Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

Judge drops charges against Blackwater guards accused of massacre

By Raw Story

In a rebuke to government prosecutors, a federal judge dismissed criminal charges against five Blackwater security guards accused of fatally shooting 14 people in Baghdad in September 2007.

Judge Ricardo Urbina said on Thursday prosecutors violated the defendants’ rights by using incriminating statements they had made under immunity during a State Department probe to build their case.

“The government used the defendants’ compelled statements to guide its charging decisions, to formulate its theory of the case, to develop investigatory leads, and ultimately to obtain the indictment in the case,” Urbina ruled.

“In short, the government had utterly failed to prove that it made no impermissible use of the defendants’ statements, or that such use was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The security guards had been “compelled” to provide the incriminating evidence during a Justice Department probe, the court said, but the US Constitution bars the prosecutors from using “statements compelled under threat of a job loss” in any subsequent criminal prosecution.

The case was among the most sensational that sought to hold Blackwater employees accountable for what was seen as a culture of lawlessness and a lack of accountability as it carried out its duties in Iraq.

The five guards, who had been part of a convoy of armored vehicles, had been charged with killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians and wounding 18 others during an unprovoked attack at a busy Baghdad traffic circle using gunfire and grenades.

The men had faced firearms charges, and up to 10 years in jail on each of 14 manslaughter counts.

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International anti-terrorist officials are alarmed that al-Qaeda is trying new “body bomb” devices that would enable suicide bombers to breach airline security measures.

Abdullah al-Asiri offered to give himself up to Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef

By Leonard Doyle in Washington

Anti-terrorism experts held an emergency meeting last month after an al-Qaeda militant passed through several airline security checks with a bomb hidden in his intestine. He later detonated the bomb with a cell phone signal, but failed in his attempt to assassinate a prominent Saudi prince.

“While not wanting to be alarmist, I admit this is alarming,” said Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations’ al-Qaeda and Taliban monitoring group.

“Even though its capability is reduced, it is clear that al-Qaeda remains determined enough and inventive enough to cause another terrorist spectacular.”

Last month US authorities foiled an alleged al-Qaeda terrorist plot in New York and also arrested two potential suicide bombers after they repeatedly tried to detonate large bombs using cell phones.

Mr Barrett was addressing the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he described how the terrorist organisation’s effectiveness had been much reduced across the world. The use of spies, targeted assassinations and the cooperation of governments had greatly reduced al-Qaeda’s effectiveness, he said.

The organisation is “losing credibility” among its potential supporters and its recent efforts “have not awed people” he concluded.

Mr Barrett also noted that al-Qaeda “hasn’t really made a connection to a new generation” of young Muslims who have little recollection of the events and are less interested in religion.

But he also warned that the organisation’s power to sow terror was far from eliminated, and described how its use of a well-known drug smugglers technique had already been shown to have breached airline security.

The frightening episode occurred on August 28 last when, Abdullah al-Asiri, one of Saudi Arabia’s most wanted men, offered to give himself up to Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, the head of Saudi Arabia’s counter terrorism operations.

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Jason Linkins | HuffPost Reporting

It’s New Year’s Eve, that time of year when you toss aside your better instincts and succumb to America’s need for Contemplative Listicles that Explain The Year In Which We Lived.

And then, one day, you make a Listicle About Listicles, or you do one better and make a Listicle of The Best 85 Words Ending In -icle, In Order.

Of course, both of those things have already been done this year.

So, we begin today with Ten Things About The Media That Did Not Suck In 2009:

BLOOMBERG NEWS

One of the sad things about living through this dark time in our nation’s economy is the terrible way the media has addressed it. When they’re not praising the culprits or treating human misery as pornography, they’re trying to get us to sympathize with very well-off people who are surviving just fine, or just experiencing a fancy mid-life crisis about the recession.

But over at Bloomberg News, the reporters who originally set about bringing the complexities of the financial world into an open-source environment spent all year carrying on with their code breaking, and they routinely deliver the most clear-eyed, pom-pom-free, fact-dense, explained-at-length journalism on how the world was destroyed and what’s being done to put it back together. There are too many examples to count: Jesse Westbrook’s piece on Mary Schapiro is just the most recent example. And when others honored Ben Bernanke on the cover of their magazine, Bloomberg took on the Fed. That’s how they rolled, all year.

