The Other Secret Bush Court?

Huffington Post
David Kirby
The Other Secret Bush Court?

Next year, a "Special Master" in an obscure Federal court known only to a few Americans will preside over a highly sensitive judicial matter of urgent national importance. The Bush Administration wants to hold the hearings in a sealed courtroom, off limits to the press and public, with stiff "sanctions" for any outsider who attempts to gain unauthorized access to the secretive proceedings within.

Terror trials in faraway Gitmo? Good guess. But these are vaccine trials on New York Avenue, in downtown Washington, at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

You may not know it, but there is an official federal "vaccine court," where some 4,750 autism-related cases have been pending for years. Claimants believe the mercury-based vaccine preservative, thimerosal, and/or the MMR vaccine, contributed to their children's autism, and they are seeking compensation from a special vaccine injury fund administered by the federal government.

The long-awaited autism vaccine trial will commence on June 11 in the courtroom of Special Master George Hastings. The plaintiffs and their attorneys have asked for complete transparency in every aspect of the tribunal, including public disclosure of all evidence and unhindered media access to the hearings. The few autism families whose medical records will be scrutinized as legal examples are waiving their right to privacy and confidentiality, so that their stories may finally be told in an open court of law.

But the DOJ (technically, the "defense") has other plans. On November 3rd, the Department wrote to Hastings saying it "would oppose public access to the courtroom and public broadcast of the trial," because such an arrangement. "would pose security and privacy concerns" for those in attendance.

Exactly whose privacy are they trying to protect? It can't be the parents, because they don't want privacy. The only party fretting about privacy is the DOJ itself, and presumably, the vaccine makers. (As for "security" concerns, isn't that why we have court officers?).

The government may call this privacy, but I call it secrecy. In fact, there has been a long and unseemly history of secrecy when it comes to federal data on thimerosal and autism.

And let's face it: People don't hide something unless they have something to hide.

Back in 2002, Health and Human Services lawyers quietly slipped into vaccine court to file a protection order to permanently seal all thimerosal-related documents. They proposed sanctions for any lawyer who shared the secret government information with autism families, the public or the press. All thimerosal data would be banned from use in future civil cases, and any materials already given to plaintiffs would be rounded up by federal agents and destroyed. The motion was withdrawn after appropriate public outcry.

Many of those federal documents pertained to an off-limits database called the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which tracks the medical records of hundreds of thousands of American children. Lawyers for the families have tried to gain access to the VSD for years, including a 2004 "Motion to Compel" that went nowhere.

In 2005, the Institute of Medicine issued a report slamming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which manages the VSD, for a "lack of transparency" in handling the data. Even more alarming, CDC officials testified that the original datasets they examined had "not been archived in a standard fashion," meaning they were either lost, or destroyed. Take your pick.

If the disappearance of these datasets was intentional, that would be a clear violation of the federal Data Quality Act. No wonder the IOM urged vaccine officials to "seek legal advice" on the status of the missing records.

But those missing datasets could well have been a bonanza to attorneys for the autism parents. Now they are gone.

And, without access to any of the raw data to which government lawyers are privy, the families' cases are woefully, and unconstitutionally, disadvantaged. In what other American court of law are defendants allowed access to evidence that is kept secret from plaintiffs?

Meanwhile, family lawyers have received 216,000 pages of discovery materials, sourced from federal agencies and private companies alike. They might well paint an incriminating portrait of thimerosal's role in autism, and that may be why individuals face a $250,000 penalty for any paper that is leaked.

But some documents have already been leaked, including one published in the Los Angeles Times showing that Merck officials knew of the cumulative and alarmingly high levels of mercury in vaccines way back in 1991, but said nothing about it to anyone.

Are there other incriminating memos from Merck (or Lilly or Glaxo, etc.)? My sources indicate that there are, but we may never get to see them. And now, by barring public access to the trial, we may never get to hear them, either.

If the DOJ has its way, only claimants and their attorneys will be allowed to sit in the courtroom, or receive password-enabled access to a live audio webcast of the trial. The media will be barred, and so will everyone else. And though there will be an official written transcript, such documents are sometimes redacted, or even sealed, after the trial.

As a journalist, I will be subject to "sanctions" if I sit in on a webcast without authorization from the court. In fact, unauthorized access to the proceedings, according to the DOJ proposal, might lead to "termination of the webcast and closing of the courtroom."

What remains unclear is whether journalists will be prosecuted for interviewing families who have access to the webcast, or who attend the trial in person. But if I get arrested for hanging around outside the court with my pen and notepad, don't blame me for trying.

Curiously, a final reason cited for barring reporters and others from vaccine court is that "opening the courtroom to the general public would make it more difficult for claimants themselves to attend." I know plenty of parents who would gladly give up their seat for, say, Wolf Blitzer or Brian Williams, but the DOJ apparently hasn't asked them.

I think it's safe to say that the Bush Administration does not want this trial publicized. That seems curious to me. The entire thimerosal question will likely be left up to just one man: Special Master Hastings. Whether he decides for the parents, or for the DOJ, his ruling will forever be considered within a vacuum, subject to intense criticism from either side, unless he agrees that all thimerosal evidence should at long last be made public.

I hope he rules that his courtroom is not Guantanamo. These parents, and the public at large, deserve no less.

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PS: My last post predicted that most autism parents would be voting Democratic this November, without giving proper credit to two members of the House GOP. Dan Burton (R-IN) and Dave Weldon (R-FL) are among the most open minded members when it comes to the mercury-autism hypothesis, and I apologize for the omission.

Meanwhile, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been hostile, at best, to the theory. I congratulate Rep. Waxman on his ascendancy to the House Government Reform Committee Chairmanship, and respectfully ask him to read "Evidence of Harm," and, if possible and when he has time, to offer a response on the Huffington Post.

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Bush's Push For Conservative Judicial Nominees A "Slap In The Face" to Democrats and majority of Americans

Yahoo! News
White House resubmits 6 court nominees
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer

The Bush administration, trying to push through judicial nominations before Republicans lose control of the Senate, resubmitted six nominees deemed by Democrats too conservative for the federal bench.

Five nominees were the subject of an angry exchange in August when Democrats said their selection was a sop to the president's conservative base.

The White House on Wednesday submitted Terrence Boyle of North Carolina and William James Haynes II of Virginia to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va.; Michael Brunson Wallace of Mississippi to the 5th Circuit in New Orleans; Peter Keisler of Maryland to the District of Columbia Circuit; and William Gerry Myers III and Norman Randy Smith, both of Idaho, for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.

Everyone except Keisler has generated intense opposition from Democrats.

Under Senate rules the nominations must be resubmitted after Congress takes an extended break, as was the case this year for the 2006 election.

"Democrats have asked the president to be bipartisan, but this is a clear slap in the face at our request," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a member of the Judiciary Committee. "For the sake of the country, we hope that this is an aberration because the president feels he must placate his hard-right base, rather than an indication of things to come."

Sen. Jon Cornyn, R-Texas, a vocal backer of many of Bush's judicial picks, said he thought it would be "very tough" to get the nominees through the Senate during the lame-duck session. But, he added, "Hope springs eternal."

Cornyn said judicial nominees will test the Democrats' stated desire to run the Senate with greater bipartisanship.

"We'll see whether now that they're in majority status, if we're going to have ideological litmus tests for judges," Cornyn said.

The president's picks for the federal bench have sparked angry debate in the Senate. The incoming majority leader, Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada, once threatened to filibuster Boyle's nomination if it came to the full Senate.

Haynes was an architect of the Bush administration's eventually abandoned policy on the treatment of terrorism detainees. He later told a Senate panel that reversing the policy was the "right thing to do."

Bush this week also has sent several nonjudicial nominees to the Senate. One was Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, renominated as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency that directs U.S. overseas broadcasts. His nomination has bogged down because allegations of misconduct. A report released in August by the State Department's inspector general said Tomlinson misused government funds for two years as the board chairman. He disputed the allegations.

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Iran complains to U.N. of Israeli threats to bomb it

Reuters
Iran complains to U.N. of Israeli threats to bomb it
By Irwin Arieff

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iran, whose president has vowed to wipe Israel off the map, complained to the United Nations on Wednesday that the Jewish state was repeatedly threatening to bomb it.

The threats were "matters of extreme gravity" and the U.N. Security Council should condemn them and demand that Israel "cease and desist immediately from the threat of the use of force against members of the United Nations," Iranian U.N. Ambassador Javad Zarif said.

His comments, which came in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan dated November 10 and circulated at the United Nations on Wednesday, prompted a quick rejoinder from John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

"I would say this is perhaps an example of the Iranians trying to learn 'chutzpah,'" Bolton told reporters, using a Yiddish word for unmitigated gall or outrageously arrogant behavior.

Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil exporter, has been aggressively pursuing a nuclear program that it says is meant only to produce electric power.

But Western powers and Israel, which is widely believed to be a nuclear power, insist the activities are a cover for making nuclear bombs.

Iran's activities have prompted speculation that Israel might launch pre-emptive strikes to destroy its nuclear facilities, as it did in Iraq in 1981 when it bombed a reactor at Osiraq.

The speculation increased after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year threatened to "wipe Israel off the map," a statement Iranian officials have argued was not a threat.

Israel has fueled the speculation with a series of "unlawful and dangerous threats," Zarif said.

His letter cited several examples. Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh said last Friday that a pre-emptive strike on Iran was possible as "a last resort," Zarif's letter said. "But even the last resort is sometimes the only resort," he quoted Sneh as saying.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on October 19 that Iran would have "a price to pay" for continuing its nuclear programs and Iranians "have to be afraid" of what Israel might do, according to Zarif's letter.

