THE FULCRUM

A US general has been suspended in Iraq over the alleged abuse of prisoners by US troops in jails she ran.

[snip]

CBS says the pictures it obtained show a wide range of abuses, including:

Prisoners with wires attached to their genitals

A dog attacking a prisoner

Prisoners being forced to simulate having sex with each other

A detainee with an abusive word written on his body.

The prison where the abuses are alleged to have taken place was a notorious torture centre during the Saddam Hussein era.

"We had no training whatsoever," he [former guard] said.

"I kept asking my chain of command for certain things... like rules and regulations. And it just wasn't happening," he said.

He said he never saw a copy of the Geneva Conventions - which govern the treatment of prisoners - until after he was charged.

The Army investigation confirmed that reservists at Abu Ghraib had not been trained in Geneva Convention rules.

"Most of Fallujah is returning to normal, there are pockets of resistance."

The United States warned the Persian Gulf state of Qatar yesterday that an otherwise strong relationship between the two nations is being harmed by "false" and "inflammatory" anti-American coverage of Iraq by the Qatar-based Arab television network Al Jazeera.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other U.S. officials delivered the terse warning to a delegation headed by Qatari Foreign Minister Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabir al Thani - the highest level at which the subject has been discussed.

...the Republican attack machine follows a pattern we've seen before, whether the target is Senator John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 or Senator Max Cleland in Georgia in 2002. The latest manifestation of these tactics is the controversy over Mr. Kerry's medals.

The neurosurgeons at the 31st Combat Support Hospital measure the damage in the number of skulls they remove to get to the injured brain inside, a procedure known as a craniotomy. "We've done more in eight weeks than the previous neurosurgery team did in eight months," Poffenbarger said. "So there's been a change in the intensity level of the war."

Numbers tell part of the story. So far in April, more than 900 soldiers and Marines have been wounded in Iraq, more than twice the number wounded in October, the previous high. With the tally still climbing, this month's injuries account for about a quarter of the 3,864 U.S. servicemen and women listed as wounded in action since the March 2003 invasion.

Secret Service agents questioned a high school student about anti-war drawings he did for an art class, one of which depicted President Bush's head on a stick.

Another pencil-and-ink drawing portrayed Bush as a devil launching a missile, with a caption reading "End the war -- on terrorism."

The 15-year-old boy's art teacher at Prosser High School turned the drawings over to school administrators, who notified police, who called the Secret Service.

"If this 15-year-old kid in Prosser is perceived as a threat to the president, then we are living in '1984'."

In a voice I doubt I would have heard had I not been so close to him, Kerry said, as I recall vividly, "There is no violent reason for this; I'm doing this for peace and justice and to try to help this country wake up once and for all."

With that, he didn't really throw his handful toward the statue of John Marshall, America's first chief justice. Nor did he drop the decorations. He sort of lobbed them, and then walked off the stage.

[snip]

...I saw what happened and heard what Kerry said and know what he meant. The truth happens to be with him.

"Urgent: HQ Direction," began a message e-mailed on April 1 to dozens of scientists and officials at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

It was not an alert about an incoming asteroid, a problem with the space station or a solar storm. It was a warning about a movie.

In "The Day After Tomorrow," a $125 million disaster film set to open on May 28, global warming from accumulating smokestack and tailpipe gases disrupts warm ocean currents and sets off an instant ice age.

Few climate experts think such a prospect is likely, especially in the near future. But the prospect that moviegoers will be alarmed enough to blame the Bush administration for inattention to climate change has stirred alarm at the space agency, scientists there say.

"No one from NASA is to do interviews or otherwise comment on anything having to do with" the film, said the April 1 message, which was sent by Goddard's top press officer. "Any news media wanting to discuss science fiction vs. science fact about climate change will need to seek comment from individuals or organizations not associated with NASA."

With security in Iraq deteriorating, the U.S. military is laying plans to increase by about 10% the number of National Guard forces moving into Iraq this fall as part of the next rotation of troops at the same time it retrains more than 100,000 soldiers so it doesn't run out of troops in more than a half-dozen critical specialties.

