[M]arkets in the Arab world, Egypt, Morocco, etc soared last year. Why was that? Prince Al-Waleed told me several months ago it was because of the spread of democracy in the region. Well maybe a little bit, said my source, but mostly it was because Arab investors pulled their money out of the U.S. and dollars because they were concerned the Patriot Act was going to get them! So they took money out of here in plunked it down back home. Same holds true with gold. BTW, source says Arab markets are due for a big correction ...

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/28/2006 04:24:00 AM 0 comments

Man Pleads Not Guilty in Voting Device Case
By Hemmy So
Times Staff Writer

February 22, 2006

A word processor accused of stealing damaging documents about electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems was arraigned Tuesday on three felony counts.

Stephen Heller was charged in Los Angeles Superior Court with felony access to computer data, commercial burglary and receiving stolen property. He pleaded not guilty.

"It's a devastating allegation for a whistle-blower," said Blair Berk, Heller's attorney. "Certainly, someone who saw those documents could have reasonably believed that thousands of voters were going to be potentially disenfranchised in upcoming elections."

The charges arise from Heller's alleged disclosure two years ago of legal papers from the Los Angeles office of international law firm Jones Day, which represented Diebold at the time. Heller was under contract as a word processor at Jones Day.

The documents included legal memos from one Jones Day attorney to another regarding allegations by activists that Diebold had used uncertified voting systems in Alameda County elections beginning in 2002.

In the memos, a Jones Day attorney opined that using uncertified voting systems violated California election law and that if Diebold had employed an uncertified system, Alameda County could sue the company for breaching its $12.7-million contract.

The documents also revealed that Diebold's attorneys were exploring whether the California secretary of state had the authority to investigate the company for alleged election law violations.

The Oakland Tribune published the legal memos on its website in April 2004. By then, the issue of whether Diebold used uncertified systems was already receiving widespread attention, because many of its systems failed during the March 2004 primary. As a result, poll workers had to turn away some early voters in San Diego County, and Alameda County voters had to use paper ballots.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/28/2006 04:14:00 AM 0 comments

February 24, 2006, 2:51 p.m.
It Didn’t Work

"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes — it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."

One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that “The bombing has completely demolished” what was being attempted — to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.

The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists." It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' throats.

A problem for American policymakers — for President Bush, ultimately — is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.

One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.

The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.

This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.

Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.

He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.

Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/26/2006 06:03:00 PM 0 comments

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Did the Bush administration “authorize” the leak of classified information to Bob Woodward? And did those leaks damage national security?

The vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) made exactly that charge tonight in a letter to John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence. What prompted Rockefeller to write Negroponte was a recent op-ed in the New York Times by CIA director Porter Goss complaining that leaks of classified information were the fault of “misguided whistleblowers.”

Rockefeller charged in his letter that the most “damaging revelations of intelligence sources and methods are generated primarily by Executive Branch officials pushing a particular policy, and not by the rank-and-file employees of intelligence agencies.”

Later in the same letter, Rockefeller said: “Given the Administration’s continuing abuse of intelligence information for political purposes, its criticism of leaks is extraordinarily hypocritical. Preventing damage to intelligence sources and methods from media leaks will not be possible until the highest level of the Administration cease to disclose classified information on a selective basis for political purposes.”

Exhibit A for Rockefeller: Woodward’s book “Bush at War".

Here is what Rockefeller had to say:

In his 2002 book Bush at War, Bob Woodward described almost unfettered access to classified material of the most sensitive nature. According to his account, he was provided information related to sources and methods, extremely sensitive covert actions, and foreign intelligence liaison relationships. If it no wonder, as Director Goss wrote, “because of the number of recent news reports discussing our relationships with other intelligence services, some of these partners have even informed the C.I.A. that they are reconsidering their participation of some of our most important antiterrorism ventures.”

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/26/2006 05:44:00 PM 0 comments

QAEDA CLAIM: WE 'INFILTRATED' UAE GOV'T
By NILES LATHEM

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda warned the government of the United Arab Emirates more than three years ago that it "infiltrated" key government agencies, according to a disturbing document released by the U.S. military.

The warning was contained in a June 2002 message to UAE rulers, in which the terror network demanded the release of an unknown number of "mujahedeen detainees," who it said had been arrested during a government crackdown in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The explosive document is certain to become ammunition for critics of the controversial UAE port deal, who fear the Dubai-based firm could be used by terrorists to sneak money and personnel into the United States.

Little is known about the origins or authorship of the message.

"You are well aware that we have infiltrated your security, censorship and monetary agencies, along with other agencies that should not be mentioned," the message said.

"Therefore, we warn of the continuation of practicing . . . policies which do not serve your interest and will only cost you many problems that will place you in an embarrassing state before your citizens.

"Your homeland is exposed to us. There are many vital interests that will hurt you if we decided to harm them."

The document was among a batch of internal al Qaeda communications captured by U.S. forces in the war on terror.

They were declassified and released earlier this month by the Center for Combating Terrorism at West Point.

"If it's real, the document shows that the UAE really is trying to cooperate with the U.S. in the war on terrorism, because they were being threatened by al Qaeda," said terrorism expert Lorenzo Vidino.

"But it also reveals that even though they [the UAE] are our friends, al Qaeda seems to have people on the inside in the UAE, just as it has in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Qatar and Kuwait."

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/26/2006 05:39:00 PM 0 comments

February 24, 2006

Who's the Dummy?

