The Bush administration showed "reckless disregard" for public health after the World Trade Center collapse by failing to warn people of the health risks of breathing toxic smoke and dust at ground zero, an environmental group said Wednesday.

Hundreds of people were sickened because of mistakes made by the government during the recovery and cleanup effort following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, the Sierra Club said in a report on the environmental and health impacts of the collapse.

"The federal government should have a duty to protect the public from the aftermath of an attack such as this," said Suzanne Mattei, the report's author. "What happened instead is that the harm was prolonged."
[...]
EPA failed at least a dozen times to change its safety assurances about the air quality at ground zero, even after it became clear that people were becoming sick, and in some cases, did not even check for toxic hazards.

Last year, the EPA's internal watchdog found the agency, at the urging of White House officials, gave misleading assurances there was no health risk from the dust in the air after the towers' collapse. Seven days after the attack, the EPA announced that the air near the site was safe to breathe, but the agency did not have enough information to make such a guarantee, the EPA's report found.
[...]
Sierra Club also cited a little known study in the July 2002 Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine that compared the health of federal employees working five blocks north of ground zero to their colleagues in Dallas.

The study found that employees at the Department of Health and Human Services who were indirectly affected by the trade center collapse "were more than likely to report constitutional symptoms" such as eye, nose and throat irritation and headache, than those in Dallas.
[...]

The FBI anticipates violent protests at the upcoming Republican National Convention in New York but does not have enough evidence to move against any group or person, the bureau's top terrorism official said Wednesday.

New York officials have said they expect hundreds of thousands of people to stage demonstrations around the convention, which begins Aug. 30.

Concern over the convention comes amid heightened security across New York over fears that foreign terrorists might strike the city again. New York remains on a "high" terrorism alert level, while most of the country is on elevated alert.

Federal investigators have infiltrated some organizations and are monitoring plans for protests being published on the Internet. The FBI also interviewed some protesters around the country before last month's Democratic convention in Boston and in anticipation of the GOP convention.

"We don't have any specific plot where we have all the variables we need to go out and take pre-emptive and judicial action," said Gary Bald, assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division.

The FBI has noted that some activist Web sites critical of Republicans and the convention include links to a site that lists Molotov cocktails, slingshots and bolt cutters as appropriate "offensive weapons" to carry during protests.

The Republican delegates here to coronate George W. Bush are unwelcome members of a hostile invading army. Like the hapless saps whose blood they sent to be spilled into Middle Eastern sands, they will be given intentionally incorrect directions to nonexistent places. Objects will be thrown in their direction. Children will call them obscene names. They will not be greeted as liberators.

Well aware that it is barren soil for their party's anti-urban, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, overtly racist ideology, Republican leaders have wisely avoided New York City as a convention site for the past 150 years. Even as the rest of America turns red, we New Yorkers remain as liberal as the people's republic of San Francisco: fewer than 18 percent of the citizens of New York's five boroughs (which include relatively conservative places like Staten Island) cast ballots for Bush/Cheney in 2000. But White House strategist Karl Rove sees the continued exploitation of 9/11 for partisan political gain as Bush's key to victory in November. That means bringing the big bash three miles north of the hole where the Twin Towers used to stand, where most of the victims of 9/11 were burned, suffocated, impaled and pulverized.

Making hay of the dead is also the point of this confab's timing. The 2004 Necropublican National Convention is being held a full month later than normal, from August 30 to September 2. The original plan was to have Bush shuttle between Madison Square Garden and Ground Zero for photo ops to coincide with the third anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Bush's visits to the Trade Center site were quietly canceled a few months back after 9/11 survivors expressed revulsion at the idea. But it was too late to change the date.

Anti-Republican sentiment is rising to a fever pitch here as the dog days tick down to the dreaded affair. A poll cited by the local ABC affiliate shows 83 percent of New Yorkers don't want their city to host the RNC. And many of them are planning to do something about it.

Officials with the city of Kissimmee, Fla., are warning residents that Federal Emergency Operation Administration impersonators may be preying on Central Florida storm-damage victims, according to Local 6 News.

The city of Kissimmee has received several reports of individuals impersonating FEMA officials Wednesday.

