Using cell phones to find missing persons pushes law

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By LEVI PULKKINEN

Wireless carriers give location to police without a warrant

The call came in to police just after midnight April 16.

Hours before, a distraught young man had phoned his mother, hinting he wanted to kill himself. When he didn't meet her as planned, she telephoned Seattle police and reported her son missing.

Because of increasing advances in technology, officers were able to find the missing man's cellular phone using his wireless network. Two hours after he was reported missing, the man was found alive but unwell lying on his desk and taken to University Hospital for a psychological evaluation.

The night's incident was one of tens of thousands in which a life may have been saved because of the ability to find someone through a cell phone. But life-or-death missing persons cases remain rare, and locater technologies raise questions about warrantless searches.

Missing persons cases present an unusual problem for police -- it's not a crime to disappear. Without a crime, police can't get a search warrant. In a criminal case, no warrant would mean no phone records for authorities.

Instead, King County Sheriff Sue Rahr said, missing persons investigators rely on phone companies to release customers' location information voluntarily. The companies require a statement from police that the phone owner may be in danger.

"The government does not have the right to look at your cellular telephone records," Rahr said. "When we do these ... cases, it's a stretch, to speak candidly."

Each year, law enforcement agencies around the country receive an overwhelming number of missing persons reports. Seattle police alone receive 2,100 to 2,300 missing persons reports a year, or about six a day, said Officer Mark Jamieson, a department spokesman.

Adults account for only 300 to 400 of the missing, Jamieson said. The rest are primarily runaway children, but, in either case, most are found within days of disappearing.

Exceptions stand out. Take the case of Seattle radio host Mike Webb.

Webb's decomposed corpse was found in his Queen Anne home in June, two months after he'd been reported missing. Prosecutors have since charged Webb's houseguest, 29-year-old Scott Brian White, in the killing, claiming that White told police he hacked Webb to death with an ax.

High-profile missing persons cases distort the public's perception of the reasons people disappear, Rahr said.

"It's a very, very small percentage of missing persons cases where it turns out that a crime has been committed," Rahr said. "That doesn't mean we're not investigating them vigorously, but it has to happen in context."

Rahr said investigators should move to acquire a missing person's cell records only if they think something has gone wrong. Before they move forward, they also need to look for other leads -- often bank transactions in missing persons cases -- and make sure that they're not unwittingly reconnecting an abuser with a spouse who has fled.

When nothing else worked, phone records proved invaluable last September in the search for Maple Valley resident Tanya Rider.

Rider had been missing for six days when King County sheriff's deputies obtained her rough location from Verizon Wireless. Searchers using that information found her alive hours later, trapped in her wrecked SUV off of state Route 169.

Since Tanya Rider's rescue, Rahr said she's met with representatives from each major cell phone provider. She's now making plans for a series of training seminars to educate detectives about the uses of the technology in missing persons cases.

In March, sheriff's deputies used the same technology to look for Nicholas Francisco, a SeaTac father of three who went missing in February. Phone records didn't turn up any new leads, Deputy Rodney Chinnick said, but the case remains active.

"It's still a work in progress, and it will continue to be until he's located," Chinnick said.

If they had been looking for Rider or Francisco as part of a criminal investigation, investigators likely would have needed a search warrant to get their cell phone records.

In missing persons cases, though, cell phone providers require that officers assert a customer may be in immediate danger -- "exigent circumstances" in the industry's parlance -- before releasing the information, said Joyce Masamitsu, associate director for state public policy for Verizon Wireless. Verizon alone handled about 26,000 such requests last year.

Masamitsu said Verizon, like other cellular providers, requires detailed follow-up reports from investigators. But she said the company doesn't conduct any independent review of the requests before releasing location information.

"All the officer needs to do is confirm to us that an exigent circumstance exists," she said.

No legal challenges have been filed related to cell locater technology in missing persons cases. But privacy rights advocates say unambiguous guidelines are needed to ensure that the technology isn't misused.

"What you'd want is those rules to be in place, and, as far as we know, they are not," said Rebecca Jechke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Homeland Security Update: Chertoff Says New Laws Needed

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At a speech before the Heritage Foundation this week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the U.S. needs to have a “nonpoliticized, serious discussion” while writing new laws to define the best way to combat terrorism.

Chertoff said that once laws are written, the public should not second-guess government actions and claim that federal officials are overstepping their authority. He decried critics who make such accusations, despite the widespread pubic calls after the September 11, 2001 attacks for the U.S. government to do more to protect the country. Chertoff further said U.S. society needs to come to a determination as to what are acceptable authorities for the U.S. government versus what violates people’s rights.

If the public limits what the government can do, it must accept that the risk of terrorist attacks may increase, he said. If the public gives the government greater authorities, it should not criticize the government for using those authorities at a later date.

Chertoff called U.S. laws “woefully inadequate” in the context of current technology. He said the most significant step American society needs to take is adapting laws to the 21st Century challenge of fighting terrorism. Changes in technology have created unique challenges for the government when it comes to intercepting communications, as well as collecting and analyzing information found in the public domain according to Chertoff.

Oil hits record $120.93 on fear of tight supply

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Oil futures rose to an all-time high near $121 a barrel Tuesday with new concerns about a threat to supply and a weaker dollar.

The surge in oil prices was also fueled by hopes that the U.S. economy will be spared a sharp downturn after the release of data Monday showing an unexpected expansion in the U.S. service sector in April, analysts said.

Light, sweet crude for June delivery rose to a record $120.93 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Tuesday. The contract later retreated to $119.88 a barrel, down 9 cents from Monday's close.

Crude futures settled on Monday at $119.97 a barrel, up $3.65 from Friday's close.

"The bulls are in control of the market," said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore. "The economic report out of the U.S. yesterday on the service sector seems to suggest the economic slowdown may not be as deep as initially thought."



"The sentiment is that the oil pricing is likely going to stay quite strong, with a lot of volatility," Shum said.

The dollar weakened against the euro on Monday, attracting investors to oil and other commodities viewed as hedges against inflation. Also, a falling dollar makes oil less expensive to investors overseas. A series of U.S. Federal Reserve rate cuts starting last year weakened the dollar considerably against foreign currencies, and analysts blame the dollar's protracted decline for oil's sharp rise this spring.

Supply outages or potential threats to supply emerged in Iran and Nigeria over the weekend and from Iraq on Monday; events in all three nations have caused prices to spike many times in recent months.

In Iraq, Kurdish rebels warned they could launch suicide attacks against American interests to punish the U.S. for sharing intelligence with Turkey after Turkey bombed rebel bases in Iraq on Friday. In Nigeria, a Royal Dutch Shell PLC spokesman said attackers hit an oil facility belonging to Shell's joint venture in southern Nigeria and that some oil production has been shut down. And Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said his country will not bend to international pressure and give up its nuclear program.

Energy investors grow concerned any time conflict breaks out or is threatened in the oil-rich Middle East. Years of unrest in Nigeria have cut off nearly a quarter of the major U.S. supplier's oil output.

Amid the occasional threats to crude supplies, global demand for oil continues to grow. The Chinese and Indian economies are growing by double digits, boosting global demand for oil.

In the U.S., where demand has been dampened over economic concerns, the prince for "gasoline at the pump is averaging 29.4 percent above last year's pace," noted Stephen Schork of the Schork Report. "Meanwhile, average diesel prices are up by 41.1 percent or $1.079 a gallon (3.8 liters)."

In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures were both down slightly at $3.3005 and $3.0455 a gallon. Natural gas futures slipped more than 3 pennies to $11.145 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Brent crude futures rose 52 cents to $118.53 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

Yahoo gets hit with the backlash

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By Jessica Guynn

Analysts, investors and employees second-guess the decision to rebuff Microsoft's bid.

SAN FRANCISCO — After a three-month standoff with Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. is about to square off against its shareholders.

Incensed that Yahoo rebuffed Microsoft's last-ditch takeover offer worth $47.5 billion, investors sent its shares plunging 15% on Monday, erasing about $6 billion in market value. Many are pressuring Yahoo's board of directors to revive talks with the software giant.

Yahoo held out for $37 a share, $4 more than Microsoft's best bid, but one major investor said Monday that shareholders would have supported a takeover at $34. Portfolio manager Gordon Crawford blamed Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang's "unrealistic" view of the company's value for the collapse of talks.

"Yahoo drove away a willing and fairly generous buyer, and all of us are the poorer for it today," said Crawford, of Los Angeles-based Capital Research Global Investors. Its parent company, Capital Research & Management Co., owns more than 16% of Yahoo's shares, making it the largest holder, according to regulatory filings.

But Yahoo's executive team said it remained confident in its strategy to turn around the Internet pioneer, which has struggled with slowing growth and stumbled in its heated competition with Google Inc. and other players. President Sue Decker said the company planned to be a leader in the lucrative online advertising market, both in search and display.

"At the end of the day, Microsoft made a decision on what it was willing to pay or not pay, and our board made a decision on what it was willing and not willing to sell for," Decker said. "Those two didn't meet."

