Tax Filing Season

Librarians' Internet Index:

Audits ( 5 )	Just For Fun ( 7 )
Calculators, Charts, & Tables ( 11 )	Opinions & Protest ( 6 )
Disaster Relief ( 3 )	Other Federal Tax Resources ( 42 )
E-filing ( 8 )	Refunds ( 2 )
Forms & Instructions, State and... ( 11 )	State Tax Resources (Primarily Cali... ( 14 )
Fraud & Scams ( 7 )	Tax Reform ( 6 )
Free and Low-Cost Filing ( 4 )	Volunteer Tax Assistance ( 2 )

If you haven't used Librarians' Internet Index, it's time.

Of course, trustworthy information may take all the fun out of searching for some of us.

http://lii.org/pub/topic/taxes

Does what we believe about Al Qaeda help Al Qaeda?

If you don't read Schneier on Security, you probably don't know what security is. Bruce
Schneier, founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. If you want to know how security really works, turn to Schneier. His book ‘Beyond Fear’ is an indispensable resource for understanding safety, crime and both Corporate and National security.

I was going through my rss feeds when I came across this.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Murdercide -- Science unravels the myth of suicide bombers:
“The belief that suicide bombers are poor, uneducated, disaffected or disturbed is contradicted by science. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, found in a study of 400 Al Qaeda members that three quarters of his sample came from the upper or middle class. Moreover, he noted, 'the vast majority--90 percent--came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that's usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.' Nor were they sans employment and familial duties. 'Far from having no family or job responsibilities, 73 percent were married and the vast majority had children.... Three quarters were professionals or semiprofessionals. They are engineers, architects and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion.' ”

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=0006A854-E67F-13A1-A67F83414B7F0104&pageNumber=2&catID=2

Liberty Increases Security

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/liberty_increas.html

From the Scientific American essay "Murdercide: Science unravels the myth of suicide bombers":

Another method [of reducing terrorism], says Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger, is to increase the civil liberties of the countries that breed terrorist groups. In an analysis of State Department data on terrorism, Krueger discovered that "countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn suicide terrorists. Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism." Let freedom ring.

…

Found on John Quarterman's blog.

Posted on January 18, 2006 at 01:33 PM

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/668

But hold on, here's more…

From his CryptoGram Newsletter, http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0601.html ,

News

Two stories that shamelessly hype computer crime:
<http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/online.security/>
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2005-12-14-meth-online-theft_x.htm>
Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare the public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.

Microsoft received a Common Criteria (CC) EAL 4+ certification for Windows, demonstrating how weak such a certification really is:
<http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1901965,00.asp>

After FBI agents expressed frustration that the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review wasn't approving their orders under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, procedural changes were made allowing the FBI to bypass that office.
<http://www.epic.org/foia_notes/note10.html>
Remember, the issue here is not whether or not the FBI can engage in counterterrorism. The issue is the erosion of judicial oversight -- the only check we have on police power. And this power grab is dangerous regardless of which party is in the White House at the moment.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is spying on Americans. Specifically, the Department of Defense is collecting data on legal and peaceful war protesters, in violation of U.S. law.
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/>

There's a lot more, and an incredible opportunity to have a real position in the debate about rights, security and Presidential power.

So ask yourself, does what we believe about security make us secure?

Does curtailing our liberties preserve our liberty?

Does ‘L’État c’est Moi’ (I am the State), seem all too familiar. Louis the fourteenth also said, ‘It's legal, because I wish it .’ http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/louis_xiv.html

Ask yourself, which novel we're living in:
1984? Is war peace? Ignorance, Strength? Is our Freedom becoming Slavery?
1984 by George Orwell: Chapter 1

Or are we in the ‘Wizard of Oz?’
Shall we pay attention to the man behind the curtain?

Does the Presidency have clothes?
Then why do they offer up fig leaves?/

In Google vs Government, It's Not About Child Porn

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-01-21-n89.html:

"It's interesting to see how many news sources mistakenly report that the current government vs Google case is about child porn. It's not. If anything, it's about children looking at pornography - i.e. webmasters not ensuring their sites are sufficiently blocking minors from viewing harmful content. Or more specifically, it's about a proposed law requiring those sites to restrict access to minors, the Child Online Protection Act, which just didn't get through in the past, and which the Bush administration now wants to revive (and for that reason, asked different search engines to hand over search logs and indexed URLs to prove the law is needed).

I wrote to the author of the original article at the Mercury News while preparing and editing my first blog post on this, realizing this isn't about child porn - indeed the error is quick to make, and I was confused too at first - but the Merc's error was never corrected. From there, it spread like wildfire into blogs and mainstream news sources alike.… "

Privacy experts condemn Google subpoena http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6029348.html?tag=nl.e539

Right-to-privacy groups said Friday that an attempt by the Bush administration to force Google to turn over a broad range of materials from its databases has set a dangerous precedent that should worry all Americans.

"This is the camel's nose under the tent for using search engines and all kinds of data aggregators as surveillance tools," said Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute who also runs Privacilla.org, an Internet privacy database.

The Bush administration is already under fire from a number of rights groups over security measures it has taken since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, including pursuing checks on library records and eavesdropping on some telephone calls.

In court papers filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., the Justice Department stated that Google had refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for 1 million random Web addresses from Google's databases as well as records of all searches entered on Google during any one-week period.

The government said it needed the information to prepare its case to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which the Supreme Court blocked from taking effect two years ago.

The law prohibited Internet companies from knowingly making available obscene or pornographic material to minors. The Supreme Court said there were potential constitutional problems with the law and sent the case back to a lower court for consideration. It is expected to be heard later this year.

The Justice Department said Friday that America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft had all complied with similar requests.…

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2460&tag=nl.e539

Posted by David Berlind @ 4:26 am

eWeek has a story about how Microsoft has unequivocally stated that no personal data was handed over during a recent DOJ inquiry:

The Microsoft admission, in a recent blog by MSN Search Dev & Test General Manager Ken Moss, assures MSN search users that "absolutely no personal data" changed hands. ….In the blog, Moss said Microsoft gave the DOJ a random sample of pages from the MSN search index, which is what MSN Search customers plumb during their search inquiries…..More controversially, Microsoft also provided "some aggregated query logs that listed queries and how often they occurred." Put another way, it's a look at the key words MSN search customers entered over an extended period of time.