One of the reports was from a woman who gave her Social Security number and banking information to a man with a clipboard claiming to be with FEMA.

The woman said she was also asked for her tax return for 2003 but she was unable to find it, according to a press release.

The woman later called FEMA and was told that the suspect was not from FEMA.

Governmental delegation of Azerbaijan headed by the State Oil Company's (SOCAR) president Natik Aliyev and president of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan investors group David Woodword are discussing the issues of further construction of the oil pipeline Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan in the Georgian capital.

On August 2, Mr. Aliev and Mr. Woodword met with Georgia's Prime Minister Zurab Zvaniya and the National Security Council's secretary Gela Bezhuashvili.....

The main private sponsors of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline construction are the State Oil Company (50%), BP (25.41%), Unocal (7.48%), Statoil (6.37%), TPAO (5.02%), Itochu (2.92%), Ramco (1.55%), Delta Hess (1.25%). The project is estimated at about $3 billion.

"The proponent of the BTC project is a consortium known as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline Company (BTC Co.), which is led by British Petroleum (BP). The other companies are the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR), Unocal, Statoil, TPAO, Itochu, Ramco, Delta Hess and ENI. The ESIA report was prepared by BP."

A growing number of U.S. military personnel who are serving, or have served, in Iraq or Afghanistan has become sick and disabled from a variety of symptoms commonly known as Gulf War Syndrome. Depleted uranium (DU) weapons have been blamed for many of the symptoms.

?Gulf war vets are coming down with these symptoms at twice the rate of vets from previous conflicts,? said Barbara A. Goodno from the Department of Defense?s Deployment Health Support Directorate.

A recent discovery by American Free Press that nearly half the soldiers in one returned unit have malignant growths has provided the scientific community with ?critical evidence,? experts say, to help understand exactly how DU affects humans.

One of the first published researchers of Gulf War Syndrome, Dr. András Korényi-Both, told AFP that 27 percent to 28 percent of Gulf War veterans have suffered chronic health problems, more than five times the rate of Viet Nam vets and four times the rate of Korean War vets.

Korényi-Both said his son had recently returned from Iraq, where he had been part of the initial Gulf War II assault from Kuwait to Baghdad. From his unit of 20 men, eight now have ?malignant growths,? Korényi-Both said.

[...]

Scientist Leuren Moret said: ?We can expect to see multiple cancers in one person. These multiple unrelated cancers in the same individual have been reported in Yugoslavia and Iraq in families that had no history of any cancer. This is unknown in the previous studies of cancer,? she said, ?a new phenomenon.?

The FBI has questioned dozens of demonstrators planning to come to New York for the Republican convention later this month and encouraged agents to scour protest groups for evidence of any planned disruptions.

In a nationwide move that civil rights advocates called "chilling", the FBI has drawn up a list of people it intends to question because they may have information about possible violence.

In Missouri, three unnamed young men have been subpoenaed and informed that they are part of a domestic terrorism investigation, although their lawyer says the police have not told them on what grounds.

"It is part of a national effort to chill dissent in this country," said William Dobbs, the spokesman for United for Peace and Justice, which is planning to stage week-long demonstrations in New York during the convention. "And it is always a worry that this kind of intimidation will scare some people off."

The FBI says it is concentrating on possible crimes rather than trying to quash dissent. Most interrogations have centred on whether violent demonstrations are planned.

The vice chairman of the Sept. 11 Commission told a Senate panel Monday that the commission's recommendations on border and transportation security "might lead to" a national identity card...

"We did recommend national standards for drivers' licenses," Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

"Over time," he told committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., "that might lead to a national ID card."

"Isn't that a fundamental issue that we're going to have to address as a nation?" McCain asked Commission Chairman Tom Kean.

Kean replied that the commission had judged biometric screening -- using techniques like fingerprinting or retinal scanning -- to be "a little less intrusive," but acknowledged "A national ID card would be another way to do it."

The American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement Tuesday that federal standards for drivers' licenses constituted a "backdoor attempt to create a national ID-card system and a serious threat to privacy, liberty and safety."
[...]
"The American public is becoming more and more agreeable to intrusiveness in order to protect themselves against terrorist attacks," [Hamilton] said...

