Campaign coffers profit from 911, coke and courts

FBI linguist won’t deny intelligence intercepts tied 911 drug money to U.S. election campaigns

by Tom Flocco
Washington
April 25, 2005
TomFlocco.com

Former FBI contract translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and her attorneys were ordered removed from the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse so that a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel could discuss her case in private with Bush administration lawyers.

In an exclusive interview on Saturday, we asked Edmonds if she would deny that laundered drug money linked to the 911 attacks found its way into recent House, Senate and Presidential campaign war-chests, according to what she heard in intelligence intercepts she was asked to translate.

"I will not deny that statement; but I cannot comment further on it," she told TomFlocco.com, in a non-denial denial.

Edmonds is appealing the Bush administration’s arcane use of "state secrets privilege," invoked last year to throw out her U.S. District Court lawsuit alleging retaliation for telling FBI superiors about shoddy wiretap translations and allegations that wiretap information was passed to the target of an FBI investigation. Given our multiple reports and numerous other interviews, Edmonds heard much more--but enough to warrant public suppression of criminal evidence by a wholly Republican appeals court panel?

"Tom, I’m telling you that not a single newspaper covered what happened to me on Thursday when I went into court," said the exasperated translator, adding, "[Judge David] Ginsberg kicked everyone out, cut off my lawyer’s arguments and told us ‘we have questions to ask the government’s attorneys that you cannot hear.’ "

Criminal evidence in Edmonds’ explosive case is apparently getting too close to Washington officials, since the former contract linguist also told us she would not deny that "once this issue gets to be...investigated, you will be seeing certain [American] people that we know from this country standing trial; and they will be prosecuted criminally," revealing the content of the FBI intercepts she heard indicates that recognizable, very high-profile American citizens are linked to the 911 attacks.

Edmonds implied that legislators and even lobbyists were benefiting from laundered narcotics proceeds in an earlier interview with the Baltimore Sun, "...this money travels. And you start trying to go to the root of it and it’s getting into somebody’s political campaign, and somebody’s lobbying. And people don’t want to be traced back to this money."

So the Bush administration’s Department of Justice enlisted its taxpayer-funded lawyers to petition a Republican U.S. Appeals Court to suppress Sibel Edmonds’ criminal evidence allegations--linked to a 3,000 death mass murder--in the name of "state secrets."

When we asked how many Americans were named in the intercepts, Edmonds said "There is direct evidence involving no more than ten American names that I recognized," further revealing that "some are heads of government agencies or politicians--but I don’t want to go any further than that," as we listened in stunned silence.

When asked in 2002 by CBS 60 Minutes co-host Ed Bradley, "did she seem credible to you? Did her story seem credible?" Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) said "Absolutely, she’s credible. And the reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story."

Plaintiff and attorneys asked to leave courtroom

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said "the court orally instructed the clerk that the hearing would be open only to the attorneys involved in the case and Edmonds."

During Thursday’s arguments, the volatility of Edmonds’ charges and the high officials it may criminally implicate prompted what looked to be a one-sided hearing, reminiscent of a medieval kangaroo court where rights and precepts of justice are ignored and the outcome is usually known beforehand.

All three judges who removed Edmonds and her attorneys are Republicans: Douglas Ginsburg and David Sentelle, having been appointed by Ronald Reagan, and Karen LeCraft Henderson who was tapped in 1990 by President George W. Bush’s father, former President George H. W. Bush.

"Judge Ginsberg said ‘I am asking the plaintiff and her attorneys to stand outside;’ then they had government officers standing at the door to prevent anyone from listening. And after about 25 minutes, they came out and said ‘we have finished questioning the government attorneys and we don’t need you anymore, so you are free to leave,’ " said the crestfallen former translator.

"I cannot be present at my own hearing; and not a single paper was there Thursday to cover the story--even though all of my allegations were supported by the FBI Inspector General’s report and my case involves 911 and national security," said Edmonds.

Assistant Director Dale Watson: FBI's Mr. Fix-it?

Edmonds told another paper "I took [the allegations] to higher levels all the way up to [assistant FBI director] Dale Watson and Director [Robert] Mueller. And, again, I was asked not to take this any further and just let it be. And if I didn’t do that they would retaliate against me," according to the Baltimore Sun.

Despite the court’s unprecedented actions, the Inspector General said Edmonds’ allegations to her superiors about a co-worker "raised serious concerns that, if true, could potentially have extremely damaging consequences for the FBI," having also concluded that the Bureau did not adequately investigate the allegations and that Edmonds was retaliated against for speaking out to protect the United States.

The former FBI translator had already linked laundered illegal narcotics money and terrorism to recent U.S. political campaigns in an earlier statement made to the Baltimore paper, "...you have money laundering activities, drug related activities, and terrorist support activities converging at certain points and becoming one....they are citing ‘foreign relations’ which is not the case....we are not talking about only government levels. And I keep underlining semi-legit organizations and following the money."

When we pressed Edmonds as to whether she would deny that FBI Assistant Director Dale Watson had prior knowledge of the 911 attacks, she quickly said, "no comment," carefully adhering to her judicial gag order--and not revealing all she knows.

Watson came under scrutiny when we attended one of the 911 Commission Hearings when Richard Clarke, former Bush Administration National Coordinator for Counterterrorism for the National Security Council (NSC), was asked "Who gave the final approval for the bin Laden family to leave the country without being interviewed?"

Clarke answered that it could have been the "Inter-Agency Crisis Management Group, but most likely it was the White House Chief of Staff's office or the State Department." [according to this writer's notes / Commission transcripts for March 23 - 24, 2004 are available at http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/index.htm]

When Commissioner Tim Roemer asked "why the Saudis were allowed to leave the country, who was on the planes, how many, and why the decision was made," Clarke said the government "feared for their lives...some of them were bin Laden family members, and the Saudi embassy requested their evacuation."

During testimony Clarke told Roemer "I refused to approve the [Saudi] request. I passed it on to [FBI Asst. Director] Dale Watson and the flight was approved....I don't think they were ever interviewed in this country." Only subpoenaed transcripts and/or video would negate Clarke's assertion.

Dale Watson, who Clarke intimated as the sponsor of the FBI-approved flights and the decision not to interview bin Laden family members and other Saudi royals or citizens, was the former FBI Executive Asst. Director for Counter-Terrorism and Counter-Intelligence.

Interestingly, Watson led controversial investigations of the first World Trade Center attack, Oklahoma City bombing, East Africa Embassy bombings, Khobar Towers bombings, USS Cole bombing, the September 11 attacks and the anthrax attacks, before retiring in 2002 to assume a position with Booz Allen Hamilton.

Democrats in Congress have been strangely silent regarding the actions of the Republican court toward Sibel Edmonds; and she won’t reveal which politicians and high government agency officials were named in the intercepts--potentially linked to laundered 911 drug money which was likely used in U.S. political campaigns.

Uncomplicated drug money laundering

"It’s so simple," Edmonds told TomFlocco.com. "Nobody is looking at the Department of Defense aspect of the whole 911 cover-up. The FBI is citing two reasons for my gag order: to protect ‘sensitive’ diplomatic relations and to protect foreign U.S. business relationships."

TomFlocco.com broke the story of Sibel Edmonds' first public press conference on March 24, 2004, when over 50 reporters and 12 news cameras did not publish the story for days. This, despite Edmonds' allegations that she was offered a substantial raise and a full-time job to encourage her not to go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice to adjust translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA. Kristen Breitweiser, 911 family member and spokeswoman, arranged to have Ms. Edmonds address the media in a public press conference for the first time, right after Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified before the 911 Commission.

In attempting to let the American people how close the 911 cover-up comes to home, Edmonds told us, "I will say this: the FBI is only a mouthpiece for the State Department. The State Department is the main reason for the cover-up. It has to do with foreign business relationships and who they are...Pakistan, Turkey...espionage in the State Department...preventing an investigation."

The former FBI translator has implicated everything "from drugs to money laundering to arms sales. And yes, there are certain convergences with all these activities and international terrorism," adding "they don’t deal with 1 or 5 million dollars, but with hundreds of millions."