Yahoo shares fell $4.30 to $24.37 on Monday, closing well below Microsoft's offer of $33 a share but 27% higher than the $19.18 they fetched before Microsoft's initial unsolicited bid was made public Feb. 1.

Brokerages cut ratings and price targets. A few unleashed condemnations.

William Morrison, an analyst with ThinkPanmure, said the rebuff to Microsoft could go down as "one of the most destructive decisions for shareholder value in the history of Internet stocks."

The mood was equally tense on the company's Sunnyvale, Calif., campus, where employees will convene today for an all-hands meeting. At the event, Yang will attempt to quell rising anxiety about Yahoo's future. Recruiters are already pouncing, taking advantage of waning confidence in the vision of Yahoo management, said one longtime employee who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

"There are definitely no 'Ding-dong, the witch is dead' refrains," he said. "There are no happy campers here. Those who did not want Microsoft to buy Yahoo are in the vocal minority."

Yahoo's stock didn't fall as much as it might have because the company is in advanced talks with Google about a partnership revolving around search advertising. Such a deal, though, would be likely to encounter intense regulatory scrutiny.

Yahoo is also in talks with Time Warner Inc. about its AOL unit. The proposed arrangement would give Time Warner an 18% stake in the combined company. Yahoo management would not address speculation about either possibility.

Analysts say Yang and his executive team have a lot to prove in the coming weeks: that Yahoo is worth $37 a share, the price it demanded from Microsoft on Saturday. They must do so under the Wall Street microscope and despite a weakening economy that is taking a toll on the online advertising market. Already impatient with management's problems with focus and execution, investors are openly skeptical about the 2009 and 2010 financial targets the company has released.

Scott Kessler, an analyst with Standard & Poor's, said Yahoo had made "mistake after mistake after mistake," adding: "Over the last number of years, Yahoo has failed to make the right strategic and tactical decisions to deliver a higher stock price."

Patrick McGurn, special counsel to RiskMetrics Group, a corporate watchdog that advises investors on voting on proxy issues, said Yahoo would have to justify its asking price and restore the stock's value to placate investors.

"You're going to see extreme pressure on Yahoo's board and management to prove that they were justified in turning away what might be the best offer available," McGurn said. "Shareholders are not going to tolerate a return to business as usual."

Yahoo is facing threats to unseat the board at its next annual meeting, which on Monday was scheduled for July 3. Dissident shareholder Eric Jackson, who has organized a group of about 140 investors who own roughly 2 million shares, is leading the effort. He has spoken with 12 more shareholders since Microsoft canceled its offer, he said.

Some are interested in putting together an alternate slate of directors.

"People are in shock and are livid at the Yahoo board," Jackson said. "I think the 'withhold' vote will be a slam dunk."

Yahoo is also facing a barrage of shareholder lawsuits. Stanford law professor Michael Klausner said the board had no legal exposure. "It's more smoke than fire," Klausner said.

But he added, "Yahoo will have to revive its stand-alone value. If that works, shareholders will be happy. If it doesn't, Microsoft will be back."

Lawyer speaks to WSWS: “David Hicks was a pawn in a political process”

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By Richard Phillips

David McLeod, the Australian lawyer for former Guantánamo Bay prisoner David Hicks, spoke with the World Socialist Web Site last week about the recent testimony of US Air Force Colonel Mo Davis. Hicks was released from a South Australian prison in late December 2007, after being transferred from Guantánamo, following a plea-deal, in March last year. Until last year Davis was the chief prosecutor at Guantánamo but resigned in protest over political interference in the military commissions. Last week he appeared as a defence witness for Salim Hamdam, a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo and swore under oath that he would not have charged David Hicks but was pressured to do so by the Pentagon (See “Former prosecutor testifies that Guantánamo military commissions are show trials”).

Richard Phillips: What’s your reaction to Davis’s testimony?

David McLeod: Mo Davis’s statements indicate that the previously leaked emails of former prosecutors stating that the military commissions were politically rigged were right. At the time these emails were pooh-poohed as without substance and from people with personal issues but now these guys have been vindicated by Davis.

You have to understand that Mo Davis was the chief prosecutor and the only people above him were extremely senior and outside the military commission process itself. For him to say that the system was politically tainted from start to finish is significant in the extreme.

The cry of the Hicks case was that he was a pawn in a political process and that is why everyone went to great lengths to ensure that he wasn’t put before a proper court. Had he been put in front of proper court he would have been back in Australia years ago.

As a lawyer I have to be careful in what I say about why he pleaded guilty but I’ve simplified it by saying he chose certainty over uncertainty. The certainty was that he knew that he’d be walking the streets of Australia in nine months time, whereas if he went in the other direction he could have spent the rest of his days at Guantánamo. At that time he was in very poor health and a weak state of mind and couldn’t stand being there for another minute longer. Of course, the architects of the scheme were successful because they managed to grind him down to this level. For them it was a big victory that he pleaded guilty.

Mo Davis discharged his role as chief prosecutor in a corporate environment where he was subject to directions and orders. The moment he released himself from the shackles of office he was able to express his mind freely. Those previously involved in the prosecution have been as one in condemning the process. Davis is simply the biggest fish to have done so, and so openly and although his statements are belated he should be given credit because he could have easily said nothing.

He is obviously very angry and keen as a lawyer to vent his outrage at the so-called process. He was fuming because the plea-deal with David Hicks was done behind his back and this is his opportunity to set the legal record state.

WSWS: The Australian press and politicians have been very quiet about Davis’s testimony. How do you read this?

DM: If you take the David Hicks case out of the legal arena, the whole experience demonstrates the immaturity of the [Australian] Commonwealth government on the international stage. It was prepared to sacrifice an Australian citizen’s rights in order to cosy up to its most important ally. Howard regarded this as the more important issue.

America is also the UK’s most important ally and yet it eventually demanded the release of its citizens. It said either you bring the military commissions up to international standards or you release our citizens. The Australian government was not prepared to do this for one of its own citizens and so the value of Australian citizenship was seriously diminished by the whole process. This is something the Commonwealth government and the parliament as a whole should be completely ashamed of.

WSWS: There was never any real difference between Howard and the Labor Party on this issue.

DM: That’s right. Although those in control of events made sympathetic statements in relationship to David Hicks when they were in opposition, they now say nothing. The first opportunity that federal attorney-general Robert McClelland had to actually do something for Hicks he consented to Australian Federal Police calls for a control order against him. Nor was McClelland prepared to speak to me.

This shows that whoever is in power is subjected to the same sorts of influences from the counter-intelligence bureaucracy. The Liberal governments were briefed by the spooks from AFP, ASIO, ASIS etc., and these are the same people that are now briefing the Labor government.

Having been in the military, and seen what goes on, I know that these forces are very effective in frightening those making political decisions. As Sir Humphrey from “Yes, Minister” would say, it takes someone with courage to stand up to that.

WSWS: What’s your response to South Australian Labor premier Mike Rann’s ongoing claims that David Hicks is a terrorist?

DM: I really don’t know what’s motivating him. I heard him on television declare that he didn’t care what any lawyer had to say—and I presume he was taking about me—but Hicks had trained with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and was a really bad bastard.

What the politicians don’t seem to get is that just because somebody does something they don’t like doesn’t mean that it’s illegal. Lawyers weren’t personally supporting David Hicks the individual but fighting for the rule of law and the rights of David Hicks, an Australian citizen.

Of course, David may have done things that we would not have approved of but the fact of the matter is that he was doing things that were perfectly lawful at the time. It was only subsequently that the Australian government declared that the people he was training with were terrorist organisations. Even former attorney-general Ruddock has admitted that Hicks never contravened Australian law. So for people like Rann to suggest that he is in some way criminally responsible is a huge and different step. The politicians deliberately disregard this fact or gloss over it for political reasons but it’s a long and slippery slope when the political executive takes over from the judiciary in the handling of those that the executive believes have contravened the law.

WSWS: And it was never a question of you as an isolated lawyer raising these issues.

DM: Yes. Everyone was in step, from the Law Council through to every law society and bar association in every state and territory in Australia. It was not as if it was “Dad’s Army” and I was Corporal Jones out of step in Captain Mainwaring’s platoon. All I was doing is what everyone else was saying; I was just the public face.

WSWS: What do Davis’s statements now mean for those still inside in Guantánamo?

DM: What can one say that hasn’t been said already? The calls that Amnesty International and other human rights organisations have made for an open investigation in Guantánamo have also been vindicated.

WSWS: Several senior Australian lawyers have called for war crimes prosecutions against Howard, Ruddock, and Downer. What’s your comment?

DM: You’ve probably read all the stuff and more aware of all the issues than me—I’m just a humble, practical lawyer—but there have been a couple of written opinions by barristers and legal academics which seem to have great merit. They say that the government, in aiding and abetting America’s illegal treatment of David Hicks, has contravened certain sections of the Australian legal code.

No doubt the Commonwealth government will try and hide behind claims that it was an international issue and limit any inquiry or action on this. This is what we encountered in the federal court action we brought against the government over its duty of care for David Hicks.

