The SeeingBlack.com 411
March 2005

AIDS Among African Americans, War ‘Welfare Queens,’ Killing Pregnant Women and WGJ: Ordering Pizza in The New Surveillance Society

Compiled By the Red-Eye Crew
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Writers

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BOSTON—The HIV infection rate has doubled among African-Americans in the United States over a decade while holding steady among Whites—stark evidence of a widening racial gap in the epidemic, according to government scientists. Other troubling statistics indicate that almost half of all infected people in the United States who should be receiving anti-HIV drugs are not getting them. The findings were released Feb. 25 here at the 12th Annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, the world's chief scientific gathering on the disease.

"It's incredibly disappointing," said Terje Anderson, director of the National Association of People With AIDS. "We just have a burgeoning epidemic in the African-American community that is not being dealt with effectively." Researchers and AIDS prevention advocates attributed the high rate among Blacks to such factors as drug addiction, poverty, and poor access to health care.

The HIV rates were derived from the widely used National Health and Nutrition Examinations Surveys, which analyze a representative sample of U.S. households and contain the most complete HIV data in the country. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compared 1988-1994 data with figures from 1999-2002. The surveys look only at young and middle-aged adults who live in households, excluding such groups as soldiers, prisoners, and the homeless. Thus, health officials believe the numbers probably underestimate true HIV rates in this country. Still, they show a striking rise in the prevalence of the AIDS virus from 1% to 2% of Blacks. White rates held steady at 0.2%. Largely because of the increase among Blacks, the overall U.S. prevalence rate rose slightly from 0.3 percent to 0.4 percent.

Smaller studies had shown rising infection rates among Blacks in recent years, but this study takes a longer and more complete look at changes in the general population. "I think it's very concerning," said Susan Buchbinder, who leads HIV research for the city of San Francisco. "I think what we need to look at is how we can reduce those rates and get more people into treatment." She recommended a stronger focus on treating drug addiction.

Other national data and published reports studied by the CDC showed that 480,000 HIV-infected people ages 15 to 49 should have been getting antiretroviral drugs in 2003, yet only 268,000, or 56 percent, were given such medications. Researcher Eyasu Teshale of the CDC said the gap represents "a substantial unmet health care need." –The Associated Press

Black Vox—The Hidden Crime: Murdering Pregnant Women
On January 27th of this year, seventeen-year old Cheri Washington stayed home from school. She was four months pregnant and that morning she walked a few blocks from her home to the house of twenty-six year old Carlos D. Williams to talk to him about their baby. According to published accounts, Williams flew into a violent rage and not only beat the Dale City, Virginia teen with a baseball bat, he also punched and stomped her. Washington tried to walk back home and was spotted by a neighbor as she fell down. The neighbor drove her home and her mother called an ambulance. By the time Washington got to the hospital, her unborn child was already dead and later that evening Washington lapsed into unconsciousness; she died early the next day. Williams was arrested the afternoon of the incident and charged with aggravated malicious wounding. Virginia law however allows prosecutors to seek the death penalty for the "willful, deliberate and premeditated killing of a pregnant woman" with "intent to cause the involuntary termination of the woman's pregnancy." The natural response is to be outraged after learning about such a brutal and merciless crime, however most people's emotions are tempered with the belief that men like Carlos D. Williams are rare.

Unfortunately, that assumption is wrong since there are many men around the country, who like Williams have killed their partners while they were pregnant or shortly after the baby's birth. In Virginia alone, Washington was at least the third pregnant woman to be killed since Thanksgiving 2004. This deadly phenomenon is particularly problematic because there is no profile of killers and many of these men are educated professionals, often considered pillars of their communities. In January 2001 former NFL player Rae Carruth was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for conspiring to kill his pregnant girlfriend, Cherica Adams. In 1999 the twenty-four year old woman was seven months pregnant when she was shot four times in a staged drive-by incident. Carruth was also convicted of using an instrument in an attempt to kill his unborn child. The child survived but as a result of event reportedly suffers from cerebral palsy.

