DeLay, Abramoff, and The Public Trust

huffingtonpost.com
Bill Moyers
DeLay, Abramoff, and The Public Trust

Back in the first Gilded Age, Boies Penrose was a United States senator from Pennsylvania who had been put and kept in office by the railroad tycoons and oil barons. He assured the moguls: "I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money... and out of your profits you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money."

Gilded Ages - then and now - have one thing in common: Audacious and shameless people for whom the very idea of the public trust is a cynical joke.

A recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that 70% of Americans believe lobbyists bribing members of Congress is the way things work. Findings like these underscore the fact that ordinary people believe their bonds with democracy are not only stretched but sundered.

You see the breach clearly with Tom DeLay. As he became the king of campaign fundraising, the Associated Press writes, "He began to live a lifestyle his constituents back in Sugar Land would have a hard time ever imagining." Big corporations provided private jets to take him to places of luxury most Americans have never seen - places with "dazzling views, warm golden sunsets, golf, goose-down comforters, marble bathrooms and balconies overlooking the ocean." The AP reports that various organizations - campaign committees, political action committees, even a children's charity established by DeLay - paid over $1 million on hotels, restaurants, golf resorts and corporate jets in DeLay's behalf.

DeLay was a man on the move and on the take. But he needed help to sustain the cash flow. He found it in a fellow right wing ideologue named Jack Abramoff. Abramoff personifies the Republican money machine of which DeLay with the blessing of the House leadership was the major domo.

Just last month Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials, a spectacular fall for a man whose rise to power began 25 years ago with his election as Chairman of the College Republicans. Despite its innocuous name, the organization became a political attack machine for the Far Right and a launching pad for younger conservatives on the make. "Our job," Abramoff, then 22 years old, wrote after his first visit to the Reagan White House, "is to remove liberals from power permanently [from] student newspaper and radio stations, student governments, and academia." Karl Rove had once held the same job as chairman. So did Grover Norquist, who ran Abramoff's campaign. A youthful $200-a-month intern named Ralph Reed was at their side. These were the rising young stars of the conservative movement who came to town to lead a revolution and stayed to run a racket.


Abramoff made his name, so to speak, representing Indian tribes with gambling interests. As his partner he hired a DeLay crony named Michael Scanlon. Together they would bilk half a dozen Indian tribes who hired them to protect their tribal gambling interests from competition. Abramoff and Scanlon came up with one scheme they called "Gimme Five": Abramoff would refer tribes to Scanlon for grassroots public relations work, and Scanlon would then kick back about 50% to Abramoff, all without the tribes' knowledge. Before it was over the tribes had paid them $82 million dollars, much of it going directly into Abramoff's and Scanlon's pockets.

Some of the money went to so-called charities set up by Abramoff and DeLay that filtered money for lavish trips for members of Congress and their staff, as well as salaries for Congressional family members and DeLay's pet projects. And some of the money found its way to the righteous folks of the Christian Right.

It gets worse.

Some of Abramoff's money from lobbying went to start a non-profit organization called the U.S. Family Network. Nice name, yes? An uplifting all-American name, like so many others that fly the conservative banner in Washington. But the organization did no discernable grassroots organizing and its money came from business groups with no demonstrated interest in the "moral fitness" agenda that was the network's professed aim.

Let's call it what it was: a scam - one more cog in the money-laundering machine controlled by DeLay and Abramoff. A former top assistant founded the organization. DeLay's wife also got a sizeable salary.

Twenty five years ago Grover Norquist had said that "What Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs in Washington. Then this will be a different town."

Well, they got what they needed, and the arc of the conservative takeover of government has now been completed.

Here we come to the heart of darkness.

One of Abramoff's first big lobbying clients was the Northern Marianas Islands in the Pacific. After World War II the Marianas became a trusteeship of the United Nations, administered by the U.S. Government under the stewardship of the Interior Department. We should all remember that thousands of Marines died there, fighting for our way of life and our freedoms. Now, the main island, Saipan, has become known as America's biggest sweatshop.

In 1998 a government report found workers there living in substandard conditions, suffering severe malnutrition and health problems and subjected to unprovoked acts of violence.

When these scandalous conditions began to attract attention, the sweatshop moguls fought all efforts at reform. Knowing that Jack Abramoff was close to Tom DeLay, they hired him to lobby for the islands. Conservative members of Congress lined up as Abramoff's team arranged for them to visit the islands on carefully guided junkets. They flew first-class, dined at posh restaurants, slept in comfort at the beachfront hotel, and returned to write and speak of the islands as "a true free market success story" and "a laboratory of liberty."

Abramoff took Tom DeLay and his wife there, too. DeLay practically swooned. He said the Marianas "represented what is best about America." He called them "my Galapagos" - "a perfect petri dish of capitalism."

For his services to the Marianas Jack Abramoff was paid nearly $10 million dollars. One of the sweatshop moguls with whom Abramoff was particularly close contributed half a million dollars to - you guessed it - Tom DeLay's U. S. Family Network.

To this day, workers on the Marianas are still denied the federal minimum wage while working long hours for subsistence income in their little "petri dish of capitalism" - "America at its best."

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The cost of corruption is passed on to you. When the government of the United States falls under the thumb of the powerful and privileged, regular folks get squashed.

Washington would have you believe this is just "a lobbying scandal." They would have you think that if they pass a few nominal reforms, put a little more distance between the politician and the lobbyist, you will think everything is okay and they can go back to business as usual.

They're trying it now. Just look at Congressman John Boehner, elected to replace Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. Today he speaks the language of reform, but ten years ago Boehner was handing out checks from the tobacco executives on the floor of the House. He has thought nothing of hopping on corporate jets or cruising Caribbean during winter breaks with high-powered lobbyists.

Moreover, the man Boehner beat to succeed DeLay - Congressman Roy Blunt - has been elected to DeLay's first job as Majority Whip despite being deeply compromised by millions upon millions of dollars raised from the same interests that bought off DeLay.

And what now of DeLay? He's under indictment for money laundering in Texas, but the other day the party bosses in Congress gave him a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and - are you ready for this? - they put him on the subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department which is investigating the Abramoff scandal, including Abramoff's connections to DeLay.

Business as usual. The usual rot. The power of arrogance.

I have painted a bleak picture of democracy. I believe it is a true picture. But it is not a hopeless picture. Something can be done about it. Organized people have always had to take on organized money. If they had not, blacks would still be three-fifths of a person, women wouldn't have the vote, workers couldn't organize, and children would still be working in the mines. Our democracy today is more real and more inclusive than existed in the days of the Founders because time and again, the people have organized themselves to insist that America become "a more perfect union."

It is time to fight again. These people in Washington have no right to be doing what they are doing. It's not their government, it's your government. They work for you. They're public employees - and if they let us down and sell us out, they should be fired. That goes for the lowliest bureaucrat in town to the senior leaders of Congress on up to the President of the United States.

Excerpted from remarks I delivered on an 8-day speaking trip in California on the issue of money and politics.

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The Texas Gerrymander

The New York Times
The Texas Gerrymander

The redrawing of election districts in Texas in 2003, which Tom DeLay helped engineer to make the state's Congressional delegation more Republican, lands in the Supreme Court today. Democrats are asking the court to rule that the plan is unconstitutional and violates the Voting Rights Act. The court should strike down the plan. It should also use the case to set limits on this kind of politically motivated drawing of districts by both parties, a practice that is making voters increasingly irrelevant.

Texas's 2003 redistricting was an extreme case of partisan gerrymandering. The state's Congressional lines had already been redrawn once, after the 2000 census, producing additional Republican seats in a way that a federal court decided was fair. But when Republicans took control of the state government, they decided to do a highly unusual second redistricting. Democratic state legislators protested and fled the state to deny the Republicans a quorum. But Texas eventually adopted a plan that tilted the state's delegation even further in the Republicans' favor.

The Supreme Court has acknowledged that partisan gerrymandering can violate the Constitution, but it has had trouble setting out a workable standard. In a Pennsylvania case two years ago, Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the deciding vote to dismiss a gerrymandering claim, but he suggested that courts could intervene in such cases "if some limited and precise rationale" could be found for doing so. In the Texas case, Democrats put forward such a standard: that "the Constitution prohibits legislators from redrawing election districts in the middle of a decade solely to achieve partisan advantage."

The Texas plan should be struck down on that ground, and because it violates the principle of one person one vote. More than a million people were added to the Texas population between the census and the 2003 redistricting. These new arrivals were not distributed equally, and it is likely that they were disproportionately Hispanic. The state used outdated 2000 population data to draw the 2003 lines, producing districts that failed to give all of the state's voters equal representation in Congress.

The Texas voters challenging the plan also make a strong claim that it violates the Voting Rights Act. The Justice Department signed off on the plan, but in doing so, as The Washington Post reported, its political appointees overruled the unanimous conclusion of six lawyers and two analysts in the voting rights section who had concluded that the new lines illegally reduced black and Hispanic voting strength.

