Monday, April 25, 2005

war

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST April 25, 2005
The Company Six Months in Ramadi: Bloodied Marines Sound Off About Want of Armor and Men
By MICHAEL MOSS
Marine leaders and infantrymen of a unit that sustained heavy losses say a lack of armor and manpower hampered their efforts.
Saga of Echo Company
“On May 29, 2004, a station wagon that Iraqi insurgents had packed with C-4 explosives blew up on a highway in Ramadi, killing four American marines who died for lack of a few inches of steel.

The four were returning to camp in an unarmored Humvee that their unit had rigged with scrap metal, but the makeshift shields rose only as high as their shoulders, photographs of the Humvee show, and the shrapnel from the bomb shot over the top.

"The steel was not high enough," said Staff Sgt. Jose S. Valerio, their motor transport chief, who along with the unit's commanding officers said the men would have lived had their vehicle been properly armored. "Most of the shrapnel wounds were to their heads."

In returning home, the leaders and Marine infantrymen have chosen to break an institutional code of silence and tell their story, one they say was punctuated not only by a lack of armor, but also by a shortage of men and planning that further hampered their efforts in battle, destroyed morale and ruined the careers of some of their fiercest warriors.

The saga of Company E, part of a lionized battalion nicknamed the Magnificent Bastards, is also one of fortitude and ingenuity. The marines, based at Camp Pendleton in southern California, had been asked to rid the provincial capital of one of the most persistent insurgencies, and in enduring 26 firefights, 90 mortar attacks and more than 90 homemade bombs, they shipped their dead home and powered on. Their tour has become legendary among other Marine units now serving in Iraq and facing some of the same problems.

"As marines, we are always taught that we do more with less," said Sgt. James S. King, a platoon sergeant who lost his left leg when he was blown out of the Humvee that Saturday afternoon last May. "And get the job done no matter what it takes."

The experiences of Company E's marines, pieced together through interviews at Camp Pendleton and by phone, company records and dozens of photographs taken by the marines, show they often did just that. The unit had less than half the troops who are now doing its job in Ramadi, and resorted to making dummy marines from cardboard cutouts and camouflage shirts to place in observation posts on the highway when it ran out of men. During one of its deadliest firefights, it came up short on both vehicles and troops. Marines who were stranded at their camp tried in vain to hot-wire a dump truck to help rescue their falling brothers. That day, 10 men in the unit died.

Sergeant Valerio and others had to scrounge for metal scraps to strengthen the Humvees they inherited from the National Guard, which occupied Ramadi before the marines arrived. Among other problems, the armor the marines slapped together included heavier doors that could not be latched, so they "chicken winged it" by holding them shut with their arms as they traveled.

"We were sitting out in the open, an easy target for everybody," Cpl. Toby G. Winn of Centerville, Tex., said of the shortages. "We complained about it every day, to anybody we could. They told us they were listening, but we didn't see it."

The company leaders say it is impossible to know how many lives may have been saved through better protection, since the insurgents became adept at overcoming improved defenses with more powerful weapons. Likewise, Pentagon officials say they do not know how many of the more than 1,500 American troops who have died in the war had insufficient protective gear.

Op-Ed Columnist: The Agony of War
By BOB HERBERT
As a nation we can wage war, but we don't want the public to be too upset by it. Marla Ruzicka tried to change that in her quest to document the suffering of Iraqi civilians.

Supreme Court Declines to Hear POWs' Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider whether U.S. prisoners of war who say they were tortured during the 1991 Gulf War should collect a $959 million judgment from Iraq.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

Human Rights Watch Cites Rumsfeld and Tenet in Report on Abuse

By DAVID JOHNSTON
"This pattern of abuse across several countries did not result from the acts of individual soldiers who broke the rules," said a statement by Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch. "It resulted from decisions made by senior U.S. officials to bend, ignore or cast the rules aside."

“Drawing largely on news reports and publicly available military reviews, the group, Human Rights Watch, concluded that there was "overwhelming evidence that U.S. mistreatment and torture of Muslim prisoners took place not merely at Abu Ghraib, but at facilities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq as well as at Guantánamo and at 'secret locations' around the world in violation of the Geneva Convention and the laws against torture."

The report, Getting Away with Torture? Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees, found no indication that Mr. Rumsfeld warned those under his command to halt abusive treatment of detainees and said that he should be investigated for abuses under a doctrine of "command responsibility." Mr. Rumsfeld has said he made it clear to subordinates that he did not condone mistreatment.

The report found that Mr. Tenet had been responsible for policies that sent detainees to countries where they were tortured, which made him potentially liable as an accomplice to torture. Mr. Tenet has not addressed the issue publicly, but C.I.A. officials have long said that Mr. Tenet insisted that agency personnel carefully follow the law.

A special prosecutor was needed to investigate these matters, the report said, because Alberto R. Gonzales, the attorney general, had a conflict of interest because he ‘was himself deeply involved in the policies leading to these alleged crimes.’”

From the earliest days of the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq, top U.S. government officials have been aware of allegations of abuse. Yet, until the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs forced action, many Bush administration officials took at best a “see no evil, hear no evil” approach to all reports of detainee mistreatment, including those described above, while others were ordering or acquiescing in the abuses.

While reports of abuse had already been coming in for a year, it was a seminal article in The Washington Post on December 26, 2002 that provided a wake-up call on U.S. tactics in the “global war on terror.”41 Citing unnamed U.S. officials, it reported that detainees in Afghanistan were subject to “awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights — subject to what are known as ‘stress and duress’ techniques.” The Post also reported being told by U.S. officials that “[t]housands have been arrested and held with U.S. assistance in countries known for brutal treatment of prisoners” and described the rendition of captured al-Qaeda suspects from U.S. custody to other countries where they are tortured or otherwise mistreated. One official was quoted as saying, “We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”42

The report said that of seven investigations by the Pentagon, none had critically examined the role of the civilian leaders with ultimate authority over detainee policy. Investigations into case-by-case abuses have largely focused on lower-level personnel. Bush administration officials have repeatedly said that the government's policies prohibit civilian and military personnel from engaging in torture and that anyone found to have used abusive procedures would be held accountable and would face possible prosecution.

So far, the government has shown no interest in an independent inquiry. Republicans in Congress have blocked requests by Democrats to examine allegations of detainee abuse. At the same time, the Justice Department has ignored requests to appoint a special prosecutor.

An Army investigation has cleared all but one of the five most senior Army officers who were responsible for detainee policies in Iraq.

http://hrw.org/reports/2005/us0405/

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/international/middleeast/24detain.html

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Bush's War on the Press

by Eric Alterman
“Make no mistake: The Bush Administration and its ideological allies are employing every means available to undermine journalists' ability to exercise their First Amendment function to hold power accountable. In fact, the Administration recognizes no such constitutional role for the press. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has insisted that the media ‘don't represent the public any more than other people do.... I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function.’

Bush himself, on more than one occasion, has told reporters he does not read their work and prefers to live inside the information bubble blown by his loyal minions. Vice President Cheney feels free to kick the New York Times off his press plane, and John Ashcroft can refuse to speak with any print reporters during his Patriot-Act-a-palooza publicity tour, just to compliant local TV. As an unnamed Bush official told reporter Ron Suskind, ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ For those who didn't like it, another Bush adviser explained, ‘Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read the New York Times or Washington Post or the LA Times.’

