Later On

Kevin Drum:

The FTC has decided to lay down the law on identity theft:

The government says that businesses have the responsibility of making sure thieves don’t use stolen information to buy goods or open phony accounts. And to that end, the Federal Trade Commission wants businesses that might be targets of identity thieves to develop written plans to spot "red flags" that fraud could be involved and prevent it.

…."Once the information is in the hands of identity thieves, there’s not much more the consumer can do," said Naomi Lefkovitz, senior attorney for the FTC, which will oversee enforcement of the rule as it applies to many — though not all — businesses. "Now it’s in the hands of the businesses."….A department store that issues its own credit cards, for example, would qualify as a creditor under the new rule, and would have to develop a plan, according to the FTC.

Ha ha. Just kidding. The FTC isn’t laying down the law. What they’re actually doing is requiring businesses to "develop a written plan for identifying signs of identity theft." That’s almost as toughminded as, say, putting together a blue ribbon commission to write a report on the problem.

Here’s a data point to ponder. In 1968 Congress passed the Truth in Lending Act. Among other things, it capped consumer liability for lost credit cards at $50. Guess what happened? Since credit card companies were responsible for all the losses above that amount, they got very aggressive and very creative at figuring out ways to minimize fraud. They made it as convenient as possible to report a lost card. They provided merchants with loads of tools to identify lost cards. They developed computer algorithms to detect usage patterns so they could proactively shut down fraudulent use. They worked really, really hard on this stuff.

In a nutshell, we made banks responsible for the losses, and banks figured out ways to prevent losses. It was the wonder of free market capitalism at work.

Now then, suppose credit issuers were responsible for the costs of identity theft? That is, if you’re responsible for issuing a card or extending credit of any kind under false pretenses, you’re responsible for the losses and you’re responsible for cleaning up the mess. Period. No excuses, no safe harbors, no nothing. If you extend credit to someone named Kevin Drum with my Social Security number, and it turns out that it wasn’t actually me you extended credit to, then it’s your problem. You pay the charges, you cancel the cards, you clean up my credit report, you contact my bank, you do everything. The basic premise should be: it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re extending credit to the person you think you are. If you don’t, it’s your responsibility to fix the mess. And if you don’t fix the mess, you’ll be liable in court for substantial damages.

What do you think would happen if that was the rule? Easy: banks and credit issuers would miraculously discover that there are lots of ways to tighten things up. Instant credit might become less popular, replaced by having to apply for a card and wait a few days for approval. Credit reporting bureaus would offer their credit protection services for free. (In fact, they’d beg you to sign up.) Credit locking — in which you have to actively allow access to your credit report on a case-by-case basis — would become the default, instead of a hassle that few people take advantage of. And those nifty computer algorithms that have helped with credit card fraud would turn their gimlet eyes on identity theft as well.

Right now, the reason identity theft is such a pain isn’t usually the money involved. Quite often, in fact, the amount of lost money is fairly modest. What makes it a pain is that, basically, nobody except you cares about it. You’re responsible for contacting your bank, your credit card company, the credit reporting bureaus, and a dozen other firms, none of whom really care about your problem and wants only to pass you along to someone else as quickly as possible.

There’s no reason we should put up with this. Responsibility should lie with those who are at fault. If you extend credit carelessly, you should clean up the mess. And it wouldn’t even be that hard. Hell, if we merely mandated credit locking instead of making it optional, it would probably eliminate about 95% of all identity theft. Applying for credit might take a day or two longer than it does now, but is that really such a bad thing? Or, perhaps we could mandate credit locking by default, and allow you to unlock your account only if you agree to accept full personal responsibility for any identity theft that might ensue.

Instead we’re getting "written plans." Blecch. Perhaps our shiny new Consumer Finance Protection bureau will be able to do a bit better once financial reform is passed and it gets up and running.

Rayne at Firedoglake:

It’s been more than 30 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and the well nearly a mile below on the sea floor began to erupt oil and methane, killing 11 of our fellow citizens and injuring even more both immediately and in the continuing damage which followed.

And nothing has happened of any consequence since then.

Oh, we’ve had a Category 5 hurricane of hot air, some decent questions from Congressional hearings, but zippo-zilch-nada in the way of an effective solution. (I pity the people of the Gulf who had to deal with another hurricane they couldn’t escape.)

We had a big metal box set over the leak, not to stop it but to try to capture the oil. Anybody with the wherewithal to Google could predict this was going to fail because of the hydrates. They crystallize on contact with a solid surface in deepwaters below the average depth of the Continental Shelf.

And then we’ve had a tiny little pipsqueak of a hose nosed into the well pipe, which might as well have been a toothpick stuck in our mouths.

Now the White House is having a hissy behind closed doors with the media because dammitall, they can’t stop asking questions about the spill. Oh that’ll work, that’ll make a difference; the biggest environmental disaster our country has experienced will go away if only the media shuts up about it.

Screw that. This has been nothing but a corporate-induced environmental and socio-biological experiment perpetuated on our commons without our consent, and the American public doesn’t take well to experimentation without debate in advance. Witness our slow-moving policy on stem cell research, for example. We don’t frigging like it.

And screw the White House for its insistence that the Fourth Estate stop pestering them and begone. The people have been demanding accountability through our elected representatives in the legislature, but it’s like maneuvering a massive battleship, one that is intended for the making of laws and not their execution.

But it’s the Executive Branch which is charged with the faithful execution of our laws, and it’s failing to do so. It has not done a competent job of communicating with the public or the media would not be hammering on them as they are for more information — and for once, the media is actually doing what we need of them, not what their corporate lords and masters expect.

