81 posts tagged “omfg”
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By Tom Geoghegan
BBC News Magazine
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Ammon Shea spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary - 20 volumes, 21,730 pages and 59 million words - and he rates poring over a dictionary as enriching as reading a novel. Why?
The prospect of talking to a man who reads dictionaries for fun prompts a sudden vocabulary-insecurity complex and a fear that every word he utters might sound like a painful medical condition.
But thanks to Ammon Shea's belief that long words only hinder conversations, there's no need to consult any dictionaries while he clearly explains his eccentric hobby.
"I'm not against big words per se or fancy or obscure words, obviously I love them, but I'm opposed to using them for their own sake," he says.
"If words are to form a communication, you use them as a tool to communicate to people and it's pointless to intentionally use a word that no-one else knows."
Mr Shea, a 37-year-old former furniture remover in New York, has spent 12 months conquering what he describes as the Everest of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), by ploughing through 20 volumes weighing a total of 137lbs (62.14kg).
In the process, he became the Morgan Spurlock of lexicologists, devouring words for eight to 10 hours a day, which caused him severe headaches, deteriorating eyesight and injuries to his back and neck. So why bother?
"I've always enjoyed reading dictionaries and they are far more interesting than people give them credit for. And I think everything you find in a great book you would find in a great dictionary, except for the plot.
"All the normal emotions - grief, happiness and loss - exist in a dictionary but not necessarily in the order that you would think."
If you come across a word like "remord" (to recall with a touch of regret) it's impossible to read that word without thinking of things that you regret yourself, he says, or to read "unbepissed" (not having been urinated on) without a chuckle.
Winter sun
"Knowing what to call something makes me more aware of that thing. For instance, it's not terribly useful for me to know that [the sound of] leaves rustled by the trees is a psithurism.
"I don't want to walk down the street with my girlfriend saying: 'Listen, there's a psithurism.' But knowing it means I pay more attention to it."
Similarly, knowing that "undisonant" is the adjective to describe the sound of crashing waves and that "apricity" is the warmth of the winter sun brings these things more often to mind.
"It's not easy to use them in conversation and so I enjoy them for their own sake. They are like one-word poems."
Turning page after page of unfamiliar words made him sometimes feel like he was reading another language, he says. That was dispiriting but also intriguing, because it showed how rich and powerful the English language is.
But absorbing so much made Mr Shea lose his grasp on his normal vocabulary. He recalls being fascinated when reading the definition for the word "glove" before he realised it was a word he already knew.
"That happened frequently. I guess it gave me a useless large vocabulary and in the short-term I lost my normal vocabulary. I would go to the shop and forget the word for milk. Momentarily I'm looking for the cold, white stuff."
Mr Shea is not alone in his love of dictionaries. WH Auden waxed lyrical about them and Arthur Scargill said his father would read one every day because his life depended on the power to master words.
Buttock-shaped
Thousands of avid Scrabble players read dictionaries looking for words, especially those with a high-scoring J, Q, X or Z, says Elaine Higgleton, editorial director of Collins Dictionaries. And crossword fans devour dictionaries for the same reason.
"We also have people writing to us who have been very interested in obscure words and obscure definitions.
"A student in Iraq was trying to learn English and he sat down trying to learn every word in the dictionary, starting at the beginning with A and working all the way through.
"It's probably not the best way to learn English, and you'd learn many more than you would need."
But dictionaries are a wonderful source of learning about the origins of the English language, she says, and especially the Greek and Latin roots to many of the words.
Collins, which records everyday language rather than all known words, is involved in a campaign to save some of the lesser-used words from being edited out of its future editions. Stephen Fry, for instance, has championed "fubsy", which means "short and stout".
"One of the nice things about dipping in and out of a dictionary is that although people are very comfortable with the vocabulary levels they have, there are some good fun words in there that offer an additional dimension of interest," says Ms Higgleton.
Some of Mr Shea's favourites garnered from the OED include "assy", which means behaving like an ass, and natiform, which means "buttock-shaped".
It's impossible to be intimidated by a dictionary that uses a word like assy, he says, and to pick one up and glance through one - rather than just opening one when in trouble with a word - can be a captivating experience.
And how much of what he has read has stayed between his ears?
Throwing 10 reasonably obscure words from the OED at him, Mr Shea was able to correctly define five of them.
Not a bad success rate after reading 59 million words.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wrote in her
line-item veto changes by hand in this copy of a 2008 spending bill
obtained by The Washington Post.
By Paul Kane
ST. PAUL -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential
nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant,
earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state
program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.
After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation -- "SP" -- Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.
According to Passage House's web site, its purpose is to provide "young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives" and help teen moms "become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families."
Palin's own daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant and has plans to wed.
"Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family," Palin said in a statement released by the McCain campaign. "We ask the media to respect our daughter and Levi's privacy, as has always been the tradition of children of candidates."
Earlier today the Associated Press reported that Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, opposed funding to prevent teen pregnancies, a position that Palin also took as governor. "The explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support," she wrote in a 2006 questionnaire distributed among gubernatorial candidates.
Reporters asked McCain in November 2007 whether he supported grants for sex education in the United States, whether such programs should include directions for using contraceptives and whether he supports President Bush's policy of promoting abstinence.
"Ahhh, I think I support the president's policy," McCain said.
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 14, 2008
This is the first of two stories adapted from "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press. Original source notes are denoted in [brackets] throughout.
A burst of ferocity stunned the room into silence. No other word for it: The vice president's attorney was shouting.
"The president doesn't want this! [1] You are not going to see the opinions. You are out . . . of . . . your . . . lane!"
Five government lawyers had gathered around a small conference table in the Justice Department command center. Four were expected. David S. Addington, counsel to Vice President Cheney, got wind of the meeting and invited himself.
If Addington smelled revolt, he was not far wrong. Unwelcome questions about warrantless domestic surveillance had begun to find their voice.
Cheney and his counsel would struggle for months to quash the legal insurgency. By the time President Bush became aware of it, his No. 2 had stoked dissent into flat-out rebellion. The president would face a dilemma, and the presidency itself a historic test. Cheney would come close to leading them off a cliff, man and office both [2].
On this second Monday in December 2003, Addington's targets were a pair of would-be auditors from the National Security Agency. He had displeasure to spare for their Justice Department hosts.
ad_icon
Perfect example, right here. A couple of NSA bureaucrats breeze in and ask for the most sensitive documents in the building. And Justice wants to tell them, Help yourselves? This was going to be a very short meeting.