The Australian and American governments have signed all the same treaties—the international covenant on human rights, the Geneva Conventions, the anti-torture conventions and so on and so forth. All of these things applied to David Hicks and yet the Australian government was not prepared at any stage to independently investigate the situation. Even when it came to torture they relied on two investigations carried out by the American government.

One of the most important reasons why a real inquiry into this whole tragic business is necessary is because David Hicks is not calling for one. Hicks has been so destroyed and debased by the whole process that he’s just glad to be home and doesn’t want to do anything at all to upset the apple cart. This government is bloody lucky that he hasn’t come back as an erudite and articulate activist because he could make the current government quite miserable I suspect.

Former prosecutor testifies that Guantánamo military commissions are show trials

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By Richard Phillips

In a damning exposure of the US military trials of Guantánamo Bay detainees, Air Force Colonel Mo Davis, the former chief prosecutor at the American prison camp, told a pre-trial hearing on April 28 that senior government and Pentagon officials had corrupted US military justice and that former Australian prisoner David Hicks should never have been charged.

Davis was appearing as a defence witness for Yemeni prisoner Salim Admed Hamdan, who has spent six years in Guantánamo, mostly in solitary confinement. His testimony further highlights the criminal conspiracy between Washington and Canberra to demonise and incarcerate Hicks for almost six years and the lack of basic legal rights for hundreds of other detainees.

Davis has made similar statements to the media before but his latest comments were the first made under oath. One of the reasons he quit his position as chief prosecutor last year was in protest over the backroom deal organised between Washington and Canberra to secure the release of Hicks before the 2007 Australian federal election.

Davis told the hearing that deputy defence secretary Gordon R. England and other top Pentagon officials wanted the highest-profile detainees put on trial before this year’s US election because they thought it would have “strategic political value”.

Davis testified that he told Defence Department general counsel William J. Haynes III that some defendants could be acquitted. Haynes, according to Davis, responded by declaring: “Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? ... We’ve got to have convictions.”

Under questioning by Hamdan’s defence lawyers, Davis also explained that Air Force Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann had sanctioned the use of evidence obtained from water-boarding, a well-known and widely practiced torture technique.

“To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into a courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, puts the prosecutor in an ethical bind,” Davis said. But Hartmann dismissed the concerns, stating that “everything was fair game—let the judge sort it.”

Hartmann reports directly to Susan Crawford, who is the Convening Authority for the Guantánamo commissions. Crawford is a protégé of US vice president Dick Cheney and was appointed to the position by him. She was principally responsible for organising the plea-bargain deal with Hicks’s defence lawyers.

Davis said that while he was chief prosecutor he was pressured to impose charges on David Hicks even though, contrary to the claims of Washington and Canberra, the Australian was not dangerous or a high profile figure. “The seriousness of what he did,” he told the hearing, “would not have met my minimum threshold.”

Contrary to standard plea-bargaining practice, Davis was not involved in any way with the deal made with Hicks’s lawyers. As he told the Australian newspaper last October: “I think it is a disgrace to call it a military commission—it is a political commission.”

An unnamed senior US military officer also told Harper’s Magazine last year: “One of our staffers was present when Vice President Cheney interfered directly to get Hicks’s plea bargain deal. He did it, apparently, as part of a deal cut with Howard. I kept thinking: this is the sort of thing that used to go on behind the Iron Curtain, not in America. And then it struck me how much this entire process had disintegrated into a political charade.”

A day after Davis’s accusations, army prosecutor Lieutenant-Colonel William Britt said in a sworn statement that Hartmann chose who would be put on trial in Guantánamo according to whether they would “seize the imagination of the American public” or not. In other words, the decisions were made on a political, not a legal basis, to suit the Bush administration’s propaganda requirements.

Michael Berrigan, deputy chief defence lawyer for Hamdan, testified that Hartmann was a bully who refused lawyers’ requests for experts and facilities to help prepare their cases. Berrigan told the hearing that the current charges against six Guantánamo prisoners, who have been accused of involvement in the September 11 terror attacks and could be executed, were drafted by civilian lawyers working for Hartmann. Berrigan said that Hartmann had copies of the charges two weeks before military prosecutors had signed them.

Howard government crimes

These comments are not only an indictment of the lawlessness of the Bush administration but also of the Howard government which waged a protracted campaign of slander and vilification against Hicks.

Canberra provided the Bush administration with a blank cheque to do what it wanted to Hicks, justifying the denial of legal representation for more than a year and other violations of his basic rights as necessary for the “war on terror”.

Likewise, Labor Party politicians, state and federal, refused to lift a finger to assist Hicks. Only after a nation-wide movement emerged demanding Hicks’s release did a few Labor officials began to timidly criticise the Howard government.

Elected to power last November, the Rudd Labor government refused to demand Hicks’s immediate release from the South Australian prison, where he had been moved to serve out his last nine months under the plea-deal. And when Hicks was eventually released in late December 2007, Labor supported a federal police demand for a 12-month control order on the still traumatised young man. The measure involves a midnight to 6 a.m. curfew, the monitoring of all his communications and compels Hicks to report to police three times a week.

South Australian state Labor premier Mike Rann has continued to vilify the young man and passed special legislation to confiscate any money earned by Hicks for media interviews or for any publication about his treatment in Guantánamo.

Not surprisingly, the Rudd government has not issued any statement on Davis’s sworn testimony exposing the nature of the Guantánamo military commissions. The Australian media, which played a filthy role in slandering Hicks, has said virtually nothing about Davis’s comments.

Hicks vindicated

Terry Hicks, David’s father, and lawyer David McLeod told the World Socialist Web Site that Mo Davis’s testimony vindicated their long and difficult struggle.

“Mo Davis, who is out of the system, can now say what he really thinks and that he wouldn’t have even charged David,” Terry Hicks said.

“This shows what we’ve been saying over the years is right—that David was being used for political purposes and that the military commission system was established for political gains, both in the US and here. It was a system set up to crucify people.

“I heard state premier Mike Rann still going on the other night on television about how David was a self-confessed terrorist because he signed the paper work. I just laughed. How the hell can people like this stand up straight? Howard, Rann and others—they’ve all told lies about David and so I guess they have to keep doing it. Eventually though they back themselves into a corner, which is what John Howard found out,” Hicks said.

David McLeod was asked at a recent legal conference if the Rudd Labor government was any different from the former Howard government in relationship to its treatment of David Hicks. McLeod didn’t mince words: “The whole area of politics, once you have been involved in it as I have,” he replied, “is a teeming morass; it is rotten, filled with maggots.

“You can trust nobody or anything anybody tells you—even if there are 12 bibles in front of you and the body of their dead grandmother that has been sworn on—which is why the government in every respect would have to be just like the previous government.”

Despite Davis’s statement, little will change for those incarcerated in the American prison hellhole. Guantánamo commissions allow hearsay and coerced evidence; defendants are not allowed to make habeas corpus petitions to force a review of their detention; and guilt or innocence is decided by a majority vote by panels of serving military officers.

Yemeni prisoner Salim Admed Hamdan, who could be subjected to a full military trial in May, the first one held in Guantánamo since it was established, is suffering from severe mental health problems. According to his lawyers he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks and talks to himself. He is kept in solitary confinement in a 2.4 metre-by-3.7 metre (8 feet-by-12 feet) cell for at least 22 hours per day.

Pentagon officials, however, deny that such conditions are producing mental health problems and cynically claim that Guantánamo does not have solitary confinement but only “single-occupancy cells”.

In 2002 the Department of Defense stopped reporting suicide attempts in Guantánamo and redefined them as “self-injurious behavior”. According to human rights organisations, there were 350 self-harm incidents in 2005 and four prisoners committed suicide between 2006 and 2007.

Bush, Democrats seek to fund Iraq war into next administration

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By Bill Van Auken

In a bid by the two major parties to prevent November’s presidential election from being turned into a referendum on the war in Iraq, the Bush administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress are both working to craft new war funding legislation that would pay for the fighting to continue at the present level well past January, when the next president takes office.

According to media reports, the congressional Democrats are still debating how—not if—they will approve the money needed to continue the ongoing wars against the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last Friday, President Bush formally submitted a detailed request for a $70 billion “bridge” appropriation that would fund the wars from the beginning of the next fiscal year in October 2008 through the spring of 2009. This comes on top of the $108 billion that the administration has requested for the current fiscal year.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, the new spending bills would bring the total amount approved by Congress to pay for the two wars since their inception to $875 billion.

While the congressional leadership had projected that legislation could be introduced as early as this week and wrapped up before the Memorial Day recess, key Democrats have indicated that the process may not prove that speedy.

Representative Steny Hoyer, the Democratic House majority leader, said he thought it was unlikely that a vote on the measure would come this week as initially anticipated.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat of Nevada) said that there was no certainty that Congress would meet the Memorial Day deadline and insisted that it did not really matter. “We will do best to finish this by the Memorial Day break,” Reid said. “But if we don’t, it’s no big deal, there is money there.” The Pentagon, he noted, has adequate funding to pay for the war into June.

