Thursday, December 30, 2004

Fw: Pass it on: How to help with tsunami relief


----- Original Message -----
From: "MoveOn.org"

Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 12:52 PM
Subject: Pass it on: How to help with tsunami relief


Dear friend,

Thanks for asking Congress and President Bush to lead the tsunami relief
effort. Please take a moment to invite your friends and colleagues to
sign -- it's important that we deliver as many messages as possible to the
President and Congress. You can just forward the sample letter below.

Spreading the word is critical, but please only pass this message along to
those who know you, of course -- spam hurts our campaign.

If you haven't already, please give what you can to Oxfam's relief efforts:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=631

Thanks, for all you do.

Sincerely,

--The MoveOn.org Team

_____________________

Subject: How to help with tsunami relief

Dear friend,

The tsunami in southern Asia and Africa may be the worst natural disaster of
our time. More than 116,000 lives were wiped out within hours.

Rising to this challenge is at the heart of global leadership, and the world
is depending on us. The U.S government can lead billions of dollars of aid
into this relief effort, if it chooses. Americans are generous and ready to
step forward, but the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration have made a
weak initial contribution to the effort -- first offering $15 million and
then $35 million when they came under pressure. Clearly, we can do more.

Let Congress and the President know that Americans are supporting strong
leadership on this relief effort, at:

http://www.moveon.org/tsunamirelief/

Thanks.

_____________________

If you've received this email in error, please correct your campaign
subscription information at:
http://www.moveon.org/s?i=-3285954-MjMRSxuPTqs2MToWEWtEKw
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Are We Stingy? Yes

A Call To Action
The New York Times
December 30, 2004
EDITORIAL

President Bush finally roused himself yesterday from his vacation in Crawford, Tex., to telephone his sympathy to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, and to speak publicly about the devastation of Sunday's tsunamis in Asia. He also hurried to put as much distance as possible between himself and America's initial measly aid offer of $15 million, and he took issue with an earlier statement by the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who had called the overall aid efforts by rich Western nations "stingy." "The person who made that statement was very misguided and ill informed," the president said.

We beg to differ. Mr. Egeland was right on target. We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world's poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world's richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That's less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities.

The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Mr. Bush's turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the United States budget that we allocate for nonmilitary foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.

Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Mr. Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the United States "has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world." But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.

Making things worse, we often pledge more money than we actually deliver. Victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged. And back in 2002, Mr. Bush announced his Millennium Challenge account to give African countries development assistance of up to $5 billion a year, but the account has yet to disperse a single dollar.

Mr. Bush said yesterday that the $35 million we've now pledged "is only the beginning" of the United States' recovery effort. Let's hope that is true, and that this time, our actions will match our promises.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Monday, December 27, 2004

December 26, 2004

Governors Unite in Fight Against Medicaid Cuts
By PAM BELLUCK

BOSTON, Dec. 25 - Fearful that President Bush plans to shift more Medicaid
costs to the states, the nation's governors are mounting a bipartisan
lobbying
effort to stave off new federal limits on the program.

Medicaid, the nation's largest health insurance program, is costing the
states and the federal government more than $300 billion a year. The growth
of the
program, which covers the poor and disabled, has outpaced state revenues,
and Medicaid is now a larger component of total state spending than
elementary
and secondary education combined, according to the National Governors
Association.

Showing rare bipartisan unity, governors of both parties said in interviews
this week that they would press hard in the coming months to preserve or
even
increase their current Medicaid allotments.

"I certainly understand the need to balance the federal budget," said Gov.
Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a Republican and the vice chairman of the
governors
association. "But people need to remember that to balance the federal budget
off the backs of the poorest people in the country is simply unacceptable.
You don't pull feeding tubes from people. You don't pull the wheelchair out
from under the child with muscular dystrophy."

The association's chairman, Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat, said
the governors were "much more in unanimity on this issue than they are on
most
issues." He added, "We do see on a regular basis that unless the governors
step up, you will see cost-shifting done because it relieves the federal
problem."

The governors could find themselves on a collision course with Mr. Bush, who
has pledged to cut the federal budget deficit in half in the next five
years.
A bipartisan lobbying effort would also put pressure on the
Republican-controlled Congress.

The White House has not tipped its hand on its new budget and would not
comment on its plans for Medicaid. Federal officials, however, have said
they are
sending auditors to state capitals to review Medicaid programs and cracking
down on methods that states have been using to try to get as much federal
Medicaid
money as possible.

The governors, who will be forming a committee to press their Medicaid
agenda, say they are determined to avoid repeating their experience the last
time
they tried to negotiate Medicaid changes with federal officials, in 2003.
Mr. Bush at that time proposed giving each state a fixed amount of federal
money
each year for 10 years, instead of basing federal payments on actual health
costs and enrollment.

"They tried to cap it the last time around," said Gov. Bob Taft of Ohio, a
Republican. "Then, you're asking the states to take a risk - what if the
caseload
grows?" That effort to make major changes in the program collapsed after
lengthy negotiations between federal officials and a bipartisan group of
governors.

The governors say Medicaid, which insures a quarter of the nation's children
and two-thirds of its nursing-home patients, has become so expensive that it
now, on average, makes up 22 percent of states' budgets, compared with 10
percent in 1987.

"It's just a huge problem for Ohio and almost every other state that I know
about," said Mr. Taft, adding that he had titled a recent speech "Medicaid:
The Monster in the Middle of the Road."

"We're going to have to do cuts in services, cuts in people on the
caseload," Mr. Taft said. "We're going to have to freeze or possibly even
cut some provider
rates just to restrain the growth. It's squeezing what we can do for
schools, what we can do for higher education. We're constraining and
tightening our
belt in every way, cutting the number of state employees. If we could
control Medicaid we wouldn't have budget problems in Ohio."

Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is among several governors battling the
Bush administration's efforts to eliminate a practice some states use to get
more
federal Medicaid money. The federal government says these states' practice
of transferring money to county governments or local hospitals is a way to
get
more federal Medicaid money by making it appear that they are spending more
on Medicaid than they are.

In Massachusetts, the Bush administration says $580 million in federal
Medicaid money obtained using such a practice was an improper grant. Mr.
Romney disagrees.

"This was a practice approved by the federal government, and it's one of the
ways that we provide health care to the poor and needy," said Eric
Fehrnstrom,
Mr. Romney's press secretary. "Discussions are going on now between us and
the federal government so that we can find a way to continue with this
practice."

Mr. Romney recently announced plans to change his state's Medicaid system,
and Mr. Fehrnstrom said the governor was counting on the federal government
not
to slash its Medicaid budget in any way. "Governor Romney is about to embark
on Medicaid reform," Mr. Fehrnstrom said. "We're determined to do that
without
raising taxes, but it's extremely important that we be allowed to rely on
the money that's already in the system."

Making their case in a letter to the White House and Congressional leaders
this week, the National Governors Association urged federal officials not to
reduce Medicaid financing in an effort to cut the deficit. In their letter,
the governors also said that the Medicare program, which covers health care
for the elderly, should pay the health care costs for those people who are
both elderly and poor, and therefore eligible for coverage by both Medicare
and Medicaid, as a way to reduce the states' Medicaid burden. Medicare,
unlike Medicaid, is fully financed by the federal government.

"Medicaid currently accounts for 50 percent of all long-term-care dollars
and finances the care for 70 percent of all people in nursing homes," the
letter
said. "Furthermore, 42 percent of all Medicaid expenditures are spent on
Medicare beneficiaries, despite the fact that they comprise a small
percentage
of the Medicaid caseload and are already fully insured by the Medicare
program."

Both the Bush administration and the governors are examining ways to give
states more flexibility in how they run their Medicaid programs.

Some governors would like, for example, to be able to rein in costs by
restricting the list of drugs covered by Medicaid, by contracting with
third-party
providers or by allowing the poorest people to get more benefits than those
who are better off. They would like to be able to make these changes without
applying for federal waivers, which often take months or years to get
approved.

In Wisconsin, Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, said his state would like the
ability to put more Medicaid dollars into services that could help elderly
people stay in their homes longer, instead of having to go into nursing
homes.

"We really need to sit down at the table and figure out how to better design
a Medicaid system," Mr. Doyle said.

