NUPGE, 28/2/2008

Canadians for Afghanistan and Friends of Science have connections to Harper's political agenda

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Guardian, 28/2/2008

British libel law means our press is vulnerable and the wealthy are shielded from criticism

Jo Holmes, Accountancy Age, 28/2/2008

Elitsa Vucheva, EUObserver, 26/2/2008

After a heated debate, MEPs from the budgetary control committee voted on Tuesday afternoon (26 February) not to publish a confidential report detailing abuses in the way some deputies use their monthly staff allowance.

In the morning session of the committee, the MEPs got locked in an internal dispute over whether to make the 92-page document public or not.

Aida Edemariam, The Guardian, 28/2/2008

In 2005, a Nobel prize-winning economist began the painstaking process of calculating the true cost of the Iraq war. In his new book, he reveals how short-sighted budget decisions, cover-ups and a war fought in bad faith will affect us all for decades to come. Aida Edemariam meets Joseph Stiglitz

Fitful spring sunshine is warming the neo-gothic limestone of the Houses of Parliament, and the knots of tourists wandering round them, but in a basement cafe on Millbank it is dark, and quiet, and Joseph Stiglitz is looking as though he hasn't had quite enough sleep. For two days non-stop he has been talking - at the LSE, at Chatham House, to television crews - and then he is flying to Washington to testify before Congress on the subject of his new book. Whatever their reservations - and there will be a few - representatives will have to listen, because not many authors with the authority of Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, an academic tempered by four years on Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and another three as chief economist at the World Bank (during which time he developed an influential critique of globalisation), will have written a book that so urgently redefines the terms in which to view an ongoing conflict. The Three Trillion Dollar War reveals the extent to which its effects have been, and will be, felt by everyone, from Wall Street to the British high street, from Iraqi civilians to African small traders, for years to come.

Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn. The figure was so low, they didn't believe it, and decided to investigate. The paper they wrote together, and published in January 2006, revised the figure sharply upwards, to between $1 and $2 trillion. Even that, Stiglitz says now, was deliberately conservative: "We didn't want to sound outlandish."

So what did the Republicans say? "They had two reactions," Stiglitz says wearily. "One was Bush saying, 'We don't go to war on the calculations of green eye-shaded accountants or economists.' And our response was, 'No, you don't decide to fight a response to Pearl Harbour on the basis of that, but when there's a war of choice, you at least use it to make sure your timing is right, that you've done the preparation. And you really ought to do the calculations to see if there are alternative ways that are more effective at getting your objectives. The second criticism - which we admit - was that we only look at the costs, not the benefits. Now, we couldn't see any benefits. From our point of view we weren't sure what those were."

Appetites whetted, Stiglitz and Bilmes dug deeper, and what they have discovered, after months of chasing often deliberately obscured accounts, is that in fact Bush's Iraqi adventure will cost America - just America - a conservatively estimated $3 trillion. The rest of the world, including Britain, will probably account for about the same amount again. And in doing so they have achieved something much greater than arriving at an unimaginable figure: by describing the process, by detailing individual costs, by soberly listing the consequences of short-sighted budget decisions, they have produced a picture of comprehensive obfuscation and bad faith whose power comes from its roots in bald fact. Some of their discoveries we have heard before, others we may have had a hunch about, but others are completely new - and together, placed in context, their impact is staggering. There will be few who do not think that whatever the reasons for going to war, its progression has been morally disquieting; following the money turns out to be a brilliant way of getting at exactly why that is.

Next month America will have been in Iraq for five years - longer than it spent in either world war. Daily military operations (not counting, for example, future care of wounded) have already cost more than 12 years in Vietnam, and twice as much as the Korean war. America is spending $16bn a month on running costs alone (ie on top of the regular expenses of the Department of Defence) in Iraq and Afghanistan; that is the entire annual budget of the UN. Large amounts of cash go missing - the well-publicised $8.8bn Development Fund for Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority, for example; and the less-publicised millions that fall between the cracks at the Department of Defence, which has failed every official audit of the past 10 years. The defence department's finances, based on an accounting system inaccurate for anything larger than a grocery store, are so inadequate, in fact, that often it is impossible to know exactly how much is being spent, or on what.

