Hey, here's a few stories Bill O'Reilly didn't report on today. Vol. CXXXIV No. 443

By Thomas H. Maugh II and Maria Cone

The first study to follow lead-exposed children from before birth into adulthood has shown that even relatively low levels of lead permanently damage the brain and are linked to higher numbers of arrests, particularly for violent crime.

Previous studies linking lead to such problems have used indirect measures of lead and criminality, and critics have argued that socioeconomic and other factors may be responsible for the observed effects.

But by measuring blood levels of lead before birth and during the first seven years of life and then correlating the levels with arrest records and brain size, Cincinnati researchers have produced the strongest evidence yet that lead plays a major role in crime.

The team also found that lead exposure is a continuing problem despite the efforts of the federal government and cities to minimize exposure.

The average lead levels in the study "unfortunately are still seen in many thousands of children throughout the United States," said Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Children's Environmental Health Center at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

The link between criminal behavior and lead exposure was found among even the least-contaminated children in the study, who were exposed to amounts of lead similar to what the average U.S. child is exposed to today, said Landrigan, who was not involved in the study.

"People will sometimes say, 'This is in the past. We are cleaning up lead. We don't have lead problems anymore,' " said criminologist Deborah Denno of Fordham University in New York, who was not involved in the study. "The Ohio study says this is still a big problem."

Nationwide, about 310,000 children between 1 and 5 have blood lead levels above the federal guideline of 10 micrograms per deciliter, and experts suspect that many times that number have lower levels that are nonetheless dangerous.

"It is a national disgrace that so many children continue to be exposed at levels known to be neurotoxic," said Dr. David Bellinger, of the Harvard Medical School, who wrote an editorial accompanying the research.

Although some urban soil is contaminated with lead from gasoline, 80 percent of lead exposure comes from houses built before 1978. Paint in such houses often contains up to 50 percent lead and, even though it has been covered by newer, lead-free paints, it flakes or rubs off.

About 38 million U.S. homes, 40 percent of the nation's housing, contain lead-based paint, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The problem is particularly acute in urban areas, which typically have older housing that has not been renovated.

More recently, parents and authorities have become concerned about lead-based paint in toys imported from China.

Researchers have long known that lead exposure reduces IQ by damaging brain cells in children during their early years.

It is also known that lead increases children's distractibility, impulsiveness and restlessness and leaves them with a shortened attention span, all factors considered precursors of aggressive or violent behavior.

A landmark 1990 paper by Denno linked lead to increases in criminal behavior, but the children in the study were not tested for lead levels. The diagnosis was based on their physicians' evaluation, Denno said.

The Cincinnati Lead Study enrolled 376 pregnant women in Cincinnati between 1979 and 1984, measuring their blood lead levels during pregnancy and the children's levels during the their first seven years.

In the first of the new studies, environmental health research Kim Dietrich of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine studied 250 of the original group, correlating their lead levels with adult criminal-arrest records from Hamilton County, Ohio.

Controlling for a variety of factors, including parental IQ, education, income and drug use, Dietrich and colleagues found that the more lead in a child's blood from birth through age 7, the more likely he or she was arrested as an adult. The tie between high lead and violent crime was particularly strong.

They found that 55 percent of the subjects (63 percent of males) had been arrested, and that the average was five arrests between the ages of 18 and 24.

The higher the blood-lead level at any time in childhood, the greater the likelihood of arrests. "The strongest association was with violent criminal activity: murder, rape domestic violence, assault, robbery and possession of weapons," Dietrich said.

Blood levels in the children ranged from 4 to 37 micrograms per deciliter.

The researchers found, for example, that every 5-microgram-per-deciliter increase in blood lead level at age 6 was accompanied by a 50 percent increase in violent crime later in life.

Confirming previous findings, the effect of lead was strongest in males, who had an arrest rate 4.5 times that of females.

"We need to be thinking about lead as a drug and a fairly strong one," Dietrich said.

In the second study, radiologist Kim Cecil and her colleagues examined a "representative sample" of 157 members of the same group using whole-brain MRI scans. They found that those with the highest blood levels of lead during childhood had the smallest brain volume.

For those with average lead level in the study, their brains were about 1.2 percent smaller. The most affected regions of the brain were those regulating decision making, impulse control and attention, among other areas.

"The most important message is that lead affects brain volume, independent of demographic and social factors that are often used to explain away poor outcomes" in life, Cecil said. "This is independent biological evidence showing that the brain is affected by lead."

By John McPhaul

TAMARINDO, Costa Rica (Reuters) - Pungent brown sewage spews into the Pacific ocean. In the background, cranes put up hotels and beachfront apartments.

Once home to monkeys, turtles and other rare wildlife, this stretch of coast in northwest Costa Rica is developing so fast that it is tarnishing the country's reputation as a destination for eco-tourists.

Some 1.4 million people visit Central America's richest country every year, but they no longer come just for the national parks that cover more than a quarter of its area and are home to almost 5 percent of the world's plant and animal species.

They also want sand, surf and even real estate.

The biggest stimulus came when the airport at nearby Liberia began handling international flights five years ago, putting the previously little-known Guanacaste province within, for example, three hours of Miami.

With tropical sunshine, sandy beaches and surf, developers saw a chance to attract everyone from surfers and honeymooners to U.S. retirees seeking a second home, transforming sleepy towns with names like Tamarindo, Quepos, Playas del Coco and Jaco.

The result is rampant construction that environmentalists fear could balloon into noisy, sprawling resorts with cruise ship ports and golf courses like those of Cancun, Mexico, which guzzle water and pollute the environment.

"These cases of poorly planned tourist developments in Costa Rica could affect the well-deserved reputation as a pioneer in eco-tourism," said Ronald Sanabria, a Costa Rican who works for the Rainforest Alliance, an international advocate for sustainability.

Already, Costa Rica has lost up to half of its monkey population in the last 12 years as developers expand into their jungle habitat, according to scientists at the University of Costa Rica.

Light pollution from Tamarindo is making life harder for leatherback turtles. The town's lights disorient the tiny hatchlings, sending them toward the luminescence instead of out to sea, where they are safer from predators.

"These large-scale tourism projects have big consequences for the environment," said Fabian Pacheco, of the Costa Rican Federation for the Conservation of Nature.

SURF'S UP

The issue is a familiar one in developing countries as they weigh the benefits of tourist dollars that come with high-rise hotels against the loss of greenery when virgin land is paved over.

Tourism is Costa Rica's top foreign exchange earner. Property developers point to the big contribution the construction sector makes to the economy, accounting for 5 percent of gross domestic product and growing by 16 percent last year.

