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WASHINGTON – Barack Obama is conducting his own affirmative action program to get more Muslims in the White House.
The move began with Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn, who took his oath of office with a hand on the Quran, to solicit the resume of what he considered to be the nation's most qualified adherents of Islam. ....
The United States has experienced the greatest surge in immigration since the early 20th century, with one in five residents a recent immigrant or a close relative of one. This series examines how American institutions are being pressed to adjust. More Articles in the Series »
“You’re having surgery to remove shrapnel from your skull,” Dr. Steven Hillson told him, pausing to let a Somali interpreter dressed in a black head scarf and a floor-length skirt translate.
The patient, Abdulqadir Jiirow, 31, nodded and explained that the shrapnel had been there since 1991, when he was 14 and civil war broke out in Somalia and an artillery shell smashed into his home. It had not bothered him much until recently, when he began to work at a meat-packing plant and the helmet and goggles needed for the job pressed on it painfully.
Mr. Jiirow said he worked in a small town several hours away and shared an apartment with other Somalis, while his wife and child lived in Minneapolis. He saw them on weekends.
“It’s still astonishing,” the doctor, shaking his head, said after Mr. Jiirow left. “ ‘Someone sent artillery into my home.’ But it’s common.”
Hennepin County Medical Center, a sprawling complex in downtown Minneapolis near the Metrodome, offers an extraordinary vantage point on the ways immigrants are testing the American medical establishment. The new arrivals — many fleeing repression, war, genocide or grinding poverty — bring distinctive patterns of illness and injury and cultural beliefs about life, death, sickness and health.
In a city where Swedes and Norwegians once had separate hospitals, Hennepin spends $3 million a year on interpreters fluent in 50 languages to communicate effectively with its foreign-born patients.
Many arrive with health problems seldom seen in this country — vitamin deficiencies, intestinal parasites and infectious diseases like tuberculosis, for instance — and unusually high levels of emotional trauma and stress. Over time, as they pick up Western habits, some develop Western ailments, too, like obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and yet they often question the unfamiliar lifelong treatments these chronic diseases need.
Some also resist conventional medical wisdom or practices, forcing change on the hospital. The objections of Somali women to having babies delivered by male doctors has led Hennepin, gradually, to develop an obstetrical staff made up almost entirely of women.
Doctors here say that for many of these newcomers, the most common health problems, and the hardest to treat, lie at the blurry line between body and mind, where emotional scars from troubled pasts may surface as physical illness, pain and depression.
“Being an immigrant, it will be a chronic illness for the rest of your life,” said Dr. Veronica Svetaz, a physician from Argentina who works at one of Hennepin’s neighborhood clinics. “You don’t belong anywhere anymore.”
From Far-Flung Countries
Like many American cities, Minneapolis has seen a tremendous influx of Hispanics, many of them here illegally from Ecuador and Mexico. Hispanics, both legal and illegal, make up the biggest immigrant group in the state, as well as in the nation.
But since the late 1970s, this once lily-white city on the prairie, frozen solid half the year, has also been taking in waves of legal refugees from more far-flung parts of the world: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Liberia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Myanmar and other countries.
So many people came here from war zones that a nonprofit group opened the nation’s first Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis in 1987. Statewide, the number of foreign-born people more than doubled in the 1990s and is nearly a quarter million now. They make up 5 percent of the population.
The influx from Somalia has been especially large. A million people fled the country when civil war broke out. Many spent years in squalid, disease-ridden refugee camps or shantytowns in Ethiopia or Kenya.
The lucky ones, granted refugee status, started arriving in the United States in the mid-1990s. Many were relocated to Minneapolis by the State Department because of the city’s strong social services and its many civic groups that help newcomers. There are an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 Somalis in Minnesota, most in Minneapolis, more than in any other American city. But the exact number is not known because refugees are not tracked when they move from state to state. Some officials and Somalis themselves think the figure is much higher than the state estimates, perhaps even double.
“Nobody can count us,” said Dr. Osman Harare, a physician and public health official in Somalia who became a patient advocate and interpreter at Hennepin. “We are nomads.”
