Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided the Office of Special Counsel here, seizing computers and documents belonging to the agency chief Scott Bloch and staff.
More than a dozen FBI agents served grand jury subpoenas shortly after 10 a.m., shutting down the agency’s computer network and searching its offices, as well as Mr. Bloch’s home. Employees said the searches appeared focused on alleged obstruction of justice by Mr. Bloch during the course of an 2006 inquiry into his conduct in office.
The independent agency, created by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal, is charged with protecting federal employees and deciding whether their complaints merit full-scale investigation — a first line of defense against fraud and mismanagement in government. It also enforces a ban on U.S. employees engaging in partisan political activity.
Bloch was a controversial Bush appointee from the start. NPR:
One of Bloch’s first official actions was to refuse to investigate any claims of discrimination based on sexual orientation. When the news of his refusal was leaked to the press, career employees in his office say, Bloch blamed them for the leak. He retaliated, the employees said, by creating a new field office in Detroit and forcing them either to accept assignments there or resign.
The Washington Blade has more on his anti-gay record:
A high-level gay employee at the U.S. Office of Special Council was among seven OSC employees that received termination notices in 2005 after refusing to be transferred to distant cities in a staff shakeup that critics called a purge of employees considered disloyal to Bloch.
A second gay employee resigned to take a job outside OSC rather than accept the transfer ordered by Bloch, according to sources familiar with OSC.
Sources familiar with the agency said Bloch targeted a total of 12 employees — including the only two known gay staffers — for involuntary transfers, in part, because they disagreed with his decision to curtail OSC’s role in investigating and adjudicating complaints of employment discrimination against gay federal workers.
NPR’s sources say a grand jury in Washington issued subpoenas for several OSC employees, including Bloch, and that his home was also searched:
In addition to concerns about obstruction of justice, investigators are also looking into whether Bloch violated the Hatch Act, a congressional mandate that prohibits employees from using their offices for partisan political purposes.
Bloch has admitted to hiring Geeks on Call — a computer servicing company — to purge his computer and two of his deputies’ computers, sources said. But he said the computers contained a virus, which necessitated a purge. Investigators are looking into whether the purge was meant to destroy evidence related to the current investigation.
Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly. — JOHN ASHCROFT
With the drip drip of revelations that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the so-called War on Terror began not with commanders and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but at the highest levels of the Bush administration, arguments that these insiders should and could be tried as war criminals have become more credible.
Just not tried in the U.S., of course.
As if we needed to be reminded that the White House has worked as hard to prevent these insiders from facing the consequences of their dirty deeds as they worked to rationalize the use of Nazi-like torture techniques, there is a provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that would immunize them against prosecution.
But only in the U.S., of course.
Overseas is another matter, and any Geneva Conventions signatory nation has the right — indeed, the responsibility — to detain someone suspected or accused of violating Article 3 of the conventions.
Indeed, courts in Italy and Germany have issued warrants demanding the arrest of CIA operatives for kidnapping and torturing citizens and residents of their nations, although the warrants have not been executed for diplomatic reasons.
And an effort to prosecute former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in France for the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the flagship accommodation in the Rumsfeld Gulag, has foundered because no court was willing to take on this hot potato.
But with every new revelation comes a flurry of articles suggesting that Bush administration big shots, present and former, might want to think twice before jetting off to Europe this summer for some sightseeing.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, and here for an index of torture-related stories and links.
Was there something beyond Eliot Spitzer’s ungoverned libido behind his breathtaking downfall? Andrei Fedyashin writes for Russia’s Novosti news service, ‘Spitzer had his career and family life taken down by the forces of political retribution … Only the naive can doubt that this was a pre-arranged “sex scandal.”‘ Pointing out that most of his Wall Street enemies were Republican, Fedyashin asks, ‘Who better to bring down, if not a Democrat and personal friend of Hillary Clinton, who had formally pledged to support her at the upcoming Democratic convention? As a governor, Spitzer is among one of about 800 so-called super-delegates, who may well decide which candidate will lead the party’s fight for the White House - Clinton or Barack Obama … Perhaps the explanation is that Hillary frightens Republicans far more than her party-comrade, Barack Obama?’
By Political Columnist Andrei Fedyashin
Translated By Igor Medvedev
March 14, 2008
Russia - Novosti - Original Article (Russian)
MOSCOW: Less than a week after a “sex scandal” erupted around the Governor of the State of New York on March 13, Democrat Eliot Spitzer announced his resignation on March 17.