Some governors said they hoped Mr. Bush's selection of Michael O. Leavitt to
be secretary of health and human services was evidence of the
administration's
willingness to allow states a greater say in any changes in Medicaid. Mr.
Leavitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is a
former
governor of Utah and used federal waivers to save money and expand coverage
in Utah's Medicaid program.

Governor Huckabee of Arkansas, where nearly a quarter of the population is
on Medicaid, said the governors' objective in the coming months would be to
ask
the federal government to "first do no harm."

He said the soaring federal budget deficit had made federal officials
realize "their house is on fire, and they're probably so consumed with the
flames
around them that they're unaware as they look to us for water that our tanks
are empty.

"Folks, our house is on fire too," Mr. Huckabee added, "and asking us to put
out your fire is probably not the solution."

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Sunday News Quiz

A Call To Action
December 26, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

My wife constantly regales me about her favorite National Public Radio show, "Wait Wait ...Don't Tell Me." The show features three journalists who have to answer questions about the week's news. Some of the news stories they are quizzed about seem totally unbelievable, while others are straightforward. Well, this is my last column for 2004, so let's play a little "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me." I'll give you 10 news stories from the past few weeks and you tell me what they all have in common.

1. The report that Colin Powell told President Bush a few weeks ago that we do not have enough troops in Iraq and that we don't control the terrain. 2. The report that the Pentagon's $10 billion-a-year effort to build an antimissile shield, and have a basic ground-based version in place by the end of this year, ran into difficulty two weeks ago when the first test in almost two years failed because the interceptor missile didn't take off. 3. The report that the Bush-Republican budget for 2005 contained a $100 million cut in federal funding to the National Science Foundation. 4. The report that at a time when young Americans are competing head to head with young Chinese, Indians and Eastern Europeans more than ever, the Bush team is trimming support for the Pell grant program, which helps poor and working-class young Americans get a higher education. (The change will save $300 million, while some 1.3 million students will receive smaller Pell grants.)

5. The report this month that children in Asian countries once again surpassed U.S. fourth graders and eighth graders in the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. (U.S. eighth graders did improve their scores from four years ago, but U.S. fourth graders remained stagnant.) A week earlier, the Program for International Student Assessment showed U.S. 15-year-olds scoring below average compared with those in other countries when asked to apply math skills to real-life tasks, the A.P. reported. 6. The report this month that the Bush administration has reduced America's contribution to global food aid programs intended to help the world's hungry feed themselves. (The Bush team said the cut was necessary to keep our deficit under control!) 7. The report that U.S. military spending this year is running at about $450 billion.

Wait, wait, don't go way; there's more: 8. The report that Donald Rumsfeld was confronted by troops in Iraq about the fact that they did not have enough armor on their vehicles and were having to scrounge for makeshift armor to protect themselves. 9. The report that among President Bush's top priorities in his second term is to simplify the tax code and to make the sweeping tax cuts from his first term permanent. (The cost to the Treasury for doing so, the A.P. reported, would be over a trillion.) And finally: 10. The report that the U.S. dollar continued to hover near record lows against the euro.

So what is the common denominator of all these news stories? Wait, wait, don't tell me. I want to tell you. The common denominator is a country with a totally contradictory and messed-up set of priorities.

We face two gigantic national challenges today: One is the challenge to protect America in the wake of the new terrorist threats, which has involved us in three huge military commitments - Afghanistan, Iraq and missile defense. And the other is the challenge to strengthen American competitiveness in the wake of an expanding global economy, where more and more good jobs require higher levels of education, and those good jobs will increasingly migrate to those countries with the brainpower to do them. In the face of these two national challenges, we have an administration committed to radical tax cuts, which, one can already see, are starting to affect everything from the number of troops we can deploy in Iraq to the number of students we can properly educate at our universities. And if we stay on this course, the trade-offs are only going to get worse.

Something has to give. We can't protect America with the grand strategy George Bush has embarked on and strengthen our students with the skills they need and cut taxes, as if we didn't have a care in the world.

If we were actually having a serious national debate, this is what we would be discussing, but alas, 9/11 has been deftly exploited to choke any debate. Which reminds me of my wife's other favorite NPR radio show. It's called "Whad'ya Know?" It always opens the same way. The announcer shouts to the studio audience, "Whad'ya know?" And they shout back. "Not Much. You?"

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Saturday, December 25, 2004

Army Historian Cites Lack of Postwar Plan

A Call To Action

washingtonpost.com
Major Calls Effort in Iraq 'Mediocre'

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 25, 2004; Page A01

The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.

"There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.

"While there may have been 'plans' at the national level, and even within various agencies within the war zone, none of these 'plans' operationalized the problem beyond regime collapse" -- that is, laid out how U.S. forces would be moved and structured, Wilson writes in an essay that has been delivered at several academic conferences but not published. "There was no adequate operational plan for stability operations and support operations."

Similar criticisms have been made before, but until now they have not been stated so authoritatively and publicly by a military insider positioned to be familiar with top-secret planning. During the period in question, from April to June 2003, Wilson was a researcher for the Army's Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group. Then, from July 2003 to March 2004, he was the chief war planner for the 101st Airborne Division, which was stationed in northern Iraq.

A copy of Wilson's study as presented at Cornell University in October was obtained by The Washington Post.

As a result of the failure to produce a plan, Wilson asserts, the U.S. military lost the dominant position in Iraq in the summer of 2003 and has been scrambling to recover ever since. "In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative . . . gained over an off-balanced enemy," he writes. "The United States, its Army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since."

It was only in November 2003, seven months after the fall of Baghdad, that U.S. occupation authorities produced a formal "Phase IV" plan for stability operations, Wilson reports. Phase I covers preparation for combat, followed by initial operations, Phase II, and combat, Phase III. Post-combat operations are called Phase IV.

Many in the Army have blamed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilians for the unexpectedly difficult occupation of Iraq, but Wilson reserves his toughest criticism for Army commanders who, he concludes, failed to grasp the strategic situation in Iraq and so not did not plan properly for victory. He concludes that those who planned the war suffered from "stunted learning and a reluctance to adapt."

Army commanders still misunderstand the strategic problem they face and therefore are still pursuing a flawed approach, writes Wilson, who is scheduled to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point next year. "Plainly stated, the 'western coalition' failed, and continues to fail, to see Operation Iraqi Freedom in its fullness," he asserts.

"Reluctance in even defining the situation . . . is perhaps the most telling indicator of a collective cognitive dissidence on part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it," he comments.

Because of this failure, Wilson concludes, the U.S. military remains "perhaps in peril of losing the 'war,' even after supposedly winning it."

Overall, he grades the U.S. military performance in Iraq as "mediocre."

Wilson's essay amounts to an indictment of the education and performance of senior U.S. officials involved in the war. "U.S. war planners, practitioners and the civilian leadership conceived of the war far too narrowly" and tended to think of operations after the invasion "as someone else's mission," he says. In fact, Wilson says, those later operations were critical because they were needed to win the war rather than just decapitate Saddam Hussein's government.

Air Force Capt. Chris Karns, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which as the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East oversaw planning for the war in Iraq, said, "A formal Phase IV plan did exist." He said he could not explain how Wilson came to a different conclusion.

Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who as chief of the Central Command led the war planning in 2002 and 2003, states in his recent memoir, "American Soldier," that throughout the planning for the invasion of Iraq, Phase IV stability operations were discussed. Occupation problems "commanded hours and days of discussion and debate among CENTCOM planners and Washington officials," he adds. At another point, he states, "I was confident in the Phase IV plan."

Asked about other officers' reaction to his essay, Wilson said in an e-mail Monday, "What active-duty feedback I have received (from military officers attending the conferences) has been relatively positive," with "general agreement with the premises I offer in the work."

He said he has no plans to publish the essay, in part because he would expect difficulty in getting the Army's approval, but said he did not object to having it written about. "I think this is something that has to get out, so it can be considered," he said in a telephone interview. "There actually is something we can fix here, in terms of operational planning."

In his analysis of U.S. military operations in 2003 in northern Iraq, Wilson also touches on another continuing criticism of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq -- the number of troops there. "The scarcity of available 'combat power' . . . greatly complicated the situation," he states.