Apparently at issue is a disagreement between House and Senate Democratic leaders about how far they should take the political charade that is organized each time the war spending measures come up. The aim of this exercise is to allow Democratic legislators to posture as war opponents, while assuring that the necessary votes are forthcoming to pass the legislation paying for the wars.

According to the Associated Press, House Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey “are pushing to avoid a veto” by Bush, while the Senate leadership is more willing to drag the process out.

“We would rather just save time and get it over with right from the start,” Pelosi told Capitol Hill reporters last Thursday.

Pelosi reportedly is proposing to organize a separate vote on a troop withdrawal amendment—rather than writing it into the funding legislation itself—and is attempting to short circuit any consideration and debate within the relevant congressional committees.

In a May 3 article on the dilemma facing the congressional Democratic leaders, the Wall Street Journal cited their fear that they “could seem insensitive to the military if they push too hard to add their spending priorities to the measure.” At the same time, the Journal noted that “they also could frustrate their vocal antiwar base if they cave in too readily to White House demands.”

Such is the political tightrope upon which Pelosi, Reid and their Senate and House colleagues are performing. They are committed to passing the war spending measure, out of fear that they could be tarred as weak on national security and accused of failing to “support our troops.” At the same time, they want to carry out this support for the war in a way that does not appear to “cave in too readily” to the White House, so as to preserve the illusions of those who still look to the Democrats as some kind of antiwar alternative to the policies of the Bush administration.

Pelosi has promised to introduce language that would tie domestic spending initiatives, such as a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits and a new college benefits package for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to the war spending bill.

These add-ons are being proposed with the knowledge that the White House will threaten a veto unless they are removed. The intention, congressional Democrats have indicated, is to thereby “expose” the Republicans as placing a greater priority on continuing the war than on solving social needs at home.

In the end, however, the Democrats will act to approve legislation based on these same priorities. “The leadership has decided to avoid a confrontation,” a senior Senate aide told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a strategic decision to avoid picking a fight where he [Bush] wants to pick a fight.”

The strategy of the Democratic leadership has the effect of diverting the debate over the Iraq war away from any consideration of the criminal character of the war itself into one over budgetary priorities and processes, in which the Bush administration will inevitably take the offensive, accusing the Democrats of larding up a military spending bill with non-military appropriations

The Bush administration has attempted to ratchet up the pressure for a speedy approval of the war funding bills by threatening to begin sending out furlough notices to civilian employees of the Defense Department as early as Memorial Day. These temporary layoffs, officials have warned, could affect as many as 200,000 of the Pentagon’s civilian workers.

One crucial issue upon which the White House and the congressional leadership appear to have an agreement is that the $70 billion “bridge” appropriation designated for fiscal 2009 can be voted on together with the $108 billion pending for fiscal 2008.

The transparent political motive on the part of the Democrats is to avoid having to vote to fund the war yet again on the eve of the November election.

“Last year they had to be pushed and cajoled into providing that bridge funding, so we see it as a positive thing that they are looking to address that earlier rather than later,” Stephen S. McMillin, deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told Congressional Quarterly News.

The $70 billion request submitted by the White House for fiscal 2009 includes $45.1 billion to pay for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and another $5.7 billion for building up puppet security forces in the two countries.

Other items in the legislation include:

* $3 billion for classified activities.

* $2.5 billion for the “global war on terrorism.”

* $1.7 billion for the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, a slush fund used by US occupation forces to bribe local forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

* $1.3 billon to buy 28 more unmanned aerial vehicles, the remote-controlled killing machines that have been increasingly used against residents of the crowded slum neighborhoods of Baghdad’s Sadr City.

* $2.2 billion for increased fuel costs.

One clearly nonmilitary item that Bush himself has proposed be added to the war funding bill is a $770 million world food aid package. That Washington’s response to the gravest threat of global starvation in generations—something that Bush treated as a threat to “our national security”—amounts to less than one one-thousandth the sum spent thus far in the campaign to subjugate two impoverished countries and turn them into American semi-colonies is a testament to the predatory character of US imperialism.

While the phony fight over the war funding bills unfolds on Capitol Hill, the real slaughter that this legislation will pay for grinds on.

US military officials, continuing their daily announcements of body counts, reported Monday that US troops killed nine “militants” in Baghdad. An AC-130 gunship—one of the military’s most lethal warplanes, which is able to slowly circle for prolonged periods, pounding those below with intense cannon and machinegun fire—was unleashed on the densely populated streets of Sadr City.

Local hospitals in the area reported taking in the bodies of at least six people and receiving 41 wounded, many of them women and children.

Meanwhile, the military announced on Sunday that four US Marines had been killed two days earlier in a roadside bombing in western Anbar province, bringing the US death toll in Iraq to 4,071.

The Violent Language of Right-Wing Pundits Poisons Our Democracy

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By Jeffrey Feldman

The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Feldmann’s new book Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy (Ig Publishing, 2008).

The emergence of a cohort of right-wing pundits who use violent logic, language and arguments in national political debate did not gradually take shape over a long stretch of time, but rose up at a starling speed in the lead-up to the national elections of 2004 and 2006. As the horrific extent of the Iraqi military occupation waxed and George W. Bush’s popularity waned, a hitherto sarcastic right-wing punditry seemed all at once to step into a new rhetorical frame. Suddenly, with Bush’s re-election in doubt, casualties spiraling out of control, and revelations of U.S. military human rights abuses popping up all over, right-wing pundits shifted their tone from critique to conspiracy. The shift is summed up best by the opening line in Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Enemy at Home: "The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11."

As if that is not enough, D’Souza’s book also accuses liberals of engaging in civil war with the rest of America and of harboring a violent dream that complements the terrorist goals of Osama Bin Laden, yearns for the destruction of U.S. military forces in Iraq and seeks the downfall of the United States. D’Souza’s book filled mainstream bookstores, giving scholarly legitimacy to violent accusations of high treason against vast segments of the American population.

Violent language as a manner of speech amongst right-wing pundits reached a crescendo in the days leading up to the 2006 midterm elections. I remember flipping through TV channels one day, attempting to avoid pundits’ violent rhetoric. But such language was everywhere. Anne Coulter joked about "nuking" Iran, Bill O’Reilly talked about the "war on Christmas," Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs spoke of the "invasion" and "conquest" of America by immigrants. I even came across a discussion of the "war against the war," in which an anti-war protest was discussed as if it was a war. Every political topic seemed clouded over by a right-wing pundit using violence language.

In the first few months after the 2006 mid-term elections, I penned several blog posts questioning whether the rise of violent rhetoric on the right might be a dangerous development that could possibly transform, through a sudden incident, into actual physical violence. Turning to the work of Hannah Arendt, in particular her masterful study of politics and violence, On Violence, I began to realize that the last significant violent turn in American political ideology and practice involved both the political right and the left. The late 1960s was a time, Arendt explained, where people increasingly believed that violence could actually produce controlled political outcomes. The result was an era in U.S. politics where a broad range of different political organizations and movements each took up violence, a product of the widespread acceptance of Mao Tse-tung’s aphorism "Political power grows at the barrel of a gun." Arendt watched this moment lead to assassinations and mass chaos in urban centers, and thus argued that violence was problematic because it led to outcomes in politics that could not be controlled. Violence, she explained, drawing on a famous quote from Karl Marx, may be the birth pang of a new political body, but we would never say that labor pains were the cause of a birth. The same is true with violence, which occasionally happens at times of great political change but is not the cause of such change.

Arendt’s thoughts on violence helped me to clarify several aspects of the trend in right-wing violent language that I was tracking in the media. First, I realized that the use of violent language was not accidental, but was the product of a shift in the political philosophy on which the right-wing punditry built their ideas. The shift was from a rhetoric of parody and burlesque to one of violence and accusation. Second, Arendt helped me to clarify exactly what role "violence" was playing in the worldview of the right-wing pundits. Most right-wing pundits see the power of the state as residing ultimately in the monopoly over violence, an idea that comes from the writings of German philosopher Max Weber. This, however, is not the political philosophy that guided the framers of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, violent rhetoric is not just a question of linguistic style, but a sign that a political philosophy in conflict with American deliberative democracy has captured the imagination of many right-wing pundits. Many factors have led to the emergence of violence among right-wing pundits, but the events of 9/11 seem central. In the wake of the attacks, right-wing pundits grew ever more convinced that the continued survival of United States depended on its willingness to use violence. The more violent language filled the airwaves of America’s broadcast media, the more this new and disturbing logic of violence and power seemed to saturate public thinking. Lastly, Arendt’s writing helped me to see that the American form of deliberative democratic politics itself was a form of government crafted as a replacement for earlier forms of rule by violence. In a discussion of American politics, the opposite of violence has never been nonviolence, but participation -- specifically, participation in deliberative democracy. The quintessential American town hall meetings that Jefferson imagined happening amongst small, mostly agricultural communities in rural colonial America were not just a system for accomplishing the needs of the people but a bulwark against tyrannical rule that resulted from a royal monopoly on all forms of power.