In an interview with the website Antiwar, Edmonds cryptically pronounced "...as for the politicians, what I can say is that when you start talking about huge amounts of money, certain elected officials become automatically involved. And there are different kinds of campaign contributions--legal and illegal, declared and undeclared."

Espionage and treason?

Edmonds has reported information about an FBI translator named Jan Dickerson whose husband, U.S. Air Force Major David Dickerson, belonged to a Turkish organization which was an investigative target of the FBI’s own counter-intelligence unit.

Edmonds said Major Dickerson told her husband that "all you have to do is tell them where your wife works and what she does, and they will let you in like that...They wanted to sell me for the information I could provide, basically."

Jan Dickerson insisted to Edmonds that she be the only one to translate the FBI’s wiretaps of a Turkish official, according to CBS 60 Minutes, which added that Edmonds revealed that Jan Dickerson told her, "Why would you want to place your life and your family’s lives in danger by translating these tapes?"

CBS host Ed Bradley said Edmonds found that "Dickerson had left out information crucial to the FBI’s investigation; information that Edmonds says would have revealed that the Turkish intelligence officer had spies working for him inside both the U.S. State Department and the Department of Defense at the Pentagon."

After reporting evidence of espionage in December, 2001--right after the 911 attacks, Edmonds told an FBI special agent who had also harbored suspicions about the Dickersons and they pursued the issue; but Bureau heads said they were never notified despite Edmonds’ proof to the contrary.

She said the FBI permitted other targets of the investigation, key people...foreign nationals based in the U.S....to flee the country "right up through January and February, 2002--five months after the 911 attacks."

Edmonds has said in the past that "I reported some of the suspects’ names higher up as I came across them in our investigation. And you know what? Within two weeks, they had all left the country. Just vanished."

Given the astonishing allegations, the strange actions of the appeals court and congressional silence on the current matter, questions can be raised as to who is on which team.

According to Edmonds, only two weeks after the Air Force convened a formal investigation, Jan and David Dickerson were permitted to leave the country on September 9, 2002--about a year after September 11.

Edmonds also said during the whole month the Dickersons were being subpoenaed, starting in June, 2002, Jan Dickerson continued to work in the FBI translations department--with a top-secret security clearance; and even though the Bureau admitted to a congressional committee that Jan Dickerson worked for the suspect organization in the past and had maintained ongoing relationships with at least two individuals under investigation, according to her interview with Antiwar.

Protecting high government officialsSpecial agent John Roberts, a chief of the FBI’s Internal Affairs Department told CBS 60 Minutes that "I don’t know of another person in the FBI who has done the internal investigation that I have and has seen what I have and that knows what has occurred and what has been glossed over and what has, frankly, just disappeared, just vaporized, and no one disciplined for it."

When asked by Bradley whether he had found cases since 911 where people were involved in misconduct and were not, let alone reprimanded, but were even promoted, Roberts replied, "Oh, yes. Absolutely." In October, 2002, former Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the court to dismiss Edmonds’ case on grounds it would compromise national security; and the FBI declined to discuss the specifics of her case on grounds that it would harm national security.

Attorney General John Ashcroft testified that he flew on a private jet to Milwaukee on the morning of September 11. Earlier reports indicated that he changed from a commercial jet to a private one due to reported terrorism "threat assessments" which government officials refuse to make public simply by redacting the "sources and methods" used in obtaining the intelligence.

Commission members failed to ask Ashcroft to explain the contents of the threat assessments and why they influenced his decision to use a private jet. 911 insider trading subject to "national security" restrictions?

We also wanted to know whether Edmonds thought the three Republican appeals court judges were taking drastic steps to clothe their private talks with Bush administration attorneys in secrecy for the purpose of conspiring to shield members of the President’s hierarchy from criminal prosecution and possible treason linked to the events of September 11.

So we ended the interview with a question dealing with the only area of 911 evidence not subject to the standard but evasive invocation of "national security," the secret "control list" of all stock trades--both puts and calls--and the master list of those individuals and entities making insider stock market trades prior to the 911 attacks about which the same FBI said "we didn't find anything incriminating."

While only a subpoena, testimony and questioning by non-political, career prosecutors will properly answer the insider trading question, we asked Sibel Edmonds the big question anyway--given the above FBI track record implicating espionage:

Do you deny that the FBI intercepts you translated indicated that financial arrangements were in place well before the 911 attacks to both fund and profit from the World Trade Center and Pentagon "terrorism" while also facilitating the laundering of drug money into recent congressional and presidential campaigns?"I cannot comment on that, Tom. You know I’m under a gag order," she said.

That should tell the American people all they need to know.

More TomFlocco.com stories about Sibel Edmonds:
Edmonds sues Ashcroft again, asserts 911-related actions were illegal
Translator Alleges FBI / State Dept Espionage
Possible Treason DOJ Asked FBI Translator To Change Pre 9-11 intercepts

Source:
http://tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=109
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Bush Lies, America Cries

This just in: Global terrorism rates are higher than any time since 1985. Thanks, Dubya!

By Mark Morford
SF Gate Columnist
Friday, April 22, 2005

Oh my God I feel so much safer. Don't you?

I mean, don't you feel so much more secure in your all-American gun-totin' oil-happy lifestyle now that we have wasted upward of $300 billion worth of your child's future education budget, along with 1,600 disposable young American lives and over 20,000 innocent Iraqi lives and about 10,000 severed American limbs and untold wads of our spiritual and moral currency, all to protect America from terrorism that is, by every account, only getting worse? Nastier? More nebulous? More anti-American?

Here's something funny, in a rip-your-patriotic-heart-out-and-spit-on-it sort of way: Just last week, BushCo's State Department decided to kill the publication of an annual report on international terrorism. Why? Well, because the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985. Isn't that hilarious? Isn't that heartwarming? Your tax dollars at work, sweetheart.

Lest you forget, this is what they do. They trim. They edit. They censor. BushCo kills what they do not like and fudges negative data where they see fit and completely rewrites whatever the hell they want, and that includes bogus WMD reports and CIA investigations and dire environmental studies and scientific proofs about everything from evolution to abortion and pollution and clean air, right along with miserable unemployment data and all manner of research pointing up the ill health of the nation, the spirit, the world.

In other words, if BushCo doesn't like what comes out of their own hobbled agencies and their own funded studies, they do what any good dictatorship does: They annihilate it. Now that's good gummint!

Let's be clear: The obliteration of the National Counterterrorism Center report merely goes to prove what so many of us already know -- that BushCo's brutish and borderline traitorous actions since they leveraged 9/11 to blatantly screw the nation have done exactly nothing to stem the tide of terrorism -- and, in fact, have, by most every measure, apparently increased the threat of terrorism. In other words, the world is a more dangerous place because of George W. Bush. Is that clear enough?

Let's put it another way: Under Bush, in the past five years, the U.S. has made zero new friends. But we have made a huge number of new and increasingly venomous enemies. And no, they don't hate us because of our malls, Dubya. They don't hate us because of our freedoms. They don't hate us because of our low-cut jeans and our moronic 8 mpg Ford Expeditions or our corrupt Diebold voting system that snuck you into office.

They hate us, George, because of our policies. Anti-Muslim. Pro-Israel. Oil-uber-alles. Anti-U.N. Anti-Kyoto. Anti-planet. Pro-war. Pro-insularity. Pseudo-swagger. Bogus staged "town hall" meetings stocked with prescreened monosyllabic Bush sycophants. Ego. Empire.

But here's the truly sad part, the hideous and depressing and soul-shredding part about all those young kids in the U.S. military right now, all those mostly undereducated, lower-middle-class kids, most of whom aren't even old enough to buy beer and many of whom have barely had sex and many who got sucked into the military vortex in an honest attempt to help pay for a college education so they could go out and not find a decent job in this miserable economy. The sad part is all those kids in the military who've been trained/brainwashed to believe they are serving in Iraq to protect America's freedom, to protect us from, well, something dark, and sinister, and deadly. When in fact, they're not. Not even close.

The truth is, we were never under threat from Iraq. There were never any WMDs, and Bush knew it. Our military is protecting nothing so much as our access to future stores of petroleum, nothing so much as helping set up a giant police station in Iraq to ensure surrounding nations don't get all uppity about just who controls the rights to those oil fields.

