Douglas Caddy

Glenn Mulcaire names News of the World staff behind phone hacking Private investigator passes names on to Steve Coogan's lawyers, in accordance with court order guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 August 2011 20.03 BST Private investigator Glenn Mulcaire has revealed the names of the News of the World staff who instructed him to carry out phone hacking, his solicitor has confirmed. The information was passed in a letter to Steve Coogan's lawyers in accordance with a court order. Mulcaire had applied for permission to appeal against the order, which was made in February, but this was denied and he was compelled to pass over the details by Friday. His solicitor, Sarah Webb, from Payne Hicks Beach, said she could not reveal who the NoW employees were because of "confidentiality issues". Schillings, which is representing Coogan, has agreed not to reveal the names yet, to give Payne Hicks Beach a chance to apply for a court order stopping their release. Mulcaire was ordered to reveal who instructed him to access Coogan's voicemails, as well as those of celebrities including Max Clifford and Elle Macpherson. He was jailed for six months in 2007 for intercepting messages left on royal aides' phones. A spokeswoman for News International said the firm had no comment.

C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book About 9/11 and Terror Fight The New York Times By SCOTT SHANE August 26, 2011 WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda. The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive. Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director. Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on the C.I.A. Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds. Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades. The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book. In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.” In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book “ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition. He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.” He added: “It saddens me that some are refusing to address past mistakes.” A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said, “The suggestion that the Central Intelligence Agency has requested redactions on this publication because it doesn’t like the content is ridiculous. The C.I.A.’s pre-publication review process looks solely at the issue of whether information is classified.” She noted that under the law, “Just because something is in the public domain doesn’t mean it’s been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government.” A spokesman for the F.B.I., Michael P. Kortan, declined to comment. The book, written with the assistance of Daniel Freedman, a colleague at Mr. Soufan’s New York security company, is scheduled to go on sale Sept. 12. Facing a deadline this week, the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, decided to proceed with a first printing incorporating all the C.I.A.’s cuts. If Mr. Soufan ultimately prevails in negotiations or a legal fight to get the excised material restored, Norton will print the unredacted version, said Drake McFeely, Norton’s president. “The C.I.A.’s redactions seem outrageous to me,” Mr. McFeely said. But he noted that they are concentrated in certain chapters and said “the book’s argument comes across clearly despite them.” The regular appearance of memoirs by Bush administration officials has continued a debate over the facts surrounding the failure to prevent 9/11 and the tactics against terrorism that followed. In former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir, set for publication next week, he writes of the harsh interrogations that “the techniques worked.” A book scheduled for publication next May by José A. Rodriguez Jr., a former senior C.I.A. official, is expected to give a far more laudatory account of the agency’s harsh interrogations than that of Mr. Soufan, as is evident from its tentative title: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.” Government employees who hold security clearances are required to have their books vetted for classified information before publication. But because decisions on what should be classified can be highly subjective, the prepublication review process often becomes a battle. Several former spies have gone to court to fight redactions to their books, and the Defense Department spent nearly $50,000 last year to buy and destroy the entire first printing of an intelligence officer’s book, which it said contained secrets. The C.I.A. interrogation program sharply divided the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., whose director, Robert S. Mueller III, ordered agents to stop participating in the program after Mr. Soufan and other agents objected to the use of physical coercion. But some C.I.A. officers, too, opposed the brutal methods, including waterboarding, and it was their complaint to the C.I.A.’s inspector general that eventually led to the suspension of the program. “The Black Banners” traces the origins and growth of Al Qaeda and describes the role of Mr. Soufan, 40, a Lebanese-American, in the investigations of the East African embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000, 9/11 and the continuing campaign against terrorism. Starting in May, F.B.I. officials reviewed Mr. Soufan’s 600-page manuscript, asking the author for evidence that dozens of names and facts were not classified. Mr. Soufan and Mr. Freedman agreed to change wording or substitute aliases for some names, and on July 12 the bureau told Mr. Soufan its review was complete. In the meantime, however, the bureau had given the book to the C.I.A. Its reviewers responded this month with 78-page and 103-page faxes listing their cuts.

http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/08/john-dean-rips-cheneys-memior-it-displays-his-authoritarian-personality/

More than 120 police investigate Murdoch empire's operations The Independent By James Cusick and Cahal Milmo Friday, 26 August 2011 The number of police officers in the UK investigating claims of illegal newsgathering by Rupert Murdoch's media empire has surged past 120. Strathclyde Police has dedicated more than 50 officers to Operation Rubicon, its investigation into allegations of perjury involving former News of the World editor Andy Coulson and wider claims of phone hacking aimed at public figures in Scotland. Up to 60 officers are already involved in the Metropolitan Police's Operation Weeting. Scotland Yard also has over a dozen officers working on Operation Elveden, the investigation into allegations of corrupt payments to police officers, and Operation Tuleta, a separate investigation into claims of computer hacking by private detectives hired by News International. But the decision by senior officers in Scotland to massively boost their investigation into the phone-hacking scandal is a further blow to Mr Murdoch's News International, suggesting that police believe they may have large numbers of potential victims to approach and need to devote considerable resources to the examination of evidence given by NOTW executives during the perjury trial of disgraced politician Tommy Sheridan. From a small number of officers a few months ago, Operation Rubicon, led by Detective Superintendent John McSporran, now involves more than 50 and has been passed by Scotland the dossier of evidence seized from private detective Glenn Mulcaire. The surge in manpower potentially reflects the political pressure now being put on the police investigating the NOTW's alleged illegal activities. Last week, Stephen House, Chief Constable of Strathclyde, confirmed in an email to staff that he had applied to become the Met Commissioner, Britain's most senior police officer. Six months into the main Met investigation, which began earlier this year, only 170 victims had been contacted by police out of the thousands of names contained in material seized in 2006 from the home in south London of Mr Mulcaire. Rubicon's inquiries are focused on a dossier containing 1,027 names, given to the police by the solicitor Aamer Anwar, who represented Mr Sheridan, the former Scottish Socialist Party leader who was jailed for perjury in a case involving the NOTW's Scottish edition. Mr Anwar said: "This inquiry [Operation Rubicon] has been given massive resources and is looking at allegations of phone hacking, perjury and breaches of data protection. It is an inquiry that will take months if not longer. And the question to be answered is when and who will face prosecution for these crimes committed in Scotland." Sheridan's accusations also involve another investigator, Steve Whittamore, regularly used by the NOTW.

NYPD confirms CIA officer works at department Aug 25 07:08 PM US/Eastern By EILEEN SULLIVAN Associated Press http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9PBDBJO0&show_article=1 WASHINGTON (AP) - New York's police commissioner confirmed Thursday that a CIA officer is working out of police headquarters there, after an Associated Press investigation revealed an unusual partnership with the CIA that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying. But he and the CIA said the spy agency's role at the department is an advisory one. Speaking to reporters in New York, commissioner Raymond Kelly acknowledged that the CIA trains NYPD officers on "trade craft issues," meaning espionage techniques, and advises police about events happening overseas. Kelly also said he was unaware of any other U.S. police department with a similar relationship with the CIA. "They are involved in providing us with information, usually coming from perhaps overseas and providing it to us for, you know, just for our purposes," Kelly said. CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said the agency does not spy inside the United States and also described the relationship with the NYPD as collaborative. "Our cooperation, in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is exactly what the American people deserve and have come to expect following 9/11," she said. A months-long investigation by the AP, published Wednesday, revealed that the NYPD has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims. Many of the operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. The mayor on Thursday defended the police department's efforts. "In the end the NYPD's first job is prevention, and I think they've done a very good job of that," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when asked about the police practices. "The law is pretty clear about what's the requirement, and I think they've followed the law." Also Thursday, New York City Councilman Brad Lander said the city council should conduct an oversight hearing on the NYPD's programs, but Lander is not in a leadership position to enforce that such hearings take place. "We must be sure that the NYPD's intelligence gathering does not violate civil liberties, target and profile our city's diverse ethnic and religious communities," Lander said. City Councilman Peter Vallone, chairman of the panel that oversees the police department, said the council already had scheduled two NYPD oversight hearings during which these issues could be raised. The disclosures about the NYPD's activities provoked exasperation in the city's Muslim neighborhoods, where government officials have sought to build relationships in Muslim communities and pledged to ensure that Muslims aren't targeted for discrimination. "The NYPD's credibility is bankrupt in our communities," Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director of the Desis Rising Up & Moving group, said in a statement Thursday. "We need accountability, transparency and an overhaul of tactics and policies." Government outreach programs have operated in Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and Washington—all cities with large Muslim communities—even as law enforcement around the country has stepped up investigative efforts to stave off attacks. But the inherent tensions caused by this duality of missions is perhaps most visible in New York. It is the only U.S. city that al-Qaida has successfully attacked twice and continues to be the target of terror plots. New York also is home to the country's most aggressive local police department investigating counterterrorism. "It seems to many of the leadership here, there are two kinds of authorities they are playing—one is in the forefront which is very cooperative," said Zaheer Uddin of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York. "And there is another authority, which is playing against Islam and Muslims, going against the First Amendment and the security of this country." Uddin asked, "Are we partners, or are we a suspicious community?" On Wednesday, the Justice Department said it will review a request by a Muslim advocacy group to investigate. "These revelations send the message to American Muslims that they are being viewed as a suspect community and that their constitutional rights may be violated with impunity," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asked for the investigation. "The Justice Department must initiate an immediate investigation of the civil rights implications of this spy program and the legality of its links to the CIA." The Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition, an umbrella organization of New York Muslim groups, on Thursday also called for an investigation. In the decade since the September 2001 attacks, government officials in New York also have met with Muslim leaders and exchanged cellphone numbers. They've attended religious services, dinners and teas, and spoken at community meetings. The FBI recently hosted an event for 500 young Muslims in Brooklyn to build trust and get to know federal law enforcement, with a bomb-sniffing dog, scuba boat and helicopter on display. "I go and visit mosques on a regular basis," Kelly previously told the AP, adding that he also holds question-and-answer sessions and planned to attend several dinners with members of the Muslim community during the holy month of Ramadan this year. The police department in 2006 hired Sidique Wai, an African immigrant and member of the New York Muslim community, to coordinate the NYPD's citywide community outreach program. He said the interaction and outreach between the community and police is unprecedented. "The majority of the faith-based—particularly the Muslim leaders throughout the city—are absolutely appreciative of the unprecedented relationship with the police department," Wai said. "I'm not aware of a deliberate effort on the part of NYPD to profile people." ___ Associated Press writer Samantha Gross in New York City contributed to this report.

US to probe phone hacking of 9/11 families The Independent By Lewis Smith and Cahal Milmo Thursday, 25 August 2011 Families of 9/11 victims have been told by the US Attorney General he is "deeply disturbed" that journalists may have hacked their phones. Eric Holder confirmed there was sufficient reason to take the claims seriously, and he has launched an official investigation into allegations phone messages may have been intercepted by journalists from the News of the World (NOTW). Relatives of seven 9/11 victims and two of their lawyers met Mr Holder, three officials from the FBI and five members of the Department of Justice. Members of two other victims' families took part via a video link. During the 75-minute meeting, Mr Holder told them there was "sufficient predicate" to hold a preliminary criminal investigation. He stopped short, however, of saying what his investigators have found. Norman Siegel, a lawyer at the meeting who represents 9/11 family organisations, said: "The Attorney General said the allegations were very disturbing and that it was a high priority for him. He confirmed there is what they called a preliminary investigation. He said this was the beginning of a dialogue with the 9/11 community. He said this was an initial meeting. I would hope we will hear from them within a few weeks – if not, I'll call them." Separately, it has emerged that David Cameron sponsored a House of Commons pass for his communications chief, Andy Coulson, which the former NOTW editor obtained without disclosing ongoing payments and benefits worth hundreds of thousands of pounds from Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Mr Coulson may have broken parliamentary rules when he failed to declare his severance package on an official register when he obtained his first pass in September 2007. At the time, Mr Coulson was receiving health insurance, the use of a company car and the payment in instalments of two years' salary remaining on his contract from News International. The revelation, reported by The Guardian, that Mr Cameron personally backed Mr Coulson's application for a pass increases pressure on the Prime Minister over his decision to employ the former tabloid editor. Tom Watson, the Labour MP, last night wrote to the parliamentary standards commissioner making a formal complaint against Mr Coulson and calling for an investigation. A Conservative Party spokesman said: "It is the individual's responsibility to declare relevant financial interests to the parliamentary pass office." The extent of the financial links between Mr Coulson and News International was brought into further question yesterday with allegations that his legal fees to date – likely to run into six figures – are being paid by Mr Murdoch's company. News International, which says it is "fully co-operating" with the police investigation into phone hacking, refused to confirm or deny it was paying Mr Coulson's legal fees or whether it was considering putting an end to any such arrangement.