Instead of scolding the press, the White House should be asking itself why it’s being pestered. Why has "oil spill" remained a trending topic among internet searches across various outlets for more than a month?

It’s because we want ACTION, not more words. We want the damned well capped and we want it capped yesterday, and no, we don’t want to leave this to a negligent corporation which has consistently failed to act in good faith. We want the Executives we elected to office to execute. Do something, for god’s sake.

I’ve had a list of action items for a while now, in fact, if the White House cannot find actionable items of their own. You know that popular site, Getting Things Done? Yeah, well you can call this Get Sh*t Done Now. Here’s my GSDN list as it is right now which I gladly submit for the White House’s immediate consideration and implementation:

1) Obama needs to use that goddamned unitary executive power he’s been clinging to and declare a state of emergency in federal waters along the Gulf of Mexico, using an Executive Order. This is now an international situation, not just an American one, because the oil will eventually end up in the North Atlantic.

2) Declare British Petroleum in violation of its lease and kick them off the site. Threaten to seize all American assets of BP-America immediately if they do not assist in setting up a claims system which will be administered and overseen by the U.S. and paid by BP. (Hire all those poor Sallie Mae folks who were going to lose their jobs because of student loan reform for this purpose. /snark)

3) Ask the Department of Energy’s Steve Chu to create a skunkworks rapid solutions team from NASA and DARPA along with schools which specialize in oceanography, mechanical technology, geology, and computer modeling. Stop waiting for the nice old farts they pulled from JASON because this is an emergency, goddamnitall, we don’t have time for them to come up with a vetted, peer-reviewed whitepaper on this. Don’t listen to anybody’s crap about so-called experts on deepwater drilling and how they’ll solve the problem. As my 16-year-old said, "If there’s experts, where are they? Show me one." Yeah. What she said.

4) Threaten to kick Ken Salazar to the curb if he doesn’t not immediately have every one of the 15+ deepwater offshore drilling sites reevaluated; every evaluation must be on POTUS desk inside 15 days from the date the Executive Order. And we want the evaluations made public — no more of this bullshit opacity the White House calls transparency. No excuses; all this stuff should have been submitted when BP and the other oil industry firms applied for the leases to begin with.

5) Approach corporations to develop an X-Prize type program to develop a private solution in tandem with the skunkworks solution. Ask Congress to create a special R&D tax credit for firms which donate money to the X-Prize for development.

6) …

Continue reading.

Mark Kleiman:

I doubt anyone will face any criminal liability at all for the deaths of 29 miners at the Upper Big Branch mine, owned by Massey Energy and its dictatorial CEO, Don Blankenship. (Blankenship, if you’ll recall, spent more than $3 million of his own money to defeat a West Virginia Supreme Court justice who was expected to rule against his firm in a $50 million case, by accusing the justice of sympathizing with child molesters.) In the unlikely event someone at Massey is convicted of bribing mine-safety officials, it certainly won’t be Blankenship: no doubt he kept himself well insulated.

But at a Congressional hearing today, miners from Upper Big Branch testified that it was Massey policy to cover up mine safety violations and to fire workers who pointed them out. Of course, they couldn’t complain to their union: Blankenship had defeated all organizing attempts by the simple tactic of promising to shut down any mine where the workers voted to exercise their legal right – internationally recognized as a human right – to bargain collectively.

Last year Blankenship earned – or at least was paid – $17.8 million, which was somewhat more than the $12 million Massey had to pay in fines for mine-safety violations. That works out to more than $600,000 for each of the men who were killed due to the illegal practices of the company he runs. Here in Los Angeles, hit-men work for less, but no doubt the compensation committee of the Massey Energy board was told by their compensation consultant that the kind of unaccountable homicide Blankenship practices requires special skills and therefore justifies additional pay.

Since Blankenship is surely above the law, there’s no real point in getting mad at him. Yes, he’s the sort of person who makes you want to believe in Hell, but wishing won’t make it so. Of course, every politician who has ever touched his blood money ought to be permanently ostracized, but that won’t happen either: they won’t even get any nasty questions from the press. After all, it’s not as if they’d listened to sermons or something truly horrible like that.

Still, there’s a larger point to make. According to good libertarian doctrine, every single one of Blankenship’s actions is fully justified. He’s entitled – indeed, morally required – on behalf of his shareholders to run mines at whatever safety (or hazard) level maximizes profits. Any miner who doesn’t like it is perfectly free to seek employment elsewhere. The Mine Safety and Health Administration is a completely illegitimate interference with freedom of contract. Firing workers who report safety problems is fully covered by the doctrine of “employment at will,” under which a worker can be fired “for good cause, for no cause, or for cause morally wrong.” Just as they are free to quit, their employer is free to fire them. That’s “freedom of contract.” By resisting unionization, Blankenship has kept his workers free from depredations of the evil union bosses, and any attempt to avoid his thuggish threats to throw all the miners out of work reflects contempt for the “secret ballot.”

In a world where the Democratic Party hadn’t misplaced its brass knuckles, or in which there existed truly liberal mass media outlets – in the sense that Fox News is a self-consciously right-wing media outlet – Don Blankenship would be Acornized. He would become the poster child for what happens when “small-government” fantasies are allowed to intrude upon reality. Every Republican office-seeker would be forced either to defend the deaths of those 29 miners or to distance himself from the anti-regulation, anti-union, “drill baby drill” policies that made those deaths, and the BP oil spill, statistically inevitable.