The community is thriving, though it is not without troubles. The F.B.I. has been investigating whether young Somali men in Minneapolis have been recruited to commit acts of terrorism in Somalia, and health officials have been looking into reports of unusually high rates of autism in the children of Somali immigrants.
A 446-bed public hospital, Hennepin has a tradition of turning no one away, and it has become the first stop for many immigrants who need a doctor.
No questions are asked about immigration status. About 20 percent of the center’s patients were born in other countries, and they account for $100 million of its $500 million yearly expenses for patient care. Hennepin’s interpreters are called on to help patients more than 130,000 times a year. The greatest demand by far is for Spanish, followed by Somali.
One of the challenges in treating immigrants is money. Hennepin has $45 million a year in costs that are not reimbursed, and though immigrants by no means account for all of it, they are “a major contributor,” said Mike Harristhal, the hospital’s vice president for public policy and strategy.
Most Somalis are in this country legally and qualify for various government health insurance programs. For people here illegally, it is a whole other story. They used to be eligible for Medicaid, but are not anymore, except for emergencies or if they are pregnant or under 18. Hennepin has sliding-scale fees for the indigent, but some cannot afford even those prices.
Minnesota has its share of people who oppose immigration and resent footing the bills for foreigners, and Mr. Harristhal acknowledged that the melting-pot atmosphere at Hennepin drives some potential customers away. But the hospital is a renowned trauma center; even those who turn up their noses at the clientele accept that for someone in a car accident, there is no better place to be.
Complex Needs at the Clinic
Much of Hennepin’s work with immigrants takes place in a stretch of examining rooms and offices on the seventh floor, which has become an international health clinic with certain days set aside for various ethnic groups.
On a Tuesday afternoon last fall, a 62-year-old woman from Somalia made her first visit to the clinic. Initially, she was exuberant, speaking so rapidly that an interpreter could barely keep up.
“I love this big government hospital, the same government that welcomed me here after the war and the sadness of Somalia,” she said, beaming at Deborah Boehm, a nurse practitioner. “Your face welcomes me.”
The patient’s broad smile showed gaps in her teeth. She wore a traditional Muslim head scarf, a floor-length skirt in bright blue and purple, flip-flops and a gauzy, pale aqua shawl over a sweatshirt. Her fingernails were tinted orange with henna.
She had a dozen bottles of pills from other clinics in the Twin Cities, and a long list of ailments: arthritis, digestive trouble, allergies, insomnia and, worst of all, pain. Twice in recent months she had gone to the emergency room for terrible aches in her legs and burning pain in her side.
Ms. Boehm said she would order a blood test to measure vitamin D, because deficiencies are common in Somalis and are a frequent cause of aches and pains. (Aching all over is not uncommon among Somalis, and older people sometimes tell doctors they feel as if camels or horses have been walking on them all night.)
The body uses sunlight to make vitamin D, and dark-skinned people make less than whites. Somali women are especially prone to deficiencies because their traditional clothing covers so much of their skin.
The patient said she sometimes could not recall how many of her children were still alive. The forgetfulness had begun when she left Africa and all the problems there.
Ms. Boehm, 56, with short, curly hair and glasses, looked at the patient intently as she took notes and said, “Haa,” the Somali word for yes. “Tell me about the problems.”
The woman’s face crumpled. She rocked in her seat, choked out a few words, then bit her hand and wiped her eyes with her shawl.
The translation, “Don’t remind me,” was unneeded.
Ms. Boehm calmly changed the subject to matters of digestion and a local supermarket that sold camel’s milk.
Later, Ms. Boehm predicted that much of her new patient’s physical trouble would turn out to have emotional roots in Somalia. Anguish morphing into physical pain and depression is something Ms. Boehm has seen time and again in treating Somali refugees.
Ms. Boehm began working with Somali women at the clinic in 1997, and her job quickly became complicated.
“I began to hear about the pain,” Ms. Boehm said. “I couldn’t find any reason for it. They would say it felt like fire or electricity, descriptions I wasn’t familiar with. I did X-rays, lab tests, ordered physical therapy. Somehow, I just couldn’t get it to go away. After 6 to 12 months I said, ‘We have to look at the mental health piece.’ ”
At her urging, the clinic brought in a psychologist, and Ms. Boehm said, “I aggressively worked on getting these women into therapy.”