Joel Brenner and Vito Potenza, the two men wilting under Addington's wrath, had driven 26 miles from Fort Meade, the NSA's eavesdropping headquarters in Maryland. They were conducting a review of their agency's two-year-old special surveillance operation. They already knew the really secret stuff [3]: The NSA and other services had been unleashed to turn their machinery inward, collecting signals intelligence inside the United States. What the two men didn't know was why the Bush administration believed the program was legal.
It was an awkward question. Potenza, the NSA's acting general counsel, and Brenner, its inspector general, were supposed to be the ones who kept their agency on the straight and narrow. That's what Cheney and their boss, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, told doubters among the very few people who knew what was going on. Cheney, who chaired briefings for select members of Congress, said repeatedly that the NSA's top law and ethics officers -- career public servants -- approved and supervised the surveillance program.
That was not exactly true, not without one of those silent asterisks that secretly flip a sentence on its tail. Every 45 days, after Justice Department review, Bush renewed his military order for warrantless eavesdropping. Brenner and Potenza told Hayden that the agency was entitled to rely on those orders [4]. The United States was at war with al-Qaeda, intelligence-gathering is inherent in war, and the Constitution appoints the president commander in chief.
But they had not been asked to give their own written assessments of the legality of domestic espionage. They based their answer in part on the attorney general's certification of the "form and legality" of the president's orders. Yet neither man had been allowed to see the program's codeword-classified legal analyses [5], which were prepared by John C. Yoo, Addington's close ally in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Now they wanted to read Yoo's opinions for themselves [6].
"This is none of your business!" Addington exploded.
He was massive in his swivel chair, taut and still, potential energy amping up the menace. Addington's pugnacity was not an act. Nothing mattered more, as the vice president and his lawyer saw the world, than these new surveillance tools. Bush had made a decision. Debate could only blow the secret, slow down vital work, or call the president's constitutional prerogatives into question.
The NSA lawyers returned to their car empty-handed.
* * *
The command center of "the president's program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation's largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing [7] -- in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.
The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington's office. Cheney's lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk [8].
It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.
In an interview, Card said the Executive Office of the President, a formal term that encompassed Bush's staff but not Cheney's, followed strict procedures for handling and securing presidential papers.
"If there were exceptions to that, I'm not aware of them," he said. "If these documents weren't stored the right way or put in the right places or maintained by the right people, I'm not aware of it."
Asked why Addington would write presidential directives, Card said, "David Addington is a very competent lawyer." After a moment he added, "I would consider him a drafter, not the drafter [9]. I'm sure there were a lot of smart people who were involved in helping to look at the language and the law."
Not many, it turned out. Though the president had the formal say over who was "read in" to the domestic surveillance program, Addington controlled the list in practice, according to three officials with personal knowledge. White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales was aware of the program, but was not a careful student of the complex legal questions it raised. In its first 18 months, the only other lawyer who reviewed the program was John Yoo.
By the time the NSA auditors came calling, a new man, Jack L. Goldsmith, was chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Soon after he arrived on Oct. 6, 2003, the vice president's lawyer invited him to EEOB 268. Addington pulled out a folder with classification markings that Goldsmith had never seen [10].
"David Addington was doing all the legal work. All the important documents were kept in his safe [11]," Goldsmith recalled. "He was the one who first briefed me."
Goldsmith's new assignment gave him final word in the executive branch on what was legal and what was not. Addington had cleared him for the post -- "the biggest presence in the room," Goldsmith said, during a job interview ostensibly run by Gonzales.
Goldsmith did not have the looks of a guy who posed a threat to the Bush administration's alpha lawyer. A mild-mannered law professor from the University of Chicago, he was rumpled and self-conscious, easy to underestimate. On first impression, he gave off a misleading aura of softness. Goldsmith had lettered in football, baseball and soccer at the Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., [12] spending his formative years with a mob-connected Teamster who married his mother [13]. He was not a bare-knuckled brawler in Addington's mold, but Goldsmith arrived at Justice with no less confidence and strength of will.
Addington's behavior with the NSA auditors was "a wake-up call for me," Goldsmith said. Cheney and Addington, he came to believe, were gaming the system, using secrecy and intimidation to prevent potential dissenters from conducting an independent review.
"They were geniuses at this," Goldsmith said. "They could divide up all these problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answers together to get the result they want."
Dec. 9, 2003, the day of the visit from Brenner and Potenza, was the beginning of the end of that strategy. The years of easy victory were winding down for Cheney and his staff.
* * *
Goldsmith began a top-to-bottom review of the domestic surveillance program, taking up the work begun by a lawyer named Patrick F. Philbin after John Yoo left the department. Like Yoo and Goldsmith, Philbin had walked the stations of the conservative legal establishment: Federalist Society, a clerkship with U.S. Circuit Judge Laurence H. Silberman, another with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
The more questions they asked, the less Goldsmith and Philbin liked the answers. Parts of the program fell easily within the constitutional powers of the commander in chief. Others looked dicier.
The two lawyers worked at the intersection of three complex systems: telecommunications, spy technology, and the statutory regimes that governed surveillance. After a few weeks, Goldsmith said, he decided the program "was the biggest legal mess I'd seen in my life."
He asked for permission to read in Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's new deputy, James B. Comey [14]. As always, he found Addington waiting with Gonzales in the White House counsel's corner office, one floor up from the chief of staff. They sat in parallel wing chairs, much as Bush and Cheney did in the Oval Office.
"The attorney general and I think the deputy attorney general should be read in," Goldsmith said.
Addington replied first.
"Forget it," he said.
"The president insists on strict limitations on access to the program," Gonzales agreed.
Weeks passed. Goldsmith kept asking. Addington kept saying no.
"He always invoked the president, not the vice president," Goldsmith said [15].
Comey was not exactly Mr. Popular at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He had arrived at Justice as a 6-foot-8 golden boy, smooth and polished, with top chops as a federal terrorism prosecutor in Northern Virginia and New York City. Then came Dec. 30, 2003. Comey did something unforgivable: He appointed an independent counsel to investigate the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a clandestine CIA officer, a move that would bring no end of grief for Cheney.
In late January, Goldsmith and Addington cut a deal. Comey would get his read-in. Goldsmith would get off the fence about the program, giving his definitive answer by the March 11 deadline.
"You're the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and if you say we cannot do this thing legally, we'll shut it off," Addington told him [16].
Feel free to tell the president that his most important intelligence operation has to stop.
Your call, Jack.
Goldsmith wanted to fix the thing, not stop it. He and Philbin traveled again and again to Fort Meade, each time delving deeper. They were in and out of Gonzales's office, looking for adjustments in the program that would bring it into compliance with the law. The issues were complex and remain classified. Addington bent on nothing, swatting back every idea. Gonzales listened placidly, sipping Diet Cokes from his little refrigerator, encouraging the antagonists to keep things civil.
