Israel bans press in the Gaza Strip | csmonitor.comIsrael bans press in the Gaza Strip
For nearly three weeks Israel has blocked access to the Gaza Strip. Foreign journalists are challenging the Gaza ban in court, calling it a 'blow' to freedom of the press.
By Ilene R. Prusher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
** This makes one wonder what atrocities they are up to this time!? This arrogant, illegitimate, terrorist nation (Israel) MUST be dealt with!!
Jerusalem - For more than 40 years the Gaza Strip has played a key role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, making it a place of keen interest to journalists.
But for nearly three weeks now, Israel has blocked media access to the 25-mile-long coastal territory in what journalists are calling a "mortal blow against freedom of the press."
On Monday, the Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel filed a petition to the Supreme Court asking it to rule on the issue, essentially forcing an overturn of the ban.
"We believe the Israeli government has an obligation to keep the Gaza border open to international journalists," says Steven Gutkin, the FPA Chairman and Jerusalem bureau chief of Associated Press. "The foreign media serve as the world's window into Gaza and it's essential that we be allowed in."
The border has been closed in the past during periods of heightened tensions and violence, but never for more than a few days at a time.
"It's been open throughout very difficult periods, and it's been closed during periods of heavy fighting. But it's been open during more tense periods than this one, and we've received no plausible explanation of why this period is any different," says Mr. Gutkin.
Israeli officials have given no specific reason why it has been closed for such a long period of time, except to indicate that opening the border – the only legal route into Gaza – would endanger the personnel who work at the heavily guarded Erez crossing.
Israel's Supreme Court responded on Tuesday by giving the state 15 days to respond to the FPA demand. But lawyers for the FPA appealed the decision, suggesting that it was an old-fashioned schedule in an age of real-time news.
"We're trying to make it clear to them that 15 days is too long," says Naomi Vestfrid, one of the lawyers on the case.
"We're in the 21st century: news travels in minutes, even seconds. We're trying to tell them that obviously, you didn't understand the urgency in the matter," says Ms. Vestfrid.
Israel has long maintained careful control over the amount of goods and people allowed to come in and out of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, home to about 1.5 million Palestinians living under great economic hardship.
As part of its disengagement from Gaza in September 2005, Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from the territory it had occupied for 38 years and said that the Gaza Strip was no longer its responsibility. However, Israel still controls all access to Gaza via land, sea, and air. Gazans are also dependent on Israel for electricity and fuel.
Since Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, Israel has further tightened its control over the territory, allowing an on-again, off-again trickle of commercial or other traffic over the border.
Israeli officials say they allow humanitarian aid and other necessary supplies into Gaza, but Palestinians say they are living under siege.
The latest clampdown on any access to and from Gaza stems from recent rocket attacks on southern Israel from militants in the Gaza Strip. Israel and Hamas had agreed to a temporary truce – called tahdiya in Arabic or regia in Hebrew – but the quiet was shattered by both sides over the past two weeks.
Human rights groups have also brought attention to the blockade of Gaza over the past month.
A new "Free Gaza" movement has sent boats from Cyprus to Gaza in defiance of the Israeli ban. Some boats have managed to dock, while in other cases, the activists were arrested.
By blocking the press from entering Gaza, the FPA charged in its petition to the Supreme Court that the ban "gives the unpleasant feeling that the state of Israel has something to hide."
Observers here theorize that Israeli defense officials are enforcing the ban as a way to put pressure on Hamas. The FPA says that there are indications that, in the interest of avoiding additional negative publicity, the Israeli army may order the border to be open on Wednesday.
"If that happens, we will explore the option of moving forward with a legal case anyway, because of the precedent," Gutkin wrote in an urgent e-mail update to members on Tuesday.
United Nations studies of the region suggest that due to the ongoing closure, conditions for Palestinians in the territories, particularly the Gaza Strip, are deteriorating.
On Wednesday, several UN offices that aid Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will launch a consolidated appeal process for 2009, during which they will release figures showing the state of decline.
"At the end of 2008, nearly 80 percent of the population in Gaza was dependent on food assistance which combined with restricted access to basic social services and movement can be described as a major human dignity crisis," said a press release from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Banking Regulator Played Advocate Over EnforcerBanking Regulator Played Advocate Over Enforcer
Agency Let Lenders Grow Out of Control, Then Fail
By Binyamin Appelbaum and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 23, 2008; A01
When Countrywide Financial felt pressured by federal agencies charged with overseeing it, executives at the giant mortgage lender simply switched regulators in the spring of 2007.
The benefits were clear: Countrywide's new regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision, promised more flexible oversight of issues related to the bank's mortgage lending. For OTS, which depends on fees paid by banks it regulates and competes with other regulators to land the largest financial firms, Countrywide was a lucrative catch.
But OTS was not an effective regulator. This year, the government has seized three of the largest institutions regulated by OTS, including IndyMac Bancorp, Washington Mutual -- the largest bank in U.S. history to go bust -- and on Friday evening, Downey Savings and Loan Association. The total assets of the OTS thrifts to fail this year: $355.7 billion. Three others were forced to sell to avoid failure, including Countrywide.
In the parade of regulators that missed signals or made decisions they came to regret on the road to the current financial crisis, the Office of Thrift Supervision stands out.
OTS is responsible for regulating thrifts, also known as savings and loans, which focus on mortgage lending. As the banks under OTS supervision expanded high-risk lending, the agency failed to rein in their destructive excesses despite clear evidence of mounting problems, according to banking officials and a review of financial documents.
Instead, OTS adopted an aggressively deregulatory stance toward the mortgage lenders it regulated. It allowed the reserves the banks held as a buffer against losses to dwindle to a historic low. When the housing market turned downward, the thrifts were left vulnerable. As borrowers defaulted on loans, the companies were unable to replace the money they had expected to collect.
The decline and fall of these thrifts further rattled a shaky economy, making it harder and more expensive for people to get mortgages and disrupting businesses that relied on the banks for loans. Although federal insurance covered the deposits, investors lost money, employees lost jobs and the public lost faith in financial institutions.
As Congress and the incoming Obama administration prepare to revamp federal financial oversight, the collapse of the thrift industry offers a lesson in how regulation can fail. It happened over several years, a product of the regulator's overly close identification with its banks, which it referred to as "customers," and of the agency managers' appetite for deregulation, new lending products and expanded homeownership sometimes at the expense of traditional oversight. Tough measures, like tighter lending standards, were not employed until after borrowers began defaulting in large numbers.
The agency championed the thrift industry's growth during the housing boom and called programs that extended mortgages to previously unqualified borrowers as "innovations." In 2004, the year that risky loans called option adjustable-rate mortgages took off, then-OTS director James Gilleran lauded the banks for their role in providing home loans. "Our goal is to allow thrifts to operate with a wide breadth of freedom from regulatory intrusion," he said in a speech.
At the same time, the agency allowed the banks to project minimal losses and, as a result, reduce the share of revenue they were setting aside to cover them. By September 2006, when the housing market began declining, the capital reserves held by OTS-regulated firms had declined to their lowest level in two decades, less than a third of their historical average, according to financial records.
Scott M. Polakoff, the agency's senior deputy director, said OTS had closely monitored allowances for loan losses and considered them sufficient, but added that the actual losses exceeded what reasonably could have been expected.
"Are banks going to fail when events occur well beyond the confines of reasonable expectation or modeling? The answer is yes," he said in an interview.
But critics said the agency had neglected its obligation to police the thrift industry and instead became more of a consultant.
"What you had here is a regulatory motif that was too accommodating to private-sector interests," said Jim Leach, a former Republican lawmaker who led what was then the House Banking Committee and now lectures in public affairs at Princeton University. "In this case, the end result is chaos for the industry, their customers and the national interest."