This is on top of misleading information: in January 2007 the administration estimated that the much-vaunted surge would cost $5.6bn. But this was only for combat troops, for four months - they didn't mention the 15,000-28,000 support troops who would also have to be paid for. Neither do official numbers count the cost of death payments, or caring for the wounded - even though the current ratio of wounded to dead, seven to one, is the highest in US history. Again, the Department of Defence is being secretive and misleading: official casualty records list only those wounded in combat. There is, note Stiglitz and Bilmes in their book, "a separate, hard-to-find tally of troops wounded during 'non-combat' operations" - helicopter crashes, training accidents, anyone who succumbs to disease (two-thirds of medical evacuees are victims of disease); those who aren't airlifted, ie are treated on the battlefield, simply aren't included. Stiglitz and Bilmes found this partial list accidentally; veterans' organisations had to use the Freedom of Information Act in order to get full figures (at which point the ratio of injuries to fatalities rises to 15 to one). The Department of Veterans Affairs, responsible for caring for these wounded, was operating, for the first few years of the war, on prewar budgets, and is ruinously overstretched; it is still clearing a backlog of claims from the Vietnam war. Many veterans have been forced to look for private care; even when the government pays for treatment and benefits, the burden of proof for eligibility is on the soldier, not on the government. The figure of $3 trillion includes what it will cost to pay death benefits, and to care for some of the worst-injured soldiers that army surgeons have ever seen, for the next 50 years.

By way of context, Stiglitz and Bilmes list what even one of these trillions could have paid for: 8 million housing units, or 15 million public school teachers, or healthcare for 530 million children for a year, or scholarships to university for 43 million students. Three trillion could have fixed America's social security problem for half a century. America, says Stiglitz, is currently spending $5bn a year in Africa, and worrying about being outflanked by China there: "Five billion is roughly 10 days' fighting, so you get a new metric of thinking about everything."

I ask what discoveries Stiglitz found the most disturbing. He laughs, somewhat mirthlessly. "There were actually so many things - some of it we suspected, but there were a few things I couldn't believe." The fact that a contractor working as a security guard gets about $400,000 a year, for example, as opposed to a soldier, who might get about $40,000. That there is a discrepancy we might have guessed - but not its sheer scale, or the fact that, because it is so hard to get insurance for working in Iraq, the government pays the premiums; or the fact that, if these contractors are injured or killed, the government pays both death and injury benefits on top. Understandably, this has forced a rise in sign-up bonuses (as has the fact that the army is so desperate for recruits that it is signing up convicted felons). "So we create a competition for ourselves. Nobody in their right mind would have done that. The Bush administration did that ... that I couldn't believe. And that's not included in the cost the government talks about."

Then there was the discovery that sign-up bonuses come with conditions: a soldier injured in the first month, for example, has to pay it back. Or the fact that "the troops, for understandable reasons, are made responsible for their equipment. You lose your helmet, you have to pay. If you get blown up and you lose your helmet, they still bill you." One soldier was sued for $12,000 even though he had suffered massive brain damage. Some families have had to buy their children body armour, saving the government costs in the short term; those too poor to afford it sustain injuries that the government then has to pay for. Then there's the fact that it was not until 2006, when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defence, that the DOD agreed to replace Humvees with mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armoured vehicles, which are much more able to repel roadside bombs; until that time, IEDs killed 1,500 Americans. "This kind of penny-wise, pound-poor behaviour was just unbelievable."

Yet on another level, Stiglitz is unsurprised, because such decisions are of a piece with the thoroughgoing intellectual inconsistency of the Bush administration. The general approach, he says, has been a "pastiche of corporate bail-outs, corporate welfare, and free-market economics that is not based on any consistent set of ideas. And this particular kind of pastiche actually contributed to the failures in Iraq." There are the well-rehearsed reasons: ignoring international democratic processes while advocating democracy; pushing forward liberalisation before Iraq was ready. Stiglitz's twist on this was the emails he was receiving from the United States Agency for International Development, complaining about the Treasury being obstructive. "They were saying, 'Can you help us? Because we're trying to get businesses to work, but the US Treasury is trying to tighten credit, so there's no money in this country.' "

