If Assange is charged with espionage, what about news orgs?

By Michael Calderone

Will Julian Assange be indicted on espionage charges? His lawyers think so, with one of them telling Al-Jazeera's David Frost on Sunday that a federal grand jury in Alexandria, VA is now considering espionage counts against the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has already authorized an investigation of WikiLeaks, with the Washington Post reporting that Assange could be tried under the Espionage Act of 1917. Several U.S. political leaders—such as Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)—have argued for just such a proceeding. And this Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on "the Espionage Act and the legal and constitutional issues raised by WikiLeaks." It looks like there's finally bipartisan consensus in Washington, with everyone from the Obama White House to Republican congressional leaders condemning the Australian hacker who serves as the public face of WikiLeaks.

But one member of Congress isn't bashing WikiLeaks and doesn't think invoking the Espionage Act makes sense. Texas GOP Rep. Ron Paul told The Cutline that he doesn't "want people messing with the Internet" and doesn't agree with government measures that would infringe on "people's rights to speak out."

It's not the first time Paul's been on his own politically. Paul said he's not surprised that Republicans, in the wake of the WikiLeaks cable dump, have come out against Assange. However, Paul said he's "very disappointed with the progressives who are for free speech." He suggested that formerly vocal progressives have now "been neutralized by this administration."

Paul said he doesn't understand how Assange "could commit espionage when he didn't steal anything." Indeed, the government believes army private Bradley Manning leaked the hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks. "If he can be charged, maybe the Washington Post and the New York Times and others can be charged," Paul added.

Paul isn't the only one who's raised the specter of an Espionage Act prosecution affording a slippery-slope argument that could justify espionage charges against news organizations reporting on the WikiLeaks documents. Several legal experts pointed out to ABC News on Monday that the U.S. Justice Department could have a tough time actually enforcing the World War I-era law, which—as written—could also implicateseverl such news organizations that published cables, such as the New York Times and the U.K. Guardian--or even anyone who's read the cables or passed them along to friends over Twitter or Facebook.

American University law professor Stephen Vladeck told ABC News that "one of the flaws of the Espionage Act is that it draws no distinction between the leaker or the spy and the recipient of the information, no matter how far downstream the recipient is."

So far, WikiLeaks has published 1,344 of the quarter-million State Dept. cables now in the group's possession; the Times has published some selective cables from the large cache. Countless journalists and non-journalists alike have written, blogged, tweeted, shared and discussed information in the classified cables--including, of course, Yahoo News writers.

Therefore, the Espionage Act could affect them, too. Benjamin Wittes, a legal analyst at the Brookings Institution, said that the act would cover any "news stories, all blogging on them, and all dinner party conversations about their contents." He added that "taken at its word, the Espionage Act makes felons of us all."

Still, Lieberman argues that Assange should be indicted for spying and has left open the possibility that news organizations could also be tried. Lieberman, through a spokeswoman, praised companies such as Amazon, PayPal and Visa for severing ties with WikiLeaks, saying they "have done the right thing and have acted as good corporate citizens." But Lieberman clearly doesn't feel the same way about some in the press.

"The news organizations that have reprinted the State Department cables have not been good citizens, but whether to prosecute news organizations is a difficult question that should be taken up and decided by Justice Department officials," Lieberman said in a statement. "For the future, members of Congress should engage in a discussion about whether to change the law, within the limits of the First Amendment, to more precisely address media disclosure of secret documents."

Feinstein, in a statement, harshly criticized WikiLeaks as she did in her Wall Street Journal op-ed last week. However, Feinstein made a distinction between Assange's group and the Times.

"WikiLeaks operates like a proliferator and an enabler of illegal activity," Feinstein said. "The New York Times considers its responsibility as journalists, including consulting with government and redacting information; their mission is to inform our democracy without recklessly and arbitrarily putting our national security at risk. Julian Assange is on-record as harboring intent to harm the U.S. government, with disregard for the consequences—both to the government and to innocent people. The New York Times does not have this bad intent."