How Little Rick is making it big in the presidential race The Independent David Usborne reports from Texas on Mitt Romney's tricky rival Thursday, 25 August 2011 Kenny Thompson's heart was in his mouth one spring morning 30 years ago as he watched a small plane bounce down the earthen air strip across the road from his house, mud caked on its wheels, its engine screaming in a way he had never heard before. "He was revving her up so tight and there was a point, you know, when either he pulled her up or put on the brakes. I didn't honestly know if he was going to make it". The pilot, he was to find out later, was Rick Perry, who had grown up in the same remote community of Paint Creek, here in North Texas, and had just finished five years in the Air Force. He missed the crown of the road by inches, recalls Mr Thompson, a county commissioner here. The plane in bright yellow colours then passed below the power lines on the other side before finally lifting into the sky. This was Perry all over. He was the kid who had once pushed a huge snowball from a classroom roof meaning to hit members of the girl's basketball team; it landed on the school superintendent instead. "If everyone knew everything he done as a kid, they would be shocked," says Don Ballard, a childhood friend and schools superintendent today. At university he dropped firework bombs into the upstairs plumbing so they would explode inside lavatory bowls three floors below, under unsuspecting bottoms. There is affection in these tales because Little Rick, as they used to call him, was later to start a political career that eventually led him to the governor's mansion in Austin, four hours south of here. But as Perry makes his late bid for the Republican presidential nomination, there are some in Paint Creek and in Austin who wonder whether this time the gamble is too big. They see mud on his wheels again. All his political life, Mr Perry has been blessed with good luck, even going back to 2000 when the Supreme Court crowned George W Bush president. Then Lieutenant Governor, Mr Perry replaced Bush as Governor of Texas without an election. This year, he's been lucky too. The weak economy has made President Barack Obama suddenly vulnerable; and other Republicans – notably Governors Hailey Barbour and Mitch Daniels – who might have leapt into the nomination race and blocked his path chose not to. And when on 12 August, Mr Perry travelled to South Carolina – a key early primary state – to confirm his candidacy, the impact was immediate. Pundits and the polls reached the same conclusion: if no one else jumps in, the race for the GOP nomination will end up being between him and the former Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, with Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party darling, playing a strong game but probably not making it all the way. The Governor has a good story to tell. In Paint Creek, his tenant farming parents lived for the first few years of his life in a cabin without indoor plumbing: all that remains today is a lonely tree across a dirt road from a collapsing chicken shed. If Bush had a silver spoon, Perry had an outhouse and a shovel. "It gave everyone a good work ethic," says Mr Ballard. "Most everyone would start at five in the morning and for all I know the Governor is doing that to this day. You go to work, you go to church, and come back home and go out to work again. That's how it was. These are the values those kids grew up with." However, in an election that will be dominated by the economy and the unemployment crisis in America, Mr Perry has a tale no other candidate can match. Relative to the rest of America, Texas is booming. In the last two years, there has been a net increase of more than a quarter of a million jobs in the state. That accounts for half of all the new jobs created across the entire nation since the end of the last recession. Throughout his tenure, Mr Perry has been assiduous in maintaining Texas as a business-friendly haven with low taxation, minimal red tape, and assorted other incentives, including help from job creation and investment agencies he set up to increase the Lone Star allure. Along the way, he has made sure that many of his appointees to those bodies have been friends ready to return the favour with big campaign donations. The model has worked well in Texas, which, since he himself defected from the Democrats in 1989, has increasingly become Republican territory. His Texan supporters don't much question the ethics of the money that washes back and forth in Austin – the state's campaign funding laws are among the most lax in the country – or see anything wrong in his wearing his Christian beliefs on his sleeve or expounding relentlessly conservative views, whether about blunting federal government or dismissing global warming. On the national stage, however, Mr Perry may find much lower levels of tolerance. His record of conservative governing and conservative views – he has even expounded in favour of creationism over Darwinism – means he probably has the Christian evangelicals who dominate the primary process sewn up, but winning the hearts of moderate and establishment Republicans, not to mention the critical slice of independents, whom he will need in the general election, will be much harder. "It's just not clear to me how he gets past that," warns Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor at the University of Texas in Austin and a specialist in presidential politics. "His policy positions are of a sort that will not appeal to independent voters in the general election. His tendency towards extremist positions on things like global warming are controversial in his own party let alone among independents." The economic circumstances would have to be "truly dire" for someone who "raises as many red flags as Governor Perry seems to, or Michele Bachmann", actually to take the White House next year, suggests Professor Buchanan, who for now has his money on Romney. "Perry has to reassure people on the question of electability." Since declaring, Mr Perry, who has a shoot-from-the-hip style, has twice said things that are likely to unsettle independents. He rehearsed his doubts about global warming being man-made and suggested that the money-printing policies of the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, made him a traitor. "Perry's task right now is to hew between two different sides," agrees Mark Jones, chairman of the politics department at Rice University in Texas. "At one level he needs to compete for social conservatives, but at the same time he can't alienate the establishment and more moderate Republicans who are Romney followers. He must demonstrate to all camps that he represents a real option to defeat Obama." Professor Jones also warns that beyond the job numbers – and even they are a little deceiving because a high proportion are low-paid or energy sector jobs – voters may not like what they see in the "seamy underbelly of Texas society and politics, particularly if they look at the underbelly of Texas education, health care, and environment policy. It's going to be really tough for Rick Perry to prevail." Back in Paint Creek, Mr Thompson, who is fixing "Road Closed" signs in a sun-baked corrugated iron barn on his farm, sees a problem too. Mr Perry's statements on global warming bother him, and he is disturbed that underfunding of schools has put Texas at the bottom of many national education rankings. "I think a political leader needs to be compassionate," he says, banging a spanner against the tailgate of his pick-up. Maybe it goes back to his decision more than 20 years to cross to the Republicans, but Mr Perry is not the universally popular man you might expect in this community, which for the first time in half a century has seen a complete failure in its cotton crops because of a savage drought that took hold last October. "I'm gonna say right here, he scares me," admits Wallar Overton, a 72-year-old farmer and school board member, who was Perry's scoutmaster when he was a young teenager. Driving along the gravel roads here, he points to the house Perry's parents still live in today, with pecan trees in the front garden, and towards the dirt pond where the Governor learnt to swim. "I'm scared of the different programmes he would cut. I am not going to vote for him and he knows that." The last stop on the tour with Mr Overton is an empty, parched field. But squint and you see a straight stretch running towards the road that's of a slightly darker hue, and in the distance a tattered windsock drooping from its pole. It's the old airstrip where Mr Perry almost came a cropper in his single-engine plane all those years ago. Mitt Romney – and even President Obama – might eventually have reason to wish he hadn't made it that day. But that will only be the case if the Governor manages shake off some of his Texas clay. Perry's polls lead Rick Perry took a double-digit lead over Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential nomination race in two polls released yesterday. Although he formally entered the race only on 13 August, 29 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said Mr Perry would most likely be their choice to oppose Barack Obama in 2012, according to a Gallup poll. Gallup said 17 per cent favoured Mr Romney, while Ron Paul was third at 13 per cent, and Michele Bachmann came fourth with 10 per cent. Mr Perry also had a 13-point lead over Mr Romney in a survey of Republican primary voters conducted by the Democratic pollster Public Policy Polling. Reuters Perry vs Bush As he emerges as a top contender for the Republican nomination for president, Rick Perry will come under fierce scrutiny from voters across the US. Things that may give them pause for thought include his loudly proclaimed Christian views, his questionable records in areas such as education, the environment, and slash-and-burn budget management. But there is something else: the country may simply not be ready for another Texas governor in the White House. But how similar would he be to George W Bush, really? Background * Bush's upbringing was a privileged one, hailing from a long political dynasty. To his critics he was a man who got his start in politics by way of Yale University and by rifling through his daddy's Rolodex. * Perry's start was tougher. He came from a part of the state his father called "The Big Empty", and it hasn't changed that much today. His mother hand-sewed the shirts he went to school in. Military service * When Bush ran for election in 2000, his campaign was haunted by questions about his allegedly evading Vietnam using his parents' contacts to serve instead in the Texas Air National Guard. * Perry will have no such difficulties, adding five years of service in the United States Air Force to his narrative of patriotic service to America. He flew C-130s in the Middle East and made captain. Karl Rove * For Bush, no single person was more important to his political rise than the Texas political strategist Karl Rove, who became a bogyman of the political left serving Bush in the White House. * Perry will be getting no such help from Rove. The two men have had testy relations for years. Rove has criticised Perry allegedly for distancing himself from Bush and assailed him for calling Ben Bernanke a traitor. Compassionate conservatism * When he ran for the White House, Bush coined that phrase to describe his brand of Republican politics that was conservative but yet more moderate on issues that included immigration. * Perry is a proud out-and-out conservative and has a record on health care, education and the environment that would anyway disqualify him from claiming any compassionate mantle.

Andy Coulson 'broke' Commons pass rules by failing to declare NI payments Cameron sponsored pass for ex-head of communications NI 'considering ending payment of Coulson's legal fees' By Polly Curtis and James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 August 2011 17.14 BST Andy Coulson appears to have broken House of Commons rules by failing to declare payments and benefits he received from News International while holding a parliamentary pass sponsored by David Cameron. Registers held in the Commons archive, seen by the Guardian, reveal that in September 2007 – three months after Coulson was employed by Cameron's office – the former News of the World editor failed to declare the health insurance, company car and severance payments he was receiving from his old employers. The records also show that for at least two months after he resigned from his position as No 10's head of communications in January this year, Coulson continued to hold a parliamentary pass, sponsored by Downing Street, which allowed him access to parliament as a No 10 employee. That will raise new questions about whether Coulson – who Cameron has admitted seeing on a social basis since his resignation – continued to perform an unofficial role for the Tories after he had left. The Labour MP Tom Watson called for the parliamentary commissioner for standards to investigate. Commons rules say all holders of parliamentary passes sponsored by MPs, which allow unfettered access to most of the parliamentary estate, must register any paid employment, gifts or benefits worth more than £329 they receive within that calender year from sources that could "in any way" relate to their work in parliament. The Guardian also understands that News International continued to pay Coulson's legal bills after he stepped down as the editor of the News of the World in January 2007. The company is considering ending the arrangement after this week's revelations that Coulson had continued to receive payments after becoming Cameron's director of communications. Coulson is understood to have consulted lawyers frequently since leaving News International after several public figures brought civil cases against the News of the World, alleging that their voicemail messages had been hacked. News International paid his legal bills last December when he was a witness in the perjury trial of the former Scottish MP Tommy Sheridan. The company declined to comment. Cameron and George Osborne first employed Coulson when the Conservatives were in opposition in July 2007. He appeared on the next register for MP-sponsored passes, published in September, declaring no other employment, gifts or benefits in that calendar year. It is now known that he received hundreds of thousands of pounds in "several" instalments from News International after leaving the company. He also failed to register the health insurance and company car he received from the company under gifts or benefits. Coulson's pass was personally sponsored by Cameron, not the Conservative party. His register entry noted only that he was director of communications and planning for the Conservative party, making no mention of any other income. From October, his pass switched to a journalist's pass, sponsored by the Conservatives, which operated with a separate declaration register. Declarations are only required of an "occupation or employment", earning more than £657 in that calendar year, that could be benefited from access to parliament. For his entire period working for Cameron at Conservative campaign headquarters, and subsequently in Downing Street, Coulson declared nothing on the registers. A Conservative spokesman said: "It is the individual's responsibility to declare relevant financial interests to the parliamentary pass office. "We were not aware until Monday night of allegations that Andy Coulson's severance package, agreed with News International before he was employed by the Conservative party, was paid in instalments that continued into the time he was employed by the Conservative party." Watson, a member of the culture select committee who has campaigned on the phone hacking debate, is writing to the parliamentary commission for standards to complain about the apparent breach. "We now know that, in September 2007, Andy Coulson was receiving staggered payments, free private healthcare and apparently a motor car from News International," Watson said. "When he applied for his House of Commons pass, Mr Coulson was expected to declare these hidden payments under parliament's transparency rules. He failed to do so. "Moreover, instead of being allocated a political party press pass, he was placed on David Cameron's personal allocation of passes. This meant David Cameron had to personally vouch for his application, so presumably they had a discussion about it. I'm writing to the standards commissioner to request he investigates the matter." Commons officials confirmed that it could take up to a month for people who hand their passes in to be removed from the register of journalists' interests. Coulson resigned on 21 January and appears on the next two registers, published in March and April, but not from June. That suggests he could have continued to hold his Downing Street-sponsored pass up until May, four months after his resignation. He resigned from News International after the jailing of two private investigators who worked for the News of the World, during his time as the paper's editor, for phone hacking.