Wilson contends that a lack of sufficient troops was a consequence of the earlier, larger problem of failing to understand that prevailing in Iraq involved more than just removing Hussein. "This overly simplistic conception of the 'war' led to a cascading undercutting of the war effort: too few troops, too little coordination with civilian and governmental/non-governmental agencies . . . and too little allotted time to achieve 'success,' " he writes.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Friday, December 24, 2004

FBI E-Mail Refers to Presidential Order Authorizing Inhumane Interrogation Techniques

A Call To Action
American Civil Liberties Union Banner


December 20, 2004

NEW YORK -- A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as “torture” and a June 2004 “Urgent Report” to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@aclu.org

Newly Obtained FBI Records Call Defense Department’s Methods "Torture," Express Concerns Over "Cover-Up" That May Leave FBI "Holding the Bag" for Abuses

NEW YORK -- A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

"These documents raise grave questions about where the blame for widespread detainee abuse ultimately rests," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "Top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers."

The documents were obtained after the ACLU and other public interest organizations filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.

Another e-mail, dated December 2003, describes an incident in which Defense Department interrogators at Guantánamo Bay impersonated FBI agents while using "torture techniques" against a detainee. The e-mail concludes "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [sic] the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the public."

The document also says that no "intelligence of a threat neutralization nature" was garnered by the "FBI" interrogation, and that the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) believes that the Defense Department’s actions have destroyed any chance of prosecuting the detainee. The e-mail’s author writes that he or she is documenting the incident "in order to protect the FBI."

"The methods that the Defense Department has adopted are illegal, immoral, and counterproductive," said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. "It is astounding that these methods appear to have been adopted as a matter of policy by the highest levels of government."

The June 2004 "Urgent Report" addressed to the FBI Director is heavily redacted. The legible portions of the document appear to describe an account given to the FBI’s Sacramento Field Office by an FBI agent who had "observed numerous physical abuse incidents of Iraqi civilian detainees," including "strangulation, beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings." The document states that "[redacted] was providing this account to the FBI based on his knowledge that [redacted] were engaged in a cover-up of these abuses."

The release of these documents follows a federal court order that directed government agencies to comply with a year-old request under the Freedom of Information Act filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.

Other documents released by the ACLU today include:

* An FBI email regarding DOD personnel impersonating FBI officials during interrogations. The e-mail refers to a "ruse" and notes that "all of those [techniques] used in these scenarios" were approved by the Deputy Secretary of Defense. (Jan. 21, 2004)
* Another FBI agent’s account of interrogations at Guantánamo in which detainees were shackled hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor. The agent states that the detainees were kept in that position for 18 to 24 hours at a time and most had "urinated or defacated [sic]" on themselves. On one occasion, the agent reports having seen a detainee left in an unventilated, non-air conditioned room at a temperature "probably well over a hundred degrees." The agent notes: "The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night." (Aug. 2, 2004)
* An e-mail stating that an Army lawyer "worked hard to cwrite [sic] a legal justification for the type of interrogations they (the Army) want to conduct" at Guantánamo Bay. (Dec. 9, 2002)
* An e-mail noting the initiation of an FBI investigation into the alleged rape of a juvenile male detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (July 28, 2004)
* An FBI agent’s account of an interrogation at Guantánamo - an interrogation apparently conducted by Defense Department personnel - in which a detainee was wrapped in an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud music and strobe lights. (July 30, 2004)

The ACLU and its allies are scheduled to go to court again this afternoon, where they will seek an order compelling the CIA to turn over records related to an internal investigation into detainee abuse. Although the ACLU has received more than 9,000 documents from other agencies, the CIA refuses to confirm or deny even the existence of many of the records that the ACLU and other plaintiffs have requested. The CIA is reported to have been involved in abusing detainees in Iraq and at secret CIA detention facilities around the globe.

The lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Jaffer, Amrit Singh and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Art Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky and Jeff Fogel of CCR.

The documents referenced above can be found at: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/fbi.html.

More on the lawsuit can be found at: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/.

© ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004 This is the Web site of the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU Foundation.
Learn more about the distinction between these two components of the ACLU.


America, the Indifferent

A Call To Action

It was with great fanfare that the United States and 188 other countries signed the United Nations Millennium Declaration, a manifesto to eradicate extreme poverty, hunger and disease among the one billion people in the world who subsist on barely anything. The project set a deadline of 2015 to achieve its goals. Chief among them was the goal for developed countries, like America, Britain and France, to work toward giving 0.7 percent of their national incomes for development aid for poor countries.

Almost a third of the way into the program, the latest available figures show that the percentage of United States income going to poor countries remains near rock bottom: 0.14 percent. Britain is at 0.34 percent, and France at 0.41 percent. (Norway and Sweden, to no one's surprise, are already exceeding the goal, at 0.92 percent and 0.79 percent.)

And we learned this week that in the last two months, the Bush administration has reduced its contributions to global food aid programs aimed at helping hungry nations become self-sufficient, and it has told charities like Save the Children and Catholic Relief Services that it won't honor earlier promises. Instead, administration officials said that most of the country's emergency food aid would go to places where there were immediate crises.

Something's not right here. The United States is the world's richest nation. Washington is quick to say that it contributes more money to foreign aid than any other country. But no one is impressed when a billionaire writes a $50 check for a needy family. The test is the percentage of national income we give to the poor, and on that basis this country is the stingiest in the Group of Seven industrialized nations.

The administration has cited the federal budget deficit as the reason for its cutback in donations to help the hungry feed themselves. In fact, the amount involved is a pittance within the federal budget when compared with our $412 billion deficit, which has been fueled by war and tax cuts. The administration can conjure up $87 billion for the fighting in Iraq, but can it really not come up with more than $15.6 billion - our overall spending on development assistance in 2002 - to help stop an 8-year-old AIDS orphan in Cameroon from drinking sewer water or to buy a mosquito net for an infant in Sierra Leone?

There is a very real belief abroad that the United States, which gave 2 percent of its national income to rebuild Europe after World War II, now engages with the rest of the world only when it perceives that its own immediate interests are at stake. If that is unfair, it's certainly true that American attention is mainly drawn to international hot spots. After the Sept. 11 bombings, Washington ratcheted up aid to Pakistan to help fight the war on terror. Just last week, it began talks aimed at contributing more aid to the Palestinians to encourage them to stop launching suicide bombers at Israel.

Here's a novel idea: how about giving aid before the explosion, not just after?

At the Monterey summit meeting on poverty in 2002, President Bush announced the Millennium Challenge Account, which was supposed to increase the United States' assistance to poor countries that are committed to policies promoting development. Mr. Bush said his government would donate $1.7 billion the first year, $3.3 billion the second and $5 billion the third. That $5 billion amount would have been just 0.04 percent of America's national income, but the administration still failed to match its promise with action.

Back in Washington and away from the spotlight of the summit meeting, the administration didn't even ask Congress for the full $1.7 billion the first year; it asked for $1.3 billion, which Congress cut to $1 billion. The next year, the administration asked for $2.5 billion and got $1.5 billion.

Worst of all, the account has yet to disperse a single dollar, while every year in Africa, one in 16 pregnant women still die in childbirth, 2.2 million die of AIDS, and 2 million children die from malaria.

Jeffrey Sachs, the economist appointed by Kofi Annan to direct the Millennium Project, puts the gap between what America is capable of doing and what it actually does into stark relief.

The government spends $450 billion annually on the military, and $15 billion on development help for poor countries, a 30-to-1 ratio that, as Mr. Sachs puts it, shows how the nation has become "all war and no peace in our foreign policy." Next month, he will present his report on how America and the world can actually cut global poverty in half by 2015. He says that if the Millennium Project has any chance of success, America must lead the donors.

Washington has to step up to the plate soon. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it is nowhere even near the table now, and the world knows it.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

2004 Elections

A Call To Action
ZNet | Electoral Politics

2004 Elections
by Noam Chomsky; November 29, 2004

The elections of November 2004 have received a great deal of discussion, with exultation in some quarters, despair in others, and general lamentation about a "divided nation." They are likely to have policy consequences, particularly harmful to the public in the domestic arena, and to the world with regard to the "transformation of the military," which has led some prominent strategic analysts to warn of "ultimate doom" and to hope that US militarism and aggressiveness will be countered by a coalition of peace-loving states, led by – China! (John Steinbruner and Nancy Gallagher, Daedalus). We have come to a pretty pass when such words are expressed in the most respectable and sober journals. It is also worth noting how deep is the despair of the authors over the state of American democracy. Whether or not the assessment is merited is for activists to determine.

