The Rag Blog

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 31, 2006; A03

Frustrated by poor federal cooperation, U.S. states and cities are building their own network of intelligence centers led by police to help detect and disrupt terrorist plots.

The new “fusion centers” are now operating in 37 states, including Virginia and Maryland, and another covers the Washington area, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The centers, which have received $380 million in federal support since the 2001 terrorist attacks, pool and analyze information from local, state and federal law enforcement officials.

The emerging “network of networks” marks a new era of opportunity for law enforcement, according to U.S. officials and homeland security experts. Police are hungry for federal intelligence in an age of homegrown terrorism and more sophisticated crime. For their part, federal law enforcement officials could benefit from a potential army of tipsters — the 700,000 local and state police officers across the country, as well as private security guards and others being courted by the centers.

But the emerging model of “intelligence-led policing” faces risks on all sides. The centers are popping up with little federal leadership and training, raising fears of overzealousness such as that associated with police “red squads” that spied on civil rights and peace activists decades ago. The centers also face practical obstacles that could limit their effectiveness, including a shortage of money, skilled analysts, and proven relationships with the FBI and Homeland Security.

Still, the centers are emerging as a key element in a sometimes chaotic new domestic intelligence infrastructure, which also includes homeland security units in local police forces and 103 FBI-led terrorism task forces, triple the number that existed before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Fusion centers are becoming “part of the landscape for local government,” said the incoming D.C. police chief, Cathy Lanier. But she warned that police are navigating a new patchwork of state and federal privacy laws that govern the sharing, collection and storage of information. “We’re in a very precarious position right now,” she said. “If we lose community support, that is going to be a big deal for local law enforcement.”

Civil liberties advocates worry that the fledgling fusion centers could stray into monitoring people engaged in lawful activities, as some members of new police homeland security units have done. A Georgia homeland security officer, for example, was discovered photographing a protest by vegans at a HoneyBaked Ham store in 2003. Privacy advocates are also concerned about the vast amount of information some fusion centers collect — and the sometimes vague limits on its use and storage.

Millions of Americans live on the margins of the American economy, depending on the likes of payday lenders and pawnshops, who charge excessive interest rates and superhigh fees for their services.

Ron Cook is a department manager at a Wal-Mart store in Atlanta. Maria Guzman is an undocumented worker from Mexico; she lives in Houston with her three children and cleans office buildings at night. Marty Lawson works for a large Minneapolis corporation. (The names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals.) What do these three people have in common? They are all regular fringe economy customers.

The term “fringe economy” refers to a range of businesses that engage in financially predatory relationships with low-income or heavily indebted consumers by charging excessive interest rates, superhigh fees, or exorbitant prices for goods or services. Some examples of fringe economy businesses include payday lenders, pawnshops, check-cashers, tax refund lenders, rent-to-own stores, and “buy-here/pay-here” used car lots. The fringe economy also includes credit card companies that charge excessive late payment or over-the-creditlimit penalties; cell phone providers that force less creditworthy customers into expensive prepaid plans; and subprime mortgage lenders that gouge prospective homeowners.

No one thinks that Donald Rumsfeld will end his days in a German prison. Or that there is any real chance he will have to face trial in Germany over allegations that he authorized policies leading to the torture of prisoners at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But that doesn’t mean that a complaint filed in Germany last month won’t have some ripple effects. The complaint asks a federal prosecutor there to begin an investigation, and ultimately a criminal prosecution, of the former secretary of defense and other U.S. officials for their roles in the abuses.

“Rumsfeld is no longer untouchable,” says Wolfgang Kaleck, the German lawyer who filed the complaint along with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Federation for Human Rights. “He is now deeply connected with claims of abuses and torture. We have taken the first step to begin the legal discussion on his accountability.”

The complaint against Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet, and other senior civilian and military officials, was filed in mid-November on behalf of 11 Iraqis who had been detained at Abu Ghraib prison and Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi detained at Guantánamo. It alleges that the defendants ordered, aided, and abetted war crimes and failed to prevent the commission of war crimes by their subordinates. In international law, war crimes are defined as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, including torture and inhuman treatment.

Rumsfeld has said the abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of a few low-level soldiers and the prisoners affected were mostly not the subject of interrogations, but just “common criminals” who were also detained. “It’s pretty clear that on the midnight shift, for a period of some weeks, there were people there who were behaving in a way that was fundamentally inconsistent with the president’s instructions to treat people humanely [and] my instructions that they were to treat people humanely,” Rumsfeld said in a Dec. 15 television interview.

But the plaintiffs claim that the torture that occurred at detention centers in Iraq and Guantánamo were not isolated incidents or the product of a few soldiers gone bad, but rather was widespread and systemic, having been ordered from the top levels of the military and the Defense Department. “The interrogational torture applied by the United States was not an accident, not a mistake, not a secret action,” the complaint states. (Pentagon and Department of Justice spokesmen declined to comment for this article.)

Stymied in their call for high-level accountability in the United States, the groups thought their best shot was to bring a case in a country, like Germany, that has a strong universal-jurisdiction law, says Michael Ratner, the CCR’s president.

Teaching answers to standardized tests should not be called “education,” especially when problem-solving will be the most important tool for a generation of students destined to inherit the incredible problems we will leave as our legacy.

To repeat the answers we feed is at best, preparing future “patriots” for greater acceptance of official policy. The consequences of this blind trust have become painfully apparent. Our government spent millions of dollars on propaganda to sell a peace-loving populace on an illegal invasion of a sovereign country.