Posting of this video of the political/religious event in Houston organized by Rick Perry is dedicated to those in the U.K. who missed attending. Please note its description of a chapter in U.K.'s history. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJPcB9JMyu4&feature=related

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/24/nypd-cia-terrorism_n_934923.html NYPD CIA Anti-Terror Operations Conducted In Secret For Years By MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN 08/24/11 06:10 AM ET AP NEW YORK -- In New Brunswick, N.J., a building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 one balmy Tuesday and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about the table and computer and surveillance equipment set up in the next room. The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University on the afternoon of June 2, 2009. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers. From that apartment, about an hour outside the department's jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the country's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A months-long investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. And it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying. Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which contributes hundreds of millions of dollars each year, is told exactly what's going on. The department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims. Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit. A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency's payroll, was the architect of the NYPD's intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency's spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States. And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters. While the expansion of the NYPD's intelligence unit has been well known, many details about its clandestine operations, including the depth of its CIA ties, have not previously been reported. The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. In a city that has repeatedly been targeted by terrorists, police make no apologies for pushing the envelope. NYPD intelligence operations have disrupted terrorist plots and put several would-be killers in prison. "The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there's not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. "And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard." But officials said they've also been careful to keep information about some programs out of court, where a judge might take a different view. The NYPD considers even basic details, such as the intelligence division's organization chart, to be too sensitive to reveal in court. One of the enduring questions of the past decade is whether being safe requires giving up some liberty and privacy. The focus of that debate has primarily been federal programs like wiretapping and indefinite detention. The question has received less attention in New York, where residents do not know for sure what, if anything, they have given up. The story of how the NYPD Intelligence Division developed such aggressive programs was pieced together by the AP in interviews with more than 40 current and former New York Police Department and federal officials. Many were directly involved in planning and carrying out these secret operations for the department. Though most said the tactics were appropriate and made the city safer, many insisted on anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak with reporters about security matters. The story begins with one man. ___ David Cohen arrived at the New York Police Department in January 2002, just weeks after the last fires had been extinguished at the debris field that had been the twin towers. A retired 35-year veteran of the CIA, Cohen became the police department's first civilian intelligence chief. Cohen had an exceptional career at the CIA, rising to lead both the agency's analytical and operational divisions. He also was an extraordinarily divisive figure, a man whose sharp tongue and supreme confidence in his own abilities gave him a reputation as arrogant. Cohen's tenure as head of CIA operations, the nation's top spy, was so contentious that in 1997, The New York Times editorial page took the unusual step of calling for his ouster. He had no police experience. He had never defended a city from an attack. But New York wasn't looking for a cop. "Post-9/11, we needed someone in there who knew how to really gather intelligence," said John Cutter, a retired NYPD official who served as one of Cohen's top uniformed officers. At the time, the intelligence division was best known for driving dignitaries around the city. Cohen envisioned a unit that would analyze intelligence, run undercover operations and cultivate a network of informants. In short, he wanted New York to have its own version of the CIA. Cohen shared Commissioner Ray Kelly's belief that 9/11 had proved that the police department could not simply rely on the federal government to prevent terrorism in New York. "If anything goes on in New York," one former officer recalls Cohen telling his staff in the early days, "it's your fault." Among Cohen's earliest moves at the NYPD was making a request of his old colleagues at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. He needed someone to help build this new operation, someone with experience and clout and, most important, someone who had access to the latest intelligence so the NYPD wouldn't have to rely on the FBI to dole out information. CIA Director George Tenet responded by tapping Larry Sanchez, a respected veteran who had served as a CIA official inside the United Nations. Often, when the CIA places someone on temporary assignment, the other agency picks up the tab. In this case, three former intelligence officials said, Tenet kept Sanchez on the CIA payroll. When he arrived in New York in March 2002, Sanchez had offices at both the NYPD and the CIA's station in New York, one former official said. Sanchez interviewed police officers for newly defined intelligence jobs. He guided and mentored officers, schooling them in the art of gathering information. He also directed their efforts, another said. There had never been an arrangement like it, and some senior CIA officials soon began questioning whether Tenet was allowing Sanchez to operate on both sides of the wall that's supposed to keep the CIA out of the domestic intelligence business. "It should not be a surprise to anyone that, after 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency stepped up its cooperation with law enforcement on counterterrorism issues or that some of that increased cooperation was in New York, the site of ground zero," CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said. Just as at the CIA, Cohen and Sanchez knew that informants would have to become the backbone of their operation. But with threats coming in from around the globe, they couldn't wait months for the perfect plan. They came up with a makeshift solution. They dispatched more officers to Pakistani neighborhoods and, according to one former police official directly involved in the effort, instructed them to look for reasons to stop cars: speeding, broken tail lights, running stop signs, whatever. The traffic stop gave police an opportunity to search for outstanding warrants or look for suspicious behavior. An arrest could be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an informant. For Cohen, the transition from spying to policing didn't come naturally, former colleagues said. When faced with a decision, especially early in his tenure, he'd fall back on his CIA background. Cutter said he and other uniformed officers had to tell Cohen, no, we can't just slip into someone's apartment without a warrant. No, we can't just conduct a search. The rules for policing are different. While Cohen was being shaped by the police department, his CIA background was remaking the department. But one significant barrier stood in the way of Cohen's vision. Since 1985, the NYPD had operated under a federal court order limiting the tactics it could use to gather intelligence. During the 1960s and 1970s, the department had used informants and undercover officers to infiltrate anti-war protest groups and other activists without any reason to suspect criminal behavior. To settle a lawsuit, the department agreed to follow guidelines that required "specific information" of criminal activity before police could monitor political activity. In September 2002, Cohen told a federal judge that those guidelines made it "virtually impossible" to detect terrorist plots. The FBI was changing its rules to respond to 9/11, and Cohen argued that the NYPD must do so, too. "In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait far too long," Cohen wrote. U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. agreed, saying the old guidelines "addressed different perils in a different time." He scrapped the old rules and replaced them with more lenient ones. It was a turning point for the NYPD. ___ With his newfound authority, Cohen created a secret squad that would soon infiltrate Muslim neighborhoods, according to several current and former officials directly involved in the program. The NYPD carved up the city into more than a dozen zones and assigned undercover officers to monitor them, looking for potential trouble. At the CIA, one of the biggest obstacles has always been that U.S. intelligence officials are overwhelmingly white, their mannerisms clearly American. The NYPD didn't have that problem, thanks to its diverse pool of officers. Using census data, the department matched undercover officers to ethnic communities and instructed them to blend in, the officials said. Pakistani-American officers infiltrated Pakistani neighborhoods, Palestinians focused on Palestinian neighborhoods. They hung out in hookah bars and cafes, quietly observing the community around them. The unit, which has been undisclosed now, became known inside the department as the Demographic Unit, former police officials said. "It's not a question of profiling. It's a question of going where the problem could arise," said Mordecai Dzikansky, a retired NYPD intelligence officer who said he was aware of the Demographic Unit. "And thank God we have the capability. We have the language capability and the ethnic officers. That's our hidden weapon." The officers did not work out of headquarters, officials said. Instead, they passed their intelligence to police handlers who knew their identities. Cohen said he wanted the squad to "rake the coals, looking for hot spots," former officials recalled. The undercover officers soon became known inside the department as rakers. A hot spot might be a beauty supply store selling chemicals used for making bombs. Or it might be a hawala, a broker that transfers money around the world with little documentation. Undercover officers might visit an Internet cafe and look at the browsing history on a computer, a former police official involved in the program said. If it revealed visits to radical websites, the cafe might be deemed a hot spot. Ethnic bookstores, too, were on the list. If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn. The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny. If a restaurant patron applauds a news report about the death of U.S. troops, the patron or the restaurant could be labeled a hot spot. The goal was to "map the city's human terrain," one law enforcement official said. The program was modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank, a former police official said. Mapping crimes has been a successful police strategy nationwide. But mapping robberies and shootings is one thing. Mapping ethnic neighborhoods is different, something that at least brushes against what the federal government considers racial profiling. Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said the Demographic Unit does not exist. He said the department has a Zone Assessment Unit that looks for locations that could attract terrorists. But he said undercover officers only followed leads, disputing the account of several current and former police and federal officials. They do not just hang out in neighborhoods, he said. "We will go into a location, whether it's a mosque or a bookstore, if the lead warrants it, and at least establish whether there's something that requires more attention," Browne said. That conflicts with testimony from an undercover officer in the 2006 trial of Shahawar Matin Siraj, who was convicted of planning an attack on New York's subway system. The officer said he was instructed to live in Brooklyn and act as a "walking camera" for police. "I was told to act like a civilian – hang out in the neighborhood, gather information," the Bangladeshi officer testified, under a false name, in what offered the first narrow glimpse at the NYPD's infiltration of ethnic neighborhoods. Officials said such operations just made sense. Islamic terrorists had attacked the city on 9/11, so police needed people inside the city's Muslim neighborhoods. Officials say it does not conflict with a 2004 city law prohibiting the NYPD from using religion or ethnicity "as the determinative factor for initiating law enforcement action." "It's not profiling," Cutter said. "It's like, after a shooting, do you go 20 blocks away and interview guys or do you go to the neighborhood where it happened?" In 2007, the Los Angeles Police Department was criticized for even considering a similar program. The police announced plans to map Islamic neighborhoods to look for pockets of radicalization among the region's roughly 500,000 Muslims. Criticism was swift, and chief William Bratton scrapped the plan. "A lot of these people came from countries where the police were the terrorists," Bratton said at a news conference, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. "We don't do that here. We do not want to spread fear." In New York, current and former officials said, the lesson of that controversy was that such programs should be kept secret. Some in the department, including lawyers, have privately expressed concerns about the raking program and how police use the information, current and former officials said. Part of the concern was that it might appear that police were building dossiers on innocent people, officials said. Another concern was that, if a case went to court, the department could be forced to reveal details about the program, putting the entire operation in jeopardy. That's why, former officials said, police regularly shredded documents discussing rakers. When Cohen made his case in court that he needed broader authority to investigate terrorism, he had promised to abide by the FBI's investigative guidelines. But the FBI is prohibited from using undercover agents unless there's specific evidence of criminal activity, meaning a federal raking program like the one officials described to the AP would violate FBI guidelines. The NYPD declined to make Cohen available for comment. In an earlier interview with the AP on a variety of topics, Police Commissioner Kelly said the intelligence unit does not infringe on civil rights. "We're doing what we believe we have to do to protect the city," he said. "We have many, many lawyers in our employ. We see ourselves as very conscious and aware of civil liberties. And we know there's always going to be some tension between the police department and so-called civil liberties groups because of the nature of what we do." The department clashed with civil rights groups most publicly after Cohen's undercover officers infiltrated anti-war groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. A lawsuit over that program continues today. During the convention, when protesters were arrested, police asked a list of questions which, according to court documents, included: "What are your political affiliations?" "Do you do any kind of political work?" and "Do you hate George W. Bush?" "At the end of the day, it's pure and simple a rogue domestic surveillance operation," said Christopher Dunn, a New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer involved in the convention lawsuit. ___ Undercover agents like the rakers were valuable, but what Cohen and Sanchez wanted most were informants. The NYPD dedicated an entire squad, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, to developing and handling informants. Current and former officials said Sanchez was instrumental in teaching them how to develop sources. For years, detectives used informants known as mosque crawlers to monitor weekly sermons and report what was said, several current and former officials directly involved in the informant program said. If FBI agents were to do that, they would be in violation of the Privacy Act, which prohibits the federal government from collecting intelligence on purely First Amendment activities. The FBI has generated its own share of controversy for putting informants inside mosques, but unlike the program described to the AP, the FBI requires evidence of a crime before an informant can be used inside a mosque. Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, would not discuss the NYPD's programs but said FBI informants can't xxxxx mosques looking for leads. Such operations are reviewed for civil liberties concerns, she said. "If you're sending an informant into a mosque when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, that's a very high-risk thing to do," Caproni said. "You're running right up against core constitutional rights. You're talking about freedom of religion." That's why senior FBI officials in New York ordered their own agents not to accept any reports from the NYPD's mosque crawlers, two retired agents said. It's unclear whether the police department still uses mosque crawlers. Officials said that, as Muslims figured out what was going on, the mosque crawlers became cafe crawlers, fanning out into the city's ethnic hangouts. "Someone has a great imagination," Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said. "There is no such thing as mosque crawlers." Following the foiled subway plot, however, the key informant in the case, Osama Eldawoody, said he attended hundreds of prayer services and collected information even on people who showed no signs of radicalization. NYPD detectives have recruited shopkeepers and nosy neighbors to become "seeded" informants who keep police up to date on the latest happenings in ethnic neighborhoods, one official directly involved in the informant program said. The department also has a roster of "directed" informants it can tap for assignments. For instance, if a raker identifies a bookstore as a hot spot, police might assign an informant to gather information, long before there's concrete evidence of anything criminal. To identify possible informants, the department created what became known as the "debriefing program." When someone is arrested who might be useful to the intelligence unit – whether because he said something suspicious or because he is simply a young Middle Eastern man – he is singled out for extra questioning. Intelligence officials don't care about the underlying charges; they want to know more about his community and, ideally, they want to put him to work. Police are in prisons, too, promising better living conditions and help or money on the outside for Muslim prisoners who will work with them. Early in the intelligence division's transformation, police asked the taxi commission to run a report on all the city's Pakistani cab drivers, looking for those who got licenses fraudulently and might be susceptible to pressure to cooperate, according to former officials who were involved in or briefed on the effort. That strategy has been rejected in other cities. Boston police once asked neighboring Cambridge for a list of Somali cab drivers, Cambridge Police Chief Robert Haas said. Haas refused, saying that without a specific reason, the search was inappropriate. "It really has a chilling effect in terms of the relationship between the local police department and those cultural groups, if they think that's going to take place," Haas said. The informant division was so important to the NYPD that Cohen persuaded his former colleagues to train a detective, Steve Pinkall, at the CIA's training center at the Farm. Pinkall, who had an intelligence background as a Marine, was given an unusual temporary assignment at CIA headquarters, officials said. He took the field tradecraft course alongside future CIA spies then returned to New York to run investigations. "We found that helpful, for NYPD personnel to be exposed to the tradecraft," Browne said. The idea troubled senior FBI officials, who saw it as the NYPD and CIA blurring the lines between police work and spying, in which undercover officers regularly break the laws of foreign governments. The arrangement even made its way to FBI Director Robert Mueller, two former senior FBI officials said, but the training was already under way and Mueller did not press the issue. ___ NYPD's intelligence operations do not stop at the city line, as the undercover operation in New Jersey made clear. The department has gotten some of its officers deputized as federal marshals, allowing them to work out of state. But often, there's no specific jurisdiction at all. Cohen's undercover squad, the Special Services Unit, operates in places such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, officials said. They can't make arrests and, if something goes wrong – a shooting or a car accident, for instance – the officers could be personally liable. But the NYPD has decided it's worth the risk, a former police official said. With Police Commissioner Kelly's backing, Cohen's policy is that any potential threat to New York City is the NYPD's business, regardless of where it occurs, officials said. That aggressiveness has sometimes put the NYPD at odds with local police departments and, more frequently, with the FBI. The FBI didn't like the rules Cohen played by and said his operations encroached on their responsibilities. Once, undercover officers were stopped by police in Massachusetts while conducting surveillance on a house, one former New York official recalled. In another instance, the NYPD sparked concern among federal officials by expanding its intelligence-gathering efforts related to the United Nations, where the FBI is in charge, current and former federal officials said. The AP has agreed not to disclose details of either the FBI or NYPD operations because they involve foreign counterintelligence. Both Mueller and Kelly have said their agencies have strong working relationships and said reports of rivalry and disagreements are overblown. And the NYPD's out-of-state operations have had success. A young Egyptian NYPD officer living undercover in New Jersey, for example, was key to building a case against Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte. The pair was arrested last year at John F. Kennedy Airport en route to Somalia to join the terrorist group al-Shabab. Both pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Cohen has also sent officers abroad, stationing them in 11 foreign cities. If a bomber blows himself up in Jerusalem, the NYPD rushes to the scene, said Dzikansky, who served in Israel and is the co-author of the forthcoming book "Terrorist Suicide Bombings: Attack Interdiction, Mitigation, and Response." "I was there to ask the New York question," Dzikansky said. "Why this location? Was there something unique that the bomber had done? Was there any pre-notification. Was there a security lapse?" All of this intelligence – from the rakers, the undercovers, the overseas liaisons and the informants – is passed to a team of analysts hired from some of the nation's most prestigious universities. Analysts have spotted emerging trends and summarized topics such as Hezbollah's activities in New York and the threat of South Asian terrorist groups. They also have tackled more contentious topics, including drafting an analytical report on every mosque within 100 miles of New York, one former police official said. The report drew on information from mosque crawlers, undercover officers and public information. It mapped hundreds of mosques and discussed the likelihood of them being infiltrated by al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. For Cohen, there was only one way to measure success: "They haven't attacked us," he said in a 2005 deposition. He said anything that was bad for terrorists was good for NYPD. ___ Though the CIA is prohibited from collecting intelligence domestically, the wall between domestic and foreign operations became more porous. Intelligence gathered by the NYPD, with CIA officer Sanchez overseeing collection, was often passed to the CIA in informal conversations and through unofficial channels, a former official involved in that process said. By design, the NYPD was looking more and more like a domestic CIA. "It's like starting the CIA over in the post-9/11 world," Cohen said in "Protecting the City," a laudatory 2009 book about the NYPD. "What would you do if you could begin it all over again? Hah. This is what you would do." Sanchez's assignment in New York ended in 2004, but he received permission to take a leave of absence from the agency and become Cohen's deputy, former officials said. Though Sanchez's assignments were blessed by CIA management, some in the agency's New York station saw the presence of such a senior officer in the city as a turf encroachment. Finally, the New York station chief, Tom Higgins, called headquarters, one former senior intelligence official said. Higgins complained, the official said, that Sanchez was wearing both hats, sometimes acting as a CIA officer, sometimes as an NYPD official. The CIA finally forced him to choose: Stay with the agency or stay with the NYPD. Sanchez declined to comment to the AP about the arrangement, but he picked the NYPD. He retired last year and is now a consultant in the Middle East. Last month, the CIA deepened its NYPD ties even further. It sent one of its most experienced operatives, a former station chief in two Middle Eastern countries, to work out of police headquarters as Cohen's special assistant while on the CIA payroll. Current and former U.S. officials acknowledge it's unusual but said it's the kind of collaboration Americans expect after 9/11. Officials said revealing the CIA officer's name would jeopardize national security. The arrangement was described as a sabbatical. He is a member of the agency's senior management, but officials said he was sent to the municipal police department to get management experience. At the NYPD, he works undercover in the senior ranks of the intelligence division. Officials are adamant that he is not involved in actual intelligence-gathering. ___ The NYPD has faced little scrutiny over the past decade as it has taken on broad new intelligence missions, targeted ethnic neighborhoods and partnered with the CIA in extraordinary ways. The department's primary watchdog, the New York City Council, has not held hearings on the intelligence division's operations and former NYPD officials said council members typically do not ask for details. "Ray Kelly briefs me privately on certain subjects that should not be discussed in public," said City Councilman Peter Vallone. "We've discussed in person how they investigate certain groups they suspect have terrorist sympathizers or have terrorist suspects." The city comptroller's office has audited several NYPD components since 9/11 but not the intelligence unit, which had a $62 million budget last year. The federal government, too, has done little to scrutinize the nation's largest police force, despite the massive federal aid. Homeland Security officials review NYPD grants but not its underlying programs. A report in January by the Homeland Security inspector general, for instance, found that the NYPD violated state and federal contracting rules between 2006 and 2008 by buying more than $4 million in equipment through a no-bid process. NYPD said public bidding would have revealed sensitive information to terrorists, but police never got approval from state or federal officials to adopt their own rules, the inspector general said. On Capitol Hill, where FBI tactics have frequently been criticized for their effect on civil liberties, the NYPD faces no such opposition. In 2007, Sanchez testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and was asked how the NYPD spots signs of radicalization. He said the key was viewing innocuous activity, including behavior that might be protected by the First Amendment, as a potential precursor to terrorism. That triggered no questions from the committee, which Sanchez said had been "briefed in the past on how we do business." The Justice Department has the authority to investigate civil rights violations. It issued detailed rules in 2003 against racial profiling, including prohibiting agencies from considering race when making traffic stops or assigning patrols. But those rules apply only to the federal government and contain a murky exemption for terrorism investigations. The Justice Department has not investigated a police department for civil rights violations during a national security investigation. "One of the hallmarks of the intelligence division over the last 10 years is that, not only has it gotten extremely aggressive and sophisticated, but it's operating completely on its own," said Dunn, the civil liberties lawyer. "There are no checks. There is no oversight." The NYPD has been mentioned as a model for policing in the post-9/11 era. But it's a model that seems custom-made for New York. No other city has the Big Apple's combination of a low crime rate, a $4.5 billion police budget and a diverse 34,000-person police force. Certainly no other police department has such deep CIA ties. Perhaps most important, nobody else had 9/11 the way New York did. No other city lost nearly 3,000 people in a single morning. A decade later, police say New Yorkers still expect the department to do whatever it can to prevent another attack. The NYPD has embraced that expectation. As Sanchez testified on Capitol Hill: "We've been given the public tolerance and the luxury to be very aggressive on this topic." ____ Associated Press writers Tom Hays and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.

