiming royalty relief because they knew market prices had exceeded the government's price triggers.

About one-quarter of all oil and gas produced in the United States comes from federal lands and federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

As it happens, oil and gas royalties to the government have climbed much more slowly than market prices over the last five years.

The New York Times reported last month that one major reason for the lag appeared to be a widening gap between the average sales prices that companies are reporting to the government when paying royalties and average spot market prices on the open market.

Industry executives and administration officials contend that the disparity mainly reflects different rules for defining sales prices. Administration officials also contend that the disparity is illusory, because the government's annual statistics are muddled up with big corrections from previous years.

Both House and Senate lawmakers are now investigating the issue, as is the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog arm.

But the much bigger issue for the years ahead is royalty relief for deepwater drilling.

The original law, known as the Deep Water Royalty Relief Act, had bipartisan support and was intended to promote exploration and production in deep waters of the outer continental shelf.

At the time, oil and gas prices were comparatively low and few companies were interested in the high costs and high risks of drilling in water thousands of feet deep.

The law authorized the Interior Department, which leases out tens of millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico, to forgo its normal 12 percent royalty for much of the oil and gas produced in very deep waters.

Because it take years to explore and then build the huge offshore platforms, most of the oil and gas from the new leases is just beginning to flow.

The Minerals Management Service of the Interior Department, which oversees the leases and collects the royalties, estimates that the amount of royalty-free oil will quadruple by 2011, to 112 million barrels. The volume of royalty-free natural gas is expected to climb by almost half, to about 1.2 trillion cubic feet.

Based on the government's assumptions about future prices — that oil will hover at about $50 a barrel and natural gas will average about $7 per thousand cubic feet — the total value of the free oil and gas over the next five years would be about $65 billion and the forgone royalties would total more than $7 billion.

Administration officials say the issue is out of their hands, adding that they opposed provisions in last year's energy bill that added new royalty relief for deep drilling in shallow waters.

"We did not think we needed any more legislation, because we already have incentives, but we obviously did not prevail," said Ms. Burton, director of the Minerals Management Service.

But the Bush administration did not put up a big fight. It strongly supported the overall energy bill, and merely noted its opposition to additional royalty relief in its official statement on the bill.

By contrast, the White House bluntly promised to veto the Senate's $60 billion tax cut bill because it contained a one-year tax of $5 billion on profits of major oil companies.

The House and Senate have yet to agree on a final tax bill.

The big issue going forward is whether companies should be exempted from paying royalties even when energy prices are at historic highs.

In general, the Interior Department has always insisted that companies would not be entitled to royalty relief if market prices for oil and gas climbed above certain trigger points.

Those trigger points — currently about $35 a barrel for oil and $4 per thousand cubic feet of natural gas — have been exceeded for the last several years and are likely to stay that way for the rest of the decade.

So why is the amount of royalty-free gas and oil expected to double over the next five years?

The biggest reason is that the Clinton administration, apparently worried about the continued lack of interest in new drilling, waived the price triggers for all leases awarded in 1998 and 1999.

At the same time, many oil and gas companies contend that Congress never authorized the Interior Department to set price thresholds for any deepwater leases awarded between 1996 and 2000.

The dispute has been simmering for months, with some industry executives warning the Bush administration that they would sue the government if it tried to demand royalties.

Last week, the fight broke out into the open. The Interior Department announced that 41 oil companies had improperly claimed more than $500 million in royalty relief for 2004.

Most of the companies agreed to pay up in January, but Kerr-McGee said it would fight the issue in court.

The fight is not simply about one company. Interior officials said last week that Kerr-McGee presented itself in December as a "test case" for the entire industry. It also offered a "compromise," but Interior officials rejected it and issued a formal order in January demanding that Kerr-McGee pay its back royalties.

On Feb. 6, according to administration officials, Kerr-McGee formally notified the Minerals Management Service that it would challenge its order in court.

Industry lawyers contend they have a strong case, because Congress never mentioned price thresholds when it authorized royalty relief for all deepwater leases awarded from 1996 through 2000.

"Congress offered those deepwater leases with royalty relief as an incentive," said Jonathan Hunter, a lawyer in New Orleans who represented oil companies in a similar lawsuit two years ago that knocked out another major federal restriction on royalty relief.

"The M.M.S. only has the authority that Congress gives it," Mr. Hunter said. "The legislation said that royalty relief for these leases is automatic."

If that view prevails, the government said it would lose a total of nearly $35 billion in royalties to taxpayers by 2011 — about the same amount that Mr. Bush is proposing to cut from Medicare, Medicaid and child support enforcement programs over the same period.

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Bush Administration Spent $1.62 Billion on PR

huffingtonpost.com
Bush Administration Spent $1.62 Billion on PR

The nutshell: the Government Accountability Office for the first time did a system-wide study of the federal government's publicity contracts with media professionals (agencies, individuals, etc.) for the past two and a half years, at the request of Congressional Democrats, who released the highlights (pdf file) today. CBS carefully notes, "As no GAO report of this nature has been done in the past, it is impossible to compare and contrast the Bush administration's media contract spending with that of other administrations." But the trade publication Adweek is much less timid.

Trends in spending on PR and ad contracts were not documented, but a prior study by the minority staff of the Government Reform Committee found that spending on public relations contracts rose rapidly under the Bush administration. That report found that spending on contracts with public relations firms had increased to $88 million in 2004 from $39 million in 2000, an increase of 128 percent.

Another trade journal, Broadcasting & Cable, points out the "key finding" that "$50 million (76 contracts) was allocated without competitive bids," and notes "14 contracts for video news releases worth a total $1.4 million." What did we get for our money?

Adweek again:

The PR and ad contracts included providing "expert advice and support in the development of several marriage-related research initiatives," an educational campaign regarding the "Medicare Modernization Act, and its coverage and benefits," and a contract regarding "message development that presents the Army's strategic perspective in the global war on terrorism," the study said. A Food and Drug Administration contract had the objective of warning the public about the "consequences and potential dangers of buying prescription drugs from non-U.S. sources."

And check Raw Story for the most commentary from the Dems.

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Give Peace a Vote

huffingtonpost.com
Give Peace a Vote
Robert Koehler

A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, Bill Scheurer realized that the nation's soul was in jeopardy. He saw George Bush on TV, standing in the rubble of Ground Zero, whipping the national grief into carte blanche for revenge. Behind him, as the death toll wavered, people held up a banner that screamed: 6,000 MORE REASONS TO KILL THEM ALL.

"That's when I said, 'We're in trouble,'" he told me the other day, describing the journey that has made him a standard-bearer for what has become perhaps the largest bloc of disenfranchised voters in the country: the war-disillusioned. Four-plus years into the Bush version of homeland security, with the blood and the lies seeping into the national psyche, with public revulsion at high simmer, Scheurer is poised to help the peace majority remake American politics.

The anger and horror so many of us have felt about the national direction since we went to war with the rest of the world has shockingly little political traction. No matter how many people oppose Bush's bomb-and-torture show, it continues, the system incapable of shutting it down. The loyal opposition blesses it with endless mush.

Do you support the war effort, Congresswoman?

"The reality is we are there. And right now, Baghdad is not safe for people to walk down the street. We need to make sure that the area is secure, and our military is doing a great job to do just that."

Go Democrats! Cringe. Say nothing.