The tourist boom has also created jobs in a poor region. "It's been good for the locals. Most of them are happy to have good, decent jobs," said Denise Shante, 51, a Canadian property broker who sells apartments priced up to $2.5 million.

As Costa Rica attracts more mainstream tourism, neighboring Panama is aggressively promoting its own eco-tourism credentials.

The breakneck development has the government and even the tourism industry worried.

When rains overflowed septic tanks in Tamarindo, tons (tonnes) of raw sewage flowed into the ocean and the resort lost its "blue flag" issued by Costa Rica's water utility to indicate healthy ocean water conditions.

"Costa Rica can no longer project the pure image of an eco-tourism paradise since reality shows investors are free to develop more and more projects without clear rules," the Costa Rican Hotel and Resorts Association warned in a report in May.

President Oscar Arias, whose government wants to cut the country's net carbon emissions to zero by 2021, has begun a crackdown at newer Pacific resorts, closing some businesses and ordering height restrictions on buildings near the beach.

"Tamarindo and Jaco got out of our hands, but our scientists are working on ways of assuring development that is compatible with nature," Arias told Reuters.

The Costa Rican Chamber of Construction says unregulated building is still going on, and in Tamarindo the most prominent feature is its building sites swarming with laborers.

The town, world-famous for its surf, bustles with surfers and tanned shoppers who fill its shops, bars and restaurants.

Some, like Shawn O'Neil, 28, a surfer from San Diego, California, say it is unfair to rope off pretty beaches for an elite who can afford expensive eco-resorts while shutting out those who prefer cheaper all-inclusive hotels.

"People say how built up Tamarindo is, but it doesn't seem like much after San Diego and Los Angeles."

By Tim Paradis

Stocks plunged Thursday as Wall Street contended with a barrage of bad news: another surge in oil prices and warnings of trouble in the key financial, automotive and high-tech industries. The major indexes showed losses of about 2 percent, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which shed more than 300 points and dropped to its lowest level in nearly two years.

The Dow fell as much as 302.97, or 2.56 percent, to 11,508.86, well under its 2008 trading low of 11,634.82 and to its lowest level since September 2006. That sent some investors rushing for the safety of Treasury bonds — government debt is regarded as a haven when the stock market is in turmoil.

The passel of worries that investors juggled Thursday added up to an increasingly troubled economy. Analysts' negative comments on General Motors Corp. sent shares of the largest U.S. automaker to their lowest level in more than 30 years, while Citigroup Inc. fell sharply after an analyst placed a "sell" rating on the stock and warned investors to expect less from the brokerage sector in an uneasy economic climate. Disappointing outlooks from technology bellwethers Oracle Corp. and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. further soured investors' moods and made the tech sector one of the steepest decliners.

The gloom was compounded by an unnerving forecast about oil prices that raised the specter of higher inflation and even more damage to the economy.

OPEC President Chakib Khelil was quoted as telling a French television station that oil could rise to between $150 and $170 per barrel this summer before pulling back later in the year. That and a falling dollar helped send light, sweet crude up more than $5 and past $140 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Rising oil has saddled nearly all parts of the economy with higher costs, weighing on consumers who now have to reach much deeper into their wallets at the gas pump and therefore have less to spend elsewhere.

Thursday's confluence of bad news overshadowed the National Association of Realtors' report that existing home sales edged up last month, only the second increase in the past 10 months. It also wiped out any positive impact from the Federal Reserve's widely expected decision Wednesday to leave interest rates unchanged.

The stream of downbeat assessments drove home to investors how much U.S. companies stand to be hurt from the fallout of the prolonged housing slump, the nearly year-old credit crisis and the soaring price of oil. The great fear on the Street has been that rising prices and worries about their finances will force consumers to further curb their spending, sending the economy into even more of a decline.

The latest reading on the gross domestic product Thursday backed up that fear. The Commerce Department said the economy as measured by GDP rose at 1 percent annual rate in the first quarter, a slight improvement from the previous estimate of 0.9 percent, but still quite anemic. Moreover, the number does not reflect the impact of higher gas and oil prices that shot up further during the second quarter, which ends Monday.

"This is unfortunately kind of a slack period. We're waiting for second-quarter earnings. Until then, we have this very negative attitude among investors and everyone seems to be latching onto negative news and shrugging off the positive news," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago, pointing to the uptick in housing sales.

Hey, here's a few stories Bill O'Reilly didn't report on today. Vol. CXXXVI No. 442

KABUL (AFP) — With Taliban rebels launching mass jail breaks, threatening a major city and killing more foreign troops than ever, Afghanistan is replacing Iraq as the focus of the "war on terror", analysts say.

The Islamist movement has dealt a series of stunning blows to President Hamid Karzai's fragile government in the past week, causing jitters among Western nations who together have around 70,000 troops in the country.

Hundreds of insurgents escaped from a prison in Kandahar on Friday and within days rebels had massed in villages outside the southern city, forcing 1,000 Afghan and NATO troops to launch a major offensive to drive them out.

Democratic US presidential candidate Barack Obama spelt out his priorities if elected by saying on Monday that the real front of the "war on terror" was now Afghanistan and that the US mission in Iraq had been a disaster.

Further underscoring the instability is the fact that Afghanistan was deadlier for foreign forces than Iraq during the month of May for the first time since the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.

In Iraq the number of coalition soldiers killed dropped to 21 last month, 17 of them in action, according to US Defense Department statistics on the independent icasualties.org website.

But nearly seven years after US-led forces invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, coalition soldier deaths in Afghanistan rose to 23 during May, 19 of them by hostile fire.

"At the end of the day they have to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and win against it here, not in Iraq," Ahmad Behzad, a member of Afghanistan's parliament and a former journalist, told AFP.

"If Taliban get grounded here and stronger its impact will be seen in US and in the West."

In a sign of international concern, world donors gathered in Paris a week ago pledged 20 billion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan but also called on Karzai to do more to fight corruption and strengthen the rule of law.

But the conference was followed a day later by the Kandahar jail break, in which a Taliban suicide bomber blew up the main gates of the building to free more than 1,000 prisoners, causing widespread alarm.

"The Taliban are making use of the summer to assert themselves, which is being taken by the Americans with great alarm," Hasan Askari, a political analyst at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, told AFP.

Behzad, the MP, said the consensus among donors and also in the US election campaign on the need to focus on Afghanistan was a positive sign, despite the fears of a Taliban resurgence.

But the focus until now on Iraq had made international forces in Afghanistan more vulnerable, he said, adding: "It gave time for Taliban to regroup, plan better and attack softer targets, and hurt the troops."

Prominent historian and analyst Habibullah Rafi said international forces in Afghanistan had to review their tactics in the wake of the scores of civilian deaths in military operations since 2001, leading to resentment.

