t r u t h o u t - Abramoff Inquiry Extends to DOJ: "Washington - The ranking Democrats on three House committees called Thursday for an outside investigator to determine why a prosecutor in Guam was demoted in 2002 after opening a criminal investigation of Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist now at the center of a federal corruption investigation.

    

The Democrats said in a letter to the Justice Department that an outside investigator was needed to determine if the prosecutor, Frederick A. Black, the acting United States attorney on Guam, was demoted as a result of 'political manipulation of Justice Department officials' by Mr. Abramoff, a major Republican fund-raiser.

    

Colleagues said Mr. Black's reassignment in November 2002 resulted in the collapse of the investigation in Guam, where Mr. Abramoff had a lucrative lobbying practice. Law-enforcement officials have confirmed that the Justice Department's inspector general, the department's independent watchdog, opened an investigation in recent weeks into the circumstances of Mr. Black's demotion."

(Via t r u t h o u t.)

The Counterterrorism Blog: Zawahiri Letter Shows Iraq's Importance to al-Qaeda's Jihad: "First, the letter shows the al-Qaeda leadership's increasing sensitivity to public opinion.  Zawahiri writes of the importance of popular support for al-Qaeda, and rebukes Zawahiri for the Iraq insurgency's 'brutal tactics -- noting that hostages can just as effectively be killed with bullets rather than by beheading.'  I've written before (most recently in the Weekly Standard) of al-Qaeda's increased efforts to tailor their message to appeasement-minded Westerners.  Apparently, Zawahiri has also given some thought to how he can bolster al-Qaeda's image in the Muslim world.

Second, the letter shows Iraq's current importance to al-Qaeda's jihad.  Officials have said that Zawahiri's letter outlines al-Qaeda's four stage plan..."

(Via The Counterterrorism Blog.)

Rove's nightmare: " To understand why Karl Rove is believed to be in grave danger of indictment for his role in the Wilson leaks, let's return to the earliest days of the investigation. If Rove is found criminally liable for lying, then the falsehoods that led to his downfall may well have been uttered during the weeks when his old friend and client John Ashcroft was still in charge of the leaks probe -- and before the case was turned over to the special counsel, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

During the autumn of 2003, after repeated requests from the CIA, Ashcroft finally exercised his duty as attorney general to investigate the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity by administration officials to various journalists. Although the CIA first notified the Justice Department as early as July 30 of a potentially serious crime -- namely, a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- Justice didn't open an investigation until the end of September, after the CIA informed the department that it had completed its own review of the facts.

For three months, until Ashcroft decided to recuse himself, the investigation remained under his control, despite the well-founded suspicions of Rove's involvement. Ashcroft willfully ignored his own inherent conflict in overseeing a case that might lead to an indictment of Rove, who had assisted his political campaigns in Missouri and had directed the process that led to his appointment as attorney general. Only after repeated protests from Democrats in Congress, strong editorial comment on the unseemliness of Ashcroft's conduct, and polls showing public demand for an independent counsel did he finally recuse himself from the Wilson matter."

(Via Salon.)

Schneier on Security: Automatic License Plate Scanners: "Like the license-plate scanners, the electronic footprints we leave everywhere can be automatically correlated with databases. The data can be stored forever, allowing police to conduct surveillance backwards in time.

The effects of wholesale surveillance on privacy and civil liberties is profound; but unfortunately, the debate often gets mischaracterized as a question about how much privacy we need to give up in order to be secure. This is wrong. It's obvious that we are all safer when the police can use all techniques at their disposal. What we need are corresponding mechanisms to prevent abuse, and that don't place an unreasonable burden on the innocent.

Throughout our nation's history, we have maintained a balance between the necessary interests of police and the civil rights of the people. The license plate itself is such a balance. Imagine the debate from the early 1900s: The police proposed affixing a plaque to every car with the car owner's name, so they could better track cars used in crimes. Civil libertarians objected because that would reduce the privacy of every car owner. So a compromise was reached: a random string of letter and numbers that the police could use to determine the car owner. By deliberately designing a more cumbersome system, the needs of law enforcement and the public's right to privacy were balanced.