Partisan gerrymandering should be a bipartisan issue because both parties have been hurt by it and no doubt will be again. Its real victims, though, are the voters.

Nationally, the lines drawn for 2002 produced the least competitive Congressional elections in history — challengers beat just four incumbents, and fewer than 40 races were even minimally competitive. If the Supreme Court permits those drawing legislative lines to use high-powered computers to create district lines that predetermine the outcomes of all but a handful of Congressional races, America may need to come up with another word for its form of government, because "democracy" will hardly apply.

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In Medicare Maze, Some Find They're Tangled in Two Drug Plans

The New York Times
In Medicare Maze, Some Find They're Tangled in Two Drug Plans
By ROBERT PEAR

KITTANNING, Pa. — Having struggled to fathom Medicare's new drug coverage, tens of thousands of beneficiaries are perplexed to find themselves actively enrolled in two prescription drug plans at the same time.

Shirley D. Beer, who lives in a mobile home here in western Pennsylvania, illustrates the predicament. Mrs. Beer was assigned to one insurance plan by the federal government, then exercised her right to choose another plan and now seems deeply embedded in both.

The first plan still carries her on its rolls and pays for some of her prescriptions, even though she declared four months ago that she wanted to drop out and had joined the second plan, which covers most of the 12 medications she takes for heart problems, high blood pressure and other chronic conditions.

Many Medicare beneficiaries like Mrs. Beer are entangled in two live plans — two "hot plans," in the lingo of pharmacists. The situation leaves patients at risk of being charged two premiums or incorrect co-payments.

The Bush administration acknowledged the problem in a recent memorandum to insurers.

"Numerous beneficiaries have switched plans," the memorandum said. "Our processing systems have not always sent the enrollment and disenrollment information to the appropriate plans." As a result, it said, "many (possibly all) of the beneficiaries who switched plans are active on enrollment files at multiple plans."

The situation illustrates the "computer glitches" that officials say have bedeviled the program since enrollment began in November.

The Medicare agency said it was working with insurers to resolve the "enrollment discrepancies." But it is proceeding with caution because, it said, a sudden, unexpected mass disenrollment could provoke a flood of inquiries and complaints to insurers and the government from puzzled beneficiaries.

Mrs. Beer, a 78-year-old widow who lives here outside Pittsburgh on a government check of $603 a month, said that her first plan, Gateway, "did not want to let me go," and that the second plan, offered by WellCare, had yet to send her an insurance card.

Medicare records show that Mrs. Beer is now enrolled in WellCare's Signature plan. But she continues to receive mail from Gateway certifying that she is a member. And Gateway's automated telephone information system verifies that she still has coverage.

"This is enough to drive any sane person crazy," Mrs. Beer said, expressing frustration at the uncertainty of her situation.

Pharmacists and beneficiaries around the country report similar experiences. Christopher J. Decker, executive vice president of the Pharmacy Society of Wisconsin, said "it happens fairly routinely" that pharmacists find patients enrolled in two drug plans.

"The plans are often willing to cover the same prescription for the same beneficiary but charge different co-payments," Mr. Decker said. "This creates confusion and problems for patients and pharmacists alike."

James M. Maister, a pharmacist in Lutz, Fla., north of Tampa, said that in some cases involving Medicare patients enrolled in two plans, "both plans have automatic deductions scheduled from the patient's Social Security check."

Health care providers in Florida said they had alerted federal officials because they worried that unscrupulous pharmacists might submit duplicate claims for the same prescription. In an e-mail response, Marisa B. Duarte, an employee in the Atlanta regional office of the federal Medicare agency, said, "We are still working out systems glitches, so having someone enrolled in two plans is common." Federal caseworkers can "verify the exact plan," Ms. Duarte added.

In his radio address on Saturday, President Bush defended the drug benefit. "This new coverage is saving seniors money on their drug premiums," Mr. Bush said. "The typical senior will end up spending about half of what they used to spend on prescription drugs each year."

Under the Medicare drug program, millions of low-income people are entitled to extra help that eliminates their premiums and deductibles and sharply reduces their co-payments.

But when a beneficiary switches plans, Medicare typically provides information on the person's low-income status to only one of the two plans. The other may still be providing coverage without realizing that the person is entitled to a low-income subsidy. This helps explain why some low-income beneficiaries have received bills for premiums they do not owe — $25 or $35 a month — while others have been charged $40 for a drug at the pharmacy, when their co-payments are not supposed to exceed $5.

Jane-ellen A. Weidanz, the Medicare project manager at the Oregon Department of Human Services, said: "There appears to be a fundamental flaw in the Medicare computer system that transmits information on enrollment of clients and their low-income status. We have clients who changed plans last November. The first plan has information on their low-income status, but the second plan still does not have the information."

The drug benefit is offered by scores of insurers under contract to Medicare. The plans typically cover different drugs.

Jude E. Walsh, pharmacy affairs coordinator for the governor of Maine, said her state had helped 15,000 people switch to plans that would cover more of their medications. "Many of these beneficiaries have been listed as active in two plans at the same time," Ms. Walsh said. "It is hugely confusing."

When a person signs up for a drug plan, the government is supposed to confirm the transaction in a computer-generated report to the insurance company offering the plan. If a person switches plans, Medicare is supposed to send a disenrollment notice to the first plan and a confirmation of enrollment to the second plan. But in some cases, the government mistakenly sent both notices to the second plan, so the first plan did not know that the person had left its rolls.

Moreover, some plans said they had quit processing disenrollments because they could not tell which notices were valid.

Having people enrolled in multiple plans can cause financial headaches for insurers. "Plans have paid claims for beneficiaries who are no longer enrolled in their plan," the Bush administration said in its memorandum to insurers.

The government said it would help insurers determine who should have paid which claims, so they could reimburse one another. If, for example, Plan A paid Medicare drug claims that should have been paid by Plan B, then Plan B owes money to Plan A.

Douglas D. Adkins, the executive director of Dayspring Village, an assisted-living center for people with mental illness in Hilliard, Fla., said the reconciliation process would be difficult.

"It's like trying to undo spaghetti," Mr. Adkins said. "It will take a lot of effort to untangle it all."

More than one in six Pennsylvania residents is on Medicare. For more than 20 years, the state has had its own program to help older adults with their drug costs. Thomas M. Snedden, director of the program, said he was eager to help 200,000 Pennsylvanians enroll in Medicare drug plans that would meet their needs.

But Mr. Snedden said he could not do so because "the federal government cannot yet provide us with a complete, accurate list identifying which state residents are already enrolled in which Medicare drug plans and which people are entitled to low-income subsidies."

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Bush says bin Laden tape aided re-election

Reuters
Bush says bin Laden tape aided re-election: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush said his 2004 re-election victory over Sen. John Kerry was aided by Osama bin Laden, who issued a taped diatribe against him the Friday before Americans went to the polls, The Examiner newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Bush said there were "enormous amounts of discussion" inside his campaign about the 15-minute tape, which he called "an interesting entry by our enemy" into the presidential race.

Bush's comments in the Washington newspaper were excerpts from the new book "Strategery" by Bill Sammon, a long-time White House correspondent.

"What does it mean? Is it going to help? Is it going to hurt?" Bush told Sammon of the bin Laden tapes. "Anything that drops in at the end of a campaign that is not already decided creates all kinds of anxieties, because you're not sure of the effect.

"I thought it was going to help," Bush said. "I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn't want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush."

In an ABC News interview before leaving on a visit to India and Pakistan, Bush said he was optimistic that bin Laden would be brought to justice. Bush said he would be discussing with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf efforts to track down the al Qaeda leader.

Many experts believe bin Laden is hiding on the Pakistan side of the border with Afghanistan.

"So long as I'm the president, we'll stay on the hunt and we'll use resources and power and influence to convince others to join us on the hunt as well," Bush told ABC. "I'm an optimistic person. I believe we will bring him to justice."

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The Minnesota GOP’s Stealth Attack On Privacy

thinkprogress.org
The Minnesota GOP’s Stealth Attack On Privacy
– Peter Swire

A story by Minnesota Public Radio reveals a disturbing new way that a political party is secretly grabbing sensitive personal information about voters.

This week the Minnesota Republican Party is distributing a new CD about a proposed state marriage amendment. Along with flashy graphics, the CD asks people their views on controversial issues such as abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, and so on.

The problem – the CD sends your answers back to headquarters, filed by name, address, and political views. No mention of that in the terms of use. No privacy policy at all. The story concludes: “So if you run the CD in your personal computer, by the end of it, the Minnesota GOP will not only know what you think on particular issues, but also who you are.”

These practices fall way below the standard for today’s polling firms and web sites. The norm for polling firms is to anonymize the data and report only statistical totals. The norm for commercial web sites is to have a privacy policy, with Federal Trade Commission enforcement if the web site breaks its privacy promise.