This was U.S. Rep. Melissa Bean's response last October, after she returned from a five-day trip to Iraq, to an Associated Press reporter's question. Bean, who represents Illinois' 8th District, having unseated archconservative Phil Crane in 2004, has proceeded to blaze a voting record that has gotten her dubbed "Crane lite," backing a healthy chunk of the Bush agenda (CAFTA, the bankruptcy bill, tax cuts for millionaires) and, of course, mouthing wishy-washy support of the war.

Come November, antiwar voters of the 8th District, which is part of the fast-growing, mall-and-subdivision exurbia north of Chicago, will have the choice of voting for Bean or likely Republican challenger David McSweeney, a millionaire former investment banker who "fully supports President Bush in the war on terror." In other words, like voters in much of the rest of the country, they'll have no choice whatsoever.

Unless Bill Scheurer gets on the ballot as an independent.

To listen to Scheurer is to start believing that: A) he means what he says; B) he has a viable shot at winning; and C) his campaign, powered by some 40 volunteers and endorsed so far by two local unions, the Teamsters and the Machinists and Aerospace Workers (both of which have given him the maximum allowable contributions), is one spot where the rubber meets the road in progressive politics - where ideals and pragmatism have joined forces to create . . . possibility.

If campaigns like Scheurer's are a go, Democrats could begin crossing the line back into values politics. What if, folks? What if the hollow, flip-flop Democrats - the ones who are so intimidated by Republicans they renounce their base (gosh, we can't be linked to the loony left) - are held accountable at the national level? What if they're forced, on pain of early retirement, to represent their constituency?

Scheurer, a 55-year-old father of four, former lawyer and tech entrepreneur, a poet, screenwriter and editor of peacemajority.org, speaks with savvy and idealism. He's uncompromising on Iraq: "We have an illegal war of aggression and occupation going on. Our republic is in serious trouble on the issue of war and peace. This is about how we've lost our way."

His campaign is also broad, standing on such core issues as universal health care, a balanced federal budget and the fight against "the attack on working families" (opposing CAFTA and other such trade agreements, tax cuts for the rich and "corporate welfare"). For more info on his campaign, and how to help, check out winwithbill.com.

"Sixty to 70 percent of Americans agree (with these positions) and yet we're totally powerless," he says. "The entire game is rigged." He calls the current two-party system a national "bipolar personality disorder - we're locked into two choices. People don't participate because it's a broken game."

In politics, majorities have to be forged. Scheurer and his volunteers are out there in the trenches doing just that: clarifying issues that cut across the social spectrum, creating a new coalition. Following the March 21 Illinois primary, they have 90 days to get 14,000 signatures within the district to put Scheurer and the tactically named Bring Our Troops Home party on the ballot. Their goal is to get 25,000. "This is our vulnerable period," he acknowledges. The campaign needs as much support right now as it can muster.

In this race between a rich Republican and a substantially financed mainstream Democrat that's likely to hinge on minutiae masquerading as substantive disagreement, one citizen running on real values is dead serious about changing the course of American politics.

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Cheney's Got a Gun

huffingtonpost.com
Cheney's Got a Gun
Roy Sekoff



Reading about Vice President Cheney's hunting trip mishap put me in mind of the last time Dick and his trusty shotgun made news. It was January 2003, and the Veep flew Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia down to Louisiana so they could duck hunt together -- a trip that took place just three weeks after Cheney had asked the High Court to let him keep the inner workings of his energy task force a secret (the Supremes eventually did just that, kicking the case back to a lower court which ruled Cheney didn't have to come clean).

Cheney didn't shoot anyone in the face on that trip. But he and Scalia did blast a hole in the concept of the public's right to know while proving they don't give a flying duck about the rest of us.

Visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roy-sekoff/cheneys-got-a-gun_b_15542.html to see
a short animation me and two friends, Julie Bergman Sender and Tate Hausman, put together to show what we think might have gone down in that bayou duck blind. Click the Play button to check it out.

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Cheney Should Be Investigated if He Authorized Leak, Democratic and Republican Senators Say

ABC News
Senators Concerned Over CIA Leak Report
Cheney Should Be Investigated if He Authorized Leak, Democratic and Republican Senators Say
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald should investigate Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the CIA leak probe if they authorized an aide to give secret information to reporters, Democratic and Republican senators said Sunday.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., called the leak of intelligence information "inappropriate" if it is true that unnamed "superiors" instructed Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to divulge the material on Iraq.

Sen. George Allen, R-Va., said a full investigation is necessary.

"I don't think anybody should be releasing classified information, period, whether in the Congress, executive branch or some underling in some bureaucracy," said Allen, who appeared with Reed on "Fox News Sunday."

According to court documents disclosed last week, Libby told a federal grand jury that he disclosed in July 2003 the contents of a classified National Intelligence Estimate as part of the Bush administration's defense of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq.

Fitzgerald said in the documents it was his understanding that "Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors."

The White House has refused to comment on the case.

"I think this calls into question in terms of Fitzgerald's investigation of the conduct of the vice president and others," Reed said. "I think he has to look closely at their behavior."

Allen expressed confidence in Fitzgerald, whom he called "a very articulate, professional prosecutor."

"And I think the facts will lead wherever they lead, and I think he will prosecute as appropriate," Allen said.

Libby, 55, was indicted on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he told reporters. He is not charged with leaking classified information.

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Lawmaker Questions Value of Spy Program

ABC News
Lawmaker Questions Value of Spy Program
Rep. Pete Hoekstra Questions Value of Bush's Domestic Surveillance Program in Wake of Coverage
By NEDRA PICKLER
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The House Intelligence Committee chairman on Sunday questioned the value of President Bush's secret eavesdropping program, saying al-Qaida undoubtedly has changed its means of communication to avoid Washington's monitoring.

Bush said two weeks ago in his State of the Union address that the program of monitoring calls and e-mail between the United States and suspected terrorist associates overseas "remains essential to the security of America." But Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., suggested that the public disclosure of the program's existence in December in the New York Times has undermined its effectiveness.

"Does anyone really believe that, after 50 days of having this program on the front page of our newspapers, across talk shows across America, that al-Qaida has not changed the way that it communicates?" Hoekstra said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Since that disclosure, legal scholars and lawmakers from both parties have questioned whether Bush had the authority to conduct the surveillance without a judge's approval.

By law, a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is designed to grant warrants for such surveillance. Bush gave the National Security Agency approval to monitor the communications without taking that step.

Hoekstra defended the program's legal standing. He said if Democrats who were briefed on the program before it became public thought the president was breaking the law, they should have tried to stop him.

"If I came out of that briefing and believed that the president was violating the law, I would have gone to the speaker and said, `Mr. Speaker, the president's violating the law,'" Hoekstra said. "`You and I need to go see the president and talk to him and get this issue resolved do it now.'"

Rep. Jane Harman, the leading Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said she did not fully understand the legal underpinnings of the program at the time of the classified briefings and was not free to consult with experts.

Since the monitoring has become public, she has argued that the president broke the law by failing to consult all the members of the intelligence committees, instead of just the leaders.

"Remember, we go into those briefings alone," said Harman, D-Calif. "We have no ability to consult staff. We have no ability to consult constitutional experts or legal experts on the history of FISA. Since the program has been disclosed, I think all of us, or at least I, have become a lot smarter about all of that."

Hoekstra and Harman appeared with two others who were among the few leading lawmakers to be briefed on the program before it became public: Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan. and former Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who was the Senate Democratic leader.

The two Republicans Hoekstra and Roberts said Congress does not need to pass further legislation granting specific authority to conduct the eavesdropping because the president had authority under the resolution that lawmakers passed four days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that authorizing him to take on al-Qaida.

