I don’t know about you, but I think American children who need medical care should get it, period. Even if you think adults have made bad choices — a baseless smear in the case of the Frosts, but put that on one side — only a truly vicious political movement would respond by punishing their injured children.

Al Qaeda's Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden's September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy's system.
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The founder of a Web site known as clandestineradio.com, Nick Grace, tracked the shutdown of Qaeda's Obelisk system in real time. "It was both unprecedented and chilling from the perspective of a Web techie. The discipline and coordination to take the entire system down involving multiple Web servers, hundreds of user names and passwords, is an astounding feat, especially that it was done within minutes," Mr. Grace said yesterday.

The head of the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors Jihadi Web sites and provides information to subscribers, Rita Katz, said she personally provided the video on September 7 to the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter.

By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.

The NSA has undoubtedly already started checking communications to track down all of the new activity, and there may be greater vulnerability for AQ during its launch. It could be that the US wanted to rattle AQ and get them to dismantle their systems, and leaked the Osama tape to both embarrass them and to get them to panic and leave a big trail. It could have been an attempt to force AQ into a mole hunt, a technique both sides used in the Cold War.

but admits: Or it could just have been stunning incompetence. More will undoubtedly be forthcoming on this story, and we'll need more details to really know what happened.

You see the Supreme Court has held that conduct that shocks the conscience is unconstitutional…. But what happens if you have no conscience? You got it… according to Bradbury waterboarding, freezing temperatures, beatings, etc didn’t shock his conscience so therefore the supreme court would find it constitutional. Did I say that he was the smarter version of Gonzales?

The generic Demoplan, which basically follows the template laid down by John Edwards, involves four moving pieces: community rating, requiring that insurance companies offer insurance to everyone at the same rate regardless of medical history; a mandate, requiring that everyone have insurance; subsidies to help lower-income people pay for insurance; and public-private competition, in which people have the option of buying into a plan run by the government.
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there are very good political reasons for going with the Demoplan: basically, it looks like something that could actually happen early in the next administration, while enacting a single-payer plan like the Conyers plan or the PNHP plan, excellent though those plans are, might take a very long time.

10.7.07 Iraq Embassy Cost Rises $144 Million Amid Project Delays By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Staff Writer

The massive U.S. embassy under construction in Baghdad could cost $144 million more than projected and will open months behind schedule because of poor planning, shoddy workmanship, internal disputes and last-minute changes sought by State Department officials, according to U.S. officials and a department document provided to Congress.
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The new facility is also intended to provide diplomats with housing that is better protected to withstand mortar and rocket attacks.

It's useful to watch Mr. Thomas at this moment, 16 years after his riveting confirmation circus. He is a barometer of what has and has not changed since then because he hasn't changed at all. He still preaches against black self-pity even as he hyperbolically tries to cast his Senate cross-examination by Joe Biden as tantamount to the Ku Klux Klan assassination of Medgar Evers. He still denies that he is the beneficiary of the very race-based preferences he deplores. He still has a dubious relationship with the whole truth and nothing but, and not merely in the matter of Anita Hill.
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The free pass CBS gave Mr. Thomas wouldn't matter were he just another celebrity "get" hawking a book. Unfortunately, there's the little matter of all that public policy he can shape — more so than ever now that John Roberts and Samuel Alito have joined him as colleagues. Indeed, Justice Thomas, elevated by Bush 41, was the crucial building block in what will probably prove the most enduring legacy of Bush 43, a radical Supreme Court. The "compassionate conservative" who turned the 2000 G.O.P. convention into a minstrel show to prove his love of diversity will exit the political stage as the man who tilted American jurisprudence against Brown v. Board of Education. He leaves no black Republican behind him in either the House or Senate.

and see I Did Do It Maureen does Clarence Thomas

Klein: Right. If we look at who the real intellectual engines of this war are, we'd see a web of people who are not simply the statesmen they appear to me but card-carrying members of the disaster capitalism complex -- shareholders, board-members and directors of companies that profit directly and enormously from war and other disasters --

Cusack: Who would these people be..?
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The effect has been to eliminate the so-called revolving door between government and industry and allow the disaster industries to simply set up shop inside the government, using the reputations of these supposedly illustrious ex-politicians as cover.
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Cusack: So you're saying that the Shultzes and the Perles and the Kissingers and the Jim Bakers of the world are embedded in the homeland security/privatized war economy?

Klein: More than embedded. I mean, they are it.

