By Michael J. Sniffen
Associated Press
Monday, April 30, 2007; A07

Black, Hispanic and white drivers are equally likely to be pulled over by police, but African Americans and Hispanics are much more likely to be searched and arrested, a federal study found.

And police are much more likely to use force against or to threaten to use force against African Americans and Hispanics than against whites, whether in a traffic stop or another encounter, according to the Justice Department.

The study, released yesterday by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, covered police contacts with the public during 2005 and was based on interviews by the Census Bureau with nearly 64,000 people age 16 or over.

"The numbers are very consistent" with those found in a similar study of police-public contacts in 2002, said bureau statistician Matthew R. Durose, a co-author of the report.

Traffic stops are the most frequent way police interact with the public, and minority groups have said that many stops and searches are based on race. Some African Americans allege being pulled over for "driving while black."

"The available data is sketchy but deeply concerning," said Hilary O. Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau. The NAACP has done surveys on traffic stops, and he said the racial disparities grow larger as the studies delve deeper.

"It's very important to look at the hit rates for searches -- the number that actually result in finding a crime," Shelton said. "There's a great deal of racial disparity there."

"This report shows there are still disturbing disparities in terms of what happens to people of color after the stop," said Dennis D. Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's racial justice project. He also said better reporting is needed.

This report, like the one for 2002, warns that the racial disparities uncovered "do not constitute proof that police treat people differently along demographic lines." The differences could be explained by circumstances not analyzed by the survey.

Black, Hispanic and white motorists were equally likely to be pulled over by police -- between 8 percent and 9 percent of each group.

The racial disparities showed up after that point:

? African Americans (9.5 percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be searched than whites (3.6 percent).

? African Americans (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1 percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent of the time.

Among all police-public contacts, force was used 1.6 percent of the time. But officers were more likely to use force against or to threaten to use force against African Americans (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) than against whites (1.2 percent).

 

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Science Daily — It’s happened with predictable regularity, every spring since International Bird Rescue Research Center (IBRRC) opened its center in San Pedro in 2001. The staff at the center, which specializes in seabirds, and especially California brown pelicans, calls it DA; short for Domoic Acid. The staff braces for the dead and dying birds they know will come, every spring.

 

This spring is different.  It’s much worse, affecting more species of birds, pinepeds and possibly even whales.  Beaches are littered with dead birds, seals, dolphins, otters, and in Santa Barbara a 29 foot sperm whale washed ashore. The reasons for the deaths are not entirely certain, however, many of the animals tested were positive for domoic acid poisoning. 

Jay Holcomb, IBRRC’s director has many questions, but not enough answers. “I have been doing this work for 35 years and I have never seen anything like this as far as the number of species affected, other than an oil spill,” Holcomb said. “We have very serious concerns about what is happening to seabirds, and how it may affect populations, especially California brown pelicans, who are heading into breeding season. The loss of breeding adults at this time may impact the next generation as well,” Holcomb said. (California brown pelicans are still on the Endangered Species List, but have been petitioned for de-listing).

Pelicans with domoic acid poisoning, which affects the brain, can have seizures while flying, causing them to literally fall from the sky. Some have crashed into car windshields or ended up in places they shouldn’t be, like airport runways and freeways. Holcomb believes many seabirds having seizures out at sea drown, making it virtually impossible to count the bodies. 

Although domoic acid is a naturally occurring toxin produced by microscopic algae, something is making recent blooms of the algae especially virulent. IBRRC is working closely with the Caron Laboratory at USC, providing body fluids from suspect birds for analysis.  Professor Dave Caron and Assistant Research Professor Astrid Schnetzer test the waters off Southern California and alert the center when domoic acid is present. The staff then braces and prepares the ICU.  The only way to save the birds is to flush the toxins out of their systems, a labor intensive process. 

This spring dead birds began littering beaches in March. IBRRC rescue personnel walking the beaches reported “dead birds everywhere.”  Species included grebes, gulls, cormorants, American avocets and loons. Not all test positive for DA. But other neurotoxins such as saxitoxin which can cause paralytic shellfish poisoning in humans, are also being examined by Dave Caron and Astrid Schnetzer. They are studying the birds with the help of IBRRC staff who provide fresh blood and body fluids of all sick birds. Long-time volunteer, Susan Kaveggia, orchestrates the sampling and has been instrumental in forging the relationship with USC.