[snip]

If soldiers volunteer to stay on active duty longer, they can. To cover the gaps in key specialties, the Army Reserve will begin this week asking for volunteers to begin active-duty tours for two years. "We're going to be establishing provisional active-duty units with the volunteers," said Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve. Gen. Helmly said it is unclear how many volunteers among the Reserve's 211,000 soldiers will step forward.

[snip]

Most of the looming shortages will be covered by retraining soldiers. To address the shortage of infantry soldiers, for example, the army is reducing the number of heavy-armored-tank brigades and retraining many of those soldiers as infantry troops, which are more effective in peacekeeping operations.

From Merriam-Webster:

1 obsolete : supreme excellence or an example of it 2 a : supreme power especially over a body politic b : freedom from external control : AUTONOMY c : controlling influence 3 : one that is sovereign; especially : an autonomous state

From this morning's New York Times:

The Bush administration's plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws, administration officials said Thursday.

The Pentagon has reacted angrily to the publication on US websites of photos of America's war dead arriving home.

[snip]

"They're not happy with the release of the photos," said Dover Air Force base spokesman Col Jon Anderson of the Pentagon.

"The photos will not be released through Air Force channels," said Air Force spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Jennifer Cassidy, who added that requests for their release could be made under the same act [Freedom of Information Act - FOI].

Bill Lets Doctors, Nurses Refuse To Treat Homosexuals

Mar 28, 2003 9:07 am US/Mountain
DENVER (AP) State representatives have removed a provision protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination by health care workers.

Rep. Don Lee, a Jefferson County Republican, took a run-of-the-mill measure dealing with agency regulations and amended it to remove protection for gays under rules set by the Medical Services Board. It was approved by the House Thursday.

Lee argued that gays don't have state legal claims against discrimination now and the rules would create a special protection for them.

Senate Bill 88 passed on a 34-29 party-line vote, with a lone Republican, Rep. Gregg Rippy of Glenwood Springs, siding with Democrats.

An angry Rep. Jennifer Veiga, a Denver Democrat and House minority leader, said Lee's approach also would allow for discriminating against people who are older, believe in a certain religion, belong to an ethnic group or have a physical disability.

"Does it create a special protected class? It absolutely does not," Veiga said. "It provides some assurance to large sections of our society that they will get treatment."

Rep. Shawn Mitchell, a Broomfield Republican, said that any medical professional who chooses not to treat someone would be disciplined under medical ethics or have a lawsuit slapped against them.

"They will be sued for medical incompetence, but not for political incorrectness," Mitchell said.
Several Democrats argued that the rule change would be unconstitutional.

In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Colorado's Amendment 2, which barred laws that protect homosexuals from discrimination.

"We went down this road in Colorado with Amendment 2," said Rep. Alice Madden, D-Boulder. "It wasn't a pretty trip."

10,261: Number of children of Wal-Mart employees in Georgia who are enrolled in the state's PeachCare for Kids health insurance program, which provides medical coverage to children whose parents cannot afford it.

Silicio was let go yesterday for violating U.S. government and company regulations, said William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft, the contractor that employed Silicio at Kuwait International Airport.

[snip]

Maytag also fired David Landry, a co-worker who recently wed Silicio.

[snip]

Maytag's Silva said the decision to terminate Silicio's and Landry's employment was made by the company. But he said the U.S. military had identified "very specific concerns" about their actions. Silva declined to detail those concerns.

This is the BushCo way: To apologize is to show weakness. To say you might've made some mistakes whilst tromping blindly down the warpath, well, that sort of humility doesn't sit well with the hawks and the corporate profiteers. There is only the push toward bigger, toward stronger, toward nastier and angrier and more troops and more weaponry and more draconian Patriot Acts and more enraged anti-U.S. fundamentalists and more dead soldiers in Iraq.

The FBI is investigating an e-mail sent to the El Paso Islamic Center that threatened to make it "the center of death and destruction" if hostages in Iraq weren't released.

