Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Monday, January 31, 2005
U.S. Denies Guantánamo Inmates' Rights, Judge Says
the Bush administration has been wrongly blocking terrorism suspects held in Cuba from fighting their detention, and that the review procedure set up to determine whether they are "enemy combatants" is inherently unfair and unconstitutional.
Judge Joyce Hens Green, who has been reviewing claims filed by several dozen detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, said the detainees were clearly entitled under a Supreme Court ruling last June to challenge the basis for their detention, despite administration arguments to the contrary.
"Although this nation unquestionably must take strong action under the leadership of the commander in chief to protect itself against enormous and unprecedented threats, that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over 200 years," Judge Green wrote.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Right Wing Revolutionaries have Invested Years in Private Accounts
This week, President Bush's plan to allow younger workers to divert Social Security taxes into personal investment accounts will be a centerpiece of his State of the Union address and a barnstorming tour of the country. It is a tough sell to an uncertain public, but Bush has a secret weapon: A generation of free-market conservatives like Crane and Piñera has been laying the groundwork for this debate.
"It could be many years before the conditions are such that a radical reform of Social Security is possible," wrote Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, Heritage Foundation analysts, in a 1983 article in the Cato Journal. "But then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform."
Now, Bush is drawing on a deep reservoir of resources — including policy research, ready-to-hire experts and polling on how to discuss the issue — that conservatives have created over the last 20 years.
When he needed a committed ally at the highest levels of the Social Security Administration, Bush two years ago tapped Cato's staff. When Bush told African American leaders last week that blacks would especially benefit from his proposal, he drew from a controversial 1998 Heritage Foundation paper arguing that African Americans were shortchanged by the current system because of their shorter life spans.
Thanks in part to the work of think tanks like Cato, Heritage and the National Center for Policy Analysis, Bush is also benefiting from a public opinion climate that is far more receptive to changing the government retirement system than it was 20 years ago.
That is partly because these groups have broadcast a consistent message: Social Security is financially unsustainable and will collapse after the baby boom generation retires. Although that is debatable, polls show that most Americans lack confidence in the program's future.
"It started as the third rail of politics, but over a period of time conservatives kept at it until [their assumptions] began to sound like common sense," said George Lakoff, an expert in political communication at UC Berkeley.
Critics of personal accounts, such as the AFL-CIO and the seniors lobby AARP, have mobilized to counter that Social Security is in good health and sustainable with minor modifications. They also argue that to pay for worker-owned accounts, the government would have to cut benefits or take other steps that undermine the health of the system.
Critics also point to the Chilean program that Bush cites as a model, and say it demonstrates the potential pitfalls of private accounts. Recent reports indicate that, as the first generation of Chilean workers on their new system begins to retire, many believe it is failing to deliver as much in benefits as they would have received under the old system.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
UK police release Guantanamo four
Four British men held at Guantanamo Bay for three years as "enemy combatants" have been freed by UK police.
Martin Mubanga, Feroz Abbasi, Richard Belmar and Moazzam Begg were being reunited with their families at a location of their choice, police said.
The men, from Birmingham and London, were questioned at Paddington Green police station after returning from Cuba but were released without charge.
The US accused them of having al-Qaeda links and says they are still a threat.
Scion of traitors and warlords: why Bush is coy about his Irish links
The US president's now apparent ancestor, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke - known as Strongbow for his arrow skills - is remembered as a desperate, land-grabbing warlord whose calamitous foreign adventure led to the suffering of generations. Shunned by Henry II, he offered his services as a mercenary in the 12th-century invasion of Wexford in exchange for power and land. When he eventually died of a festering ulcer in his foot, his enemies said it was the revenge of Irish saints whose shrines he had violated.
... The genetic line can also be traced to Dermot MacMurrough, the Gaelic king of Leinster reviled in history books as the man who sold Ireland for personal gain.
A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam
"We thought in those early days in Vietnam that we were winning," Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, one of this war's most vocal opponents, warned in a speech here on Thursday. "We thought the skill and courage of our troops was enough. We thought that victory on the battlefield would lead to victory in war and peace and democracy for the people of Vietnam. In the name of a misguided cause, we continued in a war too long. We failed to comprehend the events around us. We did not understand that our very presence was creating new enemies and defeating the very goals we set out to achieve."