Bush's Port Deal

By MEG BANNERJI

Bush's efforts to allow a United Arab Emirates firm to run U.S. ports serves two larger purposes. First of all, it helps his friends. Two members of Bush's administration have dealings with both the companies that recently merged into DP World, the Arab-owned port authority we've been hearing so much about.

DP World, by the way, is only a year old, the result of a Bush-fostered merger that made it the world's sixth largest port operator. Sound farfetched? Not at all. David Sanborn, whom Bush named head of U.S. Maritime Administration less than a month ago, runs DP World's European and Latin American operations. And in January of last year, DP World acquired an international terminal business known as CSX, a company chaired by John Snow, who resigned just in time to become Bush's Secretary of the Treasury and head a federal panel that helped seal the merger.

What about the wisdom of having a company owned by a nation with ties to 9/11 hijackers in charge of U.S. ports? Does that seem smart? The UAE is an enthusiastic host to the pro-Bin Laden TV station Al-Arabyia, which regards the Taliban as the proper government of Afghanistan. What about entrusting the UAE with the most vulnerable aspect of our port security, namely the loading, shipping, discharging and terminalizing of containers? Is that smart? Is he not aware of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations regarding port security?

Yes, he's aware, but he's more aware of the great American tragedy that secured his second term as president. We might not remember how many times 9/11 was invoked at the 2004 Republican Convention, but you can bet he does. After all, without 9/11, Bush could never have secured the oil supply of Iraq and the pipelines of Afghanistan for his friends. They were counting on him to deliver the goods, and that he did, not only by convincing Americans to die-for-oil, but by doing what he's doing this very minute, which is offering America's ports as a profitable plum to his consolidation-hungry cronies.

So who's the dummy? Not Bush, because even the down-side of the port deal looks good from where he's sitting. The inevitable bad port security makes another 9/11 quite likely, and if that happened, he could invade Iran, further quell dissent in this country, and secure a Republican regime in America 2008. People always support the Prez during wartime. Of course, if there's another 9/11, people will die. But today, Americans are already dying by the dozens in Iraq and Afghanistan, and everyone except Cindy Sheehan just yawns. Looks like he's getting away with his wars scott free.

So, yes, Bush is being VERY smart. We're the dummies.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/26/2006 06:31:00 AM 0 comments

Bush at cabinet meeting: "And so people don't need to worry about security. This deal wouldn't go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America."

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/26/2006 06:16:00 AM 0 comments

TIA Lives On
By Shane Harris, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget.

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/26/2006 05:37:00 AM 0 comments

February 24, 2006
Billionaire Gives a Big Gift but Still Gets to Invest It
By STEPHANIE STROM

Boone Pickens, the often controversial and always colorful Texas oilman turned investor, took advantage of a temporary tax break to make a gift that propelled him into the ranks of the nation's top philanthropists last year.

But what Mr. Pickens gave away with one hand he continues to control with the other.

At the end of the year, he gave $165 million to a tiny charity set up to benefit the golf program at Oklahoma State University, reaping Mr. Pickens a tax deduction. Records show that the money spent less than an hour on Dec. 30 in the account of the university's charity, O.S.U. Cowboy Golf Inc., before it was invested in a hedge fund controlled by Mr. Pickens, BP Capital Management.

"It's all his money, and he's on the investment committee" of Cowboy Golf, said Mike Holder, the university's athletic director and former golf coach, who is on the board. "If a person's making a gift of that size, he can stipulate what he wants it invested in."

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/25/2006 07:39:00 AM 0 comments

Our hollow prosperity
Posted: February 15, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Patrick J. Buchanan
© 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Now that the U.S. trade deficit for 2005 has come in at $726 billion, the fourth straight all-time record, a question arises.

What constitutes failure for a free-trade policy? Or is there no such thing? Is free trade simply right no matter the results?

Last year, the United States ran a $202 billion trade deficit with China, the largest ever between two nations. We ran all-time record trade deficits with OPEC, the European Union, Japan, Canada and Latin America. The $50 billion deficit with Mexico was the largest since NAFTA passed and also the largest in history.

When NAFTA was up for a vote in 1993, the Clintonites and their GOP fellow-travelers said it would grow our trade surplus, raise Mexico's standard of living and reduce illegal immigration.

None of this happened. Indeed, the opposite occurred. Mexico's standard of living is lower than it was in 1993, the U.S. trade surplus has vanished, and America is being invaded. Mexico is now the primary source of narcotics entering the United States.

Again, when can we say a free-trade policy has failed?

The Bushites point proudly to 4.6 million jobs created since May 2003, a 4.7 percent unemployment rate and low inflation.

Unfortunately, conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts and analysts Charles McMillion and Ed Rubenstein have taken a close look at the figures and discovered that the foundation of the Bush prosperity rests on rotten timber.

The entire job increase since 2001 has been in the service sector – credit intermediation, health care, social assistance, waiters, waitresses, bartenders, etc. – and state and local government.

But, from January 2001 to January 2006, the United States lost 2.9 million manufacturing jobs, 17 percent of all we had. Over the past five years, we have suffered a net loss in goods-producing jobs.

"The decline in some manufacturing sectors has more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing than with a super-economy that is 'the envy of the world,'" writes Roberts.

Communications equipment lost 43 percent of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37 percent ... The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30 percent. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25 percent of its workforce.

How did this happen? Imports. The U.S. trade deficit in advanced technology jobs in 2005 hit an all-time high.

As for the "knowledge industry" jobs that were going to replace blue-collar jobs, it's not happening. The information sector lost 17 percent of all its jobs over the last five years.