After considering the violent language from right-wing pundits, I began to see the language of America’s elected leaders in a new light, particularly the rhetoric of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. It was clear to me that from the start of its term in office, the Bush administration was unrivaled in its ability to manipulate the public via the media. As such, strong political ties to privately owned, right-wing broadcast media was its biggest political asset. Yet, beyond their ability to wield control of the means of communication in our country, President Bush and Vice President Cheney embraced violence as a structuring concept in their political speech.

President Bush first stepped in the direction of violent language in the week following the attacks of Sept. 11, when he gave a series of public statements during visits to the White House by foreign dignitaries and U.S. government employees. The stated theme of that week was the mounting of a campaign to fight terrorism on a global scale, but the agenda had much more to do with constructing a new persona for Bush through a series of violent statements threatening the perpetrators of the attacks of 9/11. Over and over again that week, Bush said, "We’re going to smoke them out of their holes," talking about the impending operations to find the terrorists responsible for 9/11 as if he were a cowboy setting out to kill prairie animals. Attempting much more than a bad John Wayne impersonation in those speeches, Bush was boldly stepping across a line that most presidents rarely crossed: direct calls for the death of other human beings.

That was a week of unimaginable emotional anguish for most Americans, and Bush’s foray into violent language was largely hailed as welcome bravado in response to an act of war. While researching my book on presidential speeches in the summer of 2006, I went back to the transcripts of Bush’s post-9/11 appearances and found moments filled with glib references to death and killing. Speaking to employees at the Pentagon on Sept. 17, 2001, for example, Bush said the following in response to a reporter’s question:

I know that this is a different type of enemy than we’re used to. It’s an enemy that likes to hide and burrow in, and their network is extensive. There are no rules. It’s barbaric behavior. They slit throats of women on airplanes in order to achieve an objective that is beyond comprehension. And they like to hit, and then they like to hide out. But we’re going to smoke them out. And we’re adjusting our thinking to the new type of enemy.

A sitting U.S. president’s using his own voice to advocate graphic violence to the public signaled a disturbing change in our political system. Events can be relayed in a variety of ways. President Bush chose violent descriptions to sum up the problem. At first glance, one would assume that his words had the obvious impact of injecting fear into American consciousness. Indeed, they did. In the months that followed Sept. 11, 2001, the country grew more and more afraid of knife-yielding terrorists on planes and more afraid of hidden threats, as waves of panic spread back and forth across the country. President Bush’s metaphoric description of terrorists as animals skilled at hiding and committing barbaric acts of murder led people to accept that safety and security could only be restored by an equally violent process of hunting and killing. The violence of 9/11 had made Americans nervous about danger from the skies. As President Bush began to describe hidden threats of "barbaric" violence, Americans began to worry about which dangerous persons might be hiding in their own communities, or standing behind them in the grocery store lines, or sitting one seat over on the subway.

President Bush’s turn to violent language was foreshadowed by his prior interest in the bellicose foreign policy vision of right-wing think tanks that had been pushing violent foreign policy since the late 1990s, such as the Project For The New American Century. His speeches also served as a green light to right-wing pundits, inviting them to step into a violent political idiom. Perhaps nobody embodied this more than Anne Coulter. Having made a name for herself as a pundit willing to talk about sex, Coulter’s first column after 9/11 called for Americans to "invade" Muslim nations, "kill" their leaders and "convert" foreign citizens to Christianity. Coulter had lost a close friend in one of the planes that crashed on 9/11. Angry rhetoric in response to personal loss was a form of expression that most Americans understood, even as they felt uncomfortable with it. Nonetheless, Coulter’s violent language took mainstream American media to a place it had not been since at least the 1950s, if not the 1930s. Another important step was about to be taken, however, and in this case it would be prominent pundits in the media who took the lead.

Whereas Bush had turned to violent language as a technique for dehumanizing the enemy -- talking about terrorists as if they were animals to be hunted and exterminated -- right-wing pundits on radio, television and in print slowly infused violent language into domestic political debate. Radicalized right-wing activists calling Democrats "murderers" had been a familiar, albeit disturbing, aspect of the abortion right’s debate. What changed, however, was the sudden linking of violent death in 9/11 to issues that had hitherto been discussed solely in terms of competing social agendas. Speaking in the days after the events of 9/11 on the 700 Club, the flagship daily broadcast of his Christian Broadcast Network, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed the death and destruction on liberal groups in America:

FALWELL: The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this.

ROBERTSON: Well, yes.

FALWELL: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, "You helped this happen."

ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.

Falwell’s idea that "we make God mad so God uses terrorists to exact revenge" found its correlate in equally shocking attempts by left-wing pundits and intellectuals to somehow blame the murders of 9/11 on social and economic conservatives. Political activist and professor Ward Churchill, for example, claimed infamously that the victims of the attacks were somehow responsible for their own deaths by virtue of their employment in a capitalist society and was deservedly excoriated for doing so. Nonetheless, the limited amount of violent rhetoric from the left that followed 9/11 quickly dissipated. Falwell’s and Robertson’s exchange, by contrast, nudged open a door that more and more pundits in the right-wing media began to walk through because of two additional factors that had set up a tectonic shift in right-wing rhetoric.

The first factor was that Falwell’s and Robertson’s comments happened in a post-2000 America where key evangelical leaders wield unprecedented national influence. Most notable among these evangelical leaders is James Dobson, founder and chairman of the Christian parenting organization Focus on the Family and a best-selling right-wing author who writes and speaks about the importance of using physical violence as a technique for disciplining children. Dobson played a prominent role in turning out the vote in the 2000 presidential election, and as a result, his authoritarian writing on parenting is now widely discussed in the mainstream media. In the period immediately after 9/11, however, the influence of Dobson went far beyond the question of raising children to the much broader issue of how the terrain of political debate in America had shifted in the months prior to the attacks of 2001. The Dobson era in the Republican Party, in other words, heralded a newfound comfort with the use of violent terms on a host of social issues, including homosexuality, the family and education.

The second factor was the resurgence of the National Rifle Association as a political force in right-wing politics. Most prominent of all, then NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre had already employed violent language to argue against gun control laws in the year prior to Sept. 11. In mid-2000, for example, LaPierre accused Bill Clinton of having blood on his hands for not enforcing gun laws, pushing the argument that Democrats allowed violent crime to happen in order advance a liberal agenda to deny gun owners their constitutional rights. LaPierre’s rhetoric was so inflammatory that even then NRA president, Charlton Heston, felt the need to redress him. Nonetheless, with the election of George W. Bush, LaPierre emerged as the premier author and TV pundit on gun issues. The dual rise of authoritarian evangelicals and NRA leadership in the Republican Party and the media prepared American civic debate to acquiesce to a higher level of violent rhetoric in domestic politics.

The run up to the 2004 presidential election further increased the volume and frequency of violent rhetoric in right-wing media -- a key transformation in the Republican Party that became embodied in the words and persona of Dick Cheney. Caught in a cycle of bad news from Iraq, human rights abuses, tales of secret prisons, and mounting corruption scandals, the Republican Party launched a PR campaign to equate a Democratic return to the White House with increased terrorist attacks. Speaking to a packed crowd in Des Moines, Iowa on Sept. 9, 2004, Cheney brought violence to the heart of his campaign rhetoric: It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mindset, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we’re not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us. We have to understand it is a war.

Cheney proffered his violent theme to persuade voters. Rather than tone down his speeches in response to criticism, Cheney steeled his resolve and rallied the party faithful. By 2006, arguing that electoral victory for the Democrats would lead to the mass death of Americans by terrorists had became the core election strategy of the Republican Party. As election day neared, then Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman commissioned a political ad called "The Stakes," combining a ticking bomb soundtrack, images of Osama Bin Laden, video clips from terrorist training films and shots of exploding nuclear bombs. The violent message of the ad was that a vote for the Democrats was a vote for mass annihilation at the hands of nuclear-armed Al Qaeda terrorists. The arc that had begun with President Bush using violence to dehumanize terrorists was now complete.

At this point in the discussion, many people often mistake a concern for violent rhetoric with attempts to censor political speech or limit freedom of expression. It is an understandable reaction brought on by the deep affection Americans hold for the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Freedom of speech -- no matter how obscene, offensive or threatening that speech may be -- cannot be limited, curtailed or regulated without violating civil rights, or so the argument goes.

In general, the American system recognizes that speech is not to be limited up to the point that it presents "a clear and present danger of action of the kind the state is empowered to prevent and punish."Shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater, which we are not free to do, is the classic example. If we walk into a theater and cause mass hysteria by yelling "Fire!" without due cause, there will be a penalty for our destructive action. If someone says to a friend "Shoot that man there," and he does so -- that speech is part of the crime and, thus falls under the criminal statutes against murder. Moreover, what we all too often forget in our rush to assert freedom of expression is the other side of the First Amendment, a side that is in many ways even more important: freedom from compulsion. Compelling individuals to speak or express themselves in a specific way, particularly by the state, damages the First Amendment as much if not more than limiting individual expression. If, for example, a newspaper editor were compelled to print the news each morning according to the dictates of the White House communications director, that compulsion would infringe upon the First Amendment rights of far more people than just the editor. Anyone who read or heard about the information in that paper -- as government had compelled the editor to include it -- would be deprived of his or her First Amendment rights. Moreover, when it comes to violence in speech, context is everything. Violent language appears in the Bible, in Homer’s works and in fairy tales, for example, but our system would never tolerate laws limiting the circulation or reading of The Book of Job, The Iliad or Little Red Riding Hood.

