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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA:
Kevin Zeese
Bradley Manning Support Network
press@bradleymanning.org
+1-202-640-4388
Military steps up retaliation against accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower with arbitrary "suicide watch", followed by detainment of approved visitor
QUANTICO, VA, 23 January 2011 -- Military officials at Marine Corps Base Quantico today increased the isolation of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning by detaining Manning's friend and regular visitor David House at the base entrance until visiting hours were over. House was accompanied by Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com, a website that has collected 42,000 signatures on a petition calling for improvements to the conditions of Manning's detention, which constitute extreme and illegal pre-trial punishment.
"The Bradley Manning Support Network is dismayed that Brad was denied contact with his only regular visitor besides his attorney," founder Mike Gogulski stated. "Immediately following a rally by more than 150 supporters at Quantico last week, Brad was put on suicide watch for two days for reasons his counsel could only conclude were punitive. He was stripped of all of his clothing except his boxer shorts and his glasses were taken away. It seems to me that the Marine command is now reacting in the worst possible way to rising pressure on them."
David House has been making regular trips from his home in the Boston area to visit Manning at the Marine Corps brig since he was transferred there from Kuwait last summer. While detained at the base gate, House posted to Twitter that "one of the many MPs around the car says his orders to stop us come from on high." House and Hamsher were held on entry to the base for nearly the entire period of visiting hours, repeatedly demanded to provide information and documents the MPs already had, and threatened with arrest. Hamsher's car was towed away under the pretext that she lacked proof of insurance, despite having presented a digital copy.
At Firedoglake.com, founder Jane Hamsher wrote: "There is no doubt in my mind that the primary objective of everything that happened today was to keep Bradley Manning from having the company of his only remaining visitor."
"This is a bizarre action by the Marines. I think they see the growing support for Bradley Manning, they see more and more people realizing that he is being treated unfairly, and that as the facts of the case come out more and more people see that he is a patriot and not a traitor," said Kevin Zeese, Director of Voters for Peace and member of the Bradley Manning Support Network's steering committee.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week, Amnesty International stated that "the restrictions imposed in PFC Manning's case appear to be unnecessarily harsh and punitive." The letter also suggests that Manning's confinement is in contravention of international law, and calls upon the military to conduct a review.
House intends to return to Quantico next weekend to once again attempt to visit Manning and to deliver the petition.
In addition to petitions and public protests across the nation, the Bradley Manning Support Network has asked supporters to speak out against Manning's inhumane treatment by contacting officials at Quantico. The Support Network encourages concerned individuals to phone Quantico public affairs at +1-703-432-0289, to write to base commander Colonel Choike at 3250 Catlin Avenue, Quantico, VA 22134, and to write to brig commander CWO4 Averhart at 3247 Elrod Avenue, Quantico, VA 22134. We are asking that Bradley Manning's human rights be respected while he remains in custody; specifically, that he be allowed social interaction with other inmates, that he be allowed meaningful physical exercise, that approved visitors be allowed to see him without interrogation and harassment, and that the "Prevention of Injury" order (the military's basis for the extreme pre-trial punishment regime) be lifted.
# # #
References:
Firedoglake.com, "Sign Our Letter: Stop the Inhumane Treatment of Bradley Manning", http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/bradleymanning?source=fdl
Mike Gogulski, Bradley Manning Support Network, "Manning removed from two-day suicide watch; attorney files complaint, calls action punitive", http://www.bradleymanning.org/16023/manning-removed-from-two-day-suicide-watch-attorney-files-complaint-calls-action-punitive/
David House, Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidmhouse
Jane Hamsher, Twitter: http://twitter.com/janehamsher
Jane Hamsher, "Goal of Quantico Incident Was To Abuse Bradley Manning and Intimidating David House", http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/01/23/goal-of-quantico-incident-was-to-abuse-bradley-manning-and-intimidating-david-house/
Nadim Kobeissi, interviewing Kevin Zeese, CHOMP.FM, "EMERGENCY BROADCAST: Denying Bradley Manning Basic Civility", http://chomp.fm/003/
Amnesty International, "USA: Open letter to Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense", http://amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/006/2011/en
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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THIS EVENING! URGENT EVENT!
Join the National Day of Action:
January 25, 2011 -- from 4:30 to 6 p.m.
Protest FBI and Grand Jury Repression!
US Federal Building
90 - 7th Street
San Francisco
On September 24, the FBI raided seven Chicago and Minneapolis homes of anti-war and international solidarity activists, and 14 activists were subpoenaed to appear before the Grand Jury. All 14 refused to participate.
In December, nine more Palestine solidarity and anti-war activists were subpoenaed to appear before the Grand Jury on January 25, 2011.
Fight U.S. Government Criminalization of Anti-War Activism!
JOIN organizations and individuals around the country to Protest in San Francisco on January 25.
Bay Area Committee to Stop Political Repression
stop.political.repression@gmail.com
www.stopfbi.net
Endorsers (partial):
Asian Law Caucus, Arab Resource & Organizing Center, National Lawyers Guild SF, Council on American-Islamic Relations SFBA, Arab American Union Members Council, USPCN, American Friends Service Committee, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Palestine Youth Network, ANSWER Coalition, San Francisco Labor Council, Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice, American Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, International Solidarity Movement, United National Anti-War Committee, Arab American Cultural Center of Silicon Valley
Thank you for your support. Together we can overcome these unjust policies targeting our communities and join the global movement rising for justice. All for one, one for all.
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Next meeting of UNAC Sunday, January 30, 1:00 P.M.
Location to be announced
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Bay Area Supporters of International Friends of the Leon Trotsky Museum invite you to:
"Honoring Revolutionary Continuity: An Afternoon Public Forum & Fundraiser for the Leon Trotsky Museum in Mexico City"
Sunday, February 13 @ 2:30 p.m.
Alameda Public Library
1550 Oak Street (@ Lincoln Ave.)
Alameda, Calif.
Featuring:
Presentation by ESTEBAN VOLKOV, Leon Trotsky's grandson and president of the Leon Trotsky Museum Foundation, and
Preview of "A Planet Without A Visa: The Movie" -- a film by DAVID WEISS, with presentations by LINDY LAUB, director of the documentary film, and SUZI WEISSMAN, historian of the revolutionary and socialist movements
Also: Honoring founding members of the American Trotskyist movement ESTAR BAUR, ERWIN BAUR & RUTH HARER
Sliding Scale $10 to $20
For more information, call Frank Fried at 510-459-0328
[If you are not able to make the event but would like to make a tax-deductible donation to International Friends of the Leon Trotsky Museum, please send your check, payable to Global Exchange (our fiscal sponsor), to International Friends, PO Box 40009, San Francisco, CA 94140.]
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Saturday, March 19, 2011:
Day of Action to Resist the War Machine!
8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
Scores of organizations coming together for worldwide protests
In San Francisco, the theme of the March 19 march and rally will be "No to War & Colonial Occupation - Fund Jobs, Healthcare & Education - Solidarity with SF Hotel Workers!" 12,000 SF hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 2, have been fighting for a new contract that protects their healthcare, wages and working conditions. The SF action will include a march to boycotted hotels in solidarity with the Lo. 2 workers. The first organizing meeting for the SF March 19 march and rally will be on Sunday, Jan. 16 at 2pm at the Local 2 union hall, 209 Golden Gate Ave.
In Los Angeles, the March 19 rally and march will gather at 12 noon at Hollywood and Vine.
March 19 is the 8th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Iraq today remains occupied by 50,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries.
The war in Afghanistan is raging. The U.S. is invading and bombing Pakistan. The U.S. is financing endless atrocities against the people of Palestine, relentlessly threatening Iran and bringing Korea to the brink of a new war.
While the United States will spend $1 trillion for war, occupation and weapons in 2011, 30 million people in the United States remain unemployed or severely underemployed, and cuts in education, housing and healthcare are imposing a huge toll on the people.
Actions of civil resistance are spreading.
On Dec. 16, 2010, a veterans-led civil resistance at the White House played an important role in bringing the anti-war movement from protest to resistance. Enduring hours of heavy snow, 131 veterans and other anti-war activists lined the White House fence and were arrested. Some of those arrested will be going to trial, which will be scheduled soon in Washington, D.C.
Saturday, March 19, 2011, the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, will be an international day of action against the war machine.
Protest and resistance actions will take place in cities and towns across the United States. Scores of organizations are coming together. Demonstrations are scheduled for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and more.
Click this link to endorse the March 19, 2011, Call to Action:
http://www2.answercoalition.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=8062&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org/
info@AnswerCoalition.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
Boston: 857-334-5084 | New York City: 212-694-8720 | Chicago: 773-463-0311
San Francisco: 415-821-6545| Los Angeles: 213-251-1025 | Albuquerque: 505-268-2488
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Are you joining us on April 8 at the Pentagon in a climate chaos protest codenamed "Operation Disarmageddon?" It has been decided that affinity groups will engage in nonviolent autonomous actions. Do you have an affinity group? Do you have an idea for an action?
So far these are some of the suggested actions:
Send a letter to Sec. of War Robert Gates demanding a meeting to disclose the Pentagon's role in destroying the planet. He will ignore the letter, so a delegation would then go to the Metro Entrance to demand a meeting.
Use crime tape around some area of the Pentagon. The idea of crime/danger taping off the building could be done just outside the main Pentagon reservation entrance (intersection of Army/Navy) making the Alexandria PD the arresting authority (if needed) and where there is no ban on photography. Hazmat suits, a 'converted' truck (or other vehicle) could be part of the street theater. The area where I am thinking is also almost directly below I-95 and there is a bridge over the intersection - making a banner drop possible. Perhaps with the hazmat/street closure at ground level with a banner from above. If possible a coordinated action could be done at other Pentagon entrances and / or other war making institutions.
A procession onto the Pentagon reservation, without reservations, and set up a camp on one of the lawns surrounding The Pentagon. This contingent would reclaim the space in the name of peace and Mother Earth. This contingent would plan to stay there until The Pentagon is turned into a 100% green building using sustainable energy employing people who work for peace and the abolishment of war and life-affirming endeavors.
Bring a potted tree to be placed on the Pentagon's property to symbolize the need to radically reduce its environmental destructiveness.
Since the Pentagon is failing to return to the taxpayers the money it has misappropriated, "Foreclose on the Pentagon."
Banner hanging from a bridge.
Hand out copies of David Swanson's book WAR IS A LIE. Try to deliver a copy to Secretary of War Robert Gates.
Have short speeches in park between Pentagon and river; nice photo with Pentagon in background.
Die-in and chalk or paint outlines of victim's bodies everywhere that remain after the arrest to point to where real crimes are really being committed.
Establish command center, Peacecom? Paxcom? Put several people in white shirts and ties plus a few generals directing their armies for "Operation Disarmageddon."
Make the linkage between the tax dollars going to the Pentagon and war tax resistance. Use the WRL pie chart and carry banners "foreclose on war" and "money for green jobs not war jobs."
Hold a rally with representative speakers before going to the Pentagon Reservation. This would be an opportunity to speak out against warmongering and the Pentagon's role in destroying the environment.
As part of "Operation Disarmageddon," we will take a tree and plant it on the reservation. Our sign reads, "Plant trees not landmines."
Use crime tape on Army/Navy Drive to declare the Pentagon a crime scene. Do street theater there as well. Other affinity groups could go to selected entrances.
Establish a Peace Command Center at the Pentagon. Hold solidarity actions at federal buildings and corporate offices.
What groups have you contacted to suggest joining us at the Pentagon? See below for those who plan to be at the Pentagon on April 8 and for what groups have been contacted.
Kagiso,
Max
April 8, 2011 participants
Beth Adams
Ellen Barfield
Tim Chadwick
Joy First
Jeffrey Halperin
Malachy Kilbride
Max Obuszewski
David Swanson
April 8 Outreach
Beth Adams -- Earth First, Puppet Underground, Emma's Revolution, Joe Gerson-AFSC Cambridge, Code Pink(national via Lisa Savage in Maine), Vets for Peace, FOR, UCC Justice & Witness Ministries, Traprock, Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist Order, (National-INt'l) Vets for Peace and WILPF, Pace e Bene, Christian Peace Witness & UCC Justice & Witness (Cleveland).
Tim Chadwick -- Brandywine, Lepoco, Witness against Torture, Vets for Peace (Thomas Paine Chapter Lehigh Valley PA), and Witness for Peace DC.
Jeffrey Halperin -- peace groups in Saratoga Spring, NY
Jack Lombardo - UNAC will add April 8 2011 to the Future Actions page on our blog, and make note in upcoming E-bulletins, but would appreciate a bit of descriptive text from the organizers and contact point to include when we do - so please advise ASAP! Also, we'll want to have such an announcement for our next print newsletter, which will be coming out in mid-December.
Max Obuszewski - Jonah House & Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore
Bonnie Urfer notified 351 individuals and groups on the Nukewatch list
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Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Bring the Troops Home Now!
March and Rally
April 9th, 2011
New York City (Union Sq. at noon)and San Francisco APRIL 10*, Assemble at 11:00 A.M. (location to be announced)
*This date was changed because of the Annual Cesar Chavez Parade scheduled in San Francisco April 9. This is a huge community event that we can't conflict with. We are still negotiating permits and location.
--Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!
--Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
--End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
--Immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads
To add your group's name to the endorser list, local, state or national, please contact:
United National Antiwar Committee
P.O. Box 123 Delmar, New York 12054
518-227-6947 UNACpeace.org unacpeace@gmail.com
email you endorsement to:
jmackler@lmi.net and cc: unacpeace@gmail.com
Initial List of Endorsers (List in formation)
* = For Identification only
Endorsers:
United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Center for Constitutional Rights
Muslim Peace Coalition, USA
Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Veterans for Peace
International Action Center
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Black Agenda Report
Code Pink
National Assembly to End U.S. Wars and Occupations
World Can't Wait
Campaign for Peace and Democracy
Project Salam
Canadian Peace Alliance
BAYAN USA
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
Office of the Americas
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
Middle East Children's Alliance
Tariq Ali
Dr. Margaret Flowers PNHP *
Ramsey Clark
Ambassador Syed Ahsani, Former Ambassador from Pakistan
Ahmed Shawki, editor, International Socialist Review
Ali Abunimah, Palestinian American Journalist
Alice Sturn Sutter, Washington Heights Women in Black *
Al-Awda NY: the Palestine Right to Return Coalition
American Iranian Friendship Committee
American Muslim Task Force, Dallas/Ft. Worth
Ana Edwards, Chair, Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project - Richmond, Va.
Anthony Arnove, Author, "Iraq: The logic of Withdrawal"
Andy Griggs, Co-chair, California Teachers Association, Peace and Justice Caucus/UTLA-retired*
B. Ross Ashley, NDP Socialist Caucus, Canada *
Bail Out the People Movement
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Barrio Unido, San Francisco
Bashir Abu-Manneh
Baltimore Job Is a Right Campaign
Baltimore-Washington Area Peace Council, US Peace Council Chapter
Battered Mother's Custody Conference
Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace
Blanca Misse, Student Worker Action Team/UC Berkeley, Academic Workers for Democratic Union - UAW 2865 *
Blauvelt Dominican sisters Social Justice Ministry
Bob Hernandez, Chapter President, SEIU Local 1021*
Bonnie Weinstein - Bay Area United Against Wars Newsletter
Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights
Boston UNAC
Boston University Anti-War Coalition
Café Intifada - Los Angeles
Camilo E. Mejia, Iraq war veteran and resister
Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor
Carole Seligman - Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal *
Central Jersey Coalition Against Endless War
Chesapeake Citizens
Howard Terry Adcock, Colombia Support Network, Austin (TX) , Center for Peace and Justice *
Coalition for Justice - Blacksburg, Va.
Colombian Front for Socialism (FECOPES)
Columbus Campaign for Arms Control
Committee for Justice to Defend the Los Angeles 8
Dave Welsh, Delegate, San Francisco Labor Council
David Swanson, WarIsACrime.org
David Keil - Metro West Peace Action (MWPA) *
Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality - Virginia
Derrick O'Keefe, Co-chair StopWar.ca (Vancouver)
Detroit Committee to Stop FBI/Grand Jury Repression.
Doug Bullock, Albany County Legislator
Dr. Andy Coates PNHP *
DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) - New York
Elaine Brower - national steering committee of World Can't Wait and anti-war military mom
Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST)
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Freedom Socialist Party
Gilbert Achcar - Lebanese academic and writer
Guilderland Neighbors for Peace
Haiti Action Committee
Haiti Liberte
Hands off Venezuela
Howie Hawkins, Co-Chair, Green Party of New York State *
IIan Pappe, Director Exeter University, European Centre for Palestine Studies
International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal
International Socialist Organization
International support Haiti Network (ISHN)
Iraq Peace Action Coalition - Minneapolis
Italo-American Progressive Fraternal Society
Janata Dal (United), India
Jersey City Peace Movement
Jimmy Massey, Founding member of IVAW
John Pilger, Journalist and Documentary film maker
Journal Square Homeless Coalition
Justice for Fallujah Project
Kclabor.org
Karen Schieve, United Educators of San Francisco *
Kim Nguyen, Metrowest Peace Action (MWPA)*
Kwame Binta, The November Coalition
Larry Pinkvey, Black Activist Writers Guild
Lillie "Ms. K" Branch-Kennedy - Director, Resource Information Help for the Disadvantaged (R.I.H.D.), Virginia
Lisa Savage, CODEPINK Maine, Bring Our War $$ Home Coalition *
Los Angeles - Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee
Maggie Zhou - ClimateSOS *
Maine Veterans for Peace
Malu Aina, Hawaii
Maria Cristina Gutierrez, Exec. Director, Companeros del Barrio
Mark Roman, Waterville Area Bridges for Peace & Justice
Marlena Santoyo, Germantown Friends Meeting, Philadelphia, PA
Mary Flanagan, United Teachers of Richmond *
Masjid As-Salam Mosque, Albany, NY
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Michigan Emergency Committee Against Wars and Injustice
Mike Alewitz, Central Ct. State University *
Middle East Crisis Committee
Mobilization Against War and Occupation - Vancouver, Canada
Mobilization to Free Mumia
Moratorium NOW Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shut-offs
Muslim Solidarity Committee
Nancy Murray, Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights*
Nancy Parten, Witness For Peace *
Nellie Bailey, Harlem Tenants Council *
New Abolitionist Movement
New England United
New Jersey Labor Against War
New Socialist Project
New York City Labor Against the War
New York Collective of Radical Educators
No More Victims
Nodutdol for Korean Community Development
Northeast Peace and Justice Action Coalition
Northern California Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
Northwest Greens
NotMyPriorities.org
Nuestro Norte Es El Sur ((NUNO-SUR) Our North is the South
Omar Barghouti, Human rights activist (Palestine)
Pakistan USA Freedom Forum
Pakistani Trade Union Defense Campaign
Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People
Peace Action Maine
Peace Action Montgomery
Peacemakers of Schoharie County, New York
Peace and Freedom Party
People of Faith, Connecticut
Peninsula Peace & Justice, Blue Hill, Maine
Peninsula Peace and Justice Center - Palo Alto, Ca.
Peoples Video Network
Phil Wilayto, Editor, The Virginia Defender
Philadelphia Against War
Progressive Peace Coalition, Columbus Ohio
Protestobama.org
Queen Zakia Shabazz - Director, United Parents Against Lead National, Inc.
Radio Free Maine
Ralph Poynter, Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
Revolutionary Workers Group
Rhode Island Mobilization Committee
Roland Sheppard, Retired Business Agent Painters Local #4, San Francisco *
Rochester Against War
Ron Jacobs, writer
Saladin Muhammad - Founding Member, Black Workers for Justice
Sarah Roche-Mahdi, Code Pink Boston*
Saratoga Peace Alliance
Senior Action Network
Seth Farber, PhD., Institute of Mind and Behavior *
Sherry Wolf - International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Author Sexuality and Socialism
Siege Busters Working Group
Socialist Action
Socialist Organizer
Socialist Viewpoint
Solidarity
Solidarity Committee of the Capital District
Staten Island Council for Peace & Justice
Steve Scher, Breen Party of NYC 26 AD *
Stewart Robinson, Stop Targeting Ohio Poor *
Stop the Wars Coalition, Boston
Tarak Kauff, Veterans for Peace
The Campaign Against Sanctions & Military Intervention in Iran
The Thomas Merton Center Antiwar Committee
Twin Cities Peace Campaign
Upper Hudson Peace Action
Virginia Defender
West Hartford Citizens for Peace and Justice
WESPAC Foundation
Women against Military Madness
Women in Black, Westchester
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Pittsburgh
Workers International League
Workers World Party
Youth for International Socialism
To add yourself to the UNAC listserv, please send an email to:
UNAC-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
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B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:
http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]
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WikiLeaks Mirrors
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.
Go to
http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html
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Georgia Man Fined $5000 for Growing Too Many Vegetables
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRlXieQohhA
kiss my taxed ass! Georgia Man Fined $5000 for Growing Vegetables
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfY1YXk9ihI&NR=1
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Oil Spill Commission Final Report: Catfish Responds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ZRdsccMsM
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New antiwar song that's bound to be a classic:
box
by tommi avicolli mecca
(c) 2009
Credits are:
Tommi Avicolli Mecca, guitar/vocals
John Radogno, lead guitar
Diana Hartman, vocals, kazoo
Chris Weir, upright bass
Produced and recorded by Khalil Sullivan
I'm the recruiter and if truth be told/ I can lure the young and old
what I do you won't see/ til your kid's in JROTC
CHO ooh, put them in a box drape it with a flag and send them off to mom and dad
send them with a card from good ol' uncle sam, gee it's really just so sad
I'm the general and what I do/ is to teach them to be true
to god and country flag and oil/ by shedding their blood on foreign soil
CHO
I'm the corporate boss and well I know/ war is lots of dough dough dough
you won't find me over there/ they just ship the money right back here
CHO
last of all it's me the holy priest/ my part is not the least
I assure them it's god's will/ to go on out and kill kill kill
CHO
it's really just so sad
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You might enjoy a bit of history:
William Buckley Show with Socialist Workers Party Presidential Candidates
http://vimeo.com/18611069
William Buckley Show with Socialist Workers Party Presidential Candidates from asi somburu on Vimeo.
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'CIA-created Frankenstein': US turns blind eye on terrorist?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gW6Dyr1qBU
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Cathie Black Meets With Downtown Parents
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHHhLCF0t88&feature=player_embedded
Solution to Crowded Schools? How About Birth Control?
By FERNANDA SANTOS
January 14, 2011, 4:55 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/solution-to-crowded-schools-how-about-birth-control/?ref=nyregion
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Wall Street Fat-Cats Flip Public Service Workers the Bird
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTcSOygSBBM
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Free Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eNzokgRIw&feature=player_embedded
Song for Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_eood7DUwI
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Supermax Prison Cell Extraction - Maine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUfK5i_lQs&feature=player_embedded
Warning, this is an extremely brutal video. What do you think? Is this torture?
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Rachel Maddow- New GOP scapegoat- public workers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ5byLyKPRI
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Did You Know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
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These videos refer to what happened at the G-20 Summit in Toronto June 26-27 of this year. The importance of this is that police were caught on tape and later confirmed that they sent police into the demonstration dressed as "rioting" protesters. One cop was caught with a large rock in his hand. Clearly, this is proof of police acting as agent provocatours. And we should expect this to continue and escalate. That's why everyone should be aware of these facts...bw
police accused of attempting to incite violence at G20 summ
Protestors at Montebello are accusing police of trying to incite violence. Video on YouTube shows union officials confronting three men that were police officers dressing up as demonstrators. The union is demanding to know if the Prime Minister's Office was involved in trying to discredit the demonstrators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWbgnyUCC7M
quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=related
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The Wars in "Vietnamistan!" (The name Daniel Ellsberg gave to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as quoted from the video...bw)
Veterans for Peace White House Civil Disobedience to End War
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOde31QYbI0&feature=player_embedded
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John Pilger: Global Support for WikiLeaks is "Rebellion" Against U.S. Militarism, Secrecy
December 15, 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzaclKj2B8M
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WikiLeaks founder concern for Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPrShC8qx4k&feature=player_embedded
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Newsnight: Bailed Julian Assange live interview (16Dec10)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NouXB5JACCw&feature=player_embedded
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Julian Assange: 'ongoing attempts to extradite me'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C30UhZDOO9A&feature=player_embedded
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Published on Thursday, December 16, 2010 by Countdown With Keith Olbermann
Quantico, the New Gitmo
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/12/16-0
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Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg
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15 year old Tells Establishment to Stick-it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U_gHUiL4P8&feature=player_embedded#
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POLICE KETTLING (STUDENT DEMONSTRATION against the EDUCATION CUTS), LONDON, 30-11-2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRV9h2dyBVU&NR=1
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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU
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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
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Video of massive French protest -- inspiring!
http://www.dailymotion.com/Talenceagauchevraiment
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"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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MECA Middle East Children's Alliance
Howard & Roslyn Zinn Presente! Honor Their Legacy By Providing Clean Water for Children in Gaza
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13
Howard Zinn supported the work of the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA) from the beginning. Over the years, he lent his name and his time countless times to support our work. Howard and Roz were both personal friends of mine and Howard helped MECA raise funds for our projects for children in Palestine by coming to the Bay Area and doing events for us.
