WASHINGTON (AP) - Army Secretary Thomas White said Thursday he is "appalled and angered" by the scandals that drove Enron Corp. into bankruptcy but denied any role in or knowledge of wrongdoing while he was an Enron executive.
In testy exchanges with skeptical senators, White repeatedly said he had played no part in manipulating California energy prices and knew nothing of other improprieties while he helped run an Enron subsidiary.
"Thousands of us who worked at that company were proud of what we accomplished," White said, testifying voluntarily and under oath before the Senate Commerce Committee. "I am ashamed of what has happened to that corporation."
He told senators he shared their outrage and their desire "to hold people accountable who were responsible" for any illegal conduct.
Although White said after the hearing he had no plans to resign his Pentagon ( news - web sites) post, Sen. Barbara Boxer ( news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., urged him to do just that in a letter late Thursday.
"I believe it is in the best interest of the country for you to step down as the Secretary of the Army as I believe today's hearing will spark more investigations and more distraction from your crucial duties," Boxer wrote.
Boxer said she was not satisfied with White's testimony: "I found him evasive, argumentative, not contrite about what happened, not forthcoming."
Enron's December bankruptcy was the first of a series of business scandals that have rocked the stock market and prompted Congress to push for passage of legislation that would crack down on corporate fraud and accounting irregularities.
Democrats are trying to use the scandals as an election-year issue against Republicans, pointing to President Bush ( news - web sites)'s close ties to corporate leaders and the large number of former business executives, such as White and Vice President Dick Cheney ( news - web sites), in his administration.
Friday, July 19, 2002
WASHINGTON, July 18 — The Republican leaders of the House said today that they planned to give the Bush administration almost all of what it wanted in a new Department of Homeland Security, proposing to restore to the department most of the agencies that committees had voted to remove.
Republican leaders had said all along that they intended to short-circuit the expected opposition from committee chairmen and rank-and-file members who were trying to maintain jurisdiction over agencies they have long overseen. A draft of a bill agreed to today closely hews to the changes the White House had said it would accept.
If approved by a special committee on homeland security this week and the full House next week, the bill would represent a significant victory for the administration, although it would clash with legislation being prepared in the Senate.
The ultimate shape of the department will not be clear until it is negotiated in a conference between the two chambers, probably in September. With the outcome still in flux, the Bush administration today exposed problems at its Transportation Security Administration by forcing its director out of his job.
The unexpected firing of John W. Magaw, only six months after the agency was established to protect travelers following the Sept. 11 attacks, came after weeks of skepticism from many in Congress that the agency was moving aggressively enough to take over passenger screening at the nation's airports and searching checked bags for bombs.
Today's agreement on a draft of the bill came at the same time as a joint conference committee agreed on an emergency $28.9 billion spending bill for the war in Afghanistan, new domestic security needs and assistance for New York City. The bill had been delayed for months because of partisan infighting and differences with the administration on the total amount, which Congress wanted to raise. Half of the money would go to the Defense Department. The bill includes $5.5 billion for New York and $205 million to keep Amtrak running through the fall.
WASHINGTON - Urging an open debate on whether the United States should use force to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter on Thursday introduced a resolution to put Congress on record on the issue.
"There is a need for the American people to understand the issues involved in the use of military force against Iraq," said Specter, of Pennsylvania.
"Consideration by the Congress on these key issues would provide a basis for international understanding of our position and perhaps even support in some quarters," he said.
Specter joins a growing number of lawmakers -- both Republicans and Democrats -- who want Congress to have a voice in whether the United States takes military action against Iraq.
Bush has said Washington would use all the tools at its disposal to topple Saddam and has branded Iraq part of an "axis of evil" supporting terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction. Iraq has denied the U.S. charges.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, plans hearings on Iraq in September.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, recently said he was concerned that the administration might use a $10 billion contingency fund it wants to conduct its war on terrorism to invade Iraq.
Specter, in remarks on the Senate floor, said with a congressional resolution supporting use of force against Iraq, "the international community might well be reassured that the U.S. military action was not the decision of just one man, even though he is president of the United States."
Passing the resolution could present "a united front with the president backed by congressional authorization and American public opinion on an issue where most, if not virtually all, of the international community is in opposition," he said.
High-level State Department officials have circulated e-mails accusing Rep. Dan Burton and Bush administration officials of McCarthyism and neo-Nazism for criticizing the visa system's failure to keep the September 11 terrorists out of the country.
The internal e-mails, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times, come as the State Department announced that it has reprimanded two staffers for earlier e-mails criticizing a member of Congress.
Chuck Keil, the consul general in Rome, complained to several State Department officials — including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman — that congressional critics have been saying terrorists "were able to enter the United States due to lack of vigilance or downright negligence."
"All of this smacks of the days of Senator Joe McCarthy, when a witchhunt conducted in the name of protecting Americans from the communist menace ruined the careers of Foreign Service Officers who had allegedly lost China to the Reds, or else helped Communist and Communist sympathizers obtain visas to enter the United States," he wrote.
Mr. Burton, Indiana Republican and chairman of the Government Reform Committee, "slanders [ousted Consular Affairs chief] Mary Ryan, the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Civil and Foreign Service employees of the State in Washington and overseas through a litany of half-truths and outright canards that would have done [McCarthy lawyer] Roy Cohn proud," Mr. Keil wrote.
One recipient of the Keil e-mail, Colombia A. Barrosse, is another consular official. She replied in an e-mail to some, but not all, of the same people that firing the popular Miss Ryan — after 36 years in the Foreign Service — makes it more likely that the visa function will be removed from State and given to the new Department of Homeland Security.
"We assume Mary's replacement will not be a career officer with a balanced approach but a neo-Nazi who views us as incompetent or criminal," wrote Mrs. Barrosse, who works in Washington. She declined to speak to The Washington Times.
Judea and Samaria police have arrested a reservist major in a widening probe of Israelis suspected of selling weapons to Palestinians.
The major was not identified.
According to reports Wednesday, Oded Molay, 21, a resident of the Adora settlement, was arrested Tuesday night for his suspected involvement in the scheme.
Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ordered Molay held Wednesday for another nine days.
On Sunday police arrested two pairs of brothers serving in the IDF, from the West Bank Jewish communities of Adora and Telem. They are also suspected of selling weapons to enemies, the Itim news agency said.
A Palestinian of the Tanzim from Tarkumiya, a village near Adora, has also been arrested in the case.
The Palestinian had a forged Israeli identity card, and is suspected to have been buying weapons from Israelis living in Judea and Samaria for the past three years.
The Israeli brothers told police other soldiers sold them weapons. They reportedly admitted to selling arms to other Palestinians still being sought by police.
On Sunday, Moshe Cohen of Adora was arrested after 1,000 bullets were found in his car. Police found another 3,000 bullets and various military equipment in a warehouse in but did not find any weapons. Cohen and four other suspects were arrested.
An IDF reserves officer was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of being involved in the sale of ammunition and weapons to Palestinians. Two days ago, four soldiers, residents of the settlements of Adora and Telem, were arrested for allegedly selling ammunition to a Palestinian in the Hebron area. Police suspect that some of the ammunition may have been used in the terrorist attack in Adora in April, in which four Israelis were murdered in their homes.
Senior officials familiar with the case believe that additional arrests will be made. They told Maariv that the sale of ammunition to Palestinian terrorists uncovered by the police was "only the tip of the iceberg," and said that they expected "additional discoveries that would shock everyone."
Military Police sources told Maariv that the sale of
ammunition to Palestinian terrorists uncovered by the police was "only the tip of the iceberg," and said that they expected "additional discoveries that would shock everyone."
A vote by the full House on the recommendation is expected by early next week. A two-thirds vote is needed to expel.
If expelled, Traficant, 61, would become the second member of Congress to be kicked out since the Civil War.
The unanimous vote by the 10-member House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct came hours after a defiant Traficant appeared before the committee and urged members to stay any decision on his punishment and to hear from witnesses who could testify on his behalf.
"Otherwise, I will break out of prison and I'll make a neck tie out of some these bureaucrats," he said.
2 recent attacks prompt questions on viability of occupation
JERUSALEM Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's monthlong military clampdown on Palestinian cities and villages in the West Bank faced growing criticism from across the political spectrum Thursday after two terrorist attacks in as many days left 11 Israeli residents dead and prompted renewed debate about how Israel can best protect itself.
A bus ambush Tuesday outside a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the coordinated blasts by two suicide bombers on a busy Tel Aviv pedestrian promenade Wednesday came just as the more intrepid Israelis were beginning to return to restaurants and cafés following nearly a month without a suicide bombing or armed attack.