Meanwhile New York GOP Rep. Peter King says he doesn't see a big difference between WikiLeaks and Times. He said Friday on Fox News that the Gray Lady should also be targeted. "Well, in my mind we should go after both," King said. "Let's go after Assange first, but I called four years ago for prosecution of The New York Times when they disclosed the SWIFT program, which was absolutely essential to America's anti-terrorist efforts."

Times reporter Eric Lichtblau—who co-wrote the SWIFT banking story and an earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program—recalled how former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales suggested trying journalists for publishing classified information in 2006 before eventually backing off. "It certainly has a chilling effect when they throw out the Espionage Act," Lichtblau said.

If journalists are prosecuted for espionage, Lichtblau said, "there's an awful lot of public information that's going to be off limits."

The Washington Post's Dana Priest—who won a Pulitzer for her investigation of the CIA's "black" sites—has also felt the wrath of politicians over her investigative reporting. She said that "one of the reasons they criticize publicly is they don't want other people to get the idea that they should be doing this." Similarly, Priest said the result could be a "chilling effect on sources."

Priest says she doesn't consider Assange a journalist—in her judgment, he's more of an intermediary, who channels leaked documents for a source to news organizations. But she says she's concerned any time someone who's not a government official is charged with dissemination of classified documents because "it does get closer to what we do as journalists."

Priest said that some now invoking the Espionage Act "have gone overboard," especially given the actual revelations in the State Dept. cables. "As [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates said, these documents did not damage national security," Priest said. "What they told us are interesting, important things about how the world works."

(Photo from pro-Assange in Amsterdam, Netherlands on Dec. 11, 2010: Photo/ Evert Elzinga. Photo of British news stand on Nov. 29, 2010: AP Photo/Sang Tan)

WikiLeaks’s Assange gains influential defenders

About Jeff Stein 

Posted at 3:23 PM ET, 12/13/2010

By Jeff Stein

The predominant consensus in official Washington that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should eventually stand trial here on espionage charges is not likely to change anytime soon. But three influential voices are now saying publicly what many others say privately: that blame should be focused on leakers, not Assange, who after all was merely the middleman for the handful of newspapers and magazines that were given first crack at classified military and diplomatic documents.

On Friday Jack L. Goldsmith, “widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament” when he joined the Bush administration Justice Department in 2003, according to a typicalassessment, wrote that he found himself “agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified.”

“I certainly do not support or like his disclosure of secrets that harm U.S. national security or foreign policy interests,” Goldsmith wrote on theLawfare blog. “But as all the hand-wringing over the 1917 Espionage Act shows, it is not obvious what law he has violated. It is also important to remember, to paraphrase Justice Stewart in the Pentagon Papers, that the responsibility for these disclosures lies firmly with the institution empowered to keep them secret: the Executive branch.”

Goldsmith called the government “unconscionably lax in allowing Bradley Manning,” an Army private arrested on suspicion of giving WikiLeaks Afghan and Iraq war documents last summer, “to have access to all these secrets and to exfiltrate them so easily.”

“I do not understand why so much ire is directed at Assange and so little at the New York Times,” continued Goldsmith, who resigned from the Justice Department after only nine months on the job because he disagreed with its legal rationalizations for waterboarding and other counter-terrorism tactics.

Goldsmith's remarks came only a few days after libertarian standard-bearer Rep. Ron Paul virtually celebrated WikiLeaks for exposing America's “delusional foreign policy.”

“When presented with embarrassing disclosures about U.S. spying and meddling, the policy that requires so much spying and meddling is not questioned,” said the nominal Texas Republican, denouncing calls for prosecuting Assange. “Instead the media focuses on how authorities might prosecute the publishers of such information.”

On Monday influential Harvard political scientist Stephen M. Walt endorsed Goldsmith’s views, asking whether The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward shouldn’t be prosecuted for publishing secrets if Assange was.

"I keep thinking about the Wikileaks affair,” Walt wrote for NPR’s Web site, “and I keep seeing the double-standards multiplying. Given how frequently government officials leak classified information in order to make themselves look good, box in their bureaucratic rivals, or tie the President's hands, it seems a little disingenuous of them to be so upset by Assange's activities.”