Both Democrats Harman and Daschle said they think the program is valuable and should continue, but said the law should be changed to allow it.

Meantime, Sen. Joseph Biden, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the eavesdropping program should not continue "unabated without any review."

The intelligence committees of Congress should demand to know, in secret session, what the administration is doing, said Biden, D-Del. He said he supports a proposal by the committee chairman, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, to have the FISA court review the eavesdropping program and decide whether it is legal.

"We cannot say to a president, 'Mr. President, whatever you want to do, under any circumstances, tap anything, and you don't even have to tell us what you're doing.' That is bizarre," Biden told ABC's "This Week."

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At Churches Nationwide, Good Words for Evolution

The New York Times
At Churches Nationwide, Good Words for Evolution
By NEELA BANERJEE and ANNE BERRYMAN

On the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin, ministers at several hundred churches around the country preached yesterday against recent efforts to undermine the theory of evolution, asserting that the opposition many Christians say exists between science and faith is false.

At St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church, a small contemporary structure among the pricey homes of north Atlanta, the Rev. Patricia Templeton told the 85 worshipers gathered yesterday, "A faith that requires you to close your mind in order to believe is not much of a faith at all."

In the basement of an apartment building in Evanston, Ill., the Rev. Mitchell Brown said to the 21 people who came to services at the Evanston Mennonite Church that Darwin's theories in fact had compelled people to have faith rather than look for "special effects" to confirm the existence of God.

"He forced religion to grow up, to become, really, faith for the first time," Mr. Brown said. "The life of community, that is where we know God today."

The event, called Evolution Sunday, is an outgrowth of the Clergy Letter Project, started by academics and ministers in Wisconsin in early 2005 as a response to efforts, most notably in Dover, Pa., to discredit the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools.

"There was a growing need to demonstrate that the loud, shrill voices of fundamentalists claiming that Christians had to choose between modern science and religion were presenting a false dichotomy," said Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the major organizer of the letter project.

Mr. Zimmerman said more than 10,000 ministers had signed the letter, which states, in part, that the theory of evolution is "a foundational scientific truth." To reject it, the letter continues, "is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children."

"We believe that among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator," the letter says.

Most of the signatories to the project and those preaching on Sunday were from the mainline Protestant denominations. Their congregations have shrunk sharply over the last 30 years. At the same time, the number of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians has risen considerably, and many of them, because of their literalist view of the Bible, doubt evolutionary theory.

The Clergy Letter Project said that 441 congregations in 48 states and the District of Columbia were taking part in Evolution Sunday, but that was impossible to verify independently. Around Chicago, two churches that were listed on the project's Web site as participants in the event said they were in fact not planning to deliver sermons on the subject.

Still, those who did attend sermons welcomed what they heard. After the service at St. Dunstan's, Brett Lowe, a 41-year-old computer engineer, sat in a pew as his son Ian, 2, and daughter, Paige, 6, played at his side. "Sermons like this are exactly the reason we came to this church," Mr. Lowe said.

"Observation, hypothesis and testing — that's what science is," he said. "It's not religion. Evolution is a fact. It's not a theory. An example is antibiotics. If we don't use antibiotics appropriately, bacteria become resistant. That's evolution, and evolution is a fact. To not acknowledge that is to not acknowledge the world around you."

Jeanne Taylor, 65, a recently retired registered nurse attending services at St. Dunstan's, said the Bible was based on oral tradition and today "science is a part of our lives."

At the Evanston Mennonite Church, Susan Fisher Miller, 48, an editor and English professor, said, "I completely accept and affirm the view of God as creator, but I accommodate evolution within that."

To Ms. Fisher Miller, alternatives to evolutionary theory proposed by its critics, such as intelligent design, seem an artificial way to use science to explain the holy. "It's arrogant to say that either religion or science can answer all our questions," she said. "I don't see the need either to banish one or the other or to artificially unite them."

Gretchen Ruethling contributedreporting for this article.

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US government 'failed' on Katrina

BBC NEWS
US government 'failed' on Katrina

All levels of the US government, from President Bush down, were at fault for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina, a leaked Congressional report says.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is singled out for particular criticism in the document, which is due to be published on Wednesday.

Overall, it says, the government's response was marked by "fecklessness, flailing and organizational paralysis".

The report, leaked to the US media, is one of several into the disaster.

Entitled "A Failure of Initiative", the document, produced by a special Republican-dominated House inquiry, issued a total of 90 separate findings.

"Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," said the report's summary, seen by the Associated Press.

"At every level - individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental - we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina."

Prolonged suffering

According to reports, the document concludes:

* Michael Chertoff implemented the emergency response systems "late, ineffectively or not at all", which delayed federal troops and supplies by as much as three days

* White House staff were unable to effectively "substantiate, analyze and act on the information at its disposal", giving President Bush poor and incomplete counsel

* Late decisions to issue mandatory evacuations by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco led to deaths and prolonged suffering

* The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) suffered from a lack of trained and experienced personnel.

"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination, then Katrina was a failure of initiative," the report's summary states.

"In this instance, blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision-making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror".

'Path to failure'

The investigators said they "are left scratching our heads at the range of clumsiness and ineptitude that characterized government behaviour before and after this storm.

"If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not."

Hurricane Katrina was one the worst natural disasters in US history, killing more than 1,300 people across five states when it hit last August. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in its aftermath.

On Friday, Michael Brown - who quit as Fema chief after the disaster - told a Senate oversight panel that officials knew levees were breached in New Orleans much earlier than admitted but did not act swiftly enough.

He also criticised the Department of Homeland Security, which controls Fema, saying its policies had put his organisation on "a path to failure".

Mr Brown argued that the response to Hurricane Katrina would have been more effective if a terrorist had blown up one of the levees.

Natural disaster, he said, had become the "step-child" in the Department of Homeland Security.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4707536.stm

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A fitting tribute

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Cartoonist Nightmare

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Bipartisanship at last

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Muslim cartoonist gets advice from his editors on caricature of George Bush

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The Looming Deficit

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The Trust Gap

The New York Times
The Trust Gap

We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.

This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.

DOMESTIC SPYING After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it.

According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn't work that way. It's not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last year, he dismissed as "hypothetical" a question about whether he believed the president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr. Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White House counsel.

THE PRISON CAMPS It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal illuminated the violence, illegal detentions and other abuses at United States military prison camps. There have been Congressional hearings, court rulings imposing normal judicial procedures on the camps, and a law requiring prisoners to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. Mr. Bush also made it clear that he intends to follow the new law on the treatment of prisoners when his internal moral compass tells him it is the right thing to do.

On Thursday, Tim Golden of The Times reported that United States military authorities had taken to tying up and force-feeding the prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes by the dozens at Guantánamo Bay to protest being held without any semblance of justice.

The article said administration officials were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism of Gitmo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the world.

According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Gitmo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The National Journal reported last week that many were handed over to the American forces for bounties by Pakistani and Afghan warlords. Others were just swept up. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism. Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham proceedings.

And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president's whim who is to be jailed without charges, and to insist that Gitmo is filled with dangerous terrorists.

THE WAR IN IRAQ One of Mr. Bush's biggest "trust me" moments was when he told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies.

But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war.

When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before.
•

Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.