Although the killing of Laci Peterson and her unborn child grabbed the media's attention for months, generally, the murder of pregnant women continues to garner few headlines. The deaths fade from our collective consciousness and are still considered anomalies rather than a dangerous trend that deserves more reporting and tracking by police, social service agencies and mental health professionals. The Washington Post conducted a year long examination of death-record data from across the nation and in December 2004 reported that there have been approximately 1,367 killings of pregnant women or new mothers since 1990. More than 100 murdered women were teenagers, many others had children, left motherless. According to the study, husbands, boyfriends and lovers killed 67 percent of the women by shooting them, often at home. This number however is only an estimate since there is no established system to track such crimes. At this time, federal homicide data collected by the FBI and the CDC does not capture the pregnancy status of female victims. The Washington Post study also indicated that the killings spanned a wide range of ages, races, cultures and socio-economic backgrounds, including: a minister's wife, a Navy petty officer, a waitress, a college student, a business woman, a high school athlete and an immigrant housekeeper.

More shocking is that in 2001 the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that in Maryland, "a pregnant or recently pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause." The study found that between 1993-1998 50 of 247 maternal deaths recorded in Maryland were homicides. Regrettably, there is a dearth of research that analyzes the psyches of maternal killers. What seems apparent however is that in the main, men who assault pregnant partners do so to avoid dealing with the obligations of fatherhood, marriage, paying child support or a possible scandal. Furthermore studies suggest that younger women are more at risk, since they are usually involved with young men who are more volatile, more unsure about fatherhood, less solvent and less likely to want to curtail their freedom. Some men see pregnancy as imposing a double standard: independently a woman can decide to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, however if the man is against the pregnancy, the woman, by unilaterally choosing to have the baby, can foist the financial and legal responsibilities of parenthood on him. This type of thinking leads some men to believe that the pregnancy "problem" can be solved by permanently eliminating the women and the unborn child.

For some unfathomable reason, Americans can be quite vocal in condemning the violence perpetrated against women in other countries, but they are rather mute when it comes to speaking about American men, beating, raping and murdering American women. Misogyny takes on many forms: rap music lyrics that say that women are nothing but "tricks and 'hos"; the broadening acceptance of terms like pimpin' and "wife-beater" (a type of t-shirt); and the seemingly low priority that domestic violence awareness and prevention has in the realm of public policy. The common denominator of misogynistic acts is that they devalue women and in doing so fosters an environment where violence toward them is implicitly condoned. Taking a stand to end domestic violence and maternal homicide is not about superficial political correctness, but rather, through our language, actions, media and laws, supporting the notion that women's lives are important and therefore should be protected. —Yvonne Bynoe, www.yvonnebynoe.com

War ‘Welfare Queens’: The Center for Corporate Policy's Ten Worst War Profiteers of 2004
(Note: Companies are listed alphabetically, based on our own subjective judgement. For a quantitative ranking, see the Center for Public Integrity's Winfalls of War report: )

1) AEGIS

In June, the Pentagon's Program Management Office in Iraq awarded a $293 million contract to coordinate security operations among thousands of private contractors to Aegis, a UK firm whose founder was once investigated for illegal arms smuggling.

An inquiry by the British parliament into Sandline, Aegis head Tim Spicer's former firm, determined that the company had shipped guns to Sierra Leone in 1998 in violation of a UN arms embargo. Sandline's position was that it had approval from the British government, although British ministers were cleared by the inquiry. Spicer resigned from Sandline in 2000 and incorporated Aegis in 2002.

The Aegis contract has stirred up considerable controversy, even in the shadowy world of private military contractors. A protest by rival bidder Dyncorp - whose bid was deemed unacceptable by the Army - was dismissed by the General Accountability Offfice, which concluded that Dyncorp "lacked standing to challenge the integrity of the awardee (Aegis)." Spicer's defendants point out that there is no provision in contract law to deny a contract based on a bidder's "colorful" past.

Critics say that's just the problem. U.S. and international law have failed to address the role of PMCs in Iraq, resulting in a near-total lack of accountability that epitomizes what's wrong with the corporate takeover of Iraq.

"Who gives the orders? Where do contractors fit in the chain of command? Who is responsible if things go wrong?" Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) asks.

Not only do PMCs fall outside the Military Code of Justice but, thanks to another order passed by Paul Bremer (CPA order #17), it's not clear that they could be prosecuted under Iraq's own laws. That's because the order grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from Iraq's laws, even if they injure or kill an innocent party.

2) BearingPoint

Critics find it ironic that BearingPoint, the former consulting division of KPMG, received a $240 million contract in 2003 to help develop Iraq's "competitive private sector," since it had a hand in the development of the contract itself.