To some extent, it's reassuring that Microsoft didn't hand over anything personally identifiable. On the other hand, the major issue here (as I noted the other day) is the way the DOJ is raiding databases outside of the context of any specific instance of wrongdoing. It's not searching for the smoking gun in a particular crime. At best, it's doing the equivalent of a door to door search in hopes of discovering that a crime may have been committed — not the typical sort of evidence that the authorities are supposed to be going after. The more I think about it, the more I wonder what choice the DOJ would have but to go back to the search engines for more data — this time, personally identifiable data — if it sees something in doesn't like.

We use the Net under the assumption that the Feds aren't trolling the databases of search engines and ISPs that reflect our collective online behavior in hopes of finding a haystack with a needle in it.…

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2464

The other chilling effect of the DOJ vs. Google

Posted by David Berlind @ 10:12 am

Regarding my two earlier blogs (Phone calls, e-mails and now search data. Where will Bush stop and Microsoft: No personal data went to DOJ) I just got this super-long email from someone that started with this sentence:

Google created their own problem by collecting this information in the first place.

So, let's think this through. You're an entrepreneur looking to start a business and you realize that one of the keys to your success is to keep certain information in a database. But then you realize that if you do, the Feds might issue you a warrant for its contents. Then you realize that the incident could become a headline in the news .. the sort of publicity (if you give in) that could hurt your business. So, you decide not to keep that database and in the process, may be selling yourself short of the complete opportunity that stands before you. Sounds like a chilling effect to me…

Here's my opinion.

It's vulgar, but, probably accurate. The Justice department is like a teenage boy who says, 'All I want to do is touch it. You'll still be a virgin.' But we know that teenage boys don't know how or when to stop. Soon we'll be hearing, ' It won't get you pregnant.' Then, 'Can I just put it in?'

Is The President's Signature Worth The Paper It's Written On?

The Imperial Presidency at Work - New York Times:

"you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not act in good faith"

‘Mr. Bush made a grand show of inviting Mr. McCain into the Oval Office last month to announce his support for a bill to require humane treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons run by the American military and intelligence agencies. He seemed to have managed to get Vice President Dick Cheney to stop trying to kill the proposed Congressional ban on torture of prisoners.

The White House also endorsed a bargain between Mr. Levin and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, which tempered somewhat a noxious proposal by Mr. Graham to deny a court hearing to anyone the president declares to be an "unlawful enemy combatant." The bargain with Mr. Levin removed language that stripped away cases already before the courts, which would have been an egregious usurpation of power by one branch of government, and it made clear that those cases should remain in the courts.

Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous "signing statement" on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program.

Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. The solicitor general informed the Supreme Court last week that it no longer had jurisdiction over detainee cases. It said the court should drop an existing case in which a Yemeni national is challenging the military tribunals invented by Mr. Bush's morally challenged lawyers after 9/11. The administration is seeking to eliminate all other lawsuits filed by some of the approximately 500 men at Gitmo, the vast majority of whom have not been shown to pose any threat.

Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.’

I didn't notice many questions about these theories in the committee hearings. Maybe they're telepaths and don't need to verbalize these things. I do know one thing, while pro-choice and pro-life debate abortion, the bill of rights is being crumpled up and urinated on.

One of my favorite authors, Ursula K. LeGuin in ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ wrote, “There is nothing as perfectly useless as the right answer to the wrong question.”

Boy have we been hearing the wrong questions from all sides and all parties.

What does it take to get these people to do their jobs? Alito is, like me, 55 years old. At the least, the next 30 years of our liberty is at stake. Yet here we are judging candidates for the Supreme Court on how well they duck and dodge issues. How many points does he get for not remembering anything about an organisation important enough to put on his employment application.

How many for obfuscating the meaning of the Constitution.

Who gets to yell out ‘Bingo!’?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/opinion/15sun2.html

Playing ‘Dodge Judge’ or Why Call Them Hearings When Nobody's Listening

“With uncharacteristic understatement, Justice Scalia observed that "the members of this court have disagreed regarding the scope of Congress's 'prophylactic' enforcement powers under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment." That bland phrase was a shorthand for a raging debate that this new opinion did not even try to resolve.

The underlying question is what the 14th Amendment's Section 5 means in granting Congress the "power to enforce, by appropriate legislation" the guarantees of due process and equal protection that the amendment provides.

While stripping the states of the constitutional immunity that they would otherwise enjoy is an agreed-upon aspect of Section 5 "enforcement," the question remains whether Congress is limited to permitting suits for actual constitutional violations, or whether it may go further and authorize a broader category of lawsuits that seek to deter future violations.”

“WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 - The Supreme Court, in its first federalism decision since John G. Roberts Jr. became chief justice, ruled Tuesday that Congress acted within its constitutional authority when it stripped states of immunity from some suits for damages by disabled prison inmates.

The unanimous opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, overturned a 2004 ruling by the federal appeals court in Atlanta, which held that Georgia was entitled to sovereign immunity from a lawsuit brought by a paraplegic prison inmate under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Justice Scalia said that at least to the extent that the inmate's claims indicated that prison officials had violated not only the statute but the Constitution itself, the suit could proceed. The inmate, Tony Goodman, says that prison officials have grossly neglected his needs for mobility and personal hygiene, and that his dependence on a wheelchair has left him excluded from the law library and recreational opportunities.

The decision left very significant questions unanswered, most notably the fate of a disability lawsuit that demonstrates violations of the statute but not of any constitutional provision.

Title II of the disability act, at issue in the case, bans discrimination on the basis of disability in the "services, programs, or activities" offered by state and local governments.

Without doubt, the unanimity and brevity of Justice Scalia's opinion, at only eight pages, papered over deep divisions that have been apparent on the court during years of contention over the boundaries between federal authority and state prerogatives. Two years ago, for example, the court split 5 to 4 in permitting a lawsuit against Tennessee under Title II of the disabilities act for the state's failure to make county courthouses accessible to people with disabilities.…”

While the Senators and Judge tap dance around abortion rights, a fundamental and clear constitutional question is left unasked. Why a man who would sit on the Supreme court of the United States ever had a problem with ‘one man one vote’ or the power of congress to enforce that right.

Section 5 of the 14th amendment is well over a hundred years old, and it's a lot clearer on the rights of incdividuals and the power of congress than the inferences that are central to ‘a woman's right to choose.’

Undertandably, the Senators would rather deal with sex and religion than the real taboo topic, race.