Though significant in their consequences, the elections tell us very little about the state of the country, or the popular mood. There are, however, other sources from which we can learn a great deal that carries important lessons. Public opinion in the US is intensively monitored, and while caution and care in interpretation are always necessary, these studies are valuable resources. We can also see why the results, though public, are kept under wraps by the doctrinal institutions. That is true of major and highly informative studies of public opinion released right before the election, notably by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the U. of Maryland (PIPA), to which I will return.

One conclusion is that the elections conferred no mandate for anything, in fact, barely took place, in any serious sense of the term "election." That is by no means a novel conclusion. Reagan's victory in 1980 reflected "the decay of organized party structures, and the vast mobilization of God and cash in the successful candidacy of a figure once marginal to the `vital center' of American political life," representing "the continued disintegration of those political coalitions and economic structures that have given party politics some stability and definition during the past generation" (Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Hidden Election, 1981). In the same valuable collection of essays, Walter Dean Burnham described the election as further evidence of a "crucial comparative peculiarity of the American political system: the total absence of a socialist or laborite mass party as an organized competitor in the electoral market," accounting for much of the "class-skewed abstention rates" and the minimal significance of issues. Thus of the 28% of the electorate who voted for Reagan, 11% gave as their primary reason "he's a real conservative." In Reagan's "landslide victory" of 1984, with just under 30% of the electorate, the percentage dropped to 4% and a majority of voters hoped that his legislative program would not be enacted.

What these prominent political scientists describe is part of the powerful backlash against the terrifying "crisis of democracy" of the 1960s, which threatened to democratize the society, and, despite enormous efforts to crush this threat to order and discipline, has had far-reaching effects on consciousness and social practices. The post-1960s era has been marked by substantial growth of popular movements dedicated to greater justice and freedom, and unwillingness to tolerate the brutal aggression and violence that had previously been granted free rein. The Vietnam war is a dramatic illustration, naturally suppressed because of the lessons it teaches about the civilizing impact of popular mobilization. The war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, after years of US-backed state terror that had killed tens of thousands of people, was brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether "Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity" would escape "extinction" as "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size" – particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of the US assault. And when protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to the rest ofIndochina – terrible crimes, but secondary ones.

* State managers are well aware that they no longer have that freedom. Wars against "much weaker enemies" – the only acceptable targets -- must be won "decisively and rapidly," Bush I's intelligence services advised. Delay might "undercut political support," recognized to be thin, a great change since the Kennedy-Johnson period when the attack on Indochina, while never popular, aroused little reaction for many years. Those conclusions hold despite the hideous war crimes in Falluja, replicating the Russian destruction of Grozny ten years earlier, including crimes displayed on the front pages for which the civilian leadership is subject to the death penalty under the War Crimes Act passed by the Republican Congress in 1996 – and also one of the more disgraceful episodes in the annals of American journalism.

The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, not only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted. There are very important lessons here, which should always be uppermost in our minds – for the same reason they are suppressed in the elite culture. Returning to the elections, in 2004 Bush received the votes of just over 30% of the electorate, Kerry a bit less. Voting patterns resembled 2000, with virtually the same pattern of "red" and "blue" states (whatever significance that may have). A small change in voter preference would have put Kerry in the White House, also telling us very little about the country and public concerns.

As usual, the electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry, which in its regular vocation sells toothpaste, life-style drugs, automobiles, and other commodities. Its guiding principle is deceit. Its task is to undermine the "free markets" we are taught to revere: mythical entities in which informed consumers make rational choices. In such scarcely imaginable systems, businesses would provide information about their products: cheap, easy, simple. But it is hardly a secret that they do nothing of the sort. Rather, they seek to delude consumers to choose their product over some virtually identical one. GM does not simply make public the characteristics of next year's models. Rather, it devotes huge sums to creating images to deceive consumers, featuring sports stars, sexy models, cars climbing sheer cliffs to a heavenly future, and so on. The business world does not spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to provide information. The famed "entrepreneurial initiative" and "free trade" are about as realistic as informed consumer choice. The last thing those who dominate the society want is the fanciful market of doctrine and economic theory. All of this should be too familiar to merit much discussion.

Sometimes the commitment to deceit is quite overt. The recent US-Australia negotiations on a "free trade agreement" were held up by Washington's concern over Australia's health care system, perhaps the most efficient in the world. In particular, drug prices are a fraction of those in the US: the same drugs, produced by the same companies, earning substantial profits in Australia though nothing like those they are granted in the US – often on the pretext that they are needed for R&D, another exercise in deceit. Part of the reason for the efficiency of the Australian system is that, like other countries, Australia relies on the practices that the Pentagon employs when it buys paper clips: government purchasing power is used to negotiate prices, illegal in the US. Another reason is that Australia has kept to "evidence-based" procedures for marketing pharmaceuticals. US negotiators denounced these as market interference: pharmaceutical corporations are deprived of their legitimate rights if they are required to produce evidence when they claim that their latest product is better than some cheaper alternative, or run TV ads in which some sports hero or model tells the audience to ask their doctor whether this drug is "right for you (it's right for me)," sometimes not even revealing what it is supposed to be for. The right of deceit must be guaranteed to the immensely powerful and pathological immortal persons created by radical judicial activism to run the society. When assigned the task of selling candidates, the PR industry naturally resorts to the same fundamental techniques, so as to ensure that politics remains "the shadow cast by big business over society," as America's leading social philosopher, John Dewey, described the results of "industrial feudalism" long ago. Deceit is employed to undermine democracy, just as it is the natural device to undermine markets. And voters appear to be aware of it.

On the eve of the 2000 elections, about 75% of the electorate regarded it as a game played by rich contributors, party managers, and the PR industry, which trains candidates to project images and produce meaningless phrases that might win some votes. Very likely, that is why the population paid little attention to the "stolen election" that greatly exercised educated sectors. And it is why they are likely to pay little attention to campaigns about alleged fraud in 2004. If one is flipping a coin to pick the King, it is of no great concern if the coin is biased.

In 2000, "issue awareness" – knowledge of the stands of the candidate-producing organizations on issues – reached an all-time low. Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even lower in 2004. About 10% of voters said their choice would be based on the candidate's "agendas/ideas/platforms/goals"; 6% for Bush voters, 13% for Kerry voters (Gallup). The rest would vote for what the industry calls "qualities" or "values," which are the political counterpart to toothpaste ads. The most careful studies (PIPA) found that voters had little idea of the stand of the candidates on matters that concerned them. Bush voters tended to believe that he shared their beliefs, even though the Republican Party rejected them, often explicitly. Investigating the sources used in the studies, we find that the same was largely true of Kerry voters, unless we give highly sympathetic interpretations to vague statements that most voters had probably never heard.

Exit polls found that Bush won large majorities of those concerned with the threat of terror and "moral values," and Kerry won majorities among those concerned with the economy, health care, and other such issues. Those results tell us very little.

It is easy to demonstrate that for Bush planners, the threat of terror is a low priority. The invasion of Iraq is only one of many illustrations. Even their own intelligence agencies agreed with the consensus among other agencies, and independent specialists, that the invasion was likely to increase the threat of terror, as it did; probably nuclear proliferation as well, as also predicted. Such threats are simply not high priorities as compared with the opportunity to establish the first secure military bases in a dependent client state at the heart of the world's major energy reserves, a region understood since World War II to be the "most strategically important area of the world," "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." Apart from what one historian of the industry calls "profits beyond the dreams of avarice," which must flow in the right direction, control over two-thirds of the world's estimated hydrocarbon reserves – uniquely cheap and easy to exploit – provides what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called "critical leverage" over European and Asian rivals, what George Kennan many years earlier had called "veto power" over them. These have been crucial policy concerns throughout the post-World War II period, even more so in today's evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and Asia might move towards greater independence, and worse, might be united: China and the EU became each other's major trading partners in 2004, joined by the world's second largest economy (Japan), and those tendencies are likely to increase. A firm hand on the spigot reduces these dangers.

Note that the critical issue is control, not access. US policies towards the Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of oil, and remain the same today when US intelligence projects that the US itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources. Policies would be likely to be about the same if the US were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control the "stupendous source of strategic power" and to gain "profits beyond the dreams of avarice" would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes reflects similar concerns.