Dr. Mary Bradmiller, the psychologist, said the rates of depression and post traumatic stress disorder were high. Most of her Somali patients are mothers with “tremendous psychosocial stress, domestic violence, child protection issues, war trauma, nightmares, flashbacks and separation from their families,” Dr. Bradmiller said.
A study of 1,134 Somali and Eritrean refugees in the United States in 2004 found that 25 percent of the men and 47 percent of the women had been tortured, rates that the researchers considered shockingly high. The torture of women frequently involves rape.
Survivors often resist psychological help and deny their problems. Somali culture, like many others, stigmatizes mental illness. In Somalia, mental troubles are often attributed to spirit possession, and psychotherapy barely exists. “They might have talked to a sheik or an imam or a female healer,” Dr. Bradmiller said.“They never come for therapy unless there’s a strong recommendation from a medical person they trust,” Dr. Bradmiller said.
Still, it has not been easy. Early on, she noticed insulted looks on patients’ faces when her role was being explained and found out that some interpreters were calling her the “crazy doctor.” Other interpreters laughed at what patients said.
Indeed, Dr. Bradmiller said, some therapists have left the clinic because of their struggles with interpreters. Now, she introduces herself as a “talk therapist” and chooses interpreters carefully.
“Some patients have completely checked out,” Dr. Bradmiller said. “The older children are bringing up the younger ones, and the mother doesn’t leave the house.”
If patients reach the point of talking about what happened to them in Somalia or at the refugee camps, it has to be handled carefully to prevent their being traumatized all over again, Dr. Bradmiller said.
The patients’ stories may also bring back the interpreters’ horrific memories, so Dr. Bradmiller has tried to find the interpreters who are the least vulnerable.
“I try not to digest what is being said so it doesn’t affect me,” said one, Abdi Rahmansali. “I try my best, but I’m a human being. I do get affected. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you feel your hair standing up.”
Dr. Bradmiller estimated that about only 10 percent of her patients saw the connection between their physical and emotional pain.
But for those who do, she said, the changes can be striking.
“They go to school, they cook, they put on makeup and colorful clothes, they start talking to you in English,” she said. “When life becomes more interesting than therapy, it’s time for therapy to be done.”
Home Health in Question
On an afternoon in late September, Dr. Pryce and Dr. Harare, the interpreter and patient advocate, emerged from an examining room looking tired but wryly triumphant.
They had just finished negotiating, politely but persistently, with a patient who — just as politely but persistently — had refused to allow any blood tests because it was the holy month of Ramadan and he feared that having blood drawn might be a sin.
Finally, they telephoned an imam, who declared there was no sin. The blood was drawn.
Dr. Pryce says one of the great joys of working in a hospital like Hennepin is finding ways to bridge such cultural divides — and knowing that his patients are better off because of it. But the cultural challenges can cut both ways, he said, and lately one issue has begun to grate on him and Ms. Boehm.
Somali patients have been asking them to fill out forms stating that they need personal-care assistants. Some do not need the help, Dr. Pryce said, but are being egged on by Somali-run health care agencies that want to collect insurance payments for the services.
Somalis in Minneapolis, often entrepreneurial and business minded, have opened the agencies to take advantage of relatively generous rules in Minnesota that were originally meant to help keep the elderly and chronically ill out of nursing homes.
Tricia Alvarado, director of home care for the Minnesota Visiting Nurse Agency, which evaluates requests for home help, agreed that there had been an explosion of Somali agencies, with 100 or so opening in just the last three years. Many are run by people without any medical training. And Ms. Alvarado confirmed that the agencies were putting a hard sell on potential clients.
“ ‘Diabetes?’ ” Dr. Pryce said, relaying what he said was a typical conversation between a sick Somali and a Somali-run agency. “ ‘You need a personal-care assistant. Here’s a form. Give it to your doctor.’ ”
Dr. Pryce turns down requests that he thinks are unwarranted, but patients argue and sometimes even act sicker than they really are.
The whole thing leaves him “hopping mad,” Dr. Pryce said. “I want to be a good steward of our resources, the tax money we’re all paying.”
The same thing happened with Russian immigrants in the 1990s, he said, even though state regulations were stricter then.