First video: Rick Perry struggles to answer question on abstinence Second video: More questions about who Perry really is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAOf-amXolE

Coulson to be questioned by MPs again – if police don't get him first The Independent By Andy McSmith Wednesday, 24 August 2011 Andy Coulson faces the prospect of another public grilling by MPs in the next two months if the police do not charge him with illegal phone hacking. Members of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee are angry about the replies they received when they asked whether Mr Coulson still had a financial link with Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire after he began working for David Cameron. One member of the committee, the Labour MP Paul Farrelly, accused him yesterday of acting "like a spiv". The committee's Conservative chairman, John Whittingdale, complained that Mr Coulson should have been more "clear" in his answers. Other MPs were astonished that he should have been appointed to such a sensitive political post as David Cameron's media strategist without anyone apparently making inquiries into his continuing financial links to the Murdoch empire. Jack Straw, the former home secretary, said: "This shows a degree of carelessness by David Cameron in not scrutinising the appointment before it was made. It's pretty rum that a major political party placeman should have been receiving almost as much from a newspaper group as from his employer." When Mr Coulson was giving evidence at a public session of the committee, he claimed he had no "secondary income" when he took up his post as director of communications for the Conservative Party in July 2007. It has since emerged that he received hundreds of thousands of pounds in severance pay from his job as editor of the News of the World, paid in instalments to the end of 2007. Other perks from that job, such as free health insurance, were extended for three years and he was allowed to keep his company car. A Conservative Party spokesman said last night that the party was "not aware" of Mr Coulson's severance package until it was reported in the press. The spokesman added: "Severance payments are a private matter. It is not part of the HR process to discuss severance payments from previous jobs with potential employees." Tom Watson, a Labour member of the committee who has campaigned relentlessly to expose the phone-hacking scandal, is trying to uncover whether Mr Coulson declared the payments when he applied for a pass to give him access to Parliament. Passholders are required to tell the Commons authorities who is paying them. Mr Whittingdale said the committee would meet early in September to decide whether to recall Mr Coulson for more questioning, as the position was "complicated" by the police investigation into phone hacking. Mr Coulson was arrested in July and has not been charged. Mr Whittingdale added: "If it is true that Coulson was provided with a car and health insurance, then I would have expected him to have made that clear. And I would have expected News International to have made that clear when we asked them about it."

Tories on defensive over Coulson's income while working for party Conservative party sources say staggered severance payments 'different from salary' By Polly Curtis, James Robinson and Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 August 2011 21.22 BST The Conservative party is struggling to defend itself against the disclosure that Andy Coulson, its former head of communications, received six-figure payments from News International while working for the party, despite having previously stated categorically that he had no other income. The party has been asked repeatedly about Coulson's income, insisting that he was not paid by anyone else during his time at Conservative party HQ and in Downing Street. It offered comprehensive assurances that he had no other income as recently as last month, and apparently after seeking assurances directly from Coulson. The revelation on Monday night that he received the severance payments in instalments in 2007, the first year he was employed by George Osborne and David Cameron, and also continued to use a company car and receive health insurance from News International until the beginning of 2010, raises the possibility that the payments could have been concealed from the party. But in a sign of the continued loyalty to Coulson at the top of the government, senior sources in the Conservative party stressed that the severance payments were different from receiving a salary or co-payment from News International. The party refused to answer detailed questions about what assurances Coulson gave about his earnings, whom he had given assurances to, and when. No 10 directed inquirers about the revelations to the prime minister's previous promise in the Commons to issue a "profound" apology should it transpire that Coulson lied to him over the extent of his knowledge of phone hacking at the News of the World, where he was editor before joining the Conservatives. But the Opposition and even some people within the coalition demanded to know whether Coulson had lied about his income too. Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat peer, said: "There is a clear conflict of interest in the director of communications for the Conservative party driving a company car and using health insurance provided by News International. Clearly he didn't come clean on this with the party. Have we got to the bottom of it even now? "The question is: did Andy Coulson conceal this from the Conservative party or not? If he didn't, who knew? This raises ever more serious questions and, rather than having to drag admissions out of them one at a time like rotten teeth, we need Cameron to say what he knew." Ivan Lewis, Labour's culture spokesman, said: "It must be explained why Mr Coulson was getting these payments when he resigned from the News of the World. The longer these questions are unanswered the more damage will be done to the prime minister's reputation." Tom Watson, the Labour MP who has campaigned on phone hacking, wrote to the Electoral Commission asking it to investigate the payments, arguing they could amount to an undeclared donation to the Tory party. The commission's rules suggest that a decision to investigate will rest on whether Coulson's payments benefited the party or amounted to a gift in kind that saved the party expenditure, for example by meaning it did not have to provide health insurance, which is not routinely offered at Conservative Campaign HeadquartersCCHQ. In a statement, a spokesman for the party said: "We were not aware until last night of allegations that Andy Coulson's severance package, agreed with News International before he was employed by the Conservative party, was paid in instalments that continued into the time he was employed by the Conservative party. Any payments made to Andy Coulson as part of his severance package with News International would not constitute donations in kind to the party as they were linked to his previous employment with NI, not with the Conservative party. Severance payments are a private matter. It is not part of the HR process to discuss severance payments from previous jobs with potential employees." Last month, a senior Conservative official told the Guardian: "We can give categorical assurances that he wasn't paid by any other source. Andy Coulson's only salary, his only form of income, came from the party during the years he worked for the party and in government." The Guardian has also established that News International paid Coulson's legal fees up until late last year while he was still working in Downing Street. The Cabinet Office confirmed last year that Coulson's legal fees were met by News International when the former MSP Tommy Sheridan was prosecuted for libel in December 2010. News International would not be drawn on whether Coulson's legal fees are still being paid by the company. According to insiders, however, some so-called compromise agreements signed by former staff include clauses stating that the company will meet the cost of any future legal disputes relating to their time at the company. Two former News International editors, David Yelland and Andrew Neil, publicly disputed claims that staggered severance payments were normal at the firm. Senior News International sources privately claimed Coulson was entitled to have his contract honoured despite having resigned from the paper in January 2007 after his royal editor was jailed for intercepting voicemails. However, Yelland, a former Sun editor, said on Twitter: "When I left NewsCorp I didn't sign or have any compromise agreement! I just left." It is understood that Yelland did not receive any money from the company. Neil, who edited the Sunday Times for 10 years, used Twitter to say: "My original NI editor contract said if I resigned I was entitled to nothing." A spokesman for Rebekah Brooks, who resigned as chief executive of News International last month, refused to comment on whether she has received a pay-off from the company, or whether any sum agreed is being paid in instalments.

