Katrina's Wake

Update (2/19): An administration in chaos in the wake of the storm - the emails. (Newsweek)







Items of note in the Hurricane Katrina Post Mortem:

(credit: WashPo) An upcoming 600+ page report details falilures of all levels of government: "The White House did not fully engage the president or "substantiate, analyze and act on the information at its disposal," failing to confirm the collapse of New Orleans's levee system on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, which led to catastrophic flooding of the city of 500,000 people."

(credit: NYTimes) Mr. Brown said that he told a senior White House official early on of the New Orleans flooding, and that the administration was too focused on terrorism to respond properly to natural disasters. "It is my belief," Mr. Brown told the senators, that if "we've confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could."

Officials say they've found more than 1,300 bodies, but many may be unaccounted.

Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for, and some of them _ again, no one is sure how many _ were probably washed into the Gulf of Mexico, drowned when their fishing boats sank, swept into Lake Pontchartrain or alligator-infested swamps, or buried under crushed homes, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana medical examiner.

A Kossak's got a great photo essay on the N.O. timeline.

Good night, America, how are you?
Don’t you know me I’m your native son,
I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done

Speaking of images that inflame the Muslim world...

Speaking of images that inflame the Muslim world...



I wonder what happened to:

Fearing Backlash, Pentagon Moves to Block Abu Ghraib Photos Sorry, link broken. Will repair when I can find a story about this.

Instead, here's something very current: The photos America doesn't want seen

The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff says a report from Afghanistan suggests that rioting in Jalalabad on May 11 was not necessarily connected to press reports that the Quran might have been desecrated in the presence of Muslim prisoners held in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"Always remember others may hate you, but those whohate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself." -- Nixon's farewell speech to his staff.

Pay no attention to VP behind the curtain; we almost got attacked...four years ago

Coincidence?

Today, our president came out and said a plan to ram a plane into an L.A. tower was thwarted. Foiled four years ago. And never mind the Los Angeles mayor was blindsided by the news.

Also making headlines this week (I hope):

Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information

Vice President's role in outing of CIA agent under examination, sources close to prosecutor say. This news was first reported at RawStory, fwiw.

Libby: White House 'Superiors' OK'd Leaks

Coincidence?

Keith Olbermann has been tracking this phenomenon since October in a segment/blog called the The Nexus of Politics and Terror.

Coincidence?

I mean, what would the Bush White House be trying to do? Distract us from bad news? I mean, it's not like they were slow in sending help to New Orleans even though they knew soon after the levees broke....

And so, per Bush's pledge, Cheney should get canned. Right?

I suspect the answer to these questions will be "I think not." But one can always hope.

CNN spliced out standing ovation greeting Lowery's WMD remarks at King funeral?

So reports Media Matters They've got the video clip. Well, I guess they had to make some time for the talking heads.

Some may argue that it's wrong to politicize a funeral. I'm in the camp that believes this is EXACTLY what C.S. King and her husband would have wanted.


(I mean, it's not like Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against poverty or war, right?)



Lowery – a co-founder the Southern Christian Christian Leadership Conference with Coretta Scott's husband – said this:

"What a family reunion. Rosa and Martin reminiscing, they had just begun to talk, when Martin seemed not to listen. He started to walk. The wind had whispered in his ear. “I believe somebody is almost here. Excuse me, Rosa,” Martin said as he did depart, his soles on fire, he just couldn't wait. His spirit leaped with joy as he moved toward the pearly gates. Glory, glory, hallelujah. After forty years, almost forty years, together at last, together at last, thank God Almighty, together at last!

Thank you, Coretta. Didn't she carry her grief with dignity? Her growing influence with humility? She secured his seed, nurtured his nobility she declared humanity's worth, invented their vision, his and hers, for peace in all the Earth. She opposed discrimination based on race, she frowned on homophobia and gender bias, she rejected on its face. She summoned the nations to study war no more. She embraced the wonders of a human family from shoulder to shoulder. Excuse me, Maya.

