The White House environmental adviser Van Jones, a towering figure in the environmental movement, has resigned after weeks of controversy stemming from his past activism.

”On the eve of historic fights for health-care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Mr Jones, the special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight on Saturday. ”They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

He continued: ”I have been inundated with calls – from across the political spectrum – urging me to ‘stay and fight’. But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.”

Mr Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials ”may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war” and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the Administration.

A Republican Congressman, Mike Pence, called on Mr Jones to resign on Friday, saying in a statement: ”His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.” Senator Christopher Bond wrote in an open letter: ”Can the American people trust a senior White House official that is so cavalier in his association with such radical and repugnant sentiments?”

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said on Friday that Mr Jones ”continues to work for the Administration” – but he did not state that the adviser enjoyed the full support of President Barack Obama.

Mr Jones had worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality since March. He was a civil-rights activist before turning his focus to environmental and energy issues.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Mike Pence, Van Jones

After eight years, US-led forces must show progress in Afghanistan by next year to avoid perceptions that the conflict has become unwinnable, the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has said in a sharp critique of the war effort.

Mr Gates said victory was a “long-term prospect” under any scenario and the US would not win the war in a year’s time. But US forces must begin to turn the situation around in a year, he said, or face the likely loss of public support.

Mr Gates said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published yesterday:

“After the Iraq experience, nobody is prepared to have a long slog where it is not apparent we are making headway,”

“The troops are tired, the American people are pretty tired.”

Deep public unhappiness with the war in Iraq helped sink George Bush’s public approval ratings, making him the most unpopular president in recent history in some surveys.

While not predicting a parallel fate for the Obama Administration, Mr Gates stressed the need for progress in Afghanistan.

Mr Gates has spoken in the past about the public’s fatigue with war. In the interview, he went further by offering a more specific time-frame for needed progress as well as the consequences of failing to meet it. Mr Gates has overseen an overhaul in the Administration’s Afghanistan strategy in recent months, sending 21,000 additional troops and choosing a new commander to lead the international effort.

“This is where we are really getting back into the fight,”

The strategy switch came after rebel attacks rose dramatically last year and casualties suffered by US and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops surpassed record levels.

President Barack Obama said last week that he hoped to “transition to a different phase” after the Afghan presidential election on August 20.

Mr Gates said Americans would have the patience to continue the war in Afghanistan only if the new military approach began to lift the conflict out of deadlock.

“If we can show progress, and we are headed in the right direction, and we are not in a stalemate where we are taking significant casualties, then you can put more time on the Washington clock,”

With a new strategy in place, General Stanley McChrystal, now the top commander in Afghanistan, and General David Petraeus, head of US forces in the Middle East, are due to provide their assessment of the effort in Afghanistan early next month.

Mr Gates said the commanders were free to provide an honest assessment, but also cautioned that additional troops might not be approved.

“I did not want either of them to feel constrained in making their recommendations,”

“That is not to say we will accept all of their recommendations.”

The war in Afghanistan is officially a NATO mission. Mr Gates said the alliance was facing the challenge of rising casualties just as the overall coalition war effort was beginning to function better. British forces have had 15 soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan this month, and Canada has lost five service members.

“There has been an extraordinary amount of political courage as some of our partners have taken some really devastating casualties,”

“The British have had a rough couple of weeks.”

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, george bush, pentagon, Robert Gates

Democrats have lashed out at former vice-president Dick Cheney, accusing him of abusing his power, amid reports he ordered the CIA to withhold information from Congress about a secret counter-terrorism program.

Lawmakers vowed to hold hearings on the nature of the alleged top secret program and efforts to keep members of the US legislature in the dark.

A senior member of the US Senate, Democrat Kent Conrad, who called the alleged failure to notify Congress about the program “a serious breach” said:

“This is a question of whether the former vice-president of the United States denied certain sensitive information to the intelligence leaders in Congress. That is not acceptable,”

Speaking on Sunday on CNN television, Conrad said Central Intelligence Agency notification to key members of Congress about its secret programs

“is required by law”

“That’s a serious matter,”

Representative Anna Eshoo, a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she would call for the panel to hire an outside counsel to investigate the issue.

