Survey Finds: U.S. Recession has Already Started

Also see: U.S. Stocks Retreat on Recession Concern

A U.S. recession has already started and the downturn is likely to last longer than in the recent past, with the economy recovering only late next year, according to a quarterly survey of corporate finance chiefs released today.

Fifty-four percent of the CFOs said the United States is in recession, and another 24 percent said there is a high likelihood of one starting later this year, according to a Duke University/CFO Magazine survey completed on March 7.

Nearly three-quarters of the CFOs said they were more pessimistic this quarter than in the prior quarter about the U.S. economy, reflecting concerns about consumer spending, turmoil in credit and housing markets, and high energy prices.

An index of optimism, which rates the economy on a 1 to 100 scale, is at 52, the lowest in the seven-year history of the index, the survey found.

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U.S. Trainer: Afghan War Trend Worse Than Iraq

The tide of the war in Afghanistan is running against the United States and its allies, in contrast to an improving trend in Iraq, a U.S. military official and counter-insurgency expert said on Wednesday.

"Afghanistan (is) in my eyes an under-resourced war, a war that needs a whole lot more advisers, a whole lot more economic aid," Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl told a security conference in Stockholm.

"This war is the war I'm concerned about, a war in which the United States very much needs the help of our friends."

Nagl commands the 1st battalion of the 34th armored regiment at Fort Riley, Kansas, training U.S. transition teams that embed with Iraqi and Afghan security forces.

He was part of the writing team that produced the U.S. military's manual on counter-insurgency, which is credited with transforming its approach to both conflicts with a new emphasis on winning over local populations and marginalizing insurgents.

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UN Torture Envoy Says U.S. Denies Access to Iraq Jails

The U.N. investigator on torture said on Tuesday the United States had denied his request to visit U.S.-run jails in Iraq and insisted a visit could help clear its legacy of the prison abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib.

Manfred Nowak, United Nations special rapporteur on torture, said he had received credible information the situation had improved at U.S. detention facilities in recent years, but stressed only a visit would allow him to verify them.

An international outcry erupted in 2004 after images of prisoner abuse by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad, including naked detainees stacked in a pyramid and others cowering before snarling dogs, became public.

"I was a little astonished that the U.S. government is not willing to grant me access because it might perhaps even be in their own interest if I compared different detention facilities," Nowak told a news briefing in Geneva.

"It might also be in their interest in overcoming the legacy of having been criticised so much for torture practices in Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities up to 2004," he added.

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Another New GAO Study Says Bush Follows Through on Signing-Statement Announcements of Intent to Violate Law

One of the most underexplored aspects of Bush's unprecedented use of signing statements has been the practical consequences.

A year ago, the Government Accountability Office found that, indeed, federal officials had not complied with at least some of the provisions that Bush objected to in signing statements.

In testimony to a House committee yesterday, GAO general counsel Gary L. Kepplinger announced the results of another study, this one of provisions in the 2008 defense authorization, which found more of the same. The GAO examined how 21 agencies executed 29 different provisions of the law that Bush asserted his right not to follow -- and found that in nine cases "the agencies had not executed the provisions as written."

As with the earlier study, the specific examples are less than compelling -- the investigation, for instance, avoided "a close examination of provisions involving national security, intelligence, or foreign relations matters, because of our limited access to such information and the time constraints on our work."

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6 Signs the U.S. May Be Headed for War in Iran

Is the United States moving toward military action with Iran?

The resignation of the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East is setting off alarms that the Bush administration is intent on using military force to stop Iran's moves toward gaining nuclear weapons. In announcing his sudden resignation today following a report on his views in Esquire, Adm. William Fallon didn't directly deny that he differs with President Bush over at least some aspects of the president's policy on Iran. For his part, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said it is "ridiculous" to think that the departure of Fallon -- whose Central Command has been working on contingency plans for strikes on Iran as well as overseeing Iraq -- signals that the United States is planning to go to war with Iran.

Fallon's resignation, ending a 41-year Navy career, has reignited the buzz of speculation over what the Bush administration intends to do given that its troubled, sluggish diplomatic effort has failed to slow Iran's nuclear advances. Those activities include the advancing process of uranium enrichment, a key step to producing the material necessary to fuel a bomb, though the Iranians assert the work is to produce nuclear fuel for civilian power reactors, not weapons.

