The New York Times > Washington > Commission to Allow Insurance Cuts for Retired Employees:
"The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted Thursday to allow employers to reduce or eliminate health benefits for retirees when they become eligible for Medicare at age 65.

The agency approved a final rule saying that such cuts do not violate the civil rights law banning age discrimination. The vote was 3 to 1, with Republicans lining up in favor of the rule and a Democrat opposing it."

Employers and some labor unions supported the change, saying it would help preserve coverage for early retirees. But AARP, which represents millions of Americans age 50 and older, strenuously objected.

The new rule creates a potentially explosive political issue, because it will create anxiety for many of the 12 million Medicare beneficiaries who also receive health benefits from their former employers.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/23/politics/23RETI.html

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Why They Hate Us, Really:
"For the last five weeks I have been traveling through the Middle East, meeting diplomats, officials, policy experts, military leaders, students and ordinary citizens. I learned something very important: the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the Middle East today is not the war in Iraq; more surprisingly, it is not even American support for Israel, per se. Rather, it is a widespread belief that the United States simply does not care about the rights or needs of the Palestinian people.

'The Palestinian issue is really what discredits the United States throughout the region,' a senior Western diplomat with years of experience in the Middle East told me. Or, as one student after another put it after the university lectures I conducted across the region: 'Why do Americans have to be so biased?' "

In Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and other countries, the large majority of people I spoke with are ready to tolerate the Jewish state — most even understand that the final boundaries of Israel will include some of the heavily settled areas beyond the pre-1967 borders. They also understand that few if any Palestinians will return to the homes they lost after the war that erupted when Israel declared its independence in 1948. And they are prepared to accept, though not to relish, America's close relations with Israel. Beyond that, they want increased American support for their domestic political reforms and for initiatives to enhance regional cooperation for economic growth and fighting terrorism.

But one thing sticks in their craw: Why doesn't America care more about the Palestinians' future?

They have a point. America's Middle East policy is unnecessarily zero-sum. We can be more pro-Palestinian without being less pro-Israeli. Indeed, to the degree that American policies help create support for compromise among Palestinians, pro-Palestinian initiatives can help Israel too.

Take compensation. United Nations resolutions call for financial compensation for Palestinians who cannot return to their family homes in Israel. Israel's position that it cannot accept millions of refugees and their descendants is reasonable enough, and the Bush administration's support of it is nothing new. But we should be equally clear about compensation.

Many questions need answering: where can Palestinians go to have their claims for lost property adjudicated and certified? What tribunal will hear these claims? What principles will guide its deliberations? Where will the money come from to pay the claims when peace is finally made?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/21/opinion/21MEAD.html

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Nicest Terrorist I Ever Met:
"…Entering Dr. Rantisi's home that day, I wondered how I would feel shaking the hand of someone who blew up Jewish children. I wondered, too, how he would feel about giving yet another interview to yet another American Jew, whose objectivity he surely questioned. But even killers can be charming, and reporters are disconcertingly adaptable. There was a gentle affability to Dr. Rantisi. The interpreter quickly became superfluous. He spoke English softly, musically, imperfectly but painstakingly. Though our talk was of targeted killings, he sometimes even laughed."

He described the degradation of occupation: the loss of lives and dignity, the dead Palestinian children, the uprooted trees, the bulldozed land, the desecrated holy places. The "martyrdom bombings" were retaliatory, he insisted, responses to Israeli murders and massacres. He spoke the language of the freedom fighter. "We are doing the same now that the French did to the Germans, and the Algerians to resist the French, and Vietnam to resist the Americans," he said. Taken in a vacuum, his reasoning was seductive. One could see how he charmed left-wing European journalists, including a crew of Englishmen there with us.

But there was something sinister and cynical in his choice of words — or, more accurately, one word: occupation. To most of the world, he knew, occupation was what happened to the Palestinians in 1967, when Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza. The very word suggests temporariness, compromise. But to him and the organization he'd helped found, the occupation dated back not to 1967 and not even to 1948, when the state of Israel was created, but decades before that, to when the Zionists began buying up dunums and hectares of Mandatory Palestine. All of Israel was occupied territory. Dr. Rantisi talked of truces, but they were meaningless. His peace plan was simple: five million Jews should leave. Then there would be peace. Until then, there would be jihad.

To him, all Israeli leaders were alike. Ehud Barak had done nothing for peace, he said. Shimon Peres was every bit the killer Ariel Sharon was, only smoother. And the most dovish Israeli politician of all, Yossi Beilin, was merely Mr. Peres's disciple. (In a sense, Dr. Rantisi was posthumously vindicated, for Mr. Peres was among those who applauded his killing.) To Dr. Rantisi, what differentiated Prime Minister Sharon wasn't his convictions, which were run-of-the-mill Zionist, but his stupidity. With every targeted killing, he said, Hamas only grew stronger; increasingly, its leaders were underground, beyond Israeli eyes. Now, with two of the group's pillars eliminated, Dr. Rantisi's thesis will be put to the test.

"The history will write Sharon is the first one who started destroying Israel," he told me. "And if you will live — I hope so — for 120 years, you will see that." As he spoke to me, he laughed almost affectionately, as if he really meant it. Imagine that: the future head of Hamas wishing me a long life. All I had to do was to stay off the wrong Israeli bus.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/21/opinion/21MARG.html

ZDNet AnchorDesk: What's wrong with Internet phones:
"The best thing about the traditional phone system is what people take for granted: Any phone on the planet can connect to any other. Some Internet telephone systems, such as Vonage, can also connect to any other phone. But except in extremely rare cases, two people on different VoIP systems can't connect to each other directly over the Internet--they have to use the public phone system as a go-between.… "

http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/AnchorDesk/4520-7297_16-5130570.html?tag=adss

TechsUnite.org - IT news and Worker resources:
"Total US Jobs Offshored

From 04/01/2001 To 04/20/2004

Jobs Offshored160,785

Jobs Lost99,556"

A technology labor group on Thursday launched a Web-based tool designed to track the number of jobs U.S. companies send overseas. Since April 1, 2001, U.S. companies have "offshored" at least 160,785 jobs, according to the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. The group, an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union, is running its "Offshoring Tracker" with the CWA. The organizations said the project aims to help plug a gap in information about the controversial offshore trend. "We know we're seriously undercounting--but it's a count," Tony Daley, CWA research economist, said in a statement. "Nobody else is counting. And there is a conspiracy on the other side to not count at all." From ZDNet

http://zdnet.com.com/2110-1104_2-5192150.html?tag=adnews

http://www.techsunite.org/offshore/index.cfm

Chicago Tribune | Rumsfeld's candor can be too revealing:
"Every so often a high-profile Washington figure gets himself or herself in trouble by inadvertently revealing what he or she really thinks. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knows. In a town where candor can be a crime, he's a repeat offender.

His latest score came during a Pentagon news conference Thursday when he revealed a new Rummy-ism: 'People are fungible.'"

…"fungible," which is pronounced with a soft "G" as in "sponge," refers to something that can be satisfactorily replaced, either in part or in whole, with some other part or quantity of similar value. "Oil is fungible," experts say, in arguing why no country or cartel can quite corner the market on it. If the price is too high in one place, you can buy it someplace else and the price in the first place will come down in order to compete.

Now, Rumsfeld wants you to know, our troops are fungible, too. His bold pronouncement came during an exchange with a reporter in a news conference during which Rumsfeld announced that about 20,000 American troops are about to have their tours in Iraq extended for at least three months.

A reporter wanted some clarification about the rosy scenarios of Iraqi success that Rumsfeld painted in his opening statement: "You said that the challenge in Fallujah is being contained and that the situation in the South is largely stabilized," the reporter said. "And I wonder, if that is the case, why . . . is it necessary to keep extra troops in Iraq for 90 days?"