So let's get honest and just ask it outright: Is this a worthy use of the massive bloated machine that is the U.S. military? Of the largest and most advanced fighting force in the world? To protect the flow of oil to the most gluttonous and wasteful and least accountable developed nation on the planet? Is this worth so many young American lives?

You already know the answer. Ask any oil exec. Any government economist. Any BushCo war hawk or auto manufacturer or the leaders of any major manufacturing industry. Ask the president himself. They all say the same thing: You're goddamn right it is.

Here, then, is the warped, convoluted irony: We went to war under the lie of a Saddam-fueled terrorism threat that never existed. We are at war, instead, to protect our oil and to establish regional control, an act that, in turn, has destabilized the Middle East even further and is actually inciting much of the very terrorism we were ostensibly there to battle in the first place, thus producing a level of anti-U.S. hatred not even a (still alive and apparently very chipper) Osama bin Laden could have wet dreamed. Isn't democracy fun?

We are not "spreading democracy" by invading Iraq. We are not giving a gift of a more peaceable Iraq to a grateful world. That is merely insidious Republican PR spin. Right now, the U.S. military is, in short, protecting your right to a $3 gallon of gas, which will soon be $4 and then maybe $5 and $6 as we are running out of the stuff faster than anyone thought and the fight for that which remains will only turn uglier and more violent and so I have to ask again, do you feel safer?

Because if you say yes, you are, quite simply, lying. Or delusional. Or you have had your brain edited by BushCo. Or those are some mighty powerful drugs you are obviously taking and you might wish to consider switching to aspirin and wine and Fleshbot.com.

They say that violence is the last refuge of a desperate nation. And violence under the guise of secrecy and outright lie such as BushCo has foisted upon the nation is the last refuge of a nation of thugs. Yes, I'm looking at you, Rummy. I'm looking at you, Cheney. I'm not looking at you, Karl Rove, because looking at you makes my colon clench and looking at you makes birds die and looking at you makes small children feel hopeless and lost, like the world is full of black venomous hate and bilious condescension that is aimed squarely at their heads, like a gun.

It's true. We are living in a nation run by over privileged alcoholic frat boys and power-mad thugs. This much we know. This much we need to be reminded of, over and over again, until we finally wake up.

Ah, but there is good news. There is always good news. The good news is, they are now confiscating all cigarette lighters at the airport. In the name of safety. In the name of homeland security. In the name of America, apple pie, babies, puppies, Jesus and guns. Lighters are now forbidden on all air travel. I mean, thank God.

I feel safer already.

©2005 SF Gate
Source:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2005/04/22/notes042205.DTL&nl=fix

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Neil Bush served with then-Cardinal Ratzinger on board of relatively unknown ecumenical foundation.

BY KNUT ROYCE AND TOM BRUNE
WASHINGTON BUREAU
April 21, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Neil Bush, the president's controversial younger brother, six years ago joined the cardinal who this week became Pope Benedict XVI as a founding board member of a little known Swiss ecumenical foundation.

The charter members of the board were all well-known international religious figures, except for Bush and his close friend and business partner, Jamal Daniel, whose family has extensive holdings in the United States and Switzerland, public records show.

The Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1999 to promote ecumenical understanding and publish original religious texts, said a foundation official.

Besides then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, founding board members included Rene-Samuel Sirat, the former chief rabbi of France; Jordan's Prince Hassan, a Muslim dedicated to religious dialogue; the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, another prominent Muslim; Olivier Fatio, director of the Institute of the History of the Reformation; and foundation president Metropolitan Damaskinos, a Greek Orthodox leader.

Gary Vachicouras, a theologian and foundation official in Geneva, would not explain in a telephone interview yesterday why Bush, who has no clear public connection to religious causes, was on the first board.

"He was interested at that particular time," said Vachicouras of Bush. But like some other initial board members, Bush is no longer involved, Vachicouras said. Ratzinger also left a few years ago and was replaced by Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, who is responsible for ecumenical relations for the Vatican, said Vachicouras.

Still active is Daniel, a Syrian American who has family active in the Orthodox Church in Geneva, said Vachicouras. "This is an Orthodox lay person," he said.

Neither Bush, now president of the educational software company Ignite! Learning, based in Austin, Texas, nor Daniel returned calls for comment.

In his highly publicized divorce last year, Bush revealed he and Daniel are co-chairs of Texas-based Crest Investment Co., which pays him $60,000 a year for consulting. Recently, Crest Investment officials used Bush's name as a reference in cutting an exclusive deal with Texas officials on construction of a liquid natural gas storage facility that will guarantee Crest payments of at least $2 million a year, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In the divorce proceedings, Bush also revealed that while he was in a hotel in Asia, women on at least three occasions came into his room and had sex with him. Daniel hosted Bush's second wedding at his home.

Daniel reportedly became acquainted with Bush in 1991, the year the federal Office of Thrift Supervision sanctioned Bush for having "multiple conflicts of interest" in his role as a director of Silverado Savings and Loan, a Colorado thrift whose failure cost taxpayers $1.3 billion. Bush paid $50,000 in a settlement.

The foundation, based at the Orthodox Center of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Geneva, is listed by Dun & Bradstreet business credit reports as a management trust for purposes other than education, religion, charity or research. But Vachicouras said the designation must be a mistake of translation to English because the foundation is a private nonprofit established under Swiss law. He said the foundation is being "relaunched" on its mission to publish the original text of the Bible's Old Testament in Hebrew, its New Testament in Greek and the Quran in Arabic.

Fatio, who left the board three years ago, said the foundation "never had any money." Vachicouras declined to discuss finances. He said, "We keep a low profile because that makes it easier to get work done."

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.
Source:
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wochar214226829apr21,0,2092802,print.story
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Was Bolton behind death of State Department official?

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

First reported on November 20, 2003
Updated April 20, 2005

WASHINGTON, DC—In a case eerily reminiscent of the death of British Ministry of Defense bio-weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly, an official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7, 2003.

Police indicated he may have jumped from the roof of the State Department. Kokal's body was found at the bottom of a 20-foot window well, eight floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters, near the 23rd and D Street location. Kokal's death was briefly mentioned in a FOX News website story on November 8 but has been virtually overlooked by the major media. In light of recent revelations concerning UN ambassador nominee John Bolton's bizarre and physically abusive behavior, a re-examination of the Kokal death is in order.

Kokal's INR bureau was at the forefront of confronting claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Washington police have not ruled out homicide as the cause of his death. Kokal was not wearing either a jacket or shoes when his body was found. He lived with his wife in Arlington, Virginia.

However, a colleague of Kokal's told this writer that the Iraq analyst was despondent over "problems" with his security clearance. Kokal reportedly climbed out of a window and threw himself off in such a manner so that he would "land on his head."

At the time Kokal fell from either the roof or a window, his wife Pamela, a public affairs specialist in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, was waiting for him in the parking garage. Mrs. Kokal had previously worked in Consular Affairs where she was involved in the stricter vetting of visa applicants from mainly Muslim countries after the Sept. 11 attacks.

State Department officials dispute official department communiqués that said Kokal was not an analyst at INR. People who know Kokal told the French publication Geopolitique that Kokal was involved in the analysis of intelligence about Iraq prior to and during the war against Saddam Hussein. According to State Department sources, Kokal briefed Secretary of State Colin Powell at least once a week on Iraq, adding that Kokal was a skeptic on the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Another INR official, weapons expert Greg Thielmann, said he and INR were largely ignored by Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and his deputy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud neoconservative who recently became Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser. Kokal's former boss, the recently retired chief of INR, Carl W. Ford, later said that Bolton often exaggerated information to steer people in the wrong directions.

Now that Bolton has been nominated for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and we have learned through Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings that Bolton was verbally and physically abusive to his colleagues over the past several years, it is time to take a close look at some violent deaths of State Department and CIA officials who tangled with the Bush administration over Iraq policy.