The Marine Mammal Care Center, which is next door to IBRRC in Fort MacArthur, has been overwhelmed with sick seals and sea lions who eat the same fish as pelicans; anchovies and sardines. The fish eat the affected algae, which don’t kill them, but the animals that eat the fish get concentrated amounts, depending on how many affected fish they eat. Whether they live or die depends how much of the poison they ingest. Many of these sick animals have been tested by Caron and Schnetzer. More than half of those tested have been positive for DA over the past few days.

Humans have died from eating contaminated mussels. Many times people don’t know what made them sick so they don’t report it to health authorities.  In humans, domoic acid poisoning can cause vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, abdominal cramps, headache, dizziness, confusion, disorientation, loss of short-term memory, motor weakness, seizures, cardiac arrhythmias, coma and possibly death. Short term memory loss is permanent, thus the name Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning. Birds and pinepeds exhibit similar symptoms. Because the toxin affects the brain, the long term effects of DA poisoning aren’t known, something that concerns Holcomb. 

“In my opinion, domoic acid is the new DDT,” Holcomb said. “If the effects of DA poisoning are cumulative in the brain, and we don’t know that yet, it could have serious consequences on the population of California Brown Pelicans. As of this point, we just don’t know.”

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by International Bird Rescue Research Center.

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(CNN) -- In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership."

The writers said Tenet has "a moral obligation" to return the Medal of Freedom he received from President Bush.

They also called on him to give more than half the royalties he gets from book, "At the Center of the Storm," to U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq and families of the dead. (Watch Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice talk about Tenet's book)

The letter, signed by Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael, said Tenet should have resigned in protest rather than take part in the administration's buildup to the war. (Read the full letter)

Johnson is a former CIA intelligence official and registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000. McGovern is a former CIA analyst.

Cannistraro is former head of the CIA's counterterrorism division and was head of intelligence for the National Security Council in the late 1980s.

The writers said they agree that Bush administration officials took the nation to war "for flimsy reasons," and that it has proved "ill-advised and wrong-headed."

But, they added, "your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and, as head of the intelligence community, an admission of failed leadership.

"You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq."

Tenet's 'lack of courage'

The writers accused Tenet of having helped send "very mixed signals" to Americans and their legislators prior to the war.

"CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq.

"This intelligence was ignored and later misused."

The letter said CIA officers learned later that month Iraq had no contact with Osama bin Laden and that then-President Saddam Hussein considered the al Qaeda leader to be an enemy. Still, Tenet "went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to al Qaeda.

"You showed a lack of leadership and courage in January of 2003 as the Bush administration pushed and cajoled analysts and managers to let them make the bogus claim that Iraq was on the verge of getting its hands on uranium.

"You signed off on Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations. And, at his insistence, you sat behind him and visibly squandered CIA's most precious asset - credibility."

The letter described Tenet as "one of the bullies."

"You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war being hawked by the president and vice president.

"It now turns out that you were the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community -- a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality."

The letter said Tenet's failure to resist pressures from Cheney and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld helped build public support for a war that has cost more than 3,000 American lives and many times that among Iraqis.

"You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld.

"Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States."

Tenet's memoir, to be published Monday, covers his tenure as director from July 1997 to July 2004.

In an interview to air Sunday on CBS News' "60 Minutes," Tenet expressed outrage that senior officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have used his "slam dunk" reference in discussing Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq over its weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. (Read full story)

"They never let it go. I mean, I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. 'Look at the idiot who told us and we decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous ... Let's everybody just get up and tell the truth.

Tell the American people what really happened."

 

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What might the president do with his new power to declare martial law?

by James Bovard

How many pipe bombs might it take to end American democracy? Far fewer than it would have taken a year ago.

The Defense Authorization Act of 2006, passed on Sept. 30, empowers President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident,” if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of “public order,” or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.

The media and most of Capitol Hill ignored or cheered on this grant of nearly boundless power. But now that the president’s arsenal of authority is swollen and consecrated, a few voices of complaint are being heard. Even the New York Times recently condemned the new law for “making martial law easier.”

It only took a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president’s ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened these restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the U.S. without the express permission of Congress. But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act.

Section 1076 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from “Insurrection Act” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition”—and such “condition” is not defined or limited.