"Unless the government changes its tactics, unless the international forces change the way they conduct operations, I would say the violence would increase even more," Rafi told AFP.

Analysts said that quitting Afghanistan was not an option for the US-led coalition and the separate NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, but that they were in a "very difficult position."

"If they abandon this place they are going to get hurt back home," said analyst Waheed Mujda, suggesting failing to wipe out the threat in Afghanistan could increase the likelihood of terror attacks in coalition countries.

"But if they fight for it they need more money and resources than at the beginning when it was easy," added Mujda, a former anti-Soviet fighter who served in the ministry of foreign affairs under the 1996-2001 Taliban regime.

By Joby Warrick

The first extensive medical examinations of former detainees in U.S. military jails offer corroboration for prisoners' claims of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their American captors, a Boston-based human rights group said in a report released yesterday.

The assessments of 11 men formerly held in U.S. detention camps overseas revealed scars and other injuries consistent with their accounts of beatings, electric shocks, shackling and, in at least one case, sodomy, according to the report by Physicians for Human Rights. Most also had symptoms of long-term psychological damage, including post-traumatic stress disorder, the group said.

The physicians' group, which in recent years has been critical of the administration's detention policies, arranged for a battery of exams for 11 former detainees who had spent an average of three years in detention at U.S. facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Teams of medical specialists conducted physical and psychological tests, including exams intended to assess if the subjects were lying.

The evaluations backed up the men's stories of physical and sexual assault and documented psychological damage that had left many of them severely impaired, the report said. For example, exams and X-rays of one of the former detainees showed scars and joint injuries that supported his description of being suspended for hours by his arms at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

All 11 men were eventually released from custody without being charged with crimes.

In a statement accompanying the report, retired Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Army's first official investigation on Abu Ghraib, said the new evidence suggested a "systematic regime of torture" inside U.S.-run detention camps.

A Pentagon spokesman yesterday criticized the report, saying its authors had drawn "sweeping conclusions based upon dubious allegations" of former detainees who had been out of U.S. custody for years.

"The quality of medical care we provide detainees is similar to that which our troops serving in the same locations receive," said the spokesman, Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon. "We have robust psychological and mental health care available to detainees."

By Brent Kallestad (AP)

Florida said it intends to sue the Army Corps of Engineers for violating the Endangered Species Act, a move which could further complicate already strained regional relations over shared water resources.

Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Sole said in a letter that the Corps plans to reduce water flow in the Apalachicola River would jeopardize threatened and endangered wildlife in the area.

The seven-page letter, dated Thursday, noted concerns by biologists and environmentalists about the impact that low water levels could have on the Gulf sturgeon fish, and three mussels: the fat threeridge mussel, the purple bankclimber and the Chipola slabshell.

The expanded suit throws another wrench in the complicated tug-of-war over water between Georgia, Florida and Alabama that has been waged since the early 1990s in court and in state legislatures. Caught in the middle is the Corps, the federal agency charged with managing the resources.

Georgia, which seeks to keep more of the water stored in its reservoirs, points to the epic drought gripping the state as evidence that federal authorities should change the way the reservoirs are managed. Alabama and Florida, meanwhile, say increased flow is needed not only to support the threatened species but also downstream power plants and fisheries.

Florida's notice of a lawsuit comes weeks after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that a federal plan to keep more water in Georgia won't irreversibly doom wildlife.

Florida's announcement prompted an immediate backlash from Georgia politicians and business leaders. Georgia Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle called the news of the possible lawsuit "extraordinarily disappointing."

"I find it unconscionable that the state of Florida would choose to elevate the water needs of the bankclimber and fat threeridge mussel over the needs of millions of human beings in Georgia," he said.

Pat Stevens of the Atlanta Regional Commission accused Florida of political posturing, and suggested that Florida should spend more time boosting its own water supply and efficiency.

"There's lots of things they claim are due to water use in Georgia, but they really ought to be looking to solve the problem in Florida itself instead of pointing at other folks," she said Friday.

Kelly Layman, an official with the environmental agency that filed the lawsuit, said Florida has regulated water consumption and "required water use permits for 30 years Georgia has not."

"It's that literal 'free flow' of water that causes us enormous concern and has been a long-standing crux of this battle," Layman said.

A press secretary for Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said the governor agreed with the lawsuit.

Pat Robbins, a spokesman for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said the agency doesn't comment on active litigation.

The Georgia Environmental Protection Division, which oversees the state's water policy, also declined to comment.

Hey, here's a few stories Bill O'Reilly didn't report on today. Vol. CXXXVI No. 441

By Jerome Cartillier

The dramatic proliferation of jellyfish in oceans around the world, driven by overfishing and climate change, is a sure sign of ecosystems out of kilter, warn experts.

"Jellyfish are an excellent bellwether for the environment," explains Jacqueline Goy, of the Oceanographic Institute of Paris. "The more jellyfish, the stronger the signal that something has changed."

Brainless creatures composed almost entirely of water, the primitive animals have quietly filled a vacuum created by the voracious human appetite for fish.

Dislodging them will be difficult, marine biologists say.

"Jellyfish have come to occupy the place of many other species," notes Ricardo Aguilar, research director for Oceana, a international conservation organisation.

Nowhere is the sting of these poorly understood invertebrates felt more sharply than the Mediterranean basin, where their exploding numbers have devastated native marine species and threaten seaside tourism.

And while much about the lampshade-like creatures remains unknown, scientists are in agreement: Pelagia noctiluca -- whose tentacles can paralyse prey and cause burning rashes in humans -- will once again besiege Mediterranean coastal waters this summer.

That, in itself, is not unusual. It is the frequency and persistence of these appearances that worry scientists.

Two centuries worth of data shows that jellyfish populations naturally swell every 12 years, remain stable four or six years, and then subside.

2008, however, will be the eighth consecutive year that medusae, as they are also known, will be present in massive numbers.

The over-exploitation of ocean resources by man has helped create a near-perfect environment in which these most primitive of ocean creatures can multiply unchecked, scientists say.

"When vertebrates, such as fish, disappear, then invertebrates -- especially jellyfish -- appear," says Aguilar.

The collapse of fish populations boost this process in two important ways, he added. When predators such as tuna, sharks, and turtles vanish, not only do fewer jellyfish get eaten, they have less competition for food.

Jellyfish feed on small fish and zooplankton that get caught up in their dangling tentacles.

"Jellyfish both compete with fish for plankton food, and predate directly on fish," explains Andrew Brierley from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. "It is hard, therefore, to see a way back for fish once jellyfish have become established, even if commercial fishing is reduced."

Which is why Brierley and other experts were not surprised to find a huge surge in the number of jellyfish off the coast of Namibia in the Atlantic, one of the most intensely fished oceans in the world.

