Michael McAuliff | NYDailyNews.com Republicans argued Tuesday that it would put the nation’s finances at risk if Congress gave aiing Sept. 11 responders a permanent, guaranteed program to ensure they get health care. Calling the Sept. 11 Health and Compensation Act a new “entitlement program” like Medicare, GOP members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee argued the nation already has too much that it must pay for. They said obligating the feds for lifetime care of tens of thousands of 9/11 responders was too much of a burden. “By making this a new mandatory program, you jeopardize the financial health of the United States of America,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). And they argued that the heroes of Sept. 11, 2001, were already being cared for, noting the $150 million the Obama recently requested for this year. Speaking to dozens of responders gathered in a Capitol Hill hearing chamber, Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) argued that their demand for the federal government to help “would be just if we weren’t spending money already.”
Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com Few issues highlight Barack Obama’s extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world — far away from any battlefield — and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court. Back in the day, this was called “Bush’s legal black hole.” In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees havewon 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention. Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram — including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ — in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention — contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (underBoumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee’s Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, asThe New York Times put it, Obama lawyers “told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.” But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held thatBoumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram. I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are “virtually identical to the detainees inBoumediene,” and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same: namely,“the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely.”
Coleen Rowley | HuffingtonPost.com
One month before 9/11, instructors at a Minnesota flight school call the FBI. Among other suspicious happenings, the most unusual “student” they have ever encountered just plopped down thousands in cash to learn to fly a 747, claiming his only purpose was “ego-boosting.” Agents in the Minneapolis FBI Office immediately confirm the information and seek permission to search by warning FBI Headquarters in over 60 emails and frantic telephone calls that “this is a guy who could fly into the World Trade Center.” Although the ‘Director of Central Intelligence’ is briefed within days with a presentation titled “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly“, neither the FBI or CIA staff does anything until after 9/11. Right after the attacks, however, the officials quickly cover-up these pre 9/11 lapses — actions hastened by internal repression.
This wasn’t the first lapse. In the years before 9/11, an FAA “Red Team” warns that it breaches airport security 90 percent of the time, but is censored from writing its findings and banned from retesting. The same Logan Airport gate exploited by the 9/11 hijackers had flunked just months before. After the attacks, the government grounds and reassigns the Red Team leader (a whistleblower) to remedial duties.
In 2003 a Federal Air Marshal (FAM) warns that his agency plans to cancel FAM long distance coverage on the eve of a planned hijacking. His protest leads to congressional outrage, restoration of marshals and prevention of the hijacking. But in 2006, he is fired for “Unauthorized Disclosure of Sensitive Security Information” – an unclassified “hybrid secrecy” label the TSA retroactively applied to the disclosure.
In the wake of our national security and intelligence agencies’ failures to stop Christmas passenger Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and “Times Square Bomber” Faisal Shahzad from attempting to ignite bombs, will any Congressman recognize why the glaring dots are still not being connected? Bureaucratic breakdowns and needless disasters keep recurring, in huge part, because government whistleblowers have been silenced. They do not even enjoy the simple freedom to communicate within the chain of command and defend themselves against near certain retribution.
Exposure to a dangerous cocktail of smoke, dust, fumes and gases among those involved in clean-up, rescue, recovery and demolition at the World Trade Center ultimately compromised the workers’ sense of smell, new research reveals.
Such individuals specifically experienced a diminished ability to detect odors and irritants, researchers at the nonprofit Monell Center in Philadelphia and their collaborators found.
“The nose performs many sensory functions that are critical for human health and safety,” Monell environmental psychologist and lead author Pamela Dalton said in a news release. “The sensory system that detects irritants is the first line of defense to protect the lungs against airborne toxic chemicals. The loss of the ability of the nose to respond to a strong irritant means that the reflexes that protect the lungs from toxic exposures will not be triggered.”
The study, reported in the May 18 online edition of Environmental Health Perspectives, was funded by the U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
The findings are based on an investigation involving 102 volunteer and paid post-9/11 World Trade Center workers.
Of these, 44 percent were in lower Manhattan on the day of the disaster, and 97 percent worked at the site in the week following Sept. 11, 2001.
Although most of the study participants were unaware of any smelling hardship, the authors found that two years after the exposure, 22 percent of the workers were less able to detect odors, while almost 75 percent were less able to detect irritants that cause pain, tingling, burning, stinging and/or prickling.
In terms of irritant detection, such long-term smelling impairment was harshest among those who were on the World Trade Center site immediately following the buildings’ collapse. Such workers were rendered almost totally unable to detect irritants, the researchers found.