She extended Martin's message against poverty, racism and war. She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions. We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we know there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance, poverty abound. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor.

Well, Coretta had harsh critics. Some no one could please. But she paid them no mind. She kept speaking. As we get older, or so I'm told, we listen in to heaven like the prophets of old. I heard Martin and Coretta say, “do us a favor, Joe, those four little children I spoke of in 1963, they are fine adults now, as all can see. They already know but tell them again. We love them so dear. Assure them we will always be near. Their troubles to bless and sanctify to them their deepest distress. Tell them we believe in them as we know you do. We know their faith in god and their love for each other will see them through. Assure them at the end of the tunnel awaits god's light and we are confident they will always strive for the right. Tell them don't forget to remember that we are as near as their prayer -- and never as far and we can rest in peace because they know who and whose they are.”

What a family reunion. Thank you, Lord. Just the other day I thought I heard you say Coretta, my child, come on home. You’ve earned your rest, your body is weary. You have done your best. Her Witness and character always strong. Her spirit, her melody from heaven's song, her beauty warms like the rays of the sun. Good night, my sister. Well done, well done."

Why is the wife of MLK important? Not only did she stand with him during his life, she kept the movement moving as well as expanding its mission to cover all inequality. She told Reuters in March 1998:

"I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people."

Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.- C.S.King, 1927-2006

Orwell was a prophet?

Update (2/16) from Secrecy News:
Secrecy News has a 1/27/2006 updated report "from the Congressional Research Service that addresses data mining -- what it is, what it can and cannot do, and some of the controversies that have arisen around it."
Here's the link for "Data Mining and Homeland Security: An Overview."

Notes:
Any connections with this and ECHELON ?(Credit Lupy)

Also, well worth the time to check out: No Place To Hide

"This surveillance state is not a futuristic place conjured in a Philip K. Dick novel or 'Matrix'-esque sci-fi thriller.
It is post-9/11 America, as described in Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s unnerving new book, No Place to Hide - an America where citizens' 'right to be let alone,' as Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court once put it, is increasingly imperiled, where more and more components of our daily lives are routinely monitored, recorded and analyzed."

- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

AND, on the flip side:

"It all sounds frighteningly Orwellian.
But the truth is that, for all the hue and cry over American civil liberties, we are a long way from Big Brother today. In fact, we could probably use a little more Big Brother about now.
After four and a half years, our intelligence and national-security apparatus still hasn’t learned how to track terrorists, and the Bush administration has put forward little more than cosmetic reforms."

from the February 09, 2006 edition of the Christian Science Monitor

Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?

By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.

"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about. It's one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with."

The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.

DHS officials are circumspect when talking about ADVISE. "I've heard of it," says Peter Sand, director of privacy technology. "I don't know the actual status right now. But if it's a system that's been discussed, then it's something we're involved in at some level."

Data-mining is a key technology

A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit-card issuers use data-mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity.

What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.

But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.

For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.

At least a few pieces of ADVISE are already operational. Consider Starlight, which along with other "visualization" software tools can give human analysts a graphical view of data. Viewing data in this way could reveal patterns not obvious in text or number form. Understanding the relationships among people, organizations, places, and things - using social-behavior analysis and other techniques - is essential to going beyond mere data-mining to comprehensive "knowledge discovery in databases," Dr. Kielman wrote in his November report. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

One data program has foiled terrorists

Starlight has already helped foil some terror plots, says Jim Thomas, one of its developers and director of the government's new National Visualization Analytics Center in Richland, Wash. He can't elaborate because the cases are classified, he adds. But "there's no question that the technology we've invented here at the lab has been used to protect our freedoms - and that's pretty cool."

As envisioned, ADVISE and its analytical tools would be used by other agencies to look for terrorists. "All federal, state, local and private-sector security entities will be able to share and collaborate in real time with distributed data warehouses that will provide full support for analysis and action" for the ADVISE system, says the 2004 workshop report.

A program in the shadows

Yet the scope of ADVISE - its stage of development, cost, and most other details - is so obscure that critics say it poses a major privacy challenge.