It is noteworthy that Bolton's ideological soul mate at the National Security Council (NSC), ex-Iran-Contra felon Elliot Abrams, has also been psychologically and physically abusive to his subordinates. Bolton and Abrams are long-time friends, having both helped devise the neoconservative game plan for U.S. global domination through their activities with the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

According to a UPI report, Abrams once led CIA officer Ben Miller (who was on loan to the NSC from the agency) to an open window at the NSC and told him to jump. Abrams and Bolton share a mercurial and maniacal management style that includes physical threats against subordinates. While Bolton was demanding the firing of State Department and CIA personnel, including State Department analyst Christian Westermann and CIA officer Fulton Armstrong, Abrams fired Miller and two of his NSC colleagues, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann.

Ford testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Bolton was a "quintessential kiss-up and kick-down sort of guy." A lingering question is whether Bolton is a "kick out" (as in window) sort of guy. Since Abrams's position at the NSC does not require Senate approval, the testimonies of Miller, Leverett, and Mann against Abrams were never heard by Congress.

A former INR employee revealed that some one-third to one-half of INR officials are either former CIA intelligence agents or are detailed from the agency. He also revealed it would have been impossible for Kokal to have gained entry to the roof on his own.

INR occupies both a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on the sixth floor that has no windows and a windowless structure on the roof that has neither windows nor access to the roof, according to the former official. The other windows at the State Department have been engineered to be shatter proof from terrorist bomb attacks and cannot be opened.

The suspicious fatal fall from the Watergate complex of ex-CIA and NSC official Dr. Gus Weiss a few weeks after Kokal's similar death at the nearby State Department also merits investigation. Weiss, like Kokal, was adamantly opposed to the Iraq war and Weiss, uncharacteristically, went public with his protests.

Weiss worked in the office of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson in the 1970s, along with Iraqi war architects Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. He also served on the U.S. Intelligence Board under President Jimmy Carter and was considered a hawk during the Carter and Reagan administrations. However, in later years, Weiss broke ranks with his old neoconservative colleagues and came out against the Iraq misadventure.

INR and other State Department officials reported that a "chill" set in at the State Department following Kokal's defenestration. A number of employees were afraid to talk about the suspicious death. It also is unusual that The Northern Virginia Journal, a local Arlington newspaper, has not published an obituary notice on Kokal.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based journalist and syndicated columnist. His forthcoming book is "Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates."

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/042105Madsen/042105madsen.html

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Holy Warriors

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com
Thursday 21 April 2005

Cardinal Ratzinger handed Bush the presidency by tipping the Catholic vote. Can American democracy survive their shared medieval vision?

President Bush treated his final visit with Pope John Paul II in Vatican City on June 4, 2004, as a campaign stop. After enduring a public rebuke from the pope about the Iraq war, Bush lobbied Vatican officials to help him win the election. "Not all the American bishops are with me," he complained, according to the National Catholic Reporter. He pleaded with the Vatican to pressure the bishops to step up their activism against abortion and gay marriage in the states during the campaign season.

About a week later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to the U.S. bishops, pronouncing that those Catholics who were pro-choice on abortion were committing a "grave sin" and must be denied Communion. He pointedly mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws" -- an obvious reference to John Kerry, the Democratic candidate and a Roman Catholic. If such a Catholic politician sought Communion, Ratzinger wrote, priests must be ordered to "refuse to distribute it." Any Catholic who voted for this "Catholic politician," he continued, "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion." During the closing weeks of the campaign, a pastoral letter was read from pulpits in Catholic churches repeating the ominous suggestion of excommunication. Voting for the Democrat was nothing less than consorting with the forces of Satan, collaboration with "evil! ."

In 2004 Bush increased his margin of Catholic support by 6 points from the 2000 election, rising from 46 to 52 percent. Without this shift, Kerry would have had a popular majority of a million votes. Three states -- Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico -- moved into Bush's column on the votes of the Catholic "faithful." Even with his atmospherics of terrorism and Sept. 11, Bush required the benediction of the Holy See as his saving grace. The key to his kingdom was turned by Cardinal Ratzinger.

With the College of Cardinals' election of Ratzinger to the papacy, his political alliances with conservative politicians can be expected to deepen and broaden. Under Benedict XVI, the church will assume a consistent reactionary activism it has not had for two centuries. And the new pope's crusade against modernity has already joined forces with the right-wing culture war in the United States, prefigured by his interference in the 2004 election.

Europe is far less susceptible than the United States to the religious wars that Ratzinger will incite. Attendance at church is negligible; church teachings are widely ignored; and the younger generation is least observant of all. But in the United States, the Bush administration and the right wing of the Republican Party are trying to batter down the wall of separation between church and state. Through court appointments, they wish to enshrine doctrinal views on the family, women, gays, medicine, scientific research and privacy. The Republican attempt to abolish the two-centuries-old filibuster -- the so-called nuclear option -- is only one coming wrangle in the larger Kulturkampf.

Joseph Ratzinger was born and bred in the cradle of the Kulturkampf, or culture war. Roman Catholic Bavaria was a stronghold against northern Protestantism during the Reformation. In the 19th century the church was a powerful force opposing the unification of Italy and Germany into nation-states, fearing that they would diminish the church's influence in the shambles of duchies and provinces that had followed the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire. The doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870 was promulgated by the church to tighten its grip on Catholic populations against the emerging centralized nations and to sanctify the pope's will against mere secular rulers.

In response, Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, launched what he called a Kulturkampf to break the church's hold. He removed the church from the control of schools, expelled the Jesuits, and instituted civil ceremonies for marriage. Bismarck lent support to Catholic dissidents opposed to papal infallibility who were led by German theologian Johann Ignaz von Dollinger. Dollinger and his personal secretary were subsequently excommunicated. His secretary was Georg Ratzinger, great-uncle of the new pope, who became one of the most notable Bavarian intellectuals and politicians of the period. This Ratzinger was a champion against papal absolutism and church centralization, and on behalf of the poor and working class -- and was also an anti-Semite.

Joseph Ratzinger's Kulturkampf is claimed by him to be a reaction to the student revolts of 1968. Should Joschka Fischer, a former student radical and now the German foreign minister, have to answer entirely for Ratzinger's Weltanschauung? Pope Benedict's Kulturkampf bears the burden of the church's history and that of his considerable family. He represents the latest incarnation of the long-standing reaction against Bismarck's reforms -- beginning with the assertion of the invented tradition of papal infallibility -- and, ironically, against the positions on the church held by his famous uncle. But the roots of his reaction are even more profound.

The new pope's burning passion is to resurrect medieval authority. He equates the Western liberal tradition, that is, the Enlightenment, with Nazism, and denigrates it as "moral relativism." He suppresses all dissent, discussion and debate within the church and concentrates power within the Vatican bureaucracy. His abhorrence of change runs past 1968 (an abhorrence he shares with George W. Bush) to the revolutions of 1848, the "springtime of nations," and 1789, the French Revolution. But, even more momentously, the alignment of the pope's Kulturkampf with the U.S. president's culture war has also set up a conflict with the American Revolution.

For the first time, an American president is politically allied with the Vatican in its doctrinal mission (except, of course, on capital punishment). In the messages and papers of the presidents from George Washington until well into those of the 20th century, there was not a single mention of the pope, except in one minor footnote. Bush's lobbying trip last year to the Vatican reflects an utterly novel turn, and Ratzinger's direct political intervention in American electoral politics ratified it.

The right wing of the Catholic Church is as mobilized as any other part of the religious right. It is seizing control of Catholic universities, exerting influence at other universities, stigmatizing Catholic politicians who fail to adhere to its conservative credo, pressing legislation at the federal and state levels, seeking government funding and sponsorship of the church, and vetting political appointments inside the White House and the administration -- imposing in effect a religious test of office. The Bush White House encourages these developments under the cover of moral uplift as it forges a political machine uniting church and state -- as was done in premodern Europe.

The American Revolution, the Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were fought for explicitly to uproot the traces in American soil of ecclesiastical power in government, which the Founders to a man regarded with horror, revulsion and foreboding.

