Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday September 23 2007 - (813)

Sunday September 23 2007 edition
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Missteps In The Bunker: How Blunders Led To 6 Nuclear Warheads Being Flown Across The U.S. 2007-09-23 02:05:57 Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota's Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber. The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane's wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs. That detail would escape notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisianaair base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years. The episode, serious enough to trigger a rare "Bent Spear" nuclear incident report that raced through the chain of command to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and President Bush, provoked new questions inside and outside the Pentagon about the adequacy of U.S. nuclear weapons safeguards while the military's attention and resources are devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Three weeks after word of the incident leaked to the public, new details obtained by the Washington Post point to security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials briefed on the initial results of an Air Force investigation of the incident. Read The Full Story Commentary: Oil And Betrayal In Iraq 2007-09-23 02:04:59 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by George Lakoff and was posted on the Truthout.org website on Thursday, September 20, 2007. Mr. Lakoff is a senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute and writes that the war in Iraq was always about that nation's oil. His commentary follows: Alan Greenspan should know. It was oil all along. The former head of the Federal Reserve writes in his memoir, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Greenspan even advised Bush that "taking Saddam Hussein out was essential" to protect oil supplies. Yes, we suspected it. In a deep sense, many of us knew it, just as those in Washington did. But now it's in our face. Greenspan put the mother of all facts in front of our noses. And we can no longer be in denial. The US invaded Iraq for the oil. Think about what it means for our troops and for the people of Iraq. Our troops were told, and believed because they trusted their president, they were in Iraq to protect America, to protect their families, their homes, their friends and neighbors, our democracy. But they were betrayed. Those troops fought and died and were maimed and had their marriages break up for oil company profits. An utter betrayal of our men and women in uniform and their families, a betrayal of their sacrifices, day after day, month after month, year after year - and for some, forever! Children growing up fatherless or motherless. Men and women without legs or arms or faces - for oil company profits. And hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, more maimed, and millions made refugees. For oil profits. Read The Full Story Rare Shellfish Bartered For Drugs In South Africa 2007-09-23 02:03:49 Chinese Triad gangs are fueling a trade that has seen a surge in the already crime-riddled Cape Town region. As green rubbery sea creatures are emptied from a bin liner into a sink in the police interview room at Muizenberg, Cape Town, a shabby white man looks on guiltily. He is the first link in an international, multi-million-pound illegal trade that has brought Triad gangs and drugs to South Africa and is tearing the Cape region apart. The man's flippers and wetsuit lie on the floor. He was caught by game wardens poaching abalone - a saucer-sized mollusc prized as a delicacy in the Far East. He could have earned around £220 ($440) for his catch of 12 kilos but now faces five years in Pollsmoor prison. The stolen abalone, an endangered and protected species, would have been eventually sold to predominantly Chinese buyers for around £225 ($450) a kilo. And that's the problem: the enormous value of the delicacy has brought the Chinese Triad gangs to South Africa. In a cash-free transaction, the Triads swap the abalone for the ingredients to make methamphetamine, or "tik". Hundreds of tons of abalone are  smuggled out of the Cape every year, to be exported through Hong Kong, according to Wildlife Department officials who say that the local abalone is on the brink of extinction. But it is the effects of tik on South Africans that are most noticeable. Already suffering a murder rate of 50 a day, and a rape every 26 seconds, the Cape is gripped by an epidemic of tik - a highly addictive crystallized form of speed - that has resulted in a 200 per cent surge in drug-related crime in two years. It's driving the region mad - literally. "Tik has a high propensity for causing neuro-psychiatric problems. We were seeing about 40 patients a month, we're now seeing about 180 per month. So that's more than a quadrupling of psychiatric patients," says Dr. Neshaad Schrueder, the head of the emergency unit at GF Jooste hospital in Manenberg, Cape Town. Read The Full Story Iran's Ahmadinejad Defiant As Protests Grow Over His Visit To The U.N. In New York 2007-09-23 02:02:31 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is poised to deliver a defiant address to the United Nations general assembly this week amid a storm of opposition to his visit to New York and growing international alarm over his country's nuclear ambitions. On the eve of his departure from Tehran, the Iranian military yesterday showed off a new long-range ballistic missile called the Ghadr - Farsi for "power". In a speech marking the event, Ahmadinejad shrugged off U.S. and regional concerns about Iran's more assertive role, saying: "Iran is an influential power in the region and the world should know that this power has always served peace, stability, brotherhood and justice." With the Iranian leader expected to arrive in New York on Sunday for the annual meeting of the 192-member General Assembly, diplomats said that his visit is likely to raise the temperature yet again in the debate surrounding international moves to curb Iran's nuclear enrichment program. Read The Full Story Bush: Children's Health Care Will Get Vetoed 2007-09-22 18:58:11 President Bush again called Democrats "irresponsible" on Saturday for pushing