Arianna Huffington

Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.

But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It’s July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson’s now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has “manipulate[d]” and “twisted” intelligence “to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war — and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller’s credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he’s married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an “unnamed government official”). Maybe Miller tells Rove too — or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.

This is why Miller doesn’t want to reveal her “source” at the White House — because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn’t the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)

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Multibillionaire commodities king Bruce Kovner is the patron saint of the neoconservatives, the new Lincoln Center’s crucial Medici, owner of a vast Fifth Avenue mansion—and the most powerful New Yorker you’ve never heard of.

By Philip Weiss

(Photo credit: Courtesy of Bruce Kovner)

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Greg Palast
The Guardian (London)

There are 200 million guns in civilian hands in the United States. That works out at 200 per lawyer. Wade through the foaming websites of the anti-Semites, weekend militiamen and Republicans, and it becomes clear that many among America’s well-armed citizenry have performed the same calculation. Because if there is any hope of the ceasefire that they fear, it will come out of the barrel of a lawsuit.

And that is why a shoot-to-kill coalition in the Senate, led by Wild Bill Frist (R-Tenn) and his simpering sidekick, Scary Harry Reid (D-Nev), voted yesterday to grant immunity from law suits to gun makers.

First, the score. Gunshot deaths in the US are way down – to only 88 a day. Around 87,000 lucky Americans were treated for bullet wounds last year; 32,436 unlucky ones died, including a dozen policemen by their own weapons.

For Americans, America remains more deadly than Iraq.

In one typical case, a young man, Steven Fox, described feeling pieces of his brain fly from his skull after a mugger shot him. He is permanently paralyzed.

But, hey, that’s business for you. And what a business it is. Guns, ammo and accessories are a $6 billion-a-year honey pot for several corporations: Glock, Smith & Wesson, Colt and too many others.

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Modified rape crosses with wild plant to create tough pesticide-resistant strain

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
The Guardian

Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant “superweed”, the Guardian can reveal.

The cross-fertilisation between GM oilseed rape, a brassica, and a distantly related plant, charlock, had been discounted as virtually impossible by scientists with the environment department. It was found during a follow up to the government’s three-year trials of GM crops which ended two years ago.

The new form of charlock was growing among many others in a field which had been used to grow GM rape. When scientists treated it with lethal herbicide it showed no ill-effects.

Unlike the results of the original trials, which were the subject of large-scale press briefings from scientists, the discovery of hybrid plants that could cause a serious problem to farmers has not been announced.

The scientists also collected seeds from other weeds in the oilseed rape field and grew them in the laboratory. They found that two – both wild turnips – were herbicide resistant.

The five scientists from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the government research station at Winfrith in Dorset, placed their findings on the department’s website last week.

(Read the article)

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By BOB HERBERT

I remember the arrogance that accompanied the “shock and awe” bombing campaign that kicked off the war in Iraq more than two years ago. The war was supposed to be quick and easy, a cakewalk. The enemy, we were told, would fold like a dinner napkin. And then, in the neoconservative fantasies of some of the crazier folks in the Bush crowd, the military would gear up for an invasion of Iran.

In one of the great deceptions in the history of American government, President Bush insisted to a nation traumatized by the Sept. 11 attacks that the invasion of Iraq was crucial to the success of the so-called war on terror.

“Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror,” said Mr. Bush in a speech in the fall of 2002 that was designed to drum up support for the invasion. “To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.”

In the speech, delivered in Cincinnati, Mr. Bush said of Iraq: “It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.”

I’ve always urged politicians to be careful what they wish for. The president got the war he wanted so badly. But he never understood an essential fact that Georges Clemenceau learned nearly a century ago – that “it is easier to make war than to make peace.”

So where are we, now that the real world has intervened? The military is spinning its wheels in the tragic and expensive quagmire of Iraq and there is no end to the conflict in sight. A front-page story in The Times on Sunday said the insurgents “just keep getting stronger and stronger.”

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Lawmakers remove roadblock to energy bill

H. JOSEF HEBERT
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – House and Senate conferees abandoned giving makers of the gasoline additive MTBE liability protection against environmental lawsuits on Sunday, removing the major roadblock to enactment of broad energy legislation.

Senate negotiators rejected a House proposal for an $11.4 billion MTBE cleanup fund that House Republicans had hoped would serve as a compromise and still provide the liability shield to the oil industry.

But Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said “the proposal has not been accepted by the Senate” and that he would offer another MTBE proposal on Monday.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., leader of the Senate energy negotiating team, said while some MTBE issues were still being discussed, those did not include a cleanup fund, nor liability protection.