According to a March 22 report by AID's assistant inspector general Bruce Crandlemire, "Bearing Point's extensive involvement in the development of the Iraq economic reform program creates the appearance of unfair competitive advantage in the contract award process."

BearingPoint spent five months helping USAID write the job specifications and even sent some employees to Iraq to begin work before the contract was awarded, while its competitors had only a week to read the specifications and submit their own bids after final revisions were made.

"No company who writes the specs for a contract should get the contract," says Keith Ashdown, the vice president of Washington, DC-based Taxpayers for Common Sense.

"BearingPoint was selected through a transparent and competitive bidding process to undertake the challenging Economic Governance project in Iraq," says BearingPoint's John LaPlace. "We were pleased to be selected to lead this work, just as we were pleased to be selected through competitive bids to lead similar large reform efforts in Afghanistan, Montenegro, Kosovo and other countries around the world."

Neither Crandlemire nor other critics have ever said that BearingPoint broke the law. But the company's ties to the Bush administration (according to the Center for Responsive Politics, BearingPoint employees gave $117,000 to the 2000 and 2004 Bush election campaigns, more than any other Iraq contractor) is an example of "crony contracting" that undermines the legitimacy of those who might claim to be working to establish competitive markets in the "newly liberated" country.

3) Bechtel

Schools, hospitals, bridges, airports, water treatment plants, power plants, railroad, irrigation, electricity, etc. Bechtel was literally tasked with repairing much of Iraq's infrastructure, a job that was critical to winning hearts and minds after the war.

According to the company's contract, "the U.S. government envisions a post-war reconstruction effort as a highly visual symbol of good faith toward building trust for economic, social and cultural efforts as well as for political stability in the region."

The company's Public Affairs Manager, Greg S. Pruett, writes: "[D]uring 2003 Bechtel achieved several major accomplishments. By the end of June, dredging of the Port of Umm Qasr was completed, enabling the port to receive humanitarian shipments for the first time in years. More than 1,200 schools were made ready for 1 million Iraqi school children by October 1, 2003, the beginning of Iraq' s new school year; 10 Baghdad area fire stations were rehabilitated y December...and by February 2004, 52 health care clinics in the Baghdad and Basrah areas had been restored. ... The foregoing are only examples of the successes taking place today to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure."

Corpwatch has reported a different picture of the company's work, particularly when it comes to Iraqi schools that the company claims it repaired before Corpwatch investigators found in a state of poor repair.

Certainly not all of Bechtel's shortcomings can be blamed on the company. As has been reported frequently, the security situation in Iraq has made it difficult for Bechtel and other companies to meet virtually any of the major deadlines in its original contract. In October, according to AID, the CPA had restored only 4,400 MW of electrical generating capacity target (Bechtel says Iraq's power system a chieved a generation peak of over 5,000 MWs ten times in October). Although the company says it has "added enough electricity to serve more than 700,000 people" since it arrived in Iraq in April 2003, the generating capacity is still short of AIDs goal of 6,000 MW by end of June (AID's goal was 9.000, a level that existed in the country before the first gulf war). According to a June GAO report, "electrical service in the country as a whole has not shown a marked improvement over the immediate postwar levels of May 2003 and has worsened in some governorates."

For more information about Bechtel, also see this report by Corpwatch.

4) BKSH & Associates

Chairman Charlie Black, is an old Bush family friend and prominent Republican lobbyist whose firm is affiliated with Burson Marsteller, the global public relations giant. Black was a key player in the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign and together with his wife raised $100,000 for this year's reelection campaign.

BKSH clients with contracts in Iraq include Fluor International (whose ex-chair Phillip Carroll was tapped to head Iraq's oil ministry after the war, and whose board includes the wife of James Woolsey, the ex-CIA chief who was sent by Paul Wolfowitz before the war to convince European leaders of Saddam Hussein's ties to al Qaeda). Fluor has won joint contracts worth up to $1.6 billion.

Another client is Cummins Engine, which has managed to sell its power generators thanks to the country's broken infrastructure.