The renewed violence sparked recriminations from politicians and citizens, newspaper headlines and radio talk shows, many declaring Sharon's military occupation of the West Bank a failure, despite repeated claims by his government that the tough military polices were increasing security.
That judgment, which many international observers have long pronounced, could increase the pressure on Sharon to accept new approaches to end the long-simmering conflict at the same time that officials from key countries - including the United States - are debating fresh paths to a peace accord.
"Only a couple of months ago Sharon demanded seven days of quiet" before he would reopen talks with the Palestinians, "and we had 26 days and it was never exploited," said Avraham Burg, the chairman of the Israeli Parliament, known as the Knesset, and a member of the generally left-leaning Labor Party.
"Why? Because of the working assumption of the right wing in the government that reoccupation can solve the Palestinian problem. It was proven wrong."
But criticism of Sharon was just as vitriolic from more hawkish politicians and citizens. "In the Middle East, you have to speak the language that is understood - the language of force," said Michael Kliener, a member of the Knesset from the rightist-Herut Party. "Israel has to do what the British did in Dresden, what the Americans did in Tora Bora, or what NATO did in Sarejevo. Why doesn't the Army drop leaflets" over the Palestinian territories, "saying, 'We're going to start bombing in three hours,' and whoever wants to can escape?"
Government officials defended Sharon's policy, under which thousands of Israeli soldiers have reoccupied the West Bank, enforcing tough curfews in the largest cities and confining as many as 700,000 Palestinians to their homes. Newly erected barricades and check posts have placed hundreds of smaller communities under siege.
The Ministry of Defence is planning a mass mobilisation of key reservists beginning in September, heightening expectation that the United States and Britain are stepping up preparations for an attack on Iraq.
British troops have also been pulled out of Nato's ACE Mobile Force rapid reaction corps and British involvement in a large number of exercises has been cancelled or scaled down to leave troops ready for the attack on Iraq.
The Prime Minister has strongly backed the idea of a pre-emptive strike on Iraq and refused to commit the Government to a vote in the House of Commons on the deployment of British forces.
British military planners are working on the basis that Britain will provide a very large force, including an armoured division, a naval task force and substantial numbers of combat aircraft.
The decision to pull out of the Nato rapid reaction force was taken at the same time as it was announced that the bulk of British forces were being withdrawn from Afghanistan and Bosnia.
It means that the 1,500 British troops previously earmarked for the force will not now be taking part in two major exercises this autumn, in Germany and Ukraine.
In another move to free forces for an attack on Iraq, 3,000 members of Britain's main fighting force, 1 (UK) Armoured Division, have been withdrawn from a tank exercise in Poland. The MoD insisted that no decision had been made on Iraq but did not deny that planning was under way. "Any government department has contingency plans," a spokesman said.
Defence sources said the reservists who would be called up would cover key shortages such as pilots, medical staff, special forces, intelligence and signals.
WASHINGTON, July 18 (UPI) -- When will the Bush administration launch U.S. armed forces against Iraq in a bid to topple President Saddam Hussein? Bet on this year rather than next and sooner rather than later.
The conventional wisdom in Washington in recent months has been that no such attack is likely until well into next year. Of course, that may well be the case. Several detailed articles have appeared in major U.S. newspapers citing senior, unnamed Department of Defense officials as saying that this is their understanding.
These reports may be accurate, or they may be the American version of masrilovka -- the old Soviet term for strategic disinformation to misdirect an enemy. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who championed the actual creation of an explicit information unit in the Pentagon that would spread misleading stories as well as accurate ones, is known to have a passion for such things.
What is remarkable is that, if they are the latter, it is one of the leading hawks pushing for a pre-emptive offensive war against Iraq who may have blown the whistle on it.
Speaking on a PBS network documentary about Iraq last week, Richard Perle, the former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration who is also immensely influential with civilian Pentagon hawks in the current administration one, confidently predicted that when President George W. Bush gives his State of the Union message next year he would have "good news" to give the American people about Iraq.
For almost all the American people, the best news they could be given about Iraq would be that they did not have to go to war against it. But that clearly was not what Perle was thinking at all. By "good news" about Iraq he mean the elimination of Saddam and his government by the U.S. armed forces.
There are quite a number of straws in the wind to suggest that Perle, who enjoys immense influence with and access to Feith and to Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, knows what he is talking about.
First, the British government, the only major European ally that is enthusiastically supporting the Bush administration in its determination to bring down Saddam by direct military means, is quietly acting as if a war will come this fall or winter rather than not until next year.
Francois broke the curfew the other day. He didn't mean to, his car broke down just as the brief lull the Israelis allow for the Palestinians to stock up on food came to an end. We had to push it through the narrow alleys of Bethlehem, keeping a lookout for Israeli soldiers. The sweat that began to run down Francois' face was not just from the heat and exertion. His three small boys were in the back of the car.
"If you see a tank, just leave the car and run for it" someone hissed, giving us a quick helpful shove and rushing for cover. Trouble often flares when the curfew falls. Sometimes, children throw stones at the soldiers. Sometimes the soldiers open fire. Two children were killed last month when an Israeli tank fired a shell into a crowd as curfew fell.
Francois, a Palestinian Christian, allowed us into his home in Bethlehem this week to experience the curfew. When the news of this week's attacks by Palestinian militants broke, he was devastated. Before yesterday's Israeli government announcement, he already knew the attacks meant plans to ease the curfew would be dropped.
Like 700,000 Palestinians, Francois is cooped up inside his tiny four-room house with his three sons and his wife, Marie, 24 hours a day. It is a traditional Bethlehem house – at least there is a tiny open-air courtyard for the children to play in, and the thick walls keep out the worst of the heat. Thousands are not so fortunate.
The children cannot go to school, or go out to play. Francois used to work as a tour guide but there have been almost no tourists for two years. The only money arrives from Marie's relatives in Jordan.
On Tuesday, the curfew is lifted from 9am to 2pm. Francois has to get the children out of the house. He has to do enough shopping to last until the next break, which may not be for four days. Marie is sick, and cannot help.
He drops his youngest son, Louis, who is three, at a nursery run by local nuns. The other two boys, Patrick and Michel, he takes with him. He runs the local boy scout movement, and has to call at the centre. Three scouts are practising the bagpipes – a legacy of British rule – and making a fearful caterwauling.
The scouts are supposed to go on a trip to Italy in the autumn and Francois is racing through the paperwork, scrawling details from a pile of passports – though he knows the trip may be impossible if the curfew lasts that long.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people, and the West in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
Osama bin Laden, October, 2001 (quoted in NewsMax.com 2/1/02)
At 5 am in the morning on September 12, 2001 -- less than one day after the 9/11 Attack -- a half-dozen heavily-armed federal agents raided the home of Dr. Al-Hazmi in San Antonio, Texas. Without any search warrant, the agents ransacked his home, while his wife and young children (6 & 8) were held at gunpoint. Then -- without being charged with any crime -- Dr. Al-Hazmi was shackled and thrown naked into a freezing cold FBI holding cell. Even his eyeglasses and bronchitis medicine were taken away. Next, Al-Hazmi was flown to a New York prison, where he says he was repeatedly beaten while the FBI interrogated him.
One week later, he was finally allowed to talk to an attorney and learned the reason for his arrest: Dr. Al-Hazmi's name (the "Smith" of the Middle East) is similar to that of two 9/11 hijackers, and he had booked flights through Travelocity.com, which some 9/11 hijackers (along with a few million other people) had used.
On September 24th -- 12 days after he was arrested,Dr. Al-Hazmi was released -- without his belongings and without even an apology from the FBI. He says he may now have to quit his job and leave the U.S. because hisco-workers no longer trust him. (Source: "Justice Kept In the Dark," Newsweek,12-10-01, p. 41.)
Since September 11th, over 2,000 people, including many U.S. citizens, have been imprisoned by the FBI and police in the name of "fighting terrorism." Only two of them have been charged with a crime associated with 9/11. Many say they have been denied food and sleep, access to an attorney, and have even been beaten. The FBI has even called for legalizing torture of such "suspects."
Thursday, July 18, 2002
(YellowTimes.org) - Informing as part of an open society? Indeed, under Mr. Bush's proposed Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS for short) - a kind of national, atomic-mutation of Neighborhood Watch - an estimated four percent of Americans will join a long and glorious tradition of state-security informants.
The tradition of citizen informants has roots going back at least to the French Revolution. During the terror, citizens were encouraged to inform on neighbors and even children to inform on their parents. More than a few harmless people went to the guillotine just on the basis of a hateful neighbor denouncing them.
