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It's Only Oversight
By Ari Berman
The Bush Administration initially opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission, blocked Condoleezza Rice testimony and refused to hand over classified documents. President Bush agreed to meet with the Commission only if it was done in private with Dick Cheney at his side.
Now, a year after the Commission issued its sweeping reform recommendations, the Administration still won't tell the public what it's doing to protect Americans. In early June the Commission sent detailed letters to White House chief of staff Andy Card and leaders of the Pentagon, State Department, CIA and FBI seeking updated information "on steps taken to make the American people safer and more secure." The agencies never responded to the letters or even acknowledged their receipt, the New York Times reported.
"It's very disappointing," says Commission head Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. "All we're trying to do is make the public safer."
(104) CommentsAugust 10, 2005
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The Swift Boats of Science
By Ari Berman
Paul Cameron, founder of the Family Research Institute, calls gays and lesbians "death marketers."
"I am not sure how long they will take to destroy the US from within, but sufficiently weakened, the US will probably fall to another state before that occurs," he recently told the Boston Globe.
In 1983, Cameron cofounded the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality, where he published reports claiming that homosexuals were more likely than heterosexuals to molest children and commit other crimes. Shortly thereafter, the American Psychological Association barred Cameron from its membership. The American Sociological Association said that "Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism."
(162) CommentsAugust 4, 2005
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Gain for Pain
By Ari Berman
Private prisons boomed in the 1990s, not least of all the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). As state governments eagerly transferred prisoners to the private sector, the country's largest for-profit prison became known as "a theme stock for the nineties."
That was before the stabbings, killings and escape of five convicted murderers from an overcrowded CCA facility in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1999. Inmates sued and won a $1.65 million settlement. The District of Columbia, which had been sending maximum-security prisoners to CCA's medium-security facility, did not renew its contract. CCA's stock plummeted as the company neared bankruptcy. The for-profit experiment seemed over.
Luckily for CCA and other private prisons, the Bush Administration came running to the rescue. The number of federal inmates in private facilities has grown by two-thirds since 2000, comprising more than 24,000 prisoners, the Associated Press recently reported. Nearly thirty-percent of CCA's 67,000 inmates in 38 states are now supplied by federal agencies. Thousands more illegal immigrants reside in for-profit facilities, awaiting sentencing or deportation. "The number of federal inmates is expected to rise from 185,000 to 226,000 by 2010," AP reports, "with private companies likely to be relied on for housing non-citizen immigrants convicted of federal crimes."
(41) CommentsAugust 3, 2005
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The Bully Gets By
By Ari Berman
Well, Dick Cheney finally got his man at the UN. That President Bush needed to use a recess appointment to appoint John Bolton as UN ambassador--the first time in history a president has done so--is a sign of desperation for this Administration.
Since Bush nominated Bolton back in March, the Senate hearings have dug up new dirt at every turn. Bolton hyped faulty intelligence on Iran, Syria and Cuba, spied on co-workers through National Security Agency intercepts, bullied subordinates at the State Department, and subverted diplomacy with crucial allies. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stung by the opposition of Republican Senator George Voinovich, cleared Bolton to the Senate floor without a recommendation. Bill Frist twice tried and failed to get the sixty votes necessary to bring cloture.
And last week, senators learned that Bolton lied to Congress by claiming he had not been interviewed or testified in any investigation over the past five years. In fact, Bolton was interviewed in 2003 by the State Department inspector general as part of a joint CIA investigation into skewed pre-war intelligence on Iraq. As reported earlier, Bolton played an instrumental role in creating a State Department fact sheet that falsely asserted that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy enriched Uranium from Niger. Shortly after Ambassador Joseph Wilson debunked the Hussein-Niger link, Administration officials outed his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame.