By Jeff Stein  | December 13, 2010; 3:23 PM ET

The Radicalism of Judge Hudson's Health Care Law Decision

— All For Nothing?: President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and senior staff, react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the health care reform bill on March 21, 2010. | White House photo/Pete Souza (Government Work).

A federal judge strikes down part of the health care law—and rewrites the Constitution.

By Nick Baumann | Mon Dec. 13, 2010 2:30 PM PST

---

On Monday, Henry Hudson, a federal district court judge previously best-known for sending NFL quarterback Michael Vick to prison [1], became an instant conservative superstar [2] by striking down the individual mandate, the part of the Democrats' new health care reform law that will require Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine.
Hudson wasn't the first federal judge to rule on the Affordable Care Act—two others already upheld it, and another is due to release his decision Thursday—but the George W. Bush appointee was the first to deem part of the law unconstitutional. The battle is almost certain to reach the Supreme Court, where conservatives hold a 5-4 majority. If Bush v. Gore is any indication, health care reform could be in serious trouble. (My colleague Suzy Khimm has more on the individual mandate ruling here [2]. Kevin Drum, meanwhile, says President Obama should accede to Republican demands [3] and ask the Supreme Court to review the case right away, skipping the lengthy appeals process.)
There's more to this story, though. Unfortunately, most of the commentary on Hudson's decision [PDF [4]] focuses on its immediate impact on the health care law. But the issues at stake inCuccinelli v. Sebelius (Ken Cuccinelli is the conservative attorney general of Virginia; Katherine Sebelius is President Barack Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services, or HHS) are actually far broader. Hudson's ruling doesn't just show how the Supreme Court could gut the health law—it shows how the court could neuter the entire federal government. 

The Constitution's commerce clause [5] says that Congress has the power to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States." It is the fundamental underpinning of nearly every federal law regulating the economy. Limiting its scope undermines the whole project of government intervention in the economy—and gets America closer to the libertarian goal of an "unfettered" free market. Hudson's ruling—and Cuccinnelli's argument against the individual mandate—would do just that. Under the Cuccinnelli/Hudson theory, the government may be able to regulate voluntary actions that an American take—buying health insurance, for example. But the government cannot require an individual to participate in interstate commerce if he or she does not wish to do so. Here's the relevant part of Hudson's decision (it's on page 23 of the PDF [4]):

Every application of Commerce Clause power found to be constitutionally sound by the Supreme Court involved some form of action, transaction, or deed placed in motion by an individual or legal entity. The constitutional viability of the [individual mandate] in this case turns on whether or not a person's decision to refuse to purchase health care insurance is such an activity.

It should be pretty clear to anyone who's ever been in a car accident that refusing to buy insurance for something can have broad economic effects. So in its briefs, the Obama administration argued for a broad definition of "activity," and noted that, in the economic arena, simply refusing to act does not place Americans outside of the reach of government regulation:

Virginia claims that "inaction in the present, with respect to one subject matter (insurance), which can lead to undesirable results in the future, is [not] 'activity,'" and therefore beyond the commerce power. This standard is incoherent. Congress can regulate current behavior—even behavior that Virginia would paint as "inaction"—to avert effects on commerce in the future. The person who allows hazardous waste to leak from his property "without any active human participation" is fairly described as inactive. Nonetheless, the Fourth Circuit recognized that he could not "insulate himself from liability by virtue of his passivity," and that he was subject to the Superfund Act. 