"Well, it is--the reason it is contained is because we have the extra troops there. That is self-evident," Rumsfeld said, showing a little irritation. "Come on, people are fungible. You can have them here or there. We have announced the judgment. It is clear. You understand it. Everyone in the room understands that we needed additional--the commander decided he'd like to retain in-country an additional plus or minus 20,000 people--and that is what we are doing."

People are fungible? Like so many replaceable parts? Perhaps in Rumsfeld's former corporate-CEO mindset they were. But in the world where most of us live, this ranks as his least fortunate comment since, oh, early last year.

That was when he said during another news conference that the 11 million Americans (including me) who were drafted during the Vietnam years "added no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services over any sustained period of time, because (of) the churning that took place. It took (an) enormous amount of effort in terms of training--and then they were gone."

Yup, we were `gone,' all right. Some of us left in better shape than others did. Of the more than 58,000 Americans who died in action in Vietnam, more than 20,000 were draftees. Rumsfeld, who served three years on active duty as a Navy aviator in the 1950s, later apologized for the slight. Poor Rummy. People keep tripping him up by actually paying attention to what he says.…

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0404180403apr18,1,7011132.column

The New York Times > Washington > Nafta Tribunals Stir U.S. Worries:
"After the highest court in Massachusetts ruled against a Canadian real estate company and after the United State Supreme Court declined to hear its appeal, the company's day in court was over.

Or so thought Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Massachusetts court, until she learned of yet another layer of judicial review, by an international tribunal.…"

Tribunals like the one that ruled on the Massachusetts case were created by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and they have heard two challenges to American court judgments. In the other, the tribunal declared a Mississippi court's judgment at odds with international law, leaving the United States government potentially liable for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Any Canadian or Mexican business that contends it has been treated unjustly by the American judicial system can file a similar claim. American businesses with similar complaints about Canadian or Mexican court judgments can do the same. Under the Nafta agreement the government whose court system is challenged is responsible for awards by the tribunals.

"This is the biggest threat to United States judicial independence that no one has heard of and even fewer people understand," said John D. Echeverria, a law professor at Georgetown University.

In the Massachusetts case, brought by Mondev International, the Nafta tribunal decided in 2002 that the Massachusetts courts had not violated international law.

But in a separate pending case, brought by a Canadian company challenging the largest jury verdict in Mississippi history, a different Nafta tribunal offered a harsh assessment of Mississippi justice.

"The whole trial and its resultant verdict," the three-judge tribunal ruled last summer, "were clearly improper and discreditable and cannot be squared with minimum standards of international law and equitable treatment."

The Mississippi case arose from an exchange of companies between a Canadian concern, the Loewen Group, and companies owned by a Mississippi family, the O'Keefes. The O'Keefe family, contending that the Loewen Group did not live up to its obligations, sued for breach of contract and fraud. Although the tribunal found that the businesses were worth no more than $8 million, a jury in Jackson, Miss., awarded the family $500 million in 1995.

Loewen settled the case the next year, for $175 million. But, arguing that the trial had been unfair and that it had been coerced into settling by a requirement that the company post an appeal bond of $625 million, Loewen and one of its owners filed their claim in the Nafta tribunal in 1998. They asked for $725 million from the United States.

The availability of this additional layer of review, above even the United States Supreme Court, is a significant development, legal scholars said.

"It's basically been under the radar screen," Peter Spiro, a law professor at Hofstra University, said. "But it points to a fundamental reorientation of our constitutional system. You have an international tribunal essentially reviewing American court judgments."

The part of Nafta that created the tribunals, known as Chapter 11, received no consideration when it was passed in 1993.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/politics/18COUR.html?pagewanted=all&position=

The New York Times > Washington > Pre-9/11 Files Show Warnings Were More Dire and Persistent:
"Early this year, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks played four minutes of a call from Betty Ong, a crew member on American Airlines Flight 11. The power of her call could not have been plainer: in a calm voice, Ms. Ong told her supervisors about the hijacking, the weapons the attackers had used, the locations of their seats.

At first, however, Ms. Ong's reports were greeted skeptically by some officials on the ground. "They did not believe her," said Bob Kerrey, a commission member. "They said, `Are you sure?' They asked her to confirm that it wasn't air-rage. Our people on the ground were not prepared for a hijacking."

For most Americans, the disbelief was the same. The attacks of Sept. 11 seemed to come in a stunning burst from nowhere. But now, after three weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by Al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government."

The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on Al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration.

While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings — including one that Al Qaeda seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country — had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks.

The new information produced by the commission so far has led 6 of its 10 members to say or suggest that the attacks could have been prevented, though there is no consensus on when, how or by whom. The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican, has described failures at every level of government, any of which, if avoided, could have altered the outcome. Mr. Kerrey, a Democrat, said, "My conclusion is that it could have been prevented. That was not my conclusion when I went on the commission."

While the commission was created to diagnose mistakes and to recommend reforms, its examination has powerful political resonance. The panel has reviewed the records of two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Mr. Bush, who is in the midst of a campaign for re-election, said last Sunday that none of the warnings gave any hint of the time, place or date of an assault. "Had I known there was going to be an attack on America I would have moved mountains to stop the attack," he said.

In an intense stretch this month, the commission pried open some of the most closely guarded compartments of government, revealing the flow and details of previously classified information given to two presidents and their senior advisers, and the performance of intelligence and law enforcement officials.

The inquiry has gone beyond the report of a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committee in 2002, which chronicled missteps at the mid-level of bureaucracies. Urged on by a number of families of people killed in the attacks, the Kean commission has used a mix of moral and political leverage to extract presidential communications and testimony. Among the new themes that have fundamentally reshaped the story of the Sept. 11 attacks are:

¶Al Qaeda and its leader, Mr. bin Laden, did not blindside the United States, but were a threat recognized and discussed regularly at the highest levels of government for nearly five years before the attacks, in thousands of reports, often accompanied by urgent warnings from lower-level experts.

¶Presidents Clinton and Bush received regular information about the threat of Al Qaeda and the intention of the bin Laden network to strike inside the United States. Each president made terrorism a stated priority, failed to find a diplomatic solution and viewed military force as a last resort. At the same time, neither grappled with the structural flaws and paralyzing dysfunction that undermined the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., the two agencies on which the nation depended for protection from terrorists. By the end of his second term, Mr. Clinton and the director of the F.B.I., Louis J. Freeh, were barely speaking.

¶Even when the two agencies cooperated, the results were unimpressive. Mr. Kean said that he viewed the reports on the two agencies as indictments. In late August 2001, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, learned that the F.B.I. had arrested Zacarias Moussaoui after he had enrolled in a flight school. Mr. Tenet was given a memorandum titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But he testified that he took no action and did not tell President Bush about the case.

During the Clinton years, particularly at the National Security Council, the commission has found, there was uncertainty about whether the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Mr. bin Laden justified military action. Much of the debate was provoked by Richard A. Clarke, who led antiterrorism efforts under both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush and argued for aggressive action.

"Former officials, including an N.S.C. staffer working for Mr. Clarke, told us the threat was seen as one that could cause hundreds of casualties, not thousands," according to one interim commission report. "Such differences affect calculations about whether or how to go to war. Even officials who acknowledge a vital threat intellectually may not be ready to act upon such beliefs at great cost or at high risk."

In the first eight months of the Bush administration, the commission found, the president and his advisers received far more information, much of it dire in tone and detailed in content, than had been generally understood.

