Gangster Government

Credit-market turmoil has driven the U.S. into a recession and may topple some of the nation's biggest banks, said Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

"The worst is yet to come in the U.S.," Mr. Rogoff, a Harvard University professor of economics, said in an interview here Tuesday. "The financial sector needs to shrink; I don't think simply having a couple of medium-sized banks and a couple of small banks going under is going to do the job."

The U.S. housing slump has triggered about $500 billion in credit-market losses for banks globally and led to the collapse and sale of Bear Stearns Cos., the fifth-largest U.S. securities firm. Bonds of regional banks such as National City Corp. and Keycorp are under pressure on expectations of more fallout. Mr. Rogoff said the government should nationalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation's biggest mortgage-finance firms.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae "should have been closed down 10 years ago," he said. "They need to be nationalized, the equity holders should lose all their money. Probably we need to guarantee the bonds, simply because the U.S. has led everyone into believing they would guarantee the bonds."

Last month, President Bush signed into law a housing bill that provides Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. the power to make equity purchases in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Mr. Paulson asked for the authority July 13 after the shares of the firms, which own or guarantee almost half of the $12 trillion of U.S. mortgages, slid to the lowest level in more than 17 years.

The mortgage lenders have been battered by record delinquencies and rising losses.

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OFFICIALS AT the Federal Bureau of Investigation presented more evidence this week that they say identifies Bruce E. Ivins as the lone culprit in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and sickened 17 others. But even they acknowledged that the evidence is unlikely to win over skeptics. "I don't think we're ever going to be able to put the suspicions to bed," said Vahid Majidi of the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. "There's always going to be a spore on the grassy knoll."

In fact, the FBI's latest disclosure raised more questions than it answered. For example, the agency disclosed that in February 2002, Dr. Ivins provided a sample of anthrax from a flask in his lab labeled RMR-1029; the FBI destroyed the sample, though, because Dr. Ivins allegedly did not submit it using proper protocols. The FBI now says that the spores found in a duplicate sample of RMR-1029 provided by Dr. Ivins at the same time, but stored at a university in Arizona, are almost identical to the spores used in the attack. The agency again acknowledged this week that more than 100 individuals could have had access to RMR-1029; it has not yet explained how it eliminated everyone but Dr. Ivins as a suspect.

The case against Dr. Ivins will never be tested in court; Dr. Ivins committed suicide last month as the Justice Department was preparing to indict him. And while the FBI and Justice Department are right to share information with the public, the slow rollout and the selective nature of what the agency is able or willing to share are not the best way to assess the validity of its claims. To that end, an independent commission or the Justice Department inspector general should review the investigation as a whole.

The federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.

Officials say the Border Crossing Information system, disclosed late last month by the Department of Homeland Security in a Federal Register notice, is part of a broader effort to guard against terrorist threats. It also reflects the growing number of government systems containing personal information on Americans that can be shared for a broad range of law enforcement and intelligence purposes, some of which are exempt from Privacy Act protections.

While international air passenger data has long been captured this way, Customs and Border Protection agents only this year began to log the arrivals of all U.S. citizens across land borders, through which about three-quarters of border crossings occur.

compiling such a database until recently. But the advent of machine-readable identification documents, which the government now mandates for everyone crossing the border, has made gathering the information more feasible. By June, all travelers crossing land borders will need to present a machine-readable document.

In January, border agents began manually entering into the database the personal information of travelers who did not have such documents.

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In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated a suit by a former Stanford University student who was detained and handcuffed in 2005 as she was about to board a plane to her native Malaysia.

The ruling is apparently the first to allow a challenge to the no-fly list to proceed in a federal trial court, said the plaintiff's lawyer, Marwa Elzankaly.

The decision would allow individuals to demand information from the government, present evidence on why they should not have been on the list, and take the case to a jury, Elzankaly said.

The ruling means that "someone who finds it's likely that their name has been placed on a government watch list will get their day in court," Elzankaly said.

The Transportation Security Administration, which maintains the no-fly list, had no comment on the case, said Nico Melendez, an agency spokesman in Los Angeles.

A federal judge in San Francisco had dismissed the suit, citing a law that requires all challenges to TSA orders to be filed directly in an appeals court, with no right to present evidence or convene a jury. But the appeals court majority, led by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, said the no-fly list, though maintained by the TSA, is actually compiled by a branch of the FBI, which can be sued in a trial court like most other federal agencies.

The TSA, part of the Homeland Security Department, has lists of hundreds of thousands of names of passengers who allegedly pose a risk of terrorism or air piracy, information the agency shares with airlines. Those on the no-fly list are prevented from boarding. Passengers on a separate "selectee" list undergo additional searches.

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By Rick Weiss |Washington Post

Oh, the light! The autumn light! Is there anything more glorious than an October day, awash in the sun's low-slung amber rays?

And yet . . . perhaps you feel the dread, too. The looming inkiness that, like the tide, crawls up your legs a little higher each day, turning that honeyed light to molasses and molasses to muck until you realize, too late, that the birds have left and the world has gone dark. Dark when you wake up, dark when you go home.

In simpler times we slept more in winter, but modern living denies us that luxury. So increasingly each day, soft-white lights from yonder windows break -- along with halogens, tungstens and compact fluorescents. And when we can't stand it anymore, we resort to manipulation, declaring that 6 in the morning is now 5.

You got a problem with that, take it up in the spring.

Now science is finding that our manhandling of light and time is making us sick.