Unofficially, on the day that The New York Times published the spicy details of his phone order for a “short brunette,” it was clear that Spitzer, who two years ago was thought to have a promising future as a likely Democratic candidate for the White House - had destroyed his political career and probably his family. She [the brunette] was “delivered” to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where the 48-year-old Spitzer spent the night before testifying to Congress. How badly everything turned out! Bad from a purely moral point of view and doubly bad in a U.S. presidential election year.
It later transpired that Spitzer had used the services of this brunette and other call girls through a certain company called the Emperor’s Club VIP, and over the last ten years had paid it over $80,000. And considering that he allegedly paid $1,000 for this one brunette, one concludes that he must have had 80 of them during this time. This is quite a propensity for variety - even in ten years.
In a nutshell, this is the tale of the downfall of the now-former governor of America’s third-largest state. And now, apart from having to completely quit politics, he stands accused of the “illegal promotion of prostitution,” since the call girl was dispatched from New York to Metropolitan Washington D.C. According to the laws of the United States, transporting someone across state lines to procure sex is an even greater offense than prostitution itself. Moreover, he may also be deprived of his right to practice law. Simply put, when it rains it pours.
If you are unfamiliar with Spitzer’s record and fail to take account of his backround, you might get the impression that these charges of “illegal sex” came like a bolt from the blue. Sex scandals in America, of course, are nothing new: Almost every second U.S. President has committed adultery, with John F. Kennedy - given his record of such transgressions - mastering his White House rivals. That’s to say nothing of Senators, House members and other governors.
But these scandals do differ. Some are more moderate while others hit like a thunder-clap. The Spitzer story is of the latter category. Since this is a presidential year it couldn’t have been otherwise. It’s embarrassing again to speak here of political hypocrisy in the United States. It’s so unfortunate to devalue this meaningful notion through such frequent repetition.
The case of Eliot Spitzer - as is often the case when an American politician is charged with a lack of moral rectitude - leaves many Europeans scratching their collective heads. According to this editorial from Germany’s Financial Times Deutschland, ‘From a Central European perspective, the Spitzer Affair has a rather outlandish aspect to it. New York’s once dreaded “Mister Clean” is facing ruin because in most U.S. states, prostitution and visiting a prostitute is not just a matter of moral misconduct - it’s an indictable offense.’
EDITORIAL
Translated Bu Ulf Behncke
March 12, 2009
Germany - Financial Times Deutschland - Original Article (German)
Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays virtue. But Eliot Spitzer made so many bitter enemies during the course of his career that now, some even refuse to call the Governor of New York State a hypocrite: To them, Spitzer never even pretended to respect virtue.
Spitzer, who in his previous post as Attorney General was the terror of Wall Street and many major American corporations, simply imagined himself above the law.
What Spitzer was actually thinking, nobody knows. What’s clear is that this classic drama of a smug Mister Goody-Two-Shoes whose meetings with high-class hookers proved to be his undoing, will provide ample material for psychologists and future scriptwriters alike.
Since Spitzer violated the very laws that as Governor and former Attorney General he was ultimately responsible for upholding, he is left no way out other than resignation.
From a Central European perspective, the Spitzer Affair has a rather outlandish aspect to it. New York’s once dreaded “Mister Clean” is facing ruin because in most U.S. states, prostitution and visiting a prostitute is not just a matter of moral misconduct - it’s an indictable offense.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing foreign press reaction to the the downfall of Eliot Spitzer.
I wonder if Barack Obama will go down in American history as the Elvis Presley of politics.
Elvis’s field was music. It wasn’t the music, but the way he sang it, and the way he moved doing it.
Elvis Presley was the first white man who knew how to sing black music. When Sam Phillips, the Sun Records studio owner who “discovered” Elvis, first heard it in 1954, he knew instantly that it was unique, extremely valuable, and utterly revolutionary. From that first Memphis session, and the capturing of “That’s All Right, Mama,” on vinyl, Elvis Presley’s voice radiated out in a widening gyre and all who heard it realized in less than three minutes that something was being changed forever. Little did they know. They hadn’t seen him yet.
