Shooty's News and Current events

A senior U.S. military officer acknowledged today that the Americans have not achieved their goals in Fallujah despite the agreement to end the siege of the Sunni Muslim city and turn security over to an Iraqi force.

Ten U.S. Marines and hundreds of Iraqis were killed during the three-week siege of Fallujah, which was launched after four Americans working for the Blackwater USA security company were ambushed, killed, their bodies mutilated and hung from a Euphrates river bridge.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters that the city had been generally quiet since Marines lifted the siege in early May.

Kimmitt also said the U.S.-led coalition had demanded a return to Iraqi government control, handing over of heavy weapons and the arrest of those responsible for the killing of the Blackwater employees.

"We are not satisfied we are making active progress in the latter," Kimmitt said. "We are not satisfied that there has been progress on any of those objectives, with the exception of having Iraqi presence back inside the city."

Hard-line Islamic leaders have reasserted their power in Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad. Some were active in defending the city against the Marines and have profited by a perception -- both here and elsewhere in Iraq -- that the Fallujah fighters defeated a superpower.

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Advances in technology for personal digital assistants, made by Sony and other manufacturers, and for other wireless devices, such as the Blackberry, are making the notebook computer seem as dated as a manual typewriter. Faster processing power, in a package nearly as small as a mobile phone, with a keyboard for typing e-mail messages, enables travelers to stay linked with their business colleagues and families, and to continue to be productive, even on the road, without the need for a PC.

"The idea of being 'always on' is spreading," said Roger Hibbert, associate editor of Mobile PC magazine in San Francisco. "People always want to be available," he told United Press International. "With a Blackberry, or a PDA, you don't have to pop it open to get a message by e-mail. It's more convenient."

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Now, business travelers are "looking for ways to combine all the necessary applications into just one small gadget," Jannie Luong, a spokeswoman for Verizon SuperPages, a unit of the phone company, told UPI.

Developers, such as Nokia, are changing the way their products are designed to accommodate the trend.

The Scandinavian company's latest mobile phone -- the Series 60 devices -- are phones with PDA functionality, "and a whole lot more, built into them," Erik Schmollinger, a spokesman for Nokia, told UPI.

This trend is even causing e-commerce sites -- like Verizon's -- to change the way they present information. The information provided online is being streamlined, so customers can see white and yellow pages, travel guides, hotel reviews, and movie information, "all in the palm of your hand," Luong said.

Others are changing the way they do business as well, due to the growth of the technology, and keep the devices with them all the time, even in the office.

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The primary concern is security. The university worries about being linked to a public network with its entire computing infrastructure. The solution, Trinkle said, may be to have two networks.

"There could be multiple ways to get on the network," he added.

Trinkle noted, however, in more competitive, business environments, the PDA may become a primary computing tool.

"That is likely to happen in quite a few places, with the Blackberry, and the Sony trio, becoming the interface," Trinkle said. "Folks will use it to get their information. There will be a convergence of personal and business identity online. We're starting to see in this country what took off in Japan a while ago -- a mobile phone culture."

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Law-enforcement agents raided Orlando City Hall on Friday and carted off computers used by top managers in the Fire Department as part of their widening investigation into possible election fraud in the mayor's race.

Agents with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement would reveal few details of their inquiry, but a search warrant indicated that investigators are trying to determine whether city firefighters were improperly paid with taxpayer money while campaigning for Mayor Buddy Dyer.

"It's part of our ongoing criminal investigation of election fraud," FDLE legal adviser Steve Brady said. "It's all related to the same issue, the mayoral-election issue."

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The Italian warrant for the arrest of Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, 32, an Egyptian seized in a suburb of Milan last week, details transcripts of bugged conversations and telephone calls in which he not only boasted of his involvement in the Spanish attack of March 11 but also spoke of future plans. The Spanish government has said it will seek the extradition of Ahmed — also known as “Mohamed the Egyptian”.

Ahmed moved to Milan in early April. Police surveillance teams nicknamed him “the trainer” because of his practice of befriending Muslim immigrants, finding out who was most dissatisfied with the West and asking: “What are you doing to change the situation?” A former Egyptian army explosives expert, he bears a sign of his religious devotion on his forehead — a weal caused by striking his head hard on the ground during Muslim prayers.

Bugs placed by anti-terrorist police in Ahmed’s one-bedroom flat recorded a conversation on May 26 with Yahia Payumi, 21, a Palestinian who was also later arrested.

After denouncing the torture by American troops of “our brothers in Iraq”, Ahmed was quoted as saying: “Hotaf has been prepared with many medicinal products. If they throw one stick, they wipe out an American neighbourhood.”