The Democrat told The Washington Post in reports published on Sunday:

“We have to know who gave the order for this, who gave the order to conceal this, where did they draw the money for this,”

Eshoo said the committee might have to use its subpoena power to interview some officials who oversaw intelligence issues during the Bush administration.

Officials were vague about the precise nature of the highly secret program.

Two former agency officials told the daily it involved a series of proposals designed to provide US intelligence agencies with a “needed capability” – without providing details as to what was meant.

The latest proposal was aired in the spring of 2008 but was not carried out, the officials said, although they told the newspaper it did not involve interrogations of detainees or surveillance of US-based communications.

Both were highly controversial practices that have been roundly condemned in many quarters, as the United States prosecuted its war on terrorism during the Bush administration.

The New York Times, which broke the story about the role alleged to have been played by Cheney in keeping the CIA program under wraps, reported that CIA chief Leon Panetta ended the program when he learned of its existence on June 23.

Panetta is reported to have revealed Cheney’s role in a closed briefing one day later to the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Because this program never went fully operational and hadn’t been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial,”

An intelligence official told the newspaper, speaking on condition of anonymity.

News of the alleged program came as lawmakers from both President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party and opposition Republicans are in bitter dispute over whether the CIA informed Congress adequately and comprehensively about sensitive programs.

In May, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi charged that the US spy agency misled lawmakers in 2002 about interrogation techniques widely seen as torture, including “waterboarding”, a simulated drowning method used on terrorism suspects.

On Sunday, senior Republican senator Judd Gregg conceded that in his view,

“if somebody told the CIA not to inform the appropriate members of Congress on information, that’s wrong”.

Nevertheless Gregg said:

“That isn’t a reason to disassemble the CIA and make them a whipping child in the middle.”

The Republic lawmaker said the controversy pointed to a

“continued attack on the CIA and our intelligence gathering organisations which is undermining the morale and capacity of those organisations to gather intelligence”.

Technorati Tags: Central Intelligence Agency, Dick Cheney, Kent Conrad

The mass hysteria from the right rolled in overnight, just two days after Wanda Sykes appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and gave Rush Limbaugh a taste of his own medicine. Much like when Limbaugh would gleefully sing “Barack the Magic Negro” on a daily basis or when he rabidly, and brutally ripped into Michael J. Fox and his illness – Sykes decided to take it to the next level in her digs aimed at Rush.

Sykes, who was on fire riffed hard on Limbaugh – claiming she was the 20th hijacker on 9/11 but missed the plane because he was so strung out on Oxycontin, and that while Rush “hoped Obama failed”, she hoped Limbaughs “kidneys failed”. Undoubtedly, it was a fun routine – and with anything funny – all hell has broken loose with commentators and politicians alike chiming in on why they hated what Wanda said.

It’s shocking that right wing politicos/talking heads are taking so much (and I sense, contrived) outrage over Sykes stand-up routine. If you simply add up all things “disgusting”, “vile” or any other adjective being used to describe Sykes routine – that Rush Limbaugh has said just over the year or two you would come up with a compilation that would over shadow anything Sykes said to such a degree, it would be silly to even compare the two, and their public commentary.

Technorati Tags: Comedy News, Daily Show, Daily Show Wanda Sykes, Jon Stewart, Jon Stewart Wanda Sykes, video, Wanda Sykes, Wanda Sykes Daily Show, Wanda Sykes Jon Stewart, Wanda Sykes Rush Limbaugh, Wanda Sykes White House Correspondents Dinner

Former US vice-president Dick Cheney says intelligence extracted from tough interrogations of suspected al-Qaeda militants had saved “perhaps hundreds of thousands” of US lives.

“No regrets. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do,” he said on CBS television arguing that techniques decried by critics as torture were essential to break the resistance of captured extremists.