But the White House and its supporters are doing more than just talking trash--when they talk at all. They are taking aggressive action: preventing journalists from doing their job by withholding routine information; deliberately releasing deceptive information on a regular basis; bribing friendly journalists to report the news in a favorable context; producing their own ‘news reports’ and distributing these free of charge to resource-starved
broadcasters; creating and crediting their own political activists as ‘journalists’ working for partisan operations masquerading as news organizations.

In addition, an Administration-appointed special prosecutor, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, is now threatening two journalists with jail for refusing to disclose the nature of conversations they had regarding stories they never wrote, opening up a new frontier of potential prosecution. All this has come in the wake of a decades-long effort by the right and its corporate allies to subvert journalists' ability to report fairly on power and its abuse by attaching the label "liberal bias" to even the most routine forms of information gathering and reportage (for a transparent example in today's papers, see under ‘DeLay, Tom’). Some of these tactics have been used by previous administrations too, but the Bush team and its supporters have invested in and deployed them to a degree that marks a categorical shift from the past.

The right wing's media "decertification" effort, as the journalism scholar and blogger Jay Rosen calls it, has its roots in forty years of conservative fury at the consistent condescension it experienced from the once-liberal elite media and the cosmopolitan establishment for whom its members have spoken. Fueled by this sense of outrage, the right launched a multifaceted effort to fight back with institutions of its own, including think tanks, advocacy organizations, media pressure groups, church groups, big-business lobbies and, eventually, its own television, talk-radio, cable and radio networks (to be augmented, later, by a vast array of Internet sites).

Today this triumphant movement has captured not only much of the media and the public discourse on ideas but both the presidency and Congress (and soon, undoubtedly, the Supreme Court as well); it can wage its war on so many fronts simultaneously that it becomes nearly impossible to see that almost all these efforts are aimed at a single goal: the destruction of democratic accountability and the media's role in insuring it.

The Bush attack on the press has three primary components--Secrecy, Lies and Fake News. Consider these examples:

All Presidents try to keep secrets; it comes with the job description. Following 9/11, the need for secrecy increased significantly. Bush, however, has taken advantage of this new environment to shut down the natural flow of information between the governing and the governed in ways that have little or nothing to do with the terrorist threat.

As Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity points out, "The country has seen a historic, regressive shift in public accountability. Open-records laws nationwide have been rolled back more than 300 times--all in the name of national security." Federation of American Scientists secrecy specialist Steven Aftergood adds, "Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent.... His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004."

Some of these efforts may be justified as prudent preparation in the face of genuine threats, but this is hard to credit, given the contempt the Administration has demonstrated for the public's right to information in non-security-related matters.

Upon entering office, Bush attempted to shield his Texas gubernatorial records by shuttling them into his father's presidential library. That was followed by an executive fiat designed to hide his father's presidential records, as well as those of the Reagan/Bush Administration, by blocking the scheduled release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and issuing a replacement presidential order that allowed not only Presidents but also their wives and children to keep their records secret. (The records had
already been scrubbed for national security implications.)

In the aftermath of 9/11, Administration efforts to prevent accountability accelerated to warp speed. Attorney General Ashcroft reversed a Clinton Administration-issued policy governing FOIA requests that allowed documents to be withheld only when "foreseeable harm" would likely result, to one in which merely a "sound legal basis" could be found. And that was just the beginning. Even when documents were not withheld de jure, Administration officials often withheld them de facto.

When People for the American Way sought documents on prisoners' cases being litigated in secret, the Justice Department required it to pay $373,000 in search fees before officials would even look. "It's become much, much harder to get responses to FOIA requests, and it's taking much, much longer," David Schulz, the attorney who helps the Associated Press with FOIA requests, explained to a reporter.

"Agencies seem to view their role as coming up with techniques to keep information secret rather than the other way around. That's completely contrary to the goal of the act."

In addition, as Aftergood notes, "an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, websites and official databases." These sources were once freely available but are now being withdrawn from view under the classification "sensitive but unclassified" or "for official use only." They include: the Pentagon telephone directory, the Los Alamos technical report library, historical records at the National Archives and the Energy Department intelligence budget, among many others.

Even more alarming is the web of secrecy surrounding the operations of what has become the equivalent of a police state at Guantánamo Bay and other military prisons around the world, where the accused are routinely denied due process and traditional rules of evidence are deemed irrelevant. Exactly two members of Congress, both sworn to secrecy, are being briefed by the CIA on these programs. The rest of Congress, the media and the public are given no information to judge the legality, morality or effectiveness of these extralegal
machinations, some of which have already resulted in officially sanctioned torture and possibly even murder.

The issue of "lies" has been the most consistently clouded by the Administration's supporters in the conservative media, who refuse to report facts when they conflict with White House spin. It's true, as I show in my book When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, that many presidents have demonstrated an almost allergic reaction to accuracy. Still, the Bush Administration manages to set a new standard here as well, reducing reality to a series of inconvenient obstacles to be ignored in favor of ideological prejudices and political imperatives--and it has done so virtually across the entire executive branch. As Michael Kinsley noted way back in April 2002,

"What's going on here is something like lying by reflex.... Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother. Until you realize: They haven't bothered. If telling the truth was less bother, they'd try that too."

Rather than regurgitate that fruitless debate over the war--the deliberate untruths told by the Administration have been delineated ad nauseam--consider just two recent examples of its deception on matters relating to scientific and medical evidence:

§Mercury emissions: When the EPA unveiled a rule to limit mercury emissions from power plants, Bush officials argued that anything more stringent than the EPA's proposed regulations would cost the industry far in excess of any conceivable benefit to public health. They hid the fact, however, that a Harvard study paid for by the EPA, co-written by an EPA scientist and peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists, found exactly the opposite, estimating health benefits 100 times as great as the EPA did. Even more shocking, according to a GAO investigation, the EPA had failed to "quantify the human health benefits of decreased exposure to mercury, such as reduced incidence of developmental delays, learning disabilities, and neurological disorders."

§Nuclear materials: The Los Angeles Times recently reported that government scientists apparently submitted phony data to demonstrate that a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada's Yucca Mountain would be safe. As with the EPA and mercury emissions, the Interior Department found unsatisfactory the results of a study from the Los Alamos National Laboratory concluding that rainwater moved through the mountain sufficiently quickly for radioactive isotopes to penetrate the ground in a few decades, so it just pretended it hadn't happened.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050509&s=alterman

Trees, Fruit, Evidence, Knowledge

E-COMMERCE REPORT
Questioning Eziba's Decisions

By BOB TEDESCHI
Which creditors should a financially troubled company pay first, Rwandan widows or its bank?

“When Eziba, an online retailer, declared bankruptcy last year, it left behind more than the usual amount of financial pain.

The privately held company had built a considerable business by selling hand-made goods from local artisans around the world through catalogs, stores and its own Web site. But hundreds of those suppliers were left unpaid when Eziba encountered financial trouble. Some of the company's critics, including those at Overstock.com, which later bought the company's assets, are now questioning Eziba's decision to forgo payments.

Since its debut in 1999, Eziba was never shy about publicizing the benefits it bestowed on vendors around the world. The company said it paid a total of $10 million to groups like Rwandan basket weavers, many of them widows of that country's war, and South African papier mâché artists.

But when Eziba's financial fortunes soured late last year, the company paid off a $500,000 bank loan instead of paying hundreds of artisans more than $100,000 it owed them.
Eziba said that paying off the loan was the best business practice - a contention disputed by some bankruptcy law specialists.