Without a privacy policy, the state party can tell your views to anyone at all. If you give the “wrong” answers on abortion or other issues, they can tell your boss, members of your church, or anyone else. In fact, these answers could get distributed to campaigns in your town during get-out-the-vote efforts – precisely the place where “wrong” answers can be most damaging.

The right answer here is simple. If you are collecting data and keeping it in identified form, then you should tell people. If you are selling your lists or sending them to other groups, you should tell that as well. That goes for all political parties.

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Gonzales Seeks to Clarify Testimony on Spying; Extent of Eavesdropping May Go Beyond NSA Work

washingtonpost.com
Gonzales Seeks to Clarify Testimony on Spying
Extent of Eavesdropping May Go Beyond NSA Work

By Charles Babington and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales appeared to suggest yesterday that the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance operations may extend beyond the outlines that the president acknowledged in mid-December.

In a letter yesterday to senators in which he asked to clarify his Feb. 6 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales also seemed to imply that the administration's original legal justification for the program was not as clear-cut as he indicated three weeks ago.

At that appearance, Gonzales confined his comments to the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, saying that President Bush had authorized it "and that is all that he has authorized."

But in yesterday's letter, Gonzales, citing that quote, wrote: "I did not and could not address . . . any other classified intelligence activities." Using the administration's term for the recently disclosed operation, he continued, "I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the President, the legality of which was the subject" of the Feb. 6 hearing.

At least one constitutional scholar who testified before the committee yesterday said in an interview that Gonzales appeared to be hinting that the operation disclosed by the New York Times in mid-December is not the full extent of eavesdropping on U.S. residents conducted without court warrants.

"It seems to me he is conceding that there are other NSA surveillance programs ongoing that the president hasn't told anyone about," said Bruce Fein, a government lawyer in the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations.

A Justice Department official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the program, said, however, that Gonzales's letter "should not be taken or construed to be talking about anything other than" the NSA program "as described by the president."

In his letter, Gonzales revisited earlier testimony, during which he said the administration immediately viewed a congressional vote in September 2001 to authorize the use of military force against al-Qaeda as justification for the NSA surveillance program. Bush secretly began the program in October 2001, Gonzales's letter said.

On Feb. 6, Gonzales testified that the Justice Department considered the use-of-force vote as a legal green light for the wiretapping "before the program actually commenced."

But in yesterday's letter, he wrote, "these statements may give the misimpression that the Department's legal analysis has been static over time."

Fein said the letter seems to suggest that the Justice Department actually embraced the use-of-force argument some time later, prompting Gonzales to write that the legal justification "has evolved over time."

One government source who has been briefed on the issue confirmed yesterday that the administration believed from the beginning that the president had the constitutional authority to order the eavesdropping, and only more recently added the force resolution argument as a legal justification.

Ranking Judiciary Committee Democrat Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) said Gonzales's letter falls "far short of helping us focus this picture. Instead, they blur it further with vague responses about their shifting legal analysis for this illegal domestic spying and with unclear clarifications on the scope of the program over the last four years."

Also yesterday, the Senate voted 69 to 30 to end a filibuster of the proposed four-year extension of the USA Patriot Act, the sweeping anti-terrorism law enacted in 2001. The Senate plans today to approve the measure, which contains hotly debated modifications.

In a morning Judiciary Committee hearing, hours before Gonzales's letter was released, Fein was one of several constitutional experts who sharply challenged the constitutionality of the NSA program. Other scholars and former CIA director R. James Woolsey strongly defended it.

Bush has acknowledged that he authorized the NSA to monitor phone calls and e-mails involving one party in the United States and one abroad, provided that federal agents suspect one party of terrorist ties. The administration contends that the program is not covered by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court to consider government requests to wiretap U.S. citizens and residents in terrorism and espionage cases.

Numerous lawmakers, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), disagree. Specter says the NSA program violates the FISA law, and he is proposing legislation that would allow the FISA court to rule on the program's constitutionality and to oversee aspects of the surveillance operations.

Woolsey, President Bill Clinton's first CIA director, defended the eavesdropping program.

"The one-spy-at-a-time surveillance systems of the Cold War -- including FISA, through courts -- are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping" of today's terrorism fight, he said. "An al-Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of e-mail addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly," he said, and the FISA warrant process is too cumbersome to allow it.

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DeLay, Abramoff, and The Public Trust

huffingtonpost.com
DeLay, Abramoff, and The Public Trust
Bill Moyers

Back in the first Gilded Age, Boies Penrose was a United States senator from Pennsylvania who had been put and kept in office by the railroad tycoons and oil barons. He assured the moguls: "I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money... and out of your profits you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money."

Gilded Ages - then and now - have one thing in common: Audacious and shameless people for whom the very idea of the public trust is a cynical joke.

A recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that 70% of Americans believe lobbyists bribing members of Congress is the way things work. Findings like these underscore the fact that ordinary people believe their bonds with democracy are not only stretched but sundered.

You see the breach clearly with Tom DeLay. As he became the king of campaign fundraising, the Associated Press writes, "He began to live a lifestyle his constituents back in Sugar Land would have a hard time ever imagining." Big corporations provided private jets to take him to places of luxury most Americans have never seen - places with "dazzling views, warm golden sunsets, golf, goose-down comforters, marble bathrooms and balconies overlooking the ocean." The AP reports that various organizations - campaign committees, political action committees, even a children's charity established by DeLay - paid over $1 million on hotels, restaurants, golf resorts and corporate jets in DeLay's behalf.

DeLay was a man on the move and on the take. But he needed help to sustain the cash flow. He found it in a fellow right wing ideologue named Jack Abramoff. Abramoff personifies the Republican money machine of which DeLay with the blessing of the House leadership was the major domo.

Just last month Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials, a spectacular fall for a man whose rise to power began 25 years ago with his election as Chairman of the College Republicans. Despite its innocuous name, the organization became a political attack machine for the Far Right and a launching pad for younger conservatives on the make. "Our job," Abramoff, then 22 years old, wrote after his first visit to the Reagan White House, "is to remove liberals from power permanently [from] student newspaper and radio stations, student governments, and academia." Karl Rove had once held the same job as chairman. So did Grover Norquist, who ran Abramoff's campaign. A youthful $200-a-month intern named Ralph Reed was at their side. These were the rising young stars of the conservative movement who came to town to lead a revolution and stayed to run a racket.

Abramoff made his name, so to speak, representing Indian tribes with gambling interests. As his partner he hired a DeLay crony named Michael Scanlon. Together they would bilk half a dozen Indian tribes who hired them to protect their tribal gambling interests from competition. Abramoff and Scanlon came up with one scheme they called "Gimme Five": Abramoff would refer tribes to Scanlon for grassroots public relations work, and Scanlon would then kick back about 50% to Abramoff, all without the tribes' knowledge. Before it was over the tribes had paid them $82 million dollars, much of it going directly into Abramoff's and Scanlon's pockets.

Some of the money went to so-called charities set up by Abramoff and DeLay that filtered money for lavish trips for members of Congress and their staff, as well as salaries for Congressional family members and DeLay's pet projects. And some of the money found its way to the righteous folks of the Christian Right.

It gets worse.

Some of Abramoff's money from lobbying went to start a non-profit organization called the U.S. Family Network. Nice name, yes? An uplifting all-American name, like so many others that fly the conservative banner in Washington. But the organization did no discernable grassroots organizing and its money came from business groups with no demonstrated interest in the "moral fitness" agenda that was the network's professed aim.

Let's call it what it was: a scam - one more cog in the money-laundering machine controlled by DeLay and Abramoff. A former top assistant founded the organization. DeLay's wife also got a sizeable salary.

Twenty five years ago Grover Norquist had said that "What Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs in Washington. Then this will be a different town."

Well, they got what they needed, and the arc of the conservative takeover of government has now been completed.

Here we come to the heart of darkness.

One of Abramoff's first big lobbying clients was the Northern Marianas Islands in the Pacific. After World War II the Marianas became a trusteeship of the United Nations, administered by the U.S. Government under the stewardship of the Interior Department. We should all remember that thousands of Marines died there, fighting for our way of life and our freedoms. Now, the main island, Saipan, has become known as America's biggest sweatshop.

In 1998 a government report found workers there living in substandard conditions, suffering severe malnutrition and health problems and subjected to unprovoked acts of violence.

When these scandalous conditions began to attract attention, the sweatshop moguls fought all efforts at reform. Knowing that Jack Abramoff was close to Tom DeLay, they hired him to lobby for the islands. Conservative members of Congress lined up as Abramoff's team arranged for them to visit the islands on carefully guided junkets. They flew first-class, dined at posh restaurants, slept in comfort at the beachfront hotel, and returned to write and speak of the islands as "a true free market success story" and "a laboratory of liberty."

Abramoff took Tom DeLay and his wife there, too. DeLay practically swooned. He said the Marianas "represented what is best about America." He called them "my Galapagos" - "a perfect petri dish of capitalism."