The search warrant process, as prescribed in the Fourth Amendment, is another balancing method. So is the minimization requirement for telephone eavesdropping: the police must stop listening to a phone line if the suspect under investigation is not talking."

(Via Schneier on Security.)

Religious Right Hate Speech - Nazi Propaganda vs. Religious Right Anti-gay Rhetoric: "NAZI ANTI-JEWISH SPEECH VS. RELIGIOUS RIGHT ANTI-GAY SPEECH: Are They Similar?"

An organized look at homophobic claims out of the religious right and the Nazi Film "The Eternal Jew"

    

Jews Control Everything	Gays Control Everything
Jews Are Richer, More Educated	Gays Are Richer, More Educated
Jews Are Diseased	Gays Are Diseased
Jews Are Criminals	Gays Are Criminals
Jews Spread Like a "Tide"	Homosexuality Is Part of a Tide

AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth: "O'Donnell explains the role of the 'target letter' in a prosecutor's strategy. Basically, it's a pre-indictment strategy to turn someone. Then, he makes a prediction:

[A]t least three high level Bush Administration personnel indicted and possibly one or more very high level unindicted co-conspirators.

Think about that. How high is 'very high level,' especially when it's contrasted with 'high level?' High level would seem to be Rove or Libby, since they've been the subject of debate all along. But 'very high level'? That sounds like it's getting to a cabinet level or even a Cheney."

(Via AMERICAblog.)

Salon.com | Fall of the Rovean empire?: "The idea was pure and simple: centralization of power in the hands of the Republican Party would ensure that it never lost it again. Under George W. Bush, this new system reached its apotheosis. It is a radically novel social, political and economic formation that deserves study alongside capitalism and socialism. Neither Adam Smith nor Vladimir Lenin captures its essence, though it has far more elements of Leninist democratic-centralism than Smithian free markets. Some have referred to this model as crony capitalism; others compare the waste, extravagance and greed to the Gilded Age. Call it 21st century Republicanism.

At its heart the system is plagued by corruption, an often unpleasant peripheral expense that greases its wheels. But now multiple scandals engulfing Republicans -- from suspended House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff to White House political overlord Karl Rove -- threaten to upend the system. Because it is organized by politics it can be undone by politics. Politics has been the greatest strength of Republicanism, but it has become its greatest vulnerability."

(Via Salon.)

ArmsControlWonk | an arms control weblog: Roston: J-Bolt Screwed Iraqi Scientists: "Michael Roston adds to the list of reasons that John Bolton was a lousy Undersecretary of State—apparently he held up efforts to secure Iraqi scientists after Operation Iraqi Freedom..."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)

AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth: "I just talked to a source who told me that Karl Rove has been missing from a number of recent White House presidential events - events that he has ALWAYS attended in the past. For example, Rove was absent from yesterday's presidential press conference to promote Harriet Miers. These are the kind of events Rove ALWAYS attends, I'm told, yet of late he's been MIA each and every time.

My source tells me that the scuttlebutt around town is that the White House knows something bad is coming, in terms of Karl getting indicted, and they're already trying to distance him from the president."

(Via AMERICAblog.)

t r u t h o u t - Jesse Jackson | Eased Out of the Big Easy: "After his administration's incompetence and indifference had lethal consequences in Katrina's wake, President Bush has been scrambling to regain his footing. He's called for an 'unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis.' In religious services at the National Cathedral, he called on America to 'erase this legacy of racism' exposed by those abandoned in Katrina's wake. He's called on Congress to appropriate more than $60 billion in emergency relief and outlined a recovery program likely to cost up to $200 billion, or nearly as much as the Iraq War.

    

All this has led the press to compare his plans to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Don't fall for it. A close look at the Bush plan reveals that this is a bad deal from a deck stacked against the poor who suffered the most in Katrina's wake.