Shortly after paying the loan, the company entered a voluntary liquidation process in hopes of paying off creditors like the New York public relations firm Ruder Finn, among others. (According to Emmanuel Tchividjian, a Ruder Finn senior vice president, his company, which was owed $11,000, was more concerned with protecting the interests of the Rwandan artisans, whose work Ruder Finn publicized, than recovering its money.) The bankruptcy proceedings are continuing.

But the creditors then petitioned for Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings after a liquidation attorney told them that a bankruptcy trustee might be able to recover the $500,000 payment - which it subsequently did - and thereby increase the amount available to pay themselves and the artisans.

Overstock.com, the publicly held online seller of discount merchandise, bought Eziba's assets from the bankruptcy trustee for $500,000, a price unrelated to the bank loan, and announced that it would pay the artisans in full, even though it is not legally obliged to do so. Overstock further said that it would try to revive their businesses by selling their goods on Worldstock.com, an Overstock division with a mission similar to Eziba's.

Patrick Byrne, Overstock's chief executive, said last week that Overstock had already begun identifying and paying artisans, although he welcomed Eziba's help. Earlier this month, for instance, Overstock paid a debt of $23,000 that Eziba owed to the Rwandan widows. But Mr. Byrne also said he felt that Mr. Sabot and Eziba committed grave ethical lapses by not paying its artisans when it had the money to do so.

‘I smell skunk,’ Mr. Byrne said. ‘Even if Eziba really did have to repay the bank loan when it did, which I don't believe, the fact remains that they had eight months to pay the Rwandan widows $23,000 and they chose not to.’ ”

…Elizabeth Warren, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a bankruptcy law specialist, said Eziba was not legally obligated to pay the bank first.
"Until it filed for bankruptcy, company management decided the order of payment," she said in an interview. "They preferred the bank, while the artisans were shut out. They may have had business or personal reasons for doing that, but they didn't have legal reasons."

The bankruptcy trustee handling Eziba's case, Jack E. Houghton Jr., did not return calls seeking comment. Mr. Sabot said he could not fully account for the fact that Eziba had not paid the Rwandan widows for baskets that had been shipped in May. He referred questions to Mr. Miller, who, through last fall, was engaged in a last-ditch effort to engineer a holiday sales season big enough to keep the company afloat.

"I was operating a company under very difficult circumstances," Mr. Miller said. "And we were operating under the assumption that there was another round of financing coming in so we could keep the company going and pay off everyone. Unfortunately, that didn't happen." He added that the widows, among others, had been paid about $100,000 to that point for baskets they had produced starting in 2003.

The delinquent $23,000 in payments still represented a considerable hardship for the widows, according to Kaliza Karuretwa, the counselor for trade at the Rwandan Embassy in Washington, who has been in contact with the artisans. For every basket they sold to Eziba for $18 (which was in turn priced at $55 by the company), the widows could feed a family of six for two weeks, Ms. Karuretwa said.

Also left unpaid was a cooperative of South African artisans called the African Art Factory, which was owed $80,000, according Janet Pillai, the Art Factory's chief executive. Artisans in Afghanistan, Bolivia, Bosnia and the Middle East were also owed thousands of dollars.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/18/technology/18ecom.html

Friday, April 22, 2005

American RadioWorks - Power Trips

“Reforms in recent years have made many of the lush perks once enjoyed by Congress disappear. But not all, certainly not travel. That's the conclusion of an investigation by Marketplace, American RadioWorks, and a team of graduate students from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, who cataloged every privately sponsored trip taken by members of the House or Senate since 2000. The result: Over $14 million spent by corporations, universities, and other outside interests, sending representatives around the world, for sometimes questionable reasons.


Part 1 - Rules of the Road
London. Antigua. Golf trips. Spas. Congress travels in style when outsiders foot the bill. Reporter Steve Henn explores the concern that free travel is a widely abused perk.

Part 2 - King of Travel conceptual@hotmail.comSen. John Breaux (D-La.) is a legendary dealmaker on Capitol Hill. He's also the king of congressional travel, with 56 trips in less than five years, paid for by industry groups, lobbyists, and universities.


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http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/

AMERICAN RADIOWORKS® is the national documentary unit of American Public Media. ARW is public radio's largest documentary production unit; it creates documentaries, series projects, and investigative reports for the public radio system and the Internet. ARW is based at St. Paul, Minnesota, with staff journalists in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, C.A., and Durham, N.C.

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http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/congtravel/index.html

Thursday, April 21, 2005

It Isn't Just Political Appointments

Privacy Committee Stacked with Anti-Privacy Advocates
By Jim Rapoza
Of course, the Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee is an advisory group, and advisory committees shouldn't exclude people with extreme viewpoints. But when I look at the list of committee members (at www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/editorial_0598.xml ), I don't see the extreme pro-privacy counterparts to some of these committee members.

“So here I am, head of a large corporation, and it's time for me to pick a few top people to help run the company. But who should I pick for key positions such as CFO and CIO?

My first pick is Marty, a person who can't track or control his spending, who is completely clueless and unorganized about his finances. The next time he saves a dollar will be the first time he saves a dollar. I'm going to make him chief financial officer.

And then there's Gail, who avoids using e-mail, a PC or anything technology-related and who in a company meeting famously stated that all technology is bad and that the company should return to pencil, paper and Day-Timers. She is, of course, the perfect candidate for chief information officer.

OK, I know you think I may be nuts with these decisions, but I'm just following the example of one of the biggest organizations around—namely, the U.S. government. Lately it seems as if the main qualification to get a top position in a government agency is to be completely opposed to the stated goal of that agency.

From a technology and, especially, an Internet business perspective, some of the most disconcerting agency appointments have been in the Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, a group that advises the department's chief privacy officer and has the potential to shape government policies for individuals, corporations and technology as a whole.

The first interesting decision was when the committee membership was announced in February and it included D. Reed Freeman, chief privacy officer at Claria, which was formerly known as Gator. Of course, this caused a great deal of consternation in the privacy community because Claria/Gator is one of the biggest players in spyware—I mean adware, PUPs, um, "super-keen-ware that you may have unknowingly installed." Many were surprised that a group meant to advise on privacy would include someone from an industry that is all about breaking down individual privacy on the Web.

Then this month, the chairman of this committee was named, and it turned out to be a Heritage Foundation fellow named Paul Rosenzweig, who, in privacy and government circles, is well-known for his advocacy of the proposed Total Information Awareness program, which was shot down in Congress because of its many potential privacy abuses.

So, no, it's not just Bolton and the UN. Or Cheney and energy. It's policy. No child left with a mind

There is a good number of clear moderates from the corporate and government sectors, even some who are clearly privacy advocates. But there are no hard-core consumer privacy advocates—say, on the Richard Smith level—to balance the committee.

And when the chairman is a person who has been described as seeing privacy as something to be worked around, rather than someone more from the center, it is easy to understand why some have said that the committee's goal is not to prevent invasions of privacy but to prevent privacy from invading government policies.


…So, no, it's not just Bolton and the UN. Or Cheney and energy. It's policy. No child left with a mind.…

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1784963,00.asp

“constructive ambiguity”

Israel's Ariel Sharon has had an amiable meeting with George Bush. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, badly needs the same thing

From The Economist print edition

“DIPLOMATS call it “constructive ambiguity”: wording an agreement—or a disagreement—so as to disguise the fact that there wasn't one. This week George Bush and Ariel Sharon showed their mastery of the technique. At a chummy confab at his Texas ranch, Mr Bush appeared to rebuke Israel's prime minister for not stopping settlement-building in the West Bank. Much has been made of the fact that Mr Sharon appeared to ignore him. But in reality there was little to ignore.

