HOW THE IRS LIES TO EMPLOYERS ABOUT WITHHOLDING

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By Devvy Kidd

"Truth is the first object." --Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Maese, 1809. ME 12:232

In my recent article on How The IRS Violates It’s Own Code, the facts were carefully presented which definitively proved how the IRS deliberately lies and misleads Americans by unlawfully seizing (stealing) assets by circumventing the law.

This article will prove how the American worker and employer alike have been hoodwinked regarding the withholding process. The purpose behind this chicanery is not to benefit America, but to further enrich the coffers of the private banking cartel aka the Federal Reserve.

There is no need for an income tax, flat tax, sales tax or any other direct tax. All Americans are encouraged to look behind the curtain so that they might fully understand the grand plunder sucking the lifeblood out of our economy. See: http://www.devvy.com. Don’t be fooled by this current illusion of a "booming economy." Debt is not prosperity.

Employers must withhold

So says the Great Deceivers, the Internal Revenue Service. Employers are routinely told that they must, under certain provisions of the tax code, withhold taxes of all sorts from an employee’s paycheck. Funny thing though, when sincere Americans request that the IRS send its representatives to public seminars on this issue, the IRS is no where to be found.

Robert Schulz, Chairman of the Board of We the People Foundation for Constitutional Education, Inc., made a swing through 37 cities in April and May of 2003. Before he arrived at each destination, he sent, via certified mail, an invitation to both the IRS and U.S. Attorney’s offices to come to his public seminars and correct him if he was giving out the wrong legal facts regarding withholding. What could be more reasonable?

In not one of those 37 cities did either DOJ or IRS send any representative, begging the question, "Why not?" Schulz is a man of honesty and integrity. His invitations to DOJ and IRS were sincere; his only desire was to be absolutely certain that the information he communicated to attendees was legally factual. Instead, he was met with the same usual arrogance in the form of silence. Why do you suppose that is?

Abracadabra, courtesy of the IRS

Lynda Wall is an expert in the field of withholding and has been assisting employers and employees alike for many years in understanding the law regarding this issue. We the People Foundation for Constitutional Education, Inc. will be holding our national convention in Washington, DC this coming January and Ms. Wall will give a two hour, comprehensive seminar that will firmly establish in anyone’s mind once and for all how the IRS lies to employers about this process and the lawful remedy.

According to Ms. Wall:

"The IRS will tell employers and employees that according to IRC section 3402(a)(1) of their code: ".......every employer making payment of wages shall deduct and withhold upon such wages a tax determined in accordance with tables or computational procedures prescribed by the Secretary."

"However, this is what the law really says: no (federal, state, city or county) municipal corporation shall levy or collect or cause to be levied or collected any tax upon the income, or any part thereof, of any person, resident or nonresident (also known as the "Full Paycheck Law"). Employers are prohibited from taking amounts from pay for federal or state taxes, fees or other charges absent the lawful, knowing, written consent of the employee.

"The Code of Federal Regulations clearly advises the employers at 26 CFR §31.3402(p)-1(a) "An employee who desires to enter into an agreement for withholding...shall furnish his employer with Form W-4 (or its equivalent) for withholding. The furnishing of such Form W-4 shall constitute a request for withholding." Then, 31 CFR §215.2(n)(1) clearly tells the employers they cannot take amounts from the workers’ pay for any form of State tax UNLESS the employee VOLUNTARILY elects to have such sums withheld.

"Consensual taking from pay occurs ONLY when an employee voluntarily elects in writing to volunteer to participate in any (federal, state, city or county) municipal corporate tax, program, insurance (disability, Medicare), trust (social security), including non-judicial tax levy, garnishment for taxes, tax offsets, tax interest or penalty and the employer consents such a request."

The fruits of your labor belong to you

Pursuant to 26 CFR §31.3402(p)-1(b)(2), either the employer or the employee may terminate the withholding agreement (W-4 or its equivalent) by furnishing a signed written notice to the other. An employer cannot lawfully take amounts from the worker’s pay without the risk of being sued after the worker submits his/her written notice to terminate the withholding agreement (W-4 or its equivalent).

According to Ms. Wall, when the employer’s tax professionals (CPA or attorney) are the ones negligently advising the company to convert and transmit the worker’s property (pay), those incompetent tax professionals are at risk of being sued for negligence, malpractice and misfeasance. Sheds a whole new light on things, doesn’t it?

State laws protect workers from non-consensual taking from pay without the worker’s explicit, knowing, voluntary, written consent. Only the worker or contractor/payee can make the determination whether or not he/she wants to volunteer to participate in government taxes, fees or other charges (i.e., social security trust contributions [FICA], social programs [Medicare], benefits [disability]) as well as non-judicial liens/levies, penalties and interest.

By all means, every employee and employer should go to the law library and verify the information above. It is accurate, it is factual and it is the law on the books. Don’t take the word of the IRS for anything. Check the facts for yourself. Then sit down and have a heart to heart chat with your tax professional and find out why he/she doesn’t know the law. After all, they’re supposed to be the experts looking out for you, the client.

Unlawfully penalizing employers

The IRS threatens employers with huge fines if they don’t withhold payroll taxes. Funny thing though, according to a September 15, 2003 letter from GAO (General Accounting Office) to Congressman Elton Gallegly regarding W-4’s and reporting, this little nugget of truth stands out:

"Under current law, IRS does not have statutory authority to impose a penalty to enforce employer compliance with the reporting requirement. The reporting requirement was promulgated in Treasury regulations."

How many employers has the IRS defrauded for untold millions of dollars in fines when in fact, they had no legal authority to impose or enforce such penalties and fines?

Tax cheats

The IRS likes to use a lot of rhetoric about "tax cheats" who won’t "pay their fair share." When one lifts the curtain and exposes the lies and fraud being conducted every day by the IRS, one would venture to say that the real "tax cheats" are those who work for the IRS.

Employers are being fleeced to the tune of approximately 30% of their operating budget in "payroll deductions." The worker over a ten year period with $200 of taxes withheld each pay period, would get clipped for $104,000! For what? Certainly not to fund our military, social security or any other legitimate, authorized expenditure by Congress. Those expenditures are funded through borrowing by Congress. Debt is not prosperity.

The American workers and employers have been cheated long enough. If someone owns the fruits of your labor, stolen from you by deceptive and deceitful methods, then you are a slave. The withholding issue was sold under the guise of patriotism because the American people did not want this new taxing scheme back in 1942. Sixty-one years later, the American people still don’t want this fleecing of the fruits of their labor which does not benefit them in any way. This process only encourages addictive over spending by Congress and more borrowing from the central bank. Again, debt is not prosperity.

We the people have two choices: You can either stay on your knees to this tyranny or you can get the facts and then enforce your rights using the law.

What future will you pass on to your children and grand babies? Freedom or indentured servitude?

Outcome of NYPD Case Leads to Call for Special Prosecutor

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By Richard Pyle

New York - A coalition of civil rights advocates on Sunday urged changes in the handling of police misconduct and brutality complaints after the acquittal of three officers involved in the shooting death of an unarmed man on his wedding day.

They also called for a permanent state-level special prosecutor to investigate such cases.

"The verdict in the Sean Bell case proves it is almost impossible to successfully prosecute cases of police misconduct, especially in homicide cases," said lawyer Norman Siegel, former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

"The verdict underscores the need for systemic change in the way New York handles these important and at times high profile cases, and to improve community relations," said Siegel, an outspoken advocate on civil rights and law enforcement issues.

Three city police officers were cleared Friday in the November 2006 shooting death of Bell outside a night club where he had just left his bachelor party. Two friends were wounded in the volley of 50 shots fired by the undercover officers and two colleagues.

The officers charged said they thought they were in mortal danger, but no gun was found in Bell's car.

Siegel was joined at a news conference outside police headquarters by state Sen. Eric Adams and retired police officer Marq Claxton. Adams and Claxton co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.

Adams, a former police captain, said the state-level special prosecutor's office should be reinstated permanently by law. A previous special prosecutor's office was created by former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in 1974 but abolished in 1993 by Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown, whose office prosecuted the Bell shooting case, had said there was no basis for the appointment of a special prosecutor.

The special prosecutor should have power to investigate allegations of police misconduct and brutality, as well as corruption, they said. The previous office was created primarily as a result of corruption exposes in the NYPD, and that was its primary focus, Siegel said.

"They looked the other way on cases of brutality," Siegel said.

Adams also urged passage of legislation to give the state attorney general's office power to take immediate control of a crime scene in cases like the Bell shooting to make sure all evidence is preserved.

"I don't believe a police department involved in a shooting should be responsible for the crime scene," he said.

Siegel and Adams said they looked for support on the issues from Gov. David Paterson, who recently replaced the disgraced Gov. Eliot Spitzer, saying that as a legislator and minority rights spokesman Paterson had been a strong voice in previous police shooting controversies.

Erin Duggan, a spokeswoman for Paterson, said the governor had learned of the proposals only from media reports and would review them.

He "takes the issue of police wrongdoing very seriously, but he also believes that the overwhelming majority of police officers perform their duties honorably and conscientiously each and every day," Duggan said.