The current situation with the Somalis is part of a larger problem in Minnesota: the number of clients, and the costs of personal care, more than doubled from 2002 to 2008, and the number of agencies more than tripled. A report in January by the state legislative auditor said, “Personal care services remain unacceptably vulnerable to fraud and abuse”; the state is drawing up plans to tighten its control of the services.
“I love the Somali people and their culture,” Dr. Pryce said. “I like taking care of them. It’s rewarding and interesting. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke much, they’re living the American dream, they need our help. Then you have this other side that’s really painful, this contentious issue of who gets what.”
Withering: Daniel Hannan pulled no punches in his attack on Mr Brown
A Tory who criticised Gordon Brown to his face in a brutal personal attack has won an army of fans worldwide.
A video of MEP Daniel Hannan delivering a withering assessment of the Prime Minister's handling of the economic crisis has become a surprise hit on the internet.
More than 730,000 users have viewed it on YouTube, making it the most popular clip on the site two days in a row.
Mr Hannan's assault came after the Premier had given a keynote speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday.
As Mr Brown looked on through gritted teeth, shaking his head, the Tory lambasted him as a 'Brezhnev era apparatchik' who was ' pathologically incapable' of taking responsibility for his role in the financial crisis.
The 37-year-old, who was the youngest British member elected to the European Parliament in 1999, yesterday received plaudits for his tongue-lashing.
Broadcasters - including the BBC - failed to report Mr Hannan's onslaught despite giving full coverage to Mr Brown's most pro-European speech to date.
But it was quickly posted on YouTube and news outlets from Australia to America seized on his comments.
The clip features Mr Brown looking on with a frozen smile, while Mr Hannan warned how Britain was entering the recession in a 'dilapidated condition' with an 'almost unbelievable' deficit.
Scroll down to watch the video of Daniel Hannan's address
Tirade: Gordon Brown addressing the European Parliament on Tuesday. He then had to sit through an attack on his record by MEP Daniel Hannan
After accusing Mr Brown of losing his moral authority, he finished with the pay-off line: 'You are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.'
The speech, which was met with cheers and laughter from fellow MEPs, unleashed a torrent of comments on the internet with most praising Mr Hannan's assessment.
Mr Hannan, who represents South East England, said he had been stunned by the response. He said: 'I suspect what has happened is that a lot of people have wanted to say something similar to him and have never had the chance.
'There is something very surreal about a speech in the European Parliament - one of the most boring places on earth - causing so much excitement.'
Mr Hannan, who went to Oriel College, Oxford, has good form in the debating chamber.
A former journalist, he has previously worked as a speechwriter for Michael Howard and William Hague. He has also been a key opponent of the Lisbon Treaty.
Downing Street last night failed to comment on Mr Hannan's internet fame. But one of the 5,000 who left comments on YouTube said: 'Thanks for telling Gordon to his face what many people would like to.'
Another added: 'Brilliant! As a British victim who has suffered under the Labour yoke for 12 long, depressing years, I am delighted to see that, here at last, is someone telling the story as it really is.'
A BBC spokesman last night insisted its reporting of Mr Brown's speech was 'entirely balanced'.
He said the Daily Politics show on BBC2 had run a clip of Mr Hannan's speech yesterday and a discussion with bloggers about the story.
He added: 'Daniel Hannan was one of the Daily Politics guests on the programme when it broadcast an entire edition from Brussels last week.'
Here is the Tory MEP's speech in full:
'Prime Minister, I see you've already mastered the essential craft of the European politician: namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate. You've spoken here of free trade, and amen to that.
Who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase 'British jobs for British workers,' and that you have subsidised - where you have not nationalised outright - swaths of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.
Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this House if your actions matched your words, and perhaps more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not sailing into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.
The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is now born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
Now, once again today, you have tried to spread the blame around. You spoke about an international recession, an international crisis.
Well, it's true that we are sailing together into the squalls but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging - in other words, to pay off debt. But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further.
As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the waterline under the accumulated weight of your debt.
We are now running a deficit that touches 10 per cent of GDP, an almost unbelievable figure - more than Pakistan, more than Hungary; countries where the IMF has already been called in.