Most prominent among BKSH's clients, however, is the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader Ahmed Chalabi was called the "George Washington of Iraq" by certain Pentagon neoconservatives before his fall from grace. BKSH's K. Riva Levinson was hired to handle the INC's U.S. public relations strategy in 1999. Hired by U.S. taxpayers, that is: Until July 2003, the company was paid $25,000 per month by the U.S. State Department to support the INC.

BKSH has also represented other foreign governments, including Columbia and Equatorial Guinea. In July, O'Dwyer's, the public relations industry trade publication, reported that BKSH would represent the new government of Haiti (established after a U.S.-supported coup that had thrown Jean Bertrand Aristide out) "on a pro bono basis."

"We're not looking to make any money off these people," Black explained. "It's a very poor country. We're just trying to do what we can to help out."

O'Dwyer's has also reported that Levinson is now representing Radio Sedaye Iran (Radio Voice of Iran), a Beverly Hills-based network that advocates regime change in Iran.

5) CACI and Titan

Although members of the military police face certain prosecution for the horrific treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, so far the corporate contractors have avoided any charges.

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba reported in an internal Army report that two CACI employees "were either directly or indirectly responsible" for abuses at the prison, including the use of dogs to threaten detainees and forced sexual abuse and other threats of violence. Another internal Army report suggested that Steven Stefanowicz, one of 27 CACI interrogators working for the Army in Iraq, "clearly knew [that] his instructions" to soldiers interrogating Iraqi prisoners "equated to physical abuse."

The Army says it has referred cases involving unidentified employees of CACI to the Department of Justice. Through his attorney, Stefanowicz denies any wrongdoing.

"The CACI personnel performing services in Iraq were at all times subject to the military chain of command and took their orders from military personnel," CACI officials responded to intense scrutiny of its involvement in the atrocities in a statement released in July. "While these advisors provide valuable insight and advise to the military intelligence officers they serve, they do not issue orders or exercise operational control of interrogation activities."

"Titan's role in Iraq is to serve as translators and interpreters for the U.S. Army," company CEO Gene Ray said, implying that news reports had inaccurately implied the employees' involvement in torture. "The company's contract is for linguists, not interrogators."

But according to Joseph A. Neurauter, a GSA suspension and debarment official, CACI's role in designing its own Abu Ghraib contract "continues to be an open issue and a potential conflict of interest."

Nevertheless, the GSA and other agencies conducting their own investigations have yet to find a reason to suspend the company from any new contracts. As a result, in August the Army gave CACI another $15 million no-bid contract to continue providing interrogation services for intelligence gathering in Iraq; In September, the Army awarded Titan a contract worth up to $400 million for additional translators.

The companies' apparent success in waging an aggressive damage-control campaign has been aided by heavy-hitting lobbyists. For CACI: former representatives Vin Weber (R-MN) and Vic Fazio (C-CA), as well as Edward Kutler, an aide to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. In addition, CACI has retained a firm managed by former House Speaker Bob Livingston (R-LA), among others. Titan's impressive stable of lobbyists includes Michael Herson and Van Hipp, who once worked at the Pentagon under then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

"It is patently clear that these corporations saw an opportunity to build their businesses by proving they could extract information from detainees in Iraq, by any means necessary. In doing so they not only violated a raft of domestic and international statutes but diminished America's stature and reputation around the world," says Susan Burke, an attorney who joined with the Center for Constitutional Rights to file a RICO lawsuit against CACI and Titan in June.

Another national security concern has snagged at least one Titan employee already. One of Titan's translators, Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, was arrested after visiting his family in Egypt with classified information contained on computer disks that he had taken with him from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mehalba has been in jail, awaiting trial ever since.

Meanwhile, allegations of bribery association with Titan's operations in Saudi Arabia and other countries have wrecked an anticipated $2 billion buyout by Lockheed Martin.

6) Custer Battles

At the end of September, the Defense Department suspended Custer Battles (the name comes from the company's two principle founders - Michael Battles and Scott Custer) and 13 associated individuals and affiliated corporations from all federal contracts for fraudulent billing practices involving the use of sham corporations set up in Lebanon and the Cayman Islands.

The CPA caught the company after it left a spreadsheet behind at a meeting with CPA employees. The spreadsheet revealed that the company had marked up certain expenses associated with a currency exchange contract by 162 percent.

Robert Isakson, a company employee, drew attention to the problem by filing a false claims action against the company. Isakson also alleged (and it was reported) that Custer's "war profiteering ... contributed to the deaths of at least four Custer Battles employees."