Also Sunday, more than 200 people, including elected officials and civil rights leaders, gathered at the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network in Manhattan to renew calls for officials of the U.S. Department of Justice to bring federal charges against the three officers.

Investigators: Millions in Iraq Contracts Never Finished

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By Hope Yen

Millions of dollars of lucrative Iraq reconstruction contracts were never finished because of excessive delays, poor performance or other factors, including failed projects that are being falsely described by the U.S. government as complete, federal investigators say.

The audit released Sunday by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, provides the latest snapshot of an uneven reconstruction effort that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 billion. It also comes as several lawmakers have said they want the Iraqis to pick up more of the cost of reconstruction.

The special IG's review of 47,321 reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars found that at least 855 contracts were terminated by U.S. officials before their completion, primarily because of unforeseen factors such as violence and excessive costs. About 112 of those agreements were ended specifically because of the contractors' actual or anticipated poor performance.

In addition, the audit said many reconstruction projects were being described as complete or otherwise successful when they were not. In one case, the U.S. Agency for International Development contracted with Bechtel Corp. in 2004 to construct a $50 million children's hospital in Basra, only to "essentially terminate" the project in 2006 because of monthslong delays.

But rather than terminate the project, U.S. officials modified the contract to change the scope of the work. As a result, a U.S. database of Iraq reconstruction contracts shows the project as complete "when in fact the hospital was only 35 percent complete when work was stopped," said investigators in describing the practice of "descoping" as frequent.

"Descoping is an appropriate process but does mask problem projects to the extent they occur," the audit states.

Responding, USAID in the report said it disagreed that its descoping of the hospital project was "effectively a contract termination," but that it had changed the work because of escalating costs and security problems. Mark Tokola, the director of the Iraq transition assistance office, also responded that the database the IG's office reviewed of Iraq reconstruction contracts was incomplete.

Bowen's office said its review was preliminary and that it planned follow-up reviews to investigate descoping more closely. Investigators said they were also looking into whether contractors whose projects were terminated by the U.S. government due to inadequate performance might have been awarded new contracts later despite their poor records.

Investigators said the database they reviewed lacked full data on projects such as those done by USAID, the State Department, and those completed before 2006. But they said the figures cited in the report offered a baseline in terms of unfinished Iraq reconstruction contracts.

"Adding contract terminations from these (other) sources would certainly raise the number of terminated projects," the report states.

The audit comes amid renewed focus in recent months on potential abuse in contracting government-wide, such as Iraq reconstruction. Last year, congressional investigators said as much as $10 billion - or one in six dollars - charged by U.S. contractors for Iraq reconstruction were questionable or unsupported, and warned that significantly more taxpayer money was at risk.

In recent weeks, Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., has been working with Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, on legislation that would restrict future reconstruction dollars to loans instead of grants; require that Baghdad pay for fuel used by American troops and take over U.S. payments to predominantly Sunni fighters in the Awakening movement.

Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said the latest audit report points to significant U.S. taxpayer waste in current reconstruction efforts.

"The report paints a depressing picture of money being poured into failed Iraq reconstruction projects - contractors are killed, projects are blown up just before being completed, or the contractor just stops doing the work," she said.

Oil Strikes New Record Near $120 on Supply Fears

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By Fayen Wong

Perth - Oil struck a record high at $119.93 a barrel on Monday, extending the previous session's rally, as a strike closed a major British oil pipeline and as new violence in Nigeria reignited supply fears.

Simmering tensions between the United States and Iran also helped boost oil prices.

US light crude for June delivery rose 88 cents to $119.40 by 2324 GMT, after striking a lifetime high of $119.93 a barrel shortly after electronic trading resumed after the weekend.

London Brent crude rose 66 cents to $117.

"Supply side concerns underpinned the oil price," David Moore, a commodity strategist at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, said in a note to clients.

"Oil supplies from Nigeria have been disrupted by militant attacks and a strike by some oil workers. A strike at the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland has caused significant disruption to supplies from the North Sea," he said.

The 700,000 barrels per day (bpd) Fortis pipeline, which carries nearly half of Britain's oil, was closed on Sunday as a strike over pensions began at the neighbouring 210,000 bpd Grangemouth refinery in Scotland, operator BP (BP.L) said.

The refinery, owned by international chemical company Ineos, produces a tenth of Britain's petrol and diesel but also supplies vital steam and power to BP's Kinneil plant that processes the crude oil coming ashore from 70 North Sea fields.

The government has said that there will be no overall shortages of fuel but conceded that there may be some local supply problems, particularly in Scotland and northern England.

BP said that assuming it got power back as soon as the strike ended and Fortis fields resumed production rapidly, the pipeline could be back in operation within 24 hours but might take a few more days to get back to full flow.

In Nigeria, unidentified gunmen killed five policemen and seized several weapons in a raid on a police station in the oil-rich southern Nigerian state of Rivers on Sunday, a police spokeswoman said.

The attack comes just two days after a strike and attacks by rebels forced Nigeria's two largest oil firms, Exxon Mobil (XOM.N) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L), to shut some production.

The strike forced Exxon to shut down 200,000 bpd of crude output, a senior union official said, while Shell has already been forced to shut 169,000 bpd of Bonny Light crude production after a pipeline attack in the Delta a week ago.

A step up in tensions between U.S. and the world's fourth-largest crude exporter Iran also contributed to oil's gain.

A cargo ship hired by the U.S. military fired warning shots at boats suspected to be Iranian, the U.S. Navy said on Friday, underscoring tension in the Gulf as the Pentagon sharpened its warnings to Tehran over its nuclear ambitions.

Iran denied there had been any confrontation between its forces and a U.S. ship, Iranian media reported, and said on Sunday a "disastrous situation" facing the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with Washington's domestic issues, made any U.S. attack on the Islamic Republic unlikely.

Tensions between Washington and the OPEC nation last year helped send oil to record highs. Crude prices have surged more than five-fold since 2002 as supplies struggle to keep pace with rising demand in emerging economies, such as China.

Crude oil speculators on the New York Mercantile Exchange increased net long positions in the latest week, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission released on Friday.

Net crude long positions rose to 70,562 in the week to April 22, up from 66,526 in the week to April 15.

Bank of America to pledge mortgage aid

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By E. Scott Reckard

In a hearing about its plan to buy Countrywide, the company will promise to help 265,000 troubled borrowers keep their homes and take other steps.

Pushing to fast-track its takeover of wounded home-loan goliath Countrywide Financial Corp., Bank of America Corp. will promise today to help 265,000 troubled borrowers keep their homes over the next two years by refinancing or modifying at least $40 billion in mortgages.

Bank of America also plans to double its community development lending, which focuses on affordable housing, small businesses and people in low-income and minority neighborhoods, to $1.5 trillion over 10 years, said Liam E. McGee, the bank's top consumer and small-business executive. In addition, the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank will donate $2 billion to charity over the coming decade, up 33% from its current level.

McGee is to unveil the commitments today while testifying at a Federal Reserve hearing on the bank's plan to buy Countrywide, the nation's largest mortgage lender, for $4 billion in stock. The combination would give Bank of America 25% of the U.S. mortgage market. Regulatory approval of the deal is expected, and the bank hopes to win speedy approval and complete the acquisition in July.

Providing a preview of his testimony in an interview, McGee said he was optimistic that the company's "responsible and principled approach" would avoid both the pitfalls of old-line banking -- doing business only in supposedly safer, affluent areas -- and the aggressive lending that toppled Countrywide and hundreds of smaller mortgage firms, producing a monumental wave of foreclosures.

"It's very much our intent to make mortgages available to the underserved," McGee said. "But we're going to make sure that people who get loans from us can repay them and stay in their homes."

Doing more to help mortgage holders will be the top demand of fair-lending advocates who are expected to crowd the two-day hearing at the Federal Reserve building in downtown Los Angeles. The Fed's tentative witness list contained 130 names.

Prominent California advocacy groups such as the Berkeley-based Greenlining Institute said they would support speedy approval of the deal if the bank demonstrated it would lend more responsibly and do a better job of working with troubled borrowers than Countrywide had done.

"BofA could totally dominate the home origination market if this acquisition is approved," George Dean, president of the Greater Phoenix Urban League, said in a statement released by Greenlining. "It therefore has a very special obligation."

Witnesses sponsored by the San Francisco-based California Reinvestment Coalition include four borrowers complaining of frustrating delays and broken promises made by Countrywide's bureaucracy as they struggled to make payments or fell into foreclosure proceedings. One cancer patient was promised a loan modification, but a mix-up occurred on the lender's end and the home was foreclosed on anyway, coalition spokeswoman Victoria Leon Guerrero said.

"When Bank of America takes over, it will be an even bigger operation," she said. "We want assurances they will do a better job" of handling troubled loans.

McGee said he had heard about the complaints and pledged that Bank of America would improve the level of customer service so that neither the "reality [nor] the perception" of such difficulties would continue. He said the two companies had doubled their staffs dealing with troubled borrowers to 3,900 employees over the last year, a level he said would be maintained for at least another year.

He also noted that Countrywide, unlike many lenders, already was going beyond merely sending letters and making phone calls when borrowers run into trouble. After three missed payments on a sub-prime loan, Countrywide sends an employee to knock on the door of the borrower's home to try to talk over possible solutions, McGee said.