It's not just that you are not apologising - like everyone else I've long accepted that you are pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things - it's that you are carrying on wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left.
In the last year 100,000 private sector jobs have been lost and yet you have created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister, you cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.
You cannot spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev era apparatchik giving the party line.
You know and we know and you know that we know that it's nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times.
The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets say so, which is why the pound has lost a third of its value.
In a few months, the voters will have their chance to say so, too.
They can see what the markets have seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government.'
The Toronto academic researchers who are reporting on the spying operation dubbed GhostNet include, from left, Ronald J. Deibert, Greg Walton, Nart Villeneuve and Rafal A. Rohozinski.
In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.
The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.
Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.
The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.
Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information.
The newly reported spying operation is by far the largest to come to light in terms of countries affected.
This is also believed to be the first time researchers have been able to expose the workings of a computer system used in an intrusion of this magnitude.
Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.
The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.
The researchers were able to monitor the commands given to infected computers and to see the names of documents retrieved by the spies, but in most cases the contents of the stolen files have not been determined. Working with the Tibetans, however, the researchers found that specific correspondence had been stolen and that the intruders had gained control of the electronic mail server computers of the Dalai Lama’s organization.
The electronic spy game has had at least some real-world impact, they said. For example, they said, after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.
The Toronto researchers said they had notified international law enforcement agencies of the spying operation, which in their view exposed basic shortcomings in the legal structure of cyberspace. The F.B.I. declined to comment on the operation.
Although the Canadian researchers said that most of the computers behind the spying were in China, they cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved. The spying could be a nonstate, for-profit operation, for example, or one run by private citizens in China known as “patriotic hackers.”
“We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a member of the research group and an associate professor of political science at Munk. “This could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”
A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea that China was involved. “These are old stories and they are nonsense,” the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, said. “The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime.”
The Toronto researchers, who allowed a reporter for The New York Times to review the spies’ digital tracks, are publishing their findings in Information Warfare Monitor, an online publication associated with the Munk Center.
At the same time, two computer researchers at Cambridge University in Britain who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans, are releasing an independent report. They do fault China, and they warned that other hackers could adopt the tactics used in the malware operation.
“What Chinese spooks did in 2008, Russian crooks will do in 2010 and even low-budget criminals from less developed countries will follow in due course,” the Cambridge researchers, Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson, wrote in their report, “The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement.”
In any case, it was suspicions of Chinese interference that led to the discovery of the spy operation. Last summer, the office of the Dalai Lama invited two specialists to India to audit computers used by the Dalai Lama’s organization. The specialists, Greg Walton, the editor of Information Warfare Monitor, and Mr. Nagaraja, a network security expert, found that the computers had indeed been infected and that intruders had stolen files from personal computers serving several Tibetan exile groups.
Back in Toronto, Mr. Walton shared data with colleagues at the Munk Center’s computer lab.
One of them was Nart Villeneuve, 34, a graduate student and self-taught “white hat” hacker with dazzling technical skills. Last year, Mr. Villeneuve linked the Chinese version of the Skype communications service to a Chinese government operation that was systematically eavesdropping on users’ instant-messaging sessions.
Early this month, Mr. Villeneuve noticed an odd string of 22 characters embedded in files created by the malicious software and searched for it with Google. It led him to a group of computers on Hainan Island, off China, and to a Web site that would prove to be critically important.
In a puzzling security lapse, the Web page that Mr. Villeneuve found was not protected by a password, while much of the rest of the system uses encryption.
Mr. Villeneuve and his colleagues figured out how the operation worked by commanding it to infect a system in their computer lab in Toronto. On March 12, the spies took their own bait. Mr. Villeneuve watched a brief series of commands flicker on his computer screen as someone — presumably in China — rummaged through the files. Finding nothing of interest, the intruder soon disappeared.
Through trial and error, the researchers learned to use the system’s Chinese-language “dashboard” — a control panel reachable with a standard Web browser — by which one could manipulate the more than 1,200 computers worldwide that had by then been infected.
Infection happens two ways. In one method, a user’s clicking on a document attached to an e-mail message lets the system covertly install software deep in the target operating system. Alternatively, a user clicks on a Web link in an e-mail message and is taken directly to a “poisoned” Web site.
