HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!
The Quality of a Free Man
by Claire Wolfe
I sit at the Hilltop Hermitage, high in the pines. I'm here to ask, and hopefully answer, some of the Great Questions about freedom.
Two come immediately to mind and I'm going to deal with the first one in this column.
That question is, "What are the qualities of a free man?"
I'm saying "man" unapologetically. That's how the question poses itself to me. My every attempt to impose political correctness by writing "person" or "human being" falls flat.
I believe I know why. Freedom requires what might once have been called "manly virtues" -- though in reality it doesn't matter what shape of body they come in.
Asking ourselves to live up to ideals is old-fashioned. Almost Victorian. This is an age of "anything goes" -- which can be fine and fun. But it's not enough. We need those "manly virtues" -- plus a few extras.
So bear with me, sisters and brothers-in-freedom alike. The list I'm about to propose is inclusive.
I'm beginning the freedom quest here for a simple reason: Freedom comes from free individuals, not the other way around. Seek Libertopia without first seeking within and the horse stumbles over the cart in her path and breaks her leg. Every time.
So without further ado I propose:
12 QUALITIES OF A FREE MAN
THE FIVE OUTWARD-LOOKING VIRTUES
The free man within society
A free man:
Keeps his word. A good man's word was once his bond. Now we expect our credit score to be our bond -- but such data measures only one infinitesimal part of us. You cannot build feedom on a base of lies or habitual unreliability. Free men mean what they say and do what they promise.
Does unto others as he would have them do unto him. Helps those who help themselves. Commits random acts of decency. Aids those who are striving to be free. Does not meddle in the non-violent behavior of others, but is is a good neighbor and powerful ally when one is needed.
Shuns indebtedness. This means more than shunning debt (though that, too). A free man owns his own life and thinks carefully before giving any part of it away. He rejects false loyalties and guilt trips (unwarranted claims on his life energies). If he accepts a favor he pays it back or pays it forward so others benefit by the aid he received.
Rejects coercive power. He neither seeks power over others nor accepts the right of others to hold such coercive power. You will never hear him say, "There ought to be a law." He sees humanity not as an ignorant mass to be managed or mothered, but as individuals capable of running their own lives.
Is independent and self-responsible. A free man prefers the risks and rewards of self-reliance to the temptations of "security" provided by others. He takes care of himself and his family. The ultimate corollary to this virtue is self-defense; a free man does not delegate responsibility for his own sustenance, and certainly not for his own survival.
THE FIVE INTERIOR VIRTUES
The free man within
A free man:
Solves problems creatively. Thinks out of the box. Is fascinated by new ideas. Is perpetually self-educating. Anyone who spends a large chunk of his life sitting and whining about all the factors holding him back is by definition neither free nor ready to free himself.
Acts with daily courage and fortitude. While we await the jackboot in the door, tyranny arrives in daily demands for our collaboration. We require courage to say, "No, I won't give that information"; "I have no interest in working for somebody who forces me to pee in a bottle"; "I won't pay you to kill people in my name"; "My baby doesn't need a government inventory number"; "That's politically correct nonsense"; "Not without a warrant, you won't"; or "It's time for you to stand up and take care of yourself." Free people own that kind of courage. It's food for their souls. (Which is why I list it as an Interior Virtue rather than an Outward-Looking one.)
Lives by well-considered principles. A free man doesn't just parrot "thou shalt not kill" or "thou shalt not steal." He doesn't behave just because he fears God or government may be watching. He has examined his morality. He knows why he acts or refrains from acting. Sound principles also provide the platform for standing up with courage and saying, "No" to intolerable acts.
Seeks balanced excellence. It may be a fine thing to make a million dollars or build a better mousetrap (or a more efficient solar cell or an innovative computer game). Free people do those things better than serfs. But our life is our #1 creation. Truly free people put as much energy into becoming good, wise human beings as they do into material accomplishments. To do otherwise is to remain off balance -- and therefore very easy for "authorities" to push over.
Loves life. No, this does not mean a free man always goes around with a happy-face painted on his mug. It does mean that conscious, human life is the foundation of freedom. Despite its manifold flaws, human life is a miracle to be appreciated and defended against forces that waste or destroy it.
THE TWO FOUNDATION VIRTUES
What all the rest is built on
A free man:
Is self-aware. He knows who he is, what he loves, what he finds intolerable. Knows his own inner drivers, good or ill. Self-knowledge enables us to set satisfying goals and effective boundaries. It shows us our true path. Without self-understanding, we find ourselves constantly in bad relationships and bad jobs, living in conditions we hate -- unable to say no and unable to articulate why we want to say no.
Has a spiritual center. A few years ago I'd never have put spirituality on any list of a free man's traits. Now, I see it's a foundation stone. Spirituality doesn't necessarily mean religion. A person can be spiritual without even believing in God. Spirituality is simply the sense that an individual life has a deeper meaning than is evident on the surface. When daily temptations, disappointments, or demands for collaboration threaten to push us off course, transcendent purpose keeps us walking the path.
There it is. A free man is, in his own realm, an astonishingly civilized and moral being. To those who live by controlling others, however, he is a wild beast who can't be tamed and who is too tough to make good prey.
A free man is also the cause of freedom. The sole cause of it.
When we have sufficient free individuals, political, social, and institutional freedoms will follow. They will arise not through revolution or politically driven reform, but from who we are and the choices we make every day.
We don't require superhumans. We don't even require a majority of free people. We do, however, require a larger minority of free individuals than we have today. "Doing our own thing" is one part of being free. But lasting freedom is a consequence of that old-fashioned and presently out-of-favor ideal: personal character.
We require that to create what so many of us crave: freedom that lasts.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Sunday, July 02, 2006
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE WESTERNER
Creative cowboy math
By Julie Carter
Every now and then someone forces the cowboy to do a little scratchin' on paper.
He'll call it a tally sheet and prefers to keep his figuring on his left hand glove or the right leg of his chaps.
For the purpose of this story, I'll target the team ropers. Don't worry; they are used to the abuse.
If someone with a bookkeeping background were to put the ropers "figgers" on paper, it would read something like "Income and Expense Statement, Profit Center: Competition Roping."
The expense column would have a long list of "must haves" that total to a shocking number that the cowboy will qualify with "estimate only - exact records are not important." It is hard to tell which comes first, the rope, the horse or the rig. They are listed here in no particular order of importance.
Expense:
Top-notch #1 winning rope horse $10,000
Back-up practice horse $9,500
Three-horse slant aluminum trailer $30,000
Two-seater truck to pull trailer $40,000
Ten practice Corrientes $5,000
Worthless Blue Heeler dog named Radar $200
Arena to practice and socialize in $5,000
Hydraulic chute (cheaper than a divorce) $3,500
Roping school with Nat'l Finals winner $700
Different roping school with good teacher $700
Entry fees (to date) $900
Equipment upgrade:
· New saddle $1,200
· EXTREME go and slow bit, $125
· Polyethylene urethane no-pressure saddle pad, $125
· A box of "no miss" ropes $250
Image enhancement:
· Space-age biothane tie down $20
· Straw hat (came with full-size George Strait pic) $70
· Headstall with turquoise $200
Total estimated expense $116,490
Income:
First in the average at Mineral Wells, Texas, 3:14 p.m., Sunday, May 1, 2006 $228
Picture frame (gift from admirer) $0
Total income (exact figure) $228
Of course this doesn't take any depreciation into account including the much depreciated wife who tries to keep up with it all.
Roping - what used to be a poor-boy sport - no longer is.
In Texas, where anything can happen and usually does, the classier covered arenas are now offering golf tournaments in conjunction with their ropings. One arena has a swimming pool, two restaurants, a western store, basketball court and is adding a softball field.
It is hard to find an arena in that area that you would recognize as such - built with 2" x 12" boards and used bull wire.
You cannot go to a roping in an open top trailer, single seat pickup and a ranch horse-you would not be allowed in the gate even if you could whup the entire list of entries. You won't find a single gunny sack girth in the bunch of them.
In spite of the math, every rodeo ground in America will be covered over in trucks, trailers, hats, and swinging ropes this July 4th holiday. Its Cowboy Christmas time and the cowboys are on the road 24/7 trying to win their share of the loot.
I'd like to designate the Fourth of July as "Be kind to a rodeo cowboy" holiday. They don't all win, they can't all afford it but they all love it with a passion only they feel and no one understands.
When the rodeo cowboy lays his hat on his heart in honor of the American flag, let us tip our hats to them for being an enduring part of American history.
Even the team ropers.
© Julie Carter 2006
The Country Doctor
by Larry Gabriel
Country doctors are not a thing of the past, but I have not seen much publicity about these unsung heroes of rural America.
Most of the world probably thinks there are no doctors who still make houses call in the middle of the night, do what needs doing and send you a reasonable bill at the end of the month.
They don't come out of medical school with the normal six figure income of most doctors. Many begin their careers in jobs that pay about $50 thousand dollars a year. Their mean salary is about $75 thousand a year.
They don't fit the rich doctor stereotype, partly because they can't afford it. They don't live in mansions, just a normal house. They don't drive a Mercedes, just a pickup truck (and quite often one with a lot of dents in it). They don't care about that stuff anyway.
Quite often they are the most highly educated person in a small town, but they normally don't become president of the social clubs or school boards. They are too busy making those emergency calls for routine fees.
They don't have the same prestige as a country club pediatrician, nor even the same dress and mannerisms in most cases. You rarely see their picture in the paper, but fame is not their goal anyway.
Maybe all this is related to the oath they are required to take:
Being admitted to the profession of veterinary medicine, I solemnly swear to use my scientific knowledge and skills for the benefit of society through the protection of animal health, the relief of animal suffering, the conservation of animal resources, the promotion of public health, and the advancement of medical knowledge. I will practice my profession conscientiously, with dignity, and in keeping with the principles of veterinary medical ethics. I accept as a lifelong obligation the continual improvement of my professional knowledge and competence.
When you think about it, it is really quite amazing that these people invest close to a hundred thousand dollars and twenty years in an education and move to rural America. There are only 27 veterinary medical schools in the United States. It is more difficult to get into one of them than it is to get into a normal medical school.
Yet, after all their struggle, work and time invested, they still come to the middle of the prairie to be a country vet. Many are known simply as "Doc".
The next time you see "Doc", you might want to let him (or her) know just how much we appreciate what they passed up just to share life with us on the prairies of Dakota.
They could have chosen the money in medicine, but they chose a life instead of a lifestyle.
Larry Gabriel is the South Dakota Secretary of Agriculture
Received via email:
THE YEAR 1906
The year is 1906.
One hundred years ago.
What a difference a century makes!
Here are some of the U.S. statistics for the Year 1906:
The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years.
Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California.
With a mere 1.4 million people, California was only the 21st most populous state in the Union.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!
The average wage in the U.S. was 22 cents per hour.
The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births in the US. took place at HOME.
Ninety percent of all U.S. doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION! Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press AND the government as "substandard."
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.
Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into their country for any reason.
Five leading causes of death in the U.S. were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza
2. Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke
The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.
The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was only 30!!!!
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea hadn't been invented yet.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
Two out of every 10 U.S. adults couldn't read or write.
Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at the local corner drugstores. Back then pharmacists said, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health."
Eighteen percent of households in the U.S. had at least one full-time servant or domestic help.
There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE U.S.A.!
Creative cowboy math
By Julie Carter
Every now and then someone forces the cowboy to do a little scratchin' on paper.
He'll call it a tally sheet and prefers to keep his figuring on his left hand glove or the right leg of his chaps.
For the purpose of this story, I'll target the team ropers. Don't worry; they are used to the abuse.
If someone with a bookkeeping background were to put the ropers "figgers" on paper, it would read something like "Income and Expense Statement, Profit Center: Competition Roping."
The expense column would have a long list of "must haves" that total to a shocking number that the cowboy will qualify with "estimate only - exact records are not important." It is hard to tell which comes first, the rope, the horse or the rig. They are listed here in no particular order of importance.
Expense:
Top-notch #1 winning rope horse $10,000
Back-up practice horse $9,500
Three-horse slant aluminum trailer $30,000
Two-seater truck to pull trailer $40,000
Ten practice Corrientes $5,000
Worthless Blue Heeler dog named Radar $200
Arena to practice and socialize in $5,000
Hydraulic chute (cheaper than a divorce) $3,500
Roping school with Nat'l Finals winner $700
Different roping school with good teacher $700
Entry fees (to date) $900
Equipment upgrade:
· New saddle $1,200
· EXTREME go and slow bit, $125
· Polyethylene urethane no-pressure saddle pad, $125
· A box of "no miss" ropes $250
Image enhancement:
· Space-age biothane tie down $20
· Straw hat (came with full-size George Strait pic) $70
· Headstall with turquoise $200
Total estimated expense $116,490
Income:
First in the average at Mineral Wells, Texas, 3:14 p.m., Sunday, May 1, 2006 $228
Picture frame (gift from admirer) $0
Total income (exact figure) $228
Of course this doesn't take any depreciation into account including the much depreciated wife who tries to keep up with it all.
Roping - what used to be a poor-boy sport - no longer is.
In Texas, where anything can happen and usually does, the classier covered arenas are now offering golf tournaments in conjunction with their ropings. One arena has a swimming pool, two restaurants, a western store, basketball court and is adding a softball field.
It is hard to find an arena in that area that you would recognize as such - built with 2" x 12" boards and used bull wire.
You cannot go to a roping in an open top trailer, single seat pickup and a ranch horse-you would not be allowed in the gate even if you could whup the entire list of entries. You won't find a single gunny sack girth in the bunch of them.
In spite of the math, every rodeo ground in America will be covered over in trucks, trailers, hats, and swinging ropes this July 4th holiday. Its Cowboy Christmas time and the cowboys are on the road 24/7 trying to win their share of the loot.
I'd like to designate the Fourth of July as "Be kind to a rodeo cowboy" holiday. They don't all win, they can't all afford it but they all love it with a passion only they feel and no one understands.
When the rodeo cowboy lays his hat on his heart in honor of the American flag, let us tip our hats to them for being an enduring part of American history.
Even the team ropers.
© Julie Carter 2006
The Country Doctor
by Larry Gabriel
Country doctors are not a thing of the past, but I have not seen much publicity about these unsung heroes of rural America.
Most of the world probably thinks there are no doctors who still make houses call in the middle of the night, do what needs doing and send you a reasonable bill at the end of the month.
They don't come out of medical school with the normal six figure income of most doctors. Many begin their careers in jobs that pay about $50 thousand dollars a year. Their mean salary is about $75 thousand a year.
They don't fit the rich doctor stereotype, partly because they can't afford it. They don't live in mansions, just a normal house. They don't drive a Mercedes, just a pickup truck (and quite often one with a lot of dents in it). They don't care about that stuff anyway.
Quite often they are the most highly educated person in a small town, but they normally don't become president of the social clubs or school boards. They are too busy making those emergency calls for routine fees.
They don't have the same prestige as a country club pediatrician, nor even the same dress and mannerisms in most cases. You rarely see their picture in the paper, but fame is not their goal anyway.
Maybe all this is related to the oath they are required to take:
Being admitted to the profession of veterinary medicine, I solemnly swear to use my scientific knowledge and skills for the benefit of society through the protection of animal health, the relief of animal suffering, the conservation of animal resources, the promotion of public health, and the advancement of medical knowledge. I will practice my profession conscientiously, with dignity, and in keeping with the principles of veterinary medical ethics. I accept as a lifelong obligation the continual improvement of my professional knowledge and competence.
When you think about it, it is really quite amazing that these people invest close to a hundred thousand dollars and twenty years in an education and move to rural America. There are only 27 veterinary medical schools in the United States. It is more difficult to get into one of them than it is to get into a normal medical school.
Yet, after all their struggle, work and time invested, they still come to the middle of the prairie to be a country vet. Many are known simply as "Doc".
The next time you see "Doc", you might want to let him (or her) know just how much we appreciate what they passed up just to share life with us on the prairies of Dakota.
They could have chosen the money in medicine, but they chose a life instead of a lifestyle.
Larry Gabriel is the South Dakota Secretary of Agriculture
Received via email:
THE YEAR 1906
The year is 1906.
One hundred years ago.
What a difference a century makes!
Here are some of the U.S. statistics for the Year 1906:
The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years.
Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.
There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California.
With a mere 1.4 million people, California was only the 21st most populous state in the Union.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!
The average wage in the U.S. was 22 cents per hour.
The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births in the US. took place at HOME.
Ninety percent of all U.S. doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION! Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press AND the government as "substandard."
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.
Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into their country for any reason.
Five leading causes of death in the U.S. were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza
2. Tuberculosis
3. Diarrhea
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke
The American flag had 45 stars. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.
The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was only 30!!!!
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea hadn't been invented yet.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
Two out of every 10 U.S. adults couldn't read or write.
Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at the local corner drugstores. Back then pharmacists said, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health."
Eighteen percent of households in the U.S. had at least one full-time servant or domestic help.
There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE U.S.A.!
FLE
Federal official charged with immigration fraud A immigration supervisor in the Washington district office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was charged yesterday with immigration fraud for issuing naturalized citizenship certificates to people who didn't earn them. Robert T. Schofield appeared in a federal court in Alexandria yesterday and awaited a bond hearing today. Court papers filed in support of search warrant applications said that at least 23 persons may have illegitimately obtained naturalization certificates from Mr. Schofield. "This agency has zero tolerance for anyone who might betray the confidence of the American people by compromising the integrity of our immigration system," said Emilio T. Gonzalez, director of USCIS. "This alleged behavior in no way represents the honor and ethics of the work force at USCIS. We will continue to cooperate fully with authorities in this ongoing investigation." A spokeswoman for USCIS said Mr. Schofield has worked for the agency since 1976 and was a first line supervisory adjudications officer. That means he oversaw other immigration adjudicators who rule on applications ranging from citizenship to companies seeking permission to import foreign workers. It's the second time this month a USCIS employee was arrested in a high-profile immigration scam. The FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York announced June 7 they had arrested Phillip A. Browne, a USCIS employee who conspired with his sister to sell green cards based on sham marriages....
Ex-N.Y. Police Chief Admits to Taking Gifts Bernard B. Kerik, whose rise from New York beat cop to head of the Department of Homeland Security was derailed by ethics questions, dodged prison Friday in a plea bargain by admitting he took $165,000 in gifts from a company attempting to do business with the city. Kerik, at a 10-minute hearing in state Supreme Court in the Bronx, pleaded guilty to a pair of misdemeanors under a deal that allows him to continue without interruption his new career as a Middle East security consultant. Kerik acknowledged accepting renovations on his Bronx apartment from a company attempting to land city contracts -- Interstate Industrial Corp., a business reputedly linked to organized crime. And he admitted failing to report a $28,000 loan from a real estate developer, as required by city law. The transgressions occurred while Kerik was head of the city Correction Department. In entering his plea, Kerik admitted speaking to city officials about Interstate, but he never acknowledged a link between the renovations and his support of the company. Outside court, Kerik showed no sign of remorse and offered no apology....