So Alito, somehow, can't remember being part of a group he was proud to list on his employment application. Alito never questioned one white man, one vote. No one seriously questioned it in the twentieth century, until it started to apply to racial minorities. Like many others he opposed and was vanquished. Phrases like free, white and twenty0ne, lost their meaning, and people like Alito felt robbed. In fact, they were the robbers.

When robbers associate, expect more robbery.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/politics/politicsspecial1/11confirm.html

Annoyance isn't against the law, but, wait, it is now! | Rational rants | ZDNet.com

Annoyance isn't against the law, but, wait, it is now! Rational rants ZDNet.com

“Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe @ 10:15 am

Declan McCullagh catches a ridiculous new change to federal telecommunications laws: It is now illegal, after President Bush signed H.R. 3402, the "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005," to harrass someone by posting an anonymous comment on their blog.

This is a law open to incredible abuse both by companies and politicians who want to silence critics. ”

Section 113 of the bill has been amended and rewritten in such a way as to “rewrite this part of the Communications Act of 1934 to read: (B) makes a telephone call, whether or not conversation ensues, without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person at the called number and; (C) makes or causes the telephone of another repeatedly or continuously to ring, with intent to harass any person at the called number ((C) in the case of subparagraph (C) of subsection (a)(1), includes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet (as such term is defined in section 1104 of the Internet Tax Freedom Act (47 U.S.C. 151 note)).’

That makes "annoying" someone via comments posted on a blog or Web site a crime punishable by fines of up to $50,000 and/or imprisonment for up to six months. ”

It's time to ask why last minute amendments reducing our freedoms are constantly being added to laws that have completely different puposes.

It's time to stop listening to what this administration says and only pay attentiion to what it does.

A nibble here, an amendment there, a rider to an appropriations bill, text slipped in in House Senate conference, and a President becomes Emperor.

It's all to similar to the way a crtain Reichschancellor became Fuhrer, one law at a time.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ratcliffe/index.php?p=28

The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight - New York Times

The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight - New York Times:

"the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, 'The match is about to begin,' and, 'Tomorrow is zero hour.' You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12."

“If the Bush administration did indeed eavesdrop on American journalists and political opponents (Ms. Amanpour's husband, Jamie Rubin, was a foreign policy adviser to the Kerry campaign), it's déjà Watergate all over again. But even now we can see that there's another, simpler - and distinctly Bushian - motive at play here, hiding in plain sight.

That motive is not, as many liberals would have it, a simple ideological crusade to gut the Bill of Rights. Real conservatives, after all, are opposed to Big Brother; even the staunch Bush ally Grover Norquist has criticized the N.S.A.'s overreaching. The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is instead to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures.

That's why Paul Wolfowitz, in a 2004 remark for which he later apologized, dismissed reporting on the raging insurgency in Iraq as "rumors" he attributed to a Baghdad press corps too "afraid to travel." That's also why the White House tried in May to blame lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan on a single erroneous Newsweek item about Koran desecration - as if 200-odd words in an American magazine could take the fall for the indelible photos from Abu Ghraib.

Such is the blame-shifting game Mr. Cheney was up to last week. By dragging 9/11 into his defense of possibly unconstitutional bugging, he was hoping to rewrite history to absolve the White House of its bungling. And no wonder. He knows all too well that the timing of Mr. Bush's signing of the secret executive order to initiate the desperate tactic of warrant-free N.S.A. eavesdropping - early 2002, according to Mr. Risen's new book, "State of War" - is nothing if not a giant arrow pointing to one of the administration's most catastrophic failures. It was only weeks earlier, in December 2001, that we had our best crack at nailing Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora and blew it.

What went down that fateful December is recalled in particularly gripping fashion in a just published book, "Jawbreaker," which, like Mr. Risen's book, is rising on the best-seller list at an inopportune moment for this White House. "Jawbreaker" is the self-told story of a veteran clandestine officer, Gary Berntsen, who was the pivotal C.I.A. field commander in the hunt for bin Laden. Mr. Berntsen is a fervent Bush loyalist, but his honest account doesn't do the president any favors. "We needed U.S. soldiers on the ground!" he writes, to "block a possible Al Qaeda escape into Afghanistan!" But his request to Centcom for 800 Army Rangers to do the job went unheeded.

We don't know whether the Bush order relaxing legal controls on the N.S.A. was in part a Hail Mary pass to help compensate for that disaster. Either way, all the subsequent wiretaps in the world have not brought bin Laden back dead or alive. Though the White House says that its warrantless surveillance has saved lives by stopping other terrorists since then, Mr. Bush has exaggerated victories against Al Qaeda as often as he has the battle-readiness of Iraqi troops. After he claimed in an October speech that America and its allies had foiled 10 Qaeda plots since 9/11, USA Today reported that "at least" 6 of the 10 had been preliminary ideas for attacks rather than actual planned attacks.

The louder the reports of failures on this president's watch, the louder he tries to drown them out by boasting that he has done everything "within the law" to keep America safe and by implying that his critics are unpatriotic, if not outright treasonous. Mr. Bush certainly has good reason to pump up the volume now. In early December the former 9/11 commissioners gave the federal government a report card riddled with D's and F's on terrorism preparedness.

The front line of defense against terrorism is supposed to be the three-year-old, $40-billion-a-year Homeland Security Department, but news of its ineptitude, cronyism and no-bid contracts has only grown since Katrina. The Washington Post reported that one Transportation Security Administration contract worth up to $463 million had gone to a brand-new company that (coincidentally, we're told) contributed $122,000 to a powerful Republican congressman, Harold Rogers of Kentucky. An independent audit by the department's own inspector general, largely unnoticed during Christmas week, found everything from FEMA to border control in some form of disarray.

Yet even as this damning report was released, the president forced cronies into top jobs in immigration enforcement and state and local preparedness with recess appointments that bypassed Congressional approval. Last week the department had the brilliance to leave Las Vegas off its 2006 list of 35 "high threat" urban areas - no doubt because Mohammed Atta was so well behaved there when plotting the 9/11 attacks.

THE warrantless eavesdropping is more of the same incompetence.… ”

The real questions are: "Are we still free?" , "Is the United States still a Democracy?", "If not, can we make it one again?"

Do we accept unlimited executive power in a war that, like the war on drugs, can never, ever, end?

While no one was watching the watchers, Caesar crossed the Tiber and his war powers became his permanent powers. Caesar was stopped, but the republic, imperfect as it was, died too.