Once foreclosure proceedings begin, McGee said, Bank of America will stop adding late fees to the balance owed, and he said the bank would, when legally permitted, waive fees imposed by some mortgages when borrowers pay loans off early.

At a Fed hearing in Chicago last week, the bank said it would limit the use of prepayment penalties after the Countrywide takeover, greatly restrict loans on which borrowers don't document their incomes, and altogether eliminate sub-prime loans and mortgages that allow borrowers to pay less than the monthly interest, causing their loan balances to rise.

Helping 265,000 borrowers retain their homes over the coming two years through refinancings or by reworking loan terms would keep Bank of America at about the pace of workouts that Countrywide says it achieved early this year. The advocacy groups say they are concerned because more than half a million Countrywide borrowers face foreclosure, but McGee said many of those are speculators who don't deserve and won't receive help.

Addressing another demand by the advocacy groups, McGee said the bank would be willing in some circumstances to write down the principal on mortgages to keep borrowers from becoming discouraged and defaulting because their loans are so far "underwater."

Countrywide reported $1.6 billion in losses during the second half of 2007. Bank of America agreed in January to buy the Calabasas-based lender, and Bank of America Chief Executive Ken Lewis has continued to defend the acquisition as strategically wise despite complaints by some stockholders that the risks are too great.

Bank of America quit writing sub-prime loans -- those to risky borrowers whose credit histories or heavy debt loads preclude them getting traditional bank loans -- early this decade. But it was burned badly in the related business of creating debt securities out of risky mortgages. As of April 1, the bank had recorded $8.2 billion in write-downs on sub-prime-related holdings and loan losses, the fourth-largest total of any U.S. banking firm, according to a tally by Bloomberg News.

Countrywide became the largest mortgage lender by striving to dominate all segments of the market, including sub-prime and "pay-option" loans, which allow borrowers to pay so little that their mortgage balance rises. Most foreclosures have been on sub-prime loans, but delinquencies on pay-option loans -- which are written mainly to borrowers with prime credit scores -- have risen dramatically.

Sarkozy television interview seeks to reassure French corporate elite

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By Kumaran Ira and Alex Lantier

French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave a 100-minute, nationally televised interview on April 24, covering a wide-ranging set of topics in domestic and foreign policy.

In an event ostensibly designed to shore up flagging public support for his government, Sarkozy sought to allay concerns within the French ruling elite in the face of negative economic news and mounting opposition from the working class. He sought to reassure big business that he would press ahead with his programme of economic “reforms” targeting social welfare provisions and workers’ conditions, and that close collaboration with the trade unions would allow him to push through the desired cuts.

Sarkozy’s standing has not recovered from the first major strike wave against his social cuts, the October-November 2007 railway and energy workers’ strikes in defence of their “special regime” pensions. Already embittered by the pro-business meaning of his campaign slogan—“work more to earn more”—and continuing high unemployment combined with rapid price inflation, workers were outraged by his flaunting of a super-rich lifestyle and marriage to Italian ex-supermodel Carla Bruni.

Sarkozy’s personal eccentricities were broadly seen as provocative under conditions of slowing economic growth in France as a result of the US mortgage crisis.

This year has seen an unusual extension of strike activity into the private sector, with workers demanding higher wages to keep pace with inflation. Strikes have hit retail stores such as Carrefour and Virgin Megastore, Coca-Cola, France’s major ports, and restaurants staffed by undocumented immigrant workers.

High school students have been striking for weeks against planned job cuts in teaching, and public sector workers have announced strike plans for May 15. Although the 2007 public-sector and railway strikes were defeated, due to the treachery of the trade union bureaucracy, more than 1 million of these workers attended protests in late January.

Public approval of Sarkozy in opinion polls, which dipped below 40 percent last month, has recently dropped even further. According to an Ifop poll published in Paris Match, 72 percent of those polled disapproved of Sarkozy’s policies, 65 percent said he had failed to fulfill his campaign commitments, and 53 percent said his measures hurt their purchasing power. Commenting on the poll, Le Monde noted that of all the presidents of the 50-year-old French Fifth Republic, Sarkozy was the most unpopular after one year in office.

Bourgeois political circles worry that, as class tensions rise and Sarkozy keeps announcing social cuts, the political situation could spin out of control. On April 17, former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin called for a slowing of the reforms and asked Sarkozy to “put them in a hierarchy” so that the population could better understand his goals. Current Prime Minister François Fillon said he was expecting “guidelines for the coming weeks and months to get an orientation on the reforms that must be implemented.”

Sarkozy’s April 24 interview began by addressing these concerns. Openly admitting the unpopularity of his reforms, Sarkozy said, “Of course, I didn’t think that I would spend five years commenting on my excellent poll numbers.”

In a dig at Raffarin, whose government abandoned plans for hospital and Social Security cuts in 2003, after it was destabilised by opposition to its pension cuts and its handling of the summer 2003 heat wave, Sarkozy opposed any slowing or broader explanation of the reforms. He said, “For years, governments have been putting their reforms in hierarchies. They arrive saying: we’ll do this reform, and then we’ll see about the next. They accomplish one reform if they have courage, and no reforms if they don’t.... I’ve launched 55 reforms because everything has to go together.”

He declared his continued support for an entire raft of right-wing measures and social cuts. He called for the pay-in period for pension plans to be increased to 41 years, a measure that is to be discussed with the unions at a meeting with Labor Minister Xavier Bertrand on April 28. He reiterated support for increased medical fees, as well as for a law sharply reducing unemployment benefits for workers who refuse two job offers, regardless of distance from the worker’s residence, salary, or working conditions.

He bluntly stated that he would not back down on job cuts in education, or on his opposition to undocumented immigrants’ demands for a general regularisation of their status.

Asked why the “economic growth spurt” he had promised in his election campaign had not materialised, Sarkozy cited four international economic factors: the doubling of the price of petroleum, the US subprime mortgage crisis, the euro’s rise versus the dollar, and massive price increases for food and raw materials. These factors, he said, were all outside of his control, and he concluded that the only possible response was to hasten the pace of his social cuts.

Sarkozy attempted to explain the economic crisis by demagogically denouncing “financial capitalism” that is “walking on its head.” Such language rings particularly hollow from a man with intimate ties to top French financiers like Arnaud Lagardère and Vincent Bolloré. Sarkozy borrowed the private jet of the latter, a billionaire financier, to take Carla Bruni on a Christmas vacation to Luxor, Egypt.

Sarkozy said he did not know whether he believed the Société Générale’s story that its multibillion-euro losses announced in January resulted solely from the operations of one low-ranking rogue trader. He did not explain why his government, including Fillon, stood by the Société Générale’s story at the time.

Much of the rest of the interview was dedicated to Sarkozy’s hypocritical presentation of himself as a democratic individual who cares for the little man. He promised that he would create an Active Solidarity Revenue (RSA) programme, encouraging unemployed workers to take extremely low-paying jobs by making up the income loss workers suffered by going from unemployment benefits to work. However, saying the programme would be expensive, he noted that it would not be put in place until 2009.

In his discussion of foreign policy, Sarkozy again attempted to strike a democratic pose. He largely omitted from discussion two central features of his foreign policy—its focus on bargaining with Third World countries to obtain contracts for French energy, military and transport infrastructure firms, and its alignment with the Bush administration.

Referring to recent demonstrations and riots in Tibet in the lead-up to this year’s Beijing Olympics, he acknowledged Tibet to be “part of China,” but declared that he was “shocked” by “what happened in Tibet.” He vowed to continue to work for the release of Ingrid Betancourt, a French-Colombian dual citizen currently held captive by Colombian rebel guerillas of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). He reiterated his policy of sending French troops to Afghanistan to bolster the US occupation, justified on the grounds that the Taliban were opposed to “French values.”

This pseudo-democratic charade is exposed by Sarkozy’s attempts to rehabilitate French colonialism. Last year, while promoting plans for a Mediterranean Union, Sarkozy said that relations between France and its former colony, Algeria, had always been a “love affair.”

He also became the first president of the Fifth Republic to welcome to the Elysée presidential palace the French neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who, as a paratroopers lieutenant, helped torture prisoners in Algiers during the Algerian war for independence.

The clumsiness of Sarkozy’s attempts to present democratic credentials to the masses, and the cosmetic character of his proposed economic concessions to workers, underscore that he is aiming principally to solidify support for his government in the bourgeoisie. With regards to the working class, as he briefly but clearly indicated in the interview, the goal is to suppress opposition through his collaboration with the trade union bureaucracy.

At the close of the section of the interview dealing with economic questions, Sarkozy said, “I would like to pay my respects to the trade unions: our social democracy is moving in extraordinary ways, we have not seen anything like this since the Liberation [from the Nazi occupation of France during World War II]. One cannot govern a country without responsible trade union forces.”

Sarkozy’s comment was carefully worded, but clear. The unions are reprising their role at the end of the war, when, in collaboration with the US armed forces and the Stalinist French Communist Party, they supervised a no-strike policy aimed at preventing workers’ factory councils and resistance units formed during the Liberation from undertaking a struggle for power. The Stalinists’ slogan at the time was “strikes are the weapons of the trusts.”