Warning Signs Ignored
On a hot Friday afternoon in June 2001, federal regulators swept into the suburban Chicago offices of Superior Bank and told stunned employees that it had been closed by OTS.
Superior was the largest thrift to fail since the savings and loans crisis in the early 1990s. Its demise foreshadowed the current upheaval. The company had made billions of dollars in mortgage loans to customers with credit problems but boosted profits instead of setting aside enough revenue to cover the eventual losses.
OTS regulators had not questioned the company's assurances about the quality of its loans. They had not required Superior to set aside more money. Even after the problems were identified, several federal investigators concluded that regulators had continued to rely on the company's promises rather than forcing it to take action.
"The whole Superior episode should have served as a warning," Ellen Seidman, then-director of OTS, said in a recent interview. Seidman acknowledged that she should have acted faster and more forcefully to address Superior's problems. Seidman, a Democrat, left her post shortly after the Bush administration began and had little role in revising the agency's approach.
Although the failure and disappearance of Superior triggered minor reforms, OTS did not learn the broader lesson. Thrifts were expanding into high-risk mortgage lending, but OTS was not requiring stronger safeguards.
John Reich, who has been OTS director since 2005, and Polakoff, his deputy, were well positioned to have learned the lesson. At the time of Superior's difficulties, Reich was one of the leaders of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Polakoff ran FDIC's Chicago office. Indeed, Polakoff's office recognized Superior's problems before OTS and pushed for increased scrutiny of Superior's bookkeeping.
In testimony before Congress in the fall of 2001, Reich listed what he considered the lessons of Superior's failure. Among them, he said, "we must see to it that institutions engaging in risky lending . . . hold sufficient capital to protect against sudden insolvency."
But instead of increasing oversight, OTS shrank dramatically over the next four years.
Reducing Regulation
In the summer of 2003, leaders of the four federal agencies that oversee the banking industry gathered to highlight the Bush administration's commitment to reducing regulation. They posed for photographers behind a stack of papers wrapped in red tape. The others held garden shears. Gilleran, who succeeded Seidman as OTS director in late 2001, hefted a chain saw.
Gilleran was an impassioned advocate of deregulation. He cut a quarter of the agency's 1,200 employees between 2001 and 2004, even though the value of loans and other assets of the firms regulated by OTS increased by half over the same period. The result was a mismatch between a short-handed agency and a burgeoning thrift industry.
He also reduced consumer protections. The other agencies that regulate banks review corporate health and compliance with consumer laws separately, which consumer advocates say helps ensure that each gets proper scrutiny from specialists. Gilleran merged the consumer exam into the financial exam.
Gilleran did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this article. But at the time he headed the agency, he defended the consolidation of the exams, saying thrifts would be required to conduct "self-evaluations of their compliance with consumer laws."
Then-Rep. John J. LaFalce (D-N.Y.), who at the time was the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, wrote in a letter to Gilleran that this was "a complete abrogation of the mandate your agency has been given by Congress."
The consumer exam had in part monitored whether thrifts were complying with the law by providing quality loans in lower-income communities. During Gilleran's four-year tenure, OTS cited only one institution for failing to meet that obligation, compared with 12 citations in the previous four years.
John Taylor, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and other advocates say better enforcement of consumer protections, such as rules against predatory lending, could have kept thrifts healthy because consumer complaints are an early warning of unsustainable business practices.
A Surge in High-Risk Loans
For thrifts regulated by OTS, the option ARM was the rocket fuel of the mortgage boom, the product most responsible for driving profits to record heights and for burning lenders badly on the way back down. Yet even after other bank regulators urged higher lending standards for these mortgages, OTS was reluctant to insist on it.
Simeon Ferguson, an 85-year-old Brooklyn resident with dementia, according to his attorney, signed up in February 2006 for an option ARM. The monthly cost was $2,400, but the terms of the loan from IndyMac Bancorp, a major thrift based in Pasadena, Calif., allowed Ferguson to pay less than that each month, the way people can with a credit card.
Many of the loans made by IndyMac and other thrifts were extended to borrowers without ensuring they could afford their full monthly payments. Ferguson, who lived on a fixed monthly income of $1,100, was one such borrower, according to a pending lawsuit filed on his behalf in federal court. The suit alleges that IndyMac never checked on his income or assets.
In 2006, at the peak of the boom, lenders made $255 billion in option ARMs, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication. Most option ARMs were originated by OTS-regulated banks.
Concerns about the product were first raised in late 2005 by another federal regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The agency pushed other regulators to issue a joint proposal that lenders should make sure borrowers could afford their full monthly payments. "Too many consumers have been attracted to products by the seductive prospect of low minimum payments that delay the day of reckoning," Comptroller of the Currency John C. Dugan said in a speech advocating the proposal.
OTS was hesitant to sign on, though it eventually did. Reich, the new director of OTS, warned against excessive intervention. He cautioned that the government should not interfere with lending by thrifts "who have demonstrated that they have the know-how to manage these products through all kinds of economic cycles." Reich, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this article.
The lending industry seconded Reich's concerns at the time, arguing that the government was needlessly depriving families of a chance at homeownership. IndyMac argued in a letter to regulators that in evaluating loan applications it was not fair to rule out the possibility that a prospective borrower's income might increase. "Lenders risk denying home ownership to qualified borrowers," chief risk officer Ruthann Melbourne wrote.
The proposal languished until September 2006, when it was swiftly finalized after a congressional committee began making inquiries.
The long delay in issuing the guidance allowed companies to keep making billions of dollars in loans without verifying that borrowers could afford them. One of the largest banks, Countrywide Financial, said in an investor presentation after the guidance was released that most of the borrowers who received loans in the previous two years would not have qualified under the new standards. Countrywide said it would have refused 89 percent of its 2006 borrowers and 83 percent of its 2005 borrowers. That represents $138 billion in mortgage loans the company would not have made if regulators had acted sooner.
Risks Ran Rampant
Even after the guidance was issued, some banks interpreted it as permission to maintain old habits because the regulatory agencies had stopped short of issuing a binding rule.
Washington Mutual, for instance, said in a December 2006 securities filing that it was continuing to qualify borrowers based on their ability to afford a teaser interest rate. In August 2007, the bank was still qualifying borrowers at a 2 percent teaser rate instead of the full rate of 5 percent or higher they would eventually face, according to a shareholders' lawsuit filed by Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann.
As early as 2003, the company set up credit risk teams at more than a dozen offices around the country to assess the growing flood of applications for option ARM loans. The basic job was to "make exceptions" to the bank's standards so loans could be approved, said Dorothea Larkin, a former Washington Mutual credit risk manager and a witness in the Bernstein Litowitz suit.
"As we kept making the same exception over and over again, what was an exception in 2003 and in 2004 became the norm in 2005," Larkin said in an interview.
It was clear to some Washington Mutual employees that the company was making loans that borrowers could not afford and that the bank could suffer as a result. In 2005, a small group of senior risk managers drew up a plan that would have required loan officers to document that borrowers could afford the full monthly payment on option ARM loans.
The plan was shared with OTS examiners, according to a former bank official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bank's practices are the focus of a federal investigation as well as several lawsuits.
"We laid it out to the regulators. They bought into it. They supported it," the former official said. But when a new executive team at the bank nixed the plan, the former official said, "the OTS never said anything."
In addition to taking more risks, Washington Mutual was setting aside a smaller share of revenue to cover future losses. The reserves had steadily declined relative to new loans since 2002. By June 2005, the bank held $45 to cover losses on every $10,000 in outstanding loans, according to financial records filed with federal regulators. Average reserves at OTS-regulated institutions had declined by about a third since June 2002, but Washington Mutual's reserves had fallen even further. They were 25 percent lower than the average for OTS-regulated thrifts.