Similarly, Zarif said that Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz said on January 21, "We are preparing for military action to stop Iran's nuclear program."

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Disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff goes to prison

Reuters
Ex-lobbyist in corruption scandal goes to prison

CUMBERLAND, Maryland (Reuters) - Disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, at the center of a political corruption scandal that contributed to the Republican loss of Congress in last week's elections, began serving his prison sentence on Wednesday.

The federal Bureau of Prisons said Abramoff, who has been cooperating in the government's influence-peddling investigation, arrived at about 6:30 a.m. (1130 GMT) at a minimum security federal prison camp in Cumberland, Maryland, 130 miles west of Washington.

The bureau said he is beginning to serve a sentence of five years and 10 months in prison handed down by a federal judge in Miami for fraud in the purchase of a Florida casino cruise line.

The Abramoff election-year scandal has reached into the White House and the Congress. Democrats in the mid-term elections were aided by voter anger over a series of congressional scandals, including the one involving Abramoff, a onetime Republican lobbyist.

Former Republican Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio pleaded guilty last month to illegally accepting trips, meals, drinks, tickets to concerts and sporting events and other items worth tens of thousands of dollars in return for official acts performed on behalf of Abramoff and his clients.

Two former aides to ex-Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, the former House majority leader, also have pleaded guilty. DeLay resigned in June while fighting unrelated campaign-finance charges in Texas and being dogged by questions about relations with Abramoff.

The scandal also has reached into the White House, with the conviction of former Bush administration official David Safavian and the resignation of Susan Ralston, an aide to top presidential political adviser Karl Rove.

In January, Abramoff pleaded guilty to separate charges in Washington of conspiracy, mail fraud and tax evasion in connection with his lobbying activities. He has yet to be sentenced on those charges while he cooperates with the government's investigation.

The plea deal provides a recommended prison sentence on those charges of nine years to 11 years and three months, to run at the same time as his sentence in the Florida case.

The prison camp in Maryland is a 334-bed facility. Prison officials said Abramoff would go through processing, which includes a medical screening and fingerprinting, and would be assigned a bed in the dormitory-style facility.

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Lott returns to Senate Republican leadership

Reuters
Lott returns to Senate Republican leadership
By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Republicans narrowly elected Sen. Trent Lott to their new leadership team on Wednesday, re-embracing a lawmaker who earlier had been forced to step aside as their leader over racially charged remarks.

The 49-member Republican caucus selected Lott to be the party's new whip, their No. 2 job in the chamber, as they sought to regroup after last week's elections placed Democrats back in control of the U.S. Congress.

Lott will replace Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was elevated to the top job, Senate Republican leader, for the 110th Congress set to convene in January. McConnell succeeds retiring Bill Frist of Tennessee.

"We want to work with the Democrats. Our preference is to accomplish things rather than block things," McConnell told reporters after the party's secret balloting.

In returning to leadership, Lott brushed off questions from reporters. Standing beside McConnell, he said: "The spotlight belongs on him."

Lott had been viewed as an effective Republican leader, one who was able to rally his colleagues and skillfully use the chamber's rules to move or stop legislation.

Lott was also seen as an articulate speaker -- until four years ago when he made a racially charged remark in a 100th birthday salute to Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a former segregationist who ran for president in 1948.

By suggesting the nation may have been better off if Thurmond had won, Lott, in what was meant to be a light-hearted tribute, ignited a political firestorm and he was replaced by Frist as Senate leader.

Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana opposed Lott's election as whip, saying he voted instead for Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who lost by one vote. But Lugar explained Senate Republicans overall were ready to re-embrace the amiable Mississippian.

"There was the acceptance today that he has admitted making an egregious error, and some feel he paid a very heavy cost," Lugar said. "But at the same time, he has skills that should be recognized and utilized."

Rep. Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said, "For many African Americans the sting of Trent Lott's hurtful words are unlikely to expire anytime soon." But Watt expressed hope Lott would use his new post to help the plight of the poor.

BOTH SIDES OF CAPITOL

On the other side of the Capitol, there was a new twist in the battle between Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania and Steny Hoyer of Maryland to be elected on Thursday as Democratic majority leader in the House of Representatives.

Murtha was quoted as describing as "total crap" an ethics and lobbying reform bill offered by Nancy Pelosi, the current Democratic leader who is set to be elected House speaker, the chamber's top job, in January.

Murtha offered the description during a meeting on Tuesday with a group of moderate House Democrats, according to a Democratic source who was in the room.

The source confirmed a report in Roll Call, a Capitol Hill paper, that Murtha told the group he would still work to pass the measure because it has been pushed by Pelosi, who has vowed to clean up how the scandal-rocked Congress does business.

But Murtha disputed characterization of his comments.

"I agree with what Nancy is trying to do," Murtha told MSNBC. "The crap I'm talking about is the crap that people have violated the law."

"What I said was it's 'total crap' that I think we have to deal with an issue like this ... when we got a war going on and all these other issues," Murtha said.

Pelosi has endorsed Murtha, who helped lead the Democratic charge against the Iraq war, over Hoyer, her current deputy.

Murtha has faced complaints from public advocacy groups about abusing his position as a congressman to benefit clients of his lobbyist brother.

(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan and Donna Smith)

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Ahmadinejad Is Preparing Another Holocaust For Israel. Believe him and stop him.

Huffington Post
Blake Fleetwood
"Ahmadinejad Is Preparing Another Holocaust For Israel" -- Benjamin Netanyahu

"Believe him and stop him," the Israeli opposition leader said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this."

In extraordinary interviews on Monday and Tuesday Likud leader, and former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu told a luncheon audience and a radio interviewer. "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs,"

Netanyahu repeatedly told delegates to the annual United Jewish Communities General Assembly in Los Angeles which attracts 5,000 participants, "It's 1938 all over again."

Natanyahu was responding to reports Monday that President Ahmadinejad declared that Israel was destined to "disappearance and destruction" and that Iran had full nuclear capability. "Time is running in our favor."

The General Assembly, an umbrella organization of American Jewish communal organizations is a traditional pilgrimage for Israeli politicians of all shades of opinion

According to an account by Peter Hirschberg, in Wednesday's Haaretz (An Israeli newspaper), Netanyahu amplified his remarks in an interview on Army Radio on Tuesday night.

Netanyahu insisted that Israel had the capability to wipe out Iran. "I don't want to analyze the capability required to eliminate [the Iranian nuclear] threat, but this capability exists..This capability is eroded over time, and if we wait years then obviously this capability would not exist anymore ... but right now I disagree with the claim that nothing can be done against Iran."

When asked by Israeli radio host Razi Barkai if Bush could afford embarking on another "military adventure" after Iraq, Netanyahu replied,

"... Israel would certainly be the first stop on Iran's tour of destruction, but at the planned production rate of 25 nuclear bombs a year ... [the arsenal] will be directed against 'the big Satan,' the U.S., and the 'moderate Satan,' Europe."

"Iran is developing ballistic missiles that would reach America, and now they prepare missiles with an adequate range to cover the whole of Europe," he added.

"No one cared then and no one seems to care now," he said, again drawing on the Nazi parallel - Netanyahu warned that Tehran's nuclear and missile program "goes way beyond the destruction of Israel - it is directed to achieve world-wide range. It's a global program in the service of a mad ideology."

"What happens in Iran affects what happens in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not the other way round," he said.

"There is still time. All ways (to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons) must be considered. We can't let this thing happen."


Current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert drew fire from Democrats Monday by publicly praising the war in Iraq. Clearly many Israeli leaders are panicked that the political fallout from the anti-war tsunami will weaken U.S. resolve. And an emboldened Amadinejad is giving them good reason. Expect a major PR effort to lobby for action against Iran.

It's a scary tinderbox.

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Senate vote favors Iraq reconstruction watchdog

Reuters
Senate vote favors Iraq reconstruction watchdog

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate voted on Tuesday to keep alive the federal agency that looks for waste and fraud in taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects in Iraq, hoping to reverse a recently passed law that would close the office next year.

On a voice vote, the chamber embraced a bipartisan plan to keep the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction open until 10 months after 80 percent of the funds for Iraqi reconstruction have been spent, whenever that is.

"The important work of this watchdog must continue, as long as American funds are being used for Iraqi reconstruction," said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican and co-sponsor of the plan with Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat.

The office has focused on contracting problems involving large companies such as Halliburton, which was formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. In one recent report, the office said Halliburton routinely hid information about its work in Iraq from the public by marking the data as proprietary when it wasn't.

The provision to extend the office's life was attached to a military construction spending bill that was expected to pass the Senate this week. Its fate in the House was unclear.

Some in the Senate have blamed House Republicans for the plan to close the inspector general's office next October, which was inserted earlier this year into legislation that President George W. Bush signed into law. House Republicans deny any stealth was involved in getting the provision approved.

Rep. Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat due to become chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, this week introduced legislation in the House to keep the office open. It also would give it oversight of a $1.7 billion U.S. fund set to train, equip and provide infrastructure for Iraqi security forces.

The agency, known by its acronym SIGIR and led by Inspector General Stuart Bowen, began work in January 2004 to track $18 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars initially allocated for rebuilding Iraq.

SIGIR has issued 73 audit reports and 65 project assessments, resulting in the arrest of five people and the convictions of four for fraudulent use of taxpayer money.

In its latest quarterly report, the agency said it had 92 open investigations in Iraq, including 25 led by the Justice Department. It said its audits had resulted in a net potential economic impact of $405.1 million and its recommendations could boost Iraq's annual oil revenues by $1.3 billion.