But that isn’t the world we live in.

I do get discouraged. And still there are people who believe that, if you just let companies do what they want, the free market would fix everything. (The free market sure is struggling with that oil gusher on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, isn’t it?)

Obama really likes things kept secret. He has the secret panel working on Social Security, he has the new program to assassinate American citizens for secret reasons (and probably in secret as well), he has the new secret war in the Mideast, and he has kept secret as many of the crimes of the previous administration as he can. And, of course, he’s determined to keep the secrecy tight by throwing any public-spirited whistleblowers, who let us know of government misdeeds, into prison for a long time—not only to punish them, but to ensure that the public doesn’t learn about government misdeeds except as he allows.

He’s not doing good things in this effort. Greenwald:

The Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers — whose disclosures are one of the very few remaining avenues for learning what our government actually does — continues to intensify.  Last month, the DOJ announced it had obtained an indictment against NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who exposed serious waste, abuse and possible illegality.  Then, the DOJ re-issued a Bush era subpoena to Jim Risen of The New York Times, demanding the identity of his source who revealed an extremely inept and damaging CIA effort to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear program.  And now, as Politico‘s Josh Gerstein reports, an FBI linguist who leaked what he believed to be evidence of lawbreaking is to receive a prison term that is "likely to become the longest ever served by a government employee accused of passing national security secrets to a member of the media."  As Gerstein explains:

[I]t reflects a surprising development: President Barack Obama’s Justice Department has taken a hard line against leakers, and Obama himself has expressed anger about disclosures of national security deliberations in the press. . . .

"They’re going after this at every opportunity and with unmatched vigor," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, a critic of government classification policy. . . .

Some experts said the administration and the Justice Department may be trying to appease the intelligence community after angering many by releasing the so-called torture memos and by reopening inquiries into alleged torture by CIA personnel. Others said intelligence personnel are terrified by outlets like Wikileaks, on which classified information can be posted without any meaningful chance for officials to argue for the withholding of details that could damage U.S. intelligence efforts.

Notably (and unsurprisingly), the article quotes the neocon Gabriel Schoenfeld — who spent years demanding that the Bush DOJ criminally prosecute whistleblowers and even journalists responsible for stories such as the NYT‘s NSA eavesdropping revelation, and who then wrote a whole book arguing for greater government secrecy — heaping praise on the Obama DOJ:

"I think it’s remarkable," said Gabriel Schoenfeld, a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute who urged prosecution of The New York Times for publishing details of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program in 2005. "This is the administration that came in pledging maximum transparency. Plugging leaks is … traditionally not associated with openness". . . .

"If Thomas Drake is convicted and sentenced to jail, this will be the first president to send two leakers to prison in his term in office. That’s never happened before,’ said Schoenfeld, author of the book "Necessary Secrets." "You wouldn’t have expected the Holder Justice Department to be particularly hawkish in these matters."

Schoenfeld was frequently critical of what he considered to be the Bush DOJ’s lackadaisical attitude toward punishing whistleblowers, but he is obviously pleased with the Obama administration’s aggression in that regard.

It isn’t hard to see why Obama despises leaks.  Just look at the front page of The New York Times today, which details a secret order from Gen. David Petraeus last fall ordering vastly increased Special Forces operations in a variety of Middle Eastern countries, including "allies" such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and "enemies" such as Iran and Syria.  As Iran experts Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett contend, this constitutes, at the very least, "the intensification of America’s covert war against Iran."  That is how we also learned of what is, in essence, a covert war in Yemen as well (not to mention the covert war in Pakistan).  Most of what our Government does of any real significance happens in the dark.  Whistleblowers are one of the very few avenues we have left for learning about any of that.  And politicians eager to preserve their own power and ability to operate in secret — such as Barack Obama — see whistleblowers as their Top Enemy.

Hence, we have a series of aggressive prosecutions from the Obama administration of Bush era exposures of abuse and illegality — acts that flagrantly violate Obama’s Look Forward, Not Backward decree used to protect high-level Bush administration criminals.  As John Cole has suggested, perhaps if these whistleblowers had tortured some people and illegally eavesdropped on others, they would receive the immunity that Obama has so magnanimously and selectively granted.  Instead, they merely exposed secret government corruption and illegality to the world, and thus must be punished.

While it’s true that leaks can be both damaging and illegal, these prosecutions are occurring without any showing whatsoever of harm to national security, and with ample evidence that they were undertaken to expose high-level wrongdoing.  Some secrets are legitimate, but the balance has swung so far in the direction of excess secrecy that it’s extraordinary to watch the Obama administration move the anti-whistleblower persecution far beyond what the Bush administration did.  And as Hilary Bok argued back in 2008 when the Right was demanding that NSA whistleblower Thomas Tamm be prosecuted: while it is generally preferable for whistleblowers to invoke the internal systems that exist rather than leak to the media, such an expectation is misguided under the circumstances that have prevailed for the last decade:

But there’s one big exception to this rule: when the system has itself been corrupted. When you’re operating within a system in which whistle-blowers’ concerns are not addressed — where the likelihood that any complaint you make within the system will be addressed is near zero, while the likelihood that you will be targeted for reprisals is high — then no sane person who is motivated by a desire to have his or her concern addressed will work within that system.