Underscoring this is a bit of sadness, as one of Bloomberg’s finest, Mark Pittman, passed away this year. You can see MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan leading a praise chorus, here.

STEPHEN COLBERT

Yeah, it’s getting to be a bit repetitive to constantly praise Comedy Central’s late night duo, but until more people crowd them out by making the same commitment to not suck at doing their jobs, it’s going to be obligatory. This year, Colbert’s been praised for doing all he can to bring residents of the District of Columbia some Constitutional rights, he’s been way out in front in the arena of Glenn Beck ridicule, and he inspiringly lit Barack Obama afire for his detainee policy at Bagram AFB. But my personal favorite moment came with his dissection of the health care lobby’s influence on lawmakers: “Folks, there are some things that everybody knows, but nobody says.”

You do realize that Colbert is one of the few people in the media who has noticed they way the health care lobby has worked to file down the teeth of health care reform, let alone give a shit about it, right?

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Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

NEW YORK — When financial titan Goldman Sachs joined some of its Wall Street rivals in late 2005 in secretly packaging a new breed of offshore securities, it gave prospective investors little hint that many of the deals were so risky that they could end up losing hundreds of millions of dollars on them.

McClatchy has obtained previously undisclosed documents that provide a closer look at the shadowy $1.3 trillion market since 2002 for complex offshore deals, which Chicago financial consultant and frequent Goldman critic Janet Tavakoli said at times met “every definition of a Ponzi scheme.”

The documents include the offering circulars for 40 of Goldman’s estimated 148 deals in the Cayman Islands over a seven-year period, including a dozen of its more exotic transactions tied to mortgages and consumer loans that it marketed in 2006 and 2007, at the crest of the booming market for subprime mortgages to marginally qualified borrowers.

In some of these transactions, investors not only bought shaky securities backed by residential mortgages, but also took on the role of insurers by agreeing to pay Goldman and others massive sums if risky home loans nose-dived in value — as Goldman was effectively betting they would.

Some of the investors, including foreign banks and even Wall Street giant Merrill Lynch, may have been comforted by the high grades Wall Street ratings agencies had assigned to many of the securities. However, some of the buyers apparently agreed to insure Goldman well after the performance of many offshore deals weakened significantly beginning in June 2006.

Goldman said those investors were fully informed of the risks they were taking.

These Cayman Islands deals, which Goldman assembled through the British territory in the Caribbean, a haven from U.S. taxes and regulation, became key links in a chain of exotic insurance-like bets called credit-default swaps that worsened the global economic collapse by enabling major financial institutions to take bigger and bigger risks without counting them on their balance sheets.

The full cost of the deals, some of which could still blow up on investors, may never be known.

Before the subprime crisis, the U.S. financial system had used securities for 40 years to generate $12 trillion to help Americans finance their houses, cars and college educations, said Gary Kopff, a financial services consultant and the president of Everest Management Inc. in Washington. The offshore deals, he lamented, “became the biggest contributors to the trillions of dollars of losses” in 2008’s global meltdown.

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By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) – U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.

The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted “an Asian intelligence source” – a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials – as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.

The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel’s threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.

U.S. news media reporting has left the impression that U.S. intelligence analysts have not made up their mind about the document’s authenticity, although it has been widely reported that they have now had a full year to assess the issue.

Giraldi’s intelligence sources did not reveal all the reasons that led analysts to conclude that the purported Iran document had been fabricated by a foreign intelligence agency. But their suspicions of fraud were prompted in part by the source of the story, according to Giraldi.

“The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government,” Giraldi said.

The Times is part of a Murdoch publishing empire that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New York Post. All Murdoch-owned news media report on Iran with an aggressively pro-Israeli slant.

The document itself also had a number of red flags suggesting possible or likely fraud.

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Mutsuko Murakami – IPS/IFEJ

TOKYO, Dec 29 (IPS) – The global community may have been dismayed by the outcome of the recently concluded climate change talks in Copenhagen, but Mami Naito, 42, is not about to put off dealing with this global phenomenon in her own small way. “We very much like the idea of joining the efforts to prevent global warming,” says the mother of two.

