DHS Lags in Preparations for Transition of Power, Study Says

The Department of Homeland Security is moving too slowly to prepare for the risks that will accompany the first presidential transition for U.S. counterterrorism agencies formed after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to a study scheduled for release today.

The department's plan to train scores of key career officials, temporarily fill the posts of 26 departing political appointees and complete a transition plan are insufficient or should be accelerated, according to a 118-page report by the National Academy of Public Administration that was funded by Congress and DHS.

The report urged the presumptive presidential nominees, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), to move more quickly than previous candidates to submit the names of top aides for security clearances in order to ensure that they are ready to handle a national security crisis upon taking office.

Breaking with tradition by moving the deadline up two months -- to September from November -- would ensure that background checks are completed in time for officials to receive classified briefings the day after Election Day.

"For a first-ever presidential transition in an era of terrorism, we need to think and act nontraditionally," said the academy's president, Jennifer L. Dorn.

In a 9/11-style incident or other crisis after Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, an untested team of presidential advisers and unfamiliar career officials would have to make instant decisions, she said.

"The question is, will there be trust and confidence in the judgment of career personnel who come rushing in to the White House to say, 'Mr. President, we recommend shutting down the nation's air traffic control system'?" Dorn said.

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The U.S. Justice Department broke the law

Senior Justice Department officials broke civil service laws by rejecting scores of young applicants who had links to Democrats or liberal organizations, according to a biting report issued yesterday.

The report by the Justice Department inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that a pair of high-ranking political appointees who are no longer with the department had violated department policy and the Civil Service Reform Act by using ideological reasons to scuttle the candidacy of lawyers who applied to the elite honors and summer intern programs.

In one instance, steering committee member Esther Slater McDonald deemed "unacceptable" an applicant who professed admiration for the environmental group Greenaction and passed over another with ties to the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, the report said.

McDonald, who left the Justice Department last year and now works for a law firm in the District, sent colleagues a Nov. 29, 2006, e-mail in which she complained about "leftist commentary and buzzwords" in applications. Many of the underlying documents, on which McDonald and others wrote comments, were destroyed before the probe began, according to the report.

Auditors also criticized Michael J. Elston, former chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, for failing to supervise McDonald and for weeding out candidates on his own based on "impermissible considerations." Elston may have denied one Stanford Law School applicant because she had written a law review article about gender discrimination in the military, the report said.

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ISI involved in Karzai assassination attempt

KABUL: An Afghan official on Wednesday accused Pakistan's premier spy agency of organising a recent assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai, the most serious in a string of allegations which could hobble Washington's anti-terror alliance.

The charge bodes ill for American efforts to get Pakistan's new government to work in lockstep with Karzai's embattled administration to counter Islamic militants swarming around their common border.

Karzai escaped unharmed when assailants opened fire with guns and mortars toward the president, scores of senior officials and foreign diplomats during a military parade in downtown Kabul on April 27. Three Afghans were killed.

Since then, Karzai has ramped up his criticism of Pakistan, whom Afghan officials have long suspected of secretly aiding the insurgents. Karzai even threatened to send troops into Pakistan to eliminate Taliban leaders this month.

Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh alleged last month that suspects involved in the attempt on Karzai had exchanged cell phone text messages with people in Pakistan's lawless tribal regions and the city of Peshawar.

Presidential spokesman Humayun Hamidzada said on Tuesday that "the hand of one foreign intelligence agency was clearly involved."

But Saleh's spokesman, Saeed Ansari, went further on Wednesday, claiming Afghan intelligence could prove Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, was involved.

GAO Report : U.S. Funding to Pakistan Plagued With Problems

By Robin Wright / Washington Post

The Bush administration has paid Pakistan more than $2 billion without adequate proof that the Pakistani government used the funds for their intended purpose of supporting U.S. counterterrorism efforts, congressional auditors reported yesterday. Their report concluded that more than a third of U.S. funds provided Pakistan since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were subject to accounting problems, including duplication and possible fraud.

The Pentagon paid about $20 million for army road construction and $15 million to build bunkers in Pakistan, but there is no evidence that the roads or bunkers were ever constructed, the Government Accountability Office reported. Islamabad also billed Washington $200 million for an air defense radar system that may not have met a U.S. condition: that reimbursement cover combat or logistical costs supporting U.S. military operations against terrorism beyond what a country would spend on its own needs.