Our representatives routinely pass laws they haven't read. Like the executive they've become accustomed to, and their leadership also prefers to operate in the dark.

Where there is no sight, there can be no oversight.

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/opinion/08rich.html?pagewanted=all

Defining Victory ... Down

“Bush, on TV, Says Iraq Vote Won't End Violence
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
President Bush acknowledged that the elections in Iraq were "not going to stop violence" there, and that "we're behind" on the training of capable Iraqi police forces.

"I think if we have a policy of zero violence, it won't be met," Mr. Bush said in the PBS interview.

Asked if defining victory in terms that allowed violence to continue was an unusual definition of winning wars, he answered, "Yes."

"The elections won't say, O.K., the security situation has, you know, changed dramatically, because there are still people out there that are going to try to affect the political outcome, the political debate, with violence," he said.

"More Iraqis are in the lead on operations, more territory is controlled by the Iraqis," he said. "However, as General Casey said, we're behind when it comes to training the police forces, and one of the real challenges is to make sure that the police force does not become a haven for militia" controlled by political parties. Gen. George W. Casey Jr. of the Army is the American commander in Iraq.

"I think if we have a policy of zero violence, it won't be met," Mr. Bush said in the PBS interview.

Asked if defining victory in terms that allowed violence to continue was an unusual definition of winning wars, he answered, "Yes."

New Mission for U.S. Division to Put Iraqi Forces to the Test

By THOM SHANKER
and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: December 18, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 - The Fourth Infantry Division returns to Iraq next month for a complex, yearlong tour that illustrates the risks and goals of the American military's postelection mission across Iraq.

The more than 20,000 troops in the division, about 15 percent of the 138,000-strong American commitment scheduled to remain in Iraq at least through the early part of the year, will be responsible for security across a swath of central and south-central Iraq that is much larger than previous commands have tried to cover there.

So remember … War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength…

……

The expanded mission includes more than a hope, but a requirement, that Iraqi security forces take over the security mission in larger areas of their own country. The planning is also driven by a cold reality that many of the allied troops - including Ukraine, Bulgaria, Italy and possibly even Poland - seem likely to leave Iraq over coming months.

So, like American troops all across Iraq, the Fourth Infantry Division, from its headquarters in Baghdad, will have no choice but to rely on increasing numbers of Iraqi troops, testing as never before the American and Iraqi forces - and the new government to be assembled after Thursday's vote.

The Americans are planning to turn over bases to Iraqis, and more significantly plan to turn over a much larger share of the battle space to Iraqis, with the goal to minimize a visible American presence that alienates many Iraqis and provides a target for the insurgency. When possible, the American military will remain in a stand-back role, available to rush in if Iraqi forces need assistance.

American commanders make it no secret that the coming Iraqi government, with its sovereign stature and a full, four-year tenure, means they will be operating in new political terrain. Mounting pressures in the United States - and a new Iraqi government all but certain to assert its authority in coming months - will require that the American military demonstrate some kind of success and then withdraw as many troops as quickly and as safely as possible.

The goal is to make Iraqi patrols the norm, with stability no longer dependent on the large foreign force that has so constantly enraged Iraqis. That goal has become every bit as important as quelling the insurgency, if not more so. The new mission for the Fourth Infantry Division is planned around that new goal.

"It is very much a laboratory for the overall mission, linked not just to the development of the Iraqi armed forces but to efforts to make the special security forces act like national police forces," and not loyal only to local religious or ethnic leaders, said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military specialist with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"How much of the battle space can the Iraqi forces take over, and who is actually doing the fighting - those are the key measurements," Mr. Cordesman said.

"The measure cannot be the elimination of the insurgency, as desirable as that would be," he said. "You cannot eliminate all of the bombings."

In a strong indication of the tenor of the coming months, several of the incoming commanders are also returning veterans of the Iraq mission, and come from a school of thought that balances both the rebuilding of Iraq's economy and civil institutions and the contest of arms against the insurgents.

Still, the American reliance on overwhelming firepower will remain central.”

http://www.archive.org/download/A_Few_Definitions/AFewDefinitions.mp3

Radical Militant Librarians Kick FBI Around?

"While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from OIPR's failure to let us use the tools given to us," read the e-mail message, which was sent by an unidentified F.B.I. official. "This should be an OIPR priority!!!"

“Publicly, the debate over the law known as the USA Patriot Act has focused on concerns from civil rights advocates that the F.B.I. has gained too much power to use expanded investigative tools to go on what could amount to fishing expeditions.

But the newly disclosed e-mail messages offer a competing view, showing that, privately, some F.B.I. agents have felt hamstrung by their inability to get approval for using new powers under the Patriot Act, which was passed weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

One internal F.B.I. message, sent in October 2003, criticized the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review at the Justice Department, which reviews and approves terrorist warrants, as regularly blocking requests from the F.B.I. to use a section of the antiterrorism law that gave the bureau broader authority to demand records from institutions like banks, Internet providers and libraries.

"While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from OIPR's failure to let us use the tools given to us," read the e-mail message, which was sent by an unidentified F.B.I. official. "This should be an OIPR priority!!!"

The bureau turned the e-mail messages over to the Electronic Privacy Information Center as part of a lawsuit brought by the group under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking material on the F.B.I.'s use of anti-terrorism powers. The group provided the material to The New York Times.

…
As part of the lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a federal court has ordered the F.B.I. to turn over 1,500 pages of material to the privacy information group every two weeks.

An earlier collection of F.B.I. documents, released by the group in October, showed numerous violations of internal procedure and sometimes federal law by the bureau in its handling of surveillance and investigative matters. In some cases, for instance, agents had extended surveillance operations and investigations for months without getting required approval from supervisors.

In the most recent batch of material, an F.B.I. memorandum sent in March 2004 said the process for getting the Justice Department to improve demands for business records would be "greatly improved" because of a change in procedure allowing the bureau to "bypass" the department's intelligence office, which normally reviews all such requests.

But officials at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. said they were unaware of any such change in procedure and that all bureau requests for business record were still reviewed and approved by the Justice Department.

A separate e-mail message, sent in May 2004 with the subject header "Miracles," mockingly celebrated the fact that the Justice Department had approved an F.B.I. request for records under the so-called library provision.

"We got our first business record order signed today!" the message said. "It only took two and a half years."

