Stories We Missed Because So Much Was Happening

While we have been busy blogging away on national security, the DPW deal, and the antics of the Bushies, a number of other stories have been all but ignored. This post is an attempt to catch us up.

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Iraq's Death Squads: On The Brink Of Civil War

Most of the corpses in Baghdad's mortuary show signs of torture and execution. And the Interior Ministry is being blamed. Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations' outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.

John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told The Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.

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Booming India Finds That America Wants To Be Its New Best Friend

This week Bush visits the next Asian superpower, a honeypot for US firms, a democracy - and a rival to China. Amelia Gentleman reports from Delhi

It takes a while to identify anything Indian inside the Metropolitan Mall in the rich Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. Harrison Ford peers from the cinema posters; Tommy Hilfiger lines up alongside Reebok and Benetton on the shop floor. Only how a cleaner balances flattened cardboard boxes on his head, and the prominent sign at the escalator ('Be careful of your sari while riding the stairs') hint this is not a shopping centre in Alabama.
American tastes colonise the food hall. Tex Mex jostles with hot dog stalls and ice cream parlours selling Smoothies. At Pizza Hut, teenagers buy Indianised versions of the global brand - Spicy Korma and Tikka Chicken pizzas, sprinkled heavily with green chillies.

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If Congress Doesn't Start Policing Itself More Seriously, Federal Prosecutors Might Step In

The Justice Department has a message for Congress: clean up your house or else we may have to do it for you. A senior federal law enforcement official told TIME that the paralyzed and often lax House ethics committee has created a vacuum that prosecutors won't hesitate to fill. The House’s internal mechanism for keeping corruption in check is "broken," says the official.

By contrast, current criminal probes of lawmakers are expanding rapidly. Like the Abramoff probe, the investigation into former Republican Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham from San Diego is also widening. Last week, defense contractor Mitchell Wade of MZM, Inc., pleaded guilty to supplying more than $1 million of the $2.4 million in bribes Cunningham previously admitted taking in a scheme that touches Defense Department officials and two other members of Congress. A Defense Department spokesman tells TIME that "there is an ongoing review by appropriate organizations within the Department" as to whether the Cunningham- and MZM-linked intelligence contracts would have compromised any Pentagon intelligence programs.

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Data Mining Program Continues After Lawmakers Order It Closed

A controversial intelligence data mining program, which was closed by lawmakers over privacy concerns two years ago, has continued to receive funding and remained in operation under different code names in different agencies, according to today's National Journal.

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

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Restoring the Public Trust By Bill Moyers

I will leave to Jon Stewart the rich threads of humor to pluck from the hunting incident in Texas. All of us are relieved that the Vice President’s friend has survived. I can accept Dick Cheney’s word that the accident was one of the worst moments of his life. What intrigues me as a journalist now is the rare glimpse we have serendipitously been offered into the tightly knit world of the elites who govern today.

The Vice President was hunting on a 50-thousand acre ranch owned by a lobbyist friend who is the heiress to a family fortune of land, cattle, banking and oil (ah, yes, the quickest and surest way to the American dream remains to choose your parents well.)....

Two years ago, in a report entitled Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality, the American Political Science Association concluded that progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy “may have stalled, and even, in some areas, reversed.” Privileged Americans “roar with a clarity and consistency that public officials readily hear and routinely follow” while citizens “with lower or moderate incomes are speaking with a whisper.”

The following year, on the eve of President George W. Bush’s second inauguration, the editors of The Economist, reporting on inequality in America, concluded that the United States “risks calcifying into a European-style, class-based society.”

As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was thirtyfold. Now it is seventy-five fold. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker. A recent article in The Financial Times reports on a study by the American economist Robert J. Gordon, who finds “little long-term change in workers’ share of U.S. income over the past half century.” Middle-ranking Americans are being squeezed, he says, because the top ten percent of earners have captured almost half the total income gains in the past four decades and the top one percent have gained the most of all – “more in fact, than all the bottom 50 percent.”

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Whatever Already! Comments On "Authorized" Leaks

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

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

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

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

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Ted Koppel: Iraq For U.S. Is 'About The Oil'

NEW YORK In a surprisingly strong Op Ed on Friday, Ted Koppel, the former "NIghtline" host who is now an occasional columnist for The New York Times, argues that when it comes right down to it, the U.S. adventure in Iraq is, as some charge, "about the oil."