OTS did not force the company to address the problem with reserves, though agency examiners worked full-time inside Washington Mutual's Seattle headquarters.
Polakoff said OTS closely monitored the company's allowance for loan losses and considered it sufficient. "They had good models in place calculating expected losses on the loan portfolio," he said.
But the agency did not fix a basic problem with how Washington Mutual predicted future losses. According to a confidential internal review in September 2005, the company had not adjusted its prediction of future losses to reflect the larger risks associated with option ARM loans. The review described those loans as "a major and growing risk factor in our portfolio." As a result, the company was not setting aside enough money to cover future losses.
Management responded in November to the internal review with a memo promising to update its risk assessment by June 30, 2006. During the nine months before the risk model was revised, Washington Mutual issued about $32 billion in new option ARM loans. OTS officials said in an interview that they were unfamiliar with the company's internal correspondence but would consider nine months an unacceptable delay.
"Nine months to get that model into compliance?" said Dale George, a former WaMu risk manager and a witness in a lawsuit. "I found that astounding."
Known for Being 'Lenient'
Countrywide Financial's decision to reconstitute itself as a thrift and come under the OTS umbrella was a victory for Darryl W. Dochow, the OTS official in charge of new charters in the Western region, home to Washington Mutual, IndyMac and other large thrifts.
In the late 1980s, Dochow had been the chief career supervisor of the savings-and-loan industry, and federal investigators later concluded he played a key role in the collapse of Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan by delaying and impeding proper oversight of that thrift's operations.
Dochow was shunted aside in the aftermath and sent to the agency's Seattle office. Several of his former colleagues and superiors say he eventually reestablished himself as a credible regulator and again rose in the organization. Dochow did not return a phone call requesting an interview, and OTS said he declined to give one.
As early as 2005, Angelo R. Mozilo, then the chief executive of Countrywide, approached OTS about moving out from under the supervision of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national commercial banks. In 2006, Dochow and his OTS colleagues met with Countrywide at its headquarters in Calabasas, Calif., in a room decorated with color photos of the company's float entries in the annual Tournament of Roses parade. One depicted a big bad wolf, with arms outstretched, huffing and puffing on a brick house.
Senior executives at Countrywide who participated in the meetings said OTS pitched itself as a more natural, less antagonistic regulator than OCC and that Mozilo preferred that. Government officials outside OTS who were familiar with the negotiations provided a similar description.
"The general attitude was they were going to be more lenient," one Countrywide executive said. For example, he said other regulators, specifically OCC and the Federal Reserve, were very demanding that large banks not allow loan officers to participate in the selection of property appraisers. "But the OTS sold themselves on having a more liberal interpretation of it," the executive said.
Winning Countrywide was important for OTS, which is funded by assessments on the roughly 750 banks it regulates, with the largest firms paying much of the freight. Washington Mutual paid 13 percent of the agency's budget in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, according to OTS figures. Countrywide provided 5 percent. Individual firms tend to make a larger difference to OTS finances than other bank regulators because the agency oversees fewer companies with fewer assets.
Polakoff said in an interview that the main reason Countrywide sought a new charter was that OTS was a better fit because it regulated banks that focus on mortgage lending. He said he challenged Mozilo: "If you're looking for a weak regulator, and if you're calling us because you think we're a weak regulator, stop now. We will walk away."
Polakoff said Mozilo told him, "That is absolutely not the reason we're even talking to you about a charter." Mozilo declined to be interviewed for this article.
But critics in government and industry said Countrywide's shift from OCC oversight to that of OTS was evidence of a "competition in laxity" among regulators eager to attract business. "Institutions should not be able to find a safe haven in one regulator from the reasonable concerns of another regulator," said Karen Shaw Petrou of Federal Financial Analytics, referring to the Countrywide episode.
In September 2007, six months after helping orchestrate the arrival of Countrywide under OTS, Dochow was promoted to head the agency's Western region.
He had arrived just in time for the second savings-and-loan crisis.
Print Story: Bush set to relax endangered species rules - Yahoo! News
** And so begins the final, and likely worst, rape of the eight year gang-rape we've been experiencing!!
Bush set to relax endangered species rules
By Dina Cappiello, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – Animals and plants in danger of becoming extinct could lose the protection of government experts who make sure that dams, highways and other projects don't pose a threat, under regulations the Bush administration is set to put in place before President-elect Obama can reverse them.
The rules must be published Friday to take effect before Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. Otherwise, he can undo them with the stroke of a pen.
The Interior Department rushed to complete the rules in three months over the objections of lawmakers and environmentalists who argued that they would weaken how a landmark conservation law is applied.
A Nov. 12 version of the final rules obtained by the Associated Press has changed little from the original proposal, despite the more than 250,000 comments received since it was first proposed in August.
The rules eliminate the input of federal wildlife scientists in some endangered species cases, allowing the federal agency in charge of building, authorizing or funding a project to determine for itself if it is likely to harm endangered wildlife and plants.
Current regulations require independent wildlife biologists to sign off on these decisions before a project can go forward, at times modifying the design to better protect species.
The regulations also bar federal agencies from assessing emissions of the gases blamed for global warming on species and habitats, a tactic environmentalists have tried to use to block new coal-fired power plants.
Tina Kreisher, an Interior Department spokeswoman, could not confirm whether the rule would be published before the deadline, saying only that the White House was still reviewing it. But she said changes were being made based on the comments received.
"We started this; we want to finish this," said Kreisher.
If the rules go into effect before Obama takes office, they will be difficult to overturn since it would require the new administration to restart the rule-making process. Congress, however, could reverse the rules through the Congressional Review Act — a law that allows review of new federal regulations.
It's been used once in the last 12 years, but some Democratic lawmakers have said they may employ it to block the endangered species rules and other midnight regulations by the Bush administration.
Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said Wednesday that he and other Democrats were committed to "the change that is needed."
Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the House will be looking at ways to overturn the endangered species rules and other midnight regulations.
"The House, in consultation with the incoming administration and relevant committees, will review what oversight tools are at our disposal regarding this and other last minute attempts to inflict severe damage to the law in the waning moments of the Bush administration," Hammill said.
The Bush administration has made no secret of its intent to complete the endangered species changes quickly.
When the proposal was first announced in August, the public was initially given 30 days to comment. That period was later doubled after Democratic lawmakers pressed for more time.
Then, last month, the head of the endangered species program corralled 15 experts in Washington to sort through 200,000 comments in 32 hours.
"This is definitely lightning quick," said John Kostyack, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation's Wildlife Conservation and Global Warming initiative. "I would be surprised that they spent all this time rushing it through if it wasn't greased."
If successful, the Bush administration will accomplish through rules what conservative Republicans have been unable to achieve in Congress: ending some environmental reviews that developers and other federal agencies blame for delays and cost increases on many projects.
Supporters of the changes also expected it to be finalized later this week.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, which advocates for property rights, urged that the rules be approved.
"Litigious activists have used the Endangered Species Act to fight projects," Reed Hopper, the foundation's principal attorney, said in a statement. "The administration's current proposal is a step toward curbing these abuses."
Treasury Bailout Revamp Subject Of Contentious Hearing
(RTTNews) - The Treasury Department's use of the $700 billion financial rescue package was the subject of a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill Friday.
Led by Chairman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), members of the House Oversight Committee's subcommittee on domestic policy grilled the Treasury Department's Interim Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability Neel Kashkari on the restructuring of the bailout plan.
Kashkari attempted to deflect criticism, telling the committee, "Our system is stronger and more stable than just a few weeks ago.
"
However, a panel of angry representatives accused him of playing "ring around the rosie" with their questions.
Ranking member Darrell Issa (R-CA) was particularly harsh, telling Kashkari, "You're here because Congress feels you played a bait-and-switch game," adding that representatives would remain skeptical to the Treasury's motives.