The researchers said they avoided breaking any laws during three weeks of monitoring and extensively experimenting with the system’s unprotected software control panel. They provided, among other information, a log of compromised computers dating to May 22, 2007.
They found that three of the four control servers were in different provinces in China — Hainan, Guangdong and Sichuan — while the fourth was discovered to be at a Web-hosting company based in Southern California.
Beyond that, said Rafal A. Rohozinski, one of the investigators, “attribution is difficult because there is no agreed upon international legal framework for being able to pursue investigations down to their logical conclusion, which is highly local.”In recent months demands for ACORN to be investigated under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for repeated incidents of electoral fraud have been growing.
But voting-related fraud is just the tip of the iceberg.
ACORN runs a mob-style "protection" racket known within the radical direct-action group as the "muscle for the money" program, a lawyer told the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties today.
Lawyer Heather Heidelbaugh filed an unsuccessful lawsuit last year against ACORN, specifically, a court injunction in Pennsylvania against ACORN's voter registration efforts in last year's presidential campaign. (A transcript of the Oct. 29 hearing in Moyer v. ACORN is available here.)
Heidelbaugh says that ACORN, which I profiled in the November issue of Capital Research Center's Foundation Watch, has provided protest-for-hire services and extracted donations from the targets of demonstrations by shaking down those targets mafia-style. (Heidelbaugh's written congressional testimony is available here.)
The taxpayer-subsidized ACORN network, which owes millions of dollars in back taxes, also played a major role in the subprime mortgage mess that has undermined Americans' support for free market problem-solving and set off a worldwide chain of financial troubles.
And then there's ACORN's eight-year-long coverup of the million-dollar embezzlement by founder Wade Rathke's brother. When ACORN board members Marcel Reid and Karen Inman demanded to see the financial documents, they were expelled from the group.
What else is ACORN hiding?Mission impossible of the Falkland's War
By CHRISTOPHER HUDSON, Daiy Mail
26 May 2006
It was the most daring RAF raid since the Dambusters: Flying a jet 20 years past its s
The Pentagon b
Martin Withers and his co-pilot Dick Russ
They still needed 14,000lb of fu
As it headed towards the
Once settled in its wake, less than 20 yards from the Victor's tail-cone, and plugged into its trailing fu
The gauge spun up to 7,000 gallons - just a fraction of its total fu
He had no way of knowing that the tanker was even lower on fu
Headed for the scrap heap
Dick Russ
In the Fifties they had been state-of-the-art, our most impressive weapon in the Cold War. Built to d
And then General Galtieri decided to grab the
The islanders were British: in return for their allegiance the Crown owed them protection. Margaret Thatcher, a Prime Minister sinking low in the polls, ordered a naval task force to be prepared which could set up an exclusion zone around the islands. However, if the invaders could resupply thems
The only aircraft in the entire RAF which could fly to the Falklands from a friendly base was the Handley Page Victor
That left the Vulcan nuclear bombers. None of their crews had practised dropping conventional bombs for ten years. And they hadn't practised air-to-air refu
Each had its own quirks and eccentricities. Parts were hard to find. A vital refu
The nose-mounted probes on which the hoses clamped for air-to-air refu
Navigation problems
Then there were the navigation problems. The Vulcans would have to fly over 4,000 miles of open ocean, without a single surface feature that the radar officers could use to fix a position. There were no detailed maps of the area and, at that time, no sat
The only r
Not until late in the planning did someone remember that the old Vickers Super VC10 airliners, abandoned by British Airways, had a carous
The Argentinian armed forces meanwhile were consolidating their advantage on the
Residents, powerless to resist the invader, watched a constant stream of aircraft flying in: C-130s, Fokker F-27s and F-28s and British-built BAC 1-11s. A skilful Argentine pilot even landed a fully-laden four-engined Boeing 707 on the small
What really worried Simon Baldwin, the Flight Commander back in Waddington, were not the Tiger Cats but the Swiss Oerlikon cannon which could punch through a two-foot slab of ste
Capable of supersonic speeds and accurate to 12,800ft, they would leave a Vulcan dangerously vulnerable.