What makes this trend of escalated anti-whistleblower activity particularly notable is that Obama, during his career in the Senate and when running for President, feigned serious support for whistleblowers.  Today, Bush DOJ whistleblower Jesselyn Raddack — while pointing out that "Bush harassed whistleblowers mercilessly, but Obama is prosecuting them and sending them to jail" — notes that Obama previously made commitments like this one (click on image to enlarge): …

Continue reading. Especially the promises Obama made. That man does love to make promises. Too bad he’s not so interested in keeping them.

First, I am obviously moving more—hell, just going outside to let my Garmin find the GPS satellites was more than my normal exercise. And this morning I did the stretching exercises.

Obviously, the simple notes I got were insufficient: my memory of the exercises we did yesterday is not that sharp. I did get an email, but it simply lists the title of the exercise. Obviously, the trainers should have access to a clip-file of exercise diagrams so they could paste into the email the relevant illustrations as a reminder. I’ll suggest that. (I am probably a fairly trying customer.)

No biggie, though. Today or tomorrow my stretching book will arrive, and I can get the exercise from that—and from now on, she can simply identify the exercises I’m to do. In the meantime, I did do some stretches.

I also got up early and played with the PND, entering my home address, The Wife’s address, and the address (and phone number!) of the friends we’ll see on Friday when we drive up to San Francisco. The 260W did completely charge itself via the USB cable, and when I attached it to the computer this morning to download my very first geocaching target, I was advised that there was a software update, so I collected that as well.

I was thinking of the devices that work well together (e.g., camera and cellphone), and it occurred to me that the GPS device really should have a camera—and a cellphone, why not?—and then I realized that the iPhone is already there, along with a lot of other stuff. OTOH, a dedicated PND is probably better, as my little pocket Canon (the SD940IS) is better than a cellphone camera. But I am going to need more pockets. Maybe one of these—The Wife will have a meltdown.

I’m going to download Fitday—I’ve already bought it before, so no cost: just install on new computer. A lot of my custom-defined foods are still in my Fitday files, which I did transfer. So starting today I’m measuring and food-journaling.

The Omega brush brought up a good lather from the Irisch Moos, and the Apollo Mikron with a still-newish Swedish Gillette blade gave a very smooth shave. A good splash of bay rum aftershave, and I’m ready for the day.

I just got my first PND: a Garmin nüvi 260W. It’s an obsolete model (though still being sold), so I got a factory-refurbished one for $90. Not bad at all, and my! devices these days are amazing!

I had a USB camera cable that fit the 260W, so I plugged it into the computer and went to the Garmin site. First I downloaded a "communicator" program that lets Garmin HQ (and me here) interact directly with the device. Then I was told to download map updates. Cool. I go to do that, and it says first it will upgrade the firmware, then do the map update. Better and better. So it downloads new firmware, and when I disconnect the 260W from the computer and turn it off and back on, it installs its own new firmware. Then I reconnect, and I get connected to the map server, and the new maps are now being downloaded, a process I’m told that can take some hours.

No prob, man. The Wife has a built-in navigation system in the Prius, and we’ve never gotten the maps updated or even an offer to update the maps. Clearly, a portable unit is the way to go: easier to update, you can take it with you when you’re on the road, driving or flying. And use it for geocaching.

The reason I got it was a suggestion from The Eldest that I look into geocaching as part of my fitness effort. I was instantly interested because I’ve been longing for an excuse to buy a PND. And now that I have it, I see that the 3.5" size (the 260 rather than the 260W) would be better for geocaching. So it goes.

OMG: I just noticed that the taskbar button for the map download program is also a progress bar! Is that cool? or what? I wonder if the smartness here is in Garmin’s map download program or in Win 7 (or both).

Besides the previous post and this post, Ed Brayton (and Glenn Greenwald) point another serious Obama problem:

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a district court ruling that extended the habeas corpus ruling in Boumediene to detainees at the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Boumediene had granted habeas corpus rights to detainees at Gitmo, but not to other detainees in identical situations at other prisons controlled by the United States.

Glenn Greenwald reacts to this ruling by pointing out the injustice of it and the utter hypocrisy of President Obama. First, the injustice. As he rightly points out, this simply means that the president can get entirely around the ruling in Boumediene by sending detainees to any prison abroad other than Gitmo:

Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram — including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ — in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention — contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee’s Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers “told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.”

But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram. I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are “virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene,” and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same: namely, “the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely.”

And Obama’s hypocrisy on this issue:

When the Boumediene decision was issued in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” But Obama hailed it as “a rejection of the Bush Administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo,” and he praised the Court for “rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.” Even worse, when Obama went to the Senate floor in September, 2006, to speak against the habeas-denying provisions of the Military Commissions Act, this is what he melodramatically intoned:

As a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence. . . .

By giving suspects a chance — even one chance — to challenge the terms of their detention in court, to have a judge confirm that the Government has detained the right person for the right suspicions, we could solve this problem without harming our efforts in the war on terror one bit. . . .

Most of us have been willing to make some sacrifices because we know that, in the end, it helps to make us safer. But restricting somebody’s right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer. In fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe.

Can you smell the hypocrisy? How could anyone miss its pungent, suffocating odor? Apparently, what Obama called “a legal black hole at Guantanamo” is a heinous injustice, but “a legal black hole at Bagram” is the Embodiment of Hope. And evidently, Obama would only feel “terror” if his child were abducted and taken to Guantanamo and imprisoned “without even getting one chance to ask why and prove their innocence.” But if the very same child were instead taken to Bagram and treated exactly the same way, that would be called Justice — or, to use his jargon, Pragmatism. And what kind of person hails a Supreme Court decision as “protecting our core values” — as Obama said of Boumediene — only to then turn around and make a complete mockery of that ruling by insisting that the Cherished, Sacred Rights it recognized are purely a function of where the President orders a detainee-carrying military plane to land?