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White House seeks dismissal of CIA leak suit

Reuters
White House seeks dismissal of CIA leak suit

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration asked a federal judge on Tuesday to dismiss a lawsuit brought by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney and others for alleged involvement in disclosing her employment as a clandestine CIA operative.

Cheney and the other high-level defendants in the lawsuit have valid claims of immunity because of their official positions, Justice Department lawyers said in their request to have the case thrown out.

The lawyers also said that Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, failed to allege that any of the defendants had violated a constitutional right.

The lawsuit, filed in July, names Cheney, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, top White House aide Karl Rove and Cheney's former chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

It alleged "a conspiracy among current and former high-level officials in the White House to discredit, punish and seek revenge" against Wilson for publicly disputing statements made by President George W. Bush in justifying the war in Iraq.

The Justice Department's motion to dismiss the suit cited a Supreme Court decision noting that officers of the executive branch should not function under fear that their motives could lead to a lawsuit because it would restrict their ability to function as public officials.

"The United States has a strong interest in ensuring that federal officials are appropriately protected from personal liability in lawsuits arising as a result of their official positions," the Justice Department said.

"The United States believes that... the individual federal defendants have valid claims of immunity," the document said. "The vice president possesses absolute immunity from civil damages claims in connection with acts taken within the scope of his office."

The CIA leak case erupted after Wilson accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity to punish him for writing in The New York Times that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war.

A federal investigation of the leak lead to an indictment last year of Libby on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. He is the only person charged in the case.

Rove was investigated but not charged.

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US is top purveyor on weapons sales list; Shipments grow to unstable areas

Boston Globe
US is top purveyor on weapons sales list
Shipments grow to unstable areas
By Bryan Bender

WASHINGTON -- The United States last year provided nearly half of the weapons sold to militaries in the developing world, as major arms sales to the most unstable regions -- many already engaged in conflict -- grew to the highest level in eight years, new US government figures show.

According to the annual assessment, the United States supplied $8.1 billion worth of weapons to developing countries in 2005 -- 45.8 percent of the total and far more than second-ranked Russia with 15 percent and Britain with a little more than 13 percent.

Arms control specialists said the figures underscore how the largely unchecked arms trade to the developing world has become a major staple of the American weapons industry, even though introducing many of the weapons risks fueling conflicts rather than aiding long-term US interests.

The report was compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

"We are at a point in history where many of these sales are not essential for the self-defense of these countries and the arms being sold continue to fuel conflicts and tensions in unstable areas," said Daryl G. Kimball , executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association in Washington. "It doesn't make much sense over the long term."

The United States, for instance, also signed an estimated $6.2 billion worth of new deals last year to sell attack helicopters, missiles, and other armaments to developing nations such as the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Developing nations are designated as all those except in North America, Western Europe, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand.

In addition to weapons already delivered, new contracts for future weapons deliveries topped $44 billion last year -- the highest overall since 1998, according to the report. Nearly 70 percent of them were designated for developing nations.

Many of the US sales are justified by American officials as critical to the war on terrorism or other foreign policy goals such as checking an emerging China. One such example is the recent decision to sell F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan.

The United States has long relied on arms sales to prop up allies or enhance collective defense arrangements.

"For decades, during the height of the Cold War, providing conventional weapons to friendly states was an instrument of foreign policy utilized by the United States and its allies," according to the report, titled "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations."

"This was equally true for the Soviet Union and its allies," the report said.

Yet there is growing evidence that the sales are increasingly more about dollars and cents for the US military-industrial complex and other major military economies. The trend began after the end of the Cold War, when American, European, Russian, and other defense industries were forced to consolidate and competition for foreign sales heated up.

"Where before the principal motivation for arms sales by foreign suppliers might have been to support a foreign policy objective, today that motivation may be based as much on economic considerations as those of foreign policy or national security policy," said the congressional report, which detailed both arms deliveries, or weapons actually delivered to customers, and arms agreements, or contracts signed for future deliveries.

Washington's desire to maintain the status quo was on display at a meeting at the United Nations on Oct. 26, when a UN panel voted to study whether a new treaty might be possible to regulate the sale of conventional arms. The United States was the only country out of 166 to vote no, though China and Russia were among a handful of countries to abstain.

With that lone dissent, the UN's Disarmament and International Security Committee approved a British proposal to draw up uniform standards that might block arms sales considered destabilizing, including those that might fuel ongoing conflicts, violate embargoes, undermine democratic institutions, or contribute to human rights abuses. A UN task force is set to make its recommendations to the General Assembly next year.

But powerful interests in the global arms industry have long stood in the way of controlling the arms flow to the developing world.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for example, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- the United States, Russia, France, Britain, and China -- pledged to limit the sale of arms to the volatile Middle East, attributing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to the region having been awash in high-tech arsenals.

More than a decade later, those pledges have gone unfulfilled. The United States is not the only culprit.

For the first time in eight years, Russia outpaced the United States last year in the value of new arms transfer agreements reached with developing nations, according to the Congressional Research Service report, authored by Richard F. Grimmett .

Moscow inked major deals to sell missiles, warships, and other hardware to such potential trouble spots as Iran and China, according to the report, which is considered the most authoritative breakdown of the global arms trade. China also agreed to provide weapons to trouble spots such as Iran and North Korea, while major Western European suppliers, such as Britain and France, also concluded large orders with developing countries.

But it is the United States that by far remains the top purveyor of high-tech arms to areas where analysts believe the likelihood of armed conflict remains highest. A study last year by the progressive World Policy Institute found that the United States transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in an ongoing war.

"From Angola, Chad, and Ethiopia, to Colombia, Pakistan, and the Philippines, transfers through the two largest US arms sales programs [Foreign Military sales and Commercial Sales] to these conflict nations totaled nearly $1 billion in 2003," the report found.

Meanwhile, more than half of the countries buying US arms -- 13 of the 25 -- were defined as undemocratic by the State Department's annual Human Rights Report, including top recipients Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.

The agreement last year to sell F-16s to Pakistan underscores the larger trend, according to Wade Bouse , research director at the Arms Control Association.

"F-16s with advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles are not for fighting Al Qaeda," Bouse said. "They are for fighting India."

And India, which has fought three wars with Pakistan, is considering a US offer to sell the country F-16s. "We are creating our own market by selling to both sides of regional conflicts," Bouse said.

With more such lucrative deals in the offing, there is little sign that the United States -- or other major suppliers -- wants a treaty to control the sales.

"The US would be significantly affected if there was an arms treaty that took into account human rights abuses and conflict areas," added William Hartung , director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute in New York. "The US government still wants to be able to do covert and semi-covert arms transfers. And a certain amount of it is simply keeping factories running in certain congressional districts."

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Looking for 18,000 missing votes in Florida

salon.com
Looking for 18,000 missing votes in Florida
-- Katharine Mieszkowski

Officials in Florida's 13th Congressional District have begun recounting the votes cast there in a race whose margin of victory was fewer than 400 votes. The recount is expected to take a week, but computer scientists aren't optimistic that it will get to the root of the problems experienced by voters in the district's Sarasota County, where more than 18,000 votes may have mysteriously disappeared.

Among all the reports logged last Tuesday by election-protection hotline numbers, the most serious complaints were from voters in Florida's Sarasota County, where the vagaries of the electronic voting process may have determined the outcome of the election. As a result, Democrat Christine Jennings has not conceded, even though Republican Vern Buchanan has already declared victory.

In Sarasota County, 18,000 voters -- fully 13 percent of people who voted -- did not cast a ballot for either Buchanan or Jennings, a huge "undervote" when compared to the adjacent counties, where the percentage of voters not casting a ballot in the same race was about 2 percent. Some election officials have suggested that those voters in Sarasota intentionally chose not to cast a vote in that race, as a protest against an ugly campaign. But the unusually high undervote rate compared to the neighboring counties makes that highly unlikely: "The idea that this is some kind of protest vote simply makes no sense," says Mark Lindeman, a political scientist at Bard College.

Many Sarasota County voters complained to election officials and watchdog groups about the ES&S iVotronic machine, which shows voters a review screen to check over their ballot before submitting it, but leaves no paper trail. Some voters reported that when they viewed the machine's summary screen, no candidate had been checked in the Buchanan-Jennings race, so they had to recast that vote. How many other voters had the same problem, and just didn't notice, hastily paging through the review screen? Simply recounting the votes cast won't solve this mystery, either, because it's impossible to determine a voter's intent if a vote wasn't cast. "I think a recount would not be likely to uncover anything," says Douglas Jones, a computer scientist at the University of Iowa.

Experts have several theories about what could have gone wrong in Sarasota. Perhaps the ballot was poorly designed, so it was easy to simply overlook that race on the touch screen. Or, maybe there was actually a problem with the machines' malfunctioning: "It could be the machine actually lost the vote somewhere in between the voter's finger and the review screen," says David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University. Notably, in the state attorney general's race, there were similarly large undervotes in three of the other counties in Florida that use the iVotronic machines.

How could officials really get to the bottom of what went wrong in Sarasota County? For starters, says Jones: "You need someone to get out those machines and demo the ballots on multiple machines." Then, it could become apparent if the race was simply easy to miss because of a user-interface problem. But to determine whether votes were actually lost somewhere between the voters' casting them and the review screen would require recruiting volunteers to replicate the problem on the very same machines, argues Dill.

A team from Florida Department of State is observing the recount, and preparing to audit it. As it stands, watchdog groups are skeptical that the state government's investigation will be conclusive. Ben Wilcox, executive director of Common Cause Florida, a nonpartisan election watchdog group that has called for a nonpartisan independent investigation, says: "Having government investigate the problem is kind of questionable, because the government may be part of the problem.