Bush's Arguments for War Have Fallen Apart
First, [the war in Iraq] has distracted attention from the original terrorist threat: the al-Qa'ida network that launched the attacks against New York and Washington and yearns to acquire weapons of mass destruction whose use would dwarf the impact of 11 September.
This is not to say that the US has abandoned the hunt for Bin Laden. It is simply to acknowledge a truism that any US administration finds it virtually impossible to focus on two objectives at once. Resources that would have been focused on international terrorism have been switched to Iraq.
Second, the ousting of Saddam can only have hardened the resolve of Iran and North Korea - the two other "axis of evil" members in the sights of Mr Bush - to acquire the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq never possessed. The irony of the invasion was that it removed the least menacing regime of the three.
The White House points to Libya's abandonment of its WMD ambitions as vindication of its Iraq policy. More probably, Colonel Gaddafi's decision reflected a simple calculation that international isolation was no longer in his country's interest. In all likelihood, it would have happened even if Saddam were still in power.
The lesson Tehran and Pyongyang have drawn from the invasion is that the sooner they go nuclear, the safer from US attack they will be. For all its rhetoric, one reason this administration has not gone after Iran and North Korea is because they are stronger, more dangerous opponents than Iraq.
Iran, three times more populous than Iraq, may be within a year or two of building a bomb. North Korea could, according to the CIA, already have half a dozen nuclear devices, holding South Korea to ransom.
The third unintended consequence has been the spread of anti-Americanism across the Islamic world. The toppling of Saddam was supposed to have a domino effect, bringing peace and democracy to the entire Middle East. If anything, the reverse is true. The chaos and violence of Iraq is the least appealing model imaginable. The abuse at Abu Ghraib and the evidence of torture at Guantanamo Bay - for which no senior US soldier or policymaker has been punished - has only made Washington appear more hypocritical than ever, and made thousands of young Muslims even more susceptible to the propaganda of the hardliners.
And, fourthly, there is Iraq itself. This week, Mr Bush pointed to the election as proof that Iraq is changing for the better. Senior intelligence officials - the very ones whose warnings were tossed aside in the rush to war - beg to differ. A couple of weeks ago, America's National Intelligence Council, the research arm of the US intelligence community, warned that Iraq had become "a magnet for international terrorist activity", in the words of its director, Robert Hutchings. The country had become a recruiting ground and training camp for terrorists.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Arabs Say Iraq Vote Gives Democracy a Bad Name: "Many Arabs think elections held under U.S. occupation can only produce a government similar to the U.S.-backed interim government, which they view as an American puppet"
Watching America: Will It Listen to Foreigners, or Do as It Pleases?
This has been the World Economic Forum that the United States government largely passed by. In a world that both respects and fears American power, there is worry that the United States does not care what others think.
Or, as Tony Blair, the prime minister of Britain, put it in a speech to the forum, "If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda, too." He added, "What people want is not for America to concede, but for America to engage."
Why I Am Not Taking Part in These Phony Elections: "these elections are, for Iraq's women, little more than a cruel joke. Amid the suicide attacks, kidnappings and US-led military assaults of the 20-odd months since Saddam's fall, the little-reported phenomenon is the sharp increase in the persecution of Iraqi women. Women are the new victims of Islamic groups intent on restoring a medieval barbarity and of a political establishment that cares little for women's empowerment.
Having for years enjoyed greater rights than other women in the Middle East, women in Iraq are now losing even their basic freedoms. The right to choose their clothes, the right to love or marry whom they want. Of course women suffered under Saddam. I fled his cruel regime. I personally witnessed much brutality, but the subjugation of women was never a goal of the Baath party. What we are seeing now is deeply worrying: a reviled occupation and an openly reactionary Islamic armed insurrection combining to take Iraq into a new dark age.
Every day, leaflets are distributed across the country warning women against going out unveiled, wearing make-up, or mixing with men. Many female university students have given up their studies to protect themselves against the Islamists."
What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day: "The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.
A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her parent's blood.
No promise of "freedom" rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here.
... Would anybody in the United States be seeing this picture today? Would the United States ever see it, in fact?"
Saturday, January 22, 2005
President failed to meet his Constitutional obligation, ex-Congressman alleges in Petition to Supreme Court
When Congress passed the Iraq Resolution in Oct. 2002, the legislators specifically made it subject to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, known as the War Powers Act. The Iraq resolution was definite. ”Nothing in this joint resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution,” it reads.