Cheney said, arguing again that al-Qaeda was bent on attacking a US city with a nuclear device:

“I’m convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives,”

But at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association late on Saturday, President Barack Obama skewered Cheney’s doomsday view of the world for comic effect.

“Dick Cheney was supposed to be here but he is very busy working on his memoirs, tentatively titled How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People,”

In one of his first acts as president, Obama reversed predecessor George W Bush’s approval of harsh interrogation methods such as “waterboarding”, or simulated drowning.

Recently released memorandums detail the reasoning used by Bush administration lawyers to justify waterboarding and other techniques such as sleep deprivation, physical slaps and painful “stress positions”.

Cheney reaffirmed his belief that Obama had made the US more vulnerable to attack, and condemned calls by Democratic lawmakers for the Bush legal officials to face prosecution.

“The memos do exist. I have seen them. I had them in my files at one time. Now everything is part of the National Archives. I’m sure the agency (CIA) has copies of those materials,”

“If we’re going to have this debate, it ought to be a complete debate. Those memos ought to be out there for people to look at and journalists like yourself to evaluate in terms of what we were able to accomplish.”

Obama’s national security advisor, General James Jones, dismissed Cheney’s claim that the US was now less safe from attack.

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” the former supreme commander of NATO told ABC, rebutting Cheney’s arguments for the interrogations and for detaining terror suspects without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

“And I think frankly in the Bush administration, there wasn’t complete agreement with the vice-president on that score,”

Obama, he added, was “absolutely committed” to upholding the rule of law while protecting the nation.

While Bush has kept a low profile since leaving office, Cheney has repeatedly gone on the airwaves to defend his own legacy as probably the most powerful US vice-president ever.

“If I don’t speak out, then where do we find ourselves? Then the critics have free run and there isn’t anybody there on the other side to tell the truth,” he said, adding he was prepared to testify in Congress if necessary.

Cheney also heaped scorn on his one-time cabinet rival, former secretary of state Colin Powell, who has been vilified by right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh after endorsing Obama for the presidency.

“If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh, I think,”

“My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican”.

Cheney said there was still “room for moderates in the Republican Party”, but that the party should stay true to its core principles and not “move dramatically to the left”.

The Democratic Party’s national committee responded:

“It’s sad that because Republican leaders in Congress are so devoid of ideas and direction that Dick Cheney has emerged as the party’s leading voice.”

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Dick Cheney, george w. bush, sleep deprivation, torture techniques, waterboarding

Barack Obama will make his long-awaited address to Muslims in Egypt on June 4, accelerating his bid to mend the US image in the Islamic world from an epicentre of Arab civilisation.

The speech, fulfilling an Obama campaign promise, will focus on how Americans and Muslims abroad can secure the “safety and security” of their children in a more hopeful future, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

The trip, certain to unfold amid a massive security operation, will come as Obama tries to ignite stalled Middle East peace efforts and will represent his most significant attempt yet to engage the Muslim world.

Arabs and Muslim believers across the world have been alienated by the war in Iraq, abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail outside Baghdad and the Guantanamo Bay “war on terror” camp which Obama has ordered closed.

Gibbs said that the exact venue for the speech had yet to be decided, but most speculation will centre on Cairo, the capital of Egypt, the most populous nation in the Arab world.

“On June 4, the president will give a speech in Egypt. The speech will be about America’s relations with the Muslim world,”

He added that there were no plans for Obama to make any further stops in the Middle East during the visit, which will precede a trip to France and Germany focusing on World War II commemorations.

The president promised during his 2008 election campaign to make a speech at a major Islamic forum within the first 100 days of his administration which ended last week, but the timetable slipped for logistical reasons.

As Obama tries to kick start Middle East peacemaking, the visit will follow trips to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas.

Obama is also trying to coax sworn US foe Iran to the negotiating table in a bid to halt the Islamic state’s nuclear program.