There are many other illustrations of the same lack of concern of planners about terror. Bush voters, whether they knew it or not, were voting for a likely increase in the threat of terror, which could be awesome: it was understood well before 9-11 that sooner or later the Jihadists organized by the CIA and its associates in the 1980s are likely to gain access to WMDs, with horrendous consequences. And even these frightening prospects are being consciously extended by the transformation of the military, which, apart from increasing the threat of "ultimate doom" by accidental nuclear war, is compelling Russia to move nuclear missiles over its huge and mostly unprotected territory to counter US military threats – including the threat of instant annihilation that is a core part of the "ownership of space" for offensive military purposes announced by the Bush administration along with its National Security Strategy in late 2002, significantly extending Clinton programs that were more than hazardous enough, and had already immobilized the UN Disarmament Committee.

As for "moral values," we learn what we need to know about them from the business press the day after the election, reporting the "euphoria" in board rooms – not because CEOs oppose gay marriage. And from the unconcealed efforts to transfer to future generations the costs of the dedicated service of Bush planners to privilege and wealth: fiscal and environmental costs, among others, not to speak of the threat of "ultimate doom." That aside, it means little to say that people vote on the basis of "moral values." The question is what they mean by the phrase. The limited indications are of some interest. In some polls, "when the voters were asked to choose the most urgent moral crisis facing the country, 33 percent cited `greed and materialism,' 31 percent selected `poverty and economic justice,' 16 percent named abortion, and 12 percent selected gay marriage" (Pax Christi). In others, "when surveyed voters were asked to list the moral issue that most affected their vote, the Iraq war placed first at 42 percent, while 13 percent named abortion and 9 percent named gay marriage" (Zogby). Whatever voters meant, it could hardly have been the operative moral values of the administration, celebrated by the business press.

I won't go through the details here, but a careful look indicates that much the same appears to be true for Kerry voters who thought they were calling for serious attention to the economy, health, and their other concerns. As in the fake markets constructed by the PR industry, so also in the fake democracy they run, the public is hardly more than an irrelevant onlooker, apart from the appeal of carefully constructed images that have only the vaguest resemblance to reality.

Let's turn to more serious evidence about public opinion: the studies I mentioned earlier that were released shortly before the elections by some of the most respected and reliable institutions that regularly monitor public opinion. Here are a few of the results (CCFR):

A large majority of the public believe that the US should accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court, sign the Kyoto protocols, allow the UN to take the lead in international crises, and rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the "war on terror." Similar majorities believe the US should resort to force only if there is "strong evidence that the country is in imminent danger of being attacked," thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on "pre-emptive war" and adopting a rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter. A majority even favor giving up the Security Council veto, hence following the UN lead even if it is not the preference of US state managers. When official administration moderate Colin Powell is quoted in the press as saying that Bush "has won a mandate from the American people to continue pursuing his `aggressive' foreign policy," he is relying on the conventional assumption that popular opinion is irrelevant to policy choices by those in charge.

It is instructive to look more closely into popular attitudes on the war in Iraq, in the light of the general opposition to the "pre-emptive war" doctrines of the bipartisan consensus. On the eve of the 2004 elections, "three quarters of Americans say that the US should not have gone to war if Iraq did not have WMD or was not providing support to al Qaeda, while nearly half still say the war was the right decision" (Stephen Kull, reporting the PIPA study he directs). But this is not a contradiction, Kull points out. Despite the quasi-official Kay and Duelfer reports undermining the claims, the decision to go to war "is sustained by persisting beliefs among half of Americans that Iraq provided substantial support to al Qaeda, and had WMD, or at least a major WMD program," and thus see the invasion as defense against an imminent severe threat. Much earlier PIPA studies had shown that a large majority believe that the UN, not the US, should take the lead in matters of security, reconstruction, and political transition in Iraq. Last March, Spanish voters were bitterly condemned for appeasing terror when they voted out of office the government that had gone to war over the objections of about 90% of the population, taking its orders from Crawford Texas, and winning plaudits for its leadership in the "New Europe" that is the hope of democracy. Few if any commentators noted that Spanish voters last March were taking about the same position as the large majority of Americans: voting for removing Spanish troops unless they were under UN direction. The major differences between the two countries are that in Spain, public opinion was known, while here it takes an individual research project to discover it; and in Spain the issue came to a vote, almost unimaginable in the deteriorating formal democracy here.

These results indicate that activists have not done their job effectively.

Turning to other areas, overwhelming majorities of the public favor expansion of domestic programs: primarily health care (80%), but also aid to education and Social Security. Similar results have long been found in these studies (CCFR). Other mainstream polls report that 80% favor guaranteed health care even if it would raise taxes – in reality, a national health care system would probably reduce expenses considerably, avoiding the heavy costs of bureaucracy, supervision, paperwork, and so on, some of the factors that render the US privatized system the most inefficient in the industrial world. Public opinion has been similar for a long time, with numbers varying depending on how questions are asked. The facts are sometimes discussed in the press, with public preferences noted but dismissed as "politically impossible." That happened again on the eve of the 2004 elections. A few days before (Oct. 31), the NY Times reported that "there is so little political support for government intervention in the health care market in the United States that Senator John Kerry took pains in a recent presidential debate to say that his plan for expanding access to health insurance would not create a new government program" – what the majority want, so it appears. But it is "politically impossible" and has "[too] little political support," meaning that the insurance companies, HMOs, pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc. , are opposed.

It is notable that such views are held by people in virtual isolation. They rarely hear them, and it is not unlikely that respondents regard their own views as idiosyncratic. Their preferences do not enter into the political campaigns, and only marginally receive some reinforcement in articulate opinion in media and journals. The same extends to other domains.

What would the results of the election have been if the parties, either of them, had been willing to articulate people's concerns on the issues they regard as vitally important?Or if these issues could enter into public discussion within the mainstream?We can only speculate about that, but we do know that it does not happen, and that the facts are scarcely even reported. It does not seem difficult to imagine what the reasons might be.

I brief, we learn very little of any significance from the elections, but we can learn a lot from the studies of public attitudes that are kept in the shadows. Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to try to induce pessimism, hopelessness and despair, the real lessons are quite different. They are encouraging and hopeful. They show that there are substantial opportunities for education and organizing, including the development of potential electoral alternatives. As in the past, rights will not be granted by benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions – a few large demonstrations after which one goes home, or pushing a lever in the personalized quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as "democratic politics." As always in the past, the tasks require day-to-day engagement to create – in part re-create – the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle.

Noam Chomsky is the author of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (now out in paperback from Owl/Metropolitan Books)

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Fw: And so this is Christmas


----- Original Message -----
From: "TrueMajority"

Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2004 10:48 PM
Subject: And so this is Christmas


Everybody is giving gifts. Big gifts. Little gifts. We give these gifts as
tokens of our love. We're sending and receiving cards, cards that express
our common yearning for peace on Earth, goodwill to all, tidings of kindness
and joy.

And so it is doubly disheartening at this time when the spirit of Christmas
is in the air that we open the newspaper to find:

"U.S. Cutting Food Aid Aimed at Self-Sufficiency"
It turns out that while the number of the world's people who go hungry is
rising for the first time in years, the Bush administration can find no
better way to reduce spending than to cut $600 million from global food aid
programs aimed at helping millions of people climb out of poverty.

That belt-tightening of $600 million doesn't make much of a dent in a
federal discretionary budget of $965 BILLION (it's 0.0001 percent), but in
the developing world it's emergency food to prevent the starvation of
millions, and long-term agricultural development to help people feed even
more people themselves.

Or put another way, it's 1/60th of the $35 BILLION that remains in the
budget to maintain America's Cold War nuclear weapons-equivalent to 150,000
of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima.

This is so outrageous that there's now a BIPARTISAN effort in Congress led
by Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Missouri) to convince the administration that
global food aid should not be cut.

Let's make our voices really count this Christmas and give the most
important gift we can, the gift of life for millions of our hungry brothers
and sisters around the world.

And we can make it happen. Forward this e-mail far and wide so that we flood
Congress with faxes and so the world and our government will know that it's
really Christmastime and that many of us are heeding Jesus' haunting words:
"Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are
members of my family, you did it to me."