If there was any attempt to manipulate these machines for partisan purposes, it could well be government officials doing that." For what it's worth, the feds are also getting involved: The Committee on House Administration has also announced its own plans to investigate.

In the meantime, both Buchanan and Jennings are now attending freshman orientation in Washington.

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Junior Eats Shit, Calls Poppy For Help... Again

Huffington Post
Bob Cesca
Junior Eats Shit, Calls Poppy For Help... Again

Cork on the ForkAnyone who continues to live under the delusion that President Bush is a competent, strong leader who stands on his own skill and talent needs to seriously re-evaluate his or her concept of strong leaders who stand on his or her own skill and talent. And for these remaining 31 percent who believe President Bush continues to do a heckuva job, I strongly recommend they carefully place corks on all their forks before hurting themselves... and others. That's not to say they're idiots, but this sort of continued support despite the myriad of facts to the contrary is, at best, dangerous.

Meanwhile, for you and me, it comes as no surprise that President Bush, after -- WHOOPS! -- spazzing his way through a pair of bloody wars, has been left with no other option but to call in Poppy's team of proctors to carefully push corks onto the official White House forks. And it's not the first time for the president. His entire life has been an ongoing saga of either using Poppy's influence to avoid trouble or using Poppy to bail him out after eating shit.

A large part of his education path was modeled after and aided by Poppy. The president attended Phillips Academy, then Yale where he was a member of the fabled Skull & Crossbones Society; all three of which were attended by Poppy and granddad Prescott. In a patrician family like the Bushes, it's not a stretch to say that the family name had something to do with the academically-challenged Junior's admission to these prestigious schools. Had the president been left to his own stubborn devices, I imagine he'd still be wandering the plains of Midland -- 60 years old and carrying a rotting box of Lunchables and a Trapper Keeper, wondering aloud when the short bus will finally arrive.

Then there was the Vietnam draft and the president's golden parachute: the Texas Air National Guard. After scoring just above a passing grade on the entrance exam, President Bush was somehow catapulted to near the top of the admissions list, landing in the privileged Champaign Unit reserved for upper-class citizens and relatives of famous Texans. Poppy and his pals successfully kept the president out of Vietnam.

Then there was his cocaine possession arrest in 1972 which was magically expunged from the president's record. Junior snorted shit this time and Poppy made a call to fix the record.

In 1977, President Bush formed Arbusto Oil and perpetually required Poppy's connections to wealthy investors to stay afloat after hitting oil at fewer than half of his drilling locations. Later, during the controversy surrounding the president's opportunistic sale of Harken Energy stock immediately prior to a crippling loss (Harken had absorbed Spectrum 7 which had previously merged with Bush Exploration/Arbusto), the president's lawyer in the SEC investigation was Robert Jordan who was a partner at James Baker's Baker/Botts firm. Jordan would later become the president's ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

The list goes on and horribly on. The 2000 election recount? James Baker front and center again.

This is all well worn territory, but the point is clear: when President Bush goes it alone, he eats shit and needs Poppy to Heimlich said shit from the presidential esophagus. When he plays it safe and employs Poppy's influence, he keeps his nose clean. Um... yeah. So when he set out like a neocon-guided armadilla' hunter destined to change the world with Shock & Awesome bunker busters while refusing to listen to Poppy's seasoned team of foreign policy experts (including the expert who was his first Secretary of State) he was destined for disaster. This time, though, we all were.

Yet scores of true believers, up through and including Katrina, swore by President Bush's competency. By the way, who did the president call to put a kindly face to his heckuva job in the Gulf Coast? Poppy. To this very day, 31 percent of America continues to believe in the president's job performance. This is an astounding testament to blind faith and non-reality based delusion, which isn't surprising considering the sheer multitudes among us who continue to believe Saddam orchestrated 9/11 (85 percent according to Zogby earlier this year). And now with American and Iraqi civilian casualties mounting by the day and the thought of victory appearing almost as quaint as a Lindsay Lohan kids movie, Poppy's Proctors are back. Again.

Tragically, it required nearly four years of quagmire, death and waste before the real adults were called in with a Hummer overflowing with corks. And this begs several key questions. How many lives could've been saved had this happened in the first place? And should we take seriously any right-wing objections to congressional hearings as to why this didn't happen prior to the invasion or in the early days of the occupation (sometime between "major combat operations have ended" and "bring 'em on")? Instead, blind knee-jerk jingoism and cowardice has, all along, enabled the president in his latest failed attempt to handle utensils without proper protection and without the necessary adult supervision.

---
ONE FINAL NOTE. Imagine being Vice President Cheney right now. He was supposed to be the mastermind. He was supposed to be the Dad who could do anything. And now it's as if Child Protective Services has been called in by concerned neighbors to haul his kids into protective custody on a live episode of COPS. And he must know that writhing on the front lawn in his boxers and wife-beater is out of the question, so there he's forced to sit. Taking it. On the world stage. With his shotgun tied in a cartoony knot. Couldn't have happened to a better guy. But like I said, it should've happened four years ago before he participated in the abuse and neglect.

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Former N.Y. Times reporter decries Bush policies; Liberties suffer, secrecy grows, reporter tells K-State crowd

The Topeka Capital-Journal
Former N.Y. Times reporter decries Bush policies
Liberties suffer, secrecy grows, reporter tells K-State crowd
By Jan Biles

MANHATTAN -- Judith Miller, a former New York Times investigative reporter who went to jail to protect a confidential source, said the balance between national security and civil liberties has been tipped, allowing the Bush administration to become secretive about its decisions, intrusive into public lives and reluctant to share information the public has a right to know.

Miller said many Americans don't understand how their access to information and the freedom of the press have been affected in the past few years.

"We are less free and less safe," she said, explaining that there is a "growing secrecy in the name of national security."

Miller, who spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal a source in the Valerie Plame case, spoke Friday morning at Kansas State University as part of the "Community Readiness Communications: Accurate Messages in Times of Crisis" conference.

Plame was a CIA agent whose identity was leaked in 2003 when her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, criticized the Bush administration's prewar intelligence on Iraq. Miller went to jail rather than reveal her source, White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Miller said "no one can deny lives haven't changed since 9/11" and that national security is a concern, but the federal government has used that fear to justify eavesdropping on phone conversations and tapping into e-mails without warrants and classifying information that once was available to the public.

"More than 15 million documents were classified last year," she said, explaining that translates into 125 documents a minute. "It's intimidation by classification."

And American citizens are paying for it, she said, to the tune of $7.2 billion in fiscal year 2004.

How can an electorate be free and informed if it is denied information? Miller asked. Without a free press, such stories as the torture of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, warrantless wiretapping and CIA prisons in Eastern Europe wouldn't have been reported, she said.

"People need to know what the government is doing in order to debate," she said.

Miller said the American media, however, give the federal government reason to doubt its motives and competence each time it is discovered that an article is plagiarized or gossip is reported as fact.

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don't post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

"I'm worried about bloggers," she said. "(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it's repeated as fact."

While she advocates a federal shield law to protect mainstream journalists from divulging their sources, she doesn't favor extending that to bloggers who don't follow the standards and ethnics of the journalism industry.

Still, she wouldn't restrict a blogger's right to publish online. She said some bloggers have been invaluable in uncovering government flaws.

"I'm glad to welcome them as long as they agree to the standards," she said.

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Al Qaeda seeking nuclear kit for attacks: UK official

Reuters
Al Qaeda seeking nuclear kit for attacks: UK official
By Sophie Walker

LONDON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda is trying to acquire the technology that would enable it to use a nuclear device to attack Western targets including Britain, a senior British official said on Monday.

"We know the aspiration is there. We know attempts to gather materials are there, we know that attempts to gather technology are there," the senior Foreign Office official told reporters.

The comments at a briefing came days after the head of Britain's domestic spy agency said Muslim extremists were plotting at least 30 major terrorist attacks in Britain which could involve chemical and nuclear devices.

The Foreign Office official, asked whether there was any doubt that Al Qaeda wants to gather nuclear material for use against Western targets, said: "No doubt at all."

Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of intelligence agency MI5, said last week young British Muslims were being groomed to become suicide bombers and her agents were tracking some 1,600 suspects, most of whom were British-born and linked to al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Britain suffered its worst peacetime attack in July 2005 when four British Islamists blew themselves up on London's transport network, killing 52 commuters and wounding hundreds.

Earlier this month Dhiren Barot, 34, was jailed for a minimum of 40 years for plotting to blow up the New York Stock Exchange and carry out attacks in Britain with gas-filled limousines and a "dirty bomb".

Evidence against him included copious research into explosives, chemicals and radioactive materials.

In a separate ongoing terrorism trial, prosecutors say one of the suspects had told police in an interview that his superior in a Pakistan training camp had asked him to help contact the Russian mafia about buying a nuclear bomb.

However Salahuddin Amin, who is accused of plotting conventional bomb attacks in the UK using ammonium nitrate fertilizer, said he did not believe it was a genuine plot and nothing appeared to have developed from the plan.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair will focus on the fight against terrorism when he unveils the last package of laws of his premiership in a program to be read to Wednesday by Queen Elizabeth.

(additional reporting by Mike Holden)

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Guantanamo detention cases must be dismissed: U.S.

Reuters
Guantanamo detention cases must be dismissed: U.S.
By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration said on Monday that Guantanamo prisoners have no constitutional right to challenge their detention before U.S. federal judges, and the lawsuits by hundreds of detainees must be dismissed.