The meeting was important for Mr Sharon. Both he and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the Palestinian president, were due this month to visit Mr Bush and seek his blessing for their efforts since their own summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in February. Mr Sharon went to Texas with a black mark in his book: the “E-1 Plan”, which his government revived last month, and which calls for the building of 3,500 new houses between East Jerusalem and Maale Adumim (one of the largest settlements, a few minutes' drive to the east of the capital), to consolidate Israel's hold on that block of West Bank settlements. Notwithstanding Israel's reassurances that the plan is still on paper, several others, in other settlements, are already far more advanced.

But Mr Sharon also had something to show since Sharm: success in steering his Gaza withdrawal plan through Israel's parliament, the Knesset, and keeping his governing coalition alive, despite stiff opposition both in his party and outside it. Now, belatedly but energetically, the government is forging ahead with the preparations for the withdrawal, approving compensation payments to the settlers and looking for new lands for them to move to. That is starting to distil the reluctantly acquiescent majority of them from the hardcore opponents, who have staged noisy but notably small protests in the last few days; the zealots who blocked a highway with burning tyres and tried to disrupt Muslim prayers on Temple Mount in Jerusalem at the start of this week numbered mere dozens.

In other words, Mr Sharon is so far achieving exactly what he promised. At the president's Prairie Chapel Ranch, he got his reward. Mr Bush praised the Gaza pullout, expressed his “concern” at the settlement-building and reminded Israel that it must stick to the international “road map” peace plan. That meant “no expansion of settlements”, he said three times, pointedly failing to note that the road map actually stipulates no construction of any kind; according to Israel, building within existing settlement boundaries, themselves broad and sometimes fuzzy, is not “expansion”. In the same breath, he repeated his support for Israel's holding on to the main settlement blocks, where three-quarters of the West Bank settlers live.…
‘’
Packs of media watchdogs scrutinise every news item, providing daily reams of proof that the world's media are both riddled with Israel-haters and controlled by a Zionist conspiracy. For the former view, subscribe to the mailing lists of Independent Media Review Analysis or Palestinian Media Watch—just don't confuse it with Palestine Media Watch, which (along with others) dishes out similar vitriol for anything that seems too pro-Israel.

However, in informational as well as military terms, the Palestinians are far outgunned. Israel has press officers in every ministry and embassy and an annual PR-training course in Washington, DC, for selected spokespeople. The foreign ministry has a 24-hour monitoring centre which analyses coverage in several languages, counts the airtime given to Israeli and Palestinian spokespeople down to the last second, and sends out real-time electronic reports on it to officials. Even so, says Mr Meir, he is pushing to make things more systematic, to get his colleagues to weigh up how every decision will play in the media, especially the foreign media.

The Israeli army, too, has learned lessons during the second intifada (which began in 2000), according to Ruth Yaron, its chief spokeswoman. Soldiers are trained on how to act around cameras. Press officers take part in planning operations—helping, for instance, to time them to match media deadlines—and army camera teams go along on them, providing footage (eg, of arms-smuggling tunnels and would-be suicide bombers caught at checkpoints) that goes out to the media.

As the occupied underdog, the Palestinians should have a natural advantage. But, says a Palestinian official, “The Israelis have a horrible product but they spend a lot of time in marketing, and they succeed, whereas the Palestinians have a really good product, but we invest nothing in selling it.”

As a legacy of Yasser Arafat's one-man domination of power, there is no government press office (there is an information ministry, but nobody is quite sure what it does); no co-ordinated message; no systematic media monitoring. Public statements mostly come either from officials who do not have media training or from public personalities who do but are not in the government. One result has been an inability to capitalise on things that should have been huge PR victories, such as last year's International Court of Justice ruling against Israel's West Bank barrier.

“I don't think many of our officials understand the importance of the media,” says Hanan Ashrawi, one of those public personalities, “and those who do want to be [in the media] themselves.” Some of the PA's more enlightened leaders are pushing for a better strategy, “but it's difficult”, says Ghassan Khatib, the planning minister, “when you take into consideration the nature of the people involved, the lack of a system and lack of discipline.”

Even Hamas, the Islamist party that will challenge the ruling Fatah for legislative and municipal seats this year, is more media-savvy, grumbles the Palestinian official. Earlier this month it announced its decision to run in English, a sign that it realises its shift into politics is as important a message to the West as it is to Palestinians.…

http://economist.com/World/africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3798515


http://economist.com/World/africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3873079

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

'We're No. 17'--Why U.S. coders fell flat

By Charles Cooper, CNET News.com

“Even before the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest began, everyone knew the United States had its work cut out for it.

So when the final results came in, Uncle Sam was fortunate to have placed 17th in a tie with the likes of Russian powerhouse Perm State University, perhaps best known as a must stopover for countless '80s glam rockers. Who knows? If we try hard enough, maybe next year the U.S. will be able to catch up to No. 9 Izhevsk State Technical University, way out in the not-so-cosmopolitan reaches of Russia's eastern hinterlands.

All silliness aside, the United States' mediocre showing has rightly become a topic of concern in Silicon Valley, where technology leaders are already fretting about the quality of technical talent in tomorrow's work force. The question is whether this was a harbinger of deeper trouble or simply a one-off item that most folks won't bother with--let alone remember--six months from now.

"The truth is that we're mediocre. Other countries are pushing their best and brightest to math and the sciences. And what are we doing? Every parent knows we are not spending money effectively. But I don't know that our country has the stomach yet to fix what needs to be fixed. Can we and should we? Yes, but in a way that has to be successful."

…Shortly after the publication of the ACM results, I had a conversation with a chief executive from one of the technology industry's leading companies. This CEO spoke on the condition of anonymity. For this Valley big shot, the primary issue was the education, or more precisely, the undereducation of students in this country. For this CEO, years of falling test scores have forced him to reach an uncomfortable conclusion:

"The truth is that we're mediocre. Other countries are pushing their best and brightest to math and the sciences. And what are we doing? Every parent knows we are not spending money effectively. But I don't know that our country has the stomach yet to fix what needs to be fixed. Can we and should we? Yes, but in a way that has to be successful."

And there's the rub. What's the best way of getting from here to there? People have been talking about education reform in this country ever since the first public high school opened its doors in the early 19th century. But there are increasingly insistent calls to take the bull by the horns. A recent survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked 15-year-olds from the United States as 24th in math out of 29 industrialized countries! As if that were not bad enough, their science skills were even worse.

Why can't Johnny program? By Ed Frauenheim, Special to ZDNet

Q&A The organizer of a recently global coding contest in which a U.S. team finished 17th reflects on the educational system.If David Patterson had his way, the president of the United States would congratulate top code jockeys just like the commander-in-chief applauds the Super Bowl champs.

That would send a message about the importance of technology smarts and skills, argues Patterson, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of the Association for Computing Machinery, a group that runs a major student coding contest.

"(Our presidents) meet the winners of the football championship, right?" Patterson says. "Gee, wouldn't it be wonderful if the presidents would meet the winners of the programming contest? Wouldn't that be a better world?"

After U.S. students earlier this month made their worst showing in the 29-year history of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, Patterson and others are wondering whether the United States does enough to encourage programming talent. The top U.S. school finished in a tie for 17th place. Students from China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University took the top honors, continuing a gradual ascendance of Asian and Eastern European schools during the past decade or so. The last time a U.S. institution won the world championship was in 1997.

