BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

The Foods That Are Most Affected by Pesticides

Monday, October 6th, 2008

By Sheryl Walters | By now most of us know that buying organic is absolutely essential if we want to put the best food possible into our bodies. It is just plain and simply better for our health and better for the environment, which are inextricably linked anyway.s

Study after study show that organic food has a higher nutritional content than conventionally raised food. A study published in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry, for example, found that organic foods are more likely to help you fight cancer. And another study found that rats that ate organic food had far better health compared to rats on non organic food, including:

* Improved immune system

* Better sleeping habits

* Less weight and were slimmer than rats fed other diets

* Higher vitamin E content in their blood (for organically fed rats)

But then there is the common argument that organic food is more expensive. Of course to me the best investment that any of us can possibly make is in our health and wellbeing since without our health we can’t optimally do all of the other things that we want to do in our life. Who cares about a financial investment in the stock market if you won’t feel good enough to enjoy it?

Okay, but I will be realistic for a minute. Sometimes organic food is just crazy expensive, and to buy every single item organic is just not possible. Fortunately, new studies show that some foods are less affected by pesticides and herbicides than others.

The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit organization that advocates for policies that protect global and individual health. They currently tested 43 different fruits and vegetables, and found that these 12 carried the least amount of pesticides when grown conventionally.

* Broccoli

* Eggplant

* Cabbage

* Banana

* Kiwi

* Asparagus

* Sweet peas (frozen)

* Mango

* Pineapple

* Sweet corn (frozen)

* Avocado

* Onion

Of the 43 different fruits and vegetables tested, the following 12 carried the highest amount of pesticides when grown conventionally, and are therefore the most important to buy organic.

* Peaches

* Apples

* Sweet bell peppers

* Celery

* Nectarines

* Strawberries

* Cherries

* Lettuce

* Grapes (imported)

* Pears

* Spinach

* Potatoes

So there you have it… if you aren’t going to go 100% organic so that you can save a few pennies, you now know which fruits and vegetables to make absolute sure are organic, and which ones you can save a little on when necessary.

Have Your Say: The Foods That Are Most Affected by Pesticides
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Spying on the Future: The U.S. Intelligence Community as Seers Without Sizzle

Monday, October 6th, 2008

By Tom Engelhardt

The year is 2010 and, yes, Saddam Hussein is gone and there are no American troops in Iraq, but, as the report suggests, “the challenge will be to see whether a modern, secular successor government emerges that does not threaten its neighbors” — especially since those dogged Iraqis are back at work on their nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, the national security agenda of American policymakers, who face no conventional military challenges, is dominated by five questions: “whether to intervene, when, with whom, with what tools, and to what end?”

Surveying the world in 2010, we find a Russia irredeemably in economic decline, a China beset by too many internal problems to hope for military dominance in Asia, and a North Korea so transformed that military tensions have vanished from the Korean peninsula (along, evidently, with the North Korean nuclear program). Oh, and those food riots that swept the globe recently, they never happened. After all, it’s well known that food production has kept up with population pressures, and energy production has been more than a match for global energy needs. As for global warming? Never heard of it. On the bright side, the key to the future is “international cooperation,” led, of course, by us truly.

An alternate universe from a missing Star Trek episode or that new sci-fi novel you haven’t read yet? Not quite. Thanks to the best brains in the many agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community or IC, it’s been possible for me to venture into the future, just as our own world is being shaken to its roots — into the years 2010 and 2015, to be exact.

There, surprisingly enough, life is relatively calm and the United States remains the preeminent Power of Powers. There, you aren’t likely to hear the words “deep recession” or “depression” on anyone’s lips.

In that far perkier future our intelligence analysts sent me to, you can exist forever and there will never be those four jets, box cutters, and 19 hijackers. The Bush administration will never barge into the world “unilaterally.” The U.S. will not be renowned for torture techniques or an offshore secret prison system of injustice, and nothing will contravene then-Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Ben Bernanke’s 2005 assessment that soaring housing prices were due to “strong economic fundamentals.”