The Treasury Department came under scrutiny earlier this week following the revelation that it no longer plans to buy troubled mortgage-related assets from banks with the $700 billion financial relief package created last month.
The move explicitly abandons the original intention of the rescue bill, with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson changing the focus of the relief program to other areas.
In a press conference, Paulson revealed that the government would now focus on building capital in financial institutions, finding ways to support consumer access to credit and looking at ways to ease mortgage foreclosures.
The program might also be expanded to include lightly regulated non-bank financial institutions, the Treasury secretary said, though he noted that this would bring up challenges in protecting taxpayer money.
In his opening remarks, Kucinich berated the decision to completely alter the focus of the bailout.
"Secretary Paulson's policy reversal breaks with Congressional intent, contradicts public assurances previously made by Treasury, and leaves the federal government without an adequate mechanism to stem a tide of home foreclosures," he said.
"Thus, the only significant use by Treasury of the funds Congress authorized to address the mortgage crisis underlying the financial crisis includes, among other things, propping up a Beverly Hills banker to the stars; subsidizing the evisceration of National City Bank and the laying-off of thousands of Clevelanders who worked there; and indirectly funding the payment of bonuses, compensation, and dividends by financial firms that could not have afforded to make them without the TARP capital infusion," Kucinich continued.
He added that Congress would have not passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act if it had known that the Treasury would so drastically restructure the package. Both Kucinich and Issa voted against the first and second versions of the EESA.
Print Story: Election spurs 'hundreds' of race threats, crimes - Yahoo! NewsElection spurs 'hundreds' of race threats, crimes
By Jesse Washington, Ap National Writer
Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting "Assassinate Obama." Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.
Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.
From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.
There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.
One was in Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door, Millner said.
She described her emotions as a combination of anger and fear.
"I can't say that every white person in Snellville is evil and anti-Obama and willing to desecrate my property because one or two idiots did it," said Millner, who is black. "But it definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with, and makes you wonder what they're capable of and what they're really thinking."
Potok, who is white, said he believes there is "a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them."
Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old white Georgia native, expressed similar sentiments: "I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change.
"If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama's) church being deported," he said.
Change in whatever form does not come easy, and a black president is "the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War," said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. "It's shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries."
"Someone once said racism is like cancer," Ferris said. "It's never totally wiped out, it's in remission."
If so, America's remission lasted until the morning of Nov. 5.
The day after the vote hailed as a sign of a nation changed, black high school student Barbara Tyler of Marietta, Ga., said she heard hateful Obama comments from white students, and that teachers cut off discussion about Obama's victory.
Tyler spoke at a press conference by the Georgia chapter of the NAACP calling for a town hall meeting to address complaints from across the state about hostility and resentment. Another student, from a Covington middle school, said he was suspended for wearing an Obama shirt to school Nov. 5 after the principal told students not to wear political paraphernalia.
The student's mother, Eshe Riviears, said the principal told her: "Whether you like it or not, we're in the South, and there are a lot of people who are not happy with this decision."
Other incidents include:
_Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: "Let's shoot that (N-word) in the head." Obama has received more threats than any other president-elect, authorities say.
_At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins."
_Racist graffiti was found in places including New York's Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted; Kilgore, Texas, where the local high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.
_Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.
_University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur. "It seems the election brought the racist rats out of the woodwork," Houston said.
_Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported. The president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas said a rope found hanging from a campus tree was apparently an abandoned swing and not a noose.
_Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.
_A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted 'Obama.'
_In the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying "now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house."
Emotions are often raw after a hard-fought political campaign, but now those on the losing side have an easy target for their anger.
"The principle is very simple," said BJ Gallagher, a sociologist and co-author of the diversity book "A Peacock in the Land of Penguins." "If I can't hurt the person I'm angry at, then I'll vent my anger on a substitute, i.e., someone of the same race."
"We saw the same thing happen after the 9-11 attacks, as a wave of anti-Muslim violence swept the country. We saw it happen after the Rodney King verdict, when Los Angeles blacks erupted in rage at the injustice perpetrated by 'the white man.'"
"It's as stupid and ineffectual as kicking your dog when you've had a bad day at the office," Gallagher said. "But it happens a lot."
Print Story: Obama has more threats than other presidents-elect - Yahoo! NewsObama has more threats than other presidents-elect
By Eileen Sullivan, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – Threats against a new president historically spike right after an election, but from Maine to Idaho law enforcement officials are seeing more against Barack Obama than ever before. The Secret Service would not comment or provide the number of cases they are investigating. But since the Nov. 4 election, law enforcement officials have seen more potentially threatening writings, Internet postings and other activity directed at Obama than has been seen with any past president-elect, said officials aware of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue of a president's security is so sensitive.
Earlier this week, the Secret Service looked into the case of a sign posted on a tree in Vay, Idaho, with Obama's name and the offer of a "free public hanging." In North Carolina, civil rights officials complained of threatening racist graffiti targeting Obama found in a tunnel near the North Carolina State University campus.
And in a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited $1 entries into "The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool," saying the money would go to the person picking the date closest to when Obama was attacked. "Let's hope we have a winner," said the sign, since taken down.
In the security world, anything "new" can trigger hostility, said Joseph Funk, a former Secret Service agent-turned security consultant who oversaw a private protection detail for Obama before the Secret Service began guarding the candidate in early 2007.
Obama, of course, will be the country's first black president, and Funk said that new element, not just race itself, is probably responsible for a spike in anti-Obama postings and activity. "Anytime you're going to have something that's new, you're going to have increased chatter," he said.
The Secret Service also has cautioned the public not to assume that any threats against Obama are due to racism.
The service investigates threats in a wide range. There are "stated threats" and equally dangerous or lesser incidents considered of "unusual interest" — such as people motivated by obsessions or infatuations or lower-level gestures such as effigies of a candidate or an elected president. The service has said it does not have the luxury of discounting anything until agents have investigated the potential danger.
Racially tinged graffiti — not necessarily directed at Obama — also has emerged in numerous reports across the nation since Election Day, prompting at least one news conference by a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Georgia.
A law enforcement official who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly said that during the campaign there was a spike in anti-Obama rhetoric on the Internet — "a lot of ranting and raving with no capability, credibility or specificity to it."
There were two threatening cases with racial overtones:
• In Denver, a group of men with guns and bulletproof vests made racist threats against Obama and sparked fears of an assassination plot during the Democratic National Convention in August.
• Just before the election, two skinheads in Tennessee were charged with plotting to behead blacks across the country and assassinate Obama while wearing white top hats and tuxedos.
In both cases, authorities determined the men were not capable of carrying out their plots.
In Milwaukee, police officials found a poster of Obama with a bullet going toward his head — discovered on a table in a police station.
Chatter among white supremacists on the Internet has increased throughout the campaign and since Election Day.
One of the most popular white supremacist Web sites got more than 2,000 new members the day after the election, compared with 91 new members on Election Day, according to an AP count. The site, stormfront.org, was temporarily off-line Nov. 5 because of the overwhelming amount of activity it received after Election Day. On Saturday, one Stormfront poster, identified as Dalderian Germanicus, of North Las Vegas, said, "I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how 'messiahs' come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed."
It is not surprising that a black president would galvanize the white supremacist movement, said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who studies the white supremacy movement.
"The overwhelming flavor of the white supremacist world is a mix of desperation, confusion and hoping that this will somehow turn into a good thing for them," Potok said. He said hate groups have been on the rise in the past seven years because of a common concern about immigration.
Salon.com News | Obama's plans for probing Bush tortureObama's plans for probing Bush torture
President Bush could pardon officials involved in brutal interrogations -- but he may also face a sweeping investigation under the new president.