"It seems as though the Pakistani military went on a spending spree with American taxpayers' wallets and no one bothered to investigate the charges," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. "How hard would it have been to confirm that a road we paid $15 million for was ever built? It is appalling that the Defense Department did not send any embassy officials working in Pakistan to verify these enormous costs." Washington should "stop pouring money into a black hole," Harkin said.

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32 U.S. mayors mobilize against Iran war

Thirty-two US mayors signed a resolution saying 'no' to a strike against Iran in a bid to insert prudence into runaway US foreign policy.

Mayor Bob Kiss's office in Burlington Vermont has called on fellow mayors to sign a resolution to avoid military action with Iran, AlterNet.com reports.

"In these times, when the Iraq war has sapped so many of our financial resources and cost the lives of our brave soldiers, I hope you will join me in voicing the determination of mayors across this country to stop a war with Iran before it begins," Mayor Kiss wrote.

The National Mayors Resolution for Diplomacy with Iran acknowledges the ramping up of rhetoric against Iran and cautions against unilateral military action.

“Nothing herein should be misconstrued as support for the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but it should be understood that a unilateral, pre-emptive US military attack on Iran could well prove counterproductive to the cause of promoting freedom and democracy there,” it stated.

The resolution comes as recent polling has shown that only a small minority of the US public supports military action against Iran.

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White House tried to silence EPA on emissions

White House officials last December sought to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from submitting a proposed rule that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions from new vehicles, agency sources said yesterday. And upon learning that EPA had hit the "send" button just minutes earlier, the White House called again to demand that the e-mail be recalled.

The EPA official who forwarded the e-mail, deputy associate administrator Jason Burnett, refused, said the sources, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations.

The proposed rule was EPA's response to an April 2007 Supreme Court ruling that the agency had violated the Clean Air Act by refusing to take up the issue of regulating automobile emissions that contribute to global warming.

Burnett, who resigned from the agency earlier this month, sent the e-mail to the White House Office of Management and Budget at 2:17 p.m. on Dec. 5 and received the call warning him to hold off at 2:25 p.m., the sources said. The EPA is expected to release a watered-down version of its original proposal within a week, highlighting the extent to which Bush officials continue to resist mandatory federal limits on emissions linked to global warming.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that White House officials never opened EPA's e-mail. In March, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee disclosed documents showing that the White House had overruled EPA's findings on the impact of vehicle emissions on climate change.

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U.S. court overturns DC handgun ban

A ban on handguns in Washington DC has been ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court.

In a 5-4 decision, the justices upheld a lower court ruling striking down the ban. The justices said individuals had a right to keep handguns at home.

It is the first such case considered by the court in decades and is expected to have effects on gun laws across the US.

Debate over the exact meaning of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms has raged for years.

The BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says the ruling is of profound importance, as it enshrines for the first time the individual right to own guns and limits efforts to reduce their role in American life.

The Supreme Court said the constitution did not permit "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defence in the home.

Since 1976, the private possession of handguns had been prohibited in the nation's capital, while rifles and shotguns had been required to be locked away or dismantled.

The DC city council argued that the ban was needed to help keep violence and murder rates down.

But the measure was challenged by a security guard, Dick Heller.

He argued that if he was allowed to have a handgun at work, he also had a constitutional right to have one at home.

Friends of the court

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White House won’t admit that Bush met with military analysts

At Wednesday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Dana Perino claimed that she doesn’t know whether President Bush ever met with TV military analysts who participated in the Pentagon’s secret propaganda program that was suspended earlier this year after its existence was revealed in a NY Times story by David Barstow.

When I first questioned Ms. Perino about the program on April 30, she denied White House knowledge of the program, but as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out last month, Pentagon emails dating from March 2006 reveal that Pentagon officials communicated with Karl Rove about setting up meetings between the military analysts and both President Bush and his National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley.

Here’s the exchange that I had with Ms. Perino Wednesday:

Q Has the President ever met with a group of TV military analysts assembled by the Pentagon?

MS. PERINO: I don’t know. But what — I don’t know.

Q Well, the Pentagon released emails saying that they were seeking such a meeting — that was in March 2006.

MS. PERINO: I think it would probably have been a good idea if they had. It would have been a good meeting.