See, that’s the problem you run into when you make grand declarations of principle and then ignore those principles when you set policy. You end up bearing a strong resemblance to a liar.

It’s certainly not a secret to those on the receiving end. And it’s not a secret from the military or mercenaries waging the war. The secret, it seems, is on us: the idea is to keep secret from the American people what is happening. In this country now, the government really doesn’t want the public to know what it’s doing. That’s why Bush-Cheney did so much torture and murder in secret, and it’s why Obama refuses to investigate what’s done (although such an investigation is legally required—but we’re long past having the government obey the law: cf. no-knock paramilitary raids on citizens in the dead of night; or making it a felony to record what a police officer is doing (in Illinois and doubtless coming soon to your state)). It’s why the US government now can kill its citizens without a trial based on secret evidence. The US is now a government that detains people for years and years without bringing charges or determining guilt, and when they are found to be innocent of any crime—just got swooped up—still keeps them imprisoned. The US has a President that is determined to “close Guantánamo” while he actively continues the exact same practices at Bagram.

Got carried away there, but I definitely do not like the direction this country is going. Reuters reports:

A senior U.S. military commander issued a secret order last year that laid the ground for an escalation of covert operations across the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, officials said on Monday.

Issued last September by General David Petraeus, the order authorized an escalation that included boosting military and intelligence assistance to help Yemeni forces strike al Qaeda targets, as well as deployment of more unmanned aerial drones to collect information and track high-value targets.

The order also authorized U.S. Special Operations units to work with local security forces to counter al Qaeda and other threats, a goal Pentagon officials have made no secret of.

As the head of the U.S. military’s Central Command, Petraeus oversees U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and plays a major role in planning for any possible military action against Iran over its nuclear program.

The order was first reported by the New York Times, which quoted a document it obtained as saying the goal was to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” al Qaeda and other militant groups as well as “prepare the environment” for future attacks by U.S. or local military forces.

The newspaper said the directive also appeared to authorize specific operations in Iran, most likely to gather intelligence about its nuclear program or identify dissident groups that might be useful for any future military offensive.

Some of the covert military operations that followed the secret order have been reported. These include a September 2009 attack by helicopter-borne Special Operations Forces on a car carrying one of east Africa’s most wanted al Qaeda militants, Kenyan-born Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan.

Central Command has been positioning Reaper drones at a base in the Horn of Africa. Officials said the drones can be used against militants in Yemen and Somalia, and even against pirates who attack ships traversing the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

“They (the drones) are part of it but it is much broader than that,” one U.S. official said of the order…

Continue reading.

Ryan Knutson at ProPublica (additional info at the link):

Henry Glover’s mother filed a detailed missing persons report about her son two and a half months after he disappeared, but an article in today’s New Orleans Times Picayune says police didn’t look into the matter for three years. Glover was shot walking into a shopping center in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina. His burnt remains were later discovered in the backseat of a car.

ProPublica, in collaboration with The Nation, the Times-Picayune and PBS Frontline, has worked to discover what happened to Glover after the shooting. His friend and his brother flagged down a stranger, William Tanner, who drove the men to a nearby police compound in his Chevy Malibu. Instead of helping Glover, however, police beat and handcuffed his companions. Then, an officer confiscated the Chevy Malibu, with Glover still in the backseat, and drove away. Days later, the car was found burned, with Glover’s charred remains inside.

The missing persons report was filed by Glover’s mother in November 2005, a few weeks before another report came in about a police officer firing his gun at a man on the same date and in the same shopping center as Glover was shot. Even then, the Times-Picayune reports, police failed to investigate or connect the two reports.

Glover’s is one of eight cases being examined by federal investigators related to police conduct in the aftermath of the hurricane. One case, in which police allegedly killed two civilians wounded four others on the Danziger Bridge, has resulted in charges against five former officers. Four have pleaded guilty.

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

Since the disastrous Gulf Coast oil spill, BP and the other companies responsible for the tragedy have been beefing up their lobbying and public relations efforts. Today, the oil giant has full-page ads in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today defending its response to the oil spill. From the ad:

Since the tragic accident on the Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig first occurred, we have been committed to doing everything possible to stop the flow of oil at the seabed, collect the oil on the surface and keep it away from the shore.

BP has taken full responsibility for dealing with the spill. We are determined to do everything we can to minimize any impact. We will honor all legitimate claims.

BP’s ads come as a new poll finds that 76 percent of the American public disapproves of how the company is handling the spill. And BP is not taking “full responsibility” for the spill. In fact, officials have repeatedly tried to downplay the disaster and argued that attempts to accurately measure the rate of flow at the seabed are impossible and unnecessary:

– Tony Haywood, BP CEO: “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest. It is impossible to say and we will mount, as part of the aftermath, a very detailed environmental assessment as we go forward.” [5/18/10]

– Haywood: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” [5/14/10]

– Lamar McKay, President of BP America: “The volume estimates are based effectively on surface expression, because you can’t measure what’s coming out at the seabed.” [Senate testimony, 5/12/10]

– Tom Mueller, BP: “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.” [5/14/10]

– Doug Suttles, BP COO, Global Exploration: “Since the beginning, we’ve said it’s almost impossible to get a precise number. But ourselves and people from NOAA and others believe that something around 5,000 — it’s actually barrels a day — is the best estimate.” [ABC News, 5/14/10]

In Boston Globe op-ed today, columnist Derrick Z. Jackson hits BP for its ads:

It is difficult to conceive of a more resounding insult to our intelligence than BP’s full-page advertisements in the New York Times and USA Today about its response to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The most intriguing paragraph of the BP ad was, “This is an enormous team effort. More than 2,500 of our operational and technical personnel from around the world are working tirelessly in coordination with the U.S. Coast Guard, and federal, state and local government agencies.’’