Artificial illumination is fooling the body's biological clock into releasing key wakefulness hormones at the wrong times, contributing to seasonal fatigue and depression. And daylight saving time, extended by Congress this year for an extra four weeks, risks dragging even more Americans into a winter funk.

Much more than mental health is at stake. Women who work at night, out of sync with the light, have recently been shown to have higher rates of breast cancer -- so much so that an arm of the World Health Organization will announce in December that it is classifying shift work as a "probable carcinogen."

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FBI officials, while admitting a mistake, are offering more evidence to support their assertion that government scientist Bruce Ivins was responsible for the anthrax-laced mailings that killed five people in 2001.

In a two-hour briefing Monday at the agency's headquarters, senior FBI scientists -- backed by a panel of outside experts -- revealed they examined more than 1,000 anthrax samples and interviewed all of the approximately 100 people who had had access to the flask that reportedly held the deadly strain implicated in the killings.

In the briefing, intended to counter widespread questions about the investigation, the scientists fiercely defended the forensic process that led to their conclusion but acknowledged that they may never be able to satisfy everyone.

"We'll never put all the questions to rest," said Vahid Majidi, head of the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. "There's always going to be a spore on a grassy knoll."

Majidi, FBI Laboratory Director David Hassell, six outside scientists, and academicians and several scientists from the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, joined the news conference.

The credibility of the FBI and the Justice Department took a hit after their initial identification of another scientist from the same lab, Steven Hatfill, as "a person of interest" in the probe in 2002. Hatfill was subsequently cleared and successfully sued the government.

The investigation then stretched on with no public evidence of progress until Ivins, facing an indictment, reportedly took his life last month.

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Sen. Joe Lieberman may need to visit the site wtc7 to brush up on his facts! Of course, we all know he is lying but the audacity of such a ridiculous statement is mind-boggling. Steel-framed high-rises (buildings of fifteen stories or more) have been common for more than 100 years. There have been hundreds of incidents involving severe fires in such buildings, and none have led to complete collapse, or even partial collapse of support columns.

They really are losing the information war!

Power to the people!

The Defense Intelligence Agency's newly created Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center is going to have an office authorized for the first time to carry out "strategic offensive counterintelligence operations," according to Mike Pick, who will direct the program.

Such covert offensive operations are carried out at home and abroad against people known or suspected to be foreign intelligence officers or connected to foreign intelligence or international terrorist activities -- but not against U.S. citizens, said Toby Sullivan, director of counterintelligence for James R. Clapper Jr., the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Sullivan and Pick, who is chief of the agency's Counterintelligence Human Intelligence Enterprise Management Office, spoke to reporters during a Pentagon briefing this month.

These sensitive, clandestine operations are "tightly controlled departmental activities run by a small group of specially selected people" within the Defense Department, said Sullivan, who exercises authority over all Pentagon counterintelligence activities. The investigative branches of the three services -- the Army's Counterintelligence Corps, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service -- have done secret offensive counterintelligence operations for years, and now DIA has been given the authority.

The purpose of an offensive counterintelligence operation is not criminal prosecution, which would be the goal if the target were an American recruited by a foreign power to be an agent in this country. In such an investigation, DIA officers would work with the FBI to gather evidence for use in an indictment and a trial.

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The federal agency charged with backstopping pension benefits for 44 million Americans has understated the risks of its new investment policy, a congressional watchdog said Monday.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.'s new strategy could significantly boost the PBGC's investment returns, but it "will likely also carry more risk than acknowledged by PBGC's analysis."

The PBGC said earlier this year that it would take a more aggressive investment approach by investing more in stocks and adding new alternative investments, such as real estate and private equity funds.

The agency, which has assets of $68 billion, hopes the strategy will help it close a $14 billion gap between those assets and its liabilities. Otherwise, taxpayers could be called upon to pony up extra funding, the director of the PBGC has warned.

The PBGC has said its new approach will reduce risk because it will result in a more diversified portfolio of 45 percent stocks, 45 percent bonds and 10 percent in alternative investments.

Previously, its targets were 75 percent to 85 percent bonds and 15 percent to 25 percent in stocks, although the actual figure reached 28 percent last year. The agency is seeking bids from Wall Street firms to help manage the switch.

The GAO, however, said that under certain scenarios, the new strategy would have more volatile results than the old approach. The report said that's risky because PBGC pays out more than $4 billion a year to retirees and needs access to cash.

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By Eric Lichtblau and David Johnston | IHT

Growing doubts from scientists about the strength of the government's case against the late Bruce Ivins, the military researcher named as the anthrax killer, are forcing the Justice Department to begin disclosing more fully the scientific evidence it used to implicate him.

In the face of the questions, FBI officials have decided to make their first detailed public presentation next week on the forensic science tracing the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a flask kept in a refrigerator in Ivins's laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Many scientists are awaiting those details because so far, they say, the FBI has failed to make a conclusive case.

"That is going to be critically important, because right now there is really no data to make a scientific judgment one way or the other," Brad Smith, a molecular biologist at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "The information that has been put out, there is really very little scientific information in there."

FBI officials say they are confident that their scientific evidence against Ivins, who killed himself last month as the Justice Department was preparing an indictment against him, will withstand scrutiny, and they plan to present their findings for review by leading scientists. But the scrutiny may only raise further questions.

The bureau presented forensics information to congressional and government officials in a closed-door briefing held in the past week, but a number of listeners said the briefing left them less convinced that the FBI had the right man, and they said some of the government's public statements appeared incomplete or misleading.

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