In neither 2010 nor 2015 will anyone have heard of the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the giant insurance company A.I.G. In neither year will newspapers have headlines like “Worst Crisis Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight.” In neither will anyone know that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, conducting two bankrupting wars that refused to end.

Think of it as the blandest, tidiest, least-likely-to-occur future around. And it was even paid for with your tax dollars.

Planting the Stars and Stripes in Future Soil

In a world where shock has repeatedly been the name of the game, where tall towers fall in clouds of toxic ash, investment houses disappear in the blink of an eye, and a black man is the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States, the American intelligence community has been straining to imagine a future without surprises or discontinuities. As its experts summed the matter up in 1997, “Genuine discontinuities — sharp nonevolutionary breaks with the past — are rare, and our focus is on evolutionary change.”

Lucky is the country that didn’t bet its foreign policy on that bit of intelligence wisdom. Of course, in the long decade of hubris, from the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 (something American intelligence neither predicted nor expected) to the moment American troops entered Baghdad in April 2003, it seemed obvious enough in Washington that a generational Pax Americana was settling over the world.

As a result, the futures the IC’s analysts produced back then were remarkable mainly for their inability to imagine what was stirring under the surface of the obvious. As a result, when you visit those futures, you’re not likely to have the urge to throw away your Arthur Clark or Isaac Asimov or Philip Dick or William Gibson classics. But maybe you’ll still be curious, as I was, to know what that “community’s” top minds missed when they peered ahead. Think of it as a window into the limits of our intelligence services when they tried to grasp the real nature of U.S. power by forecasting the future.

What’s strange is that the distant future was once the province of utopian or dystopian thinkers, pulp fiction writers, oddballs, visionaries, even outright nuts, but not government intelligence services. Peering into it was, at its best, a movingly strange individual adventure of the imagination, whether you were reading Edward Bellamy or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin or H.G. Wells, George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. That was, of course, before the Pentagon and allied outfits began planning for the weaponry of 2020, 2035, and 2050; before war turned nuclear and so, with the exception of two cities in 1945, could only be “fought” in think tanks via futuristic scenario writing; before names like Complex 2030, Vision 2020, UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] Roadmap 2030 were regularly affixed to government programs. In fact, the U.S. government has been planting the Stars and Stripes deep in territory previous left to sci-fi dreamers for quite a while.

In the process, regularly analyzing the distant future has become almost as much the duty of the 18 agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community as doing National Intelligence Estimates on Iran. Ever since the 1990s, they have been hard at work preparing committee-made futures that simply won’t happen. To judge by their work, they are a community of seers without sizzle, and yet the next of their fantasy futures, for the distant year 2025, is about to be made public.

Predicting America’s Diminishing Power

Every few years the National Intelligence Council (NIC) is mandated to provide “‘over the horizon’ estimates of broader trends at work in the world.” Just in case you’ve never heard of the NIC, it describes itself as “a center of strategic thinking within the U.S. Government, reporting to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and providing the President and senior policymakers with analyses of foreign policy issues that have been reviewed and coordinated throughout the Intelligence Community.”

Sometime in the 1990s, its analysts embarked on a project, released in 1997, called Global Trends 2010, a best-guesstimate about the nature of our world 13 years hence. In 2000, Global Trends (GT) 2015 came out, followed in 2004 by GT 2020.

As the 2020 project proudly described the process, the IC “consulted experts from around the world in a series of regional conferences to offer a truly global perspective. We organized conferences on five continents to solicit the views of foreign experts…” In other words, no prospective stone was left prospectively unturned to keep top U.S. policymakers up to speed.

Recently, this Washington Post headline caught my eye: “Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for U.S.” As the Post’s Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus noted, the latest of the NIC’s reports, Global Trends 2025, due out this December, was previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, “the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst.” Officially, he’s the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis as well as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The report is already supposedly being briefed to presidential candidates McCain and Obama.