The unions, especially the Stalinist-dominated General Confederation of Labor (CGT), demonstrated their reliability to the government last year by strangling the October 2007 railway strike outright, and then opposing any political struggle against the government’s “reforms” during the November strikes.

As his popularity collapses and more strikes erupt against his policies, Sarkozy is counting on continuing his close collaboration with the trade unions to keep the working class in check politically.

Sarkozy himself admitted as much in an April 18 editorial in Le Monde, titled “For Strong Unions.” He wrote: “Right after the presidential elections [of May 2007] and even before going to the Elysée, I met with trade unions and business groups to listen to them and ask for their positions on the first actions I was planning on taking. Since then, I have continued to very regularly meet with each of their representatives. I know them well, we sometimes have divergences, but our dialogue is always frank....

“The reform of the special regime pensions [was] successfully carried out last fall, thanks to an intense period of coordination at a national level, and negotiations in each enterprise affected by the reform.”

US intelligence on Syrian reactor: justifying last year’s crime to prepare for new ones

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By Peter Symonds

More than seven months after Israeli warplanes destroyed a building in Syria’s eastern desert, the Bush administration has released intelligence purporting to prove that Damascus was building a nuclear reactor at the site, with the assistance of North Korea, as part of plans to build an atomic bomb.

The CIA intelligence briefing last Thursday raised more questions than it answered, and fuelled considerable speculation about its timing and purpose. In all the commentary, however, the most obvious point is deliberately obscured. The US is belatedly justifying an unprovoked and illegal act of aggression by Israel, undoubtedly sanctioned at the time by Washington, that had the potential to spark a new war in the Middle East.

A White House statement hypocritically warned that Syria’s covert construction of the reactor was “a dangerous and potentially destabilising development for the region and the world”, carried out in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It is an open secret, however, that Israel, with Washington’s tacit approval, has covertly manufactured a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons, refused to sign the NPT and blocked International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections of its facilities.

IAEA director general Mohamad ElBaradei has previously criticised Israel for bombing Syria, rather than providing information to the IAEA. Last Friday he issued a statement, which “deplored the fact that this [CIA] information was not provided to the agency in a timely manner” in line with the international body’s responsibilities under the NPT. ElBaradei declared that he regarded “the unilateral use of force by Israel as undermining the due process of verification that is at the heart of the non-proliferation regime”.

Syria has again denied that the building destroyed by the Israeli air strike last September housed a nuclear reactor and that Syria has any intention of building nuclear weapons. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told that media that the air strike “hit a military site under construction, not a nuclear site as Israel and America claimed... Does it make sense that we would build a nuclear facility in the desert and not protect it with anti-aircraft defences? A nuclear site exposed to [spy] satellites, in the heart of Syria and in open space?”

While it is possible that Syria was constructing a nuclear reactor, none of the evidence made public by the CIA provides definitive proof. Nor does it show that the facility was “nearing operational capacity”. Even more tenuous are the claims of North Korean involvement and the existence of a Syrian nuclear weapons program. The presentation includes satellite images of the site before and after the attack, along with photographs of the building’s exterior, of the internal construction and of North Korean and Syrian nuclear chiefs standing side by side. The accompanying commentary claims that the building and internal construction match the design of North Korea’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.

Given the Bush administration’s lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, none of this “evidence” can be taken at face value. In an editorial on Saturday entitled “The curious Syrian nuclear affair”, the British-based Financial Times pointedly commented: “It would appear to justify retroactively the Israeli air strike on the site in Syria’s eastern desert last September. But given the US and Israel’s recent record in these matters, it could also be just another dog and pony show.”

Jon Wolfstal, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), pointed out that the photo of North Korean and Syrian nuclear scientists was not conclusive proof of collaboration. The reactor shown in the photographs was an old British design that was available on the Internet, he explained. It should also be noted that none of the photos, which almost certainly were supplied by Israeli intelligence, were dated.

As the CIA acknowledged in passing, construction dates back to at least 2001. The New York Times reported last October that a photograph released by the private company GeoEye showed that construction on the building was well underway in September 2003. Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst with the New America Foundation, told the newspaper that “it was surprising from the photos how little progress had been made at the site between 2003 and 2007”. Obvious questions arise. If a reactor was under construction, when exactly did Israel and the US first know about it? And did Syria call a halt, in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq?

US claims that Syria has a nuclear weapons program rest on the following dubious argument: North Korea and Syria are collaborating, Pyongyang used plutonium from its reactor to test a crude nuclear device in 2006, and therefore Damascus must be doing the same. But as several commentators have pointed out, there is no indication from the satellite photos that Syria was constructing a processing plant needed to extract plutonium from spent reactor rods. Moreover, it is not clear where Damascus was to get the fuel for a nuclear reactor. And finally, there were no signs of high levels of security that would be expected around such an installation.

In a lengthy article in February entitled “What did Israel bomb in Syria?” veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh commented: “In three months of reporting for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former [US] intelligence, diplomatic and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear weapons programs in Syria.” High-level Syrian officials confirmed that North Korea had contracted to construct the building, as it had done on other projects, but denied that it was a nuclear reactor.

Preparation for new aggression

The obvious question is: why the Bush administration has chosen to release its intelligence now, seven months after the Israeli strike? The two immediate targets are North Korea and Syria. However, amid the increasingly belligerent US propaganda campaign against Iran, last week’s dossier on Syria is also a menacing threat against Tehran, which, in defiance of US demands, is continuing to build a uranium enrichment plant as well as a nuclear research reactor.

In the case of North Korea, the latest revelations cut directly across a deal struck to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear facilities in return for a normalisation of relations and economic aid. The agreement was reached in late 2006 at six-party talks involving the two Koreas, the US, China, Russia and Japan. While going along with the arrangement, Bush administration hardliners such as Vice President Dick Cheney continued to regard the deal as an unacceptable concession to North Korea.

The talks have reached a turning point. North Korea has shut down its nuclear reactor and associated plutonium reprocessing plant at Yongbyon. But Pyongyang is insisting that Washington show good faith by removing the country from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and easing economic sanctions before North Korea makes a full declaration of nuclear facilities and starts to dismantle them. Pyongyang’s alleged “proliferation” to Syria is a convenient means for cutting across negotiations.

In a comment in the Wall Street Journal on April 15 entitled “Bush’s North Korea Capitulation”, former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, derided a plan to allow Pyongyang to “acknowledge” US concerns about proliferation, declaring it looked “like something out of Bill Clinton’s or Jimmy Carter’s playbook”. A right-wing push is also underway in Congress to demand a full accounting of North Korea’s activities before its removal from the terrorist list.

The CIA allegations are also a threat to Syria, which is now linked to the remaining two members of Bush’s “axis of evil”—Iran and North Korea. By backing last September’s attack, the Bush administration is effectively giving Israel a green light for similar raids. The US and Israel routinely condemn Syrian influence in neighbouring Lebanon and demand an end to its support for Hezbollah.

While not directly implicated in American claims about a Syrian nuclear reactor, Iran is undoubtedly at the top of the list of US targets. For months, the Bush administration has been escalating its rhetoric over Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons programs and support for anti-occupation militia inside Iraq. During his tour of the Middle East last month, Vice President Cheney referred to Iran as the “darkening cloud” over the region, underscoring the Bush administration’s oft-repeated threat to maintain “all options on the table”.

Iran was at the top of the agenda when Cheney spoke with leading Israeli officials. Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly told the media: “I spoke to him [Cheney] about the need to remove the Iranian threat before [Tehran] arms itself with a nuclear bomb.” When later asked by an American reporter if Israeli leaders had asked for approval for an Israeli attack on Iran, Cheney dismissed the suggestion as “hypothetical” but did not deny it outright. Since Cheney’s trip, Israel has conducted its largest-ever civil defence drill, during which National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer threatened “the destruction of the Iranian nation” in response to any attack by Tehran.

US accusations of Iranian “meddling” in Iraq have become more strident. Saturday’s New York Times noted that “the administration has, in fact, discussed whether to attack training camps, safe houses and weapons storehouses inside Iran that intelligence reports say are used by the [Iranian] Quds Force to train fighters, according to two senior administration officials.” While such strikes are off the agenda “for now”, the newspaper reported that General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, had ordered the preparation of a public dossier to expose Iran’s covert activities inside Iraq.

In comments last Friday, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, underscored the threat. He stated that the Pentagon was planning for “potential military courses of action” against Iran, which he branded as an “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq. While describing a conflict with Iran as “extremely stressing”, Mullen explained that it was not impossible for the US military. “It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” he said.

The agenda behind the CIA briefing is provoking alarm in European ruling circles. The Financial Times concluded its weekend editorial on an ominous note. After referring to the assassination of a top Hezbollah commander in February, the newspaper declared: “The air strike and the hit could also be interpreted as warnings to Iran to cease its regional meddling and nuclear ambitions—and maybe scare Damascus off its alliance with Tehran. One video show in Washington does not shine a light through the regional murk. But it should remind us there is too much dry tinder out there for anyone to be careless with matches.”