Then, of course, there is the administration's insistence on "sole-source bidding" - awarding vast, multi-year contracts to Halliburton, for example, instead of putting them out to tender. "An academic might say, 'How can you be a free market, yet demand single-source contracting?'" asks Stiglitz now, mildly - but this is not the way the current administration operates. We know quite a lot now about contractors' excesses, but it is their economic effect that Stiglitz and Bilmes are interested in, and this seems often to have been malign. Free market ideals had, of course, to apply to Iraq, if not to Halliburton (which received at least $19.3bn in single-source contracts), so Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, abolished many tariffs on imports, and capped corporate and income tax. Predictably, this led to general asset-stripping, and exposed Iraqi firms to free competition - meaning that many closed down, putting yet more people out of work. ("The benefits of privatisation and free markets in transition economies are debatable, of course," write Stiglitz and Bilmes in their book; a model of understatement, given that Stiglitz is famous for spelling out the harm sustained by poor countries in his book Globalisation and its Discontents (2002), and lost his job at the World Bank for outspokenly making the argument in the first place.) Many reconstruction jobs, in alignment with US procurement law, went to expensive American firms rather than cheaper Iraqi ones - a further waste of resources (one painting job, for example, cost $25m instead of $5m); these American firms, looking to keep their own costs down and profit margins high, imported cheap labour from such countries as Nepal - even though, at this point, one in two Iraqi men was out of work.

This is not, then, pure neocon ideology at work, says Stiglitz: "Ideology of convenience is a better description." It is an ideology illustrated even more clearly in another fact that Stiglitz can't believe - that Bush put through tax cuts while going to war. In Stiglitz and Bilmes's reading, this was downright underhand. Raising taxes, and resorting to the rhetoric of shared sacrifice used in the world wars, for example, would have made Americans more aware of exactly what the war was costing them, and would have provoked opposition sooner. The solution was to borrow the money, at interest of couple of hundred billion dollars a year, which, by 2017, will add up to another trillion dollars or so. This government will be gone in nine months; subsequent administrations, and generations, will have to pay it off.

At the same time, Stiglitz and Bilmes argue, the Federal Reserve colluded in this obfuscation, because it "kept interest rates lower than they otherwise might have been, and looked the other way as lending standards were lowered, thereby encouraging households to borrow more - and spend more." Alan Greenspan, by this account, encouraged people to take on variable-rate mortgages, even as household savings rates went negative for the first time since the Depression. Individuals were taking on unprecedented debt at the same time as a long housing bubble made them feel wealthy (and less concerned with derring-do abroad) - a scenario echoed on this side of the Atlantic.

As we now know, this couldn't continue - in part because of yet another effect of the war. Whatever the much argued reasons for bombing Baghdad, cheap oil has not been the result. In fact, the price of oil has climbed from $25 a barrel to $100 in the past five years - great for oil companies, and oil-producing countries, who, along with the contractors, are the only beneficiaries of this war, but not for anyone else. After calculations based on futures markets, Stiglitz and Bilmes conclude that a significant proportion of this rise is directly due to the disruptions and instabilities caused by Iraq. This price rise alone has cost the US, which imports about 5bn barrels a year, an extra $25bn per year; projecting to 2015 brings that number to an extra $1.6 trillion on oil alone (against which the recent $125bn stimulus package is simply, as Stiglitz puts it, "a drop in the bucket").

Higher oil prices have a direct effect on family, city and state budgets; they also led to a drop in GDP for the US. When interest rates finally rose in response, hundreds of thousands of home owners found that they were unable to keep up payments, triggering the toxic tsunami of defaulted mortgages that has put the US on the brink of recession and brought down Northern Rock - with all the ramifications for British home owners and banks that that has in turn entailed.

Thus, any idea that war is good for the economy, Stiglitz and Bilmes argue, is a myth. A persuasive myth, of course, and in specific cases, such as world war two, one that has seemed to be true - but in 1939, America and Europe were in a depression; there was all sorts of possible supply in the market, but people didn't have the cash to buy anything. Making armaments meant jobs, more people with more disposable income, and so on - but peacetime western economies these days operate near full employment. As Stiglitz and Bilmes put it, "Money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain"; far better to invest in education, infrastructure, research, health, and reap the rewards in the long term. But any idea that war can be divorced from the economy is also naive. "A lot of people didn't expect the economy to take over the war as the major issue [in the American election]," says Stiglitz, "because people did not expect the economy to be as weak as it is. I sort of did. So one of the points of this book is that we don't have two issues in this campaign - we have one issue. Or at least, the two are very, very closely linked together."

And it is the world economy that is at stake, not just America's. The trillions the rest of the world has shouldered include, of course, the smashed Iraqi economy, the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead, the price, to neighbouring countries, of absorbing thousands of refugees, the coalition dead and wounded (before the war Gordon Brown set aside £1bn; as of late 2007, direct operating costs in Iraq and Afghanistan were £7bn and rising). But the rising price of oil has also meant, accoring to Stiglitz and Bilmes, that the cost to oil-importing industrial countries in Europe and the Far East is now about $1.1 trillion. And to developing countries it has been devastating: they note a study by the International Energy Agency that looked at a sample of 13 African countries and found that rising oil prices have "had the effect of lowering the average income by 3% - more than offsetting all of the increase in foreign aid that they had received in recent years, and setting the stage for another crisis in these countries". Stiglitz made his name by, among other things, criticising America's use of globalisation as a bully pulpit; now he says flatly, "Yes, that's part of being in a global economy. You make a mistake of this order, and it affects people all over the world."