As a result of the current observations and the safety concerns such nasal damage might pose, Dalton and her colleagues suggest that World Trade Center responders be routinely screened for smelling impairment.
Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic on Monday moved towards investigatingGoogle following the internet group’s disclosure that it had recorded communications sent over unsecured wireless networks in people’s homes. Peter Schaar, the German commissioner for data protection, called for a “detailed probe” by independent authorities into the practice by Google. Read the Story at the Financial Times
Zbigniew Brzezinski giving the CFR branch in Montreal a presentation discussing world government and his fears of the mass global awakening that has taken place.
Jonathan Well | Bloomberg.com Score another triumph for the rigged- market theory. In a feat that would seem to defy the odds, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America this week each said its trading desk made money every day of the first quarter. Goldman said its daily net trading revenue topped $100 million 35 times last quarter out of 63 trading days. JPMorgan and Bank of America disclosed similar eye-popping stats. Citigroup, too, recorded a profit on each trading day, Bloomberg News reported, citing unnamed people who knew the results. The intrigue is high. If a too-big-to-fail bank’s traders were able to make money every day of a quarter, were they really trading in any normal sense of the word? Or would vacuuming be a more accurate term? What kinds of risks do such incredible profits entail, for the banks and the rest of us taxpayers? And are results such as these too good to be true? There seems to be no satisfying way to answer those questions, or even the more basic inquiry: How exactly do these banks’ trading divisions make money? Reading the companies’ impenetrable financial reports is of little help. However they did it, the data suggest it was as easy last quarter as hitting the side of a barn with a baseball from three feet away. This isn’t the way “trading” works in the real world. A simple exercise in measuring probabilities is instructive here.
The BCCLA welcomes the news that a Vancouver parent is launching a class action lawsuit against the Province following revelations that B.C. had been secretly storing 800,000 DNA records without consent.
The DNA records, literally dried blood on index cards that have the child’s name and date of birth recorded on them, are collected from infants in B.C. and the Yukon as part of a genetic screening test, but are not destroyed when the testing is complete. 11 years of blood test records are now on file, representing approximately 800,000 children’s DNA, stored at a private facility. “The BCCLA supports this class action, and we will continue our work on the privacy complaint while the lawsuit proceeds independently,” says Holmes. “It seems that the Health Ministry does not feel there is an issue in building a database of this kind without any public input, enabling legislation, or consent, but we do not agree that government can trample on individual rights. The courts will ultimately determine the matter unless the government relents.” Combined with sections 165-167 of Bill 11, which was passed just weeks ago, these DNA records are now available across government and to law enforcement on demand, without a court order. The BCCLA is actively involved in a privacy complaint against the Newborn Screening Program for failing to disclose to new parents that their infant’s blood tests would be used for medical research and stored indefinitely. “It seems obvious to us from their media comments that the Province won’t give these sensitive records up without a fight,” said Holmes. “Well, it looks like they’ve found one. These cards and Bill 11 could easily lead to genetic discrimination against children, or gross privacy violations by law enforcement. This is now a matter for the Courts to resolve.” The class action was filed on behalf of the parent by Jason Gratl of Gratl & Company.
Read earlier news release with background information on Bill 11 and the database here >>
Expose the worst of American Media.
FIND IT. POST IT. FAIL IT.
Michael McAuliff | NYDailyNews.com
President Obama’s budget office has withheld the money required to finish a pair of 9/11 studies on the health of people who responded to the terror attacks, the Daily News has learned.
The money was expected to be part of a funding package released last week by the Office of Management and Budget to keep 9/11 treatment programs going — cash that came just seven weeks before funding ran out, with providers fearing they might have to interrupt services.
But not included was support for a survey of responders on the Sept. 11 health registry, including thousands of people from all over the country, according to a letter obtained by the News.
Also missing is cash for a study to learn how severely exposure to the toxins of Ground Zero raised the risk of getting cancer — a question grimly highlighted Saturday by the cancer death of 42-year-old city Police Officer Robert Oswain. His relatives blame his 9/11 service.
In a letter to OMB head Peter Orszag, Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler are demanding to know what’s causing the holdup.
Rachel Slajda | TPM.com
Bernard Kerik, the former NYPD commissioner who served during 9/11 and was President Bush’s first choice for Homeland Security secretary, will report to prison today to begin a four-year sentence. In February, Kerik pleaded guilty to lying to White House officials during his DHS vetting process and to charges of tax fraud.