The most striking came in the Aug. 6 memorandum presented in an intelligence briefing the White House says Mr. Bush requested. Titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the memorandum was declassified this month under pressure from the commission. After referring to a British tip in 1998 that Islamic fundamentalists wanted to hijack a plane, it went on to warn: "Nevertheless, F.B.I. information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks." Mr. Bush has said the briefing did not provide specific details of when and where an attack might take place.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/politics/18SEPT.html?pagewanted=all&position=

The New York Times > Arts > An Israeli Who's Got Everybody Outraged:
"Benny Morris is used to making enemies. When his first groundbreaking book appeared in 1988, marshaling evidence that Israel's founders had deliberately — and often violently — forced Arabs to flee during the war for independence, Mr. Morris was reviled and called an anti-Zionist. For years he was unable to find work as a professor in Israel; when he finally landed a job at Ben-Gurion University, named for Israel's first prime minister, Ben-Gurion's son tried to have the radical young historian fired. "

Sixteen years later, Mr. Morris is again being denounced, only this time for defending Israel's attempts to rid the country of its Arabs in 1948, arguing that "ethnic cleansing" was justified because Israel's existence was threatened.

His comments, in a new book published earlier this year as well as in Israeli newspapers and interviews, have not only provoked outrage but have also put Mr. Morris at the center of a bitter controversy over Israeli history and the future of the peace process.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/arts/17MORR.html?pagewanted=all&position=

The New York Times > Washington > Expert Kept From Speaking at Antidepressant Hearing:
"Top Food and Drug Administration officials admitted yesterday that they barred the agency's top expert from testifying at a public hearing about his conclusion that antidepressants cause children to become suicidal because they viewed his findings as alarmist and premature"…

Recent studies have shown that children given antidepressants are more likely to become suicidal than those given placebos. But the studies have lead to different interpretations by psychiatrists. The refusal by drug companies to publish the studies has worsened the confusion. Internal agency documents obtained by The New York Times show that federal health officials are divided, too.

Dr. Andrew D. Mosholder, an agency epidemiologist, was the man charged with analyzing 22 studies involving 4,250 children and seven drugs. In a carefully argued, 33-page memorandum, he concluded that children given antidepressants were almost twice as likely as those given placebos to become suicidal.

He urged the agency to discourage doctors from prescribing to children all antidepressants except Prozac. Prozac is the only antidepressant proven effective in treating depressed children, and its studies showed no link with suicide, Dr. Mosholder wrote. Dr. Mosholder's conclusions mirrored those made by British health authorities.

But Dr. Mosholder's supervisors, Drs. Mark Avigan and Anne Trontell, wrote memorandums disagreeing, according to the documents.

"In particular, we disagree that the data are sufficiently robust to advocate preferential use" of Prozac in children, Dr. Trontell wrote.

Health officials convened a special advisory committee on Feb. 2 to offer guidance on how the agency should respond to the studies. As the agency's principal reviewer, Dr. Mosholder was scheduled to speak. He was removed from the agenda, Dr. Temple said.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, a Republican from Iowa and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said he was investigating whether the agency inappropriately suppressed crucial findings. Representative Joe L. Barton, a Republican from Texas who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he was also investigating.

"It would have been very wrong for the F.D.A. to withhold any information it had about unintended consequences that might result from the use of antidepressants, especially for children and adolescents," Mr. Grassley said.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/16/politics/16DEPR.html

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Vietnam Analogy:
"Iraq isn't Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse.

It's true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size conflict.

And the stress Iraq places on our military is, if anything, worse. In Vietnam, American forces consisted mainly of short-term draftees, who returned to civilian life after their tours of duty. Our Iraq force consists of long-term volunteers, including reservists who never expected to be called up for extended missions overseas. The training of these volunteers, their morale and their willingness to re-enlist will suffer severely if they are called upon to spend years fighting a guerrilla war."

Some hawks say this proves that we need a bigger Army. But President Bush hasn't called for larger forces. In fact, he seems unwilling to pay for the forces we have.

A fiscal comparison of George Bush's and Lyndon Johnson's policies makes the Vietnam era seem like a golden age of personal responsibility. At first, Johnson was reluctant to face up to the cost of the war. But in 1968 he bit the bullet, raising taxes and cutting spending; he turned a large deficit into a surplus the next year. A comparable program today — the budget went from a deficit of 3.2 percent of G.D.P. to a 0.3 percent surplus in just one year — would eliminate most of our budget deficit.

By contrast, Mr. Bush, for all his talk about staying the course, hasn't been willing to strike anything off his domestic wish list. On the contrary, he used the initial glow of apparent success in Iraq to ram through yet another tax cut, waiting until later to tell us about the extra $87 billion he needed. And he's still at it: in his press conference on Tuesday he said nothing about the $50 billion-to-$70 billion extra that everyone knows will be needed to pay for continuing operations.

This fiscal chicanery is part of a larger pattern. Vietnam shook the nation's confidence not just because we lost, but because our leaders didn't tell us the truth. Last September Gen. Anthony Zinni spoke of "Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies," and asked his audience of military officers, "Is it happening again?" Sure enough, the parallels are proliferating. Gulf of Tonkin attack, meet nonexistent W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links. "Hearts and minds," meet "welcome us as liberators." "Light at the end of the tunnel," meet "turned the corner." Vietnamization, meet the new Iraqi Army.

Some say that Iraq isn't Vietnam because we've come to bring democracy, not to support a corrupt regime. But idealistic talk is cheap. In Vietnam, U.S. officials never said, "We're supporting a corrupt regime." They said they were defending democracy. The rest of the world, and the Iraqis themselves, will believe in America's idealistic intentions if and when they see a legitimate, noncorrupt Iraqi government — as opposed to, say, a rigged election that puts Ahmad Chalabi in charge.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/16/opinion/16KRUG.html

Chicago Tribune | AP: Book Alleges Secret Iraq War Plan:
"President Bush secretly ordered a war plan drawn up against Iraq less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan and was so worried the decision would cause a furor he did not tell everyone on his national security team, says a new book on his Iraq policy.

Bush feared that if news got out about the Iraq plan as U.S. forces were fighting another conflict, people would think he was too eager for war, journalist Bob Woodward writes in 'Plan of Attack,' a behind-the-scenes account of the 16 months leading to the Iraq invasion."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-iraq-woodward-book,1,7458922.story

Fallujah

Six hundred dead,
mostly women and children,
but we mourn our young,
well-armed combatants,
and declare special ops
trained "contractors"
security guards.

People,
have been dying
in Fallujah,
under questionable
circumstance.
Yet,
no questions come.
The rage has built
and kept on building
as our well-armed
combatants
left trails of bodies
and excuses.

They've killed
demonstrators.
They said
they were
shot at, but,
they must
have been using
blanks.

They've killed
policemen.
They claim
they were
shot at, but,
all the brass
came from
our weapons,
from the
policemen's
guns
none.

So the rage
keeps
building,
creating unity
between sunni
and shia.
We
keep on killing.
Perhaps, we'll
continue, until
we enrage
the Kurds

The New York Times > International > Europe > Bin Laden Tape Offering Europe a Truce Is Called Authentic:
"'The truce will begin when the last soldier leaves our countries,' the man on the tape, speaking in Arabic, added."

he C.I.A. said today that an audiotape of a man identifying himself as Osama bin Laden, who offered to stop terrorist actions in European countries that ended military action in Muslim nations, was probably authentic.

"After conducting a technical analysis, the C.I.A. assesses that the voice is likely that of Osama bin Laden," an agency official said.

The official described it as "an attempt by bin Laden to drive a message between Europe and the United States. This would fall into the category of other bin Laden tapes as a propaganda ploy to bolster morale of Al Qaeda's rank and file. "

The official, who did not want to be named, said the tape was probably recorded during the past several weeks because it referred to the killing by Israel last month of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas.…

Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain quickly rejected the offer, with a British Foreign Ministry spokeswoman telling Reuters: "We cannot negotiate with Al Qadea. Their attacks are against the very idea of co-existence."

The speaker on the tape vows revenge against the United States for the killing.

