Here are the other winning spots

By Ian Cobain, The Guardian

The US government is attempting to halt a lawsuit that could establish whether any of the Central Intelligence Agency’s so-called rendition flights have been partly planned on British soil. Lawyers representing a number of men who have been held at Guantánamo are suing Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of the Boeing Corporation, accusing Jeppesen of involvement in the flights that took the men to secret prisons around the world. Once there, the men say, they were tortured.

The lawyers say they strongly suspect that at least some of the logistic support for the CIA’s flights was arranged at Jeppesen’s office in Crawley, West Sussex, a few miles from Gatwick airport.

However, the US government is asking a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit because “to proceed would risk the disclosure of highly classified information” about the agency’s methods.
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Think Progress

In January, pursuant to current law, all “federal civilian workers will get a 2.5 percent across-the-board raise.” Additionally, “workers living in more expensive regions of the country” are supposed to “receive an additional raise of 12.5 percent.” But President Bush ordered today that the raises for those workers will be slashed significantly:

On average, workers who live in such metro areas were due to receive an additional raise of 12.5 percent. Bush is cutting that added bump to 0.5 percent.

That means that workers scheduled to receive pay differentials will now receive a total pay raise of 3 percent, not 15 percent, on average.

Bush said he was taking action because the scheduled pay raises would exceed his budget by $12.7 billion next year, and only compound in later years.

This isn’t the first time Bush has cut the pay of low-level federal staffers. In July, he issued a pay cut for “those at the bottom of the White House staff pay scale,” while awarding a $2,800 raise to Karl Rove.

Raw Story

The federal official helming a probe into potentially illegal partisan political activities conducted by Karl Rove and other White House officials is himself the focus of a federal investigation.

Scott Bloch, the Bush-appointed head of the US Office of Special Counsel, is under investigation for the alleged improper deletion of emails on office computers, The Wall Street Journal’s John R. Wilke reports.

“Recently, investigators learned that Mr. Bloch erased all the files on his office personal computer late last year,” writes Wilke. “They are now trying to determine whether the deletions were improper or part of a cover-up, lawyers close to the case said.” The inspector general of the Office of Personnel Management is examining the case at the urging of the White House.

The Special Counsel is also under scrutiny for claims that he used his position to retaliate against other employees, and that he “dismissed whistleblower cases without adequate examination.” Investigation began in that case in 2005.
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Think Progress

A new study by the University of California’s School of Public Health finds that illegal immigrants do not pose as significant a burden on U.S. Health Care resources as is often claimed. Undocumented immigrants are less likely to have insurance, but seek out health care in much lower numbers:

“Low rates of use of health-care services by Mexican immigrants and similar trends among other Latinos do not support public concern about immigrants’ overuse of the health care system,” the researchers wrote.

“Undocumented individuals demonstrate less use of health care than U.S.-born citizens and have more negative experiences with the health care that they have received,” they said.

The study is based on a 2003 survey of 42,044 people. Researchers compared the health care habits of U.S.-based Mexicans and Latinos and grouped the results according to citizenship or other status.

Among the other findings:

Undocumented Mexican and Latin American immigrants “are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency rooms in California.”

Mexican Immigrants paid “1.6 fewer visits to doctors” per year than by those born in the U.S. to Mexican immigrants.

Other “undocumented Latinos had 2.1 fewer physician visits than their U.S.-born counterparts.”

Not only are undocumented immigrants not a burden on the U.S. health care system, but as Alexander N. Ortega, an associate professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health and the study’s lead author points out, they “seem to be underutilizing the system, given their health needs.”

– Dave de Give

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Der Spiegel Online

US President George W. Bush plays host this week to a massive summit aimed at pushing the Middle East peace process forward. Expectations, though, are low. Many doubt that Bush is truly dedicated to the project.

It was an elegant setting for the luncheon hosted by the Israel Project one week ago. Guests at the National Press Club in Washington picked at salmon on a bed of salad, forks clinked gently against plates. The hostess spoke quietly of peace and understanding.

But then David Wurmser showed up.

For four years, Wurmser was US Vice President Dick Cheney’s Middle East advisor. And he is not at all convinced that the region deserves the world’s attention. “It is absurd,” he said to general astonishment, “that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice contributes to the ozone hole by jetting across the world to bring peace to the Israelis and Palestinians.” There are, he went on, much more important challenges, like North Korea, Iran, China, energy policy, Moscow, Japan….

The list seemed endless. “For me, the conflict is way down on the priority list,” Wurmser said. “To attach so much importance to it sends the wrong signal.”

All Domestically Weak

Wurmser is no longer with the government, having left this year to start his own consulting firm. He attended and spoke at last week’s event as a civilian. Still, his comments are telling; they mirror exactly the friction generated by the Annapolis conference within the Bush Administration.

Officially the United States is the proud host, welcoming high-ranking representatives from 49 countries and organizations to the summit with the intention of exploring possible paths to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The countries represented even include Saudi Arabia and Syria, neither of which was present at the last major US negotiation initiative, Bill Clinton’s 2000 Camp David summit. All the parties are meeting on Tuesday on the premises of the picturesque Annapolis Naval Academy in the state of Maryland, where a banner in one room features the encouraging motto: “Don’t give up the ship!”