Indeed, talking to the 2008 Intelligence and National Security Alliance Analytic Transformation Conference, Fingar praised the IC for its job restoring “confidence in the product” (a not-so-subtle reference to what the Bush administration did to its reputation back in 2002-2003) and hyped the IC’s “17 years of forecasting and scenario building.” He then previewed the upcoming “product” on the futuristic intelligence block, “intended to shape the thinking of [the] new administration,” and here was his prediction of America’s fate as 2025 approaches:

“[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time… the overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military. But part of the argument here is that by 15 years from now, the military dimension [that] will remain the most preeminent will be the least significant…”

I’d have to guess that NIC members are, at this very moment, doing a little rewriting on this issue as the known world descends around our projected ears. Anyway, just how useful was Fingar’s “news,” even before our financial system plunged into the maw?

Let’s face it, if the Post headline had said: “America [or China, or a clique of petro-states] Predicted to Rule World in 2025″ that might have been news. But if you’ve been paying the slightest attention to your daily paper, Fingar’s speech offered a hint of a future hardly more illuminating than a headline saying, “Water predicted to remain in Indian Ocean in 2025.”

Birthed by the T. Rex of global intelligence combines, his revelation represents, at best, a hen’s egg of knowledge. Admittedly, such a prediction might have taken real insight back in 1997 when the U.S. was riding high, and only a handful of declinist scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein were considering the possibility that American power was not on a path to new heights. But in 2008, did anyone really need costly conferences on five continents to imagine a future in which that power would be in decline, a forecast that is now a commonplace of bestselling book titles and could have been read at websites like this one years ago?

The Future Behind Us

Still, I couldn’t resist zipping back to 1997 and then 2000 just to get a sense of what — when Washington was riding high — the IC thought lay ahead in 2010 and 2015.

Three years after it made its 1997 findings public, the NIC’s analysts saw nothing but signs of the increasing dominance of American power in the global future. Like the new administration of that moment, they were bullish on America, so much so that they even critiqued the NIC’s seers of 1997 as weak-kneed on the U.S.: “The effect of the United States as the preponderant power is introduced in GT 2015. The US role as a global driver has emerged more clearly over the past four years, particularly as many countries debate the impact of ‘US hegemony’ on their domestic and foreign policies.”

While, in 2000, there seemed no serious obstacles to the growth of American power 15 years in the future, poor Russia remained a declinist state which, fortunately, would “continue to lack the resources to impose its will,” and China faced “an array of political, social, and economic pressures that will increasingly challenge the regime’s legitimacy, and perhaps its survival.” And here was yet more splendid news from the NIC’s point of view: “The global economy, overall, will return to the high levels of growth reached in the 1960s and early 1970s.” Even better, “[i]nternational cooperation will continue to increase through 2015.” (Evidently, they forgot to brief top Bush administration officials on that particular prediction!)

Despite some discussion of non-state actors, loose nukes, and a potential “trend toward greater lethality in terrorist attacks” — after all, two American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole had by then been devastated — the IC saw no global wars on terror ahead. Terrorism was an outlier in a heady world of “globalization” that, in 2015, was remarkably sunny-side up when it came to us.

As with any document by committee, many of the report’s reigning predictions were carefully qualified elsewhere in the document, a familiar kind of cover-your-butt-ism in which you bravely predict the obvious — and (just in case) its opposite. The exuberant U.S. economy, to take a typical example, was also described as “vulnerable to a loss of international confidence in its growth prospects that could lead to a sharp downturn, which, if long lasting, would have deleterious economic and policy consequences for the rest of the world.” There was even an appendix (”Four Alternative Global Futures”) that offered modest scenarios in which U.S. power might “wane” somewhat, but here was the IC’s money paragraph for 2015:

“Experts agree that the United States, with its decisive edge in both information and weapons technology, will remain the dominant military power during the next 15 years. Further bolstering the strong position of the United States are its unparalleled economic power, its university system, and its investment in research and development — half of the total spent annually by the advanced industrial world. Many potential adversaries, as reflected in doctrinal writings and statements, see US military concepts, together with technology, as giving the United States the ability to expand its lead in conventional warfighting capabilities.”

Sigh… In the future that’s now behind us, we know just where that sort of thinking led.

