A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.... The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.

Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, researchshows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior By Roy F. Baumeister, Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger and Kathleen D. Vohs

Washington and Bahrain signed the trade deal in September. When the agreement, which will be ratified in 2005, goes into effect, 100 percent of consumer and industrial products and 81 percent of agricultural exports from the United States will enter the Gulf nation duty-free. Under the deal Bahrain will open its services market wider than any other U.S. trading partner, adopt Washington's preferred intellectual property rules and open government procurement to U.S. companies. Saudi Arabia is worried that Bahrain signed the deal independent of its regional partners and that the new rules will see the region flooded with U.S. goods. The GCC governments have already dropped all trade tariffs among themselves, meaning that once in the region, U.S. goods could potentially move freely across borders.

If there was any doubt about the many ways "Wildcard" Al Sharpton impacts city and national politics, consider his recent, under-covered foray into the 2005 mayoral campaign. One week before the Voice's wide-ranging expose on the Rev appeared ("On a New High, Sharpton Hits a New Low," December 8-14), he sat down at the Club Havana with El Diario's Gerson Borrero and railed against Democratic front-runner Freddy Ferrer, the near-victorious candidate Sharpton backed in 2001.

How Social Security reform can become a reality Wed Dec 22, 6:21 AM ET By Kent Conrad and Lindsey Graham With a renewed debate over the future of Social Security (news - web sites) underway, Republicans and Democrats alike need to begin by setting aside our differences and focusing on the common ground between us. As two policymakers - one from each party - who have been committed to the well-being of Social Security throughout our careers, we have agreed that the following principles should guide our deliberations going forward:

Denying reality even as critically wounded U.S. soldiers were fighting for their lives in a German hospital after the Mosul bombing, General Dick "Quag" Myers acted this afternoon as if he were still on tour with his fellow USO celebrities.

There's no other explanation for the blatant lie the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told an assemblage of reporters at the Pentagon about yesterday's dining-hall bombing in Iraq:

Giuliani: I Couldn't Kerik Less By IAN BISHOP December 20, 2004 -- WASHINGTON — Rudy Giuliani — desperate to protect his reputation and his business — is sprinting away from scandal-scarred Bernard Kerik. In a lengthy interview with Newsweek, Giuliani said Kerik's role at Giuliani Partners was so minor that he handled "less than 5 percent" of the company's business. In fact, Kerik doesn't even work at Giuliani Partners, the former mayor told the magazine, he works at an offshoot called Giuliani-Kerik — even though Kerik is touted as a senior executive of the parent company on its Web site. "Senior vice president of the group is what Bernie was when we started. I think that remains his title, but that's not the way we primarily relate to him," Giuliani explained. "We should probably straighten it out and point out where his ownership interest is and primary work is done."

But then I was heartened, because t it seemed people took this disgusting, grisly, and sadistic crime seriously. And I was right--sort of.

Lisa Montgomery, of Melvern, Kan., was set to appear Monday afternoon before a federal judge in Kansas City, Kan., to hear the charge against her. She was later to be transferred to Missouri, where the charge was filed. The office of U.S. Attorney Todd Graves filed a motion seeking to have Montgomery, charged with kidnapping resulting in death, held without bail pending a trial.

Stare decisis is one of the most well established principles in the law. Simply put, it means that courts will not overturn established precedent without an extraordinary reason to do so. It is also a doctrine not held sacred by all nine Justices. In Justice Antonin Scalia's words, Justice Thomas "doesn't believe in stare decisis, period."

There is something comforting in the knowledge that jurists in the nation from which we derive our legal tradition continue to uphold such basic values.

And 62 percent said they would not participate in such a program if it meant their retirement income would go up or down depending on the performance of their stock picks -- which is the essence of Bush's plan.

It is on the specifics that Bush faces problems. Support dropped to an even split when people were told that the cost of the transition to a new program could reach $2 trillion over time, as some forecasts project. And 62 percent said they would not participate in such a program if it meant their retirement income would go up or down depending on the performance of their stock picks -- which is the essence of Bush's plan.

