Former top judge says US risks edging near to dictatorship by Julian Borger

Sandra Day O’Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party’s rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary.

In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University, reported by National Public Radio and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Ms O’Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges. …

She pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist countries as lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. “It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.” …

[During the Schiavo affair,] DeLay later called for the impeachment of judges involved in the Schiavo case, and called for more scrutiny of “an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president”.

Such threats, Ms O’Connor said, “pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedom”, and she told the lawyers in her audience: “I want you to tune your ears to these attacks … You have an obligation to speak up.

“Statutes and constitutions do not protect judicial independence – people do,” the retired supreme court justice said.

She noted death threats against judges were on the rise and added that the situation was not helped by a senior senator’s suggestion that there might be a connection between the violence against judges and the decisions they make.

The senator she was referring to was John Cornyn, a Bush loyalist from Texas….

Truth Detector: Dubai Waves Good-Bye, Hello Halliburton & Wal-Mart!

[mjh: More of the wit & wisdom of Lush Limbaugh, gas bag.]

They’re pulling out of there, saying, “Screw you! To hell with it.” Now, we’ve got an opportunity here, folks. You know me: I always try to look at events and say what is the opportunity. The opportunity is, all right, everybody wants an American company to run these ports. Take advantage of this, make a move. Get Halliburton in there today. Make a move, and ram this right down Chuck Schumer’s throat…

That company is Halliburton. Wal-Mart could do it, too. They’ve shown ability to manage and move large amounts of goods with security and a good health care program for the employees.

[mjh: In the midst of this, he vaguely accuses Bill Clinton of being involved in this, especially the 45 day waiting period. Yawn. Lush, Clinton isn’t president anymore. And Bob Dole was just as involved.]

Government subverts its own ideals By ALLAN M. JALON

Thirty-five years ago Wednesday, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-person office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.

The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied.

[This break-in] remains one of the most lasting consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens. The break-in is far less well-known than Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal stature.

Found among the Media documents was a new word, “COINTELPRO,” short for the FBI’s “secret counterintelligence program,” created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States. Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles,” as one COINTELPRO memo put it, “to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

The Media documents — along with further revelations about COINTELPRO in the months and years that followed — made it clear that the bureau had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize and demoralize groups — many of them peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and anti-war groups — that the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found offensive or threatening. …

The sheer reach of a completely politicized FBI was one of the most frightening revelations of the Media documents. … “Neutralize them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.,” one memo said.

Spill spoils argument EDITORIAL

One argument in behalf of drill ing for oil in the Arctic Na tional Wildlife Refuge is that it can be done without damaging the pristine nature of this world-class nature preserve.

That argument, never really credible, is in serious disrepute today as clean-up crews struggle to contain what, at this point, is the sixth largest oil spill ever on Alaska’s North Slope. And it comes as Congress once again struggles over whether to include projected oil revenues from ANWR in the budget authorization bill.

Isn’t it time to give this issue a rest and get on with bigger fiscal issues without spoiling the environment? …

Doesn’t it make sense to leave some oil for the future, when extraction techniques should pose less environmental risk? Or are we so absorbed with satisfying our gluttonous appetite for oil that we care not a fig what the next generation does in a petroleum-exhausted world?

Both Senate and House should reject efforts to reinsert this divisive issue in budget deliberations.

If there is anything the Radical Right hates more than the New Deal (and all of FDR’s legacy), it’s the Endangered Species Act. mjh

ES&T Online News: Hidden ties: Big environmental changes backed by big industry by PAUL D. THACKER

Lobbyists and industry officials who once pushed for the president’s Healthy Forests legislation now collaborate with Rep. Pombo to alter the Endangered Species Act.