In the same half-decade, the U.S. economy created only 70,000 net new jobs in architecture and engineering, while hundreds of thousands of American engineers remain unemployed.

If we go back to when Clinton left office, one finds that, in five years, the United States has created a net of only 1,054,000 private-sector jobs, while government added 1.1 million. But as many new private sector jobs are not full-time, McMillion reports, "the country ended 2005 with fewer private sector hours worked than it had in January 2001."

This is an economic triumph?

Had the United States not created the 1.4 million new jobs it did in health care since January 2001, we would have nearly half a million fewer private-sector jobs than when Bush first took the oath.

Ed Rubenstein of ESR Research Economic Consultants looks at the wage and employment figures and discovers why, though the Bushites were touting historic progress, 55 percent of the American people in a January poll rated the Bush economy only "fair" or "poor."

Not only was 2005's growth of 2 million jobs a gain of only 1.5 percent, anemic compared to the average 3.5 percent at this stage of other recoveries, the big jobs gains are going to immigrants.

Non-Hispanic whites, over 70 percent of the labor force, saw only a 1 percent employment increase in 2005. Hispanics, half of whom are foreign born, saw a 4.7 percent increase. As Hispanics will work for less in hospitals and hospices, and as waiters and waitresses, they are getting the new jobs.

But are not wages rising? Nope. When inflation is factored in, the Economic Policy Institute reports, "real wages fell by 0.5 percent over the last 12 months after falling 0.7 percent the previous 12 months."

If one looks at labor force participation – what share of the 227 million potential workers in America have jobs – it has fallen since 2002 for whites, blacks and Hispanics alike. Non-Hispanic whites are down to 63.4 percent, but black Americans have fallen to 57.7 percent.

What is going on? Hispanic immigrants are crowding out black Americans in the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled job market. And millions of our better jobs are being lost to imports and outsourcing.

The affluent free-traders, whose wealth resides in stocks in global companies, are enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens and sacrificing the American worker on the altar of the Global Economy.

None dare call it economic treason.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/25/2006 05:46:00 AM 0 comments

Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2006 - 08:49 pm:

The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.

After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.

Another disturbing find was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010. These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.

You can find the complete set of raw voting machine event logs for Palm Beach County here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/6628.html
Note that some items were not provided to us and are ommitted from the logs.

The logs rule out the possibility that these were Logic & Accuracy (L&A) test results, and verified that these results did appear in the final totals. In addition to the date discrepancies, most had incorrect polling times, with votes appearing throughout the wee hours of the night. These machines were L&A tested, and the L&A test activities appeared in the logs with the correct date and time.

According to the voting machine assignment log, these machines were not assigned to early voting locations. The number of votes on each machine also corresponds with the numbers typical of polling place machines rather than early voting.

Many of these machines showed unexplained log activity after the L&A test but before Election Day. In addition, many more machines without date anomalies showed this log activity, which revealed someone powering up the machine, opening the program, then powering it down again. In one instance, the date discrepancy appeared when someone accessed the machine two minutes after the L&A test was completed.

Voting machines are computers, and computers have batteries that can cause date and time discrepancies, but it does not appear that these particular discrepancies could have been caused by battery problems.

The evidence indicates that someone accessed the computers after the L&A and before the election, and that this access caused a change in the machine's reporting functions, at least for date and time. Such access would take a high degree of inside access. It is not known whether any other changes were introduced into the voting machines at this time. As learned in the Hursti experiments, it is possible for an insider to access the machines and leave no trace, but sometimes a hasty or clumsy access (such as forgetting to enter a correct date/time value when altering a record) will leave telltale tracks.

For another example of time discrepancies, see the Volusia County poll tapes

Approximately 4,000 votes were cast on these machines. The vote pattern and activity pattern appears to be identical to typical patterns found on Election Day -- All votes on the discrepant machines were spread over a 12-hour period, the length of time the Florida polls are open.

A member of the Palm Beach County electronic voting technical committee asked for the names of the technicians for Palm Beach who had access to the machines during that time, but the IT person, Jeff Darter, remained silent and never answered the question.

The Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, Arthur Anderson, said that his staff had looked into the problem and that the votes were normal, it's just that the dates somehow changed.

Other anomalies
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/6627.html (Anomaly info)

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/25/2006 05:21:00 AM 0 comments

Average American Family Income Declines

Why Doctors So Often Get It Wrong

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/24/2006 04:24:00 AM 0 comments

[I]t would send a terrible signal to friends and allies not to let this transaction go through.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/23/2006 04:47:00 AM 0 comments

Outed CIA officer was working on Iran, intelligence sources say
02/13/2006 @ 10:25 am
Filed by Larisa Alexandrovna