Following these basic principles, the U.S. federal government and court system have treated broadcast media, with its unrivalled ability to penetrate every aspect of American life, as a medium with potential for endangering certain individuals if left completely unregulated. In 2007, for example, the Federal Communications Commission issued a report studying the effects of violent television on America’s children. The FCC came to the conclusion that efforts should be made to "channel" violent programming into those times of the day when children were least likely to be exposed to it and, wherever possible, to notify viewers in advance of violent content through a ratings system. Most of us benefit from this two-pronged approach without even thinking about it. When it is time for certain entertainment shows to start, a viewer discretion screen appears long enough to alert us to any violent content, language or otherwise, and in that moment we decide whether to continue watching or to choose another program. Most importantly, if we have children, that warning gives us a chance to decide if the content of the show is appropriate for our families.

As much as our system cares about protecting children from unwittingly coming into content with violent language in entertainment, the American system bends over backwards to make sure that none of the same measures infringe upon political speech. When it comes to political speech, the concern over compulsion is so deeply rooted in our culture that most scheduling restrictions or viewer advisories are held at bay. The exception to that rule, of course, are political shows that step clearly into a potential danger zone by virtue of their use of adult language -- i.e., swear words. The best example of a political show that has been time channeled and includes viewer advisories is Real Time with Bill Maher. Clearly, there are commercial disadvantages to airing a political talk show after 11 p.m., but they are balanced by the benefits of helping parents protect their children. That is not to say that Bill Maher’s language is "bad" for children, but only that the content of the discussions he leads are widely viewed as inappropriate for audiences under a certain age. Viewer advisories and time channeling are widely seen as helpful precisely because it is so difficult to define "violence" in such a way that would allow producers of content to predictably comply with regulations limiting it.

While not a source of violent rhetoric, Bill Maher’s show includes many adult themes. As such, it points to a question about political media rarely asked in discussions of regulatory efforts with respect to violent language in broadcast TV: Are most political talk shows news or entertainment? Maher’s show, with its signature combination of comedy monologue and celebrity roundtable discussion, is clearly a form of entertainment designed to challenge viewers to think critically about politics. Its content is political, but Real Time is entertainment. For many other political talk shows on TV, particularly those on Fox News, the line between news and entertainment becomes blurry if not invisible altogether. For example, in April of 2007, on an episode of The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly and his guest Geraldo Rivera discussed the issue of drunk driving, crime and illegal immigration through an exchange of violent rhetoric that many viewers described as unprecedented on a "news" broadcast. Given how disconcerted so many viewers were in response to this particular episode of O’Reilly’s show, it suggests that the type of violent exchange it featured warranted a viewer discretion advisory and time channeling required of a show more explicitly presented as entertainment. The question, in other words, is not one of censorship, but of the best way to protect viewers given the unprecedented power of broadcast media in our society and the number of political talk shows that inhabit the gray zone between news and entertainment.

Jeffrey Feldman is editor-in-chief of Frameshop and author of Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy (Ig Publishing, 2008).

Private Prison Litigator Gus Puryear's Rise to the Top

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By Silja J.A. Talvi

Editor’s Note: In 2004, Estelle Richardson’s lifeless and battered body was found on the floor of a Corrections Corporation of America prison cell. Four years later, that unsolved homicide has come back to haunt Republican stalwart "Gus" Puryear, the nation’s top private prison litigator and Bush nominee for U.S. District Court. This is Part II of an AlterNet exclusive, two-part investigative feature by Silja J.A. Talvi. (Read Part I here)

Part II: Moving On Up: Puryear, CCA, and the GOP

Until very recently, Puryear has enjoyed an easy climb up the political and corporate ladder. It hasn’t hurt that the 39-year-old Republican Party loyalist has always kept the right company, starting with the day that he was born.

Puryear’s paternal lineage is flush with old money tied, in particular, to the Southern banking industry. (It’s a tradition that Puryear has carried on by joining the board of the Nashville Bank & Trust Company.) Born in Atlanta, Puryear attended an exclusive Christian private school, Westminster. After high school graduation in 1986, Puryear received a full academic scholarship to Emory University, and then to the University of North Carolina School of Law. In 1993, freshly equipped with his J.D., Puryear landed a plum assignment as law clerk to Judge Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale, Fifth U.S. District Court of Appeals. (Hawkins was appointed to the bench in 1990, by President George H.W. Bush.)

In an odd twist of fate, clerking for Judge Barksdale brought Puryear close to the lives of prisoners, at least insofar as their legal paperwork. In an October 2005 feature in South magazine, "No more get out of jail free," Puryear noted that one-third of all the cases they dealt with were pro se prisoner cases: "In fact, when I got out of law school, I was appointed to represent an inmate in a Section 1983 civil rights action, and we took it to a jury trial," he told writer Greg Land, adding dryly, "We lost."

Land made the apt observation that Puryear’s district court experience was "fitting foreshadowing for the young lawyer who would eventually make ’no settlements’ a key corporate goal at CCA."

That case was to end up as one of only five federal cases Puryear has ever personally handled as practicing attorney, only two of which went to trial, in addition to one trial in Tennessee state court in the 1990s. This, despite Puryear’s three years as an associate attorney at Farris, Warfield & Kanaday (now Stites & Harbison), a law firm to which his grandfather had longstanding ties. Perhaps Puryear had a sense all along that he was destined to use his legal mind for a different purpose, say, for the glory of the GOP and the size of his pocketbook.

Puryear made the leap to GOP employment very quickly, serving as counsel from 1997-1998 for a legal team assembled by former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN), as part of the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. The Committee was busy investigating a major campaign finance scandal; 22 people were eventually convicted for fraud or illegally funneling foreign money to the DNC’s federal election coffers.

Puryear’s work was duly noted. From 1998-2000, Puryear held the position of legislative director for Republican Senator Bill Frist, a former state deputy director for the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign. Frist, who served in Congress from 1995-2007, was also a Belle Meade Country Club member, although he (unlike Puryear) had the common sense to resign from the historically racially segregated organization before heading toward his political career.

Puryear’s close friendship with beltway insider and Republican attorney/lobbyist powerhouse, Philip Perry, also yielded convenient connections to the Bush administration. When he was asked to help Perry’s father-in-law prepare for high profile, televised debates, Puryear set about filling up the father-in-law’s tricky brain with facts, statistics, zingers, and parrying tactics. The father-in-law and VP-to-be? Dick Cheney. The occasion? The 2000 and 2004 vice presidential debates.

Friends like these can come in handy when it comes time to search for nominees for a slate of empty federal court benches. With his connections to Frist, Thompson, Barksdale, Perry, and Cheney in place, Puryear has also had a knack for knowing when to write the requisite donation checks to GOP leaders: to date, he’s donated at least $13,000 to state and federal Republican campaign committees since 2001, including $1,000 to Mitt Romney in 2007. When Puryear donates money, he seems to do so to with a special patriotic flare: on September 11, 2003, he donated $2,000 to George W. Bush’s re-election campaign to emphasize his loyalty to the War on Terrorism.

Puryear would hardly be the first person appointed to the bench despite overtly partisan political allegiances and/or paltry legal chops. There’s really no question about either. Puryear’s affiliation with the ultra-conservative echelons of the Republican Party has spanned the course of his entire career, and his connections in the party clearly run quite deep. Small surprise, then, when Sen. Frist rose to Puryear’s defense in an April 13th opinion piece for The Tennessean about the mounting opposition to his confirmation. One could almost hear the tremolo in Frist’s voice as he bemoaned his besieged former employee’s plight: "The infusion of political posturing, fed by outside groups, into our nomination process means that nominees are sometimes subject to unfair attack …. The toll on nominees and their families cannot be underestimated. The confirmation process has become so brutal that people who want to serve the public no longer do so."

It’s unlikely that Puryear’s going to wilt away, no matter how vocal the opposition. After all, he’s still got the right friends, wealth, and business connections. Most importantly, the people behind him have a lot at stake. If Puryear were to be confirmed, he would help cement a GOP/Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) stranglehold in the State of Tennessee. Most of these ducks are already in a row: both of Tennessee’s U.S. Senate seats are controlled by CCA-supportive politicians, Republican Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker (both of whom have received tens in thousands in donations from CCA’s PAC, as well as company employees and their spouses), and former Senator Frist is rumored to be running for governor in the next election cycle.

The House that CCA Built

It’s worth taking an even closer look at the ties that have made CCA the corporate entity that it is. CCA’s press materials tout the company’s expansive network of detention centers (and its subsidiary prison transport company, TransCor America), as "prison privatization at its best." The company’s top brass have all enjoyed illustrious careers in high-ranking positions as state legislative aides, lobbyists, and influential legislators.