Some argue the results don't necessarily mean much, given the way foreign schools may put more emphasis on the contest. What's more, the number of entrants has mushroomed, from fewer than 650 teams in 1994 to more than 4,100 this year.

Patterson, though, thinks there's more to the U.S. decline--viewed by some as a sign the country's tech leadership is in trouble.

ACM's leader knows a thing or two about creating important technology: He played a key role in the development of so-called reduced instruction set computers, or RISC, and was involved in a Berkeley networking project that led to technology used by Internet companies such as Inktomi.

CNET News.com recently spoke with Patterson about ACM's contest, the state of student tech talent in the United States, and how outsourcing is affecting the field.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9593_22-5676484.html

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9589_22-5675227.html

Monday, April 18, 2005

I've Been Interviewed — Audio and Text Part 2

this is an audio post - click to play


I've Been Interviewed — Audio and Text Part 1
http://conceptual.blogspot.com/2005/04/ive-been-interviewed-audio-and-text.html

10. (Political influence of bloggers continued)

A.J. Liebling said,"Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own one." What passes for news in the conventional media is too often the mere opinion of the powerful. The answer to the speech of the few is the speech of the many. People feel that their freedom is at stake.

11.What are your thoughts on the future of the political blog?*
Blogs are here to stay. They represent every aspect of human interest. the more passionate the interest the more passionate the blog. Somtimes, I think sex comes in second to politics, for religious people it may not even come in third.

1. Could you give a brief presentation of yourself and your line of work?*

I am a middle-aged African American businessman, my business is Visual Communication. I've been involved with personal computers since the days when they were built from kits and I paid for my first fine art show by working as a technician. Computers paid for my art supplies, then, years later, computers became my art supplies.

Currently I am also a volunteer tutor at a neighborhood community center. I teach computer repair and use of the net as a resource.

2. What was your motivation for creating your blogs (concept, concept2 polyticks, concept3 tools) and what do you aim to accomplish with these?*

con·cept, my original blog, was started in October of 2000 as a way to keep track of resources, news, and tools I found on the net or recieved in email newsletters.

3.Why have you chosen to create three different blogs and what issues do you address in the three?*

There was so much political information I started con·cept2 polyticks in December of that year. In June of 2003, I started con·cept3 tools for technical information. There has been so much security related info I'm considering a new blog just for Viruses, Malware, and Security. I will be starting a blog for the people I'm tutoring but that might be private.

4.Do you mainly blog to express your own views, to inform others, to start discussions about subjects or for other reasons?

I blog to make information which is available better known. It's like marking a trail. It's my way of saying this is the path I took, and this is what I've found worth thinking about. More rarely, I'll post what I actually think about what I've found.

5.I see you mainly post articles written by other people. This is different from how most bloggers use this tool, at least from what I've seen, personally. Why have you chosen this approach, and do you also write yourself?

There are probably a million blogs that tell other people what they should think. What passes for news in the conventional media is too often the mere opinion of the powerful. Although mainstream media likes to think of itself as objective, things that don't agree with the powerful have a way of being buried in the back pages of publications. I like to post enough information from articles that inform me to interest others in reading the entire article, then, they can make up their own minds and if they comment we're discussing the same things. Occasionally, I'll post my opinion, and how I came to that conclusion. If I'm worked up enough about it, I'll post audio, but time is a major constraint. Until recently it also required a long distance call (from Chicago, Illinois to California) to get audio on blogspot.

6. Do you have a target audience or are your blogs intended for everyone to read?

My target audience is those who are honestly curious. If you're looking for things to bolster a preconcieved position sooner or later I'm going to disappoint you. I welcome honest disagreement and honest agreement, but, if believing is seeing for you, you should find other material to read.

7. Do you use these blogs in relation to your work?*

con·cept3 tools is related to both my volunteer and commercial work

8. What thought have you put into the design of your blogs?

My first attempt at con·cept was hosted at a different site. I was excited about cascading style sheets and spent more time designing than posting. the more I posted the less concerned I became about the design. finally in October 2000 I moved to blogspot, found the templates adequate and modifiable. This may change with newer blogs. To quote the late Ben Shahn "Form is the shape of content."

9. I see you update your blogs regularly. How much time and effort do you put into maintaining them?

I spend roughly an hour a day blogging. It can be as much as four hours if there's alot going onbut never less than an hour. I find most of what I post about in my inbox.

10. Bloggers seem to have gained considerable political influence over the last few years, in everything from following the presidential election to giving various, unedited views on the war in Iraq to revealing political scandals. What is your view on the cause and effects of this and could you give us a few examples that you know of?*

I think it started with the 2000 selection of George W. Bush. Like a large number of people I don't believe he won that election (though I do believe he won in 2004). People on all sides of the political spectrum were dissatisfied with the performance of mainstream media.

http://www.audioblogger.com/media/1468/175703.mp3

I've Been Interviewed — Audio and Text Part 1

this is an audio post - click to play

Hello, Mr. Ingram!

This is the only way I found of contacting you, so I'm hoping you'll read this.My name is Espen H. Sørby and I study Media science in a town called Tønsberg in Norway. At the moment I'm working on an analysis of the phenomenon that is blogs, more specifically the use of blogs as a political arena. As luck would have it, I stumbled across your blog and have found it to be very interesting. And so comes my request. I would like to use your blog in my analysis as my key example of how to use a blog to convey political views, and I'm hereby asking your permission to do so. If you would have the time and interest, I would also like to do a short interview with you, by sending you an e-mail with a list of questions. If this sounds like something you'd like to take part in, you can reach me by e-mail: or post a comment on my blog: "darko77.blogspot.com"

Best regards,
Espen Sørby

Thank you very much for taking time out of your schedule to help me out. I've attached the interview as a word file. I've writen down the due date for the assignment and also prioritized the questions, in case you are too busy to answer them all.

Interview with Alfred Ingram

1. Could you give a brief presentation of yourself and your line of work?*

I am a middle-aged African American businessman, my business is Visual Communication. I've been involved with personal computers since the days when they were built from kits and I paid for my first fine art show by working as a technician. Computers paid for my art supplies, then, years later, computers became my art supplies.

Currently I am also a volunteer tutor at a neighborhood community center. I teach computer repair and use of the net as a resource.

2. What was your motivation for creating your blogs (concept, concept2 polyticks, concept3 tools) and what do you aim to accomplish with these?*

con·cept, my original blog, was started in October of 2000 as a way to keep track of resources, news, and tools I found on the net or recieved in email newsletters.

3.Why have you chosen to create three different blogs and what issues do you address in the three?*

There was so much political information I started con·cept2 polyticks in December of that year. In June of 2003, I started con·cept3 tools for technical information. There has been so much security related info I'm considering a new blog just for Viruses, Malware, and Security. I will be starting a blog for the people I'm tutoring but that might be private.

4.Do you mainly blog to express your own views, to inform others, to start discussions about subjects or for other reasons?

I blog to make information which is available better known. It's like marking a trail. It's my way of saying this is the path I took, and this is what I've found worth thinking about. More rarely, I'll post what I actually think about what I've found.

5.I see you mainly post articles written by other people. This is different from how most bloggers use this tool, at least from what I've seen, personally. Why have you chosen this approach, and do you also write yourself?