The message was discovered on Sunday after it was sent to the center's main e-mail address from a person called "freedom lover." It said the threat would be carried out in three days if hostages in Iraq were not freed.

The note also said, "The will of the people has been portrayed to you and your Satan worshipping faith."

The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq.

[snip]

Woodward supplied his own transcript showing that Rumsfeld told him on Oct. 23, 2003: "I remember meeting with the vice president and I think Dick Myers and I met with a foreign dignitary at one point and looked him in the eye and said you can count on this. In other words, at some point we had had enough of a signal from the president that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen."

The transcript made it clear that the foreign dignitary Woodward was discussing was Bandar, although Rumsfeld would not say that. "We're going to have to clean some of this up in the transcript," Rumsfeld said in the omitted passage. "We'll give you a -- I mean you just said Bandar and I didn't agree with that so we're going to have to -- I don't want to say who it is but you are going to have to go through that and find a way to clean up my language too."

All told, the Pentagon transcript omits a series of eight questions and answers, some of them just a few words each. Yesterday Rumsfeld described the deleted passages as "some banter."

At least 10 people were killed and dozens wounded Wednesday when a car bomb destroyed a Saudi security service building in the capital, witnesses said.

Saudi officials described it as a "terrorist attack" and Arab television said the body of suicide bomber had been found.

[snip]

"We believe it is a terrorist attack," a Saudi Interior Ministry source told Reuters. He said a car packed with explosives blew up in al-Murabaa district.

The kingdom, a key U.S. ally and the world's largest oil exporter, is battling a tide of Islamist militancy linked to Saudi-born Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

[snip]

Saudi Arabia last week defused five cars rigged with explosives in Riyadh, security sources said. Suspected Muslim militants also killed at least five Saudi policemen last week.

Also last week, a wanted Saudi militant called on Muslims in a video distributed on the Internet to kill Americans.

A series of explosions ripped through three police stations and a police academy in the southern Iraqi city of Basra Wednesday, killing at least 55 people, including some 10 schoolchildren, and injuring at least 238, officials said.

Three near-simultaneous blasts targeted police stations at rush hour in Basra. At about the same time, a fourth explosion ripped through the police academy in the Basra suburb of Zubair. An hour later another blast targeted the same police academy.

Forty-five people were killed in the police station blasts and 10 were killed in the police academy explosions, officials and witnesses said. The injured included two British soldiers at the police academy, Maj. Hisham al-Halawi, spokesman for British forces in Basra, told Al-Arabiya television.

The attacks came a day after Iraqi leaders named a tribunal of judges and prosecutors to try Saddam Hussein, placing a longtime opponent of the ousted dictator in the forefront of the case against him and his former Baathist inner circle.

Meanwhile, U.S Marines backed by tanks and helicopter gunships battled insurgents in northern Fallujah on Wednesday, killing nine, as a day-old attempt to bring peace to the besieged city hit snags, with Marines saying guerrillas were not turning in weapons.

Explosions were heard coming from the scene of the fighting, and Cobra helicopter gunships were blasting with Gatling guns from the air. Tanks moved into the Julan neighborhood from which Marines said insurgents their positions.

The attack came as U.S. Marine commanders said no guerrillas have come forward so far to turn in their heavy weapons, a key tenet of an agreement reached by negotiators that began being implemented on Tuesday. The Marines, in response, halted a key commitment on their side in the deal, the return of Fallujah residents to the city.

President Bush holds significant advantages over John F. Kerry in public perceptions of who is better equipped to deal with Iraq and the war on terrorism, and he has reduced the advantages his Democratic challenger held last month on many domestic issues, according to a Washington Post-ABC News Poll.

The poll also found that Iraq and the war on terrorism have surged in importance, and rank with the economy and jobs as top voting issues. Despite signs of concern among Americans about the violence in Iraq, the poll showed Bush's approval ratings holding steady and Kerry's slipping on a variety of issues and attributes.