But in its final report last month, the commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, proposed changes to the nation's identity regime more radical than federal standards for drivers' licenses.

The report recommended a seamless biometric border so that everyone entering or leaving the country, whatever their nationality, would have their identity biometrically confirmed.
[...]
Since the passports and the data encoded on them will be machine readable, using fingerprints as a biometric would effectively be requiring U.S. citizens to hand a permanent digital record of their prints to the government of any foreign country they visited.

The commission further advocated that the biometric border be fully integrated with an internal system of checkpoints, controlling access to the nation's critical infrastructure and transport system, as well as federal buildings.

"That could be a recipe for a system of internal controls that would treat people traveling within the United States in the same way it treats those crossing its borders," cautioned Greg Nojeim, associate director of the ACLU's Washington office.

The software works quietly, noticing your work habits and tracking everything you research and write. Then it finds other employees working on the same issue and, if you choose, links you to share information...

The application by Palo Alto-based Tacit Knowledge Systems is one of several technologies the CIA, FBI and other three-letter intelligence agencies are using to manage and share information.
[...]
In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, has invested in roughly 30 companies since it launched in 1999 with the goal of finding and developing technology in the private sector which can also be used in the intelligence community.

Six of those companies -- Attensity, Inxight, Metric Stream, PiXlogic, Stratify and Tacit Knowledge Systems -- are based in the Bay Area (see chart) and focus on knowledge management and data mining.

Although backing by In-Q-Tel and the accompanying introduction to the spook community doesn't guarantee a contract, it sure helps.

"The trick to doing intelligence work is you need to already be part of the intelligence community," said Payton Smith an analyst at Input, a Reston, Va.-based company which tracks government spending. "You can't just show up on the CIA's doorstep and say 'Give me a contract.' "

Indeed, the list of leading IT security vendors in 2003 (which includes sales to the intelligence community) reads much like prior years. System integrators, including Northrop Grumman Corp., Electronic Data Systems and Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) scored the most business from Uncle Sam, securing prime contracts and winning 9 percent, 8 percent and 5 percent of government security spending, respectively.

Those companies, in turn subcontract parts of the job to other companies -- a lengthy list of players not reported by the government.

In-Q-Tel portfolio manager Joe Addiego indicated that many, if not all of his portfolio companies have partnerships or customer deals with those prime contractors. Attensity, for example, counts SAIC, General Dynamic and Northrop among its partners.

"The CIA, NSA, FBI, DIA ... they like our software and they pay us real money, but they won't talk to anybody about it," said Craig Norris, CEO of Palo Alto-based Attensity. "A lot of the things we do for them are classified. Sometimes we don't even know precisely what they're doing with our technology."
[...]

In the corridors of the Boston convention centre, the old photographs of John Kerry, the Vietnam War hero, give way to images of Kerry the impassioned anti-Vietnam War protester, frozen in time with a youthful John Lennon.

he's got my vote for this kinda shit, man...

Sen. John Kerry is distributing fliers in New York with a 30-year-old photo of him and Beatle John Lennon to woo anti-war presidential voters as he competes with rival Howard Dean in blasting President Bush on Iraq.
...
A spokesman for Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, said she was traveling and couldn't be reached for comment about the political use of a photo of her late husband.

A Kerry spokesman said he saw no need to seek Ono's permission to use the photo, which was snapped by a Kerry pal and is a cherished memento in his office.

The flier, which seeks New York volunteers, shows Vietnam vet Kerry, clad in a leather flight jacket, with Lennon at a 1971 anti-war rally in New York.

Lennon's name isn't used, but he's identifiable in his cap and trademark glasses. Kerry aides say he introduced Lennon at that rally.

Lennon has been a hero of mine for 30 years. When I saw that picture of Kerry with Lennon a while ago my heart almost stopped. That picture speaks volumes as far as I'm concerned. I was a supporter before - but that sealed the deal.

It does not augur well for this country, I fear, that both George W Bush and John Kerry are members of the same tiny, highly secretive club. The Skull and Bones society of Yale University ...