Some CCA officials held cushy jobs in governor’s offices, while others came to CCA from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the U.S. Marshals, or the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Chuck Kupferer, CCA’s Senior Director of Federal Customer Relations for U.S. Marshals Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service, is a former L.A. cop who became a chief deputy in New Orleans, and then went onto be the chief inspector with the CIA’s Counter Narcotics Center in Virginia. With annual earnings and compensation nearing $1.5 million, Richard Seiter is handsomely compensated as CCA’s Chief Corrections Officer and Executive Vice President. Of all the major CCA figureheads, Seiter’s background is the one most based in corrections. Seiter was formerly the Chief Operating Officer for Federal Prison Industries (also known as UNICOR, which is in the business of selling prisoner-made goods and services), as well as the warden of two federal prisons, and one-time director of the scandal-ridden Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections.

CCA board members are similarly loaded with connections to state and federal level offices and agencies, including Donna Alvarado, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the U.S. Department of Defense. Board member Anthony Grant was the Commissioner of Economic Community Development for Tennessee, while former Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), is perhaps best remembered as one of the Keating Five. (John McCain (R-AZ) was one of the lesser-implicated figures in the scandal.)

These days, CCA’s financial horizon looks quite splendid, even if the conditions in which the company’s "customers" are housed are far from it. With projected 2008 revenue of roughly $390 million, and 4,000-6,000 new beds in development, CCA can generally report good news back to its shareholders (NASDAQ: CXW) -- as it is anticipated to do in its May 6th, first-quarterly report. Although CCA is hardly the only player in the facility operating-and-owning aspect of the private corrections industry (e.g., GEO and Corrections Corporation), CCA is the undisputed leader of the pack. To be sure, corrections-related stocks are generally on the upswing because the demand for incarceration has far outstripped the ability of city, county, state, and particularly federal agencies to handle all of those shackled bodies. (Federal agencies already constitute over 40% of CCA’s revenue base.) Between demand and the opportunity for profit, it’s no wonder that private prison companies hold at least seven percent of the national prison population behind their walls.

In a recent article, "Lock in Some Dollars with Corrections Corporation of America," the stock advisory site, SeekingAlpha.com, makes no bones about the cold, hard facts: "Collectively, $44 billion was spent on corrections last year, a 127% increase over 1987 totals In this same time period, spending on higher education increased at just 21% -- this is dire news to hear, we know, but we believe policies aiming to cut the massive amounts of dollars spent on corrections will take longer than expected. This means jail stocks will still be good investments over the next couple of years The demographics at play suggest more crime is on its way, and no one’s better positioned than CXW."

Never mind that overall crime rates haven’t, actually, been going up, especially when it comes to serious and/or violent criminal offenses. Because CCA can’t bank on actual crime statistics, they must rely to some extent on the culture of fear that feeds the American prison machine. When the Institute on Money in State Politics studied the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, they found that private prison companies, directors, executives and lobbyists gave no less than $3.3 million to candidates and state political parties across 44 states. In general, CCA and other private prison companies have favored giving money to states with the toughest sentencing laws, because those are the states that are most likely to generate the bodies for empty jail and prison beds. Those states are also the ones most likely to have passed "two-strikes" or "three-strikes" laws -- including CCA’s home turf, Tennessee. And those laws, in turn, are based on cookie-cutter legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose corporate and "Criminal Justice and Homeland Security Task Force" members have come from the ranks of CCA and other private prison companies.

It’s a twisted game of prison-and-politics, and CCA certainly knows how to play it. According to disclosures filed with the Senate’s public records office, CCA spent nearly $2.5 million in 2007 (down from 3.4 million in 2005) to lobby Congress and federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In particular, CCA sought to build support for immigration "reform" policies that would yield more arrests and deportations, and to build opposition against the Public Safety Act, which would outlaw private prisons, as well as the Private Prison Information Act, which would force private prisons to make public the same information that government-run detention facilities must provide.

In the meantime, CCA’s PAC money keeps flowing, as well: in the past four months alone, the PAC has spent nearly $200,000, including $52,500 to federal candidates, of whom 80% are Republican.

But when Puryear was brought on board in 2001, CCA was saddled with debt, and company stock was in a tailspin. Puryear was hand picked by CCA President and Chief Executive Officer John Ferguson. Ferguson was determined to set the company on the right track. The former Commissioner of Finance for Tennessee, Ferguson was obviously up to the challenge -- actually, he exceeded expectations by leaps and bounds. Small wonder that his resulting financial reward has been of enormous magnitude. In FY 2007, Ferguson earned over $2.8 million in cash compensation, and holds over $28.5 million in unexercised stocks, by today’s market value.

Puryear’s position in the company therefore became one of utmost importance. His no-nonsense, "no-settlements" approach is still the right fit for a company besieged by lawsuits and scandals. As it was true then, it is now: CCA must do everything it can to prevent cases from going to trial because the accompanying press almost always negatively impacts stock prices, and jeopardizes the renewal or acquisition of local, state, and federal contracts. To keep shareholders (and company executives) happy, CCA needed to avoid coughing up too much money to settle even a small percentage of the hundreds of lawsuits biting at the heels of company at any given time. (In the interview with South magazine, Puryear offered that the number of claims and lawsuits facing CCA on any given day range from 700-1,000.) In another interview with Corporate Legal Times in 2004, Puryear quipped thusly: "Litigation is an outlet for inmates ... it’s something they can do in their spare time."

Richardson, of course, had none of that spare time to speak of. But Puryear seemed to have handled her case, as most others, with the kind of diplomatic finesse upon which his reputation has been built.

Unlikely Friends and Foes

In the scope of things, Estelle Richardson’s murder was hardly the biggest lawsuit or scandal that CCA ever faced. Indeed, if the Senate Judiciary Committee members had wanted to spotlight larger-scale scandals that took place during Puryear’s tenure, they could have pointed to one of the biggest prison riots in recent memory, at the CCA-operated Crowley County Correctional Facility in Olney Springs, Colorado. On July 20, 2004, just days after a mass interstate of nearly 200 prisoners from Washington State, and despite numerous signs of impending trouble (including lack of food and grossly inadequate medical staffing), prisoners staged a full-scale riot that brought the facility to its knees.

In the ensuing hours, all of the prison’s living units but one were taken over, burned, and destroyed. Unbelievably, there were only 33 uniformed guards on duty when the riot broke out, although the prison population stood at 1,122 inmates. Most of the staff fled their stations, as a post-riot incident report revealed, while those that stayed were waiting on word from CCA headquarters. Ill-trained in emergency containment and medical response, munitions and chemical weapons usage, the prison was nearly burned to the ground by the time that the outside law enforcement agencies moved in to stop the situation from escalating even further. All totaled, 13 staff and prisoners were assaulted, not including the hundreds of prisoners who were gassed, beaten, shot, and made to lie in excrement in the post-riot "containment" situation.

Those prisoners injured and abused post-riot, who had not participated in the violence and havoc to begin with, sued CCA in 2005 and 2006. According to a Trial Lawyers for Public Justice press release, "the punishment of bystanders included forcing tightly bound inmates to urinate and defecate in their own clothing; dragging handcuffed inmates from their cells face down through water filled with glass shards, blood, and raw sewage; shooting inmates who were lying down, or sitting or walking with their hands up; using tear gas on plaintiffs who were locked in their cells or were prone at gunpoint, waiting to be cuffed; withholding drinking water and medications; denying shower privileges and clean clothes for more than a week; and forcing inmates to strip and parade naked in front of female guards who snapped pictures and videotaped inmates bathing without a shower curtain."

These extreme, Abu Ghraib-like circumstances, testified to by hundreds of prisoners, were not enough to gain remedy, something that Puryear’s legal team would have had a hand in. The U.S. District Court of Appeals dismissed the complaint for "failure to exhaust administrative remedies," a common ruling in federal courts after the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act.

The Senate Judiciary Committee could also have taken a look at conditions at the CCA-run T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas, where immigrant adults and children are imprisoned in a medium-security correctional setting, and how the company’s legal department worked with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to mitigate the damage brought about by a (now settled) ACLU lawsuit on behalf of the detainees. Also of concern could have been how CCA’s legal team dealt with the knowledge that one of their own guards, who raped a female detainee at that facility, went without prosecution despite ample evidence of the crime.

Puryear’s nomination is opposed by a wide variety of organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild, AFSCME, Alliance for Justice, People for the American Way, and the Private Corrections Institute (PCI). In March, Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education Fund president Gloria Allred issued her own a statement against Puryear’s confirmation, after it was revealed that he is a resident member of the Belle Meade Country Club. Puryear’s nomination is supported, on the other hand, by the likes of Frist, Thompson, Corker and Alexander, as well as Thurgood Marshall, Jr., something touted by his allies as evidence of Puryear’s non-racism. All of that would sound good indeed, were it not for the fact that Marshall, Jr., is actually on the board of CCA.

Why would the Senate Judiciary Committee focus on Richardson’s case, then? The answer comes down to two words: Alex Friedmann. The organizer of the grassroots effort to derail Puryear’s nomination for the U.S. District Court, Tennesseans Against Puryear, Friedmann is also a former CCA prisoner, a bonafide genius of a jailhouse lawyer, and vice president of PCI.