State Tracked Protesters in the Name of Security Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in charge of protecting California against terrorism has tracked demonstrations staged by political and antiwar groups, a practice that senior law enforcement officials say is an abuse of civil liberties. The Times obtained reports prepared for the state Office of Homeland Security in recent months that contain details on the whereabouts and purpose of a number of political demonstrations throughout California. The source of the information is listed in some cases as federal law enforcement agencies, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, an investigative arm of the U.S. Homeland Security department. Political activities cited in the reports include: • An animal rights rally outside a Canadian consulate office in San Francisco to protest the hunting of seals. • A demonstration in Walnut Creek at which U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) and other officials spoke against the war in Iraq. • A Women's International League for Peace and Freedom gathering at a courthouse in Santa Barbara in support of an antiwar protester — a 56-year-old Salinas woman — facing federal trespassing charges. California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's office learned of the monitoring activity more than two months ago. On Friday, a spokesman condemned the actions, saying they violated the groups' constitutional right of free speech. "When people exercise their 1st Amendment rights to rally, march and protest, they should not have to worry that intelligence officials are watching them or their activities are in any way being painted with the terrorism brush," Lockyer spokesman Tom Dresslar said in an interview....
Gitmo win likely cost Navy lawyer his caree Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift -- the Navy lawyer who beat the president of the United States in a pivotal Supreme Court battle over trying alleged terrorists -- figures he'll probably have to find a new job. Of course, it's always risky to compare your boss to King George III. Swift made the analogy to the court, saying President Bush had overstepped his authority when he bypassed Congress and set up illegal military tribunals to try Guantanamo detainees such as Swift's alleged al-Qaida client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan. The justices agreed, ruling 5-3 Thursday in favor of dismantling the current tribunal system. Despite his spectacular success, with the assistance of attorneys from the Seattle firm Perkins Coie, Swift thinks his military career is coming to an end. The 44-year-old Judge Advocate General officer, who was recently named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country by The National Law Journal, was passed over for promotion last year as the high-profile case was making headlines around the world. "I may be one of the most influential lawyers in America," the Seattle University Law School graduate said, "but I won't be in the military much longer. That irony did strike me." Swift's future in the Navy now rests with another promotion board that is expected to render its decision in the next couple of weeks. Under the military's system, officers need to be promoted at regularly scheduled intervals or their service careers are essentially over....
Airport security slammed in Congress U.S. lawmakers this week called the TSA's baggage screening and bomb detection systems inadequate. The failure rates of some Transportation Security Administration programs indicated the potential for dire consequences, a leading GOP congressman said according to the GovExec.com report. "The system we now have in place, the failure rate (to detect explosives)] is just disastrous," said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Aviation Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Detailed information on failure rates was classified, the lawmakers said. In addition, TSA's baggage handlers we injured on the job more often than employees at other federal agencies, Mica said at a hearing. He cited an Occupational Safety and Health Administration report that said 16 percent of TSA baggage screeners were injured at work. Systems that kept luggage out of screeners' hands and on conveyor belts would be faster and safer, Mica said. Some baggage examination machines require too much staffing, as well, he said. Mica also urged the agency to look into a more standard and consistent screening system. "TSA unfortunately created a hodgepodge of systems," he said, calling for an investigation into the agency's screening contracts....
Base intruder caught with guidance system Military police at an Arizona base took 45 minutes to respond to a Tucson police call about an intruder because officers could not find the right key. A $78,000 navigation system for a Navy anti-submarine plane was allegedly later found in the intruder's home, the Arizona Daily Star reports. The incident at the Davis-Monahan Base began June 13 when police spotted a man they later identified as Christopher Howard inside the perimeter fence in an area known as "the boneyard," an aircraft storage area. Because Tucson officers had no power to make an arrest, they held Howard until they were told military police could not get to the area, when they released him with a warning to stay off the base. The FBI later arrested Howard on suspicion of stealing government property, the Daily Star said. Howard claimed to be an aircraft buff who had entered the base in an area where the fence was missing to get a closer look at the planes, the newspaper reported....
Emergency network goes unused First responders are not using the Homeland Security Department's new communication network and instead are relying on the telephone when terrorist situations arise. A report by the department's inspector general released yesterday says very few of the thousands of officials registered to access the network use the secure Web site to share information. Registered users say the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) "does not provide them the situational awareness they need to manage or respond to emergency operations or terrorist-related events," the report said. Federal officials created the HSIN after the September 11 terrorist attacks to share information with law enforcement, emergency management, fire departments, local homeland security officials, the National Guard and counterterrorism officials. The Web site has 10 portals that provide classified information, law-enforcement analysis, and data on international incidents and emergency management. The report says that in December, fewer than 100 of nearly 10,000 registered users of the counterterrorism portal logged on to the site and 40 of more than 4,000 users of the emergency-management portal checked the site. During the London bombings in July, users needed timely information on whether the attacks were suicide bombings so transportation security could be adjusted on local levels. "However, the information provided on HSIN was no more useful or timely than information available via public news sources," the report said....
The Total Information Awareness program was killed in 2003, but its spawn present bigger threats to privacy THE DISCLOSURE this week of a secret databank operation tracking international financial transactions has caused renewed concerns about civil liberties in the United States. But this program is just the latest in a series of secret surveillance programs, databanks and domestic operations justified as part of the war on terror. Disclosed individually over the course of the last year, they have become almost routine. Yet, when considered collectively, they present a far more troubling picture, and one that should be vaguely familiar. Civil liberty-minded citizens may recall the president's plan to create the Total Information Awareness program, a massive databank with the ability to follow citizens in real time by their check-card purchases, bank transactions, medical bills and other electronic means. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was assigned this task, but after its work was made public, Congress put a stop to it in September 2003 as a danger to privacy and civil liberties. However, when Congress disbanded the Total Information Awareness program, it did not prohibit further research on such databanks, or even the use of individual databanks. And, according to a recent study by the National Journal, the Bush administration used that loophole to break the program into smaller parts, transferring some parts to the National Security Agency, classifying the work and renaming parts of it as the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration program. It was long suspected that Total Information Awareness survived, and the disclosure this week of another massive databank operation has only reinforced that fear. The spawn of DARPA seem to be turning up in secret programs spread throughout agencies. The administration learned that it could not create a network of databanks in one comprehensive system, but it could achieve the same results by creating smaller systems that could be easily daisy-chained at a later date into the same kind of massive computer bank that Congress thought it had shut down. It is DARPA, albeit with assembly required for the ultimate user....
Analysis: Wartime Powers Face Scrutiny The Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo puts the brakes on what has been a sharp expansion of executive powers and raises fresh questions about other aspects of President Bush's war-on-terror policy. The 5-3 decision was a frontal assault on Bush's tactics and a reaffirmation of the court's own role in a system where power is shared among three branches of government. "What it says is that the court has a viable interest in remaining the ultimate authority on the law," said Charles Rose, a constitutional law professor at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Fla. Other administration anti-terror programs, including a warrantless eavesdropping program that worries even some Republicans, "are based on the same interpretation of presidential authority in a time of war" rejected in the Guantanamo case, Rose said. Legal and presidential scholars saw the decision as a check on the president's assertion of expanded wartime powers. They likened it to the court's 1952 rejection of President Truman's efforts to take over a strike-closed steel mill by claiming its steel production was necessary to the U.S. war effort in Korea. Similarly, the Supreme Court rejected President Nixon's claim in the early 1970s of broad wartime power to authorize warrantless wiretap surveillance of domestic groups opposed to the Vietnam war, such as the Black Panthers. "The Supreme Court normally does not reverse the president during wartime," said Stephen J. Wayne, a Georgetown University professor and presidential expert. "But this president has claimed a lot of power, much of it under the guise of the state of war that we're in against terrorists. And I think what the Supreme Court is saying is that you've gone too far."....
Court's Ruling Is Likely to Force Negotiations Over Presidential Power The Supreme Court's Guantánamo ruling on Thursday was the most significant setback yet for the Bush administration's contention that the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath have justified one of the broadest expansions of presidential power in American history. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney spent much of their first term bypassing Congress in the service of what they labeled a "different kind of war." Now they will almost certainly plunge into negotiations they previously spurned, over the extent of the president's powers, this time in the midst of a midterm election in which Mr. Bush's wartime strategies and their consequences have emerged as a potent issue. The ruling bolsters those in Congress who for months have been trying to force the White House into a retreat from its claims that Mr. Bush not only has the unilateral authority as commander in chief to determine how suspected terrorists are tried, but also to set the rules for domestic wiretapping, for interrogating prisoners and for pursuing a global fight against terror that many suspect could stretch for as long as the cold war did. What the court's 5-to-3 decision declared, in essence, was that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had overreached and must now either use the established rules of courts-martial or go back to Congress — this time with vastly diminished leverage — to win approval for the military commissions that Mr. Bush argues are the best way to keep the nation safe. For Mr. Bush, this is not the first such setback. The court ruled two years ago that the giant prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was not beyond the reach of American courts and that prisoners there had some minimal rights....
THE COURT'S STUNNING HAMDAN DECISION or much of American history, the Supreme Court has refused to resolve the most fundamental conflicts between individual rights and national security. Instead it has required Congress explicitly to authorize any presidential intrusion into the domain of civil liberty--even when national security is threatened. In this way, the Court has enlisted the separation of powers on behalf of individual liberty. The Court's stunning decision in the Hamdan case is a ringing endorsement of this simple practice. In brief, the Court ruled that in the absence of clear congressional permission, or some kind of emergency, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces may not try a suspected terrorist in special military commissions. The Court so ruled without resolving the largest constitutional questions and hence without forbidding Congress and the president, acting together, to use military tribunals as they see fit. The Court's analysis came in three parts. First, the Court said that under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Congress authorized the president to use commissions only in special circumstances. To be sure, the president can use such commissions to determine whether an alleged enemy has violated the law of war. But the particular charges against Hamdan claimed no violation of the law of war. Instead the government alleged only that he "conspired" to violate that law. The problem is that Congress has never identified "conspiracy" as a war crime--and no precedent establishes it as such. In the Court's view, this shortcoming illustrates the broader problem, which is that without specific congressional authorization, the president must establish some kind of "military necessity" for the use of special commissions. There was no such necessity here. After all, Hamdan's tribunal was not appointed by a commander in the battlefield, but by a retired general far from active hostilities. Second, the Court emphasized that Hamdan's trial would not guarantee him the right to be informed of the evidence against him--a right that is guaranteed in court-martial proceedings....
Courts, Congress Resist Growing White House Power As demonstrated by yesterday's landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the legality of military tribunals to try "enemy combatants," the administration of President George W. Bush has consistently sought to expand the power of the presidency in the name of the "global war on terror." The president has claimed he has "inherent rights" under the U.S. Constitution to do "whatever it takes" to protect the U.S. public during times of war – even if that means issuing "signing statements" that have the effect of ignoring or modifying laws passed by Congress, or invoking the so-called state secrets privilege to keep potentially embarrassing cases from getting to court. A "signing statement" is language a president can use to modify or effectively nullify laws passed by Congress. Signing statements have been sparingly used since the early days of the Republic, but President Bush has dramatically increased their use during his six years in office. Invoking the state secrets privilege – claiming that disclosure of sensitive information in a court trial would endanger national security – is another tactic frequently used by the Bush administration to stop potentially embarrassing lawsuits against the government. Many of these suits are brought by government employees who allege fraud, mismanagement, or other unlawful conduct, so the state secrets privilege has successfully been invoked by the government to silence "whistleblowers." But now a member of the president's own Republican Party is pushing back against the administration by introducing a bill to limit what he considers abuse of the state secrets tactic. Christopher Shays, a longtime Republican member of Congress from a heavily Democratic district in Connecticut, believes that the state secrets provision has been used too frequently and with too little public protection. In particular, he is concerned that it will continue to be used to block whistleblower cases. "If the very people you're suing are the ones who get to use the state secrets privilege, it's a stacked deck," says Shays, who has long been a proponent of limiting government secrecy....
USA Today: Call Database Not So Broad USA Today acknowledged in a "note to our readers" Friday that it could not establish that BellSouth or Verizon contracted with the National Security Agency to provide it with customer calling records, as it previously reported. But spokesman Steve Anderson said "this is an important story that holds up well. At the heart of our report is the fact that NSA is collecting phone call records of millions of Americans." "What we address in the editors' note," he said, "deals with the fact that we originally reported that the telephone companies were working under contract with the NSA. We've concluded that we cannot establish that BellSouth or Verizon entered into a contract with the NSA to provide the bulk calling records." In an accompanying story, the newspaper reported Friday that lawmakers on House and Senate intelligence committees have said that while the NSA has amassed a huge database calling records, cooperation with the NSA by telephone companies was not as extensive USA Today initially reported on May 11....
The Basic Questions The Financial Spying Program, how many people has it caught? Who are they? Where are they? What has been done about them? Did it catch anyone that could not have been caught another way? What was the cost per catch? Would that expenditure in time, effort and money, been better applied elsewhere? Did it catch anyone that was part of 9/11? Al Qaeda spent a lot of money on 9/11. They spent a lot of money elsewhere. How many of the Al Qaeda’s backers has this program found? More than one? Why haven’t they been arrested? Who are they? Where are they? The wiretaps without warrants program, how many people did it catch? How many operations did it interrupt? How many arrests or captures did it lead to? What did it cost? What does it continue to cost?....
DON'T FALL FOR THE BUNKUM OF "EMERGENCY POWERS" In the ancient Roman Republic, the Senate could appoint a temporary dictator, and invest him with specific and often sweeping powers, to deal with extraordinary conditions. And on both sides of the wall behind the Speaker’s desk in the United States House of Representatives are prominently displayed Roman fasces: an ax within a bundle of sticks, symbolizing the plenitude of governmental power—a classical representation of Mao Tse-tung’s epigram that “[p]olitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The illusions of modern politicians aside, however, that historical allusion does not invest Congress with all the powers of the Roman Senate, let alone a license to arm the President with the authority of an ancient Roman dictator—or of a latter-day Duce. The modern doctrine of “emergency powers” is striking because—unlike the authority of the ancient Roman Senate to appoint a dictator—“emergency powers” lack both a specific source in the Constitution and a definition. Obviously, if the Constitution contained a clause explicitly delegating to Congress “emergency powers,” delineating the content of such powers, and setting out specific conditions under which they could be exercised, by whom, and for what purposes, no one could complain. No such provision exists in the Constitution, however. Today, officeholders simply announce that an “emergency” exists and that they are assuming “emergency powers” to deal with it—with both the erstwhile “emergency” and the “powers” unilaterally defined by them without reference to anything in the Constitution. To any legally literate individual, this situation should be intolerable....
Federal official charged with immigration fraud A immigration supervisor in the Washington district office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was charged yesterday with immigration fraud for issuing naturalized citizenship certificates to people who didn't earn them. Robert T. Schofield appeared in a federal court in Alexandria yesterday and awaited a bond hearing today. Court papers filed in support of search warrant applications said that at least 23 persons may have illegitimately obtained naturalization certificates from Mr. Schofield. "This agency has zero tolerance for anyone who might betray the confidence of the American people by compromising the integrity of our immigration system," said Emilio T. Gonzalez, director of USCIS. "This alleged behavior in no way represents the honor and ethics of the work force at USCIS. We will continue to cooperate fully with authorities in this ongoing investigation." A spokeswoman for USCIS said Mr. Schofield has worked for the agency since 1976 and was a first line supervisory adjudications officer. That means he oversaw other immigration adjudicators who rule on applications ranging from citizenship to companies seeking permission to import foreign workers. It's the second time this month a USCIS employee was arrested in a high-profile immigration scam. The FBI, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York announced June 7 they had arrested Phillip A. Browne, a USCIS employee who conspired with his sister to sell green cards based on sham marriages....
Ex-N.Y. Police Chief Admits to Taking Gifts Bernard B. Kerik, whose rise from New York beat cop to head of the Department of Homeland Security was derailed by ethics questions, dodged prison Friday in a plea bargain by admitting he took $165,000 in gifts from a company attempting to do business with the city. Kerik, at a 10-minute hearing in state Supreme Court in the Bronx, pleaded guilty to a pair of misdemeanors under a deal that allows him to continue without interruption his new career as a Middle East security consultant. Kerik acknowledged accepting renovations on his Bronx apartment from a company attempting to land city contracts -- Interstate Industrial Corp., a business reputedly linked to organized crime. And he admitted failing to report a $28,000 loan from a real estate developer, as required by city law. The transgressions occurred while Kerik was head of the city Correction Department. In entering his plea, Kerik admitted speaking to city officials about Interstate, but he never acknowledged a link between the renovations and his support of the company. Outside court, Kerik showed no sign of remorse and offered no apology....
State Tracked Protesters in the Name of Security Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office in charge of protecting California against terrorism has tracked demonstrations staged by political and antiwar groups, a practice that senior law enforcement officials say is an abuse of civil liberties. The Times obtained reports prepared for the state Office of Homeland Security in recent months that contain details on the whereabouts and purpose of a number of political demonstrations throughout California. The source of the information is listed in some cases as federal law enforcement agencies, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, an investigative arm of the U.S. Homeland Security department. Political activities cited in the reports include: • An animal rights rally outside a Canadian consulate office in San Francisco to protest the hunting of seals. • A demonstration in Walnut Creek at which U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) and other officials spoke against the war in Iraq. • A Women's International League for Peace and Freedom gathering at a courthouse in Santa Barbara in support of an antiwar protester — a 56-year-old Salinas woman — facing federal trespassing charges. California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's office learned of the monitoring activity more than two months ago. On Friday, a spokesman condemned the actions, saying they violated the groups' constitutional right of free speech. "When people exercise their 1st Amendment rights to rally, march and protest, they should not have to worry that intelligence officials are watching them or their activities are in any way being painted with the terrorism brush," Lockyer spokesman Tom Dresslar said in an interview....