In its latest public accounting of its use of the library provision, which falls under Section 215 of the antiterrorism law, the Justice Department said in April that it had used the law 35 times since late 2003 to gain access to information on apartment leasing, driver's licenses, financial records and other data in intelligence investigations. ”

Here's a theory…

The FBI isn't being denied access to what they want because of bureaucratic timidity, but because as our unofficial secret police they've got a demonstrable tendency to demonize political dissenters while ignoring evidence of actual crimes.

I'll bet the loudest complainanta are the very people who saw no significance in a bunch of Saudi's, Egyptians, and Morrocans in flight schools, who disciplined the whistleblowers who pointed out lax security and conflict of interest in the FBI's analysis division. The people who think they know who the dangerous people are, the evidence be “damned.”

So here's a few kudos to the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, for not “embarrassing” the bureau and applying restraint to a law that goes too far.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/national/nationalspecial3/11patriot.html

What We Did Not Hear

“We did not hear that the war in Iraq, already one of the costliest wars in American history, is a running sore. We did not hear that it has taken more than 2,000 precious American lives and countless - because we do not count them - Iraqi civilian lives. We did not hear that the struggle has dragged on longer than our involvement in either World War I or the Spanish-American War, or that by next spring it will be even longer than the Korean War.

And we did not hear how or when the president plans to bring our forces back home - no facts, no numbers on America troop withdrawals, no dates, no reference to our dwindling coalition, no reversal of his disdain for the United Nations, whose help he still expects.…

Each month that America continues its occupation facilitates Al Qaeda's recruitment of young Islamic men and women as suicide bombers, the one weapon against which our open society has no sure defense. The president says we should support our troops by staying the course; but who is truly willing to support our troops by bringing them safely home?

The responsibility for devising an exit plan rests primarily not with the war's opponents, but with the president who hastily launched a pre-emptive invasion without enough troops to secure Iraq's borders and arsenals, without enough armor to protect our forces, without enough allied support and without adequate plans for either a secure occupation or a timely exit.”

Responsibility? There is no one more irresponsible than someone who can never admit a mistake.

Here's an apt cliché.

When you see light at the end of the tunnel, make sure you're not standing on rails.

Furthermore …

When you're heading the wrong way, turn around.

When you're in a hole, stop digging.

If you're going to make people disappear, or redefine torture to not include whatever abuse you're currently using. If you manipulate the press at home and abroad, then don't claim to be promoting ‘democracy.’…

What Would J.F.K. Have Done?
By THEODORE C. SORENSEN and ARTHUR SCHLESINGER Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/opinion/04sorensen.html?pagewanted=all

How Broadcast Television Will Survive in an On-Demand World

“November 2005 may have been the month when the major broadcast networks finally 'got' the Internet.

On November 7th, both CBS and NBC cut deals with digital television providers to allow viewers to buy 99-cent downloads of a few popular shows.

Later that week, CNN rolled out a 'final beta' of CNN Pipeline, its streaming media service that delivers unique content via the Web.

Meanwhile, ISP-cum-portal AOL began offering a range of television shows in a digital format on the Web, while Tivo incorporated Yahoo's interactivity with its cable-box service.

Earlier this year, Yahoo also announced they had hired popular video journalist Kevin Sites to report on war zones across the world.

Industry pundits agreed that traditional broadcast networks were busily searching out new revenue streams to buffer falling TV ad returns, while portals were capitalizing on increased broadband connectivity and Internet fluency among consumers.

"The computer has crashed into the Internet," said Brian L. Roberts, CEO of Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable operator, to BusinessWeek.
”

He sure a s hell doesn't ‘get it.’

Nor does Sony, the RIAA or the MPAA, but that's all right. The internet's got them.

They're busy fighting the last war. Their trenches and pillboxes are in place. But the net will trat them as damage and the packets will route around them and all their schemes will in the end lead to unconditional surrender.

We will become the media, because the computers are the presses, the

stations, the studios, and we own them. The barriers to entry get lower. Year by year, day by day, and even, minute by minute. Storage is virtually free. New distribution systems are becoming dominant, and they are also ours.

Time is running out for strategies of obstruction. The blitzkrieg has already bypassed them.

http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1895,1891810,00.asp

Does Torture Work?

“Erroneous information connecting Iraq and Al Qaeda—and used to bolster support for military action against Iraq—was likely the result of torture.

Newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency report—released last Friday by Michigan Senator Carl Levin—show that DIA analysts had doubts about the evidence provided by an Al Qaeda member held prisoner by U.S. personnel.

The New York Times' Douglas Jehl writes:
The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The story of al-Libi's capture and interrogation has been in the news before (as noted by Laura Rozen and Atrios). In June, Newsweek described al-Libi as "the subject of a bitter feud between the FBI and the CIA over how to interrogate terror suspects." The FBI favored "a carrots-and-no-sticks approach," the Newsweek report explained, while some in the CIA favored "bolder methods." After initially being questioned by FBI officers, al-Libi was handed over to the CIA and taken to Cairo, where he was apparently subjected to "bolder methods" and subsequently produced his false testimony about ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

In July's American Prospect, reporter Jason Vest (a 2003 Dart Ochberg Fellow) took an in-depth look at the FBI's approach, interviewing retired veteran FBI agent Jack Cloonan.

Vest writes:
Based on his experiences interviewing Islamist radicals everywhere from New York City to Khartoum, Cloonan believes that interrogations can gather intelligence that’s both operationally actionable and court admissible (“nothing that shocks the conscience of the court,” as he puts it), and holds that torture -- by hands American or foreign -- is rarely ever useful or necessary. Cloonan and a New York Police Department detective secured actionable intelligence from a suspect in the foiled millennium-bombing plot in just six hours on December 30, 1999 -- by following FBI procedure, and by encouraging a suspect to pray during his Ramadan fast. The suspect even agreed to place calls to his confederates, which led to their speedy arrests.

Cloonan cited al-Libi's case as an example of "how uninformed and counterproductive notions have come to dominate the post–9-11 environment." Cloonan told Vest that FBI agents were getting good results using non-coercive methods—"... they start building rapport. And he starts talking about Reid and Moussaoui. They’re getting good stuff ..."—but then the CIA took over:

What Cloonan’s agents told him happened next blew his mind. “My guys told me that a Toyota Tundra with a box in the back pulls up to the building,” he recalls. “CIA of?cers come in, start shackling al-Libi up. Right before they duct tape his mouth, he tells our guys, ‘I know this isn’t your fault.’ And as he’s standing there, chained and gagged, this CIA guy gets up in his face and tells al-Libi he’s going to fuck his mother. And then off he apparently goes to Cairo, in a box.”

