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These news articles include revealing information on sweeping
surveillance
by the National Security Agency (N.S.A.), the politicization of
government
science, U.S. arms sales to the Middle East, and more. Each excerpt is
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NSA Spying Part of Broader
EffortAugust 1, 2007, Washington
Posthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/31/AR2007073102137.html
The Bush
administration's chief intelligence official said yesterday that
President
Bush authorized a series of secret surveillance activities under a single
executive order in late 2001. The disclosure makes clear that a
controversial National Security Agency program was part of a much broader
operation than the president previously described. The disclosure by Mike
McConnell [is] the first time that the administration has publicly
acknowledged that Bush's order included undisclosed activities beyond the
warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed
in
December 2005. McConnell [disclosed] that the executive order following
the
Sept. 11, 2001 attacks included "a number of . . . intelligence
activities"
and that a name routinely used by the administration -- the Terrorist
Surveillance Program -- applied only to "one particular aspect of these
activities, and nothing more. This is the only aspect of the NSA
activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect
of those various activities whose existence has been officially
acknowledged." News reports ... have detailed a range of activities
linked
to the program, including the use of data mining to identify surveillance
targets and the participation of telecommunication companies in turning
over millions of phone records. Kate Martin ... of the Center for
National
Security Studies, said the new disclosures show that ... administration
officials have "repeatedly misled the Congress and the American public"
about the extent of NSA surveillance efforts.
"They have
repeatedly tried to give the false impression that the surveillance was
narrow and justified," Martin said. "Why did it take accusations of
perjury before the DNI disclosed that there is indeed other, presumably
broader and more questionable, surveillance?"A Push to Rewrite Wiretap LawAugust 1, 2007, Washington
Posthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/31/AR2007073101879.html
The Bush
administration is pressing Congress this week for the authority to
intercept, without a court order, any international phone call or e-mail
between a surveillance target outside the United States and any person in
the United States. It would also give the attorney general sole authority
to order the interception of communications for up to one year as long as
he certifies that the surveillance is directed at a person outside the
United States. Civil liberties and privacy groups have denounced the
administration's proposal, which they say would effectively allow the
National Security Agency to revive a warrantless surveillance program
conducted in secret from 2001 until late 2005. They say it would also
give
the government authority to force carriers to turn over any international
communications into and out of the United States without a court order.
An unstated facet of the program is that anyone the foreigner is calling
inside the United States, as long as that person is not the primary
target, would also be wiretapped. Caroline Fredrickson, director of the
ACLU's Washington legislative office [said],
"What the
administration is really going after is the Americans. Even if the
primary
target is overseas, they want to be able to wiretap Americans without a
warrant." The proposal would also allow the NSA to ... have
access to the entire stream of communications without the phone company
sorting, said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security
Studies.
"It's a 'trust us' system," she said. "Give us access
and
trust us." It's time to check the balance of
powerJuly 29, 2007, San Francisco
Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/29/ING0UR6C1D1.DTL
Since
9/11, President Bush's repeated assaults on the Constitution and
celebration of international lawlessness ... have needlessly made
Americans less safe. The president, for example, has flouted the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act in intercepting the conversations and
e-mails of American citizens on American soil on his say-so alone. He has
claimed authority to break into and enter our homes, open our mail and
commit torture. He has insisted that the entire United States is a
battlefield -- even pizza parlors -- where lethal military force may be
employed to kill ... suspects with bombs or missiles. He has detained
citizens and noncitizens alike as enemy combatants based on secret
evidence. And he has insisted that he is constitutionally empowered to
keep U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely. Congress should restore the
Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government
abuses.
The most frightening of Bush's abuses travels under the
banner of "extraordinary rendition." In its name, Bush has kidnapped,
secretly imprisoned, and tortured. The practice is what would be expected
of dictators such as the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin or Iraq's Saddam
Hussein. The detainees are held incommunicado without accusation
or trial. No judge reviews the allegedly incriminating evidence. No law
restricts interrogation methods or the conditions of confinement. And the
innocent are left without recourse as "collateral damage" in Bush's ...
global [war on terrorism].
Note: The author, Bruce
Fein, served as Associate Attorney General under President
Reagan.
Politics reportedly stifled health
reportJuly 29, 2007, San Francisco
Chronicle/Washington Posthttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/29/MNG48R95UC1.DTL
A
surgeon
general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global
health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political
appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public
health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's
policy accomplishments. The report described the link between poverty and
poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases
as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help
improve health conditions in the countries where they operate.