"We just don't know enough about this technology, how it works, or what it is used for," says Marcia Hofmann of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "It matters to a lot of people that these programs and software exist. We don't really know to what extent the government is mining personal data."

Even congressmen with direct oversight of DHS, who favor data mining, say they don't know enough about the program.

"I am not fully briefed on ADVISE," wrote Rep. Curt Weldon (R) of Pennsylvania, vice chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in an e-mail. "I'll get briefed this week."

Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later.

Echoes of a past controversial plan

ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Mr. Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."

But Mr. Sand, the DHS official, emphasizes that privacy protection would be built-in. "Before a system leaves the department there's been a privacy review.... That's our focus."

Some computer scientists support the concepts behind ADVISE.

"This sort of technology does protect against a real threat," says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. "If a computer suspects me of being a terrorist, but just says maybe an analyst should look at it ... well, that's no big deal. This is the type of thing we need to be willing to do, to give up a certain amount of privacy."

Others are less sure.

"It isn't a bad idea, but you have to do it in a way that demonstrates its utility - and with provable privacy protection," says Latanya Sweeney, founder of the Data Privacy Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. But since speaking on privacy at the 2004 DHS workshop, she now doubts the department is building privacy into ADVISE. "At this point, ADVISE has no funding for privacy technology."

She cites a recent request for proposal by the Office of Naval Research on behalf of DHS. Although it doesn't mention ADVISE by name, the proposal outlines data-technology research that meshes closely with technology cited in ADVISE documents.

Neither the proposal - nor any other she has seen - provides any funding for provable privacy technology, she adds.

Some in Congress push for more oversight of federal data-mining
Amid the furor over electronic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, Congress may be poised to expand its scrutiny of government efforts to "mine" public data for hints of terrorist activity.

"One element of the NSA's domestic spying program that has gotten too little attention is the government's reportedly widespread use of data-mining technology to analyze the communications of ordinary Americans," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D) of Wisconsin in a Jan. 23 statement.

Senator Feingold is among a handful of congressmen who have in the past sponsored legislation - unsuccessfully - to require federal agencies to report on data-mining programs and how they maintain privacy.

Without oversight and accountability, critics say, even well-intentioned counterterrorism programs could experience mission creep, having their purview expanded to include non- terrorists - or even political opponents or groups. "The development of this type of data-mining technology has serious implications for the future of personal privacy," says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.

Even congressional supporters of the effort want more information about data-mining efforts.

"There has to be more and better congressional oversight," says Rep. Curt Weldon (R) of Pennsylvania and vice chairman of the House committee overseeing the Department of Homeland Security. "But there can't be oversight till Congress understands what data-mining is. There needs to be a broad look at this because they [intelligence agencies] are obviously seeing the value of this."

Data-mining - the systematic, often automated gleaning of insights from databases - is seen "increasingly as a useful tool" to help detect terrorist threats, the General Accountability Office reported in 2004. Of the nearly 200 federal data-mining efforts the GAO counted, at least 14 were acknowledged to focus on counterterrorism.

While privacy laws do place some restriction on government use of private data - such as medical records - they don't prevent intelligence agencies from buying information from commercial data collectors. Congress has done little so far to regulate the practice or even require basic notification from agencies, privacy experts say.

Indeed, even data that look anonymous aren't necessarily so. For example: With name and Social Security number stripped from their files, 87 percent of Americans can be identified simply by knowing their date of birth, gender, and five-digit Zip code, according to research by Latanya Sweeney, a data-privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.

In a separate 2004 report to Congress, the GAO cited eight issues that need to be addressed to provide adequate privacy barriers amid federal data-mining. Top among them was establishing oversight boards for such programs.

Some antiterror efforts die - others just change names

Defense Department

November 2002 - The New York Times identifies a counterterrorism program called Total Information Awareness.

September 2003 - After terminating TIA on privacy grounds, Congress shuts down its successor, Terrorism Information Awareness, for the same reasons.