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Probe of domestic eavesdropping leak expands

Reuters
Probe of domestic eavesdropping leak expands: report

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Federal agents have interviewed officials at several law enforcement and national security agencies in a criminal investigation into The New York Times' disclosure of a U.S. domestic eavesdropping program, the newspaper reported.

In a story posted to its Web site to appear in its Sunday editions, The Times said the investigation was focused on circumstances surrounding its disclosure late last year of the highly classified program.

Officials and others interviewed by the Times said the investigation seemed to lay the groundwork for a grand jury inquiry and possible criminal charges, the Times said.

Many described the investigation as aggressive and fast moving, with the initial focus on identifying government officials who have had contacts with Times reporters, particularly those in the newspaper's Washington bureau.

It said an FBI team had questioned employees at the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the CIA and the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and that prosecutors had taken steps to activate a grand jury.

President George W. Bush has condemned the leak as a "shameful act" and CIA Director Porter Goss told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on February 2:

"It is my aim, and it is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information."

The Times characterized the case as one that pits the government, for which "the investigation represents an effort to punish those responsible for a serious security breach" and news outlets, for which the inquiry threatens confidentiality of sources "and the ability to report on controversial national security issues free of government interference."

The newspaper's executive editor, Bill Keller, said no one at the paper had been contacted in connection with the investigation, and defended the Times' reporting on the story.

"What our reporting has done is set off an intense national debate about the proper balance between security and liberty," Keller said in the story.

Civil liberties groups, Democratic lawmakers and even some Republicans have called for an inquiry into the eavesdropping program, saying it appears to have circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court approval for eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.

Former Vice President Al Gore has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the government's use of the program, and Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers Jr. has said the eavesdropping effort might amount to an impeachable offense.

Among statutes being reviewed by Justice Department investigators are espionage laws that prohibit the disclosure, dissemination or publication of national security information, the Times said.

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US federal gov't disregarded Katrina threat-Post

Reuters
US federal gov't disregarded Katrina threat-Post

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A congressional report will show the U.S. government from President Bush down disregarded the threat of Hurricane Katrina and failed to take live-saving countermeasures, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The report includes 90 findings of failures at all levels of government but proposes few specific changes, the Post said, citing a summary of the report and an interview with a senior investigator.

It lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, especially Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Post said.

It portrays Chertoff as detached from events and says he switched on the government's emergency response systems "late, ineffectively or not at all" and delayed the flow of federal troops and supplies by as much as three days.

The U.S. military, Federal Emergency Management Agency director and FEMA field commanders set up rival chains of command, the Post said.

Bush could have but did not speed the response because he alone had the power to cut through bureaucratic resistance, the Post said.

The response to the disaster showed the government failed to learn from the September 11, 2001 hijacking attacks, the report concludes.

"Blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror," the Post quoted the report as saying.

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast on August 29, causing the deaths of more than 1,200 people and flooding much of the city of New Orleans.

A Homeland Security Department spokesman told the Post the government had prepared for Katrina's landfall but Brown's "willful insubordination" hampered the response.

Brown was forced out of the agency shortly after the disaster. He told Congress on Friday he had warned the White House of flooding in New Orleans shortly after the hurricane struck, contradicting White House statements that they were not aware of the flooding until the following day.

The White House is preparing its own review, a spokesman told the Post.

The 600-page report, to be released publicly on Wednesday, was produced by a committee of eleven House Republicans.

Democrats have boycotted the review and called for an independent commission.

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Bob Barr, Bane of the Right?

washingtonpost.com
Bob Barr, Bane of the Right?
By Dana Milbank

You could find just about everything at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference this week: the bumper sticker that says "Happiness is Hillary's face on a milk carton," the "Straight Pride" T-shirt, a ride on an F-22 Raptor simulator at the Lockheed exhibit, and beans from the Contra Cafe coffee company (slogan: "Wake up with freedom fighters").

As of midday yesterday, a silent auction netted $300 for lunch with activist Grover Norquist, $275 for a meal with the Heritage Foundation president and $1,000 for a hunting trip with the American Conservative Union chairman. But lunch with former congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.), with an "estimated value" of $500, had a top bid of only $75 -- even with a signed copy of Barr's book, "The Meaning of Is," thrown in.

No surprise there. The former Clinton impeachment manager is the skunk at CPAC's party this year. He says President Bush is breaking the law by eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without warrants. And fellow conservatives, for the most part, don't want to hear it.

"You've heard of bear baiting? We're going to have, today, Barr baiting," R. Emmet Tyrell, a conservative publisher, announced as he introduced a debate Thursday between Barr and Viet Dinh, one of the authors of the USA Patriot Act.

"Are we losing our lodestar, which is the Bill of Rights?" Barr beseeched the several hundred conservatives at the Omni Shoreham in Woodley Park. "Are we in danger of putting allegiance to party ahead of allegiance to principle?"

Barr answered in the affirmative. "Do we truly remain a society that believes that . . . every president must abide by the law of this country?" he posed. "I, as a conservative, say yes. I hope you as conservatives say yes."

But nobody said anything in the deathly quiet audience.

Barr merited only polite applause when he finished, and one man, Richard Sorcinelli, booed him loudly. "I can't believe I'm in a conservative hall listening to him say [Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States," Sorcinelli fumed.

Far more to this crowd's liking was Vice President Cheney, who stopped by CPAC late Thursday and suggested the surveillance program as a 2006 campaign issue. "With an important election coming up, people need to know just how we view the most critical questions of national security," he told the cheering crowd.

Dinh, now a Georgetown law professor, urged the CPAC faithful to carve out a Bush exception to their ideological principle of limited government. "The conservative movement has a healthy skepticism of governmental power, but at times, unfortunately, that healthy skepticism needs to yield," Dinh explained, invoking Osama bin Laden.

Dinh brought the crowd to a raucous ovation when he judged: "The threat to Americans' liberty today comes from al Qaeda and its associates and the people who would destroy America and her people, not the brave men and women who work to defend this country!"

It was the sort of tactic that has intimidated Democrats and the last few libertarian Republicans who question the program's legality. But Barr is not easily suppressed. During a 2002 Senate primary, he accidentally fired a pistol at a campaign event; at a charity event a decade earlier, he licked whipped cream from the chests of two women.

Barr wasn't going to get a lesson on patriotism from this young product of the Bush Justice Department. "That, folks, was a red herring," he announced. "This debate is very simple: It is a debate about whether or not we will remain a nation subject to and governed by the rule of law or the whim of men."

He invoked Goldwater and Reagan and even said he would support Bush's program if it had congressional support. But Barr was a prophet without honor in his own land. "Why does the FISA law trump the Constitution?" one woman demanded of him. "Why should a non-elected, non-briefed judge be able to veto our national security?"

Conservatives were sore that Barr put his disagreements with Bush in the pages of Time magazine. Another questioner scolded Barr for agreeing to introduce an Al Gore speech that was also sponsored by MoveOn.org. "I have nothing whatsoever to do with them," Barr pleaded.

Still, the old prosecutor managed to elicit a crucial concession from Dinh: that the administration's case for its program comes down to saying "Trust me."

"None of us can make a conclusive assessment as to the wisdom of that program and its legality," Dinh acknowledged, "without knowing the full operational details. I do trust the president when he asserts that he has reviewed it carefully and therefore is convinced that there is full legal authority."

The crowd was against him, but Barr, leaving the event, claimed the clear conscience of a conservative. "I just told them what they need to know," he said.

Barr elaborated on his conundrum. "It's difficult," he acknowledged. "It's not about sex, which was very easy to explain."