Gitmo win likely cost Navy lawyer his caree Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift -- the Navy lawyer who beat the president of the United States in a pivotal Supreme Court battle over trying alleged terrorists -- figures he'll probably have to find a new job. Of course, it's always risky to compare your boss to King George III. Swift made the analogy to the court, saying President Bush had overstepped his authority when he bypassed Congress and set up illegal military tribunals to try Guantanamo detainees such as Swift's alleged al-Qaida client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan. The justices agreed, ruling 5-3 Thursday in favor of dismantling the current tribunal system. Despite his spectacular success, with the assistance of attorneys from the Seattle firm Perkins Coie, Swift thinks his military career is coming to an end. The 44-year-old Judge Advocate General officer, who was recently named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country by The National Law Journal, was passed over for promotion last year as the high-profile case was making headlines around the world. "I may be one of the most influential lawyers in America," the Seattle University Law School graduate said, "but I won't be in the military much longer. That irony did strike me." Swift's future in the Navy now rests with another promotion board that is expected to render its decision in the next couple of weeks. Under the military's system, officers need to be promoted at regularly scheduled intervals or their service careers are essentially over....
Airport security slammed in Congress U.S. lawmakers this week called the TSA's baggage screening and bomb detection systems inadequate. The failure rates of some Transportation Security Administration programs indicated the potential for dire consequences, a leading GOP congressman said according to the GovExec.com report. "The system we now have in place, the failure rate (to detect explosives)] is just disastrous," said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Aviation Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Detailed information on failure rates was classified, the lawmakers said. In addition, TSA's baggage handlers we injured on the job more often than employees at other federal agencies, Mica said at a hearing. He cited an Occupational Safety and Health Administration report that said 16 percent of TSA baggage screeners were injured at work. Systems that kept luggage out of screeners' hands and on conveyor belts would be faster and safer, Mica said. Some baggage examination machines require too much staffing, as well, he said. Mica also urged the agency to look into a more standard and consistent screening system. "TSA unfortunately created a hodgepodge of systems," he said, calling for an investigation into the agency's screening contracts....
Base intruder caught with guidance system Military police at an Arizona base took 45 minutes to respond to a Tucson police call about an intruder because officers could not find the right key. A $78,000 navigation system for a Navy anti-submarine plane was allegedly later found in the intruder's home, the Arizona Daily Star reports. The incident at the Davis-Monahan Base began June 13 when police spotted a man they later identified as Christopher Howard inside the perimeter fence in an area known as "the boneyard," an aircraft storage area. Because Tucson officers had no power to make an arrest, they held Howard until they were told military police could not get to the area, when they released him with a warning to stay off the base. The FBI later arrested Howard on suspicion of stealing government property, the Daily Star said. Howard claimed to be an aircraft buff who had entered the base in an area where the fence was missing to get a closer look at the planes, the newspaper reported....
Emergency network goes unused First responders are not using the Homeland Security Department's new communication network and instead are relying on the telephone when terrorist situations arise. A report by the department's inspector general released yesterday says very few of the thousands of officials registered to access the network use the secure Web site to share information. Registered users say the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) "does not provide them the situational awareness they need to manage or respond to emergency operations or terrorist-related events," the report said. Federal officials created the HSIN after the September 11 terrorist attacks to share information with law enforcement, emergency management, fire departments, local homeland security officials, the National Guard and counterterrorism officials. The Web site has 10 portals that provide classified information, law-enforcement analysis, and data on international incidents and emergency management. The report says that in December, fewer than 100 of nearly 10,000 registered users of the counterterrorism portal logged on to the site and 40 of more than 4,000 users of the emergency-management portal checked the site. During the London bombings in July, users needed timely information on whether the attacks were suicide bombings so transportation security could be adjusted on local levels. "However, the information provided on HSIN was no more useful or timely than information available via public news sources," the report said....
The Total Information Awareness program was killed in 2003, but its spawn present bigger threats to privacy THE DISCLOSURE this week of a secret databank operation tracking international financial transactions has caused renewed concerns about civil liberties in the United States. But this program is just the latest in a series of secret surveillance programs, databanks and domestic operations justified as part of the war on terror. Disclosed individually over the course of the last year, they have become almost routine. Yet, when considered collectively, they present a far more troubling picture, and one that should be vaguely familiar. Civil liberty-minded citizens may recall the president's plan to create the Total Information Awareness program, a massive databank with the ability to follow citizens in real time by their check-card purchases, bank transactions, medical bills and other electronic means. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was assigned this task, but after its work was made public, Congress put a stop to it in September 2003 as a danger to privacy and civil liberties. However, when Congress disbanded the Total Information Awareness program, it did not prohibit further research on such databanks, or even the use of individual databanks. And, according to a recent study by the National Journal, the Bush administration used that loophole to break the program into smaller parts, transferring some parts to the National Security Agency, classifying the work and renaming parts of it as the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration program. It was long suspected that Total Information Awareness survived, and the disclosure this week of another massive databank operation has only reinforced that fear. The spawn of DARPA seem to be turning up in secret programs spread throughout agencies. The administration learned that it could not create a network of databanks in one comprehensive system, but it could achieve the same results by creating smaller systems that could be easily daisy-chained at a later date into the same kind of massive computer bank that Congress thought it had shut down. It is DARPA, albeit with assembly required for the ultimate user....
Analysis: Wartime Powers Face Scrutiny The Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo puts the brakes on what has been a sharp expansion of executive powers and raises fresh questions about other aspects of President Bush's war-on-terror policy. The 5-3 decision was a frontal assault on Bush's tactics and a reaffirmation of the court's own role in a system where power is shared among three branches of government. "What it says is that the court has a viable interest in remaining the ultimate authority on the law," said Charles Rose, a constitutional law professor at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Fla. Other administration anti-terror programs, including a warrantless eavesdropping program that worries even some Republicans, "are based on the same interpretation of presidential authority in a time of war" rejected in the Guantanamo case, Rose said. Legal and presidential scholars saw the decision as a check on the president's assertion of expanded wartime powers. They likened it to the court's 1952 rejection of President Truman's efforts to take over a strike-closed steel mill by claiming its steel production was necessary to the U.S. war effort in Korea. Similarly, the Supreme Court rejected President Nixon's claim in the early 1970s of broad wartime power to authorize warrantless wiretap surveillance of domestic groups opposed to the Vietnam war, such as the Black Panthers. "The Supreme Court normally does not reverse the president during wartime," said Stephen J. Wayne, a Georgetown University professor and presidential expert. "But this president has claimed a lot of power, much of it under the guise of the state of war that we're in against terrorists. And I think what the Supreme Court is saying is that you've gone too far."....
Court's Ruling Is Likely to Force Negotiations Over Presidential Power The Supreme Court's Guantánamo ruling on Thursday was the most significant setback yet for the Bush administration's contention that the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath have justified one of the broadest expansions of presidential power in American history. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney spent much of their first term bypassing Congress in the service of what they labeled a "different kind of war." Now they will almost certainly plunge into negotiations they previously spurned, over the extent of the president's powers, this time in the midst of a midterm election in which Mr. Bush's wartime strategies and their consequences have emerged as a potent issue. The ruling bolsters those in Congress who for months have been trying to force the White House into a retreat from its claims that Mr. Bush not only has the unilateral authority as commander in chief to determine how suspected terrorists are tried, but also to set the rules for domestic wiretapping, for interrogating prisoners and for pursuing a global fight against terror that many suspect could stretch for as long as the cold war did. What the court's 5-to-3 decision declared, in essence, was that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had overreached and must now either use the established rules of courts-martial or go back to Congress — this time with vastly diminished leverage — to win approval for the military commissions that Mr. Bush argues are the best way to keep the nation safe. For Mr. Bush, this is not the first such setback. The court ruled two years ago that the giant prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was not beyond the reach of American courts and that prisoners there had some minimal rights....
THE COURT'S STUNNING HAMDAN DECISION or much of American history, the Supreme Court has refused to resolve the most fundamental conflicts between individual rights and national security. Instead it has required Congress explicitly to authorize any presidential intrusion into the domain of civil liberty--even when national security is threatened. In this way, the Court has enlisted the separation of powers on behalf of individual liberty. The Court's stunning decision in the Hamdan case is a ringing endorsement of this simple practice. In brief, the Court ruled that in the absence of clear congressional permission, or some kind of emergency, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces may not try a suspected terrorist in special military commissions. The Court so ruled without resolving the largest constitutional questions and hence without forbidding Congress and the president, acting together, to use military tribunals as they see fit. The Court's analysis came in three parts. First, the Court said that under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Congress authorized the president to use commissions only in special circumstances. To be sure, the president can use such commissions to determine whether an alleged enemy has violated the law of war. But the particular charges against Hamdan claimed no violation of the law of war. Instead the government alleged only that he "conspired" to violate that law. The problem is that Congress has never identified "conspiracy" as a war crime--and no precedent establishes it as such. In the Court's view, this shortcoming illustrates the broader problem, which is that without specific congressional authorization, the president must establish some kind of "military necessity" for the use of special commissions. There was no such necessity here. After all, Hamdan's tribunal was not appointed by a commander in the battlefield, but by a retired general far from active hostilities. Second, the Court emphasized that Hamdan's trial would not guarantee him the right to be informed of the evidence against him--a right that is guaranteed in court-martial proceedings....
Courts, Congress Resist Growing White House Power As demonstrated by yesterday's landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the legality of military tribunals to try "enemy combatants," the administration of President George W. Bush has consistently sought to expand the power of the presidency in the name of the "global war on terror." The president has claimed he has "inherent rights" under the U.S. Constitution to do "whatever it takes" to protect the U.S. public during times of war – even if that means issuing "signing statements" that have the effect of ignoring or modifying laws passed by Congress, or invoking the so-called state secrets privilege to keep potentially embarrassing cases from getting to court. A "signing statement" is language a president can use to modify or effectively nullify laws passed by Congress. Signing statements have been sparingly used since the early days of the Republic, but President Bush has dramatically increased their use during his six years in office. Invoking the state secrets privilege – claiming that disclosure of sensitive information in a court trial would endanger national security – is another tactic frequently used by the Bush administration to stop potentially embarrassing lawsuits against the government. Many of these suits are brought by government employees who allege fraud, mismanagement, or other unlawful conduct, so the state secrets privilege has successfully been invoked by the government to silence "whistleblowers." But now a member of the president's own Republican Party is pushing back against the administration by introducing a bill to limit what he considers abuse of the state secrets tactic. Christopher Shays, a longtime Republican member of Congress from a heavily Democratic district in Connecticut, believes that the state secrets provision has been used too frequently and with too little public protection. In particular, he is concerned that it will continue to be used to block whistleblower cases. "If the very people you're suing are the ones who get to use the state secrets privilege, it's a stacked deck," says Shays, who has long been a proponent of limiting government secrecy....
USA Today: Call Database Not So Broad USA Today acknowledged in a "note to our readers" Friday that it could not establish that BellSouth or Verizon contracted with the National Security Agency to provide it with customer calling records, as it previously reported. But spokesman Steve Anderson said "this is an important story that holds up well. At the heart of our report is the fact that NSA is collecting phone call records of millions of Americans." "What we address in the editors' note," he said, "deals with the fact that we originally reported that the telephone companies were working under contract with the NSA. We've concluded that we cannot establish that BellSouth or Verizon entered into a contract with the NSA to provide the bulk calling records." In an accompanying story, the newspaper reported Friday that lawmakers on House and Senate intelligence committees have said that while the NSA has amassed a huge database calling records, cooperation with the NSA by telephone companies was not as extensive USA Today initially reported on May 11....
The Basic Questions The Financial Spying Program, how many people has it caught? Who are they? Where are they? What has been done about them? Did it catch anyone that could not have been caught another way? What was the cost per catch? Would that expenditure in time, effort and money, been better applied elsewhere? Did it catch anyone that was part of 9/11? Al Qaeda spent a lot of money on 9/11. They spent a lot of money elsewhere. How many of the Al Qaeda’s backers has this program found? More than one? Why haven’t they been arrested? Who are they? Where are they? The wiretaps without warrants program, how many people did it catch? How many operations did it interrupt? How many arrests or captures did it lead to? What did it cost? What does it continue to cost?....
DON'T FALL FOR THE BUNKUM OF "EMERGENCY POWERS" In the ancient Roman Republic, the Senate could appoint a temporary dictator, and invest him with specific and often sweeping powers, to deal with extraordinary conditions. And on both sides of the wall behind the Speaker’s desk in the United States House of Representatives are prominently displayed Roman fasces: an ax within a bundle of sticks, symbolizing the plenitude of governmental power—a classical representation of Mao Tse-tung’s epigram that “[p]olitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The illusions of modern politicians aside, however, that historical allusion does not invest Congress with all the powers of the Roman Senate, let alone a license to arm the President with the authority of an ancient Roman dictator—or of a latter-day Duce. The modern doctrine of “emergency powers” is striking because—unlike the authority of the ancient Roman Senate to appoint a dictator—“emergency powers” lack both a specific source in the Constitution and a definition. Obviously, if the Constitution contained a clause explicitly delegating to Congress “emergency powers,” delineating the content of such powers, and setting out specific conditions under which they could be exercised, by whom, and for what purposes, no one could complain. No such provision exists in the Constitution, however. Today, officeholders simply announce that an “emergency” exists and that they are assuming “emergency powers” to deal with it—with both the erstwhile “emergency” and the “powers” unilaterally defined by them without reference to anything in the Constitution. To any legally literate individual, this situation should be intolerable....
Friday, June 30, 2006
From: Keeler Ranch
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 2:44 PM
Jaguar Conservation Team meeting - 6/29/06
Just a brief update on the Jaguar Conservation Team meeting in Douglas yesterday. The good news is we were able to rap up the meeting in just one day. The bad news is we accomplished very little.
As an attendee at every Team meeting, with the exception to one, since the Team’s inception in 1997, nothing surprises me any more. I knew allowing the Soil and Water Conservation Districts voting rights would be a hot issue.
Terry Johnson,AZ Game and Fish Department got out of making any decisions on this matter by telling the Team the decision would be made by the two state wildlife agency directors. In New Mexico that would be Bruce Thompson, in Arizona - Duane Shroufe. In all the time I’ve been attending the meetings, I’ve never seen Terry fail to have the authority to make a decision. Obviously, he’s trying to pass any political fallout regarding this decision on to his superiors.
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Terry J. presided over the meeting. The morning was spent going through the agenda. I’ll touch on some of the important issues:
Hidalgo County and the White Water Draw NRCD applied for and were granted signatory status under the old Memorandum of Agreement (MOA).
Draft Summary Notes: We were given copies of the draft summary notes from the April 27-28 JAGCT meeting in Lordsburg. However, they are so disjointed and vague, it makes commenting on them very difficult.
There were several motions passed, including one that allowed the Soil and Water Conservation Districts to become voting members, and another that would have minimized the priority area for jaguar conservation activities to 3 counties in Arizona and Hidalgo County in New Mexico. However, these motions are vaguely worded in the draft summary notes. It was brought to Terry Johnson’s attention that the signators of the old MOA had voted to allow Soil and Water Conservation Districts signatory status by acclimation in the April Team meeting. Hopefully this will be duly noted in the upcoming summary notes.
I would suggest we contact the AZ Game and Fish and ask the draft notes from the Lordsburg meeting be rewritten before anyone tries to comment or suggest changes. I would also encourage everyone to ask the motions be fully written…. Since the meetings are not taped and we have nothing to refer to except the summary notes, we need to be able to know what AZ G&F actually recorded.
Comments on the Draft Summary Notes are due by July 14th and should be e-mailed to Bill Van Pelt, BVanpelt@azgfd.com or Terry Johnson TJohnson@azgfd.com AZ Game and Fish Department.
Update on sightings: There have been no new sightings of jaguar in New Mexico since the last meeting. There were three “black” cat sightings that have been classified as Class III sightings in Arizona. Class III sightings are the lowest level of classification - indicating the sightings were not jaguars.
Kill activities: Jack Childs reported there had been no kills by jaguars (I might add, in 9 years there have never been any kills reported). However, they were able to document, through the trip cameras, a jaguar (Macho B) feeding on a dead cow in Arizona. The cow was from Mexico and “trespassing” on the American side of the border.
Coordination with Mexico: Bill VanPelt discussed the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s participation in the Trilateral Committee and the resolution that was passed to continue the United States’ collaborative work with Mexico. He also told everyone that Mexico had declared 2005 the year of the jaguar and will be developing a conservation plan for jaguars in Mexico to be completed by the end of 2006.
Memorandum of Agreement: There was a great deal of discussion on the new Memorandum of Agreement (MOA). Here are some of the concerns brought forth:
· The text and intent has been significantly changed from the old MOA
· The primary emphasis area for conservation action has been redefined to include Pima, Santa Cruz, Graham, Greenlee, and Cochise counties in Arizona and Hidalgo, Grant and Catron counties, in New Mexico.
· Arizona Game and Fish Department and New Mexico Department of Game and Fish are now the “Lead Agencies”.
· All other signatories on the MOA are called “Cooperators”.
· Soil and Water Conservation Districts can “participate” through an umbrella agreement with the each state with one vote per state, but individual districts can not have voting powers.
· Additional “Cooperators” may be added, only with the concurrence of the Lead Agencies.
· The chairmanship is now limited to the two state wildlife agencies.
· Only “employees” of the Cooperators can now vote. This would effectively eliminate county commissioners and supervisors from voting
· No proxies will be accepted. This would prohibit the counties from extending a proxy to their designated representatives.
It is obvious Arizona Game and Fish desires complete control over the Jaguar Conservation Team as well as control over the direction the strategy will take in the future.
Equal footing with the participating agencies will no longer be granted and there will be minimal representation of local concerns. In other words, the federal and state agencies will now be the driving force behind jaguar conservation and the real “stakeholders” will have very little to say where this agenda is driven by the unelected federal and state agencies.
I’m off to spend some time with family! Will catch you up on the new Framework discussion next week!!
Hope you all have a Fantastic 4th of July!!
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 2:44 PM
Jaguar Conservation Team meeting - 6/29/06
Just a brief update on the Jaguar Conservation Team meeting in Douglas yesterday. The good news is we were able to rap up the meeting in just one day. The bad news is we accomplished very little.
As an attendee at every Team meeting, with the exception to one, since the Team’s inception in 1997, nothing surprises me any more. I knew allowing the Soil and Water Conservation Districts voting rights would be a hot issue.
Terry Johnson,AZ Game and Fish Department got out of making any decisions on this matter by telling the Team the decision would be made by the two state wildlife agency directors. In New Mexico that would be Bruce Thompson, in Arizona - Duane Shroufe. In all the time I’ve been attending the meetings, I’ve never seen Terry fail to have the authority to make a decision. Obviously, he’s trying to pass any political fallout regarding this decision on to his superiors.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terry J. presided over the meeting. The morning was spent going through the agenda. I’ll touch on some of the important issues:
Hidalgo County and the White Water Draw NRCD applied for and were granted signatory status under the old Memorandum of Agreement (MOA).