Soon she hopes to have a solar energy-producing device installed on the roof of her house, having obtained estimates from a home appliance chain store in her residential area in Kawasaki, located south of the capital, along with her husband.

Naito and her husband are not alone in finding ways to cut their carbon emissions. According to the store’s manager, only well-to-do senior consumers were interested in such items in the past. But now, he says, people in their 30s and 40s are showing interest in such energy-saving equipment. “It is the same trend you find among younger people who are interested in driving hybrid cars if they become more affordable,” he observes.

Today, observers say, Japanese homeowners are fitting their homes with solar power systems at a dramatic pace. According to the Japan Photovoltaic Expansion Center, the solar energy battery shipments for regular homes between April and September this year more than doubled, with a combined generating capacity of 205,833 kilowatts, from the same period last year.

The Japan Federation of Housing Organisations has observed a similar trend during the same period – new home buyers installing solar panels on their roofs at a rate double or triple the corresponding figure in years past. Sekisui Chemical Co. Ltd., a major home supplier in the East Asian island nation, says more than 75 percent of new home purchases came with orders for solar panel roofs during the same months.

In Nagano Prefecture in central Japan, where the sun shines longer compared to other parts of Japan, people are rushing in for government solar energy subsidies – a recently revived programme – for their solar power purchases. The Global Warming Preventive Activity Center of Nagano Prefecture typically received 100 to 200 such subsidy requests monthly. In recent months, however, this figure has jumped to over 300. By December, the number has almost doubled to 500. The sheer volume of requests has prompted the centre to increase its staff. Still, “(we) can hardly handle them all,” says Takashi Sasaoka, an official in charge of processing subsidy requests.

In one city in Nagano, a non-profit organisation has been credited with the rapid expansion of solar energy. Ohisama (Sunshine) Energy Co., the business arm of one such organisation in Iida City – known to have one of the longest hours of sunshine throughout Japan – has been raising funds since 2004 to promote solar energy systems in the city. It has installed solar panels in a total of 162 facilities, including day care centres, city hall buildings, hospitals as well as homes and shops. Their combined capacity translates to a reduction of 711 tons of carbon dioxide emission per year.

“People have been interested in solar energy all along, but now they have stronger economic incentives for installing the equipment,” says Hiroyuki Sunaga, president of Japan Roof Nagano, which markets solar energy systems. He has seen orders of solar panel roofs almost tripling in just half a year since April, compared with the same period last year. “The market is booming with exploding demands this year,” he says.

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A windmill in Nantong, China.

As often as socialism and communism are evoked to discredit the Obama Administration’s agenda, it can be illustrative to observe how communist governments actually behave.

China’s National People’s Congress convened on Dec. 22. Three days later it passed a law requiring China’s energy companies to buy all energy generated through renewable sources–wind, solar power, hydropower, biomass, geothermal and ocean energy.

What if that energy is more expensive? Buy it anyway, the legislature told the energy companies, or pay twice its cost in fines.

What if that energy can’t be accessed with the existing power grid? Improve the grid, China told the energy companies.

Details of the new law were published this weekend by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. Every year China will determine what percentage of its energy will come from renewable sources, and every year, China’s energy companies will be expected to make it so.

In contrast, the Obama Administration is struggling to squeeze a market-based cap and trade bill laden with incentives for business through a stingy Senate, even with the enthusiastic support of Exelon, Duke, Con Ed, and other traditional American energy companies.

In its latest effort the administration is sweetening the deal with more allowances for offshore oil drilling, coal, and nuclear plants. Still, Republicans stung by defeat in the health-care debate have threatened to withhold support, and now conservative Democrats in the Senate are urging their colleagues and the White House to drop the bill.

A boon for business, cap and trade apparently is not a big enough boon for business to hold onto even one Republican vote, which makes you wonder: if government is the tyrant in China, who is the tyrant here?

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The Result: 882,000 New Jobs, 10% Drop in Emissions

by Stacy Feldman

Solar power technologies could generate 15 percent of America’s power in 10 years, but only if Washington levels the playing field on subsidies, a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) says.

