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The Nine Circles of Hell! – all the news that gives you fits in print – for Thursday, June 16, 2011, are:

Ex-spy says Bush White House wanted “to get” past This is Hell! guest

Instead of stopping guns, Arizona let arms flow to drug cartels

Healthcare spending cuts for poor, jobless, but not seniors (they vote)

Republicans want to cut food aid for low-income mothers and children

“Housing crash larger, faster than during the Great Depression”

Wisconsin’s anti-collective bargaining law back, for now

TSA screeners profiled so much they were called “Mexican hunters”

China downplays lead poisoning from polluting smelters, factories

Fukushima: “biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind”

Ex-spy says Bush White House wanted “to get” past This is Hell! guest
The New York Times
(6/16/11)

Ex-Spy Alleges Bush White House Sought to Discredit Critic

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it …

Since a series of Watergate-era abuses involving spying on White House political enemies, the C.I.A. and other spy agencies have been prohibited from collecting intelligence concerning the activities of American citizens inside the United States.

“These allegations, if true, raise very troubling questions,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former C.I.A. general counsel. “The statute makes it very clear: you can’t spy on Americans.” Mr. Smith added that a 1981 executive order that prohibits the C.I.A. from spying on Americans places tight legal restrictions not only on the agency’s ability to collect information on United States citizens, but also on its retention or dissemination of that data …

Mr. Carle said that sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. Mr. Low and Mr. Carle have starkly different recollections of what happened. According to Mr. Carle, Mr. Low returned from a White House meeting one day and inquired who Juan Cole was, making clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to gather information on him. Mr. Carle recalled his boss saying, “The White House wants to get him.”

“‘What do you think we might know about him, or could find out that could discredit him?’” Mr. Low continued, according to Mr. Carle.

Mr. Carle said that he warned that it would be illegal to spy on Americans and refused to get involved, but that Mr. Low seemed to ignore him.

“But what might we know about him?” he said Mr. Low asked. “Does he drink? What are his views? Is he married?”

Mr. Carle said that he responded, “We don’t do those sorts of things,” but that Mr. Low appeared undeterred. “I was intensely disturbed by this,” Mr. Carle said.

He immediately went to see David Gordon, then the acting director of the council. Mr. Carle said that after he recounted his exchange with Mr. Low, Mr. Gordon responded that he would “never, never be involved in anything like that.”

Mr. Low was not at work the next morning, Mr. Carle said. But on his way to a meeting in the C.I.A.’ s front office, a secretary asked if he would drop off a folder to be delivered by courier to the White House. Mr. Carle said he opened it and stopped cold. Inside, he recalled, was a memo from Mr. Low about Juan Cole that included a paragraph with “inappropriate, derogatory remarks” about his lifestyle. Mr. Carle said he could not recall those details nor the name of the White House addressee.

He took the document to Mr. Gordon right away, he said. The acting director scanned the memo, crossed out the personal data about Professor Cole with a red pen, and said he would handle it, Mr. Carle said. He added that he never talked to Mr. Low or Mr. Gordon about the memo again …

Mr. Low, who no longer works in government, did recall being curious about Professor Cole. “I remember the name, as somebody I had never heard of, and who wrote on terrorism,” he said. “I don’t recall anything specific of how it came up or why.”

Mr. Gordon, who has also left government service, said that he did not dispute Mr. Carle’s account, but did not remember meeting with him to discuss efforts to discredit Professor Cole.

Several months after the initial incident, Mr. Carle said, a colleague on the National Intelligence Council asked him to look at an e-mail he had just received from a C.I.A. analyst. The analyst was seeking advice about an assignment from the executive assistant to the spy agency’s deputy director for intelligence, John A. Kringen, directing the analyst to collect information on Professor Cole.

Mr. Carle said his colleague, whom he declined to identify, was puzzled by the e-mail. Mr. Carle, though, said he tracked Mr. Kringen’s assistant down in the C.I.A. cafeteria.

“Have you read his stuff?” Mr. Carle recalled the assistant saying about Professor Cole. “He’s really hostile to the administration.”

The assistant, whom Mr. Carle declined to identify, refused to say who was behind the order. Mr. Carle said he warned that he would go to the agency’s inspector general or general counsel if Mr. Kringen did not stop the inquiry.

Intelligence officials confirmed that the assistant sent e-mails to an analyst seeking information about Professor Cole in 2006. They said he had done so at the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which had been asked by White House officials to find out why Professor Cole had been invited to CIA-sponsored conferences.