The tape, broadcast today by two Arab satellite televison stations, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, said "the door to a truce is open for three months," but that it could be extended.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/15/international/europe/15CND-TAPE.html?8bl

The New York Times > International > U.S. Funding for Foes Enrages Venezuela's Chavez:
"Documents showing U.S. funding for Venezuelan opposition groups have prompted an increase in personal attacks by President Hugo Chavez against President Bush, according to a U.S. lawyer who helped unearth the evidence.

Eva Golinger, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based attorney who supports Chavez, said documents obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act showed that around $4 million in U.S. Congress-allocated funds had been channeled to the groups before and after a 2002 coup that briefly toppled Chavez.

``These groups are being financed by a foreign government, a U.S. government that has taken an open stance against the Chavez administration, that supported the coup ... it's major meddling,'' Golinger told Reuters in an interview Wednesday.…"

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-venezuela-usa-documents.html

The New York Times > Washington > Transcript: Testimony of Condoleezza Rice Before 9/11 Commission:
"A transcript of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the September 11 Commission on Thursday, April 8, as recorded by The New York Times: "

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/politics/08RICE-TEXT.html?pagewanted=all&position=

PCWorld.com - Tax Sites

http://www.pcworld.com/resource/browse/0,cat,1316,sortIdx,1,00.asp

Authorama - Public Domain Books:
"Authorama.com, featuring completely free books from a variety of different authors, collected here for you to read online or offline. The books may have been published before, but not in this form, which I hope you find enjoyable to read and print."

http://www.authorama.com/

Claim vs. Fact: Rice's Q&A Testimony Before the 9/11 Commission - Center for American Progress:
"Planes as Weapons

CLAIM: 'I do not remember any reports to us, a kind of strategic warning, that planes might be used as weapons.' [responding to Kean]

FACT: Condoleezza Rice was the top National Security official with President Bush at the July 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. There, 'U.S. officials were warned that Islamic terrorists might attempt to crash an airliner' into the summit, prompting officials to 'close the airspace over Genoa and station antiaircraft guns at the city's airport.' [Sources: Los Angeles Times, 9/27/01; White House release, 7/22/01]…"

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=44918

Claim vs. Fact: Condoleezza Rice's Opening Statement - Center for American Progress:
"CLAIM: 'We decided immediately to continue pursuing the Clinton Administration's covert action authorities and other efforts to fight the network.'

FACT: Newsweek reported that 'In the months before 9/11, the U.S. Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called 'Catcher's Mitt' to monitor al-Qaida suspects in the United States.' Additionally, AP reported 'though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the Bush administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months,' thus terminating the reconnaissance missions started during the Clinton Administration. [Sources: Newsweek, 3/21/04; AP, 6/25/03]…"

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=44887

Downloaded History:
"While the country may be divided over the testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, it is less divided when it comes to which testimony to listen to on the iPod.

Audible.com, one of the Internet's best-known providers of spoken-word content, has made the hearings available for listeners to download - for free - and play on computers and portable audio players."

http://audible.com/adbl/store/welcome.jsp

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/business/05audible.html

An Army of Debt | Anne-Marie Cusac | April 2004 Issue:
"Poor pay and economic strife are conditions the Reserves and National Guard share with others in the regular military. 'Lower-ranking enlisted people qualify for food stamps. It's not how we're used to thinking about government employees, but there it is,' says Kathleen Gilberd, co-chair of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild. 'Active duty pay has traditionally not been enough to help people get by.' Extreme financial crises set in when service people are deployed because they then have no opportunity to get a second job to supplement their income.

But Reservists and National Guard members are especially hard hit. 'The ones who do experience income loss, it's usually a significant income loss,' says Shirley Calhoun, spokeswoman for the National Military Family Association. Many have good-paying jobs in the civilian world. But in the military ranks, the same people may not yet have made officer, 'so they are at a lower pay level,' says Calhoun."

http://www.progressive.org/april04/cusac0404.html

Bush's Odd Warfare State | Barbara Ehrenreich | April 2004 Issue:
"Here's one way our President proposes to 'support our troops': According to his 2005 budget, the extra pay our soldiers receive for serving in combat zones--about $150 a month--will no longer count against their food stamp eligibility. This budget provision, if approved, should bring true peace of mind to our men and women on the front lines. From now on, they can dodge bullets in Iraq with the happy assurance that their loved ones will not starve as a result of their bravery."

http://www.progressive.org/april04/ehren0404.html

The Damage Done:
"Alan Jermaine Lewis
AGE 23; MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN
Machine gunner in the Army's 3rd Infantry Division. Wounded July 16, 2003, in Baghdad, when the Humvee he was driving hit a land mine.


I remember every detail about my legs. Every detail from the scars to the ingrown toenails to the birthmarks to the burn marks. I made it a habit, even before I joined the military, to cherish every part of my body, because I would always look at it like, 'What if this finger was gone, would I be able to function without it?' I don't know why. Maybe it was God's way of preparing me for what was going to happen."

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/03/03_100-7.html

HOAXBUSTERS Home Page:
"Interspersed among the junk mail and spam that fills our Internet e-mail boxes are dire warnings about devastating new viruses, Trojans that eat the heart out of your system, and malicious software that can steal the computer right off your desk. Added to that are messages about free money, children in trouble, and other items designed to grab you and get you to forward the message to everyone you know. Most all of these messages are hoaxes or chain letters. While hoaxes do not automatically infect systems like a virus or Trojan, they are still time consuming and costly to remove from all the systems where they exist. At CIAC, we find that we spend much more time de-bunking hoaxes than handling real virus and Trojan incidents. These pages describe some of the warnings, offers, and pleas for help that are filling our mailboxes, clogging our mailservers, and that generally do not have any basis in fact.…"

http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/

Urban Legends Reference Pages

http://www.snopes.com/

A Heretical View of File Sharing:
"But what if the industry is wrong, and file sharing is not hurting record sales?

It might seem counterintuitive, but that is the conclusion reached by two economists who released a draft last week of the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying.

'Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates,' write its authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.… "

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/technology/05music.html

I.R.S. Request for More Terrorism Investigators Is Denied:
"The Bush administration has scuttled a plan to increase by 50 percent the number of criminal financial investigators working to disrupt the finances of Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist organizations to save $12 million, a Congressional hearing was told on Tuesday."

The Internal Revenue Service had asked for 80 more criminal investigators beginning in October to join the 160 it has already assigned to penetrate the shadowy networks that terrorist groups use to finance plots like the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent train bombings in Madrid. But the Bush administration did not include them in the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year.

The disclosure, to a House Ways and Means subcommittee, came near the end of a routine hearing into the I.R.S. budget after most of the audience, including reporters, had left the hearing room.

It comes as the White House is fighting to maintain its image as a vigorous and uncompromising foe of global terrorism in the face of questions about its commitment and competence raised by the administration's former terrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, and its first Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill.

Representative Earl Pomeroy, a North Dakota Democrat whose question to a witness about one line on the last page of a routine report to Congress prompted the disclosure, said he was dumbfounded at the budget decision.

"The zeroing out of resources here made my jaw drop open," Mr. Pomeroy said. "It just leaps out at you."

"There are some very tough questions that have to be answered about why the decision was made to eliminate these positions because going after the financial underpinnings of terrorist activity is crucial to rooting terrorism out and defeating it," Mr. Pomeroy said.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/business/31irs.html

Q&A: Lindsay on Bush vs. Clarke:
"James M. Lindsay, who worked at the National Security Council (NSC) in 1996-97 where he was a colleague of Richard A. Clarke, says the Bush administration overemphasized the role of 'rogue' states in promoting terrorism. The argument Clarke made in testimony last week before the 9/11 commission and in his new book, 'Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror,' is that al Qaeda is not connected to any state. Lindsay shares that view: 'The administration's diagnosis on the war on terrorism is mistaken,' he says. 'And I think, using Clarke's argument, that the way the administration has approached it has actually made our battle against al Qaeda more difficult.'

