Bush donors score policy wins

Companies run by President Bush’s fund-raising “pioneers” have scored several policy victories in the past few years, including $93 million to protect an oil pipeline in Colombia, government watchdog group Common Cause said in a report released on Oct. 13.

Several pro-energy and other administration decisions benefited businesses run by volunteer Bush fund-raisers. The pioneers each raised at least $100,000 for his 2000 campaign.

For instance, the report cites the Bush administration’s pursuit of federal money to help protect the Cano Limon pipeline in Colombia used by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum. Occidental’s executives included J. Roger Hirl, a Bush pioneer who stepped down as Occidental Chemical’s president last December and as an Occidental Petroleum executive vice president last summer.

The Cano Limon is frequently sabotaged by a Colombian rebel group. Congress last February approved spending up to $93 million to protect the pipeline.

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the administration’s actions on Cano Limon were meant to fight terrorism, drug trafficking and attacks on world sources of energy.

Chellie Pingree, president of governmental-reform group Common Cause, said the report shows how important it is to fix the presidential public financing system to make it more attractive to candidates. Bush skipped public financing and its spending limits in the 2000 primaries and raised more than $100 million, much of it brought in by pioneers. (AP)

Peace group alleges police scrutiny

In a time when issues over security versus personal liberties are at the forefront of a national debate, members of Peace Fresno – a group that organizes peace marches and book sales – say an undercover officer at a political meeting brings the controversy close to home.

Many now suspect that a member of Peace Fresno was really an undercover Fresno County sheriff’s detective. When Aaron Kilner died in an off-duty motorcycle accident Aug. 30, his picture ran in the newspaper. In the story, the sheriff’s department identified the 26-year-old as a member of the anti-terrorism unit. Peace Fresno members recognized him as a man who attended their meetings and identified himself as Aaron Stokes.

After members of Peace Fresno identified Kilner, they debated among themselves for a month about what to do. Finally they agreed they would have their attorney send a letter to Fresno County Sheriff Richard Pierce asking whether they were being investigated and if so, what was reported.

Pierce would not say whether Kilner attended meetings, but he said Peace Fresno “was not and is not the subject of any investigation by the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department.” Pierce said his department “does not have any reports, files, rosters or notes on Peace Fresno or its meetings.” However, in a four-paragraph statement issued Thursday, he defended his department’s legal right to send undercover officers to community meetings.

In July, state attorney general Bill Lockyer told California law enforcement to not collect intelligence on religious or political groups without evidence of criminal activity. But under the federal Homeland Security Act of 2002, intelligence agents can look at acts of civil disobedience and minor law-breaking.

One Peace Fresno member said, “Academically, we always said this thing could go on. But suddenly it went from academic to a real hard sense that this could happen. This could happen here.” (Fresno Bee)

NY activists mobilize for 2004 GOP Convention

Adding the Internet and e-mail to traditional organizing techniques, protest groups say they are getting an early start in attracting tens of thousands of demonstrators to New York for next year’s Republican convention.

Opponents of the Iraq war, welfare reform, even those angered by the selection of New York City say they will seek protest permits and arrange travel for the four-day convention that begins Aug. 30, 2004.

Convention organizers and protesters agree that the rallies will further disrupt traffic and strain security. Police say they are formulating security plans around Madison Square Garden, the convention site, and other potential protest locations, although details have not been released.

Steve Ault, a veteran activist helping organize a massive anti-war demonstration, said the events taking shape for next year are unprecedented.

“There’s a rather profound and unique opposition to [President] Bush developing, and we see that in the early interest in these actions,” said Ault, who helped plan a 1982 nuclear disarmament rally in Central Park that drew 750,000 people. “We haven’t seen anything like this.”

One international group, Food Not Bombs, promises to cook and serve donated food to activists, delivering by bicycle if necessary.

Keith McHenry, who co-founded the group in 1980, said chapters from as far away as Vancouver, British Columbia, and Ireland are coming. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I can’t believe how organized this is,” he said. (AP)

383,000 missing votes in CA recall

More than 380,000 ballots cast in the recall election did not have a valid vote on whether to recall Gov. Gray Davis, and most of them were made on punch card systems, according to two independent studies.

In Los Angeles County, nearly 9 percent of people who cast ballots on punch card voting machines did not register a vote on whether to recall Davis, researchers said. By contrast, almost every response to the recall counted in Alameda County, which uses an electronic touch-screen system.

The state’s punch cards, including some machines installed more than 20 years ago, were the subject of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The ACLU had estimated that 40,000 votes could be lost on punch card systems and argued the recall election should be put on hold. But an 11-member panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals said the election would go forward. Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California, said “I hope this puts to rest claims that these (punch card) machines have any place in a democracy.”