But until Deepwater Horizon exploded, BP’s idea of working tirelessly with government agencies was lobbying them to bypass environmental-impact reviews for well permits. Yesterday, the Times had yet another story on how drilling projects have proceeded with environmental waivers, despite President Obama’s so-called moratorium on permits. Deepwater Horizon received an environmental waiver last year and received another one just before the April explosion.

While BP will likely survive this tragedy because of its massive profits, these attempts to shirk responsibility are already beginning to drag the company down in the public’s eyes.

Read the Guardian article that Horton links to as well. Here’s Horton:

How does a newly elected government concerned about civil liberties and the accountability of its predecessor react to credible claims that intelligence operatives were involved in the torture of prisoners? Britain’s new foreign secretary, Conservative William Hague, shows the way. The Guardian:

A judge will investigate claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said tonight. The move was welcomed by civil liberties campaigners and may put pressure on the Labour leadership candidate and former foreign secretary David Miliband, who was accused by Hague, while in opposition, of having something to hide. Miliband has repeatedly rejected the accusation and broadly indicated that he or his officials may have been misled by foreign intelligence agencies about the degree of British complicity.

Hague’s remarks appear to have caught the Foreign Office by surprise, as no details were yet available on how the inquiry will be conducted, its terms of reference or when it will start work. Hague will come under pressure to ensure the inquiry is public and comprehensive. He first called last year for an independent judicial inquiry into claims that British officials had colluded in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo detainee and a UK resident. Mohamed claimed that he was tortured by US forces in Pakistan and Morocco, and that MI5 fed the CIA questions that were used by US forces.

The usual issues will surround the inquiry. Will immunity be offered for testimony? Will the proceedings be open to the public? What judge will be tapped to handle it?

Notwithstanding the Guardian’s suggestion of surprise, this development was widely anticipated. Hague, while serving as shadow secretary, sharply criticized Miliband over his management of the torture issue. In a recent ruling, some of Britain’s most senior judges suggested strongly that they were also highly dissatisfied with the government’s statements on the subject, which they characterized as misleading. It’s clear that the Labour government was engaged in the same sort of dissembling about torture that marked the Bush Administration, using wiggle words with secret meanings. If the truth is now to emerge, it serves the public interest in Britain, just as it would serve the U.S. public interest, for it to emerge from a detached and depoliticized process–so the formal judicial inquiry is the appropriate tool, just as a commission of inquiry would be for the United States.

The new coalition Conservative-Liberal government in Britain is slowly revealing its hand. A number of commentators have wondered how these two parties could mount a consensus program, given that they seem to represent the extremes of the parliamentary spectrum. However, British parliamentary history points to some significant common ground–especially in the Old Whig tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Old Whigs put a premium on personal freedom and endorsed a moderate, steady reform agenda. Their greatest spokesman, Edmund Burke, emerged as a hero to later generations of Conservatives (many of whom are shocked to learn that he was actually not just a Whig but at times a sharp critic of the Conservatives). As Andrew Sullivan has recently argued, the emerging program of the Cameron-Clegg government in fact highlights a revival of civil liberties. It should therefore come as no surprise that the government now moves decisively to do what its Labour predecessor sharply resisted: a comprehensive formal investigation of torture allegations. At this point, no issue is more fundamental to the civil liberties agenda. The Obama Administration should watch and learn a bit about how a modern democracy approaches the question of accountability for torture.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person who says, “Trust me” must on no account be accorded any degree of trust. The rule applies tenfold if the person refuses to explain in detail about what we should trust them.

Peter Baker in the NY Times explains in some detail why we should henceforth not accord an iota of trust to the Obama Administration. His report begins:

For three months, the White House has refused to say whether it offered a job to Representative Joe Sestak to get him to drop his challenge to Senator Arlen Specter in a Pennsylvania Democratic primary, as Mr. Sestak has asserted.

But the White House wants everyone who suspects that something untoward, or even illegal, might have happened to rest easy: though it still will not reveal what happened, the White House is reassuring skeptics that it has examined its own actions and decided it did nothing wrong. Whatever it was that it did.

“Lawyers in the White House and others have looked into conversations that were had with Congressman Sestak,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “And nothing inappropriate happened.”

“Improper or not, did you offer him a job in the administration?” asked the host, Bob Schieffer.

“I’m not going to get further into what the conversations were,” Mr. Gibbs replied. “People that have looked into them assure me that they weren’t inappropriate in any way.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “trust us” response from the White House has not exactly put the matter to rest. With Mr. Sestak’s victory over Mr. Specter in last week’s primary, the questions have returned with intensity, only to remain unanswered. Mr. Gibbs deflected questions 13 times at a White House briefing last week just two days after the primary. Mr. Sestak, a retired admiral, has reaffirmed his assertion without providing any details, like who exactly offered what job.

Republicans have pressed Mr. Sestak to explain. “Congressman Sestak should tell the public everything he knows about the job he was offered, and who offered it,” former Representative Pat Toomey, his Republican opponent, said Monday.

Amber Marchand, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said, “Joe Sestak owes Pennsylvanians a full explanation for this potentially illegal activity.”