    

The first clue came from Bush's first act. He issued orders erasing the prevailing wage for work on rebuilding the Gulf, and his administration gave Halliburton a lucrative no-bid contract to begin the work. Then he designated Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana an enterprise zone, and, using emergency authority, waived all worker protections in the region - protections for equal employment, for minority contractors, for health and safety, for environmental protection.

    

We're learning that when Bush promised to remove the legacy of racism in New Orleans, he meant he'd remove the poor who were victims of that racism. Bush's secretary for Housing and Urban Development, Alphonso Jackson, revealed that to the Houston Chronicle."

(Via t r u t h o u t.)

Matthew Shepard Online Resources - Religious Right Hate Speech - Nazi Propaganda vs. Religious Right Anti-gay Rhetoric: "Welcome: Der ewige Jude ('The Eternal Jew') is often considered the most famous Nazi propaganda film. It was produced at the insistence of Joseph Goebbels, and depicts the Jews of Poland as corrupt, filthy, lazy, ugly, and perverse: they are an alien people who are taking over the world.

Fast forward to the 1990s.  United States Senator Paul Wellstone, himself Jewish, publicly took a religious right spokesman to task a few years back for anti-gay rhetoric that Wellstone felt was 'precisely the argument' the Nazis used to justify the Holocaust.

 

In an effort to see if Senator Wellstone is right - are fundamentalist Christians using anti-gay arguments that echo back to the Nazi era? - this page compares quotes from 'The Eternal Jew' with Christian conservatives' modern-day quotes about gay Americans.

Examine the quotes, and decide for yourself."

(Via Salon.)

Salon.com - War Room: "While everyone else is reading tea leaves about Harriet Miers, a woman named Lorlee Bartos says she doesn't have to. Bartos ran Miers' first and only political campaign back in 1989, and she tells the Dalls Morning News [sic] that she knows firsthand about Miers' political views.

'She is on the extreme end of the anti-choice movement,' Bartos says of her former client. 'I think Harriet's belief was pretty strongly felt. I suspect she is of the same cloth as the president.'"

(Via Salon.)

CBS News | Ike Was Right About War Machine | October 3, 2005 15:00:02: "I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States — our United States — is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into.

We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

Now we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China.

Another way the government is planning to pay for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like Medicare prescriptions, highway construction, farm payments, AMTRAK, National Public Radio and loans to graduate students. Do these sound like the things you'd like to cut back on to pay for Iraq? "

(Via Martini Republic.)

Grand Jury Indicts DeLay on New Charge - Yahoo! News: "A Texas grand jury on Monday re-indicted Rep. Tom DeLay on charges of conspiring to launder money and money laundering after the former majority leader attacked last week's indictment on technical grounds.

The new indictment, handed up by a grand jury seated Monday, contains two counts: conspiring to launder money and money laundering. The latter charge carries a penalty of up to life in prison. Last week, DeLay was charged with conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws.

Defense lawyers asked a judge Monday to throw out the first indictment, arguing that the charge of conspiring to violate campaign finance laws was based on a statute that didn't take effect until 2003 — a year after the alleged acts.

The new indictment from District Attorney Ronnie Earle, coming just hours after the new grand jurors were sworn in, outraged DeLay."

(Via Martini Republic.)

Will Prince Waleed Change Fox's Terrorism Coverage?: "Frank Gaffney has an article in yesterday's Front Page Magazine analyzing the possible effect of Prince Waleed bin Talal's new voting stake in the News Corporation, which owns the Fox News Network.  Following a challenge to Rupert Murdoch's control of NewsCorp, Prince Waleed stepped in, shifting his NewsCorp stock from non-voting to voting shares and increasing his stake from 3% to 5.46%.  Since 9/11, Fox has been an important critic of Islamic radicalism, and has broadcast a number of hard-hitting stories exposing Saudi Arabia's pernicious Wahhabi indoctrination.  Gaffney asks a vital question:  Will Prince Waleed's share in NewsCorp change Fox's coverage of the war on terror?"

(Via The Counterterrorism Blog.)

You have to see this to believe it. I'm still not sure. But wow

(Via Martini Republic.)