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.
According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.
Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program.
While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan's nuclear "father," A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.
Plame declined to comment through her husband, Joseph Wilson.
Valerie Plame first became a household name when her identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The column came only a week after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed for the New York Times asserting that White House officials twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Her outing was seen as political retaliation for Wilson's criticism of the Administration's claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.
Her case has drawn international attention and resulted in the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is leading the probe, is still pursuing Deputy Chief of Staff and Special Advisor to President Bush, Karl Rove. His investigation remains open.
The damages
Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame's work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in "severe" damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA's ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.
Plame's team, they added, would have come in contact with A.Q. Khan's network in the course of her work on Iran.
While Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss has not submitted a formal damage assessment to Congressional oversight committees, the CIA's Directorate of Operations did conduct a serious and aggressive investigation, sources say.
Intelligence sources familiar with the damage assessment say that what is called a "counter intelligence assessment to agency operations" was conducted on the orders of the CIA's then-Deputy Director of the Directorate of Operations, James Pavitt.
Former CIA counterintelligence officer Larry Johnson believes that such an assessment would have had to be done for the CIA to have referred the case to the Justice Department.
"An exposure like that required an immediate operational and counter intelligence damage assessment," Johnson said. "That was done. The results were written up but not in a form for submission to anyone outside of CIA."
One former counterintelligence official described the CIA's reasons for not seeking Congressional assistance on the matter as follows: "[The CIA Leadership] made a conscious decision not to do a formal inquiry because they knew it might become public," the source said. "They referred it [to the Justice Department] instead because they believed a criminal investigation was needed."
The source described the findings of the assessment as showing "significant damage to operational equities."
Another counterintelligence official, also wishing to remain anonymous due to the nature of the subject matter, described "operational equities" as including both people and agency operations that involve the "cover mechanism," "front companies," and other CIA officers and assets.
Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.
Several intelligence officials described the damage in terms of how long it would take for the agency to recover. According to their own assessment, the CIA would be impaired for up to "ten years" in its capacity to adequately monitor nuclear proliferation on the level of efficiency and accuracy it had prior to the White House leak of Plame Wilson's identity.
A.Q. Khan
While Plame's work did not specifically focus on the A.Q. Khan ring, named after Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the network and its impact on nuclear proliferation and the region should not be minimized, primarily because the Khan network was the major supplier of WMD technology for Iran.
Dr. Khan instituted the proliferation market during the 1980s and supplied many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere with uranium enrichment technology, including Libya, Iran and North Korea. Enriched uranium is used to make weaponized nuclear devices.
The United States forced the Pakistan government to dismiss Khan for his proliferation activities in March of 2001, but he remains largely free and acts as an adviser to the Pakistani government.
According to intelligence expert John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, U.S. officials were not aware of the extent of the proliferation until around the time of Khan's dismissal.
"It slowly dawned on them that the collaboration between Pakistan, North Korea and Iran was an ongoing and serious problem," Pike said. "It was starting to sink in on them that it was one program doing business in three locations and that anything one of these countries had they all had."
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistan became the United States' chief regional ally in the war on terror.
The revelation that Iran was the focal point of Plame's work raises new questions as to possible other motivating factors in the White House's decision to reveal the identity of a CIA officer working on tracking a WMD supply network to Iran, particularly when the very topic of Iran's possible WMD capability is of such concern to the Administration.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/23/2006 04:39:00 AM 0 comments

...Dick Cheney is an atrocious vice president who has inflamed terrorism, and whose policies have helped create far more terrorists than they have destroyed.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/23/2006 03:55:00 AM 0 comments

W aides' biz ties to Arab firm

BY MICHAEL McAULIFF

DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Breaking news update: Bush shrugs off objections to port deal

WASHINGTON - The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.

One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.

Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.

The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.

U.S. OUTSOURCES HOMELAND SECURITY TO NORTH KOREA

Little-known Korean Firm ‘Seems Okay,’ Says Chertoff

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff raised eyebrows today by announcing that the United States would outsource all of its homeland security operations to a little-known North Korean firm called Jim Kong-Il, Inc.

Coming just days after the controversial decision to allow several major U.S. ports to be run by a company based in the United Arab Emirates, the outsourcing of the nation’s homeland security functions to an obscure company based in an Axis of Evil country struck some in Washington as ill-timed at best.

But Mr. Chertoff vigorously defended the decision in a Washington press conference this afternoon, calling Jim Kong-Il, Inc. the right firm for the job, adding, “I looked into the company and it seems okay.”

When asked exactly how thoroughly he had vetted the North Korean firm, Mr. Chertoff said, “Well, I mean, I haven’t Googled it or anything but you just have to trust me on this one.”

Almost nothing is known about the North Korean company that is about to control the U.S.’s entire homeland security apparatus, nor about its highly reclusive founder, the mercurial Jim Kong-Il.

In an official statement released today, Mr. Jim said that his company’s first official act on behalf of the U.S. would be to collect all of the nation’s nuclear fuel rods.

“It is of utmost importance that America’s nuclear fuel rods do not fall into the wrong hands,” Mr. Jim’s statement read. “Therefore, we will collect all of those fuel rods and ship them to North Korea immediately.”

Julia Saraidaridis,
Systems Analyst
"Why not? Some of those al-Qaeda people have probably done much more research on our ports than anybody else."

Blake Greenberg,
Teaching Assistant
"Great. We'll be the laughingstock of the Muslim world once they get word of how many tons of flax we import each year."

P.R. Williams,
Dental Hygienist
"I think that we should have a little faith in these people. I mean, they were gracious enough to take Michael Jackson off our hands."

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/23/2006 03:49:00 AM 0 comments

The Italian Job: How Fake Iraq Memos Tripped Up Ex-Spy

Rocco Martino Goes Silent As FBI Probes the Origin Of 'Yellowcake' Scandal

By JAY SOLOMON and GABRIEL KAHN

February 22, 2006; Page A1

For much of the past decade, Rocco Martino floated in obscurity on the margins of the global spy game. The silver-haired Italian worked briefly for his country's military-intelligence service, was kicked out but continued to freelance with SISMI, as it is known. He scraped together a living selling intelligence tips under an ever-shifting list of aliases to other agencies or to journalists.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/22/2006 03:53:00 AM 0 comments

February 21, 2006

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.

A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located.

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org, on Tuesday.

The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives.

But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.

"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy."

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.

Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever possible but had no power over the reclassifications. "The decisions agencies make are those agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.

Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret.

"Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program.

Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.

"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.

"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/22/2006 03:49:00 AM 0 comments

Bushydo -- the way of the shrub. Bonsai!

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/22/2006 03:41:00 AM 0 comments

I think I will be able to count myself as an adult the day that
I am able to hear a news story about "Jack Abramoff" without
wondering who Abram is and giggling.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/21/2006 04:20:00 AM 0 comments

President Bush had to lean on Vice President Cheney to get him to talk about his hunting accident, TIME Magazine's Nancy Gibbs and Mike Allen report in Monday editions.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/20/2006 06:19:00 AM 0 comments

Dick knew nothing about the wild when he went on his first
hunting trip up in Wyoming. He walked into a clearing and was surprised
to find a young woman lying there in the nude.

"Pardon me," Dick said, "are you game?"

She looked him up and down and seductively said, "Yes."

So he shot her.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/20/2006 05:56:00 AM 0 comments

It wasn't how I imagined my departure from Iraq would be, after three years of living and working there as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. But the British security firm we hired had warned in an email that insurgents were plotting to kidnap a female American journalist and advised women not to leave their hotel unless absolutely necessary.

Several weeks later, my friend Jill Carroll, a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, was abducted in broad daylight at gunpoint as she left an interview in Baghdad. Her Iraqi translator was murdered. As I write this, despite pleas for her release the world over, Jill remains in captivity.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/20/2006 05:08:00 AM 0 comments

Well, it’s not beyond me. The way I look at it, Cheney took the opportunity to show the White House press corps that it is not the natural conduit to the nation-at-large; and it has no special place in the information chain. Cheney does not grant legitimacy to the large news organizations with brand names who think of themselves as proxies for the public and its right to know. Nor does he think the press should know where he is, what he’s doing, or who he’s doing it with.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/19/2006 08:51:00 AM 0 comments

Proper Way
To Hunt Quail:
'Don't Shoot Low'

By JUNE KRONHOLZ
February 16, 2006; Page B1

When a covey of Texas bobwhite quail is flushed from the underbrush, the birds take off with explosive speed, typically no more than 30 yards from a hunter, and then scatter. "It's very fast ... you have virtually seconds to react," says Gary Goodpaster of Ducks Unlimited, a Memphis, Tenn., conservation group. That's why, he adds, "you have to constantly be aware of where your partners are."
A hunter "should be moving his eyes around to be sure where the dogs are and where the hunters are so if the birds flush, you have confidence" about taking the shot, he adds.

Quail hunting is a genteel sport, where shooters with expensive guns and well-trained dogs hunt a skittish bird that is about the size of a fist and has the speed of a Little League pitch. "There's a lot of etiquette and tradition," says Mr. Goodpaster. While Vice President Dick Cheney may have been following most of the rules, veteran hunters say he may have neglected others when he shot 78-year-old lawyer Harry Whittington in a hunting accident Saturday.

Typically, only two or three shooters move together through the field during a quail hunt, hunters say. They stay fairly close to one another -- from five to 15 yards apart -- as they follow two or three dogs through the underbrush. A shooter generally chats back and forth with his partners "so the guy knows exactly where the other hunter is," says Rocky Evans, president of Quail Unlimited, an Edgefield, S.C., conservation group.

When the dogs have caught the scent of their prey -- or "gone birdie" -- hunters move in and flush, or startle, the covey so the birds take flight and can be shot in the air. "Before flushing, you should check to see where the other hunter is," says Mr. Evans, whose group hosts hunts where shooters undergo a safety briefing before taking to the field.

Each hunter usually has a 90-degree firing range. A hunter on the right, for example, shoots from directly in front of him to the right. "If the birds take a hard turn to the left, then the guy on the left takes the shot, not the guy on the right," says Mr. Evans.

"Don't shoot low," he adds, a rule meant to prevent injuring other hunters and their dogs. He defines low: "If you're standing and you're shooting straight out" instead of at an upward angle.

Gun safety is a mantra with hunters, and especially with the experienced, well-to-do sportsmen who shoot game birds. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, in a list of safety rules, cautions hunters to "be sure of your target and what is in front of and beyond your target." Hunters pick out and aim for one bird from the 12 or 15 in a typical covey, and "if you expect to hit one, you have to be looking at the bird," says Mr. Goodpaster.

"You're not looking at the other hunters," he adds. But as a hunter stares down the barrel of a shotgun, "you're aware of where they are, even if you're not looking at them."

* * *

Under "contributing factors" on the accident form, the Texas game warden investigating the incident checked off the box for "Victim covered by shooter who was swinging on game," rather than the box for "Victim moved into the line of fire."

* * *

There are no clear rules on how a hunter who has left the group should announce his return to the line fire, says Ducks Unlimited's Mr. Goodpaster. "Experienced hunters will typically make it a point to always let their fellow hunters know where they are," he says. "Just something, anything at all to let them know he was there."

At the same time, he adds, "most responsible and experienced hunters would typically look back over their shoulders to check up on the fellow who lagged behind." Mr. Cheney and Mr. Wittington are both reported to have been avid, longtime bird shooters.

"Low, and not knowing where the other hunter was -- that was the recipe for disaster," says Mr. Evans, of Quail Unlimited. "Before I flushed the birds, I would want to know where everybody is," he adds. "If you're holding the gun, it's your responsibility," he recalls telling a lawyer representing someone in a similar incident.