These new pretexts are even more expansive than they appear. FEMA proclaims the equivalent of a natural disaster when bad snowstorms occur, and Congress routinely proclaims a natural disaster (and awards more farm subsidies) when there is a shortfall of rain in states with upcoming elections. A terrorist “incident” could be something as stupid as the flashing toys scattered around Boston last fall.

The new law also empowers the president to commandeer the National Guard of one state to send to another state for up to 365 days. Bush could send the Alabama National Guard to suppress antiwar protests in Boston. Or the next president could send the New York National Guard to disarm the residents of Mississippi if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semiautomatic weapons. Governors’ control of the National Guard can be trumped with a simple presidential declaration.

The story of how Section 1076 became law vivifies how expanding government power is almost always the correct answer in Washington. Some people have claimed the provision was slipped into the bill in the middle of the night. In reality, the administration clearly signaled its intent and almost no one in the media or Congress tried to stop it.

The Katrina debacle seems to have drowned Washington’s resistance to military rule. Bush declared, “I want there to be a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people.” His initial proposal generated a smattering of criticism and no groundswell of support. There was no “robust discussion.” On Aug. 29, 2006, the administration upped the ante, labeling the breached levees “the equivalent of a weapon of mass effect being used on the city of New Orleans.” Nobody ever defined a “weapon of mass effect,” but the term wasn’t challenged.

Section 1076 was supported by both conservatives and liberals. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, co-wrote the provision along with committee chairman Sen. John Warner (R-Va.). Sen. Ted Kennedy openly endorsed it, and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), then-chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was an avid proponent.

Every governor in the country opposed the changes, and the National Governors Association repeatedly and loudly objected. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned on Sept. 19 that “we certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law,” but his alarm got no response. Ten days later, he commented in the Congressional Record: “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Leahy further condemned the process, declaring that it “was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study. Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”

Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein wrote an excellent article in December on how the provision became law with minimal examination or controversy. A Republican Senate aide blamed the governors for failing to raise more fuss: “My understanding is that they sent form letters to offices. If they really want a piece of legislation considered they should have called offices and pushed the matter. No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day.”

Thus, the Senate was not guilty by reason of form letters. Plus, the issue was not on the front page of the Washington Post within the 48 hours before the Senate voted on it. Surely no reasonable person can expect senators to know what they were doing when they voted 100 to 0 in favor of the bill? In reality, they were too busy to notice the latest coffin nails they hammered into the Constitution.

This expansion of presidential prerogative illustrates how every federal failure redounds to the benefit of leviathan. FEMA was greatly expanded during the Clinton years for crises like the New Orleans flood. It, along with local and state agencies, floundered. Yet the federal belly flop on the Gulf Coast somehow anointed the president to send in troops where he sees fit.

“Martial law” is a euphemism for military dictatorship. When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred. Perhaps some conservatives believe that the only change when martial law is declared is that people are no longer read their Miranda rights when they are locked away. “Martial law” means obey soldiers’ commands or be shot. The abuses of military rule in southern states during Reconstruction were legendary, but they have been swept under the historical rug.

Section 1076 is Enabling Act-type legislation—something that purports to preserve law-and-order while formally empowering the president to rule by decree. The Bush team is rarely remiss in stretching power beyond reasonable bounds. Bush talks as if any constraint on his war-making prerogative or budget is “aiding and abetting the enemy.” Can such a man be trusted to reasonably define insurrection or disorder? Can Hillary Clinton?

Bush can commandeer a state’s National Guard any time he declares a “state has refused to enforce applicable laws.” Does this refer to the laws as they are commonly understood—or the laws after Bush fixes them with a signing statement?

Some will consider concern about Bush or future presidents exploiting martial law to be alarmist. This is the same reflex many people have had to each administration proposal or power grab from the Patriot Act in October 2001 to the president’s enemy-combatant decree in November 2001 to the setting up the Guantanamo prison in early 2002 to the doctrine of preemptive war. The administration has perennially denied that its new powers pose any threat even after the evidence of abuses—illegal wiretapping, torture, a global network of secret prisons, Iraq in ruins—becomes overwhelming. If the administration does not hesitate to trample the First Amendment with “free speech zones,” why expect it to be diffident about powers that could stifle protests en masse?

On Feb. 24, the White House conducted a highly publicized drill to test responses to IEDs going off simultaneously in ten American cities. The White House has not disclosed the details of how the feds will respond, but it would be out of character for this president to let new powers he sought to gather dust. There is nothing more to prevent a president from declaring martial law on a pretext than there is to prevent him from launching a war on the basis of manufactured intelligence. And when the lies become exposed years later, it could be far too late to resurrect lost liberties.