Department of Homeland Security

February 2003 - The department's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announces it's replacing its 1990s-era Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS I).

July 2004 - TSA cancels CAPPS II because of privacy concerns.

August 2004 - TSA says it will begin testing a similar system - Secure Flight - with built-in privacy features.

July 2005 - Government auditors charge that Secure Flight is violating privacy laws by holding information on 43,000 people not suspected of terrorism

Tap This

Wonkette's got a couple of chuckle-worthy comments of a serious issue.Well, actually the way a group of students protested against a speech. There's even a follow-up post with a picture.

"The price of being brown"

From Time Magazine

The State of the Union's Mystery Suspect

An anti-war activist and a congressman's wife weren't the only ones detained by the Capitol Police

By MELISSA AUGUST/WASHINGTON

T-shirts, it turns out, aren't the only things that get you in trouble with the Capitol Police at the State of the Union address. Much has already been made of the fact that both anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young, the wife of Republican Congressman Bill Young, were ejected from the speech for wearing shirts with political messages; in Sheehan's case, her t-shirt read "2,245 dead. How many more?", while Young was sporting a sweat shirt with the words, "Support the Troops-Defending Our Freedom." Both have denounced their treatment-and both have received apologies from the police.

But on the same evening that President Bush was lauding democracy and freedom, there was one other person in attendance whose rights were infringed upon. The man, who did not want his identity revealed after the disturbing incident, was a personal guest of Florida Democrat Alcee Hastings. He is a prominent businessman from Broward County, Florida who works with the Department of Defense-and has a security clearance. After sitting in the gallery for the entire speech, he was surrounded by about ten law enforcement officers as he exited the chamber and whisked away to a room in the Capitol.

For close to an hour the man, who was born in India but is an American citizen, was questioned by the Police, who thought he resembled someone on a Secret Service photo watch list, according to Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer. Eventually, the police realized it was a case of mistaken identity and let him go. Gainer has assured Hastings that the Capitol Police, Secret Service and FBI will investigate why the man was detained for so long, and try to "sharpen our procedures." But the man was "very, very scared" by the incident, says Fred Turner, a spokesperson for Hastings. On Tuesday night, he told the congressman that the experience was "maybe just the price of being brown in America," Turner says.

"He shouldn't have gone through the ringer as long as he did," Gainer says. "He did get caught up in the morass of Secret Service FBI, Capitol Police. Everybody was trying to figure out whether he was a threat. And he absolutely, unequivocally clearly was not." Gainer apologized to the man afterwards, only one of the many apologies he has had to make this week. He met with Congressman Young at least twice, as well as with Young's wife. "There is no prohibition against simply wearing a T-shirt that states your particular cause," Gainer stresses, taking full accountability for not providing clearer direction to his officers.

Gainer says he will work with the House Sergeant at Arms to clarify the rules of the House of Representatives, and to ensure that officers have a better understanding of what constitutes a protest and demonstration. Before he finalizes the new rules, Gainer has asked his staff to look into previous arrests and ejections in the gallery to see what he can learn. One of the first protests at a State of the Union speech occurred in 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson was speaking and a group of suffragettes sitting in the gallery unfurled a large yellow banner with the words, "Mr. President, what will you do for woman suffrage?" The Capitol Police prepared to arrest the women, but the chief doorkeeper ordered them to leave them alone. An assistant doorkeeper on the floor, however, did manage to pull the banner down. Compared to what happened at this week's speech, that almost seems civilized.

Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in 'Feminine Mystique,' Dies at 85

Updated information

Susie Bright writes this about Friedan:

Betty seemed like someone's stuffy old mom. In retrospect, although I correctly identified our differences, I was irreverent towards her, dismissive. Her greatest crime, to my adolescent mind, was that she was a woman over 40. Today, I'm more respectful to anyone who gives a damn, and to any woman who has the stamina and passion to write such an influential book. She was a firebrand, and there's nothing stuffed about that.

