Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, found guilty of insider trading in April, is claiming in his appeal that part of the reason Qwest stock dropped in value is that the NSA cancelled some lucrative contracts with the company as punishment for its failure to cooperate in illegal warrantless wiretapping (unlike AT&T and Verizon). The Bush administration is pushing for retroactive immunity to be granted to AT&T and Verizon for its participation in these unconstitutional programs by threatening to veto any surveillance bill that doesn’t include such immunity. If the Democrats were smart, they’d go ahead and send him a surveillance bill without the immunity, and then criticize him when he vetoes it for taking action that is going to kill Americans. ...

CIA Director (and former head of the NSA) Gen. Michael Hayden is unhappy with CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s work uncovering abuses at the CIA, so he’s ordered his own investigation of the IG, including an examination of the office’s confidential files. That’s sure to put a chill on employee cooperation with or reporting of abuses to the IG’s office.

Lynn Brewer is a former Enron employee who claims she was an executive whistleblower, and has turned that into a career as a highly paid motivational speaker and founder of the Integrity Institute. But it turns out that she was never an executive, she worked in a clerical position writing summaries of gas and energy contracts. The document she claims was a memo in which she blew the whistle is a document her boss says she never saw and described an alleged financial transaction which she never would have done any work on. Her former VP, Tony Mends, says that Brewer was sent to the UK to train Enron employees on the use of Factiva, but she never showed up to conduct the training, instead traveling the UK with her fiance. She claims she had to stay outside of London because of a terrorist threat, but nobody else in the Enron office in London was kept from going to work. Greg Farrell at USA Today has done a great job of exposing Brewer’s claims and how she has capitalized on being confused for Sherron Watkins, who really was an Enron executive whistleblower. Brewer’s web page at “Speaker’s Spotlight” shows that she bills herself as “the” Enron whistleblower and is filled with misrepresentations: Lynn Brewer’s notoriety stems from her actions that have dubbed her “the Enron Whistleblower”. Her accomplishments include: Author of Confessions of an Enron Executive: A Whistleblowers Story; Earning a Certification in Business Ethics from Colorado State University; Founder and President of The Integrity Institute, Inc., which assesses and certifies corporate integrity at the request of organizations for the benefit of their stakeholders. Prior to joining Enron, Brewer worked in forensic accounting and spent 18 years as a legal professional in private practice, until she joined Ralston Purina, where she worked in Corporate Development for the General Counsel and Chief Financial Officer. As an executive at Enron, Ms. Brewer was responsible for Risk Management in Energy Operations, the e-Commerce initiatives for Enron’s water subsidiary, and Competitive Intelligence for Enron Broadband Services. Her responsibilities included financial derivatives and the now infamous “off-the-balance sheet” partnerships. During her nearly three-year tenure, she witnessed numerous instances of illegal and corrupt dealings, including bank fraud, espionage, power price manipulation and the gross overstatements to the press, public and financial world. When her attempts to notify those inside Enron of her knowledge failed, she notified the United States government, who refused to return her e-mails and telephone calls. Since leaving Enron, Lynn Brewer has become an internationally recognized speaker providing compelling details into Enron’s rise and fall, leaving audiences shocked when they realize how vulnerable they are to becoming the next Enron. A past nominee for the “Women of Influence” Award, Brewer was selected in 2006 for inclusion in the 25th Silver Anniversary Edition of Who’s Who of American Women for her contributions to society.Notice that she doesn’t give her actual title; her claim of being responsible for risk management as though she headed a risk management group is untrue. Her boss, Mary Solmonson, was a director, not an executive. Another boss, David Gossett, who reported to VP Mends, was also a director, not an executive. I suspect we’ll see more allegations and stories of deception by Brewer coming to light. I’d like to know if there’s any substance to her claim to have experience in the field of forensic accounting prior to working at Enron. Her 18 years experience “as a legal professional in private practice” really means she worked as a paralegal (which was apparently her role at Enron). Here’s an interview transcript where she misrepresents herself from the get-go, answering the question “what was your role at Enron” with: I was recruited about three years before the implosion of Enron, to head up a risk management group inside the legal department, that would brief, for senior management and the board of directors, these off the balance sheet partnerships at the centre of the scandal.She didn’t head up a risk management group. She didn’t brief senior management and the board of directors. She didn’t report on the off balance sheet partnerships at the center of the scandal, she wrote summaries of gas and energy contracts for managers. UPDATE (October 15, 2007): Lynn Brewer was known as EddieLynn Morgan (her maiden name) while she was at Enron, and her name appears in the “Enron corpus” of emails that were made public after the scandal. Studies of the Enron emails have been done to look at the web of interconnections between recipients, which show that EddieLynn Morgan was a very bit player–she is the recipient of a total of four emails in the corpus, and the author of none. ...

The Goldwater Institute will be giving Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Muslim turned atheist author of the book Infidel, its 2007 Goldwater award at an event in Phoenix later this year. I plan to attend and will report here afterward.

The Carpetbagger Report discusses how many of Rudy Giuliani’s friends have been accused of being criminals: A prominent Texas Republican has sued Rudy Giuliani’s law firm and a close friend and partner of Giuliani’s, Kenneth Caruso, alleging that Caruso, the firm and others “schemed and conspired to steal $10 million.” J. Virgil Waggoner, a Houston businessman and philanthropist, filed the previously unreported suit in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan in July. He alleges that Caruso, his former lawyer, conspired with Waggoner’s investment adviser to cover up the disappearance of $10 million Waggoner invested through a Caribbean bank, the British Trade & Commerce Bank. ...