Barack Obama’s field is politics. But everybody says it isn’t the politics; it’s the way he says it, and the way he moves doing it. He has created a media sensation which begets a public sensation which feeds the media sensation, and his critics say he has done it without saying or doing anything substantive. But maybe he has. Sen. Barack Obama sounds like the first black man who knows how to talk white politics.
People are all shook up. Here’s Maureen Dowd, quoting Sen. Hillary Clinton: “I think that there is a certain phenomenon associated with his candidacy, and I am really struck by that because it is very much about him and his personality and his presentation.”
She could say the exact same thing in, oh, 1955, about the young stardom candidate Elvis Presley, as the word was starting to get out. Then as now, she would have been saying it negatively, using the word “phenomenon” to suggest something transparent, or impermanent, hoping it would go away. Is a phenomenon transparent and impermanent? Or can it be substantive and permanent?
Answer: in 1959, RCA Records released Elvis’s second album of gold records. Its title: “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” He’s on the cover, skinny and loose as sin in that slinky gold suit with the diamond lapels and cuffs, all that black hair slicked and twitchy, the eyes, the pout, the grin, the grin of a boy on the road to becoming not only the King of Rock and Roll, but of an entire new culture.
Is that where the American experience is with the current phenomenon, a black man out of nowhere talking presidential politics with a personality and presentation and color that nobody has ever seen before? Is that why some people are alarmed, some begrudging, some admiring, and some unabashedly beguiled?
We all seem to be “really struck by that,” as Sen. Clinton opines. We all seem to be united in confusion, which is typical of people trying to get a handle on something that gives every appearance of being a tectonic shift, something rising, something maybe being born that in our lifetimes will take the form of a new culture.
Sen. Clinton can’t explain it, Tim Russert can’t explain it. Republicans can’t explain it. But we know that it is there, and it is substantive. Standing next to it, Hillary Clinton looks like Rosemary Clooney, and she seems to understand, as Rosemary no doubt did in 1955, that there isn’t a thing she can do about it.
The FBI would like to spend about a billion dollars — that’s $1,000,000,000, one thousand million dollars — “to create a massive computer database of people’s physical characteristics, all part of an effort the bureau says to better identify criminals and terrorists.” They admit that among other things, the efficacy and cost “will depend on how quickly technology is perfected.”
By way of disclaimer, I do not mind the fact that my fingerprints had to be sent to the FBI to obtain a professional license. That is a legitimate protection to the public. But — according to everything I have read — once I was cleared as Not A Criminal, the FBI destroyed their copy. Have no fear, Gil Grissom can still get a copy from the State of Nevada should something awful happen to me.
Nevertheless, the FBI does not need a huge database of fingerprints, palm prints, eye scans, and tattoos. The idea that terrorists would be caught using such data is unproven if not outright spurious. The last “terrorist” we caught using biometric data turned out not to have even been in the same country as the bomb he allegedly planted.
Furthermore, they admit up front that the technology to make it all work does not yet exist. Keep in mind that fingerprint scanners are only about 98-99% accurate. That’s fine when you’re scanning a dozen people who might have been near a crime scene, but not nearly good enough when you have millions of samples from random people across the country. For reference, fingerprints are the most accurate to scan biometric data widely available.
So we’re talking about spending a billion dollars on a huge database, using technology that is not yet accurate enough to do the job, with very likely no oversight whatsoever. Sounds like a bad idea to me.
“Doing the right thing” is the universal wrench of politics and governance. This is because what constitutes the right thing has more to do with how a pol or public official adjusts the wrench to fit their circumstances — which is to say survive with arms and legs intact if not win points — than the moral high ground.
That so noted, the news that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has appointed a outside prosecutor aka special counsel for the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the willful destruction of those CIA torture tapes is welcome. But we’re so used to former AG Alberto Gonzales doing the wrong thing with such consistency that I’m having to suspend belief that Mukasey is doing the right thing and not playing a role in a drama with an outcome pre-determined by the White House.
I apologize for my cynicism, but you have to admit that it is well earned. There have been many investigations, criminal and otherwise, of administration officials that have gone nowhere because they were tinged with politics, and the only Bush era precedent for the Mukasey appointment is naming Patrick Fitzgerald to be an independent prosecutor in the Wilson-Plame leak investigation.
Mukasey assigned John H. Durham (photo), a veteran federal prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the CIA tapes investigation with the FBI.