Love him or hate him, you have to give Barr high marks for consistency. "Whether it's a sitting president when I was an impeachment manager, or a Republican president who has taken liberties with adherence to the law, to me the standard is the same," he said.

And, besides, who cares about a little criticism?

"No more than normal," Barr reported.

Political researcher Zachary A. Goldfarb contributed to this report.

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Iran Jews express Holocaust shock

BBC NEWS
Iran Jews express Holocaust shock
By Sadeq Saba

The chairman of Iran's Jewish Council has strongly criticised the country's hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for saying the Holocaust was a myth.

In a letter to the president, Haroun Yashayaei said the leader's remarks had shocked the international community and caused fear in Iran's Jewish community.

Mr Yashayaei described the Holocaust as one of the most obvious and sad events in the 20th Century.

Six million Jews were killed in Nazi persecution during World War II.

This is the first time that a senior Iranian Jewish leader has openly criticised President Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust.

In his strongly-worded letter, Mr Yashayaei asked the president how he could justify what he termed the crimes of Hitler.


Political prejudice

Mr Yashayaei said the Holocaust was a fact of history and not a myth and accused the Iranian president of ignorance and political prejudice.

Iran's small Jewish community of about 30,000 is recognised by the Islamic Republic and there is even a Jewish member of parliament.

Iranian Jews normally do not interfere in political issues and they often support the country's stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In a gesture of loyalty to the Islamic Republic, Mr Yashayaei told the Iranian president that his comments on the Holocaust were against the teachings of the leader of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei.

The letter was apparently sent about a week ago and there is no news whether President Ahmadinejad has responded to it.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4705246.stm

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Time Magazine Posts Photo Of Abramoff Near President

washingtonpost.com
Time Magazine Posts Photo Of Abramoff Near President
Bloomberg

President Bush and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff appear together in a photograph on Time magazine's Web site that is the first published image of the two in the same room.

Time and the New York Times posted the photo yesterday. It shows Bush greeting the leader of an Indian tribe with adviser Karl Rove watching on Bush's right and Abramoff in the background over Bush's left shoulder. The meeting took place May 9, 2001, at the Old Executive Office building next to the White House, Time said.

Investigators are examining the activities of lawmakers and their staffs in connection with Abramoff, who last month pleaded guilty to defrauding clients and conspiring to corrupt public officials. Abramoff is cooperating with the Justice Department.

When asked about Abramoff on Jan. 26, Bush said the lobbyist was probably among thousands of people who are photographed with the president. "I, frankly, don't even remember having my picture taken with the guy," Bush said at a news conference. "I don't know him."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told Time that the photo does not change anything. "The president has taken countless, tens of thousands of pictures at home and abroad over the last five years," McClellan told Time. "A photo like this has no relevance to the Justice Department's investigation."

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Administration Proposes $3.5B in New User Fees to Fund Government but Faces Renewed Opposition

ABC News
White House Faces Opposition to User Fees
Administration Proposes $3.5B in New User Fees to Fund Government but Faces Renewed Opposition
By ANDREW TAYLOR
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - President Bush hates new taxes, that's for sure. But tell that to airline passengers, higher-income veterans and owners of freighters using the St. Lawrence Seaway. They are among those hit up for billions of dollars under his new budget plan.

The spending proposal for the budget year that begins Oct. 1 contains $3.5 billion in new user fees. Typically branded as new taxes by those who have to pay them, these fees are intended to hold down the public's cost for programs such as airline screening, medical care for veterans and military retirees, food inspection and oversight of commodities markets.

The fees would swell to $47.2 billion over five years, dunning taxpayers and industry to help pay for government services.

Most if not all of the proposed fees, however, arrived on Capitol Hill dead as a doornail.

The largest single fee would increase the tax paid by airline passengers for security screenings from $2.50 to $5 for a one-way nonstop ticket. It would raise $1.6 billion when combined with fees on cargo carriers.

The Air Transport Association, the major airlines' trade group, opposes the higher security fees and is confident Congress will reject the proposal, said the group's president, James May.

The idea behind user fees is that those who benefit from government services should pay for them rather than everyone.

Current fees on passports, national park admissions, patents, stock transactions, federal court filings and agricultural inspections and other services are expected to raise $209 billion next year.

"It's not reasonable for all Americans to bear the entire cost of government activities from which they only receive a partial benefit," said Scott Milburn, a spokesman for the White House budget office.

"User fees help match the cost of government programs to those who benefit from them," he said.

Like some other pieces of Bush's 2007 budget, the new fees mostly are proposals rejected in the past.

Airline passengers, in other words, should not start worrying about paying $10 for every round trip. Congress ignored a comparable proposal last year after protests from the airline industry.

A similar fate should befall a thrice-rejected plan to boost prescription drug co-payments for higher-income veterans without military disabilities and have those veterans pay a new enrollment fee.

Besides generating more than $500 million from the fees, the proposal would save $251 million from veterans who left the system rather than pay the fees.

"I think it's dead on arrival," said Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. "We're in a time of war and we have a huge number of veterans coming back and casualties. And I don't think at this time we are going to increase the deductible or co-payment or anything."

Bush also wants to save $249 million from the military health care costs of early retirees covered by the Pentagon's Tricare health plan by increasing enrollment fees and deductibles. This is a new proposal; it, too, is not expected to pass.

Taxpayers would benefit from a new transaction fee on futures and options markets to finance the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The commission, now supported by general taxes, and has a proposed budget of $127 million. A similar transaction fee proposal in 2002 died after the entire Illinois congressional delegation including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. signed a letter opposing it.

The Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board Exchange Options are major employers in the state.

Then there are the more obscure proposals.

A tax of 2 cents per pound on explosives made in or imported into the United States would pay to regulate the explosives industry. The tax would raise $120 million next year. An identical fee died last year amid opposition from large-scale users of explosives such as the mining industry.

Why does the White House propose dead-on-arrival fees year after year?

With domestic agency budgets so squeezed, fee proposals allow the administration to boost those budgets without appearing too profligate by assuming the fee revenue gets passed.

"We're not going to just walk away from a good idea just because someone disagrees with it," said Milburn, the budget office spokesman.

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Cracking the Tax Code

The New York Times
Cracking the Tax Code
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON

ANYONE who thinks that the federal income tax code is baffling now ought to brace for what lies ahead: big changes and uncertainty.

To many, any change may sound like welcome news. What kind of income tax system could be more incomprehensible and more riddled with special preferences than the current one?

But the main reason for change may be more unsettling. Never before has so much of the income tax code consisted of temporary measures. And never before has it been so inherently unsustainable.

Virtually all of President Bush's tax cuts and credits — the lower rates, the child tax credit, the special breaks for married couples and the lower tax rates on investment income — are set to expire by 2011.

That might not be a huge problem in itself. Mr. Bush and his Republican allies have vowed to make the tax cuts permanent, at a cost of $1.3 trillion over 10 years.

But the huge volume of expiring tax cuts is set to collide with an equally expensive challenge that neither Mr. Bush nor the Congress has started to address.

That problem is the alternative minimum tax, or A.M.T. — a tax that was originally aimed at only the very richest people but is now set to impose big tax increases on tens of millions of middle-income families over the next few years.

Mr. Bush and Congressional leaders in both parties have vowed to prevent that tax increase. But the cost would be more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years — almost identical to the cost of preserving the president's tax cuts.

