WASHINGTON - The Justice Department in 2002 told the CIA that its interrogators would be safe from prosecution for violations of anti-torture laws if they believed `in good faith’ that harsh techniques used to break the will of prisoners, including waterboarding, would not cause “prolonged mental harm.”
The newly released but heavily censored memo approved the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques method by method, but warned that if the circumstances changed, interrogators could be running afoul of anti-torture laws.
The Aug. 1, 2002 memo signed by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee was issued the same day he wrote a memo for then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales defining torture as only those “extreme acts” that cause pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure. That memo was later rescinded by the Justice Department.
Waterboarding is a form of simulated drowning that critics call torture. CIA Director Michael Hayden banned waterboarding in 2006 but government officials have said it remains a possibility if approved by the attorney general, the CIA chief and the president.
Bush administration memos authorizing interrogation techniques have been leaked to the press and released under the Freedom of Information Act starting in 2004, when the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal revealed detainee mistreatment. Thursday’s release adds to the growing record of the still secret program launched after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The new Bybee memo was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, along with two other previously unreleased documents dealing with the CIA’s interrogation program. The Bybee memo specifically approved proposed interrogation techniques that were devised for use against al-Qaida suspects who were resistant to traditional questioning methods.
The new documents indicate that senior Bush administration officials were aware of the controversial and potentially problematic use of certain interrogation methods, including waterboarding.
In a second memo, dated Jan. 28, 2003, then-CIA Director George Tenet authorized CIA officers to interrogate a terror suspect using an “enhanced technique” and ordered a record to be kept of it as the interrogation was happening. It was not clear whether such a record would be taken via notes, videotape or audiotape, but it was to include the “nature and duration of each such technique employed, the identities of those present” and other factors.
Tenet’s memo also authorized the use of both “enhanced techniques” and “standard techniques,” and said no other methods could be used “unless otherwise approved by headquarters.”
Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s national security project, said the Tenet document suggests the CIA at least contemplated “super enhanced” techniques that went beyond waterboarding.
He also said the interrogation records, if released, could be used as evidence by defendants in military tribunals at Guantanamo to prove they were tortured or coerced.
“They will be very interested to know that document identifies techniques, how long they were used and the names of the agents who inflicted the torture,” Jaffer said. “It is very important to those tribunals.”
A third document released by the ACLU Thursday is undated but likely was written in 2004, well after the last confirmed use of waterboarding against a CIA prisoner. It addresses a planned interrogation, saying that it should go forward only with the clear understanding of all policies pertaining to the treatment of prisoners.
That unsigned memo defends interrogations but warns those authorizing them to be fully aware of the then-emerging international and U.S. legal debate surrounding the issue. It appears to serve as groundwork to defend the legality of interrogations - including waterboarding - if necessary.
“Intelligence gained using the interrogation techniques has saved Americans lives and property,” the unsigned memo states.
It pointed to the Aug. 2002 Justice Department opinion that concluded “interrogation techniques including the waterboard do not violate the torture statute.”
For several years, the Bush administration relied on the findings in that 2002 opinion to maintain its interrogations did not amount to torture - and therefore had not violated any U.S. or international treaties on how detainees are treated.
However, the one-page undated memo highlights legislation by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., prohibiting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees. The amendment was part of a 2005 budget bill authorizing military operations that became law in October 2004.
The memo noted that the Durbin memo was “not, as of now, law.” It also notes a 2004 Supreme Court decision - which found that terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay could challenge their detention in U.S. courts - that “raises possible concerns about judicial review of the program, and these issues.”
The Bush administration maintains waterboarding was legal when it was used by CIA interrogators in 2002 and 2003 against top al-Qaida detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. CIA Director Hayden said waterboarding was used, in part, because of widespread belief among U.S. intelligence officials that more catastrophic attacks were imminent.
WASHINGTON - Two people who helped rescue 15 hostages from Colombian rebels posed as journalists from a real Venezuela-based television news organization, Colombia’s defense minister said Wednesday.
Two of the nine rescuers assumed the roles of journalist and cameraman from the news organization TeleSUR during the daring rescue, Juan Manuel Santos said.
An actual doctor and nurse also took part in the bloodless mission, along with members of the Colombian military who pretended to be an Italian, an Australian, an Arab, a Cuban and a Dominican, he said.
TeleSUR is based in Venezuela and primarily funded by that country’s government, but also receives funding from other Latin American countries.
“The supposed journalist had a microphone that said ‘TeleSUR,’ ” Santos said. “I don’t know if it was the same one or a different one.”
Operation Check snatched 15 hostages from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia by duping the rebels into believing that they were releasing the hostages to a humanitarian organization that would bring them to another rebel camp.
The actors “were drilled 24 hours per day in their own script” for the operation, Santos said, which freed former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American military contractors and 11 Colombian law enforcement members.
“They set up a facade of a false humanitarian organization, and they had to learn their lines,” Santos said. “If they were caught or were asked and they did not respond correctly, they were dead.”
The move also brought the capture of two rebels.
TeleSUR’s general director of information, Armando Jimenez, said the company was preparing a response.
Jean-Francois Julliard, deputy director of the press advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders, said authorities can endanger journalists when they pose as members of the news media.
“We think it is a dangerous practice because it puts in danger real journalists,” he said.
The next time a reporter approaches FARC rebels, he said, the FARC members “will be very suspicious and maybe they will take some physical measures against these journalists because they will think that they are not real journalists.”
Initially, the international community hailed the Colombian government for infiltrating the rebel group and carrying out the operation without firing a single weapon or causing bloodshed.
But the government has drawn criticism as details have emerged regarding methods used in the mission.
Last week, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said that Colombian military intelligence used a Red Cross symbol in the mission after CNN reported on unpublished photographs and videos that showed a man wearing a Red Cross bib.
Previously, Uribe and his top generals had denied that international humanitarian symbols were used in the mission.
The Geneva Conventions prohibit the use of the neutral emblem of the International Committee of the Red Cross by parties to any armed conflict.
Uribe said the man was a member of the Colombian military rescue team who panicked upon seeing the guerrillas as the helicopter was about to land.
“He saw so many guerrillas that he went into a state of angst,” Uribe said. “He feared for his life and put on the Red Cross bib over his jacket.”
However, the confidential military source who showed CNN the photographs said they were taken moments before the mission took off.
Uribe said he was sorry for the mistake and apologized to Red Cross officials. There will be no official sanction against the man wearing the bib, he indicated.
International legal expert Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, said the use of the Red Cross symbol could endanger humanitarian workers and violate the Geneva Conventions.
“The way that the images show the Red Cross emblem being used could be distinguished as a war crime,” he said.
ISLAMABAD - Pakistan has warned the international community that India’s historic nuclear deal with the United States could accelerate a nuclear arms race between Delhi and Islamabad.
The warning was made in a letter addressed to more than 60 nations as the Indian government, having survived a no confidence vote on Tuesday, dispatched diplomats to clear the deal with international regulators.
India must still negotiate a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has a board meeting on August 1, and obtain the blessing of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG).
But Pakistan warned key members of the IAEA and the NSG in its letter that the safeguards agreement would impair non-proliferation efforts and “threatens to increase the chances of a nuclear arms race in the sub-continent”.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since they gained independence from Britain, and have been de facto nuclear weapons states since conducting tit-for-tat nuclear tests in 1998.
A peace process begun in 2004 has stabilised relations, but has made little progress on the most divisive issue — the disputed region of Kashmir - and the two sides remain deeply distrustful of each other..
Mohammad Sadiq, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, confirmed the contents of the letter, which he said was distributed to IAEA members in Vienna, but not released to the media.
“There are a number of questions about the deal, not only for Pakistan, but for many other countries,” he told The Times.
“There should be a model agreement that could be signed with any country that meets the criteria. It should not be country-specific.”
The US Congress must also approve the deal, which lifts a 34-year ban on selling US nuclear fuel and technology to India even though Delhi has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Indian and US officials say that all three steps could be completed in the next few months - although the White House has said that it could be pushed to get Congressional approval before President Bush steps down.
Meanwhile, the Indian government announced that it had sent its top diplomats to Germany, which holds the rotating chair of the NSG, and to Ireland, which has objections to the nuclear deal.
Ireland is one of the strongest proponents of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was proposed by Frank Aiken, Irish Minister for External Affairs, in 1958.
The Nuclear Suppliers’ Group - founded after India tested its first nuclear device in 1974 - is an informal grouping of 45 nuclear-exporting countries designed to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and dual-use materials.
Its guidelines ban the export of nuclear fuel and technology to countries other than the five official “nuclear weapons states” - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China - that do not have a specific agreement with the IAEA safeguarding their nuclear facilities.
India has submitted a draft safeguards agreement to the IAEA, under which it would separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities and allow IAEA inspections of the former.
But Pakistan said in its letter that the draft agreement had not listed the exact sites that would be safeguarded.
“What is the purposed of the Agreement if the facilities to be safeguarded are not known?” it asked.
Pakistan is not a member of the NSG, but it does sit on the current 35-member board of the IAEA - a United Nations agency - and is expected to vote against India’s draft safeguards agreement at the August 1 meeting.