For his services to the Marianas Jack Abramoff was paid nearly $10 million dollars. One of the sweatshop moguls with whom Abramoff was particularly close contributed half a million dollars to - you guessed it - Tom DeLay's U. S. Family Network.

To this day, workers on the Marianas are still denied the federal minimum wage while working long hours for subsistence income in their little "petri dish of capitalism" - "America at its best."

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The cost of corruption is passed on to you. When the government of the United States falls under the thumb of the powerful and privileged, regular folks get squashed.

Washington would have you believe this is just "a lobbying scandal." They would have you think that if they pass a few nominal reforms, put a little more distance between the politician and the lobbyist, you will think everything is okay and they can go back to business as usual.

They're trying it now. Just look at Congressman John Boehner, elected to replace Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. Today he speaks the language of reform, but ten years ago Boehner was handing out checks from the tobacco executives on the floor of the House. He has thought nothing of hopping on corporate jets or cruising Caribbean during winter breaks with high-powered lobbyists.

Moreover, the man Boehner beat to succeed DeLay - Congressman Roy Blunt - has been elected to DeLay's first job as Majority Whip despite being deeply compromised by millions upon millions of dollars raised from the same interests that bought off DeLay.

And what now of DeLay? He's under indictment for money laundering in Texas, but the other day the party bosses in Congress gave him a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and - are you ready for this? - they put him on the subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department which is investigating the Abramoff scandal, including Abramoff's connections to DeLay.

Business as usual. The usual rot. The power of arrogance.

I have painted a bleak picture of democracy. I believe it is a true picture. But it is not a hopeless picture. Something can be done about it. Organized people have always had to take on organized money. If they had not, blacks would still be three-fifths of a person, women wouldn't have the vote, workers couldn't organize, and children would still be working in the mines. Our democracy today is more real and more inclusive than existed in the days of the Founders because time and again, the people have organized themselves to insist that America become "a more perfect union."

It is time to fight again. These people in Washington have no right to be doing what they are doing. It's not their government, it's your government. They work for you. They're public employees - and if they let us down and sell us out, they should be fired. That goes for the lowliest bureaucrat in town to the senior leaders of Congress on up to the President of the United States.

Excerpted from remarks I delivered on an 8-day speaking trip in California on the issue of money and politics.

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Bin Laden is Welcome In Pakistan

[Editor's Note: It has been 1,625 days since Bush said he'd catch Osama bin Laden "Dead or Alive!"]

washingtonpost.com
Bin Laden is Welcome In Pakistan
By Ahmed Rashid

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, is the author of "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" (Yale University Press) and "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia" (Penguin Books).

LAHORE When President Bush lands in Islamabad later this week, it may be the closest he ever comes to being in the same neighborhood as Osama bin Laden. His nemesis is probably only a few hours drive away in Pakistan's Pashtun belt, now considered to be al Qaeda Central and one of the world's most dangerous regions.

During the past 12 months or so, CIA and Pentagon officials have quietly modified the line they employed for three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- that bin Laden was hiding out "in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border." Now the same officials say with some confidence that he is "not based in Afghanistan." Whatever ambiguity there was in the past is gone: Bin Laden is in Pakistan.

What's left is the question: What are the United States and its ally, Pakistan, doing about it?

Not enough, according to high-ranking Afghan, Pakistani and Western officials I've spoken to here. Indeed, the disastrous policies of the United States and Pakistan, starting with the aftermath of the war in 2001, have only hastened the radicalization of northwest Pakistan and made it more hospitable to bin Laden and his Taliban allies. The region has become a haven for bin Laden and a base for Taliban raids across the border back into Afghanistan which they had fled.

Not that you'd be able to tell any of that from what Bush administration officials have been saying. Almost everything the administration claims about the al Qaeda leader is tinged with bravado and untruthfulness. "We are dealing with a figure who has been able to hide, but he's on the run," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said earlier this month. Here in Pakistan, however, the view is different. Bin Laden is not considered to be on the run, but well protected by friends who are making his life as comfortable as possible.

After all, his number two, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, appears to have a busy social calendar in Pakistan's Pashtun belt. U.S. missiles narrowly missed him at a dinner party held in his honor on Jan. 13.

This represents a change in venue for bin Laden and his lieutenants. Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, bin Laden's zone of influence was among Pashtuns in Afghanistan, which was the center of the Taliban's power and its major recruiting base. The Pashtuns are Afghanistan's largest ethnic group and have ruled the country for the past 300 years. They were artificially divided by the British so that today millions of Pashtuns also live across the border in Pakistan, many of them in seven so-called tribal agencies where control by the government has been minimal.

It was in eastern Afghanistan that bin Laden made his last public appearance in Jalalabad on Nov. 10, 2001, just after the northern cities had begun to fall to the anti-Taliban alliance. He addressed an estimated 1,000 Pashtun notables and militants, urging them to continue resisting the American invaders, according to U.S. journalists working in the region at the time. He dished out wads of U.S. and Pakistani cash and then disappeared into the mountain fastness of Tora Bora, never to be seen again. (The CIA didn't learn of the meeting for several days.)

Few Afghan Pashtuns would have dared to betray him then. But times have changed in Afghanistan. The majority of Afghan Pashtuns now want the benefits of peace -- economic development, roads and schools.

Pakistan's Pashtuns, by contrast, have become more radicalized than they ever were before 9/11. And the bloody Taliban-al Qaeda resurgence now under way has relied on Pakistan's Pashtun belt for most of its recruitment, logistics, weapons and funding.

Bin Laden's new friendship zone stretches nearly 2,000 miles along Pakistan's Pashtun belt -- from Chitral in the Northern Areas near the Chinese border, south through the troubled tribal agencies including Waziristan, down to Zhob on the Balochistan border, then to the provincial capital Quetta and southwest to the Iranian border. The region includes every landscape from desert to snow-capped mountains. Sparsely populated, it provides bin Laden an ideal sanctuary.

Al Qaeda's money, inspiration and organizational abilities have helped turn Pakistan's Pashtun belt into the extremist base it is today, but U.S. and Pakistani policies have helped more. Although the Taliban and al Qaeda extremists were routed from Afghanistan by U.S. forces, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's refusal to put enough U.S. troops on the ground let the extremists escape and regroup in Pakistan's Pashtun belt. The Taliban settled in Balochistan where they had originated before 1994, while al Qaeda members hid in the tribal agencies they knew well. Bin Laden had built tunnels and caves there for the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in the 1980s.

What followed was a disaster: For 27 months after the fall of the Taliban regime, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Washington's closest ally in the region, allowed the extremists free rein in the Pashtun tribal areas to re-establish training camps for militants who had escaped Afghanistan. These included Arabs, Central Asians, Chechens, Kashmiris, Africans, Uighurs and a smattering of East Asians. It was a mini-replay of the gathering in Afghanistan after bin Laden arrived there in 1996.

Musharraf did capture some Arab members of al Qaeda, but he avoided the Taliban because he was convinced that the U.S.-led coalition forces would not stay long in Afghanistan. He wanted to maintain the Taliban as a strategic option in case Afghanistan dissolved into civil war and chaos again. The army also protected extremist Kashmiri groups who had trained in Afghanistan before 9/11 and now had to be repositioned.

Indeed, in March 2002, just three months after the defeat of the Taliban, the United States began to withdraw its Special Forces, surveillance satellites and drones from Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq. Distracted by Baghdad, it did not notice what was happening in the tribal agencies. By the time the Pakistan army entered South Waziristan in March 2004, the extremists were so well entrenched that 250 Pakistani soldiers were killed in the first encounters.

Since then, with no consistent political strategy to woo the Pashtun population away from bin Laden, the army has steadily lost ground. The political agents, who ran the tribal agencies with a mixture of bribery and pressure, have been replaced by arrogant generals ignorant of local conditions. Today the extremists rule over North and South Waziristan and other tribal agencies, while the 70,000 Pakistani troops stationed there are boxed up in outposts, too frightened to patrol the mountains. More than 100 pro-government tribal elders have been assassinated by extremists for divulging information to the U.S. or Pakistani secret services.

Meanwhile down south, the Balochistan provincial government is controlled by a coalition of pro-Taliban fundamentalist parties, which came to power in elections in 2002. Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islami, the party that controls the key ministries, openly supports the Taliban.

This has created a new stronghold from which the Taliban can launch attacks back in Afghanistan. The 99 U.S. soldiers killed last year in Afghanistan were mostly targeted by the Taliban based in Balochistan. While Washington's principal aim has been to capture bin Laden and decapitate al Qaeda, whose members are believed to be in Waziristan, the United States has failed to pressure Pakistan to deal with the Taliban, despite protestations from Afghan President Hamid Karzai. On a visit to Islamabad this month, Karzai handed Musharraf intelligence dossiers detailing how suicide bombers are being trained in Pakistan. In the past few months, at least 30 attacks have killed nearly 100 people in Afghanistan, including NATO peacekeepers and a Canadian diplomat.