Lindsay is vice president, Maurice R. Greenberg chair, and director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the co-author of 'America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy,' which received the 2003 Lionel Gelber Prize. He was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on March 29, 2004.

There have been charges back and forth in the 9/11 commission last week, in the new book by Richard A. Clarke, and from the White House. What should the public think about all this? "

There are two separate questions. One is the question of what was new that we learned last week. The answer is, not much. Most of what Dick Clarke attested to before the 9/11 commission was already in the public domain. It had been reported, among other places, in The New York Times and The Washington Post and, interestingly enough, in the Bob Woodward book, "Bush at War." In that book, Bush confirms much of what Dick Clarke said, particularly on the question of the relative priority his administration gave to al Qaeda before September 11. Bush's own statement was that he knew it was an issue, he knew they were a menace, but it wasn't "boiling in his blood."

The second question is, what should Americans take away from the work of the 9/11 commission at this point? I think the broadest lesson is that before September 11, there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm in the American political system for taking aggressive actions against al Qaeda. In the Clinton administration, for which al Qaeda was a priority--there is ample evidence that the administration mobilized at various times when it feared that an attack was about to be mounted--there was an inhibition as to how much it could do. There was only so much that the political environment would tolerate, in terms of what the president could do. And indeed, Sandy Berger [Clinton's national security adviser] was accused of being too aggressive on terrorism issues.…

http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/slot2_032904.html

When Goals Meet Reality: Bush's Reversal on 9/11 Testimony:
"When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took office three years ago, they made no secret of their intention to restore presidential powers and prerogatives that they believed had withered under the onslaught of Washington's cycle of televised, all-consuming investigations.

But time and again, that effort by the Bush White House has fallen victim to political reality. It did so once more on Tuesday, when the president made a four-minute appearance in the White House press room to announce that he was giving in to demands from the 9/11 commission that he had resisted for months."

His decision to reverse course, dropping his claim of executive privilege preventing public, sworn testimony by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was part of a distinct pattern that has emerged inside this highly secretive White House.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/politics/31ASSE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Online Merchants Find Problems With Google:
"Google may be popular, but it gets its share of complaints. Merchants quibble when their sites rank poorly, while some users say the popularity-based ranking system shuts out useful, but little-known sites. "

Because a site scores higher the more other sites link to it—an indication of popularity—independent films are less likely than Hollywood blockbusters to appear in results, said Dragomir Radev, an information studies professor at the University of Michigan.

Newer and foreign sites may also be difficult to find because they are not as well known by the U.S.-centric Internet population.…

as Google's popularity grew, so did attempts to fool it. A cottage industry developed around search engine optimization to share tricks for ranking higher.

One early trick involved buying hundreds of domain names and having them link to one another to mimic popularity. As Google closed one loophole, webmasters found others.

Pranksters have figured out that they, too, could game the system, so that typing "miserable failure" gets you President Bush's biography, even though neither word appears on the page.…

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1556008,00.asp?kc=EWNWS032904DTX1K0000599

Censored Study on Bioterror Doubts U.S. Preparedness:
"Two years after a report on the 2001 anthrax attacks was completed, the Pentagon has released parts of the unclassified document, which concludes that the nation is woefully ill-prepared to detect and respond to a bioterrorist assault.

In a sweeping assessment, the report identifies weaknesses in 'almost every aspect of U.S. biopreparedness and response.' But perhaps equally significant is the two-year battle over the Pentagon's refusal to release the study. That struggle highlights the growing tension between public access to information and the government's refusal to divulge anything it says terrorists could use to attack Americans."

The dispute has pitted the Pentagon against the center that released the study, advocates of openness in government like the Federation of American Scientists, public health officials and even current and former emergency response officials of the Bush administration.

The dispute revolves around a 44-page analysis titled "Lessons from the Anthrax Attacks: Implications for U.S. Bioterrorism Preparedness." It was written by a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research center in Washington that conducts only nonsecret research for the government and other clients. The report was based largely on discussions among some 40 government and private experts on public health, national security and law enforcement who attended a meeting the center sponsored in December 2001.

The report was written by David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the center. It documents many systemic weaknesses in the nation's response to the October 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people. The study also makes recommendations about how to prevent, detect and respond to such attacks. Many of those recommendations have been or are being adopted by the Bush administration.

Since then, the center and the Project on Government Secrecy, part of the scientists' group, have been trying to get Pentagon permission to publish the complete report. But the Defense Department has refused.

In a statement issued Friday, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Pentagon unit that commissioned the $150,000 study, said it had initially refused to release the document and was still preventing parts of it from being distributed. The statement said the study could "circumvent" Pentagon "rules and practices established to prevent the spread of information associated with W.M.D.," referring to nuclear, biological, chemical and other weapons of mass destruction.

But several civil libertarians, scientists, public health officials and emergency response experts challenged the Pentagon's position.

"This study was based on discussions that were held in an unclassified setting," said Jerome M. Hauer, a former assistant secretary for public health emergency preparedness in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration, who attended the December meeting. "To close the results of that forum is myopic and does nothing to better prepare this country to deal with those threats."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/politics/29ANTH.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Some Believers Cringe at 'Under God' Defense:
"Americans who take religion seriously must surely have winced this week at some of the defenses mounted of the phrase 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Please don't imagine, for example, that pledging allegiance to a nation 'under God' is meant to suggest that God actually exists. "

Don't imagine that the phrase suggests that God watches over the nation, blessing and judging it, or that the nation is accountable to God, if that God exists. Certainly the pledge's wording doesn't imply that the nation's indivisibility and promise of liberty and justice for all is somehow tied up with that condition of being "under God."

No, nothing like that. At least, not for the phrase's defenders at Wednesday's oral arguments before the Supreme Court. For them, "under God" only means that once upon a time the nation's leaders thought things along those lines.…

the solicitor general, Theodore B. Olson, said the phrase was not a prayer or a ritual. It was only one of the constitutionally permissible "civic and ceremonial acknowledgments" of the religious heritage on which the nation was founded.

The government's brief to the Supreme Court spells this out in its analysis of the pledge's current wording: "What it really means is, I pledge allegiance to one nation, founded by individuals whose belief in God gave rise to the governmental institutions and political order they adopted, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

During the oral argument, Justice David H. Souter brought up a similar defense, the conclusion from a lower court that the pledge's words about God were merely an example of "ceremonial deism" useful for "solemnizing public occasions."

Wince.

Were the citizens and legislators who created an uproar over the Ninth Circuit's ruling upset because students might lose out on a historical reminder or a moment of "ceremonial" deism?

And why aren't more believers distressed when language that pretty clearly affirms an existing, active, transcendental God must be defended as nothing more than language about what the nation's framers thought two centuries ago?…

In fact: The Pledge dates from the Civil War, and did not then have the words 'under God'; in it. A.I.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/27/national/27beliefs.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Public Opinion: The Home Front and the Election:
"Half of Americans say it's likely that terrorist attacks will be timed to influence this fall's elections, much as the Madrid bombings affected the Spanish elections. Still, recent surveys indicate terrorism is still second to the economy as an election issue. And solid majorities say it's inappropriate for political campaigns to use Sept 11 images in their TV commercials - although they're somewhat more willing to let President Bush do so.

Since Sept. 11, terrorism and the economy have consistently been the top issues for the public in surveys. As of March 2004, the economy is leading. The March 7 ABC/Washington Post poll found that 36 percent said the economy would be the 'single most important issue' in the election, while 17 percent said terrorism and 10 percent said the war in Iraq. When asked to choose between a hypothetical candidate who would do a good job on the economy versus one who would do well on terrorism, 51 percent chose the economy while 42 percent voted for the better candidate on terrorism, according to Gallup's March 5-7 poll.