If you are a member of TrueMajority, just click "Reply" and "Send" in your
e-mail program, and we'll send a fax (text below) to your senators and
representative. If you'd like to edit your letter or if this e-mail was
forwarded to you, click this link to send a message .

Merry Christmas from all of us at TrueMajority, with love and appreciation
for allowing us to give voice to your voice.

Aaron, Andrew, Barbara, Ben, Darcy, Dave, Duane, Dusty, Ed, Elliot, Emily,
Gary, Jack, Jason, Marian, Matt, and Natalie

===========================================================

Here's the letter we'll send to your senators and representative:

Dear [Senator/Representative]:

It was recently reported that a last-minute deal cut $600 million out of
programs that help desperately poor people around the world become
self-sufficient. This was a tragic mistake.

In the coming weeks you will vote on a supplemental appropriation to fund
the continuing war in Iraq. The relatively small sum needed to fully fund
these antipoverty programs will strengthen our nation's security and I ask
you to make sure it is included in this bill. Furthermore, it appears the
president may continue or even deepen these cuts in next year's budget
proposal. No matter what the initial proposal, please work to fully fund
these programs.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Sincerely,
(We'll put your name and address here.)



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Special Report

A Call To Action
Special Report
Justice Dept. Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Anti-Terrorism Act

By Charles Lewis and Adam Mayle

(WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2003) -- The Bush Administration is preparing a bold, comprehensive sequel to the USA Patriot Act passed in the wake of September 11, 2001, which will give the government broad, sweeping new powers to increase domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance and law enforcement prerogatives, and simultaneously decrease judicial review and public access to information.

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained a draft, dated January 9, 2003, of this previously undisclosed legislation and is making it available in full text (12 MB). The bill, drafted by the staff of Attorney General John Ashcroft and entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, has not been officially released by the Department of Justice, although rumors of its development have circulated around the Capitol for the last few months under the name of “the Patriot Act II” in legislative parlance.

“We haven’t heard anything from the Justice Department on updating the Patriot Act,” House Judiciary Committee spokesman Jeff Lungren told the Center. “They haven’t shared their thoughts on that. Obviously, we'd be interested, but we haven’t heard anything at this point.”

Senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee minority staff have inquired about Patriot II for months and have been told as recently as this week that there is no such legislation being planned.


Mirror Location of Document:
www.ire.org



Mark Corallo, deputy director of Justice’s Office of Public Affairs, told the Center his office was unaware of the draft. “I have heard people talking about revising the Patriot Act, we are looking to work on things the way we would do with any law,” he said. “We may work to make modifications to protect Americans,” he added. When told that the Center had a copy of the draft legislation, he said, “This is all news to me. I have never heard of this.”

After the Center posted this story, Barbara Comstock, director of public affairs for the Justice Dept., released a statement saying that, "Department staff have not presented any final proposals to either the Attorney General or the White House. It would be premature to speculate on any future decisions, particularly ideas or proposals that are still being discussed at staff levels."

An Office of Legislative Affairs “control sheet” that was obtained by the PBS program "Now With Bill Moyers" seems to indicate that a copy of the bill was sent to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Vice President Richard Cheney on Jan. 10, 2003. “Attached for your review and comment is a draft legislative proposal entitled the ‘Domestice Security Enhancement Act of 2003,’” the memo, sent from “OLP” or Office of Legal Policy, says.
RELATED LINKS
For additional information, visit the web site of PBS' "Now With Bill Moyers". Read the transcript of Moyers' interview with Charles Lewis.

Comstock later told the Center that the draft "is an early discussion draft and it has not been sent to either the Vice President or the Speaker of the House."

Dr. David Cole, Georgetown University Law professor and author of Terrorism and the Constitution, reviewed the draft legislation at the request of the Center, and said that the legislation “raises a lot of serious concerns. It’s troubling that they have gotten this far along and they’ve been telling people there is nothing in the works.” This proposed law, he added, “would radically expand law enforcement and intelligence gathering authorities, reduce or eliminate judicial oversight over surveillance, authorize secret arrests, create a DNA database based on unchecked executive ‘suspicion,’ create new death penalties, and even seek to take American citizenship away from persons who belong to or support disfavored political groups.”

Some of the key provision of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 include:

Section 201, “Prohibition of Disclosure of Terrorism Investigation Detainee Information”: Safeguarding the dissemination of information related to national security has been a hallmark of Ashcroft’s first two years in office, and the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 follows in the footsteps of his October 2001 directive to carefully consider such interest when granting Freedom of Information Act requests. While the October memo simply encouraged FOIA officers to take national security, “protecting sensitive business information and, not least, preserving personal privacy” into account while deciding on requests, the proposed legislation would enhance the department’s ability to deny releasing material on suspected terrorists in government custody through FOIA.

Section 202, “Distribution of ‘Worst Case Scenario’ Information”: This would introduce new FOIA restrictions with regard to the Environmental Protection Agency. As provided for in the Clean Air Act, the EPA requires private companies that use potentially dangerous chemicals must produce a “worst case scenario” report detailing the effect that the release of these controlled substances would have on the surrounding community. Section 202 of this Act would, however, restrict FOIA requests to these reports, which the bill’s drafters refer to as “a roadmap for terrorists.” By reducing public access to “read-only” methods for only those persons “who live and work in the geographical area likely to be affected by a worst-case scenario,” this subtitle would obfuscate an established level of transparency between private industry and the public.

Section 301-306, “Terrorist Identification Database”: These sections would authorize creation of a DNA database on “suspected terrorists,” expansively defined to include association with suspected terrorist groups, and noncitizens suspected of certain crimes or of having supported any group designated as terrorist.

Section 312, “Appropriate Remedies with Respect to Law Enforcement Surveillance Activities”: This section would terminate all state law enforcement consent decrees before Sept. 11, 2001, not related to racial profiling or other civil rights violations, that limit such agencies from gathering information about individuals and organizations. The authors of this statute claim that these consent orders, which were passed as a result of police spying abuses, could impede current terrorism investigations. It would also place substantial restrictions on future court injunctions.

Section 405, “Presumption for Pretrial Detention in Cases Involving Terrorism”: While many people charged with drug offenses punishable by prison terms of 10 years or more are held before their trial without bail, this provision would create a comparable statute for those suspected of terrorist activity. The reasons for presumptively holding suspected terrorists before trial, the Justice Department summary memo states, are clear. “This presumption is warranted because of the unparalleled magnitude of the danger to the United States and its people posed by acts of terrorism, and because terrorism is typically engaged in by groups – many with international connections – that are often in a position to help their members flee or go into hiding.”

Section 501, “Expatriation of Terrorists”: This provision, the drafters say, would establish that an American citizen could be expatriated “if, with the intent to relinquish his nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United Stated has designated as a ‘terrorist organization’.” But whereas a citizen formerly had to state his intent to relinquish his citizenship, the new law affirms that his intent can be “inferred from conduct.” Thus, engaging in the lawful activities of a group designated as a “terrorist organization” by the Attorney General could be presumptive grounds for expatriation.

The Domestic Security Enhancement Act is the latest development in an 18-month trend in which the Bush Administration has sought expanded powers and responsibilities for law enforcement bodies to help counter the threat of terrorism.

The USA Patriot Act, signed into law by President Bush on Oct. 26, 2001, gave law enforcement officials broader authority to conduct electronic surveillance and wiretaps, and gives the president the authority, when the nation is under attack, to confiscate any property within U.S. jurisdiction of anyone believed to be engaging in such attacks. The measure also tightened oversight of financial activities to prevent money laundering and diminish bank secrecy in an effort to disrupt terrorist finances.

It also changed provisions of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed in 1978 during the Cold War. FISA established a different standard of government oversight and judicial review for “foreign intelligence” surveillance than that applied to traditional domestic law enforcement surveillance.

The USA Patriot Act allowed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share information gathered in terrorism investigations under the “foreign intelligence” standard with local law enforcement agencies, in essence nullifying the higher standard of oversight that applied to domestic investigations. The USA Patriot Act also amended FISA to permit surveillance under the less rigorous standard whenever “foreign intelligence” was a “significant purpose” rather than the “primary purpose” of an investigation.

The draft legislation goes further in that direction. “In the [USA Patriot Act] we have to break down the wall of foreign intelligence and law enforcement,” Cole said. “Now they want to break down the wall between international terrorism and domestic terrorism.”