Solar power technologies could generate 15 percent of America’s power in 10 years, but only if Washington levels the playing field on subsidies, a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) says. (Image: SolveClimate)

That means either rolling back fossil fuel subsidies, as President Obama proposed earlier this year, or increasing subsidies for clean energy, the association says.Fossil fuels received $72 billion in total federal subsidies from 2002 to 2008, keeping prices artificially low, according to figures from the Environmental Law Institute (ELI). About 98 percent of that went to conventional energy sources, namely coal and oil, leading to more emissions. The rest, $2.3 billion, was pumped into a new technology to trap and store carbon dioxide spewed by coal plants.

During that same period, solar got less than $1 billion, according to the SEIA, a trade group representing 1,100 solar companies across the nation.

To compete and gain market share — and stop global warming — this inconsistency “must reverse itself immediately,” said Rhone Resch, SEIA president and CEO.

There had been hints of this happening.

In September, the G20 group of the largest 20 economies agreed to phase out the $300 billion spent worldwide in fossil fuel subsidies “over the medium term” to combat climate change.

But neither the Obama administration nor Congress has yet to take steps to comply with the G20 commitment.

For solar to have a shot, the world cannot wait, Resch told reporters at the Copenhagen climate talks this month.

“We either remove subsidies with oil and gas or create parity with solar,” he said.

Almost a million jobs could hang in the balance.

Currently, solar contributes less than 1 percent of energy used in the U.S. and employs some 60,000 people. Increasing that amount to 15 percent would result in a total of 882,000 new jobs, the association said.

That’s compared with a dwindling coal mining industry that employs 85,000 people, said Resch.

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Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney | HuffPost Reporting

The question was simple: Should the lending practices of auto dealers be regulated?

It was already October and the 42 Democrats and 29 Republicans on the House Committee on Financial Services had spent the better part of the year hashing out the details of a new federal agency dedicated to protecting consumers from dangerous and deceptive financial products.

Auto dealers seemed like an obvious target for the new agency; nearly every time someone buys a car, the dealer also sells them an auto loan, complete with promises like zero per cent interest and a pile of cash back. Americans hold some $850 billion in car debt and dealers are responsible for marketing roughly four-fifths of that amount. They pocket lucrative commissions with little oversight, and the committee seemed poised to change that.

Enter Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), a former Saab dealer from Orange County, who according to his latest financial disclosure statement still collects rent from some of his former auto dealer colleagues. Campbell downplayed the importance of his industry partners and proposed an amendment to the bill exempting dealers from the new agency’s purview. On October 22, it came up for a vote.

As usual, the members filed into the high-ceilinged first-floor hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building. Committee Chairman Barney Frank oversaw the vote atop four tiered rows of seats, a full story above the witnesses and the audience. The longest-serving Democratic members of the panel — informally known as the banking committee — sat to the right or just below the chairman; it can take years, if not decades, for a freshman representative to ascend up the risers.

The clerk called the roll, starting from the top. Senior Democrats roundly rejected Campbell’s amendment. It appeared as if the Democrats would beat back the effort and apply the same standard to car dealers that was applied to everyone else.

Then came the bottom two rows, the place where reform goes to die. Despite the disapproval of the powerful chairman and nearly every consumer group in the country, the Campbell amendment passed by a 47-21 margin.

THE FRONTLINES

In the fall of 2008, Democrats took the White House and expanded their Congressional majorities as America struggled through a financial collapse wrought by years of deregulation. The public was furious. It seemed as if the banks and institutions that dragged the economy to the brink of disaster — and were subsequently rescued by taxpayer funds — would finally be forced to change their ways.

But it’s not happening. Financial regulation’s long slog through Congress has left it riddled with loopholes, carved out at the request of the same industries that caused the mess in the first place. An outraged American public is proving no match for the mix of corporate money and influence that has been marshaled on behalf of the financial sector.

The banking committee is the second-largest in Congress — the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has three more members — and is known as a “money committee” because joining it makes fundraising, especially from donors with financial interests litigated by the panel, significantly easier.

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By  The Associated Press

Washington is one of four states where measures to legalize and regulate marijuana have been introduced, and about two dozen other states are considering bills ranging from medical marijuana to decriminalizing possession of small amounts of the herb.