Cloonan says CIA of?cials he later spoke with furiously denied al-Libi was actually put in the box. But he seems to consider this at best a matter of hairsplitting, as there was no question as to what kind of situation al-Libi was being delivered to in Egypt.

Related: From May 2004, a Dart Center article, "Bad Apples, Bad Command, or Both?" looks at the psychological roots of atrocities. Experts on war crimes and war psychology discount the notion that abuse and torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib was the work of a few "bad apples." ”

‘’

…

Frontline: The Torture Question [Real Player, pdf, Windows Media Player]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/

Experts and pundits continue to debate the myriad of strategies deployed by the United States in the effort to combat terrorism around the world and internally. The Frontline program on PBS has created this website to complement a special edition of their show. This show focused on the question of whether torture is a viable way to obtain effective results in combating terrorism. Visitors can dive right in by watching the program in its entirety, or they may also wish to visit one of the sections providing supplementary information. One particularly compelling area is the section that provides information on how the current administration of President George W. Bush has created a protocol for conducting such investigations. Another very useful section is titled “Behind the Wire” and offers visitors an inside look
into the
U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Perhaps the most moving and intense portion of the site is the discussion section, where visitors can leave feedback and read the impassioned opinions of others who have seen the program.

>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2005. http://scout.wisc.edu/

If Persistance is Devilish are We Becoming Satanic?

When you justify with belief instead of fact, you've already done more damage than Al Qaeda could ever do to a society you nor they will ever comprehend.

“In early 2002, the Bush administration got word from a foreign intelligence service—thought to be Italy’s—that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Niger. Mr Cheney’s office took an interest, seeking to consolidate the case for war. It asked the CIA to follow up, and Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat, was sent to Africa. He found no evidence for the claim, and after the war wrote as much, angrily, in the New York Times. In the ensuing flap, two “senior administration officials” talked to Bob Novak, a columnist. He wrote that Mr Wilson was sent at the request of his wife, Valerie (née Plame), a CIA “operative” working on weapons of mass destruction. Ms Plame had been an undercover spy. Though by the time of Mr Novak's column she had been based safely in Virginia for several years, the article nonetheless blew her cover. The resulting investigation sought to determine whether someone broke the law in outing her.From The Economist Global Agenda http://www.economist.com/agenda/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=5104737”

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’

The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence. Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts , http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/politics/06intel.ready.html?hp&ex=1131339600&amp;amp;amp;amp;en=0d091794b0c89f27&ei=5094&partner=homepage

If Watergate taught Americans that it wasn't the crime but the coverup. The Plame game should teach us that when you want to believe something in the worst way, you can tell untruths in the worst way.

When you decide you aren't going to let details like the facts or the truth get in the way of what you decide is right. When you've predetermined the outcome of what's supposed to be an independent investigation. You've already chosen coverup and crime.

When you justify with belief instead of fact, you've already done more damage than Al Qaeda could ever do to a society you nor they will ever comprehend.

Alfred Ingram…

All Bennett Did Was Say It

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/politics/01bennett.html Changes made November 1,2005

http://www.archive.org/download/All_Bennett_Did_Was_Say_It/AllBennettDidWasSayIt.mp3

Alex Wong/Getty Images

“William J. Bennett, the former Republican secretary of education, said that the nation's crime rate could potentially be reduced through aborting blacks.

Mr. Bennett, a secretary of education in the Reagan administration and drug czar in the first Bush administration who has become an author and radio host, said in a broadcast this week that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." He said that would be a "morally reprehensible thing to do."

Under fire from Democrats and civil rights groups, Mr. Bennett defended his remarks on Thursday as a hypothetical argument that moral questions like the abortion debate could not be linked to pragmatic issues like the crime rate.

"One could just as easily have said you could abort all children and prevent all crime to show the absurdity of the proposition," he said in his broadcast.”

A lot of America thinks it.

They think most people on welfare are black when most are white.

They think most rapists are black, when the average rapist is a white male in his twenties.

Most of them think they know someone who has lost a job to affirmative action, or even believe they've personally lost out.

Yet the relative unemployment ratios haven't changed since we've been measuring them.

Category for category, blacks are, and always have been, unemployed at twice the rate of whites.

But that's not what people know.

So what did Bennett know and where on earth did he get his information?

Does this have anything to do with the response to Katrina?

I could talk all day about the difference between racism and bigotry, but I'd rather use an analogy.

White people react to the label ‘racist’, the way victims of Katrina reacted to the label ‘refugee.’ The connotation of the word, it's implicit intentionality, has made it so offensive that it's lost its usefulness as a description of behavior. It's useless to say that you're not talking about peoples' intentions.

Bennett wasn't trying to be bigoted.

He did, indisputably, have a set of assumptions about black people that drew his foot into his mouth as relentlessly as gravity draws a damaged plane to earth. Like most of us, he'll defend his assumptions ferociously. After all, we're not just questioning his judgment, but, however indirectly, his oldest, most cherished , relationships and memories.

Alfred Ingram

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/politics/01bennett.html

Imagine 20 Years of This - New York Times

…if science is correct, we will be repeatedly reminded what "a force of nature" implies. Meteorologists argue that we have begun a new era of Atlantic storms pumped up by hot gulf waters, a cycle that oscillates in decades. The devastating hurricanes of the 1960's like Betsy and Camille were followed by a lull from 1970 to 1995 as cooler waters stifled the wrath of adolescent tropical storms. Now the streams of warm water that encourage rapid evaporation and spiraling winds are back.

If these are just the first dark puffs of a new kind of summer weather that will prevail for the next 20 years, can we possibly be ready for what is to follow?

“The absurdity is that a dangerous squall can now be tracked almost from its birth off the coast of Africa, but its victims still cannot get out of its way. Despite our amazing ability to foretell the meteorological future, greed and sloth may have overpowered most sane efforts to plan for it.

Highways have clotted as families flee, and some of those without cars end up with nowhere to go but their rooftops. Evacuation plans for hospitals and nursing homes have been washed away by worst-case scenarios that no one envisioned - buildings marooned by deep water and beset by gunfire.