(80) CommentsAugust 2, 2005
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DeLay's Dirty Trick
By Ari Berman
Much of the dirty business of Congress is done outside of public debate, during conference negotiations between the House and Senate Republican leadership, after legislation has passed. Eleventh-hour language added to appease the Christian right, repay big business or bring controversial pork-barrel projects back home has become a regular practice for Republicans.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay took this shady scheming to a new low last week, when he "mysteriously inserted" a $1.5 billion sweetheart deal for Houston oil companies into a massive energy bill that supposedly had been finalized. The provision, according to the sharp eye of Rep. Henry Waxman, stipulates that 75 percent of the $1.5 billion allocated for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico must go toward "a corporation that is constructed as a consortium."
The leading contender for the contract just happens to be the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America consortium, based in DeLay's Sugar Land, Texas, district. Its members include war profiteer Halliburton and Marathon Oil, under SEC investigation for bribing the president of Equatorial Guinea for oil rights. Governor Rick Perry created the consortium in March 2004, promising 1,500 jobs. "None had been created as of last December," AP reports.
(29) CommentsAugust 1, 2005
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Outrageous Outtakes
By Ari Berman
** Jeb Bush claims he met Supreme Court nominee John Roberts only once, for thirty minutes, in the heat of the Florida recount fight. But Ted Cruz, then domestic policy advisor for President Bush, says Roberts played an integral role in securing Bush's election, as "legal consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for arguments before the nation's highest court," the Miami Herald reports. Cruz said Roberts was one of the first names he thought of for the campaign's legal team of "800-pound gorillas." Ultimately Roberts lent advice, polished legal briefs and participated in a dress rehearsal for the Supreme Court proceedings. Now the Bush team is handsomely repaying the favor.
** In a meeting last Friday, Sen. Dick Durbin supposedly asked Justice Roberts how his devout Catholic faith would affect his interpretation of sensitive legal issues such as abortion or the death penalty. Roberts, according to George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley, replied that he would recuse himself from cases where Catholic and civil law conflict. Conservatives went predictably ballistic, accusing Durbin of imposing a "religious test." Funny thing is that notorious right-wing loony Sen. Tom Coburn popped the same type of question about Catholicism in a meeting with Roberts the same day as Durbin. "He said, 'I'm very uncomfortable talking about that,'" Coburn told the AP.
** The Pentagon recently released two news releases, describing separate incidents in Iraq 11 days apart. Curiously, however, both releases contained a nearly identical 40-word quote attributed to an unidentified Iraqi, saying "I will now take the fight to the terrorists." Was the copycat quote even accurate in the first place? "I don't know that," replied Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita. "It's one of the obvious questions we're trying to understand." The military later issued the release without the quote, blaming an "administrative error." The same could be said of the entire Iraq war.
(7) CommentsJuly 29, 2005
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Rudy Can't Fail
By Ari Berman
Republicans and their drug company allies are doing everything they can to prevent Americans from accessing cheaper prescription drugs. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has blocked a vote on a bipartisan bill legalizing drug importation from Canada. Last month the Senate Republican Policy Committee maintained that imported drugs--10 million of which entered the US in 2004--"cannot be a viable option." This despite the fact that President Bush's own report on drug re-importation conceded that Canadian imports are safe, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that legalized importation could "reduce total prescription drug expenditures in the US by about $40 billion" over the next nine years.
As if pumping $759 million into lobbying Congress since 1998--more than any other industry--wasn't enough, big pharma has enlisted "America's Mayor" Rudy Giuliani to stamp a terror alert on the importation fight. "As the nation tightens its borders against possible future terrorist attacks, it risks undermining security and safety by opening them up to non-FDA prescription drugs," said a Giuliani Partners report released in April. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufactures of America, the industry's DC lobbying arm, conveniently underwrote the study. If it kills the drug company's profits, it'll kill you too.
High-profile shill for big pharma is just one role among many for Tycoon Rudy and his blossoming security consulting firm. "The client list often reads like the list of witnesses before Congressional committees in some of the highest-profile corporate crises of the last few years," the New York Observor wrote. "Along with Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which owns the Indian Point nuclear plant, they include the manufacturers of the painkiller OxyContin, which had become popular as a recreational drug; the scandal-plagued National Thoroughbred Racing Association; and a pharmaceutical-industry trade group, for which Mr. Giuliani produced a study suggesting that imported prescription drugs may be dangerous."