* * *

The Texas wildlife report -- which was filed Monday, two days after the incident -- says Mr. Cheney wasn't "under the apparent influence of intoxicants or drugs," although it doesn't indicate whether that meant during the interview with investigators, or during the hunt. In the Fox News interview yesterday, Mr. Cheney himself condemned the idea of mixing hunting and drinking, but said he had a beer at lunch, several hours before going out.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/16/2006 04:44:00 AM 0 comments

It would be funny, if...

Remember these widely repeated talking points?

If indeed Plame was a covert agent, why wouldn't the CIA take "affirmative measures to conceal" her identity? The answer may turn on the legal definition of covert. As we also noted in October, an employee is a "covert agent" for the purposes of the statute if and only if he "is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States." - James Taranto, OpinionJournal, July 12, 2004

In the end, we will learn that Rove was not Bob Novak's source, Plame was not covert, and Joe Wilson remains a liar. - Mark Levin, The Corner, October 29, 2005

Plame was working a desk job at CIA headquarters. Furthermore, never mind that the secret identities of CIA covert agents are, in my experience as a foreign reporter, one and the same as the secret identities of Superman, Batman, and Robin: Everybody knows except for a few designated comic book characters. - P.J. O'Rourke, The Weekly Standard, July 9, 2005

The law (Patrick Fitzgerald is) allegedly enforcing, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, was almost surely not broken when Valerie Plame's identity was revealed by Bob Novak two years ago. According to numerous legal experts — including Bruce Sanford and Victoria Toensing, who helped write the law — the facts don't fit the requirements of the law. Valerie Plame wasn't a covert field operative... - Jonah Goldberg, Jewish World Review, July 8, 2005

As her weirdly self-obsesssed husband Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day, she wasn't a "clandestine officer" and, indeed, hadn't been one for six years. So one can only "leak" her name in the sense that one can "leak" the name of the checkout clerk at Home Depot. - Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, July 17, 2005

So far Karl Rove appears guilty of telling reporters something he had heard, that Valerie Wilson (a k a Plame), the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA. But because of several exceptions in the 1982 law forbidding the disclosure of a covert operative's identity, virtually no one thinks anymore that he violated it. The law doesn't seem to apply to Plame because she apparently hadn't been posted abroad during the five previous years. - John Tierney, The New York Times, July 19, 2005

Of course, that's just a small sample of the righties who decided to echo that talking point. You probably won't be surprised to find out that they were all full of shit. Newsweek:

Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case. Lawyers for Libby, and White House allies, have repeatedly questioned whether Plame, the wife of White House critic Joe Wilson, really had covert status when she was outed to the media in July 2003. But special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done "covert work overseas" on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA "was making specific efforts to conceal" her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge's opinion.

Of course, accepting the truth requires a willingness to be a member of the reality-based community. Don't expect apologies.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/12/2006 08:26:00 AM 0 comments

Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects
NSA's Hunt for Terrorists Scrutinizes Thousands of Americans, but Most Are Later Cleared
By Barton Gellman, Dafna Linzer and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 5, 2006; A01

Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.

Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as "terrorist surveillance" and summed it up by declaring that "if you're talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why." But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.

Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/12/2006 07:17:00 AM 0 comments

Bush's Social Security Sleight of Hand
By Allan Sloan
Wednesday, February 8, 2006; D02

If you read enough numbers, you never know what you'll find. Take President Bush and private Social Security accounts.

Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.

His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.

If this comes as a surprise to you, have no fear. You're not alone. Bush didn't pitch private Social Security accounts in his State of the Union message last week.

First, he drew a mocking standing ovation from Democrats by saying that "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security," even though, as I said, he'd never submitted specific legislation.

Then he seemed to be kicking the Social Security problem a few years down the road in typical Washington fashion when he asked Congress "to join me in creating a commission to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid," adding that the commission would be bipartisan "and offer bipartisan solutions."

But anyone who thought that Bush would wait for bipartisanship to deal with Social Security was wrong. Instead, he stuck his own privatization proposals into his proposed budget.

"The Democrats were laughing all the way to the funeral of Social Security modernization," White House spokesman Trent Duffy told me in an interview Tuesday, but "the president still cares deeply about this. " Duffy asserted that Bush would have been remiss not to include in the budget the cost of something that he feels so strongly about, and he seemed surprised at my surprise that Social Security privatization had been written into the budget without any advance fanfare.

Duffy said privatization costs were included in the midyear budget update that the Office of Management and Budget released last July 30, so it was logical for them to be in the 2007 budget proposals. But I sure didn't see this coming -- and I wonder how many people outside of the White House did.

Nevertheless, it's here. Unlike Bush's generalized privatization talk of last year, we're now talking detailed numbers. On page 321 of the budget proposal, you see the privatization costs: $24.182 billion in fiscal 2010, $57.429 billion in fiscal 2011 and another $630.533 billion for the five years after that, for a seven-year total of $712.144 billion.

In the first year of private accounts, people would be allowed to divert up to 4 percent of their wages covered by Social Security into what Bush called "voluntary private accounts." The maximum contribution to such accounts would start at $1,100 annually and rise by $100 a year through 2016.

It's not clear how big a reduction in the basic benefit Social Security recipients would have to take in return for being able to set up these accounts, or precisely how the accounts would work.

Bush also wants to change the way Social Security benefits are calculated for most people by adopting so-called progressive indexing. Lower-income people would continue to have their Social Security benefits tied to wages, but the benefits paid to higher-paid people would be tied to inflation.

Wages have typically risen 1.1 percent a year more than inflation, so over time, that disparity would give lower-paid and higher-paid people essentially the same benefit. However, higher-paid workers would be paying substantially more into the system than lower-paid people would.