Durham’s appointment is an indication that there is reason to believe that high-ranking CIA officers, and perhaps other administration officials, may have committed criminal acts in destroying tapes of the 2002 interrogations of two Al Qaeda operatives despite explicit instructions that they be preserved.
Has the CIA gotten a bad rap - especially in the Arab world? According to this op-ed article from Iraq’s Kitabat newspaper, the agency has performed, ‘noble and honorable works that have always been on behalf of the entire world and for the good of civilization, security and stability. It annihilated the Nazis, the communists, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein …
“I am pleased to be the first Arab in the history of the Arabic press to write about the radiant, civilized face of CIA … The defeat of Nazism and the salvation of mankind were the first major achievements of this noble American intelligence agency.”
By Khadir Taahar
Translated By James Jacobson
December 19, 2007
Iraq - Kitabat - Original Article (Arabic)
The American Central Intelligence Agency differs from intelligence services in the Arab countries, because it defends the interests of the country and not the ruling regime. This is the radiant, humane and civilized face of the American intelligence agency. But the propaganda of the communists, nationalists and Islamists reject this achievement, which is difficult for the Arab mind to grasp, clogged as it is with demagogy, superstition and hostility toward Western civilization, in particular America. For these reasons, it’s difficult for those with such distorted thinking to see the real face of this American intelligence agency.
I am pleased to be the first Arab in the history of the Arabic press to write about the radiant, civilized face of CIA. I alone assume the moral and political responsibility for the contents of this article, which is intended to demonstrate the extent to which the CIA’s ideological opponents have distorted its record. I also intend to incite the reader to make a realistic, knowledgeable political analysis, far from the frenzy and demagogy of populist slogans and ideology.
Operating under a different name [the Office of Strategic Services ], the work of this agency began during a fierce war against the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler. The defeat of Nazism and the salvation of mankind were the first major achievements of this noble American intelligence agency, which served humanity and saved millions of people from Hitler’s evil.
Then as the evils of communism emerged, posing a threat to freedom and civilization … the agency acquired its current name and began the noble battle against the danger of communist ideology and its repressive, dictatorial political system, which threw its people into prison, led them to the gallows and destroyed human dignity under the pretext of insane slogans which were far removed from life’s self-evident truths.
It was in the end a great victory for Western civilization, the West’s humanitarian philosophy, its scientific achievements and its social laws. These laws take human rights into account, according the individual the highest level of respect, justice, rights and social guarantees ever witnessed by humanity - and during the Cold War, the noble efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency played a major role in communism’s defeat.
Then came the era of the War on Terror, with the Agency playing a central role in crushing and toppling the regimes of the Taliban and Saddam, ridding these two nations [Afghanistan and Iraq] of such evils and granting them freedom.
The Agency continues to fight a fierce battle against the germs of terrorism carried by Islamic political parties backed by Iran and Syria.
December 11th, 2007 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Norman Podhoretz, John Bolton and Newt Gingrich are leading the charge in asserting that the National Intelligence Estimate that concludes Iran dismantled its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is misleading and damaging to the national interest. The report sure was a shocker, but do these most serious charges hold water?
Neocon pilgrim and Rudy Giuliani foreign policy advisor Podhoretz and former U.N. ambassador Bolton are horse’s backsides of the first water, so we’ll put their yammering aside. But Republican conservative political guru Gingrich, who is nobody’s fool but occasionally his own, is usually worth listening to.
This is what Gingrich had to say on ABC’s This Week about the report:
“What you have is a release which, first of all, could not have been written to be more damaging to the Bush administration than it was. And the three people who wrote it are all three former State Department employees . . . they’re all three people who dislike what Bush is doing. I think they deliberately undermined the administration. I think this is the equivalent of a coup d’etat by the bureaucracy. If you actually read what they said . . . even the unclassified version doesn’t say what the front, what the headline said. The unclassified version says that there’s a big civilian program, they have at least 3,000 centrifuges already working — and 3,000’s enough to produce one bomb a year. They have a clear commitment to get nuclear weapons; there’s no evidence they’re going to give up that commitment. What the report technically said was that there was one particular program that was secret that we were certain was ongoing, we’ve now had a defector, that’s my guess, and the defector’s told them this, and my question is: How do we know that defector’s not a plant?”
Let’s break down these thoughts point by point.
*The estimate could not have been more damaging to the Bush administration and was intentionally so.