an expansion he opposes to a children's health insurance program. "Democrats in Congress have decided to pass a bill they know will be vetoed," Bush said of the measure that draws significant bipartisan support, repeating in his weekly radio address an accusation he made earlier in the week. "Members of Congress are risking health coverage for poor children purely to make a political point." In the Democrat's response, also broadcast Saturday, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell turned the tables on the president, saying that if Bush doesn't sign the bill, 15 states will have no funding left for the program by the end of the month. At issue is the Children's Health Insurance Program, a state-federal program that subsidizes health coverage for low-income people, mostly children, in families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private coverage. It expires Sept. 30. Read The Full Story More Profit And Less Nursing At Many Care Homes 2007-09-22 18:57:13 Habana Health Care Center, a 150-bed nursing home in Tampa, Florida, was struggling when a group of large private investment firms purchased it and 48 other nursing homes in 2002. The facility’s managers quickly cut costs. Within months, the number of clinical registered nurses at the home was half what it had been a year earlier, records collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicate. Budgets for nursing supplies, resident activities and other services also fell, according to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration. The investors and operators were soon earning millions of dollars a year from their 49 homes. Residents fared less well. Over three years, 15 at Habana died from what their families contend was negligent care in lawsuits filed in state court. Regulators repeatedly warned the home that staff levels were below mandatory minimums. When regulators visited, they found malfunctioning fire doors, unhygienic kitchens and a resident using a leg brace that was broken. Read The Full Story Homeland Security Dept. Keeping Records On Millions Of American Travelers 2007-09-22 02:08:12 The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials. The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System (ATS), help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country. New details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf. The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials. Read The Full Story Federal Prosecutors Investigating Blackwater In Weapons Probe 2007-09-22 02:07:32 Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, North Carolina, is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told the Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock, North Carolina. A spokeswoman for Blackwater did not return calls seeking comment Friday. The U.S. attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina, George Holding, declined to comment, as did Pentagon and State Department spokesmen. Officials with knowledge of the case said it is active, although at an early stage. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, which has heightened since 11 Iraqis were killed Sunday in a shooting involving Blackwater contractors protecting a U.S. diplomatic convoy in Baghdad. Read The Full Story White House To Seek Another $195 Billion For Iraq War 2007-09-22 02:06:52 After smothering efforts by war critics in Congress to drastically cut U.S. troop levels in Iraq, President Bush plans to ask lawmakers next week to approve another massive spending measure - totaling nearly $200 billion - to fund the war through next year, said Pentagon officials. If Bush's spending request is approved, 2008 will be the most expensive year of the Iraq war. U.S. war costs have continued to grow because of the additional combat forces sent to Iraq this year and because of efforts to quickly ramp up production of new technology, including mine resistant trucks designed to protect troops from roadside bombs. The new trucks can cost three to six times as much as an armored Humvee. The Bush administration said earlier this year that it probably would need $147.5 billion for 2008, but Pentagon officials now say that and $47 billion more would be required. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and other officials will formally present the full request at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday. Read The Full Story Judge Denies Request To Free Jena Teen 2007-09-22 02:05:31 A judge on Friday denied a request to release a teenager whose arrest in the beating of a white classmate sparked this week's civil rights protest in Louisiana. Mychal Bell's request to be freed while an appeal is being reviewed was rejected at a juvenile court hearing, effectively denying him any chance at immediate bail, a person familiar with the case told the Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because juvenile court proceedings are closed. Earlier, Bell's mother emerged from the hearing in tears, refusing to comment. Bell, 17, was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery, which could have led to 15 years in prison, but his conviction was thrown out by a state appeals court that said he could not be tried on the charge as an adult because he was 16 at the time of the beating. "This is why we did not cancel the march," said the Rev. Al Sharpton, an organizer of Thursday's rally along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the NAACP. "When they overturned Mychal's conviction, everyone said we won." Read The Full Story Pakistan's Musharraf Names Loyalist As New Intelligence Chief 2007-09-22 02:04:17 With his retirement from the army looming, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Friday named a known loyalist to head the nation's hugely influential military-led intelligence service. Musharraf also cleared the way for the intelligence chief he replaced to possibly take over as army commander. The announcements came just days after Musharraf's attorney announced that the general would step down from the army if he is elected to a new term as president. The national and provincial assemblies are set to vote Oct. 6. Opponents argue that Musharraf's army job disqualifies him from running, and the Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to his eligibility. But