On the first anniversary of Howard's passing, I hope you will join MECA in celebrating these two extraordinary individuals.
- Barbara Lubin, Executive Director
YES! I want to help MECA build a water purification and desalination unit at the Khan Younis Co-ed Elementary School for 1,400 students in Gaza in honor of Howard & Roslyn Zinn.
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13
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Lucasville Hunger Strike Ended, Some Demands Met
From: Freedom Archives
Denis O'Hearn 4:33pm Jan 15
www.Freedomarchives.org Questions and comments may be sent to claude@freedomarchives.org
Folks, I have a short report on today's rally at OSP in support of the three men on hunger strike. But, first, I can now report to you the wonderful news that all three have resumed eating because they achieved a victory. The prison authorities have provided, in writing, a set of conditions that virtually meets the demands set out by Bomani Shakur in his letter to Warden Bobby, provided elsewhere on this site.
The hunger strikers send you all thanks for your support and state that they couldn‚t have won their demands without support from people from around the world. But they add to their statement the following: this time they were fighting about their conditions of confinement but now they begin the fight for their lives. They were wrongfully convicted of complicity in 1993 murders in Lucasville prison and have faced retribution because they refused to provide snitch testimony against others who actually committed those murders. Now, because of Ohio's (and other states') application of the death penalty, they still face execution at a future date. Ohio is today exceeded only by Texas in its enthusiasm for applying the death penalty. We need to take some of this energy that was created around the hunger strike to help these men fight for their lives.
So, we may celebrate a great victory for now. Common sense has prevailed in a dark place where there appeared to be no light. But watch this space for further news on their ongoing campaign.
I hope to share a copy of the Ohio prison authorities' written statement that ended this hunger strike in a short time.
As Bomani has told me many times,
It ain't over...
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org Questions and comments may be sent to claude@freedomarchives.org
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Call for EMERGENCY RESPONSE Action if Assange Indicted,
Dear Friends:
We write in haste, trying to reach as many of you as possible although the holiday break has begun.......This plan for an urgent "The Day After" demonstration is one we hope you and many, many more organizations will take up as your own, and mobilize for. World Can't Wait asks you to do all you can to spread it through list serves, Facebook, twitter, holiday gatherings.
Our proposal is very very simple, and you can use the following announcement to mobilize - or write your own....
ANY DAY NOW . . . IN THE EVENT THAT THE U.S. INDICTS JULIAN ASSANGE
An emergency public demonstration THE DAY AFTER any U.S. criminal indictment is announced against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Spread the word and call people to come out, across the whole range of movements and groups: anti-war, human rights, freedom of information/freedom of the press, peace, anti-torture, environmental, students and youth, radicals and revolutionaries, religious, civil liberties, teachers and educators, journalists, anti-imperialists, anti-censorship, anti-police state......
At the Federal Building in San Francisco, we'll form ourselves into a human chain "surrounding" the government that meets the Wikileaked truth with repression and wants to imprison and silence leakers, whistleblowers and truthtellers - when, in fact, these people are heroes. We'll say:
HANDS OFF WIKILEAKS! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING!
Join the HUMAN CHAIN AROUND THE FEDERAL BUILDING!
New Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco (nearest BART: Civic Center)
4:00-6:00 PM on The Day FOLLOWING U.S. indictment of Assange
Bring all your friends - signs and banners - bullhorns.
Those who dare at great risk to themselves to put the truth in the hands of the people - and others who might at this moment be thinking about doing more of this themselves -- need to see how much they are supported, and that despite harsh repression from the government and total spin by the mainstream media, the people do want the truth told.
Brad Manning's Christmas Eve statement was just released by his lawyer: "Pvt. Bradley Manning, the lone soldier who stands accused of stealing millions of pages secret US government documents and handing them over to secrets outlet WikiLeaks, wants his supporters to know that they've meant a lot to him. 'I greatly appreciate everyone's support and well wishes during this time,' he said in a Christmas Eve statement released by his lawyer...." Read more here:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/mannings-message-christmas-eve-i-gr/
Demonstrations defending Wikileaks and Assange, and Brad Manning, have already been flowering around the world. Make it happen here too.
Especially here . . .
To join into this action plan, or with questions, contact World Can't Wait or whichever organization or listserve you received this message from.
World Can't Wait, SF Bay
415-864-5153
sf@worldcantwait.org
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Email received from Lynne Stewart:
12/19/10; 12:03pm
Dear Folks:
Some nuts and bolts and trivia,
1. New Address
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
2. Visiting is very liberal but first I have to get people on my visiting list Wait til I or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of you.
3. One hour time difference
4. Commissary Money is always welcome It is how I pay for the phone and for email. Also need it for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries" (pens!) A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing , ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa etc. To add money, you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons , 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa 50947-001 (Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days. Western Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated ? Of course, it's the BOP !)
5. Food is vastly improved. Just had Sunday Brunch real scrambled eggs, PORK sausage, Baked or home fried potatoes, Butter(sweet whipped M'God !!) Grapefruit juice Toast , orange. I will probably regain the weight I lost at MCC! Weighing against that is the fact that to eat we need to walk to another building (about at far as from my house to the F Train) Also included is 3 flights of stairs up and down. May try to get an elevator pass and try NOT to use it.
6. In a room with 4 bunks(small) about two tiers of rooms with same with "atrium" in middle with tv sets and tables and chairs. Estimate about 500 on Unit 2N and there are 4 units. Population Black, Mexicano and other spanish speaking (all of whom iron their underwear, Marta), White, Native Americans (few), no orientals or foreign speaking caucasians--lots are doing long bits, victims of drugs (meth etc) and boyfriends. We wear army style (khaki) pants with pockets tee shirts and dress shirts long sleeved and short sleeved. When one of the women heard that I hadn't ironed in 40 years, they offered to do the shirts for me. (This is typical of the help I get--escorted to meals and every other protection, explanations, supplies, etc. Mostly from white women.) One drawback is not having a bathroom in the room---have to go about 75 yards at all hours of the day and night --clean though.
7. Final Note--the sunsets and sunrises are gorgeous, the place is very open and outdoors there are pecan trees and birds galore (I need books for trees and birds (west) The full moon last night gladdened my heart as I realized it was shining on all of you I hold dear.
Love Struggle
Lynne
The address of her Defense Committee is:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Please make a generous contribution to her defense.
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Help end the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning!
Bradley Manning Support Network. December 22, 2010
The Marine Brig at Quantico, Virginia is using "injury prevention" as a vehicle to inflict extreme pre-trial punishment on accused Wikileaks whistleblower Army PFC Bradley Manning (photo right). These "maximum conditions" are not unheard-of during an inmate's first week at a military confinement facility, but when applied continuously for months and with no end in sight they amount to a form of torture. Bradley, who just turned 23-years-old last week, has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in late May. We're now turning to Bradley's supporters worldwide to directly protest, and help bring a halt to, the extremely punitive conditions of Bradley's pre-trial detention.
We need your help in pressing the following demands:
End the inhumane, degrading conditions of pre-trial confinement and respect Bradley's human rights. Specifically, lift the "Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order". This would allow Bradley meaningful physical exercise, uninterrupted sleep during the night, and a release from isolation. We are not asking for "special treatment". In fact, we are demanding an immediate end to the special treatment.
Quantico Base Commander
Colonel Daniel Choike
3250 Catlin Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-2707 (phone)
Quantico Brig Commanding Officer
CWO4 James Averhart
3247 Elrod Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-4242 (fax)
Background
In the wake of an investigative report last week by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com giving evidence that Bradley Manning was subject to "detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries", Bradley's attorney, David Coombs, published an article at his website on Saturday entitled "A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning". Mr. Coombs details the maximum custody conditions that Bradley is subject to at the Quantico Confinement Facility and highlights an additional set of restrictions imposed upon him under a Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order.
Usually enforced only through a detainee's first week at a confinement facility, or in cases of violent and/or suicidal inmates, the standing POI order has severely limited Manning's access to exercise, daylight and human contact for the past five months. The military's own psychologists assigned to Quantico have recommended that the POI order and the extra restrictions imposed on Bradley be lifted.
Despite not having been convicted of any crime or even yet formally indicted, the confinement regime Bradley lives under includes pronounced social isolation and a complete lack of opportunities for meaningful exercise. Additionally, Bradley's sleep is regularly interrupted. Coombs writes: "The guards are required to check on Manning every five minutes [...] At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay."
Denver Nicks writes in The Daily Beast that "[Bradley Manning's] attorney [...] says the extended isolation - now more than seven months of solitary confinement - is weighing on his client's psyche. [...] Both Coombs and Manning's psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he's a threat to himself, and shouldn't be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection."
In an article to be published at Firedoglake.com later today, David House, a friend of Bradley's who visits him regularly at Quantico, says that Bradley "has not been outside or into the brig yard for either recreation or exercise in four full weeks. He related that visits to the outdoors have been infrequent and sporadic for the past several months."
In an average military court martial situation, a defense attorney would be able to bring these issues of pre-trial punishment to the military judge assigned to the case (known as an Article 13 hearing). However, the military is unlikely to assign a judge to Bradley's case until the pre-trial Article 32 hearing is held (similar to an arraignment in civilian court), and that is not expected until February, March, or later-followed by the actual court martial trial months after that. In short, you are Bradley's best and most immediate hope.
What can you do?
Contact the Marine Corps officers above and respectfully, but firmly, ask that they lift the extreme pre-trial confinement conditions against Army PFC Bradley Manning.
Forward this urgent appeal for action widely.
Sign the "Stand with Brad" public petition and letter campaign at www.standwithbrad.org - Sign online, and we'll mail out two letters on your behalf to Army officials.
Donate to Bradley's defense fund at www.couragetoresist.org/bradley
References:
"The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention", by Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com, 15 December 2010
"A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning", by attorney David E. Coombs, 18 December 2010
"Bradley Manning's Life Behind Bars", by Denver Nicks for the Daily Beast, 17 December 2010
Bradley Manning Support Network
Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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KOREA: Emergency Response Actions Needed
The United National Antiwar Committee urges the antiwar movement to begin to plan now for Emergency 5pm Day-of or Day-after demonstrations, should fighting break out on the Korean Peninsula or its surrounding waters.
As in past war crisis and U.S. attacks we propose:
NYC -- Times Square, Washington, D.C. -- the White House
In Many Cities - Federal Buildings
Many tens of thousands of U.S., Japanese and South Korean troops are mobilized on land and on hundreds of warships and aircraft carriers. The danger of a general war in Asia is acute.
China and Russia have made it clear that the scheduled military maneuvers and live-fire war "exercises" from an island right off the coast of north Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) by South Korea are very dangerous. The DPRK has made it clear that they consider these live-fire war exercises to be an act of war and they will again respond if they are again fired on.
The U.S. deployment of thousands of troops, ships, and aircraft in the area while South Korea is firing thousands of rounds of live ammunition and missiles is an enormously dangerous provocation, not only to the DPRK but to China. The Yellow Sea also borders China. The island and the waters where the war maneuvers are taking place are north of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and only eight miles from the coast of the DPRK.
On Sunday, December 19 in a day-long emergency session, the U.S. blocked in the UN Security Council any actions to resolve the crisis.
UNAC action program passed in Albany at the United National Antiwar Conference, July 2010 of over 800 antiwar, social justice and community organizations included the following Resolution on Korea:
15. In solidarity with the antiwar movements of Japan and Korea, each calling for U.S. Troops to Get Out Now, and given the great increase in U.S. military preparations against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, National Peace Conference participants will organize immediate protests following any attack by the U.S. on Korea. U.S. war preparations include stockpiling hundreds of bunker-busters and conducting major war games near the territorial waters of China and Korea. In keeping with our stand for the right of self-determination and our demand of Out Now, the National Peace Conference calls for Bringing All U.S. Troops Home Now!
UNAC urges the whole antiwar movement to begin to circulate messages alerts now in preparation. Together let's join together and demand: Bring all U.S. Troops Home Now! Stop the Wars and the Threats of War.
The United National Antiwar Committee, www.UNACpeace.org
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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition
We here undersigned express our support for the work and integrity of Julian Assange. We express concern that the charges against the WikiLeaks founder appear too convenient both in terms of timing and the novelty of their nature.
We call for this modern media innovator, and fighter for human rights extraordinaire, to be afforded the same rights to defend himself before Swedish justice that all others similarly charged might expect, and that his liberty not be compromised as a courtesy to those governments whose truths he has revealed have embarrassed.
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GAP Inc: End Your Relationship with Supplier that Allows Workers to be Burned Alive
http://humanrights.change.org/blog/view/workers_burned_alive_making_clothes_for_the_gap
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GEORGIA PRISON STRIKE PETITION:
http://ca.defendpubliceducation.org/?p=716
A handful of East Bay organizations have put together an open letter to the strikers. If your organization would like to become a signatory, you can email me to put you on it you and can do so here.
A Letter to the Prisoners on Strike in Georgia,
We, as members of activist and community organizations in the Bay Area of California, send our support for your strike against the terrible conditions you face in Georgia's prisons. We salute you for making history as your strike has become the largest prison strike in the history of this nation. As steadfast defenders of human and civil rights, we recognize the potential that your action has to improve the lives of millions subject to inhumane treatment in correctional facilities across this country.
Every single day, prisoners face the same deplorable and unnecessarily punitive conditions that you have courageously decided to stand up against. For too long, this nation has chosen silence in the face of the gross injustices that our brothers and sisters in prison are subjected to. Your fight against these injustices is a necessary and righteous struggle that must be carried out to victory.
We have heard about the brutal acts that Georgia Department of Corrections officers have been resorting to as a means of breaking your protest and we denounce them. In order to put a stop to the violence to which you have been subjected, we are in the process of contacting personnel at the different prison facilities and circulating petitions addressed to the governor and the Georgia DOC. We will continue to expose the DOC's shameless physical attacks on you and use our influence to call for an immediate end to the violence.
Here, in the Bay Area, we are all too familiar with the violence that this system is known to unleash upon our people. Recently, our community erupted in protest over the killing of an unarmed innocent black man named Oscar Grant by transit police in Oakland. We forced the authorities to arrest and convict the police officer responsible for Grant's murder by building up a mass movement. We intend to win justice with you and stop the violent repression of your peaceful protest in the same way-by appealing to the power and influence of the masses.
We fully support all of your demands. We strongly identify with your demand for expanded educational opportunities. In recent years, our state government has been initiating a series of massive cuts to our system of public education that continue to endanger our right to a quality, affordable education; in response, students all across our state have stood up and fought back just as you are doing now. In fact, students and workers across the globe have begun to organize and fight back against austerity measures and the corresponding violence of the state. Just in the past few weeks in Greece, Ireland, Spain, England, Italy, Haiti, Puerto Rico - tens and hundreds of thousands of students and workers have taken to the streets. We, as a movement, are gaining momentum and we do so even more as our struggles are unified and seen as interdependent. At times we are discouraged; it may seem insurmountable, but in the words of Malcolm X, "Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression."
You have inspired us. News of your strike, from day one, has served to inspire and invigorate hundreds of students and community organizers here in Berkeley and Oakland alone. We are especially inspired by your ability to organize across color lines and are interested in hearing an account from the inside of how this process developed and was accomplished. You have also encouraged us to take more direct actions toward radical prison reform in our own communities, namely Santa Rita County Jail and San Quentin Prison. We are now beginning the process of developing a similar set of demands regarding expediting processing (can take 20-30 hours to get a bed, they call it "bullpen therapy"), nutrition, visiting and phone calls, educational services, legal support, compensation for labor and humane treatment in general. We will also seek to unify the education and prison justice movements by collaborating with existing organizations that have been engaging in this work.
We echo your call: No more Slavery! Injustice to one is injustice to all!
In us, students, activists, the community members and people of the Bay Area, you have an ally. We will continue to spread the news about your cause all over the Bay Area and California, the country and world. We pledge to do everything in our power to make sure your demands are met.
In solidarity,
UC-Berkeley Student Worker Action Team (SWAT) _ Community Action Project (CAP) _ La Voz de los Trabajadores _ Laney College Student Unity & Power (SUP) _ Laney College Black Student Union (BSU)
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In Solidarity
By Kevin Cooper
On Thursday, December 9, 2010, the inmates in the state of Georgia sat down in unity and peace in order to stand up for their human rights.
African American, White, and Latino inmates put aside their differences, if they had any, and came together as a 'People' fighting for their humanity in a system that dehumanizes all of them.
For this they have my utmost respect and appreciation and support. I am in true solidarity with them all!
For further information about Kevin Cooper:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255
Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL
Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's death row!
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084
To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success
For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf
Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row in California for 25 years, is asking the outgoing state governor to commute his death sentence before leaving office on 2 January 2011. Kevin Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence of the four murders for which he was sentenced to death. Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.
On the night of 4 June 1983, Douglas and Peggy Ryen were hacked and stabbed to death in their home in Chino Hills, California, along with their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and 11-year-old houseguest Christopher Hughes. The couple's eight-year-old son, Joshua Ryen, was seriously wounded, but survived. He told investigators that the attackers were three or four white men. In hospital, he saw a picture of Kevin Cooper on television and said that Cooper, who is black, was not the attacker. However, the boy's later testimony - that he only saw one attacker - was introduced at the 1985 trial. The case has many other troubling aspects which call into question the reliability of the state's case and its conduct in obtaining this conviction (see http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/013/2004/en).
Kevin Cooper was less than eight hours from execution in 2004 when the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted a stay and sent the case back to the District Court for testing on blood and hair evidence, including to establish if the police had planted evidence. The District Court ruled in 2005 that the testing had not proved Kevin Cooper's innocence - his lawyers (and five Ninth Circuit judges) maintain that it did not do the testing as ordered. Nevertheless, in 2007, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit upheld the District Court's ruling. One of the judges described the result as "wholly discomforting" because of evidence tampering and destruction, but noted that she was constrained by US law, which places substantial obstacles in the way of successful appeals.
In 2009, the Ninth Circuit refused to have the whole court rehear the case. Eleven of its judges dissented. One of the dissenting opinions, running to more than 80 pages and signed by five judges, warned that "the State of California may be about to execute an innocent man". On the question of the evidence testing, they said: "There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing and...imposed unreasonable conditions on the testing" ordered by the Ninth Circuit. They pointed to a test result that, if valid, indicated that evidence had been planted, and they asserted that the district court had blocked further scrutiny of this issue.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had already denied clemency in 2004 when the Ninth Circuit issued its stay. At the time, he had said that the "courts have reviewed this case for more than eighteen years. Evidence establishing his guilt is overwhelming". Clearly, a notable number of federal judges disagree. The five judges in the Ninth Circuit's lengthy dissent in 2009 stated that the evidence of Kevin Cooper's guilt at his trial was "quite weak" and concluded that he "is probably innocent of the crimes for which the State of California is about to execute him".
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
On 2 June 1983, two days before the Chino Hills murders, Kevin Cooper had escaped from a minimum security prison, where he was serving a four-year term for burglary, and had hidden in an empty house near the Ryen home for two nights. After his arrest, he became the focus of public hatred. Outside the venue of his preliminary hearing, for example, people hung an effigy of a monkey in a noose with a sign reading "Hang the Nigger!!" At the time of the trial, jurors were confronted by graffiti declaring "Die Kevin Cooper" and "Kevin Cooper Must Be Hanged". Kevin Cooper pleaded not guilty - the jury deliberated for seven days before convicting him - and he has maintained his innocence since then. Since Governor Schwarzenegger denied clemency in 2004, more evidence supporting Kevin Cooper's claim of innocence has emerged, including for example, testimony from three witnesses who say they saw three white men near the crime scene on the night of the murders with blood on them.
In 2007, Judge Margaret McKeown was the member of the Ninth Circuit's three-judge panel who indicated that she was upholding the District Court's 2005 ruling despite her serious concerns. She wrote: "Significant evidence bearing on Cooper's guilt has been lost, destroyed or left unpursued, including, for example, blood-covered coveralls belonging to a potential suspect who was a convicted murderer, and a bloody t-shirt, discovered alongside the road near the crime scene. The managing criminologist in charge of the evidence used to establish Cooper's guilt at trial was, as it turns out, a heroin addict, and was fired for stealing drugs seized by the police. Countless other alleged problems with the handling and disclosure of evidence and the integrity of the forensic testing and investigation undermine confidence in the evidence". She continued that "despite the presence of serious questions as to the integrity of the investigation and evidence supporting the conviction, we are constrained by the requirements of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA)". Judge McKeown wrote that "the habeas process does not account for lingering doubt or new evidence that cannot leap the clear and convincing hurdle of AEDPA. Instead, we are left with a situation in which confidence in the blood sample is murky at best, and lost, destroyed or tampered evidence cannot be factored into the final analysis of doubt. The result is wholly discomforting, but one that the law demands".
Even if it is correct that the AEDPA demands this result, the power of executive clemency is not so confined. Last September, for example, the governor of Ohio commuted Kevin Keith's death sentence because of doubts about his guilt even though his death sentence had been upheld on appeal (see http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/079/2010/en). Governor Ted Strickland said that despite circumstantial evidence linking the condemned man to the crime, "many legitimate questions have been raised regarding the evidence in support of the conviction and the investigation which led to it. In particular, Mr Keith's conviction relied upon the linking of certain eyewitness testimony with certain forensic evidence about which important questions have been raised. I also find the absence of a full investigation of other credible suspects troubling." The same could be said in the case of Kevin Cooper, whose lawyer is asking Governor Schwarzenegger to commute the death sentence before he leaves office on 2 January 2011. While Kevin Cooper does not yet have an execution date, it is likely that one will be set, perhaps early in 2011.
More than 130 people have been released from death rows on grounds of innocence in the USA since 1976. At the original trial in each case, the defendant had been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It is clear beyond any dispute that the USA's criminal justice system is capable of making mistakes. International safeguards require that the death penalty not be imposed if guilt is not "based upon clear and convincing evidence leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts". Amnesty International opposes all executions regardless of the seriousness of the crime or the guilt or innocence of the condemned.
California has the largest death row in the USA, with more than 700 prisoners under sentence of death out of a national total of some 3,200. California accounts for 13 of the 1,234 executions in the USA since judicial killing resumed there in 1977. There have been 46 executions in the USA this year. The last execution in California was in January 2006.
RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:
- Acknowledging the seriousness of the crime for which Kevin Cooper was sentenced to death;
- Urging Governor Schwarzenegger to take account of the continuing doubts about Kevin Cooper's guilt, including as expressed by more than 10 federal judges since 2004, when executive clemency was last requested;
- Urging the Governor to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence.
APPEALS TO:
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building, Sacramento, CA 95814, USA
Fax: 1 916-558-3160
Email: governor@governor.ca.gov or via http://gov.ca.gov/interact#contact
Salutation : Dear Governor
PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.
Check with the AIUSA Urgent Action office if sending appeals after 2 January 2011.
Tip of the Month:
Write as soon as you can. Try to write as close as possible to the date a case is issued.
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Amnesty International is a worldwide grassroots movement that promotes and defends human rights.
This Urgent Action may be reposted if kept intact, including contact information and stop action date (if applicable). Thank you for your help with this appeal.
Urgent Action Network
Amnesty International USA
600 Pennsylvania Ave SE 5th fl
Washington DC 20003
Email: uan@aiusa.org
http://www.amnestyusa.org/urgent/
Phone: 202.509.8193
Fax: 202.675.8566
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Free the Children of Palestine!
Sign Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
Published by Al-Awda, Palestine Right to Return Coalition on Dec 16, 2010
Category: Children's Rights
Region: GLOBAL
Target: President Obama
Web site: http://www.al-awda.org
Background (Preamble):
According to Israeli police, 1200 Palestinian children have been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in the occupied city of Jerusalem alone this year. The youngest of these children was seven-years old.
Children and teen-agers were often dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, taken in handcuffs for questioning, threatened, humiliated and many were subjected to physical violence while under arrest as part of an ongoing campaign against the children of Palestine. Since the year 2000, more than 8000 have been arrested by Israel, and reports of mistreatment are commonplace.
Further, based on sworn affidavits collected in 2009 from 100 of these children, lawyers working in the occupied West Bank with Defense Children International, a Geneva-based non governmental organization, found that 69% were beaten and kicked, 49% were threatened, 14% were held in solitary confinement, 12% were threatened with sexual assault, including rape, and 32% were forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand.