A two thirds majority is required to approve the agreement.
Among Pakistan’s other objections are the date of the board meeting, which comes less than the required 45 days after a country starts circulating its draft.
The letter said that more time was needed because the agreement “is likely to set a precedent for other states which are not members of the NPT and have military nuclear programmes”.
BRUSSELS - The European Union’s top food safety agency said on Thursday cloned animal products may not be safe and further study was needed, prompting another battle of conscience within the bloc over the merits of new technology.
“It is clear there are significant animal health and welfare issues for surrogate mothers and clones that can be more frequent and severe than for conventionally bred animals,” Vittorio Silano, chair of EFSA’s Scientific Committee, told reporters.
“For cattle and pigs, food safety concerns are considered unlikely. But we must acknowledge that the evidence base is still small. We would like to have a broader data base and we need further clarification.”
In its initial response to the issue of cloning — which many consumer and religious groups strongly oppose — EFSA said in January that cloned animals could be safe to eat.
It also said it saw “no environmental impact” from animal cloning, which takes cells from an adult and fuses them with others before implanting them in a surrogate mother.
But when asked if cloned products such as meat and dairy would be safe for people to buy in European supermarkets, Dr. Dan Collins of EFSA said: “There are possible concerns … there is an impact of animal health and welfare on food safety. We need more data.”
For many years, new technologies with potential food uses have split EU countries down the middle, with one group calling for tolerance, acceptance and more research while the other urges caution and rejection until the science is more advanced.
In contrast to the United States, for example, EU citizens have been far more reluctant to embrace biotechnology, such as genetic modification developed to increase yields or boost crop resistance against certain pests.
DEADLOCK
Debates almost always end in deadlock, meaning the European Commission gets the final say.
“The very preliminary reaction to this report is that it gives rise to increased concerns on aspects of animal health and welfare. Due to the absence of data there are also some food safety open questions,” the Commission said in a statement.
With or without EFSA’s backing, the EU executive says consumers will need to be convinced and intends to carry out an EU-wide consumer survey on the issue in September.
“The results of this survey could be the deciding factor. If EU citizens say they oppose cloning, then it could kill the whole issue,” one Commission official familiar with the matter said.
“But of course if the results prove to be mixed and unclear, then we could have a battle of hearts and minds on the issue based on science and morality.”
More than half of shoppers in a recent survey by the International Food Information Council said they were unlikely to buy food made from cloned animals.
The largest U.S. dairy producer and distributor, Dean Foods, said last month that it would not sell milk from cloned animals due to consumer concerns.
In March 2007, the European Commission — the EU’s executive arm — asked the Bologna-based food agency to investigate the merits of cloning, prompted after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave its backing to meat and milk products from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.
Hundreds of animals have been cloned mainly in the United States, and EU officials had said Britain and Germany supported the cloning of animals with London already confirming that it has imported a cloned offspring.
But Germany’s agriculture minister told Reuters on Thursday that he did not support imports of cloned meat and dairy products.
“Politically I was always against it. If EFSA affirms that now scientifically I welcome this,” Horst Seehofer said.
Advocates of livestock cloning say the technology will help produce more milk and lean, tender meat by creating more disease-resistant animals. They insist it is perfectly safe.
But opponents say scientists don’t know its effects on nutrition and biology.
“The EU with only one option: to ban animal cloning for food,” Sonja Van Tichelen, director of Eurogroup for Animals, a Brussels-based animal welfare lobby.
“Consumers in neither America nor Europe want to have food products from clones or their offspring, so why introduce it in the first place?
Additional reporting by Jeremy Smith; editing by Michael Roddy
WASHINGTON - Where do gardening, small-scale agriculture and the future of planet Earth converge? For three Washington women, it’s on a road less traveled, on byways unseen from the gotta-get-there, high-speed chaos of the interstate.
It has been a year since Lara Sheets, 26, Liz Tylander, 25, and Kat Shiffler, 24, climbed on their bicycles in Mount Pleasant and pedaled north, eventually to Montreal. Along the way they visited thriving inner-city gardens, innovative suburban farms and rooftop vegetable plots as they chronicled a grass-roots movement seeking to change the way we put food on our table.
The result is a low-budget documentary, “Garden Cycles Bike Tour,” which captures the spirit of their unusual 2,000-mile sojourn and the much larger movement that inspired it. The trip has also generated a Web site and blog, http://womensgardencycles.wordpress.com.
In the course of their three-month odyssey, the women found a community garden in the gutted ghettos of Baltimore, were run off the road by a truck in New Jersey, abandoned efforts to cycle across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York and got hopelessly lost in New England towns. They slept in the gardens of strangers, discovered new ethnic food and recipes and cemented their desire to change the world by growing vegetables.
Sipping tea in a Mount Pleasant cafe, they exhibit a playful friendship burnished by the endeavor, along with a sober commitment to a cause and a belief that they can make a difference.
When the film premieres at an environmental festival in rural Virginia in September, viewers will see a documentary that speaks to a generational disenchantment with the world these women have inherited. Industrial agriculture, with its energy dependence and huge carbon footprint, is not a sustainable way to farm, they argue.
But they also see solutions: the growth in organic farming, in farmers markets and farms supported by a network of direct subscribers — CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture). And, of course, we can become our own farmers in the back yard or a community garden plot. Sheets tends an intensive herb and vegetable garden in the rear yard of the home she shares with others in Mount Pleasant. Tylander and Shiffler, roommates in Woodley Park, tend a plot at the Twin Oaks Community Garden at 14th and Taylor streets NW.
“People of our age want to get back into farming, and we wanted to get those stories out,” said Sheets, explaining the goal of the film and the journey that spawned it.
“It’s a social movement,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University. “It’s not just young people, but it’s really grabbed the attention of young people because it’s so totally tied to climate change and other issues that concern them.”
Nestle, author of the book “Food Politics,” said the movement is “not organized and very spontaneous and grass-roots, and represents the best elements of American democracy.”
For Sheets, the call to social activism occurred as an anthropology major at James Madison University. Tylander and Shiffler were similarly galvanized by their studies at American University. After college, Sheets and Tylander were working together at an environmental organization called D.C. Greenworks. In college, they had made environmental films, and they decided in the fall of 2006 that they would document the movement in a monumental bike ride.
The original plan was to take a two-year nationwide tour, but they realized that would cost too much, said Tylander.
Just thinking about the scaled-back version, however, is enough to make the hamstrings quiver. The journey, roughly, took them to Baltimore, through Amish country to Philadelphia, Princeton, N.J., New York (all five boroughs in one day), up the Hudson Valley and on to Montreal. At the Canadian border, immigration officers asked if they were employed. “They let us in, but it took some time,” said Tylander.
They returned via Vermont, riding to Burlington and Middlebury, and then traversed Massachusetts to Boston.
Needless to say, their touring bikes — they paid about $800 each for them — look well used. (They own no cars.) Sheets calls hers Iridium Flare, Tylander’s is Pearl, and Shiffler’s L’etoile Noir.
Sheets’s bike has a sticker that reads: “Minimize Your Miles to Market. Shop Local.” She also has the backbone of a fish taped to the handlebars and, secured to the front, an owl emblem she found in Vermont. “Wisdom,” she says. Tylander’s has its own cryptic talismans from the trip, including a cattle vertebra attached to the crossbar with plastic flowers. Shiffler’s sports a simple sticker, “Cars Suck.”
The three would stay with friends and remote acquaintances, and sometimes they would knock on the door of a house that gave off friendly vibes and ask to pitch their tent in the garden. In a village in Vermont, they were drawn to a pink house draped in vines and featuring mannequins as outdoor sculpture. A sign announced free gardening classes once a week, and “we also fix broken violins.” The lady of the house was a free spirit who invited them in, fed them, and told them her life story of hardship and love. She read some of her poems. “After that experience, it was embarking on a journey that was something imaginary,” said Sheets.
Sometimes the back roads were just beautiful and they took their time; other times were harder. Approaching a city was always tense, the conflict with traffic tightened their grip on the handlebars. They worried about getting lost. “If you go the wrong way on a bike, it takes much longer to correct than if you’re in a car,” said Shiffler. Approaching Montreal, they were hours behind schedule. They were tired, it was getting dark, they checked into a chain hotel. “The only time,” said Tylander. “The only time,” added Sheets. “I want you to document that.”
Their itinerary was driven by research into the innovative urban agriculture projects that they could film along the way.
One might expect echoes of the hippie movement, except this is different. In the 1960s “you went to a farm to hide,” said Nestle. “You didn’t go to a farm to make money, unless you were farming marijuana.”
Amy Trubek, a food science professor at the University of Vermont, agreed, saying that the local food movement is “a much more pragmatic notion.”
Michel Wattiaux, a professor of dairy science at the University of Wisconsin, said he sees his students “I wouldn’t say rejecting, but questioning the traditional methods of industrial agriculture based on a large amount of inputs and chemicals and things like that.”
But more than a documentary film, he says, the check on the agribusiness model of large-scale production and long-distance shipping is the rising cost of energy.
“The situation we are in right now forces us to go back to basic assumptions,” he said, though “we aren’t going to go back to hunters and gatherers; it’s a matter of degrees.”