Far from pulling back from threats against Tehran, however, the CIA’s “video show” justifying last September’s air strike is another warning from the US and Israel. If a Syrian site can be struck without warning then Iran’s nuclear and military facilities can suffer the same fate.

Bush, Media Condemn Carter; Black Out Hamas' Overtures Towards Peace

Go to Original
By Ira Chernus

Here is some recent news from Israeli and Arab sources that you might have missed:

Haaretz reported that "Hamas’ political leader Khaled Meshal said Hamas would accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip along Israel’s pre-1967 borders, and would grant Israel a 10-year hudna, or truce, as an implicit proof of recognition if Israel withdraws from those areas."

According to Gulf News, "Former US president Jimmy Carter said that exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal had told him the movement would accept a peace deal if it was approved in a Palestinian vote. ... Hamas will accept a ceasefire that is limited to the Gaza Strip, dropping its long-standing demand that the West Bank be included in any halt in fighting with Israel, senior representatives of the group said."

Haaretz also noted that "the most significant change in Hamas’ stance in the talks over a calm is that it gave up on its demand that the calm extend to both Gaza and the West Bank. This may lead to a breakthrough, but if Israel refuses this offer, Hamas will continue its policy of the past few weeks ¬ escalating the violence and rocket fire."

Tragically, Israel did not refuse this offer. Israel simply ignored them, just as it ignored the other olive branches tentatively offered by Hamas in the wake of Jimmy Carter’s talks with Hamas leaders. The U.S. government and our mainstream media did the same. What could have been heralded as a new opening toward peace in the Middle East has instead been expunged from the discourse, flushed down the memory hole into the oblivion of official nonexistence.

That’s nothing new. For years, Hamas leaders have periodically offered truces and talked publicly of peace, negotiation, and compromise. Every time, they get the same kind of silent treatment -- for tactical, geopolitical, and ideological reasons.

On the tactical level, Israel and the U.S. want to isolate Hamas and treat it as a political nonentity, hoping that the Palestinian people will eventually, out of desperation, shift their political support to the more pliable Fatah regime of Mahmoud Abbas. It’s a risky strategy because it could so easily backfire. If the Israel-Fatah peace talks end with no result -- as most experts now predict -- an unpredictable number of Palestinians will give up on Fatah and rally around Hamas.

But Israeli and U.S. leaders see no choice. They are committed to pursuing a peace agreement that will create a weak Palestinian state. Only Fatah offers even a chance of that outcome. Why a weak state? That leads to the geopolitical reason for ignoring Hamas’ peace offerings.

If the U.S. or Israel were to respond publicly to Hamas moves, they would tacitly acknowledge that Hamas is a significant player in the game, that it does have some political power. "The world’s only superpower" and its "most reliable ally" are determined to hide this truth at all costs. Being a superpower means keeping up the illusion that you have all the power, that you can do whatever you damn please. Of course the illusion has been punctured in the streets of Iraq and the hills of southern Lebanon. But that’s all the more reason to try to keep it up everywhere else, especially in the resource-rich Middle East. To allow a Palestinian state with genuine political and economic power to exist would raise the specter of "instability" -- the foreign policy elite’s code word for anything that compromises U.S. power and influence.

Moreover, U.S. and Israeli leaders have insisted on linking Hamas with all the other Islamist forces resisting their hegemony over the Middle East. To grant Hamas any semblance of power would create the impression that the Islamists as a whole were on the rise. So it seems imperative to disempower Hamas by any means necessary.

And ignoring people can be an even more persuasive display of power than shooting them. Shooting signals to the world that the victims matter, and that signal in itself makes the victims significant players in the power game. Ignoring them says to the world that the victims are irrelevant: No one needs to respond to, or even listen to, anything they say.

These well-known power considerations are bolstered by an ideologically loaded narrative about Hamas that is equally familiar.

Hamas is a party of murderous terrorists, the story goes. They want only to destroy Israel. So nothing Israel or the U.S. says or does can dissuade them from pursuing their deadly aim. There is no point in paying any attention to their empty words. They’ve offered truces so often before, always just buying time to build up strength for their next onslaught against poor, innocent Israel. The only reasonable thing to do is to keep inflicting more and more pain until they give up. The only language they understand is force.

This ideological litany, with all its many variants, does more than justify ignoring Hamas’ conciliatory gestures. Beneath that obvious motive lies a more subtle but crucial argument. Hamas policies are never responses to Israel’s policies, it says. Their perverse hatred wells up from some irrational source deep inside them that can never be quelled. So there is no hope of the two sides ever entering into any relationship other than all-out war. The disconnect is as permanent as it is total. Thus Hamas can never expect to be a player in the game of power relationships. And Hamas has chosen this isolation as its permanent stance. Israel and the U.S. bear no responsibility. We could not develop a relationship with such evildoers even if we wanted to.

It’s a most satisfying story of guilt against innocence. If no policy changes that we "good guys" might make will ever affect those "bad guys," then obviously no policies of ours had anything to do with making "those bad guys" so bad in the first place; the guilty are just intrinsically evil. So the innocent can more easily see themselves as absolutely "good guys," innately pure and virtuous. For many who believe the narrative, this moral drama of good against evil may be the most important point of all.

Do the policymakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe it? We’ll never know. But it certainly serves their power interests. And with their sensitive fingers always held up to the political winds, they know that many voters believe it, giving them another good reason to keep up the image of total separation from evil: "We don’t talk to terrorists."

Or so they say. As Steve Masters, president of the Jewish-American peace group Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, recently noted, the Israeli rejection of Hamas overtures is merely a public show. "Despite their denials, the sides are without question engaging with each other."

But the show must go on. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice understands that perfectly well. So she insists that when Carter told Assistant Secretary of State C. David Welch of his plan to meet Hamas leaders, Welch "counseled President Carter against having contact with Hamas." Not so, Carter insists. Who should we believe, Jimmy or Condi?

When Welch himself recollected his words to Carter, they were ambiguous enough that Carter might well have taken them as a kind of "it’s pointless, but go ahead" message. As one reporter suggested at a State Department press briefing, "it may be that David Welch is such an accomplished diplomat that even when he says no, it sounds like yes." Curiously, the Washington Post article reporting Welch’s recollection was quickly disappeared from the Post’s website. The ideological image of "no mutuality, no contact" must be preserved.

This same tragicomic show was played out twenty years ago, when Yassir Arafat announced his readiness to accept a two-state solution. Official Israel treated his words as meaningless and maintained its legal ban on direct talks with the PLO. Only years later did the world discover that the government imposing that ban was actually listening closely to Arafat. It would soon break its own law and secretly negotiate what would become the widely-heralded Oslo agreement.

Back then the policy of ignoring Palestinian peace efforts was justified by the ambiguity of Palestinian leaders’ words. Now, too, those who cling to the ideological image of Hamas as evil "terrorists" point to the ambiguity of Khaled Mashaal’s words as smoking-gun evidence of his devious cunning. For example, Mashaal says his group would not "recognize Israel," but it would offer a 10-year truce "as an implicit proof of recognition." If he won’t forthrightly affirm Israel’s right to exist, doesn’t that prove Hamas really wants to destroy Israel?

Not necessarily. Carter’s meeting with Mashaal showed that another interpretive frame is available. Carter treated Hamas leaders the way the Israelis treated PLO leaders at Oslo: not as demons but as ordinary politicians pursuing their own best interests. What they see as their best interests will change as circumstances change -- circumstances created by others, mainly the Israeli and U.S. governments. In other words, Hamas policies are intimately connected to the actions of the U.S. and Israel. Like it or not, these political forces are all tied together in what another courageous son of Georgia, Martin Luther King, called "a network of mutuality, a single garment of destiny."

Hamas may estimate its best interests incorrectly or pursue them ineffectively, sometimes with absolutely unacceptable violence. Most political parties do that with depressing regularity. Often the party can’t even decide what its best interests are. Every effective political party is a big tent, trying to hold together a coalition of competing interests.

Hamas is no different. Its leaders, like all political leaders, are playing to diverse audiences and trying to please them all, knowing full well that their audiences have very different, sometimes contradictory, desires. So they often speak vaguely and confusingly. That’s why no one is sure exactly what Hamas leaders mean when they announce their views and intentions. To paraphrase what the reporter said about the State Department official, they are such accomplished diplomats that even when they say yes, it can easily sound like no.

But for those who are not deafened by ideology, they did clearly say yes. Not to outright recognition of Israel; that would stretch the Hamas coalition beyond the breaking point. But nations negotiate with others they don’t legally recognize all the time. (Nixon and Kissinger became heroes for doing it with China.)

Like Arafat twenty years ago, Mashaal has given a signal that he and his colleagues want to play the power game. They are ready to be flexible, if they get something in return. It’s the only way they can hold their coalition together, as Ha’aretz analyst Avi Issacharoff pointed out: "Hamas cannot sell its organization, not to mention the smaller [militant] groups, a calm without getting something in return. ... Hamas’ military wing will toe the line of the political leadership if the latter makes significant achievements in cease-fire talks with Israel."

That’s just what U.S. and Israeli officials won’t allow. They seem committed to maintaining the illusion of their permanent disconnect from Hamas and the illusion of innocence that goes with it, in order to pursue the illusory goal of unchallenged control in the Middle East.

