The Dec. 31 Washington Post reports on a Washington, D.C. nonprofit, founded in 1996 by lobbyist Edwin Buckham, whose sole apparent purpose in the five years of its existence was to funnel approximately $2.5 million from disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his clients to former House Majority Whip Rep. Tom DeLay and his office, former DeLay aide Buckham, and Buckham's consulting firm, Alexander Strategy Group.

The $2.5 million came mostly from Abramoff's clients at the Seattle-based law firm Preston Gates Ellis: Russian oil executives (including a $1 million donation at the time DeLay was considering legislation favorable to them), sweatshop owners in the Northern Marianas Islands (ditto, for $500,000), and the casino tribe the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians (ditto, for $250,000).

The U.S. Family Network in turn had virtually no overhead--one staff person and no program to speak of, odd for an alleged "grass roots" group--but USFN did spend money. Oh, yes. It paid a regular $10,000 a month stipend to Buckham and Alexander Strategy Group, and purchased a townhouse, three blocks from DeLay's D.C. office, that was used as a "safe house" by DeLay and his staff for fundraising and other activities. Alexander, in turn, hired Christine DeLay, wife of Tom, and paid her $115,000 to determine the favorite charities of each member of Congress. If USFN was a "charity," and other Congresscreatures had similar setups, one can see how that information would be useful.

This is, if nothing else, something the IRS should surely be interested in. It stinks to high heaven. Abramoff is finished--and DeLay is next. And plenty more will follow. --Geov Parrish

Most of us have forgotten about the Enron scandal or have given up hope that any of Enron's former top executives will ever be prosecuted for accounting misdeeds that cost Enron shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars when the company collapsed over four years ago. Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andrew Fastow have been happy at the glacial pace of the lawsuits against them; every month that goes by is one more month of freedom for them, decreasing their chances of ever having to serve significant jail time and increasing their chances of getting another top job at another corporation.

But this week, prosecutors got a major break in the case: Richard Causey, the former chief accountant at Enron, pled guilty to charges of securities fraud and promised to cooperate with prosecutors by testifying against Skilling, Lay, and Fastow. Finally, prosecutors will have the inside info they need to convict these guys. It remains to be seen whether Skilling, Lay, and Fastow will get major fines and long prison sentences, but at least we'll be able to hear the inside scoop about who knew what, when, and what they said about it. Such peeks inside corporate culture can be educational, enlightening, and help to shatter the illusions of people who worship The System. They also make great fuel for proponents of alternative systems.

And for those of us who just love to analyze current events, this is prime entertainment. Who can't laugh at a CEO who says he "just signed the papers without reading them," but is then confronted by a colleague who testifies that he knew what he was doing all along? Break out the popcorn. --Maria Tomchick

Two things happened this week to confirm that the US has installed a torture regime in Iraq in place of Saddam Hussein. The first was the announcement that the US military would not turn over their detention centers in Iraq to the Iraqi government because of concerns about prisoner abuse. (This comes in the midst of a huge push to turn over US military bases to the new Iraqi army.) The second was a announcement by Iraqi and American government inspectors who've discovered abuses at two more Iraqi-run detention facilities: one in Baghdad that was inspected on December 20th and one in Tal Afar that was inspected on December 28th.

No mention was made of which Iraqi police, military, or militia units are running these two facilities, but it's unlikely that the Tal Afar jail is being run by a Shiite militia. Because of its northern location, it's a fair bet that a unit of the peshmerga, or Kurdish nationalist militia, is in charge of the jail. This would mean that torture and abuse of detainees is not strictly an Iranian/Shiite problem, but one of inadequate training and lack of oversight of the jails and detainees in the Iraqi prison system.

We know this is true of the US military detention system in Iraq; we also know that secret, CIA-run detention centers exist outside of any oversight. But the fact that Iraqi-run jails are off limits to human rights groups and the Red Cross is deeply troubling. The Bush administration has no concept of how its efforts to undermine international law and human rights is setting a dangerous precedent for the rest of the world, even for our allies--particularly for our allies, who view the wing of US protection as a carte blanche to engage in gross human rights abuses. --M.T.

For some reason, media haven't given much attention to a truly alarming aspect of the NSA spying scandal: the NSA's use of "data mining," targeting not just a few Al-Qaeda members' overseas calls and e-mails but those of every American. NSA computers use search terms to have computers flag the most suspicious calls, and then having actual humans listen only to those calls. That's exactly how the NSA monitors global communications through programs like ECHELON, and it would certainly explain why Bush has refused to use the FISA court to obtain search warrants.

This, of course, raises all sorts of questions. Who defines the search terms? How long are the tapes kept? If a person is deemed "of interest," what other sorts of investigations are done, and are those investigations done without a warrant or judicial oversight, too? On the basis of illegally obtained evidence? And in an administration that has equated criticism of its policies with treason and the abetting of terrorists, have political opponents or citizen critics been monitored because of their political beliefs?

I've certainly been publicly critical of Bush's policies. I also make overseas calls. My ex-wife lives in Japan, and we're still friends. In the course of my job, I've placed calls to all sorts of places, including troubled outposts like Palestine and Iraq, and almost certainly in some of those calls phrases like "suicide bombing" have left my lips.

Maybe I should sue. Find out whether my constitutional rights have been violated. Make it a class action suit.

I'll bet I'm not the only one thinking along those lines.

One more thought: where has Congress been on all this? Over the years of the program, a number of Congresspeople were notified of it, and while they were surely told what the White House has told the public--that only calls to or from suspected terrorists were monitored--they have to know enough about the inner workings of the NSA to have suspicions of just this sort of broadly cast net. Yet only Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia voiced any sorts of concerns at all. The Congresscreatures who didn't blow the whistle on this program are complicit, too.