Bill McKibben, an author and food activist, makes the point in the documentary that were it not for the current back-to-the-land movement, the tradition of local farming to fill that void would have been lost. “Farmers markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy, and it happened just in time, just before the last links with the last generation of people who knew how to grow food were completely broken.”
Probe a little deeper, and you find something else in these young women: a rejection of the consumer-driven, debt-financed, career-funded lives of their parents’ generation.
Back at the Twin Oaks Community Garden, Lara Sheets is talking about her own future. “I want to go into farming, and I want to be as self-sufficient as possible,” she said. “A life seems much more fulfilling to me by becoming as self-sufficient as possible.”
Meanwhile, she and her fellow cyclers are reliving the Summer of 2007. “Sometimes it was really beautiful,” says Tylander of the trek. “And sometimes it was really hairy.”
MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL - A local antiwar organization that is planning a march on the final day of the Republican National Convention said Wednesday that its demonstration will be “more militant” than protest marches earlier in the week.While eschewing violence, members of the Anti-War Committee told reporters at a news conference outside the Xcel Energy Center that its activity on Sept. 4 will involve “a variety of tactics” that could include civil disobedience with sit-ins and “die-ins.”
The activists added that there could be civil disobedience every day of the Sept. 1-4 convention, which will be held at the Xcel in St. Paul.
An antiwar march is already planned for Sept. 1, which organizers say could attract tens of thousands, and a poor people’s march is scheduled for Sept. 2, which could draw thousands more. Organizers of the Sept. 4 march predict a turnout of 2,000.
Leaders of the Anti-War Committee are key organizers of the Sept. 1 protest, which is sponsored by the Coalition to March on the RNC and Stop the War, and the committee is also a supporter of the Sept. 2 march, sponsored by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.
Speaking for the Anti-War Committee, Katrina Plotz and Misty Rowan said Wednesday that the St. Paul police issued their organization a permit, allowing them to march on the street earlier in the day but ending by 5 p.m. However, they said they planned to march around 5 p.m., using sidewalks if necessary, so they will be near the Xcel closer to the time when U.S. Sen. John McCain gives his speech accepting the GOP presidential nomination. The march will protest McCain’s support of the Iraq war, they said.
Tom Walsh, a spokesman for St. Paul police, said he had no comment.
NEW YORK - Not every musician will make a film that features a fan facing him from a concert audience with two arms raised, middle fingers extended - more than one fan, in fact.Neil Young was singing protest songs on a “Freedom of Speech” tour with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash at the time. Ignoring that kind of nonverbal speech would contradict the message, wouldn’t it?
It was an easy call. Using the nom de plume Bernard Shakey, Young directs “CSNY: Deja Vu,” a film that uses the tumult surrounding CSNY’s 2006 concert tour as a backdrop for exploring divisions in the country over the Iraq war. It opens in theaters on Friday.
Before the tour, Young had released “Living With War,” the blunt anti-war album where he was backed by a full chorus on songs like “Let’s Impeach the President.” There was little mistaking his intentions; one of the film’s funniest moments shows Young almost physically knocked back when a CNN reporter mentioned the song and asked him, “What’s that song about?”
Young invited journalist Mike Cerre along to speak to members of the audience.
“The interviews we got were more positive than negative,” Young told The Associated Press. “But we tried to represent the people who didn’t come by, trying to equalize the positive and negative.”
Neil YoungIt wasn’t hard to find unhappy fans at a handful of shows, most obviously in Atlanta. Many streamed out, or stayed to offer hand signals. Some had inexplicably expected a greatest-hits show. Young said he was blown away watching families fight, the children wanting to stay while their parents were eager to leave.
He also had narrators read from concert reviews, positive and negative. One critic said, “I don’t want to be told how to think by four aging hippies.” Another said CSNY wasn’t interested in free speech, “just the kind they believe in.”
Plainly, he had struck a nerve. No one likes seeing angry fans, but Young had no interest in backing down.
“Just because I’m famous doesn’t mean that I work for the audience,” he said. “I’m not obligated to do anything. I’m an artist. I will do what I want to do. Whatever the consequences … I certainly hope that it’s a civilized reaction.”
Through Cerre’s contacts, “Deja Vu” tells stories of people band members met along the way. The characters include songwriter Josh Hisle, now a performing musician after two tours of duty with the Marines in Iraq; Gold Star mother and anti-war activist Karen Meredith; and Patrick Murphy, an Iraq veteran now a freshman congressman from Pennsylvania.
The title “Deja Vu” is also a hint that Young seeks to draw connections to CSNY’s activism against the Vietnam War roughly 40 years ago.
Young has resisted playing one of his best-known songs, “Ohio,” about the shooting of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in Kent State, because he didn’t want to seem like he was exploiting the victims’ memories. The song was dusted off and given new context in the “Freedom of Speech” tour.
When he released his album, Young had said it was a shame that someone older had to write those songs, implicitly criticizing the generation fighting the Iraq war. He’s since been set straight, finding a lot of music addressing the topic was being made; it just hadn’t found an outlet. Young now features a lot of it on his Web site, which keeps a constantly refreshed chart on which songs are being played the most.
Young never wants to do such a tour again, and not just because he hopes for peace.
“It’s too draining and terrifying,” he said. “I was committed to it … and I followed it all the way through to the end, but it’s very dangerous and it’s not fun. Singing those songs every day and meeting the soldiers and meeting people who were crying about their lost loved ones every day? We did that … but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life replaying that.”
The artists received death threats, although this point isn’t raised in the film.
“It’s not very positive and it doesn’t reflect well on society,” he said. “That’s where I drew the line. I just did not want to play that up.”
There’s one touching moment in “Deja Vu” when Young gathers his fellow band members around and thanks them for watching his back. They were all committed to the cause, although Stills was the one displaying the most obvious ambivalence.
Stills has been fundraising for Democratic candidates for years, but being put in a daily situation facing angry fans was tough on him. “Stephen is a wonderful guy,” Young said. “He just doesn’t like to be not liked.”
Young said he believed in everything said and done during the tour, but “I’ve moved on to what’s the solution.” He believes oil fuels many of the world’s conflicts and is helping to finance researchers all over the world hoping to find alternative fuel sources.
He considers the period during when the Iraq war was new and dissent was seen to be non-patriotic to be a blight on the nation’s history. Even if he’s moved on, he doesn’t want moviegoers to forget it.
“I hope that when they leave that they talk about it for a while, and that when they wake up the next day they still have some images from it in their mind,” he said. “The rest is up to them.”
Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has moved from blue to green, and similarly, she demonstrated her move to the left side of the political spectrum in a speech she gave in Durham: “It’s time to move from protest to resistance.”
McKinney, a former six-term Democratic congresswoman turned newly minted Green Party candidate for president, spoke at two events Tuesday, laying out her policy stances on more than a half-dozen issues.
Before a receptive audience of 25 at The Know Bookstore & Restaurant on Fayetteville Street, McKinney, who represented Georgia’s 4th District but who now lives in California, spoke for nearly two hours about ballot access, voter fraud, a George W. Bush impeachment, wartime spending, college debt, corporate lobbyists, Hurricane Katrina, and the racial gap in home ownership.
The speech appeared to be more of a policy talk than a presidential speech, and Green Party officials set McKinney’s aspirations low: besting Nader’s 2,000-odd votes that he received in the 2000 election in North Carolina. N.C. Green Party co-chair Jan Martell said she was “hoping” the party had collected 500 signatures by Tuesday, the deadline for McKinney to qualify as a write-in candidate. Meanwhile, McKinney raised $600 in contributions, according to party officials, and checks, collected in a Tupperware bin, were made payable to Power to the People, her election committee.
McKinney was eager to discuss electoral politics in general. She pointed to Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who established a secondary government in Mexico City following his narrow defeat in 2006, as a model action compared to Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s concessions in 2000 and 2004.
She also cited the ascendancy of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and other leftist leaders in Latin America as evidence of the “power of the people” being heard at the voting booth.
“What’s the difference between us and that?” she asked. “The blue pill we’ve been asked to swallow.”
She blamed the mainstream media, in part, for distributing the pill, and for allegedly distorting events ranging from Martin Luther King Jr.’s life to the genocide in Darfur. She called the latter a “cover story of atrocity that no one can disagree with” that media outlets focused on in order to justify U.S. occupation of Sudan. (While some foreign aid and humanitarian organizations urged the U.S. to intervene the humanitarian crisis, detractors, including the Canada-based Global Centre for Research on Globalization, have taken a stand similar to McKinney’s.)
“Did you ever stop to think that every one of those corporate entities has as bottom line?” she asked. “We’ve got to figure out another way to get our information, so we can think outside the box.”
At several points in her speech, McKinney hesitated to complete her thoughts because of the presence of a video camera and reporters. She pointed out that 9/11 happened shortly after the World Conference against Racism in South Africa, in which a proposal on slavery reparations had been considered. While McKinney said she was not “suggesting any linkages,” she added that black interests were “taken off the table” following the terrorist attacks. “If in fact there is a program to deny black people in this country from selecting their own leaders, then there not only should be reparations, but we are dealing with genocide.”