John D. Negroponte, who was then the director of national intelligence, said that he did not recall the incident, but that the White House might have asked others in his office about Professor Cole. A spokeswoman for the office said there was no evidence that anyone there had gathered derogatory information about him.

Around the time that Mr. Carle says the White House requests were made, Professor Cole’s conservative critics were campaigning to block his possible appointment to Yale University’s faculty. In 2006, conservative columnists, bloggers and pundits with close ties to the Bush administration railed against him, accusing Professor Cole of being anti-American and anti-Israeli. Yale ultimately scuttled the appointment.

Instead of stopping guns, Arizona let arms flow to drug cartels
CNN
(6/15/11)

Lawmakers zero in on ATF gun trafficking operation

Federal firearms agents in Arizona cringed every time they heard of a shooting after letting waves of guns pass into the hands of Mexican drug gangs, some of those agents told a House committee Wednesday.

It was part of an operation aimed at tracking the flow of weapons across the U.S.-Mexican border, but the operation has come under intense criticism since the December killing of a U.S. Border Patrol officer. Operation Fast and Furious, as the program was known, was “a colossal failure of leadership,” said Peter Forcelli, a supervisor at the Phoenix field office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

When U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was wounded and six others were killed in a January assassination attempt in Tucson, Forcelli said, an agency spokesman told him “that there was concern from the chain of command that the gun was hopefully not a Fast and Furious gun.” Another agent, Lee Casa, said, “This happened time and time again.”

“Every time there’s a shooting, whether it was Mrs. Giffords or anybody, any time there is a shooting in the general Phoenix area or even in, you know, Arizona, we’re fearful that it might be one of these firearms,” Casa told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The killings of three people connected with the U.S. consulate in Juarez, Mexico, caused similar anxiety, Casa said.

And a third agent, John Dodson, told lawmakers: “I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest. I hope the committee will receive a better explanation than I.”

Operation Fast and Furious focused on following “straw purchasers,” or people who legally bought weapons that were then transferred to criminals and destined for Mexico. But instead of intercepting the weapons when they switched hands, Operation Fast and Furious called for ATF agents to let the guns “walk” and wait for them to surface in Mexico, according to a committee report.

The idea was that once the weapons in Mexico were traced back to the straw purchasers, the entire arms smuggling network could be brought down. Instead, the report argues, letting the weapons slip into the wrong hands was a deadly miscalculation that resulted in preventable deaths, including that of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Terry was killed last year just north of the Mexican border in Arizona after he confronted a group of bandits believed to be preying on illegal immigrants. Two weapons found near the scene of the killing were traced to Fast and Furious.

“I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe it at first,” Terry’s mother, Josephine, said of when she learned that the ATF may have let some of the guns used in the attack slip through its fingers. Terry’s family said they want all those involved in his killing and who helped put the weapons in their hands to be prosecuted.

“We ask that if a government official made a wrong decision, that they admit their error and take responsibility for his or her actions,” Robert Heyer, Terry’s cousin and family spokesman, testified.

The committee’s chairman, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, called the operation “felony stupid” …

Speaking before the committee, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said that the operation started with the flawed assumption that there was a large arms trafficking network that was operating.

“That kind of assumption can cause you to start with a conclusion and work backwards, looking for facts that fit the case. Until you figure out that you’ve got the cart before the horse, you’re probably not going to get anywhere,” he said.

Casa said ATF supervisors in Phoenix, where the project was based, brushed off several agents’ concerns over letting guns go. And Dodson said that despite evidence that straw purchasers were giving their weapons to cartels, the agency went no further than to do some surveillance.

“Knowing all the while, just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico, we still did nothing,” he said.

Forcelli, also criticized the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona for what he described as a tendency not to prosecute arms trafficking cases, and said “toothless” laws against straw buyers made it difficult to recruit low-level operatives as witnesses.

“With these types of cases, for somebody to testify against members of a cartel where the alternative is seeing a probation officer once a month, they’re going to opt toward not cooperating with the law enforcement authorities,” he said.

Healthcare spending cuts for poor, jobless, but not seniors (they vote)
The New York Times
(6/15/11)

As Number of Medicaid Patients Goes Up, Their Benefits Are About to Drop

The Obama administration injected billions of dollars into Medicaid, the nation’s low-income health program, as the recession deepened two years ago. The money runs out at the end of this month, and benefits are being cut for millions of people, even though unemployment has increased.