The Founders were the ultimate representatives of the Enlightenment. They were not anti-religious, though few if any of them were orthodox or pious. Washington never took Communion and refused to enter the church, while his wife did so. Benjamin Franklin believed that all organized religion was suspect. James Madison thought that established religion did as much harm to religion as it did to free government, twisting the word of God to fit political expediency, thereby throwing religion into the political cauldron. And Thomas Jefferson, allied with his great collaborator Madison, conducted decades of sustained and intense political warfare against the existing and would-be clerisy. His words, engraved on the Jefferson Memorial, are a direct reference to established religion: "I have sworn eternal warfare against all forms of superstition over the minds of men."

But now Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay threatens the federal judiciary, saying, "The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them." And Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will participate through a telecast in a rally on April 24 in which he will say that Democrats who refuse to rubber-stamp Bush's judicial nominees and uphold the filibuster are "against people of faith."

But what would Madison say?

This is what Madison wrote in 1785: "What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the Civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not."

What would John Adams say?

This is what he wrote Jefferson in 1815: "The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?"

Benjamin Franklin? "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

And Jefferson, in "Notes on Virginia," written in 1782: "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desireable? No more than of face and stature. Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there is danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter. Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."

The Republican Party was founded in the mid-19th century partly as a party of religious liberty. It supported public common schools, not church schools, and public land-grant universities independent of any denominational affiliation. The Republicans, moreover, were adamant in their opposition to the use of any public funds for any religious purpose, especially involving schools.

A century later, in 1960, there was still such a considerable suspicion of Catholics in government that the Democratic candidate for president, John F. Kennedy, felt compelled to address the issue directly in his famous speech before the Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12.

What did Kennedy say? "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference ... I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials."

Now Bush is attempting to create what Kennedy warned against. He claims to be conservative, but he seeks a rupture in our system of government. The culture war, which has had many episodes, from the founding of the Moral Majority to the unconstitutional impeachment of President Clinton, is entering a new and far more dangerous phase. In 2004, Bush and Ratzinger used church doctrine to intimidate voters and taint candidates. And through the courts the president is seeking to codify not only conservative ideology but religious doctrine.

When men of God mistake their articles of devotion with political platforms they will inevitably stand exposed in the political arena. When politicians mistake themselves for men of God, their religion, however sincere, will inevitably be seen as contrivance.

As both president and pope invoke heavenly authority to impose their notions of tradition, they have set themselves on a collision course with the American political tradition. In the name of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, democracy without end. Amen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of The Clinton Wars, is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/04/21/tk/index_np.html
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New Pope Intervened against Kerry in US 2004 Election Campaign

Agence France-Presse
Tuesday 19 April 2005

Washington - German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry.

In a June 2004 letter to US bishops enunciating principles of worthiness for communion recipients, Ratzinger specified that strong and open supporters of abortion should be denied the Catholic sacrament, for being guilty of a "grave sin."

He specifically mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws," a reference widely understood to mean Democratic candidate Kerry, a Catholic who has defended abortion rights.

The letter said a priest confronted with such a person seeking communion "must refuse to distribute it."

A footnote to the letter also condemned any Catholic who votes specifically for a candidate because the candidate holds a pro-abortion position. Such a voter "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for holy communion," the letter read.

The letter, which was revealed in the Italian magazine L'Espresso last year, was reportedly only sent to US Catholic bishops, who discussed it in their convocation in Denver, Colorado, in mid-June.

Sharply divided on the issue, the bishops decided to leave the decision on granting or denying communion to the individual priest. Kerry later received communion several times from sympathetic priests.

Nevertheless, in the November election, a majority of Catholic voters, who traditionally supported Democratic Party candidates, shifted their votes to Republican and eventual winner George W. Bush.

Source:
http://cuncutator.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/19/221625/892
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1521&e=3&u=/afp/20050419/pl_afp/vaticanpopeus

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Arch-Conservative German Elected Pope

By Philip Pullella and Crispian Balmer
Reuters
Tuesday 19 April 2005

Vatican City - Arch-conservative German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope on Tuesday in a surprise choice that delighted traditionalist Roman Catholics but stunned moderates hoping for a more liberal papacy.

Ratzinger, 78, the Church's 265th pontiff, will take the name of Benedict XVI. He is expected to defend Pope John Paul's strict orthodox legacy and reject changes in Catholic doctrine. He is the oldest man to be elected pope for three centuries and the first German pontiff for a millennium.

The speed of the election, on only the second day of a secret cardinals conclave, and its result were both a surprise. Many Vatican experts had said Ratzinger, John Paul's tough doctrinal watchdog for 23 years, was too divisive and too old to become pope.

They had predicted he would have to cede to a more conciliatory compromise figure during the conclave, although John Paul had appointed all but two of the cardinal electors and one of those two was Ratzinger himself. The white-haired new Pope appeared on the balcony of St Peter's Basilica soon after his election, smiling broadly and greeting tens of thousands of cheering faithful.

"I entrust myself to your prayers," he said as the crowd chanted "Papa! Papa! Papa!" and waved umbrellas and flags. Some climbed lamp posts and fountains in the cobblestone square for a better view. Benedict was showered with congratulations from foreign and religious leaders but the election was greeted with consternation by those hoping for a relaxation in John Paul's strict rule over the world's 1.1 billion Catholics.

"We consider the election of Ratzinger is a catastrophe ... We can expect no reform from him in coming years ... I think even more people will turn their back on the Church," said Bernd Goehring, of the German ecumenical group Kirche von Unten.

Even in St Peter's Square, some of the celebrations were tempered by fear of widening divisions in the Church.

"It's a historic moment, but a very sad one. He is even more conservative than John Paul II. All he knows to do is condemn, condemn, condemn," said Agusti Capdevila from Barcelona. Benedict's election by a conclave meeting in the Vatican's frescoed Sistine Chapel was signaled by white smoke from the chapel chimney and the tolling of the bells of St. Peter's.

New Pope Dominated Vatican after John Paul's Death

The election indicated both that the cardinals wanted to maintain John Paul's strict Church orthodoxy and also to have a short, transitional papacy after the Polish pope's 26-year reign -- the third longest in Church history.

"I was surprised for a couple of reasons. One is his age ... The second is that I thought he might have been too much of a polarising person. But that may not be the perception that was shared by the cardinals," said Lawrence Cunningham, theology professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Ratzinger, dean of the cardinals, had dominated the Vatican since the death of Pope John Paul on April 2. He presided over the funeral Mass and daily meetings of cardinals since then. He used a homily at a Mass before the conclave to issue a stern warning that godless modern trends must be rejected. The address was widely seen as promoting his candidacy.

He was expected to take a tough line against reformist trends in Europe and North America. In a Good Friday Mass this year he said: "How much filth there is in the Church, even among those who, in the priesthood, should belong entirely to Him."

Ratzinger's stern leadership of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern successor to the Inquisition, delighted conservative Catholics but upset moderates and other Christians whose churches he described as deficient. Before St. Peter's bells confirmed Benedict's election, there were 10 minutes of confusion over the color of the smoke, which initially seemed grey.

But even before the bells pealed, thousands of faithful in the square cheered and applauded, yelling "A pope, a pope!" It was only the third time in a century that a pope had been chosen on the second day of a conclave. The new Pope had to win a two-thirds majority of the 115 red-robed cardinals.

New Pope Tough Disciplinarian

In Germany, church bells rang out and Catholics streamed into churches to celebrate Benedict's election. The choice of Ratzinger dashed hopes of a pope from the developing world, where two thirds of Catholics now live. He is expected to pay particular attention to the decline of faith and spread of secularism in Europe.

As John Paul's doctrinal overseer, Ratzinger disciplined Latin American "liberation theology" theologians, denounced homosexuality and gay marriage and pressured Asian priests who saw non-Christian religions as part of God's plan for humanity. Matt Foreman, of the U.S. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force said: "Today the princes of the Roman Catholic Church elected as Pope a man whose record has been one of unrelenting, venomous hatred for gay people."

In a document in 2000, Ratzinger branded other Christian churches as deficient -- shocking Anglicans, Lutherans and other Protestants in ecumenical dialogue with Rome for years. Ratzinger was the oldest cardinal to be named pope since Clement XII, who was also 78 when he became pope in 1730. He is the first German pope since Victor II (1055-1057).

Before the conclave door shut on Monday, Ratzinger made a final appeal to his fellow electors to protect traditional teachings and to shun modern trends. He made no mention of the challenges that other cardinals and ordinary Catholics say should top the agenda such as poverty, Islam, science, sexual morality and Church reform.