McKinney drew national attention following 9/11 when she said that President Bush deliberately ignored warnings of the attack because his allies would stand to profit from the War on Terror. Following those comments, she lost her House seat in 2002, though she was elected again in 2004 and went on to organize hearings on 9/11 and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
Earlier in the day, she spoke to a half-dozen supporters and members of the media, in front of the downtown post office in Durham. There, she said that Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain had offered war as the only solution to the foreclosure crisis.
In an interview after the two speeches, McKinney said that, despite Obama’s plan to remove troops from Iraq, the presumptive Democratic nominee would continue combat missions in Afghanistan, and look to Iran and Pakistan as potential future theaters of operation.
“The push toward war is still very real, and people need not to accept the-what do you call it?-bait-and-switch,” she said.
Willie Muhammand, who attended both speeches, said in an interview that he would vote for McKinney, though he hadn’t voted for anyone since Richard Nixon in 1960.
“Anybody who stands up against our government, in the open, I’m behind them. I stand up for her, because of her outspokenness years ago,” he said.
The Bush administration and its European allies have given Iran a two-week deadline to respond to a proposal that they freeze the expansion of their uranium enrichment program for six weeks in exchange for a US agreement to freeze the expansion of sanctions for six weeks. During the six week “freeze for freeze,” “pre-negotiations” would take place that would lay the groundwork for formal talks.
On the face of it, a six-week freeze in the expansion of enrichment seems like a small concession. The catch in this proposal, from the point of view of many in Iran, is that the US has not dropped its insistence that for formal talks to start, the Iranians must suspend enrichment completely; nor has the US signaled any flexibility on its goal for formal talks, which is that the Iranians agree to accept the end of uranium enrichment on Iranian soil under any circumstances, forever.
So, from the point of view of many in Iran, the proposal for talks is a trap. Since the goal of the talks, from the Bush administration’s point of view, is that Iran suspend enrichment forever, and since suspension of enrichment is a US precondition for the talks, by starting the talks according to its precondition the US achieves its goal temporarily, and the US continues to achieve its goal so long as the talks go on. Some Iranians fear that once talks commence under the precondition of suspending enrichment, it will be the US that has the incentive to delay. The talks can go on indefinitely without reaching any agreement and the US will have achieved its objective. If the Iranians break off the talks out of frustration that the US isn’t negotiating in good faith and resume enrichment, the Bush administration will blame Iran, and there is every reason to believe that the Bush administration’s lapdogs in Britain, France and Italy will follow suit.
But there is a saying among chess players: the best way to refute a gambit to accept it. You can look into the position more deeply than your opponent, see the trap that he has set, and walk right into it, knowing that around the trap your opponent has set you have constructed an even better trap.
There is a fundamental weakness in the Bush administration’s position, and that is that most people don’t realize that the Bush administration’s actual position is that Iran must not be allowed to enrich uranium, ever, under any conceivable circumstances. People don’t know that is the Bush administration’s position because the Bush administration has put up a fog around it, and the reason they’ve put up a fog around it is that there is no basis for the Bush administration’s position in any international agreement or treaty.
But if real negotiations started, the eyes of the international media would be focused on the talks. It would no longer be possible for the Bush administration to conceal its inflexibility on the question of enrichment. If it became clear, as it well might, that it was the Bush administration’s intransigence on the question of enrichment that was preventing the talks from reaching a successful conclusion, the Bush administration would come under tremendous pressure to be more flexible, and it might well capitulate, rather than be blamed for the failure of the talks.
It is because of this legitimate fear among neocons that it is the Bush administration, rather than Iran, whose position cannot stand the light of international scrutiny that John Bolton said the decision of the Bush Administration to send a representative to the “pre-pre-talks” in Geneva was a capitulation on the question of Iranian enrichment.
It is quite possible, even likely, that once talks are joined, the heretofore buried proposal of former UN Ambassador Pickering that the US and Iran agree on multinational enrichment of uranium in Iran will finally get a hearing in the international media; and most people in the world will think it reasonable that the endpoint of negotiations should not be the Bush administration’s position, but an agreement that meets Iran half-way.
So it might well be in Iran’s interest to call the Bush administration’s bluff. The best way to refute a gambit is to accept it.
Ambassador Pickering explains his proposal.Robert Naiman is National Coordinator of Just Foreign Policy, a membership organization devoted to reforming U.S. foreign policy to reflect the values and serve the interests of the majority of Americans. Naiman edits the daily Just Foreign Policy news summary. JFP’s web site is www.justforeignpolicy.org.
Our government has studied ways to warn future generations of the danger of nuclear energy waste, “long after society and languages have changed,” as government documents phrase it.
One idea was to invite the Native American tribes near the proposed disposal sites to pass the information related to this danger from generation to generation, by word of mouth. In other words, tradition might be one of the best ways to communicate that the yellow and black placard means death, and that it would be a good idea to stay away from this area for several thousand years.
With this image in mind, it was of great surprise to me when our Public Service Commission gave the green light to build two more nuclear plants, 10 miles north of the existing Crystal River facility. Better yet is the fact that Progress Energy can charge customers up to $9 per month, right away, even before breaking ground to help fund the two plants. I’ve lived long enough to have seen this type of logic, although now we have other options besides nuclear, and when these plants are built in 10 years, there’s a good chance they might not be needed.
Recent cost projections for the geologically and politically problematic Yucca Mountain Nuclear Disposal Facility have reached $90 billion, and it’s not opened yet. I often wonder if some contractor has been hired to inform future generations of the danger within the mountain. Without any good place to safely store spent nuclear materials and certainly no way to warn future generations of the danger, new nuke plants don’t make a whole lot of fiscal, environmental or security sense.
The main argument for nuclear is that it is needed for “base load” power supply. Base power is what the industry calls consistent dependable power, and it’s the same thing solar energy has traditionally been criticized for not providing. But solar thermal energy production is capable of supplying base power, and if the nine bucks Progress Energy wants to charge its customers for this nuclear fantasy were properly used, we could take a figure of $2 or $3 (the price of a six pack) and spread it around the entire rate-paying population.
This money could then be placed into an energy freedom incentive program, providing a path for our state to achieve energy independence. The Germans did this over a decade ago when Russia threatened to shut down natural gas to the country. Now cloudy and rainy Germany is powered to nearly 25 percent with renewable energy. The Germans call the incentive program a “loaf of bread tax.” I’ll stick with the six-pack-of-beer incentive.
The nuclear industry has always had a strange habit of crawling out from under some large rock to offer “cheap,” “safe” energy, and it seems that only a near meltdown at Three Mile Island kept it from convincing us, back in the ’70s, that it had a magic answer to all our problems. Does any of this sound strangely familiar, or should I keep going? During this time, concern grew regarding nuclear power, and a group of musicians who survived the disco era (yawn) held a concert in New York called “No Nukes.” I recently found an original copy of the LP (made from oil) at Vinyl Fever and paid a whopping $2.99 for the three-record set. The music speaks of a “clean energy future,” and 30 years later it is sadly clear that we have made little progress to make that future a reality.
So its deja vu all over again, except this time we have a host of new problems, including carbon and something called peak oil upon us. Some would call this a perfect storm.
I admit to being intrigued by $4-per-gallon gas, and, like many of you, I have kids that drive. When I hand them a $10 bill for gas, they laugh. What happened to the promised clean-energy future? Shouldn’t it have arrived already? There’s no time to wait. Let’s embrace $4-per-gallon gas and use it as a tool for change. Let innovation take root. If gas drops below $4, use the extra money to enhance renewable energy.
Leadership means having the intestinal fortitude to do things that are at times difficult. The investment in a clean energy future is critical, and this future can happen only if we break our oil addiction and collectively fund alternate sources of energy.
Unless he blows it today in Berlin, Barack Obama has made a successful debut on the world stage. Rarely has an American presidential candidate walked taller abroad than he.
Poised, polished and well-informed, he has marched through the political minefields of Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel. He looked and sounded presidential (”as president, I would …”; “as commander-in-chief, it’d be my job to …”).
Compare this with John McCain’s visits to Ottawa, Iraq and Europe, which created little excitement.
Think back also to the disastrous 1979 trip of Tory leader Joe Clark to Asia and the Middle East. Designed to establish him as PM-in-waiting, it stamped him instead as a bumbler, his staff losing luggage and he himself littering the landscape with ill-advised comments.
With Obama, we are witnessing a rare phenomenon. Long before the election and even before becoming the Democratic nominee, he’s coming across as president-presumptive, and already setting the tone and direction of U.S. foreign policy.
Almost overnight, his agenda - pull out of Iraq, concentrate on Afghanistan - is accepted wisdom.
George W. Bush, after consistently characterizing a withdrawal as a sop to terrorists, has agreed to “a general time horizon” for leaving Iraq.
It helped Obama that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pulled the rug from under Bush - first by refusing to sign an open-ended agreement to let American troops stay on indefinitely and then backing Obama’s 16-month timetable.
Obama’s long-standing call for engaging Iran has also been adopted. After insisting for years on isolating Iran, Bush sent a diplomat to Saturday’s multi-party talks in Geneva.