Rather than giving Pres. Bush the authority to take the nation to war, Callan believes, it granted him only the right to determine whether the standards laid out by the War Powers Act had been met. The War Powers Act was passed near the end of the Vietnam War in an effort to ensure that future Congresses would be less likely to abdicate their constitutional responsibility to decide whether the nation should go to war.
To justify going to war, the War Powers Act sets out several criteria. Most important of these is ”clear” evidence of an ”imminent” threat to U.S. security. The words ”clear” and ”imminent” are used repeatedly to describe situations where U.S. military force is permitted.
In the run-up to the invasion -- and ever since -- Pres. Bush went out of his way to avoid using the words ”clear” and ”imminent”, Callan says. Bush described the threat from Iraq with adjectives like ”growing” and ”gathering”.
While some of his surrogates, including his then press secretary Ari Fleisher, declared the threat ”imminent”, the president never did.
In essence, Callan's suit, filed in a U.S. circuit court three years ago, charges that the president failed to meet his constitutional obligation.
Bush Pulls 'Neocons' Out of the Shadows
LA Times
In the unending struggle over American foreign policy that consumes much of official Washington, one side claimed a victory this week: the neoconservatives, that determined band of hawkish idealists who promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) and now seek to bring democracy to the rest of the Middle East.
... Bush proclaimed in his inaugural address that the central purpose of his second term would be the promotion of democracy "in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world" — a key neoconservative goal. Suddenly, the neocons were ascendant again.
"This is real neoconservatism," said Robert Kagan, a foreign policy scholar who has been a leading exponent of neocon thinking — and who sometimes has criticized the administration for not being neocon enough. "It would be hard to express it more clearly. If people were expecting Bush to rein in his ambitions and enthusiasms after the first term, they are discovering that they were wrong."
On the other side of the Republican foreign policy divide, a leading "realist" — an exponent of the view that promoting democracy is nice, but not the central goal of U.S. foreign policy — agreed.
"If Bush means it literally, then it means we have an extremist in the White House," said Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a conservative think tank that reveres the less idealistic policies of Richard Nixon.
... But [a Bush] aide went on to repeat, with emphasis, some of Bush's words that put democratization of other countries at the center of his foreign policy. "It is a top priority for his second term," the aide said. "He's raised the emphasis. He's raised the profile…. He's made it clear that he's going to turn up the pressure a bit. He's going to try to accelerate the process."
The administration would begin unveiling specific steps to increase the pressure for democracy in undemocratic countries, the Bush aide said, but he refused to describe any at this point.
At her confirmation hearings this week, Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) named six countries as "outposts of tyranny" that would get special attention from the second-term Bush administration: Cuba, Burma, North Korea (news - web sites), Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe.
On Friday, the senior official who briefed reporters said the administration also would be pressing friendly regimes to institute democratic reforms; he mentioned Russia, China, Pakistan and Egypt "as illustrations." Much of the pressure, he said, would be private rather than public, and the administration would be careful to avoid undermining a leader like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, whom it counts as a democratic reformer.
[Calling Musharaff a democratic reformer is insane, in my opinion.]
Another senior official — a prominent neoconservative who also refused to be named — said Bush's theme reflected several "lessons learned" in the last 30 years. Chief among them, he said, was an argument that neoconservatives often made about the Soviet Union and, more recently, Iraq: that a central goal of the United States should be "systemic change" — changing hostile states' regimes, not merely their policies.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Bush Leaves Everyone Guessing
"[A]s he begins his second term, this question recurs: Is the president operating from a remotely realistic view of the world?"
John Podhoretz in the New York Post: "The president's faith in what he called 'the transformational power of liberty' in his 2004 convention speech has been manifest in almost every major address he has given since 9/11."
William McKenzie in the Dallas Morning News: "His second presidential inaugural address flowed directly from his belief that God bestows dignity upon each individual. . . .
"Sadly, what was missing was much talk about humility, about our need to bend our knees to understand God's way. Without that, we mortal Americans are likely to miss the log in our own eye when we're trying to get the speck out of others'."
James Klurfeld in Newsday: "There is an oversimplification in his vision, a messianic streak that doesn't quite square with reality."
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Bush Bad for Global Peace, US Image, World Believes
”The research makes very clear that the re-election of President Bush has further isolated America from the world,” said Doug Miller, GlobeScan's president. ”It also supports the view of some Americans that unless his administration changes its approach to world affairs in its second term, it will continue to erode America's good name, and hence its ability to effectively influence world affairs.”
