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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (214071)	1/1/2005 8:26:49 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577903

re: $350 million from the U.S. gov't. It's about time. He's must have had to wait for Rove's focus groups, to see if it was money well "pledged". Now lets wait and see if it gets spent. re: I noticed you ignored all my posts with links to the facts. That's the first fact you posted, and it still didn't have a link. John

To: RetiredNow who wrote (214071)	1/1/2005 8:41:14 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577903

Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo By NEIL A. LEWIS Published: January 1, 2005 ASHINGTON, Dec. 31 - Sometime after Mohamed al-Kahtani was imprisoned at Guantánamo around the beginning of 2003, military officials believed they had a prize on their hands - someone who was perhaps intended to have been a hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot. But his interrogation was not yielding much, so they decided in the middle of 2003 to try a new tactic. Mr. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that was supposedly taking him to the Middle East. After hours in the air, the plane landed back at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound but put in an isolation cell in the base's brig. There, he was subjected to harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being conducted by Egyptian national security operatives. The account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment given to The New York Times recently by military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several developments that have severely damaged the military's longstanding public version of how the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo operated. Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment. While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures, one former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base. Military officials have gone to great lengths to portray Guantánamo as a largely humane facility for several hundred prisoners, where the harshest sanctioned punishments consisted of isolation or taking away items like blankets, toothpaste, dessert or reading material. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was the commander of the Guantánamo operation from November 2002 to March 2004, regularly told visiting members of Congress and journalists that the approach was designed to build trust between the detainee and his questioner. "We are detaining these enemy combatants in a humane manner," General Miller told reporters in March 2004. "Should our men or women be held in similar circumstances, I would hope they would be treated in this manner." His successor, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, told reporters in November that he was "satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they've not been mistreated, they've not been tortured in any way." Journalists who were permitted to view an interview session from behind a glass wall during General Hood's tenure were shown an interrogator and detainee sharing a milkshake and fries from the base's McDonald's and appearing to chat amiably. It became apparent to reporters comparing notes in August, however, that the tableau of the interrogator and prisoner sharing a McDonald's meal was presented to at least three sets of journalists. In addition to the account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment, the new interviews provide details and confirm some of the accounts in other recent disclosures about procedures at Guantánamo: the November report in which the International Committee of the Red Cross complained privately last summer to the United States government that the procedures at Guantánamo were "tantamount to torture"; memorandums from F.B.I. officials, most of which were released in December as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union; and another set of interviews with The Times in October in which other former Guantánamo officials described coercive and abusive techniques regularly employed there. More - nytimes.com

To: RetiredNow who wrote (214071)	1/1/2005 8:46:35 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577903

The Saudi Syndrome Published: January 1, 2005 The next time you consider the purchase of a family car that matches satisfying heft with infinitesimal mileage per gallon, you might want to think about where some of that gas money will ultimately be going. Part of the price of every extra gallon helps, albeit indirectly, to finance mosques and religious schools all over the world that spread a fanatical variant of Islam that sees legitimacy in terrorist attacks. This financing, amounting to billions of dollars a year, comes from the government and private charities of Saudi Arabia, a country that is now taking in roughly $80 billion a year from oil exports. Saudi Arabia is the source of only 15 percent of America's imported oil. But since oil is an interchangeable commodity in world markets, every barrel America imports, even if it comes from Venezuela, Nigeria or Mexico, helps push up the prices received by Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter. America now imports well over half of the oil it consumes, and more than half of United States consumption is in the form of motor vehicle fuels. Thanks to America's gas guzzlers, China's booming factories and other thirsty consuming nations, this has been an extremely profitable year for oil exporting countries. Overall global demand is at record levels, and OPEC's production recently reached its highest since 1979. Even with the latest slippage in oil prices, Saudi Arabia's low production costs allow it to reap a hefty markup on every barrel sold. The Saudi government, itself under assault from Al Qaeda, is not in the business of directly financing terrorism, and since 9/11 it has responded to American pressure to control the flow of charitable funds to active terrorist groups. But what it still pays for, and what the religious charities its citizens are obliged to contribute to pay for, is a worldwide network of mosques, schools and Islamic centers that proselytize the belligerent and intolerant Wahhabi variant of Islam that is dominant in Saudi Arabia. As a result of this oil-financed largess, the teachings of more tolerant and humane Muslim leaders are losing ground in countries like Indonesia and Pakistan. Wahhabi mosques that glorify armed jihad have also made alarming gains among the Muslim populations of Europe and the United States. For years, Saudi Arabian oil money bankrolled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and provided financial support to Pakistan's government. It was Saudi aid that allowed Pakistan to defy international sanctions imposed over its nuclear bomb testing. Without Saudi money there is some question whether chronically impoverished Pakistan could have ever afforded to develop nuclear weapons and the crucial bomb-related technologies that its scientists passed on to Iran, Libya, North Korea and perhaps other countries as well. There is no sinister Saudi conspiracy at work here. This is just what anyone should expect to happen when mind-boggling sums of oil money flow into an absolute monarchy that bases its legitimacy on puritanical militant Islam and offers no pretense of political accountability or transparent accounting. The more copiously that oil money flows, the less pressure a divided Saudi royal family feels to undertake the kind of difficult political and economic reforms that might conceivably break the nexus between oil and terror. The Saudi syndrome is not the only reason Americans need to get much more serious about energy conservation. But it is a powerfully compelling one. nytimes.com