Senators Leahy and Kit Bond (R-Mo.) are sponsoring a bill to repeal the changes, but it is not setting the woods on fire on Capitol Hill. Leahy urged his colleagues to consider the Section 1076 fix, declaring, “It is difficult to see how any Senator could disagree with the advisability of having a more transparent and thoughtful approach to this sensitive issue.”

He deserves credit for fighting hard on this issue, but there is little reason to expect most members of Congress to give it a second look. The Section 1076 debacle exemplifies how the Washington establishment pretends that new power will not be abused, regardless of how much existing power has been mishandled. Why worry about martial law when there is pork to be harvested and photo ops to attend? It is still unfashionable in Washington to worry about the danger of the open barn door until after the horse is two miles down the road.

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James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and eight other books.

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Colombo (dpa, Agencies)

Aircraft flown by Tamil separatists dropped two bombs on the outskirts of the Sri Lanka capital early Sunday morning, triggering panic in the city as the military activated its air defence system and fired at the intruders.

One of the bombs hit a gas storage tank at Muthurajarwela, 12 kilometres north of the city, but state television reported that the major storage tanks escaped danger. Two civilians were injured.

The second bomb hit a fuel storage tank area in Kolonnnaa, eight kilometres north of the capital, but no damage was caused, according to the state-controlled national television, Sri Lanka Rupavahini corporation.

The order to activate the air defence system was given after a radar detected a suspicious plane that sparked fear of another Tamil rebel air attack, a military spokesman said. The military fired into the air over vital security and government installations.

Electricity was shut down for more than an hour and a half across the city and suburbs to prevent rebels from identifying targets from the air.

At the time, Sri Lankans were glued to their televisions for the cricket world cup finals between Sri Lanka and Australia, being broadcast live from the Caribbean islands.

Panic and pandemonium broke out when the air defence system started firing.

On Tuesday, Tamil rebels used a light aircraft to bomb a military complex in the north of the country, killing six soldiers and wounding 13. It was the second such air attack by the rebels after the first one in late March.

A military spokesman said that the air defence system was activated in the Colombo port, army headquarters, defence ministry, airport and an oil refinery around 2:30 am Sunday (GMT 2030 Saturday.)

Air force spokesman Group Captain Ajantha Silva confirmed that they had spotted a suspicious aircraft on the radar, but were not in a position to confirm whether it was a rebel aircraft.

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Colombo (Agencies) - Tamil Tiger aircraft bombed key installations in Sri Lanka's capital in retaliation for a military air strike on their territory early Sunday, a rebel spokesman claimed.

Tiger planes targeted two oil storage facilities because they provided fuel to Sri Lankan forces, spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiriyan said.

"We sent two squadrons to target facilities that provide fuel to military aircraft after two Sri Lankan airforce jets bombed a suburb of Kilinochchi (inside rebel-held territory) just past midnight," said the spokesman for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

He said the military had bombed the outskirts of Kilinochchi, 330 kilometres north of the capital, but gave no details of casualties.

However, he said that within an hour of the military air strike, the Tigers scrambled "two squadrons" to attack targets in the capital Colombo and returned to their secret location two hours later.

Authorities in Colombo activated air defences when suspected Tiger planes entered the city's airspace early Sunday.

Troops fired anti-aircraft guns and power was switched off just as residents were watching the country's cricket team lose to Australia in the World Cup in Barbados.

But the guns failed to bring down the guerrilla planes, officials said.

Earlier Saturday, police and security forces sealed off Sri Lanka's capital, searching every vehicle entering and leaving the city amid fears of a Tamil Tiger attack.

There were huge traffic jams at every entry point to Colombo with motorists spending several hours before they could be allowed in. Doctors and other essential services were also stuck at roadblocks.

"This is part of the operations to prevent Tigers getting into the city," a police official said.

Sixteen people were detained for questioning after the authorities searched nearly 10,000 vehicles and checked identity papers of 16,500 people, police said.

Sri Lankan forces have been on high alert since the Tigers, whose drawn-out campaign for an independent state for the island's ethnic Tamil minority has left more than 60,000 people dead, carried out their first aerial strike last month.

Security in the capital was stepped up after defence ministry reports that Tamil Tiger guerrillas had entered the air space of the island's only international airport overnight on Thursday.