Fifty-eight percent of the respondents predicted that Bush's re-election would be bad for international peace and security...
The mammoth poll, which was conducted in each country during December, also found that 42 percent of respondents worldwide said Bush's re-election had made them feel worse about the U.S. public, compared to 25 percent who said it made them feel better, and 23 percent who said it made no difference.
Global sentiment also appeared to be overwhelmingly negative about U.S.-led military operations in Iraq.
Overall, 70 percent of respondents said they were opposed to their countries contributing troops to the operation. In no country -- including those, like Poland, that are in fact contributing troops in Iraq -- did either a majority or plurality of respondents say they thought their country should contribute troops.
Voter Turnout Won't Be Enough to Legitimize Election
As the US tries to cook the books, Iraq may be heading for civil war
... Senior US officials and interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi repeatedly insist that all is well because insecurity will restrict voting in "only four of Iraq's 18 provinces".
Four out of 18 is a little over 20 per cent and in the circumstances might be acceptable. But the truth is very different. Anywhere between 40 and 50 per cent of the population live in those four provinces.
A Nuremberg Lesson
Torture Scandal Began Far Above 'Rotten Apples.'
"This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed … were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."
Most people who hear this quote today assume it was uttered by a senior officer of the Bush administration. Instead, it comes from one of history's greatest mass murderers, Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz.
... At Nuremberg, U.S. prosecutors held German officials accountable for the consequences of their policy decisions without offering proof that these decisions were implemented with the knowledge of the policymakers. The existence of the policies and evidence that the conduct contemplated in them occurred was taken as proof enough.
What Is Wrong with Torture
... Torture is not wrong because someone else thinks it is wrong or because others, in retaliation for torture by Americans, may torture Americans. It is the torture that is wrong. Torture is wrong because it inflicts unspeakable pain upon the body of a fellow human being who is entirely at our mercy. The tortured person is bound and helpless. The torturer stands over him with his instruments. There is no question of "unilateral disarmament," because the victim bears no arms, lacking even the use of the two arms he was born with. The inequality is total. To abuse or kill a person in such a circumstance is as radical a denial of common humanity as is possible. It is repugnant to learn that one's country's military forces are engaging in torture. It is worse to learn that the torture is widespread. It is worse still to learn that the torture was rationalized and sanctioned in long memorandums written by people at the highest level of the government. But worst of all would be ratification of this record by a vote to confirm one of its chief authors to the highest legal office in the executive branch of the government.
Torture destroys the soul of the torturer even as it destroys the body of his victim. The boundary between humane treatment of prisoners and torture is perhaps the clearest boundary in existence between civilization and barbarism. Whether the elected representatives of the people of the United States are now ready to cross that line is the deepest question before the Senate as it votes on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales.
Analysts Note Gap Between Bush Rhetoric And Reality
Close Ties With Repressive Governments Are Cited
... "Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, was struck by the fact that Bush mentioned "liberty" repeatedly but did not use the phrase "human rights" as an overriding goal.
"The decision to speak in terms of liberty instead of human rights was deliberate," Roth said. "Liberty is an abstract concept, but human rights bind everyone, including the Bush administration. It's easy to say I'm for liberty but difficult to say I'm for human rights when he's overseeing what we know is a conscious policy of coercive interrogation, including inhuman treatment and sometimes torture."
During her confirmation hearings this week, Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice also stressed that she would focus on spreading democracy and freedom around the globe. Several senators questioned her on the inconsistency of the administration's approach, notably Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R-R.I.). He challenged her to explain why the administration looks the other way when it comes to countries with near-dictatorships, such as Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan, while heaping scorn on nations with some level of elections, such as Venezuela and Iran."
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Bush under fire over human rights
The White House secretly persuaded Congress to overturn legislation passed last month by a 96-2 Senate vote that would have imposed restrictions on extreme interrogation methods, the New York Times reported yesterday.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser nominated to be secretary of state, opposed the measure because "it provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled".
Iraq war is breeding a new generation of professional terrorists, warns CIA report The chaos of Iraq is giving rise to a new generation of "professional" terrorists who will eventually replace al-Qaida as a global threat, according to a CIA thinktank.