Of course, there was Stalin's immense bloodbath over two continents. Informants played an important part in his heavy industry of organized murder. And one recognizes other suggestive similarities to what's happening in America. When Stalin was ready to announce another purge, he often spoke indirectly of "wreckers," wreckers of the Revolution. Just this suggestion from his lips was enough to get the thugs and psychopaths busy about their work.
Has anyone noticed the paler-but-still-similar sense of the term "terrorists"? With the heavily-biased press in America, we have all been conditioned to have an immediate mental image of a terrorist: He's a swarthy fellow with a difficult Arabic or Persian name and a strange religion. Remember, if there is one thing America is good at, one thing at which it has no equal on the planet, it is marketing. And America has intensively marketed this image for years.
The informing tradition was carried on in societies as diverse as Nazi Germany, the East German Stasi, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the horrific youth brigades of China's Cultural Revolution.
My right-wing readers, yes I do have some, sometimes question how I can possibly ever associate America with ugly things like fascism. Well, the TIPS program and the Patriot Act, both deliberately bland names for insidious, dangerous things, is the word made flesh, so to speak.
I have in the past humorously observed the prevalence of insanity in America. I admit to using that term in a rather loosely-defined sense, but America is the land of Black Helicopters, alien abductions, Aryan churches, rattlesnake worship, speaking in tongues, and Texas.
You cannot live in America without discovering there also are a lot of angry people there. You see them on the streets, you meet them in stores, you experience them as neighbors. In your face. Mind your own business. Foul language. Indeed, I can attest to a fair sampling of such language in e-mail from my more perverse readers. Odd, don't you think, to send a person you've never met a disgustingly foul letter only because you don't agree with his column? And although I receive mail from many countries, the only source for this kind of stuff, I'm sorry to say, is America.
Israel has been rocked by the revelation that some of its soldiers may have been smuggling arms to the Palestinians, knowing that they could be turned on their own people.
Several Israelis, including a reserve major, have been arrested and military officials said they may be only "the tip of the iceberg".
The news followed Wednesday's double suicide bombing in Tel Aviv which killed an Israeli and two foreign workers, as well as the bombers.
The reserve officer allegedly sold thousands of bullets to four soldiers who then passed them on to Palestinian merchants.
Four Israelis living in two West Bank settlements were also arrested and interrogated over the alleged smuggling of weapons to Palestinians in the Hebron area over the past four years.
Police suspect that they also wore their uniforms to smuggle Palestinians into Israel in return for money.
"Their acts were not acts done in innocence," said an Israeli
detective, Ari Ben Lulu. "They knew exactly what the target of each bullet was. They exploited the trust the army put in them and I would call this treason."
He added: "Who knows if the bullets they sold are not the bullets with which civilians and children from Adora [a Jewish settlement] were killed and dozens of others."
Some police believe that they will eventually uncover a wider smuggling network that has
enabled Palestinians to buy
advanced weapons such as anti-tank missiles.
Intimate treasures, a sex shop in the resort town of Fort Walton Beach, is housed in a pink-and-blue, virtually windowless concrete building--just the kind of faux-cheery structure one finds in commercial strips throughout the Sun Belt. According to its website, the store specializes in sensual lingerie, erotic games, massage oils, and "videos, videos, videos." A few years ago a sales clerk at the store was charged with two counts of obscenity for selling allegedly beyond-the-pale pornography to undercover cops. Intimate Treasures is, in short, not the sort of place one associates with government largesse--particularly not from a Republican administration that pledged to restore "honor and dignity" to the White House. Yet last September 19 the sex shop received a low-interest, 25-year loan for $410,250, guaranteed by George W. Bush's Small Business Administration (SBA). Why? Perhaps because whatever its failings, Intimate Treasures possesses one attribute that makes it a highly attractive destination for federal dollars: It's located in Florida.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance the Bush administration places on Florida. It is the largest swing state in the country, the ground on which Bush won his contested victory in 2000, and a cornerstone of the White House's reelection strategy in 2004. But more than any of these things, it is the state in which the president's younger brother Jeb is running for reelection as governor this November. No matter what else happens at the ballot box this fall, if Jeb loses to the eventual Democratic nominee--either Janet Reno or Bill McBride--it will be seen as a humiliating defeat for the president and a vote of no confidence for his administration. As a result, it seems that no federal grant, no business loan, no tinkering with federal policy that might give Jeb a political leg up is too small to merit White House attention. "We believe we are not just in a battle with the Florida Bushies but the Washington Bushies too," says Ryan Banfill, Florida Democratic Party spokesman. "And we're not just running against the White House. It's like we're running against the State Department, the Education Department, and the rest of the Cabinet too." Over the past year and a half the administration has lavished attention on Florida--visits by the president and Cabinet members, high-profile federal conservation projects, joint policy and political planning with the governor's office, and lots and lots of money. Though overall figures on discretionary federal spending are difficult to calculate, Florida seems to be getting a disproportionate share in exactly those areas most likely to help Jeb this fall. In other words, if you pay taxes, you're probably helping to reelect the president's brother.
You don't allow a friend to drive drunk. We have now got a drunk at the wheel of America; Britain needs to take the keys away from him.
What George W Bush is proposing, taking military action against Iraq to eliminate Saddam Hussein, will effectively mean that Osama bin Laden will have won.
Whatever the faults of Saddam Hussein, and he is a brutal dictator, his regime is also secular. If Saddam does indeed fall, which Bush and Blair want, it is highly likely that an Islamist regime will take over after US troops leave, as they will sooner or later.
There is a good chance that a domino effect will come into play. We could see Saudi Arabia fall, Kuwait fall, Jordan fall, Egypt fall and the entire region being swept up in a sea of anti-Western, Islamic fundamentalism. Vast numbers of ordinary Arabs will swing behind the aims of al-Qa'ida. The invasion of Iraq is the quickest path to losing the war on terror and giving legitimacy to the criminal who attacked the US and the entire freedom of the world on 11 September.
This war is being driven by right-wing armchair generals in the States. The military men who wear uniforms believe it is ludicrous, but they are being driven towards it by people around Bush.
Many Iraqi defectors being trumpeted by Washington as experts on the Baghdad regime can be discredited. As an intelligence official I know you never publicise having a defector. They have a code name and you milk them for all the information you have, not parade them.
I took an oath when I joined the Marine Corps, and I still love the code and my country, but this is wrong.
WASHINGTON (July 16, 2002 9:08 p.m. EDT) - CIA officials are not doing enough to allow field officers to recruit unsavory characters to infiltrate terrorist organizations, the chairman of a House homeland security panel said Tuesday.
Rep. Saxby Chambliss said the CIA guidelines hindering such recruitments have been altered since a congressional directive last fall ordered their elimination. But Chambliss, R-Ga., contends the changes haven not gone far enough.
"As of today, those guidelines have not been rescinded," said Chambliss, chairman of the House Intelligence subcommittee on homeland security. "That's one of the continuing parts of the problem and the puzzle at CIA."
His criticism is part of a subcommittee report - the unclassified parts of which were to be released Wednesday - detailing intelligence failures that contributed to the Sept. 11 attacks and outlining ways to prevent future ones.
The report accuses the FBI of failing to communicate effectively among its different field offices and charges that the National Security Agency improperly used resources that should have been targeted toward bin Laden, Chambliss said.
"We've had those systemic problems in each different agency that participated in the deficiencies ... that did allow Sept. 11 to happen," Chambliss said.
CIA officials disputed the finding about recruitment of unsavory characters. The agency loosened and rearranged parts of the 1995 guidelines in October, allowing officers to recruit spies to infiltrate terrorist organizations and simply notify the head of the agency's clandestine services a few days later.
"CIA headquarters has never turned down a field request to recruit an asset in a terrorist organization," CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said Tuesday. "The agency does not avoid contact with individuals, regardless of their past, who may have information about terrorist activities."
Under the 1995 rules, field officers had to get approval from headquarters - a process that could take several days or longer - before recruiting a known lawbreaker or civil rights violator.
GOSHEN, Conn. — America is at a turning point. Corporate scandals, the fall of the stock markets, the sudden mobilizations in Washington of the last few weeks to legislate against some of the more egregious corporate abuses: they all indicate that the nation's attitude toward business is changing. It is potentially a bigger change than many politicians realize. What's unnerving them is that the payback from the market bubble of the late 1990's is becoming apparent to Main Street. The charts of the downside since March 2000 are starting to match the slope of the earlier three-year upside.