It is difficult to believe that there has not been more squawking, including the usual well-placed leaks from inside the White House, if this charge had real merit. Besides which, it’s yet another example of conservatives staking out a policy position and then automatically disagreeing with, ignoring or hiding anything that goes against that policy, which has been a signature of the Bush administration.
*Iran still has a big civilian nuclear program capable of producing a bomb a year.
No argument here. But we are led to believe by administration insiders that release of the NIE was held up because skeptics insisted that fresh evidence that the weapons program had indeed been dismantled — if not merely put on hold – be obtained. It was and confirmed the original assessment.
*How do we know that Gingrich’s alleged defector is not a plant?
We certainly don’t know that. But it beggars belief that an estimate based on the work of the CIA, DIA, FBI and NSA, among other agencies known for their independence and readiness to fight turf battles, came down to the say of one defector/plant and not the unanimous judgment of all those agencies based on multiple sources.
Once upon a time, when Iran supposedly still had a nuclear weapons program and there was a war in Iraq, there was a scandal involving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former vice presidential chief of staff whose conviction in March as a result of the Wilson-Plame affair was commuted by President Bush.
Those halcyon days may seem like so much ancient history, but not for Representative Henry “Mr. Investigation” Waxman, the dogged Democrat from California, who is still trying to pry loose Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s FBI files on the case.
Waxman wants the potentially explosive files for an ongoing Oversight and Government Reform investigation because they include information that Fitzgerald did not present to the grand jury — and therefore is not subject to secrecy laws — that subsequently indicted Libby on obstruction of justice and perjury charges.
In July, the president turned down Waxman, but he has now asked newly-minted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to light a fire under the White House.
Fitzgerald, according to Waxman, has been cooperative and forwarded to his committee CIA and State Department files, but he cannot release White House-related files on his own.
The upshot of the Mukasey overture is likely to be more stonewalling because Waxman wants the transcripts, notes and other documents relating to Patrick’s interviews with the president, Vice President Cheney, former Chief of Staff Andrew Card, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.
I agree with blogger Empty Wheel, late of FireDogLake, that the focus of Waxman’s continuing investigation is how it was that Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as a covert CIA operative was leaked but there was no investigation or removal of security clearances for the blabbers, who include Rove, among others.
The answer, of course, is beyond obvious: The White House had no interest in doing anything, let alone play by the rules, once its primary objective was attained – striking back at Joseph Wilson for revealing that one of the principal rationales for the Iraq war was false and then ruining his wife’s career for good measure.
Bush administration apologists will continue to argue that Plame really wasn’t a covert operative, Patrick overstepped his bounds, Libby was framed and Bush’s commutation of Libby’s 30-month prison sentence was appropriate. They’re right about the commutation insofar as it was within the president’s purview, while the other claims are demonstrably false.
So if this is ancient history, why should Waxman be wasting his time and our money on it?
Because unlike Arkansas land deals and Oval Office blow jobs, national security was severely compromised and the truth must out.
November 8th, 2007 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
There’s yet another warning about a planned Al Qaeda attack in the United States — and the danger is that the political contamination of the terrorism issue, the perceived use of it by the Bush administration in past elections, and a jaded public could mean a serious warning could be shrugged off when and if it comes.
News reports suggest there is already some question about the latest one (that is sure to be disseminated for information purposes via some news outlets and used for political purposes by some others):
The FBI is warning that al Qaeda may be preparing a series of holiday attacks on U.S. shopping malls in Los Angeles and Chicago, according to an intelligence report distributed to law enforcement authorities across the country this morning.
The alert said al Qaeda “hoped to disrupt the U.S. economy and has been planning the attack for the past two years.”
Law enforcement officials tell ABCNews.com that the FBI received the information in late September and declassified it yesterday for wide distribution.
The alert, like similar FBI and Department of Homeland Security terror alerts issued over the past five years at holiday times, raised questions about the credibility of the information.
It’s this constant “oh by the way” that is lessening the impact of these alerts because part of the public has stopped believing them (the part that feels the administration took Fox News consultant Dick Morris’ advice and played the security card in elections) and part of the public that won’t pay much attention until and unless there is an attack because too many alarmist news stories increasingly lose their sense of urgency:
The bulletin acknowledges that U.S. intelligence officers are uncertain as to whether the information is real, and intelligence officers say there is a concern that it could be “disinformation.”