This means that although progressive indexing is an attractive idea from a social-justice point of view, it would reduce Social Security's political support by making it seem more like welfare than an earned benefit.

Bush is right, of course, when he says in his budget proposal that Social Security in its current form is unsustainable. But there are plenty of ways to fix it besides offering private accounts as a substitute for part of the basic benefit.

Bush's 2001 Social Security commission had members of both parties, but they had to agree in advance to support private accounts. Their report, which had some interesting ideas, went essentially nowhere.

What remains to be seen is whether this time around Bush follows through on forming a bipartisan commission and whether he can get credible Democrats to join it. Dropping numbers onto your opponents is a great way to stick your finger in their eye. But will it get the Social Security job done? That, my friends, is a whole other story.

Sloan is Newsweek's Wall Street editor. His e-mail is sloan@panix.com.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/12/2006 06:57:00 AM 0 comments

These trials are absolutely ridiculous since every drug has side effects for some people. I’m sure no company knows what all those side effects are. People are different so the effects of the drugs will be different. If the drugs work well on some people, it is worthwhile for others to try them and stop using them if there are bad side effects. But don’t blame the company that made the drug. There’s absolutely nothing malicious in companies trying to develop useful drugs that will at least help some people. It’s a shame that we allow such trials to occur.
Comment by Richard W. Vook - February 8, 2006 at 12:20 pm

It isnt so much an issue of whether or not the drug was reactive in certain patients but whether the risks in this medication wree inherently higher such that the medication was dangerous and further if the company was aware of these risks and reasonably should have informed consumers.

I think most medical and gun related lawsuits are crap personally but I do think that from the evidence the public has been able to see so far, merck knew and should have known about the flaws in the medication and further took active steps to remove that data from public view. These actions are not consistent with the good faith efforts of a reputable drug company.

It is for this reason that the lawsuits can and are proceeding. The issue is not whether there were side effects, the issue is the company covering up vital information that would have allowed some patients to make life-saving decisions not to use the drug.
Comment by Wayne S. Anderson - February 8, 2006 at 12:25 pm

Why doesn’t Merck use the Bayer AG defense? What if Aspirin were still under patent, and still being manufactured and sold exclusively by Bayer AG? Everone should know aspirin can cause G/I trouble. It’s not been taken off the shelves. NO ONE knew for certain the potential trouble with Vioxx, not Merck and not the FDA. Now Merck is being sued by lawyers and “victims” whose motives have to be suspect. Why aren’t those “injured” by Bayer Aspirin or its generic manufacturers suing? The answer is not just because there isn’t a big bucks payoff.

I attended the Houston trial as a observer. I noticed a lot in that trial. I saw a family who lost a loved one who did not need to die so soon. I also noticed that Merck defiantly has been covering up facts about the drug Vioxx and that it was known from the beginning that it was a harmful drug. Yes all drugs have side affects but Vioxx did cause blood clots and caused DEATH!!! I feel bad for this family because they are still enduring the pain of the lost and shouldn’t be going through this because Mr. Irvin should be alive and the drug should of NEVER been put on the market. Merck defiantly put Money over lives. Yes the drug helped many but also killed and had the risk of killing a lot more if it was still on the market.
Comment by Anonymous - February 8, 2006 at 12:52 pm

Of course, Mr. Irvin was killed by his obesity and heart disease, rather than the three weeks of Vioxx he took, and, of course, Merck didn’t cover up any facts about the drug, but “Anonymous” likely knows this already.
Comment by Ted - February 8, 2006 at 3:22 pm

Don’t you want your doctors to know the risks on a drug he is putting you on. What I am hearing is that it was ok for Merck to hide data, leave dead people off the studies, issue “simply inconmprehensibele” press releases and dodge doctors questions. Merck’s advertising focused on older, heavier, more sedentary people. They did not say don’t take this if you are fat or don’t take this if you have heart disease or are at high risk for heart disease.
Comment by Meryl - February 8, 2006 at 3:30 pm

I ask you the following- Is it malicious to develope and market the sell of drugs when you know that they will cause CV’s? How can you take the risk of taking a drug if you have no idea what the risk is? I wonder why the FDA is not allowing Dr. Graham to testify? How does one become an expert if not through research. How would you feel about the drug if is was your father/mother or siblings that died because of the way that Vioxx affected Mr Irwin.
Comment by phil - February 8, 2006 at 4:11 pm

“Ted” seems like you have some tie to Merck or are affiliated with Merck. Did you know Mr. Irvin? I would say you probably did not and also do not know his health history. When I was at the Houston trial it clearly showed that the drug contributed to Mr. Irvin’s death. There is no reason to attack someone that can not defend themselves! Merck DID cover up the facts of this drug. If they did do the correct thing then why is there so many lawsuits and also so many things pointing bad at Merck?
Comment by Sherry - February 8, 2006 at 4:12 pm

I hope that the Irvin family gets a fair trial, but I feel they will not. Why—the jury selection in NO and the judge seens to favor the corporate world. Why does judge fallon not allow all the evidence to come out so that Merc’s true colors come through…anyone for dodge ball?
Comment by phil - February 8, 2006 at 4:30 pm

One thing that everyone seems to have missed is that there is no evidence that the rate of heart attacks in those taking Vioxx for only three weeks is any higher than it is for those in similar health taking nothing. I used Vioxx for chronic back pain when it was available and it was like miracle for pain relief. If it were still on the market I would take it again.
Comment by Jim - February 8, 2006 at 5:23 pm

Merck was performing post approval studies titled “VIGOR” when it pulled VIOX. these studies were not required. No post approval studies are ever. Don’t believe me? Look up CFR21 part 11 of the code of fedral regulation for pharmaceutical and cosmetic products and read through it.