Their other goal -- winning votes in the next election -- may prove to be an illusion, too. A growing number of prominent voices in Israel are calling for negotiations with Hamas, including the mayor of the beleaguered town of Sderot and former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. Weeks ago a poll showed two-thirds of Israelis favoring direct talks with Hamas, at least for the limited goals of ending attacks from Gaza and retrieving the long-time captive soldier Gilad Shalit. Growing numbers of U.S. Jews are calling for negotiations with Hamas, too.

All these dissenting voices are using different words to deliver one simple message. Hamas leaders are speaking more clearly than ever of their willingness to negotiate. Even if their words are as yet vague and tentative, they have offered an unprecedented opening for peace. The advantages that are supposed to come from ignoring Hamas are illusions. The death and suffering that will come from ignoring Hamas and continuing the conflict are all too real.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.

Scam Artists Are Prepped to Fleece Green Industries as Soon as the Money Comes in

Go to Original
By Stan Cox

Hard times are looming. And in their desperation to keep the American economy afloat, government and business will be tossing overboard any proposals for real environmental protection. No time for such romantic foolishness when there are investments to be protected. Get those tax refunds back into retailers’ registers, quick!

Not that we won’t be hearing about the environment; indeed, the next growth spurt, if it comes, is likely to be clothed in a green as green as the felt on a blackjack table.

Earlier this year, entrepreneur Eric Janszen declared in Harper’s magazine that the next bubble -- alternative energy -- had already been "branded". His projection: the eventual creation of $20 trillion in fictitious, speculative wealth, "money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver ’energy security.’" and that "when the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry." After that next big bust, not only alternative energy but a host of other "green" industries will be left in ruin.

As long as an investing class is allowed to make all major environmental decisions, no new sources of energy will actually replace even one barrel or ton of fossil fuel; rather, they will go to further parasitizing the planet in the cause of growth. The boosters of "green" capitalism have never even bothered to argue otherwise in any effective way.

Typical is a book by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston entitled Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, which became an immediate hit among "green" tycoons when it was published in 2006. It was a how-to manual for business people wanting to run the kinds of companies that, in the authors’ phrase, "get ahead of the Green Wave," whose "environmental strategies provide added degrees of freedom to operate, profit, and grow."

These are some of the helpful tips to be found in Green to Gold:

"Most successful green marketing starts with the traditional selling points -- price, quality, or performance -- and only then mentions environmental attributes. Almost always, green should not be the first button to push."

"Eco-labels can provide legitimate environmental information to a demanding public. But they can also be used as a trade barrier, disadvantaging competitors in the marketplace."

"Corporate strategy 101 tells us that a company can drive revenues by increasing price or volume. With green products, volume is a much safer route."

"Partnering gives a company a strong defense against NGO [nongovernmental (nonprofit) organization] attacks, but a large part of that defense is the demonstration of genuine progress. We call it brand inoculation ... " [their bold]

Right in the first chapter, Esty and Wilson rank companies they’ve designated as green "WaveRiders". Number One in their international ranking is petroleum giant BP. Their account of how BP reached the top of the green heap is little more than a description of a masterful public-relations campaign. "Despite being in a business with large environmental impacts, the company is now seen as green," they write, and "Here’s the real proof: BP’s brand value, as measured by experts in measuring intangibles, has jumped significantly."

But BP’s primary mission is still to earn a profit by selling fossil fuels, so it was no big shock when the Independent reported in 2005 that the company had been lobbying against substantive proposals then before the U.S. Congress that would cap carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, BP supported a watered-down move that would have "companies only try to cut emissions with the promise of tax breaks."

Then, last year, the Environmental Protection Agency exempted BP from what the company regarded as a too-restrictive environmental law, allowing its Whiting, Indiana facility to discharge increased quantities of ammonia and other pollutants into Lake Michigan and to continue dumping mercury into the lake. This reportedly was done so that BP could refine heavy crude oil from Canadian tar sands.

Under a hail of criticism from local residents and environmentalists, BP promised, cross-its-heart, to stick to the old water-pollution limits, but its pending state permit for a $3.8 billion expansion of the Whiting facility has critics fuming over potential impacts on local air quality. The permit is expected to be approved by June 1. That is an important deadline, because it’s then that some of BP’s previously earned air-emission credits will expire. BP claims that by juggling credits, it will decrease the "net" carbon emissions from the new plant -- ecological virtue as thin as the paper the credits are printed on. And, according to reports, "particulate matter and sulfur dioxide emissions would increase."

Writing recently for In these Times, Michael Moreci described the ecological crimes that will be committed far to the northwest in the Alberta tar sands that are going to supply BP’s refinery:

"The first step involves razing vast amounts of wilderness for open-pit mining -- meaning that small plants, trees and topsoil must be extracted by the ton. And because five barrels of water are typically needed to produce a single barrel of crude, surrounding rivers must be routed to the pits, then re-routed to man-made lakes of toxic sludge. ... Once the forest and wildlife are out of the way and the pits have been dug, the raw process of extraction requires substantial manpower, heavy machinery (some of which can be up to three stories tall and weigh as much as a jetliner) and an incredible amount of energy. And that’s to produce only a single barrel of unrefined crude oil from two tons of tar sands. ... Over the next seven years, global warming pollutants released into the atmosphere from tar sands oil production are projected to quintuple to 126 megatons ... What’s more, the tar sands industry consumes enough gas in a single day to heat approximately 4 million American homes."

If BP is a "WaveRider", the wave is one of toxic sludge.

Greenwash your body

In a chapter section of Green to Gold headed, "Perfect is the Enemy of the Good" (that well-frayed motto of green capitalism), Esty and Wilson contrast what they see as an exemplary decision by McDonald’s -- to give its McNuggets a package that was not environmentally offensive enough to drive away eco-conscious customers yet not so "flimsy" that it would annoy conventional customers -- with what they see as the too-radical approach of The Body Shop International, whose pursuit of its "environmental and social mission" was "inattentive to economic realities."

To cite the The Body Shop, a U.K.-based firm specializing in skin-and-hair-care products, as a company striving for the "Perfect" reveals the shallowness of Green to Gold’s analysis. For more than 30 years, The Body Shop and its CEO, self-styled anti-capitalist capitalist Anita Roddick, avidly cultivated a corporate image as pioneers of high business ethics. But The Body Shop has been dismissed by critics as no more than a world leader in pale-green consumerism.

A 1994 expose by John Entine charged the company with exploiting workers, franchisees, and indigenous peoples who supply ingredients; using artificial and sometimes harmful chemicals in products labeled as "all natural"; selling bacteria-contaminated products; flushing toxic chemicals into sewage systems; and promoting overconsumption of costly but Wal-Mart-quality products.

Others have blasted the company’s much-publicized relationships with indigenous peoples who supply some of their ingredients. An anthropologist who worked for more than thirty years among Brazil’s Kayapo people charged in 1995 that The Body Shop purchased much smaller quantities of products like brazil-nut oil than the Kayapo wanted to sell, and forbade them to sell to other companies. The company did that, he charged, because the real purpose of the project was to acquire not oil but rather the exclusive right to heartwarming photographs of the Kayapo that would appeal to the tastes of "Western ecoliberals."

The Body Shop was purchased in 2006 by L’Oreal, the world’s largest cosmetics company. L’Oreal has refused to sign a proposed international Compact for Safe Cosmetics. The buyout prompted Ethical Consumer magazine to drop The Body Shop from a rating of 11 on the magazine’s 1-to-20 "Ethiscore" scale all the way down to 2.5.6 (The company has since climbed to a still-wretched 5 out of 20).

Ethical or not, The Body Shop can’t be considered an environmental leader, wrote Entine on the occasion of Roddick’s death last year: "She sold cosmetics made mostly with water, colorings, fragrances and preservatives made from petrochemicals. Body Shop packages beauty notions in plastic bottles, an anathema to serious environmentalists, and ships them around the world in carbon-belching trucks and planes. From an environmental perspective, its business model is a train wreck."

But in having offered its healthy business and virtuous image for sale to a huge corporation, The Body Shop is far from alone. Noting that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream has "melted into the Unilever empire," that "organic and fairtrade chocolate producer Green & Black’s was snapped up by Cadbury Schweppes," and that Colgate-Palmolive was about to "clean up on the American ethical toothpaste brand Tom’s of Maine," journalist Faith Glasgow looked into the reasons that well-intentioned companies sell out:

"The founders of small ethical firms face a challenging dilemma when it comes to bringing their products into the mainstream. Many of their supporters buy those products at least partly because they do care about the irresponsible behavior of big corporations: sell out, and a proportion will walk away. On the other hand, the quickest and easiest way to reach and maybe raise the awareness of a much wider audience is undoubtedly by accessing the superior marketing and distribution network of a multi-national. ’I think they genuinely want to reach wider audiences with their products, and they see a takeover as the best way of accessing that market," affirms [Ethical Consumer’s Rob] Harrison. ’They believe that the knock to their reputation will be outweighed by the boost to sales.’"