Call for inquiry into News International payments to Andy CoulsonLabour MP Tom Watson wants Electoral Commission to investigate whether payments and benefits to former No 10 communications director amounted to political donations By Andrew Sparrow and Polly Curtis guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 August 2011 14.57 BST The Electoral Commission is being asked to investigate whether News International payments to Andy Coulson after he started working for the Conservative party may have broken the law. Tom Watson, a Labour MP and a member of the Commons culture committee, said he wanted the Electoral Commission to investigate whether the payments and benefits – which reportedly included private health insurance and a company car – should have been declared because they amounted to a political donation. MPs on the committee are also angry because the reports appear to contradict evidence given to it by Coulson himself. The former News of the World editor, who worked as David Cameron's communications chief from July 2007 until January this year, is expected to face further questioning from the committee about the payments. On Monday night, the BBC's Robert Peston said Coulson had received several hundred thousand pounds from News International after he started working for Tories. Coulson was known to have received a payoff after he resigned from the News of the World in January 2007 following the conviction of the journalist Clive Goodman and the investigator Glenn Mulcaire for phone hacking. But Peston said Coulson received his severance pay in instalments, and that he continued receiving money from News International until the end of 2007. Peston also said Coulson continued to receive his News International work benefits, such as healthcare, for three years and that he kept his company car. The report casts doubt on the reliability of the evidence that Coulson gave to the culture committee in 2009. Coulson, who at the time was working for the Conservative party on a reported salary of £275,000 – roughly half what he was thought to have been earning at the News of the World – said he did not have any "secondary income". Watson asked: "So your sole income was News International and then your sole income was the Conservative party?" Coulson replied: "Yes." Rebekah Brooks, the former News International chief executive, appeared to confirm this when she gave evidence to the committee in July. Asked if the company had "subsidised" Coulson's salary after he left the News of the World, she said: "That's not true." On Tuesday, John Whittingdale, the Conservative MP who chairs the culture committee, said Coulson and News International should have been more open with the committee about the nature of this arrangement. "As I understand it, these were staggered payments from a severance package. So, arguably, that's just delayed pay," Whittingdale said. "But if it is also true that Coulson was provided with a car and health insurance, then I would have expected him to have made that clear. And I would have expected News International to have made that clear when we asked them about it." The committee is not meeting until September, but Whittingdale said it may decide to demand further clarification on these matters from Coulson and News International. Watson said on Tuesday the committee would have to establish whether it had been "misled". But he said that the Electoral Commission also had to establish whether the payments and benefits constituted donations to the Conservative party that should have been declared. "If it transpires that these payments were made in a discretionary fashion, rather than honouring the commitments of Mr Coulson's contract, then I think they probably do form a donation and they should have been declared," he said. "Every single day there seems to be a new revelation that contradicts what has previously been said. I want the Electoral Commission to try and get to the facts of this case. They have powers of investigation." Watson also said that Cameron should have been embarrassed to learn that Rupert Murdoch was still paying for Coulson's car and for Coulson's health insurance several years after Coulson started working for the Tories. "I just pose the question – if Alastair Campbell when he was working for Tony Blair had had his car paid and his health insurance paid – what would the reaction of the Murdoch papers be?" Watson asked. The commission said it had not yet received a complaint about the individual allegations and refused to spell out whether such payments might have been considered undeclared donations, directing inquiries to their rules regulating donations. According to the rules, staff of political parties are not considered regulated donees in their own right unless they are a member of the party and they receive money for use in their political work. Payments to a member of staff could however be considered a donation in kind to a party if it saved the party paying for items itself. As such, if the payments were in anyway considered a co-payment or top-up to subsidise his party wage it could count as a donation. Alternatively if the health insurance or company car he reportedly enjoyed for three years after leaving News International subsidised the party paying for such items itself, it could also be considered a donation. In July, the Conservatives denied Coulson was paid by News International while he was working for the party or the government. A senior Conservative party official told the Guardian: "We can give categorical assurances that he wasn't paid by any other source. Andy Coulson's only salary, his only form of income, came from the party during the years he worked for the party and in government." Labour's culture spokesman, Ivan Lewis, put out a statement on Tuesday demanding more "transparency" from Cameron and News International. "David Cameron needs to say whether he knew about the payments to Andy Coulson. The details of Mr Coulson's termination agreements with News International must be published and we need to know whether these payments, in the form of honouring a two-year contract of employment after he had been forced to resign in disgrace, were declared to the parliamentary authorities," Lewis said. "It must be explained why Mr Coulson was getting these payments when he resigned from the News of the World. "The longer these questions are unanswered the more damage will be done to the prime minister's reputation."

I found the following article, previously posted in this topic, interesting because of the willingness/eagerness of the U.K. government to brief the Murdochs and their key employees on sensitive defense and other matters on a large number of occasions without vetting these individuals first. It raised a question in my mind as to whether the Murdoch empire was connected somehow to the Australian, U.K. and/or U.S. Intelligence Agencies: Posted 27 July 2011 - 02:19 AM Murdochs were given secret defence briefings Ministers held meetings with media mogul's people more than 60 times The Independent By Oliver Wright, Whitehall Editor Wednesday, 27 July 2011 The extraordinary access that Cabinet ministers granted Rupert Murdoch and his children was revealed for the first time yesterday, with more than two dozen private meetings between the family and senior members of the Government in the 15 months since David Cameron entered Downing Street. In total, Cabinet ministers have had private meetings with Murdoch executives more than 60 times and, if social events such as receptions at party conferences are included, the figure is at least 107. On two occasions, James Murdoch and former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks were given confidential defence briefings on Afghanistan and Britain's strategic defence review by the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox. A further briefing was held with Ms Brooks, Rupert Murdoch and the Sunday Times editor John Witherow. The Chancellor, George Osborne, has had 16 separate meetings since May 2010 with News International editors and executives, including two with the Murdochs within just a month of taking office. He also invited Elisabeth Murdoch as a guest to his 40th birthday party last month. The Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, dined with Rupert Murdoch within days of the Government coming to power and, after being given quasi-judicial oversight for the Murdochs' £8bn attempted takeover of BSkyB, had two meetings with James Murdoch in which they discussed the takeover. Mr Hunt said last night that these were legitimate as part of the bid process. But the minister who sees Rupert Murdoch the most frequently is the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, a former News International employee. Mr Gove has seen the mogul for breakfast, lunch or dinner on six occasions since last May. Overall, Mr Gove has had 12 meetings with Murdoch executives since becoming a minister. The list, released by government departments yesterday evening, reinforces the impression of an unhealthily close relationship between the top echelons of News International and senior members of the Coalition Cabinet, which first became apparent when Mr Cameron released his list of contacts with news organisations a week ago. He revealed then that he had met News International executives on 26 occasions since entering Downing Street. Senior executives and editors from News International have held private meetings with Cabinet ministers more than 60 times since last May. Other newspaper groups and media organisations had significantly fewer meetings. Mr Osborne met with representatives of The Daily Telegraph group on six occasions and The Independent/London Evening Standard twice. Mr Hunt met Telegraph and Independent figures twice each and members of the BBC 11 times. The Business Secretary, Vince Cable, who was stripped of responsibility for ruling on whether the BSkyB bid should go ahead after boasting in December that he had "declared war on Rupert Murdoch", did not have as much contact as some of his colleagues. Mr Cable met the editor of The Times, James Harding, in December, although it is unclear whether this was before or after he was stripped of his responsibilities for the BSkyB bid. The Prime Minister's chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, held a meeting shortly after the election with No 10's then communications director Andy Coulson, the former head of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Stephenson and Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the News of the World and then an adviser to the Met. Both Mr Coulson and Mr Wallis have since been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking and Sir Paul resigned over his handling of the scandal. Last night a spokesman for Mr Gove insisted that his meetings with the Murdochs were of a personal nature. "Michael worked for the BBC and News International and his wife works for News International now," he said. "He has known Rupert Murdoch for over a decade. He did not discuss the BSkyB deal with the Murdochs and isn't at all embarrassed about his meetings, most of which have been about education, which is his job." A spokesman for Mr Fox said that the defence briefings given to the Murdochs covered a range of issues and were given because of the "interest in defence matters" shown by News International papers. He did not say who initiated the meetings. The Chancellor had said he would be happy to talk about the meetings, but the list was released just after interviews he gave on GDP figures so he was not available for comment. The Conservative Party co-chairman, Sayeeda Warsi, said the release of the information showed that, in contrast to Labour, the Government was being open about its dealings with the Murdochs. "This Government is delivering unprecedented transparency," she said. "Ed Miliband now needs to come clean. Where is his list of Shadow Cabinet media meetings?" Watson to write book with Independent reporter Tom Watson, the Labour MP who has done much to uncover the extent of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, is to write the "full behind-the-scenes story" with The Independent correspondent Martin Hickman. The publisher Penguin promised yesterday that the book would "describe in previously unpublished detail the nexus between News Corporation, the police and politicians, and will explain how the connections between them were unravelled". The tenacious MP for West Bromwich East led the questioning of Rupert and James Murdoch and the former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks last week when they appeared before the House of Commons select committee for Culture, Media & Sport. Hickman was named 2009 Journalist of the Year by the Foreign Press Association. Penguin said: "With unique information and access, their book will show what went wrong with some very prominent British institutions and will mark the moment when everything began to change." As yet untitled, it will be published later this year. The book is likely to be one of several documenting a scandal that has gone to the heart of British society.

Murdoch told me to have someone followed: Buttrose Australian Story http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-22/ita-buttrose-rupert-murdoch/2850338 Updated August 23, 2011 09:23:52 Photo: Ita Buttrose says Rupert Murdoch asked her to have someone followed. (ABC TV) Media figure Ita Buttrose says Rupert Murdoch suggested she have someone followed while chasing a story in her time as editor-in-chief of the Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph. In Monday night's Australian Story, Ms Buttrose said the media mogul asked her to "go beyond what I thought I should do". Ms Buttrose said the request came while working on a story at Mr Murdoch's request. "I assigned a reporter to do it but [Mr Murdoch] wasn't happy with the result and said, 'No, that wasn't good enough. Have you followed this person?'." Approaching then News Limited chief executive Ken Cowley, Ms Buttrose claims she said: "I can't give this instruction. I'm not having anybody that works for me, for whom I'm responsible, follow anybody. I don't want to be a part of it." A News Limited spokesman in Sydney said Ms Buttrose's allegations are false. "Mr Murdoch has never asked any journalist to do anything improper," the spokesman said. "Mr Cowley has never been asked by Mr Murdoch to have a reporter conduct surveillance of any kind on any individual and nor would he have agreed to it had he been asked by Mr Murdoch or anyone else." Ms Buttrose declined to reveal the subject of the print feature. Ultimately "it was dropped, we didn't go on", she said. "If you run a newspaper there's a responsibility that goes with it, and sometimes you have to be able to say to the boss, no, I don't think we should go down this path." At 39, Ms Buttrose was the first woman to edit a major metropolitan newspaper in Australia. She stayed at News Limited for four years, although "Rupert once said to me that he's got everything he wants out of an editor in 18 months". First posted August 22, 2011 14:25:57

I don't know what Perry's sexual preferences are - neither do I care. But I do know this: You, Mr Morrow, are sexually obsessed. Based on what you've written in this forum over the past year, not only are you not to be taken serious about anything; to bring forward unsubstantiated claims (about anyone) the way you do into the public arena, is despicable. It amounts to nothing beyond slander what you are doing - again and again. Attention seeking at it's worst. Among those who could be characterized as "sexually obsessed" is Bill Clinton. Voters got an early warning in his first campaign for the presidency in 1992 when the Jennifer Flowers affair erupted and other women were linked to him. Did this deter Clinton? No. Right after he was re-elected in 1996 the Monica Lewinsky scandal emerged in which it was disclosed that he and Lewinsky had oral sex in the Oval Office. Clinton defensively claimed that "I did not have sex with that woman" because it was only oral in the Oval. The country then went through years of efforts to impeach Clinton and as a result his last term in office showed few real accomplishments. Let us assume for a moment that Robert Morrow is right and that Governor Rick Perry, like Clinton, is also "sexually obsessed." If he is and if he is elected President, then at this crucial time in the history of the U.S. and the world we might witness another major Presidential sex scandal erupt that would be disastrous for the planet. Even if Robert Morrow is "sexually obsessed, it can be argued that through his obsession he is doing the U.S. and the world a great favor by alerting us now to the alleged sexual obsession of Rick Perry before that man is elected President and puts everyone through Hell.