Born in Bavaria on April 16, 1927, the son of a police chief, he served in the Hitler Youth during World War II when membership was compulsory, according to his autobiography. But he was never a member of the Nazi party and his family opposed Adolf Hitler's regime, biographers have said.

Ratzinger later became a leading theology professor and then archbishop of Munich before taking over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981.

Source:
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=8230604

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Embarrassed Bush Administration Eliminates 19-year-old International Terrorism Report

By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Friday 15 April 2005

Washington - The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Several US officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.

Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism."

But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.

"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report."

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that the publication was being eliminated, but said the allegation that it was being done for political reasons was "categorically untrue."

According to Johnson and US intelligence officials familiar with the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004.

That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.

The statistics didn't include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front in the war on terror."

The intelligence officials requested anonymity because the information is classified and because, they said, they feared White House retribution. Johnson declined to say how he obtained the figures.

Another US official, who also requested anonymity, said analysts from the counterterrorism center were especially careful in amassing and reviewing the data because of the political turmoil created by last year's errors.

Last June, the administration was forced to issue a revised version of the report for 2003 that showed a higher number of significant terrorist attacks and more than twice the number of fatalities than had been presented in the original report two months earlier.

The snafu was embarrassing for the White House, which had used the original version to bolster President Bush's election-campaign claim that the war in Iraq had advanced the fight against terrorism.

US officials blamed last year's mix-up on bureaucratic mistakes involving the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the forerunner of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Created last year on the recommendation of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the center is the government's primary organization for analyzing and integrating all US government intelligence on terrorism.

The State Department published "Patterns of Global Terrorism" under a law that requires it to submit to the House of Representatives and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a country-by-country terrorism assessment by April 30 each year.

A declassified version of the report has been made public since 1986 in the form of a glossy booklet, even though there was no legal requirement to produce one.

The senior State Department official said a report on global terrorism would be sent this year to lawmakers and made available to the public in place of "Patterns of Global Terrorism," but that it wouldn't contain statistical data.

He said that decision was taken because the State Department believed that the National Counterterrorism Center "is now the authoritative government agency for the analysis of global terrorism. We believe that the NCTC should compile and publish the relevant data on that subject."

He didn't answer questions about whether the data would be made available to the public, saying, "We will be consulting (with Congress) ... on who should publish and in what form."

Another US official said Rice's office was leery of the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate the data for 2004, believing that analysts anxious to avoid a repetition of last year's undercount included incidents that may not have been terrorist attacks.

But the US intelligence officials said Rice's office decided to eliminate "Patterns of Global Terrorism" when the counterterrorism center declined to use alternative methodology that would have reported fewer significant attacks.

The officials said they interpreted Rice's action as an attempt to avoid releasing statistics that would contradict the administration's claims that it's winning the war against terrorism.


Go to "Patterns of Global Terrorism" to read past reports online.

Source:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11407689.htm

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Scientists Scramble to Destroy Deadly Flu Strain

By Emma Ross
The Associated Press
Wednesday 13 April 2005

London - Thousands of scientists were scrambling Tuesday at the urging of global health authorities to destroy vials of a pandemic flu strain sent to labs in 18 countries as part of routine testing.

The rush, urged by the World Health Organization, was sparked by a slim, but real, risk that the samples, could spark a global flu epidemic. The vials of virus sent by a U.S. company went to nearly 5,000 labs, mostly in the United States, officials said.

"The risk is relatively low that a lab worker will get sick, but a large number of labs got it and if someone does get infected, the risk of severe illness is high and this virus has shown to be fully transmissible," WHO's influenza chief, Klaus Stohr, told The Associated Press.

It was not immediately clear why the 1957 pandemic strain, which killed between 1 million and 4 million people - was in the proficiency test kits routinely sent to labs.

It was a decision that Stohr described as "unwise," and "unfortunate."

That particular bug was "an epidemic virus for many years," Stohr said from the U.N. health agency's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. "The risk is low but things can go wrong as long as these samples are out there and there are some still out there."

The 1957 strain has not been included in the flu vaccine since 1968, and anyone born after that date has no immunity to it.

Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of the influenza branch at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said her agency was notified of the situation Friday morning. She also said officials strongly doubt someone deliberately planted the dangerous germ or that this was an act of bioterrorism.

"It wouldn't be a smart way to start a pandemic to send it to laboratories because we have people well trained in biocontainment," she said.

The concern over the shipment of pandemic flu virus to thousands labs renews questions about the safe handling of deadly germs - an issue that led to toughened U.S. rules after anthrax was sent in the mail in 2001, killing five Americans.

Most of the flu samples - 3,747 - were sent starting last year at the request of the College of American Pathologists, which helps labs do proficiency testing. The last shipments were sent out in February.

Dr. Jared Schwartz, an official with the pathology college, said a private company, Meridian Bioscience Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio, is paid to prepare the samples. The firm was told to pick an influenza A sample and chose from its stockpile the deadly 1957 H2N2 strain.

Stohr said U.S. health officials also reported to WHO that some other test kit providers besides the college used the 1957 pandemic strain in samples sent to labs in the United States. Schwartz identified them as Medical Lab Evaluators, the American Association of Bioanalysts and the American Association of Family Practitioners.

Almost 99 percent of the labs that got the test kits are in the United States, Stohr said. Fourteen were in Canada and 61 samples went to labs in 16 other countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, according to the WHO.

Some of the labs outside the United States have already destroyed their samples, he said, and WHO is hoping that the rest of the vials will be destroyed by Friday. The health agency wouldn't name the other countries whose labs received the samples.

The test kits are used for internal quality control checks to demonstrate that a lab is able to correctly identify viruses or as a way for labs to get certified by the College of American Pathologists.

The kits involve blind samples. The lab then has to correctly identify the pathogen in the vial in order to pass the test. Usually, the influenza virus included in these kits is one that is currently circulating, or at least one that has recently been in circulation.

On March 26, National Microbial Laboratory Canada detected the 1957 pandemic strain in a sample not connected with the test kit. After informing WHO and the CDC of the strange finding, the lab investigated. It informed the U.N. health agency on Friday that it had traced the virus to the test kit.

The WHO then notified the health authorities in all countries that received the kits and recommended that all the samples be destroyed immediately.

That same day, the College of American Pathologists faxed the labs asking them to immediately incinerate the samples and to confirm in writing that the operation had been completed.

Stohr said the test kits are not the only supplies of the 1957 pandemic strain sitting in laboratories around the world.

"The world really has to think what routine labs should be doing with these samples they have kept in the back of their fridges," Storh said.

Viruses are classed according to the level of lab safety precautions that must be taken when handling them. Routine viruses can be handled in labs with a basic level of biosafety protection. However, very dangerous viruses, such as Ebola, can only be handled at labs with top-level safety measures. Those labs have a biosafety level of 4.

The 1957 flu virus has for years been a level 2 virus, but many countries have upgraded it to a biosafety level of 3 because so many people have no immunity to it. Stohr said U.S. officials reviewing the classification and are expected to increase it to a level 3 later this summer.

Source:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=541&ncid=716&e=6&u=/ap/20050413/ap_on_he_me/pandemic_flu_labs

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Bush Nominee Bolton Accused of Being "Serial Abuser"

Bolton accused of abusing analysts at State Dept. Critic calls UN nominee 'kiss-up, kick-down' guy.

The Associated Press
Tuesday 12 April 2005


Washington - A former chief of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research castigated John Bolton on Tuesday as a "kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy" who abused analysts who disagreed with his views of Cuba's weapons capabilities.

With Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Democratic attack, Carl Ford Jr. appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to support accusations of harassment.

"I have never seen anyone quite like Mr. Bolton," Ford testified under oath. "He abuses his authority with little people."

'Serial Abuser'

Contradicting Bolton's assertion Monday that he never tried to have officials who disagreed with him discharged, Ford charged that Bolton was a "serial abuser" who tried to sack one analyst, Christian Westermann.