Climate change has also been a boon to these domed gelatinous creatures in so far as warmer waters prolong their reproductive cycles.

But just how many millions, or billions, of jellyfish roam the seas is nearly impossible to know, said scientists.

For one things, the boneless, translucent animals -- even big ones grouped in large swarms -- are hard to spot in satellite images or sonar soundings, unlike schools of fish.

They are also resist study in captivity, which means a relative paucity of academic studies.

"There are only 20 percent of species of jellyfish for which we know the life cycle," said Goy.

And the fact that jellyfish are not commercially exploited, with the exception of a few species eaten by gastronomes in East Asia, has also added to this benign neglect.

But the measurable impact of these stinging beasts on beach-based tourism along the Mediterranean has begun to spur greater interest in these peculiar creatures whose growing presence points to dangerous changes not just in the world's oceans, but on the ground and in the air as well.














By Lara Jakes Jordan

WASHINGTON —

A new audit concludes that rookie attorneys with Republican roots got interviewed for plum Justice Department jobs while their liberal-leaning counterparts got passed over.

The Justice Department audit released Tuesday found that a screening program installed in 2002 weeded out job applicants who had liberal or Democratic ties. Improper use of the screening program peaked in 2006, when politics and ideology disqualified what the audit called a significant number of newly graduated lawyers and summer interns seeking jobs.

The long-awaited report confirms widespread criticism last year that the once fiercely independent Justice Department was victim to political meddling by the Bush administration. The scandal led to the resignation last September of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

"Many qualified candidates were deselected by the screening committee because of their perceived political or ideological affiliations" in 2006, the audit concludes.

It found that such disqualifications "constituted misconduct and also violated the department's policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliation."

Two of the people who ran the job applicant screening program in 2006 no longer work at Justice, however, and "are no longer subject to discipline by the department for their actions," the report found.

Democrats quickly seized on the report to bludgeon the Bush administration for playing politics with law and order.

"Yet again, the department has been putting politics where it doesn't belong," House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said in a statement. "When it comes to the hiring of nonpartisan career attorneys, our system of justice should not be corrupted by partisan politics. It appears the politicization at Justice was so pervasive that even interns had to pass a partisan litmus test."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., called the audit "troubling" and said he expects to see more evidence later "on the extent to which the Bush administration has allowed politics to affect and infect the department's priorities."

The audit is the first of several reports to be issued this year looking at how deeply politics seeped into the Justice Department during the Bush administration. Internal Justice watchdogs - at the department's Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility - also are looking at the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 and management problems by Gonzales during his two years as attorney general.

Gonzales' successor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, said he agrees with all the audit's recommendations to prevent politics from influencing the screening process - and has already moved on them.

"I have also made clear, and will continue to make clear, that the consideration of political affiliations in the hiring of career department employees is impermissible and unacceptable," Mukasey said in a statement.

By Marlowe Hood

The world's oceans have warmed 50 percent faster over the last 40 years than previously thought due to climate change, Australian and US climate researchers reported Wednesday.

Higher ocean temperatures expand the volume of water, contributing to a rise in sea levels that is submerging small island nations and threatening to wreak havoc in low-lying, densely-populated delta regions around the globe.

The study, published in the British journal Nature, adds to a growing scientific chorus of warnings about the pace and consequences rising oceans.

It also serves as a corrective to a massive report issued last year by the Nobel-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to the authors.

Rising sea levels are driven by two things: the thermal expansion of sea water, and additional water from melting sources of ice. Both processes are caused by global warming.

The ice sheet that sits atop Greenland, for example, contains enough water to raise world ocean levels by seven metres (23 feet), which would bury sea-level cities from Dhaka to Shanghai.

Trying to figure out how much each of these factors contributes to rising sea levels is critically important to understanding climate change, and forecasting future temperature rises, scientists say.

But up to now, there has been a perplexing gap between the projections of computer-based climate models, and the observations of scientists gathering data from the oceans.

"The numbers didn't add up," said Peter Geckler, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California.

"When previous investigators tried to add up all the estimated contributions to sea level rise" -- thermal expansion, melting glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets, along with changes in terrestrial storage -- "they did not match with the independently estimated total sea level rise," he told AFP.

The new study, led by Catia Domingues of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, is the first to reconcile the models with observed data.

Using new techniques to assess ocean temperatures to a depth of 700 metres (2,300 feet) from 1961 to 2003, it shows that thermal warming contributed to a 0.53 millimetre-per-year rise in sea levels rather than the 0.32 mm rise reported by the IPCC.

"Our results are important for the climate modelling community because they boost confidence in the climate models used for projections of global sea-level rise resulting for the accumulation of heat in the oceans," Domingues said in a statement.

"The projections will in turn assist in planning to minimize impacts, and in developing adaptation strategies," she added.

The IPCC report was criticised for including only the impact of thermal expansion in its projections of sea level rises over the next century, despite recent studies showing that melting ice is a significant -- and growing -- factor.

The planet's oceans store more than 90 percent of the heat in the Earth's climate system and act as a temporary buffer against the effects of climate change.

Hey, here's a few stories Bill O'Reilly didn't report on today. Vol. CXXXVI No. 440

By Lisa Girion

Insurance companies often fail to properly reimburse doctors, needlessly adding more than $200 billion a year to the nation's healthcare tab, the American Medical Assn. said Monday.

An analysis of 3 million medical claims over a six-month period beginning in October also found that doctors in the U.S. spend 14% of the fees they receive from insurers and Medicare on the process of collecting those fees, the AMA said in a report issued at its annual meeting in Chicago.

The analysis sized up insurers and Medicare on how often they paid on time, how often they denied claims and how often they paid at the contracted rate and other measures.

Medicare outperformed commercial insurers in many areas, and some insurers paid physicians' bills better than others.

For example UnitedHealthcare, whose parent owns California's PacifiCare, paid physicians the contracted fee 62% of the time. By comparison, Aetna Inc. paid the contracted fee 71% of the time and Medicare paid the set fee 98% of the time.

The report, part of a campaign to reduce inefficiencies in claims payments, was the AMA's first effort to quantify the red tape and hassle that have sent many physicians into cash-only "concierge" practices or early retirement.

Improving the processing of medical claims could reduce overall costs to patients, physicians, insurers and others, the report said.

"The goal of the AMA campaign is to hold health insurance companies accountable for making claims processing more cost-effective and transparent and to educate and empower physicians so they are no longer at the mercy of a chaotic payment system that takes countless hours away from patient care," said AMA board member Dr. William A. Dolan.

A spokeswoman for America's Health Insurance Plans, a Washington trade group for insurers, said the industry was working to expand electronic claims payment processes and make other changes in an effort to pay more promptly and accurately.