There are probably a million blogs that tell other people what they should think. What passes for news in the conventional media is too often the mere opinion of the powerful. Although mainstream media likes to think of itself as objective, things that don't agree with the powerful have a way of being buried in the back pages of publications. I like to post enough information from articles that inform me to interest others in reading the entire article, then, they can make up their own minds and if they comment we're discussing the same things. Occasionally, I'll post my opinion, and how I came to that conclusion. If I'm worked up enough about it, I'll post audio, but time is a major constraint. Until recently it also required a long distance call (from Chicago, Illinois to California) to get audio on blogspot.

6. Do you have a target audience or are your blogs intended for everyone to read?

My target audience is those who are honestly curious. If you're looking for things to bolster a preconcieved position sooner or later I'm going to disappoint you. I welcome honest disagreement and honest agreement, but, if believing is seeing for you, you should find other material to read.

7. Do you use these blogs in relation to your work?*

con·cept3 tools is related to both my volunteer and commercial work

8. What thought have you put into the design of your blogs?

My first attempt at con·cept was hosted at a different site. I was excited about cascading style sheets and spent more time designing than posting. the more I posted the less concerned I became about the design. finally in October 2000 I moved to blogspot, found the templates adequate and modifiable. This may change with newer blogs. To quote the late Ben Shahn "Form is the shape of content."

9. I see you update your blogs regularly. How much time and effort do you put into maintaining them?

I spend roughly an hour a day blogging. It can be as much as four hours if there's alot going onbut never less than an hour. I find most of what I post about in my inbox.

10. Bloggers seem to have gained considerable political influence over the last few years, in everything from following the presidential election to giving various, unedited views on the war in Iraq to revealing political scandals. What is your view on the cause and effects of this and could you give us a few examples that you know of?*

I think it started with the 2000 selection of George W. Bush. Like a large number of people I don't believe he won that election (though I do believe he won in 2004). People on all sides of the political spectrum were dissatisfied with the performance of mainstream media.


http://www.audioblogger.com/media/1468/175699.mp3

Saturday, April 16, 2005

A new way of developing drugs for neglected diseases of the poor world

From The Economist
“THIS week, scientists from the Institute for OneWorld Health, the first not-for-profit pharmaceutical company in America, presented the results of a large clinical trial at the Third World Congress on Leishmaniasis in Palermo, Italy. Leishmaniasis is a parasitic infection transmitted by the bite of a sand fly. The trial shows that an antibiotic called paromomycin is effective for treating the most dangerous version of the disease, visceral leishmaniasis, which affects 1.5m people around the world and kills 200,000 of them every year. Those data are obviously important for medical reasons. But they are also important as a demonstration that the institute's novel approach to drug development is working.

About 90% of the planet's disease burden falls on the developing world. Yet only 3% of the research and development expenditure of the pharmaceutical industry is directed toward those ailments. The rest goes towards treating diseases of the rich. In 2000, Victoria Hale (pictured above), founded the institute to help tackle that discrepancy. She knew from her work as a scientist in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, and subsequently as an official at America's Food and Drug Administration, that numerous promising drug-development projects—particularly for diseases of the poor—are dropped for lack of funding. She reasoned that there was a gap in the market, between academically inclined university departments and fully fledged pharmaceutical firms, for an organisation that would identify such orphans, get their owners to donate the intellectual property if they were still in patent, raise development funding from non-commercial sources, and arm-twist researchers to contribute their expertise to the development process pro bono.

So far, the donation side seems to have worked. In 2002 Celera Genomics gave the institute a promising compound for the treatment of Chagas disease, which infects 12m people in Latin America and is an important cause of heart failure in the region. Yale University has also licensed a potential drug for Chagas to the institute. And the University of California, Santa Barbara, gave it a compound intended for the treatment of schistosomiasis, which affects 200m people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. The compound the institute has pushed furthest, though, is paromomycin. In this case no donation was needed, as the drug's patent has expired. Indeed, it is currently used for the treatment of a variety of parasites. But it has never been properly road-tested for leishmaniasis.

…In the mid-1990s, the World Health Organisation (WHO) started testing an injectable form of paromomycin as a treatment for visceral leishmaniasis. Its researchers completed small-scale trials which demonstrated that the drug was safe for use against the disease and seemed to cure the infection. But development stalled at that point because the WHO was unable to find a sponsor for a large-scale trial that would have compared paromomycin with existing treatments.

In 2001, Dr Hale approached the WHO about taking over the trials. The WHO agreed, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stumped up the money, and the institute teamed up with four health-care centres in the Indian state of Bihar in order to test the drug against amphotericin B, an established but expensive treatment.

The trial showed that the two drugs worked more or less equally well. In both cases, 99% of patients responded within four weeks—and though slightly fewer of those on paromomycin remained uninfected after six months, all those relapses proved treatable by other drugs. Given that a course of amphotericin B costs $120, while the institute reckons a course of paromomycin will come in at around $10, this seems a reasonable trade-off. The institute, supported by a further donation from the Gates foundation, plans to submit an application for regulatory approval to the Indian health ministry by the end of the year. If that is granted, the manufacturing will be done by Gland Pharma, a drug company based in Hyderabad.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3860425

Friday, April 15, 2005

American? You Don't Own Your Personal Information

Identity Thieves' Secret Weapon

“But for a single innovative law in California, the nation's consumers might not even be hearing some of the more outrageous news about mass heists of supposedly secure computer information from reputedly trustworthy sources: LexisNexis gently announces about 32,000 suspected thefts of identity data, which soon balloon to 310,000. ChoicePoint, a data broker and credit reporting agency with access to 19 billion records, lets 145,000 consumers know their personal data may have been stolen.…”

Consumers, not data dealers, deserve controlling interest in their vital information.
…mainly because California has a law requiring that consumers be notified when their personal data are pilfered. There is no such federal law, even though identity theft produces $50 billion a year in personal and business losses. As California's consumers play the canary in the data mines, consumer and law enforcement organizations are putting pressure on loosely regulated data brokers to let the rest of us in on their failures. But this is hardly the way to safeguard the American consumer.

Recent Senate hearings show that no one really knows how deeply hackers and in-house thieves are tapping into our personal records. There was the purloining of Ford Motor Credit reports on 30,000 consumers so street thieves could empty bank accounts and run up purchases. Computer backup tapes were lost at the Bank of America with the Social Security numbers and other vital data of 1.2 million federal workers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/opinion/15fri2.html

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Guantánamo Detainee's Suit Says Prison Guards Beat Him

“At one time, military officials said there was no widespread abuse at Guantánamo. But they have had to deal with several accusations of abuse, including the one that stemmed from F.B.I. memorandums that provided credibility and corroboration to accounts from released detainees and from lawyers who represent detainees.…”


By NEIL A. LEWIS
“A lawsuit filed in federal court on Wednesday says guards at the Guantánamo Bay detention center beat a detainee frequently, leaving him with visible scars and partial facial paralysis.

The suit, filed on behalf of Mustafa Ait Idir, an Algerian, is based on accounts that he gave his American lawyer on a recent visit to Guantánamo, in Cuba. Mr. Idir's lawyers said he told them that sometime in the spring of 2004 he was forcibly removed from his cell and that while he was shackled and lying on the ground, a guard jumped on his head. As a result, the suit said, Mr. Idir apparently suffered a stroke and has one side of his face paralyzed.

Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & Dorr, is representing Mr. Idir and five fellow Algerians at Guantánamo in a suit that seeks their release. The six were captured in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The lawyer's accounts form the basis of a federal suit in Boston that asks the Defense Department to release medical records that might corroborate Mr. Idir's account.

