Pentagon prepares for decades-long war on terror
Privately, Bush administration officials have said for months that they see the anti-terrorism fight as a decades-long struggle similar to the Cold War that dominated the second half of the 20th century.
Two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon clearly is digging in for a “long slog.” In one of the most striking signs, the military is repositioning its forces to encircle areas of the world seen as possible hotbeds of terrorism.
Some of the most visible changes involve where American troops will be based overseas.
Pentagon planners are considering moving some of the 116,000 troops under the US European Command away from their Cold War bases in Western Europe and into former Warsaw Pact countries closer to the Middle East.
Officials in Romania and Bulgaria have said the United States is considering using huge training bases in those countries that could be used as staging points for counterterrorist military action.
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have joined NATO. Romania, Bulgaria and five other former communist nations are in the process of joining the alliance. Eastern European countries — which US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously termed “New Europe” this year — are eager to help the United States and generally supported the war on Iraq. (AP)

YWCA chief dismissed
The feminist leader Patricia Ireland has been dismissed as chief executive of the YWCA less than six months after she was hired to head it.
Ireland was notified of the decision on Thurs., Oct. 16 in New York, where she was attending a conference. She said in an interview on Oct. 20 that members of the national coordinating board of the YWCA had asked for her resignation, but she declined because she did not want to give the impression that she had “jumped ship.”
“I was uncharacteristically speechless,” Ireland said. “There had been no notice.”
The YWCA’s appointment of Ireland last May was strongly criticized by some conservative groups, which said her background made her unfit to run an organization historically associated with traditional Christian values.
Among the concerns raised by the groups were Ireland’s tenure as president of the National Organization for Women, which supports gay and lesbian rights as well as a woman’s right to seek an abortion, and Ireland’s living with a woman in the early 1990’s while remaining married. (New York Times)

Congress presses White House for 9/11 papers
Key members of Congress from both parties blasted the Bush administration Sunday, Oct. 27 for refusing to turn over classified intelligence documents requested by the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT), who co-wrote legislation that created the commission, issued a statement saying that the administration has “resisted this inquiry at every turn.”
“After claiming they wanted to find the truth about Sept. 11, the Bush administration has resorted to secrecy, stonewalling and foot-dragging,” the statement said.
The 10-member bipartisan commission, which was created despite the initial objection of the Bush administration, has a May 27, 2004 deadline to issue its report. It is headed by Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey.
In a New York Times report on Oct. 26, Kean said that he was considering issuing a subpoena for documents that the White House had failed to turn over.
Some commission members had expressed fear that the White House is hoping to stall in turning over documents until the commission’s mandate expires in May. Lieberman said that if that happens, he and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) would “go to the floor of the Senate” to extend the commission’s term.
“President Bush may want to withhold the truth about Sept. 11, but the American people — and especially the victims’ families — demand and deserve it,” Lieberman said. (Los Angeles Times)

Republicans attack CIA on Iraq
A key committee of the US Congress is preparing to issue a damning criticism of the quality of intelligence on Iraq before the war.
According to the Washington Post newspaper, the Senate Intelligence Committee will focus its criticism on the CIA and its director, George Tenet.
But the report is already being seen as an attempt by the Republicans in Congress to deflect blame from the White House.
Democrats are deeply unhappy with the draft report. They are trying to hear more evidence from members of the Bush administration, and want publication of the report delayed.
For the Republicans, Tenet is a particularly useful target for criticism. He’s one of the few so-called “holdovers” — a Clinton appointee who survived the change of president, which makes him a useful scapegoat for the administration.
The Republicans would like this argument closed as soon as possible, well before the election season is into full swing.
But what is likely to happen now is some complicated procedural maneuvering. The Democrats have the necessary votes to retaliate by opening a new inquiry, looking more directly at the failings of the administration. (BBC)

Doctors, dollars rushed to Ft. Stewart
The Army said on Oct. 20 it is sending doctors to Fort Stewart, GA, to help hundreds of sick and injured soldiers, including Iraq veterans, who say they are waiting weeks and months for proper medical help.
Many of the Army Reserve and National Guard personnel in “medical hold” at the base are living in steamy cement training barracks that they say are unacceptable for sick and injured soldiers.
The Army’s statement and actions came in the wake of an Oct. 17 article by UPI, which documented the plight of soldiers awaiting medical attention at Fort Stewart for months and in squalid conditions.
Several of the National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers said the way they are being treated makes them believe the Army is trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. They also said that regular active duty personnel are getting far better treatment.
While soldiers are on hold, the Army decides how sick or disabled they are and what benefits — if any — they should get as a result. One document shown to UPI stated that no more doctor appointments were available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 — Veterans Day.
The soldiers estimate that around 40 percent of the nearly 600 personnel in medical hold were deployed to Iraq. Of those who went, many described clusters of strange ailments, like heart and lung problems, among previously healthy troops. They said the Army has tried to refuse them benefits, claiming the injuries and illnesses were due to a “pre-existing condition,” prior to military service, a charge the Army denied. (UPI)