Minors were often asked to give names and incriminate friends and relatives as a condition of their release. Such institutionalized and systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children by the state of Israel is a violation international law and specifically contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Israel is supposedly a signatory.
Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
We, the undersigned call on US President Obama to direct Israel to
1. Stop all the night raids and arrests of Palestinian Children forthwith.
2. Immediately release all Palestinian children detained in its prisons and detention centers.
3. End all forms of systematic and institutionalized abuse against all Palestinian children.
4. Implement the full restoration of Palestinian children's rights in accordance with international law including, but not limited to, their right to return to their homes of origin, to education, to medical and psychological care, and to freedom of movement and expression.
The US government, which supports Israel to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars a year while most ordinary Americans are suffering in a very bad economy, is bound by its laws and international conventions to cut off all aid to Israel until it ends all of its violations of human rights and basic freedoms in a verifiable manner.
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"Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests."..."Publishing State Secrets" By Leon Trotsky
Documents on Soviet Policy, Trotsky, iii, 2 p. 64
November 22, 1917
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/foreign-relations/1917/November/22.htm
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING! STOP THE FBI RAIDS NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
To understand how much a trillion dollars is, consider looking at it in terms of time:
A million seconds would be about eleven-and-one-half days; a billion seconds would be 31 years; and a trillion seconds would be 31,000 years!
From the novel "A Dark Tide," by Andrew Gross
Now think of it in terms of U.S. war dollars and bankster bailouts!
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MIDDLE EAST CHILDREN'S ALLIANCE
Your Year-End Gift for the Children
Double your impact with this matching gift opportunity!
Dear Friend of the Children,
You may have recently received a letter from me via regular mail with a review of the important things you helped MECA accomplish for the children in 2010, along with a special Maia Project decal.
My letter to you also included an announcement of MECA's first ever matching gift offer. One of our most generous supporters will match all gifts received by December 31. 2010 to a total of $35,000.
So, whether you are a long time supporter, or giving for the first-time... Whether you can give $10 or $1,000... This is a unique opportunity to double the impact of your year-end gift!
Your contribution will be matched dollar for dollar, making it go twice as far so that MECA can:
* Install twenty more permanent drinking water units in Gaza schools though our Maia Project
* Continue our work with Playgrounds for Palestine to complete a community park in the besieged East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, where violent Israeli settlers attack children and adults, Israeli police arrest the victims, and the city conducts "administrative demolitions" of Palestinian homes.
* Send a large medical aid shipment to Gaza.
* Renew support for "Let the Children Play and Heal," a program in Gaza to help children cope with trauma and grief through arts programs, referrals to therapists, educational materials for families and training for mothers.
Your support for the Middle East Children's Alliance's delivers real, often life-saving, help. And it does more than that. It sends a message of hope and solidarity to Palestine-showing the people that we are standing beside them as they struggle to bring about a better life for their children.
With warm regards,
Barbara Lubin
Founder and Director
P.S. Please give as much as you possible can, and please make your contribution now, so it will be doubled. Thank you so much.
P.S.S. If you didn't receive a MAIA Project decal in the mail or if you would like another one, please send an email message to meca@mecaforpeace.org with "MAIA Project decal" in the subject line when you make your contribution.
To make a gift by mail send to:
MECA, 1101 8th Street, Berkley, CA 94710
To make a gift by phone, please call MECA's off at: 510-548-0542
To "GO PAPERLESS" and receive all your MECA communications by email, send a message to meca@mecaforpeace.org with "Paperless" in the subject line.
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For Immediate Release
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
12/2/2010
For more information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,
UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
The United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released over the past several months. We also call for an end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.
Before sending the material to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of international law. His superiors told him to keep quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity to the world.
The Afghan material leaked earlier shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter while laughing about it. The widespread corruption among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.
At the national antiwar conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810 ). He talked about removing wounded children from a civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up. It affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians who were killed.
We ask why this material was classified in the first place. There were no state secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity by the US military, the US government and its allies. To try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our right to know the truth about these wars. In this respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.
UNAC calls for an end to the illegal and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and North Korea.
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Courage to Resist needs your support
By Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist.
It's been quite a ride the last four months since we took up the defense of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Since then, we helped form the Bradley Manning Support Network, established a defense fund, and have already paid over half of Bradley's total $100,000 in estimated legal expenses.
Now, I'm asking for your support of Courage to Resist so that we can continue to support not only Bradley, but the scores of other troops who are coming into conflict with military authorities due to reasons of conscience.
Please donate today:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
"Soldiers sworn oath is to defend and support the Constitution. Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our Constitution."
-Dan Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower
Iraq War over? Afghanistan occupation winding down? Not from what we see. Please take a look at, "Soldier Jeff Hanks refuses deployment, seeks PTSD help" in our December newsletter. Jeff's situation is not isolated. Actually, his story is only unique in that he has chosen to share it with us in the hopes that it may result in some change. Jeff's case also illustrates the importance of Iraq Veterans Against the War's new "Operation Recovery" campaign which calls for an end to the deployment of traumatized troops.
Most of the folks who call us for help continue to be effected by Stoploss, a program that involuntarily extends enlistments (despite Army promises of its demise), or the Individual Ready Reserve which recalls thousands of former Soldiers and Marines quarterly from civilian life.
Another example of our efforts is Kyle Wesolowski. After returning from Iraq, Kyle submitted an application for a conscientious objector discharge based on his Buddhist faith. Kyle explains, "My experience of physical threats, religious persecution, and general abuse seems to speak of a system that appears to be broken.... It appears that I have no other recourse but to now refuse all duties that prepare myself for war or aid in any way shape or form to other soldiers in conditioning them to go to war." We believe he shouldn't have to walk this path alone.
Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Project Director, Courage to Resist
First US military service member to refuse to fight in Iraq
Please donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
P.S. I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $50 or more, or possibly becoming a sustainer at $15 a month. Of course, now is also a perfect time to make a end of year tax-deductible donation. Thanks again for your support!
Please click here to forward this to a friend who might
also be interested in supporting GI resisters.
http://ymlp.com/forward.php?id=lS3tR&e=bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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Add your name! We stand with Bradley Manning.
"We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad... We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning."
Dear All,
The Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist are launching a new campaign, and we wanted to give you a chance to be among the first to add your name to this international effort. If you sign the letter online, we'll print out and mail two letters to Army officials on your behalf. With your permission, we may also use your name on the online petition and in upcoming media ads.
Read the complete public letter and add your name at:
http://standwithbrad.org/
Courage to Resist (http://couragetoresist.org)
on behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network (http://bradleymanning.org)
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Dear Friend,
On Friday, September 24th, the FBI raided homes in Chicago and Minneapolis, and turned the Anti-War Committee office upside down. We were shocked. Our response was strong however and we jumped into action holding emergency protests. When the FBI seized activists' personal computers, cell phones, and papers claiming they were investigating "material support for terrorism", they had no idea there would be such an outpouring of support from the anti-war movement across this country! Over 61 cities protested, with crowds of 500 in Minneapolis and Chicago. Activists distributed 12,000 leaflets at the One Nation Rally in Washington D.C. Supporters made thousands of calls to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Solidarity statements from community organizations, unions, and other groups come in every day. By organizing against the attacks, the movement grows stronger.
At the same time, trusted lawyers stepped up to form a legal team and mount a defense. All fourteen activists signed letters refusing to testify. So Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox withdrew the subpoenas, but this is far from over. In fact, the repression is just starting. The FBI continues to question activists at their homes and work places. The U.S. government is trying to put people in jail for anti-war and international solidarity activism and there is no indication they are backing off. The U.S. Attorney has many options and a lot of power-he may re-issue subpoenas, attempt to force people to testify under threat of imprisonment, or make arrests.
To be successful in pushing back this attack, we need your donation. We need you to make substantial contributions like $1000, $500, and $200. We understand many of you are like us, and can only afford $50, $20, or $10, but we ask you to dig deep. The legal bills can easily run into the hundreds of thousands. We are all united to defend a movement for peace and justice that seeks friendship with people in other countries. These fourteen anti-war activists have done nothing wrong, yet their freedom is at stake.
It is essential that we defend our sisters and brothers who are facing FBI repression and the Grand Jury process. With each of your contributions, the movement grows stronger.
Please make a donation today at stopfbi.net (PayPal) on the right side of your screen. Also you can write to:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
This is a critical time for us to stand together, defend free speech, and defend those who help to organize for peace and justice, both at home and abroad!
Thank you for your generosity! Tom Burke
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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D. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)
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1) Pay Doubles for Bosses at Viacom
"Viacom awarded its chief executive, Philippe P. Dauman, total compensation for 2010 valued at about $84.5 million, more than double the 2009 figure, including salary, bonus and stock options, the company disclosed on Friday. It awarded its chief operating officer, Thomas E. Dooley, total compensation valued at about $64.7 million, also more than double the 2009 compensation."
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
January 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/business/media/22viacom.html?ref=business
2) Israeli Panel Rules Flotilla Raid Legal
By ISABEL KERSHNER
January 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/world/middleeast/24mideast.html?hp
3) Former Spy With Agenda Operates a Private C.I.A.
By MARK MAZZETTI
January 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/world/23clarridge.html?ref=world
4) U.S. government commits avian holocaust with mass poisoning of millions of birds
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
January 22, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/031084_bird_deaths_holocaust.html
5) Mom jailed for records falsification
Akron teacher's aide who sent girls to Copley also loses chance at license
By Ed Meyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
January 19, 2011
http://www.ohio.com/news/114189939.html
6) The Competition Myth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
January 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/opinion/24krugman.html?hp
7) Topsy-Turvy Weather Tied to Weaker Arctic 'Fence'
By JUSTIN GILLIS
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/science/earth/25cold.html?ref=world
8) Mortgage Giants Leave Legal Bills to the Taxpayers
"Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress."
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/business/24fees.html?ref=us
9) States Help Ex-Prisoners Find Jobs
[Perhaps if we put the real criminals in jail (see above article) the money they stole oould go to funding job programs for ex-prisoners and anyone else who needs a job...bw]
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/business/25offender.html?ref=business
10) Halliburton More Than Doubles 4Q Profit
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/01/24/business/AP-US-Earns-Halliburton-Glance.html?src=busln
11) A modest proposal for curbing homicides: Socialism
By John Horgan
Scientific American
Jan 24, 2011 11:00 AM | 12
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=cross-check-blog-2011-01-24
12) Raising False Alarms
By BOB HERBERT
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/opinion/25herbert.html?hp
13) U.S. Home Prices Slump Again, Hitting New Lows
By DAVID STREITFELD
January 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/business/economy/26econ.html?hp
14) A Hefty Price for Entry to Davos
The town of Davos, Switzerland, an expensive place to go.
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News
January 24, 2011, 9:14 pm
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/a-hefty-price-for-entry-to-davos/?hp
15) Egyptian Police Confront Protesters
By KAREEM FAHIM
January 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/world/middleeast/26egypt.html?ref=world
16) Chief of Tunisian Army Pledges His Support for 'the Revolution'
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/world/africa/25tunis.html?ref=world
17) Turkey Says Israelis Used Excess Force in Flotilla Raid
By SEBNEM ARSU
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/world/europe/25turkey.html?ref=world
18) United States of Unemployment
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
January 25, 2011, 12:45 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/index.html
20) PRESS RELEASE - Jamie Scott Has Been Hospitalized
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MRS EVELYN RASCO
CONTACT: MRS EVELYN RASCO
850-375-4336
E-Mail: thewrongfulconviction@gmail.com
22) Protesters in Egypt Defy Ban as Government Cracks Down
By KAREEM FAHIM and MONA EL-NAGGAR
January 26, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/world/middleeast/27egypt.html?hp
23) Tunisia Issues Warrant for Arrest of Ousted Leader
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
January 26, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/world/africa/27tunisia.html?hp
24) Retirements Swallowed by Debt
By SHERISSE PHAM
January 26, 2011, 12:27 pm
http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/retirements-swallowed-by-debt/?hp
25) Murderer Is Executed in Georgia After Losing Stay
By KIM SEVERSON and ROBBIE BROWN
January 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26lethal.html?ref=world
26) Dealing With Julian Assange and the Secrets He Spilled
"But while I do not regard Assange as a partner, and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism, it is chilling to contemplate the possible government prosecution of WikiLeaks for making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated. Taking legal recourse against a government official who violates his trust by divulging secrets he is sworn to protect is one thing. But criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the United States, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious? And would more Americans be speaking up against the threat of reprisals?"
By BILL KELLER
January 26, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/magazine/30Wikileaks-t.html?hp
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1) Pay Doubles for Bosses at Viacom
"Viacom awarded its chief executive, Philippe P. Dauman, total compensation for 2010 valued at about $84.5 million, more than double the 2009 figure, including salary, bonus and stock options, the company disclosed on Friday. It awarded its chief operating officer, Thomas E. Dooley, total compensation valued at about $64.7 million, also more than double the 2009 compensation."
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
January 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/business/media/22viacom.html?ref=business
Viacom presents: Big Payday II - the sequel.
Viacom awarded its chief executive, Philippe P. Dauman, total compensation for 2010 valued at about $84.5 million, more than double the 2009 figure, including salary, bonus and stock options, the company disclosed on Friday.
It awarded its chief operating officer, Thomas E. Dooley, total compensation valued at about $64.7 million, also more than double the 2009 compensation. Viacom disclosed the compensation in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission after the market closed on Friday.
The company said, however, that the compensation was inflated by one-time stock awards linked to long-term contracts the executives signed last year. These contracts, for six and a half years, were unusually long for the industry, a spokesman, Carl Folta, said, and reflected Viacom's recent better performance.
Without those one-time awards, Mr. Folta said, Mr. Dauman's compensation was valued at about $30 million, including both cash and stock, and Mr. Dooley's at about $23 million, both below their 2009 compensation.
However, the awards raised questions among compensation experts.
"This is spectacular money but where are the spectacular results?" said Brian Foley, a pay consultant in White Plains. "In terms of the stock price, they are back to where they were in 2008, about three years ago. That's great, but is that really worth this award?"
Compensation for Viacom's founder and executive chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, was more restrained. Mr. Redstone received compensation for the 2010 period valued at about $15 million, a decline from the $16.9 million he received in 2009, the company said.
Viacom's 2010 fiscal year covered the three quarters from January to September.
Last year, the company changed its fiscal year to begin in October to align its financial reporting more closely with the seasonality of the television industry, giving it only three quarters last year. It is scheduled to report results from the first quarter of its latest fiscal year on Feb. 3.
The compensation is reminiscent of the large payouts Viacom's top executives received in 2005. At that time, Mr. Redstone, then the chief executive, and Tom Freston and Leslie Moonves, both then presidents, received total compensation for the previous year valued at about $52 million to $56 million.
The company said Friday that about 90 percent of the compensation for its 2010 period was in long-term stock options, which aligned the executives' interests with those of the company. It said the compensation was also justified by Viacom's performance.
"In 2010 Viacom achieved outstanding operational and financial results, including double-digit growth in operating income, adjusted net earnings and total shareholder return," Viacom said in the statement. "Viacom shares appreciated 33 percent during calendar year 2010, versus the S.& P. 500 gain of 12 percent."
Mr. Folta predicted that executive compensation would be less for the current 2011 fiscal year because it would not be inflated by the one-time payments linked to the contract renewals.
In November, it reported third-quarter earnings that surpassed the expectations of analysts. Its flagship MTV has enjoyed something of a renaissance recently as a cultural tastemaker and a corresponding upswing in ratings. In that quarter, revenue rose 5 percent, to $3.3 billion.
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2) Israeli Panel Rules Flotilla Raid Legal
By ISABEL KERSHNER
January 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/world/middleeast/24mideast.html?hp
JERUSALEM - An Israeli commission that examined the deadly raid on a flotilla off Gaza last May concluded on Sunday that Israel had acted in accordance with international law when its military enforced its naval blockade by intercepting the ships in international waters.
The commission alluded to what it called "the regrettable consequences of the loss of human life and physical injuries," - nine pro-Palestinian campaigners were killed and more than 50 were wounded during clashes on a Turkish vessel that was attempting to breach the blockade. But the commission found that Israeli soldiers had acted "professionally and in a measured manner in the face of extensive and unanticipated violence."
The first part of the commission's report, published on Sunday, dealt with the legality of the imposition of the naval blockade and its enforcement. It was to be presented to a United Nations panel formed to look into the raid and led by a former New Zealand prime minister, Geoffrey Palmer.
A second part, dealing with the mechanism in Israel for investigating complaints and claims regarding violations of the laws of armed conflict, will be published at a later date.
The raid stirred international outrage and condemnation of Israel and its blockade of Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave controlled by the Islamic militant group Hamas. Under intense pressure, Israel eased the restrictions on many goods going into Gaza through land crossings last summer.
Israeli officials expressed hopes that the conclusions of the panel, led by a retired Israeli Supreme Court justice, Jacob Turkel, and including two international observers, Lord David Trimble, a Nobel Peace laureate from Northern Ireland, and Brig. Gen. Kenneth Watkin, former judge advocate general of the Canadian forces, would vindicate Israel and win it at least some foreign support.
"In stark contrast to the rush to judgment from certain quarters eight months ago," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "the findings of the special Public Commission are clear: Israel acted in justifiable self defense. Our soldiers acted to protect themselves and to protect their country."
Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, issued a statement saying that the report's conclusions "prove that Israel is a law-abiding country that is capable of examining itself and that respects the norms and rules of the international system."
Some analysts were more skeptical about Israel's chances of convincing the world, arguing that the commission's findings were a foregone conclusion and that the panel members were picked by the Israeli government.
"This committee was suspect from the beginning," said Moshe Negbi, the legal commentator for Israel Radio, "because it was appointed by the government, because this was not a state commission of inquiry."
Apparently anticipating such criticism, Lord Trimble and Gen. Watkin wrote a letter accompanying the detailed, 300-page report in which they stated: "We have no doubt that the Commission is independent. This part of the report is evidence of its rigor."
Whatever the case, the commission's report was unlikely to go any way toward repairing Israel's relations with Turkey.
Eight Turks and an American-Turkish youth were killed aboard the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, part of a six-vessel flotilla, on May 31.
Turkey holds Israel fully responsible for the deaths and has demanded an apology.
Israel imposed a maritime blockade on Gaza in January 2009 during its military offensive against Hamas. The commission justified the naval blockade on military-security grounds, because of a need "to prevent weapons, terrorists and money from entering the Gaza Strip, and the need to prevent the departure of terrorists" by sea.
The commission rejected arguments that the blockade, together with the restrictions on movement through the overland crossings, constituted collective punishment of Gaza's population, saying that Israel allowed in goods "essential for the survival of the civilian population."
Gisha, an Israeli advocacy group promoting freedom of movement for Palestinians, notes that "a primary goal of the restrictions, as declared by Israel, was to paralyze the economy in Gaza and prevent its residents from leading normal lives."
But the commission, citing a sharp decrease in rocket attacks from Gaza against southern Israel by 2010, argued that the military advantage of the blockade to Israel was proportional to the harm it caused the civilian population.
In analyzing the outcome of the raid, the commission said that the passengers on board the Mavi Marmara were divided into two groups, the largest one made up of "peace activists" and a second group including a "hard core of approximately 40 activists" from the Turkish Islamic charity, Insani Yardim Vakfi, known by its Turkish initials, I.H.H.
The commission characterized the I.H.H. as a humanitarian organization that "also assists terrorist organizations with a radical-Islamic and anti-Western orientation" and said that its activists were equipped with clubs, iron rods, chains, slingshots and ball bearings. Some 200 knives were also found on board.
Video footage released at the time showed Israeli naval commandoes being set upon as they rappelled from helicopters onto the ship's deck. Some soldiers had their equipment seized, and the commission found that two were shot during the melee, but it said it was unable to determine whether the I.H.H. activists brought their own firearms on board.
The commission said that four of those killed belonged to the I.H.H., that another four appeared to have been active in other Turkish Islamic organizations and that the Turkish-American, who was 19, was not known to have belonged to any organization.
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3) Former Spy With Agenda Operates a Private C.I.A.
By MARK MAZZETTI
January 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/world/23clarridge.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - Duane R. Clarridge parted company with the Central Intelligence Agency more than two decades ago, but from poolside at his home near San Diego, he still runs a network of spies.
Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul's ruling class.
Hatching schemes that are something of a cross between a Graham Greene novel and Mad Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy," Mr. Clarridge has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker who has long been on the C.I.A. payroll, and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge's suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict, associates say.
Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies.
His dispatches - an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports - have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.
For all of the can-you-top-this qualities to Mr. Clarridge's operation, it is a startling demonstration of how private citizens can exploit the chaos of combat zones and rivalries inside the American government to carry out their own agenda.
It also shows how the outsourcing of military and intelligence operations has spawned legally murky clandestine operations that can be at cross-purposes with America's foreign policy goals. Despite Mr. Clarridge's keen interest in undermining Afghanistan's ruling family, President Obama's administration appears resigned to working with President Karzai and his half brother, who is widely suspected of having ties to drug traffickers.
Charles E. Allen, a former top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security who worked with Mr. Clarridge at the C.I.A., termed him an "extraordinary" case officer who had operated on "the edge of his skis" in missions abroad years ago.
But he warned against Mr. Clarridge's recent activities, saying that private spies operating in war zones "can get both nations in trouble and themselves in trouble." He added, "We don't need privateers."
The private spying operation, which The New York Times disclosed last year, was tapped by a military desperate for information about its enemies and frustrated with the quality of intelligence from the C.I.A., an agency that colleagues say Mr. Clarridge now views largely with contempt. The effort was among a number of secret activities undertaken by the American government in a shadow war around the globe to combat militants and root out terrorists.
The Pentagon official who arranged a contract for Mr. Clarridge in 2009 is under investigation for allegations of violating Defense Department rules in awarding that contract. Because of the continuing inquiry, most of the dozen current and former government officials, private contractors and associates of Mr. Clarridge who were interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Clarridge declined to be interviewed, but issued a statement that likened his operation, called the Eclipse Group, to the Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.'s World War II precursor.
"O.S.S. was a success of the past," he wrote. "Eclipse may possibly be an effective model for the future, providing information to officers and officials of the United States government who have the sole responsibility of acting on it or not."
A Pentagon spokesman, Col. David Lapan, declined to comment on Mr. Clarridge's network, but said the Defense Department "believes that reliance on unvetted and uncorroborated information from private sources may endanger the force and taint information collected during legitimate intelligence operations."
Whether military officials still listen to Mr. Clarridge or support his efforts to dig up dirt on the Karzai family is unclear. But it is evident that Mr. Clarridge - bespectacled and doughy, with a shock of white hair - is determined to remain a player.
On May 15, according to a classified Pentagon report on the private spying operation, he sent an encrypted e-mail to military officers in Kabul announcing that his network was being shut down because the Pentagon had just terminated his contract. He wrote that he had to "prepare approximately 200 local personnel to cease work."
In fact, he had no intention of closing his operation. The very next day, he set up a password-protected Web site, afpakfp.com, that would allow officers to continue viewing his dispatches.
A Staunch Interventionist
From his days running secret wars for the C.I.A. in Central America to his consulting work in the 1990s on a plan to insert Special Operations troops in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, Mr. Clarridge has been an unflinching cheerleader for American intervention overseas.
Typical of his pugnacious style are his comments, provided in a 2008 interview for a documentary now on YouTube, defending many of the C.I.A.'s most notorious operations, including undermining the Chilean president Salvador Allende, before a coup ousted him 1973.
"Sometimes, unfortunately, things have to be changed in a rather ugly way," said Mr. Clarridge, his New England accent becoming more pronounced the angrier he became. "We'll intervene whenever we decide it's in our national security interests to intervene."
"Get used to it, world," he said. "We're not going to put up with nonsense."
He is also stirred by the belief that the C.I.A. has failed to protect American troops in Afghanistan, and that the Obama administration has struck a Faustian bargain with President Karzai, according to four current and former associates. They say Mr. Clarridge thinks that the Afghan president will end up cutting deals with Pakistan or Iran and selling out the United States, making American troops the pawns in the Great Game of power politics in the region.
Mr. Clarridge - known to virtually everyone by his childhood nickname, Dewey - was born into a staunchly Republican family in New Hampshire, attended Brown University and joined the spy agency during its freewheeling early years. He eventually became head of the agency's Latin America division in 1981 and helped found the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center five years later.
In postings in India, Turkey, Italy and elsewhere, Mr. Clarridge, using pseudonyms that included Dewey Marone and Dax Preston LeBaron, made a career of testing boundaries in the dark space of American foreign policy. In his 1997 memoir, he wrote about trying to engineer pro-American governments in Italy in the late 1970s (the former American ambassador to Rome, Richard N. Gardner, called him "shallow and devious"), and helping run the Reagan administration's covert wars against Marxist guerrillas in Central America during the 1980s.