In a prepared statement, company attorneys suggested that the government's decision to not participate in Isakson's case is evidence that the charges are baseless, and that "the individuals [involved] filed this claim solely as a last ditch effort to achieve a competitive edge over CB." (Also see the company's response to the news report.)

The suspension was the first for any company in association with its work in Iraq. The FBI and the Pentagon inspector general's Defense Criminal Investigative Services are both conducting ongoing investigations.

7) Halliburton

In December Congressman Waxman (D-CA), announced that "a growing list of concern's about Halliburton's performance" on contracts that total $10.8 billion have led to multiple criminal investigations into overcharging and kickbacks.

In nine different reports, government auditors have found "widespread, systemic problems with almost every aspect of Halliburton's work in Iraq, from cost estimation and billing systems to cost control and subcontract management." Six former employees have come forward, corroborating the auditors' concerns.

Another "H-bomb" dropped just before the election, when a top contracting official responsible for ensuring that the Army Corps of Engineers follows competitive contracting rules accused top Pentagon officials of improperly favoring Halliburton in an early-contract before the occupation. Bunnatine Greenhouse says that when the Pentagon awarded the company a 5-year oil-related contract worth up to $7 billion, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions that she said were unprecedented in her experience.

Halliburton spokesperson Beverly Scippa says that while she cannot comment on the allegations until specific charges are filed, any suggestion that the company's involvement made it difficult for other companies to fairly compete are "absolutely untrue," pointing to a earlier GAO report that found that Halliburton/KBR was "the only contractor DOD had determined was in a position to provide the services within the required time frame given prewar planning requirements."

But others, including Waxman, believe that Greenhouse's version of events corroborates existing evidence that the contracting process was biased toward Vice President Dick Cheney's old company.

Pentagon officials referred the matter to the Pentagon's inspector general, a move that critics say effectively buried the issue.

(For everything you want to know about Halliburton and more visit Halliburton Watch).

8) Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin remains the king among war profiteers, raking in $21.9 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2003 alone. With satellites and planes, missiles and IT systems, the company has profited from just about every phase of the war except for the reconstruction. The company's stock has tripled since 2000 to just over $60.

Lockheed is also helping Donald Rumsfeld develop a new tech-heavy integrated global warfare system that the company promises will change transform the nature of war. In fact, the large defense conglomerate's sophistication in areas as diverse as space systems, aeronautics and IT will allow it to play a leading role in the development of new weapons systems for decades to come, including a planned highly-secure military Internet, a spaced-based missile defense system and next-generation warplanes such as the F-22 (currently in production) and the Joint Strike Fighter F-35.

When it comes to defense policy, Lockheed's network of influence is virtually unmatched. E.C. Aldridge Jr., the former undersecretary of defense for acquisitions and procurement, gave final approval to begin building the F-35 in 2001, a decision potentially worth $200 billion to the company. Although he soon left the Pentagon to join Lockheed's board, Aldridge continues to straddle the public-private divide: Rumsfeld appointed him to a blue-ribbon panel to study advanced weapons systems.

Former Lockheed lobbyists and employees include the current secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, secretary of transportation Norm Mineta (a former Lockheed vice president) and Stephen J. Hadley, Bush's proposed successor to Condoleeza Rice as his next national security advisor.

Lockheed is not only represented on various Pentagon advisory boards, but is also tied to various influential think tanks. For example, Lockheed VP Bruce Jackson (who helped draft the Republican foreign policy platform in 2000) is a key player at the neo-conservative planning bastion known as the Project for a New American Century.

9) Loral Satellite

In the buildup to the war the Pentagon bought up access to numerous commercial satellites to bolster its own orbiting space fleet. U.S. armed forces needed the extra spaced-based capacity to be able to transmit huge amounts of data to planes (including unmanned Predator drones flown remotely by pilots who may be halfway around the world), and guide missiles and troops on the ground.

Industry experts say the war on terror literally saved some satellite operators from bankruptcy. The Pentagon "is hovering up all the available capacity" to supplement its three orbiting satellite fleets, Richard DalBello, president of the Satellite Industry Association explained to the Washington Post in 2003. The industry's other customers - broadcast networks competing for satellite time - were left to scramble for the remaining bandwidth.