Yesterday, Kerik, who has been under house arrest since his sentencing, reflected on the past 10 years in a lengthy blog post titled, “It is time to move forward.”
He called the length of his sentence a “gross injustice” and vowed to continue fighting it in appellate court. He said he was been “a convenient target of personal and political attacks” because of the challenges he has faced over the years, and cited his “otherwise unblemished record of service to this country dating back more than 30 years to my days as a young GI in Korea.”
He also reflected in a more personal way.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross once said, “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.” I’m not exactly a stained-glass window, I don’t think I’ve sparkled or shined, and I certainly don’t claim to be beautiful, but I do think there is a light within me!
That light is my love for my wife, my children, and my country. It is a light that they ignited; they sustain, and will guide me through the dark times ahead.
Kerik will serve his term at the Federal Correctional Institute in Cumberland, Md.
Paul Joseph Watson | InfoWars.com
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Senator Mitch McConnell pointed out that Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan once argued that the government should have the power to ban books and censor political pamphlets, as yet more alarming information on Kagan’s hostility towards the First Amendment comes to light.
During the Citizens United vs. FEC case, Kagan’s office was asked by Chief Justice John Roberts if the government could ban publications it they were paid for by a corporation or labor union.
“If it’s a 500-page book, and at the end it says, ‘and so vote for x,’ the government could ban that?” Roberts asked, to which Kagan’s deputy, Malcolm L. Stewart, said the government could censor such information.
Justice Roberts blasted Kagan’s argument at the time, reports Newsmax.
“The government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern,” he wrote.
“Solicitor Kagan’s office in the initial hearing argued that it would be OK to ban books,” Senator McConnell said. “And then when there was a rehearing Solicitor Kagan herself in her first Supreme Court argument suggested that it might be OK to ban pamphlets.”
McConnell called for a full investigation of Kagan’s First Amendment stance in light of her “troubling” position on free speech, adding that classic political pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and the Federalist Papers could be banned under Kagan’s logic.
Two F-16 military fighter jets intercepted an ultralight aircraft that flew into Arizona from Mexico on Sunday and tracked it until the ultralight returned to Mexico, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said.
A statement by the NORAD command center in Colorado said the ultralight crossed into U.S. airspace just after 6 a.m. Arizona time (9 a.m. ET).
The F-16s were launched to intercept it, and they shadowed it for 30
minutes before the ultralight returned to Mexico, according to the NORAD
statement. No other details were immediately available.
Ross Douthat | NYTimes.com
This feels like a populist moment. Americans are Tea Partying. Greeks are rioting. Incumbents are being thrown out; the Federal Reserve is facing an audit; Goldman Sachs is facing prosecution. In Kentucky, Ron Paul’s son might be about to win a Republican Senate primary.
But look through these anti-establishment theatrics to the deep structures of political and economic power, and suddenly the surge of populism feels like so much sound and fury, obscuring the real story of our time. From Washington to Athens, the economic crisis is producing consolidation rather than revolution, the entrenchment of authority rather than its diffusion, and the concentration of power in the hands of the same elite that presided over the disasters in the first place.
Consider the European situation. For a week after Greece’s fiscal meltdown began, all the talk was about the weakness of the European Union, the folly of its too-rapid expansion, and the failure of the Continent’s governing class to anticipate the crisis.
But then the E.U. acted, bailing out Greece to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, and dictating economic terms to Athens that resemble “the kind of thing a surrendering field marshal signs in a railway car in the forest at the end of a bloody war,” in the words of the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. If the bailout succeeds, the E.U.’s authority over its member states will be dramatically enhanced — and a crisis created by hasty, elite-driven integration will have led, inexorably, to further integration and a more powerful elite.
This trajectory should be familiar to Americans. The panic of 2008 happened, in part, because the public interest had become too intertwined with private interests for the latter to be allowed to fail. But everything we did to halt the panic, and all the legislation we’ve passed, has only strengthened the symbiosis.
From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the auto bailout to health care reform, we’ve created a vast new array of public-private partnerships — empowering insiders at the expense of outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and Washington at the expense of state and local governments. Eighteen months after the financial crisis, the interests of our financiers, C.E.O.’s, bureaucrats and politicians are yoked together as never before.
A similar, quieter consolidation has taken place in the realm of national security. After campaigning against the Bush administration’s foreign-policy overreach, President Obama has retained nearly all of the war powers that George Bush took up in the wake of 9/11.