Not that it's a new phenomenon. In the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and again in the Roaring Twenties, wealth momentum surged, the rich pulled away from everyone else and financial and technological innovation built a boom. Then it went partially or largely bust in the securities markets. Digging out is never easy. But this time, the deep-rooted nature of "financialization" in the United States that developed in the 1980's and 90's may make it even tougher.
Near the peak of the great booms, old economic cautions are dismissed, financial and managerial operators sidestep increasingly inadequate regulations and ethics surrender to greed. Then, after the collapse, the dirty linen falls out of the closet. Public muttering usually swells into a powerful chorus for reform — deep, systemic changes designed to catch up with a whole new range and capacity for frauds and finagles and bring them under regulatory control.
Even so, correction is difficult, in part because the big wealth momentum booms leave behind a triple corruption: financial, political and philosophic. Besides the swindles and frauds that crest with the great speculative booms, historians have noted a parallel tendency: cash moving into politics also rises with market fevers.
During the Gilded Age, the railroad barons bought legislatures and business leaders bought seats in the United States Senate. In the last years of the 19th century, one senator naïvely proposed a bill to unseat those senators whose offices were found to have been purchased. This prompted a colleague to reply, in all seriousness, "We might lose a quorum here, waiting for the courts to act."
While a panicky Congress has rushed in recent days to reform the business world, it has not entirely lost its well-developed instinct for catering to special interests. On two issues critical to cleaning up corporate malfeasance, Congress has opted to put the preferences of big business — and big campaign contributors — ahead of the public good.
The first involves the notorious Bermuda tax loophole that allows companies to avoid paying taxes by nominally moving their headquarters to Bermuda, even while they continue to operate from the United States. This is a blatant scam that should be eliminated. Closing the loophole would bring in an estimated $6.3 billion over 10 years.
Democrats and Republicans in the House have introduced dueling bills. The Republican version would temporarily close the tax loophole, but it is also larded with special-interest tax breaks that add up to almost 10 times the amount that would be realized from doing so. General Motors and Ford would be among the big winners under the Republican bill, which would make it easier to accumulate untaxed profits overseas.
Congress is also fearful of challenging corporate practices in the awarding of stock options, intimidated by the possibility that wealthy corporate executives will withhold campaign contributions from lawmakers who dare to tinker with the current system. Now that Coca-Cola and a few other companies are moving to reform the system themselves by counting stock options as an expense, Congressional action could speed the changeover to a more responsible approach.
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, introduced an amendment that would require the Financial Accounting Standards Board to review the issue within a year. It is likely that the standards board, which sets the rules for corporate accounting practices, will force companies to report options as expenses. But amid intense lobbying by corporations — particularly Silicon Valley companies, which rely heavily on options — the Levin amendment was blocked earlier this week.
July 17 — House GOP leaders, risking a backlash from a disgruntled public and many of their own members, will fight some of the Senate’s proposed restrictions on fraudulent accounting practices that have rocked Wall Street and frightened investors, key legislators said yesterday.
ONE DAY AFTER the Senate unanimously passed a broad overhaul of corporate and securities laws, top House Republicans said they will try to delay, and likely dilute, some of the proposed changes.
“The Senate bill is not a good bill and has major flaws,” said Rep. Michael G. Oxley (R-Ohio), who is chairman of the Financial Services Committee and will represent House Republicans in final negotiations over the legislation. “Everything is going to be on the table.”
As the stock market dipped lower yesterday, hopes for swift enactment of new accounting laws appeared jeopardized by the decision of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) to reject the Senate bill.
SACRAMENTO -- That deep, mellow voice of Vice President Dick Cheney still resonates in my ear. It's accentuated now by reverberations from the Enron smoking gun.
"Frankly, California is looked on by many folks as a classic example of the kinds of problems that arise when you do use price caps," Cheney told me in April of last year. "Your problem is that your demand for electricity is up and your supplies have actually declined.... "Ultimately, of course, the peak power period this summer will exceed any capacity the state has and you'll end up in those rolling brownouts. There's no magic wand that Washington can wave."
Cheney was reflecting the laissez-faire, hidebound ideology of the new Bush administration. And he could not have been more wrong.
California then did not have wholesale price caps. It had consumer rate caps that had left private utilities short of enough money to pay their gouging suppliers.
The power pirates--many of them pals and political patrons of Cheney and President Bush--were reaping profits of 400% to 600%. The cost of electricity that private utilities (Edison, PG&E, SDG&E) were sending consumers soared from $7.4 billion in 1999 to
$27.6 billion in 2000 and seemed headed for $70 billion in 2001.
Demand had not been up significantly; indeed, it then was falling. Supplies were rising.
There was a magic wand Washington could wave. And it finally did get waved in June after dogged goading by Gov. Gray Davis, other West Coast Democrats and a new Democratic U.S. Senate. The wand was regional price caps, imposed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Those caps--so abhorred by the Bushies--worked with new long-term power contracts negotiated by Davis, plus a mild summer, to quash the energy crisis.
Megawatts that had sold for $321--and frequently exceeded $1,000--were capped at $92. They soon slid to $60 and now are back down to $30. That's about where they were when California naively set out on its ill-fated deregulation venture, which shifted control over most electricity from the state Public Utilities Commission to the pro-profiteer FERC.
Despite Cheney's glum prophecy, there were no rolling brownouts last summer, nor have there been any since.
BRATTLEBORO -- Likening a new program to recruit 1 million citizen informants to Soviet-style repression, Sen. Patrick Leahy, said Tuesday he will have some tough questions for Justice Department leaders spearheading the effort.
"I find it kind of scary," Leahy told the Reformer Tuesday about the little-known Operations TIPS, the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, which is set to launch next month.
According to a government Web site, TIPS "will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity."
"We used to laugh at the old Soviet Union idea where everybody reported everybody else," said Leahy. " ... We don't need to have it happen here. "
The Vermont Democrat, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he will challenge Attorney General John Ashcroft on the need for TIPS when Ashcroft appears before the committee next week.
Federal officials are releasing little information about the program. But the Web site, www.citizencorps.gov, indicates Citizen Corps is a component of the president's USA Freedom Corps program introduced by Bush in his State of the Union address in January that called on Americans to donate 4,000 hours of volunteer time.
"Citizen Corps creates opportunities for individuals to volunteer to help communities bring together a network of volunteers and first responders at the local levels," Debbie Garrett, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington, told the Reformer Tuesday.
One of the five parts of the Department of Justice Program includes Operations TIPS, which the Washington Times described Tuesday as "a national reporting pilot program scheduled to start next month in 10 cities, with 1 million informants -- or nearly 4 percent of Americans -- initially participating in the program."
WASHINGTON - Almost halfway through its historic investigation, the joint House-Senate inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks is hampered by infighting, politics, leaks, and dueling agendas.
Several staff members at a recent meeting talked openly of ''getting'' CIA Director George Tenet fired, according to two knowledgeable sources who spoke on condition of anonymity. They described a staff that has been divided and lacked direction.
One source said members of the independent staff made ''disparaging, unprofessional'' comments about Tenet one day after the CIA director's closed-door testimony last month before the House and Senate committees.
That's exactly the sort of ''blame game'' that Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter Goss, the two chairmen from Florida overseeing the investigation, promised would not happen.
Members of Congress are accustomed to battling the Pentagon to bring defense contracts to their districts and keep bases open. A more important conflict is now brewing: The Defense Department, using the cover of "too much bureaucracy," is bucking its obligation to provide full information to Congress.
Tensions between the legislative and executive branches are nothing new, but the Bush administration has been louder than most in claiming that the pendulum has swung too far toward Capitol Hill in recent decades.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has complained that bureaucracy ties up Pentagon officials, forcing them to spend too much time answering to Congress. Thus the Pentagon's proposal to do away with requirements to file hundreds of annual reports, which, the Pentagon says, usually go unread. There are equally ambitious plans to ban strikes by Defense Department civilian contract workers and scrap Civil Service protection for civilian workers at the Pentagon. Even as the Pentagon receives many billions more dollars, it doesn't want to submit all of the reports needed for congressional (read: civilian) oversight.
Times staff writer Esther Schrader reported this week that administration officials say the Pentagon is the tip of the spear in the movement to relieve executive branch agencies of oversight considered unnecessary and burdensome. But the requirements did not spring up out of thin air.
A stock rout this year has erased $2.4 trillion in market value, representing almost one-quarter of the U.S. gross domestic product, as waves of accounting problems, executive skulduggery and profit warnings have pounded Wall Street's confidence.
The Wilshire Total Market Index , the broadest index for the U.S. equity market, closed at its lowest point in almost 4 years Wednesday and has tumbled more than 18 percent so far this year.