He was indicted in 1991 on charges of lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-contra scandal; he had testified that he was unaware of arms shipments to Iran. But he was pardoned the next year by the first President George Bush.
Now, more than two decades after Mr. Clarridge was forced to resign from the intelligence agency, he tries to run his group of spies as a C.I.A. in miniature. Working from his house in a San Diego suburb, he uses e-mail to stay in contact with his "agents" - their code names include Willi and Waco - in Afghanistan and Pakistan, writing up intelligence summaries based on their reports, according to associates.
Mr. Clarridge assembled a team of Westerners, Afghans and Pakistanis not long after a security consulting firm working for The Times subcontracted with him in December 2008 to assist in the release of a reporter, David Rohde, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban. Mr. Rohde escaped on his own seven months later, but Mr. Clarridge used his role in the episode to promote his group to military officials in Afghanistan.
In July 2009, according to the Pentagon report, he set out to prove his worth to the Pentagon by directing his team to gather information in Pakistan's tribal areas to help find a young American soldier who had been captured by Taliban militants. (The soldier, Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, remains in Taliban hands.)
Four months later, the security firm that Mr. Clarridge was affiliated with, the American International Security Corporation, won a Pentagon contract ultimately worth about $6 million. American officials said the contract was arranged by Michael D. Furlong, a senior Defense Department civilian with a military "information warfare" command in San Antonio.
To get around a Pentagon ban on hiring contractors as spies, the report said, Mr. Furlong's team simply rebranded their activities as "atmospheric information" rather than "intelligence."
Mr. Furlong, now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Pentagon's inspector general, was accused in the internal Pentagon report of carrying out "unauthorized" intelligence gathering, and misleading senior military officers about it. He has said that he became a scapegoat for top commanders in Afghanistan who had blessed his activities.
As for Mr. Clarridge, American law prohibits private citizens from actively undermining a foreign government, but prosecutions under the so-called Neutrality Act have historically been limited to people raising private armies against foreign powers. Legal experts said Mr. Clarridge's plans against the Afghan president fell in a gray area, but would probably not violate the law.
Intelligence of Varying Quality
It is difficult to assess the merits of Mr. Clarridge's secret intelligence dispatches; a review of some of the documents by The Times shows that some appear to be based on rumors from talk at village bazaars or rehashes of press reports.
Others, though, contain specific details about militant plans to attack American troops, and about Taliban leadership meetings in Pakistan. Mr. Clarridge gave the military an in-depth report about a militant group, the Haqqani Network, in August 2009, a document that officials said helped the military track Haqqani fighters. According to the Pentagon report, Mr. Clarridge told Marine commanders in Afghanistan in June 2010 that his group produced 500 intelligence dispatches before its contract was terminated.
When the military would not listen to him, Mr. Clarridge found other ways to peddle his information. For instance, his private spies in April and May were reporting that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive cleric who leads the Afghan Taliban, had been captured by Pakistani officials and placed under house arrest. Associates said Mr. Clarridge believed that Pakistan's spy service was playing a game: keeping Mullah Omar confined but continuing to support the Afghan Taliban.
Both military and intelligence officials said the information could not be corroborated, but Mr. Clarridge used back channels to pass it on to senior Obama administration officials, including Dennis C. Blair, then the director of national intelligence.
And associates said that Mr. Clarridge, determined to make the information public, arranged for it to get to Mr. Thor, a square-jawed writer of thrillers, a blogger and a regular guest on Mr. Beck's program on Fox News.
Most of Mr. Thor's books are yarns about the heroic exploits of Special Operations troops. In interviews, he said he was once embedded with a "black special ops team" and helped expose "a Taliban pornography/murder ring."
On May 10, biggovernment.com - a Web site run by the conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart - published an "exclusive" by Mr. Thor, who declined to comment for this article.
"Through key intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan," Mr. Thor wrote, "I have just learned that reclusive Taliban leader and top Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Omar, has been taken into custody."
Just last week, he blogged about another report - unconfirmed by American officials - from Mr. Clarridge's group: that Mullah Omar had suffered a heart attack and was rushed to a hospital by Pakistan's spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence.
"America is being played," he wrote.
Taking on Afghan Leaders
Mr. Clarridge and his spy network also took sides in an internecine government battle over Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Khandahar Provincial Council.
For years, the American military has believed that public anger over government-linked corruption has helped swell the Taliban's ranks, and that Ahmed Wali Karzai plays a central role in that corruption. He has repeatedly denied any links to the Afghan drug trafficking.
According to three American military officials, in April 2009 Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top American commander in Afghanistan, told subordinates that he wanted them to gather any evidence that might tie the president's half brother to the drug trade. "He put the word out that he wanted to 'burn' Ahmed Wali Karzai," said one of the military officials.
In early 2010, after General McKiernan left Afghanistan and Mr. Clarridge was under contract to the military, the former spy helped produce a dossier for commanders detailing allegations about Mr. Karzai's drug connections, land grabs and even murders in southern Afghanistan. The document, provided to The Times, speculates that Mr. Karzai's ties to the C.I.A. - which has paid him an undetermined amount of money since 2001 - may be the reason the agency "is the only member of the country team in Kabul not to advocate taking a more active stance against AWK."
Ultimately, though, the military could not amass enough hard proof to convince other American officials of Mr. Karzai's supposed crimes, and backed off efforts to remove him from power.
Mr. Clarridge would soon set his sights higher: on President Hamid Karzai himself. Over the summer, after the Pentagon canceled his contract, Mr. Clarridge decided that the United States needed leverage over the Afghan president. So the former spy, running his network with money from unidentified donors, came up with an outlandish scheme that seems to come straight from the C.I.A.'s past playbook of covert operations.
There have long been rumors that Hamid Karzai uses drugs, in part because of his often erratic behavior, but the accusation was aired publicly last year by Peter W. Galbraith, a former United Nations representative in Afghanistan. American officials have said publicly that there is no evidence to support the allegation of drug use.
Mr. Clarridge pushed a plan to prove that the president was a heroin addict, and then confront him with the evidence to ensure that he became a more pliable ally. Mr. Clarridge proposed various ideas, according to several associates, from using his team to track couriers between the presidential palace in Kabul and Ahmed Wali Karzai's home in Kandahar, to even finding a way to collect Hamid Karzai's beard clippings and run DNA tests. He eventually dropped his ideas when the Obama administration signaled it was committed to bolstering the Karzai government.
Still, associates said, Mr. Clarridge maneuvered against the Karzais last summer by helping promote videos, available on YouTube, purporting to represent the "Voice of Afghan Youth." The slick videos disparage the president as the "king of Kabul" who regularly takes money from the Iranians, and Ahmed Wali Karzai as the "prince of Kandahar" who "takes the monthly gold from the American intelligence boss" and makes the Americans "his puppet."
The videos received almost no attention when they were posted on the Internet, but were featured in July on the Fox News Web site in a column by Mr. North, who declined to comment for this article. Writing that he had "stumbled" on the videos on the Internet, he called them a "treasure trove."
Mr. Clarridge, his associates say, continues to dream up other operations against the Afghan president and his inner circle. When he was an official spy, Mr. Clarridge recalled in his memoir, he bristled at the C.I.A.'s bureaucracy for thwarting his plans to do maximum harm to America's enemies. "It's not like I'm running my own private C.I.A.," he wrote, "and can do what I want."
Barclay Walsh contributed research.
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4) U.S. government commits avian holocaust with mass poisoning of millions of birds
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
January 22, 2011
http://www.naturalnews.com/031084_bird_deaths_holocaust.html
(NaturalNews) The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is engaged in what can only be called an avian holocaust through its Bye Bye Blackbird program that has poisoned tens of millions of birds over the last decade. The USDA even reports the number of birds it has poisoned to death in a PDF document posted on the USDA website.
Anticipating the USDA possibly removing that document, we have posted a copy on NaturalNews servers at:
http://www.naturalnews.com/files/US...
The original source URL of this file was:
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_...
This document shows that, just in 2009, the following bird populations were poisoned and killed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, using taxpayer dollars:
(Listed as "Intentional" and "Killed / Euthanized")
Brown-headed cowbirds: 1,046,109
European Starlings: 1,259,714
Red-winged blackbirds: 965,889
Canadian geese: 24,519
Grackles: 93,210
Pigeons: 96,297
...plus tens of thousands of crows, doves, ducks, falcons, finches, gulls, hawks, herons, owls, ravens, sparrows, swallows, swans, turkeys, vultures and woodpeckers, among other animals.
The chart even shows that the USDA "unintentionally" euthanized one Bald Eagle.
Also murdered in 2009 by the USDA are victims of other species:
27,000 beavers, 1700 bobcats, 81,000 coyotes, 2,000 gray foxes, 336 mountain lions, 1900 woodchucks, 130 porcupines, 12,000 raccoons, 20,000 squirrels, 30,000 wild pigs, 478 wolves.
See the list yourself at: http://www.naturalnews.com/files/US...
The mass-murdering U.S. government that disavows violence?
Keep in mind that murdering animals is an act of violence. Yet in the wake of the recent Giffords shooting, we have U.S. government officials running around screaming about how much they disavow violence, saying things like "violence should never be used to resolve problems."
But their actions say something different: Violence against non-human life forms is not only tolerated and approved by the federal government, but even encouraged. Through these mass killings of birds, cougars, ducks and other animals, the United States federal government is actively engaged in widespread acts of violence against nature, murdering literally millions of animals on an annual basis.
Keep in mind that the numbers shown above are only for 2009. A similar number of animals were killed by the USDA all the other years, too, going all the way back to the 1960's when the "Bye Bye Blackbird" program was first initiated.
By my estimates, the USDA has actively murdered at least 100 million animals in America over the last four decades, putting this on the scale of an animal holocaust and a crime against nature.
Don't speak of crosshairs or straight shooting
In the politically correct language-muzzled aftermath of the Giffords shooting, the mere mention of the term "crosshairs" is enough to evoke an on-air apology on network news programs. Now you can't say someone is a "straight shooter," either.
But if you work for the USDA, you can murder animals by the tens of millions and virtually no network news outlet even covers the story. It's not enough, apparently, that humans have already caused widespread destruction of animal habitat across North America; now our own government is actively murdering literally millions of animals every year.
And for what? What is the justification for these actions? According to the USA, these animals are a "nuisance" to farmers.
When is it okay to kill an animal?
I have great admiration for farmers, and I understand that there are times when predators can get out of control and cause a lot of damage. Coyotes can get into the chicken coop and kill your chickens, so on most farms and ranches, coyotes are considered live target practice at every opportunity. That's why nearly all U.S. ranchers own rifles as tools which are used for sniping at groundhogs and moles which tend to take more than their fair share of garden vegetables.
I know one rancher who was trying to plant an orchard and woke up one morning to find his newly planted trees had all been destroyed by a small band of hyperactive beavers. Needless to say, those beavers ended up right in the crosshairs of a utility 22 rifle.
I also understand that wild pigs (feral swine) can root up valuable crops in their search for food. There are times when certain types of animals can become very difficult for ranchers and farmers to deal with. Although I personally don't enjoy the thought of it, I can at least understand that there might be an economic justification in the minds of farmers and ranchers to kill certain animals which are destroying their crops (or chickens, or orchards). I've never met a farmer or rancher who simply killed animals for the fun of it. The ammo is too expensive, and farmers don't have that kind of time to waste in the first place. Most farmers, by the way, have a very high respect for life and only kill when they feel they have no available alternative.
But since when did sparrows, starlings and blackbirds ever pose a real threat to anyone? They're not going to fly off with your cow, and to blame these birds for eating the grain being fed to the cows is ridiculous in the first place because cows aren't supposed to eat grain.
Cows are supposed to eat grass. If you are running a cow operation where the birds are eating your grain and you think the birds are the problem, the real problem is that you're feeding cows the wrong food! If you raise your cows on grass, the birds don't get into the grain and you don't have to poison the birds.
You see, when one ecological element gets out of balance (feeding grain to cows, for example), it then causes another problem that must be dealt with in some other destructive way (such as poisoning the birds). This cycle of disharmony continues and escalates until entire ecosystems are out of whack. Then the USDA shows up with a pickup truck full of poison bait and goes to work poisoning animals.
The solution isn't to keep poisoning animals and trying to control populations through toxic chemicals but rather to return to holistic web-of-life farming methods that work in harmony with nature rather than treating nature as the enemy.
Then again, we are talking about the U.S. Department of Agriculture here. And while the USDA has a great number of truly useful programs (such as their USDA organic label, which is a high-integrity program), the agency as a whole remains steeped in the conventional agricultural mythology of pesticides, GMOs and "poisoning varmints."
How the federal government is abusing your tax dollars
All of this really makes me wonder about the whole argument of Big Government versus small government. The argument of those who say we should all pay our taxes is that the government needs your money to "build roads and schools."
What they don't bother to mention is that the government is also using your money in very destructive ways, too, such as poisoning animals and pushing GMOs into European nations (http://www.naturalnews.com/030828_G...).
Personally, I am ethically and morally opposed to my money being used for such destructive purposes. And even though I continue to pay my taxes, I do so under strong protest to the reality that my own government is committing an avian holocaust -- a crime against nature -- with the help of the dollars I reluctantly send to Washington.
The very thought of it makes me sick. I would be more than happy to contribute money to actually building schools and roads. But to see my hard-earned dollars used by the USDA to murder innocent animals is extremely offensive, and it is a violation of my own ethics and principles. My main purpose in serving as the editor of NaturalNews.com has been to protect life. And in my mind, that protection extends beyond human life. I believe we also have a reasonable obligation to protect the life of the animals around us -- and the very ecosystems upon which we ultimately depend.
Although I can understand certain rare cases in which eliminating an animal may be the only logical choice for a farmer who is losing his crops and whose livelihood is at stake, it seems that the current killing of animals by the USDA is wildly indiscriminate and lacks proper moral or even economic justification.
Poisoning the humans, too?
It also brings up the bigger question that I posed in a previous article on this topic: If the U.S. government thinks nothing of murdering tens of millions of birds and mammals who have become a "nuisance," then what happens when the human population becomes "too large" and needs to be controlled, too?
Will they simply feed us poison and hope we die off like the birds?
I might suggest that program is already under way. It's called water fluoridation. Food additives. Vaccines. Pharmaceuticals.
And the government doesn't call it murder, by the way. They refer to it as "euthanasia."
The only difference is they're killing the humans more slowly.
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5) Mom jailed for records falsification
Akron teacher's aide who sent girls to Copley also loses chance at license
By Ed Meyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
January 19, 2011
http://www.ohio.com/news/114189939.html
An Akron woman was sentenced to 10 days in the Summit County Jail, placed on three years of probation and ordered to perform community service after being convicted of falsifying residency records so that her two children could attend Copley-Fairlawn schools.
Summit Common Pleas Judge Patricia Cosgrove, who handed down the sentence Tuesday afternoon in a packed courtroom, ordered Kelley Williams-Bolar, 40, to begin serving the sentence immediately.
Williams-Bolar, who was standing before the bench with her lawyer, sagged into the arms of sheriff's deputies as she was led away, sobbing loudly, to begin her jail time.
After seven hours of deliberations, a jury convicted her late Saturday of two counts of tampering with records.
While her two girls were registered as living with her father in Copley Township within the Copley school district, prosecutors maintained that they actually were living with Williams-Bolar on Hartford Avenue in Akron, in subsidized housing provided by the Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority.
In addition to the tampering offenses, Williams-Bolar and her father, Edward L. Williams, 64, were charged with fourth-degree felonies of grand theft, accused of defrauding the school system of two years of educational services for the girls.
School officials testified that those services were worth about $30,500 in tuition.
The jury failed to reach unanimous verdicts on those charges, and Cosgrove declared a mistrial.
A decision on whether to re-try the grand theft charges against Williams-Bolar and her father is pending, prosecutors said.
On the tampering conviction, Cosgrove gave Williams-Bolar the maximum prison sentence - five years - for each of the two charges, with the sentences to run concurrently.
The judge then suspended all but 10 days of the sentence, which will be served in the county jail. Cosgrove also ordered Williams-Bolar to perform 80 hours of community service in mentoring programs sponsored by her church or the NAACP.
Teaching pursuit derailed
Cosgrove noted Williams-Bolar faces another form of punishment.
Williams-Bolar, a single mother, works as a teaching assistant with children with special needs at Buchtel High School. At the trial, she testified that she wanted to become a teacher and is a senior at the University of Akron, only a few credit hours short of a teaching degree.
That won't happen now, Cosgrove said.
''Because of the felony conviction, you will not be allowed to get your teaching degree under Ohio law as it stands today,'' the judge said. ''The court's taking into consideration that is also a punishment that you will have to serve.''
Williams-Bolar addressed Cosgrove briefly before being sentenced, saying ''there was no intention at all'' to deceive school officials.
She pleaded with Cosgrove not to put her behind bars.
''My girls need me,'' she said. ''I've never, ever gone a day without seeing them off. Never. My oldest daughter is 16.
''I need to be there to support them.''
Williams-Bolar's two girls, now 16 and 12, are attending schools elsewhere. They left the Copley-Fairlawn district before the 2009 school term.
The Rev. Lorenzo Glenn of Macedonia Baptist Church also pleaded for leniency, saying his church has a mentoring program well suited for probation in lieu of prison time.
Glenn told the judge that he has known Williams-Bolar for more than 20 years and was overwhelmed by her convictions.
''This is a serious matter, but by all means,'' Glenn said, ''it was done to help her children.''
Glenn noted the attention the case has drawn and the resources used to prosecute the case.
All of Cleveland's major television stations had cameras at the sentencing.
''When I see all the media here today, you'd think it was a serial killing,'' Glenn said.
Cosgrove said some incarceration was appropriate, ''so that others who think they might defraud the school system perhaps will think twice.''
Assistant county prosecutor Terri Burnside, one of the two government lawyers assigned to the case, did not object to probation for Williams-Bolar.
After the sentencing, Brian Poe, Copley-Fairlawn school superintendent, said the prosecution of Williams-Bolar and her father ''obviously is a very difficult and uncomfortable case.''
According to court testimony, there were 30 to 40 similar residency cases involving other families from August 2006 to June 2008, when Williams-Bolar's children were enrolled in Copley schools.
Williams-Bolar was the only parent prosecuted, according to testimony.
Poe said an effort was made to avoid criminal charges.
''We were able to resolve 99.9 percent of our residency disputes with the folks we called in for residency hearings,'' he said. ''In this case, we were not able to resolve that.
''So, therefore, with the information that we were able to uncover, we felt it necessary to provide that information to the prosecutor's office.''
Prosecutors presented several hours of videotaped evidence - much of it shot by a private investigator through a wrought-iron fence. The videos showed Williams-Bolar dropping off her children at a bus stop, a short walk from her father's home, for the ride to school.
Poe said this case was not pursued as a deterrent.
''We have, for the past three and a half years, gone after residency cases and had residency hearings,'' he said. ''It's something that's important to us. We are not an open-enrollment district.''
Laurie Cramer, spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, said Edward Williams has outstanding theft and tampering charges in connection with a case involving the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Those charges were separated from the Copley-Fairlawn residency case before it went to trial. A pretrial hearing involving Williams is scheduled for 1 p.m. Monday in Cosgrove's court.
Ed Meyer can be reached at 330-996-3784 or emeyer@thebeaconjournal.com.
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6) The Competition Myth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
January 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/opinion/24krugman.html?hp
Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board has been renamed the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio address, the president declared that "We can out-compete any other nation on Earth."
This may be smart politics. Arguably, Mr. Obama has enlisted an old cliché on behalf of a good cause, as a way to sell a much-needed increase in public investment to a public thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that government spending is a bad thing.
But let's not kid ourselves: talking about "competitiveness" as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it's a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what's good for corporations is good for America.
About that misdiagnosis: What sense does it make to view our current woes as stemming from lack of competitiveness?
It's true that we'd have more jobs if we exported more and imported less. But the same is true of Europe and Japan, which also have depressed economies. And we can't all export more while importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to. Yes, we could demand that China shrink its trade surplus - but if confronting China is what Mr. Obama is proposing, he should say that plainly.
Furthermore, while America is running a trade deficit, this deficit is smaller than it was before the Great Recession began. It would help if we could make it smaller still. But ultimately, we're in a mess because we had a financial crisis, not because American companies have lost their ability to compete with foreign rivals.
But isn't it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.
Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that's more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?
Still, you might say that talk of competitiveness helps Mr. Obama quiet claims that he's anti-business. That's fine, as long as he realizes that the interests of nominally "American" corporations and the interests of the nation, which were never the same, are now less aligned than ever before.
Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr. Immelt. But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.'s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity.
By the way, some have praised Mr. Immelt's appointment on the grounds that at least he represents a company that actually makes things, rather than being yet another financial wheeler-dealer. Sorry to burst this bubble, but these days G.E. derives more revenue from its financial operations than it does from manufacturing - indeed, GE Capital, which received a government guarantee for its debt, was a major beneficiary of the Wall Street bailout.
So what does the administration's embrace of the rhetoric of competitiveness mean for economic policy?
The favorable interpretation, as I said, is that it's just packaging for an economic strategy centered on public investment, investment that's actually about creating jobs now while promoting longer-term growth. The unfavorable interpretation is that Mr. Obama and his advisers really believe that the economy is ailing because they've been too tough on business, and that what America needs now is corporate tax cuts and across-the-board deregulation.
My guess is that we're mainly talking about packaging here. And if the president does propose a serious increase in spending on infrastructure and education, I'll be pleased.
But even if he proposes good policies, the fact that Mr. Obama feels the need to wrap these policies in bad metaphors is a sad commentary on the state of our discourse.
The financial crisis of 2008 was a teachable moment, an object lesson in what can go wrong if you trust a market economy to regulate itself. Nor should we forget that highly regulated economies, like Germany, did a much better job than we did at sustaining employment after the crisis hit. For whatever reason, however, the teachable moment came and went with nothing learned.
Mr. Obama himself may do all right: his approval rating is up, the economy is showing signs of life, and his chances of re-election look pretty good. But the ideology that brought economic disaster in 2008 is back on top - and seems likely to stay there until it brings disaster again.
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7) Topsy-Turvy Weather Tied to Weaker Arctic 'Fence'
By JUSTIN GILLIS
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/science/earth/25cold.html?ref=world
Judging by the weather, the world seems to have flipped upside down.
For two winters running, an Arctic chill has descended on Europe, burying that continent in snow and ice. Last year in the United States, historic blizzards afflicted the mid-Atlantic region. This winter the deep South has endured unusual snowstorms and severe cold, and a frigid Northeast is bracing for what could shape into another major snowstorm this week.
Yet while people in Atlanta learn to shovel snow, the weather 2,000 miles to the north has been freakishly warm the past two winters. Throughout northeastern Canada and Greenland, temperatures in December ran as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Bays and lakes have been slow to freeze; ice fishing, hunting and trade routes have been disrupted.
Iqaluit, the capital of the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, had to cancel its New Year's snowmobile parade. David Ell, the deputy mayor, said that people in the region had been looking with envy at snowbound American and European cities. "People are saying, 'That's where all our snow is going!' " he said.
The immediate cause of the topsy-turvy weather is clear enough. A pattern of atmospheric circulation that tends to keep frigid air penned in the Arctic has weakened during the last two winters, allowing big tongues of cold air to descend far to the south, while masses of warmer air have moved north.
The deeper issue is whether this pattern is linked to the rapid changes that global warming is causing in the Arctic, particularly the drastic loss of sea ice. At least two prominent climate scientists have offered theories suggesting that it is. But many others are doubtful, saying the recent events are unexceptional, or that more evidence over a longer period would be needed to establish a link.
Since satellites began tracking it in 1979, the ice on the Arctic Ocean's surface in the bellwether month of September has declined by more than 30 percent. It is the most striking change in the terrain of the planet in recent decades, and a major question is whether it is starting to have an effect on broad weather patterns.
Ice reflects sunlight, and scientists say the loss of ice is causing the Arctic Ocean to absorb more heat in the summer. A handful of scientists point to that extra heat as a possible culprit in the recent harsh winters in Europe and the United States.
Their theories involve a fast-moving river of air called the jet stream that circles the Northern Hemisphere. Many winters, a strong pressure difference between the polar region and the middle latitudes channels the jet stream into a tight circle, or vortex, around the North Pole, effectively containing the frigid air at the top of the world.
"It's like a fence," said Michelle L'Heureux, a researcher in Camp Springs, Md., with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
When that pressure difference diminishes, however, the jet stream weakens and meanders southward, bringing warm air into the Arctic and cold air into the midlatitudes - exactly what has happened the last couple of winters. The effect is sometimes compared to leaving a refrigerator door open, with cold air flooding the kitchen even as warm air enters the refrigerator.
This has happened intermittently for many decades. Still, it is unusual for the polar vortex to weaken as much as it has lately. Last winter, one index related to the vortex hit its lowest wintertime value since record-keeping began in 1865, and it was quite low again in December.