By Mark Benjamin
With growing talk in Washington that President Bush may be considering an unprecedented "blanket pardon" for people involved in his administration's brutal interrogation policies, advisors to Barack Obama are pressing ahead with plans for a nonpartisan commission to investigate alleged abuses under Bush.
The Obama plan, first revealed by Salon in August, would emphasize fact-finding investigation over prosecution. It is gaining currency in Washington as Obama advisors begin to coordinate with Democrats in Congress on the proposal. The plan would not rule out future prosecutions, but would delay a decision on that matter until all essential facts can be unearthed. Between the time necessary for the investigative process and the daunting array of policy problems Obama will face upon taking office, any decision on prosecutions probably would not come until a second Obama presidential term, should there be one.
The proposed commission -- similar in thrust to a Democratic investigation proposal first uncovered by Salon in July -- would examine a broad scope of activities, including detention, torture and extraordinary rendition, the practice of snatching suspected terrorists off the street and whisking them off to a third country for abusive interrogations. The commission might also pry into the claims by the White House -- widely rejected by experienced interrogators -- that abusive interrogations are an effective and necessary intelligence tool.
A common view among those involved with the talks is that any early effort to prosecute Bush administration officials would likely devolve quickly into ugly and fruitless partisan warfare. Second is that even if Obama decided he had the appetite for it, prosecutions in this arena are problematic at best: A series of memos from the Bush Justice Department approved the harsh tactics, and Congress changed the War Crimes Act in 2006, making prosecutions of individuals involved in interrogations more difficult.
Instead, a commission empowered by Congress would have the authority to compel witnesses to testify and even to grant immunity in exchange for information. Should a particularly ugly picture emerge, the option of prosecutions would still theoretically be on the table later, however unlikely.
In Obama's camp, there is a sense among some that such a commission would essentially mean letting Bush get away with crimes. "People have called for criminal investigations," one person familiar with the talks told me this summer as plans got under way. On Wednesday, a person participating in the talks confirmed that some people involved in the planning felt strongly that the commission would amount to "bullshit" and that Bush officials should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
But few think prosecutions are realistic, given the formidable legal hurdles and the huge policy problems competing for Obama's attention. Among them is the complicated task of closing down the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, which Obama advisors say is a priority. Some observers outside the Obama camp are also questioning how much Democrats really want exposed with regard to interrogation, since top Democrats in Congress were briefed in secret on some of the harshest tactics used by the CIA and appear to have done little, or perhaps nothing, to stop them.
Further complicating the Obama team's planning is uncertainty about what President Bush might do. On the one hand, a blanket pardon for anyone involved in the interrogations could be viewed by the public as a tacit admission of colossal wrongdoing -- after years of public denial -- which would do nothing to help Bush's tarnished legacy. Yet, if the administration fears an investigation will follow Bush out the door in January, they may not want to leave officials exposed to potentially revealing criminal proceedings. Bush might seek to frame a blanket pardon as a preemptive strike against wrongheaded, partisan retribution.
Constitutional scholars say a pardon of this kind would be an unprecedented move -- the prospective pardon of not just individuals but entire categories of people, perhaps numbering in the thousands, for carrying out the president's orders , which the White House has argued all along were legal.
Those scholars agree, however, that Article II of the Constitution gives Bush much latitude: There is no authority that can stop the president from doing so if he wishes, and there is no outside check or balance to revisit such a decision, however controversial it may be. "The president can do with pardoning power whatever he wants," explained University of Wisconsin Law School professor Stanley Kutler. "It is complete and plenary unto itself."
A blanket pardon from Bush could cover, for example, anyone who participated in, had knowledge of, or received information about Bush's interrogation program during the so-called war on terror. Not only are there potentially too many people to name without risking missing somebody, but some of the names are presumably classified.
"The classic pardon is an identifiable individual; here you are talking about potentially thousands of people involved in illegal activities," explained Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School. A blanket pardon of this variety, Turley said, "would allow a president to engage in massive illegality and generally pardon the world for any involvement in unlawful activity."
There are, in fact, some constitutional scholars who believe a pardon might actually facilitate more complete participation in a fact-finding commission, by removing the threat of looming liability. "Holding people accountable is certainly nice, but in terms of healing the country and moving forward, so is actually getting a clear picture of what happened and letting the public make an informed decision," said Kermit Roosevelt at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. "If we had a pardon followed by something like a truth and reconciliation commission, that might not be such a bad outcome." (Roosevelt represents a detainee held at Guantánamo.)
The politics of it would be fraught with danger, however, and could so blemish Bush's legacy that some doubt he would go so far. "A pardon is an admission of guilt," noted Donald Kettl, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Bush has argued for years that his interrogation program was perfectly legal. With a pardon, Kettl said, Bush is essentially saying, "Gee, maybe we did not do the right thing."
It is not entirely unprecedented for a president to grant a pardon based on a category of behavior, rather than pardoning an individual by name. The day after his inauguration, President Carter pardoned all those who avoided the Vietnam draft by failing to register or by fleeing to Canada. George Washington pardoned participants in the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers in 1865.
But these were pardons designed to foster reconciliation, handed out to categories of individuals who acted on their own conscience, rather than the president's own allegedly illegal orders. "This would be a different deal completely," explained Kettl. "It would be anticipating that people thought the official policy of the administration was wrong."
A Quiet Windfall For U.S. BanksA Quiet Windfall For U.S. Banks
With Attention on Bailout Debate, Treasury Made Change to Tax Policy
By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 10, 2008; A01
The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration's request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.
But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.
The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.
"Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no," said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. "They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks."
The story of the obscure provision underscores what critics in Congress, academia and the legal profession warn are the dangers of the broad authority being exercised by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in addressing the financial crisis. Lawmakers are now looking at whether the new notice was introduced to benefit specific banks, as well as whether it inappropriately accelerated bank takeovers.
The change to Section 382 of the tax code -- a provision that limited a kind of tax shelter arising in corporate mergers -- came after a two-decade effort by conservative economists and Republican administration officials to eliminate or overhaul the law, which is so little-known that even influential tax experts sometimes draw a blank at its mention. Until the financial meltdown, its opponents thought it would be nearly impossible to revamp the section because this would look like a corporate giveaway, according to lobbyists.
Andrew C. DeSouza, a Treasury spokesman, said the administration had the legal authority to issue the notice as part of its power to interpret the tax code and provide legal guidance to companies. He described the Sept. 30 notice, which allows some banks to keep more money by lowering their taxes, as a way to help financial institutions during a time of economic crisis. "This is part of our overall effort to provide relief," he said.
The Treasury itself did not estimate how much the tax change would cost, DeSouza said.
A Tax Law 'Shock'
The guidance issued from the IRS caught even some of the closest followers of tax law off guard because it seemed to come out of the blue when Treasury's work seemed focused almost exclusively on the bailout.
"It was a shock to most of the tax law community. It was one of those things where it pops up on your screen and your jaw drops," said Candace A. Ridgway, a partner at Jones Day, a law firm that represents banks that could benefit from the notice. "I've been in tax law for 20 years, and I've never seen anything like this."
More than a dozen tax lawyers interviewed for this story -- including several representing banks that stand to reap billions from the change -- said the Treasury had no authority to issue the notice.
Several other tax lawyers, all of whom represent banks, said the change was legal. Like DeSouza, they said the legal authority came from Section 382 itself, which says the secretary can write regulations to "carry out the purposes of this section."
Section 382 of the tax code was created by Congress in 1986 to end what it considered an abuse of the tax system: companies sheltering their profits from taxation by acquiring shell companies whose only real value was the losses on their books. The firms would then use the acquired company's losses to offset their gains and avoid paying taxes.
Lawmakers decried the tax shelters as a scam and created a formula to strictly limit the use of those purchased losses for tax purposes.