Law enforcement officials at three different agencies told ABCNews.com the FBI alert was based on a source who has proved reliable in the past.
The source reportedly had only “indirect access” to al Qaeda and word of the actual threat came to U.S. intelligence officers “through a lengthy chain” of contacts.
With the shopping season approaching, however, the FBI officials decided it was necessary to share the information.
The FBI move is wise. It’s better for police and mall officials to be on the alert, than ignore it.
On the other hand, the problem with “disinformation” is it could signal that terrorist forces are trying to get the U.S. to place its attention — and resources — in one direction while an actual terrorist attack will come somewhere else out of the blue.
It is difficult to know where to begin in describing all the things that are wrong with Saudi Arabia, let alone its favored-nation status with the U.S., so we’ll leave it at the fact that this oil-rich and profoundly constipated kingdom has been a fertile breeding ground for terrorists. In fact, all but four of the 9/11 hijacker were Saudis.
That seems to have been lost of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington, who says in a new documentary that Saudi Arabia could have helped the U.S. prevent the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington if American officials had consulted Saudi authorities in a “credible” way.
The comments by Bandar are similar to those earlier this week by Saudi King Abdullah, who suggested Britain could have prevented the July 2005 train bombings in London if it had heeded warnings from Riyadh.
Speaking to the Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya on Thursday, Bandar — now Abdullah’s national security adviser — said Saudi intelligence was “actively following” most of the 9/11 plotters “with precision.”
“If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened,” he said.
Now it is no secret that the CIA and FBI also had a pretty good idea about what several of the hijackers were up to whom already were in country, but because of the overweaning dysfunctionality of the agencies – as well as a White House national security advisor who had her head where the sun don’t shine – warnings were ignored.
Nevertheless, Bandar’s imprecation rankles – and in fact is deeply offensive.
Of all the ills of American health care, least visible is the pervasive fraud it encourages in everyone involved–doctors, patients, labs, hospitals and, most of all, the insurers who manage the mess.
One small symptom can be seen in a New York Timesreport of 91 Medicare audits showing “widespread violations of patients’ rights and consumer protection standards†in private drug plans for the elderly that were supposed to save them money but, in some cases, are endangering their lives.
Slap-on-the-wrist fines totaling $770,000 of 11 companies won’t make a dent in the billions they are raking in from the most vulnerable Americans, who might have been helped by authorizing Medicare to bargain with pharmaceutical companies or allowing medications to be imported from Canada instead of devising new ways for insurance companies to fleece them.
Other clues about the enormity of health care fraud emerged this summer when the new Justice Department Medicare Fraud Strike Force announced measures to crack down on medical companies that send phony bills or provide excessive treatments, pointing to 2,400 investigations last year and warning that more cases were on the way.
The FBI, which estimates health-care stealing to total between $60 and $100 billion dollars a year, lists a few of the ways it’s done:
Hospitals, doctors, pharmacists, and other care providers submit fake bills for services never rendered–or overcharge for those delivered.
Service providers bill insurance for unnecessary and costly procedures.
Doctors sell prescriptions to patients for cash.
Companies charge insurance for expensive equipment but provide poor substitutes.
Crooked M.D.s entice patients to visit their offices for “free services” or gifts, then steal their personal information and use it to file fake claims.
If you have a strong stomach, you can Google “health care fraud†and get 23 million hits, many reporting convictions of providers across the country. But reading too many may make you sick and in need of medical attention.
September 5th, 2007 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Sgt. Joseph Mosner, veteran of Bush’s Forever War
As we slouch toward to the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, the real story of that awful day and its aftermath is now well known.
While the attacks were the darkest day for the world’s remaining superpower since Pearl Harbor, astoundingly they were leveraged by President George W. Bush into the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history — the Iraq war.
This American flag-draped act of hubris and deceit is so colossal that its bloody consequences have brought the Republican hegemony in Washington to a crashing end and assured Bush’s place in history as a manipulated mediocrity who squandered America’s world standing in the service of a fool’s mission. No matter when or how the Iraq war ends, his actions will reverberate for many years to come.
In the eight months that Bush held office prior to the 9/11 attacks, the intelligence community that he pledged to reinvigorate slept the sleep of the complacent, rousing itself only when there were turf battles to be fought.
This despite the fact that:
* The CIA, NSA and FBI had detailed intelligence that Al Qaeda was plotting an attack on the homeland and so informed Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, and possibly Vice President Cheney, as well.