James E. Overland, a climate scientist with NOAA in Seattle, has proposed that the extra warmth in the Arctic Ocean could be heating the atmosphere enough to make it less dense, causing the air pressure over the Arctic to be closer to that of the middle latitudes. "The added heat works against having a strong polar vortex," he said.
But Dr. Overland acknowledges that his idea is tentative and needs further research. Many other climate scientists are not convinced, saying that a two-year span, however unusual, is not much on which to base a new theory. "We haven't got sufficient insight to make definitive claims," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at a company called Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Mass., has spotted what he believes is a link between increasing snow in Siberia and the weakening of the polar vortex. In his theory, the extra snow is creating a dense, cold air mass over northern Asia in the late autumn, setting off a complex chain of cause and effect that ultimately perturbs the vortex.
Dr. Cohen said in an interview that the rising Siberian snow might, in turn, be linked to the decline of Arctic sea ice, with the open water providing extra moisture to the atmosphere - much as the Great Lakes produce heavy snows in cities like Buffalo and Syracuse.
He is publishing seasonal forecasts based on his work, supported by the National Science Foundation. Those forecasts correctly predicted the recent harsh winters in the midlatitudes. But Dr. Cohen acknowledges, as does Dr. Overland, that some of his ideas are tentative and need further research.
The uncertainty about what is causing the strange winters highlights a core difficulty of climate science. While mainstream researchers are sure that greenhouse gases released by humans are warming the Earth, they acknowledge being on shakier ground in trying to predict the regional effects of that change. It is entirely possible, they say, that some regions will cool temporarily, because of disruption of the atmospheric and oceanic circulation, even as the Earth warms over all.
Bloggers who specialize in raising doubts about climate science have gleefully pointed to the recent winters in the United States and Europe as evidence that climatologists must be mistaken about a warming trend. These commentators have not been as eager to write about the strange warmth in parts of the Arctic, a region that scientists have long predicted will warm more rapidly than the planet as a whole.
Without doubt, the winter weather that began and ended 2010 was remarkable. Two of the 10 largest snowstorms in New York City history occurred last year, including the one that disrupted travel right after Christmas. The two snowstorms that fell on Washington and surrounding areas within a week in February had no known precedent in their overall impact on the region, with total accumulations of 40 inches in some places.
But the winters were not the whole story. Even without them, 2010 would have gone down as one of the strangest years in the annals of climatology, thanks in part to a weather condition known as El Niño, which dumped heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere early in the year. Later, the ocean surface cooled, a condition known as La Niña, contributing to heavy rainfall in many places.
Despite cooling from La Niña, newly compiled figures show that 2010 was among the two warmest years in the historical record. It featured a blistering heat wave in Russia, all-time high temperatures in at least 17 countries, the hottest summer in New York City history, and devastating floods in Pakistan, China, Australia, the United States and other countries.
"It was a wild year," said Christopher C. Burt, a weather historian for Weather Underground, an Internet site.
Still, however erratic the weather may have become, it is not obvious to most people how global warming could lead to frigid winters. Many scientists are hesitant to back such assertions, at least until they gain a better understanding of what is going on in the Arctic.
In interviews, several scientists recalled that in the decade ending in the mid-1990s, the polar vortex seemed to be strengthening, not weakening, producing mild winters in the eastern United States and western Europe.
At the time, some climate scientists wrote papers attributing that change to global warming. Newspapers, including this one, printed laments for winter lost. But soon after, the apparent trend went away, an experience that has made many researchers more cautious.
John M. Wallace, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, wrote some of the earlier papers. This time around, he said, it will take a lot of evidence to convince him that a few harsh winters in London or Washington have anything to do with global warming.
"Just when you publish something and it looks like you're seeing a connection," Dr. Wallace said, "nature has a way of humbling us."
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8) Mortgage Giants Leave Legal Bills to the Taxpayers
"Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress."
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/business/24fees.html?ref=us
Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress.
The bulk of those expenditures - $132 million - went to defend Fannie Mae and its officials in various securities suits and government investigations into accounting irregularities that occurred years before the subprime lending crisis erupted. The legal payments show no sign of abating.
Documents reviewed by The New York Times indicate that taxpayers have paid $24.2 million to law firms defending three of Fannie's former top executives: Franklin D. Raines, its former chief executive; Timothy Howard, its former chief financial officer; and Leanne Spencer, the former controller.
Late last year, Randy Neugebauer, Republican of Texas and now chairman of the oversight subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, requested the figures from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It is the regulator charged with overseeing the mortgage finance companies and acts as their conservator, trying to preserve the company's assets on behalf of taxpayers.
"One of the things I feel very strongly about is we need to be doing everything we can to minimize any further exposure to the taxpayers associated with these companies," Mr. Neugebauer said in an interview last week.
It is typical for corporations to cover such fees unless an executive is found to be at fault. In this case, if the former executives are found liable, the government can try to recoup the costs, but that could prove challenging.
Since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the government in September 2008, their losses stemming from bad loans have mounted, totaling about $150 billion in a recent reckoning. Because the financial regulatory overhaul passed last summer did not address how to resolve Fannie and Freddie, Congress is expected to take up that complex matter this year.
In the coming weeks, the Treasury Department is expected to publish a report outlining the administration's recommendations regarding the future of the companies.
Well before the credit crisis compelled the government to rescue Fannie and Freddie, accounting irregularities had engulfed both companies. Shareholders of Fannie and Freddie sued to recover stock losses incurred after the improprieties came to light.
Freddie's problems arose in 2003 when it disclosed that it had understated its income from 2000 to 2002; the company revised its results by an additional $5 billion. In 2004, Fannie was found to have overstated its results for the preceding six years; conceding that its accounting was improper, it reduced its past earnings by $6.3 billion.
Mr. Raines retired in December 2004 and Mr. Howard resigned at the same time. Ms. Spencer left her position as controller in early 2005. The following year, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, then the company's regulator, published an in-depth report on the company's accounting practices, accusing Fannie's top executives of taking actions to manipulate profits and generate $115 million in improper bonuses.
The office sued Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and Ms. Spencer in 2006, seeking $100 million in fines and $115 million in restitution. In 2008, the three former executives settled with the regulator, returning $31.4 million in compensation. Without admitting or denying the regulator's allegations, Mr. Raines paid $24.7 million and Mr. Howard paid $6.4 million; Ms. Spencer returned $275,000.
Fannie Mae also settled a fraud suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission without admitting or denying the allegations; the company paid $400 million in penalties.
Lawyers for the three former Fannie executives did not respond to requests for comment. A company spokeswoman did not return a phone call or e-mail seeking comment.
In addition to the $160 million in taxpayer money, Fannie and Freddie themselves spent millions of dollars to defend former executives and directors before the government takeover. Freddie Mac had spent a total of $27.8 million. The expenses are significantly larger at Fannie Mae.
Legal costs incurred by Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and Ms. Spencer in the roughly four and a half years prior to the government takeover totaled almost $63 million. The total incurred before the bailout by other high-level executives and board members was around $12 million, while an additional $18 million covered fees for lawyers for Fannie Mae officials below the level of executive vice president. Many of these individuals are provided lawyers because they are witnesses in the matters.
Employment contracts and company by-laws usually protect, or indemnify, executives and directors against liabilities, including legal fees associated with defending against such suits.
After the government moved to back Fannie and Freddie, the Federal Housing Finance Agency agreed to continue paying to defend the executives, with the taxpayers covering the costs.
But indemnification does not apply across the board. As is the case with many companies, Fannie Mae's by-laws detail actions that bar indemnification for officers and directors. They include a person's breach of the duty of loyalty to the company or its stockholders, actions taken that are not in good faith or intentional misconduct.
Richard S. Carnell, an associate professor at Fordham University Law School who was an assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial institutions during the 1990s, questions why Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and others, given their conduct detailed in the Housing Enterprise Oversight report, are being held harmless by the government and receiving payment of legal bills as a result.
"Their duty of loyalty required them to put shareholders' interests ahead of their own personal interests," Mr. Carnell said. "Had they cared about the shareholders, they would not have staked Fannie's reputation on dubious accounting. They defied their duty of loyalty and served themselves. At a moral level, they don't deserve indemnification, much less payment of such princely sums."
Asked why it has not cut off funding for these mounting legal bills, Edward J. DeMarco, the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said: "I understand the frustration regarding the advancement of certain legal fees associated with ongoing litigation involving Fannie Mae and certain former employees. It is my responsibility to follow applicable federal and state law. Consequently, on the advice of counsel, I have concluded that the advancement of such fees is in the best interest of the conservatorship."
If the former executives are found liable, they would be obligated to repay the government. But lawyers familiar with such disputes said it would be difficult to get individuals to repay sums as large as these. Lawyers for Mr. Raines, for example, have received almost $38 million so far, while Ms. Spencer's bills exceed $31 million.
These individuals could bring further litigation to avoid repaying this money, legal specialists said.
Although the figures are not broken down by case, the largest costs are being generated by a lawsuit centering on accounting improprieties that erupted at Fannie Mae in 2004. This suit, a shareholder class action brought by the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System and the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, is being heard in federal court in Washington. Although it has been going on for six years, the judge has not yet set a trial date. Depositions are still being taken in the case, suggesting that it has much further to go with many more fees to be paid.
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9) States Help Ex-Prisoners Find Jobs
[Perhaps if we put the real criminals in jail (see above article) the money they stole oould go to funding job programs for ex-prisoners and anyone else who needs a job...bw]
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/business/25offender.html?ref=business
Faced with yawning budget gaps and high unemployment, California, Michigan, New York and several other states are attacking both problems with a surprising strategy: helping ex-convicts find jobs to keep them from ending up back in prison.
The approach is backed by prisoner advocates as well as liberal and conservative government officials, who say it pays off in cold, hard numbers. Michigan, for example, spends $35,000 a year to keep someone in prison - more than the cost of educating a University of Michigan student. Through vigorous job placement programs and prudent use of parole, officials say they have cut the prison population by 7,500, or about 15 percent, over the last five years, yielding more than $200 million in annual savings. The state spends $56 million a year on various re-entry programs, including substance abuse treatment and job training.
"We had a $2 billion prison budget, and if you look at the costs saved by not having the system the size it was, we save a lot of money," said Patricia Caruso, who was Michigan's corrections commissioner from 2003 through 2010. "If we spend some of that $2 billion on something else - like re-entry programs - and that results in success, that's a better approach."
All told, the 50 states and the federal government spend $69 billion a year to house two million prisoners, prompting many budget cutters to see billions in potential savings by trimming the prison population. Each year, more than 600,000 inmates are released nationwide, but studies show that two-thirds are re-arrested within three years.
"An exorbitant amount of money is dedicated to incarcerating people," said Nancy La Vigne, director of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute. "There are ways you can go about reducing the number of people incarcerated. The best way to help them successfully integrate into society and become independent, law-abiding citizens is to make sure they get a job."
Pushed by faith-based organizations and helped by federal stimulus money, California, Michigan, New York and other states expanded jobs programs in recent years to give prisoners a second chance and to reduce recidivism. The nation's overall jobless rate is 9.4 percent, but various studies have found unemployment rates of 50 percent or higher for former prisoners nine months or a year after their release.
Many states remain enthusiastic about the re-entry programs, but in a few states facing deficits, like Kansas, officials are cutting them back, partly because of the curtailment of federal stimulus dollars that helped finance them.
"There's a lot of national momentum to expand strategies to reduce recidivism, and a lot of that is focusing on connecting people to jobs," said Michael Thompson, director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center, a research organization for state policy makers. "At the same time, some states that want to accomplish those goals are concerned about cutting money where they can and are putting some of these programs on the chopping block."
Brian Vork, executive director of 70 Times 7 Life Recovery, a faith-based nonprofit in Holland, Mich., that helped place 60 former prisoners into jobs last year, said he had seen firsthand what a difference a job can make. His organization, whose name refers to a Biblical passage in which Jesus speaks of how many times to forgive sinners, has set up a construction company - part apprenticeship program, part life-skills mentor - that allows him to study the offenders who participate.
"You get some people who really want to change, and then you get some people who want all the bad things to stop happening to them regardless of their behavior," Mr. Vork said. "What makes it all worthwhile is when you see the light bulb go off in some people."
Take Robert Satterfield, 46, who spent five and a half years in prison on embezzlement and other charges. After being released, he spent several fruitless months searching for work and then turned to 70 Times 7 for guidance and training. Mr. Vork recommended him to Premier Finishing, a metalworking company with 16 employees.
Premier's owner, Andy Ribbens, said the six former inmates working for him were among his best employees. "These guys will do whatever it takes," he said. "Maybe they had their come-to-Jesus moment in prison: 'If I ever get out of here, I don't want to ever go back.' Their attitude is second to none, although it's not every ex-offender."
Mr. Satterfield is grateful for his second chance. He has received several raises since being hired 16 months ago, with his pay jumping to $13 an hour from $9.
"I feel blessed that this company is willing to give me a chance," he said. "I'm giving back now. I'm part of the taxpaying rolls. I don't like paying taxes, but I prefer that to being on food stamps."
In New York, the state and city are channeling money to groups like America Works and the Center for Employment Opportunities to train and place offenders, while Illinois is sending money to the Safer Foundation in Chicago.
Several states also provide employers with wage subsidies - $2,500 in New York's case - if they hire an offender for at least six months.
With 170,000 inmates, California is under orders from a federal judge to reduce its prison population by about 25,000 because of severe overcrowding. That has many Californians worried that a flood of newly released inmates will cause crime to spike.
Jerry Brown, the governor of California, has proposed expanding county job-placement programs for former inmates as part of a broader move to shift more state prisoners to county jails.
Meanwhile, federal support is drying up. Three years ago under President Bush, Congress passed the Second Chance Act in a bipartisan vote. It gave states money for re-entry programs, including $100 million in the year that ended last September. While no federal budget has yet been passed for this fiscal year, the Senate Appropriations Committee has voted to cut funding to $50 million.
"The reality is many of these programs are disappearing," said Joan Petersilia, a Stanford law professor and an adviser to Mr. Brown on criminal justice matters.
While state officials and prisoner advocates argue that these job programs for prisoners are worth the investment, the efforts sometimes face angry resistance.
"We often hear, why on earth should we want to help these guys, and where is the help for my son and daughter who haven't done anything wrong?" said Pat Nolan, a former Republican leader of the California State Assembly who served prison time for taking bribes and is now vice president of the Prison Fellowship, a Christian ministry to prisoners. "I don't think there should be a preference for someone with a record, but there shouldn't be a permanent black mark against them either, unless we want to condemn them to life on the margins of society and elicit the behavior that leads to."
Glenn E. Martin, vice president with the Fortune Society, a Manhattan group that helps offenders find jobs, said that persistently high unemployment had made placing former inmates even more challenging. "You have many more people in the labor market who are overqualified, and that makes it much more competitive for our people," he said.
Candice Ellison, 22, a New Yorker who spent two and a half years in prison for assaulting another woman, has applied for scores of jobs in the last six months, to no avail. She has turned to the Fortune Society, and it has helped her buy interview clothes and coached her on how to discuss her conviction.
"Some of my high school friends say it's not that hard to get a job, but for people like me with a criminal background, it's like 20 times harder," Ms. Ellison said.
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10) Halliburton More Than Doubles 4Q Profit
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/01/24/business/AP-US-Earns-Halliburton-Glance.html?src=busln
Filed at 1:20 p.m. EST
NEW YORK (AP) - Halliburton Co. said net income more than doubled in the fourth quarter as oil drilling activity remained strong away from the Gulf of Mexico. Here's a look at how the company fared in the final three months of 2010.
TOTAL OPERATING INCOME BY REGION:
-North America: up six-fold to $632 million;
-Latin America: up 63 percent to $78 million;
-Europe/Africa: down 2 percent to $167 million;
-Middle East/Asia: up 3 percent to $165 million.
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11) A modest proposal for curbing homicides: Socialism
By John Horgan
Scientific American
Jan 24, 2011 11:00 AM | 12
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=cross-check-blog-2011-01-24
If responses to my last post are any guide-including a diss from one of my own students!-many readers reject gun controls as a way to reduce shootings like the recent massacre in Arizona and other gun-related homicides.
Common sense tells me that unbalanced people like Jared Loughner, the Arizona shooter, should have a harder time getting a semiautomatic weapon and high-capacity clips. Moreover, some researchers have found a correlation between levels of household gun ownership and homicide. But I realize that the causal link between shootings and gun controls-and gun ownership-is complex, more so than my previous post implied.
Restrictions on gun ownership in New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and other regions were followed by a surge in firearm-related crimes, as this 2008 article in The New York Times noted. Moreover, a comparison of Wikipedia rankings of nations by gun ownership and by firearm-related deaths shows that these variables are not closely correlated. Yes, the U.S. homicide rate is much higher than in England, Japan and other nations that severely restrict civilian ownership of firearms. But Colombia, with a gun ownership rate less than one tenth that of the U.S., has a firearm-related homicide rate seven times higher. Brazil, which also has less than one tenth as many guns per capita than the U.S., has 50 percent more firearm-linked homicides.
As much as I hate to admit it, these statistics support the slogan that guns don't kill; people do. The link between homicides and easy access to guns-like the link between real violence and media violence-is tenuous. You can make the cause for or against a causal relation, depending on what society or time period you examine. Complexities like these lead to complaints that "social science" is an oxymoron.
But even gun-lovers want fewer homicides, right? So let me suggest another possible way to achieve that goal. The idea was inspired by the evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson (who died in 2009) and her husband Martin Daly, both of McMaster University in Ontario. In their 1988 book Homicide, often upheld as the gold standard in applying Darwinian theory to social problems, Daly and Wilson pointed out that males have always committed the vast majority of homicides. The reason, the psychologists contended, is that our male ancestors fought fiercely for "control over the reproductive capacities of women," which resulted in an innate male tendency toward violent aggression.
Although today lethal aggression can (often) lead to imprisonment or execution-both of which hamper reproduction-it would have promoted genetic fitness in societies predating the rule of law, according to Daly and Wilson. As evidence of their evolutionary thesis, Daly and Wilson noted that modern men kill blood relatives much less often than they kill unrelated females out of sexual jealousy as well as male rivals and even the children of other men. (One of Daly and Wilson's best-known findings is that stepfathers are many times more likely than biological fathers to kill their children.)
Males, and especially young males with few prospects, also kill nonrelatives to achieve status and "resources"-by committing armed robbery, for example, or shooting a rival drug dealer. Like other evolutionary psychologists, Daly and Wilson struggled to explain variations in behavior among individuals and societies. For example, the homicide rate of their homeland, Canada, is only about a third that of its neighbor, the U.S. Rates of homicide also vary widely from region to region within each country. Why?
I heard Daly and Wilson propose an answer to this puzzle at a 2009 meeting on aggression that I reported on for Scientific American; they also presented the hypothesis in this 2001 paper (pdf). The best predictor of high homicide rates in a region, they asserted, is income inequality. As a measure of such inequality, Daly and Wilson employed the so-called Gini index (named after its originator, the Italian statistician Corrado Gini), which ranks inequality on a scale ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. A region in which everyone has exactly the same income would have a Gini score of 0.0, whereas a region in which one person makes all the money has a score of 1.0.
Daly and Wilson found a strong correlation between high Gini scores and high homicide rates in Canadian provinces and U.S. counties. High Gini scores predicted homicides better than low average income, high unemployment and simpler measures. Basically, Daly and Wilson were blaming homicides not on poverty per se but on the collision of poverty and affluence, the ancient tug-of-war between haves and have-nots. The income-inequality hypothesis, Daly and Wilson asserted, can account for the "radically different national homicide rates" of the U.S. and Canada, the latter of which has more generous social-welfare programs (including universal health care) and hence fewer economic disparities.
Naturally, some researchers have reported data that fail to support the income-inequality theory of homicide. But I find it persuasive, especially because it points toward an attractive solution to high homicide rates: a more equitable economic system, perhaps with higher taxes for the wealthy and more generous welfare programs for the poor. In short, socialism. I hope that opponents of gun control will consider this modest, alternative proposal for reducing lethal shootings.
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12) Raising False Alarms
By BOB HERBERT
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/opinion/25herbert.html?hp
If there's a better government program than Social Security, I'd like to know what it is.
It has gone a long way toward eliminating poverty among the elderly. Great numbers of them used to live and die in ghastly, Dickensian conditions of extreme want. Without Social Security today, nearly half of all Americans aged 65 or older would be poor. With it, fewer than 10 percent live in poverty.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us that close to 90 percent of people 65 and older get at least some of their family income from Social Security. For more than half of the elderly, it provides the majority of their income. For many, it is the only income they have.
When you see surveillance videos of some creep mugging an elderly person in an elevator or apartment lobby, the universal reaction is outrage. But when the fat cats and the ideologues want to hack away at the lifeline of Social Security, they are treated somehow as respectable, even enlightened members of the society.
We need a reality check. Attacking Social Security is both cruel and unnecessary. It needs to stop.
The demagogues would have the public believe that Social Security is unsustainable, that it is some kind of giant contributor to the federal budget deficits. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the Economic Policy Institute has explained, Social Security "is emphatically not the cause of the federal government's long-term deficits, since it is prohibited from borrowing and must pay all benefits out of dedicated tax revenues and savings in its trust funds."
Franklin Roosevelt couldn't have been clearer about the crucial role of the payroll taxes used to finance Social Security. They gave the beneficiaries a "legal, moral and political right" to collect their benefits, he said. "With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program."
There has always been feverish opposition on the right to Social Security. What is happening now, in a period of deficit hysteria, is that this crucial retirement program is being dishonestly lumped together with Medicare as an entitlement program that is driving federal deficits. Medicare costs are a serious problem, but that's because of the nightmarish expansion of health care costs in general.
Beyond Medicare, the major drivers of the deficits are not talked about so much by the fat cats and demagogues because they were either responsible for them, or are reaping gargantuan benefits from them, or both. The country is drowning in a sea of debt because of the obscene Bush tax cuts for the rich, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have never been paid for and the Great Recession.
Mugging the nation's grandparents by depriving them of some of their modest, hard-earned Social Security retirement benefits is hardly an answer to the nation's ills. And, believe me, those benefits are modest. The average benefit is just $14,000 a year, which is less than the minimum wage would pay. With employer-provided pensions going the way of the typewriter and pay telephones, the income from Social Security is becoming more precious by the day.
"If we didn't have Social Security, we'd have to invent it right now," said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future. "It's perfectly suited to the terrible times we're going through. Hardly anyone has pensions anymore. People's private savings have taken a huge hit, and home prices have been hit hard. So the private savings that so many seniors and soon-to-be seniors have counted on have just been wiped out.
"Social Security is still there, and it's still paying out retirement benefits indexed to wages. It's the one part of the retirement stool that is working."
The deficit hawks and the right-wingers can scream all they want, but there is no Social Security crisis. There is a foreseeable problem with the program's long-term financing, but it can be fixed with changes that do no harm to its elderly beneficiaries. One obvious step would be to raise the cap on payroll taxes so that wealthy earners shoulder a fairer share of the burden.
The alarmist rhetoric should cease. Americans have enough economic problems to worry about without being petrified that their Social Security benefits will be curtailed. A Gallup poll taken recently found that 90 percent of Americans ages 44 to 75 believed that the country was facing a retirement crisis. Nearly two-thirds were more fearful of depleting their assets than they were of dying. The fears about retirement are well placed - most Americans do not have enough to retire on. But there should be no reason to believe that Social Security is in jeopardy.
The folks who want to raise the retirement age and hack away at benefits for ordinary working Americans are inevitably those who have not the least worry about their own retirement. The haves so often get a perverse kick out of bullying the have-nots.
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13) U.S. Home Prices Slump Again, Hitting New Lows
By DAVID STREITFELD
January 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/business/economy/26econ.html?hp
The long-predicted double-dip in housing has begun, with cities across the country falling to their lowest point in many years, data released Tuesday showed.
Prices in 20 major metropolitan areas fell 1 percent in November from October, according to the Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller Home Price Index. The index is only 3.3 percent above the low it reached in April 2009 and has fallen fell 1.6 percent from a year ago.
"A double-dip could be confirmed before spring," the chairman of S.&P.'s index committee, David M. Blitzer, said.
Eight of the 20 cities in the index fell to new lows for this cycle, including Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; Portland, Ore.; Miami, Seattle; and Tampa, Fla. Only a handful of places - essentially California and Washington - saw prices rise.
Analysts said the declines would continue even if they would be nowhere near as intense as in 2007 and 2008.
"The enormous supply overhang of existing homes (particularly factoring in all those in foreclosure or soon to be) promises to keep pressure on prices for some time," Joshua Shapiro, the chief United States economist of MFR Inc., said.