And the borrowed trillions have to come from somewhere. Because "the saving rate [in America] is zero," says Stiglitz, "that means that you have to finance [the war] by borrowing abroad. So China is financing America's war." The US is now operating at such a deficit, in fact, that it doesn't have the money to bail out its own banks. "When Merrill Lynch and Citibank had a problem, it was sovereign funds from abroad that bailed them out. And we had to give up a lot of shares of our ownership. So the largest shareowners in Citibank now are in the Middle East. It should be called the MidEast bank, not the Citibank." This creates a precedent of dependence, "and whether we become dependent on Middle East oil money, or Chinese reserves - it's that dependency that people ought to worry about. That is a big change. The amount of borrowing in the last eight years, on top of the borrowing that began with Reagan - that has all changed the US's economic position in the world."

So quite apart from the war, does he think a particular kind of unfettered market has had its day? "Yes. I think that anybody who believes that the banks know what they're doing has to have their head examined. Clearly, unfettered markets have led us to this economic downturn, and to enormous social problems." Combined with the war, whoever inherits the White House faces a crisis of epic proportions. Where do they go from here? "The way that shapes the debate," says Stiglitz, "is that Americans have to say, 'Even if we stay for another two years, just two years, and we're spending $12bn a month up front in Iraq, and it's costing us another 50% in healthcare, disability, bringing it up to $18bn a month in Iraq, and you look at that in another 24 months, we're talking about half a trillion dollars more for two years - forgetting about the economic cost, the ancillary costs, the social costs - just looking at the budgetary cost - not including the interest - you have to say, is this the way we want to spend a half a trillion dollars? Will it make America stronger? Will it make the Middle East safer? Is this the way we want to spend it?"

Far better, he suggests, to leave rapidly and in a dignified manner, and to spend some of it on helping Iraqis reconstruct their own country - and the rest on investing in and strengthening the American economy, so that it can retain its independence, and have the wherewithal, at least, to play a responsible role in the world. The book ends with a list of 18 specific reforms arising from Stiglitz and Bilmes's discoveries, focusing on exactly how to fund and run a war from now on (depend not on emergency funds and borrowing but on surtaxes, for example, so that voters know exactly what it is they are paying for, and can vote accordingly). He has been approached by Barack Obama as a possible adviser should he reach the White House, although he says, "I've gone beyond the age where I would want to be in Washington full time. I would be interested in trying to help shape the bigger picture issues, and in particular the issues associated with America positioning itself in the new global world, and re-establishing the bonds with other countries that have been so damaged by the Bush administration."

I suggest, as devil's advocate, that to count costs in the way he has, and to advise retrenchment, might be seen as encouraging America to return to isolationism. "No. I think that's fundamentally wrong. The problem with Iraq was that it was the wrong war, and the wrong set of issues. Obama was very good about this. He said, 'I'm not against war - I'm just against stupid wars.' And I feel very much the same way. While we were worried about WMD that did not exist in Iraq, WMD did occur in North Korea. To use an American expression, we took our eye off the ball. And while we were fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan got worse, Pakistan got worse. So because we were fighting battles that we couldn't win, we lost battles that we could have." To discover that those lost battles included better healthcare for millions of Americans, a robust world economy, a healthier and more independent Africa, and a more stable Middle East, seems worth a bit of green-eye-shaded number crunching.

In figures

$16bn
The amount the US spends on the monthly running costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - on top of regular defence spending

$138
The amount paid by every US household every month towards the current operating costs of the war

$19.3bn
The amount Halliburton has received in single-source contracts for work in Iraq

$25bn
The annual cost to the US of the rising price of oil, itself a consequence of the war

$3 trillion
A conservative estimate of the true cost - to America alone - of Bush's Iraq adventure. The rest of the world, including Britain, will shoulder about the same amount again

$5bn
Cost of 10 days' fighting in Iraq

$1 trillion
The interest America will have paid by 2017 on the money borrowed to finance the war

3%
The average drop in income of 13 African countries - a direct result of the rise in oil prices. This drop has more than offset the recent increase in foreign aid to Africa

Elizabeth Williamson, Washington Post, 26/2/2008

The Guardian, 26/2/2008

British law protects the right of workers to belong to a trade union, but in the US, union-busting is a lucrative business. So should we be worried that aggressive 'union-avoidance' consultancies are increasingly at work here? Jon Henley and Ed Pilkington report

Like many British trades unions, the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association makes a small but regular annual contribution to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, a reputable organisation that has campaigned for many years against the US trade blockade of Cuba and for the right of the Cuban people to national sovereignty and self-determination.