Adds Ellen Goodman :

Betty Friedan, author and agitator, most assuredly did not conform. Not to Peoria, Ill., where she grew up. Not to suburbia, where she raised her children. Not even, always, to feminism.

From the New York Times...

Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in 'Feminine Mystique,' Dies at 85

By MARGALIT FOX

Betty Friedan, the feminist crusader and author whose searing first book, "The Feminine Mystique," ignited the contemporary women's movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world, died yesterday, her 85th birthday, at her home in Washington.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Emily Bazelon, a family spokeswoman.

With its impassioned yet clear-eyed analysis of the issues that affected women's lives in the decades after World War II — including enforced domesticity, limited career prospects and, as chronicled in later editions, the campaign for legalized abortion — "The Feminine Mystique" is widely regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, the book had sold more than three million copies by the year 2000 and has been translated into many languages.

"The Feminine Mystique" made Ms. Friedan world famous. It also made her one of the chief architects of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960's and afterward, a sweeping social upheaval that harked back to the suffrage campaigns of the turn of the century and would be called feminism's second wave.

In 1966, Ms. Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women, serving as its first president. In 1969, she was a founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known as Naral Pro-Choice America. With Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and others, she founded the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.

Though in later years, some feminists dismissed Ms. Friedan's work as outmoded, a great many aspects of modern life that seem routine today — from unisex Help Wanted ads to women in politics, medicine, the clergy and the military — are the direct result of the hard-won advances she helped women attain.

For decades a familiar presence on television and the lecture circuit, Ms. Friedan, with her short stature and deeply hooded eyes, looked for much of her adult life like a "combination of Hermione Gingold and Bette Davis," as Judy Klemesrud wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1970.

A brilliant student who graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942, Ms. Friedan trained as a psychologist but never pursued a career in the field. When she wrote "The Feminine Mystique," she was a suburban housewife and mother who supplemented her husband's income by writing freelance articles for women's magazines.

Though Ms. Friedan was not generally considered a lyrical stylist, "The Feminine Mystique," read today, is as mesmerizing as it was more than four decades ago:

"Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today," Ms. Friedan wrote in the opening line of the preface. "I sensed it first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three small children, half-guiltily, and therefore half-heartedly, almost in spite of myself, using my abilities and education in work that took me away from home." [Excerpt From 'The Feminine Mystique']

The words have the hypnotic pull of a fairy tale, and for the next 400 pages, Ms. Friedan identifies, dissects and damningly indicts one of the most pervasive folk beliefs of postwar American life: the myth of suburban women's domestic fulfillment she came to call the feminine mystique.

Drawing on history, psychology, sociology and economics, as well as on interviews she conducted with women across the country, Ms. Friedan charted a gradual metamorphosis of the American woman from the independent, career-minded New Woman of the 1920's and 30's into the vacant, aproned housewife of the postwar years.

The portrait she painted was chilling. For a typical woman of the 1950's, even a college-educated one, life centered almost exclusively on chores and children. She cooked and baked and bandaged and chauffeured and laundered and sewed. She did the mopping and the marketing and took her husband's gray flannel suit to the cleaners. She was happy to keep his dinner warm till he came wearily home from downtown.

The life she led, if educators, psychologists and the mass media were to be believed, was the fulfillment of every women's most ardent dream. Yet she was unaccountably tired, impatient with the children, craving something that neither marital sex nor extramarital affairs could satisfy. Her thoughts sometimes turned to suicide. She consulted a spate of doctors and psychiatrists, who prescribed charity work, bowling and bridge. If those failed, there were always tranquilizers to get her through her busy day.

A Nebraska housewife with a Ph.D. in anthropology whom Ms. Friedan interviewed told her:

"A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx Brothers comedy. I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I'm ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me though the day. Yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood."

"The Feminine Mystique" began as a survey Ms. Friedan conducted in 1957 for the 15th reunion of her graduating class at Smith. It was intended to refute a prevailing postwar myth: that higher education kept women from adapting to their roles as wives and mothers. Judging from her own capable life, Ms. Friedan expected her classmates to describe theirs as similarly well adjusted. But what she discovered in the women's responses was something far more complex, and more troubling — a "nameless, aching dissatisfaction" that she would famously call "the problem that has no name."