But the spokeswoman, Susan Pisano, said physicians shared some of the blame.

"In order for claims to be processed quickly and correctly, there are two parties that have to do their jobs," Pisano said.

UnitedHealthcare spokesman Gregory Thompson said, "Data show there is often a significant lag time between when services are provided and physician claims are submitted." Peter Lee of the Pacific Business Group on Health, a San Francisco-based coalition that represents large employers, said the report "lays down the gauntlet not only for health plans but also for elected officials to make sure healthcare reform creates a system that puts patients first and provides coverage rather than builds inefficiencies and waste that we have far too often."

"Savings on administrative waste is low-hanging fruit, and the cost of extra paperwork is actually part of the reason we have millions of uninsured," Lee said.

One reason cited for delays: when insurers ask doctors to resubmit claims or provide additional information before a claim can be paid. There was wide variation among insurers and Medicare on how long it took them to tell a physician that additional information was needed. Coventry Health Care, an insurer doing business predominantly in the South, had the fastest turnaround at five days. Humana Inc. was slowest, at 22 days. Cigna Corp. was next at 20 days, followed by Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. at 17 days.

The percentage of outright denials of claims varied by insurer, the report said, ranging from 3% (United and Coventry) to 7% (Medicare and Aetna). The reasons for denials include patients' preexisting conditions, deductibles not being met, expenses incurred prior to coverage and expenses incurred after coverage ended.

Some physicians and healthcare experts pointed to the banking industry as a model. The industry has reduced transaction costs by having competing financial institutions use uniform documents and standard procedures. Some banks have opened healthcare franchises, helping hospitals and physician groups automate their claims collection processes. The AMA is pushing for the insurance industry to follow banking's lead.

"Eliminating the inefficiencies of the billing and collection process would produce significant savings that could be better used to enhance patient care and help reduce overall healthcare costs," the AMA's Dolan said.

By Audrey Hudson

The government is testing drugs with severe side effects like psychosis and suicidal behavior on hundreds of military veterans, using small cash payments to attract patients into medical experiments that often target distressed soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, a Washington Times/ABC News investigation has found.

In one such experiment involving the controversial anti-smoking drug Chantix, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took three months to alert its patients about severe mental side effects. The warning did not arrive until after one of the veterans taking the drug had suffered a psychotic episode that ended in a near lethal confrontation with police.

James Elliot, a decorated Army sharpshooter who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving 15 months in Iraq, was confused and psychotic when he was Tasered by police in February as he reached for a concealed handgun when officers responded to a 911 call at his Maryland home.

Mr. Elliott, a chain smoker, began taking Chantix last fall as part of a VA experiment that specifically targeted veterans with PTSD, opting to collect $30 a month for enrolling in the clinical trial because he needed cash as he returned to school. He soon began suffering hallucinations and suicidal thoughts, unaware that the new drug he was taking could have caused them.

Just two weeks after Mr. Elliott began taking Chantix in November, the VA learned from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that the drug was linked to a large number of hallucinations, suicide attempts and psychotic behavior. But the VA did not alert Mr. Elliott before his own episode in February.















By Warren P. Strobel

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.

"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who's since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. "True, but officially it is not happening," she is quoted as having said.

A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.

"In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has 'moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC," Fredman said, according to the minutes.

The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relentlessly for tougher interrogation methods in the belief that terrorism suspects were resisting interrogation.

It's unclear from the documents whether the Pentagon moved the detainees from one place to another or merely told the ICRC they were no longer present at a facility.

Fredman of the CIA also appeared to be advocating the use of techniques harsher than those authorized by military field guides "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," the minutes report Fredman saying at one point.

Beaver testified that she didn't recall making the comment about avoiding "harsher operations" while ICRC representatives were around, but she said she probably was referring to the need to conduct extended periods of interrogations of detainees without disruption.

The minutes of the Guantanamo meeting were among 25 documents released Tuesday by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is leading a probe of the origins of cruel treatment of detainees in President Bush's "war on terrorism."

The administration overrode or ignored objections from all four military services and from criminal investigators, who warned that the practices would imperil their ability to prosecute the suspects. In one prophetic e-mail on Oct. 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, wrote a colleague: "This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of. ... Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this." The objections from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines prompted Navy Capt. Jane Dalton, legal adviser to the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to begin a review of the proposed techniques.

But Dalton, who's now retired, told the hearing Tuesday that the review was aborted quickly. Myers, she said, took her aside and told her that then-Defense Department general counsel William Haynes "does not want this ... to proceed." Haynes testified that he didn't recall the objections of the four uniformed services.

Officials in Rumsfeld's office and at Guantanamo developed the techniques they sought by reverse-engineering a long-standing military program designed to train U.S. soldiers and aviators to resist interrogation if they're captured.

The program, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, was never meant to guide U.S. interrogation of foreign detainees.

An official in Haynes' office sought information about SERE as early as July 2002, the documents show. Two months later, a delegation from Guantanamo attended SERE training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Levin said, "The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees." The documents confirm that a delegation of senior administration lawyers visited Guantanamo in September 2002 for briefings on intelligence-gathering there. The delegation included David Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; Haynes; acting CIA counsel John Rizzo; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and now the homeland security secretary. Few of the Republicans at Tuesday's hearing defended the Bush administration’s detainee programs. Guidance provided by administration lawyers "will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military intelligence communities," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C..

Regarding the ICRC, the United States long has complained that other countries such as China or the old Soviet

Union prevented independent access to prisoners or made their conditions look better when outsiders were inspecting. The Bush administration appears to have engaged in similar practices, however.

Bernard Barrett, the ICRC’s Washington spokesman, said, "We knew that we did not always have full access to all detainees. It was a fairly serious issue." “It’s been addressed,” he said. “We are confident we now have access to all detainees at Guantanamo.”

Hey, here's a few stories Bill O'Reilly didn't report on today. Vol. CXXXVI No. 439

By Michelle Roberts

His lifelong dream of becoming a soldier had, in the end, come to this for Isaac Stevens: 28, penniless, in a wheelchair, fending off the sexual advances of another man in a homeless shelter.

Stevens' descent from Army private first-class, 3rd Infantry Division, 11 Bravo Company, began in 2005 — not in battle, since he was never sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan, but with a headfirst fall over a wall on the obstacle course at Fort Benning, Ga. He suffered a head injury and spinal damage.

The injury alone didn't put him in a homeless shelter. Instead, it was military bureaucracy — specifically, the way injured soldiers are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow.

"When I got out, I hate to say it, but man, that was it. Everybody just kind of washed their hands of me, and it was like, `OK, you're on your own,'" said Stevens, who was discharged in November and was in a shelter by February. He has since moved into a temporary San Antonio apartment with help from Operation Homefront, a nonprofit organization.