A law firm in Boston, Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & Dorr, is representing Mr. Idir and five fellow Algerians at Guantánamo in a suit that seeks their release. The six were captured in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The suit is the first effort to use the Freedom of Information Act to compel the Bush administration to disclose medical records at Guantánamo.

A senior Air Force general has been investigating possible abuses at Guantánamo, an assignment that stemmed from the disclosure of several Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandums in which bureau agents recounted abuses that they had witnessed there.

The memorandums, which were not meant to be made public but were disclosed in a separate suit by the American Civil Liberties Union, provided accounts of detainees' being beaten and chained for long periods.

Unlawful Combatants are no longer people out of uniform in the combat zone, but according to the Bush administration, people picked up anywhere that are suspected of anything that the administration chooses to designate that way.

Like Dred Scott, they have no rights the executive branch need consider. They have been declared non people. They have been so declared at Ohare, La Guardia, Bosnia, and anyplace else on the planet.
A.I.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/politics/14detain.html

DeLay: “We set up the courts. We can unset the courts.”

“We set the jurisdiction of the courts,” Mr. DeLay said. “We set up the courts. We can unset the courts.”

As to the ethics questions, Mr. DeLay repeated that he was “more than happy” to have the House ethics committee review those issues. But it cannot do so because the committee is embroiled in a fight over rules changes that critics say will discourage ethics inquiries. Democrats, upset that Republicans adopted the changes without their cooperation, are refusing to constitute the committee this session. The panel met Wednesday to try to resolve the impasse, but was unsuccessful.
“We're trying to find some common ground,” said the chairman, Representative Doc Hastings, Republican of Washington. “We have been talking. As long as we can talk, I tend to be an optimist.”

Democrats, meanwhile, sharply criticized the ethics rule changes on Wednesday at a news conference that featured Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, and the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada. Ms. Pelosi warned that House Republicans, who rode to power in 1994 by portraying Democrats as arrogant, had become arrogant.

“I have said for a long time their greed will be their downfall,” she said.“I have said for a long time their greed will be their downfall,” Nancy Pelosi said.

At least one Republican, Mr. Shays, seemed to agree on Wednesday. “I'm no fan of Nancy Pelosi,” he said. But, he added, “we said we would be different and we were when we started out. We are quickly becoming like they were when they were in the majority.…”

“I'm no fan of Nancy Pelosi,” one Republican, Mr. Shays said. But, he added, “we said we would be different and we were when we started out. We are quickly becoming like they were when they were in the majority.
“Deflecting all questions about his ethical conduct and political future, Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, on Wednesday stepped up his crusade against judges, announcing that he had instructed the Judiciary Committee to investigate federal court decisions in the Terri Schiavo case and to recommend possible legislation.

At a crowded news conference, Mr. DeLay said he would not entertain questions about his political activities. It was his first question-and-answer session with reporters since one fellow Republican, Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, called for him to resign his leadership post and another, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said he should explain himself to the American people.

"I'm not here to discuss the Democrats' agenda," Mr. DeLay declared.

He has asserted that Democrats and the "liberal media" are orchestrating a campaign to discredit him by raising questions about possible ethics violations, including overseas travel financed by outside groups.

But the questions persisted. Mr. Gingrich, who in a television interview Tuesday said Mr. DeLay seemed to be blaming a left-wing conspiracy, told a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors on Wednesday that the majority leader must ultimately "brief the country in a public way."

"He and his lawyers have to decide when that is," Mr. Gingrich said. "But he at some point has got to convince people that what he has done was reasonable and authentic and legitimate."

Mr. DeLay was also a topic at the White House press briefing, where Scott McClellan, President Bush's spokesman, said the president supported what Mr. DeLay and other Congressional leaders were doing "to move forward on the agenda that the American people want us to enact."

But Mr. McClellan suggested that the relationship between Mr. Bush and Mr. DeLay, a fellow Texan, was more business than social.

"Sure," Mr. McClellan said, when asked if the president considered Mr. DeLay a friend. He went on, "I think there are different levels of friendship with anybody."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/politics/14delay.html

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

No Child Left With a Mind

Study Finds Shortcoming in New Law on Education

By GREG WINTER

“The academic growth that students experience in a given school year has apparently slowed since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the education law that was intended to achieve just the opposite, a new study has found.

In both reading and math, the study determined, test scores have gone up somewhat, as each class of students outdoes its predecessors. But within grades, students have made less academic progress during the school year than they did before No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002, the researchers said.

That finding casts doubt on whether schools can meet the law's mandate that all students be academically proficient by 2014. In fact, to realize the goal of universal proficiency, the study said, students will have to make as much as three times the progress they are currently making.

The study was conducted by the Northwest Evaluation Association, which develops tests for about 1,500 school districts in 43 states. To complete it, the group drew upon its test data for more than 320,000 students in 23 states, a sample that it calls "broad but not nationally representative," in part because the biggest cities, not being Northwest clients, were not included.

One of the more ominous findings, the researchers said, is that the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students could soon widen. Closing the gap is one of the driving principles of the law, and so far states say they have made strides toward shrinking it.

But minority students with the same test scores as their white counterparts at the beginning of the school year ended up falling behind by the end of it, the study found. Both groups made academic progress, but the minority students did not make as much, it concluded, an outcome suggesting that the gaps in achievement will worsen.

But rising test scores tend to mask how much progress individual students make as they travel through school, the researchers found. Since No Child Left Behind, that individual growth has slowed, possibly because teachers feel compelled to spend the bulk of their time making sure students who are near proficiency make it over the hurdle

…The findings diverge from those of other recent studies, including a survey last month by the Center on Education Policy, a research group. It found that a significant majority of state education officials reported widespread academic progress and a narrowing of the achievement gap.

"This new study should give everybody pause before they run off and say, 'We're marching to victory,' " said Jack Jennings, the center's president. "Maybe we're not."

Kerri Briggs, a senior policy analyst at the Education Department, said the Northwest study had both encouraging and worrisome aspects, but added that she would have to examine it more closely before passing judgment.

Some critics speculated that because the study lacked data from big cities, which have large populations of minority students and have posted significant gains on test scores in recent years, it might have overstated or mischaracterized what was happening with the achievement gap.

"It's hard to know how much you can extrapolate from this study," said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Education Trust, which released its own report in January showing mixed results on student performance and achievement gaps. "I don't think you want to make generalizations about what's going on nationwide."

Still, the Northwest study tracked student performance at a level that others did not, a factor that may help explain why some of its findings appear unorthodox. Rather than relying on test scores at just one point in the year, the Northwest study looked at how students fared in the fall and then again in the spring, in an effort to see how much they had learned during the year.

With this approach, Northwest found that test scores on its exams did, in fact, go up from one year to the next under No Child Left Behind, typically by less than a point. The reason successive classes appear to do a little better than those before them may stem from the fact that younger students have grown up during a time of more regular testing than their immediate predecessors, the researchers said, and are therefore higher achievers.

But rising test scores tend to mask how much progress individual students make as they travel through school, the researchers found. Since No Child Left Behind, that individual growth has slowed, possibly because teachers feel compelled to spend the bulk of their time making sure students who are near proficiency make it over the hurdle.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/national/13child.html

A “Kiss-Up, Kick-Down Sort of Guy”

By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
…John R. Bolton had so bullied an intelligence analyst over Cuba's suspected weapons programs that it shook the intelligence bureau and prompted the secretary of state to intervene.