Perry Mines Texas System to Raise Cash for Campaigns The New York Times August 21, 2011 By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL LUO Two years ago, John McHale, an entrepreneur from Austin, Tex., who has given millions of dollars to Democratic candidates and causes, did something very unusual for him: he wrote a $50,000 check to a Republican candidate, Rick Perry, then seeking a third full term as governor of Texas. In September 2010, he did it again, catapulting himself into the top ranks of Mr. Perrys donors. Mr. McHale, a Perry spokesman said after the initial donation, understands Governor Perrys leadership has made Texas a good place to do business. Including, it turned out, for Mr. McHales business interests and partners. In May 2010 an economic development fund administered by the governors office handed $3 million to G-Con, a pharmaceutical start-up that Mr. McHale helped get off the ground. At least two other executives with connections to the firm had also given Mr. Perry tens of thousands of dollars. Mr. Perry leapt into the Republican presidential primary this month preceded by his reputation as a thoroughbred fund-raiser. But a review of Mr. Perrys years in office reveals that one of his most potent fund-raising tools is the very government he heads. Over three terms in office, Mr. Perrys administration has doled out grants, tax breaks, contracts and appointments to hundreds of his most generous supporters and their businesses. And they have helped Mr. Perry raise more money than any politician in Texas history, donations that have periodically raised eyebrows but, thanks to loose campaign finance laws and a business-friendly political culture dominated in recent years by Republicans, have only fueled Mr. Perrys ascent. Texas politics does have this amazing pay-to-play culture, said Harold Cook, a Democratic political consultant. Mark Miner, a spokesman for Mr. Perry, said there was no connection between Mr. McHales contributions and the grant to G-Con. He said that the purpose of the state money was to create jobs and that it was appropriate for Mr. Perry to appoint people who support his vision and policies to state oversight posts. These issues have been brought up in previous elections to no avail, Mr. Miner said. Mr. Perry is not the first governor to have taken contributions from contractors or appointees to state commissions and boards, which oversee many of the agencies that in other states are controlled directly by the governor. But because he has been in office more than a decade, he has had greater opportunity than any of his predecessors to stock the government with loyalists he has appointed roughly 4,000 people to state posts while enacting policies that have benefited allies and contributors. And Mr. Perry has been much more aggressive than any past governor in soliciting money from them. According to a study last year by Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog organization, Mr. Perry has raised at least $17 million from more than 900 appointees or their spouses, roughly one dollar out of every five that he has raised as governor. Among the state boards that have generated the most campaign contributions for Mr. Perry, the study found, were the State Parks and Wildlife Commission and the board of regents of Texas A&M, Mr. Perrys alma mater. Those appointees have donated more than $4 million to his campaigns for governor. I know that at least some of the people who were initially approached to be regents have been later turned down because they didnt pass what I would call a loyalty test, said Jon L. Hagler, a prominent A&M alumnus and a major donor to the university. Mr. Perry has also drawn scrutiny for two of his signature economic development efforts, the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. The enterprise fund, which is intended to be a deal-closing tool for the state as it competes for jobs, has dispensed $435 million in grants to businesses since 2003. The technology fund, which has doled out nearly $200 million to companies since 2005, has a similar job creation mandate. More than a quarter of the companies that have received grants from the enterprise fund in the most recent fiscal year, or their chief executives, made contributions to either Mr. Perrys campaign dating back to 2001 or to the Republican Governors Association since 2008, when Mr. Perry became its chairman, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The award to G-Con is just one example of state money paying dividends for Perry benefactors. The company is working with the Texas A&M university system on a pharmaceutical manufacturing effort toward influenza vaccines. Among G-Cons officers, according to records filed with the Texas secretary of state, is David M. Shanahan, who also has a significant ownership stake in the company. He is also the founder and president of Gradalis, a biotech firm based in Dallas that received a separate $1.75 million grant from the states technology fund in February 2009. Campaign finance records show that Mr. Shanahan contributed $10,000 to the governor in November 2009. The following month, G-Con filed its application for an enterprise fund grant, said Lucy Nashed, a spokeswoman in the governors office. (Mr. Shanahan also donated $5,000 in 2007.) State records from a network of firms associated with G-Con also list Mr. McHale, the longtime Democratic donor, as an officer. Patricia Haigwood, a spokeswoman for G-Con, said Friday that Mr. McHale, who did not return messages asking for comment, was one of the original board members of G-Con. But she said he left the company in late April 2010 and had not made an investment in G-Con. Gradalis, however, controls 10 percent of G-Con, corporate records show. And Mr. McHale and James R. Leininger, a San Antonio businessman who has given more than $230,000 to Mr. Perry, have minority interests in Gradalis, Ms. Haigwood said. Gradaliss technology fund grant came under scrutiny last year when The Dallas Morning News revealed that Mr. McHale and Mr. Leininger, both major Perry donors, had significant financial interests in the company. Ms. Nashed said that grants from both funds must be approved by the speaker of the Texas House and the lieutenant governor and that all recipients go through rigorous reviews. Mr. Perry has also drawn criticism for his appointees to the board of the Teacher Retirement System, a $110 billion pension fund that is among the nations largest. In recent years he has appointed at least four top donors or fund-raisers to the board. Mr. Perrys trustees leaned on the fund to invest more money with hedge funds and private equity firms, as many public pension funds have in recent years. But in some cases, the appointees appear to have pushed for firms whose investors, officers, or partners were Perry donors. In 2009 an investment manager at the fund, Michael Green, wrote to a board trustee saying that the funds chief investment officer had pressed him and other employees to set aside their objections to such investments, including allocations to two firms whose partners and former partners have donated more than $1 million to Mr. Perrys campaigns. When Mr. Green complained about the pressure, a superior dismissed his concerns. Mr. Greens boss, he wrote to the trustee, told him: This is the way business is done. An internal investigation concluded that no rules had been broken. Philip Mullins, a trustee, said, I think the concerns that were raised were based on a feeling that the chairman and some other people on the board were trying to set up a fund-raising campaign for the governor of Texas. Another instance of political donations to Mr. Perry seeming to dovetail with his policy decisions came in 2005, when the TXU Corporation, a utility based in Dallas, sought permits to build coal-fired power plants. That October, Mr. Perry issued an executive order for a review panel to fast-track the application. In the months that followed, current and retired TXU executives, as well as the companys political action committee, sent Mr. Perry more than $100,000 in donations, including one check dated the same day as Mr. Perrys order. Mr. Perrys office said at the time that the order was unrelated to the contributions. A state judge later blocked the order, ruling that Mr. Perry had overstepped his authority. In 2003, after a rash of mold-related lawsuits against home construction companies, Mr. Perry championed the creation of a state board, the Texas Residential Construction Commission. The new commission was a priority of Mr. Perrys most generous contributor: Bob Perry, a homebuilder who has contributed more than $2 million to the governor over his career. (The two men are not related.) The legislation creating the board also sharply limited the rights of homeowners to sue contractors for faulty construction, shunting most disputes to the commission. After its passage, Bob Perry and his wife sent two $50,000 checks to the governors campaign. Three weeks later, the governor appointed an executive of Perry Homes, Bob Perrys company, to the commission, which was abolished in 2009. In 2009, as Mr. Perry was running for re-election, José Cuevas Jr., a restaurateur and the governors appointee as chairman of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, used a personal e-mail account to solicit donations for Mr. Perry from the owners of dozens of restaurants and bars overseen by the board. In an interview last week, Mr. Cuevas said he saw nothing wrong with asking the owners, many of them business contacts, for donations. It was important, he said, for Mr. Perrys appointees to support his broader mission of smaller government. When you personally know someone, Mr. Cuevas said, and know their abilities and vision, youre willing to raise as much money as hard as you can for that person. -------------------- Perry criticizes government while Texas job growth benefits from it Washington Post By Michael A. Fletcher, Published: August 20, 2011 LONGVIEW, Tex. — Texas Gov. Rick Perry has leapfrogged to the top tier of Republican presidential candidates largely on the strength of one compelling fact: During more than a decade as governor, his state created more than 1 million jobs, while the nation as a whole lost 1.4 million jobs. Perry says the “Texas miracle” rests on conservative pillars that he would bring to the White House: minimal regulation and government, low taxes and a determination to limit the reach of Uncle Sam. What he does not say is that much of that job growth has come because of government, not in spite of it. With a young and fast-growing population, a large and expanding military presence and an influx of federal stimulus money, the number of government jobs in Texas has grown at more than double the rate of private-sector employment during Perry’s tenure. The disparity has grown sharper since the national recession hit. Between December 2007 and last June, private-sector employment in Texas declined by 0.6 percent while public-sector jobs increased by 6.4 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall, government employees account for about one-sixth of the workforce in Texas. The significant role of government in Texas’s relative prosperity stands in stark contrast to the “go-it-alone” image cultivated by Perry, who credits a lack of government interference for fostering a business-friendly environment in Texas. “The fact is, government doesn’t create jobs, otherwise the last 21 / 2 years of stimulus would have worked,” Perry said this month in a speech to the National Conference of State Legislatures. “Government can only create the environment that allows the private sector to create jobs. The single most important contributor to our jobs-friendly climate here in Texas is our low tax burden, because we know dollars do far more to create jobs and prosperity in the people’s hands than they do in the government’s.” Perry has criticized Washington for “thumbing its nose” at the American people. In announcing his candidacy for president last weekend, Perry said he would “work every day to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.” Mark Miner, a Perry spokesman, said the governor’s job-creation record speaks for itself. He also said the state received less per capita — about $1,000 per resident vs. more than $1,400 in New York and $1,200 in California — than most other states from the stimulus plan while still producing more jobs. Population boom Analysts call the growth in government employment in Texas a natural consequence of the surging population, which has grown by more than 20 percent in the past decade to 25.1 million. The increase has caused local governments and school systems to hire more teachers, budget analysts, compliance officers and police officers. “A lot of growth has been happening in the public sector to respond to a growing population,” said Don Baylor Jr., a senior policy analyst with the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a research and advocacy group in Austin. “That has been an ongoing driver of our job growth.” Baylor warned that the growth in government jobs may shortly come to an abrupt halt when state budget cuts take effect this year. In July, a dip in government jobs contributed to a spike in the state’s unemployment rate, which went from 8.2 percent to 8.4 percent. “I think we are about to find out what the jobs picture looks like” without growth in the public sector, Baylor said. The Texas economy also has benefited from the huge sums spent by the federal government. The state is home to several large military installations as well as NASA, which helped Texas reap more than $227 billion in federal spending in 2009 — more than double its 2001 total, according to the Census Bureau. Texas is the nation’s second-most-populous state, behind California, where the federal government spent almost $346 billion in 2009. In the wake of the Great Recession, the state has raked in nearly $25 billion in federal stimulus money, which has gone to everything from road projects and unemployment benefits to helping to balance the state budget. Befitting its population, Texas has received the third-highest amount of stimulus money in the nation, behind California and New York. “It is not like Texas does not benefit from Washington,” said Richard W. Fisher, president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “We get ours. But still, the driving force of the Texas economy is the private sector.” Company executives and economic development officials credit Texas’s economic successes to what they call a pro-business culture. Texas is a right-to-work state, has relatively low business taxes and has no state income tax. They also applaud Perry for pushing through a series of tort reform measures, which limit medical malpractice lawsuits, impose fees on unsuccessful plaintiffs and make it easier to dismiss cases deemed to lack merit. Texas also has abundant land for development and limited land-use restrictions, making development cheaper and easier than in many places. Fluor, a global firm that designs and builds complex industrial plants, moved its corporate headquarters to the Dallas area from Orange County, Calif., five years ago. Alan Boeckmann, who was Fluor’s chief executive at the time, said the corporation was eager to take advantage of what Texas had to offer. “Most of the reasons fall into the category of corporate efficiency,” he said. “We had very little in the way of clientele and business issues in California. Also, it was very difficult to recruit people to California because the cost of living scared them away.” Texas’s relatively soft landing after the recession has helped its other assets, which include a booming energy sector, world-class airports, Gulf of Mexico ports and burgeoning trade with its southern neighbor, Mexico. Trade with China also is up sharply. Housing prices in check Texas was shielded from the worst of the housing-market bust by the state government’s tight regulation of home equity loans, which were not permitted until the late 1990s and are limited to 80 percent of a homeowner’s equity. Elsewhere, property owners often took out riskier home equity loans and mortgages that left them financially crippled when housing prices collapsed, causing damaging ripples across the economy. At the same time, mortgage lenders in Texas are tightly regulated, which prevented abuses that were prevalent in many parts of the country. Taken together, the regulations helped keep Texas housing prices in check. “Because of early and robust regulation, We never had that disconnect between incomes and home prices that you saw elsewhere at the height of the housing bubble,” said Douglas B. Foster, commissioner of the Texas Department of Savings and Mortgage Lending. “So there was no need for exotic mortgage products.” Perry’s campaign called the mortgage regulations appropriate. “Governor Perry is not against all regulations,” Miner said. “He is against regulations that kill jobs and harm the economy.” James C. Oberwetter, president of the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce, says that, overall, the state’s economy has benefited from a light hand of government — even if that has allowed social problems to fester. “There are some conservative principles at work, which, true enough, cause problems for funding some of our social programs,” he said. “Yet, on the other hand, it leads us to great job creation.” Many educators and others say that trade-off is evident in many social indicators. More than a quarter of the state’s population lacks health-care coverage. Texas is last in the country when it comes to the number of adults with high school diplomas. It is 44th in the country in school spending per pupil, and its rate of income inequality is the ninth- highest in the country. The Census Bureau says 9.5 percent of the Texas workforce is paid at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, tying it with Mississippi for the largest share of minimum-wage workers in the country. Many restaurant workers are among those who earn less than the minimum wage. “In Texas, as anywhere else in the nation and in all capitalist societies, you earn what you learn,” Fisher, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, wrote in a June op-ed piece in the Dallas Morning News, calling for educational improvements. “Income is directly correlated to educational attainment.” In Longview, in the oil- and gas-producing heart of East Texas, the economy is growing swiftly, and employers are struggling to find qualified workers. “We can’t get enough production welders,” said Aaron Lowe, a welding engineer at Trinity Rail, a railroad car manufacturer that has been expanding briskly in recent months after shrinking during the downturn. The same is true at other employers. Eastman Chemical, which manufactures coatings, adhesives and other products, has seen a huge boom in sales with the drop in natural-gas prices. The two local medical centers also are hiring. Still, education officials worry about the future of a city where only half of the high school graduates go on to higher education. “Every independent school district in Texas is underfunded,” said James Wilcox, superintendent of schools in Longview. And that, he said, will hurt in the short run. Wilcox said he recently had to cut 20 of the school system’s 1,100 jobs to accommodate state budget cuts. He also said it will hurt in the long run by leaving many of his students unprepared for the evolving job market. “If kids go right to work from high school, they are only going to get pretty much minimum-wage jobs,” Wilcox said. “They have to be able to get some training that would make it so they don’t have to start at the bottom.”