By 49 percent to 44 percent, Bush is viewed as better able to deal with the country's biggest problems. Five weeks ago, those numbers were reversed. By comfortable margins, voters see Bush as stronger than Kerry on key national security issues.

The media operation is expected to provide a platform for the NRA in the run-up to this year's presidential elections - a time when restrictions surround the use of donors' money for political advertising.

The NRA's media outlets will be financed by unlimited donations, known as "soft money".

Campaign finance laws ban the use of "soft money" for political advertising in the run-up to elections

"If you own a news operation," said Mr LaPierre, "you can say whatever you want. If you don't, you're gagged."

Experts say that the NRA might be able to sidestep campaign finance laws if it can convincingly show that it is running a media organisation.

The United States, which has increased troops numbers in Afghanistan to hunt for Osama bin Laden and other militants, may cut their number after the country holds elections, the top U.S. military officer [General Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff] said on Friday.

[snip]

"We will see how events unfold. I think generally most of the country is pretty secure as a matter of fact,"he added.

[snip]

Driven from power by U.S.-led forces in late 2001, the Taliban have declared a jihad, or holy war, on foreign and Afghan government troops and aid organizations, and threatened this week to step up attacks against the government and foreign troops.

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni wondered aloud yesterday how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be caught off guard by the chaos in Iraq that has killed nearly 100 Americans in recent weeks and led to his announcement that 20,000 U.S. troops would be staying there instead of returning home as planned.

"I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus," said Zinni, a Marine for 39 years and the former commander of the U.S. Central Command. "Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?"

At a Pentagon news briefing yesterday, Rumsfeld said he could not have estimated how many troops would be killed in the past week.

Known as the "Warrior Diplomat," Zinni is not a peace activist by nature or training, having led troops in Vietnam, commanded rescue operations in Somalia and directed strikes against Iraq and al Qaeda.

He once commanded the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton.

Out of uniform, Zinni was a troubleshooter for the U.S. government in Africa, Asia and Europe and served as special envoy to the Middle East under the Bush administration for a time before his reservations over the Iraq war and its aftermath caused him to resign and oppose it.

Not even Zinni's resume could shield him from the accusations that followed.

"I've been called a traitor and a turncoat for mentioning these things," said Zinni, 60. The problems in Iraq are being caused, he said, by poor planning and shortsightedness, such as disbanding the Iraqi army and being unable to provide security.

"I spent two years in Vietnam, and I've seen this movie before," he said.

The U.S. military rejected a scenario in which a hijacked airliner flew into the Pentagon as it planned a training exercise months before an airliner was slammed into the building by hijackers in September 2001, defense officials said on Wednesday.

The proposed scenario was rejected by the Pentagon's elite Joint Staff as not in keeping with the April 2001 exercise, which dealt largely with how U.S. forces would be commanded in a confrontation with North Korea if defense headquarters somehow became incapacitated.

Defense officials said several scenarios under which military command had to be moved from the Pentagon were rejected and that the suggestion involving a possible foreign commercial airliner strike not only appeared unrealistic but could have taken over the whole exercise.

A stern, defiant President Bush said he wouldn't back down from the challenges of Iraq and offered no hint he would alter his approach there, despite a recent surge of violence that has boosted U.S. casualties and heightened criticism of the president's war plans.

In a rare nationally televised address, Mr. Bush insisted that success in Iraq is vital to defeat terrorism and protect Americans. Above all, he indicated that none of the violence and turmoil there would alter his plan to turn sovereignty over to Iraqis on June 30.

In reply to the overtures, Mr. Bush offered no apologies and admitted no specific mistakes.

He did allow that before Sept. 11 "there are some things I wish we'd have done, when I look back. I mean, hindsight's easy. It's easy for a president to stand up and say, now that I know what happened, it would have been nice if there were certain things in place." Mr. Bush noted, though, that "I still would have called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein." Weapons of mass destruction, he said, "could still be there. They could be hidden."