The decline is worth more than Germany's gross national product, a measure of the dollar value of all goods and services produced in that country plus income from abroad. U.S GDP, which measures the value of goods and services produced within the United States, is about $10 trillion.
But for all the doom and gloom, some see recent sharp declines as good news.
In a series of little-noticed executive orders intended to ease the tax burden on corporate America, the Bush administration has implemented a number of new policies that will provide corporations with billions of dollars in tax relief without the consent of Congress.
The actions include new regulations, notices of new rulemaking, and tax collection policies on issues ranging from tax-free compensation for corporate executives to tax deductions for “intangible” assets to greatly expanded tax accounting flexibility for small- and medium-sized businesses.
Many of the business-oriented actions taken by the Treasury Department since the beginning of the year are so arcane that few members of Congress, including those with jurisdiction over tax policy, were familiar with the new regulations and revenue procedures.
When asked about the new policies implemented by the Treasury Department, Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he was not familiar with them.
President Bush yesterday gave a vote of confidence to the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who is facing an investigation into his business practices.
But just as the president's attempts to calm Wall Street last week saw the markets nosedive, this set of remarks only increased the pressure on his deputy. Mr Bush expressed confidence that Mr Cheney would be exonerated by the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the accounting practices of Halliburton, the oil company he ran from 1995 to 2000.
"I've got great confidence in the vice-president. He's doing a heck of a good job. When I picked him, I knew he was a fine business leader and a fine, experienced man," Mr Bush said.
Others are also confident that Mr Cheney will be exonerated by the SEC, but that is largely because it is run by a Bush appointee, Harvey Pitt, who has already been criticised for his lax approach towards corporate fraud.
"The president caused a problem today by wading into the case," said a Democratic party spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri. "Before his comments, the notion that Harvey Pitt was going to conduct an impartial investigation was thin, and I think that the president's comments raise more concerns about the SEC's ability to be objective."
The legal pressure group Judicial Watch has sued Mr Cheney and Halliburton, alleging that they defrauded shareholders by overstating company revenues by nearly $450m. Both the company and the White House have dismissed the claims as groundless.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush ( news - web sites) said on Wednesday he was confident a federal probe of Halliburton Co. would show Vice President Dick Cheney ( news - web sites) did nothing wrong while serving as chief executive, prompting Democrats to charge the remarks could taint the investigation.
Asked whether he was confident the Securities and Exchange Commission ( news - web sites), which is investigating Halliburton's procedures in accounting for cost overruns, would find Cheney did nothing wrong while chief executive of the oil services company, Bush told a news conference: "Yes, I am."
"That matter will run its course, the Halliburton investigation, and the facts will come out at some point in time," Bush said.
"I've got great confidence in the vice president. He's doing a heck of a good job. When I picked him, I knew he was a fine business leader and a fine, experienced man, and he's doing a great job," Bush said.
Cheney, regarded as one of Bush's steadiest hands and most influential advisers, is likely to weather the still-open probe and any questions over his tenure at Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, analysts said.
But they said the business records of Bush, Cheney and other former corporate chiefs in the Bush administration are not the political assets they had been as Bush seeks to crack down on corporate malfeasance he attributes to excesses of the 1990s.
"Tens of thousands of marines and soldiers [will invade Iraq] from Kuwait. Hundreds of warplanes based in as many as eight countries, possibly including Turkey and Qatar, would unleash a huge air assault against thousands of targets, including airfields, roadways and fiber-optics communications sites. Special operations forces or covert CIA operatives would strike at depots or laboratories storing or manufacturing Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to launch them." New York Times , July 5, 2002
This isn't a fictional scenario from a Tom Clancy novel. It's a real scenario from "CentCom Courses of Action"--the latest U.S. plan for war on Iraq.
Leaked to the New York Times, the plan calls for attacks on Iraq by U.S. air, land, and sea- based forces from the north, south, and west, in coordination with covert operations inside Iraq by the CIA and various Iraqi groups. As many as 250,000 U.S. troops could be involved. The goal: to overthrow the Iraqi government and install a pro-U.S. regime.
In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S.-led coalition killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Iraqis. A new U.S. war carried to Baghdad could make that bloodbath pale in comparison.
The Central Command plan reveals the rulers’ determination to wage war on Iraq, and how advanced their planning is. Yet the establishment treated their disclosure as routine -- as if the U.S. has an undisputed right to openly plot wars on whomever, whenever.
No big outcry came from Congress -- leading Democrats vocally support "regime change” in Iraq. One Republican backed congressional hearings "as a way of building public support for potential military action." Mainstream editorials focused on tactics and timing – not justice.
Washington, DC: Congressman Ron Paul is working with several congressional colleagues this week to end trade restrictions that hurt Texas farmers. While the House considers several large spending bills, including a bill that funds agricultural programs, Paul and others plan to use the amendment process to block the Cuban agricultural embargo. More than 270 members of the House voted in April to allow private financing for agricultural sales to Cuba by American banks, and Paul hopes that momentum from that vote will spill over into this week.
"Decades of agricultural trade sanctions have done nothing to topple the Castro regime, but they have hurt American farmers and the Cuban people," Paul stated. "Our farmers should not be denied access to markets because of a misguided and ineffective State department policy. Our current approach simply opens the door for farmers around the world to exploit the Cuban market. Rather than punishing our farmers with trade embargoes, Congress should be eliminating barriers and opening new markets like Cuba."
OPERATION TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - is a scheme that Joseph Stalin would have appreciated. Plans for its pilot phase, to start in August, have Operation TIPS recruiting a million letter carriers, meter readers, cable technicians, and other workers with access to private homes as informants to report to the Justice Department any activities they think suspicious.
This is not an updating of George Orwell's ''1984.'' It is not a satire on the paranoid fantasies of right-wing kooks who see black helicopters swooping across their big sky. It will be a nationwide program run by Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department. If it is allowed to start up and gather steam, it will begin in 10 cities and then expand everywhere, enrolling millions of Americans to spy on their neighbors.
On the Web site of President Bush's new Citizen Corps program, this assault on the Constitution is described without any hint of irony as ''a national reporting system that allows these workers, whose routines make them well-positioned to recognize unusual events, to report suspicious activity.''
After the Berlin Wall came down and communism vanished into the dustbin of history, Czechs, East Germans, Poles, and Hungarians had to suffer through wrenching revelations about the reporting systems their totalitarian regimes had instituted. The Communist Party bosses in those captive nations justified the pervasive recruitment of citizens to inform on their neighbors as a requirement of security and a proof of loyalty to the party, the revolution, or the working class.
We're supposed to have a government of the people, for the people and by the people.
In fact, Americans are largely supposed to govern themselves in the system devised by our brilliant founders.
That is no longer the case because the U.S. government in Washington doesn't trust its citizens.
This sad truth has become crystal clear in the wake of the terror attacks of Sept. 11. Instead of enlisting Americans to fight this evil as past governments have in times of war, this administration, with at least the tacit approval of Congress, has used the attacks as an excuse to clamp down on the civil liberties of Americans and to keep closer tabs on law-abiding citizens. At the same time, the government has demonstrated, time and time again, its own startling inability to use its vast resources to prevent massive attacks on the people and even to recognize and identify from where the threats emanate.
The votes have been cast and there is little doubt that India's most celebrated rocket scientist will be elected as its 11th president today.
The first thing Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam will readily acknowledge is that his name is a mouthful.
But when he showed up in parliament during the voting MPs and members of state legislatures elect India's president reporters were keen to ask him about something else that is distinctive, his flowing locks. The nation wants to know: Will he have a haircut before he is sworn in next week or will India have a president who resembles an ageing rock star?
Mr Kalam, pushing 71, chuckled but would not clear up the mystery.
His simplicity and his almost ascetic lifestyle have helped bolster the myth of the selfless, patriotic scientist who has devoted his entire life to a single mission making India into a major military power. He has stood up against Western sanctions and developed an indigenous technological capability for a range of military rockets. He has also supervised a series of underground nuclear tests and helped produce nuclear warheads.
Incredibly, even though Mr Kalam is lionised as the "Missile Man", his missiles do not work. None of the battlefield missiles developed by the government-owned defence manufacturer he headed for years are of any use to the armed forces. As for his surface-to-surface missiles, the range of is considered too short to be effectively deployed against Pakistan, while another doesn't go far enough to threaten China.
The American Justice Department has denied that it has plans to turn millions of US citizens into spies in the war against terrorism.
Civil liberties groups are complaining that a pilot scheme due to begin next month could lead to government spies prying into all American homes.