Most legal scholars agree with the Obama administration on this. They believe the commerce clause allows Congress to regulate economic decisions [6], not just economic activity. Hudson, as you know by now, doesn't buy that argument. Hudson believes the Constitution provides for a federal government far more constrained in its abilities to regulate the economy than any state government. In the state of Virginia (ahem), for example, drivers who refuse to purchase auto insurance have to pay the state $500 a year [7]. In making this claim, Hudson has "rewritten the Commerce Clause," Tim Jost, a professor at Washington and Lee University law school, told reporters on Monday [6].
Drastically limiting the scope of the Constitution's commerce clause (as Hudson would do) is the slippery slope to the libertarian paradise. Almost every meaningful action the federal government takes with regard to the economy rests on the commerce clause. In the past, the Supreme Court has read that clause to be incredibly constrained. During the Lochner era [8] (1897-1937), the court routinely struck down federal laws regulating working hours, child labor, and minimum wages as inappropriate interventions in individuals' "right of contract."
In that time, individuals' "rights" to do whatever they wanted in the market—even if a 12-year-old "agreeing" to work 80 hour weeks for next-to-nothing made it more likely that other children would have to do the same—were thought to outweigh the state's interest (and, you know, the moral imperative) in not having children being worked to death in textile mills.
Similarly, in Hudson's decision, an individual's "right" to decline to purchase health insurance—even though, by doing so, she is creating a future burden on the state and making it less likely that the state will be able to pay for health care for others—is more important than the state's interest (and the moral interest) in trying to make sure that people don't die because they don't have enough money to pay for health care. The individual's economic rights trump all else—even the right (which, to be fair, many conservatives don't believe exists) of other citizens to life: the right to not die because they don't have health insurance.
There's more to be said about the validity of Hudson's constitutional arguments. Over at the Incidental Economist, Ian Crosby explains [9] why even if you buy Hudson's argument that refusing to purchase insurance is not "activity," the ruling still doesn't hold water. But it's important to remember that there are real people's lives at stake here [10], and more fundamental things than arguments over constitutional legalese are at stake. Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia are smart legal minds. They can probably make a fairly convincing constitutional argument for anything they decide—and as Bush v. Gore showed, they don't even have to do that.
Ultimately, the nine members of the Supreme Court are going to be making a political decision about how much power they believe the government should have over the economic activities of ordinary Americans. Should the feds be able to require people to buy insurance for health care, a universally used good that society is expected to (and does) provide? Or does the Congress of the United States have less power to regulate health care than the Legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia has to regulate who pays to fix your Jetta after a fender-bender?

Wikileaks, Rendition, and the CIA's Italian Job

What could leaked State Department cables tell us about a CIA kidnapping in Milan and other extraordinary renditions?

By Nick Baumann | Mon Dec. 13, 2010 3:15 AM PST

---

Among the hundreds of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in recent weeks were a number pertaining to extraordinary rendition—the practice of effectively kinapping a suspected terrorist in one country and transporting him to another, usually Arab, nation for interrogation that almost invariably invovles torture. Most of the time, renditions happen quietly; CIA operatives swoop in and out and no one's the wiser. Then came the February 2003 kidnapping of a cleric named Abu Omar in Milan, Italy. The operation was bungled (the American operatives used unencrypted, trackable cell phones, for starters), and, in a major embarassment to the US, the 23 CIA agents involved were eventually tried by an Italian court. In 2009, they were convicted in absentia [1] of violating Italian law. (Peter Bergen wrote about the case, and interviewed Abu Omar himself [2], for the March/April 2008 issue of Mother Jones.) Recently, I spoke to Steve Hendricks, a freelance journalist and author whose most recent work is the just-released A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial [3], about Abu Omar, renditions, and the impact of the Wikileaks disclosures. Here's an edited transcript of our conversation. (In some cases, I've expanded my original questions to provide additional context):

