Free Internet Press Newsletter - Monday October 15 2007 - (813)

Monday October 15 2007 edition
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Security Contractors' Status Is Questioned: Are They Unlawful Combatants? 2007-10-15 03:45:05 U.S. officials worry that firms like Blackwater USA could be considered unlawful combatants. As the Bush administration deals with the fallout from the recent killings of civilians by private security firms in Iraq, some officials are asking whether the contractors could be considered unlawful combatants under international agreements. The question is an outgrowth of federal reviews of the shootings, in part because the U.S. officials want to determine whether the administration could be accused of treaty violations that could fuel an international outcry. The issue also holds practical and political implications for the administration's war effort and the image of the U.S. abroad. If U.S. officials conclude that the use of guards is a potential violation, they may have to limit guards' tasks in war zones, which could leave more work for the already overstretched military. Unresolved questions are likely to touch off new criticism of Bush's conduct of the unpopular Iraq war, especially given the broad definition of unlawful combatants the president has used in justifying his detention policies at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Read The Full Story U.S. Military: Al-Qaeda In Iraq Crippled 2007-10-15 03:44:21 Many officials caution of terrorist group's resilience. The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.  As the White House and its military commanders plan the next phase of the war, other officials have cautioned against taking what they see as a premature step that could create strategic and political difficulties for the United States. Such a declaration could fuel criticism that the Iraq conflict has become a civil war in which U.S. combat forces should not be involved. At the same time, the intelligence community, and some in the military itself, worry about underestimating an enemy that has shown great resilience in the past. "I think it would be premature at this point," a senior intelligence official said of a victory declaration over al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, as the group is known. Despite recent U.S. gains, he said, AQI retains "the ability for surprise and for catastrophic attacks." Earlier periods of optimism, such as immediately following the June 2006 death of AQI founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. air raid, not only proved unfounded but were followed by expanded operations by  the militant organization. Read The Full Story Editorial: Iraqi Oil Spoils 2007-10-15 03:43:24 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Monday, October 15, 2007. The quickening pace of oil deals between Kurdish regional leaders and foreign companies is another sign that Iraq is spinning out of control and the Bush administration has no idea how to stop it. President Bush set enactment of a national oil law that centralizes development and ensures an equitable division of the profits as a key benchmark of progress. Iraq’s leaders, who have little interest in equity or reconciliation, have blithely ignored it. So the Kurds have taken matters into their own hands, signing nine legally questionable exploration deals with foreign companies. The administration has complained that the deals “needlessly elevated tensions” between the Kurds and the central government. But it apparently hasn’t leaned very hard on the one American oil company involved, Hunt Oil of Dallas, which has close ties to the White House. Iraq’s oil ministry, meanwhile, has warned that the contracts will be either ignored or considered illegal. We cannot blame the Kurds for wanting to get on with exploiting their region’s lucrative oil deposits for energy and for profit. While the rest of Iraq is convulsed in violence and politically paralyzed, the Kurdish-administered northeast is the one relatively peaceful region, with functioning schools and government, a separate army and booming business. Read The Full Story Surprise - NOT! Lobbyists Find Ways To Bypass Ethics Law 2007-10-14 15:44:50 Despite new law, firms find ways to ply politicians. In recent days, about 100 members of Congress and hundreds of Hill staffers attended two black-tie galas, many of them as guests of corporations and lobbyists that paid as much as $2,500 per ticket. Because accepting such gifts from special interests is now illegal, the companies did not hand the tickets directly to lawmakers or staffers. Instead, the companies donated the tickets back to the charity sponsors, with the names of recipients they wanted to see and sit with at the galas. The arrangement was one of the most visible efforts, but hardly the only one, to get around new rules passed by Congress this summer limiting meals, travel, gifts and campaign contributions from lobbyists and companies that employ them. Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) and Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky)  found bipartisan agreement on maintaining one special privilege. Together they put language into a defense appropriations bill that would keep legal the practice of some senators of booking several flights on days they return home, keeping the most convenient reservation and dumping the rest without paying cancellation fees - a practice some airlines say could violate the new law. Read The Full Story Arab Allies Skeptical Of U.S. Peace Effort 2007-10-14 15:43:49 The summit to push Israeli-Palestinian talks forward is seen as hasty, ill-conceived and not likely to achieve much. The upcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace conference resembles a dinner party with a less-than-inspiring menu and a bunch of well-tailored yet exasperated guests who, if they show up at all, doubt that anyone will go home happy. Posturing and recrimination often characterize such negotiations, but Arab nations, including Washington's closest allies, are criticizing the November conference as a miscalculated photo op by a Bush administration desperate to repair its image in the Middle East. "This is not an effort to save the Palestinians, it's an attempt to prop up the administration's very low standing in the Arab world," said Mustafa Alani, an analyst with the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. "Saudi Arabia and other Washington allies will lose a lot of credibility if this is just to take part in an American show." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans a visit to the region this week aimed at persuading Arab countries to send at least ministry-level officials to the meeting in Annapolis, Maryland. Yet analysts and media in the Middle East complain that the U.S. has not done the diplomatic legwork needed to advance peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Preliminary talks between the two sides are at an impasse. Read The Full Story Israel's Olmert Faces New Criminal Investigation 2007-10-14 15:42:51 Israel's attorney general on Sunday ordered a new criminal investigation into Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the latest in a series of probes that threaten to weaken the Israeli leader during ongoing peace efforts with the Palestinians. The Justice Ministry said the investigation would look into suspicions that Olmert acted improperly while he was trade minister earlier this decade. The state comptroller, a watchdog agency, has alleged that Olmert steered a government grant to a friend in 2001. "The suspicions pertain mainly to Olmert's involvement in the investment center and political appointments, and helping his political friends in public bodies." Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the police would in the coming days appoint a team of investigators to handle the case. Read The Full Story Illegal Export Of U.S. Military Technology Is Growing 2007-10-14 03:04:33 Pentagon investigators thought they had discovered a major shipment of contraband when they intercepted parts for F-14 Tomcat warplanes headed to Iran, via FedEx, from Southern California. Under U.S. sanctions since its 1979 revolution, Tehran had been trying for years to illegally obtain spare parts for the fighters, which are used only in Iran. When agents descended on the Orange County, California, home of Reza Tabib, the 51-year-old former flight instructor at John Wayne Airport who sent the shipment, they were astonished to discover 13,000 other aircraft parts, worth an estimated $540,000, as well as a list of additional requests by an Iranian military officer and two airplane tickets for Tehran. Caught red-handed, the Iranian-born American citizen pleaded guilty in May and was sentenced to two years in prison. The Tabib tale is among a growing array of cases either under investigation or being prosecuted for illegally exporting sensitive military equipment, from missile parts and body armor to nuclear submarine technology, according to the Justice Department. Many are destined for groups or countries that target the United States and its allies, such as night-vision equipment destined for Iran and for Lebanon's Hezbollah, and components for improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, used against U.S. troops in Iraq.  Read The Full Story Editorial: Spies, Lies and FISA 2007-10-14 03:03:57 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Sunday, October 14, 2007. As Democratic lawmakers try to repair a deeply flawed bill on electronic eavesdropping, the White House is pumping out the same fog of fear and disinformation it used to push the bill through Congress this summer. President Bush has been telling Americans that any change would deny the government critical information, make it easier for terrorists to infiltrate, expose state secrets, and make it harder “to save American lives.” There is no truth to any of those claims. No matter how often Mr. Bush says otherwise, there is also no disagreement from the Democrats about the need to provide adequate tools to fight terrorists. The debate is over whether this should be done constitutionally, or at the whim of the president. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, requires a warrant to intercept international communications involving anyone in the United States. A secret court has granted these warrants quickly nearly every time it has been asked. After 9/11, the Patriot Act made it even easier to conduct surveillance, especially in hot pursuit of terrorists. But that was not good enough for the Bush team, which was determined to use the nation’s tragedy to grab ever more power for its vision of an imperial presidency. Mr. Bush ignored the FISA law and ordered the National Security Agency to intercept phone calls and e-mail between people abroad and people in the United States without a warrant, as long as “the target” was not in this country. Read The Full Story Is There Life On A Moon Of Saturn? 