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Dollar Falls to Record Low on Concern Fed Package Won't Succeed

By Ye Xie and Gavin Finch / Bloomberg

The dollar fell to a record below $1.55 per euro on concern that the Federal Reserve's plan to provide funds to banks won't be enough to break the gridlock in money-market lending and stem credit losses.

The U.S. currency erased more than half of yesterday's 1.6 percent rally versus the yen, the biggest in six months, which came after the Fed said it would extend $200 billion of credit to financial institutions to spur lending. Traders bet the Fed will cut rates by as much as three quarters of a percentage point next week to avert a recession, while the European Central Bank keeps borrowing costs unchanged.

``It's difficult for the dollar to gain traction,'' said Paresh Upadhyaya, who helps manage $50 billion in currency assets at Putnam Investments in Boston. ``The Fed is probably running out of options; the market is fixated on interest-rate differentials, which are clearly negative for the dollar.''

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Plan To Spray Toxic Biological Chemicals Over San Francisco Announced!!!

The U.S. Government is planning to poison more than two million people, in California, using an untested biological "pesticide" this summer. The chemical to be sprayed is classified by the EPA as a "pesticide" and the plan is to douse cities with this chemical designed to stick on everything for 90 days or longer. This application is not a one time event, but will continue every 1-3 months for as long as five years.

The pesticide to be sprayed is not designed to harm the light brown apple moth's who it is designed for, but merely to confuse its mating habits. While harmless to moths, the pesticide has been documented to harm humans. Side effects range from vomiting and flu like systems, to male and female reproductive cycle disruption. One child nearly died from the exposure, and some people have developed asthma from being exposed to this chemical concoction.

It is cause for alarm that a chemical being labeled as harmless and "safe" even in minute doses, causes severe health effects in some people. The government is racing to cover up and hide the dangerous health effects, so that they can continue their aerial spray plans this summer.

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Bush Doublespeak at NRB Laughable

US President George W. Bush on Tuesday promised cheering supporters that he would not risk "reversible" gains in Iraq with a troop withdrawal plan tied to the November US elections.

"I want to assure you -- just like I assure military families and the troops -- the politics of 2008 is not going to enter into my calculation, it is the peace of years to come that will enter into my calculation," he pledged to a Christian broadcasters association.

Bush made no mention of just-begun talks in Baghdad aimed at forging a long-term security partnership deal between the United States and Iraq by July, well before the US president's term ends in January 2009.

The president's Democratic foes have denounced the potential pact as an effort to tie his successor's hands. The White House and Iraqi officials say it is necessary because the UN mandate for the US presence expires at year's end.

Bush, his approval ratings slumped at near-record lows, pointed to US troop draw-downs scheduled to occur by July and denied that political pressure was playing any role in US force levels in war-torn Iraq.

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Auditors: Iraq Faces Budget Surplus While U.S. Foots the Bill

Iraq isn't spending much of its own money, despite soaring oil revenues that are pushing the country toward a massive budget surplus, auditors told Congress on Tuesday.

The expected surplus comes as the U.S. continues to invest billions of dollars in rebuilding Iraq and faces a financial squeeze domestically because of record oil prices.

"The Iraqis have a budget surplus," said U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. "We have a huge budget deficit. . . . One of the questions is who should be paying."

Walker and the other auditors did not give a figure as to the likely surplus. U.S. officials contend that Iraq's lack of spending is due primarily to Baghdad's inability to determine where its money is needed most and how to allocate it efficiently. Two senators have called for an investigation into the matter.

Democrats say the assessment is proof that the Iraq war as a waste of time and money. The U.S. has spent more than $45 billion on rebuilding Iraq.

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Report: NSA's Warrantless Spying Resurrects Banned 'Total Information Awareness' Project

Total Information Awareness -- the all-seeing terrorist spotting algorithm-meets-the-mother-of-all-databases that was ostensibly de-funded by Congress in 2003, never actually died, and was largely rebuilt in secret by the NSA, according to the Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman.