Draft Summary Notes: We were given copies of the draft summary notes from the April 27-28 JAGCT meeting in Lordsburg. However, they are so disjointed and vague, it makes commenting on them very difficult.
There were several motions passed, including one that allowed the Soil and Water Conservation Districts to become voting members, and another that would have minimized the priority area for jaguar conservation activities to 3 counties in Arizona and Hidalgo County in New Mexico. However, these motions are vaguely worded in the draft summary notes. It was brought to Terry Johnson’s attention that the signators of the old MOA had voted to allow Soil and Water Conservation Districts signatory status by acclimation in the April Team meeting. Hopefully this will be duly noted in the upcoming summary notes.
I would suggest we contact the AZ Game and Fish and ask the draft notes from the Lordsburg meeting be rewritten before anyone tries to comment or suggest changes. I would also encourage everyone to ask the motions be fully written…. Since the meetings are not taped and we have nothing to refer to except the summary notes, we need to be able to know what AZ G&F actually recorded.
Comments on the Draft Summary Notes are due by July 14th and should be e-mailed to Bill Van Pelt, BVanpelt@azgfd.com or Terry Johnson TJohnson@azgfd.com AZ Game and Fish Department.
Update on sightings: There have been no new sightings of jaguar in New Mexico since the last meeting. There were three “black” cat sightings that have been classified as Class III sightings in Arizona. Class III sightings are the lowest level of classification - indicating the sightings were not jaguars.
Kill activities: Jack Childs reported there had been no kills by jaguars (I might add, in 9 years there have never been any kills reported). However, they were able to document, through the trip cameras, a jaguar (Macho B) feeding on a dead cow in Arizona. The cow was from Mexico and “trespassing” on the American side of the border.
Coordination with Mexico: Bill VanPelt discussed the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s participation in the Trilateral Committee and the resolution that was passed to continue the United States’ collaborative work with Mexico. He also told everyone that Mexico had declared 2005 the year of the jaguar and will be developing a conservation plan for jaguars in Mexico to be completed by the end of 2006.
Memorandum of Agreement: There was a great deal of discussion on the new Memorandum of Agreement (MOA). Here are some of the concerns brought forth:
· The text and intent has been significantly changed from the old MOA
· The primary emphasis area for conservation action has been redefined to include Pima, Santa Cruz, Graham, Greenlee, and Cochise counties in Arizona and Hidalgo, Grant and Catron counties, in New Mexico.
· Arizona Game and Fish Department and New Mexico Department of Game and Fish are now the “Lead Agencies”.
· All other signatories on the MOA are called “Cooperators”.
· Soil and Water Conservation Districts can “participate” through an umbrella agreement with the each state with one vote per state, but individual districts can not have voting powers.
· Additional “Cooperators” may be added, only with the concurrence of the Lead Agencies.
· The chairmanship is now limited to the two state wildlife agencies.
· Only “employees” of the Cooperators can now vote. This would effectively eliminate county commissioners and supervisors from voting
· No proxies will be accepted. This would prohibit the counties from extending a proxy to their designated representatives.
It is obvious Arizona Game and Fish desires complete control over the Jaguar Conservation Team as well as control over the direction the strategy will take in the future.
Equal footing with the participating agencies will no longer be granted and there will be minimal representation of local concerns. In other words, the federal and state agencies will now be the driving force behind jaguar conservation and the real “stakeholders” will have very little to say where this agenda is driven by the unelected federal and state agencies.
I’m off to spend some time with family! Will catch you up on the new Framework discussion next week!!
Hope you all have a Fantastic 4th of July!!
NEWS ROUNDUP
Buyout will end Siskiyou grazing After three years of negotiations, ranchers and conservationists have agreed to terms of a buyout to get cattle off the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which was created to protect the rare mix of plants found where the Siskiyou Mountains connect with the Cascade Range. "This is a compromise that none of the ranchers really want, but we figure is the best thing for ranchers, our economic interests and for the taxpayers," said Bob Miller of Hornbrook, Calif., whose family has run cattle in the area for a century. "It's basically the best compromise we can come up with to solve a major problem that's been created by modern times." Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., announced from Washington, D.C., that he plans to introduce a bill in July that would pay ranchers $814,200 if they agree to give up leases that allow about 500 cattle to graze on the monument. Conservation groups offered to sweeten the deal with an as-yet-undetermined amount of cash if all 17 ranching families with grazing rights agree to retire their leases. The bill also would create a 23,000-acre Soda Mountain Wilderness within the monument, something conservation groups have been trying to achieve for 30 years....
House approves coastline oil and natural gas exploration The House of Representatives voted 232-187 Thursday to permit new oil and natural gas exploration off the nation's coastlines in swaths that have been off-limits since 1981 because of environmental concerns. The vote, in which 40 Democrats voted with the Republicans, reflected the political pressures of soaring fuel prices and a desire to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil, especially from the volatile Mideast. Supporters argued that expanded offshore drilling would lower natural gas prices, help farmers and manufacturers, bolster national security and bring back jobs. "We depend on foreign countries for 66 percent of our energy," said House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., who managed the drilling bill. "I'm telling you, it's time to stop saying no." The Senate hasn't passed an offshore drilling bill, and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said it's unlikely to allow new drilling off the East and West coasts. However, he said he sensed an "improving likelihood" that Congress this year will authorize deepwater exploration in portions of the Gulf of Mexico that now are off-limits to new drilling....
Life for rangers on the front lines and in the backcountry of national parks Although he spends most of his patrol alone, National Park Service ranger Kean Mihata rarely gets lonely. At any point during his shift, the law enforcement officer could be called on to assist an injured climber dangling from a cliff wall, wrap a Band-Aid on a youngster's finger, quiet rowdy campers or chase poachers. Some nights, he might be required to do all of those. "It keeps things interesting," says Mihata, who spent four years as an interpretative ranger with the National Park Service before spending the last four with law enforcement. His career has included stints in California and Alaska. "The diversity here is amazing. I get to see folks from everywhere in the world. I can't think of a job I would love as much as this one." More often than not, Mihata is answering questions, like "When is the next shuttle?" He often hands out speeding tickets and escorts oversized vehicles through the tight confines of the Mount Carmel Highway tunnel....
'Preservation' should not mean abandoning our property rights Just one year after the Supreme Court's dreadful Kelo decision sparked an outcry against government eminent-domain abuse, some in Congress are preparing a new threat to property owners in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Va.) wants to transform the entire U.S. 15 corridor, from Charlottesville to Gettysburg, into a National Heritage Area. National Heritage Areas are preservation zones, where the National Park Service and designated preservationist groups team up to influence how an area is developed (or not developed). Wolf's bill, the Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Area Act, is a pork-barrel earmark awarded to preservationist interest groups. Only instead of merely providing pork, this would actually purchase lobbyists. The legislation essentially deputizes the National Trust for Historic Preservation, other like-minded preservationist groups and the Park Service to oversee land-use policy in the corridor. This consortium would form a "management entity" and be given a federal mandate to create an "inventory" of all property in the area that it wants "preserved," "managed," or "acquired" because of its "national historic significance." In an effort to downplay concerns from property-rights advocates, a spokesperson for the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership (the umbrella group that is spearheading the Heritage Area effort), claims, "A National Heritage Area does not interfere with the local authority at all." Such a statement signifies either extreme ignorance of the legislation, or outright dishonesty. Wolf's legislation is specifically designed to interfere with local authorities....
Hippies beat back US forest officers United States Forest Service officers were hit, elbowed and pelted with a rock when they tried to arrest unruly campers at a gathering of the Rainbow Family, a free-spirited, loosely affiliated band of hippies, officials said. The confrontation on Monday night was one of at least three clashes between officers and campers as thousands of the Rainbow Family gather for a weeklong outing, which officially begins on Saturday. None of the injuries was serious, Forest Service spokesperson Kimberly Vogel said on Thursday. About 5 000 members of the group, which promotes non-violence and harmony with nature, have arrived at the campsite in the Routt National Forest about 50km north of Steamboat Springs in defiance of the Forest Service, which has refused to grant the group a permit, citing the fire danger. About 200 campers surrounded 15 officers and became verbally abusive on Monday night, Vogel said. As the officers tried to arrest some campers, the crowd surged forward, striking at least three officers and pulling the suspects free, Vogel said....it will be interesting to see how many do Federal time like Kit Laney.
Rainbow Family trials to stay in firehouse The trials for the Rainbow Family members camping in the Routt National Forest will continue in the small firehouse near Steamboat Springs, a federal judge said Thursday. U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Krieger denied a motion for a temporary restraining order filed by David Lane, an attorney for several Rainbow Family members. But Krieger later set a hearing for today in Denver on a second attempt by attorneys for the Rainbow Family to stop the trials. Lane's original suit, filed Tuesday, said the firehouse's small size effectively turned the trials into "secret proceedings." The firehouse is about 35 miles northwest of Steamboat. About 250 Rainbow Family members have been charged with camping illegally because the group, estimated to reach 20,000 by next week, was unable to obtain a permit because of fire danger....
Thieves targeting federal land to steal bark off trees People who believe in herbal medicines say slippery elm bark is good for what ails you -- especially problems associated with the skin, stomach and bowels. But stripping all the bark from slippery elm trees isn't good for the trees. It kills them. Thefts of slippery elm bark -- like ginseng and other plants valued as herbal cures -- are on the rise on public lands in Kentucky and elsewhere. In the last couple of weeks, several people have been charged in connection with stripped elm trees in Leslie and Jackson counties in the Daniel Boone National Forest. In Leslie County, three people were charged twice in one week. The second time, they told officers they were trying to make money to pay fines for the first offense, Forest Service spokeswoman Kim Feltner said today....
Continental Divide biathlon course evaluated The Forest Service says a military biathlon course, proposed for the Continental Divide just west of Helena, would have mostly minimal effects on the area. The Montana Army National Guard wants to build, maintain and use the course for biathlon -- rigorous Nordic skiing, followed by target shooting with .22-caliber rifles. The site is on Forest Service land near MacDonald Pass -- an already popular among Nordic skiers in Helena. Some skiers like the Guard's one-and-a-half (m) million dollar plan, because the groomed course would be open to the public when not in military use. Others say the course would disrupt a peaceful area, inhabited by wildlife and popular for family recreation....
Little-known law keeps Wyo. Range leases open Judi Adler and her neighbors around Hoback Ranches thought they were in the clear. The natural gas leases for minerals under the public and private lands surrounding their homes were due to expire in a matter of months, and they had received no notice of any impending drilling plans. A few months later, they read an article in the newspaper that the land, including the mineral rights directly underneath their homes, had been authorized by the federal government for oil and gas production. An operator had plans to drill three deep natural gas wells there. The move left the homeowners wondering what happened. The law governing mineral lease suspensions is Section 39 of the 1920 Minerals Leasing Act. Under that law, operators can apply for a suspension for two reasons: when it is in the interest of resource conservation, or because of “force majeure,” which basically means when the operator can’t produce the lease due to reasons beyond its control. The second clause has elicited most of the controversy. Force majeure could mean that the BLM was unable to do the proper surveys to approve a well before the lease expired, or, in a recent controversial case in Cora near the Green River, the company could not get any private landowners to grant it access to its landlocked lease parcel. In the case of the Wyoming Range, however, the suspensions can be linked to a 1992 BLM memo that effectively expanded the workable definition of force majeure to include instances when “leasing delays by the federal government prohibit a lessee’s ability to form lease blocks sufficient for the orderly exploration and development of oil and gas resources....
House measure would sweeten oil shale deal Energy companies could potentially reap millions of dollars in royalty breaks under a House bill approved Thursday that calls for the United States to model its western oil shale program after Canada's booming tar sands industry. Companies in Canada are making fortunes turning sticky, tar-covered sand into oil. The United States hopes to do the same with tar sand in Utah and its cousin, oil shale, a rock that yields petroleum when heated. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming contain an estimated 500 billion to 1.1 trillion recoverable barrels of oil from oil shale, though companies are still exploring whether it can be tapped economically. The provision in a House energy bill, which also lifts a ban on oil and gas drilling off much of the U.S. coast, directs the interior secretary to use Canada as an example of how to shape the royalties the oil shale companies would pay for energy from public lands. Canadian tar sands producers pay little in royalties until several years into development....
BLM struggles with drilling demand The federal government is struggling to keep up with demand as high energy prices and a push to tap U.S. oil and gas reserves fuel a rush to drill in the Rocky Mountain states, land managers told a Senate committee this week. The number of drilling permit applications to the Bureau of Land Management jumped 27 percent between 2004 and 2006, agency and industry officials said. The BLM has scrambled to keep pace, but has been able to boost the number of permits approved by only 20 percent over the same time frame. "We find ourselves in an uphill battle to get on top of the workload," said Kathleen Clarke, director of the BLM, which oversees much of the nation's onshore public oil and gas reserves. The situation is expected to grow more intense. Natural gas production from reserves in the Rockies is projected to double in the next 20 years, surpassing production in the Gulf of Mexico. Duane Zavadil of the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States said the BLM needs to update its permitting process to prevent delays....
Report: Grouse protections not working When state and federal regulators opened the door to drilling of 51,000 coal-bed methane wells in the Powder River Basin several years ago, they did so not knowing the implications to wildlife. Now ongoing monitoring indicates that seasonal restrictions intended to protect sage grouse and their wintering habitat in the region isn't working. The University of Montana report suggests that year-round restrictions on coal-bed methane development are needed in some areas -- particularly in the northern portion of the basin on the Wyoming/Montana border. The report concludes that "conservation strategies to date to protect the species have been largely ineffective. An effective conservation strategy is one that limits the cumulative impact of disturbances across the landscape at all times of the year." David Naugle, a wildlife professor at the University of Montana, has headed up the sage grouse research, paid for by the Bureau of Land Management in both Wyoming and Montana. Naugle released a related report earlier this month noting a 84 percent decline in sage grouse in the Powder River Basin, where much of the coal-bed methane production takes place....
Judge: BLM should consider alternatives to herbicides An administrative judge with the US Interior Department has ruled that the Bureau of Land Management should have considered alternatives to herbicides when it studied a project to control brush near Roswell. Judge Robert Holt says the agency must revise its environmental assessment for the project, which involves treating 2,700 acres near the Rio Hondo. The agency must evaluate options that include mechanical or manual control, burning and biological control. Holt says the BLM’s failure to analyze more alternatives violated regulations for preparing environmental assessments as well as provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act....
Poaching probe nets a big haul In the biggest single-day bust of suspected poachers in state history, California wildlife officers on Thursday arrested 17 people in three cases threatening native sturgeon and abalone populations. With 85 state game wardens involved, the California Department of Fish and Game called the roundup unprecedented. Arrests were made in at least eight California cities. One arrest occurred in Oregon, and three more in California are pending. The sturgeon poaching ring, unconnected to the abalone cases, was centered on an illegal caviar-producing operation in Sacramento. It involved six Bay Area men who allegedly caught the fish illegally in the Sacramento River, authorities said. Four others in the Sacramento area processed the fish roe, or eggs, into caviar....
Horned lizard still not 'endangered' An easygoing desert lizard with the ability to disappear into its surroundings doesn’t deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government ruled Wednesday. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday announced it won’t list the Flat-tailed horned lizard as a threatened species because it has plenty of habitat left in its range. Lizard defenders said the ruling is misguided and could push the reptile, described as a mini-dinosaur, closer to extinction. People have driven the the reptile from unprotected areas in the Coachella Valley, and development threatens lizards living in a desert wildlife preserve, they say. The ruling Wednesday follows a November 2005 court ruling that ordered the service to reconsider a decision to withdraw a proposal to list the lizard....
Judgment Day Set for Polar Bears Conservation groups today announced they have reached a settlement in a lawsuit to protect polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. Under the settlement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must complete its “12-month” finding on whether polar bears should be listed under the Endangered Species Act by December 27, 2006. “The scientific community is issuing sharp warnings to address global warming now, or suffer consequences that include the loss of Arctic sea ice and species such as the polar bear,” said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We need to immediately protect polar bears under the Endangered Species Act and immediately cut greenhouse gas pollution.” Polar bears live only in the Arctic and are totally dependent on sea ice for all of their essential needs, including hunting their prey of ice seals. The rapid warming of the Arctic and melting of the sea ice poses an overwhelming threat to polar bears, which could become the first mammal to lose 100 percent of its habitat due to global warming....
Prairie dogs wreaking havoc in area grasslands Uninvited guests are wreaking havoc on Wesley Grau’s land. True, prairie dogs inhabited the grasslands of North America long before Grau began farming and ranching in Grady. Nonetheless, Grau said, the rodents are irksome, and he wishes them gone. “I fight them constantly,” said Grau, who prefers to keep his population control methods secret. “They are similar to big rats.” In the past seven years, Grau has spent roughly $25,000 trying to curb the prairie dog population on his land. The wily animals have decimated entire acres of grazing land for his cattle. His horses have broken legs in prairie dog holes on numerous occasions, and rattlesnakes are prone to nesting in the underground webs of the dogs....
Agreement conserves entire Roberts Ranch in Livermore A recent agreement between Catherine Roberts and The Nature Conservancy legally protects the entire historic Roberts Ranch from development. Located in the Laramie Foothills between Fort Collins and Laramie, Wyo., the ranch is "one of the most beautiful places in the world," said Catherine Roberts, who, like her late husband and his ancestors, loves the land and cares for it. "The pioneer Roberts family and their descendents have all had a burning desire to keep this land in its natural state," Roberts said in a prepared statement. "The economics of our day makes that difficult, and so I am grateful for the chance to work on this conservation easement with so many other individuals dedicated to keeping a portion of this great land open, just as it was when the first ranchers saw it." The beginnings of the Livermore ranch, which now encompasses 16,500 acres, date back 130 years. On July 3, 1874, the first members of the Roberts family arrived in what was then called Livermore Park to manage land and cattle for Greeley resident Russell Fisk. Robert Owen Roberts had lived in other states back East before arriving in Greeley and serendipitously meeting Fisk. The six-member Roberts family first occupied Fisk's rat-infested and leaky log house....