The sky over the Katunayake international airport near Colombo -- where government war planes share a runway with civilian jets -- was lit up with anti-aircraft gunfire in response to the incursion by a "suspicious aircraft."

 

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Harper and O'Connor can't escape Afghan torture scandal

There are, to be sure, significant differences between the torture scandal currently engulfing Ottawa and the one that rocked the Bush administration three years ago. There are no gruesome photos and, unlike the abuse of Iraqi detainees, the torture in is being done by 's local allies.

But in many ways this scandal is equal to the outrage of Abu Ghraib. With the photographic evidence of the abuse in , even old Donald Rumsfeld could not have pulled the straight-faced performance of Stephen Harper and Gordon O'Connor in the House of Commons this week.

 

Faced with the shocking accounts from Afghan detainees featured in The Globe and Mail this week, Harper had the audacity on Tuesday to dismiss the reports as “allegations of the Taliban.”

 

Graeme Smith, The Globe and Mail correspondent in (and, by the Prime Minister's appalling logic, a Taliban spokesperson), conducted weeks of research touring “medieval nightmare” prisons and interviewing 30 detainees. Smith recorded accounts of beatings, electric shock, whipping, freezing and starvation among the methods employed by the security forces to which Canadian soldiers turned over their detainees.

 

On Wednesday, The Globe and Mail delivered the knockout punch to Harper's and the Conservatives' evasions and denials. The headline summed it all up, “What Ottawa doesn't want you to know: Government was told detainees often faced 'extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial'.”

 

A 2006 report on compiled for Foreign Affairs Canada provides proof that the Conservative government knew about all of this, contrary to everything O'Connor and the PM have been saying for months - and what they, incredibly, continued to assert in the House this week. Key passages of the report were blacked out, but The Globe and Mail obtained an original copy. The censored content, what Ottawa didn't want us to know, includes the following passages:

 

"Despite some positive developments, the overall human rights situation in deteriorated in 2006...

 

Extra judicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial are all too common. Freedom of expression still faces serious obstacles, there are serious deficiencies in adherence to the rule of law and due process by police and judicial officials. Impunity remains a problem in the aftermath of three decades of war and much needed reforms of the judiciary systems remain to be implemented." (The Globe and Mail, A1, April 25, 2007)

 

It is important to note that the torture scandal that has exploded in recent days is something that the anti-war movement and human rights activists have been trying to expose for years. Lawyers Against War, Amnesty International and academics like University of British Columbia professor Dr. Michael Byers have long been sounding the alarm that was in violation of the Geneva Convention by handing over detainees to almost certain torture and abuse.

 

This includes, lest we forget, handing over prisoners to U.S. authorities, who have established their own facilities for “enemy combatants” at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan and the infamous Guantanamo base on occupied Cuban territory.

 

Canada's complicity in torture has also been a motivation for the many groups across the country advocating for troops out of Afghanistan. Those who have defended the current NATO mission as a “humanitarian intervention” have lost a lot of credibility this week.

 

For instance, in a recent feature essay in This Magazine, Vancouver journalist Jared Ferrie does not mention torture once and makes a bold assertion, “for all its flaws, the current Afghan government's human rights record is light years ahead of any in the past three decades.”

 

Rather than “light years ahead,” Afghanistan's current situation looks like more of the same that the country has endured for decades:

Counter-insurgency war, corrupt government, “medieval” prisons and widespread torture. This has accompanied the long tradition of foreign intervention, pursued in turn by the UK, the USSR, and the  US.

 

Canada is now deeply complicit in all of this, and neither the denials of Stephen Harper nor the rationalizations of liberal interventionists will be able to change that fact.

 

 

*Derrick O'Keefe is a founding editor of the weekly on-line journal Seven Oaks Magazine and a co-chair of Vancouver's StopWar coalition.

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April 27, 2007 8:58 PM

Brian Ross and Justin Rood Report:

Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation. 

Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.

A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for "personal reasons."

On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the "Pamela Martin and Associates" escort service "to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage."   Tobias, who is married, said there had been "no sex," and that recently he had been using another service "with Central Americans" to provide massages. 

Tobias' private cell number was among thousands of numbers listed in the telephone records provided to ABC News by Jeane Palfrey, the woman dubbed the "D.C. Madam," who is facing the federal charges. In an interview to be broadcast on "20/20" next Friday, Palfrey says she intends to call Tobias and a number of her other prominent D.C. clients to testify at her trial.