Once the “Vigor” data was out and released by Merck after hiring a third party impartial company to explain the results to avoid conflict, they submitted the results to the FDA. the FDA recomended a “Black Box” Warning be added to the label. this is the highest form of warning the FDA can recomened be placed on a package. the FDA could have easily required the recall of Viox, it did not. Merck voulentarily pulled Viox because there were other pain medication w/o the high CV implications.

No body is denying that the CV implications are not substantial.

The question in any of these cases should first be “did viox contribute to the CV incedent”. If no, done.

I personally do not believe that Merck did hide anything. the fact that they debated the safety of the drug does not mean they believed it to be dangerous. All drugs have those debates prior to submision. the fact that they are documented and available clearly demonstrates that there was no cover up. Therfore the question is are they negligent in how they interpreted the data at hand. If a jury decides yes Viox caused the CV incedent and then yes Merck was negligent, fine award an appropriate amount.

These first law suits, which will not be reflecftive of them all, are out of hand. One week samples with a history of heart disease, give us a break. they are stealing tax payer dollars to process these cases.

Throw out the garbage cases, punish the lawyers who brought them to trial. Lets get to the really important cases and find out what happens.
Comment by Steve - February 8, 2006 at 6:59 pm

Did you not see the New England Journal of Med? stating that Merk left out 3 deaths in their VIGOR study? would that have caused the FDA to pull Vioxx off the market? I think this is about Merk and their Dollars. From the NE Journal, it does seem that there was an attempted coverup.
Comment by David - February 8, 2006 at 9:38 pm

This is another lawyer lottery. The financial penalties already imposed on Merck will slow theirs and all other pharmaceutical companies in bringing out any new drugs with the smallest of side effects. These cares are only about lawyers and their firms getting richer. The unintended consequence is one we will all suffer from the lack of new drug development.
Comment by Gary - February 9, 2006 at 12:05 am

Amazing reactions….

The issue isn’t that all drugs have side effects for a minority of users. It’s that Big Pharma thought putting Vioxx out in the market with deliberately misleading info re: fatal side effects was the way to go because, you know, honesty would have a negative effect on profits and that was more important than a couple of lives.

Also amazing — and offensive — is the number of posters here who seem to have an issue of accountability. It’s amazing how much conservatives loathe accountability when they’re caught. Accountability is alwys for the “other.” Shame. With the kind of “good conservative morality” many of the above posters show, it’s no wonder this country is in the dreadful shape it’s in.
Comment by Mitchell - February 9, 2006 at 4:47 am

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/09/2006 04:46:00 AM 0 comments

Some Democrats Are Sensing Missed Opportunities

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/09/2006 03:51:00 AM 0 comments

February 8, 2006

A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

* * *

The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming.

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/09/2006 03:45:00 AM 0 comments

"The Lie-Clock"

A man died and went to heaven. As he stood
in front of St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, he
saw a huge wall of clocks behind him. He
asked, "What are all those clocks?" St. Peter
answered, "Those are Lie-Clocks. Everyone
on Earth has a Lie-Clock. Every time you lie
the hands on your clock will move."

"Oh," said the man, "whose clock is that?"
"That's Mother Teresa's. The hands have
never moved, indicating that she never
told a lie."

"Incredible", said the man. "And whose clock
is that one?" St. Peter responded, "That's
Abraham Lincoln's clock. The hands have
moved twice, telling us that Abe told only
two lies in his entire life."

"Where's Bush's clock?" asked the man.

"Bush's clock is in Jesus's office. He's using
it as a ceiling fan."

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/08/2006 04:33:00 AM 0 comments

We thought you said spend the $200 billion on "dark fiber"

The United States is the 19th ranked nation in household broadband connectivity rate, just ahead of Slovenia. Want to know why? Because, contends telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick, the Bell Companies never delivered symmetrical fiber-optic connectivity to millions of Americans though they were paid more than $200 billion to do it. According to Kushnick's book, "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal", during the buildup to the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act, the major U.S. telcos promised to deliver fiber to 86 million households by 2006 (we're talking about fiber to the home, here). They asked for, and were given, some $200 billion in tax cuts and other incentives to pay for it. But the Bells didn't spend that money on fiber upgrades -- they spent it on long distance, wireless and inferior DSL services. Some headlines from Kushnick's work:

• By 2006, 86 million households should have been rewired with a fiber optic wire, capable of 45 Mbps, in both directions.
  
• The public subsidies for infrastructure were pocketed. The phone companies collected over $200 billion in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household.
  
• The World is Laughing at US. Korea and Japan have 100 Mbps services as standard, and America could have been Number One had the phone companies actually delivered. Instead, we are 16th in broadband and falling in technology dominance.
  

A damning list of indictments, and one that puts the telcos' demands for a two-tiered Internet in harsh perspective (see " 'Course what we'd really like to do is 'prioritize' some of these services right out of business ..." and "Interesting approach, Bill; why don't you try it on your phone network first?"). We paid an estimated $2000 per household for fiber to the home and instead got DSL over the old copper wiring. As Kushnick notes, that's like ordering a Ferrari and getting a bicycle. The Bells should be ashamed. And held accountable.

Posted by John Paczkowski on 05:51 AM

# posted by The Seditionist @ 2/05/2006 08:13:00 AM 0 comments