Whether the conversations might have been illegal is unclear without knowing what precisely was said. There are certainly statutes that bar government employees from using their authority to influence a Senate nomination or to promise employment as a reward for political activity. Yet presidents have given appointments to many people to reward allies or take would-be obstacles out of the way for other allies, explicitly or not.

Even if the conversations were perfectly legal, as the White House claims, the situation challenges President Obama’s efforts to present himself as a reformer who will fix a town of dirty politics. And the refusal to even discuss what was discussed does not advance the White House’s well-worn claim to being “the most transparent” in history.

When Mr. Gibbs was pressed on the matter Thursday, he resolutely referred to his original statement exonerating the White House and refused to elaborate.

“But you never really explained what the conversation was,” said Jake Tapper of ABC News.

“And I don’t have anything to add today,” Mr. Gibbs said.

“But,” Mr. Tapper continued, “if the White House offers a congressman a position in the administration in order to convince that congressman not to run for office …”

“I don’t have anything to add to that,” Mr. Gibbs said.

Mr. Tapper persisted: “But do you really think the American people don’t have a right to know about what exactly the conversation was?”

“I don’t have anything to add to what I said in March,” Mr. Gibbs said.

The White House had nothing more to say Monday. David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, said on CNN, “I don’t think any questions will be left unanswered on this,” but he did not actually answer the questions. [In other words, Axelrod simply lied---another reason to abandon a position of trusting them – LG] Other Democrats have come to the White House’s defense by arguing that even if Mr. Sestak’s assertion about a job were true, it would hardly be shocking in a city of political tradeoffs.

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It’s beyond disgusting. This is what we probably should get used to: all the easy oil is gone, and we’re now in the age of “tough oil”: oil very difficult to recover.

Watch this.

When armed men break down the door at 3:00 in the morning, and rush in with guns drawn, all shouting: it’s unpleasant, and if you’re just a regular citizen, you probably feel as though you’ve been transported to a police state—some totalitarian country where this happens all the time.

Well, it happens all the time in the US. The CATO Institute has put up an interactive map that shows where the raids have gone wrong in one of these ways:

• Death of an innocent.
• Death or injury of a police officer.
• Death of a nonviolent offender.
• Raid on an innocent suspect.
• Other examples of paramilitary police excess.
• Unnecessary raids on doctors and sick people.

Thanks to TYD for sending me the link. Above the map, click on any of the colored flags above the map that show type of incident to see the occurrences of those types.

Click on a colored flag on the map for details about the incident it marks.

We need to put a stop to this.

Ian Urbina in the NY Times:

Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general’s report to be released this week.

The report, which describes inappropriate behavior by the staff at the Minerals Management Service from 2005 to 2007, also found that inspectors had accepted meals, tickets to sporting events and gifts from at least one oil company while they were overseeing the industry.

Although there is no evidence that those events played a role in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the report offers further evidence of what many critics of the Minerals Management Service have described as a culture of lax oversight and cozy ties to industry.

The report includes other examples of troubling behavior discovered by investigators.

In mid-2008, a minerals agency employee conducted four inspections on drilling platforms when he was also negotiating a job with the drilling company, a cover letter to the report said.

And an inspector from the Lake Charles office admitted to investigators that he had used crystal methamphetamine, an illegal drug. Investigators said they believe the inspector may have been under the influence of the drug during an inspection.

The report was provided to The New York Times by a person familiar with the investigation who is not authorized to speak to reporters. Previous inspector general investigations of the minerals agency have focused on inappropriate behavior by the royalty-collection staff in the agency’s Denver office.

The new report describes similar activities and improper relationships with industry representatives in the leasing and inspections staff in an agency gulf region office in Louisiana.

The report found that employees from the Lake Charles office had repeatedly accepted gifts, including hunting and fishing trips from the Island Operating Company, an oil and gas company working on oil platforms regulated by the Interior Department.

Taking such gifts “appears to have been a generally accepted practice,” said the report, written by department’s acting inspector general, Mary L. Kendall…

Continue reading.

No real surprises, but it’s now confirmed. Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post:

The federal agency responsible for regulating U.S. offshore oil drilling repeatedly ignored warnings from government scientists about environmental risks in its push to approve energy exploration activities quickly, according to numerous documents and interviews.

Minerals Management Service officials, who can receive cash bonuses in the thousands of dollars based in large part on meeting federal deadlines for leasing offshore oil and gas exploration, frequently changed documents and bypassed legal requirements aimed at protecting the marine environment, the documents show.

This has dramatically weakened the scientific checks on offshore drilling that were established under landmark laws such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, say those who have worked with the MMS, which is part of the Interior Department.

“It’s a war between the biologists and the engineers,” said Thomas A. Campbell, who served as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s general counsel under President George H.W. Bush. “They just have a very different worldview, and sometimes the engineers simply don’t listen to the biologists.”

Interviews and documents show numerous examples in which senior officials discounted scientific data and advice — even from scientists elsewhere in the federal government — that would have impeded oil and gas companies drilling offshore.

Under the Bush and Obama administrations, red flags raised by scientists at NOAA and the Marine Mammal Commission have gone unheeded. Obama officials say they are taking steps to ensure that science guides drilling decisions; former agency officials say such questions are rarely as simple as they seem. [Especially when bribes, cocaine, and sex entered the picture---it got really complicated then. – LG]

Several instances involving the leasing process for a section of Alaska’s Beaufort Sea and the Gulf of Mexico illustrate the problems the agency faces…

Continue reading.