A few days ago, at a Washington lunch; two of the men there told me, separately and furtively, that they had just returned from "Bohemian Grove" - yet another secret little gathering that meets for 16 days every summer among the redwood trees of northern California. The vast majority of Americans do not even know that such a secret society exists, though every Republican president since Calvin Coolidge has been a member. The combined wealth of the 2,500 or so members, I am told, is roughly $100bn; its membership is all-male, nearly all-white, and mostly Republican.

These exclusive societies flourish in the land of the free. Skull and Bones was started in 1832, the Bohemian Club in 1872. Every college and university in the United States is ridden with fraternities, clubs that often have bizarre initiation rites, and which are formed expressly for the purpose of denying membership to others.

Perhaps it is a hidden effect of living in so competitive a society: those who belong to such bodies need to reassure themselves that they are still members of a group that others cannot join. Even successful men still feel the need to indulge themselves in this way.

Bill Clinton, a Democrat deemed sufficiently successful to be allowed into Bohemian Grove, has flown into Sonoma County airport to spend time amid the 2,700 acres 70 miles north-west of San Francisco.
[...]
Tricky Dick Nixon joined in 1953 and two of his advisers, John Ehrlichman and "Bob" Haldeman, became members, too. But Nixon was caught on the Watergate tapes telling them what he really thought: "The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time - it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine . . ."

Ehrlichman later wrote: "Once you've spent three days with someone in an informal situation, you have a relationship - a relationship that opens doors and makes it easier to pick up the phone."

Which, I am sure, is precisely why Bohemian Grove exists. Men of power meet, and power thus proliferates. George H W Bush was horrified when his son could not be bothered at first to take up his invitation to join Skull and Bones, and promptly flew to Yale to make sure his Boy George joined up. John Kerry needed no such paternal prodding. Like the elder Bush, he knew what was good for him - the lifelong membership of a club from which 99.999 per cent of the American electorate is excluded.

If President Bush's nomination of U.S. Rep. Porter Goss of Florida is approved, the Central Intelligence Agency will have its third Yale alumnus as its director.

And Goss, who first joined the agency the year he graduated from Yale - 1960 - will be continuing the university's long tradition of contributing to the agency.

Though its connections with the CIA are nowhere near what they once were, Yale - which has roots in espionage as far back as alumnus Nathan Hale - has arguably done more than any other university to shape the course of American intelligence.

From the 1940s to the early 1960s, Yale was closely connected with the CIA and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. The bonds loosened in the 1970s, but were never severed. A list of some of the agency's most influential figures reads like a who's who of Yale alumni. There have been two CIA directors: former President George H.W. Bush, who served in 1976 and 1977, and R. James Woolsey, who served from 1993 to 1995.

Yalies Richard M. Bissell Jr. and Tracy Barnes engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster... William F. Buckley Jr. served a stint in the CIA.

There was Sherman Kent, a member of the research and analysis division of the OSS who was instrumental in bringing new Yalies into the CIA; and Walter L. Pforzheimer, who headed several operations in OSS and helped draft the act that created the CIA in 1947.

And there was James Jesus Angleton, perhaps the quintessential American spy
[...]
Robin Winks, a Yale history professor who died last year, wrote in his book "Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War 1939-1961" that 42 Yale students, just from the Class of 1943, went into the OSS. So many Yale alumni populated its research and analysis branch that it came to be known as "the campus."

Ernest May, a historian at Harvard who specializes in the CIA and OSS, said... "The key was that there were a number of Yale faculty members who were Anglophile and they admired the British system... they volunteered for the OSS, which was modeled after the British intelligence system."...

At least one CIA operation directly involved Yale's business matters...

Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw has canceled a fundraising speech here, citing a locally based website that has been critical of him.

The site, SSRI Citizen, is operated by Rob Robinson, son of City Councilwoman Sally Robinson.

Marianne Edwards, development director for the Fortwood Center, said the agency received a letter on Friday from Mr. Bradshaw's agent, informing them of the cancellation.
[...]
The Robinson site (www.ssricitizen.org) focuses on SSRIs, or Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, a class of drugs which includes popular medications such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Luvox and Celexa. The Robinson site says the drugs can cause serious side effects, including hostility and aggression.