But from the beginning, some conservative economists and Republican administration officials criticized the new law as unwieldy and unnecessary meddling by the government in the business world.
"This has never been a good economic policy," said Kenneth W. Gideon, an assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy under President George H.W. Bush and now a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a law firm that represents banks.
The opposition to Section 382 is part of a broader ideological battle over how the tax code deals with a company's losses. Some conservative economists argue that not only should a firm be able to use losses to offset gains, but that in a year when a company only loses money, it should be entitled to a cash refund from the government.
During the current Bush administration, senior officials considered ways to implement some version of the policy. A Treasury paper in December 2007 -- issued under the names of Eric Solomon, the top tax policy official in the department, and his deputy, Robert Carroll -- criticized limits on the use of losses and suggested that they be relaxed. A logical extension of that argument would be an overhaul of 382, according to Carroll, who left his position as deputy assistant secretary in the Treasury's office of tax policy earlier this year.
Yet lobbyists trying to modify the obscure section found that they could get no traction in Congress or with the Treasury.
"It's really been the third rail of tax policy to touch 382," said Kevin A. Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
'The Wells Fargo Ruling'
As turmoil swept financial markets, banking officials stepped up their efforts to change the law.
Senior executives from the banking industry told top Treasury officials at the beginning of the year that Section 382 was bad for businesses because it was preventing mergers, according to Scott E. Talbott, senior vice president for the Financial Services Roundtable, which lobbies for some of the country's largest financial institutions. He declined to identify the executives and said the discussions were not a concerted lobbying effort. Lobbyists for the biotechnology industry also raised concerns about the provision at an April meeting with Solomon, the assistant secretary for tax policy, according to talking points prepared for the session.
DeSouza, the Treasury spokesman, said department officials in August began internal discussions about the tax change. "We received absolutely no requests from any bank or financial institution to do this," he said.
Although the department's action was prompted by spreading troubles in the financial markets, Carroll said, it was consistent with what the Treasury had deemed in the December report to be good tax policy.
The notice was released on a momentous day in the banking industry. It not only came 24 hours after the House of Representatives initially defeated the bailout bill, but also one day after Wachovia agreed to be acquired by Citigroup in a government-brokered deal.
The Treasury notice suddenly made it much more attractive to acquire distressed banks, and Wells Fargo, which had been an earlier suitor for Wachovia, made a new and ultimately successful play to take it over.
The Jones Day law firm said the tax change, which some analysts soon dubbed "the Wells Fargo Ruling," could be worth about $25 billion for Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo declined to comment for this article.
The tax world, meanwhile, was rushing to figure out the full impact of the notice and who was responsible for the change.
Jones Day released a widely circulated commentary that concluded that the change could cost taxpayers about $140 billion. Robert L. Willens, a prominent corporate tax expert in New York City, said the price is more likely to be $105 billion to $110 billion.
Over the next month, two more bank mergers took place with the benefit of the new tax guidance. PNC, which took over National City, saved about $5.1 billion from the modification, about the total amount that it spent to acquire the bank, Willens said. Banco Santander, which took over Sovereign Bancorp, netted an extra $2 billion because of the change, he said. A spokesman for PNC said Willens's estimate was too high but declined to provide an alternate one; Santander declined to comment.
Attorneys representing banks celebrated the notice. The week after it was issued, former Treasury officials now in private practice met with Solomon, the department's top tax policy official. They asked him to relax the limitations on banks even further, so that foreign banks could benefit from the tax break, too.
Congress Looks for Answers
No one in the Treasury informed the tax-writing committees of Congress about this move, which could reduce revenue by tens of billions of dollars. Legislators learned about the notice only days later.
DeSouza, the Treasury spokesman, said Congress is not normally consulted about administrative guidance.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member on the Finance Committee, was particularly outraged and had his staff push for an explanation from the Bush administration, according to congressional aides.
In an off-the-record conference call on Oct. 7, nearly a dozen Capitol Hill staffers demanded answers from Solomon for about an hour. Several of the participants left the call even more convinced that the administration had overstepped its authority, according to people familiar with the conversation.
But lawmakers worried about discussing their concerns publicly. The staff of Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Finance Committee, had asked that the entire conference call be kept secret, according to a person with knowledge of the call.
"We're all nervous about saying that this was illegal because of our fears about the marketplace," said one congressional aide, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. "To the extent we want to try to publicly stop this, we're going to be gumming up some important deals."
Grassley and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) have publicly expressed concerns about the notice but have so far avoided saying that it is illegal. "Congress wants to help," Grassley said. "We also have a responsibility to make sure power isn't abused and that the sensibilities of Main Street aren't left in the dust as Treasury works to inject remedies into the financial system."
Carol Guthrie, spokeswoman for the Democrats on the Finance Committee, said it is in frequent contact with the Treasury about the financial rescue efforts, including how it exercises authority over tax policy.
Lawmakers are considering legislation to undo the change. According to tax attorneys, no one would have legal standing to file a lawsuit challenging the Treasury notice, so only Congress or Treasury could reverse it. Such action could undo the notice going forward or make it clear that it was never legal, a move that experts say would be unlikely.
But several aides said they were still torn between their belief that the change is illegal and fear of further destabilizing the economy.
"None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression," one said.
Some legal experts said these under-the-radar objections mirror the objections to the congressional resolution authorizing the war in Iraq.
"It's just like after September 11. Back then no one wanted to be seen as not patriotic, and now no one wants to be seen as not doing all they can to save the financial system," said Lee A. Sheppard, a tax attorney who is a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Analysts. "We're left now with congressional Democrats that have spines like overcooked spaghetti. So who is going to stop the Treasury secretary from doing whatever he wants?"
Print Story: Obama planning US trials for Guantanamo detainees - Yahoo! News
**Finally someone is going to reinstate the U.S. Constitution (which disappeared once those criminals Bush and Cheney came into power)!!
Obama planning US trials for Guantanamo detainees
By Matt Apuzzo And Lara Jakes Jordan, Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON – President-elect Obama's advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.
During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a "sad chapter in American history" and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed.
Under plans being put together in Obama's camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.
A third group of detainees — the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans aren't final.
The move would be a sharp deviation from the Bush administration, which established military tribunals to prosecute detainees at the Navy base in Cuba and strongly opposes bringing prisoners to the United States. Obama's Republican challenger, John McCain, had also pledged to close Guantanamo. But McCain opposed criminal trials, saying the Bush administration's tribunals should continue on U.S. soil.
The plan being developed by Obama's team has been championed by legal scholars from both political parties. But it is almost certain to face opposition from Republicans who oppose bringing terrorism suspects to the U.S. and from Democrats who oppose creating a new court system with fewer rights for detainees.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and Obama legal adviser, said discussions about plans for Guantanamo had been "theoretical" before the election but would quickly become very focused because closing the prison is a top priority. Bringing the detainees to the United States will be controversial, he said, but could be accomplished.
"I think the answer is going to be, they can be as securely guarded on U.S. soil as anywhere else," Tribe said. "We can't put people in a dungeon forever without processing whether they deserve to be there."
The tougher challenge will be allaying fears by Democrats who believe the Bush administration's military commissions were a farce and dislike the idea of giving detainees anything less than the full constitutional rights normally enjoyed by everyone on U.S. soil.
"There would be concern about establishing a completely new system," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the House Judiciary Committee and former federal prosecutor who is aware of the discussions in the Obama camp. "And in the sense that establishing a regimen of detention that includes American citizens and foreign nationals that takes place on U.S. soil and departs from the criminal justice system — trying to establish that would be very difficult."
Obama has said the civilian and military court-martial systems provide "a framework for dealing with the terrorists," and Tribe said the administration would look to those venues before creating a new legal system. But discussions of what a new system would look like have already started.