To: RetiredNow who wrote (214071)	1/1/2005 8:49:06 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1577903

Trouble in the Forests Published: January 1, 2005 The Bush administration is proceeding briskly with its demolition job on the environmental regulations it inherited from previous administrations, especially the rules protecting the national forests against commercial exploitation. Over the last four years, the Forest Service has weakened agreements aimed at preserving old-growth trees and wildlife in the Pacific Northwest and in the Sierra Nevada. It persuaded Congress to adopt its misnamed "Healthy Forests" initiative that helps timber companies as much as it helps communities at risk from forest fire. It threatens to overturn President Bill Clinton's popular roadless rule protecting the most remote areas of the forests, and it has already removed those protections from the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Then last week, just before Christmas - the administration's preferred time for unveiling bad news - it announced a radical overhaul of the rules governing the management of the nation's 155 national forests. The ostensible purpose of the change is to streamline a cumbersome management process and give individual forest managers more flexibility to respond to threats like wildfires and the increasing use of the forests by off-road vehicles. But the new rules would also eliminate vital environmental reviews, as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, jettison wildlife protections that date to President Ronald Reagan, restrict public input, and replace detailed regulations, like those limiting clearcuts and protecting streams, with vague "results-based" goals. These are unacceptably high costs to pay for regulatory efficiency. More broadly, the whole idea of giving local managers more flexibility defies history, however reasonable it appears on the surface. The main reason Congress enacted the National Forest Management Act in 1976 was that the public had lost confidence in the Forest Service, not only local foresters but also their bosses in Washington, who seemed mainly interested in harvesting timber no matter what the cost to the forest's ecological health. There are, of course, forest mangers who act responsibly. And the administration promises that forest plans will be regularly audited under an "environmental management system" it has borrowed from private industry. But it is not clear who will be conducting these audits (indeed, it's entirely possible the timber industry could end up monitoring itself). Nor, given the vagueness of the new guidelines, are there any longer clear standards against which foresters and their plans can be measured. This is a recipe for trouble. Forest supervisors have always been subject to fierce pressures from timber companies and the communities that depend upon them for jobs. Unless the law unambiguously requires them to protect nature - giving them legal cover to resist industry pressures - we could see a return to the days when what counted on a résumé was not whether a manager harmonized the competing needs of nature and commerce but whether he met his annual "cut." Representative Tom Udall and others in Congress may try to overturn these rules legislatively. Their chances in this Congress are slim to none. It's also true that in a purely statistical sense, the stakes for both sides are not as high as they were 15 years ago, when about 30 percent of domestic timber production came from the national forests. Today that figure is about 5 percent, partly because of shifting industry priorities and partly because of court rulings protecting endangered species like the spotted owl and their forest habitat. Still, there's plenty of room for mischief, especially if President Bush succeeds in rescinding the roadless rule. People like Mr. Udall are right to keep fighting. nytimes.com