Gibbs defended Obama from claims that by choosing Egypt, where the State Department says there are

“significant restrictions on the political process and freedom of expression” the US president was watering down US support for democracy promotion abroad.

“It is a country that in many ways represents the heart of the Arab world,”

“I think it will be a terrific opportunity for the president to address and discuss our relationship with the Muslim world.”

Obama last month reached out to Muslims from the well of the Turkish parliament.

“You cannot put out fire with flames,”

Obama said, arguing that brute force alone could not thwart extremism as he sent a flurry of coded messages throughout the Middle East.

Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and is the son of a Kenyan father of Muslim heritage, drew on his own biography as he sought to forge new trust with the Islamic world.

The president said US ties with Islam could not be simply defined by opposition to terrorism, decades into a US struggle with extremism that was sharpened by the September 11 attacks in 2001.

“The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country – I know, because I am one of them.”

Within days of taking office in January, Obama launched his effort to engage the Muslim world by granting an interview with the Al-Arabiya television network.

Jon Alterman, the director of the Middle East Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies here said:

“Obama has created a combination of curiosity and excitement throughout the Middle East,”

“He embodies change in a region where many people are terribly thirsty for political change.”

The White House also said Friday that Obama will visit the German city of Dresden and the former Nazi death camp at Buchenwald in June 5, before travelling onto D-Day commemorations in France.

Obama’s great-uncle, Charlie Payne, took part in the liberation of part of the Buchenwald camp in 1945 with the US Army but Gibbs said it was unclear whether he would travel with the president.

Payne was a private in the 89th Infantry Division during World War II when he took part in the liberation of Ohrdruf, a forced-labour camp that was part of Buchenwald.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, egypt, Middle East, Muslims

The world is on the brink of a “robotics revolution” in military combat that will have profound social, psychological, political and ethical effects, says a leading US defence analyst.

Peter Singer, who headed Barack Obama’s defence policy team during last year’s presidential campaign, said yesterday that the use of robots for fighting war was growing exponentially.

The US had invaded Iraq in 2003 with just over a handful of unmanned aerial drones, and no unmanned ground vehicles, he said. Today it used more than 7000 drones in the air, and more than 12,000 unmanned ground vehicles capable of combat.

More than 43 countries were developing military robotics, including Israel, Iran, China, Pakistan and Russia, as well as Britain and Australia.

In 25 years, Dr Singer said,

“our robotics will be about a billion times more powerful [in their computing power] than today”.

Their use in warfare was a massive development in human history, he told the Lowy Institute in Sydney, via videolink from Washington.

“We are living through the end of humankind’s 5000-year-old monopoly on the fighting of war … The robots of today are the first technologies to change the ‘who’ of war, not just the ‘how’ of war…”

Dr Singer, who has just written Wired For War, warned that remote war-fighting could come at a high price, as nation-states would be unable to keep the technology to themselves.

Adversaries such as al-Qaeda were also likely to gain the use of remote war-fighting devices. And there were a host of social, ethical and doctrinal questions developing from the use of such weapons.

With robotics transforming the nature of warfare, it was risky, he warned, to

“make grand commitments before you figure out where things are headed”.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, defence policy, Peter Singer, Robot soliers, robots

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has unveiled a four-point plan to fight piracy that calls for prosecution and freezing pirates’ assets.

The United States seeks to work with the international community to “explore ways to track and freeze pirate assets”, Clinton told reporters, adding Washington was determined to make sure “states take responsibility for prosecuting and imprisoning captured pirates.

Clinton dismissed suggestions that it would be difficult to track the ill-gotten gain of pirates operating out of Somalia, where state institutions collapsed in the last two decades.

Clinton said:

“We track and freeze and try to disrupt the assets of many stateless groups, including Islamist terrorists”

“We notice pirates are buying more and more sophisticated equipment … buying faster and more capable vessels,”

With the outlaws “clearly using ransom money for both their personal benefit and for piracy”, she added there are “ways to crack down on companies that do business with pirates”.