Ed Brayton has an entertaining post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars about the lawsuit against Oral Roberts University and Oral’s son Richard Roberts by several former ORU faculty: The allegations are contained in a lawsuit filed Tuesday by three former professors. They sued ORU and Roberts, alleging they were wrongfully dismissed after reporting the school’s involvement in a local political race. Richard Roberts, according to the suit, asked a professor in 2005 to use his students and university resources to aid a county commissioner’s bid for Tulsa mayor. Such involvement would violate state and federal law because of the university’s nonprofit status. Up to 50 students are alleged to have worked on the campaign. ...

Taner Edis at the Secular Outpost comments on a recent article by Jon Haight about the benefits of religion, including its impact on generosity. I’ve previously offered some comments on evidence that conservatives and the religious are more generous than liberals and the secular and that believers are more generous than atheists. I’ll add that I doubt that studies of charitable giving dig deep enough to uncover whether the giving is going to charities like these. Is it really being more generous if your charitable donations aren’t being used to actually do good?

P.Z. Myers has written an open letter in response to Sam Harris’ address to the Atheist Alliance, in which Harris said this: So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.Myers rightly takes issue with this proposal. This quotation was the first thing I read from Harris’ address on the SKEPTIC mailing list, and I wrote this in response before I read his entire talk: I disagree with everybody who says there’s only one way we should all be. I have no problem with there being atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, naturalists, skeptics, brights, humanists (secular or otherwise), rationalists, and people in the closet or under the radar.But then, after reading Harris’ entire speech, I amended this as follows: Now that I’ve actually read his essay, I do strongly agree with him that “atheism is not a worldview.” It is a small but significant component of a large set of possible worldviews. I went to my first atheist meetup group meeting a couple of weeks ago, curious to see what it would be like. It was the first meeting of a group of people who have different ideas about what they want to do–some want to be political activists against the religious right. Some want to picket churches. Some want social events with like-minded people. I gave my endorsement for the last of these, and further suggested that they be as inclusive as possible to bring together people from other existing groups in the Phoenix area–skeptics, humanists, atheists, etc., as an informal network to have events and let people know of what other groups are doing. The megachurches succeed by creating a framework in which there are lots of little subgroups catering to a wide variety of interests, and a secular community should offer the same. Harris’ point that “Atheism is not a thing” is the same point I made to this group–it may be that the only thing we have in common is a lack of belief in God. If the group focuses on that, the meetings will be as entertaining as a meeting of people whose only commonality is disinterest in watching spectator sports, who get together to discuss their disinterest in watching spectator sports (or worse yet, watching spectator sports to comment on how stupid it is).I should add to this that in my opinion, the term “freethinker” includes a subset of theists (I am in agreement with Jeff Lowder on this point, though, unlike Jeff, I believe I have met such people, though perhaps I have confused some kinds of fideists with freethinkers), and I welcome association with them. I have a preference for the term “skeptic” over “atheist” because I like the way it focuses the attention on method–doubt–rather than on doctrine–lack of belief in gods. If I were to find sufficient evidence for the existence of God, I would become a theist, but I would remain a skeptic. One of the most inspiring books I’ve read in the last couple of years was Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History, because she shows that there is a very long tradition of doubters of the dominant religious views, and that even in cases where doubters are driven underground, doubt resurfaces again. UPDATE (October 8, 2007): Sam Harris has responded to criticism here, and P.Z. Myers responds to that here. I agree with Myers. UPDATE (October 9, 2007): P.Z. Myers comments on Sam Harris’ references to an atheist “cult." Again, I agree with Myers here–the attributes of a cult are something like this or this. There can be atheist cults, but they need to exhibit those characteristics to deserve the name. UPDATE (October 16, 2007): Chris Hallquist weighs in on the subject at the Internet Infidels website. ...

Comment for Peter S. Williams’ blog, which doesn’t allow comments except from the blog owner and team members: Charles Manson claimed to levitate a school bus in order to get it to the group’s hideout at Barker Ranch in Death Valley in 1968. His followers claim he did it, too. We know the school bus got there, because it was still there until a few years ago. The terrain up Goler Canyon Road is very difficult even for four-wheel drive vehicles. I don’t believe Manson levitated the bus (or that there was a single tree that bore twelve kinds of fruit, one for each month of the year, at Barker Ranch, as he also claimed). Do you? There are also numerous eyewitness reports of remarkable phenomena, including levitations, occurring at Spiritualist seances. However, the most exhaustively documented ones show that eyewitness testimony is at odds with what actually happened–a phenomenon that magicians are quite familiar with. If demonic activity results in such things as levitation, why is it not documentable through video recordings or testimony from witnesses trained in illusion and trickery? ...

P.Z. Myers comments on a couple of professors defending the literal existence of angels and demons. Intelligent design advocate and Discovery Institute Fellow William Dembski on angels: Peter Williams’ The Case for Angels is about…the theological rift between a Christian intelligentsia that increasingly regards angels only as figurative or literary devices, and the great mass of Christians who thankfully still regard them as real (a fact confirmed by popular polls, as Williams notes in this book). This rift was brought home to me at a conference I helped organize at Baylor University some years back. The conference was entitled ‘The Nature of Nature’ and focused on whether nature is self-contained or points beyond itself. The activity of angels in the world would clearly constitute on way nature points beyond itself. Why is it important to know about angels? Why is it important to know about rocks and plants and animals? It’s important because all of these are aspects of reality that impinge on us. The problem with the secular intelligentsia is that they deny those aspects of reality that are inconvenient to their world-picture. And since the intelligentsia are by definition intelligent (though rarely wise), they are able to rationalize away what they find inconvenient. This is what Bishop Sheen was getting at with the previous quote when he referred to the intelligentsia rationalizing evil, and this what Williams is so successful at unmasking in the intelligentsia’s rejection of angels. ...