2007-10-14 03:03:05 New images of a giant planet's satellites taken by the 10-Year Cassini probe have excited scientists. They are visions of a unique family of worlds on the other side of the solar system: a moon with lakes of liquid methane: a tiny, rocky world with geysers of water that are being sprayed into space and a strange mottled moon that has been splattered with dark, organic-rich gunk, like a comedian who has been hit by a custard pie. These bizarre sets of images were released last week as NASA, and the European Space Agency (ESA) prepare to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the launch of their Cassini-Huygens probe to Saturn. Blasted into space on 15 October, 1997, the probe took seven years to reach Saturn. Since then, the robot spacecraft has been delivering stunning photographs of the ringed planet and its fantastic family of moons. "The launch was the start of one of space exploration's great adventures and we didn't really know what we would find," said Professor Andrew Coates, of University College London, who heads one of the U.K. teams involved in Cassini. "Now we are reaping the rewards of nearly 20 years work on the mission and the science continues to be amazing." The mission's most spectacular moment occurred in December 2004, when its tiny Huygens probe separated from its mother craft, Cassini, and headed towards Saturn's main satellite, Titan, the only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere. Several weeks later, it parachuted down to a landing on its surface and returned close-up images of this weird, distant world. Read The Full Story	Heart Patients Warned As Maker Halts Sale Of Heart Implant Part 2007-10-15 03:44:42 The nation’s largest maker of implanted heart devices, Medtronic, said Sunday that it was urging doctors to stop using a crucial component in its most recent defibrillator models because it was prone to a defect that has caused malfunctions in hundreds of patients and may have contributed to five deaths. The faulty component is an electrical “lead,” or a wire that connects the heart to a defibrillator, a device that shocks faltering hearts back into normal rhythm. The company is urging all of the roughly 235,000 patients with the lead, known as the Sprint Fidelis, to see their doctors to make sure it has not developed a fracture that can make the device misread heart-rhythm data. Such a malfunction can cause the device to either deliver an unnecessary electrical jolt or fail to provide a life-saving one to a patient in need. In most cases, the defibrillators can be reprogrammed without surgery to minimize the problem. Medtronic estimated that about 2.3 percent of patients with the Fidelis lead, or 4,000 to 5,000 people, would experience a lead fracture within 30 months of implantation. Those patients will require a delicate surgical procedure to replace the lead, said experts. Read The Full Story Washington Post Correspondent Salih Saif Aldin Killed In Iraq 2007-10-15 03:43:52 Correspondent's death adds to list of at least 118 journalists already killed in Iraq while on duty. On Sunday afternoon, Salih Saif Aldin set out for one of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods. He knew exactly where to go. He nodded, smiled, grabbed his camera. There was nothing he needed to say. Saif Aldin always came back - from death threats, from beatings, from kidnappings, from detentions by American soldiers, from the country's most notorious and deadly terrain - but on Sunday he didn't. The 32-year-old Iraqi reporter in the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau was shot once in the forehead in the southwestern neighborhood of Sadiyah. He was the latest in a long line of reporters, most of them Iraqis, to be killed while covering the Iraq war. He was the first for the Washington Post. "The death of Salih Saif Aldin in the service of our readers is a tragedy for everyone at the Washington Post. He was a brave and valuable reporter who contributed much to our coverage of Iraq," said Leonard Downie, Jr., executive editor of the Post. "We are in his debt. We grieve with his family, friends, fellow journalists and everyone in our Baghdad bureau." At 2 p.m., Saif Aldin took a taxi from the Post's office to Sadiyah to interview residents about the sectarian violence there between Shiite militiamen and Sunni insurgents. It was his third trip to the embattled neighborhood within a week. For him, there were no red zones, no green zones, no neighborhoods out of bounds. Two hours later, a man picked up Saif Aldin's cellphone and called a colleague at the Post to say he had been shot. Read The Full Story Oil Price Hovers Under $84 Record Price 2007-10-15 03:43:01 Oil prices were little changed on Monday, hovering within sight of last week's record high of $84.05 a barrel as mounting tension between Turkey and Iraq added to a rally fueled by winter supply worries and dollar weakness. U.S. light, sweet crude for November delivery rose 5 cents to $83.74 a barrel by 2:24 a.m. EDT. Prices rose for a fourth day on Friday, hitting a new intra-day record high, after the Kurdistan Workers Party said it would move back into Turkey from northern Iraq and target the Turkish government. London Brent crude fell 17 cents to $80.38 a barrel. Oil has remained above $80 for most of the past month after soaring from below $70 in mid-August, fueled by a mixture of supply concerns ahead of winter and record lows for the U.S. dollar, which has driven speculators to buy oil as a hedge. Read The Full Story Pension Plans Being Sold As Employers Look For An Exit 2007-10-14 15:44:17 Some financial services firms are trying to clear a regulatory path that would let them buy out pension plans, freeing employers from pension obligations while potentially giving profit-driven financiers direct control over the retirement savings of millions of Americans. The interested players range from venerable Wall Street banks such as J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup to start-ups, including one co-founded five months ago by Bradley D. Belt, the former executive director of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PGBC). These groups say the buyouts would not only benefit companies