In Green to Gold, Esty and Winston applaud two other companies, Wal-Mart and Whole Foods Market, for making environmental improvements and peddling green products. They quote with approval Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, who told his fellow executives "that their sustainability efforts would help protect the company’s ’license to grow’."

One chapter of my own book Sick Planet recounts how those two Fortune 500 companies (Wal-Mart now at No. 1, Whole Foods at No. 411) are attempting, each through its own tried-and-true strategy, to expand the market for natural and organic food.

The two Goliaths are slugging it out to capture that big stretch of socioeconomic territory that separates them. Wal-Mart, the shopping home of American families who live below the median income, made headlines in May 2006 by announcing a big increase in its marketing of organic food and cotton clothing. (Organic coffee has since been added to the menu.) By the end of 2006, probably not by complete coincidence, the 196-store chain Whole Foods, leader in the natural-food market and purveyor of edible wonders to the prosperous, announced that its long string of double-digit growth years was ending, with projected 2007 growth dipping to "only" 6 to 8 percent.

Whole Foods handled that problem last year by the time-honored method of buying out the competition: Wild Oats Marketplace, operator of more than 70 stores in the U.S. In August, with a Federal Trade Commission antitrust suit still standing in the way of the merger, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey unwittingly bolstered the government’s case with an email to his board. He wrote that his target Wild Oats "is the only existing company that has the brand and number of stores to be a meaningful springboard for another player to get into this space ... Eliminating them means eliminating this threat forever, or almost forever."

Whole Foods has grown phenomenally by selling luxury goods to consumers in the upper income brackets. Mackey is frank about that. In 2005, he told the Independent, "You can’t have it both ways. If you want the highest quality, it costs more. It is like complaining that a BMW is more expensive than a Hyundai. Yes, but you’re getting a better car." And that’s why you don’t see rusty Fords and Plymouths parked outside a Whole Foods Market.

Of the pre-merger company’s 170 U.S. stores in 2006, not a single one was located in a zip code with an average 2003 household income as low as $27,800 -- the most common Whole Foods hourly-job salary. More than 95 percent were in zip codes above the national median income, with more than 25 percent above $100,000. Lower-level Whole Foods employees could eat fairly well shopping at Wal-Mart, but supplying all their food needs at Whole Foods would be a stretch. Meanwhile, most Wal-Mart employees would have trouble affording their own employer’s rock-bottom food, let alone its organic food, and could not afford to open the doors at Whole Foods.

Asked how virtuous food can be made more affordable, Mackey has shown a touchingly simple faith in economic progress: "I think [organic and natural food] can continue to penetrate, as the culture becomes wealthier." If that’s what it takes, don’t count on much progress in the economically fraught years that lie ahead.

Wal-Mart’s announced goal was to sell organic food at only 10 percent over the price of conventional food. That hasn’t happened. This week at the company’s Supercenter in Salina, Kansas, organic food was available but not easy to find, tucked into small bins scattered here and there in the huge produce section. Organic versions were selling at the following premiums: spinach, 28% above its conventional counterpart; lettuce, 50%; onions, 56%; potatoes, 100% (i.e., double the price of conventional "NASCAR" brand Russets); milk, 105%; and tomatoes, 200% (and the organic ones were from Mexico).

One result of the corporate takeover of organic food retailing has been the industrialization of organic agriculture. Whole Foods and other big sellers are forced to seek out suppliers who can deliver massive loads of a relatively uniform product, even out of season. Those generally idealistic companies unintentionally paved the organic highway that Wal-Mart is now traveling, and, too late, fear is spreading. For one thing, everyone’s afraid a big share of Wal-Mart’s organic products will come from the company’s favorite source for just about all other merchandise: China.

Michael Pollan has asked how Wal-Mart will manage to cut organic food’s typical premium of 50 percent over conventional food to only 10 percent: "It may mean that they’ll have to import food from China or other countries. They’ll have to buy only from the biggest suppliers."

Critics charge that corporations are exploiting organic agriculture’s feel-good image even when selling conventional products. At a Whole Foods store in Manhattan, writer Field Maloney spotted pictures and folksy profiles of neighborly food-growers (like "a sandy-haired organic leek farmer named Dave") positioned above non-organic onions from Oregon and Mexico. (Wal-Mart has been caught in similar deception). Maloney guessed that Whole Foods executives are feeling a little off-balance these days, amidst so much talk about the virtues of locally grown food: "After all, a multinational chain can’t promote a ’buy local’ philosophy without being self-defeating."

If you want to coax higher prices out of customers and keep employees happy at low pay, it helps for both groups to feel a connection to a movement that’s making the world a better place. But the bigger Whole Foods and other retailers grow, the harder it will be to extract premium prices from consumers while convincing workers that they’re part of an important cause.

Of all religions, the one to which Americans cling most tightly is the doctrine of the free market. No belief is more deeply held than the one that says markets will always satisfy people’s needs in the best and most efficient way. That belief persists, unaffected by the market economy’s repeated, spectacular failures to perform as advertised. If green energy and green consumption remain as they are -- as sects within the religion of the market -- they also are doomed to fail.

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book, Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, was just published by Pluto Press.

The Myths and Harsh Effects of Bush's Economic Class War

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By Larry Beinhart

George Bush came into office. There was a recession almost immediately. Officially it began in March of 2001 and, officially, it ended eight months later.

The causes of that recession are vague and amorphous, generally credited to the "business cycle."

There is, in addition, a minor Republican industry dedicated to back-dating the onset by five months, to November, 2000, in order to make it a Clinton recession. Or, to inadvertently to say that the very election of George Bush screwed up the economy, he didn’t even have to come to power.

Bush came in with a plan for tax cuts. Originally, that was based on the government having a surplus and it was packaged as giving people their own money back. When the surplus disappeared, due to the recession and the tax cuts, he kept pushing the tax cuts as a jobs and stimulus package. The economy went into "recovery" by 2003.

The administration claimed that the recovery was due to the tax cuts. It was an odd and rather limp recovery. Indeed, it was a mysterious one and the mystery was that the US was still losing jobs. This was considered inexplicable.

The administration claimed that the weakness in the economy was due to 9/11 and being in a war. The very same people who used that story would have been the first to say that Roosevelt and the New Deal did not bring the US out of the depression, it was World War II that did it. Historically, wars have produced booms. But their war was somehow different.

Nonetheless, the five years from 2003 to 2007 are now routinely described as having been a "boom," a time of "robust" growth, low inflation, and low unemployment. Now we are in, or facing, a recession.

This recession was brought about by a specific over-expansion, the "sub-prime lending bubble."

This has caused turmoil in the credit markets.

The cure is a "stimulus package." It consists of two parts. Low interest rates and giving cash out to every American, in the hopes that we will "consume" our way out of trouble. It’s hard to tell how much anyone believes this will work, but Republicans and Democrats have all signed on, no one is saying it’s nonsense, or pointing out the obvious, that’s the horse that brought us here. Here’s the reality.

The recession of 2001 never ended.

At least not for ordinary Americans.

Ordinary Americans found that their income was declining. From 2001 to 2007, median family income declined - depending on where you get your figures from - by somewhere between $500 and $1,000. Median individual income went down by at least $1,000.

The yearly average number of new private sector jobs created from 2001-2008 was just

369,000, not even keeping up with the growth in population. It should be compared to the average number of new private sector jobs created from ’92 to 2,000: 1,760,000 per year.

The number of people in manufacturing jobs decreased by over 3 million.

The number who got health care at work went down, from 64.2 million to 59.7 million. The number of people without health care went up from 38.4 to 46.9 million.

The number of people in poverty increased from 31.6 million to 36.5 million.

The value of America’s businesses, at least as measured by the stock market, did not go up. An astonishing thing in what was called a boom. Meantime, the cost of living went up.

Home heating oil went up about 150 percent. Gas at the pump at least doubled. The cost of health insurance went up about 50 percent. The cost of college went up about 30 percent. Now food is going up. How can the myth and the reality be so different?

Part of it is the standard theology and story telling about free markets and America always being number one and the envy of the world. Add to that the great grasp of media manipulation on the part of the administration, the herd mentality in politics, the media, even, and especially, among economists.

The key fact is this: during the Bush administration the US economy "grew" by 37 percent. Give or take, plus or minus, but something around there

What has been ignored is what that growth consists of. And even more, what it cost.

The middle class has shrunk and is less well off. So the growth isn’t there.

The stock market is flat, so it’s not in business. Manufacturing jobs have been dramatically reduced, so it’s not there.

The "growth" in the US economy is a bubble. It consists entirely of debt. Can it be true that the growth in the US economy in the last seven years, such as it is, consists entirely of debt?

Here are the numbers:

The US economy grew by about $4 trillion.

-- The national debt in Jan. 2008: $9.2 trillion

-- The national debt in 2001: $5.7 trillion

An increase of $3.5 trillion

-- Total consumer credit debt in 2008: $12.8 trillion

-- Total consumer credit debt in 2001: $7.65 trillion

An increase of $5.25 trillion

In the course of achieving growth of $4 trillion, we took on $8.75 trillion in debt, combining what we owe as a nation and as individuals.

Since we have nothing to show for it, it’s the worst single investment in world history. Is debt innately evil?

No.