But for one firm of so-called labour relations consultants hired five years ago by Culina Logistics, a transport firm working for some of the world's leading food and drinks companies, that paltry £80 donation was reason enough, when the union attempted to organise the workforce at one of its warehouses, to stick up a poster declaring, in all seriousness: "Your subscription bankrolls one-party communist states."

The Guardian, 23/2/2008

From government to big business, if you have a dirty secret, Wikileaks is your nightmare. David Leigh and Jonathan Franklin on the site a US court has tried to muzzle

A secretive Swiss bank landed an apparently novel censorship blow against the internet this week. Anyone who tried to call up wikileaks.org, a global website devoted to publicising leaked documents, found themselves frustrated. The site simply wasn't there any more.

The Julius Baer bank in Zurich succeeded in hamstringing the shadowy individuals behind the website by the simple trick of moving not against them, but against a US company that hosted their domain name.

Columbia Journalism Review, Trudy Lieberman, 15/2/2008

A “more complicated truth” on campaign contributions

Saturday night at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Richmond, Virginia, Barack Obama did it again. He said he hadn’t taken money from lobbyists. The election, he said, was boiling down to “a choice between debating John McCain about lobbying reform with a nominee who’s taken more money from lobbyists than he has, [presumably Hillary Clinton] or doing it with a campaign that hasn’t taken a dime of their money because we’ve been funded by you the American people.” That he does not take money from lobbyists or from political action committees (PACs) is a point Obama often makes on the campaign trail, and his no-dirty-money rhetoric has positioned him as the candidate brave enough to shun business as usual in Washington. In November in Iowa, he said corporate lobbyists “have not funded my campaign.” And in December he said in a New Hampshire Public Radio program, “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over, that they had not funded my campaigns…” His message of financial purity is catching on. For just one recent example, a student writing in The Daily Evergreen, the student newspaper at Washington State University, told his readers last week that Obama has been careful not to compromise himself, “rejecting campaign support from Political Action Committees and lobbyists.”

The word “lobbyist” seems to have a particular meaning in Obama’s campaign vocabulary. His stump speeches imply that he is not taking money from people who want things from the government and push for them. The reality is that he has.

To explain: Opensecrets.org, the Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics, is the most authoritative source on campaign finances. Basing its reports on data from the Federal Election Commission, the Center shows that Obama indeed doesn’t take much money from a sector the Center calls “lobbyists.” Through the end of December, Clinton received more than $800,000 and McCain around $400,000 from this group, which the Center says includes people who work for lobbying firms at the local, state, and federal level and their relatives who are not otherwise employed, as well as those who are officially registered as Washington lobbyists. Obama received contributions of about just $86,000 from this group. Obama’s Web site says he doesn’t take money from Washington lobbyists or political action committees,and the Center says that if his campaign finds that the money came from registered Washington lobbyists, it does get returned.

How meaningful is this? “It’s a politically smart position for him to take. It sounds profound,” says Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics. “But in fact neither PACs nor lobbyists give a lot to presidential campaigns. He’s not leaving a whole lot of money on the table by eschewing PACs and lobbyists.” PAC money represents only about one percent of all the money in a presidential race because, Ritsch says, so many people donate that their contributions dwarf PAC money.

Significantly, the Center’s lobbyist sector excludes in-house lobbyists who work solely for one company, union, trade association, or other group. These people may lobby, but their contributions are grouped in the totals for the various industries they represent, along with contributions from other employees in the sector, their relatives, whatever PAC money has been raised, and donations from trade and professional associations which, of course, carry lots of weight in the horse trading that occurs when legislation is drafted. (Corporations cannot contribute directly to candidates.)

Contributions made by the various industry sectors tell the real story in a presidential race. And Opensecrets.org shows that Obama is picking up gobs of money put on the table by these special interests—including those involved in health care, which will surely have a lot riding on the outcome of the election and will expect to be heard after the election is over.