This article traces Rick Perry's career but omits any reference to the current controversy about his sexual activities. Is his run of luck about to end? ------------------------------------------------------- Weekend Edition August 19 - 21, 2011 CounterPunch Diary Rick Perry: One Lucky Son-of-a-Bitch By ALEXANDER COCKBURN www.counterpunch.org Let’s get one thing straight from the start. Rick Perry is no blow-dry George Bush clone, even though he owes his political career about 50/50 to Bush and Osama bin Laden. So what is the political profile of the Texas Governor, now officially in the race as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination? A Rasmussen poll this week had him at 29, as against his current rivals, Romney at 18, and Bachmann 13. Inside Texas he’s one of the most successful politicians in the entire history of the state. George Bush lost his first congressional race. In a lifetime career of ten elections since 1984 Perry has never lost one. He has an acute sense of political timing. His defeated opponents readily attest to Perry’s relentless self-discipline as a campaigner , skills at raising campaign cash. He already has a huge prospective war chest for his first national foray. They all emphasize the fatal consequences of underestimating him. He has a team of campaign advisors, notably, notably Dave Carney, whose skills – ruthless in the crunch - have elicited admiration from professionals across the board. Prior to Perry the Texas governorship were a notoriously weak post, with decisive power wielded by the legislature and State Comptroller and state commissioners, Railroad Commission etc. Perry has changed all that across his three stints as governor, previously contentious posts now inhabited by his compliant appointees. But above all, Rick Perry is one lucky son of a bitch. Not just once or twice, but at almost every decisive twist fork in the road Fate has given him a benign tap on the shoulder. “Give me lucky generals,” Napoleon once exclaimed. Looking at Perry’s CV he’d have made him Grand Marshall of France on the spot. Back at the pre-dawn of Perry’s political career Democrats were still the most powerful political party in Texas, and Perry began as a (an extremely conservative) Democrat. Son of tenant farmers (dryland cotton) in Paint Creek, sixty miles north of Abilene, Perry says he never met a Republican till he was 25. He was elected first as a Democratic state legislator and in 1988 was the Texas campaign chairman for (the extremely conservative) Democrat Al Gore who ultimately lost in the primaries to Michael Dukakis. Seeing scant future for Democrats in Texas Perry’s showed his aptitude for timing and shifted to the Republican Party, making straight for its conservative wing. His first really big race was as Agricultural Commissioner –a powerful post in Texas and one held in 1990 by Jim Hightower, a left populist, detested by Big Texas Money, which sluiced into Perry’s challenge. Some say Hightower was overconfident, and his office burdened with a couple of scandals, not staining Hightower personally; others that Perry, with plenty of cash on hand from Hightower’s plentiful corporate and big ag foes enemies hit him with campaign commercials, linking him to Jesse Jackson and black insurgency. Maybe both are true. At all events Perry squeaked through, and was handily reelected in 1994. In 1998 Perry ran for Lieutenant Governor. Victory would put the first Republican in the slot since Reconstruction. Bush was already planning his 2000 presidential run, which would mean quitting the gubernatorial chair. But he could not risk the charge from fellow Republicans that presidential ambitions had allowed him to hand over the governor’s mansion to a Democrat, stepping up from the Lieut. Gov’s office, and so Karl Rove took a close strategic and tactical interest in Perry’s bid. The Bush clan ran ads for Perry, though the latter’s refusal to follow Bush’s “big tent, compassionate society” message sowed the seeds for hostility between Perry and the Bush camp that is still flaring, with Rove currently denouncing Perry’s current onslaughts on Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. (How the world spins! I can remember in the early 1970s Texas populist Democrat Wright Patman, chairman of the House Banking Committee, snarling at then Fed chairman Arthur Burns, before him to give testimony, “Can you give me any reason why you should not be in the penitentiary?”) Perry was up against John Sharp, a capable Democrat , previously Comptroller. Recently Sharp recalled to Paul Burka of Texas Monthly, “Running against Perry is like running against God. Everything breaks his way! Either he’s the luckiest guy in the world or the Lord is taking care of him. He’s a relentless campaigner. I was up at five every morning just to match his schedule. Our money was about even, until an extra million dollars miraculously came to him at the last minute. Two weeks before the election, the largest flood of the century hit the Eighteenth District, which I’d represented in the state Senate. The flood inundated towns all along the Guadalupe River, with massive flooding in Gonzales, Cuero, and Victoria, my hometown. No one thinks about voting when their house is flooded. I received 70 percent of the vote there, but, of course, it was a record-low turnout. It’s hard to get out the vote from a boat. I don’t know if God is calling Rick Perry to run for president, but if he runs, the other candidates are going to need a big dose of magic and a lot of shoe leather. He is focused with a capital F, and his political advisers are the best I’ve ever seen. If you run against Rick Perry, you better pack a big lunch.” In 2000 and in the wake of the big Florida fix Bush moved up to the Oval Office and Perry became governor. Enter fate in the form of Osama. On September 10 2001 Bush was a failing president and Perry far from strong. Amid the embers of the Towers, the Great War on Terror was on, Bush renaissant and manly Republicanism juicing up Perry. With vicious campaign ads race-baiting his 2002 gubernatorial opponent he won his second term against Tony Sanchez and a third run in 2010, another powerful dose of luck when Kay Bailey Hutchison messed up her primary challenge. And now Perry, an early communicant with the Tea Party has the luck of facing the perennially unconvincing Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann. All governors running for the presidency in an economically stable state claims that responsibility for this good fortune is theirs alone. If times are hard Washington DC gets the blame. No Republican is going to credit Big Government with anything but baneful intrusion and failure. Perry’s no exception. Thanks in part to Texas’ exacting regulation of home mortgages, -- courtesy of progressive campaigns in the last century – the state emerged relatively unscathed in the great housing bust. Perry of course invokes low regulation and the entrepreneurial powers of the untrammeled Market for Texas’ budgetary virtue since the great crash of 2008. All nonsense. As Burka points out, “Texas has been a low-tax, low-service state for at least half a century, most of that time under conservative Democratic leadership. Then, as now, a good bidness climate was the first objective of state fiscal policy. The Legislature, not the governor, determines the level of spending, and the elected comptroller serves as a watchdog who can refuse to approve spending that exceeds available revenue.” When federal stimulus money came through Perry used it to mop up red ink in the annual budget. Last week Jared Bernstein, formerly Biden’s economic advisor, pointed out derisively that “When he announced his candidacy for President the other day, he growled that his goal as president would be to make Washington ‘as inconsequential in your lives as I can.’ Except when it comes to job creation. Over the last few years, government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas: 47 per cent of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas. Texas employment wasn’t down much at all in these years, as the state lost only 53,000 jobs. But looming behind that number are large losses in the private sector (down 178,000) and large gains (up 125,000) in government jobs… “The nation as a whole added 264,000 government jobs, 2007-10, meaning public-sector jobs added in Texas account for almost half of the nation’s public-sector jobs over these years. How did that happen? Well, Gov Perry has a funny way of going about that ‘inconsequential’ thing. According to many news accounts from back in the Recovery Act days: “Turns out Texas was the state that depended the most on those very stimulus funds to plug nearly 97 per cent of its shortfall for fiscal 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.” “Now, I’ve got no problem with a state government using Recovery Act funds to retain or create jobs. In fact, the figure and quote above shows Texas to be following a traditional Keynesian game plan: as the private sector contracts, turn to the public sector to temporarily make up part of the difference.” Perry has a few skeletons in his closet, some of them noisome to the conservatives. In 2007 he tried to force an executive order through requiring that sixth-grade girls in Texas be vaccinated, with the consent of their parents, (withheld consent was to be a tough process) against the human papilloma virus, a sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer. Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, was pushing the vaccine and Perry’s former chief of staff was Merck’s lobbyist. Ultimately Perry’s plan was beaten back, and he admits it was a mistake. It’s one of the reasons the some of the right think Perry is a phony conservative, since the whole plan was redolent of nanny-state government and unwarranted intrusion into family business. Then there was the Perry-initiated Trans-Texas Corridor , a vast network of toll roads and rights of way , crossing Texas, scything its way through land acquired by power of eminent domain carrying cars, trains, pipelines and powerlines, fiber optic cables and so forth, to be built and controlled by Cintra-Zachry, a partnership between Spanish-based toll-road developer/operator Cintra and Texas-based Zachry Construction,. Aside from the fortunes to be made by Perry backers, eminent domain – a “taking”, par excellence -- is anathema to the libertarian right. In 2010, the Federal Highway Administration, formally ended the project. The action eliminated the study area and canceled the agreement between TxDOT and Cintra Zachry. In 2011, the Texas Legislature formally canceled the Trans-Texas Corridor. Openings for Bachman: Perry said at one point he was “fine” with New York state legalizing marriage between same-sex couples. He based this on his belief that the Tenth Amendment reserves for the states all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government in the Constitution. The religious right went crazy and Perry hastily backtracked saying that he favored constitutional amendment outlawing same sex marriage and abortion. Nor does the libertarian, Tea Party right relish Perry’s support for the children of illegal aliens to attend Texas state colleges and universities. “To punish these young Texans for their parents’ actions is not what America has always been about” he told a New Hampshire paper this summer. In 2010 he criticized Arizona’s immigration law, saying “it would not be the right direction for Texas.” He’s also actually closed a prison in Texas – a first for the state - and boosted diversionary programs to keep convicted people out of them, part of the realization by state governors and legislatures that the gulag is too expensive. Another source of grave suspicion by the Tea Party right, Perry attended a 2007 Bilderburg conference, thus rendering himself in the eyes of many in the Tea Party, a pawn of secret world government. For their part the progressives howl about Perry’s gesture towards secession. “We’ve got a great union,” he famously said in response to a reporter’s question. “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.” Big cheers from the crowd. I don’t see what’s wrong with Perry’s stand. I’m all for the right to self-determination, hence state secession. Aside from anything else, it’s how empires fall apart. Vermont, Alaska, Hawai’i, Texas – the empire crumbling just like the Towers. What’s wrong with that picture? Perry enters the race, intent on capturing the right-wing base, crushing Romney and Bachmann in South Carolina, which clinched McCain’s path to nomination in 2008. Hence the Perry-hosted “Response” -- a national day of prayer, on August 4 at Reliant Arena that drew 30,000 Christians and that was broadcast on cable Christian channels and the Internet nationwide, including in at least 1,000 churches. "Father, our heart breaks for America," Perry intoned in his 12-minute address. "We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government and, as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us." Christians should turn to God for answers to the nation's troubles. Perry subsequently tried to distance himself a bit from the New Apostolic Movement, the crowd behind The Response. I don’t see why. Their views seem far more engaging than those of Obama’s economic necromancers. The Movement’s high command believe they have a direct line to God who remits specific instructions and warnings, no doubt more credible than those of Standard & Poor. Ignore the warnings at your peril: earthquakes in Japan, terrorist attacks in New York, economic collapse. They don’t care for the Freemasons and consider the Democratic Party to be controlled by the Satan-worshipper and all-round slut Jezebel plus three lesser demons. Sounds like a plausible description of the DNC to me. Some prophets even claim to have seen demons at public meetings. Me too. Of course the progressives raise the usual alarm about Perry being an evangelical Christian, not a wholesome servant of God like Obama, baptized in the early 1990s at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Perry on the campaign trail is be taking his whacks at Bernanke, who richly deserves every kick, and regularly receives them right here from the great Mike Whitney, whom CounterPunch strongly recommends to Perry as his prime economic adviser. Of course Perry is slamming AGW and making fun of Al Gore. If Perry can’t make hay with the recent report “Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis” by NASA scientists at Penn State, fretting that aliens may exact fearsome retribution for excessive C02 production by earthlings, he doesn’t deserve to be in the race. Perry’s rhetorical lunges have drawn measured reproof from the New York Times, seeking to push Perry towards the kook exit. But at this stage in the game measured approval in the New York Times is not exactly what Perry is after, any more than is Bachmann or the man closer to the libertarian right’s heart than Perry, namely Ron Paul, scandalously blacked out in the press. No surprises there. Coming out against war and empire really is a no-no. The obvious question is whether Perry, having won the right, can clamber back along the kook branch towards something vaguely resembling the solid timber of sanity, to capture the necessary independents and disillusioned folk who bet on Obama in 2008. Hard to say. Perry is pretty far out on the limb. Reagan, with the strenuous help of the press, managed the crawl back in 1980, amid widespread disappointment and disgust with Jimmy Carter. Disappointment and disgust with Barack Obama? The president has slithered down in the most recent polls, and now is just above the 50 per cent disapproval rating. There are still around 30 million Americans without work, or enough work. There’s the endlessly cited observation that no president presiding over moe than a 7 per cent jobless rate can hope for a second term. The progressive sector is already rallying the Obama vote by pounding out the unsurprising message that Perry is a shil and errand boy for corporate America, Amazing! Imagine that a conservative Texas Republican would end up in that corner, arm in arm with Barack Obama, messenger of hope and change, also shil and errand boy for corporate America, starting with the nuclear industry, the arms sector, the ag/pesticide complex and moving on through Wall Street and the Fed, and equipped with truly noxious beliefs about fiscal discipline, the merits of compromise. He’s a far more dangerous man to have in the Oval Office than Perry. We need a polarizer to awake the left from its unending, unbreakable infatuation with our current president, despite all the horrors he has perpetrated and presided over, mostly significantly the impending onslaught on Social Security and Medicare. Bush and Obama have much in common, starting with no fixed beliefs, and sessions at Ivy League schools. Perry went to Texas A&M back in the 1970s. I remember a speaking trip, in the company of Christopher Hitchens and JoAnn Wypijewski many years back, when CH hadn’t jumped the fence. I think we were in Houston in the company of the late Molly Ivins. I told Molly our next gig was at Texas A&M at College Station and she rang me at the motel later that night, imploring us to cancel the engagement, citing grave personal risk to our persons. In the event we had a fine time, and when Hitchens paused in his seditious diatribes to demand extra fuel in the form of a pint or two of vodka to be brought to the podium, helpful Aggies , some in uniform, dashed forward with restorative beakers of the stuff. -------------------------- http://www.texasmonthly.com/2011-09-01/feature7.php

Such as whether the CIA, which founded and funded certain publications without the public finding out about this until years later, may have played an undisclosed principal role in the origin and rise of the Murdoch clans' media empire?