But even before the first speech was held at the conference, many observers had already abandoned any hope of significant progress. “All the participants have the fear of failure on their minds rather than the hope of success,” Tamara Cofman Wittes from the Brookings Institution told SPIEGEL ONLINE, adding that the key protagonists — US President George W. Bush, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — are all very weak domestically.
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By Spencer Ackerman TPMuckraker

Yesterday, General Douglas Lute, a top Iraq adviser to President Bush, said that the administration didn’t require Senate ratification for its forthcoming long-term security guarantee to the Iraqis. It’s unclear whether that’s true, and I’ll tell you more as soon as I know it. But even if it is, the Iraqi constitution stipulates that Iraq’s parliament has to ratify any such agreement. And the Iraqi parliament is a lot more hostile to the idea of hosting U.S. troops indefinitely than the U.S. Senate is.

Take a look at Article 58, Section 4 of the Iraqi constitution. It stipulates that the Iraqi parliament shall ratify “international treaties and agreements by a two-thirds majority.” Whether or not President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki can finagle the deal so that it’s not a treaty — as Lute suggested yesterday — it most certainly is an “agreement.”

And it’s hard to see the votes for a two-thirds parliamentary majority.

In May, 144 out of 275 parliamentarians signed a petition calling for a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces. Convincing those same parliamentarians that they should vote for an indefinite U.S. presence is made an even harder sell when considering that Maliki is dishonestly selling his deal with Bush as meaning an end to the occupation. If there was any doubt about Maliki’s strategy to push the security deal through despite popular and parliamentary opposition, one of his senior aides told the Los Angeles Times that, in the paper’s paraphrase, “what was being discussed was a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces in the next few years.” Score one for full-on bamboozlement.

But just because, procedurally, Maliki would be constitutionally obligated to seek parliamentary ratification is no guarantee that he will. After all, he helms a government that, among other abuses of power, tortures and assassinates corruption judges for investigating his cronies. So the rule of law isn’t much of a prophylactic for the Iraqi premier. But if Maliki contravenes his own constitution in order to give President Bush an enduring U.S. troop presence in Iraq, that’ll at least undercut the Bush administration’s pledge that it seeks this new “normalized” relationship in order to “Respec[t] and uphol[d] the Constitution as the expression of the will of the Iraqi people and stan[d] against any attempt to impede, suspend, or violate it.”

Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada saw his case move one step closer to resolution earlier this month when a federal court issued a preliminary injunction against a second court martial. The Army’s prosecution of the first officer to publicly refuse to deploy to Iraq has been in legal limbo since a February court martial ended abruptly, when the military judge threw out a stipulation agreement and declared a mistrial.In June 2006, Lt. Watada held a press conference where he declared that the Iraq War was illegal, and that it was his duty to refuse orders to deploy. Lt. Watada was charged with violations of article 87 and 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for refusing to deploy to Iraq, and publicly explaining his reasons for doing so. If convicted, he faced up to six and a half years in prison.

Following February’s mistrial, the Army refiled charges against Lt. Watada, and prepared for a second court martial. The defense argued Fifth Amendment protection against being tried for the same crime twice, and filed appeals with every level of military court. Lt. Watada’s claims to constitutional protections were not heard in court until the case reached the civilian, federal district court, in Tacoma, WA.

Lt. Watada’s refusal to deploy to Iraq launched him into the public spotlight. His refusal to obey direct orders made him the center of controversy, and he drew sharp criticism from many fellow members of the officer corps. At the same time, many active duty soldiers expressed gratitude to the Lieutenant for giving voice to the rising opposition to the war among those being asked to fight it.

Prior to the beginning of his first court martial, Lt. Watada faced four years in prison, for explaining his opposition to the Iraq War. In attempting to prove those charges, the Army subpoenaed two journalists and a number of peace activists. Sarah Olson interviewed Lt. Watada before his public announcement, and objected to the Army’s attempted use of journalists to criminalize and prosecute speech.

The Center for Media and Democracy joined numerous professional organizations, journalists and media outlets in supporting Olson’s claims that hauling a journalist into military court to testify as a prosecution witness against their source creates a chilling effect on personal speech and dissenting political voices, and that subpoenaing journalists, especially in cases where speech itself is the crime in question, erodes the necessary separation between press and government, and encourages the public to see journalists as agents of government prosecution.

The Center for Media and Democracy formed the Defend the Press coalition that sent thousands of letters and emails to Ft. Lewis, demanding that the Army respect the spirit of the First Amendment requiring the press be free from government intimidation, and that the public have access to a vigorous debate on important issues — including whether or when the military should go to war.

As the Army proceeded with plans for its second court martial, it subpoenaed all of its witnesses except the journalists involved, and as it becomes clear that Lt. Watada will have his Fifth Amendment rights upheld, it is also a victory that he will not be prosecuted for speaking about his opposition to the war. Members of the military are opposing the Iraq War in growing number. Many of them are acting on this opposition: The Army reported recently that the number of AWOL soldiers had grown 80 percent since the beginning of the Iraq War, and GI rights advocates say the Army’s data still represents only a fraction of AWOL soldiers.

Without actually hearing from these men and women, public debate is dominated by the Bush Administration. A vigorous and free debate cannot be had on any issue when one side has all the power and access, and the other is barred from even speaking to the media. But, as Lt. Watada’s case appears to be headed for what supporters call a victory, it’s useful to remember that the original issues Lt. Watada raised — those of the illegality of the war, and a soldier’s obligation to refuse orders thought to be illegal — have not yet had their day in court.