Sen. Joseph F. Biden, Jr., D-Del., who is leading the fight to block the nomination, responded angrily to the accusation of mistreatment. Anytime a senior official calls in a lower-level one "and reams him a new one," he said, "that's just not acceptable."

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said it was not an isolated incident, that Bolton had harassed at least three officials who disagreed with the extent of threats he saw posed by Cuba and other countries.

Calling Bolton a "bully," Boxer said, "I think Mr. Bolton needs anger management at a minimum and he does not deserve to be promoted" to the U.N. post.

But Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a moderate Republican from Rhode Island whose vote could be critical, noted calmly that analysts criticized by Bolton had "kept their jobs." Chafee has already described himself as inclined to support confirmation.

Testimony Discounted

And. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., noted that Ford had not witnessed the incident he testified about, saying that much of his testimony would not be admissable in a court of law.

Ford told the committee he considered himself a loyal Republican, a conservative and a strong supporter of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Ford said he appeared before the committee only after a lot of "soul-searching."

On Monday, Bolton - in his one day of scheduled testimony - rigorously rejected assertions that he tried to fire subordinates who disagreed with him.

"I didn't seek to have these people fired. I didn't seek to have them discharged. I said I lost my trust in them," Bolton testified.

Bolton also assured the committee that he supports international law and views the United Nations as "an important component of our diplomacy." The 56-year-old State Department chief of arms control is a hard-liner with a skeptical view of some U.S. arms control treaties and a frequent critic of the value of the United Nations.

Also on Monday, committee Democrats met behind closed doors were interviewing Neil Silver, a senior department intelligence official, and a CIA agent whose identify the senators sought to conceal.

Democrats also took aim at Bolton's strident criticism of the U.N., which they said made him ill-suited for the U.N. post.

'Nothing but Disdain'

"You have nothing but disdain for the U.N.," Boxer said. "You can dance around it. You can run away from it. You can put perfume on it," she said.

However, with Republicans in the committee majority by 10-8 and the Senate itself by 55-44 plus an independent, Bolton could be on a track to confirmation unless damaging new information about him emerges. The chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., hopes to hold a committee vote Thursday and has no plan to recall Bolton for more testimony.

Summing up the view of Republicans amid a relentless Democratic attack, Sen. George Allen of Virginia told the embattled undersecretary of state, "You have the knowledge. ... You will bring a credit to the U.N. that they sorely need."

Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7462527/

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The Voice of the White House

April 2, 2005:

“Today, I would like to discuss how the news is both censored and controlled by Karl Rove. It has now become very apparent that the American mass media is under a tight rein and publishes nothing but canned material.

Economic disasters throughout the world, threatening political and economic attacks on the United States, domestic failures and much more are deliberately concealed by two means:

They are not ever discussed in the mainline media and the public, which is too stupid and too lazy to read many informative foreign news sites, are deliberately distracted with pap and nonsense. If it wasn’t the Lacy Peterson Story, it was the Michael Jackson mess or the Tsunami in Indonesian waters , the tasteless Terri the Turnip matter and now we have the Dead Pope story to keep the trailer-park boobies entertained. The dollar is tanking with disastrous results, oil is drying up solely because of Bush’s crude and militant actions and various countries I shall not name, but certainly know about, have banded together to economically shaft Bush.

Of course he cannot respond by bombing Venezuela and inviting his proto-fascist friends in Columbia to march in and run their oil fields for Mobil simply because he has run out of expendable young men to lead to the international slaughter.

Others are taking note that the United States has become a toothless tiger and are acting accordingly. That Bush and his Evil Dwarf, Fat Karl the Eunuch are solely responsible for all of this never manages to get through the glittering media circus and the American people will wake up some day to $5.00 a gallon gas and guess how much heating oil will cost this winter?

The airlines are collapsing along with General Motors, the idiot new housing bubble will burst just like the idiot dot com boom and all the newly-rich real estate agents, banks and others with a vested interest will join the stockbrokers with Swiss bank accounts who swindled all of the public with their dot com rigged stocks.

Eventually, Bush will have to leave the White House and he, Fat Karl, Laura and others who have been steadily looting the rest of us will move to mansions in Costa Rica and laugh themselves to sleep. The rest of us will be eating toe jam sandwiches, without the bread, and coping with the remnants of hysterical religious freaks who will be in a state of denial because their Blessed Jesus hasn’t airlifted them to heaven.

You get what you pay for and for me, the moaning from the trailer parks and Pentecostal warehouses and Ascension Parlors will be music to my ears.”

http://tbrnews.org/Archives/a1494.htm

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Dolphins flourish in North Sea

Survey finds huge influx of warm water marine life

Martin Wainwright
Saturday April 2, 2005
Guardian

Warmer water is washing unprecedented numbers of "southern" fish and other marine life into the previously inhospitable North Sea, according to a survey by university biologists.

More than 600 sightings of dolphins and whales - some in schools of more than 200 - have been recorded in a year-long audit of waters between Britain, Scandinavia and Germany.

Large shoals of sea bass, usually found off Cornwall, have added to the new ecology, astonishing fishermen, who described the number of squid in particular as "unreal". A volunteer fleet of fishing craft and pleasure yachts working for Newcastle University also charted an invasion of red mullet, pilchard and velvet crabs, all indicators of warmer seas.

Notable sightings include a white-beaked dolphin and calf, and Risso's dolphins, which are thought to have followed migrating squid from the English Channel. The increase in prey has meanwhile tempted colder water species such as the killer whale to increase in numbers, harrying growing populations of seal.

"The sea is changing," said a trawler skipper, Stephen Moss, whose ship, Green Pastures, of Blyth, Northumberland, has increasingly been trailed by dolphins in the last year. "We've been catching commercial quantities of red mullet and occasionally pilchard, and this year we were hauling in mackerel right up to Christmas. We're definitely seeing changes in the water temperature. The number of squid now is just unreal."

The survey was organised by the university's Dove Marine Laboratory at Cullercoats, just north of the mouth of the Tyne, where tallies are being compared with records from previous years.

Joanna Stockhill, the coordinator of the project, said: "Other recent surveys have suggested an increase in warmer water species in the North Sea, and everything we have got is pointing in that direction.

"Risso's dolphins, which are primarily a warm water species with few previous records from the North Sea, account for 12% of our 614 whale and dolphin sightings. The number of common dolphin also support the warming theory. They've usually been found off the south-west coast of Britain and only rarely in the North Sea, until recent years."

Sightings have been monitored and backed up in most cases by details of behaviour, to avoid identification mistakes. Volunteers were also encouraged to get photographic proof, such as Linda Lane Thornton's picture of the pair of white-beaked dolphins.

"We've been sailing from Blyth for three years and we're definitely seeing an increase in whales and dolphins," said Mrs Lane Thornton, the secretary of the Royal Northumberland Yacht Club. She and her husband, Andy, have been trailed regularly in their yacht by dolphins this year.

"Their reports are among quite a few which describe these species following vessels, rubbing on the hull and trying to score the occasional fish escaping from trawlers' nets," said Dr Stockhill. One of the biggest of the 614 sightings was a shoal of 250 white-beaks 26 miles off Cullercoats.

The survey, backed by the Sea Watch Foundation, which monitors whale and dolphin numbers off Britain's coasts, follows previous recent records of exotica such as a semi-tropical rainbow wrasse caught off Southend pier, and landings of sea cucumbers and anchovies in the North Sea. The team is drawing up a "sustainable future" plan for stock management in the North Sea.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5161465-111492,00.html

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Net Aids Theft of Sensitive ID Data

By Jonathan Krim
The Washington Post
Monday 4 April 2005

Critical Social Security numbers widely available.
Want someone else's Social Security number?

It's $35 at www.secret-info.com. It's $45 at Iinfosearch.com, where users can also sign up for a report containing an individual's credit-card charges, as well as an e-mail with other "tips, secrets & spy info!" The Web site Gum-shoes.com promises that "if the information is out there, our licensed investigators can find it."

Although Social Security numbers are one of the most powerful pieces of personal information an identity thief can possess, they remain widely available and inexpensive despite public outcry and the threat of a congressional crackdown after breaches at large information brokers.

Brokers such as ChoicePoint Inc. and LexisNexis have pledged to restrict the availability of such data after personal information on more than 175,000 people was purloined from the two firms by identity thieves posing as legitimate businessmen.