Q What would such a meeting have discussed?

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Leaked NIST Docs: “Unusual” Event Before Collapse Of WTC 7

Leaked confidential NIST documents concerning the investigation into the collapse of WTC 7, the 47-storey skyscraper that was not hit by a plane but imploded in under seven seconds on 9/11, reveal that an "unusual" event preceded the collapse of the building - a "jet of flames" that shot out of several windows after most of the fire had already died down.

The documents - entitled Confidential and Predecisonal Document NIST Report on Building 7 - form the preamble for a long-awaited final verdict on what caused a structurally reinforced building to fall like a controlled demolition despite suffering relatively minimal fire damage.

Chapter 1: WTC 7 Visual Evidence, Damage Estimates, and Timeline Analysis (William Pitts) is a thorough analysis of window fires by video and picture evidence, which concludes that all major fires before floors 7 and 13 died out prior to collapse.

The report states, "At 4:38 p.m. all of the windows between 13-44A and 13-47C were open, and the fires responsible for opening the windows had died down to the point where they could no longer be observed."

"Just prior to the collapse of the building at 5:20:52 p.m. a jet of flames was pushed from windows in the same area. The event that caused this unusual behavior has not been identified."

The report describes the nature of fires from floors 7-13 and also states, "With the exception of the fires on the 19th, 22nd, 29th, and 30th floors discussed at the start of this section, there is essentially no direct visual evidence of fires on other floors of WTC 7."

The photographs displayed in the report, many of which have never been seen before, do not show any other damage to the building than the small fires from floors 7-13 and the relatively minimal "scoop" observed on the lower right-hand west face of the building.

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U.S. border agents copying contents of travelers' laptops

By Federica Narancio / McClatchy Newspapers

U.S. border agents are copying and seizing the contents of laptops, cell phones and digital cameras from U.S. and foreign travelers entering the United States, witnesses told a Senate subcommittee Wednesday.

The extent of this practice is unknown despite requests to the Department of Homeland Security from the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution and several nonprofit agencies.

The department also declined to send a representative to the hearing. Subcommittee Chairman Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said Homeland Security had told him that its "preferred" witness was unavailable Wednesday.

Feingold added that he'd submitted written questions about the seizures of electronic data — and of some devices — to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in April. To date, Feingold said, he's gotten no reply.

Chertoff's department provided a written statement that said it wasn't its intention to infringe on Americans' privacy but to protect the country from terrorists and criminals, whose electronic devices can reveal incriminating materials.

During border searches of laptops, according to the statement, the department's Customs and Border Protection officers have found "jihadist material, information about cyanide and nuclear material, video clips of improvised explosive devices being exploded, pictures of various high-level al Qaida officials and other material associated with people seeking to do harm to U.S. and its citizens."

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Can't-Do Government

By Paul C. Light / Washington Post

We've seen the federal government at its worst over the past six months. Consider the controversies over contaminated tomatoes and meat, tainted toys, toxic trailers, counterfeit Heparin, aircraft groundings, veterans' care, missing warheads and unrelenting contract fraud. For every NASA success on the surface of Mars, there seems to be a failure back on Earth.

Congress and the presidential candidates have yet to connect the dots: The next president will inherit what Alexander Hamilton called a "government ill executed."

The evidence starts at the top of government, where the next president will oversee at least 64 discrete titles, including associate deputy secretaries, deputy associate undersecretaries and assistant assistant secretaries. The layering not only increases the distance that information must travel before reaching the president, it also obscures true performance.

In addition, the next president will appoint almost 3,000 political executives. Not only will these appointees dilute transparency between the top and bottom of government, but each must go through a brutish approval process that will vitiate the chain of command. The 60 pages of clearance forms have never been more complex or difficult to complete -- one set has to be filled out using a typewriter. Hillary Clinton might have promised to be ready on Day One, but she would have been lucky if her appointees were in place by March of Year Two.

The president will also oversee a federal workforce that is increasingly frustrated and demoralized -- with good reason. Asked to do more with less, it is close to doing everything with almost nothing.

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George Carlin: 'They Own and Control America'

Related: George Carlin on 9/11 Truth and the NWO

By Alicia Hope / Gangster Government

George Carlin was the man! I've always loved his comedy! Bill Maher, who was on Larry King's homage to Carlin the other night, will never be able to hold Carlin's jock strap! We'll never forget what you did to the 9/11 truthers in your audience, Mr. Maher!