Operation TIPS, the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, will, according to the Justice Department, give millions of American lorry drivers, postal workers, train guards and gas and electrical engineers a way to report suspicious activity.
Starting in 10 cities next month, participating workers will be given a free phone number and told to call in if they notice anything out of the ordinary during their daily routine.
The American Civil Liberties Union is horrified. It says the gas man will become a government-sanctioned peeping tom and that the programme will encourage vigilantism and racism.
In response, the Justice Department is partially backing down.
It has issued a statement saying only public places will be covered by the scheme.
But TIPS will still go ahead, with its supporters saying it will make it more difficult for terrorists to operate undetected, and its opponents saying it turns America into a nation of spies.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Postal Service has decided not to take part in a government program touted as a tip service for authorities concerned with terrorism, but which is being assailed as a scheme to cast ordinary Americans as "peeping Toms."
"The Postal Service had been approached by homeland security regarding Operation TIPS; however, it was decided that the Postal Service and its letter carriers would not be participating in the program at this time," the agency said in a statement issued Wednesday.
The project is promoted by the Justice Department as a means for workers whose jobs bring them in contact with neighborhoods, highways and businesses to report suspicious activities.
But it has drawn the wrath of the American Civil Liberties Union, which charged it would result in Americans spying on one another.
Attorney General John Ashcroft's spokeswoman said that the program, still in the development stage, would set up people to spy upon one another in their homes and communities.
Barbara Comstock said the agency had no intention for people - such as utility workers - to enter or have access to the homes of individuals. The idea is to organize information from people whose jobs take them through neighborhoods, along the coasts and highways and on public transit, she said.
Said Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge: "The last thing we want is Americans spying on Americans. That's just not what the president is all about, and not what the TIPS program is all about."
The ACLU said the concept was worrisome, nonetheless.
"The administration apparently wants to implement a program that will turn local cable or gas or electrical technicians into government-sanctioned Peeping Toms," said Rachel King, an ACLU legislative counsel.
The ACLU said it was concerned that these volunteers would, in effect, be searching people's homes without warrants, that resources would be wasted on a flood of useless tips and that the program would encourage vigilantism and racial profiling.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Secretary of State Colin Powell says the CIA is working on a new plan to protect Israel from terror attacks, as the White House expressed cautious optimism Wednesday about progress toward peace.
Even while shunning Yasser Arafat - an approach opposed by Russian, European and U.N. officials who met the day before in New York with Powell - the secretary said the United States was discussing the security plan with Palestinian officials.
"I think we have a pretty good plan," Powell said without divulging any details at a news conference following the New York meeting of the Mideast policy planning group called the Quartet.
U.S. military recruiters have the authority to demand that education officials turn over the names, addresses and phone numbers of high-school students under a new federal law.
President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" law orders school bosses from New York and across the country to comply with the new edict - or risk losing federal funds.
At the beginning of the school year, parents will be given an opportunity to call school officials to "opt out" of disclosing their child's personal information.
Access to student records is a boon to the military in urban areas, where many young men fail to register for the draft, as required by law.
The compliance rate in the Big Apple is one of the lowest among major U.S. cities, said Lewis Brodsky, a spokesman for the Selective Service. Only 49 percent of young men in New York register after turning 18.
The Selective Service had complained that until recently, it was difficult to get city officials to make recruiters welcome in their schools.
"We're aware of the provision. It's part of the law and we will comply," said Board of Education spokesman Kevin Ortiz.
RABAT: The eviction by Spanish forces of Moroccan troops from a tiny Mediterranean islet amounts to "a declaration of war" by Madrid, the leader of one of Morocco's coalition government parties said Wednesday. "I am stupified. One cannot solve problems with gunfire. This is a declaration of war and an error," said Majubi Aherdan, a former defence minister who head the National Popular Movement (MNP). "Spain has forgotten that Morocco is an independent country," he added, asserting that all ties with Spain should be severed.
Meanwhile, the European Union was set to rally behind Madrid on Wednesday after Spanish forces ousted Moroccan troops from a disputed islet, even though the European Commission had called for a diplomatic solution to the standoff. "There will be no cries of victory, but there is unlikely to be any criticism either," said a Commission official after Spain's pre-dawn swoop on the uninhabited Mediterranean island of Perejil.
The official, who asked not to be named, said the 15-nation bloc's executive arm would issue a statement on the ouster of the Moroccan troops. Morocco, whose troops had occupied Perejil since last Thursday, said it was using the island as an "observation post" to help clamp down on illegal immigration and drug smuggling. Spain said the operation to remove the Moroccans had been carried out without any injuries to either side. A senior EU diplomat said Spain had tried very hard in the last few days to remove the Moroccan troops through diplomatic means and, having failed, "probably only had one option".
"You will not find an EU country which today says that Spain did wrong because the first fault was on the Moroccan side," said the diplomat, requesting anonymity. "The procedure used to change the status quo last Thursday was not appropriate." The European Commission, anxious to keep good relations with a key Mediterranean partner, had said earlier this week that diplomats must be allowed to get on with resolving the problem.
WASHINGTON -- Moving to assert congressional authority, key lawmakers urged a select House panel today to make major changes in President Bush's proposed Homeland Security agency.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., and the panel's ranking Democrat, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, led a parade of powerful lawmakers who want to change Bush's proposed merging of 22 agencies and offices into a single Cabinet department.
Young and Obey said the House Select Committee on Homeland Security should reject Bush's request for authority to transfer up to 5 percent of the new agency's budget without congressional approval.
"In our view, the administration's transfer proposal is overly broad and unprecedented," Young told the panel.
Added Obey: "It gives the agency, in effect, a totally free hand."
Wednesday, July 17, 2002
The rise of Ann Coulter's new book, "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right," to the top of the New York Times bestseller list may be a shock to some, but the controversial pundit's scathing rhetoric and outspoken conservatism have helped position her as exactly the sort of figure who sells books. More polemic than argument, "Slander" is riddled with factual errors, egregious misrepresentations and a constant stream of broad, inflammatory claims about liberals, as numerous critics have been quick to point out. Yet despite the limits of her one-sided argument, she actually offers a troubling lament for the state of our political discourse -- even as she contributes to its decline.
Coulter began her career as a pundit during the investigation and impeachment of former President Bill Clinton. An attorney, Coulter aided Paula Jones with her legal case and later wrote a book on Clinton titled "High Crimes and Misdemeanors." Since then, she has written a syndicated column and made frequent television appearances.
Coulter is self-consciously inflammatory. As she told the Sunday Times of London recently, "I am a polemicist. I am perfectly frank about that. I like to stir up the pot. I don't pretend to be impartial or balanced, as broadcasters do." It is exactly that kind of invective which has earned her so much publicity.
"Slander" has already come in for heavy criticism over her factual errors and distortions. Throughout the book, for example, she relies heavily on quantitative searches of the Lexis-Nexis news database to support her assertions about the media's bias and its unfair treatment of conservatives, making at least 15 such claims. At first blush, these bits of evidence seem to provide strong support to her arguments. Yet very serious questions have been raised about her methodology.
The American Prospect's weblog, Tapped, noted that Coulter's claim that "Between 1995 and 2001, the New York Times alone ran more than one hundred articles on 'Selma' alone" is demonstrably false. Tapped also reported the inaccuracy of her claim that "In the New York Times archives, 'moderate Republican' has been used 168 times," while "There have been only 11 sightings of a 'liberal Republican.'" But a search in the New York Times' own archive found 22 hits for "liberal Republican" since 1996; in a search of the Times archives for "all available dates" in Lexis-Nexis, the weblog found 524 such citations.
Bob Somerby punctured Coulter's argument that the New York Times reveals a liberal bias by having used the phrases "Christian conservatives" or "religious right" 187 times during, roughly, the 2000 calendar year, while never using the phrases "atheist liberals" or "the atheist left." Somerby found that the New York Times compared favorably with the conservative Washington Times, which had 151 references to "Christian conservatives" or the "religious right" in 2000 -- along with, of course, no references to "atheist liberals" or "the atheist left."
The central paradox of George W. Bush's presidency is that he is a conservative Republican who holds office at a time when the public has regained its appetite for activist government. As a result, his habitual tack on domestic matters has been to rhetorically align himself with popular reforms but substantively align himself with his ideological and financial base in the business lobby. He has followed this pattern on social spending, campaign finance reform, prescription drugs, patients' rights, airport security, and other issues. And now he has done it again on corporate reform.