There would be no easy out, no middle ground. Addington made clear that he did not believe for a moment that Justice would pull the plug.
* * *
Mike Hayden and Vito Potenza drove down from NSA headquarters after lunch on Feb. 19, 2004, to give Jim Comey his first briefing on the program. In the Justice Department's vault-like SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, Hayden got Comey's attention fast.
"I'm so glad you're getting read in, because now I won't be alone at the table when John Kerry is elected president," the NSA director said [17].
The witness table, Hayden meant. Congressional hearing, investigation of some kind. Nothing good. Kerry had the Democratic nomination just about locked up and was leading Bush in national polls. Hardly anyone in the intelligence field believed the next administration would climb as far out on a legal limb as this one had.
"Hayden was all dog-and-pony, and this is probably what happened to those poor folks in Congress, too," Comey told his chief of staff after the briefing. "You think for a second, 'Wow, that's great,' and then if you try actually to explain it back to yourself, you don't get it. You scratch your head afterward and you think, 'What the hell did that guy just tell me?' "
The NSA chief insisted on limiting surveillance to e-mails, phone calls and faxes in which one party was overseas, deflecting arguments from Cheney and Addington that he could just as well collect communications inside the United States.
That was one reason Hayden hated when reporters referred to "domestic surveillance." He made his point with a folksy analogy: He had taken "literally hundreds of domestic flights," he said, and never "landed in Waziristan." That sounded good. But the surveillance statutes said a warrant was required if either end of the conversation was in U.S. territory. The American side of the program -- the domestic surveillance -- was its distinguishing feature.
By the end of February, Goldsmith and Philbin had reached their conclusion: Parts of the surveillance operation had no support in law. Comey was so disturbed that he drove to Langley one evening to compare notes with Scott W. Muller, the general counsel at the CIA. Muller "got it immediately," agreeing with the Goldsmith-Philbin analysis, Comey said.
"At the end of the day, I concluded something I didn't ever think I would conclude, and that is that Pat Philbin and Jack Goldsmith understood this activity much better than Michael Hayden did," he said.
On Thursday, March 4, Comey brought the findings to Ashcroft, conferring for an hour one-on-one. Three senior Justice Department officials said in interviews that Ashcroft gave his full backing. He was not going to sign the next presidential order -- due in one week, March 11 -- unless the White House agreed to a list of required changes.
* * *
A few hours later, Ashcroft was reviewing notes for a news conference in Alexandria when his color changed and he sat down heavily. An aide, Mark Corallo, ducked out and returned to find the attorney general laid out on his back. By nightfall, Ashcroft was taken to George Washington University Medical Center in severe pain, suffering acute gallstone pancreatitis. Comey became acting attorney general on Friday.
The next day -- Saturday, March 6, five days before the March 11 deadline -- Goldsmith brought the Justice Department verdict to the White House. He told Gonzales and Addington for the first time that Justice would not certify the program.
A long silence fell. It lasted three full days.
Gonzales phoned Goldsmith at home before sunrise on Tuesday, March 9, with two days left before the program expired. Obviously there was bad chemistry with Addington. Why not come in and talk, he asked, just the two of us?
Goldsmith arrived at the White House in morning twilight. Alone in his office, Gonzales begged the OLC chief to reconsider. Gonzales tried to dispute Goldsmith's analysis, but he was in over his head. At least let us have more time, he said. Goldsmith said he couldn't do that.
The time had come for the vice president to step in. Proxies were not getting the job done. Cheney was going to have to take hold of this thing himself.
Even now, after months of debate, Cheney did not enlist the president. Bush was across the river in Arlington, commending the winners of the Malcolm Baldrige awards for quality improvement in private industry [18]. Campaign season had come already, and the president was doing a lot of that kind of thing. That week he had a fundraiser in Dallas, a "Bush-Cheney 2004 event" in Santa Clara, Calif., and a meet-and-greet at a rodeo in Houston.
Soon after hearing what had happened between Goldsmith and Gonzales, the vice president asked Andy Card to set up a meeting at noon with Mike Hayden, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, and John McLaughlin from the CIA (substituting for his boss, George J. Tenet). Cheney spoke to them in Card's office, the door closed.
Four hours later, at 4 p.m., the same cast reconvened. This time the Justice contingent was invited. Comey, Goldsmith and Philbin found the titans of the intelligence establishment lined up, a bunch of grave-faced analysts behind them for added mass. The spy chiefs brought no lawyers. The law was not the point. This meeting, described by officials with access to two sets of contemporaneous notes, was about telling Justice to set its qualms aside.
The staging had been arranged for maximum impact. Cheney sat at the head of Card's rectangular table, pivoting left to face the acting attorney general. The two men were close enough to touch. Card sat grimly at Cheney's right, directly across from Comey. There was plenty of eye contact all around.
This program, Cheney said, was vital. Turning it off would leave us blind. Hayden, the NSA chief, pitched in: Even if the program had yet to produce blockbuster results, it was the only real hope of discovering sleeper agents before they could act.
"How can you possibly be reversing course on something of this importance after all this time?" Cheney asked [19].
Comey held his ground. The program had to operate within the law. The Justice Department knew a lot more now than it had before, and Ashcroft and Comey had reached this decision together.
"I will accept for purposes of discussion that it is as valuable as you say it is," Comey said. "That only makes this more painful. It doesn't change the analysis. If I can't find a lawful basis for something, your telling me you really, really need to do it doesn't help me."
"Others see it differently," Cheney said.
There was only one of those, really. John Yoo had been out of the picture for nearly a year. It was all Addington.
"The analysis is flawed, in fact facially flawed," Comey said. "No lawyer reading that could reasonably rely on it."
Gonzales said nothing. Addington stood by the window, over Cheney's shoulder. He had heard a bellyful.
"Well, I'm a lawyer and I did," Addington said, glaring at Comey.
"No good lawyer," Comey said [20].
In for a dime, in for a dollar.
Addington started disputing the particulars. Now he was on Jack Goldsmith's turf. From across the room the head of the Office of Legal Counsel jumped in. And right there in front of the big guys, the two of them bickered in the snarly tones of a couple who knew all of each other's lines.
* * *
As the sun went down on Tuesday, March 9, the president of the United States had yet to learn that his Justice Department was heading off the rails. A train wreck was coming, but Cheney wanted to handle it. Neither Card nor Gonzales was in the habit of telling him no.
"I don't think it would be appropriate for the president to be engaged in the to-and-fro until it is, you know, penultimate," Card said in a recent interview [21]. "I guess the definition of 'penultimate' could vary from four steps to three steps to two steps to one step. That's why you have White House counsel and people who do the legal work."