Since President Bush took office, Republicans have successfully pushed through major reforms that target regulations for power-plant emissions and the management of federal forests. During his 2004 campaign for reelection, the president praised his Healthy Forests initiative as “a good, common-sense policy.” This year, the Republican-led Congress is gearing up for yet another “common-sense” reform to a major piece of environmental legislation—the Endangered Species Act (ESA). …

The movement to alter ESA is being led in Congress by Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), a rancher from California and the powerful chair of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources. …

To write the bill, Pombo called on the help of Steve Quarles, a lobbyist who works for the timber industry. “I spent a great deal of time with Pombo’s staff,” Quarles told ES&T, and during that time he helped write the bill. …

Practically a Washington, D.C., institution, Quarles has long worked to shape environmental laws to favor corporations. During the debate over the president’s Healthy Forests legislation, Quarles lobbied for its passage on behalf of the American Forest and Paper Assoc., the largest trade group for the forest products industry. Previously, he represented the American Forest Resource Council (AFRC), a group that lobbies for management of public lands to favor industry.

Wigley, too, has a long history with the timber industry. … For the 2002 elections, Wigley raised $327,100 from timber companies, such as Weyerhaueser and Boise Cascade. This money was then handed out to Republicans running for state offices in Oregon. Before joining OFIC, Wigley worked as a press officer for Georgia Pacific, one of the world’s largest forest-products corporations. His biography also states that he is a graduate of the American Campaign Academy, a group created by advisers to former Rep. Newt Gingrich to train Republican political operatives. …

Jim Peterson of the industry-funded Evergreen Foundation was quoted calling Project Protect a “hardball approach” to get the president’s bill signed. “It’s not a warm, fuzzy PR campaign,” he said. “It’s a fight to the finish. We intend to work behind the scenes with industry associations with much of the PR off the radar screen by design.” …

Wigley wrote in February 2005, he revealed his own views on Project Protect. “When I directed the healthy forests battle two years ago, I had to change the way the forest products industry talked,” he wrote. “We didn’t change our goals—just the way we communicated.” …

“Some people call it Astroturf,” said Ken Gross, a lawyer who specializes in ethics and campaign-finance cases. Unlike traditional grassroots groups that may consist of local activists meeting in someone’s living room, these new operations are backed by corporate money and run like professional political campaigns. “It’s not mom-and-pop; it’s highly sophisticated, with well-compensated people. …”

An October 2005 Harris Poll found that 74% of Americans believe that “protecting the environment is so important that requirements and standards cannot be too high, and continuing environmental improvements must be made regardless of cost.”

Senate urged to safeguard species act By Erica Werner, Associated Press Writer

As a Senate committee prepares to take up revisions to the Endangered Species Act, nearly 6,000 biologists from around the country signed a letter Wednesday urging senators to preserve scientific protections in the landmark law.

The House passed an Endangered Species Act rewrite last year that many scientists and environmentalists viewed as extreme. Interest groups are lobbying to ensure that legislation expected soon from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will be an improvement.

“Unfortunately, recent legislative proposals would critically weaken” the law’s scientific foundation, said the letter organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The 5,738 signers included six National Medal of Science recipients.

“For species conservation to continue, it is imperative both that the scientific principles embodied in the act are maintained, and that the act is strengthened, fully implemented, and adequately funded.”

FBI Cites More Than 100 Possible Eavesdropping Violations By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer

The FBI reported more than 100 possible violations to an intelligence oversight board over the past two years, including cases in which agents tapped the wrong telephone, intercepted the wrong e-mails or continued to listen to conversations after a warrant had expired, according to a report issued yesterday.

In one case, the FBI obtained the contents of 181 telephone calls rather than just the billing records to which it was entitled. In another, a communication was monitored for more than a year after eavesdropping should have ended — although investigators blamed a third-party provider for the mix-up. …

“Despite the Bush administration’s attempt to demonize critics of its anti-terrorism policies as advancing phantom or trivial concerns, the report demonstrates that the independent Office of Inspector General has found that many of these policies indeed warrant full investigations,” [Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee,] said.

But Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department is “pleased that the inspector general once again confirmed that there have been no substantiated civil liberties violations from the Patriot Act.”