* Knew the terrorists’ modus operandi if not their exact targets.
* Knew the identities of some of the terrorists and their whereabouts in country.
But Rice, by her own subsequent admission, still was fighting a Cold War that had been over for a decade. Cheney, of course, isn’t talking.
Today Rice is secretary of state, while the nation’s spymaster on 9/11 and two of the architects of the Iraq war and occupation were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for what the commander in chief proclaimed was “their pivotal roles in great events,” but was nothing less than a reflection of and payback for the sycophantic loyalty that he demands.
* * * * *
Could the 9/11 attacks have been stopped?
I have been reluctant to conclude that they could have, but the growing mountain of evidence showing what key U.S. intelligence operatives, Rice and others knew but did not feel compelled to act on has convinced me that there was a reasonable chance that the terrorists could have been intercepted at airports in Boston, Newark and Washington on that deceptively beautiful September morning, if not before.
Could the Iraq war have been stopped?
That’s an easy one. With a compliant Congress and somnambulant news media, Bush’s neoconservative coven was going to get a war that they had long lusted for even if it was in the wrong place at the wrong time and would divert precious resources from the nascent GWOT in general and Afghanistan in particular.
While we will never know how the war in Afghanistan might have turned out if it hadn’t been starved of resources, there is no question that the Bush administration’s pushback against Al Qaeda has not been anywhere near the triumph that it claims. The White House’s own intelligence mavens say that much of the leadership cadre of the terrorist group remains intact, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and they have rebuilt this incubus to its pre-9/11 strength. Meanwhile, the neocons’ built-to-order war in Iraq has become a graduate school where jihadists can hone their skills before exporting them elsewhere.
That Al Qaeda has been able to reconstitute itself so successfully can be traced back to a single event:
In the most ignominious chapter in a presidential tenure littered with bad judgments, the fires at Ground Zero were still burning when the decision was made not to throw the full weight of America’s might at Al Qaeda and its leadership but to instead go after Saddam Hussein, a has-been of a brutal dictator who had long been in the neocon crosshairs but of course had only a tangential connection to the jihad against the U.S. and the West.
July 31st, 2007 by DAVID SCHRAUB, Assistant Editor
Yesterday, Senator Ted Stevens’ (R) house was raided by the FBI and IRS. Today, Stevens has threatened to place a hold on the House-passed Ethics Reform bill.
Read our earlier post HERE about now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ urgent trip to visit a hospitalized and ailing then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to pressure him to sign domestic spying orders that some in the Justice Department (including, it turns, out Ashcroft) refused to approve. But it’s one thing to read about it, another to actually watch and listen to the testimony of James B. Comey, former Deputy Attorney General of the United States, about an incident on the evening of March 10, 2004.
Question to Republicans, independents, and Democrats: putting aside political issues and a desire to see a given party win or lose have we ever seen an administration quite like this one? But watch it — and come to your OWN decision (this sometimes takes a while to load so be patient):
May 5th, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Let us pray. My God. My God. Let us pray.
My first understanding of the madness of some few from the cultures from the Mideast came here in the USA when Iranian-American women and their children fled to our shelter for battered women, one of the first in the country, back in 1970.
Their family men battered the walls and locked doors with their bodies, broke windows, screaming insanely without cease. Rage. Rage with no skin.
The bellowing aggression of the abused women’s family men… rivaled car-fulls of men who rode with rifles and hoods on the back roads in my backwoods where I grew up. At the shelter, we needed police with guns drawn to protect the women who had fled their families, beautiful beautiful women, with beautiful beautiful children with eyes like does’ and glossy black hair. How could anyone harm such innocence? How could they? How could anyone?
Arresting the men was the only way to contain them. A woman was not allowed to leave a man. A woman was not a separate being. A woman could not defy a man who was dead wrong. She just could not. Should not. Better not. No woman could do that to them, could humiliate them that way. Forgetting that they raised welts on such tender female flesh with fists and hangers and belt buckles… throwing the women and children to the ground and stepping on their faces like they were putting out a cigarette, in order to soil the tender cara, the faces under their shoes. Mad, not as in angry. Mad, as in insane.