Encouraged by federal flood insurance, islands whose very existence is ephemeral have been lined with vacation homes. Low-lying urban neighborhoods with their asphalt toes resting in swamps have been built below levees too fragile to hold. Hurricane-resistant houses have been designed, but their squat forms have proven unpopular with customers craving ocean vistas.

We imagine ourselves to be a can do people. Elect a won't do administration that doesn't even believe in the job it campained so hard for. Why are we surprised that it creates can't do bureaucracy. It doesn't believe government has a right to life. What the market doesn't do shouldnt be done.

Marshes that once absorbed storms have been allowed to die off and sink, leaving stretches of open water that can be flung shoreward by storm surges. Pipelines designed to flex have snapped - Katrina's damage may include 10 major spills.

Even the economy, unable to flee, has become a victim. The nation's refineries have been concentrated in the threatened hurricane belt. Gas-guzzlers and rising prices are beating into the heads of drivers the nature of the laws of supply and demand. Insurance companies have been rocked, struggling airlines have gasped at their jet fuel bills. The damage so far already could reach $200 billion. ”
‘’

…As a society,I'm afraid our imagination fails. Again, and again, and yet, despite evidence, against all reason, again. We imagine ourselves to be a can do people. Elect a won't do administration that doesn't even believe in the job it campained so hard for. Why are we surprised that it creates can't do bureaucracy. It doesn't believe government has a right to life. What the market doesn't do shouldnt be done

Alfred Ingram…

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/weekinreview/25mcne.html?pagewanted=all

NOLA.com blogs and forums help save lives after Katrina

The real shame is that the outstanding coverage of the response to Hurricane Katrina is inconsistent.

By Mark Glaser

“OJR: Did you ever consider the possibility that you wouldn't have a print newspaper?

Donley: No, it neveroccurredd to us, we never discussed it. The idea was to use the Web to give breaking information to people and then the full stories would be in the newspaper. When we heard this would be a Category 4 or 5, that had an effect on us, on the number of people we would keep around. Normally, I would take two people with me into the hurricane bunker but this time I just went in by myself. People really needed to get their families out. We had a smaller staff than we normally would.

The electricity went out very early on Monday morning [August 29] and it wasn't settled until 8 or 9 at night that there wouldn't be a paper out. But we wanted to put all the newspaper coverage of the hurricane online because of the massive number of evacuees who wouldn't be able to see the newspaper anyway. We didn't know ahead of time but put it up online for that purpose late in the day.

In the hurricane bunker we never lost electricity or Internet connectivity up until the time we evacuated. But we lost the library system, and [the newspaper editors] lost the ability to print stories to the XML depositories, they lost the ability to transfer photos. We started to put together crude transfer systems on the fly, but in the end we just started pasting the final print versions into the Weblog.

OJR: How did you make the decision to put literally all your print stories into the blog?

Donley: We have used a blog-style situation ever since Hurricane Georges for news updates and breaking news stuff, but never with the intention to run the print stories. They usually combine the tidbits into print stories.

We were running two blogs live. One was from the city desk and they were funneling news from their reporters. And I was running the NOLA View blog, first what we were experiencing in the newsroom and that morphed into reports from the police scanner. I'm used to listening to scanner traffic in one ear and taking notes on it, but this is something we'd never heard before. The only parallel was scanner tapes from the 9/11 emergency. It was that kind of stuff. I could actually hear phone calls patched through, and you could hear the water going up in someone's attic, and you could hear the cops crying, "I can't get to them, they're dropping off the roof one at a time."

Eventually people started sending requests for rescues. So that blog morphed from my little color thing to people reporting other people trapped and some of the agencies using it to rescue people. I have some remote producers monitoring that full-time and going through rescue requests.

OJR: I heard from a number of people posting on your blog that it helped save the lives of people they knew.

Networks, at least the uncentralized ones, just worked. Both the people and the protocols routed around the damage and, as a result lives were saved. FEMA, centered in Homeland Security, fell apart. In part, because the center tried to hold all authority… Al Ingram

Donley: Necessity is the mother of invention. We do know that this Lt. Gen. Honore who oversees the military operation, one of his aides who has a group of people who have been monitoring the forum continually and taking notes and sending out rescue missions based on that information. In fact, one time we had some server issues, and he wrote us frantically saying, "Get this up as soon as you can, people's lives depend on it. We've already saved a number of lives because of it."

OJR: I can't think of another online forum that's saved lives like that before.

Donley: It was weird because we couldn't figure out where these pleas were coming from. We'd get e-mails from Idaho, there's a guy at this address and he's in the upstairs bedroom of his place in New Orleans. And then we figured out that even in the poorest part of town, people have a cell phone. And it's a text-enabled cell phone. And they were sending out text messages to friends or family, and they were putting it in our forums or sending it in e-mails to us.

The cell service didn't work, but they could send text. They're saying now that the body counts won't be as bad as they thought, and I know at least some of that is that people figured out how to hack the system, to use this kludge to save people's lives.”

…Networks, at least the uncentralized ones, just worked. Both the people and the protocols routed around the damage and, as a result lives were saved. FEMA, centered in Homeland Security, fell apart. In part, because the center tried to hold all authority to the point of refusing to act when explicit total authority wasn't transferred from the governor to them in triplicate.

Food, medicine, even diesel fuel sent to supply a hospitals emergency generator was confiscated, not allowed to go through. Buses sent to evacuate desperate people were halted. Truckloads of supplies were blocked. It's not that the local authorities didn't make deadly mistakes and FEMA did. It's the nature of the mistakes, why they confiscated supplies, why they cut the sheriff's line, why they held up search and rescue volunteers, that must be examined.

Security was put ahead of human need in a natural catastrophe. Management swallowed emergency. I think Brown was the smallest part of the problem. What the agency was structured to do will turn out to be a lot more important.

This administrations theory of governance will be most important of all. Unless the press and congress blow this one too.

Unfortunately, that would be totally consistent. The real shame is that the outstanding coverage of the response to Hurricane Katrina is inconsistent.…

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050913glaser/

Some Things Bear Repeating

More US Military dead in combat than being reported.