In the wake of the Madrid bombings, 48 percent told Newsweek it's likely that terrorist attacks will be carried out close to Election Day in an attempt to influence the presidential election. Two-thirds of those surveyed in the March 18-19 Newsweek poll said it was very (26 percent) or somewhat likely (40 percent) that terrorist attacks would be carried out against 'major U.S. cities.…"

http://www.publicagenda.org/specials/terrorism/terror_pubopinion2.htm

Chicago Tribune | Big mistakes in the war on terror:
"In President Bush's handling of the war on terror, two facts stand out: Before Sept. 11, he failed to take military action against an enemy that had attacked us, and later, he took military action against an enemy that had not attacked us.

He has a rejoinder for anyone who accuses him of failing to move against Al Qaeda early in his term. He said Tuesday, 'George Tenet briefed me on a regular basis about the terrorist threat to the United States of America, and had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted.'"

We would have acted? What a relief. Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden was not kind enough to phone the Oval Office with a schedule of events planned for New York and Washington that day.…

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0403250100mar25,1,2161454.column

News Analysis: For a Day, Terrorism Transcends Politics as Panel Reviews Failures

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/politics/24ASSE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

When a Dissertation Makes a Difference:
"For Devah Pager, a young sociologist from Honolulu, 'kulia i ka nu'u' — "to strive for the summit" — means to do research that can influence policy, a realistic quest for her if the last few years are any indication.

As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she studied the difficulties of former prisoners trying to find work and, in the process, came up with a disturbing finding: it is easier for a white person with a felony conviction to get a job than for a black person whose record is clean."

Ms. Pager's study won the American Sociological Association's award for the best dissertation of the year in August, prompting a Wall Street Journal columnist to write about it. Howard Dean repeated her main finding in stump speeches and interviews throughout his glory days as the front-runner.

Then, addressing the overall problem convicted felons have re-entering the job market, President Bush announced in the State of the Union message a $300 million program to provide mentoring and help them get work. Jim Towey, the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said that Ms. Pager's study was one of the many sources of information that helped shape the administration's four-year plan.…

Initially Ms. Pager's interest was race, stirred by her move from Hawaii to Los Angeles to attend the University of California. "I was struck by the level of separation between racial groups on campus, throughout the city," she said. "Race seemed to define space. Hawaii, by contrast, has the highest rate of intermarriage in the country. Growing up, every other person, it seemed, was hapa, or half, the term used to describe someone multiracial or mixed." She added, "When you grow up with that being normal, everything else seems strange — and wrong."…

Though her family is "solidly upper middle class," she said, her parents obliged her and her two older brothers to work to pay part of their college expenses. "I resented it initially," she said, "but in fact it ended up being a great way for me to get involved in things I wouldn't have been involved with otherwise."

The interest in released prisoners arose while she was studying for her doctorate in Madison, Wis. She organized a karaoke night for the sociology department ("I'm a diva," she wrote in an e-mail message, playing off the pronunciation of her given name. "I love to sing."), and she volunteered for an organization that provides services and shelter to homeless men. There she met many black men with prison records. "It was a nice break to get out and do some direct service," she said. She spent time with the men, distributed their mail and made herself available "as a resource, to allow them to unload." Those who had served jail time often talked about how it complicated the job search. "That was one of the first things that clued me into what an immutable barrier it was standing in their way," she said.

At about this time Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project reported that in seven states felony convictions had permanently disenfranchised one in four African-American men. An innovative but difficult research plan began to take shape.

Both of her main advisers, Robert M. Hauser and Erik Olin Wright, tried to dissuade her, gently suggesting how hard it is for graduate students to obtain financial support, manage complicated field work and end up with meaningful results.…

To isolate the effect of a criminal record on the job search, Ms. Pager sent pairs of young, well-groomed, well-spoken college men with identical résumés to apply for 350 advertised entry-level jobs in Milwaukee. The only difference was that one said he had served an 18-month prison sentence for cocaine possession. Two teams were black, two white.

A telephone survey of the same employers followed. For her black testers, the callback rate was 5 percent if they had a criminal record and 14 percent if they did not. For whites, it was 17 percent with a criminal record and 34 percent without.

"I expected there to be an effect of race, but I did not expect it to swamp the results as it did," Ms. Pager said. "It really was a surprise."…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/arts/20DEVA.html?pagewanted=all&position=

The On-Line Conference On Community Organizing and Development: Web advice:
"Using the Internet for Activism "

The Activist Toolkit by ONE/Northwest (ONLINE NETWORKING for the ENVIRONMENT) will help with all kinds of technical advice for using the Internet in activism.

Benton's Best Practices Toolkit, designed to help nonprofits make effective use of communications and information technologies.

Contentbank, an online resource for information, tools and people dedicated to building Internet content that works for low-income and underserved communities by the Children's Partnership.

Designing Effective Action Alerts for the Internet by Phil Agre, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

On-Line Advocacy provides a variety of resources for those thinking about an on-line advocacy program.

The Institute for Global Communications maintains EcoNet, PeaceNet, ConflictNet, LaborNet, and WomensNet, with lots of on-line resources.

NetAction shows ways that the Internet can support grass-roots activism, with a great deal of information resources and an on-line cyberactivism training course

Organizers' Collaborative, harnessing the collaborative potential of the Internet and working to making computers accessible as a tool in support of community-based, social change organizing.

Organizing on the Internet, a COMM-ORG list-serv message from Larry Yates with insights and links about Internet activism.

Progressive Technology Project Resources for Organizers has technology assessment and planning tools.

Technology Resources for Non-Profit Organizations provides web hosting, Internet Service Provide, hardware, and technology assistance links.

Using the Internet for Organizing and Advocacy, by Dirk Slater of the LINC Project.

The Virtual Volunteering Project, with advice, links, and resources supporting Internet activism.…

http://comm-org.utoledo.edu/cboweb.htm#inetactivism

Deficit Study Disputes Role of Economy:
"When President Bush and his advisers talk about the widening federal budget deficit, they usually place part of the blame on economic shocks ranging from the recession of 2001 to the terrorist attacks that year.

But a report released on Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that economic weakness would account for only 6 percent of a budget shortfall that could reach a record $500 billion this year."

Next year, the agency predicted, faster economic growth will actually increase tax revenues even as the deficit remains at a relatively high level of $374 billion.

The new numbers confirm what many analysts have predicted for some time: that budget deficits in the decade ahead will stem less from the lingering effects of the downturn and much more from rising government spending and progressively deeper tax cuts.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/16/politics/16BUDG.html

Op-Ed Columnist: An Insult to Our Soldiers:
"As we mobilize troops from around the country and send them off to fight and possibly die in that crucible of terror known as combat, is it too much to ask that they be paid in a timely way?

Researchers from the General Accounting Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, studied the payroll processes of six Army National Guard units that were called up to active duty. What they found wasn't pretty.

There were significant pay problems in all six units. A report released last November said, 'Some soldiers did not receive payments for up to six months after mobilization and others still had not received certain payments by the conclusion of our audit work.'

This is exactly the kind of thing that servicemen and women, especially those dealing with the heightened anxiety of life in a war zone, do not need. Maj. Kenneth Chavez of the Colorado National Guard told a Congressional committee of the problems faced by the unit he commanded:"

"All 62 soldiers encountered pay problems. . . . During extremely limited phone contact, soldiers called home only to find families in chaos because of the inability to pay bills due to erroneous military pay."

These problems are not limited to the National Guard. But one of the reasons the Guard has been especially hard hit is that, in the words of another congressman, Christopher Shays, its payroll system is "old and leaky and antiquated," designed for an era when the members of the Guard were seen as little more than weekend warriors.

That system has been unable to cope with widespread call-ups to extended periods of active duty and deployment to places in which personnel qualify for a variety of special pay and allowances, particularly in combat zones.