The dossiers listed the names and addresses of Pakistani recruiters and people who equip suicide bombers with explosives before sending them to Afghanistan. Much of the recruitment takes place at a radical Islamic bookshop, several mosques and some madrassas in the port city of Karachi, while the training is done at safe houses in Quetta and Chaman, in Balochistan province.

"We have provided President Musharraf with a lot of very detailed information on acts of terrorism . . . and we discussed in great detail what actions Pakistan could now take," Karzai told me on Feb. 17 in Islamabad. ''Americans are dying, a Canadian diplomat has been killed, our people are suffering. So it is time that action is taken to stop these acts of terrorism and interference in Afghanistan internal affairs," he said. "We expect results."

Getting those results won't be easy. Bin Laden has fighters and sympathizers down the length and breadth of Pakistan's Pashtun belt. No Pakistani Pashtun has reason to betray bin Laden, despite the $27 million reward for his head. Thanks to the drug trade in Afghanistan and the suitcases full of cash still arriving from backers in the Arabian Gulf, neither al Qaeda nor the local Pashtuns are short money. The Pakistani army's failure to offer Pashtuns a greater political role in the national framework has not inspired any loyalty among the tribesmen. And misguided U.S. interventions, such as the January missile strike that killed women and children, do the rest.

Washington's recent decison to start pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan this year has only reinforced al Qaeda's belief that it is winning. After nearly five years of avoiding capture or death, every single day that bin Laden stays alive is a day that inspires the extremists who protect him and join his ranks.

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"Qaeda escapee" says will take fight to US soil

Reuters
"Qaeda escapee" says will take fight to US soil

DUBAI (Reuters) - A Web site often used by militants posted a video tape on Monday in which a purported al Qaeda escapee from a U.S. airbase in Afghanistan vowed to fight Americans in Iraq and the United States.

The man, identified as Faruq al-Iraqi, said he was one of four al Qaeda members who escaped from the base in July. A U.S. defense official said in November four Qaeda members, including the group's most senior operative in southeast Asia, Omar al-Faruq, escaped from Bagram military prison in July.

"I say to the Americans ... we will fight them ... in Iraq and in their country," the man said on the tape recorded late in 2005 and posted on the Web site.

"They (Americans) will not be able to stop the march of Jihad ... with their checkpoints, forces, machinery, advanced equipment. No matter how strong or equipped they are they will not defeat the Almighty."

Sitting in a jungle wearing an ammunition belt, the man told the story of an "easy" escape from the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan where he was held after his arrest in Indonesia.

"We did not think it was this easy, to leave like this. We thought there were military positions...," said Iraqi, who said he escaped with three other Qaeda members he identified with aliases Abou Nasser, Abou Yehya and Abdullah al-Shami.

The tape showed what purported to be all four of them.

U.S. intelligence officials say Faruq, a Kuwaiti, was captured in Indonesia in 2002 and handed to U.S. custody.

The tape's authenticity could not be verified.

The U.S. military has said prison security procedures were bolstered immediately after the breakout of the four men, who were still at large.

The Bagram detention center has housed hundreds of suspects since U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban in late 2001 for refusing to give up bin Laden after the September 11 attacks on the United States.

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NYT sues Pentagon over domestic spying

Reuters
NYT sues Pentagon over domestic spying

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times sued the U.S. Defense Department on Monday demanding that it hand over documents about the National Security Agency's domestic spying program.

The Times wants a list of documents including all internal memos and e-mails about the program of monitoring phone calls without court approval. It also seeks the names of the people or groups identified by it.

The Times in December broke the story that the NSA had begun intercepting domestic communications believed linked to al Qaeda following the September 11 attacks. That provoked renewed criticism of the way U.S. President George W. Bush is handling his declared war on terrorism.

Bush called the disclosure of the program to the Times a "shameful act" and the U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation into who leaked it.

The Times had requested the documents in December under the Freedom of Information Act but sued upon being unsatisfied with the Pentagon's response that the request was "being processed as quickly as possible," according to the six-page suit filed at federal court in New York.

David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, acknowledged that the list of documents sought was lengthy but that the Pentagon failed to assert there were "unusual circumstances," a provision of the law that would grant the Pentagon extra time to respond.

The Defense Department, which was sued as the parent agency of the NSA, did not immediately respond to the suit.

McCraw said there was "no connection" between the Justice Department probe and the Times' lawsuit.

"This is an important story that our reporters are continuing to pursue and of the ways to do that is through the Freedom of Information Act," McCraw said.

The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the federal government to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for surveillance operations inside the United States.

But the Bush administration says the president as commander in chief of the armed forces has the authority to carry out the intercepts and that Congress also gave him the authority upon approving the use of force in response to the September 11 attacks.

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Democrats seek special probe of Bush's NSA program

Reuters
Democrats seek special probe of Bush's NSA program
By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic lawmakers have asked President George W. Bush to order a special probe of his domestic spying program, while a Senate Republican readied legislation that would subject the controversial program to judicial review.

In a letter released on Monday, 18 House of Representatives Democrats told Bush a special counsel was necessary because administration officials including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are too involved in defending the National Security Agency program to provide independent scrutiny.

The inspectors general of the Defense Department and the Justice Department turned down earlier requests from Democrats for independent probes into the program, which the White House acknowledged in December after it was revealed by the New York Times.

Authorized by Bush soon after the September 11 attacks, the program allows the NSA to monitor the international telephone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens without court warrants while in pursuit of al Qaeda.

Democrats and some Republicans say Bush may have overstepped his constitutional authority and violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires warrants for all electronic eavesdropping.

Democrats have also charged that Bush violated the National Security Act by allowing complete oversight by only eight members of Congress rather than the full intelligence committees of the House and Senate.

"Unfortunately, a pattern of resistance is emerging from the executive branch agencies implicated by these allegations," said a February 26 letter from Democrats led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who sits on both the House judiciary and homeland security committees.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the monitoring was tightly focused on international communications involving al Qaeda and had been reviewed by legal officials at the White House, Justice Department and NSA.

"I really don't think there's any basis for a special counsel. And I think the attorney general has spoken about that as well," he said.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which heard Gonzales' defense of the program on February 6, was to hear testimony from legal experts at four universities and a Washington think tank on Tuesday at its second hearing on the program's legality.

The committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has urged the White House to submit the program to a review by the secret federal court that approves warrants for electronic surveillance under FISA.

Draft legislation prepared by Specter would require the White House to seek FISA court approval for domestic electronic eavesdropping every 45 days.

The attorney general also would be required to provide the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence panels with information on any electronic surveillance programs at 45-day intervals.

(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro)

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US Army pays Halliburton despite audit concerns

Reuters
US Army pays Halliburton despite audit concerns
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army said on Monday it has reimbursed a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., the oil services giant formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, the vast majority of costs disputed by government auditors on a on a no-bid contract in Iraq.

The Army Corps of Engineers said the Army decided to reimburse Halliburton engineering and construction unit Kellogg Brown & Root all but about $9 million of $221.9 million in costs that Pentagon auditors had questioned as possibly inflated or unwarranted.

This was part of an overall $2.4 billion contract to deliver fuel and fix oil equipment in Iraq, the Army said.

The Army's reimbursement decision was first reported by the New York Times.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency had also listed $41.1 million in costs listed by the company as "unsupported" by documentation, for a total of $263 million in costs challenged by Pentagon auditors.

"In a cost reimbursement contract, the contractor is not required to perform perfectly to be entitled to reimbursement," Army Corps of Engineers spokeswoman Rhonda James said in a statement.

"Nevertheless, the contracting officer did find that some of the costs actually incurred by (Kellogg Brown & Root) were not reasonable under the circumstances and refused to reimburse them," James added.

James said that Pentagon auditors had questioned whether KBR "had always used the best business approach in executing the mission, not whether it had provided the services or paid the claimed amounts to its subcontractors."

UNDER SCRUTINY

Halliburton, run by Cheney from 1995-2000, has been under scrutiny for its contracts in Iraq, and several U.S. government agencies have looked into whether it overcharged for some work. Halliburton is the world's second-largest oil services company and the U.S. military's biggest contractor in Iraq.

Halliburton said the reimbursement validates the costs it says it incurred and charged the Army, resolving an issue pending since October 2003.

"Once all the facts were fully examined, it is clear, and now confirmed, that KBR performed this work appropriately per the client's direction and within the contract terms," Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann said in a statement.

Mann said KBR had now been reimbursed for all but $3.8 million in costs under the Restore Iraqi Oil contract under which it imported fuel into Iraq from Turkey and Kuwait. The company said the only costs that were not fully reimbursed were small adjustments related to administration costs.

Halliburton has been criticized for its work in Iraq by congressional Democrats and others, including for contracts that were awarded on a "no-bid" noncompetitive basis. Halliburton has said that criticism of its work in Iraq was politically motivated.

A top U.S. Army procurement officer, Bunny Greenhouse, last year described Halliburton's deals in Iraq as "contract abuse" and said auditors had flagged more than $1 billion in potential overcharges.

Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Government Reform Committee, criticized the Army's decision and requested that the committee subpoena Pentagon documents relating to Halliburton.

"The Defense Department provided no adequate explanation for this irresponsible action, and it has been withholding relevant documents about its compensation determinations from the committee for almost a year," Waxman wrote in a letter to committee chairman Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican.

(Additional reporting by Deepa Babington in New York)

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Bush job rating falls to all-time low: poll

Reuters
Bush job rating falls to all-time low: poll

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's job rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, amid strong opposition to the Dubai Ports World deal and increasing pessimism over the war in Iraq, according to a CBS News poll released on Monday.

Bush's overall job approval fell eight points from 42 percent last month. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they disapproved of Bush's performance on the job, the poll found.

Bush's previous low job approval rating of 35 percent came last October, a month after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast and shortly after the U.S. death toll in Iraq reached the 2,000 mark, CBS said.

Long among his strongest suits, ratings for Bush's handling of Iraq fell to a new low of 30 percent, down from 37 percent in January, the poll found.

In addition, 62 percent of Americans said they think U.S. efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq were going badly compared with 36 percent who said things were going well.

In recent days, the Bush administration has faced increasing sectarian violence and fears of civil war in Iraq as well as strong bipartisan congressional opposition to a deal allowing an Arab state-owned company to operate six key U.S. ports.

According to the poll, 70 percent believe the Dubai Ports World transaction should not be allowed to go through while only 21 percent did not see the ports deal as a problem.

One surprising bright spot for the administration in the polls was that Americans appeared ready to move on after Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident. Seventy-six percent said it was understandable that the accident could happen.

However media coverage of the accident may have made the public's generally negative view of Cheney a bit more so, CBS said. The poll found that 46 percent hold a negative view of Cheney and 18 percent hold a favorable view, down from a 23 percent favorable rating in January.

The telephone poll of 1,018 adults was conducted February 22-26 and had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

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Protests Planned Against Media War Coverage

MediaChannel.org
Protests Planned Against Media War Coverage
By Danny Schechter

ANNOUNCEMENT: UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE IS PARTNERING WITH MEDIACHANNEL.ORG TO FOCUS ATTENTION ON MEDIA COMPLICITY IN THE IRAQ WAR.

Last week, new photographs of detainees abused by US soldiers in the infamous Abu Ghraib gulag in Iraq surfaced. They were discovered by the American Civil Liberties Union. The story was covered on TVŠ in Australia!

The most elaborate statistics on the abuse scandal appeared in the press.

· 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse
· 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse
· 660 images of adult pornography
· 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees
· 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts

This information made headlines in the Guardian newspaperŠ in England!

Meanwhile, in the United States, all of the networks covered a speech by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who once famously said, "As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."

Now, the Pentagon's Rumsfeld is declaring a new war - on the press. The Washington Post reports:

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday called for the U.S. military and other government agencies to mount a far more aggressive, faster and nontraditional information campaign to counter messages of extremist and terrorist groups in the world media. Rumsfeld Š lashed out at the U.S. media, whose coverage he blamed for effectively halting recent military information initiatives, such as paying to place articles in Iraqi newspapers."

Rumsfeld's attack on the media for mildly questioning propaganda posing as news is consistent with the Administration's management of war news through a billion dollar "information warfare" program that engineered positive media coverage for the invasion.

That continuing coverage documented by critics, including in my own new book, "When News Lies: Media Complicity and the Iraq War" is on its way from being a public complaint to becoming a political issue.

America's largest anti-war coalition, United For Peace and Justice, is broadening its anti-war protest to include targeting a US media system that has largely substituted jingoism for journalism and backed the war - often in the name of supporting the troops.

UFPJ Coordinator Leslie Cagan announced that her organization is partnering with MediaChannel.org and other media groups to organize a Media Day of War Coverage Protest on March 21, 2006. It takes part during a week of organizing and activism marking the third anniversary of the war. Plans are also underway for forums and film screenings on March 20th.

"We are thrilled that anti-war activists will now be connecting with media reform activists to challenge mainstream media 'coverage' that has underreported civilian casualties and much of the costs of the war," says MediaChannel Director David DeGraw.

"Sadly, the media helped make the war possible, and despite mea culpas about flawed pre-war coverage, the coverage has basically not changed, an approach which treats every Administration claim seriously, while marginalizing the anti-war movement."

Even as public opinion shifted against the war - only 37% of the American people are said to still back the war - most of the media downplay reporting on demands for troop withdrawal.

Focusing on the media role is a departure for the anti-war movement that helped organize the protests that brought 30 million people to the streets on March 15, 2003. Until now, protesters have focused almost entirely on government policies and practices.

Recognizing the media role indicts a corporate America that has, in some cases, profited from the war with rises in ratings and revenues. This includes General Electric (GE), owner of NBC-Universal, who received $600,000 in Iraq reconstruction contracts.

Before the war began broadcast networks lobbied the FCC for rule changes to allow them to buy more stations. At the time, Washington insiders spoke of a quid pro-quo with the networks asking the FCC to waive their rules while their news shows waved the flag. In that period, then FCC Commissioner Michael Powell justified a need for more media concentration with the claim that "only big companies can cover a war like the one in Iraq."

Many journalists and media organizations have since blasted one-sided coverage. Editor & Publisher, a media industry trade magazine, has consistently documented and criticized pervasive media practices that boosted the war with more "selling than telling."

Mediachannel.org launched a "Tell the Truth About the War" campaign months ago, calling for better and more consistent coverage. Thousands of emails from readers have gone to media executives.

If the war is to end, the coverage has to change. We need to press the press and move the media.

Now MediaChannel plans to organize meetings between critics and media companies. Planning for protests and panels is underway - not only in New York, but at local newspapers, radio and TV stations across the nation as part of a national effort. A national email campaign will be launched as well.

If you would like to endorse or participate in this effort, or help in your community by organizing meetings, house parties - including screenings of WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) and other films critical of the war media coverage - contact Priya@mediachannel.org

-- "News Dissector" Danny Schechter edits MediaChannel.org. For more on the protest: www.UFPJ.org. Buy his book: "When News Lies: Media Complicity and the Iraq War"

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Pentagon to Identify Detainees; Military to Comply With Court Order at Guantanamo Bay

washingtonpost.com
Pentagon to Identify Detainees
Military to Comply With Court Order at Guantanamo Bay

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer

Pentagon officials are preparing to release the names of several hundred detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the first time the government will publicly link names to previously revealed information about many captives at the island prison.

The change came when the government decided this week not to appeal a federal judge's order to provide names that were redacted from documents released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Associated Press. Although the government has previously released thousands of pages related to hearings on whether individual detainees are "enemy combatants," it has always withheld the names of the prisoners who participated in those hearings.

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff ordered the Defense Department to release the names by next Friday. Pentagon officials said yesterday that the decision not to appeal the ruling, made by the Justice Department, came over the strong objections of the Defense Department general counsel's office, which has been seeking to prevent the release of the names.

The names of hundreds of detainees have become public since the Supreme Court in June 2004 allowed them to file federal court cases contesting their imprisonment. Others have been identified in the media and by advocacy groups, some after they were released. Over the past several years, The Washington Post has independently confirmed the names of approximately 450 people who were detained at Guantanamo Bay for some part of the past four years.

But the Pentagon has refused to discuss individual detainees in its custody.

The document release could include information gleaned from International Committee of the Red Cross letters that detainees used to defend themselves in "combatant status review tribunals," meaning the names of detainees' family members could also be a part of the disclosure.

"The Department of Defense will comply with the judge's decision in this matter," Navy Lt. Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.

Defense officials made it clear yesterday that the release will not be a roster of the approximately 490 detainees now held at Guantanamo Bay. Instead it will contain names associated with about 390 hearing transcripts. Some detainees did not participate in the hearings.

Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said yesterday that the ruling is a step in the right direction but will not quell concerns about the U.S. detention system. The center oversees federal cases filed on behalf of hundreds of the detainees in Cuba.

"The government has detained prisoners without due process; lied about who these people are; concealed their treatment from the public and denied basic information to the very people who are authorized to represent the detainees," Goodman said in a written statement. "This administration prefers to operate in the shadows, but Judge Rakoff's ruling helps shine a light that can make this process more open and democratic."

The Defense Department, however, has given the ICRC access to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, escorted news media representatives and members of Congress through the facility, and allowed international human rights officials to visit. But department officials have strictly limited contact with detainees.

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World Court to launch landmark Bosnia genocide case

Reuters
World Court to launch landmark Bosnia genocide case
By Emma Thomasson

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Bosnia will accuse Serbia and Montenegro of genocide in the 1992-95 war on Monday, as the highest U.N. court opens the first trial of a state for the war crime.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, also known as the World Court, opens the case 13 years after Bosnia sued the rump Yugoslav state from which it seceded in 1992, triggering a war in which at least 100,000 people were killed.