For his part, the President, asked if his job was at risk, said, "I don't plan on losing my job. I plan on telling the American people that I've got a plan to win the war on terror. And I believe they'll stay with me. They understand the stakes."

Freeh [ex-FBI Director], questioned by Democratic commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, later said intelligence services were aware of the danger that a terrorist might use a hijacked plane as a weapon.

He acknowledged steps were taken to protect the White House as well as special events, such as the 2000 Olympic Games and meetings of world leaders, against such a threat, but nothing was done to protect the country at large.

Ben-Veniste asked: "So it was well known in the intelligence community that this was a potential threat?"

Freeh responded: "It was part of the planning for those events, that is correct."

"The situation in Iraq has improved," Mr. Bush insisted [with his trademarked smirk - ed].
April 12, 2004

Military officials expressed concern about a growing problem that also plagued U.S. forces during the invasion last year: attacks on supply convoys. Over the past week, insurgents repeatedly have attacked military and commercial trucks and passenger vehicles on two major highways that run west and south from Baghdad, slowing the movement of troops and supplies and rendering both roads off-limits to most foreigners, U.S. military commanders said Monday.

The two highways provide the major links to the densely populated agricultural zone in the south and to Fallujah and Ramadi to the west. In the past week, armed bands of as many as 60 men have ambushed fuel convoys, kidnapped foreign civilians and shot down aircraft along the highways.

Military commanders remain very concerned about the motorways and have declared them dangerous but not impassable, Kimmitt said. He said it could take several weeks before they were completely safe for traffic.

The attacks have led many truck drivers working for Kellogg Brown & Root and other private contractors to refuse to drive, delaying the delivery of much-needed supplies to troops, military officials said.

Private contractors are responsible for providing about half the military's supplies in Iraq.

(Emphasis mine, ed.)

Rather, the task force wants to see the U.S. nuclear arsenal expanded to include more precise, lower-yield weapons -- especially those that could penetrate targets buried deep underground where conventional weapons can't reach. The idea is to give a President the option of incinerating enemy weapons, leaders and command-and-control systems with as little damage as possible to civilians. Having the option of highly precise nuclear weapons with greatly reduced radioactivity would also make the threat of their use more believable to terrorists contemplating attacks on the U.S. or allies.

In a disclosure likely to rekindle privacy-concern fires, AMR Corp.'s American Airlines admitted giving information on 1.2 million passengers to outside research companies vying for contracts with the Transportation Security Administration.

[snip]

American's disclosure comes at a sticky time for the TSA, which is struggling to develop the new system amid growing privacy concerns by the public. Testing for the screening system is already months behind schedule.

"He takes that role seriously, as sort of educator-in-chief," [Dan] Bartlett said.

The commission met in private with former President Bill Clinton later in the day, it said in a statement that praised Clinton for being “forthcoming and responsive.”

“I thought it was tremendously helpful,” former Sen. Slade Gorton of Washington, a Republican member of the commission, said Thursday night on CNBC’s “Capitol Report.”

“He was totally forthcoming,” Gorton added. “He answered our questions very well. It was a very productive four hours.”

MATTHEWS: How far did that information get up to the ladder to the president?

LORIE VAN AUKEN, WIDOW OF 9/11 ATTACK: You know, that’s the question we have, the urgency question. In “Bush at War,” it was quoted that Bush said he felt that al Qaeda was important but not urgent. Whose job is to convey urgency to the president if not the national security advisor, getting information from the intel. agencies up to the president?

Although I've only recently stuck my toe in the fast-moving blogstream, I've been a fan -- and an advocate -- ever since bloggers took the Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond story, ran with it, and helped turn the smug Senate majority leader into the penitent former Senate majority leader, a bit of bloody political chum floating in a tank of hungry sharks. Simply put, blogs are the greatest breakthrough in popular journalism since Tom Paine broke onto the scene.

REALITY: "Militiaman loyal to an anti-U.S. Shiite cleric controlled large swaths of three Iraqi cities Thursday after clashes with coalition forces, while U.S. Marines fought insurgents for the second day around a mosque in the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Fallujah."