Mother Jones: Wikileaks recently released a diplomatic cable [4] detailing a conversation between Rolf Nikel, the German Deputy National Security Adviser, and John Koenig, the deputy chief of the US embassy in Berlin. In the discussion, Koenig pressured Nikel to tell his bosses not to prosecute the CIA personnel involved in the rendition of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen who was kidnapped, flown to Afghanistan, and allegedly beaten, sodomized, and repeatedly interrogated before the US realized it had the wrong guy. According to the cable, part of the pressure that was put on the Germans had to do with the kidnapping and subsequent trial you write about in your book. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Steve Hendricks: The Deputy Chief of Mission who had that conversation in Germany with his counterpart there referenced "repercussions" in the US-Italian relationship [in the wake of the decision to prosecute the CIA officers involved in the Abu Omar case.] That's an interesting phrase because there almost certianly weren't any repercussions. Italy was already doing what the White House wanted. The governments of [Silvio] Berlusconi, [Romano] Prodi, and Berlusconi again all got in line, doing everything they could to derail prosecution. Their problem was that the magistracy [that was prosecuting the CIA officers] was independent. About all that Rome could do was to file challenges in court making the same arguments over there that Obama and Bush made over here: That we can't talk about these things because doing so would reveal state secrets.
MJ: So the US successfully pressured the Italian government to try to interfere with the Milan prosecution?
SH: I don't think they needed any nudge from the White House to get them to do that. Certainly, the Berlusconi government was one of the biggest backers of the Bush administration's [counterterrorism policies]. It's extremely unlikely that we're going to learn that there was any real arm-twisting going on there.
MJ: So does that mean that the idea in the US (at least on the left) that Europeans oppose Bush-style counterterrorism policies is wrong, and that civil libertarians' hopes that Europeans may force accountability for torture are misguided?
SH: It's a real mix. We're talking about a wide range of both public and elite opinion. Germany probably falls right in the middle of that map. They're not dying to piss off the US, but neither are they as slovenly on their knees in the way the Italian government was. The other piece of it as far as accountability for torture and so on is that Europe as a whole seems to understand that we're part of an international community, whether we like it or not. They seem to have a greater respect for international conventions—they're aware of the [UN] Convention Against Torture [5], for example, and there's a lot more fallout over there for disobeying international conventions.
MJ: Does the constitutional independence of top judicial and prosecutorial officials in European countries like Germany, Italy, and Spain make a difference when it comes to prosecuting these sorts of cases?
SH: Well, in the case of Germany what we know is that the judge in Munich issued warrants. That was independent of the central government. But it was the choice of central government whether to enforce those warrants. There were things that they could actually do and had a choice about whether they would or would not do it. [Ed. note: The government ultimately decided to enforce the warrants, but did not make a formal request for the extradition of the agents involved after an initial, informal request was denied.] I imagine we will be hearing in the future about what exactly did happen after that pressure was put on—what the wrangling was, and [how the government decided] "We have to ignore the Americans."
[In Spain and Italy], their magistrates...[have] independence that we completely lack over here. Federal prosecutors all work for the Justice Department. They work at the whim of the Attorney General and the President. That's why we don't have a single prosecutor here who would do what [magistrates in Italy and Spain did in charging CIA personnel with crimes].
MJ: What about US attorneys like Patrick Fitzgerald and John Durham, who are investigating issues related to interrogation and detention and are generally referred to as "independent"?
SH: They are independent within a narrow range. [Attorney General] Eric Holder isn't looking over the shoulder of every prosecutor in the country. But they know what they can and cannot do. It's almost like the censorship of the newsroom: you know certain topics are completely out of bounds. Every prosecutor is going to know they can't bring a prosecution against Bush or Obama—or for extraordinary renditions, even though those are violations of the Convention Against Torture, which is US law. They'd be fired if they did that. On truly deep foundational levels, are we going to accuse our president of committing crimes against humanity? No. They don't have that kind of independence.