Sheep get free lunch on city In mid-June, runners and bicyclists were surprised when they crested the hill behind Hughes Stadium in the Maxwell Open Space. There, sharing the view and the trails, were a couple hundred bleating ewes with lambs, a Peruvian sheepherder, a sheep dog and a bright blue herder's wagon. One hiker on the trails described the unusual scene as "charming." A bicyclist stopped just to take in the view, and neighborhood folks brought kids in strollers to see the little lambs. It was the meeting of two worlds, urban and rural. Sheep were a big part of the settling of the West, but sheepherder's wagons are about as rare anymore as open space itself. The most-asked question: What are the sheep doing here? The answer: They're a cost-effective supplement to Round-Up. The Fort Collins Natural Resources staff has been increasingly concerned about the expansion of invasive weeds into open spaces, caused partly by the prolonged drought. Sheep are viewed as one more weapon in the arsenal against those pesky plants. "On a large scale, sheep are cost effective and gentler on the land than traditional mechanical and chemical weed treatments," said Rick Bachand with the city's natural areas program. Sheep are particularly well suited for rocky, steep hillsides that are difficult to reach with machinery....
Drought Putting Thousands Of Cattle Up For Sale Some say parts of central South Dakota may be drier now than during the dust bowl years in the 1930's. The severe drought is forcing many ranchers to make tough decisions, like selling off their entire herds just to keep the animals from starving to death. And sales at a livestock auction in Campbell County have almost doubled this year. As livestock are unloaded the pens at the Herreid Livestock Market fill up. It's a sight that reminds ranchers and farmers of just how bleak the situation is becoming in drought stricken central South Dakota. Co-owner and Manager of Herreid Livestock Market Herman Schumacher says, "It's as tough a time as I've ever seen in the cattle industry as far as weather is concerned." President of the Campbell County Bank Bruce Brandner says, "It's come down to buy hay, move the cattle out of the country, or just have to sell the whole herd." Over the past month, livestock sales at the market have increased by almost 90 percent....
Buyout will end Siskiyou grazing After three years of negotiations, ranchers and conservationists have agreed to terms of a buyout to get cattle off the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which was created to protect the rare mix of plants found where the Siskiyou Mountains connect with the Cascade Range. "This is a compromise that none of the ranchers really want, but we figure is the best thing for ranchers, our economic interests and for the taxpayers," said Bob Miller of Hornbrook, Calif., whose family has run cattle in the area for a century. "It's basically the best compromise we can come up with to solve a major problem that's been created by modern times." Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., announced from Washington, D.C., that he plans to introduce a bill in July that would pay ranchers $814,200 if they agree to give up leases that allow about 500 cattle to graze on the monument. Conservation groups offered to sweeten the deal with an as-yet-undetermined amount of cash if all 17 ranching families with grazing rights agree to retire their leases. The bill also would create a 23,000-acre Soda Mountain Wilderness within the monument, something conservation groups have been trying to achieve for 30 years....
House approves coastline oil and natural gas exploration The House of Representatives voted 232-187 Thursday to permit new oil and natural gas exploration off the nation's coastlines in swaths that have been off-limits since 1981 because of environmental concerns. The vote, in which 40 Democrats voted with the Republicans, reflected the political pressures of soaring fuel prices and a desire to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil, especially from the volatile Mideast. Supporters argued that expanded offshore drilling would lower natural gas prices, help farmers and manufacturers, bolster national security and bring back jobs. "We depend on foreign countries for 66 percent of our energy," said House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., who managed the drilling bill. "I'm telling you, it's time to stop saying no." The Senate hasn't passed an offshore drilling bill, and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said it's unlikely to allow new drilling off the East and West coasts. However, he said he sensed an "improving likelihood" that Congress this year will authorize deepwater exploration in portions of the Gulf of Mexico that now are off-limits to new drilling....
Life for rangers on the front lines and in the backcountry of national parks Although he spends most of his patrol alone, National Park Service ranger Kean Mihata rarely gets lonely. At any point during his shift, the law enforcement officer could be called on to assist an injured climber dangling from a cliff wall, wrap a Band-Aid on a youngster's finger, quiet rowdy campers or chase poachers. Some nights, he might be required to do all of those. "It keeps things interesting," says Mihata, who spent four years as an interpretative ranger with the National Park Service before spending the last four with law enforcement. His career has included stints in California and Alaska. "The diversity here is amazing. I get to see folks from everywhere in the world. I can't think of a job I would love as much as this one." More often than not, Mihata is answering questions, like "When is the next shuttle?" He often hands out speeding tickets and escorts oversized vehicles through the tight confines of the Mount Carmel Highway tunnel....
'Preservation' should not mean abandoning our property rights Just one year after the Supreme Court's dreadful Kelo decision sparked an outcry against government eminent-domain abuse, some in Congress are preparing a new threat to property owners in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Va.) wants to transform the entire U.S. 15 corridor, from Charlottesville to Gettysburg, into a National Heritage Area. National Heritage Areas are preservation zones, where the National Park Service and designated preservationist groups team up to influence how an area is developed (or not developed). Wolf's bill, the Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Area Act, is a pork-barrel earmark awarded to preservationist interest groups. Only instead of merely providing pork, this would actually purchase lobbyists. The legislation essentially deputizes the National Trust for Historic Preservation, other like-minded preservationist groups and the Park Service to oversee land-use policy in the corridor. This consortium would form a "management entity" and be given a federal mandate to create an "inventory" of all property in the area that it wants "preserved," "managed," or "acquired" because of its "national historic significance." In an effort to downplay concerns from property-rights advocates, a spokesperson for the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership (the umbrella group that is spearheading the Heritage Area effort), claims, "A National Heritage Area does not interfere with the local authority at all." Such a statement signifies either extreme ignorance of the legislation, or outright dishonesty. Wolf's legislation is specifically designed to interfere with local authorities....
Hippies beat back US forest officers United States Forest Service officers were hit, elbowed and pelted with a rock when they tried to arrest unruly campers at a gathering of the Rainbow Family, a free-spirited, loosely affiliated band of hippies, officials said. The confrontation on Monday night was one of at least three clashes between officers and campers as thousands of the Rainbow Family gather for a weeklong outing, which officially begins on Saturday. None of the injuries was serious, Forest Service spokesperson Kimberly Vogel said on Thursday. About 5 000 members of the group, which promotes non-violence and harmony with nature, have arrived at the campsite in the Routt National Forest about 50km north of Steamboat Springs in defiance of the Forest Service, which has refused to grant the group a permit, citing the fire danger. About 200 campers surrounded 15 officers and became verbally abusive on Monday night, Vogel said. As the officers tried to arrest some campers, the crowd surged forward, striking at least three officers and pulling the suspects free, Vogel said....it will be interesting to see how many do Federal time like Kit Laney.
Rainbow Family trials to stay in firehouse The trials for the Rainbow Family members camping in the Routt National Forest will continue in the small firehouse near Steamboat Springs, a federal judge said Thursday. U.S. District Court Judge Marcia Krieger denied a motion for a temporary restraining order filed by David Lane, an attorney for several Rainbow Family members. But Krieger later set a hearing for today in Denver on a second attempt by attorneys for the Rainbow Family to stop the trials. Lane's original suit, filed Tuesday, said the firehouse's small size effectively turned the trials into "secret proceedings." The firehouse is about 35 miles northwest of Steamboat. About 250 Rainbow Family members have been charged with camping illegally because the group, estimated to reach 20,000 by next week, was unable to obtain a permit because of fire danger....
Thieves targeting federal land to steal bark off trees People who believe in herbal medicines say slippery elm bark is good for what ails you -- especially problems associated with the skin, stomach and bowels. But stripping all the bark from slippery elm trees isn't good for the trees. It kills them. Thefts of slippery elm bark -- like ginseng and other plants valued as herbal cures -- are on the rise on public lands in Kentucky and elsewhere. In the last couple of weeks, several people have been charged in connection with stripped elm trees in Leslie and Jackson counties in the Daniel Boone National Forest. In Leslie County, three people were charged twice in one week. The second time, they told officers they were trying to make money to pay fines for the first offense, Forest Service spokeswoman Kim Feltner said today....
Continental Divide biathlon course evaluated The Forest Service says a military biathlon course, proposed for the Continental Divide just west of Helena, would have mostly minimal effects on the area. The Montana Army National Guard wants to build, maintain and use the course for biathlon -- rigorous Nordic skiing, followed by target shooting with .22-caliber rifles. The site is on Forest Service land near MacDonald Pass -- an already popular among Nordic skiers in Helena. Some skiers like the Guard's one-and-a-half (m) million dollar plan, because the groomed course would be open to the public when not in military use. Others say the course would disrupt a peaceful area, inhabited by wildlife and popular for family recreation....
Little-known law keeps Wyo. Range leases open Judi Adler and her neighbors around Hoback Ranches thought they were in the clear. The natural gas leases for minerals under the public and private lands surrounding their homes were due to expire in a matter of months, and they had received no notice of any impending drilling plans. A few months later, they read an article in the newspaper that the land, including the mineral rights directly underneath their homes, had been authorized by the federal government for oil and gas production. An operator had plans to drill three deep natural gas wells there. The move left the homeowners wondering what happened. The law governing mineral lease suspensions is Section 39 of the 1920 Minerals Leasing Act. Under that law, operators can apply for a suspension for two reasons: when it is in the interest of resource conservation, or because of “force majeure,” which basically means when the operator can’t produce the lease due to reasons beyond its control. The second clause has elicited most of the controversy. Force majeure could mean that the BLM was unable to do the proper surveys to approve a well before the lease expired, or, in a recent controversial case in Cora near the Green River, the company could not get any private landowners to grant it access to its landlocked lease parcel. In the case of the Wyoming Range, however, the suspensions can be linked to a 1992 BLM memo that effectively expanded the workable definition of force majeure to include instances when “leasing delays by the federal government prohibit a lessee’s ability to form lease blocks sufficient for the orderly exploration and development of oil and gas resources....
House measure would sweeten oil shale deal Energy companies could potentially reap millions of dollars in royalty breaks under a House bill approved Thursday that calls for the United States to model its western oil shale program after Canada's booming tar sands industry. Companies in Canada are making fortunes turning sticky, tar-covered sand into oil. The United States hopes to do the same with tar sand in Utah and its cousin, oil shale, a rock that yields petroleum when heated. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming contain an estimated 500 billion to 1.1 trillion recoverable barrels of oil from oil shale, though companies are still exploring whether it can be tapped economically. The provision in a House energy bill, which also lifts a ban on oil and gas drilling off much of the U.S. coast, directs the interior secretary to use Canada as an example of how to shape the royalties the oil shale companies would pay for energy from public lands. Canadian tar sands producers pay little in royalties until several years into development....
BLM struggles with drilling demand The federal government is struggling to keep up with demand as high energy prices and a push to tap U.S. oil and gas reserves fuel a rush to drill in the Rocky Mountain states, land managers told a Senate committee this week. The number of drilling permit applications to the Bureau of Land Management jumped 27 percent between 2004 and 2006, agency and industry officials said. The BLM has scrambled to keep pace, but has been able to boost the number of permits approved by only 20 percent over the same time frame. "We find ourselves in an uphill battle to get on top of the workload," said Kathleen Clarke, director of the BLM, which oversees much of the nation's onshore public oil and gas reserves. The situation is expected to grow more intense. Natural gas production from reserves in the Rockies is projected to double in the next 20 years, surpassing production in the Gulf of Mexico. Duane Zavadil of the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States said the BLM needs to update its permitting process to prevent delays....
Report: Grouse protections not working When state and federal regulators opened the door to drilling of 51,000 coal-bed methane wells in the Powder River Basin several years ago, they did so not knowing the implications to wildlife. Now ongoing monitoring indicates that seasonal restrictions intended to protect sage grouse and their wintering habitat in the region isn't working. The University of Montana report suggests that year-round restrictions on coal-bed methane development are needed in some areas -- particularly in the northern portion of the basin on the Wyoming/Montana border. The report concludes that "conservation strategies to date to protect the species have been largely ineffective. An effective conservation strategy is one that limits the cumulative impact of disturbances across the landscape at all times of the year." David Naugle, a wildlife professor at the University of Montana, has headed up the sage grouse research, paid for by the Bureau of Land Management in both Wyoming and Montana. Naugle released a related report earlier this month noting a 84 percent decline in sage grouse in the Powder River Basin, where much of the coal-bed methane production takes place....
Judge: BLM should consider alternatives to herbicides An administrative judge with the US Interior Department has ruled that the Bureau of Land Management should have considered alternatives to herbicides when it studied a project to control brush near Roswell. Judge Robert Holt says the agency must revise its environmental assessment for the project, which involves treating 2,700 acres near the Rio Hondo. The agency must evaluate options that include mechanical or manual control, burning and biological control. Holt says the BLM’s failure to analyze more alternatives violated regulations for preparing environmental assessments as well as provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act....
Poaching probe nets a big haul In the biggest single-day bust of suspected poachers in state history, California wildlife officers on Thursday arrested 17 people in three cases threatening native sturgeon and abalone populations. With 85 state game wardens involved, the California Department of Fish and Game called the roundup unprecedented. Arrests were made in at least eight California cities. One arrest occurred in Oregon, and three more in California are pending. The sturgeon poaching ring, unconnected to the abalone cases, was centered on an illegal caviar-producing operation in Sacramento. It involved six Bay Area men who allegedly caught the fish illegally in the Sacramento River, authorities said. Four others in the Sacramento area processed the fish roe, or eggs, into caviar....
Horned lizard still not 'endangered' An easygoing desert lizard with the ability to disappear into its surroundings doesn’t deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government ruled Wednesday. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday announced it won’t list the Flat-tailed horned lizard as a threatened species because it has plenty of habitat left in its range. Lizard defenders said the ruling is misguided and could push the reptile, described as a mini-dinosaur, closer to extinction. People have driven the the reptile from unprotected areas in the Coachella Valley, and development threatens lizards living in a desert wildlife preserve, they say. The ruling Wednesday follows a November 2005 court ruling that ordered the service to reconsider a decision to withdraw a proposal to list the lizard....
Judgment Day Set for Polar Bears Conservation groups today announced they have reached a settlement in a lawsuit to protect polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. Under the settlement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must complete its “12-month” finding on whether polar bears should be listed under the Endangered Species Act by December 27, 2006. “The scientific community is issuing sharp warnings to address global warming now, or suffer consequences that include the loss of Arctic sea ice and species such as the polar bear,” said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We need to immediately protect polar bears under the Endangered Species Act and immediately cut greenhouse gas pollution.” Polar bears live only in the Arctic and are totally dependent on sea ice for all of their essential needs, including hunting their prey of ice seals. The rapid warming of the Arctic and melting of the sea ice poses an overwhelming threat to polar bears, which could become the first mammal to lose 100 percent of its habitat due to global warming....
Prairie dogs wreaking havoc in area grasslands Uninvited guests are wreaking havoc on Wesley Grau’s land. True, prairie dogs inhabited the grasslands of North America long before Grau began farming and ranching in Grady. Nonetheless, Grau said, the rodents are irksome, and he wishes them gone. “I fight them constantly,” said Grau, who prefers to keep his population control methods secret. “They are similar to big rats.” In the past seven years, Grau has spent roughly $25,000 trying to curb the prairie dog population on his land. The wily animals have decimated entire acres of grazing land for his cattle. His horses have broken legs in prairie dog holes on numerous occasions, and rattlesnakes are prone to nesting in the underground webs of the dogs....
Agreement conserves entire Roberts Ranch in Livermore A recent agreement between Catherine Roberts and The Nature Conservancy legally protects the entire historic Roberts Ranch from development. Located in the Laramie Foothills between Fort Collins and Laramie, Wyo., the ranch is "one of the most beautiful places in the world," said Catherine Roberts, who, like her late husband and his ancestors, loves the land and cares for it. "The pioneer Roberts family and their descendents have all had a burning desire to keep this land in its natural state," Roberts said in a prepared statement. "The economics of our day makes that difficult, and so I am grateful for the chance to work on this conservation easement with so many other individuals dedicated to keeping a portion of this great land open, just as it was when the first ranchers saw it." The beginnings of the Livermore ranch, which now encompasses 16,500 acres, date back 130 years. On July 3, 1874, the first members of the Roberts family arrived in what was then called Livermore Park to manage land and cattle for Greeley resident Russell Fisk. Robert Owen Roberts had lived in other states back East before arriving in Greeley and serendipitously meeting Fisk. The six-member Roberts family first occupied Fisk's rat-infested and leaky log house....
Sheep get free lunch on city In mid-June, runners and bicyclists were surprised when they crested the hill behind Hughes Stadium in the Maxwell Open Space. There, sharing the view and the trails, were a couple hundred bleating ewes with lambs, a Peruvian sheepherder, a sheep dog and a bright blue herder's wagon. One hiker on the trails described the unusual scene as "charming." A bicyclist stopped just to take in the view, and neighborhood folks brought kids in strollers to see the little lambs. It was the meeting of two worlds, urban and rural. Sheep were a big part of the settling of the West, but sheepherder's wagons are about as rare anymore as open space itself. The most-asked question: What are the sheep doing here? The answer: They're a cost-effective supplement to Round-Up. The Fort Collins Natural Resources staff has been increasingly concerned about the expansion of invasive weeds into open spaces, caused partly by the prolonged drought. Sheep are viewed as one more weapon in the arsenal against those pesky plants. "On a large scale, sheep are cost effective and gentler on the land than traditional mechanical and chemical weed treatments," said Rick Bachand with the city's natural areas program. Sheep are particularly well suited for rocky, steep hillsides that are difficult to reach with machinery....
Drought Putting Thousands Of Cattle Up For Sale Some say parts of central South Dakota may be drier now than during the dust bowl years in the 1930's. The severe drought is forcing many ranchers to make tough decisions, like selling off their entire herds just to keep the animals from starving to death. And sales at a livestock auction in Campbell County have almost doubled this year. As livestock are unloaded the pens at the Herreid Livestock Market fill up. It's a sight that reminds ranchers and farmers of just how bleak the situation is becoming in drought stricken central South Dakota. Co-owner and Manager of Herreid Livestock Market Herman Schumacher says, "It's as tough a time as I've ever seen in the cattle industry as far as weather is concerned." President of the Campbell County Bank Bruce Brandner says, "It's come down to buy hay, move the cattle out of the country, or just have to sell the whole herd." Over the past month, livestock sales at the market have increased by almost 90 percent....
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Land Rights Network
American Land Rights Association
PO Box 400, Battle Ground, WA 98604
(360) 687-3087 – Fax: (360) 687-2973
alra@governance.net
Web Address: http://www.landrights.org
Legislative Office: 507 Seward Square SE - Washington, DC 20003 landrightsnet@yahoo.com -- (202) 329-3574
Leftwing Nominee to Oversee ESA, wetlands?