He likened the situation to H.L. Mencken's statement that when someone says something is "not about the money" it is indeed "about the money." The same is true in this case relating to oil.

While it's wrong to say that we invaded the country to take over its oil supply, Koppel writes in the Times, "the construction of American military bases inside Iraq, bases that can be maintained long after the bulk of our military forces are ultimately withdrawn, will serve to replace the bases that the United States has lost in Saudi Arabia. There may be other national security reasons that the United States cannot now precipitously withdraw its forces from Iraq, including the danger that the country would become a regional terrorist base; but none is greater than forestalling the ensuing power vacuum and regional instability, and the impact this would have on oil production....

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Santorum Charity Low On Giving, Up On Fees

WASHINGTON - Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record)'s charity donated about 40 percent of the $1.25 million it spent during a four-year period, well below Better Business Bureau standards — paying out the rest for overhead, including several hundred thousand dollars to campaign aides on the charity payroll.

The charity, Operation Good Neighbor, is described on its Web site as an organization promoting "compassionate conservatism" by providing grants to small nonprofit groups, many of them religious.

The Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance says charitable organizations should spend at least 65 percent of their total expenses on program activities.

Operation Good Neighbor is based at the same address as Pennsylvania Sen. Santorum's campaign office in suburban Philadelphia, and some of the same people who have worked on his campaign are working for his charity and collecting money from it, records show.

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United Arab Emirates Donated At Least $1M To Bush Library

HOUSTON -- A sheik from the United Arab Emirates contributed at least $1 million to the Bush Library Foundation, which established the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The UAE owns Dubai Ports World, which is taking operations from London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., which operates six U.S. ports.

A political uproar has ensued over the deal, which the White House approved without congressional oversight. Dubai Ports World offered Thursday night to delay part of the takeover to give the Bush administration more time to convince lawmakers the deal poses no security risks.

The donations were made in the early 1990s for the library, which houses the papers of former President George Bush, the current president's father.

The list of donors names Sheik Zayed Bin Sultan al Nahyan and the people of the United Arab Emirates as one donor in the $1 million or more category.

The amount of the gift grants them recognition on the engraved donor wall in the library entrance or on the paving bricks that line the library's walkways, according to library documents.

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Reports Tied UAE To Bin Laden & Cole Bombing

As its ties to the U.S. war on terror are brought into the spotlight, more details about the ties between The United Arab Emirates and U.S. enemies abroad are being unearthed.

The AP recently reported that the Sept. 11 Commission report states U.S. intelligence believed that Osama bin Laden had visited an Afghan desert in 1999 near a hunting camp used by UAE officials.

According to the AP, commission sources claimed that:

"Bin Laden regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited the Emiratis ... National technical intelligence confirmed the location and description of the larger camp and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the United Arab Emirates."

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Bush Family Ties To The UAE: Lou Dobbs Took A Look At The Family Ties Between The Two

DOBBS: President Bush's family and members of the Bush administration have long-standing business connections with the United Arab Emirates, and those connections are raising new concerns and questions tonight in some quarters about why the president is defying his very own party leadership and his party in defending the Dubai port deal.

CHRISTINE ROMANS: The oil-rich United Arab Emirates is a major investor in The Carlyle Group, the private equity investment firm where President Bush's father once served as senior adviser and is a who's who of former high-level government officials. Just last year, Dubai International Capital, a government-backed buyout firm, invested in an $8 billion Carlyle fund.

Another family connection, the president's brother, Neil Bush, has reportedly received funding for his educational software company from the UAE investors. A call to his company was not returned.

Then there is the cabinet connection. Treasury Secretary John Snow was chairman of railroad company CSX/. After he left the company for the White House, CSX sold its international port operations to Dubai Ports World for more than a billion dollars.

In Connecticut today, Snow told reporters he had no knowledge of that CSX sale. "I learned of this transaction probably the same way members of the Senate did, by reading about it in the newspapers."

Another administration connection, President Bush chose a Dubai Ports World executive to head the U.S. Maritime Administration. David Sanborn, the former director of Dubai Ports' European and Latin American operations, he was tapped just last month to lead the agency that oversees U.S. port operations.