Participants in the afternoon meeting, including some of Cheney's recruits, left the room shaken. Mueller worked for the attorney general, and the FBI's central mission was to "uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States." Hayden's neck, and his agency, were on the line. The NSA director believed in the program, believed he was doing the right thing. But keep on going when the Justice Department said no?
Early the next morning -- Wednesday, March 10, with 24 hours to deadline -- Hayden was back in the White House. One colleague saw him conferring in worried whispers with Homeland Security adviser John A. Gordon, a mentor and fellow Air Force general, much the senior of the two. They huddled in the West Wing lobby, Hayden on a love seat and Gordon in a chair [22].
Jim Comey was in the White House that morning, too, arriving early for the president's regular 8:30 terrorism brief. He had heard nothing since the discouraging meeting the day before.
Comey found Frances Fragos Townsend, an old friend, waiting just outside the Oval Office, standing by the appointment secretary's desk. She was Bush's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism. Comey had known her since their days as New York mob prosecutors in the 1980s. Since then, Townsend had run the Justice Department's intelligence office. She lived and breathed surveillance law.
Comey took a chance. He pulled her back out to the hallway between the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room.
"If I say a word, would you tell me whether you recognize it?" he asked quietly.
He did. She didn't. The program's classified code name left her blank. Comey tried to talk around the subject.
"I think this is something I am not a part of," Townsend said [23]. "I can't have this conversation." Like John Gordon and deputy national security adviser Steven J. Hadley and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, she was out of the loop [24].
Oh, God, Comey remembers thinking. They've held this so tight. Even Fran Townsend. The president's counterterrorism adviser is not read in? Comey towered over his diminutive friend. He chose his words carefully.
"I need to know," he said, "whether your boss recognizes that word, and whether she's read in on a particular program. Because we had a meeting here yesterday on that topic that I would have expected her to be at."
He meant national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Comey was hoping for an ally, or maybe rescue.
"I felt very alone, with some justification," Comey recalled. "The attorney general is in intensive care. There's a train coming down the tracks that's about to run me and my career and the Department of Justice over. I was exploring every way to get off the tracks I could."
Townsend had a pretty good guess about what was on Comey's mind. Cheney had kept her out of the loop, but it was hard to hide a warrantless domestic surveillance program completely from the president's chief terrorism adviser.
"I'm not the right person to talk to," she told her friend, her voice close to a whisper. Comey ought to go see Rice.
"I'm going to tell her you've got concerns," Townsend said.
Comey's concerns no longer interested Cheney. The vice president had tried to back him down. That didn't work.
Only one day remained before the surveillance program expired. Time for Cheney to take the fight somewhere else.
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 15, 2008
This is the second of two stories adapted from "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press. Original source notes are denoted in [brackets] throughout.
Vice President Cheney convened a meeting in the Situation Room at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, March 10, 2004, with just one day left before the warrantless domestic surveillance program was set to expire. Around him were National Security Agency Director Michael V. Hayden, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and the Gang of Eight -- the four ranking members of the House and the Senate, and the chairmen and vice chairmen of the intelligence committees.
Even now, three months into a legal rebellion at the Justice Department, President Bush was nowhere in the picture [1]. He was stumping in the battleground state of Ohio, talking up the economy.
With a nod from Cheney, Hayden walked through the program's vital mission [2]. Gonzales said top lawyers at the NSA and Justice had green-lighted the program from the beginning. Now Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was in the hospital, and James B. Comey, Ashcroft's deputy, refused to certify that the surveillance was legal.
That was misleading at best. Cheney and Gonzales knew that Comey spoke for Ashcroft as well. They also knew, but chose not to mention, that Jack L. Goldsmith, chief of the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice, had been warning of major legal problems for months.
More than three years later, Gonzales would testify that there was "consensus in the room" from the lawmakers, "who said, 'Despite the recommendation of the deputy attorney general, go forward with these very important intelligence activities.' [3] " By this account -- disputed by participants from both parties -- four Democrats and four Republicans counseled Cheney to press on with a program that Justice called illegal.
In fact, Cheney asked the lawmakers a question that came close to answering itself. Could the House and Senate amend surveillance laws without raising suspicions that a new program had been launched? The obvious reply became a new rationale for keeping Congress out.
The Bush administration had no interest in changing the law, according to U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, chief of the federal government's special surveillance court when the warrantless eavesdropping began.
"We could have gone to Congress, hat in hand, the judicial branch and the executive together, and gotten any statutory change we wanted in those days, I felt like," he said in an interview. "But they wanted to demonstrate that the president's power was supreme."
* * *
Late that Wednesday afternoon, Bush returned from Cleveland. In early evening, the phone rang at the makeshift FBI command center at George Washington University Medical Center, where Ashcroft remained in intensive care. According to two officials who saw the FBI logs, the president was on the line [4]. Bush told the ailing Cabinet chief to expect a visit from Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.
A Senate hearing in 2007 described some of what happened next. But much of the story remained untold [5].
Alerted by Ashcroft's chief of staff, Comey, Goldsmith and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III raced toward the hospital, abandoning double-parked vehicles and running up a stairwell as fast as their legs could pump.
Comey reached Ashcroft's bedside first. Goldsmith and his colleague Patrick F. Philbin were close behind. Now came Card and Gonzales, holding an envelope. If Comey would not sign the papers, maybe Ashcroft would.
The showdown with the vice president the day before had been excruciating, the pressure "so great it could crush you like a grape," Comey said [6]. This was worse.
Was Comey going to sit there and watch a barely conscious man make his mark? On an order that he believed, and knew Ashcroft believed, to be unlawful?
Unexpectedly, Ashcroft roused himself. Previous accounts have said he backed his deputy. He did far more than that. Ashcroft told the president's men he never should have certified the program in the first place [7].
"You drew the circle so tight I couldn't get the advice that I needed," Ashcroft said, according to Comey. He knew things now, the attorney general said, that he should have been told before. Spent, he sank back in his bed.
Mueller arrived just after Card and Gonzales departed. He shared a private moment with Ashcroft, bending over to hear the man's voice.
"Bob, I'm struggling," Ashcroft said.
"In every man's life there comes a time when the good Lord tests him," Mueller replied. "You have passed your test tonight."
* * *
Goldsmith was out the door. He telephoned Ed Whelan, his deputy, who was at home bathing his children.
"You've got to get into the office now," Goldsmith said. "Please draft a resignation letter for me. I can't tell you why."
All hell was breaking loose at Justice. Lawyers streamed back from the suburbs, converging on the fourth-floor conference room. Most of them were not cleared to hear the details, but a decision began to coalesce: If Comey quit, none of them were staying.