“In terms of state legislatures, this is far and away the most active year that we’ve ever seen,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, which supports reforming marijuana laws.

Nadelmann said that while legalization efforts are not likely to get much traction in state capitals anytime soon, the fact that there is such an increase of activity “is elevating the level of public discourse on this issue and legitimizing it.”

“I would say that we are close to the tipping point,” he said. “At this point they are still seen as symbolic bills to get the conversation going, but at least the conversation can be a serious one.”

Opponents of relaxing marijuana laws aren’t happy with any conversation on the topic, other than keeping the drug illegal.

“There’s no upside to it in any manner other than for those people who want to smoke pot,” said Travis Kuykendall, head of the West Texas High Intensity Drug-Trafficking Area office in El Paso, Texas. “There’s nothing for society in it, there’s nothing good for the country in it, there’s nothing for the good of the economy in it.”

Legalization bills were introduced in California and Massachusetts earlier this year, and this month, New Hampshire and Washington state prefiled bills in advance of their legislative sessions that begin in January. Marijuana is illegal under federal law, but guidelines have been loosened on federal prosecution of medical marijuana under the Obama administration.

Even so, marijuana reform legislation remains a tough sell in some places. In the South, for example, only Mississippi and North Carolina have decriminalization laws on the books.

“It’s a social and cultural thing,” said Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C.-based marijuana advocacy group. “There are some parts of the country where social attitudes are just a little more cautious and conservative.”

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By Agence France-Presse

US researchers have found an antibody that hunts down prostate cancer cells in mice and can destroy the killer disease even in an advanced stage, a study showed Monday.

The antibody, called F77, was found to bond more readily with cancerous prostate tissues and cells than with benign tissue and cells, and to promote the death of cancerous tissue, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

When injected in mice, F77 bonded with tissue where prostate cancer was the primary cancer in almost all cases (97 percent) and in tissue cores where the cancer had metastasized around 85 percent of the time.

It recognized even androgen-independent cancer cells, present when prostate cancer is incurable, the study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania showed.

F77 “initiated direct cell death of prostate cancer cells… and effectively prevented tumor outgrowth,” it said.

But it did not target normal tissue, or tumor tissues in other parts of the body including the colon, kidney, cervix, pancreas, lung, skin or bladder, the study showed.

The antibody “shows promising potential for diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer, especially for androgen-independent metastatic prostate cancer,” which often spreads to the bones and is difficult to treat, the researchers wrote in PNAS.

Currently, the five-year survival rate for metastatic prostate cancer is just 34 percent, according to the study.

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer among men, claiming half a million lives each year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

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A new approach for the Islamic world

by Asghar Ali Engineer

The world of Islam is in turmoil today. The events of 11th September in New York have given it a new jolt. The Muslim world was far from stable even before that. It had experienced many crises, conflicts and revolution. The post-colonial phase in whole of Africa and Asia that way has not seen long lasting stability.

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We review the choicest falsehoods from a year that kept us busy.

Summary

Although 2009 was not an election year, it kept us exceptionally busy, and led to millions of visits to our site. In this year-end summary, we offer some of the worst examples of the falsehoods we encountered during the first year of the Obama administration.

The list of howlers includes the false claim that the stimulus bill would dictate to doctors what procedures they can and can’t perform, and assertions that health care legislation would require seniors to get advice on how to commit suicide. Democrats exaggerated the problems their legislation aims to fix — at one point Obama falsely accused an insurance company of being responsible for the death of an Illinois cancer patient. We debunked claims that the “swine flu” vaccine had killed some U.S. sailors, and another claim that a bill passed by the House would require homeowners to make expensive energy-saving modifications to their homes before they would be allowed to sell them. We dealt with false claims about levitating trains, “green jobs,” gun control and — still — Obama’s place of birth.

If the year brought any signs that politicians as a class are getting any more truthful or less careless about their facts, we didn’t notice it. For a quick and (we hope) entertaining review of a spin-filled year, please read on to our “Analysis” section.

Analysis

As in past years, our “Whoppers” article presents just a selection of what we consider our most important findings, with special emphasis on the misinformation being most heavily repeated during the year. We don’t attempt to assign rankings to particular claims — your opinion is as good as ours when it comes to deciding whether one falsehood is worse than another.