Monitoring the Future has been funded under a series of competing, investigator-initiated research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Surveys of nationally representative samples of American high school seniors were begun in 1975, making the class of 2004 the 30th such class surveyed. Surveys of 8th and 10th graders were added to the design in 1991, making the 2004 nationally representative samples the 14th such classes surveyed. The sample sizes in 2004 are 17,413 8th graders located in 147 schools, 16,839 10th graders located in 131 schools, and 15,222 12th graders located in 128 schools, for a total of 49,474 students in 406 secondary schools overall. The samples are drawn to be representative of students in private and public secondary schools across the 48 coterminous United States, selected with probability proportionate to estimated class size, to yield separate, nationally representative samples of students from each of the three grade levels.

To Arabs and Muslims, this discovery is less than Archimedean. For them, it has always been self-evident: The Palestine problem, a legacy of Western colonialism as virulent today as it ever was, has always been the greatest single source of anti-Western sentiment in the region. So if terrorism now ranks as the greatest single contemporary threat to global order, and if Iraq is its most profitable arena, Palestine must have a great deal to do with it.

• Dr. P. Trey Sunderland III, a senior psychiatric researcher, took $508,050 in fees and related income from Pfizer Inc. at the same time that he collaborated with Pfizer — in his government capacity — in studying patients with Alzheimer's disease. Without declaring his affiliation with the company, Sunderland endorsed the use of an Alzheimer's drug marketed by Pfizer during a nationally televised presentation at the NIH in 2003. • Dr. Lance A. Liotta, a laboratory director at the National Cancer Institute, was working in his official capacity with a company trying to develop an ovarian cancer test. He then took $70,000 as a consultant to the company's rival. Development of the cancer test stalled, prompting a complaint from the company. The NIH backed Liotta. • Dr. Harvey G. Klein, the NIH's top blood transfusion expert, accepted $240,200 in fees and 76,000 stock options over the last five years from companies developing blood-related products. During the same period, he wrote or spoke out about the usefulness of such products without publicly declaring his company ties. Announcing such ties is not required by the NIH. The agency has encouraged outside consulting, and has allowed most of its scientists to file confidential income disclosure forms.

Bush Says U.S. Immigration System Not Working
Mon Dec 20, 2004 03:50 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush said flatly on Monday that America's immigration system is not working and that in his new term he would push for a temporary guest worker program. At a news conference, Bush spoke at length about U.S. immigration problems. Last January he proposed allowing some of the estimated 8 million to 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States to gain legal work visas for at least six years. But the U.S. Congress did not pass the plan. Some in Bush's own Republican Party oppose concessions to illegal immigrants and would like to see restrictions placed on legal immigration as well.

The institute has an $11 million federal contract to help bring about a "fundamental cultural shift" in Ukraine, as the organization puts it, "from a passive citizenry under an authoritarian regime to a thriving democracy with active citizen participation."

The first salvo was launched by the Securities Industry Association, which recently issued a research report arguing that the private accounts would not be a financial bonanza for Wall Street. In the paper, the association calculated that firms would collect at least $39 billion in fees, and perhaps considerably more, from managing such accounts over the next 75 years. But the group noted that the fees charged would be significantly below the fees that investment firms receive these days from low-cost mutual funds. And even if the fees rose significantly as more people chose actively managed accounts, the association's report argued, they would still pale in comparison with the $3.3 trillion in revenues Wall Street firms are projected to earn from their core securities business over that period.

The results of national tests do not put Georgia's young readers in such a favorable light. In 2003, 59 percent of Georgia fourth-graders were at the basic level or higher in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given to a sampling of children around the country.

The jobs Year Up alumni land pay an average of $14 an hour, and Chertavian says he'll tweak the curriculum as the market for technology jobs changes. But he's equally devoted to nurturing students' love of learning. Through a partnership with Cambridge College, which caters to people who juggle school, work, and family, Year Up students earn up to 18 credits. "Now, forevermore on their résumé they can say, 'College Degree expected,' " Chertavian says. "With just that alone, on average they're expected to earn 25 percent more than their counterparts who don't have some college experience."

So Zenpundit invites my opinion of his views on historians speaking out on current events. Inspired by a couple of posts at American Future, Mark (and Marc) didn't seem impressed.

That being said, academics make a terrible misjudgement by misrepresenting their instant analysis of contemporary events on their blogs or in op-ed pieces as sound scholarship, particularly historical scholarship. It isn't. It's informed, expert opinion and interesting to be sure, compared to lightweight ruminating by airhead anchors in the MSM but the methodology, documents and peer review simply are not there. The official declassified state papers for American foreign policy - The Foreign Relations of the United States series- is only just now opening up the Nixon-Ford years to scrutiny. There is much left for this period in the National Archives, at the CIA, at Defense and at presidential libraries to be declassified - to say nothing of the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II administrations.