R.I.P.,

Mr. Carlin

Court Says Military Erred in a Guantanamo Case

A federal appeals court for the first time has rejected the military's designation of a Guantanamo detainee as an enemy combatant.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned as "invalid" a military tribunal's conclusion that prisoner Huzaifa Parhat is an enemy combatant.

The court directed the Pentagon either to release or transfer Parhat or to hold a new tribunal hearing "consistent with the court's opinion."

This is the first time that a circuit court has overruled a finding by a so-called status review tribunal, the Pentagon panel of military officers that determines whether a captive at Guantanamo meets the definition of "enemy combatant."

The ruling could force the government to release Parhat and reassess enemy-combatant designations in other cases. Administration officials have vowed to close Guantanamo someday, but they say they're "stuck" with the 65 or so detainees who've been identified for release but can't be let go because their countries refuse to take them back.

Some 270 people remain prisoner at Guantanamo.

Parhat, 37, has been held more than six years. He's one of a group of ethnic Uighurs from western China who were shipped to Guantanamo from Afghanistan. The United States has faced numerous problems finding countries that are willing to accept foreign prisoners who can't return to their own countries because of concerns that they might be tortured there.

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GAO Report Faults Post-'Surge' Planning

By Karen DeYoung / Washington Post

The administration lacks an updated and comprehensive Iraq strategy to move beyond the "surge" of combat troops President Bush launched in January 2007 as an 18-month effort to curtail violence and build Iraqi democracy, government investigators said yesterday.

While agreeing with the administration that violence has decreased sharply, a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office concluded that many other goals Bush outlined a year and a half ago in the "New Way Forward" strategy remain unmet.

The report, after a bleak GAO assessment last summer, cited little improvement in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to act independently of the U.S. military, and noted that key legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament had not been implemented while other crucial laws had not been passed. The report also judged that key Iraqi ministries spent less of their allocated budgets last year than in previous years, and said that oil and electricity production had repeatedly not met U.S. targets.

Bush's strategy of January 2007, the GAO said, "defined the original goals and objectives that the Administration believed were achievable by the end of this phase in July 2008." Not meeting many of them changed circumstances on the ground and the pending withdrawal of the last of the additional U.S. forces mean that strategy is now outdated, the report said. The GAO recommends that the State and Defense departments work together to fashion a new approach.

The GAO report contrasted with a Pentagon report, dated June 13 but not released until yesterday.

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Nationwide Housing Collapse!!!

Related: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers

No matter who's measuring, the results are the same: Housing prices are tumbling at the sharpest rates ever with a bottom still at least a year away, economists say.

Both the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price indices and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight index on Tuesday reported record year-over-year declines in April, a sobering signal that the housing slump not only is deepening, but also engulfing markets once above water.

The last holdout in the Case-Shiller index, Charlotte, N.C., finally succumbed to the national housing downturn, with prices slipping 0.1 percent from a year ago. No city in the Case-Shiller 20-city index appreciated in April, the first time that's happened since its inception in 2000.

"I think that's the most disturbing part of the report," said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com. "It shows the declines are now across all markets, that this is a nationwide housing collapse rather than one in a few markets."

The 20-city index dropped by 15.3 percent in April versus last year, while the narrower 10-city index plunged 16.3 percent, its biggest decline in its 21-year history.

The OFHEO index showed prices falling 4.6 percent in April from the same month last year, when the index peaked. That was the biggest decline since record-keeping started in January 1991.

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Granting Immunity to Telecoms is a Criminal Act

The U.S. Constitution was written to afford U.S. citizens clear precise laws so that they might know their rights and secure justice in the courts.  However, the federal government's increasing focus on the fraudulent "war on Terror" had led to an illegal expansion of government and reduced civil liberties for citizens under the color of law.  Now the House has just passed by majority vote a grant of privileged immunity for the Telecoms, guilty of spying on Americans.  This act of anarchy by Congress dishonors the United States. For the Senate to approve this measure would be a criminal act. 

Congress lacks Authorization to Grant Telecoms Selective Immunity

Article 4, Section. 2. Clause 1: The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. All citizens are entitled to the same immunities.  Telecoms are not entitled to privileged immunities.