Nearly 20,000 disabled soldiers were discharged in the past two fiscal years, and lawmakers, veterans' advocates and others say thousands could be facing financial ruin while they wait for their claims to be processed and their benefits to come through.

"The anecdotal evidence is depressing," said Rep. John Hall, D-N.Y., who heads a subcommittee on veterans disability benefits. "These veterans are getting medical care, but their family is going through this huge readjustment at the same time they're dealing with financial difficulties."

Most permanently disabled veterans qualify for payments from Social Security and the military or Veterans Affairs. Those sums can amount to about two-thirds of their active-duty pay. But until those checks show up, most disabled veterans draw a reduced Army paycheck.

The amount depends on the soldier's injuries, service time and other factors. But a typical veteran and his family who once lived on $3,400 a month might have to make do with $970 a month.

Unless a soldier has a personal fortune or was so severely injured as to require long-term inpatient care, that can be an extreme hardship.

The Army, stung by the scandal last year over shoddy care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, has been working to help soldiers during the in-between period, said Col. Becky Baker, assigned to injured soldier transition at the U.S. Surgeon General's Office.

In a change in policy that took effect last August, the Army is allowing wounded soldiers to continue to draw their full Army paychecks for up to 90 days after discharge, Baker said. It is also sending more VA workers to Army posts to process claims more quickly, and trying to do a better job of informing soldiers of the available benefits and explaining the application process.

"We make certain that we've covered all the bases before we discharge the soldier," Baker said.

She acknowledged, however, that the changes have been slow to take hold across an Army stretched by war. "It's definitely a practice that is new. It takes awhile for new practices to be institutionalized," the colonel said.

Stevens was moved to the Operation Homefront apartment after a social worker at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, acting on her own initiative, rescued Stevens from a homeless shelter there.

"This is a situation where someone used their common sense and they did the right thing, versus saying, `This is the rules. We can't do this,'" Tripler spokeswoman Minerva Anderson said of the social worker.

Typically, the first 100 days after discharge are spent just gathering medical and other evidence needed to make a decision on disability, VA officials say. If paperwork is incomplete, or a veteran moves to another state before the claim is decided, the process can drag on longer. Disagree with the VA's decision, and the wait time grows.

"The claims are a lot more complicated than people think," said Ursula Henderson, director of the VA's regional office in Houston.

Amy Palmer, a disabled veteran and vice president of Operation Homefront, which helps newly disabled servicemembers, said: "Nobody's assigned to them. You're on your own once you get out."

Hall is pushing legislation that would force the VA to use compatible computer systems and more consistent criteria and to reach out to veterans better.

"A veteran goes and serves and does what the country asks them to do," the congressman said. "But when they come back they're made to jump through these hoops and to wait in line for disability benefits."

Simon Heine served three tours in Iraq as a tank mechanic before he was discharged with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

His wife quit college so she could figure out how her four children could live on less than $1,000 a month. Eventually, she moved the family of six into an Operation Homefront apartment so they could finish navigating the bureaucracy and wait out the arrival of Social Security and VA benefits.

"It is like giving you a car and taking the steering wheel off. They say, `There is the gas and the brake. Just go straight,' and hopefully, you are going in the right direction," Heine said.















By E. Scott Reckard

When developer Empire Land sought protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Riverside in April, its biggest debt by far -- $5.1 million -- was to PFF Bank & Trust.

Southern California's oldest bank, PFF -- formerly Pomona First Federal -- had doubled its loan portfolio to $4 billion over the last decade, in large part by financing residential developers and builders of affordable housing in the Inland Empire.

But the bank's losses on such lending has soared, sending the stock price of its parent company, PFF Bancorp, down 90% this year. Desperate for fresh capital, the company agreed Monday to be acquired for $30.5 million in cash.

Home-mortgage specialists may have been the first lenders to suffer for their roles in financing the housing bubble. But, as foreclosures rise and home prices fall, many smaller banks and thrifts that backed residential developers and home builders are watching black ink turn red and are spending uncomfortable amounts of time with regulators. The financial institutions also are enduring jabs from critics who say they tossed lending standards out the window.

PFF Chief Executive Kevin McCarthy said in an interview that his bank started pulling back on land loans two years ago, anticipating a downturn like "the normal economic cycles we've always had out here."

"But nobody foresaw what would happen to the housing market, or that sub-prime mortgages would collapse so completely," he said. As for the sale to Oak Park, Ill.-based FBOP Corp., parent company of community banks including California National Bank, McCarthy said it was a hard but necessary choice: "I'm doing this to keep as many employees on the job as I can."

Community banks embraced commercial lending in recent years, largely ceding home loans, credit cards and other mass-market products to big national players.

Residential construction loans, which generate big fees, were especially profitable for smaller banks -- until housing collapsed in places like the Inland Empire, where prices are down more than 30% from their highs, and the Central Valley, where some former boom markets are off more than 40%. Raw land on which Ontario-based Empire Land installed roads, sewers and utilities, expecting to then sell it to builders, has declined even more.

"In the Inland Empire, we're hearing land is going for 20 or 30 cents on the dollar" of its appraised value when the loans were made, said RBC Capital Markets analyst Joe Morford.

According to data tracker Foresight Analytics of Oakland, 15.8% of single-family home construction loans were at least 30 days delinquent in Riverside and San Bernardino counties last quarter, up from just 1.7% a year earlier. The delinquency rate was 14.7% in Los Angeles County, 14.9% in Orange County and 15.4% in Ventura County. It was 30.4% in Merced County, near Sacramento.

Regulators were late to recognize the severity of the problems with these loans, Morford said. But this year they have taken notice.

In a report last week on regional economic activity, the Federal Reserve said of conditions in the West: "Credit quality eroded a bit further, mainly for loans related to the housing sector, with the most significant adverse impacts on asset portfolios noted for smaller community banks."

Regulators are now aggressively requiring banks to write down the value of questionable loans and to raise more capital to make up for those write-offs. That creates a pinch for banks, one that is apparent in their regulatory filings.

Security Pacific Bancorp of West L.A. -- which resembles in name only the former L.A.-based banking giant acquired in 1992 by what is now Bank of America Corp. -- has written off millions in dud Inland Empire housing loans. In a recent order, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and state regulators required Security Pacific, with $585 million in assets, to diversify its operations, cut off deadbeat clients and "determine that the lending staff has the expertise necessary to properly supervise construction loans."

Other Inland Empire-based construction loan specialists also are feeling the pain.