In papers filed with a U.S. appeals court in Washington, Justice Department attorneys gave their most detailed argument yet that the cases must be dismissed because of the tough anti-terrorism law signed by President George W. Bush last month.

Lawyers for the prisoners have argued the new law does not give the U.S. government the power to arrest suspects overseas and imprison them indefinitely without any charges and without allowing them to challenge their detention in U.S. court.

They say a provision of the law unconstitutionally suspends the right under habeas corpus, a long-standing principle of American law, for detainees to contest their imprisonment.

Justice Department attorneys disagreed. "There is no constitutional habeas right for an enemy alien held outside the United States to challenge his detention," they said. "No actual habeas rights have been suspended."

After Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law, the Justice Department told federal district court judges they no longer have jurisdiction over some 200 cases covering more than 400 prisoners at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Department lawyers told the appeals court the new law and a similar law, the Detainee Treatment Act that Congress approved late last year, provide "an unprecedented level of judicial review for the claims of the enemy aliens held at Guantanamo."

They said the prisoners received a military proceeding, called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, to determine if the detainee has been rightfully deemed to be an unlawful enemy combatant.

Those proceedings can be appealed directly to the appeals court, but the prisoners are not entitled to a sweeping factual inquiry by a federal district court judge, the lawyers said. Those cases must be dismissed.

The appeals court is expected to rule later this year or early next year, but any decision likely will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would have the final word on the law's constitutionality.

The law was prompted by a Supreme Court ruling in June that said Bush lacked the legislative authority in setting up his first system of military commissions after the September 11 attacks.

That prompted Bush to go to Congress to get authority under the new law authorizing tough interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects under a new system of military commissions.

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Global warming could wipe out most birds: WWF

Reuters
Global warming could wipe out most birds: WWF
By Daniel Wallis

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Unchecked climate change could drive up to 72 per cent of the world's bird species into extinction but the world still has a chance to limit the losses, conservation group WWF said in a report on Tuesday.

From migratory insect-eaters to tropical honeycreepers and cold water penguins, birds are highly sensitive to changing weather conditions and many are already being affected badly by global warming, the new study said.

"Birds are the quintessential 'canaries in the coal mine' and are already responding to current levels of climate change," said the report, launched at a United Nations conference in Kenya on ways to slow warming.

"Birds now indicate that global warming has set in motion a powerful chain of effects in ecosystems worldwide," WWF said.

"Robust evidence demonstrates that climate change is affecting birds' behavior -- with some migratory birds even failing to migrate at all."

In the future, it said, unchecked warming could put large numbers of species at risk, with estimates of extinction rates as high as 72 per cent, "depending on the region, climate scenario and potential for birds to shift to new habitats".

It said the "more extreme scenarios" of extinctions could be prevented if tough climate protection targets were enforced and greenhouse gas emissions cut to keep global warming increases to less than 2 degrees C (1.6 F) above pre-industrial levels.

Already in decline in Europe and the United States, many migratory birds were now missing out on vital food stocks that are appearing earlier and earlier due to global warming, widely blamed by scientists on emissions from burning fossil fuels.

In Canada's northern Hudson Bay, the report said, mosquitoes were hatching and reaching peak numbers earlier in the spring, but seabirds breeding there had not adjusted their behavior.

In the Netherlands, it added, a similar mismatch had led to the decline of up to 90 per cent in some populations of pied flycatchers over the last two decades.

"NOWHERE TO GO"

Predicted rising temperatures could see Europe's Mediterranean coastal wetlands -- critical habitats for migratory birds -- completely destroyed by the 2080s, it said.

Rising temperatures were also seen having disastrous impacts on non-migratory species, as their habitat ranges shifted.

"Many centers of species richness for birds are currently located in protected areas, from which birds may be forced by climatic changes into unprotected zones," the report said.

"Island and mountain birds may simply have nowhere to go."

In the U.S., unabated warming was seen cutting bird species by nearly a third in the eastern Midwest and Great Lakes, while almost three-quarters of rainforest birds in Australia's northeastern Wet Tropics were at risk of being wiped out.

"In Europe, the endangered Spanish imperial eagle, currently found mainly in natural reserves and parks, is expected to lose its entire current range," WWF's report said.

Also at high risk were eight species of brightly colored Hawaiian honeycreeper, Galapagos Islands penguins and the Scottish capercaillie -- the world's biggest grouse -- which WWF said could lose 99 per cent of its habitat because of warming.

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Bush skeptical of Democrat troop reduction idea

Reuters
Bush skeptical of Democrat troop reduction idea
By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush, under pressure by the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress to change course in Iraq, reacted skeptically on Monday to their call for a phased troop withdrawal.

Bush met behind closed doors with members of a bipartisan panel expected to press him to shift strategy in Iraq in the face of unrelenting violence, rising U.S. casualties and concern among Americans that there is no end in sight to the war.

The independent Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican with close ties to the Bush family, and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, is to give its report to Bush and the U.S. Congress next month and experts say it could offer Bush a way to change tactics in Iraq.

"We were pleased to meet with senior administration officials today and look forward to our consultations with some prominent Democrats tomorrow," Baker and Hamilton said in a statement. "We are working expeditiously to complete our report and recommendations."

Democrats who rode Americans' anger about the war into control of the House of Representatives and the Senate showed they were eager to flex their newfound muscle.

Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who will become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in January, said Democrats would seek a bipartisan agreement to persuade Bush to start pulling troops out of Iraq in four to six months.

"We've got to put greater responsibility on the Iraqis and the way to do that -- probably the only way to do that -- is to let the Iraqis know that within four to six months of the president notifying them, that we're going to begin a phased redeployment of our troops out of Iraq," Levin said.

This is an option Bush adamantly opposed during the congressional campaign season and there was no early indication he would agree to such a plan now.

"I believe it is very important ... for people making suggestions to recognize that the best military options depend upon the conditions on the ground," he said.

The Iraq Study Group's work has attracted interest from both parties but members have not yet revealed its proposals beyond general statements from Baker that a shift in course is needed.

Bush's meeting with Baker, Hamilton and other members was his first extended session with them. The group also met other top Bush administration policymakers.

It will meet Democratic foreign policy experts on Tuesday, including former national security advisor Sandy Berger, former assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

"I'm not sure what the report is going to say," Bush told reporters after meeting with the group. "I'm looking forward to seeing it."

Injecting a note of caution into the possibility of a major shift in strategy, Bush said: "I believe that it's important for us to succeed in Iraq, not only for our security but for the security of the Middle East, and that I'm looking forward to interesting ideas."

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the commission has not yet presented its alternatives to the president.

"This was not proposal shopping by the Iraq Study Group. It was a general conversation about the situation there," he said.

The commission will have a video conference on Tuesday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

One approach reportedly being considered by the panel was for Washington to open a dialogue with Iran and Syria, accused by the Bush administration of supporting terrorism and fanning instability in neighboring Iraq.

Blair, Bush's biggest ally on Iraq, called in a speech in London for Syria and Iran to be engaged in efforts to stem violence in Iraq and to secure a broader Middle East peace settlement.

But Bush was cool to such a move, saying Syria needed to get out of Lebanon and Iran needed to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

(Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell, Tabassum Zakaria and Matt Spetalnick)

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Happy Days, and More to Come

Huffington Post
Frank Dwyer
Happy Days, and More to Come

Happy days are here again, and they're about to get happier.

Once the investigations start--and they have to start, that's the mandate: oversight, answers, the reason we have a Congress, the reason we voted the way we did--the future is, in a sense, out of our hands. It doesn't really matter what anyone wants or says he wants now, or what anyone says will or should happen: one small step, which can't be avoided, will lead inexorably to the next, and then to another, then another, and another--and before long--we can't avoid it--we'll be having a big televised committee hearing, which is, after all, the most fun you can have in your living room--and then, not long after that, we'll be come to the most profoundly satisfying, democracy-affirming, delirium-inducing results we can imagine.

The various Congressional committees will soon begin their mandated investigations. First, we'll have subpoenas, battles in the press, snarling and stalling. What fun! Imagine Cheney! Rumsfeld! all of them! Oh, how well we'll get to know these disdainful, secretive people who worked for us and abused our trust: Wolfowitz and Perle, Tenet and Bremer, Chertoff and Brown, Colin and Condi (what did they do? what did they know?), big oil execs, big pharmaceutical execs, Haliburton execs--all bobbing and weaving, defending themselves by attacking, all under the spotlight of justice. Here we go--Fifth Amendment pleas, lies, more lies, more subpoenas (memos, emails, diaries, secret tapes). Here we go: indictments (some for perjury), new gung-ho Liddys marching off to jail with maniacal fervor, new less gung-ho John Dean's choosing instead with more discretion in their valor to vomit all over the table (wasn't that Ehrlichman's happy phrase?), all this President's men behaving just as those other ones did in the good old days, defying, denying, squirming, cooperating, twisting in the wind, turning on each other, trying to keep a place in the too-crowded lifeboat on the choppy sea, eating each other up.

And new heroes arising. And one of them (who will it be?) asking, relentlessly, "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

One step at a time: and then the surviving Republican leadership (Warner, Hagel, McCain, Graham?) will go to Cheney and say, Resign now. The Party, unlike the insurgency, is in its last throes: resign for the good of the Party, blame it on your heart, and if you do we will guarantee you a pardon. Otherwise, we won't. You'll know better than we do how much a pardon might come in handy.

And Cheney will resign.

And then they will go to Bush and say, Replace Cheney now with a someone who can get along with the majority party, someone who is not a rancorous, partisan divider as Cheney and you yourself have been--an elder statesman, who won't try to jump in front of us in the 2008 election: James Baker, Warren Rudman, Alan Simpson. (Not Tom Kean. His obscene shilling for ABC/Disney has bumped him off the least. I wonder if he'll think it was worth it: he might have been President.)