By 2004, of course, things were beginning to go sour in Bushworld, and so the 2020 study had a somewhat more dystopian edge to it. (It could pose the question, “U.S. Unipolarity – How Long Can It Last?” even if the answer was: a long time.) And finally, this December, it seems, the “waning” of U.S. power will make it, just a tad late, out of the appendices and into the bloodstream of the future.

Handmaidens of Delusion

What’s undeniably fascinating about these futuristic exercises is the degree to which they reflect the limits of the world of the present as seen from Washington; they reflect, that is, just what Washington has been (and largely still remains) incapable of grasping about the nature of power — and danger — on this planet. In this way, the IC’s analysts remained handmaidens to delusion, not just when it came to foreign powers, but when it came to our own country. The Global Trends reports will remain significant documents for future historians who want to chart just how glacially slow was Washington’s realization that the collapse of Soviet power didn’t actually mean American power was destined to be transcendent on Earth.

In its predictions, it’s clear that the IC had little better luck getting its agents embedded in the future than it did getting them inside al-Qaeda or into Iran. Not surprisingly, given what we know about the bureaucratic morass that is American intelligence, the GT reports have all the faults of intelligence by committee and negotiation — which is why H.G. Wells, Arthur Clark, Isaac Asimov, George Orwell, and others, who caught something of the strangeness of possible futures, would never have had a chance in hell of succeeding in careers in the IC. Wells’s Martians with their poison gas and flying machines, Orwell’s Big Brother with his “memory hole,” and Huxley’s “feelies” would have been left on the negotiating room floor. Far too quirky. Far too many “discontinuities” involved for the IC.

Better to forecast what the people you brief already believe, raised to the highest predictive power and squared, and skip the oddballs with their strange hunches, the sorts who might actually have a knack for recognizing the shock of the future lurking in the present. Don’t pay any mind, for that matter, to FBI agents reporting the truly strange in the present — like, say, “a 33-year-old French citizen of Moroccan descent” at a flight school who wants to learn how to fly a commercial jet, but not how it takes off or lands.

What the Global Trends documents represent, then, is not a deep dive into the mysteries of the future, but a series of belly flops by an unbearably obese IC into a barely grasped present. Let 18 intelligence outfits proliferate and one thing is guaranteed: in some future, maybe even tomorrow, no matter how powerful you are, you won’t know what hit you.

If I were the next president, I might prefer to skip the IC, spend a few nights with a little science fiction, peer into the darkness, muster some commonsense, and take a wild guess or two.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has recently been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn’t covered, it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note on Readings: The Global Trends reports are all on line. You can read them by clicking here: Global Trends 2010, Global Trends 2015, Global Trends 2020. You can read both of Thomas Fingar's recent speeches by clicking here (pdf file -- and fair warning, despite his billing as the "top analyst" in the U.S. Intelligence Community, they are almost unbearably banal, soporific, and remarkably incoherent). Finally, I wrote about Global Trends 2020 when it came out in 2004. For any of you who might find that of interest, click here.]

Have Your Say: Spying on the Future: The U.S. Intelligence Community as Seers Without Sizzle
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Bush To Provide $6.4 Billion In Arms To Taiwan

Monday, October 6th, 2008

BigNewsNetwork | The U.S. government is to sell $6.4 billion of weapons to Taiwan, the State Department announced on Friday.

State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood said Congressional approval was required, but believes this will come quickly. A submission went to Congress on Friday afternoon.

The sales involve a range of U.S.-made weapons systems, including Patriot III anti-missile missiles, Apache attack helicopters, Harpoon missiles, and Javelin anti-tank missiles.

The State Department has sponsored the sale through its appointment earlier this year of former Under-Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz to the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board. Wolfowitz is also Chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council, which includes a number of U.S. military contractors as members.

Wood said the deal had been in the works for ‘a few months.’ He said the decision, ‘is consistent with U.S. policy of providing arms for defense of Taiwan and consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act.’

‘This arms deal is a key factor in bringing security and stability across the Taiwan Strait,’ he added. The deal also provides Taiwan upgrades for it’s E-2T aircraft, and spare parts for its air force.