Click Here for Full Blotter Coverage.

"I'm sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, four to eight years, because I'm shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever," Palfrey told ABC News.

Palfrey maintains she ran a sexual fantasy business that was legal and that if any of the women who were working for her had sex, they did so in violation of her rules and without her knowledge. She says there are a number of other prominent Washington, D.C. men who will be on her witness list.  "I'll bring every last one of them in if necessary," Palfrey said.

As the Bush administration's so-called "AIDS czar," Tobias was criticized by some for emphasizing faithfulness and abstinence over condom use to prevent the spread of AIDS.

In a 2004 interview, Tobias explained his approach as "A and B and C. . . Abstinence works. 'Be faithful' works. Condoms work. They all have a role. But it's not a multiple choice, where there is only one answer."

As a top official overseeing global AIDS funding to other countries, Tobias was responsible for enforcing a U.S. policy, enacted during the Bush administration, that requires recipients to swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking. USAID adopted a similar policy in 2004.

At an April 18 speech, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised Tobias' work. "Randy Tobias has indeed had many roles in his life, but none more important than the roles he's played in government, where he has been someone who has been most involved in organizing America's compassion to the world."

A biography of Tobias was removed from the USAID Web site, but an archived version shows that before joining the State Department, Tobias had been CEO of drug manufacturer Eli Lilly Co. and AT&T Communications, and served on the board of trustees for Duke University, including three years as its chair.

In 2003, he co-wrote a book on leadership lessons with his son, Todd, entitled, "Put the Moose on the Table." Indiana University, whose publishing arm produced the volume, is also home to the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence.

Along with his wife, Marianne, Tobias donated over $100,000 to Republican candidates and political committees, according to the campaign finance Web site OpenSecrets.org.

Tobias is the second prominent man to be identified as a customer of the Palfrey’s "sexual fantasy service."  Two weeks ago, Palfrey alleged that military strategist Harlan K. Ullman, creator of the "shock and awe" combat theory and now a scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was also a customer.  Ullman has said that the claim was "beneath the dignity of comment."

Palfrey is expected to appear in court on Monday, to request permission to replace her criminal defense attorney, currently a federal public defender.

This post has been updated.

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Some 50 MPs who were dismissed last month have been reinstated

At least 11 Ecuadorian MPs have sought political asylum in Colombia after a state prosecutor issued warrants for their arrests for treason.

More are expected to follow, according to one of the MPs, Gloria Gallardo.

Some 24 MPs have been accused of rising against the government, out of a total of 50 MPs who were fired last month and reinstated on Monday.

They were sacked for opposing a vote on constitutional reform which gives President Rafael Correa more power.

The referendum was approved by the overwhelming majority of voters last week.

On Monday, the Supreme Court said the 50 MPs' dismissals were unconstitutional and reinstated them.

But Congress, now led by supporters of Mr Correa, responded by sacking the court's nine top judges on Tuesday.

The 24 MPs are accused of sedition for "rising against the government, refusing to recognise the constitution, and impeding a meeting of the Congress", prosecutor Elsa Moreno is quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.

"We have come to Colombia, which is a sister country, to ask for protection and political asylum," said Ms Gallardo.

"We are being persecuted. The government is violating our human rights."

Political crisis

Mr Correa says the deputies were sacked for incompetence and did not deserve their jobs back.

Mr Correa took over as president in January promising radical change to the way the country is governed and hoping to end 10 years of political turmoil, but it has been a chaotic few months, says the BBC's South America correspondent, Daniel Schweimler.

Fifty-seven congressmen were originally removed from office, but the constitutional court verdict applied only to the 50 who had signed a legal petition to be reinstated.

The right-wing Congressmen and women are opposed to radical reforms being implemented by left-wing president Mr Correa - reforms he says will give a greater voice to the people and bypass a Congress he accuses of corruption and mismanagement.

 

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As a mid-career professional with a doctorate in chemistry, Maurice Stephenson appeared made to order for the Los Angeles Unified School District, especially because he was eager to teach at a high-poverty campus in a system woefully short of qualified science teachers.

But the honeymoon ended abruptly after less than two years. Fed up with student insolence and administrative impotence, he stalked out of Manual Arts High School on March 12 and never went back.