That leaves taxpayers looking at several possibilities. If Mr. Bush's tax cuts are extended, but the A.M.T. is unchanged, tens of millions of people will face big new surcharges.

If the alternative tax is frozen or simply repealed, Congress is likely to make up for the lost money by cutting back or eliminating scores of other tax breaks.

If Congress lets Mr. Bush's tax cuts expire, regular tax rates are likely to shoot up sharply but the A.M.T. may become fairly easy to repeal.

At the moment, neither Mr. Bush nor Congress is proposing any of those options.

Instead, both Congressional and White House budget plans assume that the alternative minimum tax will generate hundreds of billions in extra revenue.

In a sign of growing paralysis, House and Senate Republicans have also been increasingly unable to agree on any long-term tax plan. Far from making Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent, they are now struggling just to extend today's tax breaks for another year or two.

"The process itself is really broken," said C. Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and author of numerous books on tax policy. "It presents people with a very misleading picture of what's going on. You have increases in spending without tax revenues to pay for them, and you have tax increases that won't occur."

Mr. Bush and top administration officials contend that they want to eliminate the alternative minimum tax as part of a top-to-bottom overhaul of the income tax.

But Mr. Bush has all but abandoned any effort at tax reform in 2006, even though he listed it as a top priority just one year ago.

Mr. Bush omitted any mention of the issue in his State of the Union address on Jan. 31, and the White House has been silent about the detailed proposals made last fall by his handpicked advisory council on tax reform.

Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, defending Mr. Bush's other tax proposals at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, flatly refused to hint at when the administration would propose a broader overhaul.

"I think it's best for me to refrain from offering thoughts on that until we pull together our total package" and are in a position to present it to the president, Mr. Snow said.

To be sure, Congress has a long history of passing supposedly temporary tax breaks that are routinely extended year after year. But where temporary provisions were once a sideline issue, they are now the dominant feature of the tax code.

That is a result of a deliberate decision by the White House and Republican leaders in Congress to have the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 expire by 2011.

Part of the reason was procedural: temporary tax cuts can be part of a budget "reconciliation" bill, which can pass the Senate with only 51 votes rather than the 60 votes needed to stop a filibuster.

But Republican lawmakers also saw political advantages. Temporary tax cuts look cheaper than permanent cuts. And many Republicans delighted in voting for the same tax cuts year after year.

"What started to happen in 2001 was qualitatively different," said Joel B. Slemrod, a professor of tax policy at the University of Michigan. "Part of it was to fit the letter of the law into the budget rules, and part of it was calculated to keep issues on the agenda that were to the Republicans' favor."

Whatever the reasons, virtually all the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and scores of other tax breaks are set to expire by 2011. The list is long and expensive. Among the biggest items are these:

The rate reductions for people at every income level; these cuts would cost more than $100 billion a year to extend.

The tax cuts on stock dividends and capital gains, which expire at the end of 2008; an extension of these cuts would cost more than $20 billion a year

The $1,000 child tax credit, which would cost $35 billion a year to extend.

Repeal of the estate tax on inheritances, which would cost more than $50 billion a year to extend.

Mr. Bush and Republican leaders have pushed to make permanent all the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. But that goal will compete directly with a long list of other promises, the biggest of which is to freeze or simply repeal the alternative minimum tax.

If the law is left unchanged, about 15 million additional families will face the alternative tax in 2006, and their collective tax increase will be more than $30 billion for this year alone, according to government estimates.

Those amounts climb even higher in each subsequent year and would total $1.1 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

Simply keeping the alternative minimum tax at its 2005 level would cost taxpayers nearly $100 billion in 2010 and more than $200 billion in 2015, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.

To glimpse the difficulty of the tax choices ahead, look no further than the struggle this month among House and Senate Republicans to extend just a small collection of expiring tax breaks.

President Bush had placed special urgency on permanently extending his tax cut on stock dividends.

But Republican leaders have not come close to that goal. The Republican-led Senate passed a $60 billion package that omitted any extension of the tax cut on stock dividends, which does not expire until 2008, in order to keep the A.M.T. from rising in 2006.

Restraining the alternative minimum tax for just one year will cost about $34 billion, while extending the dividend tax cut alone for one year would cost about $10 billion.

House Republicans were bolder and more willing to increase the deficit. The House passed a $90 billion package of separate laws that included a two-year extension of the dividend tax cut and a one-year fix for the A.M.T.

House and Senate leaders are still locked in a struggle over their rival approaches. But even if they agree on $90 billion worth of tax-cut extensions, they will face bigger quandaries next year.

Politically, that means that fewer and fewer tax breaks will be considered too sacred to sacrifice. It also means that tax breaks benefiting those with less political power could be at greater risk.

Scores of other expiring tax breaks for middle-class and lower-income people could face challenges as well. Among them are a tax deduction for parents who pay college tuition, a tax deduction for schoolteachers who buy classroom supplies, and tax credits for hiring workers in areas of high unemployment.

As the competition to save endangered tax breaks grows more intense, survival is likely to go to the fittest.

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GAO Tells Congress of Data Security Problems, Privacy Concerns Persist With 'Secure Flight'

ABC News
New Passenger Screening Program Hits Turbulence
GAO Tells Congress of Data Security Problems, Privacy Concerns Persist With 'Secure Flight'
By DEAN NORLAND

Feb. 9, 2006 — - Significant challenges, some relating to data security, remain in developing a program intended to keep terrorists off airplanes, the Government Accountability Office told Congress today.

GAO official Cathleen Berrick testified that the Transportation Security Administration is reviewing problems with the Secure Flight passenger prescreening program. The ambitious new program intends to check airline passengers' names against the government's terror watch list.

Just weeks ago, the TSA said it hoped to soon launch Secure Flight, but lawmakers and privacy groups have expressed concern about government plans for using personal information to screen air travelers.

Berrick said that although TSA has taken steps to implement better information security, that its efforts are incomplete.

"Without a completed system security program, Secure Flight may not be adequately protected against unauthorized access and use or disruption once the program becomes operational," Berrick told the Senate panel.

Privacy Vs. Safety Concerns

Now the agency said it hopes to roll out Secure Flight in phases with better data security measures, said Edmund "Kip" Hawley, assistant secretary for TSA. But he gave no indication when that might begin.

Besides checking passenger names against watch lists, Secure Flight is also supposed to be able to more accurately distinguish passengers with similar names to those on watch lists so that innocent passengers would not be subjected to additional screening at an airport because of a false positive match.

Hawley said that the TSA is "fully committed to protecting passenger privacy with the deployment of Secure Flight by incorporating privacy protection features into the system design."

Another TSA prescreening program, Registered Traveler, seems to be faring better. Registered Traveler would allow frequent fliers who do not pose a security threat to sign up for the program. Members could be required to supply background information or submit to a biometric eye scan, but when they arrive at the airport, they would receive expedited treatment at security screening points.

The fee-based program would be entirely voluntary. TSA expects to start the screening of Registered Traveler applicants in mid-June.

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GOP chief plans to show Democrats as weak, use blogs

USA TODAY

GOP chief plans to show Democrats as weak, use blogs

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican national chairman Ken Mehlman on Friday outlined a political strategy for 2006 to portray Democrats as too weak to protect the country and to bypass the mainstream media to spread the GOP message.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mehlman roused the crowd at a Washington hotel to cheers as he told them President Bush had finally responded to decades of terrorist attacks.

"For a generation, terrorists learned they could make war on free nations without fear of war in return," Mehlman said, adding that Bush understood how to respond. "On Sept. 12, the terrorists got war in return."