So here’s a selection of the bogus bits that stood out. We start with what we judge to be the most heavily misrepresented subject of all, health care legislation.

Conservatives: Pulling the Plug on Grandma

• “Death Panels” The “pulling the plug on grandma” falsehood really took off once former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin coined the term “Death Panel,” but this falsehood got its first push from former New York lieutenant governor and health care overhaul opponent Betsy McCaughey.
  
  Betsy McCaughey

  She misrepresented a provision (since dropped) that merely called for Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling sessions to help seniors make end-of-life care decisions, such as designating a health care proxy, choosing a hospice or writing a living will. McCaughey twisted that into “a required counseling session” that would “tell them how to end their life sooner.” Palin later wrote on her Facebook page that she doesn’t want government bureaucrats to decide whether her parents or child with Down Syndrome are “worthy of health care.” Who would? Certainly not legislators, who didn’t call for the creation of any such “Death Panel” in the health care bills. “False Euthanasia Claims,” July 29; “Palin vs. Obama: Death Panels,” Aug. 14; ” ‘SpotCheck.org’? We Disagree.” Aug. 25

• Socialized Medicine: Several groups and politicians claimed that the major health care bills in Congress called for a single-payer system like Canada’s, under which all citizens have health insurance provided by the government, or even a system like Britain’s, where doctors and hospitals are employed by the government. The truth is that none of the major bills that were debated in Congress called for such a drastic change to the U.S. system, much to the chagrin of single-payer advocates. “Government-Run Health Care?” April 30; “Canadian Straw Man,” July 17; “The Government-Run Mantra,” Nov. 6
• Dictating to Doctors: McCaughey falsely claimed that the stimulus bill (passed in February) required that doctors follow government orders on which medical procedures can and can’t be performed. It didn’t. All the bill really did was create a council on “comparative effectiveness research,” which examines which treatments or drugs work best or are most cost-effective. It said none of the council’s reports or recommendations “shall be construed as mandates or clinical guidelines for payment, coverage, or treatment.”  “Doctor’s Orders?” Feb. 20.
• Breast Cancer Massacre: One TV spot claimed that “300,000 American women with breast cancer might have died” if our health care system was like England’s. The ad’s conservative sponsor cited the American Cancer Society as a source, but the cancer society never used such a number and an ACS epidemiologist called the ad sponsor’s calculations “really faulty.” “A False Appeal to Women’s Fears,” Sept. 4
• “26 Lies” E-mail: Judging from our editor inbox, one of the most widely circulated chain e-mails of 2009 was a lengthy list of 48 claims about specific sections of the House health care bill, complete with page numbers. We combed through every item and found that only four were true, 26 were false and the rest were misleading. At one point the author, a conservative blogger, claimed that the bill contained “more payoffs for ACORN.” But ACORN has nothing to do with the medical home services funded by the bill. The author also claimed that illegal aliens “will be provided with free healthcare services,” misrepresenting a provision that simply prohibits discrimination in health care based on “personal characteristics.” “Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200,” Aug. 28

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The ties between indicted banker Allen Stanford and members of Congress — including millions in contributions and weekends in five-star Caribbean resorts — are now the subject of a sweeping federal investigation.

BY MICHAEL SALLAH AND ROB BARRY
msallah@MiamiHerald.com

Just hours after federal agents charged banker Allen Stanford with fleecing investors of $7 billion, the disgraced financier received a message from one of Congress’ most powerful members, Pete Sessions.

“I love you and believe in you,” said the e-mail sent on Feb. 17. “If you want my ear/voice — e-mail,” it said, signed “Pete.”

The message from the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee represents one of the many ties between members of Congress and the indicted banker that have caught the attention of federal agents.

The Justice Department is investigating millions of dollars Stanford and his staff contributed to lawmakers over the past decade to determine if the banker received special favors from politicians while building his spectacular offshore bank in Antigua, The Miami Herald has learned.

Agents are examining campaign dollars, as well as lavish Caribbean trips funded by Stanford for politicians and their spouses, feting them with lobster dinners and caviar.

The money Stanford gave Sessions and other lawmakers was stolen from his clients while he carried out what prosecutors now say was one of the nation’s largest Ponzi schemes.