In a fantastic story Monday, Gorman pulls together threads and lays out what many have suspected and alleged in lawsuits -- the NSA is collecting and sifting through immense amounts of data about who Americans talk to, what they are interested in, how they spend their money and where they travel in order to find secret terrorism cells inside America.

The NSA is engaged in a widespread mining of so-called transactional data -- domestic telephone records, credit card purchases, travel data, international financial data, internet searches, subject lines and headers of emails -- pulling in immense data about Americans and foreigners, which it then uses to find particular targets -- or even, according to Gorman -- to decide what cities to target for blanket surveillance.

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address.

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Soldiers in Iraq Given Untested H2O

U.S. soldiers at a military base in Iraq were provided with treated but untested wastewater for nearly two years by KBR, the giant government contractor, and may have suffered health problems as a result, according to a report released yesterday by the Pentagon's inspector general.

The inspector general said that from March 2004 to February 2006, KBR inappropriately distributed chlorinated wastewater to 5,000 U.S. troops at Camp Q-West, located at the Qayyarah West airfield about 180 miles north of Baghdad. The wastewater had been processed by a reverse-osmosis purification system and treated with chlorine before being distributed to showers and latrines on the base.

The report said that from October 2005 to June 2006, sick-call records showed 38 reported illnesses that "an attending medical official said could be attributed to water, such as skin abscesses, cellulites, skin infections and diarrhea." The report said it was impossible to definitively link the treated water to all the illnesses.

At a handful of other bases that were audited, both KBR and the military failed to perform required water-quality checks, the report stated. At Camp Ar Ramadi in Anbar province, auditors found that of 251 soldiers interviewed, 44 percent reported water provided for personal hygiene that was discolored or had an unusual odor. Four percent of the soldiers said they got sick from the water.

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New Camera Brings About Vast Improvement for Surveillance

Researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville have developed a wide-angle camera that will be able to provide security forces with the ability to monitor large areas through high-resolution images taken from a satellite or an airborne craft, according to researcher David Pollock.

It was Pollock who first discovered that if you point a large number of lenses toward a common point, and then make a small correction on each of the lenses, you provide a camera with capabilities that far surpass existing technologies.

"If you look at high-resolution images taken by satellite or aircraft, the field-of-view in those photographs is tiny," he said. "This camera provides anyone with the ability to view the entire scene and, simultaneously, zoom in closely on a certain area with very high resolution at real time."

Flying at an altitude of 15,000 feet, a developmental version of the camera can see a 21-kilometer diameter area with a resolution of 0.3 meters. As a comparison, most Google Earth imagery is 1 meter.

The optics systems patent shared by UAHuntsville and Sony Corp. provides this unique coverage and resolution, according to Pollock.

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Poland Uses Coercion Before Agreeing to Missile Shield

President Bush promised yesterday to upgrade Poland's antiquated armed forces with a plan to be developed before he leaves office in January as he sought to secure an agreement that would allow the United States to establish an antimissile system in Eastern Europe despite vigorous Russian objections.

Meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at the White House, Bush appeared to boost efforts to get his missile defense program on track in the face of deep skepticism in Warsaw. Tusk came to office in November far cooler to the idea of stationing U.S. interceptors on Polish soil than his predecessor, and until recently talks had bogged down.

Poland has maintained that its air defenses must be upgraded before it accepts any U.S. system, particularly given Russian threats to target the country if American interceptors are based there. Bush implicitly linked the two issues yesterday. "Mr. Prime Minister, before my watch is over, we will have assessed those needs and come up with a modernization plan that's concrete and tangible," he told Tusk in front of television cameras in the Oval Office.

Tusk interpreted that as a deal, saying that he and Bush "came to a conclusion . . . that the missile defense system and the modernization of the Polish forces . . . come in one package.

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U.S. Envoy Admits Role in Aldo Moro Killing

An American envoy has claimed that he played a critical role in the fate of Aldo Moro, the former Italian prime minister who was murdered by terrorists in 1978.

Steve Pieczenik, an international crisis manager and hostage negotiator in the State Department, said that Moro had been "sacrificed" for the "stability" of Italy.

In a new book called We Killed Aldo Moro, Mr Pieczenik said he was sent to Italy by President Jimmy Carter on the day that Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, a far-Left terrorist group.