Technorati Tags: hillary clinton, pirate assets

President Barack Obama directed his administration Monday to allow unlimited travel and money transfers by Cuban Americans to family in Cuba, and to take other steps to ease U.S. restrictions on the island.

The formal announcement was being made at the White House Monday afternoon, during presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs’ daily briefing with reporters. The official spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to upstage the president’s announcement.

With the changes, Obama aims to create new space for the Cuban people in their quest for political freedom and a democratic government, in part by making them less dependent on the Castro regime, the official said.  Other steps taken Monday include allowing gift parcels to be send to Cuba, and issuing licenses to increase communications among and to the Cuban people.

About 1.5 million Americans have relatives in Cuba.Obama had promised to take these steps as a presidential candidate. It has been known for over a week that he would announce them in advance of his attended this weekend of a Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago.

“There are no better ambassadors for freedom than Cuban Americans,”

Obama said in a campaign speech last May in Miami, the heart of the U.S. Cuban-American community.

“It’s time to let Cuban Americans see their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. It’s time to let Cuban American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime.”

Sending money to senior government officials and Communist Party members remains prohibited.

Restrictions imposed by the Bush administration had limited Cuban travel by Americans to just two weeks every three years. Visits also were confined to immediate family members.  Other steps taken Monday include expanding the things allowed in gift parcels being sent to Cuba, such as clothes, personal hygiene items, seeds, fishing gear and other personal necessities.

The administration also will begin issuing licenses to allow companies to provide cell and television services to people on the island, and to allow family members to pay for relatives on Cuba to get those services, the official said.

Also in that Miami speech nearly a year ago, Obama promised to depart from what he said had been the path of previous politicians on Cuba policy –

“they come down to Miami, they talk tough, they go back to Washington, and nothing changes in Cuba.”

“Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy,”

he said then.

“This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century — of elections that are anything but free or fair; of dissidents locked away in dark prison cells for the crime of speaking the truth. I won’t stand for this injustice, you won’t stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba.”

He also promised to engage in direct diplomacy with Cuba, “without preconditions” but with “careful preparation” and “a clear agenda.”

Some lawmakers, backed by business and farm groups seeing new opportunities in Cuba, are advocating wider revisions in the trade and travel bans imposed after Fidel Castro took power in Havana in 1959.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Cuba, Robert Gibbs

Lawrence Summers, the top economic adviser to the US President, Barack Obama, earned millions over the past year as managing director of the hedge fund D. E. Shaw Group and through speaking fees, some from financial institutions now at the centre of the Government’s rescue program.

Financial disclosure reports released by the White House show that Dr Summers received $US5.2 million from D. E. Shaw.
He also reported payments for appearances before institutions such as J. P. Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers.

Overall, Dr Summers was paid $US2.7 million for more than 40 appearances before different organisations and companies, including financial institutions.

Mr Obama has enacted strict rules against hiring lobbyists for Administration positions that would have influence over their former clients. A White House official said Dr Summers would not work on issues specifically related to D. E. Shaw for two years. The official noted that Dr Summers was not an adviser or an employee of the firms that paid him to give speeches.

Another senior adviser at the White House, David Axelrod, disclosed that he sold his share of two campaign and media strategy businesses last year for $US3 million. The money will be paid to him in annual instalments over the next five years, beginning on December 31. Mr Axelrod also reported income of more than $US1 million last year from the two companies, David Axelrod & Associates and ASK Public Strategies.

Dr Summers began as managing director at D. E. Shaw Group in October 2006. A company press release at the time said he would be involved part-time to offer advice on strategic initiatives, provide high-level research and advise the executive committee.

A White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said Dr Summers

“has been at the forefront of this administration’s work to shore up our nation’s financial system and to put in place a regulatory framework that will strengthen the financial system and its oversight – all in an effort to help the families across America who have paid a very steep price for risky decisions made by Wall Street executives”.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lawrence Summers, Lehman Brothers