The housing market, which usually leads the economy out of a recession, is holding it back this time. New home sales are in the doldrums and mortgages are hard to come by. Government programs have stanched the bleeding but do not provide permanent relief.
In some cities, the decline over the last year was quite sharp.
Prices in Atlanta and Chicago fell more than 7 percent, exceeding even the drops in the perennially troubled Detroit and Las Vegas.
The Case-Shiller Index is a three-month average of prices. One hopeful sign is that on both a seasonally adjusted and an unadjusted basis, the declines measured in November were less than in October.
The 20 cities fell 0.5 percent on seasonally adjusted basis in November after a 1 percent drop in October.
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14) A Hefty Price for Entry to Davos
The town of Davos, Switzerland, an expensive place to go.
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News
January 24, 2011, 9:14 pm
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/a-hefty-price-for-entry-to-davos/?hp
What's the price tag to be a Davos Man?
Chief executives, government leaders and academics around the world are headed to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum's annual meeting this week - a heady power gathering that mixes business, politics and Champagne in the Swiss Alps.
It is an event that draws a wide range of decision makers, from Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, to Prime Minister George A. Papandreou of Greece to U2's Bono, ostensibly to contemplate how to solve the world's problems.
Of course, much of the week is really about one thing: networking. As the "Black Swan" author Nassim N. Taleb described it to Tom Keene of Bloomberg Television, the event is "chasing successful people who want to be seen with other successful people. That's the game."
An invitation to the meeting is supposed to be considered an exclusive honor. But for corporate executives, the cost of being a Davos Man, or, yes, a Davos Woman, even for just a couple of days, does not come cheap.
For the past week, I have interviewed more than a dozen C.E.O.'s and other executives who regularly make the pilgrimage to mingle at a high altitude in order to measure the true financial cost for corporations to attend the annual meeting.
But before we get to the fees for private planes, hotels, and a car and driver, there is the all-important ticket. And it isn't free.
Just to have the opportunity to be invited to Davos, you must be invited to be a member of the World Economic Forum, a Swiss nonprofit that was founded by Klaus Schwab, a German-born academic who managed to build a global conference in the snow.
There are several levels of membership: the basic level, which will get you one invitation to Davos, costs 50,000 Swiss francs, or about $52,000. The ticket itself is another 18,000 Swiss francs ($19,000), plus tax, bringing the total cost of membership and entrance fee to $71,000.
But that fee just gets you in the door with the masses at Davos, with entry to all the general sessions. If you want to be invited behind the velvet rope to participate in private sessions among your industry's peers, you need to step up to the "Industry Associate" level. That costs $137,000, plus the price of the ticket, bringing the total to about $156,000.
Of course, most chief executives don't like going anywhere alone, so they might ask a colleague along. Well, the World Economic Forum doesn't just let you buy an additional ticket for $19,000. Instead, you need to upgrade your annual membership to the "Industry Partner" level. That will set you back about $263,000, plus the cost of two tickets, bringing the total to $301,000.
And if you want to take an entourage, say, five people? Now you're talking about the "Strategic Partner" level. The price tag: $527,000. (That's just the annual membership entitling you to as many as five invitations. Each invitation is still $19,000 each, so if five people come, that's $95,000, making the total $622,000.) This year, all Strategic Partners are required to invite at least one woman along in an effort to diversify the attendee list.
As part of the Strategic Partner level, you get access to the private sessions as well as special conference rooms to hold meetings. And perhaps the biggest perk of all, your car and driver are given a sticker allowing door-to-door pickup service.
At the moment, the forum says it is not accepting applications to become a Strategic Partner unless the company is from China or India and it must be one of the 250 largest in the world.
In fairness, it is worth pointing out that membership at all levels does not just get you access to the meeting in Davos, but also to at least a half-dozen other meetings held around the world. Membership also gives you access to the forum's various research projects as well.
All those costs, of course, do not include the travel-related costs of getting to Switzerland, schlepping around and perhaps holding a dinner or a cocktail party for clients (which is where the real action happens anyway.).
One large investor is renting a five-bedroom chalet this year just outside of Davos for himself and his staff. The cost? $140,000 for the week. A car and driver, which the World Economic Forum will organize for you, is about $10,000 a week for a Mercedes S Class.
A first-class fare from New York to Zurich is running at about $11,000. But a private plane using NetJets will cost about $70,000 round trip, according to one executive who has used the service. Helicopter service from Zurich to Davos? $3,400 each way. (The forum provides a free bus service for those worried about their environmental footprint.)
Of course, many companies have dinners for clients, with dinners on multiple evenings for some firms.
At the Posthotel, for example, the restaurant is charging a minimum of $210 a head. A cocktail party for 60 to 80 people for just one hour? That costs about $8,000. Two hours? $16,000.
The bigger parties, like one that will be given by Google on Friday night for several hundred people, can run more than $250,000 for the evening. (In years past, Google has flown in the band and bartenders; one year, the company had an oxygen bar.)
All these embedded costs have helped make the World Economic Forum a big business - perhaps the biggest conference organizer in the world. According to its annual report, it brings in about $185 million in revenue and spends nearly all of it, with almost half of its costs going toward events and the other half on personnel.
But all this spending may soon be going out of vogue. As one attendee, the author David Rothkopf, recently wrote on his blog, "The entire endeavor is fading for several reasons, all associated with the inadequacy of Davos as a networking forum."
He explained, "As Steve Case, founder of AOL, once told me while standing at the bar in the middle of the hubbub of the main conference center: 'You always feel like you are in the wrong place in Davos, like there is some better meeting going on somewhere in one of the hotels that you really ought to be at. Like the real Davos is happening in secret somewhere.' "
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15) Egyptian Police Confront Protesters
By KAREEM FAHIM
January 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/world/middleeast/26egypt.html?ref=world
CAIRO - Thousands of protesters clashed with the police in the Egyptian capital on Tuesday as antigovernment activists energized by events in Tunisia sought to transform Police Day, a national holiday, into a "day of revolution."
The demonstrators quickly swelled in number as they snaked through winding streets and converged on the central Tahrir Square, where they met security forces in full riot gear and a water cannon truck. Clashes began after protesters jumped on the truck and tried to take control of it.
Thousands occupied the square, hurling rocks and beating back several attempts by security forces to disperse them with tear gas. Some in the security force stooped to pick up the rocks and hurl them back at the protesters. A few protesters were seen dismantling a fire truck.
The marchers included young people documenting the clashes with cellphone cameras and middle-aged men carrying flags of the Wafd party, one of Egypt's opposition groups. Women, some in headscarves and some bareheaded, also marched.
The protesters echoed the deep-seated frustrations of an enduring, repressive government that drove Tunisians to revolt: rampant corruption, injustice, high unemployment and the simple lack of dignity accorded them by the state. At least six young Egyptians have set themselves on fire in recent weeks, in an imitation of the self-immolation that set off the Tunisian unrest.
The antigovernment demonstration appeared to be among the largest to hit Cairo since 1977, when riots forced the government to back down from an increase in the price of bread.
There were reports of demonstrations in cities around the capital and across the Nile delta, including Alexandria, Suez, and other cities. In Alexandria, protesters tore down a picture of President Hosni Mubarak, the country's 82-year-old leader, and another of his son, Gamal, who many believe is being groomed to take over power, Reuters reported.
More than 90,000 people signed up on a Facebook page for the protests, framed by the organizers as a stand against torture, poverty, corruption and unemployment. But the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most powerful opposition movement, said it would not officially participate, although some of its members were expected to be on the streets.
In Cairo shortly after noon, a small group of protesters gathered in front of the Supreme Court building. The crowd quickly grew to include hundreds, shadowed by many more police officers in black riot gear.
The officers formed a moving cordon around the demonstration and there were scuffles as the officers tried to halt the march by linking arms and forming lines.
One woman was injured when the officers pushed protesters against a wall near an on-ramp leading to a bridge over the River Nile. But the demonstrators quickly escaped the cordon and marched down the riverside Corniche, snarling traffic.
"Freedom, freedom, freedom," they chanted. "Where are the Egyptian people?"
In the past, Egypt's security forces have dealt violently with such protests, and in the days leading up to Tuesday's action, the Interior Ministry issued a stern warning against demonstrations without permits. Before the protests, the streets were drained of Cairo's usual rush-hour traffic, and more than a dozen troop carriers were seen in Tahrir Square.
As in Tunisia, Egypt has seen a rise in young activists turning to Facebook and Twitter to voice their concerns about the closed political system and especially police brutality, which is rarely punished in Egypt and has increasingly served as rallying point for human rights activists.
J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York.
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16) Chief of Tunisian Army Pledges His Support for 'the Revolution'
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/world/africa/25tunis.html?ref=world
TUNIS - The general who may be both the most powerful and the most popular figure in Tunisia spoke publicly Monday for the first time since the ouster of the former dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, pledging to uphold "the revolution" and urging patience until the interim government can hold new elections.
"Our revolution is your revolution," the military leader, Gen. Rachid Ammar, yelled through a megaphone to more than 1,000 demonstrators in a square near his office, according to several witnesses. "The army will protect the revolution."
General Ammar was trying to placate protesters who are demanding the dissolution of the interim government because of the continued dominance of officials from Mr. Ben Ali's old ruling party. His remarks are significant because he is playing an unseen but potentially decisive role in the Tunisian government. Many here hope Tunisia will be the first Arab democracy, rising from the first popular overthrow of an Arab strongman.
In the final days of Mr. Ben Ali's rule, Tunisians watched in wonder as the military inexplicably withdrew from positions defending the capital. After Mr. Ben Ali fled the country a day later, Arab newspapers reported that it was General Ammar's refusal to fire on civilians that led to Mr. Ben Ali's final exit.
When chaos engulfed the country the next day it was General Ammar's military that visibly stepped in to control both civilian looters and marauding members of Mr. Ben Ali's former security forces. And in the week since then, the military has repeatedly interceded to protect civilian protesters from violence at the hands of the police.
Tunisian newspapers have lauded General Ammar as a national savior. Opposition political leaders have warily acknowledged that his military is the main force upholding the security of the country and its fragile interim government.
Some have speculated that he himself may run for office, noting that his bullhorn speech resembled the beginning of a political campaign. Others, however, argued that his speech - evidently intended to bolster the credibility of the civilian government - was the first sign that he was working for the civilian leaders and not pulling their strings.
A crowd of soldiers who heard the speech, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the general had explicitly endorsed the need for free elections. Speaking fluent English, the soldiers said the general had told the crowd that both the people and the military would ensure a democratic outcome. They praised the protesters for ridding the country of the corruption that surrounded Mr. Ben Ali, and pledged their own support for a constitutional democracy.
Western diplomats and political scientists say the Tunisian military is unlike any other in North Africa and the Middle East - much smaller, more professional and historically apolitical. It has never fought wars and instead worked mostly on efforts like peacekeeping missions or disaster relief.
The soldiers themselves expressed considerable pride at the difference between their force and those in other countries in the region, like Egypt, where all three post-revolutionary dictators have come from the military and, they said, the military's first loyalty is often to itself. The soldiers all smiled with evident delight as they volunteered that their democratic revolution might threaten other Arab leaders.
Challenges to the interim government's legitimacy, meanwhile, mounted. Caravans of hundreds of demonstrators had arrived in Tunis over the weekend from the impoverished southern provinces where the revolt began. Defying an 8 p.m. curfew, they set up camp in the old-city square amid the office of the prime minister, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Defense.
Witnesses said that in the early hours of Sunday morning police officers stationed nearby tried to disperse the rowdy crowd with water cannons, but the Tunisian military again interceded to protect the demonstrators and hold back the police - a job that one army officer called "very difficult."
By Monday morning, hundreds of local people had joined the newcomers, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, previously the right-hand man to Mr. Ben Ali. "Ghannouchi, wait, wait, we will dig you a grave," they chanted.
Residents of Tunis donated stacks of old mattresses and bags of food for the demonstrators. Women dispensed sandwiches from the stone porch of the Ministry of Finance, renamed by graffiti artists the "Ministry of Thieves," and demonstrators picnicked amid army tanks and coils of barbed wire.
The government appeared to be trying to wait out the protesters. A government official, speaking without authorization and on condition of anonymity, argued that the protesters would settle down after they had vented some of the pent-up anger left from decades of silence enforced by the old government.
The government bolstered its credibility with the protesters by returning to the airwaves a private television station shut down Sunday in what seemed to be a blatant violation of pledges to respect freedom of speech. Officials blamed holdover members of the special political police force, acting without authorization, and there were conflicting reports about which official deserved credit for reopening the station.
Officials of the legal opposition parties and Al Nahda, an outlawed Islamist party, have held talks about the formation of a supervisory council to oversee the new government, people involved in those discussions have said. Such a body could help resolve the problem of finding an authority other than the ruling-party-dominated Parliament that could oversee drafting of a constitution.
Separately, Jeffrey D. Feltman, American assistant secretary of state for the Near East, arrived in Tunis to confer with the interim government.
Brahmi Fakhredine contributed reporting.
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17) Turkey Says Israelis Used Excess Force in Flotilla Raid
By SEBNEM ARSU
January 24, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/world/europe/25turkey.html?ref=world
ISTANBUL - Turkey released details on Monday of its own report about the seizure last year of a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza by Israeli commandos. The government contended that two of the activists who were killed on the ship had been shot by Israeli forces from a helicopter before the commandos landed on the vessel.
In all, nine people were killed in the clash on May 31, when the Israeli military stormed a flotilla that had been organized by an Islamist charity in Turkey. Eight of the dead were Turks and one held dual Turkish and American citizenship.
The military had ordered the ships to turn back when they tried to breach an Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. The flotilla ignored the order.
"During the attack, Israeli soldiers have applied excessive, random and disproportionate power against civilian passengers," said the report, parts of which were published on Monday by the semi-official Anatolian News Agency.
The report also said that Israeli commandos physically and psychologically abused passengers after taking control of the ship. "Most of the passengers were kept handcuffed, strip searched, and women were subject to discriminative behavior by the male Israeli soldiers," the report said.
An Israeli commission concluded in a report released Sunday that the Israeli military had acted in accordance with international law. The report, which will form the core of Israel's submission to United Nations investigators, cleared the Israeli government and military of wrongdoing and said the operation had been legal and justified.
It concluded that the Israeli military had not fired any rounds from a helicopter and that the commandos had resorted to guns only after other, less lethal weapons failed to drive back passengers who attacked them as they boarded the ship.
The Israeli report outraged the Turkish government, which responded by publishing details of the report it submitted in September to the United Nations investigators.
"While it had the possibility of intercepting the convoy carrying unarmed civilians without causing bloodshed, Israel opted for a course which made loss of life inevitable," Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement late Sunday night.
President Abdullah Gul of Turkey told reporters in Ankara on Monday: "The report issued by Israel is nothing more than a document of its own that has no credibility in the face of international law, no legality or no persuasiveness. It actually clearly indicates that the Israeli government has such a spoiled attitude in disregarding the world and international law." .
The reports also offered differing conclusions on the methods used to intercept the flotilla.
"Israel could have tied a rope around the ship's propeller to make it stop, without firing bullets, or it could have used water on activists," a Turkish Foreign Ministry official said. The report from the Israeli commission said that the authorities had used less force than would have been permissible under international law, and that tactics like entangling a ship's propeller were dangerous.
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18) United States of Unemployment
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
January 25, 2011, 12:45 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/index.html
Nevada once again had the highest unemployment rate in the country, at 14.5 percent in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Michigan - which had long held the record for the highest state unemployment rate - was not even in the top three, having been surpassed by California (12.5 percent) and Florida (12 percent).
North Dakota reported the lowest jobless rate, 3.8 percent, followed by Nebraska and South Dakota, 4.4 and 4.6 percent. North Dakota has held the title of lowest state unemployment rate every month since November 2008.
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19) Undressing the State of the Union address
By Tommi Avicolli Mecca
JANUARY 26, 2011 10:13AM
http://open.salon.com/blog/avimecca/2011/01/26/undressing_the_state_of_the_union_address
A lot of what President Obama said in his most recent State of the Union address was predictable: the economy is in recovery, the wars are almost over, and every Joe or Jane can still realize their dreams. Tell that to the millions out of work or living on the streets.
There are concerns: the deficit will require sacrifices and cuts (but not the ending of the wars), the threat of global terror is still alive and well, and our educational system needs a jumpstart to catch up to other countries. It's not as if we haven't heard all of that before.
There were also, of course, the feel-good moments, such as the story of roofers who helped repair the Pentagon after 9/11 and who are now producing solar panels, and a call for eliminating the taxpayer dollars that go to oil companies. "I don't know if you've noticed, but they're doing just fine on their own," Obama joked. Good luck selling that to the Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress.
But there was also the zinger, and it was a big one. Boasting of the fact that open gays and lesbians (but not transgender folks) can now join the military to kill people overseas, thanks to the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT), Obama urged "our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and the ROTC. It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation."
The battles on campuses to eliminate JROTC and ROTC were not about DADT. They were about keeping academic institutions free of military recruiters needing to fill quotas. The repeal of DADT doesn't change anything other than the fact that gays and lesbians won't be discriminated against in the armed forces.
DADT was not the reason I or millions of others got involved in the anti-war movement in the late 60s. Those "divisive battles of the past" were about human lives being sacrificed in a senseless war in Vietnam. They were about opposition to a military industrial complex that still sacrifices young poor and working-class individuals to further the profits of companies such as Halliburton. America's latest wars were declared against two countries that never attacked us, and did not, contrary to the assertion of a past president, have weapons of mass destruction aimed at our shores.
If "moving forward as one nation" means supporting ROTC at colleges or JROTC in high schools, then we are one nation minus one.
Of course, we are not, nor have we ever been, one nation. We have always been divided along class, race, gender and other lines.
Obama's opening remark that "we share common hopes and a common creed" is absolute gibberish to this queer radical native son. It is the rhetoric of a man who desperately wants to sound like the great healer and mediator and who wants to be loved by everyone, something that is not uncommon in politicians.
I don't share "common hopes" with the tea party crowd and their queen Sarah Palin, and, as an atheist, I certainly don't share "a common creed" with the Christian majority, especially the fundamentalists and evangelicals who truly believe that the biblical mandate to execute queers should be the law of the land.
Ultimately, Obama's wants all of us to buy into an agenda that, while it promotes healthcare reform, albeit a weak one, and more money to put people back to work, also includes continued warfare in two countries (to the cost of millions per day), out of control defense and military spending (59% of our nation's annual budget), and recruitment of young people into a horrific war machine.
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20) PRESS RELEASE - Jamie Scott Has Been Hospitalized
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MRS EVELYN RASCO
CONTACT: MRS EVELYN RASCO
850-375-4336
E-Mail: thewrongfulconviction@gmail.com
JAMIE SCOTT HOSPITALIZED - BROTHER IN AFGHANISTAN NEEDS TO COME HOME
(Pensacola), FL - 12/25/11 - Jamie Scott has been hospitalized with an excessively high potassium level. The sisters were released from prison to serve life on parole and have had a very rough time adjusting with little funds to support themselves. Their mother is on a fixed income and unable to make necessary repairs as a result of storm damage to the house. These repairs require immediate attention to accommodate Jamie upon her release from the hospital.
Currently, their brother serving in Afghanistan owns the home and is the only person who is able to conduct business regarding the house -- the insurance company will not comply with Mrs. Rasco. Willie James Scott Jr., is in need of your assistance to get home. Please contact all media outlets and make this information public.
--
Nancy Lockhart, M.J.
http://nancylockhart.blogspot.com
843.217.4649
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21) Pesticide linked to bee deaths should be suspended, MPs told
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor and Josephine Forster
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/pesticide-linked-to-bee-deaths-should-be-suspended-mps-told-2194480.html
A new generation of pesticides is implicated in the widespread deaths of bees and other pollinators and should be suspended in Britain while the Government reviews new scientific evidence about their effects, MPs were told yesterday.
Neonicotinoid pesticides are linked by "a growing weight of science" to insect losses, and the assessment regimes for them are inadequate, the Labour MP Martin Caton told the House of Commons.
Mr Caton, MP for Gower, said in an adjournment debate that "alarm bells should be ringing" about neonicotinoids, which are "systemic" insecticides - that is, they are present in every part of treated plants, including the pollen and nectar which bees and other pollinators regularly gather. At the moment, the Government's position is that the compounds are safe when used properly, and there are no restrictions on their UK use - even though they have been banned, in varying degrees, in other countries.
Related articles
Last week The Independent highlighted new research from the US suggesting that neonicotinoids make honey bees far more vulnerable to diseases, even at doses so tiny that they cannot subsequently be detected.
Mr Caton told MPs that several pieces of fresh research had emerged "which tie the use of neonicotionods into environmental damage to honeybees and wild pollinators". Before that, he said, the invertebrate conservation charity Buglife had produced a review of 100 scientific studies and papers on the subject highlighting the concern.
On the basis of their findings Buglife had called on the Government to reconsider the position of neonicotinoids, and Lord Henley, a minister at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), had replied that both the Advisory Committee on Pesticides (ACP) and the Chemicals Regulation Directorate (CRD) had reviewed the Buglife study, although he "did not answer the main thrust of the report".
In fact, Mr Caton told MPs, the ACP had not reviewed the study, and the CRD review of it was not finished. "But we know that Defra, without a completed review of the report, decided not to accept [Buglife's] interpretation of the science, and continued to maintain that we have a robust system of assessing risks from pesticides in the UK," he said. He called on the Food and Farming minister, Jim Paice, who was responding for the Government, to suspend use of neonicotinoids "until the best scientific evidence gives them the all-clear".
The Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, said Defra "seems extraordinarily complacent about the health of bees". She told MPs: "As long ago as 2005, I asked the European Commission to comment on a Defra cut that saw a halving of seasonal bee inspectors. Given that beekeeping contributes over £165m a year to the UK's economy in direct terms, and has an unquantifiable value in terms of the health of our ecological systems, this complacency seems very misplaced."
Mr Paice rejected the charge of complacency, saying the Government took the issue of bee health very seriously, and that he himself had raised it in the House as long ago as 1997. He said the Buglife report had been fully reviewed and advice taken from government agencies, with the conclusion that, as an amalgamation of available evidence, the report did not "raise new issues".
When Mr Caton intervened to say that a review had not, in fact, been fully completed, Mr Paice said: "This is news to me."
He promised to respond in writing to Mr Caton's concerns.
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22) Protesters in Egypt Defy Ban as Government Cracks Down
By KAREEM FAHIM and MONA EL-NAGGAR
January 26, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/world/middleeast/27egypt.html?hp
CAIRO - Defying a new ban on public gatherings, small groups of protesters appeared in Cairo and other cities on Wednesday, a day after tens of thousands of people around the country marched in opposition to the nearly 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.
In front of Cairo's press and lawyer's syndicate buildings, more than 100 people shouted slogans, outnumbered by a force of security officers. "You're protecting thieves," they chanted. Police officers began striking the protesters with bamboo sticks.
Later in the afternoon, young protesters fought with police officers in downtown neighborhoods in clashes that spilled onto the streets of the working class neighborhood of Boulaq. Residents there joined forces with the protesters, prompting security officers to fire concussion grenades and tear gas. After hundreds of young men ran two armored troop carriers out of the neighborhood - in reverse, at top speed - the protest wended its way past the Ramses Hilton, an upscale tourist hotel, as guards shut the gates.
As the protesters stopped traffic on the riverside Corniche, for at least the third time in two days, dozens of the Interior Ministry's feared plainclothes officers ran at the crowd, laying about them with sticks.
The Associated Press, quoting witnesses, said that riot police armed with batons attacked about 100 protesters in the central Egyptian city of Asyut, arresting nearly half.
The government's effort to ban protests showed the extent to which it had been rattled by the scale of Tuesday's demonstrations, among the largest in decades here, and focused on the central Tahrir Square. "No provocative movements or protest gatherings or organizing marches or demonstrations will be allowed," the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
The United States ambassador in Cairo called on the Egyptian government "to allow peaceful public demonstrations," and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated that call in blunt remarks to reporters.
"We urge the Egyptian authorities not to prevent peaceful protests or block communications including on social media sites," she said, Reuters reported. Mrs. Clinton's remarks came a day after she called the government in Egypt "stable."
During protests on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, many reported trouble accessing Facebook and Twitter, the social networking sites that helped organize and spread news of the protests. Twitter confirmed that its site had been blocked in Egypt on Tuesday, Reuters reported.
Adding to the government's challenges, the country's benchmark stock index fell more than 6 percent when markets reopened early Wednesday, Reuters reported. They had been closed Tuesday for the national holiday honoring the police, a day the protesters co-opted. .
Nadeem Mansour, a human rights advocate at the Hisham Mubarak Law Center in Cairo, said that the center had received reports that hundreds of protesters had been arrested in Tuesday's demonstrations. He said people were being detained throughout Tuesday, but the bulk of the arrests took place at overnight.