Moro, who had been prime minister for a total of more than five years between 1963 and 1976, was snatched at gunpoint from his car in Rome.

He had been heading to parliament for a crucial vote on a ground-breaking alliance he had proposed between the Christian Democrat Party and the Italian Communist Party.

The alliance enraged both sides of the political spectrum in Italy, and also upset both Moscow and Washington.

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The Federal Reserve's Rescue has Failed!

The verdict is in. The Fed's emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed.

Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter.

The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into the safest pockets of the US credit universe.

It is hard to imagine a more plain-vanilla outfit than the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages bridges, bus terminals, and airports.

The authority is a public body, backed by the two states. Yet it had to pay 20pc rates in February after the near closure of the $330bn (£166m) "term-auction" market. It had originally expected to pay 4.3pc, but that was aeons ago in financial time.

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I Was Kidnapped by the CIA

For hours, the words come pouring out of Abu Omar as he describes his years of torture at the hands of Egypt's security services. Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice raped.

He mentions, almost casually, the hearing loss in his left ear from the beatings, and how he still wakes up at night screaming, takes tranquilizers, finds it hard to concentrate, and has unspecified "problems with my wife at home." He is, in short, a broken man.

There is nothing particularly unusual about Abu Omar's story. Torture is a standard investigative technique of Egypt's intelligence services and police, as the State Department and human rights organizations have documented myriad times over the years. What is somewhat unusual is that Abu Omar ended up inside Egypt's torture chambers courtesy of the United States, via an "extraordinary rendition"—in this case, a spectacular daylight kidnapping by the Central Intelligence Agency on the streets of Milan, Italy.

First introduced during the Clinton administration, extraordinary renditions—in which suspected terrorists are turned over to countries known to use torture, usually for the purpose of extracting information from them—have been one of the cia's most controversial tools in the war on terror.

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U.S. Prisons: Big Business & A New Form of Slavery

Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million - mostly Black and Hispanic - are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don't have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don't like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, "no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens." The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world's prison population, but only 5% of the world's people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates.

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House Judiciary Committee Files Suit to Compel Former White House Council & Chief of Staff to Cooperate

By Mike Lillis

In a move to test the John Adams’ statement that the nation should be one of laws and not men, the House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit (pdf) Monday against two White House aides—one current and one former—who have refused to cooperate with a congressional investigation surrounding the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The Bush administration, citing executive privilege, has said that both Harriet Miers, former White House council, and chief of staff Josh Bolten are immune to congressional requests urging cooperation in the investigation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a statement Monday rejecting that claim.

Congress, on behalf of the American people, is clearly entitled to the information that is being sought – it involves the politicization of the Justice Department and law enforcement, not national security information nor communications with the President. The President has no grounds to assert executive privilege.

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Report: Blackwater Cost Government Millions by Saying Their Employees Weren't Their Employees

Super-private security firm Blackwater has managed to stay out of the headlines for the last couple of months. But that might be about to change.

House oversight committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) released a memorandum this afternoon to committee  members that Blackwater is evading  tax and employment laws by deceptively labeling its armed guard employees as "independent contractors." In March 2007, the committee found that Blackwater had cost the IRS $50 million by improperly labeling its employees. Today’s report found the following:

- Blackwater has received $1.25 billion in federal contracts since 2000. Despite this haul, they have asked for- and gotten- special privileges for the government as a "small business." The State Dept. has awarded Blackwater $144 million in small business set asides since 2000. The reason is that when armed employees are counted as independent contractors their staff is considered small enough for the designation.

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N.Y. Times: New York Governor Linked to Prostitution

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who gained national prominence relentlessly pursuing Wall Street wrongdoing, has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a law enforcement official and a person briefed on the investigation.

The wiretap captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a hotel room, according to an affidavit filed in federal court in Manhattan. The person briefed on the case and the law enforcement official identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.

Mr. Spitzer, a first term Democrat, today made a brief public appearance during which he apologized for his behavior, and described it as a “private matter.” He did not address his political future.

“I have acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong,” said Mr. Spitzer, who appeared with his wife Silda at his Manhattan office. “I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promised better.”

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