Bush's message this week was that he is truly and deeply outraged by corporate malfeasance. The administration leaked to the press a conversation between Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Bush, wherein the former bemoaned the fact that kids with marijuana get more jail time than do corporate crooks, which prompted the president to reply, "You're absolutely right," and shake his head. In his speech on corporate responsibility on Tuesday, Bush railed against "business executives breaching the trust and abusing power," and called for "a new era of integrity in corporate America." To accompany his tough rhetoric, Bush presented a seemingly thorough proposal, filled with nice, round numbers: A ten-point Accountability Plan; a doubling of prison sentences for financial fraud; a $100 million funding increase; and 100 new staffers for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The purpose of all this was to create the appearance of reform while doing as little as possible. Eighteen months into his presidency, Bush has the routine down to a science.
Begin with Bush's threats of lengthy prison sentences, one of the highlights of his speech. It might seem obvious that the threat of jail time would deter white-collar crime. The problem, alas, is that criminalizing financial fraud rarely works. Consider--to take one company at random--Harken Energy, which employed Bush as a consultant and audit committee member. Harken inflated its stock by putting together a group of insiders to purchase a subsidiary at an inflated price. "This was an honest disagreement about accounting procedures," Bush told reporters the day before his speech. "And the SEC ... asked Harken to restate earnings, which it did. I mean, that's the way the SEC works." Bush is wrong to use the system as a moral defense of Harken's obviously unethical accounting. But as a legal matter he's right. Financial fraud usually involves lots of people delving into legally murky terrain. Pinning the responsibility on a single individual, and proving criminal intent, is usually impossible. Increasing jail terms, as a former SEC official puts it, is "more symbolic than something that's likely to have an important effect."
The good news is that there are plenty of other ways to rein in corporate malfeasance. The bad news is that, his rhetoric notwithstanding, Bush opposes almost all of them. His ten-point plan is an empty shell, filled with measures the SEC or stock exchange already planned to adopt or with measures that are actually weaker than the ones they have proposed. Right now, for instance, the SEC can't bar executives from serving on boards unless it can prove their "substantial unfitness." The SEC wants to lower the standard to merely "unfit," making it easier to bar crooked executives. Bush's speech included a ringing call to bar "corporate leaders who are convicted of abusing their powers." This new standard--actual criminal conviction--would set the bar for executives even lower than it is right now.
Or take SEC funding. Even Republicans say SEC enforcement has languished due to years of underfunding. Its lawyers not only earn vastly less than the private sector they match wits against; they earn considerably less than lawyers in other federal agencies. Bush promises a $100 million boost, which sounds generous--until you realize that even House Republicans have pledged an increase three times greater.
An executive sells shares in his energy company two months before the company announces unexpected bad news, and the stock price eventually tumbles to a quarter of the price at which the insider sold his.
George W. Bush at Harken Energy Corp. in 1990? Yes, but also Richard B. Cheney at Halliburton Co. in 2000.
When Cheney left Halliburton in August 2000 to be Bush's running mate, the oil services firm was swelling with profits and approaching a two-year high in its stock price. Investors and the public (and possibly Cheney himself) did not know how sick the company really was, as became evident in the months after Cheney left.
Whether through serendipity or shrewdness, Cheney made an $18.5 million profit selling his shares for more than $52 each in August 2000; 60 days later, the company surprised investors with a warning that its engineering and construction business was doing much worse than expected, driving shares down 11 percent in a day. About the same time, it announced it was under a grand jury investigation for overbilling the government.
In the months that followed, it became clear that Halliburton's liability for asbestos claims, stemming from a company Cheney acquired in 1998, were far greater than Halliburton realized. Then, in May of this year, the company announced it was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for controversial accounting under Cheney's leadership that inflated profits. Halliburton shares closed at $13.10 yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange.
There has been no serious allegation of wrongdoing by the vice president himself in all of this. But the highflying company Cheney hailed as a "great success story" during the 2000 campaign is now a troubled behemoth fighting for its life. The humbling of Halliburton raises doubts about Cheney's stewardship there and, by extension, his reputation as a smart executive bringing a businessman's acumen to the White House.
The developments at Halliburton since Cheney's departure leave two possibilities: Either the vice president did not know of the magnitude of problems at the oilfield services company he ran for five years, or he sold his shares in August 2000 knowing the company was likely headed for a fall.
Five years ago Bill Clinton announced that he was ending welfare as we knew it. Last week George W. Bush could have commemorated the occasion in his Wall Street speech by proposing to end capitalism as we know it the brand of capitalism that's wrecking more lives and families than welfare ever did, the brand whose cheats have been more obscene, more numerous and more criminal than "welfare queens" ever were, the brand that turned corporate directors into crooked dealers and shareholders into their willing addicts so long as the fix was in.
But the presidency is itself one of those brands, and George W. Bush only its most recent logo. Bush did not go to Wall Street to end anything. He went there to profess his "faith" in the system, faith generally being this president's solution to anything challenging when B-52s won't do. But faith-based capitalism is what got us into this circle of hell in the first place.
At some point in the late 1980s the market stopped being a bet and became a religion. The crash of 1987 probably did it, when that single-day 22 percent drop of the Dow, which should have screamed recession, turned instead into a sling shot to another bull market. Big investors realized they could do on Wall Street what Wal Mart does on Main Street: Muscle in, use deep pockets to ride out losses, then clean up when the little guys are wiped out. Losses become the necessary seed for fatter shareholder profits.
Building companies was OK. "Creating wealth" was better. Computers and SUVs aside, the American economy of the 1990s made nothing new. But it commodified the notion of wealth by turning stocks into a product with its own value-added wonders. There's a difference between the trading price of a share and its inherent value, of course. In the 1980s, the two began to diverge, slowly at first, exuberantly by the late 1990s, inflated by the NASDAQ's tech stocks. Those were the so-called dot-coms, which took the equation of the valueless product to its logical conclusion: There was no need for a product to back up the stock anymore. The concept was the stock. And the Initial Public Offering craze was to the 1990s what junk bonds were to the 1980s helium to a stock bubble as ephemeral as cyberspace.
But everyone played to the shareholder, dot-com or not. Superstar CEOs like General Electric's Jack Welch became the new deities, because they knew how to dismantle their companies while making their share price glow. By the early 1990s, as journalist Doug Henwood put it in a speech deconstructing the so-called New Economy, "it was clear that the quickest way to add 5 points to your stock price was to lay off 50,000 workers." By the late 1990s there wasn't much left to lay off, but the stock price had to keep going up. Enron and WorldCom showed the way by inventing profits and calling it accounting. It was brilliant, and for a few years it worked very well. On faith.
Faith, that is, in the infallibility of the market no matter how self-fulfilling its promises. The infallibility doctrine is nothing new. Like all such doctrines, its validity is somewhere between superstition and quackery, which is why we have regulations to temper it. Or used to. The Reagan administration spent the 1980s eviscerating the market of the checks and balances put in place during the New Deal. What Reagan couldn't do because of a Democratic Congress, the Republican Congress of the mid-1990s finished up. GOP Rep. Ron Paul, a market faithful, summed up his party's view of government regulators: "These little men filled with envy are capable of producing nothing and are motivated by their own inadequacies and desires to wield authority against men of talent."
It turns out the CEOs were the little men producing nothing.
The United Nations, the European Union and Russia have rejected Washington's call to remove Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and questioned its decision to place security for Israelis above all other goals in the region.
At a meeting of the quartet in New York to draft a common approach towards Middle East peace, leading international representatives made clear their reservations over US policy in the region.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and EU representatives met US Secretary of State Colin Powell as fresh violence erupted in the region.
Eight Israelis died and at least 20 were injured in an attack outside a Jewish settlement, an assault which indicated that Israel's re-occupation of Palestinian territories was failing to fulfil its stated aim of providing its citizens with security.
It was the first high profile meeting of the quartet since President George W Bush made a new Middle East policy statement last month, and it left the US clearly isolated on two key issues.
While Mr Bush indicated that there should only be a Palestinian state after the Palestinians got rid of Mr Arafat - their democratically elected leader - Washington's quartet partners said they would continue to work with him.
"The UN still recognises Chairman Arafat and will continue to deal with him until the Palestinians decide otherwise," said Mr Annan at a news conference after discussions with Mr Powell.
His comments were echoed by Mr Ivanov and the Danish Foreign Minister, Per Stig Moeller, both of whom stressed the need to respect the sovereignty of the Palestinian people.
The foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt, who met the quartet for separate round of talks, also criticised US attempts to sideline Mr Arafat.
"The issue is not the person of Mr Arafat, but the occupation." said Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher.
One week before a groundbreaking ceremony at a joint Israeli-Palestinian industrial park on the outskirts of the Gaza Strip, the latest Intifada broke out.