Bush's stance on fighting terror is popular with participants in this annual meeting of hard-line conservatives from around the country and so are his federal court appointments.

But many at this national conference question the Bush administration's spending, deficits, immigration policies, prescription drug plan and increased use of federal power.

The GOP chief said such questioning is healthy for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, keynoted the conference dinner, sketching out the Bush administration's efforts to reform the U.N.

Bolton's targets included waste and abuse of peacekeeping operations reported by the U.N. itself that he said virtually matches in losses the amount the United States contributes to the operation.

He also condemned a "culture of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel" that he said was pervasive at the United Nations and includes offices that exist only as part of an anti-Israel network.

Turning to Iran, whose nuclear programs have been referred to the Security Council, for possible punitive action, Bolton said Iran should follow Libya's lead, which abandoned its pursuit of unconventional weapons and shipped the technology to a U.S. facility at Oak Ridge, Tenn. Bolton drew a laugh by saying the United States could find room at Oak Ridge for Iranian nuclear equipment, as well.

"Like Libya, they can come to the conclusion that their pursuit of nuclear weapons is more harmful than the elimination of the program," Bolton said.

The fight against terrorism is centered in Iraq, Mehlman said, and the only way to prevent terrorists from taking charge there is to stick it out and win.

He quoted Democratic chairman Howard Dean saying that the idea the United States can win in Iraq is wrong and reminded that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., accused American soldiers of "terrorizing women and children."

"Democratic leaders always seem to blame America first," Mehlman said, "especially when a Republican is in the White House."

Mehlman said the loss in popularity of the mainstream media — both the evening network news and daily newspapers — is an opportunity for conservatives. He pointed to the growing popularity of talk radio and blogging.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told the group he plans to push for a Senate vote in May on the inheritance tax, called the "death tax" by conservatives. And he said he would push for a vote June 5 on "the marriage protection amendment" that seeks to amend the Constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-02-10-gop-strategy_x.htm?csp=34

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France rapped over human rights

BBC NEWS
France rapped over human rights

France's law enforcement and prison system have been sharply criticised by Europe's human rights watchdog.

The Council of Europe found prisons were overcrowded and police operated with a sense of impunity, according to excerpts from a report due next week.

The council's human rights commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles said there was a "widening gap" between the "text of law and what is actually practiced".

The report makes 50 recommendations to improve France's record.

They include faster and more effective access to legal assistance for detainees, separating convicts and people awaiting trial and shortening the maximum allowed 45-day solitary confinement.

Details of the report were leaked to Le Parisien newspaper, and confirmed by Mr Gil-Robles.

'System of justice'

The findings are based on Mr Gil-Robles inspection of seven prisons and five police precincts last September.

He said France "has a relatively complete legal arsenal offering a high level of human rights protection" but "does not always give itself sufficient means to put it into application".

He found prisons were overcrowded and dirty, jail cells in police stations were in a terrible state and the justice system was too slow.

He criticised the treatment of minors in prisons and warned that a "hardening of immigration policies... risks violating the rights of genuine asylum seekers".

He said there was a weak reaction to anti-Semitic and racist crimes and called on France to fight against all forms of police brutality and violence.

"What is most important for me is that the penitentiary system is not a system of vengeance but a system of justice - for punishing criminals and, afterwards, permitting them to reintegrate into society," Mr Gil-Robles told France-Info radio.

"Today, this is not possible given the current state" of the French system.

The Council of Europe is intended as the guardian of human rights, democracy and the rule of law in all its 46-member states.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4705498.stm

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MoD to probe Iraq 'abuse' video

BBC NEWS
MoD to probe Iraq 'abuse' video

Pictures from a video allegedly showing British soldiers brutally beating a group of Iraqi teenagers have been published by the News of the World.

The newspaper says the incident took place two years ago in southern Iraq. An unidentified cameraman is heard laughing and urging his colleagues on.

The Ministry of Defence said it was aware of the allegations and the Royal Military Police were investigating.

The footage appears to show soldiers dragging youths and kicking them.

Alleged abuse

The newspaper described the footage as a "secret home video" apparently filmed for fun by a corporal.

It allegedly shows a disturbance in the street outside what the paper calls a military compound.

Soldiers are shown chasing youths involved in the disturbance, dragging four of them into the compound and beating them on various parts of the body with batons and kicking them, one in the genitals.

The recording is said to show an attack lasting a minute, with 42 blows counted.

The News of the World said a soldier could also be seen kicking a dead Iraqi in the face.

Authenticity

The paper claims that it has established that the soldiers involved were British, but would not disclose which unit or regiment were allegedly involved.

It said it has made exhaustive checks to establish the video's authenticity after obtaining the footage from a whistleblower, who they declined to identify.

The Ministry of Defence said it took any allegations of abuse very seriously.

"We condemn all acts of abuse and always treat any allegations of wrongdoing extremely seriously," said Brigadier Martin Rutledge, Chief of Staff to the Adjutant General, who deals with personnel and discipline.

"Over 80,000 service men and women have now served in Iraq since military operations began. Only a tiny number are alleged to have been involved in incidents of deliberate abuse."

The Army's chief General Sir Mike Jackson launched an inquiry last year into the issue of whether pre-deployment training was adequate.

Abuse allegations had damaged the Army but a cover-up would be worse, he said.

Three British soldiers were jailed last year after a prisoner abuse scandal at an aid camp in Iraq.

But photographs published by the Daily Mirror purporting to show soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment abusing Iraqi detainees were revealed to be fakes.

Officials at the International Criminal Court, meanwhile, have told lawyers for civilians who claim they were tortured by British troops in Iraq that they would not be bringing prosecutions.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4705482.stm

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Laura Bush calls Hillary Clinton "out of bounds"

Reuters
Laura Bush calls Hillary Clinton "out of bounds"

TURIN, Italy (Reuters) - U.S. first lady Laura Bush called New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton "out of bounds" on Saturday for a recent attack on her husband, U.S. President George W. Bush, but chalked it up to politics.

Sen. Clinton, pondering a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, has begun to intensify her criticism of the Bush administration, recently saying it could go down in history as among the worst ever.

"Of course I think it's out of bounds," Mrs. Bush told ABC News from Turin, where she attended opening events at the Winter Olympics. "But I think it's politics, it's certainly politics."

The Bush and Clinton families have a complicated relationship. President Bush and his father, the former president, both Republicans, get on well with former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, but the Bush family does not want to see Clinton's wife, the former first lady, win the presidency in 2008.

A rich political tapestry was evident at the funeral last week in Atlanta for Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, with the Bush and Clinton families gathered along with former President Jimmy Carter.

At that event, former President Clinton gave a hint of his thinking about who should win in 2008. He noted that former presidents were present, as was the current president, and then he gestured to his wife to suggest she was the future president.

Mrs. Bush said the two Bush presidents and Clinton "are in a club together and really I think wives of the presidents are in a club, as well."

"We know what it's like to live in that house. We certainly know what it's like to have your husband criticized. So I think there's a certain empathy that we might have for each other that we wouldn't have maybe for somebody else who said something like that," she said.

In an example of the way Republicans are dealing with Sen. Clinton's attacks, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, has said Sen. Clinton's attack was an example of anger and that Americans do not like to elect angry candidates.