The Bush administration appeared keen to get the sales approved prior to the end of the Bush presidency. Many analysts were surprised at the rush, and the lack of debate. The sales are likely to strain relations with China. Wood however said China had been ‘briefed’ on the negotiations.

In an editorial published Saturday the Taipei Times said, ‘The reasons for the reversal are unclear at this time, though pressure had been building on the State Department over the status of the arms for an extensive period — pressure from Taiwan lobbyists in the Congress, from military sources, from Paul Wolfowitz in his capacity as chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council and as a foreign policy hawk and, ironically enough, from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government after years of blocking the deal in opposition.’

‘In recent months it became clearer that moves were under way behind the scenes to get this problem fixed before US President George W. Bush ends his presidency,’ the Taipei Times editorial said. ‘Wolfowitz, for one, was oddly optimistic in a speech in Taipei in July, linking passage of the deal to Bush’s personal honor. Wolfowitz might have known something that most others did not; even think-tank identities with extensive connections in the US political and military spheres had grown awfully pessimistic as time wore on,’ the Taiwanese newspaper editorial said.

Have Your Say: Bush To Provide $6.4 Billion In Arms To Taiwan
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Government spies could scan every call, text and email

Monday, October 6th, 2008

Ministers are considering a £12 billion plan to monitor the e-mail, telephone and internet browsing records of every person in Britain.

By Nick Allen | The huge eavesdropping programme would involve the creation of a mammoth central computer database to store hundreds of billions of individual pieces of communications traffic.

Supporters say it would become one of the security services’ most comprehensive tools in the fight against terrorism but critics described it as “sinister”.

MI5 currently has to apply to the Home Secretary for warrants to intercept specific email and website traffic but, under the new plan, internet and mobile phone networks could be monitored live by GCHQ, the Government listening post.

The Home Office said no decision had been taken but security officials claim live monitoring is necessary to pick up terrorist plots.

It would allow them to capture records like chat room discussions on password-protected Islamic extremist websites.

The annual number of phone calls and other electronic communications in the UK is predicted to nearly double from 230 billion in 2006 to 450 billion by 2016.

Last year 57 billion text messages, or 1,800 a second, were sent. That rose from one billion in 1999.

The number of broadband internet connections rose from 330,000 in 2001 to 18 million last year. Three billion e-mails are sent every day, or 35,000 every second.

One of the spurs for a central database is a concern over how that electronic communications data is currently stored by hundreds of different internet service providers and private telephone companies.

Records may only be held for limited periods of time and are then lost which makes it impossible for police and the security services to establishing historical links, or so-called “friendship trees”, between terrorists.

If all communications information was centrally stored then links could be made between terrorist cells and other sympathisers could be identified.

The telephone and internet companies are currently required to give records of calls or internet use to law enforcement agencies if a senior officer authorises that it is needed for an inquiry.

Last year there were more than half a million such requests.

The cost of monitoring everything, and keeping it on a central database, has been estimated at £12 billion and would dwarf the proposed cost of the identity cards programme.

Critics also claim it would be virtually impossible to keep such a vast system secure and free from abuse by law enforcement agencies.

Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said: “It would mark a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals.

“Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data, and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need.”

The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has already called for a public debate about Government proposals for the state to retain people’s internet and phone records.

A spokesman for the commissioner said: “He warned that it is likely that such a scheme would be a step too far for the British way of life. Proposals that threaten such intrusion into people’s lives must be properly debated.”

Richard Clayton, a security expert at Cambridge University, said the proposal would mean installing thousands of probes in telephone and computer networks which would re-route data to the central database.

Have Your Say: Government spies could scan every call, text and email
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

42-day detention dropped as unworkable

Monday, October 6th, 2008

Sean O’Neill | Gordon Brown is preparing for a humiliating climbdown over his proposal to hold terrorist suspects for 42 days after being told that it will be defeated in the House of Lords.

Ministers admit privately that there is not “a cat in Hell’s chance” of the legislation, which returns to the Lords this week, being passed into law.