Andrea Nill at ThinkProgress:

Last week, following Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s speech before Congress, many conservatives blasted Calderon for slamming Arizona’s new immigration law and “meddling” in U.S. politics. “It’s about us. It’s about our citizenry,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “I just think that’s a line I would prefer that he did not cross. He went farther than I’m comfortable with,” stated Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). A statement released by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) read, “It’s unfortunate and disappointing the president of Mexico chose to criticize the state of Arizona by weighing in on a U.S. domestic policy issue during a trip that was meant to reaffirm the unique relationship between our two countries.” However, Calderon isn’t the first international figure to voice his concerns over the law. In fact, he joins a loud chorus of global leaders who have criticized the drastic measures that Arizona is taking to lock out undocumented immigrants:

CENTRAL AMERICA: The Guatemalan Foreign Ministry issued a press release soon after Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB-1070 into law, deploring the measure and expressing the government’s “deep concern” for the threat it represents to basic justice. The new government of Honduras also condemned the law. “Honduras considers that the passing of the law is the wrong step and does nothing to resolve the core problems behind of illegal immigration,” said Minister of the Presidency María Antonieta Guillén. Officials in El Salvador urged its citizens to avoid traveling to Arizona, and in Nicaragua, officials called on the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations (UN) “to take the necessary measures to safeguard the rights of the Hispanic population.”

SOUTH AMERICA: The Chilean Secretary of OAS, José Miguel Insulza,responded to Nicaragua’s request by expressing “the concern of the OAS, its Secretary General, the countries of the hemisphere and the Latin American community with the passage of a law in a state of the United States that we consider to be discriminatory against immigrants, and in particular against a population of such origin that lives in this country.” Heads of state and foreign ministers of the 12-member Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) slammed SB-1070, stating that it encourages “discretional detention of people based on racial, ethnic, phenotypic, language and migratory status reasons under the questionable concept of ‘reasonable doubt.’”

EUROPE: After reviewing the law, UN experts based in Geneva, Switzerland stated that SB-1070 could violate international standards that are binding in the United States. “A disturbing pattern of legislative activity hostile to ethnic minorities and immigrants has been established with the adoption of an immigration law that may allow for police action targeting individuals on the basis of their perceived ethnic origin,” the experts said. Amnesty International, whose headquarters is based in London, agreed, calling the law “cruel and misguided” and in violation of Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

AFRICA: South African Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu has been an outspoken critic of Arizona’s immigration law. “Abominations such as apartheid do not start with an entire population suddenly becoming inhumane. They start here. They start with generalizing unwanted characteristics across an entire segment of a population,” wrote Tutu. “A solution that degrades innocent people, or that makes anyone with broken English a suspect, is not a solution.”

When it comes down to it, Arizonans may not care about what the international community has to say about its controversial new law, but global leaders have every right to care about what might happen to their countrymen and woman who visit, live, or travel through their state. In the end, it’s not meddling, it’s diplomacy with a stick.

And this morning, from the Center for American Progress in an email:

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What exactly is the thinking (if any) behind the law against recording (audio or video) a police officer on duty? (The only thing I can think of is that police do not want to have a record of what they’ve done because they plan on doing bad things—probably illegal things.) Ed Brayton:

Balko writes at Reason about a vile law in Illinois that makes it a major felony to record a police officer on duty:

Last week, an Illinois judge rejected Chicago artist Christopher Drew’s motion to dismiss the Class I felony charge against him. Drew is charged with violating the state’s eavesdropping statute when he recorded his encounter with a police officer last December on the streets of Chicago. A Class I felony in Illinois is punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison. It’s in the same class of crimes as sexual assault. Drew will be back in court in June to request a jury trial.

His argument:

I’m of the opinion that it should always be legal to record on-duty police officers, both as a matter of policy and under the free speech, free press, and right to petition the government provisions in the First Amendment. We saw the power and potential of audio and video recording technology to expose government abuse in the Iranian protests last summer. But we also see it here in the U.S. with the thousands of police misconduct videos uploaded to YouTube in recent years.

Typically, police who want to arrest someone for recording them while on duty use a strained interpretation of state wiretapping laws or whatever state or local law addresses obstructing or interfering with law enforcement. These incidents are troubling enough, and I think state legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials. Those laws should include remedies for people wrongly arrested, or who have had their cameras or cell phones illegally confiscated, damaged, or destroyed.

I would go further than that. We already have dashboard cameras; we need lapel cameras as well, and they should be mandatory for all levels of law enforcement while on duty. the thousands of cases of police misconduct that have been caught on video are are merely fortunate circumstances — the ones that just happened to be caught on someone’s cell phone or on a surveillance camera. Since that represents only a miniscule fraction of all situations, they almost certainly represent only the tip of the iceberg of police misconduct.

Catching such injustice should not be left to chance. We are forever being told by the law-and-order crowd that the only people who should be concerned about such surveillance are those who are doing something wrong. But the one case where it actually applies — to police officers acting as agents of the state — they suddenly develop amnesia.

Good officers should, in fact, welcome such surveillance. Sometimes claims of police misconduct are false and having video evidence would prove them to be false. That’s why good police officers are happy to have interrogations recorded, because it prevents false claims of coercion.

I hate struggling with wireless, and today I received the 50′ of Ethernet cable from Amazon ($9.79 plus free shipping: quite reasonable), and my Roku is now attached via a wired connection: no more futzing with wireless! Yay! And the cable is not in the way at all (ran it over the top of doorways and behind bookcases, so it’s not even particularly visible.