War on Terror is a Fraud

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15 states: The Congress shall have Power to provide for calling forth the Militia to suppress an insurrection or to repel an invasion. Article 1, Section 9 states:No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law;

Terror is not a crime.  It has no name, no face, and cannot be caught and jailed. It's illegal to fund the war on Terror because terror is an emotion and not a tangible thing. Given terror is invisible, it cannot be fought. A war against something invisible is absurd.

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9/11 - Emergency Official Witnessed Dead Bodies In WTC 7

By Paul Joseph Watson / Prison Planet

Exclusive video of emergency official Barry Jennings discussing explosions inside WTC 7 before either of the twin towers had collapsed and having to step over dead bodies of victims as he attempted to vacate the building has been released for the first time.

The clip, which was originally intended to feature in Loose Change Final Cut but had to be withdrawn according to Jennings' wishes after he had received threats, has now been made public in anticipation of a BBC documentary about Building 7 which is expected to skew Jennings' account in an attempt to reinforce the official story.

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Law School Dean Calls Conference to Plan Bush War Crimes Prosecution

Related: Bush war crimes trial?, Impeach Bush Now?

By Debra Cassens Weiss

The dean of Massachusetts School of Law at Andover is planning a September conference to map out war crimes prosecutions, and the targets are President Bush and other administration officials.

The dean, Lawrence Velvel, says in a statement that “plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."

Other possible defendants, he said, include federal judges and John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who wrote one of the so-called torture memos.

“We must insist on appropriate punishments,” he continued, “including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war criminals in the 1940s."

Velvel elaborates in an introduction to a series of articles published in The Long Term View (PDF). He writes “there is no question” that Bush and other officials are guilty of the federal crime of conspiracy to commit torture.

He also criticizes Justice Department officials for their legal memos. “The DOJ lawyers who wrote the corrupt legal memos giving attempted cover to Bush's actions have been rewarded by federal judgeships, cabinet positions, and high falutin' professorships,” he writes. Yoo is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley law school, while another former Justice Department official who signed a Yoo memo, Jay Bybee, is a judge on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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Kucinich: Major General Taguba’s Comments Add Weight to articles of impeachment

Related: Taguba Accuses Bush Admin of War Crimes

In a statement released to the media today, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) cites the comments made by Major General Taguba in a report released by the human rights organization Physician’s for Human Rights as adding weight to his recently submitted articles of impeachment.

Congressman Kucinich’s remarks today as follows:

“Major General Taguba’s comments confirm my long standing assertion that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have committed war crimes in violation of the War Crimes Act, Section 18 of U.S.Code § 2441. Commission of war crimes is an impeachable offense,” Kucinich said.

In the preface to a recently released report by the Physicians for Human Rights on the potential criminality of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, Major General Taguba writes:

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

“Prisoner abuse documented by Major General Taguba of Abu Ghraib, the FBI’s report of mistreatment at Guantanamo, Vice President Cheney’s admission that waterboarding was used on September 11 suspects, and the Administration’s approval of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ are all examples of the systematic and illegal torture of detainees in U.S. custody,” Kucinich said.

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Army ‘Vacuum’ Missile Hits Taliban & Endangers Civilians

British forces in Afghanistan have used one of the world’s most deadly and controversial missiles to fight the Taliban.

Apache attack helicopters have fired the thermobaric weapons against fighters in buildings and caves, to create a pressure wave which sucks the air out of victims, shreds their internal organs and crushes their bodies.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted to the use of the weapons, condemned by human rights groups as “brutal”, on several occasions, including against a cave complex.

The use of the Hellfire AGM-114N weapons has been deemed so successful they will now be fired from RAF Reaper unmanned drones controlled by “pilots” at Creech air force base in Nevada, an MoD spokesman added.

Thermobaric weapons, or vacuum bombs, were first combat-tested by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and their use by Russia against civilians in Chechnya in the 1990s was condemned worldwide.

The secret decision to buy the Hellfire AGM-114N missiles was made earlier this year following problems attacking Taliban fortified positions.

British Apache pilots complained that standard Hellfire antitank missiles were going straight through buildings and out of the other side. Even when they did explode, there were limited casualties among the Taliban inside, particularly when a building contained a number of rooms.

American Apache pilots overcame the problem in Iraq with the thermobaric Hellfire.

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