"He was just the ultimate priest," Helen Kasper of Hurley, one of Erickson's parishioners, told the Daily Globe of Ironwood, Mich. "He was very strict in what he wanted done. He was very faithful to his religion."

Players roll the dice, move around the board, renting properties, buying lights and equipment, planting and harvesting crops. Moving in an opposite direction on the cylinder shaped board is the "GrowBuster." He lands on the unsuspecting player's property, rips out the plants and sends the player directly to jail.

"It's just a freak thing," said Roland Langford, who works as a custodian in nearby Maryville. "It's a real nice town. People get along. That's what you like about it here -- the people."

The Panzerfaust hate music CD cover.

Panzerfaust made no effort to hide the main purpose of "Project Schoolyard." Their Web site proudly proclaims: "We just don't entertain racist kids … We create them."

You can search for headlines in the massive database for free. In some cases, you may be able to go to the individual publication's website and find the same story for free, so if you have time and no expense account, it's probably worth trying. If you want to purchase the full text of a story, you're charged $3 per document and that gives you access to the story for 90 days. You can print and download the stories once you've bought them.

Webb gained notoriety in the 1990s after writing a series of stories for the Mercury News linking the CIA to Nicaraguan Contras seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government and to drug sales of crack cocaine flooding South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s.

Quote of note:

Recent court developments have been grim for those who cherish a free press.

On Dec. 9, a television reporter in Providence, R.I., Jim Taricani, was sentenced to six months of house arrest for refusing to reveal who gave him an F.B.I. videotape showing a local official taking a bribe. Mr. Taricani did nothing illegal. Yet the Rhode Island federal judge who sentenced him pointedly said that only health problems spared him a prison term.

The worry now is that a three-judge federal appellate panel in Washington will take an equally cramped view of reporters' rights and affirm sentences of up to 18 months in prison that a lower court imposed in October on Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. At issue is the pair's principled refusal to disclose their sources in connection with the investigation that the United States attorney and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is leading into the leaking of the name of a covert C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to the columnist Robert Novak.

Freedom and choice are wonderful things that allow us to realize our human potential. But there's a limit to how many choices each of us has time to make, and most people in the rich world are pretty much maxed out already. You see this truth in the behavior of the affluent, who actually pay to avoid choices. They hire home decorators so they don't have to stare glassily at 200 kinds of curtain rail. They hire marriage planners so they don't have to fret about cream napkins vs. white ones. There are said to be 10,000 wedding consultants practicing in the United States. If the rich are deliberately avoiding choice, why are we so sure that the majority want more of it?

New version of test to be administered in 'red' states of Georgia, Kansas By Cole Walters
Education Correspondent

NEW YORK, NY—Officials from the College Board, the nonprofit entity that administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT, have announced that they are producing a new version of the test for students who live in school districts where creationism rather than evolution is taught in science classes. Students who take the revised test, which will be introduced in school districts in Kansas and Georgia in the fall of 2005, will no longer be tested on their ability to comprehend passages from scientific texts that are based on the controversial theory of evolution. Instead, they will read excerpts from writings on such creation-related topics as the six days in which God created the earth or the great flood, then answer a series of questions to indicate how well they've understood the passages.

Race, Family Income and Standardized Tests: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (Fair Test) has released some interesting information. This information caused the College Board which owns the SAT to demand that Fair Test remove the data from its website. Fair Test has put charts on its website that breaks down SAT scores by gender, ethnicity and family income. The College Board sent Fair Test a letter asserting that “publication of the data, significantly impacts the perceptions of students, parents, and educators regarding the services we provide." Fair test responded in a letter to the College Board stating: "That is precisely our goal”.

Too often, in my twenty years of military service, I experienced senior military leaders push religion on subordinates. Many seniors strongly advocated prayer breakfast attendances with threats of efficiency report repercussions. One Fort Hood brigade commander actually made his officers attend Sunday worship services with reportable consequences. The man is a general today, probably believing he was doing God's work. Then there were numerous chaplains who had to bless our tank guns to assure the highest gunnery training scores. I always abhorred their practices because I thought if there is a God out there, desperately trying to sort out our complex world, we should not waste his divine efforts on mere training events.