The sixth paragraph in the article below attempts to distinguish between being arrested and being formally charged later on. August 19, 2011 The New York Times Detective in Phone Hacking Inquiry Is Arrested By SARAH LYALL LONDON — A Scotland Yard detective has been arrested on suspicion of leaking details about the phone hacking case to the news media, the police said on Friday. The detective, described as a 51-year-old man, was arrested at work on Thursday “on suspicion of misconduct in a public office relating to an unauthorized disclosure of information,” the police said. He has not been charged, but was released and ordered to report back for further questioning on Sept. 29. He has been suspended from his job. The police would not identify the detective, but said he was assigned to Operation Weeting, which is looking into allegations of phone hacking at the now-defunct tabloid The News of the World and other newspapers. Leaking to the news media is technically a criminal offense. But such disclosures have long been common practice for some police officers who work frequently with the news media, and it is highly unusual for an officer to be arrested on suspicion of merely leaking information. A second investigation is looking at charges that some reporters and editors paid the police for information, but no officers have been arrested in that case. A person close to the investigation said it was likely that the Operation Weeting leaks at issue in Thursday’s arrest were recent ones, perhaps having to do with the disclosure of the names of people arrested so far on suspicion of phone hacking. The police typically do not name suspects until they have been formally charged, identifying them instead by gender and age. The arrest of the suspected leaker seems designed to send a signal that the leader of the investigation, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, is angry about the disclosures and is determined to keep details of the investigation out of the public domain. “I made it very clear when I took on this investigation the need for operational and information security,” Commissioner Akers said in a statement. “It is hugely disappointing that this may not have been adhered to.” She added that the police department “takes the unauthorized disclosure of information extremely seriously and has acted swiftly in making this arrest.” A former Scotland Yard official with knowledge of the inquiry said it was both surprising and unusual that the first arrest of an officer was for reportedly leaking information to the news media about the phone hacking investigation rather than selling information to The News of the World. A separate Metropolitan Police inquiry is investigating e-mails that suggest police officers sold classified contact information about public figures, including members of the royal family, to reporters and editors at The News of the World. The police also said that a second man was arrested on Friday as part of Operation Weeting, bringing to 14 the number of people arrested so far on suspicion of phone hacking or illegally accessing voice mail messages. With the recent addition of 20 new officers, there are now 65 investigators working full time on the case. The man, 35, was named by Sky News as Dan Evans, a former reporter for The News of the World. The newspaper suspended Mr. Evans in the spring of 2010 after his name emerged as part of a civil suit brought against it by the interior designer Kelly Hoppen. Ms. Hoppen, the stepmother of the actress Sienna Miller, claimed that her phone had been hacked into. Ms. Hoppen’s case began with information seized by the police in 2006, when the first phone hacking case — involving Clive Goodman, the former royal reporter for The News of the World, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired by the paper — came to light. At the time, the police seized 12,000 pages of documentation from Mr. Mulcaire that included lists of cellphone numbers, PINs and names of people whose messages he might have illegally intercepted. Both Mr. Mulcaire and Mr. Goodman were convicted in 2007; each served several months in jail. But this arrest seems to stem from a more recent episode. If that is the case, it would contradict assertions at the time by the paper’s parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, that after the arrests The News of the World cracked down, putting a stop to phone hacking. Until last winter, the company said that the hacking had been limited to one “rogue” reporter — Mr. Goodman. According to Sky, the detective arrested on Thursday is suspected of leaking information to the newspaper The Guardian, which has consistently revealed more details than its competitors about the hacking arrests. On its Web site, The Guardian said it would not comment on the allegations, merely saying, “We note the arrest.” The paper quoted a spokesperson as saying: “On the broader point raised by the arrest, journalists would no doubt be concerned if conversations between off-the-record sources and reporters came routinely to be regarded as criminal activity. In common with all news organizations we have no comment to make on the sources of our journalism.” News International, the British newspaper arm of the News Corporation, said it was cooperating with the investigation and would have no comment about the arrests. Don Van Natta Jr. contributed reporting from Miami.

The media attack on Robert Morrow's attempt to expose Rick Perry's alleged sexual activities brings to mind how the same media attempted to dampen speculation about Bill Clinton's sexual activities when he first ran for president in 1992. It took a New Orleans high school friend of mine to shine the light on that matter. Christopher Bell of Montgomery, Alabama, was a free lance writer for the National Star, which was one of Rupert Murdoch's first media entries into the U.S. It was somewhat akin to the National Enquirer. The publication did not last for many years. But I digress. Christopher Bell took it upon himself to travel from Montgomery to a town in Arkansas where it was rumored a certain lady lived who "knew" Bill Clinton. Bell spent several days trying to find the lady but had no luck. About to give up he stopped at a diner to have lunch and on a lark asked the waitress if she was acquainted with a "Jennifer Flowers." Without hesitation the waitress replied, "Jennifer is my best friend" and promply telephoned her. Flowers immediately agreed to meet Bell, who then broke the Bill Clinton-Jennifer Flowers scandal in the National Star. From Clinton's camp came no denials but instead a public worry about a "bimbo outbreak," as Flowers was not alone in knowing Bill Clinton. The mass media then quickly took up the issue, which became presidential campaign history. So who knows where Robert Morrow's ad may lead us? Already on Facebook Morrow has posted that his ad has brought forth several concrete leads. If so, the mass media may end up having egg on its face for how it treated Morrow and for downplaying Perry's transgressions.

Phone hacking: Met police detective arrested Policeman suspected of leaking details of hacking investigation as force also confirms arrest of 35-year-old man By James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 August 2011 17.47 BST A police detective has been arrested on suspicion of leaking details about Scotland Yard's phone-hacking investigation. The man has not been charged but he has been suspended by the Metropolitan police. The Met also on Friday arrested a 35-year-old man, who Sky News named as former News of the World reporter Dan Evans, on suspicion of phone hacking. He has been released on police bail. Evans was suspended by the paper more than a year ago after being named in a civil case against the now defunct tabloid's publisher, News International subsidiary News Group Newspapers, brought by interior designer Kelly Hoppen. Sue Akers, the force's deputy assistant commissioner, who is leading the investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World, said: "I made very clear when I took on this investigation the need for operational and information security. It is hugely disappointing that this may not have been adhered to." Akers added: "The MPS [Met] takes the unauthorised disclosure of information extremely seriously and has acted swiftly in making these arrests." A spokesperson for Guardian News & Media, which publishes the Guardian, declined to comment on reports that the leaks had been to the Guardian, and said: "We note the arrest of a Scotland Yard detective on suspicion of misconduct in a public office relating to unauthorised disclosure of information. "On the broader point raised by the arrest, journalists would no doubt be concerned if conversations between off-the-record sources and reporters came routinely to be regarded as criminal activity. In common with all news organisations we have no comment to make on the sources of our journalism."

ON THE DEATH OF SEAL TEAM SIX August 19, 2011 by Joseph P. Farrell http://gizadeathstar.com/2011/08/on-the-death-of-seal-team-six/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GizaDeathStar+%28Giza+Death+Star%29&utm_content=FaceBook My heart goes out to those families that have lost loved ones – courageous people – in the attack on Seal Team Six. I had wanted to comment on this at the time, but I truly believe that these families must be allowed time to grieve. I grieve with them, and grieve for our nation. Make no mistake, they lost their lives to defend my right to say what I am now going to say in this blog. I acknowledge my indebtedness to them, and to all veterans, for the priceless privilege to speculate, and to question, openly and freely. As most people here know, I am deeply suspicious of the “Death” of Bin Laden. Like SS General Hans Kammler, it would appear that the man died several times, each time under very different circumstances. Then there was the woodenness of President Obama in reporting the event, and the dubious “evidence” we were shown of the death of the notorious Al Qaeda leader. Now, the very team that we’re told led the raid, is dead. To be sure, we’re told that none of the raid members were involved in the recent deaths. But who believes anything coming out of the government any more, much less this administration. I must confess, I cannot avoid the fact that I am extremely suspicious of the deaths of these soldiers; it seems all to convenient a method of silencing anyone that might challenge the official story. We’ve been down that road before; one need only say “Kennedy assassination witnesses” to get that picture clearly. We’re told that the Chinook helicopter did not contain any members actually involved in the raid on “Bin Laden’s” compound, we’re told that it was brought down by a lucky strike from an RPG (rocket propelled grenade), and that the perpetrators were hunted down and killed in an airstrike. Now we’re told that a movie deal is in the works, and that Hollywood producers are in close talks with Pentagon leaders in order to “get the story straight,” in other words, the movie is likely to be pure propaganda designed to prop up an official story that looks increasingly tattered. Expect that movie to emphasize that we’re in Afghanistan fighting “the war on terror” and not a war designed to gain control over the energy resources of the region and deny them to Russia, China, and India. But we’ve already lost that war, the real war: Russia and China have made it clear that any attack on Iran would be viewed as an attack on their own vital interests. Remember south Ossetia, and the lame attempt of “Grand Chessboard” players to secure that region? An attempt that Vladimir Putin quickly crushed? The whole tragedy of the death of those soldiers is, that they died, really, for a deeper geopolitical reality, not “the war on terror” but “the war to keep energy out of Russia’s and China’s hands.” That war is looking increasingly shaky. And while we’re at it, you might want to follow the oil money trail. Here’s a place to begin: google “Bridas Corp” and you’ll see how, after raping a certain South American country, the Anglo-American elite drove yet another former ally and proud nation into the hands of the emerging BRICS nations. In that, there lies a tale. Better yet, go to this wikipedia article, and connect a few more dots for yourself: Bridas Corporation During the recent Republithug presidential debate in Iowa, Congressman Ron Paul made an impassioned plea for the US to stop the “war on terror” (read, war to keep China and Russia from controlling central Asia energy supplies), and bring the troops home, and focus on our pressing domestic issues, including our economy. I have to agree with the Congressman.

Glenn Mulcaire ordered to reveal who told him to hack phones Steve Coogan leads battle to reveal whether News of the World ordered hacking of Elle MacPherson and five other public figures By Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 August 2011 11.43 BST Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News of the World phone hacking, has been ordered by a court to reveal who instructed him to access the voicemails of model Elle MacPherson and five other public figures including Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes. Mulcaire is due to reveal these details by the end of next week in a move that will throw further light on the scale of phone hacking at the now defunct News International tabloid. The Guardian has learned that Mulcaire has lost an attempt to appeal against a court order obliging him to identify who instructed him to hack the phones, something he has resisted since February. Mulcaire, who was jailed in 2007 after pleading guilty to hacking the phones of members of the royal household for the News of the World, has been forced into making the disclosure following legal action by the comedian and actor Steve Coogan. In February, Coogan's lawyers argued in court that if it were proved that the News of the World had instructed Mulcaire to hack into the phones of the six public figures, it would show that phone hacking was taking place at an industrial scale. Mulcaire must now name names in relation to MacPherson, Hughes and four others – the celebrity PR Max Clifford; the football agent Sky Andrew; Jo Armstrong, a legal adviser to the Professional Footballers Association; and Gordon Taylor, the former head of the PFA. At his trial in 2006 Muclaire also admitted hacking the phones of five of the six names in Coogan's court order. Taylor was gagged by News International after reaching a £700,000 out-of-court settlement. Armstrong also settled with the paper out of court. "After six months of refusing to answer these questions I am pleased that Glenn Mulcaire has now finally been ordered to say who at the News of the World asked him to hack the mobile phones of Max Clifford, Sky Andrew, Gordon Taylor, Simon Hughes MP, Elle MacPherson and Jo Armstrong," Coogan said. "Whilst I am pleased with this latest development I remain frustrated by Mr Mulcaire's refusal to answer questions about who authorised him to unlawfully access my voicemail messages and will continue to press for these answers." The latest developments are the second blow this week to News International. On Tuesday it emerged that NI's head of human resources had been sent a letter by the News of the World's former royal editor, Clive Goodman, alleging that phone hacking had been "widely discussed" in editorial meetings chaired by the paper's former editor, Andy Coulson. Goodman was jailed at the same time as Mulcaire in early 2007 on the basis that he was the only News of the World journalist involved in intercepting mobile phone messages. Coulson has maintained that he was unaware of this activity at the News of the World when he was editor, while News International claimed phone hacking was the work of a single "rogue reporter" – Goodman – until December 2010. The high court ordered Mulcaire to reveal the names in relation to the six people and refused him leave to appeal against the order. Mulcaire went back to the court of appeal but on 1 August Lord Justice Toulson rejected his application for leave to appeal. Separately, Mulcaire is appealing against an order requesting him to name who ordered him to hack Coogan's voicemail, and a court case is expected to be listed in October. That appeal may fall by the wayside because News International has stopped paying his legal fees. However, Mulcaire is now suing News International in an attempt to force the company to continue paying his legal bills. Coogan's solicitor, John Kelly of Schillings, described Toulson's decision to refuse Mulcaire leave to appeal as "a very significant development". He said: "He will now have to identify exactly who at the News of the World asked him to access the mobile phones of the named individuals and who he provided the information to at the News of the World. Mr Mulcaire is due to provide these answers by the end of the month and we await his answers with interest." Last month Coogan joined Hugh Grant at the vanguard of the campaign to force the News of the World's publisher to come clean about the tactics employed by its journalists to get stories. Coogan, who has had his private life picked over by the tabloids, went on Newsnight to express how thrilled he was that the News of the World had been closed down.