RUMSFELD: "Rumsfeld discounted the strength of al-Sadr's militia. "There's nothing like an army," he said. "You have a small number of terrorists and militias coupled with some protests." U.S. officials estimate al-Sadr's force at about 3,000 fighters."

If the CPA or the Iraqis arrest al Sadr the Shiites will explode in anger and violence. Recent events will seem tame in comparison. If he is wounded or killed in the attempt it will seem that a nuclear weapon had gone off.

If the CPA does nothing about al Sadr and the Shiites, the spiral of violence will continue to spin out of control and more coalition soldiers and civilians and Iraqis will die by ones and twos or threes.

If the coalition decides to withdraw from Iraq precipitously (something that is not likely to happen given the swollen egos of BushCo.), anarchy and chaos will explode in Iraq and it will descend into the worst religiously fueled civil war imaginable.

If the coalition stays the violence perpetrated by the Sunnis will continue and probably spread well outside the Sunni Triangle and infect the rest of the country, ensuring that more coalition personnel die every day. A religious civil war is likely in this situation as well.

More than 60% of U.S. corporations didn't pay any federal taxes for 1996 through 2000, years when the economy boomed and corporate profits soared, the investigative arm of Congress reported.

The disclosures from the General Accounting Office are certain to fuel the debate over corporate tax payments in the presidential campaign. Corporate tax receipts have shrunk markedly as a share of overall federal revenue in recent years, and were particularly depressed when the economy soured. By 2003, they had fallen to just 7.4% of overall federal receipts, the lowest rate since 1983, and the second-lowest rate since 1934, federal budget officials say.

Having long flouted the new-source review law, many of the nation's biggest power companies were facing, in the last months of the 1990's, an expensive day of reckoning. E.P.A. investigators had caught them breaking the law. To make amends, the power companies were on the verge of signing agreements to clean up their plants, which would have delivered one of the greatest advances in clean air in the nation's history. Then George W. Bush took office, and everything changed.

"Within hours of a call by [Moktada al-Sadr, a 31-year-old firebrand Shiite cleric] to his followers to "terrorize your enemy," his militiamen, said to number tens of thousands across Iraq, emerged into the streets of Baghdad, Najaf, Kufa and Amara..."

A report released by a House committee on Thursday describes how the Bush administration worked with the United States chemical industry to undermine a European plan that would require all manufacturers to test industrial chemicals for their effect on public health before they were sold in Europe.

[snip]

Behind the scenes, the administration was working with the chemical industry to devise a plan to undermine the proposal, according to e-mail messages and documents released in the report.

[snip]

The report, requested by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, says that American environmental groups and the general public were kept out of the administration's closed discussions and strategy sessions.

"We were frozen out," said Joseph Digangi of the Environmental Health Fund, an advocacy group cited in the report. "The administration went directly to the U.S. chemical industry and adopted their position whole cloth."

Anthony Gooch, the spokesman for the European Commission in the United States, said of the report: "There would seem to be an inordinate weight given to only one side of a complex argument. Significant concerns about the environment and public health seem to be totally absent from their policy."

The lobbying efforts of the United States appear to have succeeded. The European Union revised the proposal, known as Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals, or Reach.

Five months after trade officials sent e-mail messages discussing how to persuade senior European officials to demand new cost-benefit analyses, France, Germany and Britain wrote to the president of the European Commission requesting a new assessment of the effects that the program would have on the industry.

The Washington Post says people with direct knowledge of the call say Alberto Gonzales, President Bush's top lawyer, called commissioner Fred Fielding and may also have called commissioner James Thompson, before Richard Clarke was due to appear on March 24.

[snip]

Fielding and Thompson both asked questions on March 24 that concerned Clarke's credibility. Fielding referred to a previously classified briefing Clarke gave to Congress in 2002 in which he reportedly praised the Bush administration's terrorism strategy.

Thompson mentioned a White House briefing in 2002 that Clarke had given anonymously. Fox News first reported on Clarke's White House briefing just hours before.