Int
Pilot training at Waddington continued day and night, while the engineers struggled to enhance the old bombers' capability and their chances of surviving. The Vulcans still looked beautiful, but inside the cockpit was a cramped, claustrophobic confusion of wires and pipes crafted from ste
Uncomfortably cramped
In the small blister above the plane's nose where the pilot and co-pilot sat, it was uncomfortably cramped, with bar
On April 29, three Vulcan bombers took off for
The following morning, Jerry Price, the senior RAF officer on Ascension Island, received the order for Operation Black Buck, the codename given to the mission to bomb
Together with his operations team, Price now laboured over the fiendishly complicated refu
The crews all knew they were entering uncharted territory. If the mission succeeded, it would be the furthest bombing raid in history.
Before their night flight, few managed to sleep. The Vulcan radar officers carefully removed the safety pins from the 21 1,000lb bombs hanging in the bomb bays.
Among the security codes and the authentication codes were
the two words Superfuse and Rhomboid. The first was to be transmitted if the bomb run was successful, the second if it failed. Whatever the outcome of Operation Black Buck, by the following morning
In case the Vulcans were shot down, the crew had to memorise the coordinates of remote safe houses on the
The men pulled on their flying suits and then eased into their tough rubber immersion suits, zipped front and back and sealed tight at the cuffs and neck. If they ditched in the
At 10.30 pm on April 30, the first aircraft fired up its engines to full power. Followed by the other aircraft they hoisted their massive fu
Within minutes, the lead Vulcan was in trouble. The red pressure-warning light was on and a alarm sounded. One of the little portholes had come unstuck and could not be resealed. In the cabin, the temperature was dropping to minus 30 as the plane climbed towards 20,000 ft.
There was nothing to be done. Vulcan 598 had to return to base with its bitterly disappointed crew. The entire operation now depended on Martin Withers and his team in the second Vulcan, 607.
Then a tanker had to pull out. Of the 14 Victors on Ascension two had now failed and been replaced. A minimum of 10 Victors were needed to make the refu
The crew of 607 went through their w
to avoid being detected by the enemy.
Further on, the last two tankers were busy fu
Suddenly with a loud crack the probe sheared off one of the tankers which was due to shepherd 607 to its last refu
Short of fu
In the Vulcan, Withers was furious. They were already 37 minutes behind plan. But as Russ
Even now they could not be certain where they were. The inflight navigation system gave two different compass readings.
The Radar Officer, Bob Wright, and the Navigator, Gordon Graham, had split the difference. If they were on course, the computer would respond with the information needed for Wright to get the bombs on target but only when the radar was switched on again - seconds before the planned drop.
Simon Baldwin in Waddington had worked out that the bomber should approach low to minimise its 'footprint' and then climb upwards to 8000 or 10,000 feet to try to stay clear of the "kill zone" of the Argentinian defences before unleashing its weaponry.
As Vulcan 607 streaked towards her target, Graham called the mileage before the rapid climb, and Hugh Prior, the
A radar contact appeared: 607 was dead on target. It was 4.30
in the morning, local time, when the Vulcan roared upwards, straight into view of the Argentine search radars. But the young radar operators were unperturbed. The bomber could only be one of theirs - this had not been a shooting war so far.
During the few minutes it took the Argentinians to wake up to the fact that this was in fact an enemy aircraft, the Vulcan had soared to its 10,000ft altitude and lev
Its speed was 400 mph. From this moment the aircraft could not deviate, even if enemy radar was locked on them. At this height the runway would have been the size of a scratch of a fingernail on the map and the bomb run had to be precise to a few yards.
Two miles from the runway the first of the thousand-pounders f
Vulcan 607 did, in fact, have enough fu
by the skin of its teeth been successful.
The damage destroyed any remaining hopes Argentine forces had of using the runway for their fast jets. Their entire Mirage fighter force had to be moved promptly back to the north of
It shook Argentine morale to the core and provoked Galtieri's decision to order a naval offensive against the British Task Force, which had disastrous consequences for the Argentine Navy.
The V-bomber had been designed decades before to reach into the snowy wastes of Soviet
The
* * * * * * * * * *
Take care.
Cheers - - - Charlie
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