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Watchdog Group Files Ethics Complaint RE: Senator Santorum's House Loan

Progressive ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee alleging that Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) violated the Senate Gift Rule by accepting a mortgage from The Philadelphia Trust Company, a bank that serves affluent clients, RAW STORY has learned.

The filing comes in response to an article in the American Prospect by Philadephia Daily News reporter Will Bunch.

The following is a release from CREW, who filed the complaint. Such a complaint is not a formal complaint, as only senators or congressmembers can file ethics complaints against other members.

Democrats have not filed an ethics complaint despite clamoring over a "culture of corruption" for their 2006 campaigns and myriad reports of unethical practices by Republican members of Congress. A handful of Democrats have also taken fire for ethics scandals.

Republicans have threatened to file complaints on Democratic members of Congress if Democrats file complaints against them, including against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). As such, ethics inquiries in both chambers remain at a standstill.

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US Stuns Advocates Of New Rights Body Proposal

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States stunned U.N. officials and rights advocates on Thursday by threatening to reopen talks on a painfully negotiated resolution for a new U.N. Human Rights Council.

General Assembly President Jan Eliasson released a draft compromise text on the council to replace the discredited Geneva-based Human Rights Commission, which has included some of the world's worst rights violators.

The proposal sets a higher threshold for abusing nations to get a seat on the body and calls for a majority vote of all 191 General Assembly members, not just those present. Currently, nations are elected by regional slates in the 54-member Economic and Social Council.

The United States and other Western nations had wanted about 30 members rather than the 47 proposed in the text as well as a two-thirds vote to make it harder for rights abusers, such as Zimbabwe or Sudan, to gain a seat.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said he preferred "real" negotiations between governments rather than consultations with Eliasson or his mediators.

That could result in a line-by-line negotiation of the text, which would open the door to other critics of the new rights council, a reform demanded by world leaders at a U.N. summit in September. The council aims to continue the practice of investigating abusers and helping nations on human rights bodies and laws.

"Based on conversations we've had with other governments, the strongest argument in favor of this draft is that it's not as bad as it could be," Bolton told reporters. "So we will be studying it further."

Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Eliasson and human rights groups opposed Bolton's suggestions.

Annan said countries had had enough time for discussions, so "now is the time for a decision." He said the council was not everything he proposed a year ago but was better placed "to address situations of gross and systematic violations of human rights."

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Report Probes US Custody Deaths

Almost 100 prisoners have died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, according to US group Human Rights First. The details were first aired on BBC television's Newsnight programme. Of the 98 deaths, at least 34 were suspected or confirmed homicides, the programme said.

The Pentagon told Newsnight it had not seen the report but took allegations of maltreatment "very seriously" and would prosecute if necessary.

The report, which is to be published on Wednesday, draws on information from Pentagon and other official US sources.

Torture: Human Rights First representative Deborah Pearlstein told Newsnight she was "extremely comfortable" that the information was reliable.

The report defines the 34 cases classified as homicides as "caused by intentional or reckless behaviour". It says another 11 cases have been deemed suspicious and that between eight and 12 prisoners were tortured to death.

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Industries Get Quiet Protection From Lawsuits

Federal agencies are using arcane regulations and legal opinions to shield automakers and others from challenges by consumers and states.

Near sunrise on a summer morning in 2001, Patrick Parker of Childress, Texas, swerved to avoid a deer and rolled his pickup truck.

The roof of the Ford F-250 crumpled, and Parker didn't stand a chance. His neck broke and, at 37, he was paralyzed from the chest down. He sued, and Ford Motor Co. settled for an undisclosed amount. "You can imagine what happens when you're belted in and the roof comes down even with the door," Parker said. "Your options are death or quadriplegia."

Parker's case and hundreds like it are behind a beefed-up roof safety standard proposed in August by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But safety regulators tucked into the proposed rule something vehicle makers have long desired: protection from future roof-crush lawsuits like the one Parker filed.

The surprise move seeking legal protection for automakers is one in a series of recent steps by federal agencies to shield leading industries from state regulation and civil lawsuits on the grounds that they conflict with federal authority.

Some of these efforts are already facing court challenges. However, through arcane regulatory actions and legal opinions, the Bush administration is providing industries with an unprecedented degree of protection at the expense of an individual's right to sue and a state's right to regulate.