if the court rules that he can run, he is believed to have the votes he needs to win. Musharraf's appointments are being watched closely in Pakistan, where the military has ruled for more than half the nation's 60-year history. Read The Full Story	CEOs, Bush Rangers Rebuff Republicans On Iraq War, Widening Deficit 2007-09-23 02:05:29 Dozens of corporate executives who backed President George W. Bush for re-election in 2004, including some of his top fund-raisers, are now helping Democrats running for president. John Mack, chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., and Terry Semel, chairman of Yahoo! Inc., are among some 60 executives writing checks to Democrats such as Senators Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, a review of U.S. Federal Election Commission records shows. While the vast majority of business leaders still back Republicans for 2008, the stature of some of those donating to Democrats suggests that support may be eroding, seven years into the Bush presidency. Some executives expressed concern over Republican positions on issues ranging from the war in Iraq and stem-cell research to global warming and the fiscal deficit. The shift in political-spending patterns is "very unusual," says Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a Washington-based group that advocates campaign-finance reform. Read The Full Story Commentary: The Saudi Connection That Belittles Britain 2007-09-23 02:04:28 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Nick Cohen and appears in The Oberserver edition for Sunday, Sept. 23, 2007. Mr. Cohen is a columnist for The Observer and New Statesman. He writes occasional pieces for many other publications, including the London Evening Standard and New Humanist. In his commentary, Mr. Cohen writes that there are signs the shameful censoring of Saudi critics in Britain is being challenged. The riches keep rolling in from Saudi Arabia. On top of the £21 billion ($42 billion) from the al-Yamamah arms deal, the Saudis agreed to pay a further £4.3 billion ($8.6 billion) last week for 72 Eurofighters. Spare parts will probably bring in another billion or so and there are plenty more billions where they came from. So much money, but at what price? The last days of Tony Blair made it painfully clear that if it came to a choice between the rule of law on the one hand and British manufacturing's dependence on Saudi arms orders and the West's dependence on Saudi oil on the other, the rule of law would have to go. When the then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, ordered the Serious Fraud Office to stop its investigation into allegations that BAE had paid off Saudi royals, he showed that zero tolerance had its limits and New Labor was prepared to be soft on crime and the causes of crime in order to keep the Saudis sweet. As scandalous as the allegations the authorities find it convenient to ignore are the accusations they are willing to pursue. While alleged fraud goes unexamined, the West Midlands police case against Channel 4 for investigating Saudi funding of extremist mosques goes on and on. In the long run, what is being done to Channel 4 is more significant than the nobbling of the Serious Fraud Office. It goes to the heart of Britain's failure to come to terms with the Saudi attempt to convert Europe's Muslims to wahhabhism and its sister creeds. There has been nothing to match the scale of its propaganda effort in British history. Read The Full Story Bush Steps Up On Climate Change - But Plans No Change In U.S. Policy 2007-09-23 02:02:55 Amid a mounting sense of urgency about the need for action to slow climate change, President Bush this week will be playing what is, for him, an unusually prominent role in high-level diplomatic meetings on how to confront global warming. What he will not do, officials said, is chart any shift in policies that have put him at odds with much of the world on the issue. Monday, at a private dinner on climate change hosted by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Bush will join about two dozen other heads of state, several from countries most vulnerable to higher temperatures and rising seas. On Thursday, he will address a White House-hosted climate change conference that will include senior officials from rapidly developing nations such as China, India and Brazil, which have been reluctant to divert economic resources to curb their rising greenhouse gas emissions. Top Bush administration officials said the president is not planning to alter his opposition to mandatory limits on greenhouse gases or to stray from his emphasis on promoting new technologies, especially for nuclear power and for the storage of carbon dioxide produced by coal plants. Read The Full Story War Crimes Lawyers Fight U.N.'s Ban Ki-Moon On 'Secret Appointment' 2007-09-23 02:01:41 U.N. Secretary General is challenged over appointment of top prosecutor of International Criminal Tribunal. The new leadership of the United Nations is facing a defiant challenge from within one of its few recent successes - the war crimes tribunal in The Hague - over who will steer the epic trials towards their close. Prosecution lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) - trying Europe's bloodiest war criminals since the Nazis - fear a backstage deal has been struck between new U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon over an appointment of a successor to chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who leaves in December. Senior Hague lawyers say they are ready to quit over the issue. Accounts by tribunal and U.N. sources of how a former Belgian attorney-general petitioned for the job and has reportedly been guaranteed it affords a rare insight into the veiled sanctums of the U.N. Read The Full Story Governor Makes It Official - Alaska's 'Bridge To Nowhere' Is Not Going Anywhere 2007-09-22 18:57:38 Some called it a bridge to the future. Others called it the bridge to nowhere. On Friday, Alaska decided the bridge really was going nowhere, officially abandoning the project in Ketchikan that became a national symbol of federal pork-barrel spending. While the move closes a chapter that has brought the state reams of ridicule, it also leaves open wounds in a community that fought for decades to get federal help. "We went through