When Ms. Friedan sent the same questionnaire to graduates of Radcliffe and other colleges, and later interviewed scores of women personally, the results were the same. The women's answers gave her the seeds of her book. They also forced her to confront the painful limitations of her own suburban idyll.

Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on Feb. 4, 1921, in Peoria, Ill. Her father, Harry, was an immigrant from Russia who parlayed a street-corner collar-button business into a prosperous downtown jewelry store. Her gifted, imperious mother, Miriam, had been the editor of the women's page of the local newspaper before giving up her job for marriage and children. Only years later, when she was writing "The Feminine Mystique," did Ms. Friedan come to see her mother's cold, critical demeanor as masking a deep bitterness at giving up the work she loved.

Growing up brainy, Jewish, outspoken and, by the standards of the time, unlovely, Bettye was ostracized. She was barred from the fashionable sororities at her Peoria high school and rarely asked on dates. It was an experience, she would later say, that made her identify with people on the margins of society.

At Smith, she blossomed. For the first time, she could be as smart as she wanted, as impassioned as she wanted and as loud as she wanted, and for four happy years she was all those things. Betty received her bachelor's degree in 1942 — by that time she had dropped the final "e," which she considered an affectation of her mother's — and accepted a fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate work in psychology.

At Berkeley, she studied with the renowned psychologist Erik Erikson, among others. She won a second fellowship, even more prestigious than the first, that would allow her to continue for a doctorate. But she was dating a young physicist who felt threatened by her success. He pressured her to turn down the fellowship, and she did, an experience she would later recount frequently in interviews. She also turned down the physicist, returning home to Peoria before moving to Greenwich Village in New York.

There, Ms. Friedan worked as an editor at The Federated Press, a small news service that provided stories to labor newspapers nationwide. In 1946, she took a job as a reporter with U. E. News, the weekly publication of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.

In 1947, she married Carl Friedan, a theater director who later became an advertising executive. They started a family and moved to a rambling Victorian house in suburban Rockland County, N.Y.

Ms. Friedan, whose marriage would end in divorce in 1969, is survived by their three children, Daniel Friedan of Princeton, N.J.; Emily Friedan of Buffalo; and Jonathan Friedan of Philadelphia; a brother, Harry Goldstein, of Palm Springs, Calif., and Purchase, N.Y.; a sister, Amy Adams, of New York City; and nine grandchildren.

"The Feminine Mystique" had the misfortune to appear during a newspaper printers' strike. The reviews that appeared afterward ran the gamut from bewildered to outraged to cautiously laudatory. Some critics also felt that Ms. Friedan had insufficiently acknowledged her debt to Simone de Beauvoir, whose 1949 book, "The Second Sex," dealt with many of the same issues.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review in April 1963, Lucy Freeman called "The Feminine Mystique" a "highly readable, provocative book," but went on to question its basic premise, writing, of Ms. Friedan:

"Sweeping generalities, in which this book necessarily abounds, may hold a certain amount of truth but often obscure the deeper issues. It is superficial to blame the 'culture' and its handmaidens, the women's magazines, as she does. What is to stop a woman who is interested in national and international affairs from reading magazines that deal with those subjects? To paraphrase a famous line, 'The fault, dear Mrs. Friedan, is not in our culture, but in ourselves.' "

Among readers, however, the response to the book was so overwhelming that Ms. Friedan realized she needed more than words to address the condition of women's lives. After moving back to Manhattan with her family, she determined to start a progressive organization that would be the equivalent, as she often said, of an N.A.A.C.P. for women.

In 1966, Ms. Friedan and a group of colleagues founded the National Organization for Women. She was its president until 1970.