From New Jersey to California, state officials are bracing for the end to more than $90 billion in federal largess specifically designated for Medicaid. To hold down costs, states are cutting Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals, limiting benefits for Medicaid recipients, reducing the scope of covered services, requiring beneficiaries to pay larger co-payments and expanding the use of managed care.

As a result, costs can be expected to rise in other parts of the health care system. Cuts in Medicaid payments to doctors, for example, make it less likely that they will accept Medicaid patients and more likely that people will turn to hospital emergency rooms for care. Hospitals and other health care providers often try to make up for the loss of Medicaid revenue by increasing charges to other patients, including those with private insurance, experts say.

Neither the White House nor Congress has tried to extend the extra federal financing for Medicaid, even though the number of beneficiaries is higher now than when Congress approved the aid as part of an economic recovery package in February 2009.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that federal Medicaid spending will decline in 2012 for only the second time in the 46-year history of the program. But states say they will have to have to spend more on Medicaid as they struggle to make up for the loss of federal money.

State officials say they are resigned to the loss of the extra federal matching payments, given the climate in Congress, where deficit reduction is a paramount goal …

Although Medicaid provides health insurance to one in five Americans at some point in a year, it is more vulnerable to cuts than Medicare and Social Security, which have broader political support.

“Medicaid is very much on the chopping block,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care. “Seniors vote. But if you are poor and disabled, you might not vote, and if you are a child, you do not vote — that’s a lot of Medicaid’s population. They don’t have money to do lobbying.”

Republicans want to cut food aid for low-income mothers and children
The Associated Press
(6/15/11)

Republicans dodge farm subsidy cuts

Republicans have maneuvered to quietly prevent a bill that makes large cuts in domestic and international food programs from chipping away at federal farm subsidies.

The GOP move to head off $167 million in cuts in direct government payments to farmers, regardless of crop prices and yields, highlights how difficult it will be for Congress to come up with even a fraction of the more than $2 trillion in long-term budget savings lawmakers have promised.

The annual bill to pay for food and farm programs next year would cut food aid for low-income mothers and children by $685 million, about a 10 percent reduction from this year’s s level.

“Housing crash larger, faster than during the Great Depression”
CNBC
(6/14/11)

US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression

It’s official: The housing crisis that began in 2006 and has recently entered a double dip is now worse than the Great Depression.

Prices have fallen some 33 percent since the market began its collapse, greater than the 31 percent fall that began in the late 1920s and culminated in the early 1930s, according to Case-Shiller data.

The news comes as the Federal Reserve considers whether the economy has regained enough strength to stand on its own and as unemployment remains at a still-elevated 9.1 percent, throwing into question whether the recovery is real.

“The sharp fall in house prices in the first quarter provided further confirmation that this housing crash has been larger and faster than the one during the Great Depression,” Paul Dales, senior economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, wrote in research for clients.

Wisconsin’s anti-collective bargaining law back, for now
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
(6/14/11)

Supreme Court reinstates collective bargaining law

Acting with unusual speed, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the reinstatement of Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial plan to end most collective bargaining for tens of thousands of public workers.

The court found that a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when it hastily approved the collective bargaining measure in March and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had halted the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge.

The changes on collective bargaining will take effect once Secretary of State Doug La Follette arranges for official publication of the stalled bill, and the high court said there was now nothing to preclude him from doing that. La Follette did not return a call Tuesday to say when the law would be published.

The ruling came on lines that have become familiar in recent years for the often divided court.

The majority opinion was by Justices Michael Gableman, David Prosser, Patience Roggensack and Annette Ziegler. The other three justices – Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson and Justices Ann Walsh Bradley and N. Patrick Crooks – concurred in part and dissented in part. Abrahamson’s dissent was particularly stinging as she upbraided her fellow justices for errors and faulty analysis …

But Abrahamson wrote that the order seems to open the court unnecessarily to the charge that the majority has “reached a predetermined conclusion not based on the facts and the law, which undermines the majority’s ultimate decision.”

The majority justices “make their own findings of fact, mischaracterize the parties’ arguments, misinterpret statutes, minimize (if not eliminate) Wisconsin constitutional guarantees, and misstate case law, appearing to silently overrule case law dating back to at least 1891,” Abrahamson wrote …

But Democrats decried the Supreme Court decision for finding lawmakers do not have to follow the open meetings law. They said they would move to amend the state constitution to make them subject to the meetings law, a process that would take years and be difficult to start while they remain in the minority.

“The majority of the Supreme Court is essentially saying that the Legislature is above the law. It’s now clear that unless the constitution is amended, the Legislature is free to ignore any laws on the books,” said a statement from Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha).