The hearings at the court, set up after World War Two to mediate in disputes between states, are scheduled to run until May 9. A ruling is expected by the end of the year.

In its application to the court in 1993, Bosnia said the agents and surrogates of Serbia and Montenegro "killed, murdered, wounded, raped, robbed, tortured, kidnapped, illegally detained and exterminated the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina".

"The policy of driving out innocent civilians of a different ethnic or religious group from their homes ... was practiced by Yugoslav/Serb forces in Bosnia on a scale that dwarfs anything seen in Europe since Nazi times," the application said.

While Bosnia's lawyers say their primary objective is to establish that Serbia committed genocide, the country could also seek hefty compensation from its neighbor if it wins the case.

Serbia and Montenegro's lawyer in the case, Radoslav Stojanovic, admitted that individuals might have wanted to kill Bosnian Muslims, but said the court could not prove the state or the Serbian people had intended genocide.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal, not far from the ICJ in The Hague, is trying former Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milosevic for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide during the wars that tore the Balkans apart in the 1990s.

SREBRENICA MOURNERS

Survivors of the war in Bosnia will hold a vigil outside the World Court on Monday, displaying a banner bearing the names of the victims of the 1995 Serb massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia.

"It was the first genocide on European territory since World War Two. In spite of appeals, protests and campaigns by human rights organizations, Europe did not intervene in Bosnia until it was too late," the vigil organizers said in a statement.

In 2001, senior Bosnian Serb commander Radislav Krstic became the first person convicted of genocide by the tribunal -- for Srebrenica -- but his conviction was cut on appeal to one of aiding and abetting the crime.

The two men most wanted by the tribunal, Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, are also accused of genocide in the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo.

Bosnia's Muslims and Croats followed Slovenia and Croatia in breaking away from Yugoslavia in April 1992, against the wishes of Bosnian Serbs who made up one third of the population.

Backed by the Serbian-led remnants of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav army, the Bosnian Serbs responded by swiftly capturing two-thirds of Bosnia and launching "ethnic cleansing" in which tens of thousands of non-Serbs were killed and hundreds of thousands forced out of their homes.

The 1995 Dayton peace agreement divided post-war Bosnia into two highly autonomous regions -- a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb Republic -- under a loose umbrella central government.

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Bush appeal wanes for some Republican faithful

Reuters
Bush appeal wanes for some Republican faithful
By Stuart Grudgings

ALEXANDRIA, Louisiana (Reuters) - Robert Dukes, a Baptist preacher who calls New Orleans "sin city" and believes gay rights are the biggest threat to America, is questioning his faith in President George W. Bush.

He sees Bush as having done little to halt moral decline, and fears the administration has mortgaged America's future to China. The controversial decision to allow a Dubai firm to operate some U.S. ports has raised further doubts in his mind about the man he supported in the past two elections.

"We ought to be able to run our own ports," said Dukes, a muscular 45-year-old whose full-time job is as a police trainer in the central Louisiana city of Alexandria. "Right now, if we had an election, I don't know what in the world I'd do."

Some Republicans in Alexandria, a suburban sprawl of chain stores and churches, acknowledge Bush's appeal is waning as he enters the final years of his presidency. But whether that will hurt them at the polls is another matter.

On the face of it, Louisiana -- a state that voted twice for the Democrat Bill Clinton before swinging behind the Republican Bush in the last two presidential elections -- should be a prime Democratic target.

Fifty-two soldiers from Louisiana have died in Iraq and even loyal Republicans admit the response to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in August, was unsatisfactory.

Despite that, none of the state's five Republican seats in the U.S. Congress is seen as in danger in November's election.

In line with white southern voters' shift from Democratic blue to Republican red since the 1970s, after the Democrats shifted to support civil rights for blacks, Republicans have successfully harnessed social and religious conservatism.

"There's a philosophical shift where the common-sense party is Republican," said Quint Carriere, who leads a local group of Republican activists. "Where your granddaddy was a Democrat, in today's terms he's a Republican."

BLUE-DOG DEMOCRATS

Alexandria's congressman, Rodney Alexander, who stands on a tax-cutting, pro-gun and anti-abortion platform, switched from the Democrats in 2004 to run as a Republican and saw his vote share rise to 59 percent from 50 percent in 2002.

Early polls have showed Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal would beat Gov. Kathleen Blanco easily in next year's governor's race, possibly helped because thousands of black voters were moved out of the state after Katrina.

"There's always been a slight advantage to Democrats in the state, but that could well have been wiped out by the displacement," said John Maginnis, a writer on Louisiana politics. "I think people's antipathy might be directed toward George Bush, but not particularly toward the Republican Party."

Carriere said his support for the party was not unconditional. The scandal over its cozy ties with lobbyists and the administration's slow Katrina response have raised doubts in his mind over its management abilities.

"They are very slow in stepping up to the plate with information," said Carriere, 42, in the coffee shop he manages. "You stop things before they start."

But the perception remains that the Republicans are more in tune with local values. Democrats who do well here tend to be so-called "blue-dog Democrats" who often vote to support gun rights and against abortion, against the party's left.

"In this area, if you're pro-gun control, you can hang it up," said Carriere.

Milton Gordan, a rare black Republican activist in Alexandria, said the only thing he feared was the Democrats finding another Bill Clinton, whose Southern background and moderate policies helped him carry the state.

The slow Katrina response could cost the Republicans votes, he said, but the "culture of entitlement" promoted by the Democrats was not seen as the answer.

"We need to teach people that life has misfortunes," Gordan said. "Government is not the answer to everything."

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Carefully drawn political maps help incumbents

Reuters
Carefully drawn political maps help incumbents
By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - While technically all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are up for grabs in November, handicappers expect a mere 33 to be competitive, in part because many incumbents already have picked the voters they hope will return them to office.

Across the country, lawmakers will run for re-election in bizarrely shaped congressional districts carefully drawn to include voters who support them and exclude those who don't.

In Chicago, Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez will face voters in several Hispanic neighborhoods but not the predominantly black neighborhood that sits between them.

South of the city, Republican Rep. Jerry Weller's parents will get a chance to vote for their son, whose district was redrawn five years ago to encompass their house.

Critics of the practice known as gerrymandering -- named for Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, a master of tortuous redistricting two centuries ago -- say it produces a legislative body that doesn't accurately represent the country.

"We now have a system where too often our representatives are selecting their voters rather than voters selecting their representatives," Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama said at a recent conference on election reform.

The U.S. Supreme Court this week will consider whether a 2003 effort by Texas Republicans that gave them six more seats in Congress violates the federal voting rights laws, as Democrats and minority groups charge.

The court in 2004 upheld a Pennsylvania effort that helped Republicans, on the grounds that the court should not interfere with a process best left to politics.

HOW IT WORKS

Since the House cannot add seats as the population expands, states must redraw their electoral maps after every 10-year population census to ensure that their congressional seats are allocated properly among states according to the population.

States that gain population, like Florida and Texas after the 2000 census, often pick up seats from states that lose population, like Pennsylvania did. Within each state, districts must be redrawn to reflect population shifts as well.

In most cases, the party that controls the state legislature runs the show. Democrats in Maryland gained two congressional seats in 2002 after they drew the state's political boundaries to their advantage. In Michigan, Republicans who redrew their state map picked up three seats that year.

In states where neither party has a clear advantage, such as Illinois, leaders often work out a compromise that protects as many incumbents as possible.

"Every legislator knows where their political strengths are, where the greatest number of votes comes from, and with the ability to draw the maps themselves they can carve out districts that are very precisely drawn to favor their future political interests," said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation.

REFORM QUESTIONED

States like Iowa, Arizona and New Jersey don't let lawmakers draw their own districts but appoint an outside panel of experts to do the job.

Voters in California and Ohio rejected similar proposals last fall, but observers said both proposals suffered from association with the politicians promoting them -- an increasingly unpopular Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, out-of-power Democrats in Ohio. Efforts are under way in both states to put the issue before voters again in a less partisan manner.

Redistricting reform alone won't make House races more competitive, experts say, because incumbents would still enjoy huge fund-raising and name-recognition advantages over most challengers.

Even states like Arizona haven't seen an increase in the number of competitive races since they adopted a nonpartisan redistricting scheme, said Emory University political science professor Alan Abramowitz.

"As long as you have an incumbent running, you're not going to have a competitive race," Abramowitz said.

But George Mason University professor Michael McDonald said impartial redistricting can make sure those advantages are not absolute, even in an era of increased partisanship.

"The red parts are becoming redder and the blue parts are becoming bluer but that doesn't mean we can't draw districts that are reasonably competitive," he said, referring to the popular nicknames for states dominated by either Republicans or Democrats.