One of NOW's most visible public actions was the Women's Strike for Equality, held on Aug. 26, 1970, in New York and in cities around the country. In New York, tens of thousands of woman marched down Fifth Avenue, with Ms. Friedan in the lead. (Before the march, she made a point of lunching at Whyte's, a downtown restaurant formerly open to men only.)

Carrying signs and banners ("Don't Cook Dinner — Starve a Rat Tonight!" "Don't Iron While the Strike Is Hot"), women of all ages, along with a number of sympathetic men, marched joyfully down the street to cheering crowds. The march ended with a rally in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, with passionate speeches by Ms. Friedan, Ms. Steinem, Ms. Abzug and Kate Millett.

Not all of Ms. Friedan's ventures were as successful. The First Women's Bank and Trust Company, which she helped found in 1973, is no longer in business. Nor were even her indomitable presence and relentless energy enough to secure passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Though widely respected as a modern-day heroine, Ms. Friedan was by no means universally beloved, even — or perhaps especially — by members of the women's movement. She was famously abrasive. She could be thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament.

In the 1970's and afterward, some feminists criticized Ms. Friedan for focusing almost exclusively on the concerns of middle-class married white women and ignoring those of minorities, lesbians and the poor. Some called her retrograde for insisting that women could, and should, live in collaborative partnership with men.

Ms. Friedan's private life was also famously stormy. In her recent memoir, "Life So Far" (Simon & Schuster, 2000), she accused her husband of being physically abusive during their marriage, writing that he sometimes gave her black eyes, which she concealed with make-up at public events and on television.

Mr. Friedan, who died in December, repeatedly denied the accusations. In an interview with Time magazine in 2000, shortly after the memoir's publication, he called Ms. Friedan's account a "complete fabrication." He added: "I am the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting by a reckless driver savagely aiming at the whole male gender."

Ms. Friedan's other books include "It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement" (Random House, 1976); "The Second Stage" (Summit, 1981); and "The Fountain of Age" (Simon & Schuster, 1993).

The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, she was a visiting professor at universities around the country, among them Columbia, Temple and the University of Southern California. In recent years, Ms. Friedan was associated with the Institute for Women and Work at Cornell University.

Despite all of her later achievements, Ms. Friedan would be forever known as the suburban housewife who started a revolution with "The Feminine Mystique." Rarely has a single book been responsible for such sweeping, tumultuous and continuing social transformation.

The new society Ms. Friedan proposed, founded on the notion that men and women were created equal, represented such a drastic upending of the prevailing social norms that over the years to come, she would be forced to explain her position again and again.

"Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men,' " she told Life magazine in 1963. "It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."

Holes in the Bush Empire

Below written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

THE PLAME CASE, MISSING EMAIL, AND THE PRESIDENT'S DAILY BRIEF

The government failed to preserve certain official email messages
generated by the Office of the Vice President and the Executive
Office of the President in 2003 as required by law, Special
Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed in a January 23 letter.

The contents and quantity of the missing email are unknown.

In another letter dated January 9, Mr. Fitzgerald also disclosed that
his Office has received redacted versions of the President's Daily
Brief ("a very discrete amount of material relating to PDBs")
concerning Valerie Plame Wilson or Amb. Joseph Wilson's trip to
Niger. Mr. Libby's attorney had requested all copies of the
President's Daily Brief "in its entirety" from May 2003 through
March 2004.

These and several other interesting nuggets emerged in correspondence
between the Special Prosecutor and attorneys for I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, the former aide to Vice President Cheney who is being
prosecuted for perjury in connection with the CIA Plame leak
investigation.


See the December 14 discovery request from Libby attorney John D.
Cline, and the January 9 and January 23 letters from Mr. Fitzgerald,
all of which were filed in DC District Court on January 31, here (this is a download of pdf files).

While it has apparently proved feasible to declassify portions of
PDBs from 2 or 3 years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency still
insists that 40 year old PDBs regarding the Vietnam War cannot
possibly be declassified.

That dispute is the subject of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by UC Davis Professor Larry Berman. For background on the case see this National Security Archive update.