MJ: So how much power do European magistrates have, really?
SH: International law increasingly reflects the doctrine of universal jurisdiction. If someone has committed a truly heinous crime, a crime against humanity, and the country where it was committed is not prosecuting the person, than courts elsewhere arguably have jurisdiction to go after these people. That's how [famed Spanish magistrate Baltasar] Garzon went after [former Chilean dictator Augusto] Pinochet. It's a doctrine to be used sparingly. But the case of the US since 9/11 is exactly what this doctrine contemplated: crimes that have largely gone unpunished.
MJ: But will we ever see another prosecution like the Milan trial?
SH: For a while, there were rumors coming out of Germany that German prosecutors were about to bring charges against the people in Germany who were involved in the rendition of Abu Omar. It's long been known that the Germans were looking into who was involved there. But it would appear that the CIA has learned a lot of lessons, or the Obama CIA has learned many lessons from the kidnapping in Milan and other fiascos. Although Obama insists he will continue to use extraordinary renditions, we haven't heard about any of them. That means they're either carrying out fewer, they're carrying them out with greater discretion, or both. If that's the case, then we're probably not going to have any more Kidnapping in Milan-type fiascos blowing up anytime soon. After all, we heard about almost none of the Clinton-era renditions, and he did several dozen.
MJ: Why was the Milan operation so bungled? Even if you think extraordinary renditions are a good thing, I assume you'd want to make sure they were done quietly and competently, no?
SH: The main reason, I think, is just that [in the years immediately following the September 11th attacks, the Bush administration] demanded so much of the CIA in so little time, and the CIA was already so broken an agency, that to ask them to do the minimal level of competence was a lot on any given day. In Legacy of Ashes [6] [an award-winning history of the agency], Tim Weiner essentially says that in the entire history of the agency, there's barely a major operation that they carried off with competence. That's true. If you take an agency this disfunctional and say, "We want you to do ten times what you were doing," you're going to have problems. They didn't have enough planes, so they had to rent "torture taxis [7]." They didn't have enough heavies to do the actual grunt work of renditions, so they had to hire contractors. It's amazing that more of these renditions didn't blow up in our face like this.
If you're doing renditions in smaller numbers, and not doing it willy-nilly, the third-world dictatorships were usually happy to get these guys, who are usually their home-grown extremist types. But when you start doing it with this cowboy attitude and semi-publicly, and making it very clear to all the terrorists that people are being sent to Egypt or whatever, that's not exactly helpful to Egypt and Morrocco and Syria and so on. So it's not shocking to me that some of this information began to leak out.
MJ: Are there any obstacles to a future president reinstituting an aggressive, semi-public, high-volume rendition program? Or other parts of the Bush-era interrogation and detention regime?
SH: There aren't any barriers, and that's why people have been clamoring for prosecutions. Without punishment or huge public censure, there's nothing to stop it from happening again. The only thing that has really been done of any substance is the executive order [signed by President Barack Obama banning torture [8].] But of course that was already US law, and President Palin could countermand [the executive order] in the stroke of a pen. Of course, one of the great overlooked thing about why Obama isn't going after Bush is that a lot of [Bush's] sins started with Clinton... [By prosecuting top Bush administration officials for torture, Obama] would be opening Clinton up for prosecution—and he'd be opening himself up, too. Clinton originating this stuff is, I think, a big piece of why we're not getting any action on it today.
MJ: How did this all come about?
SH: It came about in 1993, if we can believe [former Clinton administration counterterrorism adviser] Richard Clarke. [After the first attacks on the World Trade Center], he decided it was too cumbersome to snatch suspected terrorists and bring them back to the US for trial—and Clinton and the rest of the national security staff agreed. We don't know who the first person [to be rendered] was, but we know that by August 1995 they succeeded in rendering a guy named Abu Talal [al-Qasimi] [9] from Croatia to Egypt, and that was such a success that over the remaining five years they rendered about ten people a year. (Read more: Rendition By The Numbers [10].)
The fact that this program went so smoothly, and that what little got known about it in public got so little condemnation was a big green light after 9/11, when Bush and the CIA wanted to amp this up. They thought it'd be okay, and they weren't entirely right but they were broadly right: they knew they could get away with it. And Clinton having set it up was a big piece of that.

Sources Say Steele Will Seek Second Term As RNC Chair

by Doug McKelway | December 13, 2010

Read more: http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/12/13/sources-say-steele-will-seek-second-term-rnc-chair#ixzz182GTKI00

Controversial Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who last month presided over the GOP's biggest electoral gains since 1938, will announce tonight that he is running for re-election, Fox News has learned from two RNC members.

Ending weeks of rumors that he would not seek a second term, Steele plans to throw his hat into the ring during a conference call with RNC members at 7:30 p.m. ET, the sources said. Steele is said to be amused by false reports of his retirement and intentionally kept his plans secret for the last month in order to flush out competitors for the post, Fox has learned.

During Steele's tenure, Republicans picked up 63 House seats in last month's elections, the biggest gain in more than seven decades. But Steele has been dogged by criticism from some Republicans who see him as prone to missteps.