Corona-based Vineyard National Bancorp, with $2.3 billion in assets, lost $70 million in its last two quarters, and its stock is down 82% from a year ago. It has blamed inland housing loans, though it also specializes in another tricky business, financing builders of expensive custom homes in West L.A., the South Bay and coastal Orange County. Its executives declined to be interviewed.

Regulators now classify Vineyard and its subsidiary, Vineyard Bank of Rancho Cucamonga, as troubled. The company had postponed its annual meeting while it negotiated for new investment, but said last week that discussions with an interested party had fallen through.

Some of the Asian American community banks that have prospered in Southern California also have been forced to swallow housing-related losses. Aaron J. Deer, an analyst at Sandler O'Neill & Partners, cut profit estimates recently for Pasadena's East West Bancorp and Los Angeles' Preferred Bank and Cathay Bancorp, whose core depositors are ethnically Chinese, because of exposure to construction and related loans.

Home builder troubles haunted even City National Corp. of Beverly Hills, the Southland's largest commercial bank with more than $15 billion in assets. City National avoided the riskier segments of home-mortgage lending and suffered none of the losses on mortgages and bonds backed by home loans that have plagued larger competitors.

But City National's clients have always included home builders, and the bank paid the price as losses on builder loans contributed to a 22% drop in first-quarter earnings. That was despite the fact that such loans made up only 5% of the company's $11.8-billion loan portfolio, and few of them were made in the Inland Empire or Central Valley, CEO Russell Goldsmith said.

Nor are out-of-state banks immune to the problems here. Central Pacific Financial Corp., a Honolulu bank that sought to diversify on the mainland, said Inland Empire construction loans played a major role in the $54.2 million in loan losses recorded by the company in the first quarter, up from just $4.3 million a year earlier.

Central Pacific Chief Executive Clint Arnoldus said the bank, with $5.8 billion in assets, has a "solid plan" to "aggressively manage our California loan portfolio." But he added that it was tough to make projections about a turnaround.

"No one can predict when California's housing market will stabilize," he said.

Hey, here's a few stories Bill O'Reilly didn't report on today. Vol. CXXXVI No. 438

By Tom Lasseter

KABUL, Afghanistan — U.S. soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms and hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees McClatchy interviewed said Bagram Air Base was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram, north of Kabul, and at a similar U.S. internment camp at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.

McClatchy's eight-month investigation found a pattern of abuse that continued for years. The abuse of detainees at Bagram has been reported by U.S. media organizations, in particular The New York Times, which broke several developments in the story. But the extent of the mistreatment, and that it eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantánamo, hasn't been revealed previously.

Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al-Qaida's Sept. 11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of detainees had little or no connection to al-Qaida.

Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten regularly. Of 41 former Bagram detainees interviewed, 28 said guards or interrogators had assaulted them. Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantánamo Bay. But because President Bush loosened or eliminated rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after U.S. guards beat them.

In an effort to assemble as complete a picture as possible of U.S. detention practices, reporters interviewed 66 former detainees, double-checked key elements of their accounts, spoke with U.S. soldiers who had served as detention-camp guards, and reviewed thousands of pages of records from Army courts-martial and human-rights reports.

The Bush administration refuses to release full records of detainee treatment, and no senior Bush administration official would agree to an on-the-record interview to discuss the findings.

20 months of brutality

The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists. Habibullah and Dilawar, like many Afghans, had only one name.

Dilawar died Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy.

The only U.S. officer reprimanded for the Bagram deaths is Army Capt. Christopher Beiring, who commanded the 377th Military Police Company from summer 2002 to spring 2003.

The soldier who faced the most serious charges, Spc. Willie Brand, said he hit Dilawar about 37 times, including 30 times in the flesh around the knees during one session in an isolation cell.

Brand, who had faced up to 11 years in prison, was reduced in rank to private — his only punishment — after he was found guilty of assaulting and maiming Dilawar.

Former detainees interviewed by reporters and by some human-rights groups said the violence was rampant from late 2001 until summer 2003 or later, at least 20 months.

Although they were at Bagram at different times and speak different languages, the 28 former detainees who told reporters they'd been abused there told strikingly similar stories.

Soldiers who served at Bagram starting in summer 2002 confirmed that detainees were struck routinely.

"Whether they got in trouble or not, everybody struck a detainee at some point," said Brian Cammack, a former specialist with the 377th Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit from Cincinnati. He was sentenced to three months in military confinement and a dishonorable discharge for hitting Habibullah.

The rules didn't apply

Spc. Jeremy Callaway, who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was uncomfortable following orders to "mentally and physically break the detainees." He didn't go into detail.

"I guess you can call it torture," said Callaway, who served in the 377th from August 2002 to January 2003.

Asked why someone would abuse a detainee, Callaway told military investigators: "Retribution for September 11, 2001."

But almost none of the detainees at Bagram had anything to do with the terrorist attacks.

Maj. Jeff Bovarnick, the former chief legal officer for operational law in Afghanistan and legal adviser at Bagram, said in a sworn statement that of 500 detainees he knew of who had passed through Bagram, about 10 were high-value targets, the military's term for senior terrorist operatives.

The mistreatment of detainees at Bagram, some legal experts said, may have been a violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war, which forbids violence against or humiliating treatment of detainees.

The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 imposes penalties up to death for such mistreatment.

But at Bagram, the rules didn't apply. In February 2002, President Bush issued an order denying suspected Taliban and al-Qaida detainees prisoner-of-war status. He also denied them basic Geneva protections known as Common Article Three, which sets a minimum standard for humane treatment.

In 2006, Bush pushed Congress to narrow the definition of a war crime under the War Crimes Act, making prosecution even more difficult.

Military police at Bagram had guidelines, Army Regulation 190-47, telling them they couldn't chain prisoners to doors or to the ceiling. They also had Army Regulation 190-8, which said humiliating detainees wasn't allowed.

But neither was applicable at Bagram, Bovarnick said.

Lack of accountability

The military-police rule book saying that enemy prisoners of war should be treated humanely didn't apply, he said, because the detainees weren't prisoners of war, according to the Bush administration's decision to withhold Geneva Conventions protections from suspected Taliban and al-Qaida detainees.

The military-police guide for the Army correctional system, which prohibits "securing a prisoner to a fixed object, except in emergencies," wasn't applicable, either, because Bagram wasn't a correctional facility, Bovarnick told investigators in 2004.

"I do not believe there is a document anywhere which states that ... either regulation applies, and there is clear guidance by the secretary of defense that detainees were not EPWs," enemy prisoners of war, Bovarnick said.

Compounding the problem, military-police guards and interrogators lacked proper training and received little instruction from commanders about how to do their jobs, according to sworn testimony taken during military investigations.

Senior Pentagon officials refused to be interviewed for this article. Col. Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman, released this statement:

"The Department of Defense policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely. The United States operates safe, humane and professional detention operations for unlawful enemy combatants at war with this country."