Of all the multiple-choice reasons for this invasion, the one remaining is that Iraq sits in a strategic position for our military to control Asian oil. Imagine the mark this answer would have received on a government-generated standardized test.

Introductory remarks: Most people who can read or have a television have now heard about the recent elections in Mexico and Calderon’s theft of the vote from Obrador – and the aftermath. Many on the Left know something about the election in general terms but do not understand how the fraud was carried out and by whom. Still others know very little about the Zapatistas, the ELZN and The Other Campaign and the revolution now underway in this country that holds strategic importance to the U.S. Many of our readers have also been following the courageous stand the people of Oaxaca have taken against the U.S. backed, neoliberal government in Mexico. In the document that follows, you can learn much more about the background and future of this revolution.

Until now these issues have been passed on through news reports and scattered commentary. To our knowledge, we now have (in the following document) the first comprehensive and exhaustive treatment of these issues by true revolutionaries who are on the front lines in Mexico. The following definitive, organizational and informative document places these events into the revolutionary context which gave them birth. This reading is for those who want to understand what is currently happening and a view toward the future of the revolution in Mexico. Because of it is long and not easily available for cursory “screen reading”, we encourage you to do as we have done – print it out and spend some time with it. We are indebted to Agatha Haun and Fausto Guidice, translators for Tlaxcala for translating this document into English, exclusively for Axis of Logic. Emphases and formatting have been added throughout by Axis editors. If you think it too much work to read and digest this important document, think of it as a book … and imagine the work that went into writing and translating it! Thank you.

– Les Blough, Editor

Like a blue-blood version of a Mob family with global reach, the Bushes have eliminated one more key witness to the important historical events that led the U.S. military into a bloody stalemate in Iraq and pushed the Middle East to the brink of calamity.

The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be – as the New York Times observed – the “triumphal bookend” to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might have staged another celebration as he did after the end of “major combat,” posing under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on May 1, 2003.

But now with nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush may be forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.

Still, Bush has done his family’s legacy a great service while also protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S. government officials.

He has silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history that stretched from Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 to the alleged American-Saudi “green light” for Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.

Hussein now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used to produce the unconventional weapons that were deployed against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who got the money and who facilitated the deals.

Nor will Hussein be available to give his account of the mixed messages delivered by George H.W. Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie before Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there another American “green light” or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to hear?

Like the climactic scene from the Mafia movie “Casino” in which nervous Mob bosses eliminate everyone who knows too much, George W. Bush has now guaranteed that there will be no public tribunal where Hussein gives testimony on these potentially devastating historical scandals, which could threaten the Bush Family legacy.

A former United Nations weapons inspector and leading Iraq War opponent has written a new book alleging that Jerusalem is pushing the Bush administration into war with Iran, and accusing the pro-Israel lobby of dual loyalty and “outright espionage.”

In the new book, called “Target Iran,” Scott Ritter, who served as a senior U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 and later became one of the war’s staunchest critics, argues that the United States is readying for military action against Iran, using its nuclear program as a pretext for pursuing regime change in Tehran.

“The Bush administration, with the able help of the Israeli government and the pro-Israel Lobby, has succeeded,” Ritter writes, “in exploiting the ignorance of the American people about nuclear technology and nuclear weapons so as to engender enough fear that the American public has more or less been pre-programmed to accept the notion of the need to militarily confront a nuclear armed Iran.”

Later in the book, Ritter adds: “Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else.”

Ritter’s book echoes recent high-profile attacks on the pro-Israel lobby by former President Jimmy Carter and by scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Ritter, who recently returned from a weeklong speaking engagement on The Nation cruise, speaks of a “network of individuals” that pursues Israel’s interests in the United States. The former weapons inspector alleges that some of the pro-Israel lobby’s activities “can only be described as outright espionage and interference in domestic policies.” Ritter also accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of having an inherent dual loyalty. He called for the organization to be registered as a foreign agent.

CAIRO: Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit called yesterday for an end to nuclear double standards, after the UN imposed sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt uranium enrichment.

“The negligence of certain Western countries over questions of non-proliferation, and the fact that they permit some states to acquire a nuclear capacity while preventing others from doing so, is nothing but double standards,” the foreign minister said in a statement.

“That must stop,” he added. “It is known that Israel has a nuclear capability that is not subject to any control by the International Atomic Energy Agency,” the UN’s nuclear watchdog in Vienna.

Israel has never officially admitted having nuclear weapons, but it is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and refuses to allow international inspections of its Dimona nuclear facility.

OAK RIDGE – The government has invested a fortune in the cleanup of Melton Valley, which – considering its inglorious past as a dumping ground for all things nuclear – might be better named Meltdown Valley.

Workers have plugged wells, capped landfills, drained waste ponds and injected grout in cracks and crevices in an effort to halt the spread of radioactive contamination. They have torn down old buildings, hauled away junk and excavated “hot spots” that couldn’t be cleaned or contained.

But there are times when federal contractors don’t know what to do.

That’s the case with five big tanks underneath a three-sided shed a few miles from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They’ve been sitting there for decades, unadorned except for a collection of signs that warn of the radiation hazards.

According to John Owsley, the state’s environmental oversight director in Oak Ridge, the tanks – and their radioactive contents – don’t fit neatly into any of the normal categories for disposal.

They’re stuck in nuclear nowhere.

“It doesn’t quite meet the definition of high-level waste, and the activity is too high for it to be disposed of as low-level waste,” Owsley said.

Therefore, the tanks will stay where they are, alongside a dusty gravel road, while DOE and its contractors and environmental regulators explore the options.