that want to get off the hook of pension responsibilities, but also help workers by putting their retirement assets in the hands of shrewd money managers. If those assets are profitably invested, the groups say, it would reduce pressure on the PBGC, which insures the pensions of nearly 44 million Americans but has a deficit of $18 billion. Critics counter that buyouts are a dangerous idea that would further diminish pension benefits at a time when baby boomers are beginning to retire and longer life expectancies mean more years of pension checks. Opposition groups mistrust the motives of the financial firms seeking a piece of the $2.3 trillion in assets in corporate pension plans around the country. "My initial take on all of this is: This has a lot more to do with taking care of CEOs than taking care of workers," said Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-North Dakota), a member of the House Way and Means Committee. "CEOs could look at this as a very useful way to get the uncertainties of pension funding and liability off their books." Read The Full Story Terrorists Trained In Pakistan 2007-10-14 15:43:24 Cases in Denmark and Germany illustrate a dangerous emerging pattern. As al-Qaeda regains strength in the badlands of the Pakistani-Afghan border, an increasing number of militants from mainland Europe are traveling to Pakistan to train and to plot attacks on the West, say European and U.S. anti-terrorism officials. The emerging route, illuminated by alleged bomb plots dismantled in Germany and Denmark last month, represents a new and dangerous reconfiguration. In recent years, the global flow of Muslim fighters had shifted to the battlefields of Iraq after the loss of al-Qaeda's Afghan sanctuary in late 2001. "There have always been people going to Pakistan, but it is more frequent now," said a senior French intelligence official who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity. "There is a return. It is a cycle. ... And you have the attractive phenomenon that all the big chiefs of al-Qaeda are there." Unlike Iraq, where foreign fighters plunge quickly into combat, recruits in Pakistan are more likely to be groomed for missions in the West. Aspiring holy warriors drawn to the Pakistani-Afghan border region today include European converts and militants from Arab, Turkish and North African backgrounds, said investigators. Read The Full Story Namibia Deports U.S. Security Employees 2007-10-14 15:42:39 Namibian authorities have ordered the deportation of two Americans working for a security firm that was trying to recruit Namibians to work as guards at U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, said a government minister. The Namibian Cabinet also recommended the closure of the local branch of the Las Vegas-based security firm, Special Operations Consulting-Security Management Group (SOC-SMG), which was set up earlier this month, Information Minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah said Friday. Nandi-Ndaitwah said two American employees of the firm - Paul Grimes, the firm's country representative and Fredric Piry, the chief of operations - were to be "immediately removed" from the country. They had been given 24 hours to leave Namibia, she said Friday. It was not clear Sunday whether Grimes and Piry, who were staying at a five-star hotel in the capital Windhoek, had left the country. Calls to their mobile phones were not answered. Read The Full Story In China, Lake's Champion Is Silenced 2007-10-14 03:04:20 China treats environmental advocates as bigger threats than the pollution that prompts them to speak out. Lake Tai, the center of China’s ancient “land of fish and rice,” succumbed this year to floods of industrial and agricultural waste. Toxic cyanobacteria, commonly referred to as pond scum, turned the big lake fluorescent green. The stench of decay choked anyone who came within a mile of its shores. At least two million people who live amid the canals, rice paddies and chemical plants around the lake had to stop drinking or cooking with their main source of water. The outbreak confirmed the claims of a crusading peasant, Wu Lihong, who protested for more than a decade that the region’s thriving chemical industry, and its powerful friends in the local government, were destroying one of China’s ecological treasures. Wu, however, bore silent witness. Shortly before the algae crisis erupted in May, the authorities here in his hometown arrested him. In mid-August, with a fetid smell still wafting off the lake, a local court sentenced him to three years on an alchemy of charges that smacked of official retribution. Read The Full Story U.S. Tries To Halt Turkey Attack In Iraq 2007-10-14 03:03:42 U.S. diplomats fly to Ankara to stop military move against Iraqi Kurds after "genocide" resolution. Senior U.S. officials were engaged last night in last-ditch efforts to persuade Turkey not to launch a major military incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan to target armed separatists. A team was diverted from a mission to Russia to make an unscheduled stop in Ankara Saturday. Against the background of the escalating diplomatic row between Turkey and the U.S. over a congressional resolution that branded as "genocide" massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice revealed she had personally urged Turkey to refrain from any major military operation in northern Iraq. The row between the two NATO allies comes against the dangerous background of a threat by the Turkish parliament to approve this week a "hot pursuit" of the Kurdish separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, across the border into northern Iraq. Read The Full Story
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