— EMERGENCY —
—
*** IMMEDIATE RESPONSE NEEDED ***
POSSIBLE NOMINATION OF LEFTWING ENVIRO JOHN TOMKE
*****See Action Items Below
President Bush may make a tragic mistake and nominate a prominent Land Grabber to a key position in the Interior Department!!! This would be an attack on private property rights and a HUGE setback for efforts to change the Endangered Species Act and reform wetlands laws!!!
Mr. John Tomke is one of the final candidates for the position of Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks in the Department of the Interior. This is a critically important spot in the Interior Department that oversees, among other areas, the Endangered Species Act and wetlands policy.
John Tomke has a lengthy record as a Very Liberal Republican who has made it his hobby to attack private property rights.
Tomke is the one responsible for the Bush Administration backing down on efforts to protect private property rights on wetlands policy in 2003. Here is the story:
FIRST: In January of 2001 the Supreme Court issued a decision in support of private property rights called the “SWANCC” case. (SWANCC stands for Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County, one of the parties in the case).
The Court ruled that the federal Corps of Engineers did not have jurisdiction over waters that were outside of “navigable waters of the United States.” This was a welcome change, since the Corps had been claiming permits were necessary for any activity on any kind of permanent or even temporary wet spot, puddle or depression in the ground, even if it did not drain into a stream or creek that eventually reached a river.
The Supreme Court left it up to the Bush Administration to issue regulations specifically defining what was “outside of navigable waters.”
SECOND: Two years later, in January 2003, the Bush Administration issued proposed regulations that protected private property rights. The Administration proposed to exempt from federal wetlands jurisdiction places that were plainly not “navigable,” like wet depressions in the ground and temporary potholes that filled after a rain and then dried up.
THIRD: John Tomke, a Liberal Republican and major financial supporter of Bush for President, then got activated. He assembled and led a coalition of leftwing environmental groups in support of more federal power over private property. John Tomke demanded - and received - an hour long personal meeting with President Bush. Tomke convinced President Bush to back down on his support for private property rights!!!
By April of 2003, the Bush Administration completely changed course and reversed itself, and agreed to the demands of John Tomke and the politically correct leftwing environmentalists. The Administration agreed to keep Federal Corps of Engineers jurisdiction over virtually every inch of wet ground in the United States!!!!!
Now Tomke demands power over the Endangered Species Act!!! He wants to reverse six years of progress made in support of private property rights.
*****Action Items:
-----1. Call or e-mail Brian Waidmann, who is Secretary Kempthorne’s Chief of Staff: Direct phone line: 202-208-5043. E-mail: brian_waidmann@ios.doi.gov
-----2. Call or e-mail Douglas Domenech,. He is Secretary Kempthorne’s White House Liaison (202) 208-5647. E-mail: doug_domenech@ios.doi.gov
-----3. Call Kit Kimball. She is Secretary Kempthorne’s External and Intergovernmental Affairs Director at (202) 208-1923. E-mail: kit_Kimball@ios.doi.gov
-----4. Call, fax and e-mail the White House at (202) 456-1111, Fax: (202) 456-2461 or e-mail: comments@whitehouse.gov
-----5. Call, fax and e-mail Vice President Richard Cheney’ office at (202) 456-1111, Fax: (202) 456-2461 or e-mail: vice_president@whitehouse.gov
-----6. Call both your Senators to urge them to oppose John Tomke’s nomination.
Any Senator may be called at (202) 224-3121.
American Land Rights Association
PO Box 400, Battle Ground, WA 98604
(360) 687-3087 – Fax: (360) 687-2973
alra@governance.net
Web Address: http://www.landrights.org
Legislative Office: 507 Seward Square SE - Washington, DC 20003 landrightsnet@yahoo.com -- (202) 329-3574
Leftwing Nominee to Oversee ESA, wetlands?
— EMERGENCY —
—
*** IMMEDIATE RESPONSE NEEDED ***
POSSIBLE NOMINATION OF LEFTWING ENVIRO JOHN TOMKE
*****See Action Items Below
President Bush may make a tragic mistake and nominate a prominent Land Grabber to a key position in the Interior Department!!! This would be an attack on private property rights and a HUGE setback for efforts to change the Endangered Species Act and reform wetlands laws!!!
Mr. John Tomke is one of the final candidates for the position of Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks in the Department of the Interior. This is a critically important spot in the Interior Department that oversees, among other areas, the Endangered Species Act and wetlands policy.
John Tomke has a lengthy record as a Very Liberal Republican who has made it his hobby to attack private property rights.
Tomke is the one responsible for the Bush Administration backing down on efforts to protect private property rights on wetlands policy in 2003. Here is the story:
FIRST: In January of 2001 the Supreme Court issued a decision in support of private property rights called the “SWANCC” case. (SWANCC stands for Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County, one of the parties in the case).
The Court ruled that the federal Corps of Engineers did not have jurisdiction over waters that were outside of “navigable waters of the United States.” This was a welcome change, since the Corps had been claiming permits were necessary for any activity on any kind of permanent or even temporary wet spot, puddle or depression in the ground, even if it did not drain into a stream or creek that eventually reached a river.
The Supreme Court left it up to the Bush Administration to issue regulations specifically defining what was “outside of navigable waters.”
SECOND: Two years later, in January 2003, the Bush Administration issued proposed regulations that protected private property rights. The Administration proposed to exempt from federal wetlands jurisdiction places that were plainly not “navigable,” like wet depressions in the ground and temporary potholes that filled after a rain and then dried up.
THIRD: John Tomke, a Liberal Republican and major financial supporter of Bush for President, then got activated. He assembled and led a coalition of leftwing environmental groups in support of more federal power over private property. John Tomke demanded - and received - an hour long personal meeting with President Bush. Tomke convinced President Bush to back down on his support for private property rights!!!
By April of 2003, the Bush Administration completely changed course and reversed itself, and agreed to the demands of John Tomke and the politically correct leftwing environmentalists. The Administration agreed to keep Federal Corps of Engineers jurisdiction over virtually every inch of wet ground in the United States!!!!!
Now Tomke demands power over the Endangered Species Act!!! He wants to reverse six years of progress made in support of private property rights.
*****Action Items:
-----1. Call or e-mail Brian Waidmann, who is Secretary Kempthorne’s Chief of Staff: Direct phone line: 202-208-5043. E-mail: brian_waidmann@ios.doi.gov
-----2. Call or e-mail Douglas Domenech,. He is Secretary Kempthorne’s White House Liaison (202) 208-5647. E-mail: doug_domenech@ios.doi.gov
-----3. Call Kit Kimball. She is Secretary Kempthorne’s External and Intergovernmental Affairs Director at (202) 208-1923. E-mail: kit_Kimball@ios.doi.gov
-----4. Call, fax and e-mail the White House at (202) 456-1111, Fax: (202) 456-2461 or e-mail: comments@whitehouse.gov
-----5. Call, fax and e-mail Vice President Richard Cheney’ office at (202) 456-1111, Fax: (202) 456-2461 or e-mail: vice_president@whitehouse.gov
-----6. Call both your Senators to urge them to oppose John Tomke’s nomination.
Any Senator may be called at (202) 224-3121.
NEWS ROUNDUP
Burns pitches ban on oil, gas leases on federal land in Rocky Mountain Front A law that provides permanent protection of the Rocky Mountain Front by banning new oil and gas leases on federal land was delivered Tuesday from an unlikely source. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., who in 2002 said tapping into oil and gas reserves is in the national interest, took steps to prevent new leases from being approved on Forest Service land in the Lewis and Clark National Forest and adjacent Bureau of Land Management property on the Front. Conservation organizations applauded the efforts, while some questioned Burns' motivation. "I think this is tremendous," said Karl Rappold, a rancher on the Front and a member of the Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front. "This is what we've been working on for years. I want to thank Sen. Burns." The Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front is an organization of ranchers, hunters, anglers, outfitters, guides, local business owners, public officials, conservationists and other Montanans working to protect the Front....
Energy Company Donates Gas Leases, Is It a Harbinger for a Western Shift? A day after Sen. Conrad Burns made the first step in banning all new oil and gas leases on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, Questar E&P, a natural gas company, announced it is handing 1,691 acres of oil and gas leases in the Front's Blackleaf Canyon area over to Trout Unlimited. Trout Unlimited's Vice President for Conservation, Chris Wood, said TU had been in negotiations for some time on the Front leases, but the Burns language introduced yesterday in the Interior Appropriations Bill was a final piece of the puzzle. "It's fair to say (the donation) is a direct result of the concept of permanently retiring the area," Wood said. "They saw the big picture just as much as we did." This deal is a first of its kind, Wood said, but hopefully not the last -- on the Front or West-wide. "This could be precedential," he said. "With Questar stepping to the place, this could be a larger trend." He said TU is actively pursuing similar deals in the West. The Burns move is one of a few such surprises in the last two weeks on the issue of oil, gas and public lands. Last week, Republican congresswoman Heather Wilson signed on with Democrat Stuart Udall to support legislation to keep oil and gas development out of New Mexico's Valle Vidal. A few days earlier, Wyoming Republican Sen. Craig Thomas had a bombshell of his own, saying generally, national forests should be off limits to energy exploration....
Supreme Court Takes Up States' Carbon-Emissions Challenge to Feds The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court's most important decisions on the environment. The decision means the court will address whether the administration's decision to rely on voluntary measures to combat climate change are legal under federal clean air laws. "This is the whole ball of wax. This will determine whether the Environmental Protection Agency is to regulate greenhouse gases from cars and whether EPA can regulate carbon dioxide from power plants," said David Bookbinder, an attorney for the Sierra Club. The EPA said in a statement that the agency "is confident in its decision (not to regulate carbon dioxide) and will address the issue before the court." It said voluntary programs "are helping achieve reductions" in carbon emissions "while saving millions of dollars." Bookbinder said if the court upholds the administration's argument it also could jeopardize plans by California and 10 other states, including most of the Northeast, to require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles....
U.S. Coral Eden Found; Others Saved From Destructive Fishing Large and diverse coral communities have been discovered in the deep, cold waters of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary off Washington State (map of Washington), scientists announced this week. And in a separate but related development, coral and other seafloor communities in the North Pacific were today given sweeping new protections from destructive fishing practices. Bottom trawling—fishing by dragging heavily weighted nets across the seafloor—has been a major concern for conservationists worried about protecting deep-sea ecosystems (read "Trawlers Destroying Deep-Sea Reefs, Scientists Say"). A new ruling by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) bans tom trawling in a 370,000-square-mile (958,000-square-kilometer) area off Alaska's Aleutian Islands (map of Alaska). The closure creates the largest no-trawl zone in U.S. waters....
Ranchers pushed from Aspen area Cowpokes are officially an endangered species in the Roaring Fork Valley. More than 11,000 acres of ranch land was sold in the area in the last year, and most of that land was sold to development firms, said Martha Cochran, director of the Aspen Valley Land Trust, a conservation organization. "The core of the ranching community is getting pushed out," said Cochran, whose group is battling to preserve some of the last remaining large tracts on the valley floor. The ongoing real estate frenzy that shattered sales volume records for the last two years and is on a record pace this year is also giving the area a facelift by bringing urbanization to the remaining rural corners. Cochran said only a handful of ranches larger than 1,000 acres remain between Aspen and Glenwood Springs. "It's gone," she said. "Other than Capitol Creek, it's gone."....
Rainbow trials need more room, lawyer says The trials for the Rainbow Family members in a small, rural firehouse on charges of camping without a permit should stop and resume in a public courtroom, attorney David Lane said Wednesday. In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, Lane said that access to the first round of trials was denied to the public and some of the attorneys for the Rainbow Family members. He said the firehouse's limited space effectively turned the trials into "secret proceedings" and asked for a temporary restraining order to halt the trials. An estimated 20,000 members of the Rainbow Family will gather next week in the Routt National Forest but were unable to get a camping permit because of the fire danger. About 4,000 Rainbow Family members have already arrived. U.S. Marshals and Forest Service enforcement officers have arrested about 249 people for camping without a permit. Some also face alcohol and drug charges....
Grassland ownership fight grows A 79-year-old American Indian woman who lives on the Cimarron National Grassland is embroiled in a battle with the federal government over the land's boundaries. Bea Riley, who has lived the past 26 years encircled by the grassland in Morton County, said she wants to swap land with the federal government, which says the boundaries of her land are 70 feet off from where they should be. Joe Hartman, who manages the grassland for the U.S. Forest Service, said tepees Riley put on a campground she built would simply have to be moved so they are no longer on the disputed property. "We told her that we'd work with her in getting that corrected," Hartman said, adding that another problem is that Riley's daughter's home juts into the grassland. Hartman said that structure was an "intentional trespass" because it was built after the correct boundaries of Riley's plot had been determined. But Riley said work on her daughter's house started before the correct land lines were determined....
Inn Owner Furious About Handling of Grand Canyon Fire A fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is among the hottest fires in the nation right now. It has already burned nearly 60,000 acres and is forcing evacuations. Among the evacuees are the famous mules that take tourists up and down the canyon. The calendar, says summer has barely started. But, the year's fire season has already made it's mark. Steve Rich of Salt Lake says the blackened landscape here has been heartbreaking for his family. His ancestors pioneered the area almost 150 years ago. He and many other locals tried to stop what happened. The Rich Family owns the Jacob Lake Inn, gateway to the Grand Canyon's North Rim. Their restaurant, lodge and gift shop is five miles from where the fire started almost three weeks ago. Steve Rich, Jacob Lake Inn: "The fire was this big. They decided to let that thing burn. And we begged them to put it out." But National Forest officials let it burn because it was in an area earmarked as overgrown with fire fuel....
Judge: Leave old dams alone A federal court judge has ruled that 18 small dams in the Emigrant Wilderness are not to be rebuilt, repaired or maintained by the Stanislaus National Forest. Instead, U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Ishii said the dams must remain until they decay naturally, which forest officials say could take a century or more. "We are still undecided on whether we are going to appeal or not," Stanislaus National Forest spokesman Jerry Snyder said yesterday. U.S. Department of Justice attorneys representing the Forest Service will make the final decision on whether to appeal the decision. Ishii's ruling, released earlier this month, is the latest chapter in a nearly two-decade-old debate over how the forest should manage the check dams....
Peru ratifies US trade deal Peru's Congress ratified a free-trade deal with the United States on Wednesday that the country's president promptly signed despite noisy street protests, clearing the way for its approval by U.S. lawmakers. Congress voted 79-14 for the accord, which was backed by businesses who say it will be a huge boost to Peru's export-driven economy and opposed by farmers who fear that U.S. imports will ruin their livelihoods. Six lawmakers abstained. Thousands of demonstrators in Lima protested against the deal, shouting "Down with the United States!" Stephen Norton of the U.S. Trade Representative's office welcomed the ratification and said it would create more jobs in Peru, "opening a market of 28 million consumers to U.S. manufacturers, farmers, ranchers, and service providers." Peru's President Alejandro Toledo signed the pact in a ceremony in Lima, allowing it to become law if the United States approves the accord. Peru's approval is a blow for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies -- the leftist leaders of Cuba and Bolivia -- who want Latin America to turn away from the United States and join an alternative regional pact....
Gene Autry's Legacy and an Indian Museum Merge (and Collide) When one of the country's premier collections of American Indian artifacts joined forces three years ago with the collectibles of the Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry, the move was officially billed as a merger of equals. This being Hollywood, however, the storyline was reduced to something simpler: the cowboys were once again battling the Indians. Guess which side won. Instead of celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding next year, the Southwest Museum of the American Indian will lock its doors here on June 30. Over the next three years, the 240,000 objects in its collection, many of which have not been out of storage for decades, will be cleaned, cataloged and prepared for a move to a proposed new building next to Autry's Museum of the American West, in Griffith Park. That is where the Autry National Center, as the merged museum complexes are now known, will celebrate another 100th anniversary next year: the Gene Autry Centennial, a birthday exhibition that, according to the museum, will explore "the Singing Cowboy's influence on myth and history in the American West."....
Burns pitches ban on oil, gas leases on federal land in Rocky Mountain Front A law that provides permanent protection of the Rocky Mountain Front by banning new oil and gas leases on federal land was delivered Tuesday from an unlikely source. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., who in 2002 said tapping into oil and gas reserves is in the national interest, took steps to prevent new leases from being approved on Forest Service land in the Lewis and Clark National Forest and adjacent Bureau of Land Management property on the Front. Conservation organizations applauded the efforts, while some questioned Burns' motivation. "I think this is tremendous," said Karl Rappold, a rancher on the Front and a member of the Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front. "This is what we've been working on for years. I want to thank Sen. Burns." The Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front is an organization of ranchers, hunters, anglers, outfitters, guides, local business owners, public officials, conservationists and other Montanans working to protect the Front....
Energy Company Donates Gas Leases, Is It a Harbinger for a Western Shift? A day after Sen. Conrad Burns made the first step in banning all new oil and gas leases on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, Questar E&P, a natural gas company, announced it is handing 1,691 acres of oil and gas leases in the Front's Blackleaf Canyon area over to Trout Unlimited. Trout Unlimited's Vice President for Conservation, Chris Wood, said TU had been in negotiations for some time on the Front leases, but the Burns language introduced yesterday in the Interior Appropriations Bill was a final piece of the puzzle. "It's fair to say (the donation) is a direct result of the concept of permanently retiring the area," Wood said. "They saw the big picture just as much as we did." This deal is a first of its kind, Wood said, but hopefully not the last -- on the Front or West-wide. "This could be precedential," he said. "With Questar stepping to the place, this could be a larger trend." He said TU is actively pursuing similar deals in the West. The Burns move is one of a few such surprises in the last two weeks on the issue of oil, gas and public lands. Last week, Republican congresswoman Heather Wilson signed on with Democrat Stuart Udall to support legislation to keep oil and gas development out of New Mexico's Valle Vidal. A few days earlier, Wyoming Republican Sen. Craig Thomas had a bombshell of his own, saying generally, national forests should be off limits to energy exploration....
Supreme Court Takes Up States' Carbon-Emissions Challenge to Feds The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court's most important decisions on the environment. The decision means the court will address whether the administration's decision to rely on voluntary measures to combat climate change are legal under federal clean air laws. "This is the whole ball of wax. This will determine whether the Environmental Protection Agency is to regulate greenhouse gases from cars and whether EPA can regulate carbon dioxide from power plants," said David Bookbinder, an attorney for the Sierra Club. The EPA said in a statement that the agency "is confident in its decision (not to regulate carbon dioxide) and will address the issue before the court." It said voluntary programs "are helping achieve reductions" in carbon emissions "while saving millions of dollars." Bookbinder said if the court upholds the administration's argument it also could jeopardize plans by California and 10 other states, including most of the Northeast, to require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles....