The Robinson site refers to Terry Bradshaw as "Mr. Paxil" and says, "Former football legend Terry Bradshaw now hawks Paxil for GlaxoSmithKline."

Mr. Bradshaw, who led the Pittsburgh Steelers to four Super Bowl championships, was scheduled to speak on the topic of "Why Not Be Your Best? The Winning Strategy Of Conquering Depression."
[...]

[SSRI Citizen] is also challenging SSRI drug company promotions which position celebrities such as actress Delta Burke (Effexor) and former NFL star Terry Bradshaw (Paxil) as drug spokespersons. "These individuals, who are paid handsomely for the use of their name and influence, are not spelling out for the public the extraordinarily serious risks associated with their drug of choice," Robinson said. "Its 'Trojan horse' marketing ? get the pills into medicine cabinets of America using glitzy ads and slick Hollywood stars. But don?t tell the public what really might be lying-in-wait for them inside those innocent-looking pills."

"The bottom line is these drug companies are driven by shareholders to increase sales of these drugs and thus increase profits," Robinson said. "In the case of GlaxoSmithKline its 'If we can make three billion dollars a year off Paxil ? why not four, five or more?' Its that kind of rationale that led to GSK?s pivotal role in the creation of another 'Trojan horse' marketing stratagem called 'TMAP' or the Texas Medication Algorithm Project. Through TMAP, GSK and other drug companies methodically compromised the decision making of elected and appointed public officials to gain access to captive populations of mentally ill individuals in prisons and state mental health hospitals." For more information see www.ahrp.org/infomail/04/07/07.html

In another marketing ploy GlaxoSmithKline is using Terry Bradshaw to lead the Paxil marketing charge in a program called 'The All-Stars at Work' which targets ?mental health in the workplace.' "The 'program' is supported by an unrestricted 'educational grant' from GlaxoSmithKline," Mr. Robinson said. "We considered sending Mr. Bradshaw a complimentary case of bumper stickers that say "Terry Bradshaw Says Eat More Paxil" to hand out to workers. Maybe it would make him think twice about his continued promotion of the drug. At least, we?d like to think so."

Mr. Bradshaw is also traveling throughout the country under the aegis of GSK to promote the use of Paxil through a series of speeches, albeit without his former Paxil sidekick Ricky Williams. (Mr. Williams, another football star, parted company from GSK last year and was recently quoted in the press as saying 'Marijuana is 10 times better for me than Paxil.') The web site GSK formerly maintained for the duo at www.rickyandterry.com has vanished and been replaced by another dubbed www.terryinyourtown.com All mention of Mr. Williams has been expunged from GSK?s web site at www.gsk.com

"Although Mr. Bradshaw claims his GSK-backed 'depression tour' is 'the coolest thing he's ever done in his life' his tour schedule is not posted at his web site. If you contact GSK or the public relations firm responsible for coordinating Mr. Bradshaw?s appearances all you get is an answering machine asking you to leave your contact information. But no one ever calls back," Robinson said. "If Mr. Bradshaw?s promotion of Paxil is, as he puts it ? 'so cool' ? wouldn't GSK want everyone in the world to know where Mr. Bradshaw is going to be, and when, so the public can have an opportunity to hear him talk about Paxil?"
[...]

"Are you ready?" Tomas Cuellar, a screening supervisor at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, asked a girl in a wheelchair yesterday as he pushed her through a Terminal B checkpoint.

The girl nodded and Mr. Cuellar escorted the girl through the "corral," where passengers wait for screeners to run electronic wands around them.

The girl was one of 15 disabled children and young adults learning to use the airport as part of a Children's Hospital program to help them transition toward independent living.
[...]
The screening process is the most controversial part of travel by disabled persons because of complaints about insensitivity by screeners to their special needs.

Early this year, TSA screeners started paying closer attention to prosthetic devices after intelligence reports showed terrorists could fill them with explosives. The screening procedure involves swiping them with swabs to detect trace chemicals from explosives.

The Amputee Coalition of America complained the swiping was sometimes done around sockets, near the wearers' private parts.
[...]
Tim Grant, deputy feder