Consider the sector called lawyers and law firms. Clearly, lawyers and law firms lobby on behalf of their own interests—like fighting malpractice reform, which could again surface as a thorny issue for the new administration. Clinton and Obama have raised similar amounts from lawyers and law firms—$11.8 and $9.5 million. McCain and Huckabee have taken far less. The health sector has also given to Obama, Clinton, and McCain. In the pharmaceutical and health product industries, contributions to Clinton total $349,000 and $338,000 to Obama. Again, McCain trails in donations at about $98,000, an indication that the sector sees the real action on the Democratic side of the ballot. Health professionals, which include doctors, nurses, and dentists, have given Clinton some $2.3 million and Obama $1.7 million.

Brian Beutler, Mother Jones, 22/2/2008

The Pentagon spun a minor melee off the coast of Iran into a direct menace to U.S. interests. Why isn't Congress concerned?

"You will explode in a few minutes." According to the Pentagon, those menacing words, directed at U.S. warships, came from an Iranian Guard Corps sailor aboard an armed speedboat that maneuvered uncomfortably close to the American ships in the Strait of Hormuz early last month. The incident very nearly escalated into a military confrontation with Iran.

But there's a problem with the Pentagon's version of events: it was highly misleading. The threat likely didn't come from an Iranian sailor, nor was the confrontation as dramatic as the Pentagon portrayed it. Yet, the administration nearly spun this fairly insignificant episode into a casus belli. How has the Democratic Congress reacted to the Pentagon's phony depiction of this encounter? It hasn't. Six weeks have passed without any hint of a congressional inquiry.

Should Congress decide to probe the administration's portrayal of the Hormuz confrontation, its jurisdiction over the issue would be fairly broad. An investigation into the matter could hypothetically involve any number of congressional committees, including the House and Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, as well as Henry Waxman's House oversight committee.

In the days following the January 6 confrontation, I asked staff members of all the relevant committees what action, if any, might be taken. The House Armed Services Committee, I was told, was following the matter closely. And in its first week back from the Christmas recess the Senate Armed Services Committee received a staff briefing on the incident. But since then neither committee has indicated that its members are concerned with the possibility that the Pentagon may have misled the public. (Aides on the House Foreign Affairs and the Senate Foreign Relations committees did not respond to repeated inquiries.)

The lone voice of congressional concern appears to be Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.), who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs. Last fall, his committee held a series of hearings examining the tense relationship between the U.S. and Iran, including the possibility that a minor melee—quite like the one in the Strait—could trigger an accidental war.

"The recent incident in the Strait of Hormuz underscores the need for means to be developed to prevent inadvertent armed escalation between the U.S. and Iran," he says, adding that "incidents involving Iranian speedboats are not unforeseeable.... We've known about these tactics for many, many years." He notes that his subcommittee will continue to investigate "conflict de-escalation mechanisms that should be in place in order to ensure that our country does not fall into an armed conflict that would not be in our national security interests."

But the possibility of an accidental war is somewhat tangential to the matter at hand. The real question is whether key details of the Hormuz confrontation were distorted by the Pentagon.

And evidence suggests that they were.

During the January 6 confrontation, according to news accounts, three Navy ships crossed paths with five Iranian speedboats manned by perhaps one or two dozen Iranian sailors. The sailors taunted their American counterparts as they blazed through the Strait of Hormuz and passed near the Navy vessels. It was aggressive, to be sure, but too common an occurrence in this well-traveled waterway to be accurately described a threatening maneuver.

About a half-hour later, after warnings had been traded back and forth between sailors, a new male voice crept onto the radio frequency the Americans were using to communicate with the Iranians and issued the now infamous warning. He spoke in English, but, as an audio recording of the the encounter indicates, his accent was not Persian.

The Pentagon chose to describe the incident differently. Senior Pentagon officials attributed the mystery voice—now thought by many observers and Navy officials to belong to an infamous maritime prankster known as the "Filipino Monkey"—to the Iranians, ultimately releasing video footage of the confrontation with audio of the threat superimposed over it to the public.

What did the Bush administration stand to gain by emphasizing this confrontation? It's hard to say. But one possible explanation is that this was a way to play up the Iranian threat after the administration's claims about Iran's nuclear ambitions were seriously undercut by the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, released in November, which found that the country had terminated its nuclear weapons program four years earlier.

With Iranian naval forces threatening Americans, Iran could be depicted as a direct menace. Is that why the Pentagon engaged in this cut-and-paste exercise? Who ordered it? Was there any vetting before the Pentagon released its misleading account of the incident? Was anyone held accountable? There are many questions that linger in the wake of the January confrontation. But for the most part Congress seems uninterested in seeking the truth.