Few teachers quit so dramatically, but leave they do. In California, teachers are departing the profession in alarming numbers — 22% in four years or fewer — but simply offering them more money won't solve the problem, according to a report released Thursday.

The real issue is working conditions, which are the flip side of a student's learning conditions, said Ken Futernick, who directs K-12 studies at the Center for Teacher Quality at Cal State Sacramento.

His study, which was based on a survey of nearly 2,000 California teachers, maps a growing crisis that fundamentally affects student learning.

The study also casts doubt on commonly pursued remedies both for the teacher shortage and student achievement in general.

Classroom interruptions, student discipline, increasing demands, insufficient supplies, overcrowding, unnecessary meetings, lack of support — all play a role in burning out teachers.

"They're not just driving teachers crazy; they're driving teachers out of the classrooms," Futernick said.

Stephenson is among the 35% of L.A. Unified teachers who quit within five years, according to school district data.

And as in most other cases, salary wasn't the primary factor.

In fact, L.A. Unified's data lists salary as the No. 9 reason why new hires leave. No. 1 is "moving." But also cited are "lack of support from administrator," "student discipline policy" and "unmotivated students."

Those results are consistent with Futernick's findings: "When teaching and learning conditions are poor, we discovered that many teachers see their compensation as inadequate. When these teaching and learning conditions are good, not only do teachers tend to stay, they actually view their compensation as a reason for staying."

The findings suggest that when teachers unions advocate primarily for salary, they have it somewhat wrong. On the other hand, Futernick said, administrators are clearly misguided when they focus single-mindedly on getting rid of "bad teachers."

That issue pales in importance to teacher retention. Moreover, at a struggling school, "one is hard-pressed to know the good teachers from the bad. Such a place is not conducive to good teaching," he said.

At high-minority and high-poverty schools, teacher turnover typically runs at 10% annually.

"If this churning is going on, you can be sure you have a dysfunctional school," Futernick said. "As long as we think of these schools as combat zones, we'll never solve the retention problem and we'll never close the achievement gap" between white and Asian students and their black and Latino peers.

Indeed, some researchers have cited the quality of teaching as perhaps the single most important factor that affects student achievement.

High-poverty schools have the additional hurdle of a more limited teaching applicant pool, and they are more likely to have teachers who work outside their field of training.

By some estimates, about $455 million per year is squandered in teacher training in California because of premature departures. Vastly improving teaching conditions probably would cost much more.

"We have a high-school dropout problem," Futernick said, "in large part because we have a teacher dropout problem."

Stephenson, 52, had two pressing complaints at Manual Arts. For one, he said, 39 students were enrolled in a lab class that he said could safely hold only 30.

Then there were the students themselves.

"They were showing up to class totally unprepared, with no pens, no pencils, no paper to work with," he said.

That was particularly irksome, he said, because students could obtain free supplies from a school office.

When he did that errand for them, fellow teachers chastised Stephenson for enabling bad student behavior. Meanwhile, he said, the message from the administration was: The students are staying. Make the best of it.

When the new term started in March, Stephenson took a different tack: "I gave them one week to get all the materials they needed so they could do all their work."

They ignored him. He walked.

So was this teacher worth keeping? Other instructors at the same school have inspired their students. And at a school where freshmen outnumber seniors 3 to 1, any student inside a class could be considered a striving survivor.

District officials had no immediate response to Stephenson's account.

A teachers union official insisted that Stephenson had a solid reputation among instructors.

He became a teacher after years as a science consultant to grant writers and contractors seeking government work.

Officials from L.A. Unified, the largest school district in the state, insisted that they were focusing on the teacher retention problem as never before. The school system has increased its percentage of credentialed teachers to 94% from 78% in the last four years. It also offers pay incentives for teachers in needed fields and for teachers who go to hard-to-staff schools.

The teacher vacancy rate is at an all-time low, said Vivian Ekchian, the district's deputy chief of human resources.

Also, at 22 high schools, including Manual Arts, the district has assigned a full-time teacher to help struggling colleagues and provided a pool of substitutes who attend staff meetings and work at the campus full time.

Teachers union President A.J. Duffy is unimpressed: "L.A. Unified is very good at creating the illusion that they're on it and that things are getting better — and we don't believe that anymore. Which is why our thrust is local control of schools with accountability."

That view has some resonance with academics. California, in its desire for accountability, has made education ever more bureaucratic, rule-oriented and regimented, said Stanford University education professor Susanna Loeb at a conference last week.