The Government has decided against using the Parliament Act to force the measure through after peers reject it, The Times has learnt. That decision will effectively confine the controversial proposal — which the Prime Minister fought tooth and nail to get through a Commons vote in June — to the legislative dustbin.

The Terrorism Act 2006 increased the pre-charge detention limit from 14 to 28 days. The imminent abandonment of the proposal to extend this further to 42 days comes after mounting criticism from senior figures in the fight against terrorism.

Writing in The Times today, the former police chief who was in charge of anti-terrorism operations across Britain described the proposed mechanism for triggering the emergency detention power as “not fit for purpose”.

Andy Hayman, former Assistant Commissioner for Special Operations at Scotland Yard, gave the clearest signal yet that police chiefs are unhappy with the proposals before Parliament.

Mr Hayman said that concessions made to secure the Counter-Terrorism Bill’s passage through the Commons had created a scheme that was “bureaucratic, convoluted and unworkable”. He added: “The draftsman’s pen has introduced so many hoops to be jumped through that a police case for detaining a terror suspect will become part of the political game.

“It would have been my job to make these proposals work, but just trying to understand them gives me a headache.”

Mr Hayman’s intervention in the debate is significant. He was the first police officer informed by the Prime Minister in July last year of his plan to seek extra detention powers.

He says he was astonished that Mr Brown was revising the proposal after Tony Blair’s bruising defeat in 2005 when he tried to give the police the power to hold suspects for longer.

Mr Hayman adds: “I remain curious as to what prompted this rethink.”

He focused his concerns on the complexity of the system being proposed, which would require the involvement of a judge, the Director of Public Prosecutions and an independent lawyer before extended detention could be authorised. That would be followed by a parliamentary debate on whether there was a sufficiently grave emergency to justify the use of the 42-day power.

But he said that his opposition to the proposals did not change his view that the police would soon require extended detention powers.

Mr Hayman added: “As someone who has been deeply involved in every major counter-terrorism investigation since 2005, I am convinced that we will soon need the power to hold suspects for more than the current limit of 28 days — and that we need to legislate for that power now rather than in the middle of an emergency.”

The former officer joins other respected voices from the counter-terrorism world in openly criticising the Government’s 42-day plan.

Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, used her maiden speech in the Lords in July to attack the measure.

She said: “In deciding what I believe on these matters, I have weighed up the balance between the right to life, the most important civil liberty, the fact that there is no such thing as complete security and the importance of our hard-won civil liberties. And therefore on a matter of principle, I cannot support the 42-days pre-charge detention in this Bill.”

She went on to express similar concerns to those that have been voiced by Mr Hayman: “I don’t see on a practical basis, as well as a principled one, that these proposals are in any way workable.”

Sir Ken Macdonald, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has stated his view that there is no need to extend detention powers beyond the present limit. “In our experience, the 28-day limit works well,” Sir Ken told The Times in April this year.

Aides to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, denied reports that he would try to block the appointment of a supporter of 42 days as the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

Have Your Say: 42-day detention dropped as unworkable
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Govt. Uses Contractors to Probe Iraq Contractors

Monday, October 6th, 2008

In an apparent violation of federal regulations, the State Department has outsourced to private contractors the responsibility to investigate possible crimes committed by security contractors in Iraq.

Earlier this year, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security hired the private firm U.S. Investigations Services (USIS) to fill positions in the newly created Force Investigation Unit (FIU) that investigates potential misuses of force against civilians by U.S. security contractors. The contract investigators have been in Iraq since this summer.

The FIU was created in the wake of last year’s deadly shooting in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square, when 17 Iraqi civilians allegedly were killed by security personnel employed by Blackwater Worldwide who were guarding a State Department convoy. The case sparked widespread outrage and prompted calls for greater oversight of security contractors in Iraq.

According to a contract obtained by ABC News, the company was hired to supplement Diplomatic Security personnel. However, the eight USIS contractors hired for the team represent the majority of the full-time team, an apparent violation of federal regulations that prohibit such work by contractors.