(10) CommentsJuly 28, 2005
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Grand Interrogator
By Ari Berman
The Bush Administration appears far more concerned with renaming the "war on terror" than rethinking its failed anti-terror policies. To date, the Administration has failed to hold high-ranking officers or officials accountable for torture at Abu Ghraib, to properly investigate prisoner abuses at Guantanamo Bay, or to abandon its controversial "extraordinary rendition" program. Now the White House is intensely lobbying Congress against any oversight that might compromise its well-honed torture tactics.
As part of a massive $491 billion defense authorization bill, John McCain on Monday introduced amendments to set uniform interrogation standards according to the Army field manuel on interrogation, to register all foreign detainees, including "ghost detainees," with the International Red Cross, and to prohibit the Pentagon from engaging in "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of prisoners. McCain's amendments have the support of former Air Force lawyer Lindsay Graham, Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner and possibly 10 other Republican Senators, comprising what the Washington Post called "an incipient Republican rebellion."
Luckily for Bush, the Senate postponed debate on the authorization bill until the fall, opting instead to shield gun manufacturers from civil liability lawsuits in their last week of business. The NRA seems to be the only thing that could get the Administration temporarily off the hook.
(63) CommentsJuly 27, 2005
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Norm Coleman: Minister of Agitprop
By Ari Berman
Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman is once again playing the coveted role of Republican Minister of Agitprop. Leading the smear campaign against Kofi Annan wasn't enough for the once-moderate Mayor of St. Paul. Now he's been hand-picked by the Republican leadership to be one of Karl Rove's "principle defenders in Congress."
When Coleman's constituents called his office last Wednesday to complain about Rove's role in identifying CIA agent Valerie Plame to reporters, they were "met with a prepared text chalking up any of Rove's problems to simply a partisan attack by Democrats," wrote a Minneapolis Star Tribune reader. The next day, camera-hog Coleman swung into action, holding a press conference where he admonished Democrats for "sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere of collegiality and constructive cooperation" in the Senate. "Stop the partisan attacks, let's get away from the gotcha politics of Washington," he said. Later that day, after Democrats introduced legislation to revoke Rove's security clearance, Coleman and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist tried in vain to censor Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Dick Durbin. Irony escapes the attack dog.
At the whiff of any Republican scandal, Coleman quickly takes the lead in echoing GOP talking points. After Condeeleza Rice revealed that Bush had received a memo titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" a month before 9/11, Coleman defended Rice by saying: "We've got to get away from finger pointing and the blame game." A month later, Coleman blamed abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison on a "small group of soldiers" and called Donald Rumsfeld's Senate testimony "contrite, candid and thorough," blindly trusting that Bush would hold high-ranking officers accountable. "This is not a time for critics," Coleman said.
(49) CommentsJuly 19, 2005
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Big Pharma's Best Friends
By Ari Berman
[Correction: It's come to our attention that Drs. Paul and Young are not under NIH or HHS investigation. Both won NIH exemptions for their private industry work, and disclosed accordingly. Furthermore, Paul's correct title is chief of the laboratory of immunology at the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. We regret the errors.]
Ethics and science are two areas Republicans in power display notable contempt toward. The intersection of the two has proved particularly troubling.
Last year the House Committee on Energy and Commerce discovered that 81 scientists at the government's National Institutes of Health (NIH) were secretly on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies as consultants. Between 1999 and 2004, the fees ranged from $5 to $517,000.
(20) CommentsJuly 19, 2005
Ari Berman
The Daily Outrage aims to shine a spotlight on the forces that corrupt our democracy. The outrages come from all over these days: lobbyists stifling reformers in both parties, defense contractors profiting off pre-emptive war, the mainstream media echoing government deceptions, and a rightwing attack machine defending neo-imperialists and distorting progressive values. These stories rarely make the front-page, penetrate talk-radio, or appear on the evening news. So let The Daily Outrage guide you through the tangled web of media, money and politics at home and abroad. And click here to let us know of any outrages you think we should be covering.
Photo Credit: Michael Lorenzini
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