At the FBI, they called Mueller "Bobby Three Sticks," playfully tweaking the Roman numerals in his fancy Philadelphia name. Late that evening, word began to spread. It wasn't only Comey. Bobby Three Sticks was getting ready to turn in his badge.
Justice had filled its top ranks with political loyalists. They hoped to see Bush reelected. Had anyone explained to the president what was at stake?
Whelan pulled out his BlackBerry. He fired off a message to White House staff secretary Brett Kavanaugh, a friend whose position gave him direct access to Bush.
"I knew zilch about what the matter was, but I did know that lots of senior DOJ folks were on the verge of resigning," Whelan said in an e-mail [8], declining to discuss the subject further. "I thought it important to make sure that the president was aware of that situation so that he could factor it in as he saw fit."
Kavanaugh had no more idea than Whelan, but he passed word to Card.
The timing was opportune. Just about then, around 11 p.m., Comey responded to an angry summons from the president's chief of staff. Whatever Card was planning to say, he had calmed down suddenly.
What was all this he heard, Card asked, about quitting?
"I don't think people should try to get their way by threatening resignations," Comey replied [9]. "If they find themselves in a position where they're not comfortable continuing, then they should resign."
"He obviously got the gist of what I was saying," Comey recalled.
It was close to midnight when Comey got home, long past the president's bedtime. Bush had yet to learn that his government was coming apart.
Trouble was spreading. The FBI's general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, and her CIA counterpart, Scott W. Mueller, told colleagues they would leave if the president reauthorized the program over Justice Department objections [10].
Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray, who ran Justice's criminal division, stopped Comey in a hallway.
"Look, I don't know what's going on, but before you guys all pull the rip cords, please give me a heads-up so I can jump with you," he said.
James A. Baker, the counselor for intelligence, thought hard about jumping, too [11]. Early on, he got wind of the warrantless eavesdropping and forced the White House to disclose it to Lamberth. Later, Baker told Lamberth's successor that he could not vouch that the Bush administration was honoring its promise to keep the chief surveillance judge fully informed.
"I was determined to stay there and fight for what I thought was right," Baker said in an interview [12], declining to say what the fight was about, on or off the record. He had obligations, he said, to the lawyers who worked for him in the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. "If it had come to this, if people were willing to go to the mat and tolerate the attorney general and deputy attorney general resigning, that's pretty serious. God knows what else they would have come up with."
* * *
At the White House on Thursday morning, the president moved in a bubble so tight that hardly any air was getting in. It was March 11, decision day. If Bush reauthorized the program, he would have no signature from the attorney general. By now that was nowhere near the president's biggest problem.
Many of the people Bush trusted most were out of the picture. Karl Rove was not cleared for the program. Neither was Dan Bartlett or Karen Hughes.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice had the clearance, but Cheney did not invite her to the meetings that mattered.
Bush gave a speech to evangelicals that morning and left the White House for an after-lunch fundraiser in New York [13]. In whatever time he took to weigh his options, the president had only Cheney, Card and Gonzales to advise him.
The vice president knew exactly where he stood, unswerving in his commitment to keep the program just as it was. Gonzales later told two confidants that he had broken with David S. Addington, Cheney's lawyer, urging Bush to find common ground with Justice. Card, too, told colleagues that he had urged restraint.
"My job was to communicate with the president about the peripheral vision, not just the tunnel vision of the moment," he said, deflecting questions about the details [14].
Did peripheral vision mean a broader view of the consequences?
"Yes," Card replied. "It was like -- I don't want to limit it to this particular matter, but that's part of a chief of staff's job. A lot of people who work in the White House have tunnel vision, and not an awful lot of people have peripheral vision. And I think the chief of staff is one of the people who should have peripheral vision."
Card didn't really need the corner of his eye to see a disaster at hand. Even so, Bush didn't know what his subordinates knew that Thursday morning.
Cheney, Addington, Card and Gonzales had plenty of data. Card had heard the news directly from Comey the night before. On Thursday, the FBI director delivered much the same warning.
For Cheney, it didn't matter much whether one official or 10 or 20 took a walk. Maybe they were bluffing, maybe not. The principle was the same: Do what has to be done.
"The president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer -- that was the Cheney view," said Bartlett, Bush's counselor, who was later briefed into the program and the events of the day. "You can't let resignations deter you if you're doing what's right."
Cheney and Addington "were ready to go to the mat," he said, and the vice president's position boiled down to this: " 'That's why we're leaders, that's why we're here. Take the political hit. You've got to do it.' "
* * *
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Addington opened the code-word-classified file on his computer. He had a presidential directive to rewrite.
It has been widely reported that Bush executed the March 11 order with a blank space over the attorney general's signature line. That is not correct [15]. For reasons both symbolic and practical, the vice president's lawyer could not tolerate an empty spot where a mutinous subordinate should have signed. Addington typed a substitute signature line: "Alberto R. Gonzales."
What Addington wrote for Bush that day was more transcendent than that. He drew up new language in which the president relied on his own authority to certify the program as lawful. Bush expressly overrode the Justice Department and any act of Congress or judicial decision that purported to constrain his power as commander in chief. Only Richard M. Nixon, in an interview after leaving the White House in disgrace, claimed authority so nearly unlimited [16].
The specter of future prosecutions hung over the program, now that Justice had ruled it illegal.
"Pardon was in the air," said one of the lawyers involved.
It was possible to construct a case, he said, in which those who planned and carried out the program were engaged in a criminal conspiracy. That would be tendentious, this lawyer believed, but with a change of government it could not be ruled out.
"I'm sure when we leave office we're all going to be hauled up before congressional committees and grand juries," Addington told one colleague in disgust.
* * *
Bush signed the directive before leaving for New York around lunchtime on Thursday, March 11, 2004.
Comey got word a couple of hours later. He sat down and typed a letter.
"Over the last two weeks . . . I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong," he wrote [17]. "As we have struggled over these last days to do the right thing, I have never been prouder of the Department of Justice or of the Attorney General. Sadly, although I believe this has been one of the institution's finest hours, we have been unable to right that wrong. . . . Therefore, with a heavy heart and undiminished love of my country and my Department, I resign as Deputy Attorney General of the United States, effective immediately."
David Ayres, Ashcroft's chief of staff, pleaded with Comey to wait a few days [18]. He was certain that Ashcroft would want to quit alongside him. Comey agreed to hold his letter through the weekend.
Bush was not a man to second-guess himself. By Friday morning, he would need new facts to save him. Somebody, finally, would have to tell him something.