“In caustic and unusually personal testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Carl W. Ford Jr., who was assistant secretary for intelligence and research, said Mr. Bolton was a ‘kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy’ who ‘abuses his authority with little people,’ and an ill-suited nominee to become ambassador to the United Nations.

Mr. Bolton, he said, had been dissatisfied with what he considered the analyst's overly cautious assessment of Cuba's weapons program.

The testimony offered an extraordinary public glimpse into the long-running and raw intelligence wars in the Bush administration, pitting hawks like Mr. Bolton, a protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney, against more circumspect intelligence operatives at the State Department who, among other differences, cast doubt on some prewar claims about Iraq.

Mr. Ford described himself as a conservative Republican and enthusiastic supporter of President Bush, Mr. Cheney and the policies of Mr. Bolton, who has been under secretary of state for arms control and international security since 2001 and an outspoken conservative critic of the United Nations. All the Republican senators at the hearing took pains to praise Mr. Ford for his service and his candor.

Democrats portrayed Mr. Ford's testimony about the clash between Mr. Bolton and the analyst, Christian P. Westermann, as having grave and far-reaching implications for American credibility, especially telling in light of the failure to find illicit weapons in Iraq that the intelligence agencies had said would be there. Republicans, though, characterized it as an isolated incident that would not derail the nomination.

Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, had to go to the intelligence bureau after Mr. Bolton's criticism of Mr. Westermann, and assure employees that they should continue to "speak truth to power," Mr. Ford recounted.

The reputation of the State Department's intelligence bureau has since emerged relatively unscathed by the highly publicized reviews of intelligence failures in the last few years, its analysts known for resisting what has come to be called group think.

Mr. Ford's gruff, direct and sometimes off-color manner took some senators aback, as when he described Mr. Bolton's dressing-down of Mr. Westermann by saying that ‘he reamed him a new one.’ ”

Mr. Ford's gruff, direct and sometimes off-color manner took some senators aback, as when he described Mr. Bolton's dressing-down of Mr. Westermann by saying that "he reamed him a new one."

It was hardly the kind of language usually heard from diplomats appearing before the Foreign Relations Committee, and it raised eyebrows, but also chuckles, among the senators, their aides and the rows of spectators.

"There are a lot of screamers that work in government," Mr. Ford said. "But you don't pull somebody so low down the bureaucracy that they are completely defenseless. It's an 800-pound gorilla devouring a banana."

Despite the drama, however, Mr. Bolton remained likely to be confirmed for the United Nations post, a nomination that startled both Congress and Embassy Row when the president announced it last month. Senator Lincoln Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican who Democrats were hoping would oppose the nomination, said he remained inclined to support the nominee, viewing the episode about which Mr. Ford testified as an isolated incident.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/international/13bolton.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Put a 100,000 Social Securty Numbers On a Laptop,
Lose It,
Get $19,000,000 and Lead the Cybersecurity Project!

Ironically, news of the Berkeley cybersecurity research project comes just weeks after the school warned more than 98,000 people that their personal information may have been exposed following the theft of a laptop computer from its graduate school admissions office.
“The University of California, Berkeley, will lead a $19 million government-funded project to research how to best protect the nation's computing infrastructure.

The announcement, made by the National Science Foundation late Monday, makes U.C. Berkeley one of two U.S. schools receiving funds this year to establish a Science and Technology Center.

The NSF research efforts, which are aimed at promoting interdisciplinary studies in science, will also expand to the University of Kansas this year. The Kansas Science and Technology Center will tackle issues related to polar ice sheets.

According to the NSF, the cybersecurity project at Berkeley will investigate issues of "computer trustworthiness in an era of increasing attacks at all levels on computer systems and information-based technologies." The project will receive the $19 million in funding over five years, as will the Kansas study.

Ironically, news of the Berkeley cybersecurity research project comes just weeks after the school warned more than 98,000 people that their personal information may have been exposed following the theft of a laptop computer from its graduate school admissions office.

A number of other schools will join the Berkeley effort, forming a group that the research project has dubbed the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST). Among the institutions joining the effort are Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Mills College, San Jose State University, Smith College, Stanford University and Vanderbilt University. On a U.C. Berkeley Web site, TRUST said it will perform research in the areas of security science, systems science and social science.

A collection of corporations will also help promote the research, including BellSouth, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Sun Microsystems and Symantec.…

http://tech.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-7349_3-5666782.html

Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest

By JIM DWYER
“Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.

"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention. ”

For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.

Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.

Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.

Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases should be "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal."

So far, 162 defendants have either pleaded guilty or were convicted after trial, and videotapes that bolstered the prosecution's case played a role in at least some of those cases, although prosecutors could not provide details.

Besides offering little support or actually undercutting the prosecution of most of the people arrested, the videotapes also highlight another substantial piece of the historical record: the Police Department's tactics in controlling the demonstrations, parades and rallies of hundreds of thousands of people

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12video.html?pagewanted=all&position

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Are US Forces Holding a Shot and Wounded CBS Cameraman?

Reporters Without Borders
Iraq 9 April 2005

“Reporters Without Borders said today it was very worried that the US forces have detained a CBS cameraman of Iraqi nationality ever since shooting and wounding him during an operation against an insurgent on 5 April.

"We call on the US army to release him very quickly if no evidence is produced to support his alleged collaboration with the insurgency," the press freedom organization said.

The organization said there have already been cases of journalists being detained for no reason by the coalition forces in Iraq. In May 2004, for example, three journalists with the French TV station Canal + were detained while working in Baghdad. They were held for nearly 30 hours although they had their press cards and their TV station immediately confirmed their identity.

A US army statement said the CBS cameraman was being held because be might pose "an imperative threat to the coalition forces." CBS said the US military suspect him of links to the rebels because video footage found in his camera shows he was on the scene of several bombings shortly after they took place. This makes the US military think he may have been warned in advance in the insurgents.

CBS yesterday issued a statement of support for their cameraman, who began working for them three months ago after being recommended by one of their fixers. CBS has asked that he not be named for his own protection.

He was wounded in the hip during an exchange of shots between an Iraqi insurgent and members of the 1st brigade of the US 25th infantry division near the northern town of Mosul. In a statement issued by the Pentagon, the US army said soldiers fired at a rebel who was "waving an AK-47 (assault rifle) and inciting a crowd of civilians."

During the incident, "an individual that appeared to have a weapon who was standing near the insurgent was shot and injured. This individual turned out to be a reporter who was pointing a video camera. Regretfully, the reporter was injured during the complex and volatile situation," the statement said, adding that the incident was being investigated.

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=13162

Friday, April 08, 2005

It's a Flat World, After All

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.''
“It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.

I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world quite by accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore, working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore.

The longer I was there, the more upset I became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia.

Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.''

At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development.

When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''

Summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said , ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' Countries like India were now able to compete for global knowledge work as never before -- and America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''

''What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''

In Bangalore one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. He was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made our world flat!

Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest.

Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor.

Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time.

While the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing.

Individuals must ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day? How can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally? Globalization 3.0 differs from the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and in how it empowers individuals. It differs in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and American companies and countries.

Going forward, this will be less and less true. Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but by a much more diverse -- non-Western, nonwhite -- group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.

''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. … at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''

Andreessen touches on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting the knowledge pools in the world together. We've tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, and the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses. By connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South.

30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.

When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.… ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?incamp=article_popular_3&pagewanted=all&position=
con·cept: April 2005