In an Oct. 9, 2002, hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism, and Government Information, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher testified that Justice had been, “looking at potential proposals on following up on the PATRIOT Act for new tools and we have also been working with different agencies within the government and they are still studying that and hopefully we will continue to work with this committee in the future on new tools that we believe are necessary in the war on terrorism.”

Asked by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) whether she could inform the committee of what specific areas Justice was looking at, Fisher replied, “At this point I can’t, I’m sorry. They're studying a lot of different ideas and a lot of different tools that follow up on information sharing and other aspects.”

Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy Viet Dinh, who was the principal author of the first Patriot Act, told Legal Times last October that there was “an ongoing process to continue evaluating and re-evaluating authorities we have with respect to counterterrorism,” but declined to say whether a new bill was forthcoming.

Former FBI Director William Sessions, who urged caution while Congress considered the USA Patriot Act, did not want to enter the fray concerning a possible successor bill.

"I hate to jump into it, because it's a very delicate thing," Sessions told the Center, without acknowledging whether he knew of any proposed additions or revisions to the additional Patriot bill.

When the first bill was nearing passage in the Congress in late 2001, however, Sessions told Internet site NewsMax.Com that the balance between civil liberties and sufficient intelligence gathering was a difficult one. “First of all, the Attorney General has to justify fully what he’s asking for,” Sessions, who served presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush as FBI Director from 1987 until 1993, said at the time. “We need to be sure that we provide an effective means to deal with criminality.” At the same time, he said, “we need to be sure that we are mindful of the Constitution, mindful of privacy considerations, but also meet the technological needs we have” to gather intelligence.

Cole found it disturbing that there have been no consultations with Congress on the draft legislation. “It raises a lot of serious concerns and is troubling as a generic matter that they have gotten this far along and tell people that there is nothing in the works. What that suggests is that they’re waiting for a propitious time to introduce it, which might well be when a war is begun. At that time there would be less opportunity for discussion and they’ll have a much stronger hand in saying that they need these right away.”

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Copyright 2002, The Center for Public Integrity. All rights reserved

Goodbye Jack Newfield

A Call To Action

By John Nichols, The Nation
Posted on December 22, 2004, Printed on December 23, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20824/

In RFK: A Memoir, the finest of the shelf full of books he produced during a career that was as prolific as it was meaningful, Jack Newfield succeeded in explaining the late Robert F. Kennedy better than any of the late New York senator's many biographers. "Part of him was soldier, priest, radical, and football coach. But he was none of these," wrote Newfield, who had chronicled his subject's transition from President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's "first-brother" to presidential candidate in his own right. "He was a politician. His enemies said he was consumed with selfish ambition, a ruthless opportunist exploiting his brother's legend. But he was too passionate and too vulnerable ever to be the cool and confident operator his brother was."

With Newfield's death Monday night at age 66, there will be a search for the words to describe the late journalist. In the end, if that search is successful, it will find its way back to the words that Newfield employed to describe Kennedy.

Newfield, who most of us came to know as the star reporter for New York's Village Voice newspaper from the 1960s to the 1980s, and who most recently was a regular contributor to The Nation, had many passions - from boxing to baseball to civil rights and civil liberties. But the thing I loved best about Jack Newfield was that he loved politics. When he described Kennedy as a politician, he was not dismissing the man whose majestic 1968 presidential campaign he chronicled in an up-close-and-personal fashion that put the reporter just a short distance away from the scene where that campaign - and so many of the hopes of Newfield's decade, the 1960s - were dashed. Rather, Newfield was honoring Kennedy, about whom the reporter would say, "Though it's really unknowable, I think that if Bobby had lived to be president we would have ended the Vietnam War much sooner, renewed the war on poverty; we would have had a totally different policy toward blacks than Richard Nixon had."

All of those things mattered to Newfield, whose progressive passions were never obscured by his reporter's pen and notepad. Like all great reporters, he knew that slogans like "fair-and-balanced" were merely camouflage for laziness and the lie of relativism. The point was to get at the truth. And Newfield knew that the most important arena in which to go seeking for truth, in all its ugliness and glory, was the political fray.

Newfield understood that politics ought to be a noble endeavor. Yet, he recognized that it seldom was. He had a facility for spotting both the failings of those who gave politics its bad name – especially those of the political bosses of Brooklyn and Queens – and the potential of those who sought to redeem the enterprises of electioneering and governing. And he saw redemption in participatory democracy; among the final articles by this veteran of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s was an optimistic report on the increasingly important role that African-American voters would play in the 2004 election.

One of Newfield's last endeavors was the editing of a pair of books of essays, American Rebels and American Monsters. Newfield was on the side of the rebels. He celebrated them when they were beating the monsters in the 1960s, and when they were frequently beaten by those same monsters in the decades that followed.

Jack Newfield saw a world of heroes and villains, and he recognized that when they battled in the political arena it was the job of the journalist to go beyond merely reporting. He understood that the search for truth led, ultimately, to the point where the journalist had to take a side. He took the side of civil rights marchers, of anti-poverty crusaders, of reformers and radicals who believed that the promise of social and economic equity would be made real if the better angels of the American experiment could only be awoken by an article or a book. And so he wrote, passionately, powerfully and with a faith in the potential of a word well chosen to change the world.

Jack Newfield defined journalism for this reporter, and for thousands of others. His passing robs the craft not just of an able practitioner, but of a man who taught the rest of us that the combination of pen and ink could produce the rarest of all commodities: truth, and sometimes justice.
© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20824/

Democratic Leadership Rethinking Abortion

A Call To Action

By Peter Wallsten and Mary Curtius
Times Staff Writers

December 23, 2004

WASHINGTON — After long defining itself as an undisputed defender of abortion rights, the Democratic Party is suddenly locked in an internal struggle over whether to redefine its position to appeal to a broader array of voters.

The fight is a central theme of the contest to head the Democratic National Committee, particularly between two leading candidates: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who supports abortion rights, and former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, an abortion foe who argues that the party cannot rebound from its losses in the November election unless it shows more tolerance on one of society's most emotional conflicts.

Roemer is running with the encouragement of the party's two highest-ranking members of Congress, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and incoming Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Dean, a former presidential candidate, is popular with the party's liberal wing.

If Roemer were to succeed Terry McAuliffe as Democratic chairman in the Feb. 10 vote, the party long viewed as the guardian of abortion rights would suddenly have two antiabortion advocates at its helm. Reid, too, opposes abortion and once voted for a nonbinding resolution opposing Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

Party leaders say their support for preserving the landmark ruling will not change. But they are looking at ways to soften the hard line, such as promoting adoption and embracing parental notification requirements for minors and bans on late-term abortions. Their thinking reflects a sense among strategists that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and the party's congressional candidates lost votes because the GOP conveyed a more compelling message on social issues.

But in opening a discussion about new appeals to abortion opponents, party leaders are moving into uncertain terrain. Abortion rights activists are critical pillars of the Democratic Party, providing money and grass-roots energy. Some of them say they are concerned that Democratic leaders are entertaining any changes to the party's approach to abortion.

A senior official of one of the nation's largest abortion rights groups said she would be concerned if the party were to choose Roemer to head the Democratic National Committee.

"We want people who are pro-choice. Of course I would be disappointed," said the official, who asked that her name be withheld because of her close alliance with party officials.

Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said Democratic strategists who were pushing for the abortion discussion had misconstrued the results of the November election by overstating the strength of "values" voters.

She said the party should remain committed to the "women of America, and their health and their lives and their rights."

Feldt said she had spoken to Kerry and Roemer on Wednesday, and that both had sought to allay her concerns. Both assured her that the party was not changing its stance on abortion, but merely wanted to be more "inclusive."

The debate among Democrats comes at a time when abortion rights supporters are feeling particularly vulnerable. Congress passed a ban on what critics call "partial-birth" abortion last year that Bush signed into law. Last month, abortion opponents were emboldened when four conservative Republicans were elected to the Senate. Also, anticipated retirements from the Supreme Court could give Bush the chance to nominate justices that would tilt the court against Roe vs. Wade.