Sessions, 54, a longtime House member from Dallas who met with Stanford during two trips to the Caribbean, did not respond to interview requests.

Supporters say the lawmaker, who received $44,375 from Stanford and his staff, was not assigned to any of the committees with oversight over Stanford’s bank and brokerages.

His press secretary, Emily Davis, said she was unable to comment on the e-mail sent at 11:31 a.m. on the day Stanford was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “I haven’t seen it, so I can’t verify its authenticity at this time,” she said.

But the message found on Stanford’s computer servers and the contributions he made to Sessions and other lawmakers — totaling $2.3 million — are now part of the government’s inquiry.

Records show Stanford also doled out $5 million on lobbying since 2001, setting up his own Washington firm last year with expensive furnishings and artwork — the money plundered from his customers’ accounts.

D.C. CONNECTIONS

Over the years, he took on battles to protect his banking network while fending off regulators.

In 2001, he pressed successfully to kill a bill that would have exposed the flow of millions into his secretive offshore bank in Antigua.

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CRISTIAN SALAZAR |  

Marissa Shorenstein, a spokeswoman for Gov. David Paterson, confirmed that Sutton died Saturday. She did not know the cause. His daughter, Cheryl Sutton, declined to comment Saturday when reached by phone at her New York City home.

The son of a slave, Percy Sutton became a fixture on 125th Street in Harlem after moving to New York City following his service with the famed Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. His Harlem law office, founded in 1953, represented Malcolm X and the slain activist’s family for decades.

The consummate politician, Sutton served in the New York State Assembly before taking over as Manhattan borough president in 1966, becoming the highest-ranking black elected official in the state.

Sutton also mounted unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Senate and mayor of New York, and served as political mentor for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential races.

Jackson recalled Sutton talking about electing a black president as early as 1972. Sutton was influential in getting his 1984 campaign going, he said.

“He never stopped building bridges and laying the groundwork,” Jackson said Sunday. “We are very glad to be the beneficiaries of his work.”

In a statement released Saturday night, Gov. David Paterson called Sutton a mentor and “one of New York’s and this nation’s most influential African-American leaders.”

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GRETCHEN MORGENSON

YOU might think that board members overseeing businesses that cratered in the credit crisis would be disqualified from serving as directors at other public companies.

You would, however, be wrong.

Directors who were supposedly minding the store as disaster struck at companies like Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual or Fannie Mae have not all been banished from other boardrooms. In many cases, directors just seem to skate away from company woes that occurred on their watch.

To some investors, this is an example of the refusal of those involved in the debacle to accept responsibility for it. Whether you are talking about top executives loading up on leverage, regulators who slept while companies took on titanic risks or mortgage lenders that made thousands of dubious loans, few in this crowd have acknowledged culpability. Taxpayers and shareholders, meanwhile, who had nothing to do with the problems, are left holding the bag.

“None of these directors have stood up and said, ‘We made a mistake here by not calling management to account,’ ” said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm. “They have certainly avoided the limelight as far as blame is concerned.”

Moreover, they continue to get work as directors at other companies.

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by Cenk Uygur
Firedoglake

After talking about this with a great many progressives on our show, I’ve come to some conclusions. These are so self-evident that they will be viewed as obvious in hindsight.

Does he mean well or does he have bad intentions? Come on, don’t be ridiculous. Of course, he means well. But in his own mind, George Bush thought he meant well too (for the most part). I’m positive that Obama thinks that he is doing the best he can to bring about as much change as he can within the limits of this system.

Is he a true progressive or a corporatist sell out? Well, that depends on what you mean. Has he wound up helping corporate America tremendously through health care “reform,” finance “reform,” etc.? Well, Wall Street certainly seems to think so (and so do most progressives). Did he do that because he thought, “I can’t wait to help corporate America and screw over the little guy”? No, I’m sure he thought he had to accommodate the powers that be in order to affect any change at all in this system. But the bottom line has been the same, either way – the system has been tweaked but corporate America chugs along with even more government largesse than before.

I’m sure Obama is a progressive that would help the average American if he thought he could. But apparently he thinks he can’t. He can only bring them a small amount of change because of what he thinks the system will allow.