U.S. Coral Eden Found; Others Saved From Destructive Fishing Large and diverse coral communities have been discovered in the deep, cold waters of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary off Washington State (map of Washington), scientists announced this week. And in a separate but related development, coral and other seafloor communities in the North Pacific were today given sweeping new protections from destructive fishing practices. Bottom trawling—fishing by dragging heavily weighted nets across the seafloor—has been a major concern for conservationists worried about protecting deep-sea ecosystems (read "Trawlers Destroying Deep-Sea Reefs, Scientists Say"). A new ruling by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) bans tom trawling in a 370,000-square-mile (958,000-square-kilometer) area off Alaska's Aleutian Islands (map of Alaska). The closure creates the largest no-trawl zone in U.S. waters....
Ranchers pushed from Aspen area Cowpokes are officially an endangered species in the Roaring Fork Valley. More than 11,000 acres of ranch land was sold in the area in the last year, and most of that land was sold to development firms, said Martha Cochran, director of the Aspen Valley Land Trust, a conservation organization. "The core of the ranching community is getting pushed out," said Cochran, whose group is battling to preserve some of the last remaining large tracts on the valley floor. The ongoing real estate frenzy that shattered sales volume records for the last two years and is on a record pace this year is also giving the area a facelift by bringing urbanization to the remaining rural corners. Cochran said only a handful of ranches larger than 1,000 acres remain between Aspen and Glenwood Springs. "It's gone," she said. "Other than Capitol Creek, it's gone."....
Rainbow trials need more room, lawyer says The trials for the Rainbow Family members in a small, rural firehouse on charges of camping without a permit should stop and resume in a public courtroom, attorney David Lane said Wednesday. In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, Lane said that access to the first round of trials was denied to the public and some of the attorneys for the Rainbow Family members. He said the firehouse's limited space effectively turned the trials into "secret proceedings" and asked for a temporary restraining order to halt the trials. An estimated 20,000 members of the Rainbow Family will gather next week in the Routt National Forest but were unable to get a camping permit because of the fire danger. About 4,000 Rainbow Family members have already arrived. U.S. Marshals and Forest Service enforcement officers have arrested about 249 people for camping without a permit. Some also face alcohol and drug charges....
Grassland ownership fight grows A 79-year-old American Indian woman who lives on the Cimarron National Grassland is embroiled in a battle with the federal government over the land's boundaries. Bea Riley, who has lived the past 26 years encircled by the grassland in Morton County, said she wants to swap land with the federal government, which says the boundaries of her land are 70 feet off from where they should be. Joe Hartman, who manages the grassland for the U.S. Forest Service, said tepees Riley put on a campground she built would simply have to be moved so they are no longer on the disputed property. "We told her that we'd work with her in getting that corrected," Hartman said, adding that another problem is that Riley's daughter's home juts into the grassland. Hartman said that structure was an "intentional trespass" because it was built after the correct boundaries of Riley's plot had been determined. But Riley said work on her daughter's house started before the correct land lines were determined....
Inn Owner Furious About Handling of Grand Canyon Fire A fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is among the hottest fires in the nation right now. It has already burned nearly 60,000 acres and is forcing evacuations. Among the evacuees are the famous mules that take tourists up and down the canyon. The calendar, says summer has barely started. But, the year's fire season has already made it's mark. Steve Rich of Salt Lake says the blackened landscape here has been heartbreaking for his family. His ancestors pioneered the area almost 150 years ago. He and many other locals tried to stop what happened. The Rich Family owns the Jacob Lake Inn, gateway to the Grand Canyon's North Rim. Their restaurant, lodge and gift shop is five miles from where the fire started almost three weeks ago. Steve Rich, Jacob Lake Inn: "The fire was this big. They decided to let that thing burn. And we begged them to put it out." But National Forest officials let it burn because it was in an area earmarked as overgrown with fire fuel....
Judge: Leave old dams alone A federal court judge has ruled that 18 small dams in the Emigrant Wilderness are not to be rebuilt, repaired or maintained by the Stanislaus National Forest. Instead, U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Ishii said the dams must remain until they decay naturally, which forest officials say could take a century or more. "We are still undecided on whether we are going to appeal or not," Stanislaus National Forest spokesman Jerry Snyder said yesterday. U.S. Department of Justice attorneys representing the Forest Service will make the final decision on whether to appeal the decision. Ishii's ruling, released earlier this month, is the latest chapter in a nearly two-decade-old debate over how the forest should manage the check dams....
Peru ratifies US trade deal Peru's Congress ratified a free-trade deal with the United States on Wednesday that the country's president promptly signed despite noisy street protests, clearing the way for its approval by U.S. lawmakers. Congress voted 79-14 for the accord, which was backed by businesses who say it will be a huge boost to Peru's export-driven economy and opposed by farmers who fear that U.S. imports will ruin their livelihoods. Six lawmakers abstained. Thousands of demonstrators in Lima protested against the deal, shouting "Down with the United States!" Stephen Norton of the U.S. Trade Representative's office welcomed the ratification and said it would create more jobs in Peru, "opening a market of 28 million consumers to U.S. manufacturers, farmers, ranchers, and service providers." Peru's President Alejandro Toledo signed the pact in a ceremony in Lima, allowing it to become law if the United States approves the accord. Peru's approval is a blow for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies -- the leftist leaders of Cuba and Bolivia -- who want Latin America to turn away from the United States and join an alternative regional pact....
Gene Autry's Legacy and an Indian Museum Merge (and Collide) When one of the country's premier collections of American Indian artifacts joined forces three years ago with the collectibles of the Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry, the move was officially billed as a merger of equals. This being Hollywood, however, the storyline was reduced to something simpler: the cowboys were once again battling the Indians. Guess which side won. Instead of celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding next year, the Southwest Museum of the American Indian will lock its doors here on June 30. Over the next three years, the 240,000 objects in its collection, many of which have not been out of storage for decades, will be cleaned, cataloged and prepared for a move to a proposed new building next to Autry's Museum of the American West, in Griffith Park. That is where the Autry National Center, as the merged museum complexes are now known, will celebrate another 100th anniversary next year: the Gene Autry Centennial, a birthday exhibition that, according to the museum, will explore "the Singing Cowboy's influence on myth and history in the American West."....
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Land Rights Network
American Land Rights Association
PO Box 400, Battle Ground, WA 98604
(360) 687-3087 – Fax: (360) 687-2973
alra@governance.net
Web Address: http://www.landrights.org
Legislative Office: 507 Seward Square SE - Washington, DC 20003 landrightsnet@yahoo.com -- 202 329 3574
Greens Threaten To Takeover ESA
GRASSROOTS ALERT!
YOU URGENT ACTION IS REQUIRED
KEY VACANCY INSIDE INTERIOR DEPARTMENT NEEDS YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
Last year, Assistant Secretary of Interior for Fish, Wildlife & Parks Craig Manson retired leaving a huge hole in senior leadership inside the Bush Administration on issues impacting private property owners as well as supporters of multiple-use of public lands.
In recent weeks, it has come to light that the Bush Administration is considering nominating John Tomke, most recently of Ducks Unlimited…to fill this important slot.
THIS MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN!
This critically important position has responsibility for the Endangered Species Act and its impact on so many things we do. It’s a tough assignment that no doubt requires someone with thick skin and a dedicated vision to get things done. Unfortunately, Mr. Tomke is not that person.
Although Ducks Unlimited is a major player in conservation / environmental issues through its massive national membership, they have shown little if any support for major Bush Administration initiatives such as:
-----ESA reform
-----ANWR
-----Active forest management
Leading sportsmen groups; forest products companies as well as energy companies all share grave concern over this possible nomination.
At a time when there is very little time left in this Administration to make meaningful change to land management and use, we simply can’t afford to have an Assistant Secretary who lacks the experience and the will to get the tough things done.
*****Action Items:
-----1. Call or e-mail Brian Waidmann, who is Secretary Kempthorne’s Chief of Staff: Direct phone line: 202-208-5043
-----2. Send him an E-mail: brian_waidmann@ios.doi.gov
-----3. Call both your Senators to urge them to oppose John Tomke’s nomination.
Any Senator may be called at (202) 224-3121.
-----4. Forward this message as widely as you can.
Tell him the following:
----- John Tomke is not qualified for the job of Assistant Secretary. The issues are way too controversial and too complex for someone who has not shown the ability to deliver on these issues in the past.
----- This nomination is a slap in the face to those who have worked hard on key Administration initiatives such as Endangered Species Act reform, ANWR and specific species issues.
----- An Administration which has still failed to deliver ESA reform regulations – is now putting people in positions of power who have worked actively against such reforms.
----- There are other, more qualified candidates who better represent the views of the people across this country who worked hard to elect President Bush in 2000 and 2004. We didn’t work hard for this President’s election and re-election only to be told NO on the issues most important to our coalitions across the country.
PLEASE MAKE THIS CALL OR SEND YOUR E-MAIL TODAY!
This nomination might be eminent and your help is needed today. We must stop this from happening or we’ll likely see the last 2 years of this Administration as a total waste of time and effort for all of our hard work over the past 6 years.
Please forward this message as widely as possible.
American Land Rights Association
PO Box 400, Battle Ground, WA 98604
(360) 687-3087 – Fax: (360) 687-2973
alra@governance.net
Web Address: http://www.landrights.org
Legislative Office: 507 Seward Square SE - Washington, DC 20003 landrightsnet@yahoo.com -- 202 329 3574
Greens Threaten To Takeover ESA
GRASSROOTS ALERT!
YOU URGENT ACTION IS REQUIRED
KEY VACANCY INSIDE INTERIOR DEPARTMENT NEEDS YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
Last year, Assistant Secretary of Interior for Fish, Wildlife & Parks Craig Manson retired leaving a huge hole in senior leadership inside the Bush Administration on issues impacting private property owners as well as supporters of multiple-use of public lands.
In recent weeks, it has come to light that the Bush Administration is considering nominating John Tomke, most recently of Ducks Unlimited…to fill this important slot.
THIS MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN!
This critically important position has responsibility for the Endangered Species Act and its impact on so many things we do. It’s a tough assignment that no doubt requires someone with thick skin and a dedicated vision to get things done. Unfortunately, Mr. Tomke is not that person.
Although Ducks Unlimited is a major player in conservation / environmental issues through its massive national membership, they have shown little if any support for major Bush Administration initiatives such as:
-----ESA reform
-----ANWR
-----Active forest management
Leading sportsmen groups; forest products companies as well as energy companies all share grave concern over this possible nomination.
At a time when there is very little time left in this Administration to make meaningful change to land management and use, we simply can’t afford to have an Assistant Secretary who lacks the experience and the will to get the tough things done.
*****Action Items:
-----1. Call or e-mail Brian Waidmann, who is Secretary Kempthorne’s Chief of Staff: Direct phone line: 202-208-5043
-----2. Send him an E-mail: brian_waidmann@ios.doi.gov
-----3. Call both your Senators to urge them to oppose John Tomke’s nomination.
Any Senator may be called at (202) 224-3121.
-----4. Forward this message as widely as you can.
Tell him the following:
----- John Tomke is not qualified for the job of Assistant Secretary. The issues are way too controversial and too complex for someone who has not shown the ability to deliver on these issues in the past.
----- This nomination is a slap in the face to those who have worked hard on key Administration initiatives such as Endangered Species Act reform, ANWR and specific species issues.
----- An Administration which has still failed to deliver ESA reform regulations – is now putting people in positions of power who have worked actively against such reforms.
----- There are other, more qualified candidates who better represent the views of the people across this country who worked hard to elect President Bush in 2000 and 2004. We didn’t work hard for this President’s election and re-election only to be told NO on the issues most important to our coalitions across the country.
PLEASE MAKE THIS CALL OR SEND YOUR E-MAIL TODAY!
This nomination might be eminent and your help is needed today. We must stop this from happening or we’ll likely see the last 2 years of this Administration as a total waste of time and effort for all of our hard work over the past 6 years.
Please forward this message as widely as possible.
FLE
Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials. The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database. Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said. The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview on Thursday. The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records. The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift. That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues....
Bush Condemns Terror Finance Report in Times President Bush on Monday sharply condemned the disclosure of a program to secretly monitor the financial transactions of suspected terrorists. ''The disclosure of this program is disgraceful,'' he said. ''For people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America,'' Bush said, jabbing his finger for emphasis. He said the disclosure of the program ''makes it harder to win this war on terror.'' The program has been going on since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It was disclosed last week by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. Using broad government subpoenas, the program allows U.S. counterterrorism analysts to obtain financial information from a vast database maintained by a company based in Belgium. It routes about 11 million financial transactions daily among 7,800 banks and other financial institutions in 200 countries. ''Congress was briefed and what we did was fully authorized under the law,'' Bush said, talking with reporters in the Roosevelt Room after meeting with groups that support U.S. troops in Iraq. ''We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America,'' the president said. ''What we were doing was the right thing.''....
GOP bill targets NY Times House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records. The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation. The resolution comes as Republicans from the president on down condemn media organizations for reporting on the secret government program that tracked financial records overseas through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international banking cooperative. Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), working independently from his leadership, began circulating a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) during a late series of votes yesterday asking his leaders to revoke the Times’s congressional press credentials. The Standing Committee decides which organizations and reporters can be accredited, according to the rules of both the House and Senate press galleries. Members of that committee are elected by accredited members of those galleries....
Damage Study Urged on Surveillance Reports Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, asked the director of national intelligence on Tuesday to assess any damage to American counterterrorism efforts caused by the disclosure of secret programs to monitor telephone calls and financial transactions. Mr. Roberts, Republican of Kansas, singled out The New York Times for an article last week that reported that the government was tracking money transfers handled by a banking consortium based in Belgium. The targeting of the financial data, which includes some Americans' transactions, was also reported Thursday by The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. In his letter to John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, Mr. Roberts wrote that "we have been unable to persuade the media to act responsibly and to protect the means by which we protect this nation." He asked for a formal evaluation of damage to intelligence collection resulting from the revelation of the secret financial monitoring as well as The Times's disclosure in December of the National Security Agency's monitoring of phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans suspected of having links to Al Qaeda. In London, meanwhile, a human rights group said Tuesday that it had filed complaints in 32 countries alleging that the banking consortium, known as Swift, violated European and Asian privacy laws by giving the United States access to its data....
Bush's Use of Authority Riles Senator Senators on the Judiciary Committee accused President Bush of an "unprecedented" and "astonishing" power grab on Tuesday for making use of a device that gave him the authority to revise or ignore more than 750 laws enacted since he became president. By using what are known as signing statements, memorandums issued with legislation as he signs it, the president has reserved the right to not enforce any laws he thinks violate the Constitution or national security, or that impair foreign relations. A lawyer for the White House said that Mr. Bush was only doing his duty to uphold the Constitution. But Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, characterized the president's actions as a declaration that he "will do as he pleases," without regard to the laws passed by Congress. "There's a real issue here as to whether the president may, in effect, cherry-pick the provisions he likes and exclude the ones he doesn't like," Mr. Specter said at a hearing. "Wouldn't it be better, as a matter of comity," he said, "for the president to have come to the Congress and said, 'I'd like to have this in the bill; I'd like to have these exceptions in the bill,' so that we could have considered that?" Mr. Specter and others are particularly upset that Mr. Bush reserved the right to interpret the torture ban passed overwhelmingly by Congress, as well as Congressional oversight powers in the renewal of the Patriot Act....
Court Review of Wiretaps May Be Near, Senator Says Senator Arlen Specter said Sunday that the White House and Congress were close to reaching a resolution on submitting a National Security Agency wiretap program to judicial review. "I think there is an inclination to have it submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and that would be a big step forward for protection of constitutional rights and civil liberties," Mr. Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday." President Bush and his top advisers have resisted calls for formal legal oversight of the program under which the N.S.A. listens in on phone calls and reads e-mail messages to and from Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes may be linked to terrorists. Only those communications into and out of the country are monitored, administration officials say. Until late 2001, the security agency focused only on the foreign end of such conversations; if the agency decided that someone in the United States was of intelligence interest, it was supposed to get a warrant from the intelligence surveillance court. Now such warrants are sought only for communications between two people in the United States. Revelations about that program have incited debate in Congress and beyond about the president's constitutional authority to order the wiretaps, and lawsuits have been filed against the government and phone companies....
Top Court Upholds No-Knock Police Search The Supreme Court made it easier Thursday for police to barge into homes and seize evidence without knocking or waiting, a sign of the court's new conservatism with Samuel Alito on board. The court, on a 5-4 vote, said judges cannot throw out evidence collected by police who have search warrants but do not properly announce their arrival. It was a significant rollback of earlier rulings protective of homeowners, even unsympathetic homeowners like Booker Hudson, who had a loaded gun next to him and cocaine rocks in his pocket when Detroit police entered his unlocked home in 1998 without knocking. The court's five-member conservative majority, anchored by new Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito, said that police blunders should not result in "a get-out-of-jail-free card" for defendants. Dissenting justices predicted that police will now feel free to ignore previous court rulings requiring officers with search warrants to knock and announce themselves to avoid running afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches....
Hard Knocks With No-Knock Last week, a 5-4 majority led by Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that violation of the "knock-and announce" rule—a custom by which police serving a warrant knock on the suspect's door and wait some decent period of time (which in a previous case had been defined as 15 to 20 seconds)—does not require suppression of evidence found in a search. In the case, police searching for drugs and firearms at the home of suspect Booker T. Hudson announced themselves outside Hudson's home, did not knock, and failed to wait more than a few seconds before breaking down his door. They found drugs and a gun as described in the warrant, and the issue at hand was whether the failure to knock and wait was enough to invoke the "exclusionary rule," barring evidence obtained in an unconstitutional fashion. Scalia argues, and supporters of his decision agree, that there is no constitutional issue involved in the no-knock entry. In a glib editorial preemptively mocking "civil libertarians, especially those on the left," the New York Sun notes that the knock and announce rule is not written into the Fourth Amendment, or any other part of the U.S. Constitution. Instead, it is an English common-law practice dating back to the Middle Ages. (It has been part of federal statutory law since 1917.) The George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr finds no conflict between Scalia's alleged "originalism" and his Hudson decision. Does any of this make sense? If you presume that constitutionality is the full measure of your rights as an American citizen and a human being, maybe. But preserving the idea that American citizens are entitled to some dignity is about more than ruling out whatever wasn't specifically mentioned by the founding fathers. The idea that everybody is entitled to the presumption of innocence isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution either, but this concept underlies a range of customs and common law practices (most of which are also absent from the text of the Constitution) that have long been recognized as part of individual liberty. Presuming innocence doesn't mean everybody is innocent; it means authorities must err on the side of your rights as an American citizen....