"It would have to be some sort of hybrid that involves military commissions that actually administer justice rather than just serve as kangaroo courts," Tribe said. "It will have to both be and appear to be fundamentally fair in light of the circumstances. I think people are going to give an Obama administration the benefit of the doubt in that regard."
Though a hybrid court may be unpopular, other advisers and Democrats involved in the Guantanamo Bay discussions say Obama has few other options.
Prosecuting all detainees in federal courts raises a host of problems. Evidence gathered through military interrogation or from intelligence sources might be thrown out. Defendants would have the right to confront witnesses, meaning undercover CIA officers or terrorist turncoats might have to take the stand, jeopardizing their cover and revealing classified intelligence tactics.
In theory, Obama could try to transplant the Bush administration's military commission system from Guantanamo Bay to a U.S. prison. But Tribe said, and other advisers agreed, that was "a nonstarter." With lax evidence rules and intense secrecy, the military commissions have been criticized by human rights groups, defense attorneys and even some military prosecutors who quit the process in protest.
"I don't think we need to completely reinvent the wheel, but we need a better tribunal process that is more transparent," Schiff said.
That means something different would need to be done if detainees couldn't be released or prosecuted in traditional courts. Exactly what that something would look like remains unclear.
According to three advisers participating in the process, Obama is expected to propose a new court system, appointing a committee to decide how such a court would operate. Some detainees likely would be returned to the countries where they were first captured for further detention or rehabilitation. The rest could probably be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts, one adviser said. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing talks, which have been private.
Whatever form it takes, Tribe said he expects Obama to move quickly.
"In reality and symbolically, the idea that we have people in legal black holes is an extremely serious black mark," Tribe said. "It has to be dealt with."
Print Story: Gay activists jarred by California marriage defeat - Yahoo! News
Obama's victory was a major step forward for America, but this clearly shows that our country still has a long way to go! Very sad to see this kind of ignorance prevail.
Gay activists jarred by California marriage defeat
By David Crary And Lisa Leff, Associated Press Writers
LOS ANGELES – In a heartbreaking defeat for the gay-rights movement, California voters put a stop to gay marriage, creating uncertainty about the legal status of 18,000 same-sex couples who tied the knot during a four-month window of opportunity opened by the state's highest court.
Passage of a constitutional amendment against gay marriage — in a state so often at the forefront of liberal social change — elated religious conservatives who had little else to cheer about in Tuesday's elections. Gay activists were disappointed and began looking for battlegrounds elsewhere in the back-and-forth fight to allow gays to wed.
"There's something deeply wrong with putting the rights of a minority up to a majority vote," said Evan Wolfson, a gay-rights lawyer who heads a group called Freedom to Marry. "If this were being done to almost any other minority, people would see how un-American this is."
Legal skirmishing began immediately, with gay-rights groups challenging the newly passed ban in court Wednesday and vowing to resist any effort to invalidate the same-sex marriages that took place following the state Supreme Court decision in May.
The amendment, which passed with 52 percent of the vote, overrides that court ruling by defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Thirty states now have adopted such measures, but the California vote marks the first time a state took away gay marriage after it had been legalized.
Gay-marriage bans also passed on Tuesday in Arizona and Florida, with 57 percent and 62 percent support, respectively, while Arkansas voters approved a measure aimed at gays that bars unmarried couples from serving as adoptive or foster parents.
Massachusetts and Connecticut are now the only states to allow same-sex marriage.
Even as the last votes were being counted in California, the American Civil Liberties Union and other opponents of the ban filed a challenge with the state Supreme Court. They contended that California's ballot cannot be used to undermine one group's access to rights enjoyed by other citizens.
The measure's passage casts a shadow of uncertainty over the marriages performed in the past four months. California State Attorney General Jerry Brown has said existing gay marriages will remain valid, but other legal experts said challenges are likely.
Amid the uncertainty, some gay couples continued applying for marriage licenses Wednesday. They succeeded in some jurisdictions and not others.
Jake Rowe, 27, and James Eslick, 29, were in the midst of getting their marriage license at Sacramento City Hall when someone from the clerk's office stopped the wedding Wednesday morning.
"I'm thoroughly surprised," Rowe said. "I thought Californians had come to the point where they realized discrimination wasn't right."
Some newlyweds took a positive approach.
"I'm really OK," said Diana Correia of Berkeley, who married her partner of 18 years, Cynthia Correia, on Sunday in front of their two children and 80 relatives and friends. "I hope the marriage holds, but we are already married in our hearts, so nobody can take that away."
Proposition 8 became the focus of the most expensive social-issues campaign in U.S. history, with the rival sides raising a combined $74 million. Religious groups, including the Mormon church and the Roman Catholic Church, played pivotal roles in pushing for the ban.
"People believe in the institution of marriage," said Frank Schubert, co-manager of the Yes on 8 campaign. "It's one institution that crosses ethnic divides, that crosses partisan divides."
Exit polls revealed dramatic demographic gaps in the gay-marriage vote. While about six in 10 voters under 30 opposed the ban, about the same proportion of those 65 and older supported it. There were sharp racial discrepancies as well. Even as black voters overwhelmingly backed Barack Obama — a gay-rights supporter — in the presidential race, about seven in 10 of them voted against gay marriage, compared with about half of white voters.
Denise Fernandez, a 57-year-old black woman from Sacramento, said she voted for Obama and Proposition 8. "I believe a Christian is held accountable," she said.
Obama had a nuanced position on the issue, saying he opposes gay marriage while also speaking out against Proposition 8.
Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, did not directly criticize Obama, but said: "We'd hope for a day when candidates who are supportive of same-sex marriage are unafraid to clearly state that to the voters."
Gay-marriage proponents say New York, where the Democrats now control both the Legislature and the governor's office for the first time in 35 years, may be a promising battleground. New Jersey also is considered a gay-marriage prospect.
"We pick ourselves up and trudge on," said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. "There has been enormous movement in favor of full equality in eight short years. That is the direction this is heading, and if it's not today or it's not tomorrow, it will be soon."
Print Story: Israel spy chief fears Jewish extremist plot - Yahoo! NewsIsrael spy chief fears Jewish extremist plot
By MATTI FRIEDMAN, Associated Press Writer Matti Friedman, Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM – The head of Israel's internal security service said Sunday he is "very concerned" that Jewish extremists could assassinate an Israeli leader in an attempt to foil peace moves with the Palestinians.
There has been a recent increase in violence by hardline Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and this week, Israel marks the 13th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli opponent of his negotiations.
"Just ahead of the anniversary of Rabin's murder, the Shin Bet sees in the group we're talking about on the extreme right a willingness to use firearms in order to halt diplomatic processes and harm political leaders," Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said. "The Shin Bet is very concerned about this."
Diskin spoke at the weekly meeting of the Israeli Cabinet, and his statement was released by another meeting participant who spoke on condition of anonymity because the session was closed.
Opening the meeting, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned of growing lawlessness among West Bank settlers. Groups of settlers have clashed repeatedly with Israeli police, soldiers and Palestinians in the past week over the evacuation of an unauthorized outpost they set up in the West Bank city of Hebron.
Alongside law-abiding settlers, Olmert said, "there is also a significant group of people that has cast off all authority and behave in a way that threatens the correctness of the rule of law, not only in the area they live in, but in the overall atmosphere of the state of Israel, and that is unacceptable and we are not willing to live with it."
Olmert said the government would establish a special team entrusted with enforcing the law among settlers.
Rabin's assassination on Nov. 4, 1995, continues to reverberate.
On Friday, two Israeli TV stations pulled telephone interviews with his assassin, Yigal Amir, after they were roundly condemned for giving him exposure.