Criticism of Steele has helped lead to a crowded field of challengers seeking to head the RNC. Among those who have officially announced they are in the race are Saul Anuzis, a committee member from Michigan who ran and lost to Steele in 2009, and Reince Priebus of Wisconsin, a former member of Steele's inner circle, along with former Luxembourg Ambassador Anne Wagner

Former RNC Political Director under Steele Gentry Collins and Maria Cino, a former Bush administration official are also both flirting with a run.

Members of the Republican National Committee will select a chairman to lead the organization in January.

Read more: http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/12/13/sources-say-steele-will-seek-second-term-rnc-chair#ixzz182GP8WcO

We're Still at War:

 Photo of the Day for December 13, 2010

Mon Dec. 13, 2010 2:30 AM PST

As the sun heads toward the horizon, two UH-60 Black Hawks and a CH-47 Chinook prepare to land at Forward Operating Base Connolly to pick up Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates after he visited troops at Forward Operating Base Connolly in eastern Afghanistan Dec. 7.Photo by U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Mark Burrell, Task Force Bastogne Public Affairs

Tiny Bone Could Unlock Mystery of Amelia Earhart

Updated: 1 day 17 hours ago

Hugh Collins

(Dec 11) -- A tiny piece of bone could unlock the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart, the pilot who vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean 73 years ago. 

The fragment, believed to be from a human finger, was found on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the southwest Pacific, Discovery News reported. 

Researchers investigating Earhart's disappearance found the fragment of bone in June 2009 along with pieces of a pocketknife, prewar American bottles and makeup from a woman's compact. 

Courtesy of TIGHAR

Researchers probing Amelia Earhart's disappearance found this tiny bone fragment, believed to be from a human finger, on a remote island in the Pacific.

At first they thought the bone was from a turtle. Further investigation showed it could very well be human. 

"After 22 years of rigorous research and 10 grueling expeditions, we can say that all of the evidence we have found on Nikumaroro is consistent with the hypothesis that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, landed and eventually died there as castaways," Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, told Discovery.

Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic solo and became an icon of the active woman. In 1937, she embarked on an attempt to fly around the globe.

After a stop in Lae, New Guinea, Earhart and Noonan took off July 2 bound for tiny Howland Island, a distance roughly the same as a trip across the continental United States.

Neither Earhart nor Noonan was ever seen again, despite a massive search and rescue mission. 

Federal Judge Strikes Down Part of Health Care Law

Larry O'Dell

AP

Updated: one minute ago

RICHMOND, Va. (Dec. 13) -- A federal judge declared a key provision of the Obama administration's health care law unconstitutional Monday, siding with Virginia's attorney general in a dispute that both sides agree will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson is the first federal judge to strike down the law, which has been upheld by two other federal judges in Virginia and Michigan. Several other lawsuits have been dismissed and others are pending, including one filed by 20 other states in Florida.

Hudson rejected the government's argument that it has the power under the Constitution to require individuals to buy health insurance, a provision that was set to take effect in 2014.

"Of course, the same reasoning could apply to transportation, housing or nutritional decisions," Hudson wrote. "This broad definition of the economic activity subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation" and is unsupported by previous legal cases around the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

There was no immediate comment from the White House.

The lawsuit was filed by Virginia Republican Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli in defense of a new state law that prohibits the government from forcing state residents to buy health insurance. The key issue was his claim that the federal law's requirement that citizens buy health insurance or pay a penalty is unconstitutional.

"This won't be the final round, as this will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, but today is a critical milestone in the protection of the Constitution," Cuccinelli said in a statement after the ruling.

Hudson, a Republican appointed by President George W. Bush, sounded sympathetic to the state's case when he heard oral arguments in October, and the White House expected to lose this round.
Administration officials told reporters last week that a negative ruling would have virtually no impact on the law's implementation, noting that its two major provisions - the coverage mandate and the creation of new insurance markets - don't take effect until 2014.

The central issue in Virginia's lawsuit was whether the federal government has the power under the constitution to impose the insurance requirement. The Justice Department said the mandate is a proper exercise of the government's authority under the Commerce Clause.

Cuccinelli argued that while the government can regulate economic activity that substantially affects interstate commerce, the decision not to buy insurance amounts to economic inactivity that is beyond the government's reach.