It was Rice, largely in the dark herself, who threw the president a lifeline. She had a few minutes alone with him, shortly before 7:30 a.m., on the day after he renewed the surveillance order. She told Bush about Comey's agitated approach, the day before, to Frances Fragos Townsend, the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism. This was no way to keep a secret.
"It was a compartmented issue," Rice recalled in an interview [19]. "Obviously, there was a security issue here and not just a legal one, because you didn't want this sort of bumping around."
Rice made a suggestion.
Comey is "a reasonable guy," she told the president. "You really need to make sure that you are hearing these folks out."
An hour later, Comey and Robert Mueller arrived at the White House for the regular 8:30 terrorism briefing. They had a lot to cover: Bombs aboard commuter trains in Madrid had killed 191 people.
Both men told aides that this would be their last day in government. There would be no door-slamming, but the president had made his choice and they had made theirs.
Bush stood as the meeting ended, crossing behind Cheney's chair. Comey moved in the opposite direction, on his way out. He had nearly reached the grandfather clock at the door, two witnesses said, when the president said, "Jim, can I talk to you for a minute? [20]"
Bush nodded toward the private dining room a few steps from his desk, the one he shared with Cheney once a week. This time the vice president was not invited.
"I'll wait for you downstairs," Mueller told Comey.
* * *
By now, around 9:15 Friday morning, Bush knew enough to be nervous about what the acting attorney general might do. That did not mean he planned to reverse himself. One high-ranking adviser said there was still an "optimism that maybe you can finesse your way through this."
Afterward, in conversations with aides, the two men described the meeting in similar terms.
"You don't look well," Bush began.
Oldest trick in the book. Establish dominance, put the other guy off his game [21].
"Well, I feel okay."
"I'm worried about you. You look burdened."
"I am, Mr. President. I feel like there's a tremendous burden on me."
"Let me lift that burden from your shoulders," Bush said. "Let me be the one who makes the decision here."
"Mr. President, I would love to be able to do that."
Bush's tone grew crisp.
"I decide what the law is for the executive branch," he said.
"That's absolutely true, sir, you do. But I decide what the Department of Justice can certify to and can't certify to, and despite my absolute best efforts, I simply cannot in the circumstances."
Comey had majored in religion, William and Mary Class of 1982. He might have made a connection with Bush if he had quoted a verse from Scripture. The line that came to him belonged to a 16th-century theologian who defied an emperor.
"As Martin Luther said, 'Here I stand; I can do no other,' " Comey said. "I've got to tell you, Mr. President, that's where I am."
Now Bush said something that floored Comey.
"I just wish that you weren't raising this at the last minute."
The last minute! He didn't know.
The president kept talking. Not the way it's supposed to work, popping up with news like this. The day before a deadline?
Wednesday. He didn't know until Wednesday. No wonder he sent Card and Gonzales to the hospital.
"Oh, Mr. President, if you've been told that, you have been very poorly served by your advisers," Comey said. "We have been telling them for months we have a huge problem here."
"Give me six weeks," Bush asked. One more renewal.
"I can't do that," Comey said. "You do say what the law is in the executive branch, I believe that. And people's job, if they're going to stay in the executive branch, is to follow that. But I can't agree, and I'm just sorry."
If they're going to stay.
Comey was edging toward a breach of his rule against resignation threats.
This man just needs to know what's about to happen.
"I think you should know that Director Mueller is going to resign today," Comey said.
Bush raised his eyebrows. He shifted in his chair. He could not hide it, or did not try. He was gobsmacked.
"Thank you very much for telling me that," he said.
Comey hurried down to Mueller, who sat in the foyer outside the Situation Room. A Secret Service agent followed close behind. The president would like to see you, the agent told Mueller.
Comey pulled out his BlackBerry and sent a note to six colleagues at 9:27 a.m.
"The president just took me into his private office for a 15 minute one on one talk," he wrote [22]. "Told him he was being misled and poorly served. We had a very full and frank exchange. Don't know that either of us can see a way out. . . . Told him Mueller was about to resign. He just pulled Bob into his office."
The FBI director was no more tractable than Comey. This was a rule-of-law question, he told the president, and the answer was in the Justice Department [23]. The FBI could not participate in operations that Justice held to be in breach of criminal law. If those were his orders, he would respectfully take his leave.
And there it was, unfinessable. Bush was out of running room, all the way out. He had only just figured out that the brink was near, and now he stood upon it.
Not 24 hours earlier, the president had signed his name to an in-your-face rejection of the attorney general's ruling on the law. Now he had two bad choices. March on, with all the consequences. Or retreat.
The president stepped back from the precipice. He gave Mueller a message for Comey.
"Tell Jim to do what Justice thinks needs to be done," he said.
Seven days later, Bush amended his March 11 directive. The legal certification belonged again to the attorney general. The surveillance program stopped doing some things, and it did other things differently. Much of the operation remained in place. Not all of it.
* * *
Because Bush did not walk off the cliff, and because so much of the story was suppressed, an extraordinary moment in presidential history passed unrecognized.
"I mean, it would be damn near unprecedented for the top echelon of your Justice Department to resign over a position you've taken," Bartlett said.
There might be one precedent, he allowed. He did not want to spell it out.
"Not a good one," he said.
During the Watergate scandal, the attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned, refusing to carry out Richard Nixon's order to fire the special prosecutor. Nixon lost his top two Justice officials, and that was called the Saturday Night Massacre.
Bush had come within minutes of losing his FBI director and at least the top five layers at Justice. What would they call that? Suicide, maybe?
"You don't have to be the smartest guy to figure out that [mass resignations] would be pretty much the most devastating thing that could happen to your administration," said Mark Corallo, Ashcroft's communications director and, during Bush's first race for the White House, chief spokesman for the Republican National Committee. "The rush to hearings on the Hill, both in the House and Senate, would be unbelievable. The media frenzy that would have ensued would have been unlike anything we've ever seen. That's when you're getting into Watergate territory."
Long after departing as chief of staff, Card held fast to the proposition that whatever happened was nobody's business, and no big deal anyway [24].
"I think you're writing about something that's irrelevant," Card said. "Voyeurism."
Because?
"Nobody resigned over this," he said. It all boiled down to trash talk: " 'Oh, I was gonna swing at the pitch but it was too high.' "
That seems unlikely to stand as history's verdict. In the fourth year of his presidency, a man who claimed the final word was forced by subordinates to comply with their ruling on the law. Ashcroft, Comey, Goldsmith, Philbin -- believers, one and all, in the "unitary executive branch" -- obliged the commander in chief to stand down. For the first time, a president claimed in writing that he alone could say what the law was. A rebellion, in direct response, became so potent a threat that Bush reversed himself in a day.