The Associated Press, citing unnamed Egyptian security officials, reported that 860 protesters have been arrested on Tuesday and Wednesday, roughly two-thirds of them in Cairo.
That first day of protests, fueled in part by the toppling of the authoritarian government in Tunisia, began small but grew, with protesters occupying Tahrir - Liberation - Square. Security forces, normally quick to crack down on public dissent, were slow to suppress the demonstrations, allowing them to swell.
That shifted early Wednesday. Police officers firing rubber bullets and tear-gas grenades succeeded in driving groups of demonstrators from the square as a sit-in grew into a confrontation involving thousands of people.
Plainclothes officers beat several demonstrators and protesters set fire to a police car.
Cairo braced for broader protests Wednesday, but as of midday, Tahrir Square was clogged with normal traffic. Dozens of security officers in armored personnel carriers stood by.
Elsewhere in the city, troop carriers were also stationed in front of government buildings and in working-class neighborhoods.
The Tuesday protests were scattered across the country, occurring in Alexandria, Suez and other cities besides Cairo. There were reports of at least four deaths, including three protesters, and many injuries.
On Tuesday, photographers in Alexandria caught people tearing up a large portrait of Mr. Mubarak. An Internet video of demonstrations in Mahalla el-Kubra showed the same, while a crowd snapped cellphone photos and cheered. The acts - rare, and bold here - underscored the anger coursing through the protests and the challenge they might pose to the aging and ailing Egyptian leader.
Several observers said the protests represented the largest display of popular dissatisfaction in recent memory, perhaps since 1977, when people across Egypt violently protested the elimination of subsidies for food and other basic goods.
The government quickly placed blame for the protests on Egypt's largest opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is tolerated but officially banned. In a statement, the Interior Ministry said the protests were the work of "instigators" led by the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement had announced in advance it would not participate, and responded to the government's accusations by declaring that it had little to do with Tuesday's turnout.
The reality that emerged from interviews with protesters - many of whom said they were independents - was more complicated and reflected one of the government's deepest fears: that opposition to Mr. Mubarak's rule spreads across ideological lines and includes average people angered by corruption and economic hardship as well as secular and Islamist opponents. That broad support could make it harder for the government to co-opt or crush those demanding change.
"The big, grand ideological narratives were not seen today," said Amr Hamzawy, research director of the Carnegie Middle East Center. "This was not about 'Islam is the solution' or anything else."
Instead, the protests seemed to reflect a spreading unease with Mr. Mubarak on issues from extension of an emergency law that allows arrests without charge, to his presiding over a stagnant bureaucracy that citizens say is incapable of handling even basic responsibilities.
Their size seemed to represent a breakthrough for opposition groups harassed by the government as they struggle to break Mr. Mubarak's monopoly on political life.
One protester, Ramy Rafat, 25, said he lived in El-Marg, an impoverished neighborhood in north Cairo. Mr. Rafat, who has a master's degree in petroleum geology and is unemployed, said he learned about the protest on a Facebook page for Khaled Said, 28. Mr. Said's family says police officers fatally beat him last year.
"There are a lot of things wrong with this country," Mr. Rafat said. "The president has been here for 30 years. Why?"
Aya Sayed Khalil, 23, brought her sister, her mother and her father to the protest. "I told them the revolution was coming," she said. Asked about their political affiliation, Ms. Khalil's mother, Mona, said, "We're just Egyptians."
The marchers came from all social classes and included young men recording tense moments on cellphone cameras, and middle-age women carrying flags of the Wafd party, one of Egypt's opposition groups. A doctor, Wesam Abdulaziz, 29, said she had traveled two hours to join the protest. She had been to one demonstration before, concerning the treatment of Mr. Said.
"I came to change the government," she said. "I came to change the entire regime."
Liam Stack and Dawlat Magdy contributed reporting in Cairo and J. David Goodman in New York.
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23) Tunisia Issues Warrant for Arrest of Ousted Leader
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
January 26, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/world/africa/27tunisia.html?hp
TUNIS - The interim government here has issued an international arrest warrant for the overthrown president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and members of his family for financial offenses, the justice minister said Wednesday, as protesters continued their call to rid the government of cabinet members connected to Mr. Ben Ali.
The warrant has been sent to Interpol. Meanwhile, Switzerland announced that it has blocked tens of millions of dollars in funds connected to the Ben Ali family, but did not provide further details.
In a country where it is novel for public officials to face a free press, the justice minister, Lazhar Karoui Chebbi, announced the warrant in a long monologue at the head of a conference table surrounded by throngs of journalists whose subsequent questions quickly descended into a shouting match. Mr. Chebbi was once allied with Mr. Ben Ali.
As the minister spoke, the chants of protesters calling for the release of political prisoners came in through the windows, while the families of prisoners thronged the steps to the ministry and the hall outside the room.
A small group of pro-government demonstrators called for calm, but army and police forces resorted to tear gas and shots in the air to hold back an antigovernment crowd of more than 1,000 people massed outside the prime minister's offices. Some scaled the walls of government buildings, toppled a lamppost and nearly pulled a police officer out of his armored car.
But there were signs that the government's crackdown was being carefully calibrated to avoid further energizing the opposition. The police cleared only a side street and left the protest in the square to continue, surrounded by army soldiers watching from the sidelines.
Many in the crowd were near exhaustion. Some had driven hundreds of miles to get to the protests by Tuesday morning; many had had little sleep. But excitement spread as a scheduled news conference by Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi neared, in the hope that he would announce an end to the dominance of the interim government by members of the old ruling party - including himself.
Government officials have insisted that only members of the old ruling party have the experience necessary to guide the country to free elections in six months, and they appear to be attempting to wait out the protests. Officials have suggested they are looking for a protest leader to emerge in order to negotiate an end to the impasse.
The protesters, meanwhile, say history gives them no reason to trust the same people who helped Mr. Ben Ali rule Tunisia for 23 years. "They must all go and let us build this country with our brains and our hands," said Amina Azouz, a Tunisian graduate student at the Sorbonne and online activist protesting outside the prime ministers office. "Please, leave us alone!"
In efforts to placate the demonstrators, the Tunisian government has put forward a plan to spend over $350 million to compensate those injured in the unrest, the families of people who were killed, and craftsmen and traders whose businesses have suffered during the revolt.
A week ago, government officials offered a toll of civilian casualties from the month of protests saying that 78 had died and 94 injured. There were also deaths among security forces, they said.
The confrontation seemed again to raise the question of what would satisfy protesters here whose example in recent days seemed to provide inspiration to antigovernment marchers in Egypt calling for the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.
Demonstrators in Beirut, meanwhile, rallied Tuesday against Parliament's election of a new prime minister backed by Hezbollah, and have helped fuel the impression of a region in turmoil.
On Tuesday in Tunis, after days of antigovernment protests, dozens marched in the capital to show their support for the interim government that replaced Mr. Ben Ali, pleading with their fellow citizens to give the temporary leadership time to hold elections.
But they remained vastly outnumbered by more than a thousand protesters demanding the dissolution of the government, angry at its continued domination by former members of Mr. Ben Ali's ruling party.
The two groups scuffled briefly.
The state news agency also reported that another Tunisian had attempted to set himself on fire in the impoverished interior city of Gefsa. It was the first instance of an attempt at self-immolation since a peddler burned himself to death, setting off the country's revolt. More than a dozen people in North Africa and the Middle East have set themselves on fire since the Tunisian revolution started.
There was also sporadic evidence that not all of the police were abiding by the interim government's pledges to respect press freedoms. Moises Saman, a freelance photojournalist with the Magnum agency, working in Tunis for The New York Times, was mildly injured when he was assaulted by about a half-dozen police officers Tuesday evening at dusk. He was attempting to photograph a group of police officers beating a man in an alley.
Alan Cowell and Marlise Simons contributed reporting from Paris.
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24) Retirements Swallowed by Debt
By SHERISSE PHAM
January 26, 2011, 12:27 pm
http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/retirements-swallowed-by-debt/?hp
Bill Freedman, 86, felt financially secure. He had a comfortable income from Social Security, an I.R.A., investments and an inheritance. But when he took a fall last October, his daughter, Nancy Freedman, went to his Manhattan apartment and found several credit cards piled up in a desk drawer. After making a few phone calls, she discovered he was $15,000 in debt.
"I read him the riot act," said Ms. Freedman. Her father maintains that his finances were manageable. Still, he thought it was a good idea to hand over the reins to his daughter, who now has his power-of-attorney. His bills and statements are mailed to her apartment.
"I urge everyone to have that conversation with their parents" about money, said Ms. Freedman. "I also think it is the parents' responsibility to tell their children."
Is it? Study after study shows that more of them are living with heavy credit card debt, regularly swiping cards to pay for things like gas and groceries. And as the balances pile up, the elderly cope in a number of ways. Some, like Mr. Freedman, permit their adult children to step in, while others seek outside counsel in an effort to preserve their independence. Some elderly debtors are trapped in limbo, too proud to ask for help but too strapped to pay off the debt.
No wonder growing numbers of the elderly have or want jobs. A report from Boston College's Sloan Center on Aging and Work found 30 percent of workers over age 55 have more credit card debt than retirement savings; 41 percent have as much. The majority of older Americans face the very real possibility of starting retirement in the red.
"They don't have anything to fall back on," said Carl Vanhorn, a public policy professor at Rutgers University and co-author of the study. "They can't sell their house, their retirement savings are non-existent, they owe all this money in credit card debt - and that's a bleak future."
The growing reliance on plastic has driven the average credit card debt for people over 65 to $10,235, according to a July 2009 study by Demos, a public policy research organization in New York.
José Garcia, associate director of research and policy at Demos, said the increase in the number of older Americans getting new credit cards outpaces that of any other age group.
It is all too easy to get new credit cards, said 76-year-old Agnes Brady. On paper, Mrs. Brady was an ideal applicant. She had inherited her husband's pension when he died, and later sold their house and paid off all her outstanding debts. She had a good credit rating and $42,000 in annual income.
But her one-bedroom condo in Monroe, N.Y., cost $1,200 a month. Out-of-pocket medical expenses and insurance payments regularly topped $200 each month. She picked up credit cards from Macy's, TJ Maxx, Pier 1 Imports and other stores.
Between bills, doctor's visits and gifts for the grandchildren she dotes on, Mrs. Brady soon found herself mired in debt. After looking at her statements, she recalled, "I said, 'Mother of God, look at the interest. How are you going to get caught up?'"
Mrs. Brady pays interest rates from 21.9 percent to 23 percent on five store credit cards, carrying balances between $2,400 and $5,015. She cut up her Visa card from Bank of America, but still owes $7,488.39 on it. Altogether, her debt tops $22,000. Every month, she struggles to meet minimum payments.
"I sat down and realized how much I had every month, which is nothing," said Mrs. Brady.
An increasing number of seniors seeking credit counseling last year from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (N.F.C.C.). One of them was Mary Ward, 82, of Philadelphia. With no savings to tap into, Mrs. Ward was getting cash through her six credit cards to lend to her daughter and to pay for everyday needs.
"Some were 19 [percent], some 10, some 14," she said. "Whatever it was, I would get it just to have credit cards."
Soon, she was scrambling to make minimum payments on $6,000 in debt, borrowing from one card to make payments on another. She eventually went to a local branch of the N.F.C.C., where a counselor helped persuade her creditors to lower their interest rates. Mrs. Ward was soon paying a manageable $240 per month and will be debt-free in September.
Bankruptcy might make sense in some cases, said Gail Cunningham, a spokesperson for the N.F.C.C., but the elderly are "a segment of the population that would be reluctant to frivolously file bankruptcy. They feel a financial and a moral obligation to repay their debts." The proportion of seniors filing for bankruptcy accounts for less than 9 percent of all petitioners, she noted.
But this generation is also proud and hesitant to ask for help. "Doing financial counseling with this group, you spend a lot of time working with them, giving them permission to access social services, explaining to them that they contributed to the system," said Leslie Linfield, executive director of the Institute for Financial Literacy.
Mrs. Linfield encourages adult children and family members to get involved, ascertain what is going on financially and help parents access services like veteran pension benefits if necessary.
The group has also developed a new course, "Senior Financial Safety," that covers money management, consumer fraud, post-retirement planning and caring for senior peers. All told, 12,000 seniors around the country will take the course this year through local community organizations.
As for Agnes Brady, the grandmother staring down $22,000 of debt, she hopes other seniors will learn from her mistakes. Her advice: "Make sure you have an egg for yourself, my honey. And don't get into credit cards."
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25) Murderer Is Executed in Georgia After Losing Stay
By KIM SEVERSON and ROBBIE BROWN
January 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26lethal.html?ref=world
ATLANTA - A convicted murderer in Georgia whose lawyers argued that the painkilling drugs used to help execute him might be ineffective lost an 11th-hour appeal to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night and was put to death shortly before midnight.
Justice Clarence Thomas had briefly stayed the execution of the inmate, Emmanuel Hammond, 45. But the court then allowed it to go forward.
Earlier in the day, a county court and the State Supreme Court both ruled that evidence supposedly showing that a Georgia prisoner who was executed in September had suffered pain because of an ineffective dose of the drug, sodium thiopental, was too speculative to warrant a stay.
Georgia prison officials first injected Mr. Hammond with sodium thiopental ordered from an unlicensed British company that operates from the back of a London driving school.
Mr. Hammond's public defenders, as well as death penalty opponents, argued that the British company might have shipped batches of the drug that were past the expiration date and possibly ineffective at blocking the pain of paralysis and death that come with execution.
Sodium thiopental, one of three drugs commonly used in combination in executions, is designed to make sure the prisoner will not feel pain when medications that paralyze the body and then stop the heart are introduced.
In the two last-minute appeals Tuesday, lawyers argued that in September the same drug failed to render the other inmate unconscious before the injections that followed.
The case raises new questions about how well certain batches of the drug work and the lengths states have taken to obtain it.
The drug has been in short supply throughout the 34 states that use it to execute prisoners after the American company that manufactured it stopped producing it last year, saying that obtaining the active ingredient in the drug had become difficult. Scarcity of the drug has led to delays in executions in at least two states, California and Oklahoma.
Corrections officials in several other states have been scrambling to use existing supplies before they expire and have been studying whether other drugs could be substituted. On Tuesday, Ohio announced that it would begin substituting the surgical sedative pentobarbital in March, following Oklahoma, which last year became the first state to switch to pentobarbital.
Buying the drug from Europe has become increasingly problematic for corrections officials. The American company that once supplied the drug, Hospira Inc., had hoped to begin producing the drug this winter at its plant in Italy, but Italian authorities said it would not allow the drug to be exported if it was to be used for capital punishment.
As the shortage became acute last fall, California and Arizona obtained shipments of sodium thiopental from an unlicensed British wholesaler called Dream Pharma, but the British government has since refused to allow exports of drugs for use in capital punishment, a policy that is under consideration by the European Union.
Georgia, too, received supplies of sodium thiopental from the same source and was likely manufactured by a company that has not existed for five years, according to Mr. Hammond's lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union and Reprieve, a British human rights group. Their evidence is based on public records that contain receipts and e-mails tracing the transactions.
At least two other states might also have received shipments, but only Georgia and Arizona have believed to have used the imported drug.
"Questions about this drug mean some executions are going to be delayed in a lot of states," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
The imported drug was at the heart of arguments in three hearings on Tuesday. Mr. Hammond's lawyers wanted the execution delayed until the provenance and quality of the drugs could be verified.
The Food and Drug Administration initially did not allow the drug into the country because it was suspected to be adulterated or mislabeled. The drug, which usually expires in about a year, carried a 2006 date. For reasons that are unclear, the F.D.A. eventually did allow it into the country.
"The origin and irregularities of these drugs raise serious questions as to whether they are adulterated, expired or counterfeit," Mr. Hammond's lawyers wrote in their appeal to the State Supreme Court. "Without the requested relief, Mr. Hammond will suffer irreparable harm in that he will be executed in an unconstitutional manner."
The state argued that there was no evidence the drugs would not work.
"Such speculation is inadequate to support a stay of execution," wrote Samuel S. Olens, the Georgia attorney general. "In addition, the timing of the filing of this matter, one week after an execution date was set, indicates it is filed for the purpose of delay."
The murder victim's sister-in-law, Bari Love, said Tuesday that the family would not comment on the scheduled execution.
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26) Dealing With Julian Assange and the Secrets He Spilled
"But while I do not regard Assange as a partner, and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism, it is chilling to contemplate the possible government prosecution of WikiLeaks for making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated. Taking legal recourse against a government official who violates his trust by divulging secrets he is sworn to protect is one thing. But criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the United States, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious? And would more Americans be speaking up against the threat of reprisals?"
By BILL KELLER
January 26, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/magazine/30Wikileaks-t.html?hp
This past June, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether I had any idea how to arrange a secure communication. Not really, I confessed. The Times doesn’t have encrypted phone lines, or a Cone of Silence. Well then, he said, he would try to speak circumspectly. In a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual proposition: an organization called WikiLeaks, a secretive cadre of antisecrecy vigilantes, had come into possession of a substantial amount of classified United States government communications. WikiLeaks’s leader, Julian Assange, an eccentric former computer hacker of Australian birth and no fixed residence, offered The Guardian half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables. The Guardian suggested — to increase the impact as well as to share the labor of handling such a trove — that The New York Times be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source agreed. Was I interested?
I was interested.
The adventure that ensued over the next six months combined the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of handling a vast secret archive with the more mundane feat of sorting, searching and understanding a mountain of data. As if that were not complicated enough, the project also entailed a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian); an international cast of journalists; company lawyers committed to keeping us within the bounds of the law; and an array of government officials who sometimes seemed as if they couldn’t decide whether they wanted to engage us or arrest us. By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents and generated much breathless speculation that something — journalism, diplomacy, life as we know it — had profoundly changed forever.
Soon after Rusbridger’s call, we sent Eric Schmitt, from our Washington bureau, to London. Schmitt has covered military affairs expertly for years, has read his share of classified military dispatches and has excellent judgment and an unflappable demeanor. His main assignment was to get a sense of the material. Was it genuine? Was it of public interest? He would also report back on the proposed mechanics of our collaboration with The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, which Assange invited as a third guest to his secret smorgasbord. Schmitt would also meet the WikiLeaks leader, who was known to a few Guardian journalists but not to us.
Schmitt’s first call back to The Times was encouraging. There was no question in his mind that the Afghanistan dispatches were genuine. They were fascinating — a diary of a troubled war from the ground up. And there were intimations of more to come, especially classified cables from the entire constellation of American diplomatic outposts. WikiLeaks was holding those back for now, presumably to see how this venture with the establishment media worked out. Over the next few days, Schmitt huddled in a discreet office at The Guardian, sampling the trove of war dispatches and discussing the complexities of this project: how to organize and study such a voluminous cache of information; how to securely transport, store and share it; how journalists from three very different publications would work together without compromising their independence; and how we would all assure an appropriate distance from Julian Assange. We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, but he was a man who clearly had his own agenda.
By the time of the meetings in London, WikiLeaks had already acquired a measure of international fame or, depending on your point of view, notoriety. Shortly before I got the call from The Guardian, The New Yorker published a rich and colorful profile of Assange, by Raffi Khatchadourian, who had embedded with the group. WikiLeaks’s biggest coup to that point was the release, last April, of video footage taken from one of two U.S. helicopters involved in firing down on a crowd and a building in Baghdad in 2007, killing at least 18 people. While some of the people in the video were armed, others gave no indication of menace; two were in fact journalists for the news agency Reuters. The video, with its soundtrack of callous banter, was horrifying to watch and was an embarrassment to the U.S. military. But in its zeal to make the video a work of antiwar propaganda, WikiLeaks also released a version that didn’t call attention to an Iraqi who was toting a rocket-propelled grenade and packaged the manipulated version under the tendentious rubric “Collateral Murder.” (See the edited and non-edited videos here.)
Throughout our dealings, Assange was coy about where he obtained his secret cache. But the suspected source of the video, as well as the military dispatches and the diplomatic cables to come, was a disillusioned U.S. Army private first class named Bradley Manning, who had been arrested and was being kept in solitary confinement.
On the fourth day of the London meeting, Assange slouched into The Guardian office, a day late. Schmitt took his first measure of the man who would be a large presence in our lives. “He’s tall — probably 6-foot-2 or 6-3 — and lanky, with pale skin, gray eyes and a shock of white hair that seizes your attention,” Schmitt wrote to me later. “He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”
Assange shrugged a huge backpack off his shoulders and pulled out a stockpile of laptops, cords, cellphones, thumb drives and memory sticks that held the WikiLeaks secrets.
The reporters had begun preliminary work on the Afghanistan field reports, using a large Excel spreadsheet to organize the material, then plugging in search terms and combing the documents for newsworthy content. They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2009, but the material on the spreadsheet ended abruptly in April 2009. A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel. Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized — a total of 92,000 reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan.
The reporters came to think of Assange as smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous. At lunch one day in The Guardian’s cafeteria, Assange recounted with an air of great conviction a story about the archive in Germany that contains the files of the former Communist secret police, the Stasi. This office, Assange asserted, was thoroughly infiltrated by former Stasi agents who were quietly destroying the documents they were entrusted with protecting. The Der Spiegel reporter in the group, John Goetz, who has reported extensively on the Stasi, listened in amazement. That’s utter nonsense, he said. Some former Stasi personnel were hired as security guards in the office, but the records were well protected.
Assange was openly contemptuous of the American government and certain that he was a hunted man. He told the reporters that he had prepared a kind of doomsday option. He had, he said, distributed highly encrypted copies of his entire secret archive to a multitude of supporters, and if WikiLeaks was shut down, or if he was arrested, he would disseminate the key to make the information public.
Schmitt told me that for all Assange’s bombast and dark conspiracy theories, he had a bit of Peter Pan in him. One night, when they were all walking down the street after dinner, Assange suddenly started skipping ahead of the group. Schmitt and Goetz stared, speechless. Then, just as suddenly, Assange stopped, got back in step with them and returned to the conversation he had interrupted.
For the rest of the week Schmitt worked with David Leigh, The Guardian’s investigations editor; Nick Davies, an investigative reporter for the paper; and Goetz, of Der Spiegel, to organize and sort the material. With help from two of The Times’s best computer minds — Andrew Lehren and Aron Pilhofer — they figured out how to assemble the material into a conveniently searchable and secure database.
Journalists are characteristically competitive, but the group worked well together. They brainstormed topics to explore and exchanged search results. Der Spiegel offered to check the logs against incident reports submitted by the German Army to its Parliament — partly as story research, partly as an additional check on authenticity.
Assange provided us the data on the condition that we not write about it before specific dates that WikiLeaks planned on posting the documents on a publicly accessible Web site. The Afghanistan documents would go first, after we had a few weeks to search the material and write our articles. The larger cache of Iraq-related documents would go later. Such embargoes — agreements not to publish information before a set date — are commonplace in journalism. Everything from studies in medical journals to the annual United States budget is released with embargoes. They are a constraint with benefits, the principal one being the chance to actually read and reflect on the material before publishing it into public view. As Assange surely knew, embargoes also tend to build suspense and amplify a story, especially when multiple news outlets broadcast it at once. The embargo was the only condition WikiLeaks would try to impose on us; what we wrote about the material was entirely up to us. Much later, some American news outlets reported that they were offered last-minute access to WikiLeaks documents if they signed contracts with financial penalties for early disclosure. The Times was never asked to sign anything or to pay anything. For WikiLeaks, at least in this first big venture, exposure was its own reward.
Back in New York we assembled a team of reporters, data experts and editors and quartered them in an out-of-the-way office. Andrew Lehren, of our computer-assisted-reporting unit, did the first cut, searching terms on his own or those suggested by other reporters, compiling batches of relevant documents and summarizing the contents. We assigned reporters to specific areas in which they had expertise and gave them password access to rummage in the data. This became the routine we would follow with subsequent archives.
An air of intrigue verging on paranoia permeated the project, perhaps understandably, given that we were dealing with a mass of classified material and a source who acted like a fugitive, changing crash pads, e-mail addresses and cellphones frequently. We used encrypted Web sites. Reporters exchanged notes via Skype, believing it to be somewhat less vulnerable to eavesdropping. On conference calls, we spoke in amateurish code. Assange was always “the source.” The latest data drop was “the package.” When I left New York for two weeks to visit bureaus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we assume that communications may be monitored, I was not to be copied on message traffic about the project. I never imagined that any of this would defeat a curious snoop from the National Security Agency or Pakistani intelligence. And I was never entirely sure whether that prospect made me more nervous than the cyberwiles of WikiLeaks itself. At a point when relations between the news organizations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their e-mail that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts.