political hot water - tons of it - and not just nationally but internationally," Ketchikan-Gateway Borough Mayor Joe Williams said. "We have nothing to show for it." Read The Full Story Blackwater USA Faces Criminal Charges In Iraq 2007-09-22 18:56:37 The Iraqi government expects to refer criminal charges to the Iraqi courts within days in a shooting here by a private American security company, the state minister for national security affairs said Saturday. The minister, Shirwan al-Waili, said that the government had received little information so far from the American side of a joint investigation. But he said that the Iraqi investigation of the shooting, in which at least eight Iraqis were killed, was largely completed and that he believed the findings were definitive. “The shots fired on the Iraqis were unjustifiable,” he said. “It was harsh and horrible.” Although Waili did not spell out exactly what the investigative committee would recommend to the Iraqi criminal court, a preliminary report of findings by the Interior Ministry, National Security Ministry and Defense Ministry stated that “the murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operations.” “The criminals will be referred to the Iraqi court system,” it stated. Read The Full Story Britain Plans To Annex South Atlantic Ocean Floor 2007-09-22 02:07:45 The new British Empire? U.K. hopes to annex lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields. Britain is preparing territorial claims on tens of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension Island and Rockall in the hope of annexing potentially lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields, the Guardian newspaper has learned. The U.K. claims, to be lodged at the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (UNCLCS), exploit a novel legal approach that is transforming the international politics of underwater prospecting. Britain is accelerating its process of submitting applications to the U.N. - which is fraught with diplomatic sensitivities, not least with Argentina - before an international deadline for registering interests. Relying on detailed geological and geophysical surveys by scientists and hydrographers, any state can delineate a new "continental shelf outer limit" that can extend up to 350 miles from its shoreline. Data has been collected for most of Britain's submissions and Chris Carleton, head of the law of the sea division at the U.K. Hydrographic Office and an international expert on the process, said preliminary talks on Rockall are being held in Reykjavik, Iceland, next week. Read The Full Story Iraq Expands Investigation Of Blackwater 2007-09-22 02:07:17 Recent deadly shooting by U.S. contractor casts light on Blackwater's other violent episodes. Iraq's probe into a deadly shooting by Blackwater USA in Baghdad last weekend has expanded to include allegations about the security firm's involvement in six other violent episodes this year that left at least 10 Iraqis dead. The incidents include the killing of three guards at a state-run media complex and the shooting death of an Iraqi journalist outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, chief spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Iraqi officials say these violent encounters have made them increasingly frustrated with Blackwater's conduct in Iraq, but the government backed away Friday from its attempt to expel the company. Blackwater has said its guards acted appropriately in the weekend incident, but it did not respond to requests for comment Friday on the other episodes cited by Khalaf. Read The Full Story U.S., Europeans Planning Their Own Sanctions Against Iran 2007-09-22 02:06:09 The United States and its European allies are preparing to impose their own broad military and economic sanctions against Iran if Russia and China balk at voting for a tough new resolution at the United Nations, according to U.S. and European officials. The breakaway diplomacy would impose a kind of "sanctions of the willing" on Iran, said a Western diplomat, playing off the "coalition of the willing" that was mobilized after diplomacy at the United Nations did not produce support for military action in Iraq. The U.S. State Department Friday hosted all-day talks with the four other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - Britain, China, France and Russia - and Germany, to try to hash out the parameters of a new resolution on the eve of the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York City. In talks the State Department described as "serious and constructive," the six agreed to proceed, after months of delays, with a third U.N. resolution punishing Iran; but deep differences remain on both substance and timing, with the United States and the Europeans on one side and Russia and China on the other, said officials from several delegations. Read The Full Story British Wachdog Under Fire Over Mortgage Lender's Collapse 2007-09-22 02:04:47 Embattled Financial Services Authority promises "root and branch" review of Northern Rock crisis. Britain's embattled Financial Services Authority Friday night promised a "root and branch" review into its handling of the Northern Rock crisis as it emerged that the Bank of England had provided a £3 billion ($6 billion) emergency line of credit to help the Newcastle-based bank over the past week. The chief City regulator said there were many lessons to be learned from the first run on a British high street bank in 150 years and promised to cooperate fully with an increasingly wide-ranging House of Commons investigation into the affair. It emerged Friday night that the FSA official responsible for regulating Northern Rock was replaced just weeks before it announced that its problems required emergency help from the Bank of England. The FSA drafted in its former wholesale insurance supervisor Julian Adams to oversee the bank. A spokesman for the regulator refused to identify Adams' predecessor or comment on his appointment. It also emerged Friday that members of Northern Rock's board received more than £30 million ($60 million) in salaries, bonuses and incentives in the past five years. Adam Applegarth, the bank's embattled chief executive, received almost £10 million ($20 million). Read The Full Story
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