"This is the first time when the president of the United States really wanted something in wartime, and tried to overrule the Department of Justice, and the law held," said Goldsmith, after studying similar conflicts under Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In the aftermath, the White House senior staff asked questions. Was the president getting timely information and advice? Had he relinquished too much control to Cheney?
Bush, aides said, learned something he would not forget. Cheney was the nearest thing to an anti-politician in elected office. Bush could not afford to be like that. In his second term, his second chance, the president would take greater care to consult his own instincts.
"Cheney was not afraid of giving pure, kind of principled advice," Bartlett said. "He thinks from a policy standpoint, and I think he does this out of pure intentions. He thinks of the national security interest or the prerogatives of the executive. The president has other considerations he has to take into account. The political fallout of certain reactions -- he's just going to calculate different than Cheney does."
"He grew accustomed to that," Bartlett said.
Friday, September 12, 2008 by: Susan Thixton
(NaturalNews) The FDA is supposed to protect our pet's food. Congress took note of the deadly pet food recall last year and mandated the FDA to clean up its act. Human food and pet food regulations are supposed to be updated and in working order by September 2009 according to the Amendments Act. I have my doubts. The list below does not come directly from the FDA in exact words, yet it is a fair interpretation of how the FDA acts in caring for the safety of our pet's food and treats.
1. All U.S. pet foods are safe –- and will continue to be safe. We have everything under control.
2. The pet food recall last year was not our fault –- China did it. We do not think it's necessary to restrict Chinese imports or label pet foods with information that some ingredients might come from China. China has taken measures to prevent this from ever happening again. We trust Chinese imports. Besides, around 1% of all imported products are inspected by the FDA. We have everything under control.
3. U.S. pet owners should not be concerned that sick, diseased cattle and other animals are processed into pet food. Even though the FDA currently considers sick, diseased cattle to be Specified Risk Materials to spread mad cow disease and we are aware that cats around the world have contracted the feline version of this disease, we do not believe they are a risk for use in pet foods. The FDA has been told by pet food industry stakeholder groups that Specified Risk Materials –- animal materials at risk to spread mad cow disease –- are too costly to destroy. We trust the advice of these stakeholder groups and agree that the cost to destroy these risk materials is too high. Sorry, but pet food is the only place to discard specified risk materials. We consider Specified Risk Materials safe for your pet to consume. We have everything under control.
4. Pentobarbital –- the drug used to euthanize animals including pets –- is safe for pets to consume. Yes, we are aware that our neighbor government agency, the Fish and Wildlife Agency, reports that over 100 Bald and Golden Eagles have died recently from eating a euthanized animal. The FDA did a lengthy and complete 8 week study and we determined there is no risk to pets consuming this lethal drug over a lifetime. We have everything under control.
5. The FDA has no idea how the euthanizing drug pentobarbital gets into pet food. We are aware that there is some significant evidence that euthanized pets are rendered (cooked) and put back into pet food. We have spent a great deal of tax payer money developing testing procedures to determine the species source of the drug. Our test results found nothing... well, to be more specific, we spent a great deal of our limited budget trying to quiet the rumors that euthanized dogs and cats are processed into pet food... but, we failed. We cannot say for certain where or how pentobarbital gets into many popular brands of pet foods. However, we firmly believe the information that pet food industry stakeholder groups tell us –- pentobarbital in pet food is not from rendered euthanized dogs and cats. Pet owners should not be concerned how pentobarbital gets into pet food nor which pet foods contain euthanized animals. We have everything under control.
6. The FDA finds it completely acceptable for a pet food to make the claim 'Premium' or 'Choice' on the label even if the food contains chicken feet and cow intestines. Our pets in the U.S. are so fortunate; we understand that chicken feet and cow intestines are considered a delicacy in some countries. The FDA provides a confusing explanation on pet food labels on our website, but we feel the following sums it up: "The pet food label contains a wealth of information, if one knows how to read it. Do not be swayed by the many marketing gimmicks or eye-catching claims." We have everything under control.
7. Should any pet owner feel the FDA is not completely looking out for the best interest of U.S. pets, please note that the FDA leaves most decisions regarding the rules and regulations of pet food to AAFCO (American Association of Feed Control Officials). Since the pet food industry stakeholder groups provide AAFCO with the same valuable advice they provide us, in fact members of these stakeholder groups sit on the Advisory Boards to AAFCO –- the FDA feels confident that AAFCO has everything under control. Should you still feel the FDA is not doing enough to protect your pet, we provide you with the same response we give whenever we are questioned about our ability to protect human and pet food: "We don't have the funding or the manpower".
If it wasn't so sad, the real life condition of pet food seems almost like it's been taken straight out of the pages of some script from a twisted humor television show. My guess would be that the FDA does consider they have 'everything under control' and that all U.S. pet foods are safe. Many doubt that.
It's not rocket science to understand that a quality piece of meat is far more nutritious for your pet than chicken feet and/or cow intestines. And even more so, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that sick, diseased animals or euthanized animals (especially the possibility of euthanized pets) should never be processed into pet food. The good news (honestly) is that there are some high quality pet foods out there that do not use these types of inferior ingredients. It takes a small amount of effort to find them, but the rewards are obvious.
Wishing you and your pet the best,
Susan Thixton
The Washington Post
Saturday, September 13, 2008; 10:37 PM
The following are key documents related to the Bush administration's implementation and defense of the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program.
Thu Sep 11, 2008
By Tom Doggett
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Interior Department employees who oversaw oil drilling on federal lands had sex and used illegal drugs with workers at energy companies where they were conducting official business, an internal government report said on Wednesday.
Employees at the department's Minerals Management Service "socialized with, and received a wide array of gifts and gratuities from, oil and gas companies," according to the department's inspector general, Earl Devaney.
"When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse," Devaney said.
The alleged activities occurred between 2002 and 2006 and involved 19 former and current workers at the Minerals Management Service's offices in Denver and Washington. Devaney recommended that those still on the job be fired.
The workers were involved in the "royalty-in-kind" program that collects and sells oil and gas turned over by energy companies as royalties for drilling on federal lands. About $4 billion a year in royalty-in-kind oil and gas is collected and sold by the department.
The oil companies named in the report were Chevron, Shell Oil, Hess Corp and Gary Williams Energy Corp. ...
[Update below]
By Tom Doggett
Thu Sep 11, 2008
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Thursday said he was "outraged" by department workers who had sex, used drugs and took gifts from employees at regulated oil companies, while one senator called for a Bush administration official to resign over the scandal.