A report by the National Intelligence Council says the war in Iraq has provided a training and recruitment ground for Islamist militants, much as Afghanistan did for the founding generation of al-Qaida during the war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
... Specifically, the report warns that the US faces an increasing risk of an attack involving biological agents, such as anthrax, and that an emerging and more sophisticated generation of terrorists could also use chemical weapons.
The bleak forecast undermines one of the Bush administration's central justifications for invading Iraq: that it was necessary to curb terrorism; that the country was a central front in the "war on terror"; and that the deposed Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had links to al-Qaida's chief, Osama bin Laden.
Instead, the report describes how hundreds of foreign terrorists entered Iraq after the US invasion, and how the insurgency against American forces was viewed by radical Muslims as a war against a foreign occupier, akin to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Terrorists also took advantage of postwar chaos, porous borders and a country awash with weapons.
But unlike the rise of al-Qaida in Afghanistan, the emerging terrorists do not require a geographical base, and are expected to rely increasingly on the internet.
"While taking advantage of sanctuaries around the world to train, terrorists will not need a stationary headquarters to plan and carry out operations," the report says.
Bush has given an enormous victory to the terrorists. By continuing his appalling policies he strengthens the terrorists, and weakens us, but sadly, most Americans will probably never realize how incompetent Bush is, and what his actions are really accomplishing.
Investigation of the US' Appalling and Secret War On Terror Prison and Interrogation SystemThe former director of the CIA, George Tenet, told the US 9/11 Commission last year that even before September 11 the US had abducted more than 70 foreigners it considered terrorists - a process Washington has declared legal under the label "extraordinary rendition".
An investigation by the Washington Post last year suggested that the US held 9,000 people overseas in an archipelago of known prisons (such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq) and unknown ones run by the Pentagon, the CIA or other organisations. But this figure does not include others "rendered" to third-party governments who then act as subcontractors for Washington, enabling the US to effectively torture detainees while technically denying that it carries out torture.
[Read the story of how an unemployed German car salesman from the town of Ulm went on a New Year's holiday to Macedonia, was seized by Macedonian police at the border, held incommunicado for weeks without charge, then beaten, stripped, shackled and blindfolded and flown to a jail in Afghanistan, run by Afghans but controlled by Americans. Five months after first being seized, he says, still with no explanation or charge, he was flown back to Europe and dumped in an unknown country which turned out to be Albania.
... "It was a crime, it was humiliating, and it was inhuman, although I think that in Afghanistan I was treated better than the other prisoners. Somebody in the prison told me that before I came somebody died under torture. Those responsible have to take responsibility, and should be held to account."]
President of Fabricated Crises
The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none.
... Social Security is on a sounder footing now than it has been for most of its 70-year history. Without altering any of its particulars, its trustees say, it can pay full benefits straight through 2042. Over the next 75 years its shortfall will amount to just 0.7 percent of national income, according to the trustees, or 0.4 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That still amounts to a real chunk of change, but it pales alongside the 75-year cost of Bush's Medicare drug benefit, which is more than twice its size, or Bush's tax cuts if permanently extended, which would be nearly four times its size.
... In Bushland, it's always time to fabricate a crisis. We have a crisis in medical malpractice costs, though the CBO says that malpractice costs amount to less than 2 percent of total health care costs. (In fact, what we have is a president who wants to diminish the financial, and thus political, clout of trial lawyers.) We have a crisis in judicial vacancies, though in fact Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block just 10 of Bush's 229 first-term judicial appointments.
... this presidency, more than any I can think of, has relied on the classic tools of propaganda. Indeed, it's almost impossible to imagine the Bush presidency absent the Fox News Network and right-wing talk radio.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Bush Administration Tells D.C. to Pay Inaugural Expenses
D.C. officials said yesterday that the Bush administration is refusing to reimburse the District for most of the costs associated with next week's inauguration, breaking with precedent and forcing the city to divert $11.9 million from homeland security projects.
Federal officials have told the District that it should cover the expenses by using some of the $240 million in federal homeland security grants it has received in the past three years -- money awarded to the city because it is among the places at highest risk of a terrorist attack.
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Case Shines Harsh Light on 'Pundit Industry': "Williams said it was only after being interviewed by journalists Friday that he realized many major news outlets had disclosure requirements to ensure that their employees avoided such conflicts of interest.
He said he had 'no doubt' that other commentators had similar ethical dilemmas that simply hadn't been publicized."