In excerpts of the interviews, Amir's first, he said he had been inspired to commit the assassination by criticism of Rabin's peace moves that he heard from ex-military politicians like Ariel Sharon, Israel's former prime minister. Sharon has been in a coma since suffering a stroke in January 2006.
Settlers and Palestinians clashed again in Hebron on Sunday when hundreds of Palestinians held a protest against the presence of Israeli troops and settlers in the city. The Palestinians scuffled with Israeli soldiers, and settlers pulled down three Palestinian flags hung by the protesters and burned one of them.
Print Story: Judge orders White House to produce wiretap memos - Yahoo! NewsJudge orders White House to produce wiretap memos
By JOAN LOWY, Associated Press Reporter Joan Lowy, Associated Press Reporter
WASHINGTON – A judge has ordered the Justice Department to produce White House memos that provide the legal basis for the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 warrantless wiretapping program.
U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. signed an order Friday requiring the department to produce the memos by the White House legal counsel's office by Nov. 17. He said he will review the memos in private to determine if any information can be released publicly without violating attorney-client privilege or jeopardizing national security.
Kennedy issued his order in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups in 2005 after news reports disclosed the wiretapping.
The department had argued that the memos were protected attorney-client communications and contain classified information.
But Kennedy said that the attorney-client argument was "too vague" and that he would have to look at the documents himself to determine if that argument is valid and also to see if there is information that can be released without endangering national security.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said Saturday the department is reviewing the opinion and will "respond appropriately in court."
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush authorized the National Security Agency to spy on calls between people in the U.S. and suspected terrorists abroad without obtaining court warrants. The administration said it needed to act more quickly than the court could and that the president had inherent authority under the Constitution to order warrantless domestic spying.
After the program was challenged in court, Bush last year put it under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established in 1978 after the domestic spying scandals of the 1970s.
"We think just as a common sense matter the legal theories for the president's wiretap programs cannot be classified and should be available to the public," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, one of the groups seeking the memos.
"It's an important decision because up to this point the judge has relied on the government's assertion that it has done everything properly under the law and that it has disclosed everything it needs to disclose," Rotenberg said Saturday.
A Last Push To DeregulateA Last Push To Deregulate
White House to Ease Many Rules
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 31, 2008; A01
The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.
The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.
Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.
Once such rules take effect, they typically can be undone only through a laborious new regulatory proceeding, including lengthy periods of public comment, drafting and mandated reanalysis.
"They want these rules to continue to have an impact long after they leave office," said Matthew Madia, a regulatory expert at OMB Watch, a nonprofit group critical of what it calls the Bush administration's penchant for deregulating in areas where industry wants more freedom. He called the coming deluge "a last-minute assault on the public . . . happening on multiple fronts."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said: "This administration has taken extraordinary measures to avoid rushing regulations at the end of the term. And yes, we'd prefer our regulations stand for a very long time -- they're well reasoned and are being considered with the best interests of the nation in mind."
As many as 90 new regulations are in the works, and at least nine of them are considered "economically significant" because they impose costs or promote societal benefits that exceed $100 million annually. They include new rules governing employees who take family- and medical-related leaves, new standards for preventing or containing oil spills, and a simplified process for settling real estate transactions.
While it remains unclear how much the administration will be able to accomplish in the coming weeks, the last-minute rush appears to involve fewer regulations than Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, approved at the end of his tenure.
In some cases, Bush's regulations reflect new interpretations of language in federal laws. In other cases, such as several new counterterrorism initiatives, they reflect new executive branch decisions in areas where Congress -- now out of session and focused on the elections -- left the president considerable discretion.
The burst of activity has made this a busy period for lobbyists who fear that industry views will hold less sway after the elections. The doors at the New Executive Office Building have been whirling with corporate officials and advisers pleading for relief or, in many cases, for hastened decision making.
According to the Office of Management and Budget's regulatory calendar, the commercial scallop-fishing industry came in two weeks ago to urge that proposed catch limits be eased, nearly bumping into National Mining Association officials making the case for easing rules meant to keep coal slurry waste out of Appalachian streams. A few days earlier, lawyers for kidney dialysis and biotechnology companies registered their complaints at the OMB about new Medicare reimbursement rules. Lobbyists for customs brokers complained about proposed counterterrorism rules that require the advance reporting of shipping data.
Bush's aides are acutely aware of the political risks of completing their regulatory work too late. On the afternoon of Bush's inauguration, Jan. 20, 2001, his chief of staff issued a government-wide memo that blocked the completion or implementation of regulations drafted in the waning days of the Clinton administration that had not yet taken legal effect.
"Through the end of the Clinton administration, we were working like crazy to get as many regulations out as possible," said Donald R. Arbuckle, who retired in 2006 after 25 years as an OMB official. "Then on Sunday, the day after the inauguration, OMB Director Mitch Daniels called me in and said, 'Let's pull back as many of these as we can.' "
Clinton's appointees wound up paying a heavy price for procrastination. Bush's team was able to withdraw 254 regulations that covered such matters as drug and airline safety, immigration and indoor air pollutants. After further review, many of the proposals were modified to reflect Republican policy ideals or scrapped altogether.
Seeking to avoid falling victim to such partisan tactics, White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten in May imposed a Nov. 1 government-wide deadline to finish major new regulations, "except in extraordinary circumstances."
That gives officials just a few more weeks to meet an effective Nov. 20 deadline for the publication of economically significant rules, which take legal effect only after a 60-day congressional comment period. Less important rules take effect after a 30-day period, creating a second deadline of Dec. 20.
OMB spokeswoman Jane Lee said that Bolten's memo was meant to emphasize the importance of "due diligence" in ensuring that late-term regulations are sound. "We will continue to embrace the thorough and high standards of the regulatory review process," she said.
As the deadlines near, the administration has begun to issue regulations of great interest to industry, including, in recent days, a rule that allows natural gas pipelines to operate at higher pressures and new Homeland Security rules that shift passenger security screening responsibilities from airlines to the federal government. The OMB also approved a new limit on airborne emissions of lead this month, acting under a court-imposed deadline.
Many of the rules that could be issued over the next few weeks would ease environmental regulations, according to sources familiar with administration deliberations.
A rule put forward by the National Marine Fisheries Service and now under final review by the OMB would lift a requirement that environmental impact statements be prepared for certain fisheries-management decisions and would give review authority to regional councils dominated by commercial and recreational fishing interests.
An Alaska commercial fishing source, granted anonymity so he could speak candidly about private conversations, said that senior administration officials promised to "get the rule done by the end of this month" and that the outcome would be a big improvement.
Lee Crockett of the Pew Charitable Trusts' Environment Group said the administration has received 194,000 public comments on the rule and protests from 80 members of Congress as well as 160 conservation groups. "This thing is fatally flawed" as well as "wildly unpopular," Crockett said.
Two other rules nearing completion would ease limits on pollution from power plants, a major energy industry goal for the past eight years that is strenuously opposed by Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups.
One rule, being pursued over some opposition within the Environmental Protection Agency, would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases. According to the EPA's estimate, it would allow millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, worsening global warming.
A related regulation would ease limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants near national parks.
A third rule would allow increased emissions from oil refineries, chemical factories and other industrial plants with complex manufacturing operations.
These rules "will force Americans to choke on dirtier air for years to come, unless Congress or the new administration reverses these eleventh-hour abuses," said lawyer John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
But Scott H. Segal, a Washington lawyer and chief spokesman for the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, said that "bringing common sense to the Clean Air Act is the best way to enhance energy efficiency and pollution control." He said he is optimistic that the new rule will help keep citizens' lawsuits from obstructing new technologies.
Jonathan Shradar, an EPA spokesman, said that he could not discuss specifics but added that "we strive to protect human health and the environment." Any rule the agency completes, he said, "is more stringent than the previous one."