Friedmann speaks with a steady pace, in a nearly expressionless monotone, but the words he chooses are carefully placed and to the point: "People should be concerned about this nomination as a matter of justice," he explains. "We shouldn’t make the mistake and think that U.S. District Court nominations are not something to be worked up about. In fact, these judges are among the most powerful in the country. They make serious, precedent-setting, and life-and-death decisions on a regular basis."

It was because of his efforts that the Senate Judiciary Committee first came across information about Richardson’s case, and it was primarily because of his efforts that Puryear’s relative lack of experience as a trial lawyer in any court system caught the committee’s notice. (And then there is that pesky bit about Puryear’s membership in the Belle Meade Country Club; Puryear can thank Friedmann for that, as well.)

Because of Friedmann’s efforts, much of the opposition to Puryear’s appointment has centered on the question of whether the top corporate lawyer could possibly be impartial enough to serve as a U.S. District Court judge in the same district where CCA headquarters are located. Hundreds of lawsuits related to CCA have been filed in that court, but Puryear insists that this would not be a problem: he has promised, in advance, that he would recuse himself from any such lawsuits for a period of five years.

Friedmann says that he didn’t actually set out to highlight Richardson’s case, because he didn’t anticipate that the committee members would even bring their attention to it. Moreover, he didn’t anticipate that Puryear would so blatantly downplay the very fact and circumstances related to Richardson’s murder. Nor did he expect that the committee would fire off a series of challenges to Puryear’s February testimony, or that Puryear would rally his defense troops in such a way that one of the primary attorneys who sued CCA on behalf of Richardson’s family would wind up on his side.

After it became evident that Puryear’s original testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee hadn’t gone particularly well, a series of behind-the-scene moves appear to have been set into motion. That process seems to have accelerated after Dr. Bruce Levy, Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Tennessee, got wind of Puryear’s assertions. Dr. Levy took particular exception to Puryear’s suggestion that Richardson’s broken ribs were quite possibly the result of CPR, and that it was also quite possible that she hadn’t been murdered, after all. Because Dr. Levy had personally conducted the autopsy on Richardson, he took it upon himself to fire off an unusually opinionated letter. "The committee should be very concerned about a nominee for federal judge who is less than truthful when answering questions from the [committee]," he wrote on February 21, 2008, emphasizing that there was no question that Richardson had, indeed, been brutally beaten while still alive -- and that her injuries led directly to her death.

Then, in quick succession, these events transpired:

• On February 22, David Randolph Smith, lawyer for the Richardson family and Joseph Welborn, representing CCA, files a joint motion in U.S. District Court (Middle District of Tennessee) to unseal the transcript of the settlement hearing re: Richardson’s minor children. The attorneys argue that the transcript would not violate the confidentiality component of the agreement because that portion didn’t contain the actual terms of the settlement (or the monetary amount). Judge Campbell grants the motion, although none of the Richardson family members are notified that the action is taking place;
  
  
  
  
  
• That transcript, however, did make clear the actual dollar amount of CCA’s gross settlement: $2 million dollars, of which one-quarter went to various plaintiffs’ attorneys. Of that $500,000, Richardson family attorney Smith received $192,000;
  
  
  
  
  
• On February 25, Smith, freed from certain confidentiality concerns, sends an unexpected letter of support for Puryear to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the letter, he agrees that Richardson could have died for any number of reasons and that her death was not necessarily a murder at all;
  
  
  
  
  
• On February 26, James Sanders, a Tennessee attorney with Neal & Harwell, issues a three-page letter of support, praising Puryear’s skills and talents. Also freed from confidentiality concerns, Sanders, who helped to represent CCA in the Richardson case, addresses her death specifically: "I can tell you that the facts, particularly the medical evidence, showed conclusively that Ms. Richardson’s death was not caused by correctional officers extracting Ms. Richardson from a cell in short, there is no credible evidence to support Dr. Levy’s homicide conclusion, other than the head injury and the death itself."

Ah, yes, just those bothersome little details. The head injury and the death itself.

In his written response to the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, Puryear tried to show his sympathetic side: "I regret that this uncertainty leaves a cloud over CCA; however, I know that the far greater tragedy is that the children of Estelle Richardson will likely never know exactly why their mother died."

But if Richardson herself could speak from her grave, she would be likely to say that the far greater tragedy is this: That a man like Puryear would have the sheer audacity to try to sweep her murder under the rug, yet again.

Silja J.A. Talvi is an investigative journalist and the author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press: 2007). Her work has already appeared in many book anthologies, including It’s So You (Seal Press, 2007), Prison Nation (Routledge: 2005), Prison Profiteers (The New Press: 2008), and Body Outlaws (Seal Press: 2004). She is a senior editor at In These Times.

Mosaic News - 5/2/08: World News from the Middle East

People & Power - The other side of surge

Iraqi filmmaker Ghaith Abdul-Ahad returns to Baghdad where anger and desperation appear at every turn;

Abdel-Karim Sekkar reports on the new omanisation policy in Oman;

People & Power shows how a group people are fighting desertification in Burkina Faso.

War Without End: 2003

On May 1 2003 George Bush, the president of the United States, gave a speech on the aircraft USS Abraham Lincoln declaring an "end to major combat operations" in Iraq.

Five years on with violence continuing unabated across the country Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel Hamid - in a special five part series - looks at the major events of the Iraq war.

Each week will focus on one of the last five years looking at the events and the policies that helped shape Iraq and the current chaos in the country.

Net Neutrality

Go to Original
By Christopher Kuttruff

The Federal Communications Commission has recently encountered mounting scrutiny in response to its broad deregulatory practices. Public frustration regarding the FCC has peaked at a time of fierce debate on net neutrality.

In a memo obtained Tuesday by The Washington Post, 30 current and former commission employees complained about the leadership of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Staff members observed that "the FCC process appears broken and most of the blame appears to rest with Chairman Martin."

The memo, written to chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee John Dingell and chairman of the House Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Bart Stupak, increases pressure on the FCC chairman, who, in particular, has been accused of a rigidly anti-regulatory, pro-corporate approach. Many critics assert that his approach has contributed to a lack of oversight over network providers.

For those not familiar with this sometimes complex issue, network neutrality involves the idea that internet users should control how they use resources online and broadband providers should not be allowed to abuse their influence on the market to favor certain content, applications or services over others.

An egregious example of violating this principle could entail an internet broadband company impeding access to certain web sites that run counter to their own business or political interests. This could be achieved by filtering search results to favor certain web sites or by slowing bandwidth to other sites or services.

One can quickly see the significance of maintaining a balanced, unrestricted network.

In August and September 2007, reports started surfacing from Comcast customers that their BitTorrent transfer speeds were being slowed or even blocked. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer protocol that allows internet users to transfer large files quickly and efficiently. BitTorrent has become an extremely popular tool because it allows many internet users to download and upload non-contiguous pieces of files simultaneously. Comcast’s techniques for inhibiting such transfers, not too dissimilar from censorship methods used by the Chinese government, prompted a barrage of complaints from consumers as well as pressure from the FCC.

Comcast argued that it was trying to prevent users from consuming too much bandwidth and affecting internet speeds of other subscribers, but many angry customers rejected this justification. These customers stated in a petition to the FCC: "[Comcast] is blatantly violating the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement by degrading a range of peer-to-peer applications. Comcast has also engaged in deceptive practices and continues to do so ... without informing users and while advertising access to the Internet. Peer-to-peer protocols benefit distributors of large files. If these protocols are burdened, content providers that use server-client distribution will receive a skewed competitive advantage unrelated to consumer preferences."

In what many critics have called an empty attempt to improve public image and avoid FCC regulation, Comcast issued a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" to better define its policies.

Even Chairman Martin, however, noted in a statement: "I am concerned, though, that Comcast has not made clear when they will stop this discriminatory practice. It appears this practice will continue throughout the country until the end of the year and in some markets, even longer."

Despite Martin’s concern on the matter, many computer users refer to other incidents of network manipulation and stress that the problem is more generally a lack of regulation.

In September 2007, Verizon blocked NARAL Pro-Choice America from sending political messages to those who opted to receive said messages from the organization regarding an ongoing campaign. Although Verizon quickly changed its decision after media attention, the event marked another disturbing example of how much control communications companies have over exchanges of information.

Certain members of the House have tried to pass legislation to clearly prohibit network interference, but have met significant resistance.

In 2006, Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan), Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) and several other co-sponsors attempted to pass the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006. This legislation would have changed the Clayton Antitrust Act to prohibit certain kinds of discrimination by broadband network providers. The Act would have made it illegal to "discriminate against, or to interfere with the ability of any person to use a broadband network service to access, to use, to send, to receive, or to offer lawful content, applications or services over the Internet." (H.R. 5417) The bill, which passed the House Judiciary Committee on May 25, 2006, by 20-13, was later buried - not to be taken up on the House floor.

The failure of Congress to pass comprehensive legislation on net neutrality has forced computer users seeking effective regulation to continue pressuring broadband companies and the FCC, lest potentially unbalanced practices previously exhibited by Comcast, Verizon and others go unnoticed.