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Specter Proposes NSA Surveillance Rules; Measure Would Make Administration Seek FISA Court's Permission to Eavesdrop

washingtonpost.com
Specter Proposes NSA Surveillance Rules
Measure Would Make Administration Seek FISA Court's Permission to Eavesdrop

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer

The federal government would have to obtain permission from a secret court to continue a controversial form of surveillance, which the National Security Agency now conducts without warrants, under a bill being proposed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

Specter's proposal would bring the four-year-old NSA program under the authority of the court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The act created a mechanism for obtaining warrants to wiretap domestic suspects. But President Bush, shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on communications without such warrants. The program was revealed in news reports two months ago.

Specter's plan could put him at odds with the administration, which has praised a rival proposal that would exempt the NSA program from the surveillance law. Specter's proposal would also require the administration to give a handful of lawmakers more information about the program than they now receive, such as the number of communications intercepted and a summary of the results.

The draft version of Specter's bill, which is circulating in intelligence and legal circles, would require the attorney general to seek the FISA court's approval for each planned NSA intercept under the program. Bush has said the agency monitors phone calls and e-mails between people in the United States and people abroad when any of them is thought to have possible terrorist ties.

Specter's bill would require the attorney general to give the secret court "a statement of the facts and circumstances" causing the Justice Department to believe "that at least one of the participants in the communications to be intercepted . . . will be the foreign power or agent of a foreign power specified in [the law], or a person who has had communication with the foreign power or agent." The attorney general would have to provide "a detailed description of the nature of the information sought" and "an estimate of the number of communications to be intercepted . . . during the requested authorization period."

The draft says the surveillance program's goal is "to gather foreign intelligence information or to protect against international terrorism."

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil rights group, said the bill's language is alarmingly broad. "It's not limited to al-Qaeda or even terrorism," she said. Those who communicate with "foreign powers" could include a vast array of innocent people, Martin said.

Specter spokesman Bill Reynolds said he had not read the proposed bill and had no comment.

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L.I. Democrat Takes On Spitzer in Governor Race

The New York Times
L.I. Democrat Takes On Spitzer in Governor Race
By PATRICK D. HEALY

GLEN COVE, N.Y., Feb. 25 — Thomas R. Suozzi, the Nassau county executive and a self-styled renegade Democrat, announced Saturday that he was challenging Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for his party's nomination for governor, running as an underdog who will rely to an unusual degree on businesses leaders who have been sued by Mr. Spitzer and New Yorkers who dislike his tactics.

Mr. Suozzi's bid, declared at a boisterous rally in his Long Island hometown here, stands as a direct affront to the New York Democratic Party, which is behind Mr. Spitzer with rare unanimity in the hope of electing the first Democrat as governor since Mario M. Cuomo was defeated in 1994.

"This will be a tough fight: My opponent will have the vote of almost every single Democratic Party boss," Mr. Suozzi told a crowd of more than 1,000 supporters, after taking the stage to the music of U2's "Beautiful Day."

"He'll have the support of almost every single Albany legislator, Albany lobbyist and Albany lawyer," he said of Mr. Spitzer, then quipping to much laughter, "So far, I've been endorsed by my mother and my father — and I'm working on Helene," his wife.

Mr. Suozzi pledged to "fix the culture of Albany" by working to reduce property taxes, overhauling Medicaid to save billions, settling a state education funding lawsuit, and giving more money to schools in New York City and districts statewide.

Mr. Spitzer, the two-term attorney general, earned a national reputation and the moniker "the Sheriff of Wall Street" for his successful prosecutions of white-collar crime on Wall Street. He has high favorability ratings in polls statewide and has raised a formidable $19 million. But Suozzi aides — and some Democratic officials — say that Mr. Spitzer has a prickly side and can come across as haughty, and that these traits will come out in the heat of a contest.

Supporters of Mr. Suozzi, 43, say he has the raw political talent and the track record to win an upset victory akin to Hugh L. Carey's in 1974 and Mr. Cuomo's in 1982, not to mention Mr. Suozzi's own toppling of the Democratic front-runner and the Republicans' decades-long hold on the executive's office in 2001.

He faces a long climb, with few powerful allies and far less money than Mr. Spitzer, but Mr. Suozzi is showing brio by pursuing a two-pronged strategy that is unconventional by New York standards.

He is aggressively seeking support from centrist Democrats, independents, and Republicans, by straying from New York liberal doctrine on issues like abortion rights and gay marriage and by targeting his own party's leadership with an agenda he calls Fix Albany.

It is a risky bet, because liberals and party loyalists historically dominate Democratic primaries, but Suozzi advisers say even these voters may buck the party bosses.

"New York voters have a long history of not going along with the candidate that the establishment tells them to support," said Jay Jacobs, Mr. Suozzi's campaign chairman, citing the Carey and Cuomo victories in their Democratic primaries, among others. "They don't like being told what to do, and their ears will perk up when there's a contest."

Yet it is Mr. Suozzi's support from Mr. Spitzer's enemies that could make for an especially fractious and unpredictable season up to the Democratic primary in September.

Mr. Suozzi's aides say he has amassed more than $10 million in donations and pledges so far, twice the amount of cash on hand that he announced last month, though that fund-raising estimate could not be independently verified.

Of his $5 million on hand, more than $1 million has come with the help of business leaders like Kenneth G. Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, who have been sued by the attorney general's office, according to several donors and campaign finance records. Mr. Langone is part of a suit alleging mishandling of New York Stock Exchange compensation.

Mr. Spitzer announced $19 million in cash on hand last month. Mr. Suozzi is aiming to raise $20 million to be competitive in advertising. His camp is assuming that Mr. Spitzer will ultimately have $30 million or more.

Allies of Mr. Suozzi predict that the anti-Spitzer faction will contribute millions more toward his $20 million goal. But they also said they expected to win votes from other New Yorkers who believe Mr. Spitzer has been overzealous in his prosecutions and heavy-handed in his tactics.

"The likability factor is a very important piece of this," Mr. Jacobs said. "Tom is very good at walking into a room and connecting with people. He likes people. Think of Kennedy vs. Nixon. Think of Clinton vs. Bush or Bush vs. Kerry."

Mr. Spitzer's advisers charged that Mr. Suozzi was trying to cut into the attorney general's lead in polls by tapping his legal enemies, and that he is making himself their pawn. On Saturday, a group supporting Mr. Spitzer, Citizen Action, called on Mr. Suozzi to "clean up your act" by rejecting donations from Mr. Langone and other Spitzer targets.

At his campaign rally, Mr. Suozzi said his "fight is not with the Democrats" and groups backing Mr. Spitzer, but with leaders of both parties who have not tackled taxes and other headaches for voters.

"New York needs a strong chief executive with a proven record of government reform and results," Mr. Suozzi said, citing his record helping Nassau recover from near-bankruptcy in 2001.

At a news conference after his speech, Mr. Suozzi said he was campaigning in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and on Staten Island this weekend because he was "sending a direct message to Eliot Spitzer that I'm leaving no stone unturned."

Asked about that statement, Mr. Spitzer, who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, would not comment directly in a brief interview on Saturday.

Instead, he said: "I have been and will be running a campaign based on what I have done for seven years, which is to walk right into the buzz saw of the status quo to change New York for the better. I will visit every town and county and speak to every voter."

Democratic allies of Mr. Spitzer also say that Mr. Suozzi is a political unknown statewide whose chances are being intensified by news media eager for a political battle. They also question his opposition to gay marriage and his attacks on what opponents call partial-birth abortion, saying he is acting like a Republican.

When pressed, though, most of them acknowledge that Mr. Suozzi is the kind of politician who many voters statewide have historically related to: A handsome Italian-American Catholic from the suburbs whose grandparents were poor immigrants and who has proved appealing to some Nassau Republicans.

Still, Spitzer advisers say they do see Mr. Suozzi as a threat. They say they will work with party leaders to try to deny him an automatic spot on the September primary ballot; if he cannot win support at the party convention in May, he will have to gather tens of thousands of voters' signatures to be on the ballot.

This move is not one the Spitzer camp would use on a mere nuisance challenger, political analysts say.

"Our poll numbers say Suozzi's nowhere, but it's early, and there's this history of anti-establishment Democrats pulling upsets," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "Will he get anti-Spitzer Wall Street money? It looks like he will get some. He's an attractive guy, he has a track record, and New Yorkers love outsiders."

The lore of the outsider holds strong appeal for Mr. Suozzi, who idolizes and sometimes quotes Theodore Roosevelt, Al Smith, and Robert F. Kennedy. His aides cite Mr. Kennedy's 1968 race for president; they also draw confidence from Mr. Carey's victory over another Democrat, Howard Samuels, in 1974, and Mr. Cuomo's win over New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch in the primary in 1982.

They also recall Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's modest poll numbers a year ago, when he was running for re-election, and Andrew Cuomo's lead in early polls for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2002. Mr. Cuomo dropped out before the primary.

Still, Suozzi supporters are not counting on Mr. Spitzer to falter.

"It's a fallacy to say we just need Eliot to stumble," Mr. Jacobs said. "New Yorkers love outsiders, and they'll love Tom."

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