The G.A.O. report said, "Four Virginia Special Forces soldiers who were injured in Afghanistan and unable to resume their civilian jobs experienced problems in receiving entitled active duty pay and related health care."

The country is asking for extraordinary — in some cases, supreme — sacrifices from the military, and then failing to meet its own responsibility to provide such basic necessities as pay and health care.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/opinion/15HERB.html

Research Panel Warns Mexico of Threat From Modified Corn:
"Genetically engineered corn has made its way into Mexican fields from modified American seeds and could ultimately displace native corn varieties unless the government moves to protect them, a multinational panel of researchers warned Thursday. "

So little is known about the potential effect of altered corn in Mexico — where maize was first domesticated 9,000 years ago — that risks to the country's 60 corn varieties and the larger ecosystem are unpredictable, said the panel, convened by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation set up under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"One thing is clear," the study's coordinator, Chantal Line Carpentier, said in a telephone interview from Oaxaca, where the panel was meeting. "The huge diversity in Mexico should be protected in situ and in gene banks. And Mexico does not have the money."

Much of the concern is that contamination of native varieties would limit future possibilities of developing improved crop lines from corn that is now completely free of genetic modification.

The commission will present a final report and recommendations to the American, Mexican and Canadian governments in June.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/international/americas/12MEXI.html

A Student Aid Ban for Past Drug Use Is Creating a Furor:
"If Ms. Melendez had been an armed robber, a rapist, even a murderer, she would not be in the same predicament. Once out of prison, she would have been entitled to government grants and loans, no questions asked.

But under a contentious provision of federal law, tens of thousands of would-be college students have been denied financial aid because of drug offenses, even though the crimes may have been committed long ago and the sentences already served.…"

The aid prohibition has been a sore point since its enactment in 1998, inciting debate and recriminations all around. Members of Congress have accused the Clinton and Bush administrations of distorting the law's intent. The Education Department has fired back, saying Congress handed it a vague and sloppy law — one referring simply to "a student who has been convicted" of a drug offense — that the department is faithfully enforcing.

Students are equally perplexed. After serving almost 10 years in prison for attempted murder, Jason Bell went straight to college on federal grants and loans. Now a senior at San Francisco State University, he helps other ex-convicts enroll in the university but often has the hardest time assisting drug offenders whose crimes were minor, certainly a lot less serious than his.

"It's a form of double jeopardy," said Mr. Bell, 32. "They do the time, but then there are still roadblocks when they finish. I don't believe people should be punished twice."

Some members of Congress say they are pushing to rewrite the law for precisely that reason. And, for the first time since the prohibition took effect, the president's budget includes a commitment to revise it — not to throw it out, but to narrow its scope so that students like Ms. Melendez get a second chance.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/education/13DRUG.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Op-Ed Columnist: The Politics of Self-Pity:
"Republicans relished their philosophy of personal responsibility last week with John Belushi's famous mantra: Cheeseburgercheeseburgercheeseburger.

When the House passed the 'cheeseburger bill' to bar people from suing fast food joints for making them obese, Republican backers of the legislation scolded Americans, saying the fault lies not in their fries, but in themselves.

'Look in the mirror, because you're the one to blame,' said F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, home of brats and beer bellies."

So it comes as something of a disappointment that the leader of the Republican Party, the man who epitomizes the conservative ideal, is playing the victim. President Bush has made the theme of his re-election campaign a whiny "not my fault."

His ads, pilloried for the crass use of the images of a flag-draped body carried from ground zero and an Arab-looking everyman with the message, "We can fight against terrorists," actually have a more fundamental problem. They try to push off blame for anything that's gone wrong during Mr. Bush's tenure on bigger forces, supposedly beyond his control.

One ad cites "an economy in recession. A stock market in decline. A dot-com boom gone bust. Then a day of tragedy. A test for all Americans."

Mr. Bush's subtext is clear: If it weren't for all these awful things that happened, most of them hangovers from the Clinton era, I definitely could have fulfilled all my promises. I'm still great, but none of my programs worked because, well, stuff happens."

It's as if his inner fat boy is complaining that a classic triple cheeseburger from Wendy's (940 calories and 56 grams of fat, 25 of them saturated, and 2,140 milligrams of sodium) jumped out of its wrapper and forced its way down his unwilling throat, topped off by a pushy Frosty (540 calories and 13 grams of fat, 8 of them saturated).…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/opinion/14DOWD.html

Democrats Demand Inquiry Into Charge by Medicare Officer:
"Democrats called Saturday for an investigation of charges that the Bush administration threatened to fire a top Medicare official if he gave data to Congress showing the high costs of hotly contested Medicare legislation.

The official, Richard S. Foster, chief actuary of the Medicare program, said he had been formally told not to provide the information to Congress. Moreover, he said, he was told that 'the consequences of insubordination would be very severe.'"

Senior officials at the Medicare agency made it clear that "they would try and fire me" for responding directly to inquiries from Congress, Mr. Foster said in an interview on Saturday.

Mr. Foster said he had received that message from Thomas A. Scully, who was then administrator of the Medicare program. Mr. Scully denies threatening Mr. Foster but confirms having told him to withhold certain information from Congress.…

The Senate and the House approved different Medicare bills on June 27, after being assured that the cost would not exceed $400 billion over 10 years, the amount proposed by President Bush.

Just two weeks earlier, Mr. Foster estimated that the drug benefits in a bill very similar to the Senate measure would cost $551.5 billion.

Mr. Foster said he prepared "dozens and dozens of analyses and estimates" of the cost of the legislation last year. "All our estimates showed that the cost of the drug benefit, through 2013, would be in the range of $500 billion to $600 billion," he said.

The cost estimates were all provided to Mr. Scully, and some were also sent to the White House, the Office of Management and Budget and top officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Foster said. For example, he said, "some cost estimates were sent directly to Doug Badger," the White House official who coordinates health policy for the administration.

Mr. Duffy confirmed that the White House had received the actuary's cost estimates for parts of the bill. But he said the administration had relied on the Congressional Budget Office as "the primary authority" on the overall cost.

"For many years," Mr. Foster said, "my office has provided technical assistance to the administration and Congress on a nonpartisan basis.

"But in June 2003, the Medicare administrator, Tom Scully, decided to restrict the practice of our responding directly to Congressional requests and ordered us to provide responses to him so he could decide what to do with them. There was a pattern of withholding information for what I perceived to be political purposes, which I thought was inappropriate."

Mr. Foster, 55, was an actuary at the Social Security Administration from 1973 to 1995, when he became chief Medicare actuary.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/politics/14MEDI.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Dual Use: Buy a Golf Club, Build a Bomb:
"Sometimes, it seems that any piece of modern technology can, with a few turns of a screw, be transformed into a weapon of mass destruction. Federal agents arrested Asher Karni, an Israeli businessman living in South Africa, on Jan. 1 for exporting parts that Mr. Karni said were destined for machines that break apart kidney stones. Federal agents say the parts, known as triggered spark gaps, were actually destined to be triggers for nuclear bombs in Pakistan."

The triggered spark gaps - precision switches that send short, large bursts of electricity - are in fact used by a machine called a lithotripter to break up kidney stones. But the same device can also serve as the trigger for detonating the cocoon of conventional explosives that surrounds the uranium in an atomic bomb, starting the chain reaction that creates the much larger nuclear explosion.

The triggered spark gap is a classic example of a so-called dual-use technology, which cannot be exported without permission from the Department of Commerce.

"A dual-use item by definition can be perfectly innocent or it could have military applications," said Kenneth I. Juster, the under secretary of commerce who oversees the export control program.

Mr. Karni invited suspicion by ordering 200 spark gaps from PerkinElmer Optoelectronics of Salem, Mass., far more than the handful of spares a hospital would need. PerkinElmer notified governmental officials and, at their request, sent a shipment of 66 triggers, secretly disabled.