During the meeting at the heart of the case, Barca had screamed at Republicans to halt the meeting because he said they were violating the open meetings law. They ignored him as cameras recorded the dramatic confrontation.

Tens of thousands of public workers and their supporters demonstrated at the Capitol in February and March to oppose the collective bargaining changes. They have returned in smaller numbers this week as the Legislature prepared to take up the state budget, and thousands of people rallied on the Capitol lawn shortly after the court issued its order …

The legal fight over Walker’s plan will continue on other fronts. Two other lawsuits are already pending, and “numerous” others are expected, according to Madison attorney Lester Pines, who represented Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller (D-Monona) in the case the Supreme Court decided Tuesday. The other cases challenge the law on other grounds, rather than on open meetings violations.

TSA screeners profiled so much they were called “Mexican hunters”
The Star-Ledger
(6/12/11)

Report: Newark airport screeners targeted Mexicans

A special unit of airport screeners, charged with detecting suspicious behavior, engaged in racial profiling so frequently at Newark Liberty International Airport that their resentful colleagues called them “Mexican hunters,” according to an internal federal report.

Officially known as behavior detection officers, or BDOs, the screeners were supposed to focus on nervous, erratic or evasive gestures or speech and other indicators to single out passengers for extra scrutiny, but instead they concentrated on whether Mexican or Dominican passengers had proper visas or passport stamps, the report said — all at the direction of their managers.

If not, those passengers would be subjected to bag searches, pat downs, questioning and referrals to immigration with bogus behaviors invented by the screeners to cover up the real reason the passengers were singled out.

“It became a joke in the unit, these individuals were called the great Mexican hunters,” Newark BDO Paul Animone told investigators, according the report. “I did not agree or did not go along with these types of referrals, but if I was teamed up with one of these BDOs, I would go along with the referral and perform the bag check. When I disagreed with these referrals and brought it to the attention of the BDO managers, I was told by the BDO managers that I was not a team player” …

The report said Mexican and Dominican passengers were singled out for scrutiny of their travel documents as an easy way to drive up the number of referrals by Newark’s BDO unit so that it would appear productive, even though the officers’ real job was to look for behavior that might indicate a security threat …

Though the Boston report does not say how many BDOs in Newark were racially profiling passengers, it leaves no doubt that the practice was widespread, lasting from early 2008 to late 2009, when investigators began looking into the issue.

Much — but not all — of the activity took place in Terminal B, for international flights. The report’s findings were based on interviews with BDO officers who said they were aware of the practice by several officers, and singled out their managers as the instigators.

The report found that managers’ emphasis on referrals created a perception among BDOs that there was a quota system in place, and that promotions depended on their producing high numbers. The report said one of the managers, George Schultz, instructed officers to manipulate a point system used to assess whether a passenger’s behavior merits referral to law enforcement officers, or LEOs. The report said the practice was so widespread that transportation security officers, or TSOs, and supervisory TSOs, who are not involved in behavior detection, eventually confronted behavior detection managers Robert Hakius and Joseog Yurechko about it.

China downplays lead poisoning from polluting smelters, factories
Reuters
(6/15/11)

China downplays risk to children from lead poisoning: report

Chinese children suffering lead poisoning from polluting smelters and factories have been denied testing, effective treatment and even basic information by officials who downplayed health threats, a human rights advocacy group said on Wednesday.

The report from Human Rights Watch comes after China’s latest lead pollution outbreak, when 103 children and scores of adults were poisoned by tinfoil-making workshops in eastern Zhejiang province.

Beijing has vowed to clean up this chronic pollution, but New York-based Human Rights Watch said those efforts only go so far in addressing the needs of hundreds of thousands of children it says are suffering from lead poisoning in China.

Lead, especially harmful for children, can lead to learning difficulties and behavioral problems, and often parents who work at the plants bring home extra doses on their clothes and skin.

“I want to know how sick my son is, but I can’t trust the local test results,” one mother from Hunan province in southern China told investigators, according to the report available on the Human Rights Watch website: (www.hrw.org).

Fukushima: “biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind”
Al Jazeera
(6/16/11)

Fukushima: It’s much worse than you think

Past This is Hell! guest Dahr Jamail writes …

“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.

Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

“Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,” he said, “You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.”

TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water – as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.

“The problem is how to keep it cool,” says Gundersen. “They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?”

Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.

“The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor,” Gundersen added. “TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water.”

Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive “hot spots” around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.

“We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,” said Gundersen. “The data I’m seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man’s-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can’t clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.”