And then the new Vice-President will be sworn in.

And meanwhile the different committees will be turning over so many stones, shining the people's light on so much interesting murk, watching as the surprised creatures, disturbed in their cozy slime, run for cover and find there is no cover, there is no more cover! And the committees will begin to learn some curious things, curioser and curioser. The one I'm most looking forward to and feel most confident about predicting is that the grossly illegal wiretaps for which the Decider said he didn't need authorization and now so frantically, desperately seeks it will actually include surveillance of the Kerry campaign. (Far-fetched? Do you really imagine that lazy, imperviously-privileged, arrogant Bush and his amoral macchiavel, the former genius Karl Rove, would be too smart of principled to do such a thing? They both believed that a "permanent majority" and a sleazy, constant manipulation of the attack on America had forever isolated Bush from outdated Constitutional checks and balances and the pesky indignity of any legislative or judicial oversight. Do you really think little-brain Bush would hesitate to do what big-brain Nixon did, when he had the same opportunity and temptation? Bush's pathology may be narcissistic denial, not paranoia, but surely he would have thought it as important as Nixon did to use every possible means to safeguard his own political power. He'd confused safeguarding his own power, after all, with saving the country. That's why he claimed authority the poor old Framers couldn't explicitly give him, because they couldn't even imagine the awesome responsibility--with the very survival of the nation depending on one man's ability to move quickly and decisively to do whatever he deemed necessary to protect the country from bloody, implacable enemies in an unfortunately permanent war. Of course such a Lord Protector has to keep track of what all the people on his Enemies' List are doing, and though Osama may be hard to spy on, Democrats aren't. It is beyond dispute that the President saw Democrats as his enemies, and the enemies of the country he wanted to protect: just the other day he was saying that if you voted for Democrats "the terrorists win, and America loses." Looked at from that Cromwellian, or Louis XIV, or Nixonian point-of-view, Bush actually had a responsibility to wiretap the Kerry campaign. Did he? We'll see.

And if he did--even my Republican ex-friends, snorting disdainfully, sputtering, obfuscating, trying to change the subject, wanting to lie again about John Kerry's perfectly clear and true remark about an ignorant man (Sunnis? Shiites? Who knew?) who has gotten the whole world stuck in Iraq--when they are finally forced to give their opinions about the possibility of Bush having wiretapped Kerry, these intelligent Republicans (never mind fair and balanced) admit that okay, sure, it's possible, and then go on to say that if Bush wiretapped the Democrats--that was the reason, after all, that Nixon's CREEPs broke into the Watergate--then he should be impeached, like Nixon; and sometimes they add angrily that he should also go to jail.

And if it isn't the wiretaps, it will be some curious lie in the Katrina debacle, or the torture initiative, or the stifling of administration scientist, or colluding in the magical pre-election fall of gas prices, or one of the hundred different high crimes and misdemeanors committed to fight a foolish, murderous war in Iraq, or all of the above.

And so the Impeachment Committee will form in the House.

And after a little time, as the articles proliferate, and an Imperial Executive firestorm or two fails to halt the collapse and subvert, again, the Constitution, and after the people get angrier and angrier, stimulated, as people are, by all the blood in the water, then those same beleaguered Republican leaders, thinking about 2008 and still daring to dream of a two-party system, will pay another visit to the Decider, and they'll say, now--here's one more thing you don't get to decide, now, sorry, we can't save you, resign now, for the good of the Party, and of the country, and so you can finally be the-uniter-not-the-divider you promised to be), resign now, if you think you might find a general pardon from President Rudman helpful down the road--and it looks like you may need one as general as possible. (What's that? No, sorry, we can't do anything about the War Crimes Trials in Germany. Just be careful about traveling abroad. You won't find that much of a hardship, will you?)

And then there will be a final smirking, faux-sincere, combative, jokey frat boy, incoherent, mispronounced, self-serving farewell speech before that one last jaunty strut--arms jutting out from the body to make a little man look bigger, cocky, smirking, maybe a brisk salute or two and some victory signs in among the hand wavings to the assembled White House staff. Another historical Republican perp walk--a perp strut, this time--across the White House lawn to the helicopter, blades already whirling, and then that last sad, humiliating Air Force One flight back to Texas, and a whole lot of leftover life in Crawford, hacking brush, with plenty of time to think about books--not about writing one, of course, but about how in the world you could possibly get enough of them together not to look silly when you dedicate your library.

What I am describing is a real slippery slope. Finally. But it's a little different from the ones the fear- and hate-mongers, the values hypocrites, the faux-religious, the moral bankrupts, the greedy and corrupt and contemptuous, the corporofascists and their stooges kept warning us about. Inexorable, unavoidable, one step at a time--and no escape, no turning back. No turning back for the Decider. No turning back for the dead weight, free-loading, ignorant hordes of non-voters. No turning back for the arrogant, cowardly, manipulating, bought-and-paid for national Democratic machine, however cozy and centrist those dishonored leaders want to be. No turning back for the American people. Democracy. Constitution. Accountability. Justice.

Happy days. No turning back for any of us, once we take the first step; and America just took it.

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Saudi Arabia: Iraq a major terror base

Yahoo! News
Saudi Arabia: Iraq a major terror base

Saudi Arabia's interior minister on Sunday called Iraq a major base for terrorism, a sign of growing alarm over the neighboring country where U.S. forces are struggling to prevent Sunni-Shiite violence from escalating into full-scale civil war.

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif said the situation in Iraq is deteriorating daily and the country has become a threat to the whole region.

"There is no doubt that Iraq now forms a main base for terrorism," he told the pan-Arab Al-Arabiya television station in the capital Riyadh.

"The situation in Iraq is changing day after day, and this situation has numerous threats," he said before his departure to the United Arab Emirates to attend a meeting on security issues in the Gulf states.

The minister also said Saudi youth were being lured to fight in Iraq. U.S. and Iraqi officials have long complained about Saudi extremists crossing into Iraq to join the battle against American and coalition forces. U.S. officials announced last April that Saudis were one of the top five nationalities among foreign fighters captured by coalition forces in Iraq.

The oil-rich kingdom has been moving forward with plans to build a fence along its frontier with Iraq to prevent militants from crossing the border.

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Democrats: Identify pork sponsors

USA TODAY
Democrats: Identify pork sponsors
By Peter Eisler and Kathy Kiely, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Democrats aim to open the next Congress in January with a new rule that identifies lawmakers who use legislative "earmarks" to help special interests — a change Republicans promised but didn't implement.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said her first agenda item after being elected House speaker will be a vote to require sponsors of earmarks to be identified. Currently, lawmakers can remain anonymous in sponsoring an earmark, which is language in a bill that directs funds or tax benefits to a business, project or institution.

"There has to be transparency," the California congresswoman told USA TODAY last week. "I'd just as soon do away with all (earmarks), but that probably isn't realistic."

Pelosi said some earmarks "are worthy," and they can be a legitimate way for Congress to force fiscal priorities on the White House.

House Republican leaders adopted a disclosure rule in September, but no earmark sponsors have been identified under the rule because it effectively exempted bills that dictate spending for 2007.

Congress begins a lame-duck session today to consider unfinished 2007 appropriations bills. Those bills could give members another chance to insert anonymous earmarks. Regardless, the Republican rule expires at year's end, so Democrats would have to pass their own disclosure requirement.

Earmarking has drawn complaints from groups such as the National Taxpayers Union that say anonymity encourages wasteful spending. Conservative groups and some GOP lawmakers, such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have said Republicans' failure to bring accountability to the process helped fuel the party's losses last week.

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, cited earmark disclosure as one of several "needed reforms" that Republicans should back in the new Congress. "We hope that the party in which most of us have invested our trust will learn the right lessons" from the elections, he said.

Last month, a USA TODAY investigation found that many special interests got earmarks after hiring lobbyists who were relatives of lawmakers or staffers affiliated with the House and Senate appropriations committees.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the number of earmarks in appropriations bills has tripled in the past decade to about 16,000. One famous example was an earmark that set aside millions for a "bridge to nowhere" — a span over a remote Alaskan waterway to a sparsely populated island.

"You can't have bridges to nowhere for America's children to pay for," Pelosi said. "Or if you do, you have to know whose it is."



Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-12-dems-pork-sponsors_x.htm?csp=34

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Pelosi Endorses Murtha as Next Majority Leader

Washington Post
Pelosi Endorses Murtha as Next Majority Leader
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer

House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) yesterday as the next House majority leader, thereby stepping into a contentious intraparty fight between Murtha and her current deputy, Maryland's Steny H. Hoyer.

The unexpected move signaled the sizable value Pelosi gives to personal loyalty and personality preferences. Hoyer competed with her in 2001 for the post of House minority whip, while Murtha managed her winning campaign. Pelosi has also all but decided she will not name the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) to chair that panel next year, a decision pregnant with personal animus.

Pelosi had been outspoken about her frustration with Murtha's declaration that he would challenge Hoyer, currently the House minority whip, for the majority leader post long before Democrats had secured the majority. Many believed she would remain on the sidelines, just as Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) did earlier this year when three Republicans vied for the post of House majority leader.

But in her first real decision as the incoming speaker, Pelosi said she was swayed by Murtha's early stance for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Her letter of endorsement yesterday made clear that she sees Iraq as the central issue of the next Congress and that she believes a decorated Marine combat veteran at the helm of the House caucus would provide Democrats ammunition in their fight against congressional Republicans and President Bush on the issue.