The race for Democratic Party chairman remains wide open among Dean, Roemer and several other contenders, including longtime operative Harold M. Ickes, New Democrat Network head Simon Rosenberg and South Carolina political strategist Donald L. Fowler Jr. The field of candidates is likely to remain in flux until days before the February vote.

In an interview, Roemer said he would not try to change the minds of abortion rights supporters. But he also said he would encourage the party to eliminate its "moral blind spot" when it comes to late-term abortions.

"We should be talking more about adoption as an alternative, and working with our churches to sponsor some of those adoptions," Roemer said Wednesday from his Washington office. He said he was calling 40 to 50 delegates a day to make his pitch. Most of all, he said, he thinks that abortion opponents would be more comfortable if the party talked about the issue in a more open-minded manner.

"We must be able to campaign in 50 states, not just the blue states or 20 states," said Roemer, referring to the most Democratic-leaning states.

Dean declined through a spokeswoman to talk about the issue, but earlier this month he signaled that he would maintain the party's defense of abortion rights, telling NBC's Tim Russert: "We can change our vocabulary, but I don't think we ought to change our principles."

Votes will be cast by 447 members of the Democratic National Committee, many of whom are among the party's most liberal members. These members are thought to be friendly to Dean and less receptive to Roemer. But the former Indiana congressman is getting attention amid reports that Pelosi and Reid urged him to run.

Roemer has also highlighted his service on the independent panel investigating the government's response to the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that credential builds his appeal to security-minded voters. He noted that he was an elected official from Indiana, a "red state" where Democrats want to make gains.

A Pelosi spokesman said the House Democratic leader liked Roemer because of his national security credentials. But a senior Democratic congressional aide said Pelosi also thought that Roemer's stance on abortion could be an additional benefit.

"She is pro-choice and very staunchly pro-choice," the aide said of Pelosi. But at the same time, the aide said, "she supports showing that this is a big-tent party."

In the presidential election, Kerry, a Catholic, said he personally opposed abortion but did not believe in imposing that belief on others. He said he would not appoint antiabortion judges to the bench.

But after his election loss, the Massachusetts senator concluded that the party needed to rethink its stance. Addressing supporters at a meeting held by the AFL-CIO, Kerry said he discovered during trips through Pennsylvania that many union members were also abortion opponents and that the party needed to rethink how it could appeal to those voters, Kerry spokesman David Wade said.

On the other side of the debate, Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Conservative Women for America, which opposes abortion, said she thought it would be "very smart" for Democrats to elect Roemer chairman of the party.

"It would make sense for Democrats as a whole to recognize that Americans want protections for women and unborn children, want sensible regulations in place, instead of forbidding the law to recognize that an unborn child is a human being," Wright said. "To not pass legislation just to keep the abortion lobby happy is nonsensical, and it appears that some Democrats have recognized that."

Wright said it was too early to know whether Democrats would change their votes on upcoming antiabortion legislation, or would only change the way they speak of abortion. She said the comments of some party leaders led her to believe that "it would just be changing of wording, just trying to repackage in order to be more appealing — really, to trick people."

Some local Democratic leaders said they would be open to an antiabortion chairman under the right circumstances, but that it would be difficult to envision those circumstances.

"That would be a very large philosophical mountain for me to climb," said Mitch Ceasar, a Broward County, Fla., lawyer who is a voting member of the party's national committee.

Ceasar said he took note of Roemer's abortion stance when he received a letter recently from him. He said he was surprised to learn that abortion was an issue in the contest to succeed McAuliffe. "It never occurred to me before his candidacy," Ceasar said. "I never wondered whether Terry McAuliffe was pro-choice or not."

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Students to Bear More of the Cost of College

A Call To Action
The New York Times
December 23, 2004

By GREG WINTER

College students in virtually every state will be required to shoulder more of the cost of their education under new federal rules that govern most of the nation's financial aid.

Because of the changes, which take effect next fall and are expected to save the government $300 million in the 2005-6 academic year, at least 1.3 million students will receive smaller Pell Grants, the nation's primary scholarship for those of low income, according to two analyses of the new rules.

In addition, 89,000 students or so who would otherwise be getting some Pell Grant money will get none, the analyses found.

"Season's greetings from Uncle Sam," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, which conducted one of the analyses and represents about 1,800 colleges and universities. "Your student aid stocking is going to be a little thinner next year."

Beyond the implications for Pell Grants, the new rules are expected to have a domino effect across almost every type of financial aid, tightening access to billions of dollars in state and institutional grants and, in turn, increasing the reliance on loans to pay for college. Taken together, many education experts say, the consequences for the nation's core financial aid programs are among the most substantial in a decade.

"This is the first time in at least 10 years where there's been a significant reduction for this magnitude of students," said Brian K. Fitzgerald, director of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which was created by Congress to advise the lawmakers on financial aid. It was this committee that performed the other analysis.

The changes are the denouement of a fight that has roiled Congress for more than 18 months. When the Bush administration first proposed altering financial aid rules last year, legislators stopped the revisions from taking hold, arguing that tough economic times meant students needed more help to attend college, not less.

But this year the administration found support from Congressional leaders seeking to constrain the cost of Pell Grants, an expense that has steadily increased as more low-income students go to college.

Even with the new rules, spending on Pell Grants, which could easily surpass $12 billion this fiscal year, may continue to increase, and the ranks of recipients will probably grow as well, because so many new students are applying for aid.

Without the changes, though, Pell Grant costs would be about $300 million higher than with them, according to figures from the White House Office of Management and Budget, since tens of thousands of additional students would be eligible for aid and hundreds of thousands more would receive larger awards.

Exactly how individual families will be affected depends greatly on their financial circumstances and on where they live. Parents who earn at least $15,000 will be negatively affected in every state except New Jersey and Connecticut. Those in states including New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina and Wisconsin will be among the hardest hit.

Many may see their federal grants decline by only a few hundred dollars, or not at all, some financial aid experts estimate. Others can be expected to contribute significantly more.

Painful though it may be, supporters of the new rules say, trimming back on awards has its benefits, especially for future students.

Educators and lawmakers on all sides have long agreed that the maximum Pell Grant, currently set at $4,050 a year, is wholly inadequate given today's college costs. But, supporters of the changes say, unless there is a serious effort to scale back the program, whose costs have been exceeding lawmakers' appropriations for it, Congress may never be in a position to give larger awards to the poorest of students, who need them the most.

"There aren't any easy answers, and there are consequences for wrongly adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the current budget shortfall," said David Schnittger, spokesman for the Republican majority on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The debate stems from a seemingly small alteration to the federal financial aid formula, a complicated equation that either directly governs or heavily influences distribution of federal, state and institutional aid. Its purpose is to determine how much of a family's income is truly discretionary and therefore fair game for covering college expenses.

Much as with the federal income tax, the formula allows families to deduct some of what they pay in state and local taxes. This year the administration gained enough Congressional backing to reduce that amount significantly, in some cases cutting it by half or more. On paper, at least, that leaves families with more money left over to pay for college, even though state and local taxes have gone up in the last few years, not down.

The Department of Education, which issues the financial aid formula, says it has no choice but to update the deductions periodically.

"We're required by law to do this, and we can't pick and choose which parts of the law to follow," said Susan Aspey, a department spokeswoman.

Ms. Aspey said by e-mail yesterday that about 80,000 additional students - not 89,000 as the two analyses determined - would be receiving grants if the changes had not been made. She also said that nearly half of the nation's 5.3 million Pell recipients would not be affected, though that would appear to leave the possibility that the number affected will be even higher than the 1.4 million estimated in the two analyses. Ms. Aspey could not be reached last night for elaboration.

In adjusting the formula, the department is relying on data from 2002, which may not fully reflect the economic difficulties that many families have faced since then. Department officials, however, say the new formula is a lot more accurate than the previous one, which was at least a decade old.

The enormous University of California, with campuses scattered across the state, estimates that at least half of its 46,000 Pell Grant recipients will face some sort of reduction as a result of the changes. At the other end of the spectrum, Knox College, a small liberal arts institution in Illinois, says the changes will most likely reach upward to affect the middle class as well.

"Of course we focus on the students who have the greatest need, but these families are needy, too," said Teresa Jackson, Knox's director of financial aid. "They can't just sit down and write a check for $30,000 a year. I can appreciate the difficulty with the budget, but my gosh, to cut back on financial aid given the times doesn't make a lot of sense."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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