The list of dual-use technologies, largely drawn from international agreements, also includes some other items not obviously deadly. Carbon fibers, the stuff of tennis rackets and golf clubs, are ideal for the nose cones of intercontinental ballistic missiles, because they resist the heat of re-entry through the atmosphere.

A type of extremely hard steel, known as maraging steel, , is useful for bombs (and golf clubs, too). The element beryllium, used in high performance aircraft and furnace linings, can be shaped into reflectors of neutrons, necessary to make sure a nuclear explosion doesn't peter out.

Aluminum tubes can be used in centrifuges that separate out the rare form of uranium used in atomic bombs. And many ingredients in common insecticides can be made into deadly human poisons as well. Also regulated are high-precision scientific equipment needed to assemble bombs.

The law regulating dual-use technologies, the Export Administration Act, expired three years ago, but remains in force by presidential executive order. The Senate passed a new version in 2001, but it stalled in the House because of concern that the new version weakened controls on potentially dangerous technologies. Even if controls on American exports were airtight, however, they would be of no use if a country or terrorist could buy what they needed elsewhere.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/weekinreview/14chang.html

U.S. Set to Ease Some Provisions of School Law:
"Education Secretary Rod Paige says the Bush administration is working to soften the impact of important provisions of its centerpiece school improvement law that local educators and state lawmakers have attacked as arbitrary and unfair.

Tomorrow, the Education Department will announce policies relaxing a requirement that says teachers must have a degree or otherwise certify themselves in every subject they teach, Dr. Paige said in an interview on Friday. Officials are also preparing to offer new flexibility on regulations governing required participation rates on standardized tests, he said."

Those changes would follow the recent relaxation of regulations governing the testing of special education students and those who speak limited English. They appear devised to defuse an outcry against the law, known as No Child Left Behind, in thousands of local districts, especially in Western states where powerful Republican lawmakers have called the law unworkable for tiny rural schools.

Legislatures in Utah, Virginia and a dozen other states, many controlled by Republicans, are up in arms about what they see as the law's intrusion on states' rights. They have approved resolutions in recent weeks protesting or challenging the law.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/education/14CHIL.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Op-Ed Columnist: Our Wounded Warriors:
"Thousands of U.S. troops have been wounded and injured in Iraq. They have been paralyzed, lost limbs, suffered blindness, been horribly burned and so on. They are heroes, without question, but their stories have largely gone untold."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/opinion/12HERB.html

Op-Ed Columnist: No More Excuses on Jobs:
"It's true that there are two employment surveys, which have been diverging lately. The establishment survey, which asks businesses how many workers they employ, says that 2.4 million jobs have vanished in the last three years. The household survey, which asks individuals whether they have jobs, says that employment has actually risen by 450,000. The administration's supporters, understandably, prefer the second number."

But the experts disagree. According to Alan Greenspan: "I wish I could say the household survey were the more accurate. Everything we've looked at suggests that it's the payroll data which are the series which you have to follow." You may have heard that the establishment survey doesn't count jobs created by new businesses; not so. The bureau knows what it's doing — conservative commentators are raising objections only because they don't like the facts.

And even the less reliable household survey paints a bleak picture of an economy in which jobs have lagged far behind population growth. The fraction of adults who say they are employed fell steeply between early 2001 and the summer of 2003, and has stagnated since then.

But wait — hasn't the unemployment rate fallen since last summer? Yes, but that's entirely the result of people dropping out of the labor force. Even if you're out of work, you're not counted as unemployed unless you're actively looking for a job.

We don't know why so many people have stopped looking for jobs, but it probably has something to do with the fact that jobs are so hard to find: 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work more than 15 weeks, a 20-year record. In any case, the administration should feel grateful that so many people have dropped out. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, if they hadn't dropped out, the official unemployment rate would be an eye-popping 7.4 percent, not a politically spinnable 5.6 percent.

In short, things aren't as bad as they seem; they're worse. But should we blame the Bush administration? Yes — because it refuses to learn from experience.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/opinion/12KRUG.html

C.I.A. Chief Says He's Corrected Cheney Privately:
"George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told a Senate committee on Tuesday that he had privately intervened on several occasions to correct what he regarded as public misstatements on intelligence by Vice President Dick Cheney and others, and that he would do so again.…"

Mr. Tenet identified three instances in which he had already corrected public statements by President Bush or Mr. Cheney or would do so, but he left the impression that there had been more.

His comments, in testimony before the Armed Services Committee, came under sharp questioning from some Democrats on the panel, who have criticized him and the White House over prewar intelligence on Iraq. He insisted that he had honored his obligation to play a neutral role as the top intelligence adviser.

In response to a question, he said he did not think the administration had misrepresented facts to justify going to war.

Mr. Tenet said he planned to call Mr. Cheney's attention to a recent misstatement, in a Jan. 9 interview, when the vice president recommended as "your best source of information" on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda the contents of a disputed memorandum by a senior Pentagon official, Douglas J. Feith.

That memorandum, sent last October to the Senate Intelligence Committee, portrayed what was presented as conclusive evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda, but it was never endorsed by intelligence agencies, who objected to Mr. Feith's findings.

Mr. Tenet said he was not aware of Mr. Cheney's comments in that interview, published in The Rocky Mountain News, until Monday night.…

According to government officials who have seen copies of the briefing documents, the information was presented to Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, and included slides that were strongly disparaging of C.I.A. analyses.

The other two instances in which Mr. Tenet said he had acted to correct administration statements involved the State of the Union address in January 2002, when he objected after the fact to Mr. Bush's inclusion of disputed intelligence about Iraq's seeking to obtain uranium from Africa, and a Jan. 22 radio interview in which Mr. Cheney portrayed trailers found in Iraq as being for biological weapons, and thus "conclusive evidence" that Iraq "did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction."

That was the conclusion initially reached by American intelligence agencies last spring, and it is still on the C.I.A.'s Web site. But it has been disputed since last summer within intelligence agencies, and Mr. Tenet said he had told Mr. Cheney there was "no consensus" among American analysts, with those at the Defense Intelligence Agency in particular arguing that the trailers were for producing hydrogen.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/politics/10INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Op-Ed Columnist: The Unrecognizable Recovery:
"The Bush crowd couldn't have been more pleased with the timing of the Martha Stewart verdict on Friday afternoon.

The big news heading into the weekend was almost guaranteed to be the awful jobs report released by the Labor Department Friday morning. The White House needed a world-class distraction and the Stewart jury, eager to wrap things up before the weekend, obliged. It strolled in, as if on cue, with a verdict of guilty on all counts. Distractions don't get much bigger.

The Labor Department report was as grim as faces on a bread line. Despite all the president's promises, the economy added just 21,000 jobs last month. No jobs were added by the private sector. The 21,000 additional jobs were all government hires."

The report also showed that job growth in December and January was worse than previously believed. The January tally was revised from 112,000 to 97,000. The December count dropped from 16,000 to a pathetic 8,000.

A number of demographic groups are getting absolutely hammered. A new study by Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, found historic lows in the reported labor force participation of 16- to 19-year-olds. According to the study, "The estimated 36.8 percent employment rate for the nation's teens was the lowest ever recorded since 1948."

A more ominous finding was that over the past three calendar years the number of people aged 16 to 24 who are both out of work and out of school increased from 4.8 million to 5.6 million, with males accounting for the bulk of the increase.

The Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project, in a joint analysis of newly released data, reported a disturbing increase in long-term joblessness. Unemployment lasting half a year or longer grew to 22.1 percent of all unemployment in 2003. That was an increase from 18.3 percent in 2002, and the highest rate since 1983.

Among those having a particularly hard time finding work, according to the report, are job seekers with college degrees and people 45 and older.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/opinion/08HERB.html