Its
publication was blocked by William Steiger, a specialist in
education and a scholar of Latin American history
whose family
has
long ties to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Since
2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the
Department of Health and Human Services. Richard Carmona, who
commissioned
the "Call to Action on Global Health" while serving as surgeon general
from
2002 to 2006, recently cited its suppression as an example of the Bush
administration's frequent efforts during his tenure to give scientific
documents a political twist. Carmona told lawmakers that, as he fought to
release the document, he was "called in and again admonished ... via a
senior official who said,
'You don't get it. This will be a
political document, or it will not be released.' "
A few days before the end of his term as the nation's senior medical
officer, he was abruptly told he would not be reappointed.
White House To Push Mideast Arms
SalesJuly 28, 2007, CBS News/Associated
Presshttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/28/national/main3107184.shtml
The Bush
administration will ask Congress to expand multibillion-dollar aid and
weapons sales packages to friendly nations in the Middle East. Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice will announce proposed extensions and
enlargements of foreign aid to Israel and Egypt, and a proposed arms
sales
package to Persian Gulf nations including Saudi Arabia.
The
Israeli
and Egyptian proposals would lock in U.S. commitments for the next 10
years. The total for Israel would rise from $2.4 billion to about $3
billion a year, and Egypt would continue to receive $1.3 billion a
year. The Bush administration also wants Congress to give their
stamp of approval to an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia. Overall, the
aid and arms packages would total $20 billion ... which is double what
officials first estimated when details first became public this past
spring. Terrorism expert Sajjan Gohel says the Saudi arms sale might not
be a good idea. "It shows that the Bush administration isn't looking
really at the long-term, but seems to be ... concerned about trying to
secure oil reserves and deposits in Saudi Arabia," Gohel said.
Note:For decades Israel, with a population now of just over 7 million, has
been receiving U.S. tax dollars to the tune of over $300 per year for
every man, woman, and child? The new proposal will increase that to over
$400. This is more than 10 times what any other nation receives per
capita. And what results has all of this aid brought? Click here
for a 2002
Christian Science Monitor article which starts off
"Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If
divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person."
State Vote Machines Lose Test To
HackersJuly 28, 2007, San Francisco
Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper), Front Page http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/28/MNGP6R8TJO1.DTL
State-sanctioned
teams of
computer hackers were able to break through the security
of virtually every model of California's voting machines and change
results or take control of some of the systems' electronic functions,
according to a University of California study. The researchers
"were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they
tested,'' said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the "top to
bottom review" of every voting system certified by the state.
Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to say exactly
how vulnerable California elections are to computer hackers. The
review included voting equipment from every company approved for use in
the state. Bowen said ... that the report is only one piece of
information she will use to decide which voting systems are secure enough
to use in February's presidential primary election.
Note:For more reliable, verifiable information on the problems with new
electronic voting machines, click here.
Bechtel meets goals on fewer than half of its
Iraq rebuilding projectsJuly 26, 2007, International Herald
Tribunehttp://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/26/africa/26reconstruct.php
One of
the largest American contractors working in Iraq, Bechtel National, met
its original objectives on fewer than half of the projects it received as
part of a $1.8 billion reconstruction contract, while most of the rest
were canceled, reduced in scope or never completed as designed. But the
report, by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an
independent agency, places a large share of the blame for the failures on
the government overseers at the United States Agency for International
Development who administered the contract.
[USAID] assigned just
two people in Iraq to oversee the giant contract, which included some 24
major projects and 150 subcontractors and stipulated that all invoices be
approved or denied in just 10 days. The report is the first of a
planned series of audits of Western contractors that have received large
slices of the roughly $40 billion in American taxpayer money that has
been
spent on the troubled program to rebuild Iraq. Stuart Bowen Jr., who
heads
the special inspector general's office, said the United States government
clearly shared responsibility with the company for the project failures.
"I would say there's fault on both sides," Bowen said in an interview
Wednesday. He added that neither the aid agency nor the United States
Army
Corps of Engineers, which also oversaw aspects of the contract, ever came
close to filling all their staff positions in Iraq. "This isn't so much
an indictment of Bechtel as it is a criticism of the system," said
Stephen
Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington.
Jeu 2 Aoû - 21:37 par mihou