"I salute your courageous leadership that changed the national debate and helped make Iraq the central issue of this historic election. It was surely a dark day for the Bush Administration when you spoke truth to power," she wrote. "Your strong voice for national security, the war on terror and Iraq provides genuine leadership for our party, and I count on you to lead on these vital issues."

Murtha responded, "I am deeply gratified to receive the support of Speaker Pelosi, a tireless advocate for change and a true leader for our Party and our country."

Pelosi's decision could be a significant blow to Hoyer, who has worked for years to move up in the Democratic leadership. Political handicappers had regarded Hoyer to be the strong favorite when House Democrats meet Thursday to choose a majority leader for the 110th Congress. Although Murtha's stance on Iraq has made him a hero among many grass-roots party activists, his positions against abortion and gun control have pushed many House liberals into Hoyer's camp, including the leader of the Out of Iraq Caucus, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).

Hoyer's camp counts 21 of the roughly 40 incoming freshman Democrats as committed supporters. Many freshmen believe the Democrats should stick with the team that brought them to the majority, said John Sarbanes, who was elected last week to represent central Maryland in the House.

Hoyer also has the strong support of many of the party's conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats, who worry about Murtha's involvement in the Abscam bribery sting in 1980 and what they see as his freewheeling style on the House Appropriations Committee, where he has openly advocated for the interests of his district and his political supporters.

Some of Hoyer's supporters put the best face on Pelosi's intervention, saying Murtha would not have asked for a public letter of support if his campaign were not in trouble.

"I don't think it's significant," said Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.), a leading Blue Dog and Hoyer supporter. "Everyone already knew she was supporting Murtha. I don't think this will have much of an impact. Steny's going to win this fight."

But Murtha has garnered the support of some influential Californians close to Pelosi, including Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), a liberal firebrand who will chair the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

In a statement, Hoyer said he remains confident he has the votes.

"Nancy told me some time ago that she would personally support Jack. I respect her decisions as the two are very close," he wrote. "I am grateful for the support I have from my colleagues, and have the majority of the caucus supporting me. I look forward to working with Speaker Pelosi as Majority Leader."

Another potentially fractious vote in the House Democratic Caucus was settled late last week when Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the outgoing chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, decided against running for House majority whip. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the only African American in the House Democratic leadership, had already announced his candidacy.

Emanuel instead will stand unopposed for the job Clyburn will vacate, House Democratic Caucus chairman. In his announcement, he appealed for party unity ahead of Thursday's leadership elections.

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Democrats Aim to Save Inquiry on Work in Iraq

The New York Times
Democrats Aim to Save Inquiry on Work in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ, DAVID JOHNSTON and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 — Congressional Democrats say they will press new legislation next week to restore the power of a federal agency in charge of ferreting out waste and corruption in Iraq and greatly increase its investigative reach.

The bills, the first of what are likely to be dozens of Democratic efforts to resurrect investigations of war profiteering and financial fraud in government contracting, could be introduced as early as Monday morning.

The move would nullify a Republican-backed provision, slipped into a huge military authorization bill, that set a termination date for the agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The agency’s findings have consistently undermined Bush administration claims of widespread success in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Oversight, the power wielded by Congressional committees to demand information and internal documents and to haul executive branch officials to hearings, by subpoena if necessary, is reverberating through Congress as a Democratic battle cry.

“The unilateral decision made by House Republicans to shut down this critical office should be reversed immediately,” said Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is poised to become the majority leader.

The House version of the bill will be introduced by Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat likely to take over as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, a member of Mr. Skelton’s staff said Friday. Mr. Skelton also said he would resurrect a subcommittee on oversight and investigations that was jettisoned by Republicans to investigate military spending.

In the Senate, Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is in line to become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that seeking a new strategy for Iraq would be his primary focus, but that he would also look carefully at military contracting.

“There have been serious allegations and evidence of misconduct among suppliers,” Mr. Levin said. “And the taxpayers, of course, get socked on that. And the troops are not properly taken care of when that happens.”

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said on Saturday that the administration was willing to have discussions with Congress on the proposal to extend the inspector general’s tenure. Mr. Fratto added, “We have a history of cooperating fully with and supporting inspectors general.”

Mr. Fratto said he could not speak more definitively on the subject because the legislation was yet to be released.

In a measure of the momentum behind the bill, it is expected to be introduced in the Senate by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, along with co-sponsors Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, and Joseph I. Lieberman, who won re-election as an independent in Connecticut.

“It is inconceivable that we would remove this aggressive oversight while the American taxpayer is still spending billions of dollars on Iraq reconstruction projects,” Ms. Collins said.

Mr. Reid has said that after the lame-duck session ends, the Democrats will press ahead with Congressional oversight, particularly on Iraq. But Democratic leaders have also been conciliatory in discussing broader efforts to review the administration’s initiatives of the past six years.

The imperative to investigate financial misdeeds extends beyond the military. Congressional aides said that the House government reform committee under Representative Henry A. Waxman of California might also investigate spending related to domestic security and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

The Appropriations Committee, which is likely to be led by Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, is likely to review more closely spending like large supplementary requests for Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition, after the negative political fallout of corruption cases involving lawmakers, the Appropriations Committee is under pressure to curtail earmarks, which are spending measures for specific projects not sought by a federal agency but sponsored by a lawmaker — sometimes anonymously and often for a financial supporter.

Potentially explosive confrontations over foreign policy issues between Democrats and the Bush administration may be unavoidable. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, who is expected to become the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been a critic of the C.I.A.’s secret detention program and the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program.

It is unclear how far chairmen like Mr. Rockefeller may push the administration to obtain more information about secret programs. The committee, like many others, has often degenerated into partisan rancor over the past two years, and Mr. Rockefeller, like other incoming chairmen, has told colleagues that one of his priorities is to restore the committee’s historic bipartisanship.

But there is unlikely to be much downside for the Democrats in going after waste and fraud in government contracting, particularly in the Iraq war, which is not only unpopular with the American public but also where corporate giants like Halliburton, Parsons and Bechtel have committed highly publicized missteps in the rebuilding program.

Investigations by the Iraq oversight agency, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., have already led to convictions of American occupation officials on bribery charges and uncovered many instances of substandard construction.

Mr. Bowen’s investigations of Halliburton have uncovered tens of millions of dollars of charges for work that achieved little in the way of results, but apparently met the letter of the company’s contract with the United States to repair oil facilities. Mr. Bowen has also found that Halliburton has been using federal loopholes to impede investigations of its work by declaring nearly all information about company activities in Iraq to be proprietary, or sensitive because it could aid the company’s competitors.

So it came as a surprise to many that Mr. Bowen’s office was directed to go out of business on Oct. 1, 2007, by an obscure provision in an authorization bill that President Bush signed last month. The termination language was quietly inserted into the bill by staff members working for Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who now leads the House Armed Services Committee.

As in the bill that the president signed, the new Senate proposal would expand the pot of money that Mr. Bowen could investigate, but it would not set a hard deadline for the agency’s work to come to an end. Both the House and Senate measures extend the deadline at least into 2008, by most readings, but the House measure would also add about $2 billion — for training and equipping Iraqi security forces — to the amount that the agency could investigate, a Congressional staff member said. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is expected to become the House speaker, said she would strongly support that legislation.

“Democrats want the inspector general to stay at work until the job is done,” Ms. Pelosi said. “Those individuals and companies responsible for shoddy work or fraudulent billing practices must be held accountable.”

Several officials on Capitol Hill said that the locus of resistance to extending the tenure of Mr. Bowen’s office came from the State Department, which believes that its own inspector general should begin taking on the job of investigating reconstruction in Iraq. But that notion finds resistance among some lawmakers who distrust the administration’s will to investigate itself.

Outside the reconstruction program, some agencies are likely to be singled out for special scrutiny, not only the Pentagon, but also the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Incoming Democratic chairman have said they plan to review the C.I.A.’s secret detention and interrogation program for important terrorism suspects and what some lawmakers have said is the sluggish pace of the F.B.I.’s effort to transform itself into a counterterrorism agency.

The Homeland Security Department has had at least some scrutiny from Congress in recent years, most particularly related to its performance and that of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

But the new Democratic leaders, their aides said, intend to significantly broaden the oversight efforts, a step that may include more frequent subpoenas for administration officials who have declined to appear for some hearings, as was the case in the hurricane investigation.

One area that almost certainly will draw additional oversight is mass-transit security, said Dena L. Graziano, spokeswoman for Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who is expected to take over the House Committee on Homeland Security.

And Democrats have long argued that the administration is too focused on aviation security, and has failed to devote enough money or attention to preventing bombings like those that have occurred in Madrid and London. Some Democrats, nursing years of slights at the hands of Republican appointees in federal agencies who ignored or brushed aside hundreds of their letters asking for information, are eager for answers. The Senate Judiciary Committee has staff members trying to compile a complete list of unanswered questions.

Some Democrats said before the election that they would inquire more deeply into some issues, asking for fuller accountability among senior officers and civilian officials at the Pentagon over the harsh treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“I think the accountability for Abu Ghraib has not yet been accomplished in terms of finding out who was involved, at what level,” said Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island.

For all the pledges of rigorous oversight, Democrats are moving warily, fearful of a misstep, mainly in national security areas, that could return them to the sidelines as a minority party.

That may explain the focus on less volatile issues like waste and fraudulent spending and why few Democrats are proposing inquiries on hot-button issues, like the underlying rationale for the war in Iraq or the underpinning for the administration’s counterterrorism policies.