Supreme Court Ruling on Police Raids Endangers Citizens Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in its 5-4 decision in the case of Hudson v. Michigan that when police conduct an illegal, no-knock raid, any evidence they seize in the raid can still be used against the suspect at trial, even though the raid was conducted illegally. I’ve spent the last year researching these types of volatile, highly-confrontational, paramilitary raids for a forthcoming report for the Cato Institute. The decision in Hudson is almost certain to lead to more illegal no-knock raids, more mistaken raids on innocent people, and more unnecessary deaths, both of civilians and of police officers. As recently as 1995, the Court ruled in the case of Wilson v. Arkansas that the centuries-old common law notion that police should announce themselves before entering a private home was engrained in the Fourth Amendment. That is, it is an inherent part of the Constitution. The Court issued this ruling unanimously, including votes by Justices Thomas and Scalia. In Hudson the Court didn’t overturn Wilson. The announcement requirement still exists. But the Court did take away the only realistic way of enforcing it, which is to punish police by barring evidence when they break it. In his opinion, Scalia argued that there are better ways to punish police who break the rule, such as suing them. But both the state of Michigan and the U.S. government both acknowledged in their briefs in the case that they couldn’t come up with a single case where such a lawsuit had been successful. In other words, with Hudson and Wilson, the Court has said not only is the requirement that police announce themselves before entering a private home law, it’s in the Constitution, the highest law in the land. Yet the Court has also said it’s not too concerned with enforcing that law. The Rule of Law is a value held dear by most conservatives. Conservatives tend to loathe the fact that we have laws on the books that go unenforced. And rightly so. Unenforced law undermines respect for the law and for the criminal justice process. Yet that’s exactly what has happened with Hudson....
FBI Erred Widely in Moussaoui Probe, Report Says The FBI's mistakes in the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui extended from headquarters officials who dismissed the threat posed by the al-Qaeda operative down to field agents and even a prominent FBI whistle-blower, according to a government report made public yesterday. The report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said "numerous systemic problems" within the bureau prevented the FBI from unraveling Moussaoui's role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror plot when he was arrested a month before the attacks. Moussaoui later became the only person charged in a U.S. courtroom in connection with the attacks. He was sentenced to life in prison last month. Fine concluded that senior FBI managers failed to move aggressively to gain a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings before Sept. 11. But unlike previous public criticisms of the FBI's bungling of the case -- which have focused on senior FBI managers in Washington -- Fine's analysis said there was plenty of blame to go around. The inspector general said former FBI lawyer Colleen Rowley, who gained fame as a whistle-blower when she pointed out the errors by headquarters, had failed to properly guide agents on what type of search warrant to seek. He said agents in Minneapolis, who have been hailed for warning supervisors about Moussaoui, rushed to open an intelligence investigation before realizing that they would need a criminal search warrant. The so-called "wall" that existed at the time between intelligence and criminal investigators has been blamed for the failure to examine Moussaoui's belongings until after Sept. 11. Ultimately, Fine concluded, no FBI policies or procedures were violated in the Moussaoui investigation....
A Busy School for Border Patrol in New Mexico Cadets must double up in dorms, and prefabricated temporary classrooms have sprouted almost everywhere. Scores of agents have been withdrawn from policing the border to serve as instructors. And next year, twice as many trainees as this year are expected to troop through the cramped quarters. All in all, the Border Patrol Academy here in the desert of southeastern New Mexico is bursting at the seams and bustling with activity as the agency strives to train enough cadets to fulfill President Bush's plan adding 6,000 agents by the end of 2008 as part of his border security program. Charles C. Whitmire, the acting chief of the academy, said Thursday at the conclusion of a two-day tour for the news media that the president's goal would be met. "The answer is absolutely," he said. Several of the cadets, a broad range of former members of the military and law enforcement agencies, recent college and high school graduates, and even a few former missionaries, said the physical training was the most difficult. The recruits hit the deck for endless push-ups, situps and other exercises, along with frequent runs in the heat of the desert, to get them in shape for border assignments in often hostile, dangerous terrain where an agent frequently patrols alone. On average, only 1 in 30 applicants ends up an agent....
Border agents return gunfire after smugglers shoot at vehicle U.S. Border Patrol agents attempting to stop a marijuana-laden SUV that entered the country illegally Wednesday got into a gunfight with the smugglers. At about 7 p.m., agents were notified that the camera operations division "had picked up on" a vehicle crossing the border near the Bar K S Ranch just south of the Royal Road subdivision, said Lu Majeda, agency spokesman. "Our agents responded," Majeda said, "and attempted to intercept a gray newer model SUV. While making that attempt the vehicle eventually stopped and a group of people exited the vehicle. At the same time, shots were fired on our agent. We don't know if the shots came from the suspects that came out of the SUV or if there was a scout or someone already in place that was shooting. Majeda explained that it is common for smugglers to have people in place on the ground to watch as drug loads are moved through an area. "The shots hit our agent's vehicle, but did not hit the agent. He did return fire. At this time, we do not know if any of the others were hit or injured."....
Opponent's Gun Permit Is Revoked Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has revoked the concealed weapons license of a retired sheriff's captain who waged a fiery but unsuccessful campaign to unseat him in last week's election, a move the candidate's lawyer called "blatant retaliation." Undersheriff Larry Waldie notified retired Capt. Ken Masse of the move two days after the election, accusing the failed candidate of waging a deceptive and dishonest campaign that "may have damaged the public's confidence in this agency." Masse, who served 35 years with the department before retiring last year, intends to appeal the revocation. Peace officers in California are routinely issued credentials that allow them to carry concealed weapons after they retire. Those credentials can be revoked upon a showing of "good cause" by the department. Police agencies usually take such action only after retired officers are accused of criminal wrongdoing or other evidence indicates they could pose a danger with a gun or law enforcement credentials, said Masse's attorney, Dieter Dammeier. "It happens when there's dangerous conduct, not when somebody is engaged in politics," Dammeier said....
Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials. The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database. Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said. The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview on Thursday. The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records. The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift. That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues....
Bush Condemns Terror Finance Report in Times President Bush on Monday sharply condemned the disclosure of a program to secretly monitor the financial transactions of suspected terrorists. ''The disclosure of this program is disgraceful,'' he said. ''For people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America,'' Bush said, jabbing his finger for emphasis. He said the disclosure of the program ''makes it harder to win this war on terror.'' The program has been going on since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It was disclosed last week by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. Using broad government subpoenas, the program allows U.S. counterterrorism analysts to obtain financial information from a vast database maintained by a company based in Belgium. It routes about 11 million financial transactions daily among 7,800 banks and other financial institutions in 200 countries. ''Congress was briefed and what we did was fully authorized under the law,'' Bush said, talking with reporters in the Roosevelt Room after meeting with groups that support U.S. troops in Iraq. ''We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America,'' the president said. ''What we were doing was the right thing.''....
GOP bill targets NY Times House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records. The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation. The resolution comes as Republicans from the president on down condemn media organizations for reporting on the secret government program that tracked financial records overseas through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international banking cooperative. Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), working independently from his leadership, began circulating a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) during a late series of votes yesterday asking his leaders to revoke the Times’s congressional press credentials. The Standing Committee decides which organizations and reporters can be accredited, according to the rules of both the House and Senate press galleries. Members of that committee are elected by accredited members of those galleries....
Damage Study Urged on Surveillance Reports Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, asked the director of national intelligence on Tuesday to assess any damage to American counterterrorism efforts caused by the disclosure of secret programs to monitor telephone calls and financial transactions. Mr. Roberts, Republican of Kansas, singled out The New York Times for an article last week that reported that the government was tracking money transfers handled by a banking consortium based in Belgium. The targeting of the financial data, which includes some Americans' transactions, was also reported Thursday by The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. In his letter to John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, Mr. Roberts wrote that "we have been unable to persuade the media to act responsibly and to protect the means by which we protect this nation." He asked for a formal evaluation of damage to intelligence collection resulting from the revelation of the secret financial monitoring as well as The Times's disclosure in December of the National Security Agency's monitoring of phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans suspected of having links to Al Qaeda. In London, meanwhile, a human rights group said Tuesday that it had filed complaints in 32 countries alleging that the banking consortium, known as Swift, violated European and Asian privacy laws by giving the United States access to its data....
Bush's Use of Authority Riles Senator Senators on the Judiciary Committee accused President Bush of an "unprecedented" and "astonishing" power grab on Tuesday for making use of a device that gave him the authority to revise or ignore more than 750 laws enacted since he became president. By using what are known as signing statements, memorandums issued with legislation as he signs it, the president has reserved the right to not enforce any laws he thinks violate the Constitution or national security, or that impair foreign relations. A lawyer for the White House said that Mr. Bush was only doing his duty to uphold the Constitution. But Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, characterized the president's actions as a declaration that he "will do as he pleases," without regard to the laws passed by Congress. "There's a real issue here as to whether the president may, in effect, cherry-pick the provisions he likes and exclude the ones he doesn't like," Mr. Specter said at a hearing. "Wouldn't it be better, as a matter of comity," he said, "for the president to have come to the Congress and said, 'I'd like to have this in the bill; I'd like to have these exceptions in the bill,' so that we could have considered that?" Mr. Specter and others are particularly upset that Mr. Bush reserved the right to interpret the torture ban passed overwhelmingly by Congress, as well as Congressional oversight powers in the renewal of the Patriot Act....
Court Review of Wiretaps May Be Near, Senator Says Senator Arlen Specter said Sunday that the White House and Congress were close to reaching a resolution on submitting a National Security Agency wiretap program to judicial review. "I think there is an inclination to have it submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and that would be a big step forward for protection of constitutional rights and civil liberties," Mr. Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday." President Bush and his top advisers have resisted calls for formal legal oversight of the program under which the N.S.A. listens in on phone calls and reads e-mail messages to and from Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes may be linked to terrorists. Only those communications into and out of the country are monitored, administration officials say. Until late 2001, the security agency focused only on the foreign end of such conversations; if the agency decided that someone in the United States was of intelligence interest, it was supposed to get a warrant from the intelligence surveillance court. Now such warrants are sought only for communications between two people in the United States. Revelations about that program have incited debate in Congress and beyond about the president's constitutional authority to order the wiretaps, and lawsuits have been filed against the government and phone companies....
Top Court Upholds No-Knock Police Search The Supreme Court made it easier Thursday for police to barge into homes and seize evidence without knocking or waiting, a sign of the court's new conservatism with Samuel Alito on board. The court, on a 5-4 vote, said judges cannot throw out evidence collected by police who have search warrants but do not properly announce their arrival. It was a significant rollback of earlier rulings protective of homeowners, even unsympathetic homeowners like Booker Hudson, who had a loaded gun next to him and cocaine rocks in his pocket when Detroit police entered his unlocked home in 1998 without knocking. The court's five-member conservative majority, anchored by new Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito, said that police blunders should not result in "a get-out-of-jail-free card" for defendants. Dissenting justices predicted that police will now feel free to ignore previous court rulings requiring officers with search warrants to knock and announce themselves to avoid running afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches....
Hard Knocks With No-Knock Last week, a 5-4 majority led by Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that violation of the "knock-and announce" rule—a custom by which police serving a warrant knock on the suspect's door and wait some decent period of time (which in a previous case had been defined as 15 to 20 seconds)—does not require suppression of evidence found in a search. In the case, police searching for drugs and firearms at the home of suspect Booker T. Hudson announced themselves outside Hudson's home, did not knock, and failed to wait more than a few seconds before breaking down his door. They found drugs and a gun as described in the warrant, and the issue at hand was whether the failure to knock and wait was enough to invoke the "exclusionary rule," barring evidence obtained in an unconstitutional fashion. Scalia argues, and supporters of his decision agree, that there is no constitutional issue involved in the no-knock entry. In a glib editorial preemptively mocking "civil libertarians, especially those on the left," the New York Sun notes that the knock and announce rule is not written into the Fourth Amendment, or any other part of the U.S. Constitution. Instead, it is an English common-law practice dating back to the Middle Ages. (It has been part of federal statutory law since 1917.) The George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr finds no conflict between Scalia's alleged "originalism" and his Hudson decision. Does any of this make sense? If you presume that constitutionality is the full measure of your rights as an American citizen and a human being, maybe. But preserving the idea that American citizens are entitled to some dignity is about more than ruling out whatever wasn't specifically mentioned by the founding fathers. The idea that everybody is entitled to the presumption of innocence isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution either, but this concept underlies a range of customs and common law practices (most of which are also absent from the text of the Constitution) that have long been recognized as part of individual liberty. Presuming innocence doesn't mean everybody is innocent; it means authorities must err on the side of your rights as an American citizen....
Supreme Court Ruling on Police Raids Endangers Citizens Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in its 5-4 decision in the case of Hudson v. Michigan that when police conduct an illegal, no-knock raid, any evidence they seize in the raid can still be used against the suspect at trial, even though the raid was conducted illegally. I’ve spent the last year researching these types of volatile, highly-confrontational, paramilitary raids for a forthcoming report for the Cato Institute. The decision in Hudson is almost certain to lead to more illegal no-knock raids, more mistaken raids on innocent people, and more unnecessary deaths, both of civilians and of police officers. As recently as 1995, the Court ruled in the case of Wilson v. Arkansas that the centuries-old common law notion that police should announce themselves before entering a private home was engrained in the Fourth Amendment. That is, it is an inherent part of the Constitution. The Court issued this ruling unanimously, including votes by Justices Thomas and Scalia. In Hudson the Court didn’t overturn Wilson. The announcement requirement still exists. But the Court did take away the only realistic way of enforcing it, which is to punish police by barring evidence when they break it. In his opinion, Scalia argued that there are better ways to punish police who break the rule, such as suing them. But both the state of Michigan and the U.S. government both acknowledged in their briefs in the case that they couldn’t come up with a single case where such a lawsuit had been successful. In other words, with Hudson and Wilson, the Court has said not only is the requirement that police announce themselves before entering a private home law, it’s in the Constitution, the highest law in the land. Yet the Court has also said it’s not too concerned with enforcing that law. The Rule of Law is a value held dear by most conservatives. Conservatives tend to loathe the fact that we have laws on the books that go unenforced. And rightly so. Unenforced law undermines respect for the law and for the criminal justice process. Yet that’s exactly what has happened with Hudson....
FBI Erred Widely in Moussaoui Probe, Report Says The FBI's mistakes in the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui extended from headquarters officials who dismissed the threat posed by the al-Qaeda operative down to field agents and even a prominent FBI whistle-blower, according to a government report made public yesterday. The report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said "numerous systemic problems" within the bureau prevented the FBI from unraveling Moussaoui's role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror plot when he was arrested a month before the attacks. Moussaoui later became the only person charged in a U.S. courtroom in connection with the attacks. He was sentenced to life in prison last month. Fine concluded that senior FBI managers failed to move aggressively to gain a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings before Sept. 11. But unlike previous public criticisms of the FBI's bungling of the case -- which have focused on senior FBI managers in Washington -- Fine's analysis said there was plenty of blame to go around. The inspector general said former FBI lawyer Colleen Rowley, who gained fame as a whistle-blower when she pointed out the errors by headquarters, had failed to properly guide agents on what type of search warrant to seek. He said agents in Minneapolis, who have been hailed for warning supervisors about Moussaoui, rushed to open an intelligence investigation before realizing that they would need a criminal search warrant. The so-called "wall" that existed at the time between intelligence and criminal investigators has been blamed for the failure to examine Moussaoui's belongings until after Sept. 11. Ultimately, Fine concluded, no FBI policies or procedures were violated in the Moussaoui investigation....
A Busy School for Border Patrol in New Mexico Cadets must double up in dorms, and prefabricated temporary classrooms have sprouted almost everywhere. Scores of agents have been withdrawn from policing the border to serve as instructors. And next year, twice as many trainees as this year are expected to troop through the cramped quarters. All in all, the Border Patrol Academy here in the desert of southeastern New Mexico is bursting at the seams and bustling with activity as the agency strives to train enough cadets to fulfill President Bush's plan adding 6,000 agents by the end of 2008 as part of his border security program. Charles C. Whitmire, the acting chief of the academy, said Thursday at the conclusion of a two-day tour for the news media that the president's goal would be met. "The answer is absolutely," he said. Several of the cadets, a broad range of former members of the military and law enforcement agencies, recent college and high school graduates, and even a few former missionaries, said the physical training was the most difficult. The recruits hit the deck for endless push-ups, situps and other exercises, along with frequent runs in the heat of the desert, to get them in shape for border assignments in often hostile, dangerous terrain where an agent frequently patrols alone. On average, only 1 in 30 applicants ends up an agent....
Border agents return gunfire after smugglers shoot at vehicle U.S. Border Patrol agents attempting to stop a marijuana-laden SUV that entered the country illegally Wednesday got into a gunfight with the smugglers. At about 7 p.m., agents were notified that the camera operations division "had picked up on" a vehicle crossing the border near the Bar K S Ranch just south of the Royal Road subdivision, said Lu Majeda, agency spokesman. "Our agents responded," Majeda said, "and attempted to intercept a gray newer model SUV. While making that attempt the vehicle eventually stopped and a group of people exited the vehicle. At the same time, shots were fired on our agent. We don't know if the shots came from the suspects that came out of the SUV or if there was a scout or someone already in place that was shooting. Majeda explained that it is common for smugglers to have people in place on the ground to watch as drug loads are moved through an area. "The shots hit our agent's vehicle, but did not hit the agent. He did return fire. At this time, we do not know if any of the others were hit or injured."....
Opponent's Gun Permit Is Revoked Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has revoked the concealed weapons license of a retired sheriff's captain who waged a fiery but unsuccessful campaign to unseat him in last week's election, a move the candidate's lawyer called "blatant retaliation." Undersheriff Larry Waldie notified retired Capt. Ken Masse of the move two days after the election, accusing the failed candidate of waging a deceptive and dishonest campaign that "may have damaged the public's confidence in this agency." Masse, who served 35 years with the department before retiring last year, intends to appeal the revocation. Peace officers in California are routinely issued credentials that allow them to carry concealed weapons after they retire. Those credentials can be revoked upon a showing of "good cause" by the department. Police agencies usually take such action only after retired officers are accused of criminal wrongdoing or other evidence indicates they could pose a danger with a gun or law enforcement credentials, said Masse's attorney, Dieter Dammeier. "It happens when there's dangerous conduct, not when somebody is engaged in politics," Dammeier said....
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