US Military Report: The High Death Rates exposed by Brian Harring

The Bush Butcher’s Bill: Officially, 52 US Military Deaths in Iraq from 1 through 15 May, 2005 – Official Total of 1,803 US Dead to date (and rising)

U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German hospitals have not previously been counted. They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005. The ongoing, underreporting of the dead in Iraq, is not accurate. The DoD is deliberately reducing the figures. A review of many foreign news sites show that actual deaths are far higher than the newly reduced ones. Iraqi civilian casualties are never reported but International Red Cross, Red Crescent and UN figures indicate that as of 1 January 2005, the numbers are
just under 100,000.
by Brian Harring, Domestic Intelligence Reporter

Note: There is excellent reason to believe that the Department of Defense is deliberately not reporting a significant number of the dead in Iraq.…

“The Bush administration is an Accessory Before the Fact to Murder.
If we don't act on this we're Accessories after the fact.
http://conceptual.blogspot.com/2004/10/concept-accessory-before-fact-to.html

Link: http://www.audblog.com/media/1468/107899.mp3

The Natural Talent of a Burning Bush

I think we all know a “Mr. Fix-it.” You know the type. They're the guys (and yes, they always seem to be guys) who'll burn down the house lighting the stove. They've got a million and one ideas for improving the world (all wrong), and they're natural born salesmen.

Link: http://www.audblog.com/media/1468/110098.mp3

I've Been Interviewed — Audio and Text Part 1

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

http://conceptual.blogspot.com/2005/04/ive-been-interviewed-audio-and-text.html

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

I've Been Interviewed — Audio and Text Part 2”

…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.

The government gets away with these huge lies because they claim, falsely, that only soldiers actually killed on the ground in Iraq are reported. The dying and critically wounded are listed as en route to military hospitals outside of the country and not reported on the daily postings. Anyone who dies just as the transport takes off from the Baghdad airport is not listed and neither are those who die in the US military
hospitals. Their families are certainly notified that their son, husband, brother or lover was dead and the bodies, or what is left of them (refrigeration is very bad in Iraq what with constant power outages) are shipped home, to Dover AFB. You ought to realize that President Bush personally ordered that no
pictures be taken of the coffined and flag-draped dead under any circumstances. He claims that this is to comfort the bereaved relatives but is designed to keep the huge number of arriving bodies secret. Any civilian, or military personnel, taking pictures will be jailed at once and prosecuted. Bush has never attended
any kind of a memorial service for his dead soldiers and never will. He is terrified some parent might curse him in front of the press or, worse, attack him.

WASHINGTON August 5, 2005
Pentagon Agrees to Issue Photos of Coffins of Iraq War Dead
By JOHN FILES (NYT) News
Under the terms of a legal settlement announced on Thursday, the Pentagon will make available "as expeditiously as possible" some photographs of the coffins of service members killed in Iraq. The agreement runs counter to a longstanding Pentagon policy that bars the public release of such photographs. But in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, the Pentagon has already released hundreds of such photographs this year, and it agreed under the settlement to continue to do so.

The agreement responded to a Freedom of Information Act suit filed in October in Federal District Court here that sought all photographs and video images that showed coffins or similar items that held the remains of American military personnel at Dover Air Force Base, Del., beginning in February 2003.

The Pentagon has strictly enforced a policy barring news photographs showing the coffins. That policy has been in place since the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and President Bush has said it protects the privacy of the families of the dead.

Ralph Begleiter, a journalism professor at the University of Delaware who was a lead plaintiff in the current suit, said the Pentagon's agreement to release the photographs represented a "significant victory for the honor of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in war for their country, as well as for their families, for all service personnel and for the American people."

The Pentagon issued a statement, saying, "As with all information, including images, the Department of Defense has an obligation and a responsibility to strike a balance between our strong desire to be as transparent as possible and the legitimate concerns to protect the privacy of military families and as necessary, operational security."

But there was no indication that the government would permit news organizations to begin taking such photographs.

Under President Bill Clinton, the policy against taking such photographs was not rigorously enforced, and Mr. Clinton took part in numerous ceremonies that honored dead service members.…

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/conceptual?id=11

Why?

“The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield.
The Bursting Point
By DAVID BROOKS”

“AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.

As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.

After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."

This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda.…
Falluja Floods the Superdome
By FRANK RICH”

“"Why didn't they leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me, "Why do people live in such a place?"

Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed, jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds.

Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one another? Because the faces of those drowning and the faces of those looting were largely black faces, race came into the picture. What kind of people are these, the people of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and then turn on one another?

Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.

What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled.

And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop the looting and care for the refugees.

And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That's my question.
Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?
By ANNE RICE”

“THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn.

In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race and class found themselves slack-jawed.…
What Happens to a Race Deferred
By JASON DePARLE”

…

“They waited, and they waited, and then they waited some more in the 90-degree heat, as many as 5,000 people huddled at a highway underpass on Interstate 10, waiting for buses that never arrived to take them away from the storm they could not escape.

Babies cried. The sick huddled in the shade in wheelchairs or rested on cots. Dawn Ray, 40, was in tears, looking after an autistic niece who had soiled herself and her son who is blind and has cerebral palsy. A few others, less patient, simply started walking west with nowhere to go, like a man pushing a
bike in one hand and pulling a shopping cart in another. But most just waited with resigned patience - sad, angry, incredulous, scared, exhausted, people who seemed as discarded as the bottles of water and food containers that littered the ground.

"Disease, germs," one woman, Claudette Paul, said, covering her mouth with a cloth, her voice smoldering with anger. "We need help. We don't live like this in America."

New Orleans has always existed in a delicate balance between land and water, chaos and order, black and white, the very rich and the very poor. It has been the lacy ironwork of French Quarter balconies, the magical shops and galleries on Royal Street and the magisterial cuisine not just at Galatoire's or Mr. B's or Commander's Palace but also at humble po-boy joints and neighborhood restaurants in every part of town.

But it has also been a place of crushing poverty, of dreary housing projects and failing schools, where crime and violence have been an incessant shadow in daily life, as much a part of the local sensibility as the smothering blanket of heat and humidity.

This week, bit by bit, that delicate balance came completely undone. Water took over earth when levees broke, putting 80 percent of the city under water. The mix of fatalism and bravado that allowed the city's biggest fear - a killer hurricane - to become the marquee drink of Bourbon Street gave way to terror and despair and horrifying spasms of looting and violence. New Orleans became unrecognizable not just physically, but psychologically as well. Faced with a disaster of biblical proportions, everything fell apart, and government was either overmatched or slow to the task.…
A Delicate Balance Is Undone in a Flash, and a Battered City Waits
By PETER APPLEBOME, CHRISTOPHER DREW, JERE LONGMAN and ANDREW
REVKIN”