Yahoo! News - Mysterious jet tied to torture flights: "The first public mention of the Gulfstream appeared six weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, when a Pakistani newspaper reported that Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a 27-year-old microbiology student at Karachi University, had been spirited aboard the plane at Karachi's airport by Pakistani security officers in the early hours of Oct. 23, 2001.
There is no information about where Mohammed was taken. But Pakistani officials said later that Mohammed, a Yemeni national, was believed by the U.S. to belong to Al Qaeda and to have information about the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole (news - web sites).
Since Sept. 11, unnamed U.S. officials have been quoted in several publications discussing the U.S. practice of 'rendition,' which involves sending suspected terrorists or Al Qaeda supporters captured abroad for interrogation to countries where human rights are not traditionally respected.
Well-documented case
One well-documented rendition occurred in December 2001, when two Egyptian nationals, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, were flown aboard the Gulfstream from Sweden's Bromma airport to Cairo. A Swedish television broadcaster, TV4, reported last year that a check of the plane's registration number, N379P, showed it belonged to Premier Executive.
The Swedish ambassador to Cairo later said Agiza and al-Zery both told him they had been tortured by Egyptian police. Al-Zery was released in October 2003 without charges. Agiza was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his alleged membership in an Egyptian terrorist group.
The Swedish government has called on Egypt to agree to an international investigation into the torture charges.
[The Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) has declined to discuss the plane. But one retired CIA (news - web sites) officer said that he understood the Gulfstream had been operated by the Joint Special Operations Command, an interagency unit that organizes counterterrorist operations in conjunction with the CIA and military special forces.]"
Bush's Drug Videos Broke Law, Accountability Office Decides: "The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said on Thursday that the Bush administration violated federal law by producing and distributing television news segments about the effects of drug use among young people.
The accountability office said the videos 'constitute covert propaganda' because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, which were distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. They were broadcast by nearly 300 television stations and reached 22 million households, the office said.
The accountability office does not have law enforcement powers, but its decisions on federal spending are usually considered authoritative.
In May the office found that the Bush administration had violated the same law by producing television news segments that portrayed the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.
The accountability office was not critical of the content of the video segments from the White House drug office, but found that the format - a made-for-television 'story package' - violated the prohibition on using taxpayer money for propaganda. "
Campaigning in Iraq has Worsened Ethnic, Religious Tensions: "national identity has been breaking down in the parliamentary election campaign. In the absence of political ideologies or competing policy agendas, the nation's newly formed political parties are increasingly depending on religious and ethnic labels to help voters distinguish among them. "
White House Paid Commentator to Promote Law: "Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams 'to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts,' and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.
Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but 'I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in.'
The top Democrat on the House Education Committee, Rep. George Miller of California, called the contract 'a very questionable use of taxpayers' money' that is 'probably illegal.' He said he will ask his Republican counterpart to join him in requesting an investigation.
The contract, detailed in documents obtained by USA TODAY through a Freedom of Information Act request, also shows that the Education Department, through the Ketchum public relations firm, arranged with Williams to use contacts with America's Black Forum, a group of black broadcast journalists, 'to encourage the producers to periodically address' NCLB. He persuaded radio and TV personality Steve Harvey to invite Paige onto his show twice. Harvey's manager, Rushion McDonald, confirmed the appearances."
Bush Social Security Investment Accounts Will Cut Benefits Without Solving the Problem
"After Democrats said Bush was planning to reduce benefits, the president's aides declared that a drop in promised benefits should not be described as a benefit cut, further fueling charges Bush will slice benefits.
Then, a White House memo leaked this week confirmed the president is seriously considering the benefit cut.
The memo by Bush aide Peter Wehner said, "We're going to take a very close look at changing the way benefits are calculated." To gain support for private accounts and changing benefits, it also advised Bush to portray Social Security as "heading for an iceberg."
... White House officials also have been fending off proposals from some Republicans who believe that allowing larger private accounts will negate the need for a cut in benefits. For example, while a proposal from Bush's Social Security commission calls for private accounts with a maximum annual allocation of $1,000 along with cuts in benefits for younger workers, Sununu has proposed a plan that allows as much as $5,000 in annual contributions to private accounts and no cut in benefits.
Wehner, an aide to Bush adviser Karl Rove... [said] "We simply cannot solve the Social Security problem with personal retirement accounts alone.""