Never before has a lame-duck president looked so lame and hobbled his party’s presidential candidate as much as Bush has McCain.
Not all of Obama’s policy positions are perfect, obviously.
His call for an additional 10,000 American troops for Afghanistan, welcomed by Canada and other NATO allies, is not a long-term solution. A military surge is less likely to work there than in Iraq. Just as he is advocating a political solution for Iraq, he needs one for Afghanistan - in fact, more so.
To the West, more troops mean more resources to beat back the Taliban. To many Afghans, however, more Western troops mean more of a foreign military stranglehold on their country and, more immediately, more civilian deaths.
NATO troops, especially Americans, have lately been involved in a steady stream of incidents in which civilians have been killed.
Some of these incidents don’t even make it to our media and, when they do, dutifully echo NATO claims that so many “militants” or “Taliban” were killed. Within hours comes word that either all or many of the victims had been civilians. This is fuelling widespread anger and eroding NATO’s legitimacy.
Similarly, Obama’s position, repeated on this trip, that he’d bomb Pakistani hideouts of the Taliban is a recipe for igniting more anti-Americanism in Pakistan, which, in turn, will make it nearly impossible for the newly elected, still teetering, government to do much.
On Israel, Obama’s previous comment that Jerusalem should be Israel’s “undivided” capital is the same one that got Clark into much trouble. Since then, the governments in both Washington and, lately, Ottawa have become more pro-Israeli. But the trend elsewhere in the world has been in the opposite direction.
If Obama is to be the change leader that he aspires to be, not only domestically but across the world to restore America’s good name, it is essential that he be more even-handed. That would be in Israel’s long-term interest as well.
Haroon Siddiqui’s column appears Thursday and Sunday.
For the past two years I have been fretting over a mystery. Although Labour seems to have done everything possible to ensure that it stays out of office, there remains a possibility that it might form another government at some point between now and 2050. This means that its climate change bill, which will become law in the autumn, could come back to haunt it. Despite its evident flaws, this is radical and unprecedented legislation. It imposes a legal obligation on future governments to cut carbon dioxide pollution by 60% or more by 2050, with binding interim targets every five years.
The government has some good climate policies. It also has some bleeding disastrous ones, which appear to commit the United Kingdom to high carbon pollution for the entire period covered by the bill. A future Labour government would find itself snared by its own current policies. Surely it wouldn’t be foolish enough to set such a trap for itself?
One policy alone seems to doom future governments to prosecution: the planned doubling of the capacity of the UK’s airports by 2030. Using the Department for Transport’s projections, I estimate that by 2050 aeroplanes will account for 91% of all the greenhouse gases the country should be producing. Under the less optimistic figures published by Defra, the environment department, the proportion rises to 258%.
Until now this hasn’t been a problem: the government has refused to include aircraft pollution in the 2050 target. But following an amendment in the Lords, the draft bill imposes a duty on the government either to include it or to explain to parliament why it hasn’t done so, within five years. The government claims that it might not be possible to add these gases to the UK’s carbon budget because, “in the absence of an internationally agreed methodology”, no one knows how to calculate what proportion of this pollution belongs to us.
It’s a knotty problem, isn’t it? If you were the government and you knew that 67% of the passengers using UK airports were residents of this country, could you work out what proportion of aircraft emissions should be counted in the UK’s carbon budget? No? Me neither. Wouldn’t know where to begin.
This ridiculous excuse can’t be sustained for much longer. At some point, aircraft gases will have to be included in the carbon target. Throw in the government’s roadbuilding programme and its intention to approve new coal-burning power plants, and you can see it has a problem.
The only factor now holding down carbon emissions is the price of energy. They fell by 2% last year, and the government admits that this “was largely explicable in terms of price relativities”. In other words, it has again become cheaper to burn natural gas in power stations than to burn coal, while the cost of oil has encouraged people to drive less. The 2% reduction means that the UK’s carbon budget is now a grand total of 0.8% smaller than it was in 1997. The government can post a 16% cut in greenhouse gases since 1990 only because of the accidental reductions made during the dash for gas under the Tories and the sharp reduction in methane and nitrous oxide from rubbish dumps and industry. Neither of these cuts can be repeated.
But this doesn’t even begin to describe the government’s problem. Its new climate change report contains a tantalising figure. It is expressed in such a backhanded way that you have to perform half a dozen small calculations to discover what it means. The report boasts that, even when emissions in countries exporting goods to the UK are taken into account, “the total annual reduction of UK greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 was around 240 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent below business as usual”. The government says that “business as usual” would have led to an increase of 40% in emissions since 1990. This gives us a figure of 1079 million tonnes. Subtract 240 from 1079 and you get 839, or 187 million tonnes above current emissions. This means that instead of declining by 16% since 1990, as the government insists, the greenhouse gases for which the UK is responsible have risen by 9%.
When I finished this sum I sat still for quite a long time. The UK’s entire climate change programme is based on a statistical artefact. The only reason our pollution appears to have declined is that we have outsourced our emissions. A fair account of our carbon emissions would include those we import minus those we export: a balance that can only worsen in a post-industrial economy.
So how can the government reconcile its energy policies with future political hazard? Well, the mystery has at last been solved. The key to the puzzle is found in a minor briefing note just published by Defra. It explains that, during the latest stage of the bill, the government “remov[ed] the quantified limit on the use of internationally traded credits in meeting the UK’s targets”. In other words, we could buy the entire cut from other countries.
Given that we are outsourcing some of our greenhouse gases, you might think it makes sense to outsource our carbon cuts as well. But there are three problems. The first is that we are exporting emissions that are difficult to address, and importing, through carbon trading, the easiest and cheapest cuts.
The second is that while the emissions we export are certain and verifiable, the cuts we buy through carbon credits are often fraudulent. For instance, as the writer Oliver Tickell documents, 96% of the carbon credits from hydroelectric dam construction were issued after construction had begun: the dams would have been built without the carbon market, so no additional cuts have been achieved. About 30% of all carbon credits come from the sale of trifluoromethane cuts by Chinese and Indian companies making refrigeration gases. Many of them are still producing this pollutant only because they make so much money from cleaning it up: the carbon market pays them 47 times more for these cuts than the gas costs to remove.
Behind these problems lurks a much greater one, which is mathematically impossible to resolve. You can trade your way out of trouble when the cut you are trying to achieve is a small one. But when the global cut required to prevent two degrees of warming is 60 or 80 or 90%, then every rich nation must reduce its emissions by roughly the same amount. Otherwise half the world would have to buy credits equivalent to 180% of the emissions produced by the other half.
The government will have to impose some kind of cap on carbon trading. But I bet it will be set high enough to cover any failures in domestic policy, as measured by the rigged accounting methods civil servants seem to use. This means that successive governments will have no legal incentive to change their energy policies. The carbon trading provision torpedoes the useful content of the entire bill.
But at least the mystery has been solved, and it will no longer keep me awake at night. Now I can focus on the real nightmares.
The peace movement was moving full-throttle during the primary season to confront the presidential candidates on the war, and can take credit for helping to shift the momentum from Hillary Clinton — who voted for the invasion of Iraq — to Barack Obama — who opposed the invasion. And we have certainly contributed to the momentous shift on the need for a timeline for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. We have also moved into high gear to prevent a war with Iran, and so far, have been holding our ground on that front.
But in Afghanistan the peace movement has been missing in action. This has come back to hit us in the face during Barack Obama’s Middle East trip, where he called for sending 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan. John McCain, not to be one-upped in putting our young men and women in harm’s way, is also calling for an escalation of the Afghan war.
My first trip to Afghanistan was during the height of the U.S. invasion in 2001. I was horrified to see the number of innocent civilians killed and maimed by our “smart bombs.” As I sat in makeshift hospitals watching children bleed to death, or saw the craters made by our bombs where homes used to be, or visited farmers whose limbs were torn off by our cluster bomblets, I wondered where this military adventure would lead.
Seven years later, we see the results: Innocent Afghans continue to be killed and maimed, more US soldiers are now dying in Afghanistan than Iraq, the Taliban have gained new strength, opium production has soared, and Osama bin Laden has not been found. The Afghan people continue to be among the poorest in the world, women are still oppressed, and the U.S. government reneged on its promise of a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild Afghanistan.
Now we have the two major presidential contenders — Barack Obama and John McCain — advocating the exact same “solution”: Send more troops. But more troops will only mean more violence, more suffering, more killing of innocents, and more recruits for the Taliban. This war will drag on and on, for there is no way to conquer tribal forces in a vast, rugged, thinly populated country like Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. Just ask the Russians. With nearly twice as many troops as the U.S./NATO forces and with three times the number of Afghan soldiers, they left defeated after 9 years of fighting and 15,000 dead.
It’s time for the peace movement to come up with a position on Afghanistan. We know that war is not the answer, but what is? It’s not enough to simply say “Troops out now.” Should we be calling for talks with the Taliban? In Iraq, the U.S. government not only talked to Sunni insurgent groups that killed U.S. soldiers but is now allied with them.