The Interior Department's inspector general issued a scathing report on Wednesday that found "a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" at the department's Minerals Management Service, whose employees handled billions of dollars in oil and natural gas supplies that were turned over by companies as in-kind royalty payments for drilling on federal lands.
"I am outraged by the immoral behavior, illegal activities, and appalling misconduct of several former and current long-serving career employees in the Minerals Management Service's royalty-in-kind program," Kempthorne said. "We will take swift action to restore the public trust."
Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida called for the agency's top head, MMS director Randall Luthi, to resign.
In response to the inspector general's report, Luthi had said that "I do not believe Americans have lost financially," but admitted "it is too early to tell" if government workers gave oil companies financial favors at the expense of taxpayers.
In a letter to Kempthorne on Thursday, Nelson asked for all department employees involved in the scandal to be immediately fired and for the secretary to ask Luthi to submit his resignation.
"Besides being a sad commentary on the failures of certain public servants, this case shows us how the oil industry can hold sway over government officials," Nelson said.
Nelson called for hearings into the scandal by the Senate Commerce Committee, on which he serves. The House Resources Committee is planning a hearing on the matter next week.
While not responding directly to the senator's letter, Kempthorne said: "We must and we will eliminate any remaining negative elements in the Minerals Management Service."
In his report, the inspector general said some MMS workers in the royalty-in-kind program took cocaine and marijuana and had "illicit sexual encounters."
Government workers also got drunk at social events with employees of oil companies doing business with the agency and MMS workers had "brief sexual relationships" with industry contacts, the inspector general said.
The oil companies named in the report were Chevron, Shell Oil, Hess Corp and Gary Williams Energy Corp.
Total Is About Double The U.S. Troop Death Toll In Iraq
Sep 5, 2008
CHICAGO (CBS) ― An estimated 125 people were shot and killed over the summer. That's nearly double the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.
In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 125 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.
According to the Defense Department, 65 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq. About the same number were killed in Afghanistan over that same period.
In the same time period, an estimated 247 people were shot and wounded in the city.
Police department spokeswoman Monique Bond disputed the numbers, saying in an e-mail that sometimes shootings are re-classified as accidental. She said the CBS 2 analysis did not match official department statistics, but she did not provide details. CBS 2 has asked for that information.
"The department officially releases crime statistics on a monthly basis to ensure the proper investigations are thoroughly conducted to determine manner and motive which also may result in reclassifications, '' Bond said.
Violent crime reports available on the department's website do not break down shootings by month. However, the latest report shows that the murder in the city is up 18 percent from last year. From January-July, the department reports 291 people were murdered, compared with 246 for the same period in 2007.
Bond said gang-related violence presents the most serious danger to Chicago residents.
"Gang and gun violence continue to be the dominating threat on our streets," Bond said in an e-mail. "Up to 60 percent of the shootings are gang related. More than 90 percent of the offenders have criminal histories and up to 80 percent of the victims have criminal histories."
For total shootings, the South Side's Englewood District, which includes the Englewood and West Englewood neighborhoods on the city's South Side, fared the worst over the summer. A total of 11 people were shot dead there, and 46 were shot and wounded.
The highest homicide totals came in the Grand Crossing District, which includes the South Shore, Woodlawn, Park Manor and Grand Crossing neighborhoods on the South Side, 13 people were killed and 24 were injured.
Also hit severely by gun violence over the summer was the Harrison District on the city's West Side, where 11 people were shot dead and 25 were shot and wounded. In the Southwest Side's Chicago Lawn District, 12 people were shot and killed and 15 were shot and wounded. In the Ogden District – which includes the Near Southwest Side's Lawndale and Little Village neighborhoods – nine people were killed and eight were injured.
The South Chicago District on the Southeast Side saw nine people killed and 18 injured, almost all concentrated in the South Chicago and Avalon Park neighborhoods at the north end of the district.
The Far South Side's Calumet District – including the Roseland, Fernwood and Pullman neighborhoods – saw nine killed and 23 injured.
Breakdown of summer shootings by police district:
• District 1 – Central (Loop, West Loop, Near South Side): 1 dead, 4 injured
• District 2 – Wentworth (Washington Park, Bronzeville, Fuller Park): 2 dead, 10 injured
• District 3 – Grand Crossing (South Shore, Woodlawn, Park Manor, Grand Crossing) 13 dead, 24 injured
• District 4 – South Chicago (Far Southeast Side to Indiana state line): 9 dead, 18 injured
• District 5 – Calumet (Roseland, Fernwood, West Pullman): 9 dead, 23 injured
• District 6 – Gresham (Auburn-Gresham, Chatham): 5 dead, 19 injured
• District 7 – Englewood (Englewood, West Englewood: 11 dead, 46 injured
• District 8 – Chicago Lawn (most of the Southwest Side): 12 dead, 15 injured
• District 9 – Deering (Back of the Yards, Bridgeport, Canaryville, Brighton Park): 4 dead, 15 injured
• District 10 – Ogden (Little Village, much of North Lawndale): 9 dead, 8 injured
• District 11 – Harrison (Garfield Park, parts of North Lawndale): 11 dead, 25 injured
• District 12 – Monroe (Near West Side): 1 dead, 2 injured
• District 13 – Wood (West Town, Ukrainian Village, parts of Humboldt Park): 3 dead, 1 injured
• District 14 – Shakespeare (Wicker Park, Bucktown, Logan Square, parts of Humboldt Park): 6 dead, 1 injured
• District 15 – Austin (North and South Austin): 6 dead, 8 injured
• District 16 – Jefferson Park (Far Northwest Side from Portage Park to O'Hare International Airport): 0 dead, 0 injured
• District 17 – Albany Park (Albany Park, Irving Park, Avondale): 2 dead, 0 injured
• District 18 – Near North (Lincoln Park, Gold Coast Magnificent Mile, Near North Side): 1 dead, 5 injured
• District 19 – Belmont (Lakeview, Roscoe Village, Lincoln Square, North Center): 1 dead, 1 injured
• District 20 – Lincoln (Edgewater, Andersonville, Rosehill Cemetery, Budlong Woods): 0 dead, 1 injured
• District 21 – Prairie (Hyde Park, Kenwood Oakland-Douglas, Lake Meadows, Chinatown): 2 dead, 2 injured
• District 22 – Morgan Park (Beverly, Morgan Park, Mt. Greenwood): 5 dead, 4 injured
• District 23 – Town Hall (East Lakeview, Uptown): 1 dead, 4 injured
• District 24 – Rogers Park (East and West Rogers Park): 2 dead, 2 injured
• District 25 – Grand Central (Belmont-Cragin, Kelvyn Park, Hermosa, Galewood): 8 dead, 10 injured
Adam Harrington, cbs2chicago.com