According to Federal Acquisition Regulation part 7.5, it is not permissible to hire contractors for jobs “considered to be inherently governmental functions” including “the direct conduct of criminal investigations.”

The State Department did not respond to a list of questions submitted seeking comment, including the status of the contract and whether such a contract might possibly be illegal.

“We received a contract [and] we’ve staffed it,” USIS spokesman Michael John said. “Since it’s a contract with the Department of State, we serve at the Department of State’s request.

“If it’s determined that we can’t hold a contract, we obviously won’t be doing work on that contract,” he added.

After the Nisoor Square shooting, much of the forensic evidence was cleaned up before an investigation could take place, making it difficult to build a case against any individuals who might have been accused of wrongdoing.

Cont.. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Story?id=5951683&page=2

Have Your Say: Govt. Uses Contractors to Probe Iraq Contractors
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

The establishment that destroyed America’s first republic

Monday, October 6th, 2008

By Sam Smith | Of George Bush’s many sins, one has remained unnoted. He and his aides are so absurdly inept at most of what they do that they have diverted attention from the fact that America’s collapse began well before Bush came into office and has continued under his command with considerable aid and comfort from the most respected, celebrated well paid subcultures of our society. In the end, Bush is but a painful caricature of a much deeper reality, part of which is that if we had not already been in a state of cultural, political and intellectual disintegration, he never would have been elected in the first place.

Just one year into Bush’s regime, I spoke at a punk concert and offered some thirty examples of civil liberties that had eroded during the life of anyone only 25 years of age. I also noted that the earnings of everyone under 25 - black, white, latino, male and female - had declined over the past twenty years, about 5% for the most part - with the earnings of black and white males under 25 down 17 to 21%. A typical young white male was earning $97 less a week in real dollars than two decades earlier. And this was all before Bush got his hands on the country.

It has become easy and fun to blame it all on Bush - and certainly he has contributed more than his share to the nation’s problems - but as we may discover when he leaves, he has had plenty of predecessors as well as many accomplices who will remain in power.

A fair judgment would be that America began falling apart about twenty years before Bush took office. The man in charge at the time was Ronald Reagan, who took two centuries of American history and turned it into a corny cowboy movie that he could understand but had little relationship to reality. Yet, like Bush, he could not have done it alone. The purported best and brightest told us it was true.

And they have yet to tell us the truth about the Reagan years that spawned the deadly philosophy that greed is good, nothing big needs to be regulated and the market will save us all.

It is useful - if a bit tardy - to review the Reagan facts rather than the legend, for it shows how the most mundanely accurate analysis might have led us in a different direction. For example, a study published in the Congressional Record in March 1984 looked at the first three years of the Regan administration and compared to the three that preceded it. The study found

- Real GNP growth down 59%
- Industrial production down 97%
- Housing starts down 27%
- Domestic auto sales down 26%
- Business failures up 189%
- Civilian unemployment up 389%
- Real disposable income down 32%
- Prime rate up 35%
- Federal budget deficit up 215%
- Farm income down 326%

Also during the Reagan years:

- Four members of the Reagan cabinet came under criminal investigation

- The Reagan administration had secret plans for an unconstitutional takeover of the federal government under an ill-defined national emergency. Members of the government created by the coup were selected and included Richard Cheney.

- Reagan’s policies led to the greatest financial scandal in American history up to that point: the Savings & Loan debacle which cost taxpayers billions of dollars. “”

- Reagan made major cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, aid to families with dependent children, and school lunch programs. Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers in a devastating blow to government union members from which the labor movement never recovered.

- “”The AIDS crisis exploded (with 20,000 deaths) before Reagan could even bring himself to address the issue six years later. In his authorized biography he is quoted as saying that “maybe the Lord brought down this plague,” because “illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.”

- Reported the Washington Post: “The administration in 1984 secretly sold arms to Iran — which the United States considered a supporter of terrorism — to raise cash for Nicaraguan contra rebels, despite a congressional ban on support for the Latin American insurgency. An independent investigation concluded that the arms sales to Iran operations “were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan [and] Vice President George Bush,” and that “large volumes of highly relevant, contemporaneously created documents were systematically and willfully withheld from investigators by several Reagan Administration officials.”