Even if the 4.6 percent of Californians whose ballots did not answer the recall question had voted against it, Davis would have lost. The recall passed by a margin of 10.8 percent, and Republican actor Arnold Schwarzenegger enjoyed a comfortable victory.

But California’s anomalies could resonate nationwide, as counties scramble to modernize election equipment to qualify for federal funding in the 2002 Help America Vote Act. (AP)

Calls from soldiers desperate to leave Iraq flood hotline

Morale among some war-weary GIs in Iraq is so low that a growing number of soldiers — including some now home on R&R — are researching the consequences of going AWOL, according to a leading support group.

The GI Rights Hotline, a national soldiers’ support service, has logged a 75 percent increase in calls in the last 12 weeks, with more than 100 of those calls from soldiers, or people on their behalf, asking about the penalties associated with going AWOL — “absent without leave” — according to volunteers and staffers who man the service.

Many of the calls have come from soldiers who are among those now on the first wave of 15-day authorized leaves that began almost two weeks ago. Some hotline callers have indicated they may not return, staffers said.

“The military is aware of how low troop morale is,” said Teresa Panepinto, program coordinator of the GI Rights Hotline, a service that dates back to the Korean War. Volunteers throughout the country take live calls and respond to messages left by soldiers who want to know their rights.

Panepinto said monthly calls to the hotline have risen from 2,000 to 3,500 in the last three months.

She said many soldiers complained about the length of the Iraq campaign, the rough desert conditions and a US death toll that has risen well above 300, including nearly 180 soldiers killed after President Bush’s May 1 declaration that major combat operations in Iraq had ended. (New York Post)

Supreme Court urged to review detentions at Guantanamo

More than two dozen former US military officers, federal judges, diplomats and ex-POWs on Thursday attacked the indefinite detentions of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a miscarriage of justice and urged the US Supreme Court to intervene.

Representing seven groups that have filed friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of 16 detainees at the base, the former officials said the detentions of more than 650 terror suspects without access to lawyers hurts the United States’ reputation and could endanger Americans elsewhere.

The detainees have sued in federal court, seeking the right to talk to lawyers and to challenge their detentions before a court, but have had their cases rejected and are now appealing to the Supreme Court.

“The perception of this case abroad — that the power of the United States can be exercised outside the law — will diminish our stature and repute,” said a brief filed by 19 former diplomats. “Our most important diplomatic asset has been this nation’s values.”

So far, federal judges have ruled that because the base, leased from Cuba, is on foreign territory, aliens held there have no access to US courts to challenge their detentions. The Bush administration maintains that the detainees — most of them captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan — are “unlawful combatants,” do not deserve POW status under the Geneva Conventions and can be held indefinitely. (Knight Ridder)

Schwarzenegger electricity plan fuels fears of another debacle

California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing a push to deregulate the state’s electricity markets — a move embraced by business leaders and some energy analysts but criticized by many Democrats and consumer advocates as a return to the failed policies that sparked California’s energy crisis.

The actor-turned-politician made little mention of his plan to reduce state regulation of energy markets during the recall race, devoting his time instead to bashing Gov. Gray Davis. But with many of those contracts set to expire in the next two years, the governor-elect will have to present his solutions or risk facing his own energy crisis.

Schwarzenegger’s energy strategy is being driven by some of the same members of former Gov. Pete Wilson’s team who led the push for energy deregulation in the mid-1990s, and former Enron Corp. Chairman and CEO Ken Lay met with the actor and others in the spring of 2001, when Lay was pushing deregulation in California. Schwarzenegger has said he doesn’t remember details of the meeting.

Consumer groups already are warning that the proposals made by Schwarzenegger during the campaign would expose electricity users to greater fluctuations in prices while limiting state oversight of power trading — a combination that could allow the type of market manipulation that plagued California during the state’s energy crisis in 2000-01.

Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento are already warning that they would block any effort to push another deregulation plan through the legislature. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Bush aides will review leak notes

White House lawyers will review phone logs and other records supplied by presidential aides before turning the documents over to the Justice Department officials conducting the investigation into who leaked a CIA undercover operative’s identity, officials said Monday.

The disclosure inspired new Democratic calls for an independent inquiry.

“To allow the White House counsel to review records before the prosecutors would see them is just about unheard of in the way cases are always prosecuted,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, speaking on NBC’s Today show. “And the possibility of mischief, or worse than mischief, is very, very large.”

Administration officials said the White House counsel’s office may need up to two weeks to organize documents that some 2,000 employees were required to submit by 5pm on Oct. 14.

President Bush said information would be submitted to the Justice Department “on a timely basis,” calling the investigation “a very serious matter, and our administration takes it seriously.”

“I’d like to know who leaked,” Mr. Bush added. “And if anybody has got any information, inside our government or outside our government, who leaked, they ought to take it to the Justice Department so we can find out the leaker.” (Dallas Morning News)