It just occurred to me that when someone says "Bush" in the future no one will think of Bush the Elder.
Quote of note:

"This is a new low for the United States, not just to pull out, but to block other countries from moving ahead on their own path," said Jeff Fiedler, an observer representing the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's almost spiteful to say, 'You can't move ahead without us.' If you're not going to lead, then get out of the way."

U.S. Waters Down Global Commitment to Curb Greenhouse Gases
By LARRY ROHTER

BUENOS AIRES, Dec. 18 - Two weeks of negotiations at a United Nations conference here on climate change ended early Saturday with a weak pledge to start limited, informal talks on ways to slow down global warming, after the United States blocked efforts to begin more substantive discussions.

"I don't think that there really is any such thing as a widows-and-orphans stock anymore," said Chris Orndorff, head of equities at Payden & Rygel, the investment management firm based in Los Angeles. Stocks are simply more volatile today and many industries are less regulated, he said.

At root, then, the researchers found, the choice of whether to save comes down more to psychology than to economics. Their approach is squarely in the growing field of behavioral economics, which is gingerly stepping away from the economists' orthodoxy that humans are eternally rational, relentlessly profit-seeking machines.

Among the ideas cited by Defense Department officials is the idea of "fighting for intelligence," or commencing combat operations chiefly to obtain intelligence.

One part of the overall proposal is being drafted by a team led by Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, a deputy under secretary of defense.

I keep a folder in my credenza marked "Holy War." It bulges with Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict: teenaged girls in North Africa shot in the face for not wearing a veil, professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female students in the same classroom, the fanatical Jewish doctor with a machine gun mowing down 30 praying Muslims in a mosque, Muslim suicide bombers bit on the obliteration of Jews, of the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced on CNN to the world that "Everything I did, I did for the glory of God," of Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of Christians and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each other in Nigeria. There is a large folder in my death marked "Timothy McVeigh," blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people in part as revenge against the U.S. Government for killing David Koresh and his followers. We didn't realize it at the time, but the first strike at New York's World Trade Center in 1993 was a religious act of terror. The second one in 9/11, claiming over 3,000 lives, was another act of religious terror. Meanwhile, groups calling themselves the Christian Identity Movement and the Christian Patriot League arm themselves, and Christians intoxicated with the delusional doctrine of two 19th-century itinerant preachers not only await the rapture, but believe they have an obligation to get involved politically to hasten the apocalypse that would bring to an end the world. Christians can invoke God for the purpose of waging religious war. Consider the American general who has turned up as a force in the web of command and action leading to the torture and humiliation of prisoners in Iraq. General William Boykin, you may recall, is the commander who lost 18 men in Somalia trying to capture a warlord in the notorious "Black Hawk Down" fiasco of 1993. He later described the conflict as a battle between good and evil. "I knew," he said, "that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was the real God, and his was an idol." Boykin became a circuit writer for the religious right, actively in a group called the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles to evangelism. Their manifesto summons warriors in, quote, "a spiritual battle for the souls of the nation and the world." Traveling the country with his slide show, while an active member of the United States military in uniform, General Boykin declares that, quote, "Satan wants to destroy this nation. He wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army." "The forces of satan will only be defeated," says the general, "if we come against them in the name of Jesus." You might have thought that kind of fatwa from a high military officer in uniform wearing the American insignia would have struck the powers that be in the Pentagon and White House as somewhat un-American, if not un-Christian, but not only has General Boykin been kept in office, he turned up as a principal in the chain of command leading to the Iraqi prison. It was Boykin who flew to Guantanamo and ordered Major General Jeffrey Miller, then in charge of prisoners at the highly secret Camp X-ray, to go to Iraq and extend the methods practiced at X-ray to the prison system there on orders of Secretary Rumsfeld. This is the same General Boykin who last June publicly announced that, quote, "George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters. He was appointed by God."

Within less than a year, however, the investigations into espionage and aiding the enemy grew into a major source of embarrassment for the Pentagon, as the prosecutions of Captain Yee and another Muslim serviceman at the base, Airman Ahmad I. Al Halabi, unraveled dramatically. Even now, Defense Department officials refuse to explain in detail how the investigations originated and what drove them forward in the face of questions about much of the evidence.