- “”"”"”After a major tax cut, there was a long recession and unemployment that hit ten percent.

This was the foundation upon which the present disaster has been built - policy drawing upon fantasy, theological rigidity, fiscal myth and a faith in “free markets” actually created by hidden subsidies, thousands of lobbyists, runaway Pentagon purchases and manipulation of the law to favor banks and corporations rather than ordinary Americans.

By the time the truth was too painful to ignore - nearly three decades later - the myth had recruited major media from Fox and the Wall Street Journal to NPR and the Washington Post. It had been given the blessing of innumerable academics who developed complex justifications for primitive, simplistic and false assumptions. And even Democrats - from Clinton to Obama - paid regular homage to economic principles whose only true beneficiaries were the very few at the very top.

It became the core ideology of an American establishment that would turn out to be the worst and the dumbest. As Harold Meyerson pointed out recently, even the robber barons of the 19th century used European capital to build American industry such as railroads and steel. The contemporary establishment has taken American assets and turned them into a massive liability.

Yet a Rasmussen poll taken after the start of the Bush financial crash found that 59% of voters still agreed with Reagan’s inaugural declaration that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Even 49% of Democrats agree with only 34% demurring.

This is not Karl Rove’s fault. This is the result of nearly three decades of indoctrination in anti-social, anti-democratic and economically fallacious absurdities by almost every major instructional institution in the country including Harvard, and the PBS News Hour. Listening to the post crash coverage I heard words I had not found in the media for years, words like FDR, New Deal, government intervention and Keynes. Where had these phrases been all this time? Why was it only now respectable to mention Franklin Roosevelt again?

And why has the media and academia given so much encouragement to the myth of free markets while ignoring real things that have gotten worse since Reagan took office? Things like:

- Minimum wage as % of average wage
- Real income
- Real income bottom 60% of Americans
- Bottom 99% share of total income
- Income gap between rich and poor
- Workers pay as a percent of CEO pay
- Older families covered by pensions
- Workers covered by defined benefit pensions
- Annual personal savings rate of families
- Elder bankruptcies
- Housing foreclosures
- Child poverty rate
- Severe poverty rate
- Percent of Americans employed
- Pensions that include health care benefits
- Number of families without health insurance
- Number of public hospitals
- Number of corporations controlling most media
- Student loan debt
- Increase in wealth of wealthiest ten senators (up 13 times)
- Percent of workforce unionized

Four years before the Bush crash, Michelle Singletary wrote in the Washington Post:

“Authors Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi conclude that earning two incomes doesn’t guarantee financial security: In the past 25 years, the number of families in bankruptcy has increased 400 percent, and housing foreclosures are up 350 percent.”

You can find these stories if you look hard enough; what you can’t find is these stories being told in more than one or two places at a time during which those in the worst and dumbest establishment continued to peddle the wonders of the free market.

The self-defined best minds of our society have engaged in an act of such reckless negligence that it would have produced a criminal indictment if they had been behind the wheel of a car. But because they were only driving the politics and economy of a few hundred million citizens, they get to keep their jobs, their op ed pieces and their preferred place in society.

In the 1960s, a large number of Americans declined to permit such a fraud to continue, choosing instead to not only rebel against those who had done the damage but to remove their podiums, undermine their status, knock down their pedestals, discredit their reputations and hold them in ridicule.

And for awhile America gained breathing room to make things better; for a while we could dream, smile and get things done.

But it’s far more than just a matter of rounding up the usual suspects. If we settle for justice against Paulsen and Bush, for example, then we’ll be no better off than we were in Iraq after getting rid of Saddam.

For any rebellion to succeed, for America to rebuild itself, it must shatter the immunity of the status quo in all its vicious dimensions. We have three decades of false teaching, journalistic myth and political corruption to disassemble. And we need something to take its place just as the civil rights movement needed freedom schools to replace generations of lies about blacks and whites.

America has been deceived, defrauded and defeated by the worst and the dumbest. The first step in recovery is to let them know in every way that the party’s over.