No U.S. military officer above the rank of captain has been called to account for what happened at Bagram.

Hey, here's a few stories Bill O'Reilly didn't report on today. Vol. CXXXVI No. 437

By Tom Lasseter

GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. They shouted "Allahu akbar" — God is great — as one of them slammed a metal mop squeezer into Akhtiar's head and sent blood down his face.

Akhtiar was among more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration has described these men as "the worst of the worst."

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. U.S. troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantánamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces.

The Islamic radicals who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government; he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer said. Akhtiar was imprisoned on the basis of false information that anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy Newspapers investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the United States has imprisoned wrongfully in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military-tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that, despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

The reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. Some detainees went home far more militant than when they arrived.

Of course, Guantánamo also houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who along with four other high-profile detainees faces military commission charges. Cases also have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such as attending al-Qaida training camps.

But because the Bush administration set up Guantánamo under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal court challenge, it's impossible to know how many of the 770 men who have been held there were terrorists.

A series of White House directives placed "suspected enemy combatants" beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.

However, the administration's attempts to keep the detainees beyond the law came crashing down Thursday, when the Supreme Court ruled that detainees have the right to contest their cases in federal courts, and that a 2006 act of Congress forbidding them from doing so was unconstitutional.

"Some of these petitioners have been in custody for six years with no definitive judicial determination as to the legality of their detention," the court said in its 5-4 decision.

One former administration official said the White House's initial policy and legal decisions "probably made instances of abuse more likely. ... My sense is that decisions taken at the top probably sent a signal that the old rules don't apply ... Certainly some people read what was coming out of Washington: The gloves are off; this isn't a Geneva world anymore."

Like many others who previously worked in the White House or Defense Department, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of legal and political sensitivities of the issue.

McClatchy's interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantánamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has been reported previously by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.

In contrast, the U.S. military at Guantánamo often relied on secondhand accounts while defense lawyers relied mainly on detainees' accounts.

The Pentagon declined to discuss the findings. It issued a statement Friday saying that military policy always has been to treat detainees humanely, to investigate credible complaints of abuse and to hold people accountable. The statement says an al-Qaida manual urges detainees to lie about prison conditions once they're released. "We typically do not respond to each and every allegation of abuse made by past and present detainees," the statement said.

The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantánamo detention center that many prisoners weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment that Guantánamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least one-third of the population didn't belong there.

Of 66 detainees interviewed by McClatchy, the evidence indicates that 34, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had ties to al-Qaida's leadership, and it isn't clear any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy's findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, refused to comment.

The Pentagon's only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.

"These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians," Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.

Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy's conclusions squared with their observations.

"As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless," a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using "Gitmo," military slang for Guantánamo.

Rather than take a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the "War Council" devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected "enemy combatants" indefinitely with few legal rights.

The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed Bush to disregard or rewrite U.S. law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.

The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that U.S. soldiers — along with War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.

The Bush administration didn't launch a formal review of the detentions until a 2004 Supreme Court decision forced it to begin holding military tribunals at Guantánamo. The Supreme Court ruling last week said those tribunals were deeply flawed, but it didn't close them down.

So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six detainees — less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who have been at Guantánamo — with direct involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks; they dropped charges in one case. Those few cases are now in question after the high court's ruling Thursday.

















By Kevin Landrigan

CONCORD – The tax cut plan of Democratic nominee to be Barack Obama offers three times the break for middle class families than proposals of likely Republican nominee John McCain, according to analysts working for a left-leaning think tank.

Families making between $37,595 and $66,354 of annual income with Obama would get an average tax cut of $1,042 per family while McCain’s tax cut for this group would be $319, the report states.

“The choice in November for tax policy may be the largest voters have ever had in this country,” said Jason Furman, director of economic policy for Barack Obama’s campaign.

“John McCain’s tax cut is far larger, more regressive and far more radical than anything President George W. Bush has ever proposed. Barack Obama is proposing one of the largest income tax cuts for the middle class in American history.”

The McCain campaign fired back Wednesday that it’s their candidate who has a better record of voting for tax cuts while Obama, in the Senate, has voted to raise some taxes.

“Barack Obama voted 94 times to raise taxes in just three years in the Senate. Any suggestion that he’ll lower taxes for hard-working New Hampshire families is an insult to their intelligence,” said Jeff Grappone, McCain’s New England communications director.

“Facts are facts. Barack Obama has promised higher income taxes, Social Security taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes and tax hikes on small businesses. These tax hikes will hit middle class Americans and seniors hardest, and it’s change we can’t afford.”

The Telegraph obtained a copy of the report expected to form Obama’s response to McCain’s planned visit to Nashua on Thursday afternoon.

McCain is hosting a town hall-style forum on the Daniel Webster College campus, the first since he challenged Obama last week to join him for a series of question and answer sessions without a moderator.

Once fully implemented, the report finds 23 percent of McCain’s tax cut goes to the wealthiest Americans making more than $2.8 million a year.

McCain’s plan give this group an average tax cut of $270,000, the report said.
By contrast, Obama would raise taxes for these wealthy families by an average $700,000 a year according to the report.

Obama pays for his plan in part by raising the top tax rate on capital gains and dividends to 25 percent.

McCain eventually sets those rates to be no higher than 15 percent.

The individual authors of this 36-page report work for the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.

They state these conclusions are their own and aren’t meant to represent views of the Tax Policy Center.

Obama’s cuts include a tax credit for working families of $500 for a one-earner household, $1,000 if both adults are employed.

The Obama campaign states this would eliminate income taxes for families making less than $40,000 a year.

Obama offers a similar tax credit for seniors to erase income taxes for those couples with $50,000 of annual income.

The report goes on to conclude, however, that more than a third or 10 million seniors would pay higher taxes under Obama’s plan.

McCain would nearly double the exemption for dependents – from $3,600 to $7,000 – in 2009 for families making less than $50,000 in 2009. This would be phased in for families that make more to $7,000 by 2016.

McCain lowers the top corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. Obama would raise it from 35 percent now to 39.6 percent.

The report contends that the total cost of McCain’s plan is under-estimated by phasing it in and having some breaks already schedule to expire in future years.
“Like President Bush’s tax cuts, the true cost of McCain’s policies may be masked by phase-ins and sunsets (scheduled expiration dates) that reduce the estimate costs,” the report states.

It also contends both candidates overestimate revenue they would get from closing corporate tax loopholes.

“As noted, both candidates may be over-optimistic in their revenue targets for tax loopholes closers – Obama probably more than McCain,” it states.

McCain also fails to identify enough cuts in federal spending to help pay for his plan, the report concludes.