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The War Goes On, Unreported...

huffingtonpost.com
The War Goes On, Unreported...
Eric Alterman

Center for American Progress: Think Again

As the “coalition forces” lurch toward the third anniversary of the Bush administration’s ill-fated March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the members of the media stand poised to embark on yet another round of navel-gazing over their role in first helping to enable, and later make sense of, this senseless war – a war that has proven as dangerous to journalists as anyone else.

We began January with the Christian Science Monitor’s Jill Carroll being abducted – and her translator killed – on a Baghdad street, and ended the month with ABC’s Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt being seriously injured in a bombing near the capital. In all, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 61 journalists have been killed in Iraq since March 2003 – 42 of whom, lest we forget, were Iraqi. In addition, 23 “media workers” have also lost their lives, bringing the total up to 84. That’s a rate of more than two a month since the start of the war.

One reason this astounding casualty rate may have been left off the front pages here in the States (aside from the Woodruff/Carroll tragedies) is most likely reflected in the ethnic breakdown seen above: the majority of those killed have been Iraqis. And if you peruse the “media workers” list, which consists of translators, drivers, fixers, and other media support personnel, you’ll find that it is made up solely of Iraqis or Arabs. It brings to mind the National Review Online's John Derbyshire, who recently wrote that after seeing a headline about the Egyptian ship that sank in the Red Sea, “A couple of sentences in, I learned that the ship was in fact a ferry, the victims all Egyptians. I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don't care about Egyptians.”

But if we didn’t already know of the dangers reporters in Iraq face, the stream of editorials and first-hand accounts from reporters over the past month have driven the lesson home. Hidden beneath this public lament is another sobering fact: While the danger for reporters increases day-by-day, many western news organizations have been downsizing their staffs in Iraq due to the astronomical costs associated with keeping a full staff in country for such an extended period of time. With such a withdrawal, it stands to reason that the daily coverage of the nuts and bolts of the war on the ground would suffer – which is what the Columbia Journalism Review found when it sent a reporter to Baghdad last month to cover the coverage.

In late January, Paul McLeary (who used to co-author this column with me before being hired by CJR), wrote that “from the anecdotal evidence I collected [while in Baghdad] it's clear that news organizations have scaled back so much that there are fewer and fewer reporters to go out on embeds with the military. As a result, everyday stories…are being lost.”

Obviously, stories are still coming out of Iraq, but as more reporters leave, as they did en masse after the November 2005 bombing of the al-Hamra Hotel in Baghdad (one of the most popular among western reporters), the quantity of the coverage has decreased. Paul wrote, “the fact is that the grinding, day-to-day reality of the war is essentially being forgotten…. With a dwindling number of people assigned to cover the war, there is only so much that can be done, resulting in coverage restricted to the ‘big’ stories, while many of the small, daily victories and defeats go unnoticed. And in that, the enormity of the story itself gets diminished.”

We’ve seen this pattern of waning concern and mounting indifference before, and as Nicholas Kristoff has been hammering home for months now in the New York Times, we’re seeing the unwillingness of news organizations to commit their people to dangerous situations showing up in the dearth of coverage of the genocide in Darfur.

So, while we dwell on the danger reporters face in Iraq, we run the risk of ignoring the fact that there are fewer and fewer reporters present to cover the story. As a result, it slips further from the headlines, and from our collective consciousness. As David Axe recently wrote in Salon, the reporters who remain in Iraq are increasingly constrained by both the danger and cost of extremely expensive security measures, which have “sharply limited their ability (and in some cases their willingness) to move around and provide accurate, comprehensive coverage of Iraq…. The remaining handful of non-embedded reporters in Baghdad are mostly holed up in a few besieged hotels, which, according to one source, are under constant surveillance by insurgent groups. Western reporters rarely venture out of the heavily fortified Green Zone, instead relying on local stringers to gather quotes and research stories.”

But as McLeary discovered, Axe is wrong to stoke the myth that reporters are all taking refuge in the Green Zone, when in reality only a few news organizations make their home there. Some of the biggest, like Time, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, CBS, the AP and Knight Ridder are all out in Baghdad itself, well removed from the protective embrace of the American military.

But it hardly matters where a reporter lives if confined, for reasons of security, to a hotel room. As for the dwindling number of journalists actually living in those hotels and compounds, try as they might, their corporate bosses aren’t giving them enough staff to cover all the dimensions of the story. “[I]f news organizations won't invest the money and manpower to cover it from top to bottom,” McLeary wrote, “it will end up becoming a story told only through its major disasters and victories, without many of the small, personal narratives and struggles that give the story its humanity.” And without that, there really isn’t much of a story to tell, at all.

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Brown warned White House before Katrina struck

Reuters
Brown warned White House before Katrina struck

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former federal disaster chief Michael Brown told a U.S. Senate panel on Friday he warned President George W. Bush of impending catastrophe in New Orleans last summer and informed White House aides of dangerous flooding shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck.

Brown said on August 29, the day the hurricane hit, he relayed urgent reports that the city's levee pumps were failing, contradicting White House officials who have said they were unaware on August 29 the levees were no longer functioning.

With the pumps overwhelmed and the levees seriously breached, floodwaters overtook much of New Orleans in a natural disaster that killed about 1,200 people along the Gulf Coast.

On September 1, Bush said in a television interview, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Yet Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the committee's ranking Democrat, cited a report from the National Weather Service at 9:14 a.m. on August 29 that at least one of the levees protecting the city was breached.

Brown, who headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in his first detailed testimony about his contacts with Bush and top White House officials that he informed the White House that "we were realizing our worst nightmare."

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is investigating failures by federal, state and local officials to deal with the hurricane and particularly why the Bush administration was so slow to react to the emergency.

Brown blamed the poor federal response to Katrina in part on the absorption of FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security, which he said was focused on preventing terrorist attacks and neglected the threat of natural disasters. He urged it be set up as a separate agency once again.

In addition to one or two direct talks with Bush before the storm, Brown said he talked with White House officials about 30 times once Katrina hit land. Those conversations included White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Brown said, adding: "Sometimes the president would get on the phone."

Before agreeing to answer questions about his contacts with the White House, Brown sought assurances he would not be caught in a legal cross-fire over whether those conversations should be divulged.

Committee head Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, gave Brown a green light to testify, saying the White House was given the chance, but had not invoked executive privilege.

'UNMANAGEABLE SITUATION'

In his testimony, Brown said Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff's sprawling agency was making Katrina response decisions contrary to his own. "It became an absolutely unmanageable situation," Brown said.

Brown emerged as the main scapegoat for the government's response. He was forced to resign shortly after the disaster.

Collins, who is leading the Senate probe of the government response, put some of the blame on Brown's shoulders. Following his testimony, Collins said Brown "let his poor relations" with Chertoff interfere with communications.

Some Democrats on the committee tried to lay blame squarely with the White House. "Keep your chin up. Fight back," Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey told Brown, adding that the Bush administration was handling hurricane reconstruction poorly.

Besides those killed, hundreds of thousands were made homeless in the storm, which devastated much of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Nearly six months later, many of those displaced do not know whether their homes will be rebuilt.

Bush was nearing the end of his monthlong summer vacation when the hurricane struck. He was on a working trip to Arizona and California on the day it hit and the day after, August 29 and August 30, and returned to Washington from his Texas ranch on August 31.

Brown's appearance before the Senate panel was followed by a subpoena to appear before the House Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina. The panel is meeting this weekend.

"This will be a closed meeting. We want to get the information we need from Brown without causing a further media circus," said Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia who chairs that committee.

(Additional reporting by Alan Elsner and Donna Smith)

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