In one sense, it should come as no surprise in this electronic age that our government is spying on us. Privacy is an illusion; Big Brother is here. Yet even when that's taking place, there are supposed to be checks and balances. There is supposed to be accountability--to the bureaucracy, to courts and judges, to the voters who elect the politicians who authorize these sorts of things. A secret program whose scope and terms are set by and known to only a tiny few should be truly alarming. --G.P.

On Dec. 22, the US News & World Report broke the story that:

"In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C. area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, US News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go onto the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts...."

The five other cities are New York, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas and... Seattle. Other cities were also targeted during special events like the Super Bowl. The day after the report, the FBI quietly acknowledged that the program was actually larger than reported, involving "thousands" of surveillances.

Why Seattle, which has neither a large Muslim population nor a history of public terrorism plot investigations, would be one of the selected cities is anyone's guess--as is the actual local target(s) of the FBI's interest. In the last four years, there have been numerous cases of local (Muslim) immigrant families being targeted by patently unfair "War on Terror"-related visa, immigration, and deportation proceedings. Local advocacy groups like Hate Free Zone have repeatedly beaten their heads against walls trying to get local media to take any kind of serious interest. It wasn't much different this time; the Seattle Times and local TV ignored the story.

Naturally, the White House thinks the radiation monitoring is legal. But it almost certainly is not. The most applicable precedent is a case in which police used heat-seeking equipment near the property to suss out drug manufacturing setups inside private homes--without entering the property, and without a search warrant. The US Supreme Court ruled that that was an unconstitutional violation of 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

The cases are almost identical. The White House will surely claim that in this instance the Constitution is trumped by national security concerns--which is, more or less, exactly what they've claimed in all these other spying and torture scandals. But it's not. And the wide net cast by this program--as with the NSA spying--is such that no court would ever approve warrants for countless people specifically suspected of no crime.

We're going to get more and more of these revelations. What they add up to is a White House that believes it can do anything it likes--a White House that believes it is above the law--and a White House that treats American citizens as the enemy.

I'll say it yet again: Impeach the bastards. --G.P.

I'm not that much of a fan of Sen. Maria Cantwell, but she did a truly amazing job in leading a coalition that managed to beat back Sen. Ted Stevens' sleazy last-minute attempt to slip authorization for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling into (yet another) unrelated bill.

Cantwell's effectiveness on ANWR, though, highlights a key difference between her and senior Washington state Democratic Sen. Patty Murray. Cantwell gets things done. Murray raises money.

A year into her third term--after 13 years in the Senate--Murray has yet to lead the charge on a single meaningful bill or issue. Murray is the second leading Democratic recipient in Congress of donations from disgraced Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, and that sort of cash-and-carry politics is much of how Murray uses her precious seat. Even on the one single gutsy vote Murray has taken in her decade-plus--her last minute 2002 decision not to support Bush's invasion of Iraq--she has been largely invisible ever since, staying quiet as Bush's disastrous invasion spirals ever further out of control.

Cantwell, by contrast, has now managed, in her first term, to lead what is arguably the Democrats' most significant Senate victory in the Bush years. (Admittedly, there's not much competition.) While Cantwell is a DLC centrist to the core, with all the baggage that suggests, she's been good on both the environment and tech issues. The ostensibly more liberal Murray has done well by her corporate donors. That's about it. Alongside Murray and the largely inert Rep. Jim McDermott, Cantwell is not only Seattle's most conservative Congressional representative, but the only one who gets anything done. --G.P.

Liberal KIRO-AM radio talk show host Mike Webb has been fired after his arrest Dec. 20 on insurance fraud charges. He's also apparently under investigation for forgery. With the standard caveat of innocent until proven guilty, the legal case against Webb is pretty compelling--compelling enough that KIRO didn't wait for a trial. This one reeked of exactly the sort of hypocrisy Webb so often decried on his show; he was, among other things, a tireless critic of Republican corruption and dubious enrichment schemes.

I was a somewhat regular guest on Webb's show, and I can't deny that he was good to me--naturally, because we were usually on the same side. But he's never been my media cup of tea. I do a lot of appearances around the country on talk radio, and I won't knowingly go on conservative shows where I'm there solely as a prop or punching bag for a bullying host to titillate his dittohead listeners. (Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson generally do not do this on KVI, which is why I appreciate them even when I often disagree.) That's how Webb treated his conservative callers and (occasional) guests, and it's always bugged me. Not to mention those intensely irritating oldies.

That said, Webb's exit was a real loss for local Seattle media. There are plenty of more-or-less-liberal print commentators in Seattle, but KIRO-AM and KUOW have the only local radio equivalents. Of these, Webb was the only one who brought the sort of consistent fire to his convictions (sorry, bad pun) standard among conservative talkers--not necessarily the same thing as being abusive--and Seattle radio needs more of it, not less. If the ever-erratic KIRO programmers don't replace Webb with someone politically similar, that underscores all over again the inexplicable nature of Air America outlet KPTK's failure to hire a local host. It's an obvious void in a mostly saturated, heavily liberal media market. --G.P.

In a Dec. 19 AP story summarizing last-minute House of Representatives actions before holiday adjournment, there was this little nugget concerning the Republicans' efforts to slash spending for social programs for the poor:

"Republicans originally put the savings at $41.6 billion, but that figure was later reduced to $39.7 billion with restoration of Medicare payments for oxygen patients, a late concession to lawmakers with interests in the durable medical equipment industry."

There, in a casual phrase, is everything wrong with our lawmaking process. It didn't matter to Congress that "oxygen patients" are people who are seriously ill, usually disabled and unable to work, and literally might die without the ability to pay for their treatment. It did matter that some lawmakers have "interests in the durable medical equipment industry." --G.P.