The State Department enabled the Blackwater shooter to be spirited out of the country within 36 hours, and although Blackwater subsequently fired him, he has never faced any criminal charges. Nor have any of the others involved in the 195 shooting incidents Blackwater officials admitted have occurred in the past two years, incidents in which 84 percent of the time Blackwater contractors fired first. According to Blackwater's own documents, the congressional committee reports, "in the vast majority of incidents ... Blackwater shots are fired from a moving vehicle and Blackwater does not remain on the scene to determine if their shots resulted in casualties." During one trip U.S. diplomats made to the Ministry of Oil, 18 different Iraqi civilian vehicles were smashed by the fast-moving motorcade. Those hit-and-runs were conducted in full view of the escorted State Department officials without any of them forcing a subsequent investigation.

Despite all the nonsense about a "liberated Iraq," one of President Bush's favorite phrases, the Iraqis still lack the authority to prosecute American mercenaries occupying their country because of a law pushed through by then-U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer, who was also guarded by Blackwater personnel. Bremer awarded the original no-bid contract to Blackwater, run by a major Republican campaign contributor, Erik Prince, who has donated $225,000 to the GOP. Prince's sister Betsy DeVos was Michigan's Republican Party chair and a Bush-Cheney "Pioneer" who came through with at least $100,000 for their 2004 campaign

Blackwater, with its $1 billion in government receipts from 2001 to 2006, is the tip of an immense iceberg.

Where was Admiral McConnell in that decade of maxi-privatization?

He was senior vice-president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a private security firm conveniently located near Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA. With an army-for-hire of some 10,000 operatives, it is in the vanguard of contractors that achieved unprecedented power (and profit) as sensitive national objectives were farmed out for cash.

More important, McConnell was also chairman of the board at the 1,500-member Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), an industry association that is the primary voice of private security and intelligence firms in Washington.

The Clinton camp, he said, never put pressure on his bosses to silence him.

“Not so this crowd,” he added, explaining that Bush White House officials -- especially those from Vice President Cheney's office -- called MSNBC brass to complain about the content of his show and attempted to influence its editorial content. "They will not silence me!" Matthews declared.

"They've finally been caught in their criminality," Matthews continued, although he did not specify the exact criminal behavior to which he referred. He then drew an obvious Bush-Nixon parallel by saying, “Spiro Agnew was not an American hero."

When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that went missing, a White House lawyer pointed the finger at an outside IT contractor.

The only problem? No such IT contractor exists, according to sources close to the investigation of a possible violation of the Federal Records and Presidential Records acts.

In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury’s approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques.

Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

I'm still following up on the question of the way in which the Rather complaint invokes the debate on Hamdi. I wanted to draw extended attention to this article. In it, Tim Grieve susses out precisely what seems to be the reason Rather included the Abu Ghraib details in his complaint.

Did Clement know he was misleading the justices, or was he kept out of the loop so that he could avoid revealing truths that would undermine the administration' "trust us" arguments in the enemy combatant cases? Did Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers persuade CBS to delay broadcasting the photographs from Abu Ghraib to protect the lives of U.S. soldiers -- or to spare the administration embarrassing questions during the Supreme Court arguments in the enemy combatant cases?

(Her emphasis)

"New Books By Alan Greenspan and Naomi Klein: One is Prophetic, One is Pathetic" By Arianna Huffington

The Shock Doctrine, By Stephen Lendman, t r u t h o u t | Book Review
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Her newest book is "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism", that explodes the myth of "free market" democracy. It shows how neoliberal, Washington consensus fundamentalism dominates the world with America its lead exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere. Wars are waged, social services cut and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or bludgeoned to object. Klein describes a worldwide process of social and economic engineering she calls "disaster capitalism" with torture along for the ride to reinforce the message - no "New World Order" alternatives are tolerated.

10.2.07 Former DOJ Lawyer Couldn't Find Way to Legalize Bush Spying Program

"Is it fair to say in your opinion the warrantless wiretapping program or at least significant parts of it were illegal or without legal basis?" Leahy asked.

"It was a legal mess," Goldsmith said. "It was the biggest legal mess I encountered there."

A source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said a Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner, drafted the two-page "spot report" on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy's Tactical Operations Center.

That office - which tracks and monitors all incidents and movements involving diplomatic security missions - has outsourced positions to Blackwater and another private firm, the embassy source said.

The bureaucratic barriers to coverage the Bush administration has imposed are not only fundamentally misguided, but also illegal...

...They conflict with the statute authorizing SCHIP. Moreover, they were issued without the opportunity for public comment, as required by federal law. Accordingly, I have joined Democratic and Republican governors from states across the country to bring a lawsuit challenging these new rules in court.
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Children should not have to wait until they get sick enough to go the emergency room to receive treatment. Rather, they need preventive and primary care. Ensuring that children with health problems are diagnosed and treated in a timely manner will save money and save lives.