Nation Topics - US Intelligence | The Nation

The article focuses on the data mining of e-mails and phone calls by National Security Agency computers. Many similar attempts have been made to quantify and profile personal information in the interest of National Security. The author argues that phrenologists, eugenists and forensic fingerprinters all have claimed scientific certainty in identifying persons. Such claims should be met with suspicion.

The article presents the poem "Pentagon Secretly Paid To Place Article In Iraqi Newspapers: Another Lesson In Democracy," by Calvin Trillin. First Line: Democracy's the only way; Last Line: But better if it's bought and paid for.

Focuses on the denial of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush to claims of prisoner abuse, despite mounting evidence in support of those claims. Description of Guantánamo as a gulag by Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan; Claim by Bush that accusations of abuse are fabrications made by ex-prisoners who hate America; Evidence of abuse gained from Pentagon and other government sources, not just ex-prisoner interviews.

The article presents information about "The Nation" articles on the Internet. David Corn explains why Paul Wolfowitz's nomination to be the next World Bank president is a win for the Pentagon but a loss for the world. Plus, Michael Blanding highlights the student movement against Coca-Cola.

Criticizes United States President George W. Bush's budget proposals. Reference to the government spending on the military and the Pentagon; Lack of pay equity between chief executive officers and the average workers; Criticism of Bush's tax cuts for rich people and corporations; Problems with Bush's plan to privatize Social Security.

The authors comment on the Pentagon budget and the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush's agenda in the U.S. Congress. In the wake of the November elections, arms control and peace advocates scored an important victory when Congress eliminated funding for research on new nuclear weapons. The leader in this effort was Republican Representative David Hobson. The Pentagon took advantage of the slow news week and leaked its plans to cut $30 billion from more than a dozen weapons programs in the next five years. The cuts amount to only a little over 1 percent of the Pentagon's total budget over the next five years, and some represent little more than a budget shell game; as Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress points out concerning the purchase of Virginia-class attack submarines. And other proposed cuts may be stopped in their tracks by the arms lobby, once interested members of Congress team up with contractors to save home-state systems. But even allowing for these limitations, the fact that the Pentagon felt compelled to offer any cuts at all provides an important opportunity to debate national security priorities. Another area where the Bush Administration may be vulnerable to pressure is in increasing funding to dismantle nuclear weapons and secure or destroy nuclear bomb-making materials in the former Soviet Union. The elephant in the room in any discussion of US military policy is Iraq. The Administration will soon put forward an $80 billion supplemental request for funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan with another funding request later this year. This will be on top of the FY 2006 Pentagon budget. All the more reason to speak out now against the notion of covert military action in Iran, and against the idea of empowering the Pentagon to undertake such adventures.

Mentions a "Newsweek" report about Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Details of "the Salvador option" and the use of paramilitary squads to assist the Pentagon and Iraqi militia units; Reference to US policy under the Reagan Administration in the 1980s which supported the El Salvador military that relied on death squads, which killed civilians including Archbishop Oscar Romero; Indication that Elliott Abrams who was a State Department official in the 1980s is now working in the White House.

The article looks at an inquiry being held by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into whether Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, ran a covert program with operatives in high-level U.S. government positions to influence the President George W. Bush Administration's decision to go to war in Iraq. According to sources familiar with the investigation, the FBI is looking at a group of neoconservatives who have occupied senior posts at the White House, the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. The point of the probe is not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The most likely targets of the inquiry are Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and Harold Rhode of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment.

The war on Iraq has made us all painfully aware of the Pentagon's growing reliance on private companies. Commercial firms have been hired to do everything from cooking meals to interrogating prisoners to providing security for US proconsul Paul Bremer. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution estimates that for every ten troops on the ground in Iraq, there is one contract employee. Military outsourcing is nothing new. The latest wave of military privatization started in the first Bush Administration, when Defense Secretary Cheney asked Halliburton to study what it would cost to have a private company take charge of getting US forces overseas in a hurry. The Clinton Administration picked up where Bush/Cheney left off, hiring Halliburton--then run by Cheney--as the logistics arm for the war in Kosovo. The 1990s military outsourcing boom was driven by a combination of practicality and ideology. There is a reason that governments have historically maintained a monopoly over the use of force. Allowing private companies into the mix interferes with the ability of citizens to hold their government accountable for when and how force is used. Key members of Congress have started to press for action on this issue.

The editors call upon the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush to tell the truth about the war in Iraq and its failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The two brothers who scaled the face of Big Ben in London with a banner reading "Time for Truth" sent the right message on the anniversary of the beginning of the US-led war on Iraq and just days before the start of hearings in Washington by an independent commission looking into the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At a moment when there are no easy answers as to how to end the US occupation of Iraq without compounding existing instability, the one thing citizens need most is straight talk: about who knew what about Al Qaeda before 9/11 and about why the Iraq war was fought, among other questions. But truth still seems in short supply, as evidenced by the furious Administration response to a new memoir by former White House national security official Richard Clarke, who describes a President obsessed with Iraq on the day after the Al Qaeda attacks even after being reminded that no links had been found between the two. The White House should keep in mind what happened in Spain, where a government already unpopular because of its support of Bush's war was voted out after trying to pin the blame for railway bombings on domestic rather than Islamic terrorists. The globe's citizens know better than to accept Bush's skewed worldview; they see the Iraq war as a dangerous diversion, not an effective response to Al Qaeda-style violence.