How can we stop Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan from being a training ground for militant fundamentalists? How can we bring those involved in terrorist attacks to justice, and prevent future attacks, without waging an open-ended war? Should we advocate a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and if so, based on what criteria? How can we work with the peace movements in NATO countries to have a more unified and effective position?
What should we call for in terms of development aid to Afghanistan? How can the Afghan economy be weaned from opium? How can we truly support Afghan women? What will happen to them if the Taliban take over again?
This debate is long overdue. We can’t put it off anymore and knee-jerk slogans won’t work. We, the peace movement, need to come together and develop a strategy before our troops are sent from the “bad war” in Iraq to the “good war” in Afghanistan. Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINKand Global Exchange.
Minimum wage workers have been stuck in a losing game of “Mother May I” with the federal government. Workers step forward when the government says yes to raising the minimum wage. Workers step backward when the cost of living increases, but the minimum wage doesn’t.
Until 1968, minimum wage workers took frequent and big enough steps forward to make overall progress. Since 1968, when the minimum wage reached its peak buying power, workers have taken many steps backward for every step forward.
The July 24 minimum wage raise is so little, so late that workers will still make less than they did in 1997, adjusting for the increased cost of living, and way less than in 1968.
The decade between the federal minimum wage increase to $5.15 an hour on Sept. 1, 1997, and the July 24, 2007 increase to $5.85 was the longest period in history without a raise.
Gas prices rose from $1.23 to $2.97 a gallon in the same period. Now it’s over $4.
The new $6.55 minimum wage is lower than the 1997 minimum wage, which is worth $6.88 in 2008 dollars, and way lower than the inflation-adjusted $9.86 minimum wage of 1968. For full-time workers that translates into $20,509 a year at the 1968 rate, compared with just $13,624 at the hourly rate of $6.55.
The minimum wage does not provide a minimally adequate living standard — and it still won’t when the last scheduled raise to $7.25 takes place next July.
Workers are constantly choosing what to go without — “heat or eat,” child care or health care.
Health care aides can’t afford to take sick days. Retail clerks and child care workers depend on food banks. Security guards sleep at homeless shelters.
It wasn’t always this way. Workers used to share in the gains of rising worker productivity.
Between 1947 and 1973, worker productivity rose 104 percent and the minimum wage rose 101 percent, adjusting for inflation. The middle class grew.
Between 1973 and 2007, productivity rose 83 percent and the minimum wage fell 22 percent, adjusting for inflation. Average worker wages fell 10 percent while domestic corporate profits rose 219 percent, and profits in the disproportionately low-wage retail industry jumped 346 percent. More jobs paid poverty wages.
Higher education does not protect you from falling wages. The inflation-adjusted wages of recent college graduates were lower in 2007 than they were in 2001.
There’s been a massive shift of income from the bottom and middle to the top. The richest 1 percent of Americans has increased their share of the nation’s income to a higher level than any year since 1928, the eve of the Great Depression.
Our modern robber baron age features people like Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo. He pocketed $103 million last year as the subprime mortgage ponzi scheme morphed into the worst financial crisis since the Depression.
Minimum wage workers don’t put raises into predatory lending, commodity speculation or offshore tax havens. They recycle their needed raises back into local businesses and the economy through increased spending.
Eight of the “SurePayroll Top Ten States for Small Businesses” in 2008 have had state minimum wages above the federal level. They include Washington, California and Oregon, three of the four states with the highest minimums.
Minimum wage raises are stimulus for an economy tanking from a housing bubble gone bust, sharply higher oil prices, extreme inequality, unsustainable debt, and fraud and speculation crowding out productive investment.
Higher wages benefit business by increasing consumer purchasing power, reducing costly employee turnover, raising productivity, and improving product quality and company reputation. They reinforce long-term success.
Let Justice Roll, a national faith, community, labor and business coalition, which I advise, is calling for a minimum wage of $10 in 2010.
$10 in 2010 will bring the minimum wage closer to the value it had in 1968, a year when the unemployment rate was a low 3.6 percent.
It will bring the minimum wage closer to the “minimum standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general well-being of workers” promised by the Fair Labor Standards Act establishing the minimum wage 70 years ago.
It will strengthen the foundation under our unsound economy.
The election season is heating up, with back-to-back conventions approaching — the Democrats in Denver followed by the Republicans in St. Paul, Minn. The conventions have become elaborate, expensive marketing events, where the party’s “presumptive” nominee has a coronation with much fanfare, confetti and wall-to-wall media coverage. What people don’t know is the extent to which major corporations fund the conventions, pouring tens of millions of dollars into a little-known loophole in the campaign-finance system.
Stephen Weissman of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute explains the unconventional funding:
“It’s totally prohibited to give unlimited contributions to political parties. It’s totally prohibited for a corporation or a union to just go right into its treasury and give money to political parties. Yet, under an exemption that was created by the Federal Election Commission, which essentially is made up of representatives of the two major parties, all of this money can be given if it’s given through a host committee under the pretense that it’s merely to promote the convention city.”
According to CFI’s new report, “Analysis of Convention Donors,” since the last presidential election, the corporations funding the conventions have spent more than $1.1 billion lobbying the federal government. Add to it the millions they pour into the conventions. Says Weissman: “In return for this money, the parties, through the host committees, offer access to top politicians, to the president, the future president, vice president, cabinet officials, senators, congressmen. They promise these companies who are giving that they will be able to not only get close to these people by hosting receptions, by access to VIP areas, but they’ll actually have meetings with them.”
Disclosure of what corporations are giving is not required until 60 days after each convention, which is essentially Election Day, so there is no time to challenge a candidate on particular corporate donors. Weissman reports that most of the corporations that are giving to the convention “host committees” also have serious business before the federal government. Take AT&T, for example. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com recently pointed out that the Democratic conventioneers and registered media in attendance will receive a tote bag prominently emblazoned with the AT&T logo. It’s a perfect metaphor for a much larger gift, the one Democrats and Republicans just gave AT&T and other telecoms: retroactive immunity for spying on U.S. citizens. While Sens. Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd fought the bill, Sen. Barack Obama, until recently a staunch opponent of telecom immunity, reversed his position and supported it, reneging on a pledge to filibuster. Perfect timing.
The conventions are also training grounds for the next generation of elected officials. Many state legislators attend the conventions as delegates, where they marinate in the ways of big-money politics. From the corporate parties to the hospitality suites, they learn that there is nothing to be gained by challenging the status quo.
Obama has sworn off special-interest and lobbying money for his campaign, and he made historic strides in using the Internet to marshal millions of small donors and amass a campaign war chest with $72 million in cash on hand at the end of June. Yet the Denver convention is looking more and more like business as usual. Weissman writes in his report, “Lavish conventions with million-dollar podiums, fancy skyboxes and Broadway production teams are not necessary to the democratic process.”
What is necessary, Weissman says, is stripping soft money out of the convention process: “Congress should pass a law that says no more soft money for these conventions, no corporate treasury, union treasury, no unlimited individual money. Instead, the parties — let’s discard this host-committee fiction — can go out there and ask people to help the convention, but with the same limits where they’re asking people to help them normally.”
“Deep Throat” is said to have told Bob Woodward during Watergate to “follow the money.” It looks as if this summer you need only go to the Democratic and Republican national conventions. It’s time to close this loophole.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America.
WASHINGTON - Experts calling for changes in the U.S. foreign aid system got a sharp reminder Tuesday on Capitol Hill from representatives of half the world’s population: put women at the center of efforts to improve lives in developing countries.
A growing consensus around the need to put a new face on Washington’s 40-year-old Foreign Assistance Act — including the creation of a cabinet-level post for Global and Human Development — has drawn the attention of organizations dedicated to improving the lot of women around the world.
Yolanda Richardson, president of the Center for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA), told Hill staffers and others that implementing policies that recognize the vital role women play in poor communities is the best way to “improve the quality and effectiveness of our global development assistance.”
The briefing was co-sponsored by CEDPA and seven Congresswomen, and highlighted the work of women activists in Angola, Egypt, and Nigeria who described how their efforts have changed women’s lives and, in so doing, improved the conditions of entire communities.
The three women described a variety of health, conflict resolution, and job training projects in their countries, aimed largely at empowering women in regions of the world where they have traditionally been powerless, both in their homes and in the larger society.
In Nigeria, said Nsekpong Udoh of Community Partners for Development, “until women are empowered economically they can’t afford to become involved in politics; they remain invisible. So we provide a lot of microcredit.”
In Angola, the focus is on peace-building and conflict resolution following the country’s 30-year civil war. Cesaltina Nunda of the group Angola 2000 said women played an instrumental role in finding and handing over weapons after the war.
“Even though the war is over and we have collected many weapons and helped local communities resolve many conflicts, we cannot stop now,” Nunda said. “Talking about violence is a process, and it can’t be resolved in a year or two.”
Humanitarian groups argue that economic and social development, too, is a lengthy process, but the U.S. government’s aid efforts have become increasingly intertwined with political and military agendas and timeframes that focus too much on results sought by Washington and too little on the needs of those who receive development aid.
“Development doesn’t work that way,” said Sam Worthington, president of InterAction. “You have to sit down with people and see what they need. You need time and flexibility” to do the job right. InterAction is an association representing 168 U.S. nonprofit groups focused on the world’s poor and most vulnerable people.