(more…)
Jeff Kaye | TheSeminal.com
Like a modern-day Ministry of Truth, the American Psychological Association (APA) has scrubbed the webpage describing “deception scenarios” workshops that were part of a conference it conducted with the CIA and Rand Corporation on July 17-18, 2003. In addition, the APA erased the link to the page, and even all mention of its existence, from another story at its July 2003 Science Policy Insider News website that briefly described the conference. In May 2007, in an article at Daily Kos, I noted that the workshops were describing “new ways to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees.” Quoting from the APA’sdescription (and note, the link is to an archived version of the webpage; emphasis is added): In August 2007, in a landmark article at Vanity Fair, journalist Katherine Eban revealed that SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were participants at the APA/CIA/Rand affair. Mitchell and Jessen have since been linked with the implementation of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” in 2001-2002. Just last November, in an article at Firedoglake, I recalled the issue of the 2003 conference and askedWho Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture “Workshop”? I wrote at that time:
Washington, D.C. – Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, commented today on the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill and its eventual political fate in the Senate:
“My first reaction to the Kerry-Lieberman bill is that it’s the same old cap-and-trade scheme that the Senate has defeated three times since 2003,” Senator Inhofe said. “In fact, it has a strong resemblance to the disastrous Waxman-Markey bill. Only now, along with paying skyrocketing electricity prices, consumers will pay a gas tax.
“The Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade proposal is just like Waxman-Markey in another key respect: it will destroy millions of good-paying jobs, many of which will be lost in regions, such as the Midwest, South, and Great Plains, which depend on coal for electricity. Given these facts, it’s no wonder that this massive energy tax is opposed by Republicans and Democrats alike, and that is has virtually no chance of passing the Senate.”
“The sooner we reject global warming cap and trade legislation, and get to work on an all-of the-above energy policy, the sooner the American public will have access to affordable, abundant, American-made energy.”
The heavyweights want a report from the Treasury Secretary, including David Rockefeller and Lynn Forester de Rothschild (Forester was introduced to soon to be husband, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, by Henry Kissinger at the 1998 Bilderberg Group conference in Scotland. They spent their honeymoon at the White House.)
In addition to Rockefeller and Lady de Rothschild, on Friday afternoon, Treasury Secretary Geithner will also meet with the other members of the Board of Directors of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics to discuss the Administration’s agenda for economic growth and strengthening the global financial system.
Here’s the hefty list of the Institute’s Board of Directors:
David Weigel | WashingtonPost.com
Last month I wrote about anti-illegal immigration groups pushing a video of a rally where opponents of Arizona’s tough new law talked — in my view — like particularly ornery tea partyers. That video was the first link in a chain of videos that show pro-amnesty activists getting angry and their opponents seeing, to be frank, anti-white racism. The latest outrage is the new movie from Robert Rodriguez, “Machete,” an action film based on a fake trailer from the very fun 2007 film “Grindhouse” that pits Mexican actor Danny Trejo against white racist politicians. The ad campaign was launched with a tongue-in-cheek video of the menacing Trejo sending “a message to Arizona.” Cue the outrage, as Texas radio host Alex Jones explains.
Jake Tapper | ABCNews.com
At his joint appearance with Afghan President Hamid Karzai today, President Obama said US military action in Afghanistan and the surrounding region “is in our national security interests” because of recent terrorist plots in the U.S. that have ties to the region.
“As we’ve seen in recent plots here in the United States, Al Qaida and its extremist allies continue to plot in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” President Obama said. “A growing Taliban insurgency could mean an even larger safe haven for Al Qaida and its affiliates.”
John Byrne | RawStory.com
Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, helped protect the Saudi royal family from lawsuits that sought to hold al Qaeda financiers responsible in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The suits were filed by thousands of family members and others affected by the Sept. 11 attacks. In court papers, they provided evidence that members of the Saudi royal family had channeled millions to al Qaeda prior to the bombings, often in contravention of direct guidance from the United States.
But Kagan, acting as President Obama’s Solicitor General, argued that the case should not be heard even if evidence proved that the Saudis helped underwrite al Qaeda, because it would interfere with US foreign policy with the oil-rich nation. She posited “that the princes are immune from petitioners’ claims” because of “the potentially significant foreign relations consequences of subjecting another sovereign state to suit.”
In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer published Tuesday, the mother of a man who was killed on United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania said he didn’t know why Kagan argued that the case not even be heard. By keeping the case off the dockets, the Saudis were spared scrutiny of their finances.
“We had hoped she would be with us so that we could have our day in court,” Beverly Burnett said.