So far, neither those moves nor revelations of a series of breaches at major banks and universities has curbed a multi-tiered and sometimes shadowy marketplace of selling and re-selling personal data that is vulnerable to similar fraud.

A simple Internet search yields more than a dozen Web sites offering an array of personal data.

Some are run by small data brokers and other re-sellers. Others are run by private investigators, many of whom have complained that recently announced restrictions on the availability of Social Security numbers would hurt their ability to assist law-enforcement, track down dead-beat dads or locate witnesses.

Yet with only scant checks to verify whether someone requesting data is legitimate, several sites sell full Social Security numbers, potentially contributing to an epidemic of identity theft or fraud that touched about 10 million Americans in the past year.

No law prohibits the sale of Social Security numbers, but privacy experts and some government agencies have warned for years that the number is over-used and under-protected.

Inaugurated in 1936, the nine-digit number was intended to match citizens to the retirement money they would eventually receive. Over time, the number became essential for getting or verifying credit and for employment background checks.

Eventually, it became so deeply linked to personal data throughout the economy that it became a de-facto national identifier.

"For identity thieves, it's their magic key . . . that gets into every door," said Daniel J. Solove, a George Washington University law school professor who specializes in privacy law. Getting a number can make it possible for criminals to access to bank or credit-card accounts, establish credit to make purchases, or find someone they wish to harm.

Nonetheless, some insurance companies still use the Social Security number as an individual's account number, printing it on identification cards, leaving people vulnerable if wallets are stolen or lost. Medical offices routinely request Social Security numbers, often when initial appointments are made, and many universities use it as a student identification number.

According to a recent study commissioned by Unisys Corp., a technology consulting company, about half of large financial institutions use Social Security numbers to verify the identities of customers who call in for services. Some even use it to identify customers as part of the log-in process when they want to access accounts via the Internet.

So vital are Social Security numbers in this sea of information that ChoicePoint warned investors in a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing that its business could suffer if the rules on distribution of Social Security numbers were tightened.

The mass breaches of data at ChoicePoint and LexisNexis forced the companies to be proactive.

Executives of both firms told Congress last month that for many of their non-law-enforcement clients, Social Security numbers would be truncated so that only five digits would appear on reports.

But plenty of sources of the information still exist. Using an intermediary, The Washington Post was able to obtain the full Social Security number of a reporter within 24 hours from two of three online providers the intermediary contacted.

Not all of the providers advertise Social Security numbers, and those that do promise to verify that the buyer has a legitimate reason for seeking the number, such as to complete tax forms of an employee or to find someone involved in a court action.

The intermediary, a security consultant who helped the Federal Trade Commission identify illegal data sales in 1999, told the providers he needed the number for tax purposes. Two providers accepted that reason without question or requests for documentation. A third provider refused to provide Social Security numbers.

Robert Douglas, the intermediary, operates the consulting firm PrivacyToday.com. Douglas, who chose the method of acquiring the numbers on his own, said he used the pretext of tax preparation because that would be a common trick used by an identity thief at this time of year.

Michael Leighton, a North Carolina private investigator who operates secret-info.com, acknowledged that he did not request further documentation from Douglas. But he said the company verifies that a requester is calling from a land-based phone line with a valid address. Douglas said he used a cell phone.

"We get on average between 30 and 75 requests a week," Leighton said. "We maybe do less than 10" because others did not have a valid reason for seeking a Social Security number.

Leighton declined to say whether he received the data directly from a large data broker, or from other re-sellers.

The other site that provided the reporter's number, USRecordsearch.com, does not advertise that it sells the numbers. But with the same explanation for why he wanted the data, Douglas received the reporter's full number.

A principal of the Florida-based company did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.

Under a law that took effect in 2001, non-public data from financial records cannot be sold or transferred without giving individuals a chance to opt out. There are several exceptions, however, including employment checks, for tax filing, or to process a financial transaction.

But the system relies on the honesty of the person seeking data, and the diligence of the person selling it.

"Until Congress understands about the re-sale market here, they are not going be able to get a handle on this problem," Douglas said.

Bruce Hulme, chairman of the legislative committee of the National Council of Investigation & Security Services, the largest investigators' trade group, said he could not condone investigators who make a side business out of indiscriminately selling data.

"They should pull those Web sites down," he said. "They better know the client."

Still, Hulme said private investigators have generally proved to be more careful stewards of private data than are information brokers. His organization is beginning a lobbying campaign to ensure that any new laws don't cut off private investigators' access to data they say they need.

Several members of Congress are sponsoring new privacy legislation, including bills that would ban the sale of Social Security numbers without individuals' permission.

Private investigators are clearly worried. In Internet chat groups, they exchange information on which data brokers are still selling full Social Security numbers, while bemoaning how they are being punished for the security lapses of the brokers.

For their part, ChoicePoint and LexisNexis say they are "re-credentialing" all non-government clients. At ChoicePoint, those who use the Internet to request information were greeted with a pop-up notice indicating that privileges might be restored after the certification process was complete.

ChoicePoint declined to provide an executive for an interview. Spokeswoman Kristen McCaughan said the company plans to give full access only to government or law-enforcement agencies, banks and insurance companies. She declined to say how many of its customers, including private investigators, would end up with restricted access.

McCaughan said the company sells data to fewer than 15 other brokers or re-sellers, and that their access will now be subject to stricter guidelines.

A LexisNexis spokesman said clients downgraded to restricted access included law firms, media and private investigators.

The financial services industry argues that it has steadily reduced its reliance on the Social Security number for several years, but that the number's use has benefits for consumers.

Nessa Feddis, senior federal counsel of the American Bankers Association, said that with so many numbers consumers already must remember, using Social Security numbers to verify accounts makes sense.

If a credit-card is lost or stolen, she said, a consumer can quickly report the missing card to a bank by knowing his or her Social Security number. If the only accepted identifier was a separate account number, she said, the person would have to wait until he or she could get to a credit-card statement at home.

Privacy experts argue that at the very least, institutions should employ multiple test questions when people call in, rather than just the Social Security number. And they point out that if the number is compromised, it is hard to limit the damage because new numbers are almost never issued.

"The current system has the worst of all worlds," Solove said. "Anyone can easily find it [the Social Security number] out . . . It's used everywhere, and it's really hard to change if it falls in the wrong hands. How could you come up with a worse system?"

Source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23686-2005Apr3.html

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EU proposes 15% duty on US goods

BBC News
2005/03/31

The World Trade Organisation ruled it illegal more than a year ago.

The Commission said US paper, farm goods, textiles and machinery would face an extra 15% duty from May 1. The Commission has acted in concert with seven other countries which have also protested to the WTO about the Byrd Amendment. It said it was expecting Japan, South Korea and Brazil to impose similar penalties soon.

Stand off

Commission officials said no meetings with US officials were scheduled to take place before the additional duty was imposed.

Earlier this month talks on the subsidies given to European aircraft maker Airbus and US manufacturer Boeing faltered when both EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson and Robert Zoellick, former US Deputy Secretary of State, accused the other of hanging up the phone durign a call.

Under a WTO ruling, the Byrd Amendment should have been repealed by the end of December 2003. The Commission said it has decided to impose the additional duties in the "light of the continuing failure of the United States to bring its legislation in conformity with its international obligations".

Why are we waiting?

"More than a year later, the United States has still not respected its international obligations," the European Commission said. The level of retaliation imposed by the Commission will be just below $28m and will be related to the latest amount of duty redistributed to US companies under the Byrd Amendment.

The Commission has drawn up a list of products that will be affected, but its also has a reserve list in case it needs to raise additional retaliatory duty in future years. It says that since 2000 US companies have received $1bn in anti-dumping fees redistributed to them under the Byrd Amendement.

It expects to see a significant rise in this figure from 1 October if Byrd is not repealed. "That distribution alone could amount to $1.6bn," the European Commission said.

All eight complainants - which include the EU, Brazil, Canada, Chile, India, Japan Korea and Mexico - are authorised to apply sanctions against the US. Canada is expected to announce sanctions against the US shortly.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/business/4396905.stm

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