The project - brainchild and long-time dream of Israeli industrialist Stef Wertheimer - never materialised, and the dusty piece of land which once promised to transform the Middle East through economic growth and co-existence now lies barren and deserted.
Two years later, thousands of Israelis and Palestinians are dead.
There is no peace process, and both societies are in the grip of economic crises.
One could forgive Mr Wertheimer, the 76-year-old chairman and founder of manufacturing giant Iscar, if he were to devote his energies to shoring up his billion dollar empire, or considering retirement.
But the man whose companies are responsible for 10% of Israel's economic output is still surprisingly optimistic.
And he is armed with a new plan to transform the Middle East.
Dubbed the "mini-Marshall Plan," after the scheme which helped rebuild Europe after World War II, Mr Wertheimer is calling for massive injections of cash into the eastern Mediterranean - Jordan, Turkey, the Palestinian territories and Israel's minority populations - in an effort to stabilise the region.
The plan's aim is to ensure a GDP per capita of at least $6,000 per year for the region's inhabitants.
According to Mr Wertheimer, that figure has historically led to democratisation and cools the flames of fundamentalism that drive people to follow the likes of Osama bin Laden.
"People are dangerous when they have nothing to lose," says Wertheimer, in an interview at the Tefen Industrial Park in the northern Galilee, one of four such parks he has founded in Israel.
GOP trembles as election nears; tumbling stock
Washington -- It was about the time President Bush started speaking about corporate accountability last week that the stock market began a steep decline.
Now, a week into a plunge that has brought stock prices down to 1997 levels,
Bush is finding his own poll numbers tumbling in the same direction.
In a political confluence from hell, the president and a handful of top administration officials are facing questions about their personal corporate transactions that made them very wealthy men at precisely the time when millions of Americans are receiving quarterly statements that report devastating losses in their retirement and stock portfolios.
With the 2002 election less than four months away, whether the White House has the ability to restore confidence in the markets is an enormous concern for Republican lawmakers who had been counting on the president's wartime popularity to shore up their slim majority in the House and challenge the Democrats' one-seat advantage in the Senate.
"Two out of three likely voters tell us that they have an IRA or a 401(k)," said independent pollster John Zogby, whose survey over the weekend found unmistakable signs of erosion in the president's popularity.
"One look at their quarterly report and there goes confidence in the economy and the government. . . . This issue is THE issue," Zogby said.
A poll conducted over the weekend for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report found just 42 percent of registered voters said they would definitely vote to re-elect Bush, down from 54 percent earlier this year.
The United States Congress has released a damning report listing serious failings by all of the country's main intelligence agencies before last September's terror attacks.
The agencies include the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA).
The document cites a number of lapses, including poor communications, poor resource allocation, and the CIA's failure to follow a congressional directive.
The report was released by the Senate and House of Representatives Intelligence panels, which has been investigating the agencies' roles in a series of closed-door hearings in recent weeks.
Vice President Dick Cheney has spent most of the past year in hiding, ostensibly from terrorists, but increasingly it seems obvious that it is Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the media and the public he fears. And for good reason: Cheney's business behavior could serve as a textbook case of much of what's wrong with the way corporate CEOs have come to play the game of business.
The game involves more than playing loose with accounting rules, as Halliburton Co. is accused of doing while Cheney was the Texas-based energy company's chief executive.
On Sunday, SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, whom Cheney pushed for the job, reluctantly turned on his sponsor and announced a vigorous investigation of Halliburton's accounting violations. Recent business scandals, however, are also the product of legal loopholes that allow firms to scoop up billions in unregulated profits.
It was just such loopholes that allowed the rise and subsequent fall of Enron and telecom heavyweights like WorldCom--in the process making CEOs like Dick Cheney very, very rich.
Recall that Cheney was a political hack for most of his professional life, first as a staffer in the Ford White House, then as a congressman for a decade and after that as secretary of Defense under the current president's father.
During the Clinton years, however, Cheney took an extremely lucrative five-year cruise into the private sector as chief executive of Halliburton.
After deciding, following an extensive search, that he would be George W. Bush's best candidate for vice president, Cheney resigned from the energy services company with a $36-million payoff for his final year of corporate service.
This journey from the public payroll to the corporate towers and back left a slimy trail of conflict-of-interest questions. For example, Defense Secretary Cheney conveniently changed the rules restricting private contractors doing work on U.S. military bases, allowing the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of his future employer, Halliburton, to receive the first of $2.5 billion in contracts over the next decade. When Cheney left to become CEO of the entire company, he recruited his Pentagon military aide, Joe Lopez, to become senior vice president in charge of Pentagon dealings, which ultimately formed the most lucrative part of the otherwise ailing company's business.
Since returning to the public office, these disturbing patterns have continued.
The president's speech last week on business reform was a test of whether this country still can muster a gag reflex.
It wasn't that he did little but urge stiffer penalties on conduct that's already illegal. That's fine. With the public sickened by spreading revelations of corporate scandal, President Bush's advisors will see to it that he doesn't remain as far behind the angry wave of reform as he currently is.
What was upsetting wasn't his limpness; it was his hypocrisy. For at bottom, the approach to business that the president was deploring was his own -- and that of his brothers Neil and Jeb, our own governor.
The Bushes' means of getting rich wasn't crooked. It was just a clubby, frat-boy kind of wheeling and dealing, which originated nothing and created nothing, and which depended on closeted undertakings and private favors.
Because rich men were eager to associate with the illustrious Bush name, they got no-risk invitations to low-risk deals, with their downside covered by somebody else -- stockholders or taxpayers. Everybody understood that they were there to get rich quickly, and they kept one eye on the exit door.
In those respects, the Bush brothers exemplify what has been a defining style of American business for the past quarter-century, which reduces capitalism to an ATM: a fountain of cash for the lucky initiates who get the PIN number.
That's a radical departure from the boring old idea that companies exist to prosper and grow by producing at a reasonable cost and selling at an acceptable price, while paying fair wages and earning a decent return for the people whose enterprise and bankroll made it all possible.
Under ATM capitalism, businesses exist to throw off as much cash as possible, as soon as possible, to the people who own, run or manage to fiddle profit from them.
The Bush White House is strictly top-of-the-organizational-chart, an outfit run by corporate bosses: Dick Cheney from Halliburton, the oil-services giant; Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill from Alcoa; and Commerce Secretary Don Evans from the Denver oil-and-gas outfit Tom Brown. These are capitalists who know how to make a buck and were never ashamed of it.
They never had to be, until the corporate trust scandals landed on the President and Vice President like a sack of nickels. At issue is whether the two men benefited during their business careers from the same kind of cronyism and slippery accounting that the Administration is now publicly condemning. The day before Bush was scheduled to deliver a speech meant to spank Wall Street, he held a press conference to advertise his standing as a Main Street kind of guy. He wanted to show small investors, says an aide, that he "shared their outrage."
But once the questions began, Bush looked like a 5-year-old losing a battle with an ice-cream cone on a summer day. His sale of stock as a director of Harken Energy in 1990, a once scrutinized deal that had faded into obscurity, was now alive in a much less forgiving environment. Bush dumped $848,000 worth of Harken stock two months before the company announced a $23.2 million loss; he was 34 weeks late in filing a form the Securities and Exchange Commission required to record the sale. Old news, the President said, noting that the SEC investigated the sale and took no action.
Bush's business dealings were legal but on the wrong side of the new corporate morality he is now preaching. How could the President chastise executives for doing the same kinds of things he did as a director, without apology? Bush received subsidized loans from Harken to buy company stock—a practice he now wants to ban. In 1989 Harken concealed losses by selling most of a subsidiary to an off-the-books entity controlled by company insiders. Bush was on the audit committee, which, at least in theory, approved the deal. It's the same tactic used by Enron—on a massive, more pernicious scale—before it imploded.
As Bush struggled to explain away the past, Cheney was being investigated by the SEC and sued by Halliburton shareholders and the conservative activist group Judicial Watch. The allegation: that Halliburton, while Cheney was CEO, greased the books to boost the firm's flagging fortunes. Its decline was due in part to Cheney's signature strategic move—Halliburton's merger with Dresser Industries in 1998, when Dresser was about to be buried under asbestos-contamination lawsuits. Halliburton remains burdened with the liability of more than 200,000 suits and as of last year was on the hook for $125 million in settlements. Its stock has fallen from nearly $60 to about $13.50, imperiling the retirement savings of blue-collar workers. (Cheney cashed in his Halliburton stock options before taking office, clearing more than $20 million before the shares tanked.)