The Associated Press, 21/2/2008

WASHINGTON — The pharmaceutical industry's main trade group spent more than $22 million lobbying the federal government in 2007, a 25 percent boost from the year before that paid off on some key issues.

Proposals aimed at lowering drug prices and restricting industry advertising fell by the wayside in Congress. But lobbying experts say the road ahead for the industry looks increasingly bumpy.

"This seems to be a case where the increase in lobbying activity is defensive, not offensive," said Massie Ritsch of the Center for Responsive Politics, a government watchdog.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, whose members include Pfizer, Amgen Inc. and Eli Lill& Co., spent about $12 million in the second half of 2007 to lobby on how prices are set for seniors' medications, rules governing drug imports and other issues, according to lobbying disclosure records filed last week.

Ken Johnson, a senior vice president at the trade group, said that while the industry faced many challenges on Capitol Hill last year, most of the increased spending went toward advertisements urging Congress to reauthorize a program that provides health care to poor children.

Democrats and Republicans agreed early in the year that the program must be reauthorized, though they continue to wrangle over its future size.

"We would like to see every person in America have health insurance," Johnson said. President Bush has twice vetoed efforts to add 6 million to 10 million children to the program over the next five years.

The drug industry, consistently one of the top spenders in Washington, has long faced criticism from some lawmakers over the safety and price of its products. But beginning late in 2006, after the Democrats regained control of Congress, drug makers faced a slew of proposals unfriendly to their interests.

The industry trade group advocated against:

_ a proposal by House Democrats that would have allowed the government _ not private health insurers _ to negotiate drug prices for seniors in Medicare. The measure, aimed at wringing lower prices from drug makers, stalled in the House after President Bush threatened to veto it.

_ legislation that would allow the U.S. to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and other foreign countries, citing safety concerns. Import proponents said foreign competition would help drive down U.S. drug prices. The issue failed to gain traction in Congress, despite several high-profile hearings.

_ patent-reform legislation that it argued could weaken legal protections on drug patents. High-tech companies supported the bill that passed the House last year aimed at improving the U.S. patent system, but PhRMA argued it could weaken patent protections by reducing infringement penalties. The bill is still pending in the Senate.

_ a bill overhauling the Food and Drug Administration's drug-safety system. The legislation, which became law last September, gave FDA new powers to update drug safety labeling and monitor side effects after drugs are approved.

But the final bill did not include restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising opposed by the drug industry.

Former Louisiana Rep. Billy Tauzin is the pharmaceutical industry trade group's president and chief executive.

PhRMA's other registered lobbyists include: Mimi Kneuer, who was Tauzin's former chief of staff, Amy Efantis, former legislative director for Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., Valerie Jewett, former legislative director for Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., and Matt Sulkala, who was senior legislative assistant to Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Fla.

Clodagh Mulvey, The Irish Times, 22/2/2008

Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Finance have dropped in volume by nearly 80 per cent since the Act was amended in 2003, it was revealed today.

Responding to a Dáil question about the number of requests received by the Department since the introduction of the Act in 1997, Minister for Finance Brian Cowen provided data showing that requests had dropped by 78 per cent in the four year period from 2003 to 2007 - from 305 to 66 requests annually.

The Freedom of Information Act obliges departments, the HSE, local authorities and other statutory agencies to publish information on their activities and to make personal information available to citizens.

Describing the figures as "utterly alarming", Fine Gael deputy Lucinda Creighton said the legislation amending the Act in 2003 was "simply flawed" with high fees impeding many citizens from utilising the legislation to its full potential.

"The Minister for Finance has disgracefully refused to reduce fees for FOI requests, which are the highest in Europe. There is an unfair cost barrier in place which is designed to impede members of the public from exercising their rights under the legislation," she added.

Ms Creighton called for the Act to be extended to include bodies such as An Garda Siochána and said the legislation should provide more clarity and less discretion in relation to exemptions in relation to privacy and cabinet confidentiality.

"In a climate of suspicion and mistrust of politicians and political institutions, it is alarming that the Government can continue to stand over legislation that is arbitrary, exclusionary and inconsistent in its application," Ms Creighton said.

"Until these issues are addressed, we in Ireland will continue to lag behind the rest of the modern democratic world in relation to openness and transparency," she added.

Matthew Moore, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23/2/2008

Kevin Rudd was head of the Queensland cabinet office when Wayne Goss gutted the freedom-of-information laws to enable ministers to drive forklifts into the cabinet room loaded with material they wanted exempt from release.