You can criticize him for lack of imagination, duplicity during the campaign, lack of spine and political miscalculation. And you might be right about some or all of that, but all of those aren’t the essence of Obama. The core of Obama is a man who is a cautious politician. That is what he is at his center. He can’t help himself. Asking him to be something else is asking a rock to be a little less hard. He is what he is.

So, what Obama does by his nature is find the middle ground. As an excellent innate politician, he will find the political center of any field and rush to it. That’s where elections are won – the center. So, that’s why he sounded so progressive during the primaries, because that was the center of the left. And why he sounded like such a reformer during the general election because the great majority of Americans desperately wanted change.

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The inside story of the privileged student who embraced al-Qa’ida and tried to blow a transatlantic jet out of the sky – and the lessons for us all

By Andrew Johnson and Emily Dugan

With his wealth, privilege and education at one of Britain’s leading universities, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab had the world at his feet – able to choose from a range of futures in which to make his mark on the world.

Instead, the son of one of Nigeria’s most important figures opted to make his impact in a very different way, by strapping explosives to his leg – or even possibly implanting them in his thigh – and attempting to blow up a passenger jet as it came in to land over Detroit airport on Christmas Day. The high explosive was identified last night by the FBI as Pentaerythritol (PETN – a major component of Semtex).

Also last night, as he was charged by US authorities with trying to blow up an airliner, a surprising picture emerged of the would-be bomber. Abdulmutallab, 23, had lived a gilded life, and, for the three years he studied in London, he stayed in a £2m flat. He was from a very different background to many of the other al-Qa’ida recruits who opt for martyrdom.

His father, Umaru, is the former economics minister of Nigeria. He retired earlier this month as the chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria but is still on the boards of several of Nigeria’s biggest firms, including Jaiz International, a holding company for the Islamic Bank. The 70-year-old, who was also educated in London, holds the Commander of the Order of the Niger as well as the Italian Order of Merit.

Dr Mutallab said he was planning to meet with police in Nigeria last night after realising his son had joined the notorious roster of al-Qa’ida terrorists, and is said to have warned the US authorities about his son’s extreme views six months ago.

Police in London were continuing to collaborate with the American-led investigation into the would-be bomber last night. Scotland Yard detectives were searching his flat and two others in the same mansion block in Marylebone, central London. They later cordoned off the street lined with Rolls-Royce, Jaguar and Mercedes cars. They were also understood to be searching the building’s basement.

Abdulmutallab was reportedly on a security watch list, but those who studied with him expressed shock that the person who seemed so quiet and unassuming – a devout Muslim but not radical – apparently came close to perpetrating a Christmas Day massacre.

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Breckenridge is boasting that it has become the Amsterdam of the Rockies

Joanna Walters

It’s already being dubbed “the Amsterdam of the Rockies” and an après-ski spliff is likely to become almost as common as a beer when cannabis possession is legalised in the hip mountain town of Breckenridge, Colorado, on 1 January.

Well known as a laid-back party resort characterised by baggy-trousered snowboarders and a vigorous happy hour, Breckenridge voted last month to relax marijuana laws.

From New Year’s Day there will be no criminal or civil penalties imposed on anyone carrying up to an ounce of marijuana – or the paraphernalia usually associated with it, such as long rolling papers, a small pipe or a bong. That also goes for tourists, in a resort popular with British visitors who flock there for the exciting ski slopes and the exuberant nightlife.

“I’m already getting calls from people outside the state asking questions, such as ‘Can I do it while I’m skiing?’, ‘Can I bring it to my hotel room?’, that kind of thing,” said Kim Green, spokeswoman for the Breckenridge police department.

The answer to the first question is no. The operators of the ski resort have made it clear that, while cannabis use may be decriminalised in the town, they are still able to ban it on the slopes under separate laws, and will come down heavily on anyone skiing while stoned.

The answer to the hotel question, though, is potentially a yes, provided guests can get hold of the drug in the first place. And that could be tricky. It will remain illegal to buy, sell or grow cannabis and also to display or use it in public. That means no Amsterdam-style “coffee shops”, but the remaining restrictions in Breckenridge have not stopped campaigners making comparisons between the town and the Dutch capital.

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