Special-education teachers are inundated with paperwork and other stresses that push them out of teaching or at least out of teaching the disabled.

"I told everybody I would teach as long as it was fun," said Barbara Millman, who left her teaching job at a school in San Pedro for the severely disabled at age 63. "They kept squeezing more kids into a class and trying to get by with less assistants. I felt the kids were not getting the kind of attention they needed and that we also were not valued as experts."

Other states, including Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina, use teacher survey information in ways that California does not, Futernick said. North Carolina, in particular, has adopted workplace standards that protect teachers from unnecessary interruptions, paperwork and meetings.

Such standards seem a universe apart from the experience of a former Los Angeles middle school teacher who said she taught at a rodent- and roach-infested campus where students read at a second-grade level and frequently wandered the grounds because no one made them go to class.

"It got to the point where my morale was so low, and I cared so little that I would show up 15 minutes late, with my students waiting outside. No one ever said a word to me. I was still a star," said the former teacher, who asked not to be named because she has returned to the school system for a job outside the classroom.

She had to leave the classroom because "I saw myself turning into the others. What we attract are the martyrs and the lazy, and the conditions perpetuate it."

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howard.blume@latimes.com

For the report, go to http://www.calstate.edu/ teacherquality/retention.

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By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 27, 2007; A04

An active-duty Army officer is publishing a blistering attack on U.S. generals, saying they have botched the war in Iraq and misled Congress about the situation there.

"America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq," charges Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran who is deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. "The intellectual and moral failures . . . constitute a crisis in American generals."

Yingling's comments are especially striking because his unit's performance in securing the northwestern Iraqi city of Tall Afar was cited by President Bush in a March 2006 speech and provided the model for the new security plan underway in Baghdad.

He also holds a high profile for a lieutenant colonel: He attended the Army's elite School for Advanced Military Studies and has written for one of the Army's top professional journals, Military Review.

The article, "General Failure," is to be published today in Armed Forces Journal and is posted at http://www.armedforcesjournal.com. Its appearance signals the public emergence of a split inside the military between younger, mid-career officers and the top brass.

Many majors and lieutenant colonels have privately expressed anger and frustration with the performance of Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno and other top commanders in the war, calling them slow to grasp the realities of the war and overly optimistic in their assessments.

Some younger officers have stated privately that more generals should have been taken to task for their handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, news of which broke in 2004. The young officers also note that the Army's elaborate "lessons learned" process does not criticize generals and that no generals in Iraq have been replaced for poor battlefield performance, a contrast to other U.S. wars.

Top Army officials are also worried by the number of captains and majors choosing to leave the service. "We do have attrition in those grade slots above our average," acting Army Secretary Pete Geren noted in congressional testimony this week. In order to curtail the number of captains leaving, he said, the Army is planning a $20,000 bonus for those who agree to stay in, plus choices of where to be posted and other incentives.

Until now, charges of incompetent leadership have not been made as publicly by an Army officer as Yingling does in his article.

"After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public," he writes. "For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq."

Yingling said he decided to write the article after attending Purple Heart and deployment ceremonies for Army soldiers. "I find it hard to look them in the eye," he said in an interview. "Our generals are not worthy of their soldiers."

He said he had made his superiors aware of the article but had not sought permission to publish it. He intends to stay in the Army, he said, noting that he is scheduled in two months to take command of a battalion at Fort Hood, Tex.

The article has been read by about 30 of his peers, Yingling added. "At the level of lieutenant colonel and below, it received almost universal approval," he said.

Retired Marine Col. Jerry Durrant, now working in Iraq as a civilian contractor, agrees that discontent is widespread. "Talk to the junior leaders in the services and ask what they think of their senior leadership, and many will tell you how unhappy they are," he said.

Yingling advocates overhauling the way generals are picked and calls for more involvement by Congress. To replace today's "mild-mannered team players," he writes, Congress should create incentives in the promotion system to "reward adaptation and intellectual achievement."

He does not criticize officers by name; instead, the article refers repeatedly to "America's generals." Yingling said he did this intentionally, in order to focus not on the failings of a few people but rather on systemic problems.

He also recommends that Congress review the performance of senior generals as they retire and exercise its power to retire them at a lower rank if it deems their performance inferior. The threat of such high-profile demotions would restore accountability among top officers, he contends. "As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war," he states.

 

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