CEDPA’s Richardson agrees with those calling for a new approach to foreign aid, but is convinced that unless new policies and strategies place a special focus on women, they will fail to address the very basic issue of poverty reduction in developing countries.
When development projects strengthen women’s ability to improve their lives, she stressed, they also have a positive impact on children, families, and communities. This is what makes aid effective and sustainable, two of its most important goals.
The work being done by the three organizations represented at the briefing, which all work in partnership with external providers of foreign aid, is a model Richardson would like to see followed.
The issues addressed in each country reflect urgent national and community needs — for employment opportunities in Egypt, health in Nigeria, and peace-building in Angola — and in each case women are trained to become decision makers and actors in the development process.
Does anyone seriously doubt that one of the reasons why a House Judiciary Committee hearing will at least discuss the “I” word on Friday is Cindy Sheehan’s independent challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi?
Pelosi, famously, took impeachment “off the table” just before the 2006 election.
Then, this month, she edged it back on the menu — suggesting that the Judiciary Committee might take up the matter of Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s proposal to impeach the president for using deception to draw the nation into an illegal and immoral war.
Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who has never made any secret of his desire to address the imperial reach of the Bush-Cheney presidency — especially on matters of war and peace — jumped at the chance to schedule the hearing. A two-hour session, at which the “i” word will be discussed openly by advocates such as Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, is scheduled for Friday.
Though the hearing is unlikely to evolve into the full-fledged inquiry that many of us believe necessary, it is remarkable that in the summer of a presidential election year the key committee in a chamber where impeachment was supposed to be off the table will turn its attention to the tool that the founders afforded the legislative branch for constraining the executive.
Why is this happening now?
It is worth noting that this is petition-gathering season for independent candidates running in California. Sheehan, the mother of a slain Iraq War soldier who turned her grief into activism, and her supporters are busy collecting the 10,198 signatures that will be needed to get her name on the ballot.
Sheehan — echoing the sentiments of the millions of Americans who believe that it if it is wrong for a Republican administration to abuse the Constitution then it is just as wrong for Democratic leaders to refuse to defend the document’s principles — has made presidential accountability a central issue of her independent campaign in a city that has already overwhelmingly endorsed an impeachment initiative.
Indeed, Sheehan announced that she would challenge the speaker after it became clear — after President Bush commuted White House aide Scooter Libby’s prison sentence last summer — that Pelosi was blocking consideration of impeachment by the House.
Local media has focused on Sheehan’s advocacy for impeachment, noting this spring when she filed initial paperwork for her candidacy that the woman who has been referred to as “the Rose Parks of the anti-war movement” had decided to run because “seeing George Bush impeached would be a victory for humanity.”
Sheehan is a realist. She admits that her candidacy is “an uphill battle.”
But she has drawn significant television, radio and newspaper coverage in San Francisco, as well as endorsements from the local Green and Peace and Freedom parties and local officials such as the president of the city’s school board and plan commission. She has raised more than $100,000 for the campaign, attracted an energetic team of volunteers. And, now, as those volunteers hit the streets to collect the signatures to put Sheehan’s name on the ballot, Pelosi is suddenly showing some flexibility — the key word being “some” — with regard to the impeachment discussion.
No matter how many votes she gets in November, give Cindy Sheehan credit for opening up the debate — not just in San Francisco but in Washington.
John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.
And so the story of the moral implosion of the British prison system comes to this: we are imprisoning people in toilets. Doncaster prison - run by the private firm Serco - was designed to hold 800 people, but it now pens in more than a thousand. So the governors have put beds in the toilets, and detained people there for more than 18 hours a day, week after week. In toilets. In Britain. Today.
There are now two prison systems in this country. There is Her Majesty’s Prison Service, where mad and broken people are warehoused alongside the genuinely violent in cramped and fetid cells. Then there is the Fantasy Prison System, implanted by the press in the public imagination, where pampered prisoners are given foot massages while watching flat-screen TVs.
No matter how many prisons I visit, from Wormwood Scrubs to Feltham Young Offenders Institute, I cannot find the holiday camps. Instead, I find prisons that clunkingly conform to every “tough” demand of the right - and are therefore placing you and your family in greater danger.
Allow me to explain. When our prisons contained 40,000 people, back in 1993, they managed to make 47 per cent of the inmates go straight. But today - after cramming twice as many people into almost the same space - that rate has dramatically plummeted to just 25 per cent. The rest graduate to the same or worse crimes.
We know what makes criminals less likely to reoffend. We have known for years, from study after study after study - but drunk on rhetoric, we are speeding in the opposite direction. So let’s go through the recipe that really turns prisoners into law-abiding citizens, abandoned in the mid-1990s when Michael Howard got Britain smoking the crack-down crack.
Ingredient One: Transfer the mentally ill into secure hospitals. The first thing that strikes you in any prison is how many of the people there are insane. One 60-year-old man diagnosed with serious brain damage staggered up to me in the bowels of Wormwood Scrubs thinking I was his father. The Government admits 13 per cent of our prisoners have schizophrenia and 70 per cent have one or more diagnosable mental disorder. I could fill this newspaper with descriptions of prisoners who stab their own necks with knives or set fire to themselves at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
There is another way. The state of Pennsylvania was facing the same prison problem as Britain - so they decided that if the police arrest a mentally ill person, he should no longer go into the normal courts system. When, say, Sally Judson - a diagnosed schizophrenic who developed a heroin habit - was picked up for disorderly conduct recently, she was taken to a mental health “court”. Instead of jailing her, they drew up an action plan with her. They found her a doctor, a therapist and a waitressing job. If she relapses on heroin, there is a rehab place waiting for her. This system works: mentally ill people have a 55 per cent reoffending rate in the normal courts, but in the mental health courts it is just 10 per cent.
Ingredient Two: Make sure prisoners stay in touch with their families. You can hear the Gaunt-groans and the Littlejohn-lies now: who cares if some criminal bastard can’t speak to his baby-mother? But the evidence shows this is the single biggest factor in keeping a criminal from reoffending. If you manage to keep your partner, you are 20 per cent more likely to stay out of jail. But our prisons actually militate against this. Because of the severe overcrowding, some 37,000 prisoners are being held more than three hours’ journey from home, and 5,000 are being held more than six hours away. Their mostly broke families can’t afford the long journey. Telephone? BT charges up to seven times more to call home from prison than it would cost from a normal phone box. Far away and expensive to phone, nearly half of male prisoners currently lose touch with their families.
Ingredient Three: Make sure prisoners aren’t illiterate and homeless when they walk out the prison gates. When they arrive, a third of prisoners can’t read or write a word. They almost invariably leave as they came. The Adult Learning Inspectorate found fewer than 8 per cent of prisoners are taught to read and then given meaningful work that could lead to a job on the outside. Worse, one-third of prisoners are released to “No Fixed Abode” - a friend’s couch, if they’re lucky.
In Liverpool prison, I saw a brilliant scheme where prisoners are taught construction skills - and then use them to do up an abandoned council house to live in when they leave. It’s a crime-busting double whammy: work skills, and a house nobody else wanted. Why isn’t this being done in every prison in Britain?
Ingredient Four: Medicalise prisoners’ drug addictions. Some 12 per cent of prisoners are heroin addicts, imprisoned either for possessing the drug or committing property crimes to feed their ravaging need. Wouldn’t it be better to spend the £40,000 of jail money to put them in rehab? True, heroin addiction is so powerful that the even the best rehab in the world fails with 80 per cent of addicts. But for them, we can prescribe a clean, legal supply for £4,000 a year. Then they can lead healthy lives: Arthur Conan Doyle and the father of modern surgery, William Halsted, did. When the Swiss did this, burglary fell by 70 per cent.
Ingredient Five: Make sure prison is only for violent and sexual offenders. There are about 16,000 vaguely sane people in our jails who have committed violent or sexual offences. They need to be banged up while they are rehabilitated, for however long it takes. But if they are crammed in with 64,000 others - the shoplifters and cannabis dealers - nobody gets any treatment and nobody gets any better.
Indeed, the evidence shows the opposite happens. Professor Carol Hedderman has calculated that the growth in the prison population is due to a huge rise in short sentences of six months or less. They are all for crimes that used to be dealt with by community service - like the two teenage boys in Deerbolt who have just been sentenced to 15 months in an adult jail for graffiti. That’s long enough to put in place all the factors that drive up crime - they lose their job, their house and their girlfriend, and their debts spiral - but not long enough to teach them anything, even if we tried. This is the reason for the surge in reoffending.
Yet still the Government builds more mega-prisons, while the Tories yelp for them to go even further and faster. Why? Every politician wants to be seen as the Toughest Daddy, cheered on by a press that raves against a prison system that doesn’t exist. But the “tough” approach - shove ‘em in the toilets, teach ‘em nothing - produces more crime. The macho swagger hides glass testicles. No: we need to show this isn’t about soft vs. tough, but about smart, crime-busting policies vs. dumb, crime-boosting policies.
But for today, reason and evidence remain locked away in the prison toilets. Isn’t it time we let them out?