“Those are gone,” Domenici told reporters as the House-Senate conferees held an unusual Sunday session in hopes of completing work on a sweeping energy bill by Monday night.

If the negotiators are successful an energy bill could pass Congress before week’s end, meeting an Aug. 1 goal to have a bill at the White House as urged by President Bush.

The legislation creates billions of dollars in tax breaks and other federal subsidies such as loan guarantees for energy industries and for energy conservation. It also would provide a boon to farmers by requiring billions of gallons of corn-base ethanol to be used in gasoline, although the amount remains to be negotiated.

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BLANCHE PETRICH

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Also see below: 
How the United States Marked the 3rd Anniversary of the Downing Street Memo

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Effort here to charge London suspect was blocked

By Hal Bernton and David Heath
Seattle Times staff reporters

The Justice Department blocked efforts by its prosecutors in Seattle in 2002 to bring criminal charges against Haroon Aswat, according to federal law-enforcement officials who were involved in the case.

British authorities suspect Aswat of taking part in the July 7 London bombings, which killed 56 and prompted an intense worldwide manhunt for him.

But long before he surfaced as a suspect there, federal prosecutors in Seattle wanted to seek a grand-jury indictment for his involvement in a failed attempt to set up a terrorist-training camp in Bly, Ore., in late 1999. In early 2000, Aswat lived for a couple of months in central Seattle at the Dar-us-Salaam mosque.

A federal indictment of Aswat in 2002 would have resulted in an arrest warrant and his possible detention in Britain for extradition to the United States.

“It was really frustrating,” said a former Justice Department official involved in the case. “Guys like that, you just want to sweep them up off the street.”

British intelligence officials now think that in the days and hours before the July 7 bombings, Aswat was in cellphone contact with at least two of the four suicide bombers, according to The Times of London.

Aswat was a highly public aide to Abu Hamza al Masri, the militant cleric whose North London mosque was a hotbed of radical Islamist preaching. In 1999, Aswat came to the attention of the FBI and federal prosecutors here as part of the investigation into the Bly camp and its founder, former Seattle entrepreneur James Ujaama.

(Read the article)

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High Quality Often Loses Out In the 40-Year-Old Program

By Gilbert M. Gaul
Washington Post Staff Writer

First of three parts

As far back as 1999, federal and state regulators began to receive complaints that the heart surgery unit at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center in Florida was a breeding ground for germs.

Dust and dirt covered some surgical equipment. Trash cans and soiled linens were stored in hallways. IV pumps were spattered with dried blood. One patient’s wife said she saw a medical assistant tear surgical tape with his teeth.

State inspectors in 2002 found “massive post operative infections” in the heart unit, requiring patients to undergo more surgery and lengthy hospital stays.

In a four-year period, 106 heart patients at Palm Beach Gardens developed infections after surgery, according to lawsuits and government records. More than two dozen were readmitted with fevers, pneumonia and serious blood infections. The lawsuits included 16 patients who died.

How did Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly, respond?

It paid Palm Beach Gardens more.

Under Medicare’s rules, each time a patient comes back for another treatment, a hospital qualifies for an additional payment. In effect, Palm Beach Gardens was paid a bonus for its mistakes.

(Read the article)

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Prostitution Puts U.S. and Brazil at Odds on AIDS Policy

RIO DE JANEIRO, July 23 – In their baseball caps and T-shirts adorned with a rose in the shape of a heart, they are a familiar and welcome presence in the red-light district on the outskirts of downtown here. For years now, they have been distributing condoms to the prostitutes who work the streets, part of the Brazilian government’s larger effort to hold AIDS in check.

Until recently, the condom campaign of the group called Fio da Alma had been partly financed through the United States Agency for International Development. But no longer: rather than comply with an American demand that all foreign recipients of AIDS assistance must explicitly condemn prostitution, Brazil has decided to forgo up to $40 million in American support.

“Our feeling was that the manner in which the Usaid funds were consigned would bring harm to our program from the point of view of its scientific credibility, its ethical values and its social commitment,” Pedro Chequer, director of the Brazilian government’s AIDS program, said in an interview in Brasil

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After Two Years the New York Times Starts to Take TreasonGate Seriously. “Ex-Diplomat’s Surprise Volley on Iraq Drove White House Into Political Warfare Mode.” Of Course, Their Headline Should Read, “White House Outs CIA Operative Because Husband Exposed Bush Administration Lies That Led America Into War.” But the New York Times Can Only Handle the Truth One Timid Step at a Time. Meanwhile, It Still Stands by Possible Co-conspirator and White House Stenographer, Judith Miller. Question to New York Times: What Comes First, the National Security of the United States or Loyalty to Bushevism?

