How US hid the suicide secrets of Guantanamo

The Observer | World | How US hid the suicide secrets of Guantanamo: "David Rose | Sunday June 18, 2006 | The Observer

After three inmates killed themselves, the Pentagon declared the suicides an act of 'asymmetric warfare', banned the media and went on a PR offensive. But as despair grows within the camp, so too does outrage mount at its brutal and secretive regime
...

Yet our bizarre experience raises a fundamental question: when it comes to Guantanamo, can the world believe a single word that Gordon and his numerous cohorts say? There is, to say the least, an alternative explanation for the three Guantanamo deaths. Since early 2003, when the Red Cross issued the first of many reports stating that inmates were experiencing high levels of depression, there has been mounting evidence that detention there has wrought havoc on some prisoners' mental health. It is not so surprising: most prisoners get just two 30-minute periods out of their cells - the size of a double bed - each week, except when being interrogated. Some have endured this since 2002, and have no idea when, if ever, they may leave.

By the time of my own visit in October 2003, a fifth of them were on Prozac and there had been so many suicide attempts - 40 by August 2003 - that the Pentagon had reclassified hangings as 'manipulative self-injurious behaviours'. Cannily, perhaps, it has refused to give exact statistics on how many SIBs have occurred, claiming that since the reclassification there have been (until last week) only two genuine attempted suicides. ...

Records reveal Hastert's hand in land deal

Records reveal Hastert's hand in land deal | Chicago Tribune: "$3 million gain for 3 partners in 3 years | By Mike Dorning and Andrew Zajac | Washington Bureau | Published June 15, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert and two partners turned a profit of more than $3 million on property they accumulated and sold in just over three years near the route of a proposed controversial freeway on the western fringe of suburban Chicago, according to land records and financial disclosure reports released Wednesday.

Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean rejected the notion that the land, located 5 1/2 miles from the proposed Prairie Parkway route, rose in value because of the highway project. The speaker long has been an aggressive proponent of the highway and helped secure more than $200 million in federal funding through an earmark in federal transportation legislation.

The property near Plano, Ill., was sold three months after the transportation bill was signed into law. It was purchased by a real estate developer who is planning to build more than 1,500 homes on the land.
...
Hastert received five-eighths of the proceeds from the land sale, said Dallas Ingemunson, one of his partners. That indicates a profit of more than $1.5 million for Hastert.

The Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based ethics advocacy group, assailed Hastert for allegedly profiteering from the proposed highway. The group charged that he had sought to conceal his interest because the sale was made through a land trust that did not publicly identify Hastert as a partner.

Hastert profited `in secrecy'

"Speaker Hastert's trust allowed him to profit--in secrecy--from the very growth that he cites to justify the Prairie Parkway," said Bill Allison, a senior fellow with the foundation, in a statement to reporters. ...

Newly released emails suggest Army Corps lied about Cheney role in Halliburton contract

The Raw Story | Newly released emails suggest Army Corps lied about Cheney role in Halliburton contract: "Newly released emails suggest Army Corps lied about Cheney role in Halliburton contract | Avery Walker |

New documents obtained by a conservative watchdog group suggest that the US Army Corp of Engineers may have publicly lied regarding the involvement of the Vice President's office in awarding a 2003 multi-billion dollar, no-bid contract to Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, RAW STORY has learned.

RAW STORY has obtained a copy of the emails, which were acquired by the government watchdog group Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act.

The newly released emails show the Army Corps attempting to deflect attention from Cheney's office by distributing talking points that would mask Cheney's purported role. The Corps could not immediately be reached for comment.

Among the 100 pages of newly-obtained documents is an 2003 email in which Army Corps official Carol Sanders writes, "Mr. Robert Andersen, Chief Counsel, USACE, participated in a 60 Minutes interview today in New York regarding the sole source award of the oil response contract to Kellogg, Brown and Root... [Andersen] was able to make many of the points we had planned."

Sanders subsequently provided sound bites from the interview, including, "There was no contact whatsoever (with the VP office)." ...

George Bush Sr. asked retired general to replace Rumsfeld | Salon

George Bush Sr. asked retired general to replace Rumsfeld | Salon: "By Sidney Blumenthal

The former president's secret campaign to oust the secretary of defense was rebuffed by President Bush, a source says.

Former President George H.W. Bush waged a secret campaign over several months early this year to remove Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The elder Bush went so far as to recruit Rumsfeld's potential replacement, personally asking a retired four-star general if he would accept the position, a reliable source close to the general told me. But the former president's effort failed, apparently rebuffed by the current president. When seven retired generals who had been commanders in Iraq demanded Rumsfeld's resignation in April, the younger Bush leapt to his defense. "I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain," he said. His endorsement of Rumsfeld was a rebuke not only to the generals but also to his father.

The elder Bush's intervention was an extraordinary attempt to rescue simultaneously his son, the family legacy and the country. ...

Chertoff calling for a more rational, risk-based allotment of federal resources ... New York -40%, Washington -40%, Lousiville + 70%

Terrorists Target Milwaukee!: "And other headlines you're unlikely to see. | Saturday, June 3, 2006; Page A16

MICHAEL CHERTOFF took control of the Department of Homeland Security calling for a more rational, risk-based allotment of federal resources to prepare for and combat the threat of terrorist attacks. So where is the rationality, and what is the risk, that would justify increasing homeland security grants to Charlotte, Omaha, Milwaukee and Tampa and cutting those to New York and Washington?