The former Queensland freedom-of-information commissioner Fred Albietz recalled Rudd's role in an interview with The Australian last year, explaining how the laws were tightened when it looked like he would release ministerial briefing notes. "It was the first major attack on FoI, and it has never recovered," Albietz said. "My understanding is that Kevin Rudd was advising the premier … not to release the documentation."

EuObserver, 22/2/2008 

The great and the good of corporate Europe have been meeting in Brussels over the last two days (21-22 February) for the fifth annual European Business Summit, burnishing their green credentials.

The summit, whose theme this year is "Greening the economy: New energy for business", holds the attention of the European Commission perhaps more than any other stakeholder meeting that takes place in the 27-nation bloc.

Jim Pickard, FT.com, 22/2/2008

Former ministers and civil servants who breach the rules when they take jobs in the private sector should face criminal action, a senior Whitehall figure said on Thursday.

Appearing in front of the Commons public administration committee as part of its inquiry into the role of lobbyists – the first such investigation for 15 years – Lord MacLennan said there was a convincing argument for following the US system, where there were clearly defined legal requirements covering such moves.

AMIR ATTARAN, February 21, 2008, Globe and Mail

At the very least, credible public intellectuals should disclose the source of their funding

The war in Afghanistan is one of ideas and ideologies. Ideologies, in that the Pashtun extremist worldview is far from our own. Ideas, in that our society is likely to prevail only if it makes wiser and cleverer decisions than theirs. That is why, when one adds up Canada's advantages in this war, there is none greater than our values of inquiry and debate.

But recently, a new threat has emerged. The Department of National Defence is intruding on academic financing, spending millions of dollars sponsoring think tanks and scholars to offer up agreeable commentary. When these intellectuals comment, they are not always quick to disclose that the military funds them.

By Indira Das-Gupta, Third Sector Online, 18 February 2008

The Euclid Network, which supports voluntary sector leaders across
Europe, has welcomed proposals by the European Commission to make
lobbying more transparent, but has called for greater clarification on
how the plans will affect charities.

After a period of consultation on the European Transparency Initiative,
the commission has recommended a voluntary register of interests for all
lobbyists.

However, the network is calling for the commission to provide greater
clarification because, although NGOs are specifically mentioned with
regard to the register of interests, the proposed code of conduct does
not include a specific category for third sector organisations.

The network has asked what kind of sanctions would be applied in the
event of incorrect registration or breach of the code.

The commission also said the register would become a way to select and
award organisations with special access and funding. But Filippo
Addarii, director of the network, said the plans to introduce incentives
remain unclear.

"Lobbyists must register their funding sources and their aims and
objectives, which will mean that rogue agencies and the 'fake civil
society' are weeded out," he said. "These steps towards accountability
and openness will build trust among third sector organisations.

"However, if the commission does not make clear what the sanctions and
incentives are, how can we sign up? For this to work, obvious sticks and
carrots are needed."

The consultation period closed on Friday, and the commission aims to
have the new code ratified by June 2008.

BBC News, 21/2/2008

The EU's anti-fraud office is to look at an internal report amid claims that it has uncovered embezzlement by MEPs.

The confidential audit is reported to have found that MEPs had not accounted properly for the £100m a year allocated to staff costs.

British Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies, who has seen the report, said he was shocked by the scale of alleged fraud.

But European Parliament officials said it did not deal with individual Euro MPs or reveal cases of fraud.

Possible inquiry

Franz Bruner, director general of Olaf, the EU's internal anti-fraud squad, said he had demanded to see the audit report by the end of this week.

Forbes.com, 21/2/2008

The American Beverage Association spent about $684,616 last year to lobby on childhood nutrition issues.

The trade group spent about $486,915 in the second half of 2007 to lobby Congress, according to a disclosure for posted online Feb. 14 by the Senate's public records office. It lobbied on developing new nutritional standards for school food programs.

The American Beverage Association spent about $198,000 during the first six months of 2007 to lobby on similar issues and legislation that create a task force on childhood obesity and redefine foods that have minimal nutritional value.

Members of the trade group's board of directors work for companies such as Coca-Cola (nyse: KO - news - people ), Pepsi (nyse: PEP - news - people ), Cadbury Schweppes (nyse: CSG - news - people ) and Nestle (other-otc: NSRGY.PK - news - people ).

Lobbyists are required to disclose activities that could influence members of the executive and legislative branches, under a federal law enacted in 1995.

Midlothian Advertiser, 5/2/2008