NAIROBI - More than 14 million people in the east Africa region require urgent food aid due to drought and spiralling cereal and fuel prices, aid agencies say.
In an emergency appeal launched today, Oxfam warns that millions of people in Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Djibouti and Kenya are fast being pushed “towards severe hunger and destitution”. Earlier this week the UN said it needed £200m to avert a humanitarian disaster.
The hunger crisis is worse than the last regional emergency in 2006, when drought caused 11 million people to need assistance, because of the added impact of the global food price increases. Poor families are struggling to buy staples such as maize and wheat, which have more than doubled in price over the past 12 months.
“In previous droughts most people on the margins found ways to cope,” said Peter Smerdon, of the World Food Programme. “But the simultaneous increase in food prices this time around means they are cutting down on meals and taking their kids out of school in order to try to get by. More people are falling over the edge.”
Ethiopia is worst affected, with more than 10 million people requiring assistance following two poor rainy seasons. About 4.6 million need emergency food aid until the next harvest in November - rain is now falling in some areas - while a further 5.7 million on safety-net programmes require additional food or cash grants. At least 75,000 children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
The sharp increase in the fuel price has added to the cost of getting food around the country. Oxfam says that in the remote Somali and Afar regions, cereal prices have increased by up to 500%, while livestock are dying due to lack of water.
In Somalia the rice price has more than tripled since May 2007. Drought and mass displacement caused by civil war mean that 2.6 million people require food aid - a number that could rise to 3.5 million. Delivering the relief is difficult due to piracy and the targeting of aid workers by militias. In Djibouti 115,000 people require assistance, while in Uganda’s eastern Karamoja district, the figure is 700,000. In Kenya, 900,000 people need help.
Normally, the WFP buys relief food from regional governments, but is having to import food from India and South Africa. The Ethiopian government has used up its emergency cereal reserves to feed the urban poor, while Uganda and Kenya are reluctant to sell the small stocks they have.
Earlier appeals by the UN for help in tackling the Somalian and Ethiopian food crises have only been a third funded.
Barbara Stocking, Oxfam’s chief executive, said the UK public had the right to question why the appeals “happen year after year”. “The answer is that the world consistently fails to address adequately the underlying causes of these crises. Chronic poverty in a world of gross inequality of wealth and opportunity lie at the heart of these cyclical crises,” she said.
MOSCOW - Russia was today considering the use of bases in Cuba for its nuclear bombers, in a move that revives memories of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and which is likely to profoundly annoy the United States.
Russian military sources said that Moscow is contemplating using Cuba as a refuelling base for its nuclear-bomb carrying aircraft. The move is in retaliation for the Bush administration’s plan to site a missile defence shield in Europe.
Russia objects vehemently to the Pentagon’s plan. It says the US’s proposed system in Poland and the Czech republic - which formally agreed a deal with Washington last week - poses a direct threat to Russia and its security.
According to a report in Monday’s Izvestiya, the Kremlin now wants to use Cuba as a base for its long-range Tu-160 and Tu-95 strategic nuclear bombers. Citing a “highly-placed military source”, the paper said discussions had taken place.
“While they are deploying the anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech republic, our long-range strategic aircraft already will be landing in Cuba,” the source told the paper. No final decision on landing bombers in Cuba had been taken, it added.
Today defence analysts told the Guardian there was little strategic point in using Cuba as a nuclear base - adding that the idea appeared to have been floated simply as a way of irritating the US and underscoring Russia’s anger.
Russia’s ageing nuclear aircraft have a range of 2,000-3,000kms - allowing them comfortably to fire a nuclear missile at the US from much further away, defence expert Pavel Felgenhauer said. “Frankly in Cuba they would be sitting ducks,” he added.
Additionally, there were other places were the planes could refuel, he said. “Any deployment in Cuba would be highly provocative and very costly. There would be no military advantage. Cuba would want compensation,” Felgenhauer said.
He added: “They [the Russians] are trying to tell the guys [in America] that if they don’t back out of their missile defence shield in Europe, we can make mischief in different places.”
It was not immediately clear whether Cuba had agreed to Russia’s proposal. In a brief, cryptic note posted on a government website, Fidel Castro said his brother Raul - Cuba’s president - was wise not to respond to the report.
Castro said that Cuba was not obliged to offer the US an explanation for the story, “nor ask for excuses or forgiveness.” Most observers believe that Raul - who took over from his brother in February - would be unlikely to agree to any request from Moscow.
But today’s apparent discussion is reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when Khrushchev attempted to site nuclear missiles on the Caribbean island. His aim was to lesson the then strategic nuclear gap with the US.
Khrushchev eventually backed down and withdrew the missiles. The US secretly removed its missiles from Turkey. It also agreed not to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro’s communist regime.
During the Cold War, Cuba remained an important military ally for the Soviet Union. In 2002, however, Russia’s then president Vladimir Putin decided to close Russia’s Soviet-era radar and listening station in Cuba on the grounds of cost.
Last summer Putin ordered the resumption of worldwide bomber patrols by Russia’s nuclear aircraft. Although some experts have dismissed the flights as mere “willy waving”, Nato jets including from Britain have scrambled in response.
The US state department today said it had not had official confirmation from the Russian government about the report. “We continue to work with the Russians on this issue,” Gonzalo Gallegos told the Associated Press, referring to the US’s missile defence shield.
He added: “We have consistently made it clear to them that our proposed deployment of a limited missile defence system in Europe poses no threat to them or their nuclear deterrent.”
Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev, has disappointed western observers who had hoped he might take a more conciliatory foreign policy line. During an address to ambassadors in Moscow this month, he explicitly criticised the US’s missile defence shield, promising Russia would respond ‘appropriately’.
Russia’s approach has recently hardened on several key international issues, experts say.
“It’s become much more rigid,” Felgenhauer said, adding that hardline officials inside Russia’s foreign and defence ministries appeared to be responsible. “There is uncertainty over who is really in charge of Russian foreign policy,” he said.
He added: “We are returning to policy positions agreed last autumn. There is no series attempt at compromise. Right now there is zero purpose in compromise until there is a new administration in Washington.”
“We are just spitting at each other,” he observed.
WASHINGTON - Auditors at a Pentagon oversight agency were pressured by supervisors to skew their reports on major defense contractors to make them look more favorable instead of exposing wrongdoing and charges of overbilling, according to an 80-page report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office.
The Defense Contract Audit Agency, which oversees contractors for the Defense Department, “improperly influenced the audit scope, conclusions and opinions” of reviews of contractor performance, the GAO said, creating a “serious independence issue.”
The report does not name the projects or the contractors involved, but staff members on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee who were briefed on the findings cited seven contractors, some of whom are among the biggest in the defense industry: Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Fluor, Parker Hannifin, Sparta, SRS Technologies and a subsidiary of L3 Communications.
Supervisors at DCAA attempted to intimidate auditors, prevented them from speaking with GAO investigators and created a “generally abusive work environment,” the report said. It cited incidents of “verbal admonishments, reassignments and threats of disciplinary action” against workers who “raised questions about management guidance.”
In a case later identified as involving Boeing, the GAO said the agency made “an upfront agreement” with the company to limit the scope of work and basis for an audit in 2002. The audit related to a cost-and-pricing system of aircraft that included the C-17, aerial refueling tanker, the B-1 and other planes, according to documentation provided to Congressional staff members. These deals were being negotiated by Darleen Druyun who was then a top Air Force acquisition official. Druyun later went to prison after admitting that she favored Boeing in selecting its tanker while she was seeking a job with the company.
When DCAA auditors found “significant deficiencies” and put out a draft report of the problems, the contractor objected. The GAO said an executive told the auditors that if there was an inadequate rating, he would “escalate the issue to the highest level possible in the government and within his own company.”
The managers at the audit agency assigned a new supervisor to the case, threatening the senior auditor with personnel action if “he did not delete findings from the report and change the draft audit opinion to adequate,” the GAO reported.
Dan Beck, a Boeing spokesman, said the company had no comment on the GAO report.
The GAO said it launched the two-year inquiry after complaints on a fraud hotline. Its investigators conducted more than 100 interviews of 50 people involved in audits between 2003 and 2007. It is working on another report following a 2006 request from the Senate homeland security committee due in November.
“Some DCAA supervisors were cutting corners and pressuring their subordinates to give more favorable audits to contractors than the auditors felt the contractors deserved,” Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate committee, said in a statement. “This shows a blatant disregard for the safeguards that are supposed to be in place to ensure that contractors charge the government no more than a fair and reasonable price.”
“This report is being taken very seriously,” said Darryn James, a Pentagon spokesman. He said officials at DCAA and the Defense Department’s comptroller’s office, which oversees that agency, are reviewing the findings and “will determine what — if any — of the next appropriate steps will be. . . . We have faith in our auditors. They are held to high standards.”
In a July 11 letter to the GAO, April G. Stephenson, DCAA director, said the agency disagreed with the “totality” of the GAO’s findings. She said the agency had “taken prompt and immediate action to correct the issues.” She said she found no evidence to support GAO’s conclusions that “DCAA managers took actions against their staff that hindered their investigations.”
Many of the companies named by Senate staff members as being in the GAO report could not be reached las