Civil rights groups blast Bush court nominee
Civil rights groups, which have been pressing Senate Democrats to filibuster a series of important judicial nominations by President Bush, are now mobilizing opposition to the latest nominee, California Supreme Court justice Janice Rogers Brown.
Brown has been nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is widely considered to be the second-most important court in the United States, after the Supreme Court itself.
Among other positions she has taken over the years, Brown once attacked the New Deal as “the triumph of socialist revolution” and, as noted by the New York Times, she praised a series of Supreme Court decisions in the early 20th century that found laws approved by Congress to protect the health and safety of workers to be illegitimate interference by the state in business.
A large coalition of women’s, civil rights, labor, and environmental groups is already on record against Brown whose ultra-conservative views on many public-policy issues are similar to those of Supreme Court Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
In one case cited by her critics, Aguilar v. Avis Rent a Car Systems, Inc., Brown dissented from a majority decision that ordered the company to stop its supervisor from calling Hispanic workers by racial epithets. In a lone dissent, she argued that racially discriminatory speech in the workplace, even if it rises to the level of illegal discrimination, is protected by the company’s First Amendment right to free speech. (OneWorld.net)

US free trade boss pied
Regina Vargo, the Chief US Trade Negotiator for the Central American Free Trade Area (CAFTA), was pied at a reception in Houston by an anti-CAFTA activist representing Confeiteiros Sem Fronteiras (Bakers without Borders).
Bananas were specially chosen for the pie, to signify the agricultural products of Latin America, which at this point represent the most contentious issue at the talks. Vargo was in Houston for the eighth round of negotiations on CAFTA which is due to be passed by the end of this year. The pieing took place at the Westin Galleria Hotel where the talks were happening during the reception following the opening ceremonies. CAFTA will be the first multilateral trade agreement passed by the United States since the passage of NAFTA almost a decade ago. A lot of pressure is being placed on Central American countries to wrap up the CAFTA negotiation quickly after the successful walkout of the “G-22” countries at the WTO meeting last month in Cancun. (Confeiteiros Sem Fronteiras)

Republican and Democrat parties know all about you
The Democrat and Republican parties are collecting information about millions of individual voters, a key ingredient in their 2004 campaign game. The close 2000 presidential election showed how important getting even a fraction more of a party’s supporters to the polls can be. Democratic National Committee has “DataMart,” a new 158-million-record database of voter information connected to “Demzilla,” which tracks and manages party contact with donors and activists. Republican National Committee has a 165-million-name database called “Voter Vault.”
In addition to its value in get-out-the-vote efforts, the data the parties accumulate helps fund-raisers, who can use it to spot voters who identify with a party but haven’t yet donated to it.
It also can help parties lavish special e-mails, direct mail and phone calls on small-dollar donors, who have become even more valuable now that the campaign finance law has banned corporate, union and unlimited individual donations.
The Democrat party’s database includes Census data, such as block-level demographic information; national consumer data, which provides individual details such as whether a person is married, owns a home and has children; voter files, which are available from several states and show a person’s party identification and which elections he has voted in; and rundowns on how precincts voted in past elections.
The Republican National Committee declined to say what kind of data Voter Vault has. (AP)

Study: hundreds of thousands of inmates mentally ill
As many as one in five of the 2.1 million Americans in jail and prison are seriously mentally ill, far outnumbering the number of mentally ill who are in mental hospitals, according to a comprehensive study released Tues., Oct. 21.
The study, by Human Rights Watch, concludes that jails and prisons have become the nation’s default mental health system, as more state hospitals have closed and as the country’s prison system has quadrupled over the past 30 years. There are now fewer than 80,000 people in mental hospitals, and the number is continuing to fall.
The report also found that the level of illness among the mentally ill being admitted to jail and prison has been growing more severe in the past few years. And it suggests that the percentage of female inmates who are mentally ill is considerably higher than that of male inmates.
Where statistics are available, mentally ill inmates have higher than average disciplinary rates, the study found. A study in Washington found that while mentally ill inmates constituted 18.7 of the state’s prison population, they accounted for 41 percent of infractions.
Medical care for mentally ill inmates is often almost nonexistent, the study says. In Wyoming, a Justice Department investigation found that the state penitentiary had a psychiatrist on duty two days a month. In Iowa, there are three psychiatrists for more than 8,000 inmates. (New York Times)