But then there was also Tina Isa, what pluck she had and courage. Her innocence. Tina Isa, a beautiful young women, a teenager. Her family from the Mideast. She became Americanized in the best kind of ways. Wore slim jeans and pure white t shirts. With her swinging ebony hair she was a Palestinian American beauty. Truly. Straight A student.
She lived with her mother, father and older sister (who still dressed the traditional way with head covering and long dark shifts). And she wanted what lots of American girls want… an after school job.
Tina Isa and her father, mother and sister fought about Tina taking a part-time job at a local Wendy’s. All three family members resisted her wish to earn some money; some she would give toward the family and some she would maybe buy some clothes. An innocent argument.
I grew up in an immigrant family, and the world of the new generation and the world of the elders are often light years away. Conflict in these matters is not the end of the world when the new world is truly new and you are young and filled with sparkling life. You’ll find a way to go beyond where your parents draw the lines too tightly. But, how to truly respect your family and yet truly live at the same time, that’s the challenge.
Unbeknownst to Tina Isa, as upright as her father acted on the outside, he was doing nefarious things. He and three other men were operating a cell of the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), a Palestinian terrorist group, yes, amazingly, right in the Midwestern city of St. Louis, Mo.
But Tina Isa just thought her father traveled for business. She didn’t know that during one trip for meetings in Mexico City, her father and others decided upon several tasks. They planned to target Jewish and American interests for terrorist attacks. They plotted to secure firearms and larger weaponry, arranging for secret storage sites.
Her father and his gang of thugs were collecting and relaying secret information and monies for the ANO, procuring passports by deceptive means so that other ANO members could travel anonymously, and particularly, to put great effort into discovering the identity of snitches in their own network who were passing information to law enforcement groups.
Meanwhile Tina Isa listened to the radio, sang along and didn’t know her family home had been bugged. Didn’t know that any phone call, any conversation that took place anywhere in her house was being recorded at a distance by the FBI, who were onto her father; suspecting him of being an illegal arms dealer. The FBI didn’t know what they didn’t know about Mr. Isa, either.
So, every evening the FBI guys went home to their families. Every morning the G-men came back to their hidden surveillance site and listened to the audios of the Isa home the night before. They just needed to amass enough evidence to arrest and get a solid conviction to put Mr. Isa and his friends in prison. It was boring work in a way, listening to the household noise of dinner and dishes, hoping the phone would ring, hoping something would break for them.
Imagine a new morning. Sun up, newly shaven, settling into the surveillance nest and taking one tape off the reel and putting on a fresh one. Imagine putting the tape of last night at the Isa household on the new box. Imagine expecting to hear the clack of dishes, padding of shoeless feet and instead hearing immediate screams…. screams of bloody murder, screams of a young girl crying and begging… Read the rest of this entry »
March 20th, 2007 by SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
Controversy surrounding this famous film actress refuses to die. Here is the latest…
Marilyn Monroe may have been tricked into killing herself as part of a plot hatched with the knowledge of the former US attorney general, Robert Kennedy, according to a secret FBI file, says The Independent.
“The document, uncovered by an Australian film director, Philippe Mora, suggests Monroe was ‘induced’ to make a suicide attempt, in the belief she would be found in time, and her stomach pumped. Instead, it suggests, she was left to die by staff and friends, including the actor Peter Lawford, who was married to Kennedy’s sister, Patricia.
“The 36-year-old actress was found naked and face down on her bed on 5 August 1962, with a large quantity of barbiturates in her system. For 45 years conspiracy theorists have claimed that her death was not a simple suicide, with some linking it to alleged affairs with Kennedy and his brother, the then President, John F Kennedy.
“French-born Mora admits he is not sure what to make of the file. He asks: ‘Is all this the elaborate dirty tricks of Kennedy haters from decades ago, or are we getting closer to the historical truth?” For more click here…
The debate last year over renewal of the USA Patriot Act was a rare instance in which Congress – or at least some members – pushed back against the imperial Bush presidency and successfully fought to include some safeguards on the powers of the FBI, among other federal agencies.
I don’t shock easily these days. Six-plus years of George Bush will do that. But I was shocked, just shocked to see that the FBI has broken the law by abusing its powers to secretly obtain private information from you, I and our fellow Americans.
Then I realized that Bush had said all along that he was under no obligation to honor USA Patriot Act provisions, or any other law, for that matter.
So what’s the big deal? Although FBI Director Robert Mueller has now apologized, the FBI was merely following the lead of our lawless president.