There are lots of good reasons to take on debt. But the national choices should be made on roughly the same basis as taking on personal debt. If you can pay as you go, it’s cheaper.

But sometimes there are emergencies. If something is vital, like saving your child’s life, even when you don’t have health insurance, you will hock whatever you can. When the nation is attacked, we normally spend what we have, plus what we can raise with taxes, and then borrow more, for the national defense.

It also makes sense to borrow to do something profitable - start, expand, or improve a business. The government equivalent is building infrastructure. Roads, education, communications, criminal justice and court systems, all facilitate commerce and generate more business, which ultimately creates new tax revenue.

Sometime you borrow to buy something that’s worth the extra cost of paying interest, either because of it’s utility, like a car, or because you expect it to appreciate more than the interest you pay, like a house.

Nowadays, governments routinely borrow to jump start or stimulate economies.

That idea started during the Great Depression. It’s generally credited to John Maynard Keynes and is exemplified in many of the New Deal experiments. As originally conceived, it was trickle up, or ideally, multiply up economics. If you put the unemployed to work, they would spend their income on housing, food and other necessities. That would go to shopkeepers, service people, property owners, farmers and the manufacturers of the goods they all bought. At each step there would be tax revenue so the deficits would ultimately pay for themselves.

Then along came the trickle down people.

They believed that if rich people had more money, they would invest it in businesses, creating more employment, that would produce more things, that people would flock to buy, which would, likewise, create more tax revenue.

The problem is that it doesn’t work. If there was a real shortage of investment capital, it might work, but in a generally balanced economy it doesn’t. It didn’t work under Reagan or Bush the Elder. They each saw it fail and retreated from it.

It doesn’t work because rich people with extra money do not say, "Ah hah! I have an extra hundred grand, I’ll open a grocery store!" They toss it in whatever market is handy or buy a second, third, or fourth home.

On the other hand, if there are lots of working people with some extra money, because they have good jobs, or because they have any jobs at all, you can bet your social security that someone will come along to sell them something. And the more they have, the more businesspeople will pop up to seize the opportunity, no matter how much they have to pay in taxes to do so. They will bribe, smuggle, go into war zones to make a profit. Here’s what happened in Bush the Lesser’s experiment.

The government pumped out lots of money by increased spending, much of it going to the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, and, of course, a special big chunk on the wars.

They also cut taxes. Mostly for the very rich. So rich people suddenly had lots of money on hand. They didn’t go out and open new businesses, they simply sold the money. That is, they put it in "the financial sector," banks, investment companies, brokerages, insurance companies, real estate funds, hedge funds and the like.

The financial sector suddenly had an influx of money. So they went out and sold it. That is, they went out aggressively to make loans, both to businesses and consumers. The government was hand in glove with them, keeping interest rates low and deregulating or signoring regulations.

There was a real estate bubble. That should have been a warning sign. Real estate is a passive investment. It is a signal that there is a lot of money around with no productive place to go. No businesses expanding. No hot new industries. No genuine growth.

The real estate bubble is now routinely described as the root of our current economic problems.

That’s not true. It’s merely a symptom.

The problem is that the government, the nation, and the individuals in our country have all taken on massive amounts of new debt. Without investing it anything productive. Even our conquests of Afghanistan and Iraq are not profitable (except for specific war profiteers), they are drains, endlessly creating more debts. Debts which are, bizarrely, kept off the books the way Enron used to do it, or more pertinently, the way George Bush used to do it when he was at Harken Energy.

This is quite accurately reflected in the fall of the dollar against such currencies as the Euro. The dollar is now worth one third less than it was in 2001, pretty much the size of the bubble, one third of the economy.

It is also the primary cause of half of the increase in the price of oil. Since oil is priced in dollars, oil producers have had to raise their prices by fifty percent just to keep even. As our energy policy has been to just keep using oil, that makes the problem self-perpetuating, sending more and more money out of the country.

Here’s another statistic to make things scarier still: Amount more Americans earned than spent in 2001: +2.3 percent Amount less Americans are earning than spending in 2008: -0.5 percent (State of the Union 2008: By the Numbers, Reuters, 1/28/2008 the source of many of the statistics included here.) The beat goes on.

The solutions that have been proposed so far are more of what has created the problem.

A check sent to every American, paid for by .... debt. Support for failing financial institutions and for defaulting mortgage holders, paid for by .... debt. Artificially low interest rates, so there will be more lending, creating more debt. All to keep the big bubble from bursting. All in the service of denying the big bubble is actually a bubble.

If America is going to get out of this, we will probably have to do it the old fashioned way, work for it. The way to encourage work, is to make doing business - making things, inventing things, providing services - more attractive and profitable than simply lending money.

Credit that’s too easy to get encourages careless and wasteful choices among consumers, bankers, and business people. Just as it results in sub-prime mortgages, it results in the sort of corporate takeovers, financed by hedge funds and big banks, that require downsizing, selling off the assets, snatching the profits and leaving a bankrupt wasteland behind.

Fixing it requires raising taxes to pay off the government debts. Cutting military spending, the bloated excesses in the name of the War on Terror and ending the War in Iraq, will help immensely. But good luck in getting that done. Until, as Osama bin Laden planned, we go bankrupt from those wars just as the Soviet Union did from their Afghan War.

It also requires sensible investment by the government, in the sort of infrastructure that will create business that takes place here, in the United States.

More than any of that, it requires a new intellectual and moral standard. One that raises up reality at least to the status of the myths.

Larry Beinhart is the author of "Wag the Dog," "The Librarian," and "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." All available at nationbooks.org.

The No Planers

the 11th UC vid. Buckle up!

Letters Give CIA Tactics a Legal Rationale

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By Mark Mazzetti

Washington - The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.

The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.

While the Geneva Conventions prohibit "outrages upon personal dignity," a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.

"The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act," said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public.

Mr. Bush issued the executive order last summer to comply with restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court and Congress. The order spelled out new standards for interrogation techniques, requiring that they comply with international standards for humane treatment, but it did not identify any approved techniques.

It has been clear that the order preserved at least some of the latitude that Mr. Bush has permitted the C.I.A. in using harsher interrogation techniques than those permitted by the military or other agencies. But the new documents provide more details about how the administration intends to determine whether a specific technique would be legal, depending on the circumstances involved.

The letters from the Justice Department to Congress were provided by the staff of Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee and had sought more information from the department.

Some legal experts critical of the Justice Department interpretation said the department seemed to be arguing that the prospect of thwarting a terror attack could be used to justify interrogation methods that would otherwise be illegal.

"What they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not committed an offense," said Scott L. Silliman, who teaches national security law at Duke University.

But a senior Justice Department official strongly challenged this interpretation on Friday, saying that the purpose of the interrogation would be just one among many factors weighed in determining whether a specific procedure could be used.

"I certainly don't want to suggest that if there's a good purpose you can head off and humiliate and degrade someone," said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was describing some legal judgments that remain classified.

"The fact that you are doing something for a legitimate security purpose would be relevant, but there are things that a reasonable observer would deem to be outrageous," he said.

At the same time, the official said, "there are certainly things that can be insulting that would not raise to the level of an outrage on personal dignity."

The humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners is prohibited by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Determining the legal boundaries for interrogating terrorism suspects has been a struggle for the Bush administration. Some of those captured in the first two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were subjected to particularly severe methods, including waterboarding, which induces a feeling of drowning.

But the rules for interrogations became more restrictive beginning in 2004, when the Justice Department rescinded a number of classified legal opinions, including a memorandum written in August 2002 that argued that nothing short of the pain associated with organ failure constituted illegal torture. The executive order that Mr. Bush issued in July 2007 was a further restriction, in response to a Supreme Court ruling in 2006 that holding that all prisoners in American captivity must be treated in accordance with Common Article 3.

Mr. Benczkowski's letters were in response to questions from Mr. Wyden, whose committee had received classified briefings about the executive order.

That order specifies some conduct that it says would be prohibited in any interrogation, including forcing an individual to perform sexual acts, or threatening an individual with sexual mutilation. But it does not say which techniques could still be permitted.

Legislation that was approved this year by the House and the Senate would have imposed further on C.I.A. interrogations, by requiring that they conform to rules spelled out in the Army handbook for military interrogations that bans coercive procedures. But Mr. Bush vetoed that bill, saying that the use of harsh interrogation methods had been effective in preventing terrorist attacks.

The legal reasoning included in the latest Justice Department letters is less expansive than what department lawyers offered as recently as 2005 in defending the use of aggressive techniques. But they show that the Bush administration lawyers are citing the sometimes vague language of the Geneva Conventions to support the idea that interrogators should not be bound by ironclad rules.

In one letter written Sept. 27, 2007, Mr. Benczkowski argued that "to rise to the level of an outrage" and thus be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, conduct "must be so deplorable that the reasonable observer would recognize it as something that should be universally condemned."

Mr. Wyden said he was concerned that, under the new rules, the Bush administration had put Geneva Convention restrictions on a "sliding scale."

If the United States used subjective standards in applying its interrogation rules, he said, then potential enemies might adopt different standards of treatment for American detainees based on an officer's rank or other factors.

"The cumulative effect in my interpretation is to put American troops at risk," Mr. Wyden said.