From consultations with our lawyers, we were confident that reporting on the secret documents could be done within the law, but we speculated about what the government — or some other government — might do to impede our work or exact recriminations. And, the law aside, we felt an enormous moral and ethical obligation to use the material responsibly. While we assumed we had little or no ability to influence what WikiLeaks did, let alone what would happen once this material was loosed in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, that did not free us from the need to exercise care in our own journalism. From the beginning, we agreed that in our articles and in any documents we published from the secret archive, we would excise material that could put lives at risk.
Guided by reporters with extensive experience in the field, we redacted the names of ordinary citizens, local officials, activists, academics and others who had spoken to American soldiers or diplomats. We edited out any details that might reveal ongoing intelligence-gathering operations, military tactics or locations of material that could be used to fashion terrorist weapons. Three reporters with considerable experience of handling military secrets — Eric Schmitt, Michael Gordon and C. J. Chivers — went over the documents we considered posting. Chivers, an ex-Marine who has reported for us from several battlefields, brought a practiced eye and cautious judgment to the business of redaction. If a dispatch noted that Aircraft A left Location B at a certain time and arrived at Location C at a certain time, Chivers edited it out on the off chance that this could teach enemy forces something useful about the capabilities of that aircraft.
The first articles in the project, which we called the War Logs, were scheduled to go up on the Web sites of The Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel on Sunday, July 25. We approached the White House days before that to get its reaction to the huge breach of secrecy as well as to specific articles we planned to write — including a major one about Pakistan’s ambiguous role as an American ally. On July 24, the day before the War Logs went live, I attended a farewell party for Roger Cohen, a columnist for The Times and The International Herald Tribune, that was given by Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A voracious consumer of inside information, Holbrooke had a decent idea of what was coming, and he pulled me away from the crowd to show me the fusillade of cabinet-level e-mail ricocheting through his BlackBerry, thus demonstrating both the frantic anxiety in the administration and, not incidentally, the fact that he was very much in the loop. The Pakistan article, in particular, would complicate his life. But one of Holbrooke’s many gifts was his ability to make pretty good lemonade out of the bitterest lemons; he was already spinning the reports of Pakistani duplicity as leverage he could use to pull the Pakistanis back into closer alignment with American interests. Five months later, when Holbrooke — just 69, and seemingly indestructible — died of a torn aorta, I remembered that evening. And what I remembered best was that he was as excited to be on the cusp of a big story as I was.
We posted the articles on NYTimes.com the next day at 5 p.m. — a time picked to reconcile the different publishing schedules of the three publications. I was proud of what a crew of great journalists had done to fashion coherent and instructive reporting from a jumble of raw field reports, mostly composed in a clunky patois of military jargon and acronyms. The reporters supplied context, nuance and skepticism. There was much in that first round of articles worth reading, but my favorite single piece was one of the simplest. Chivers gathered all of the dispatches related to a single, remote, beleaguered American military outpost and stitched them together into a heartbreaking narrative. The dispatches from this outpost represent in miniature the audacious ambitions, gradual disillusionment and ultimate disappointment that Afghanistan has dealt to occupiers over the centuries.
If anyone doubted that the three publications operated independently, the articles we posted that day made it clear that we followed our separate muses. The Guardian, which is an openly left-leaning newspaper, used the first War Logs to emphasize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, claiming the documents disclosed that coalition forces killed “hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents,” underscoring the cost of what the paper called a “failing war.” Our reporters studied the same material but determined that all the major episodes of civilian deaths we found in the War Logs had been reported in The Times, many of them on the front page. (In fact, two of our journalists, Stephen Farrell and Sultan Munadi, were kidnapped by the Taliban while investigating one major episode near Kunduz. Munadi was killed during an ensuing rescue by British paratroopers.) The civilian deaths that had not been previously reported came in ones and twos and did not add up to anywhere near “hundreds.” Moreover, since several were either duplicated or missing from the reports, we concluded that an overall tally would be little better than a guess.
Another example: The Times gave prominence to the dispatches reflecting American suspicions that Pakistani intelligence was playing a double game in Afghanistan — nodding to American interests while abetting the Taliban. We buttressed the interesting anecdotal material of Pakistani double-dealing with additional reporting. The Guardian was unimpressed by those dispatches and treated them more dismissively.
Three months later, with the French daily Le Monde added to the group, we published Round 2, the Iraq War Logs, including articles on how the United States turned a blind eye to the torture of prisoners by Iraqi forces working with the U.S., how Iraq spawned an extraordinary American military reliance on private contractors and how extensively Iran had meddled in the conflict.
By this time, The Times’s relationship with our source had gone from wary to hostile. I talked to Assange by phone a few times and heard out his complaints. He was angry that we declined to link our online coverage of the War Logs to the WikiLeaks Web site, a decision we made because we feared — rightly, as it turned out — that its trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets. “Where’s the respect?” he demanded. “Where’s the respect?” Another time he called to tell me how much he disliked our profile of Bradley Manning, the Army private suspected of being the source of WikiLeaks’s most startling revelations. The article traced Manning’s childhood as an outsider and his distress as a gay man in the military. Assange complained that we “psychologicalized” Manning and gave short shrift to his “political awakening.”
The final straw was a front-page profile of Assange by John Burns and Ravi Somaiya, published Oct. 24, that revealed fractures within WikiLeaks, attributed by Assange’s critics to his imperious management style. Assange denounced the article to me, and in various public forums, as “a smear.”
Assange was transformed by his outlaw celebrity. The derelict with the backpack and the sagging socks now wore his hair dyed and styled, and he favored fashionably skinny suits and ties. He became a kind of cult figure for the European young and leftish and was evidently a magnet for women. Two Swedish women filed police complaints claiming that Assange insisted on having sex without a condom; Sweden’s strict laws on nonconsensual sex categorize such behavior as rape, and a prosecutor issued a warrant to question Assange, who initially described it as a plot concocted to silence or discredit WikiLeaks.
I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that mix hacker counterculture, high-level conspiracy and sex as both recreation and violation.
In October, WikiLeaks gave The Guardian its third archive, a quarter of a million communications between the U.S. State Department and its outposts around the globe. This time, Assange imposed a new condition: The Guardian was not to share the material with The New York Times. Indeed, he told Guardian journalists that he opened discussions with two other American news organizations — The Washington Post and the McClatchy chain — and intended to invite them in as replacements for The Times. He also enlarged his recipient list to include El País, the leading Spanish-language newspaper.
The Guardian was uncomfortable with Assange’s condition. By now the journalists from The Times and The Guardian had a good working relationship. The Times provided a large American audience for the revelations, as well as access to the U.S. government for comment and context. And given the potential legal issues and public reaction, it was good to have company in the trenches. Besides, we had come to believe that Assange was losing control of his stockpile of secrets. An independent journalist, Heather Brooke, had obtained material from a WikiLeaks dissident and joined in a loose alliance with The Guardian. Over the coming weeks, batches of cables would pop up in newspapers in Lebanon, Australia and Norway. David Leigh, The Guardian’s investigations editor, concluded that these rogue leaks released The Guardian from any pledge, and he gave us the cables.
On Nov. 1, Assange and two of his lawyers burst into Alan Rusbridger’s office, furious that The Guardian was asserting greater independence and suspicious that The Times might be in possession of the embassy cables. Over the course of an eight-hour meeting, Assange intermittently raged against The Times — especially over our front-page profile — while The Guardian journalists tried to calm him. In midstorm, Rusbridger called me to report on Assange’s grievances and relay his demand for a front-page apology in The Times. Rusbridger knew that this was a nonstarter, but he was buying time for the tantrum to subside. In the end, both he and Georg Mascolo, editor in chief of Der Spiegel, made clear that they intended to continue their collaboration with The Times; Assange could take it or leave it. Given that we already had all of the documents, Assange had little choice. Over the next two days, the news organizations agreed on a timetable for publication.
The following week, we sent Ian Fisher, a deputy foreign editor who was a principal coordinator on our processing of the embassy cables, to London to work out final details. The meeting went smoothly, even after Assange arrived. “Freakishly good behavior,” Fisher e-mailed me afterward. “No yelling or crazy mood swings.” But after dinner, as Fisher was leaving, Assange smirked and offered a parting threat: “Tell me, are you in contact with your legal counsel?” Fisher replied that he was. “You had better be,” Assange said.
Fisher left London with an understanding that we would continue to have access to the material. But just in case, we took out a competitive insurance policy. We had Scott Shane, a Washington correspondent, pull together a long, just-in-case article summing up highlights of the cables, which we could quickly post on our Web site. If WikiLeaks sprang another leak, we would be ready.
Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.
The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one reporter who participated in meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration.”
Subsequent meetings, which soon gave way to daily conference calls, were more businesslike. Before each discussion, our Washington bureau sent over a batch of specific cables that we intended to use in the coming days. They were circulated to regional specialists, who funneled their reactions to a small group at State, who came to our daily conversations with a list of priorities and arguments to back them up. We relayed the government’s concerns, and our own decisions regarding them, to the other news outlets.
The administration’s concerns generally fell into three categories. First was the importance of protecting individuals who had spoken candidly to American diplomats in oppressive countries. We almost always agreed on those and were grateful to the government for pointing out some we overlooked.
“We were all aware of dire stakes for some of the people named in the cables if we failed to obscure their identities,” Shane wrote to me later, recalling the nature of the meetings. Like many of us, Shane has worked in countries where dissent can mean prison or worse. “That sometimes meant not just removing the name but also references to institutions that might give a clue to an identity and sometimes even the dates of conversations, which might be compared with surveillance tapes of an American Embassy to reveal who was visiting the diplomats that day.”
The second category included sensitive American programs, usually related to intelligence. We agreed to withhold some of this information, like a cable describing an intelligence-sharing program that took years to arrange and might be lost if exposed. In other cases, we went away convinced that publication would cause some embarrassment but no real harm.
The third category consisted of cables that disclosed candid comments by and about foreign officials, including heads of state. The State Department feared publication would strain relations with those countries. We were mostly unconvinced.
The embassy cables were a different kind of treasure from the War Logs. For one thing, they covered the entire globe — virtually every embassy, consulate and interest section that the United States maintains. They contained the makings of many dozens of stories: candid American appraisals of foreign leaders, narratives of complicated negotiations, allegations of corruption and duplicity, countless behind-the-scenes insights. Some of the material was of narrow local interest; some of it had global implications. Some provided authoritative versions of events not previously fully understood. Some consisted of rumor and flimsy speculation.
Unlike most of the military dispatches, the embassy cables were written in clear English, sometimes with wit, color and an ear for dialogue. (“Who knew,” one of our English colleagues marveled, “that American diplomats could write?”)
Even more than the military logs, the diplomatic cables called for context and analysis. It was important to know, for example, that cables sent from an embassy are routinely dispatched over the signature of the ambassador and those from the State Department are signed by the secretary of state, regardless of whether the ambassador or secretary had actually seen the material. It was important to know that much of the communication between Washington and its outposts is given even more restrictive classification — top secret or higher — and was thus missing from this trove. We searched in vain, for example, for military or diplomatic reports on the fate of Pat Tillman, the former football star and Army Ranger who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. We found no reports on how Osama bin Laden eluded American forces in the mountains of Tora Bora. (In fact, we found nothing but second- and thirdhand rumors about bin Laden.) If such cables exist, they were presumably classified top secret or higher.
And it was important to remember that diplomatic cables are versions of events. They can be speculative. They can be ambiguous. They can be wrong.
One of our first articles drawn from the diplomatic cables, for example, reported on a secret intelligence assessment that Iran had obtained a supply of advanced missiles from North Korea, missiles that could reach European capitals. Outside experts long suspected that Iran obtained missile parts but not the entire weapons, so this glimpse of the official view was revealing. The Washington Post fired back with a different take, casting doubt on whether the missile in question had been transferred to Iran or whether it was even a workable weapon. We went back to the cables — and the experts — and concluded in a subsequent article that the evidence presented “a murkier picture.”
The tension between a newspaper’s obligation to inform and the government’s responsibility to protect is hardly new. At least until this year, nothing The Times did on my watch caused nearly so much agitation as two articles we published about tactics employed by the Bush administration after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The first, which was published in 2005 and won a Pulitzer Prize, revealed that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on domestic phone conversations and e-mail without the legal courtesy of a warrant. The other, published in 2006, described a vast Treasury Department program to screen international banking records.
I have vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W. Bush tried to persuade me and the paper’s publisher to withhold the eavesdropping story, saying that if we published it, we should share the blame for the next terrorist attack. We were unconvinced by his argument and published the story, and the reaction from the government — and conservative commentators in particular — was vociferous.
This time around, the Obama administration’s reaction was different. It was, for the most part, sober and professional. The Obama White House, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making the documents public, did not seek an injunction to halt publication. There was no Oval Office lecture. On the contrary, in our discussions before publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defense and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press bashing. There has been no serious official talk — unless you count an ambiguous hint by Senator Joseph Lieberman — of pursuing news organizations in the courts. Though the release of these documents was certainly embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or to the national interest.
The broader public reaction was mixed — more critical in the first days; more sympathetic as readers absorbed the articles and the sky did not fall; and more hostile to WikiLeaks in the U.S. than in Europe, where there is often a certain pleasure in seeing the last superpower taken down a peg.
In the days after we began our respective series based on the embassy cables, Alan Rusbridger and I went online to answer questions from readers. The Guardian, whose readership is more sympathetic to the guerrilla sensibilities of WikiLeaks, was attacked for being too fastidious about redacting the documents: How dare you censor this material? What are you hiding? Post everything now! The mail sent to The Times, at least in the first day or two, came from the opposite field. Many readers were indignant and alarmed: Who needs this? How dare you? What gives you the right?
Much of the concern reflected a genuine conviction that in perilous times the president needs extraordinary powers, unfettered by Congressional oversight, court meddling or the strictures of international law and certainly safe from nosy reporters. That is compounded by a popular sense that the elite media have become too big for their britches and by the fact that our national conversation has become more polarized and strident.
Although it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news, our attitude toward these issues is far from indifferent. The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here. Moreover, The Times has nine staff correspondents assigned to the two wars still being waged in the wake of that attack, plus a rotating cast of photographers, visiting writers and scores of local stringers and support staff. They work in this high-risk environment because, while there are many places you can go for opinions about the war, there are few places — and fewer by the day — where you can go to find honest, on-the-scene reporting about what is happening. We take extraordinary precautions to keep them safe, but we have had two of our Iraqi journalists murdered for doing their jobs. We have had four journalists held hostage by the Taliban — two of them for seven months. We had one Afghan journalist killed in a rescue attempt. Last October, while I was in Kabul, we got word that a photographer embedded for us with troops near Kandahar stepped on an improvised mine and lost both his legs.
We are invested in the struggle against murderous extremism in another sense. The virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.
So we have no doubts about where our sympathies lie in this clash of values. And yet we cannot let those sympathies transform us into propagandists, even for a system we respect.
I’m the first to admit that news organizations, including this one, sometimes get things wrong. We can be overly credulous (as in some of the prewar reporting about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction) or overly cynical about official claims and motives. We may err on the side of keeping secrets (President Kennedy reportedly wished, after the fact, that The Times had published what it knew about the planned Bay of Pigs invasion, which possibly would have helped avert a bloody debacle) or on the side of exposing them. We make the best judgments we can. When we get things wrong, we try to correct the record. A free press in a democracy can be messy. But the alternative is to give the government a veto over what its citizens are allowed to know. Anyone who has worked in countries where the news diet is controlled by the government can sympathize with Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted remark that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers.
The intentions of our founders have rarely been as well articulated as they were by Justice Hugo Black 40 years ago, concurring with the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers: “The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”
There is no neat formula for maintaining this balance. In practice, the tension between our obligation to inform and the government’s obligation to protect plays out in a set of rituals. As one of my predecessors, Max Frankel, then the Washington bureau chief, wrote in a wise affidavit filed during the Pentagon Papers case: “For the vast majority of ‘secrets,’ there has developed between the government and the press (and Congress) a rather simple rule of thumb: The government hides what it can, pleading necessity as long as it can, and the press pries out what it can, pleading a need and a right to know. Each side in this ‘game’ regularly ‘wins’ and ‘loses’ a round or two. Each fights with the weapons at its command. When the government loses a secret or two, it simply adjusts to a new reality.”
In fact, leaks of classified material — sometimes authorized — are part of the way business is conducted in Washington, as one wing of the bureaucracy tries to one-up another or officials try to shift blame or claim credit or advance or confound a particular policy. For further evidence that our government is highly selective in its approach to secrets, look no further than Bob Woodward’s all-but-authorized accounts of the innermost deliberations of our government.
The government surely cheapens secrecy by deploying it so promiscuously. According to the Pentagon, about 500,000 people have clearance to use the database from which the secret cables were pilfered. Weighing in on the WikiLeaks controversy in The Guardian, Max Frankel remarked that secrets shared with such a legion of “cleared” officials, including low-level army clerks, “are not secret.” Governments, he wrote, “must decide that the random rubber-stamping of millions of papers and computer files each year does not a security system make.”
Beyond the basic question of whether the press should publish secrets, criticism of the WikiLeaks documents generally fell into three themes: 1. That the documents were of dubious value, because they told us nothing we didn’t already know. 2. That the disclosures put lives at risk — either directly, by identifying confidential informants, or indirectly, by complicating our ability to build alliances against terror. 3. That by doing business with an organization like WikiLeaks, The Times and other news organizations compromised their impartiality and independence.
I’m a little puzzled by the complaint that most of the embassy traffic we disclosed did not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. Ninety-nine percent of what we read or hear on the news does not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. News mostly advances by inches and feet, not in great leaps. The value of these documents — and I believe they have immense value — is not that they expose some deep, unsuspected perfidy in high places or that they upend your whole view of the world. For those who pay close attention to foreign policy, these documents provide texture, nuance and drama. They deepen and correct your understanding of how things unfold; they raise or lower your estimation of world leaders. For those who do not follow these subjects as closely, the stories are an opportunity to learn more. If a project like this makes readers pay attention, think harder, understand more clearly what is being done in their name, then we have performed a public service. And that does not count the impact of these revelations on the people most touched by them. WikiLeaks cables in which American diplomats recount the extravagant corruption of Tunisia’s rulers helped fuel a popular uprising that has overthrown the government.
As for the risks posed by these releases, they are real. WikiLeaks’s first data dump, the publication of the Afghanistan War Logs, included the names of scores of Afghans that The Times and other news organizations had carefully purged from our own coverage. Several news organizations, including ours, reported this dangerous lapse, and months later a Taliban spokesman claimed that Afghan insurgents had been perusing the WikiLeaks site and making a list. I anticipate, with dread, the day we learn that someone identified in those documents has been killed.
WikiLeaks was roundly criticized for its seeming indifference to the safety of those informants, and in its subsequent postings it has largely followed the example of the news organizations and redacted material that could get people jailed or killed. Assange described it as a “harm minimization” policy. In the case of the Iraq war documents, WikiLeaks applied a kind of robo-redaction software that stripped away names (and rendered the documents almost illegible). With the embassy cables, WikiLeaks posted mostly documents that had already been redacted by The Times and its fellow news organizations. And there were instances in which WikiLeaks volunteers suggested measures to enhance the protection of innocents. For example, someone at WikiLeaks noticed that if the redaction of a phrase revealed the exact length of the words, an alert foreign security service might match the number of letters to a name and affiliation and thus identify the source. WikiLeaks advised everyone to substitute a dozen uppercase X’s for each redacted passage, no matter how long or short.
Whether WikiLeaks’s “harm minimization” is adequate, and whether it will continue, is beyond my power to predict or influence. WikiLeaks does not take guidance from The New York Times. In the end, I can answer only for what my own paper has done, and I believe we have behaved responsibly.
The idea that the mere publication of such a wholesale collection of secrets will make other countries less willing to do business with our diplomats seems to me questionable. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates called this concern “overwrought.” Foreign governments cooperate with us, he pointed out, not because they necessarily love us, not because they trust us to keep their secrets, but because they need us. It may be that for a time diplomats will choose their words more carefully or circulate their views more narrowly, but WikiLeaks has not repealed the laws of self-interest. A few weeks after we began publishing articles about the embassy cables, David Sanger, our chief Washington correspondent, told me: “At least so far, the evidence that foreign leaders are no longer talking to American diplomats is scarce. I’ve heard about nervous jokes at the beginning of meetings, along the lines of ‘When will I be reading about this conversation?’ But the conversations are happening. . . . American diplomacy has hardly screeched to a halt.”
As for our relationship with WikiLeaks, Julian Assange has been heard to boast that he served as a kind of puppet master, recruiting several news organizations, forcing them to work in concert and choreographing their work. This is characteristic braggadocio — or, as my Guardian colleagues would say, bollocks. Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source. I will not say “a source, pure and simple,” because as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception. But the relationship with sources is straightforward: you don’t necessarily endorse their agenda, echo their rhetoric, take anything they say at face value, applaud their methods or, most important, allow them to shape or censor your journalism. Your obligation, as an independent news organization, is to verify the material, to supply context, to exercise responsible judgment about what to publish and what not to publish and to make sense of it. That is what we did.
But while I do not regard Assange as a partner, and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism, it is chilling to contemplate the possible government prosecution of WikiLeaks for making secrets public, let alone the passage of new laws to punish the dissemination of classified information, as some have advocated. Taking legal recourse against a government official who violates his trust by divulging secrets he is sworn to protect is one thing. But criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the United States, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious? And would more Americans be speaking up against the threat of reprisals?
Whether the arrival of WikiLeaks has fundamentally changed the way journalism is made, I will leave to others and to history. Frankly, I think the impact of WikiLeaks on the culture has probably been overblown. Long before WikiLeaks was born, the Internet transformed the landscape of journalism, creating a wide-open and global market with easier access to audiences and sources, a quicker metabolism, a new infrastructure for sharing and vetting information and a diminished respect for notions of privacy and secrecy. Assange has claimed credit on several occasions for creating something he calls “scientific journalism,” meaning that readers are given the raw material to judge for themselves whether the journalistic write-ups are trustworthy. But newspapers have been publishing texts of documents almost as long as newspapers have existed — and ever since the Internet eliminated space restrictions, we have done so copiously.
Nor is it clear to me that WikiLeaks represents some kind of cosmic triumph of transparency. If the official allegations are to be believed, most of WikiLeaks’s great revelations came from a single anguished Army private — anguished enough to risk many years in prison. It’s possible that the creation of online information brokers like WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks, a breakaway site announced in December by a former Assange colleague named Daniel Domscheit-Berg, will be a lure for whistle-blowers and malcontents who fear being caught consorting directly with a news organization like mine. But I suspect we have not reached a state of information anarchy. At least not yet.
As 2010 wound down, The Times and its news partners held a conference call to discuss where we go from here. The initial surge of articles drawn from the secret cables was over. More would trickle out but without a fixed schedule. We agreed to continue the redaction process, and we agreed we would all urge WikiLeaks to do the same. But this period of intense collaboration, and of regular contact with our source, was coming to a close.
Just before Christmas, Ian Katz, The Guardian’s deputy editor, went to see Assange, who had been arrested in London on the Swedish warrant, briefly jailed and bailed out by wealthy admirers and was living under house arrest in a country manor in East Anglia while he fought Sweden’s attempt to extradite him. The flow of donations to WikiLeaks, which he claimed hit 100,000 euros a day at its peak, was curtailed when Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to be conduits for contributors — prompting a concerted assault on the Web sites of those companies by Assange’s hacker sympathizers. He would soon sign a lucrative book deal to finance his legal struggles.
The Guardian seemed to have joined The Times on Assange’s enemies list, first for sharing the diplomatic cables with us, then for obtaining and reporting on the unredacted record of the Swedish police complaints against Assange. (Live by the leak. . . .) In his fury at this perceived betrayal, Assange granted an interview to The Times of London, in which he vented his displeasure with our little media consortium. If he thought this would ingratiate him with The Guardian rival, he was naïve. The paper happily splashed its exclusive interview, then followed it with an editorial calling Assange a fool and a hypocrite.
At the mansion in East Anglia, Assange seated Katz before a roaring fire in the drawing room and ruminated for four hours about the Swedish case, his financial troubles and his plan for a next phase of releases. He talked vaguely about secrets still in his quiver, including what he regards as a damning cache of e-mail from inside an American bank.
He spun out an elaborate version of a U.S. Justice Department effort to exact punishment for his assault on American secrecy. If he was somehow extradited to the United States, he said, “I would still have a high chance of being killed in the U.S. prison system, Jack Ruby style, given the continual calls for my murder by senior and influential U.S. politicians.”
While Assange mused darkly in his exile, one of his lawyers sent out a mock Christmas card that suggested at least someone on the WikiLeaks team was not lacking a sense of the absurd.
The message:
“Dear kids,
Santa is Mum & Dad.
Love,
WikiLeaks.”
Bill Keller is the executive editor of The New York Times. This essay is adapted from his introduction to “Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Updated Coverage from The New York Times,” which will be published in e-book form on Jan. 31. For sale at nytimes.com/opensecrets.
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