Unfortunately, Mr. Chertoff and his team aren't offering satisfying explanations for those funding decisions, which were determined according to a formula -- ostensibly risk-based -- whose details are secret. If there is a sound reason why Louisville's grant has jumped by 70 percent while the Washington area's and New York's have plummeted by 40 percent, we haven't heard it. If there is any sense to rating the risk of catastrophe in Washington in the bottom 25 percent of the nation's cities, while rating the Washington metropolitan area in the top 25 percent, we haven't heard that, either."
...

We take Mr. Chertoff's point that New York has been showered with federal homeland security dollars since Sept. 11, 2001 -- $528 million at last count -- and that has built a lot of security infrastructure there. Ditto Washington, which has received more than $227 million. It is also true that nearly half the Urban Areas Security Initiative grants for 2006 will go to just five metropolitan areas -- New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and San Francisco -- while the increases for smaller cities are relatively small in dollar terms.

But it remains the case, so far as intelligence experts can determine, that al-Qaeda is intent on carrying out massive, showy, extravagantly lethal attacks of the sort that are possible in Washington, New York and just a handful of other American cities. And in those cities, there are clearly unmet needs; for instance, the District remains without hospital emergency capacity adequate to deal with a major terrorist attack. It seems folly, therefore, to suppose that efforts to safeguard New York and Washington can be eased while attention is turned to a dozen mid-sized cities, let alone to 270,000 potentially vulnerable bits and pieces of officially designated critical infrastructure spread across the nation. ..

Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?: "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15) ...

===============
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html

2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70615FA3C5B0C778DDDA80994DC404482&n
=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fElection%20Results

3) United States Department of Defense, ''Defense Department Special Briefing on Federal Voting Assistance Program,'' August 6, 2004. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040806-1502.html

4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,'' June 2005, page 11. http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/downloads/surveys/ovf_survey_01jun2005_
v1.0_usletter.pdf

5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.

6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004. http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2004/0921/local/stories/02local.htm

7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.

8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf

9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2. http://www.democracyfornewmexico.com/democracy_for_new_mexico/files/
NewMexico2004ElectionDataReport-v2.pdf

James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,'' Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission,'' September 2005, pg. 10. http://www.eac.gov/election_survey_2004/pdf/EDS%20exec.%20summary.pdf

11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.

12) See ''Ohio?s Missing Votes.''

13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf

14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, "Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio," June 22, 2005. Page 5 http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/www.democrats.org/pdfs/ohvrireport/fullreport.pdf

15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''

16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3 http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf

17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.

18) Dick Morris, "Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage," The Hill, November 4, 2004. http://www.hillnews.com/morris/110404.aspx

19) Martin Plissner, "Exit Polls to Protect the Vote," The New York Times, October 17, 2004.

....

Minorities unfairly pay more for mortgages, study says - MarketWatch

Minorities unfairly pay more for mortgages, study says - MarketWatch: "Trade group challenges study's findings; credit quality at issue" | By Amy Hoak, MarketWatch | Last Update: 6:02 PM ET May 31, 2006

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- African-Americans and Latinos enter into high-priced, subprime mortgages more often than white borrowers with identical credit qualifications, according to a study by the Center for Responsible Lending.

The report, released Wednesday, examined 50,000 subprime loans using data collected under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and supplemented with the Loan Performance Subprime Asset-Backed Securities Database. The two sources were used to isolate borrowers' race and ethnicity from all other risk factors, the report's author said.

"For many types of loans, borrowers of color in our database were more than 30% more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk," according to the report.

...

When 2004 HMDA data was first released, it showed blacks and Hispanics were more likely to end up in the high-cost subprime market than whites. But the government said the statistics couldn't be taken as "evidence of bias in lending decisions," Armstrong said.

Lenders argued minority borrowers tend to be less affluent, have weaker credit histories and make smaller down payments, said Debbie Bocian, senior researcher for the Center for Responsible Lending.

"We weren't convinced. Our organization was created to fight predatory lending, and we wanted to make sure that borrowers of all races and ethnicities had fair access to home financing," Bocian said in a statement.

"So, we supplemented the 2004 HMDA data with information from a proprietary loan-level database that contains critical information on the risk profiles of its loans," she said. "We looked at a large national sample of loans -- about 50,000 subprime mortgages in all."

According to the study, African-American borrowers were more likely to receive higher-rate home purchase and refinance loans than white borrowers with similar qualifications. Those with prepayment penalties on their subprime home loans were 6% to 34% more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers.

Latino borrowers purchasing homes were 29% to 142% more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than non-Latino, white borrowers with similar qualifications, the study concluded. ...

FEC finds Frist violated law by failing to disclose $1.4 million personal loan

The Raw Story | FEC finds Frist violated law by failing to disclose $1.4 million personal loan: "RAW STORY | Published: Thursday June 1, 2006

Earlier today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) received notice from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) indicating that in response to a complaint filed by CREW, the FEC found that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's 2000 Senate campaign committee, Frist 2000, Inc. violated federal campaign finance laws, RAW STORY can report. Their release follows. ...

CREW's complaint alleged -- and the FEC agreed -- that Frist 2000, Inc. failed to disclose a $1.44 million loan taken out jointly by Frist 2000, Inc. and by Frist's 1994 campaign committee, Bill Frist for Senate, Inc. The result of the discrepancy was to make it appear that Frist 2000, Inc. had significantly more money that it actually had. ...