Loral Space & Communications Chairman Bernard L. Schwartz is very tight with the neoconservative hawks in the Bush administration's foreign policy ranks, and is the principal funder of Blueprint, the newsletter of the Democratic Leadership Council.

In the end, the profits from the war in Iraq didn't end up being as huge for the industry as expected, and certainly weren't enough to compensate for a sharp downturn in the commercial market. But more help may be on its way. The Pentagon announced in November that it would create a new global Intranet for the military that would take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build. Satellites, of course, will play a key part in that integrated global weapons system.

10) Qualcomm

Two CPA officials resigned this year after claiming they were pressured by John Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for technology security to change an Iraqi police radio contract to favor Qualcomm's patented cellular technology, a move that critics say was intended to lock the technology in as the standard for the entire country.

Iraq's cellular market is potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues for the company, and potentially much more should it establish a standard for the region. Shaw's efforts to override contracting officials delayed an emergency radio contract, depriving Iraqi police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers and border guards of a joint communications system for months.

Shaw says he was urged to push Qualcomm's technology by Rep. Darrell E. Issa, a Republican whose San Diego County constituency includes numerous Qualcomm employees. Issa, who received $5,000 in campaign contributions from Qualcomm employees from 2003 to 2004, sits on the House Small Business Committee, and previously tried to help the company by sponsoring a bill that would have required the military to use its CDMA technology.

"Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depend on the success of U.S.-developed wireless technologies like CDMA," Issa claimed in a letter to Donald Rumsfeld. But the Pentagon doesn't seem to be buying the argument. The DoD's inspector general has asked the FBI to investigate Shaw's activities.

(For an excellent, in-depth investigation of Qualcomm see Michael Scherer, "Crossing the Lines," Mother Jones, Sept./Oct. 2004) —www.corporatepolicy.org

Police Probe White Supremacist Link to Murders
White supremacist Matt Hale was the self-proclaimed "Pontifex Maximus" of the World Church of the Creator, and while it's always been unclear how many followers he really had, Hale has never lacked for opportunities to spread his message of hate.

Even as he sits in prison — only allowed rare visits and conversations with his parents — Hale was in the news again Tuesday as police investigated the shooting deaths of the husband and mother of U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow.

Hale, 33, is to be sentenced next month for trying to arrange the murder of Judge Lefkow, who presided over a trademark case involving the name of his group. She found the bodies of her husband and mother in the basement of her home Monday night.

Authorities acknowledged the possibility that hate groups could be involved in the killings — Hale's gospel of "racial holy war" was linked to a follower's three-day shooting rampage targeting minorities in 1999.

But police also cautioned against hasty conclusions, with Chicago Police Chief of Detectives James Molloy saying "it would be far too early to draw any definitive links."
Groups like Hale's have made great use of the Internet as a communication tool, and White supremacist discussion forums buzzed with the news. Members debated whether the deaths were a good or bad thing for their movement.

One posting condemned the crime as something that could have "dire consequences" for White nationalists, while another said that those who oppress a body of people "can only expect the barrel of a gun in response."

Anther posting predicted a crackdown on the groups and advised members to destroy evidence on their computers and to hide guns, ammunition and hate literature. Several postings theorized the killing of the judge's relatives was the work of federal agents who want a severe sentence for Hale.

The Lefkows had been discussed on White nationalist Web sites before. Links from 2002 featured photos of Lefkow's husband and daughters, as well as excerpts from Michael Lefkow's biography found on the Web site for his law office. In one 2003 discussion, members talked about the case against Hale and posted the Lefkows' home address, noting with disbelief that the address was listed on the resume on Michael Lefkow's own Web site. —The Associated Press

We Got Jokes (But it Ain’t Funny!):
Ordering Pizza in the Surveillance Society
Order pizza and pay more for living in a “war zone?” Well, pizza shops may not deliver in our neighborhoods anyway. But this neighborhood crime penalty is just one of many wacky scenarios in an online video by the American Civil Liberties Union. “The government and corporations are aggressively collecting information about your personal life and your habits,” the organization says. “They want to track your purchases, your medical records, and even your relationships. The Bush Administration's policies, coupled with invasive new technologies, could eliminate your right to privacy completely. Please help us protect our privacy rights and prevent the Total Surveillance Society.”

Check out the video at http://www.aclu.org/pizza/

— March 4, 2005

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