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, July 22 – President Bush was celebrating his 57th birthday at the White House on July 6, 2003, a muggy midsummer Sunday. He had played golf with old friends at Andrews Air Force Base on Saturday, followed by an early birthday party arranged by his wife. The weekend marked a rare lull in the presidential schedule, a welcome break before a grueling trip to Africa that would start on Monday.

But a former diplomat named Joseph C. Wilson IV had just delivered an unwelcome present. In an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, an interview with The Washington Post and an appearance on “Meet the Press” on NBC, Mr. Wilson accused the administration of twisting the facts about Iraqi weapons and leading the nation to war on false pretenses.

In the growing chorus of criticism of the run-up to war, Mr. Wilson’s one-man media onslaught stood out as a sort of eyewitness account. He had been dispatched to Niger by the C.I.A. to see whether Iraq was buying uranium there for nuclear weapons. He claimed to have debunked the story in March 2002, only to have it reappear in January 2003, in the president’s State of the Union address.

If believed, Mr. Wilson’s accusations were poised to add an insider’s authority to the cloud of doubt beginning to grow around the Iraq enterprise, as the resistance was proving far more stubborn than anticipated and the search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons was coming up empty.

Ten weeks had passed since Mr. Bush’s speech aboard an aircraft carrier, before a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished.” And the president was being criticized by Democrats as taunting Iraqi insurgents a few days earlier by using the phrase “Bring ‘em on.” Behind the scenes, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council were skirmishing over who would take the blame for inaccurate intelligence.

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By Douglas Frantz, Sonni Efron and Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — The special prosecutor in the CIA leak investigation has shifted his focus from determining whether White House officials violated a law against exposing undercover agents to determining whether evidence exists to bring perjury or obstruction of justice charges, according to people briefed in recent days on the inquiry’s status.

Differences have arisen in witnesses’ statements to federal agents and a grand jury about how the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, was leaked to the press two years ago.

According to lawyers familiar with the case, investigators are comparing statements by two top White House aides, Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, with testimony from reporters who have acknowledged talking to the officials.

Although no one has suggested that the investigation into who leaked Plame’s name has been shelved, the intensity of the inquiry into possible perjury charges has increased, according to one lawyer familiar with events who spoke on condition that he not be identified.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, and his team have made no decision on whether to seek indictments.

The investigation focused initially on whether administration officials illegally leaked the identity of Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a campaign to discredit Wilson after he wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times criticizing the Bush administration’s grounds for going to war in Iraq.

The sources said prosecutors were comparing the various statements to the FBI and the grand jury by Rove, who is a White House deputy chief of staff and President Bush’s chief political strategist. In Rove’s first interview with the FBI, he did not mention a telephone conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, according to lawyers involved in the case. Cooper has since said that he called Rove specifically to discuss the matter.

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by Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis

The Democratic National Committee’s investigation into Ohio’s 2004 presidential election irregularities is the perfect postscript to the party’s ‘election protection’ efforts last fall: it is a shocking indictment of a party caught completely off-guard in its most heated presidential campaign in years, and a party that still doesn’t fully understand what happened and how to avoid a repeat in the future.

The report primarily documents the fact that Jim Crow voter suppression tactics targeting Democratic African-American voters were rampant in Ohio

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George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because out thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that i can refer back to them when necessary:
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Wednesday night, political guru and comedian Jon Stewart dropped by the Comedy Central green room as I awaited my turn on The Daily Show. He had asked me on his program to discuss my recent Salon.com/Rolling Stone articles about the federal government’s efforts to conceal the overwhelming scientific evidence linking vaccine preservative thimerosal to the epidemic of neurological disorders among American children. Stewart observed that if the story is true, the perpetrators should have their skin abraded with multiple incisions prior to being dipped in salt brine.

Earlier that day the New York Times reported an “unusual” invitation-only press conference in which representatives of the three federal agencies involved in the cover-up, CDC and FDA and the National Institute of Child Health Development, defended the use of thimerosal in vaccines. Following that press conference, Republican Congressman Dave Weldon, who is sponsoring legislation to ban thimerosal, rightfully denounced the trio for misleading the American public.

Although thimerosal is now discontinued in most American vaccines, it is still being administered to millions of children in the developing world with the help of American tax dollars. The public attempts by federal regulators to exonerate thimerosal will help ensure that this practice continues. Salt brine is too good for these people. A more appropriate punishment would be to force them to spend time in the lower level special education classes now bursting at the seams across America and see the autistic children lying on the floor screaming, many of them in dire agony from autistic enterocolitis.

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