Agendas are likely to shift over time, particularly in the House, where the leadership lineup will not be known with certainty for weeks. In addition, the transfer of majority control in both chambers means Republicans and Democrats must switch offices in the House and Senate. Republicans will be forced to dismiss some committee staff members, and Democrats will expand their workforce, in some committees nearly doubling staff size.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Skelton said that in the past, “the Congress has not worked, and has not asked the tough questions or held the administration to account.”

But he said it was the responsibility of every Democrat taking over a subcommittee chairmanship also to apply more scrutiny to government action, and not just those of subcommittees specifically charged with that mandate.

“Our subcommittee chairmen will be able to bring oversight back to their individual subcommittees,” he said.

David Johnston and Thom Shanker reported from Washington, and James Glanz from New York. Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Miami, and Mark Mazzetti and Rachel L. Swarns from Washington.

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Insurgent activity rising in Afghanistan

Yahoo! News
Insurgent activity rising in Afghanistan
By JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer

Insurgent activity in Afghanistan has risen fourfold this year, and militants now launch more than 600 attacks a month, a rising wave of violence that has resulted in 3,700 deaths in 2006, a bleak new report released Sunday found.

In the volatile border area near Pakistan, more than 20 Taliban militants — and possibly as many as 60 — were killed during several days of clashes, officials said Sunday.

The new report said insurgents were launching more than 600 attacks a month as of the end of September, up from 300 a month at the end of March this year. The violence has killed more than 3,700 people this year, it said.

Afghanistan saw about 130 insurgent attacks a month last year, said the report by the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, a body of Afghan and international officials charged with overseeing the implementation of the Afghanistan Compact, a five-year reconstruction and development blueprint signed in February.

The violence "threatens to reverse some of the gains made in the recent past, with development activities being especially hard hit in several areas, resulting in partial or total withdrawal of international agencies in a number of the worst-affected provinces."

The report said that the rising drug trade in Afghanistan is fueling the insurgency in four volatile southern provinces. The slow pace of development is contributing to popular disaffection and ineffective implementation of the drug fight, it said.

Afghanistan's poppy crop, which is used to make heroin, increased by 59 percent in Afghanistan this past year.

Insurgents have launched a record number of roadside bombs and suicide attacks this year, and there have been clashes all year between insurgents and Afghan and NATO security forces, particularly in the southern and eastern provinces near the border with Pakistan.

The 3,700 deaths the report attributes to insurgent-related violence is comparable to the number of deaths — about 3,500 — tallied by The Associated Press this year based on reports from the U.S. military, NATO and Afghan officials.

In the east, Gen. Murad Ali, the deputy Afghan army commander for Paktika province, said 20 bodies were recovered from fighting in Bermel district in the last several days. In addition, he said, two trucks carrying Taliban fighters were destroyed by airstrikes or artillery fire, and officials estimated 40 fighters were killed in those strikes.

Four NATO soldiers and three Afghan soldiers were injured, he said, though a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force said he was not aware of any serious injuries among NATO troops.

Maj. Luke Knittig said the operations in Bermel, which borders Pakistan, were part of an ongoing Afghan-NATO mission to root out Taliban militants before winter.

"We know we've engaged in successful operations in Bermel with a purpose, and we think those have had a very positive effect against insurgent activity there," Knittig said.

Knittig said Ali's estimate of 60 dead fighters "sounds about right to me," but he did not have an independent estimate of the number killed. "We are not into the numbers game here lately," he said.

Death tolls in remote areas of Afghanistan are almost impossible to verify and often vary widely.

Abdul Baqi Nuristani, the provincial police chief, said only 25 militants have been killed in Bermel the last couple days. He said three Afghan and three NATO soldiers were injured in what he called "a very big battle."

Ali said tribal elders took the bodies of eight Pakistani fighters back over the border to be buried.

Afghan officials have repeatedly accused Pakistan of not doing enough to prevent Pakistani or other foreign fighters from crossing the border to launch attacks. Pakistan says it does all it can, though border attacks have increased since a September agreement led the Pakistani military to pull out of its lawless tribal region.

Bermel is home to a military base that hosts both Afghan and U.S. soldiers. NATO-led troops aided by military aircraft killed 15 suspected insurgents in the district on Tuesday after troops on patrol came under attack.

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Lawmakers gear up to fight some old battles

Reuters
Lawmakers gear up to fight some old battles
By Donna Smith

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawmakers geared up to fight old battles with President George W. Bush over domestic wiretapping and a contentious U.N. nominee, even as Bush pledged to cooperate with the new Democratic-led Congress that starts in January.

The current Republican-led Congress -- including lawmakers who lost their seats in Tuesday's elections -- returns this week to work through a pile of unfinished legislation on spending, taxes, trade and international affairs that could keep it here until the Christmas holidays.

Bush made clear he wants certain things done while Congress is in Republican hands, including legislation authorizing the administration's domestic warrantless wiretapping program and Senate confirmation of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

With the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- who became the face of the Iraq war that was a major cause of Republican election losses -- senators from both parties also said they will work quickly to consider Bush's choice of a replacement, former CIA director Robert Gates.

Lawmakers also will choose leaders for the next Congress, when Democrats take control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in 12 years.

All of this is in addition to unfinished budget work for the 2007 fiscal year that began on October 1 and other items already on Congress' agenda including a civil nuclear agreement with India and normalizing trade relations with Vietnam.

Democrats say Bush is asking too much.

"For a Republican Congress that has gone forward for two years and produced so little, and then the president to come up with a huge agenda for the next weeks -- you have to ask 'why didn't you use some time you spent arguing on some other less important issues before,'" said Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the renewed push on Bolton, whose hawkish views made him a conservative favorite, and the domestic surveillance program that critics call unconstitutional, should not be viewed as "necessarily provocative."

DIFFERENT PRIORITIES

Congress has completed just two annual spending bills for the military and domestic security initiatives, and must deal with measures to finance farm programs, law enforcement, the environment, foreign aid and a range of other programs. Those have been operating through a stop-gap measure set to expire on November 17.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who will become majority leader, issued his own priorities list for the lame duck session -- and it did not include Bush's domestic surveillance program or Bolton.

Instead, Reid highlighted bioterrorism legislation, offshore drilling legislation that passed the Senate earlier this year but not the House, the India nuclear agreement and a bill extending popular business and individual tax breaks, in addition to the spending bills on everyone's list.

Bolton's nomination appears doomed given continued opposition by Democrats and a key Republican, Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who lost his reelection bid.

The plan is for lawmakers to break after next week for the Thanksgiving holiday and return starting on December 4 to finish the leftovers. A Senate Republican aide said a bill giving nuclear-armed India access to U.S. nuclear fuel and reactors for the first time in three decades may be ready by then.

The aide also said he hoped the House would accept a Senate-passed bill that would open a small new area in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and natural gas drilling. The House backed a broader bill that would open exploration in most U.S. Atlantic and Pacific waters more than 100 miles from shore.

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White House intent on Bolton for U.N. envoy

Reuters
White House intent on Bolton for U.N. envoy

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration is intent on overcoming Democratic opposition to U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, the White House said on Sunday, but top Democrats said Congress would not confirm the outspoken envoy.

"I think if (Bolton) actually was able to get a vote in the full Senate, he would succeed ... I'm still hopeful that we can get him through," White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten said on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

"He's been a good ambassador. He deserves confirmation, so we are following the rules," Bolten said.

The White House will try to build more bipartisan support for the nominee, Bolten said, instead of trying to sidestep Congress by keeping Bolton at the United Nations in a job that does not require congressional approval.

When originally faced with Democratic opposition, Bush put Bolton in the U.N. job in August 2005 with a temporary recess appointment that did not require congressional approval but expires in January.

Bush, now in an unfriendly political environment after Democrats swept last week's congressional elections, wants to see Bolton formally approved for the U.N. ambassadorship before Democrats take control of Congress in January.

Democrats have blocked confirmation of Bolton, a former undersecretary of state for nonproliferation, since he was first nominated in March 2005, charging he is ill-suited for the diplomatic workings of the United Nations.

"Mr. President, if you really mean it, that you really want to cooperate and have a bipartisan (support) -- play by the rules, Mr. President. ... Send somebody else," Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who is expected to head the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, said on "This Week."

Bolton has been a polarizing figure, not just among Democrats. Opposition from Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican who lost his seat in last week's elections, might also hurt Bolton's chance of confirmation.

'HE'S GOING TO LOSE'

The nominee "doesn't even have the votes of a Republican-controlled committee. ... He's going to lose," Biden said.

Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who will become the Senate majority leader, also indicated Bolton's chances were not good.

"Even before we took over, the Republicans didn't have enough votes to get the guy out of committee, so I think we should go to things we can work together on," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, another senior Democrat, told ABC that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has "not decided that he is the appropriate person for that job."

The White House's Bolten declined to confirm what course the White House would take if Bolton's nomination failed again.

He told CNN's "Late Edition" show that at least one lawmaker, Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, has reconsidered earlier opposition to Bolton. "We hope other members will see that," Bolten said.

White House counselor Dan Bartlett told "Fox News Sunday" that Bolton's record in the United Nations -- especially in building support for resolutions on North Korea and Iran -- had proved naysayers wrong.

"He's done a good job. We believe that both senators from both the Republican Party and Democratic Party ought to give this man the opportunity to continue," Bartlett said.

In blocking Bolton's original nomination, Democrats said he manipulated intelligence to promote hawkish views in his previous arms control job. He also has been criticized for having a go-it-alone attitude toward foreign policy but supporters say he is a strong defender of U.S. interests.

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Another Girl In The Club

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Heckuva Job!

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I am a Democrat!

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Stuff Happens!

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Hooray!

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