Although the woman named Hotaf was said to have been discovered, other women were ready to replace her, Ahmed added. “Amal, Hanan, Fatiha — you only need to call them and they come. God is great.”

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, Fla. (AP) - Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a bug.

The electronic voting machines are a response to Florida's 2000 presidential election

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The elections chief, Ed Kast, abruptly resigned Monday, saying he wanted a change of pace.

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"These are minor technical hiccups that happen," said Hood spokeswoman Nicole DeLara. "No votes are lost, or could be lost."

Wexler and coalition members said they want to know how the state can be sure that glitches will not prevent elections officials from even detecting computer malfunctions.

"How do you know that any votes were lost if your audit is wrong?" asked Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade coalition.

State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once - an overvote - and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race - an undervote.

They emphasize that the "glitch" in the touchscreen machines occurs when the audit is done after the election, not when the tally sheet is printed in each precinct when polls close.

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More than 12,000 former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party are in the process of reintegration into public service a year after losing their jobs under a now abandoned policy of punishing loyalists of the ousted regime, a senior official said Thursday.

In a backtrack on its once hardline stance, the so-called National De-Baathification Committee - a body created and headed by erstwhile Pentagon favourite Ahmad Chalabi - reinstated the public servants.

"Our committee, which fired 30,000 people, has decided to reintegrate 12,000 who have appealed the decision," Mithal Allussi, director of the committee, said.

"They come from a range of sectors, for example the interior ministry, education or electricity," he said.

"Some decided to restart active work and others chose retirement."

The softer stance on former Baath party members followed Chalabi's fall from favour in a head-on collision with his US allies last month.

When US overseer Paul Bremer arrived in Iraq one year ago, he issued a decree expelling all senior Baathists from the administration and dissolving the armed forces.

The policy was the result of Chalabi's intense lobbying with his well-placed friends in Washington at the expense of Bremer's predecessor Jay Garner, who saw administering the war-torn country as the priority, not a witch-hunt.

Some 6,000 teachers were among the 30,000 civil servants fired by the committee under Chalabi.

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Five years after the United Nations and Nato intervened to end the war in Kosovo, Belgrade insists the international mission has been a "stinging failure" and is demanding a change of strategy.

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"It is evident that after the recent violence the international community must count the costs of the stinging failure of its policies in Kosovo," said Dragan Marsicanin, a senior figure in the ruling coalition.

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Kosovo's outgoing UN mission chief, Harri Holkeri, warned Thursday the security situation there was "very fragile" and the province could turn into a hotbed for terrorism if it was abandoned by the international community.

"If the international community gives up, what would it be? That would be a carte blanche for terrorism, for violence... all kinds of actions against humanity," Holkeri said.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who visited the breakaway province last Monday for the second time since the anti-Serb riots, said a society plagued by such ethnic violence "does not belong to Europe".

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Serbia is now demanding a dramatic change in strategy to allow the province to be "decentralised" between Serb and Albanian areas - an idea that has been criticised as amounting to the ethnic division of Kosovo.

This policy, announced by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica earlier this year, has been unanimously adopted by the Serbian parliament and is seen here as the only practical solution to ensure security for the Serbs.

It would grant extended powers to five enclaves where Serbs were in the majority before their post-war exodus, when more than 200,000 fled in fear of reprisal attacks by the Albanian majority.

Only around 80 000 Serbs remain in Kosovo, out of a total population in the province of 1,8 million. Nato troops who are supposed to ensure security were completely overwhelmed by the organised mob violence in March.

Marsicanin said the decentralisation plan was the "only solution" which could "stabilise the region" in accord with UN Resolution 1244, which established the UN protectorate in Kosovo.

The plan has won the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who described it as a "very good base for work" after meeting Kostunica last week.

Western European leaders have been far more cautious, however one Western diplomat in Belgrade told AFP that Kostunica's plan was a "good point of departure" and that the "decentralisation of Kosovo is inevitable".

Kosovo Albanian Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi has condemned the idea as an emotional response to the March violence and a way of dividing the province or reintegrating it with Serbia.

The ethnic Albanian leadership of Kosovo demands nothing short of independence, however the province remains technically part of Serbia and its "final status" will be decided by the Security Council.

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Labour and the Tories have both seen their vote slump in the early UK results for the European elections.

After results from London, the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber and Wales, the Tory vote is down 7% and Labour has fallen 6%.

With turnout at a record high, the main winner seems to be the UK Independence Party, whose vote has doubled to 13%.

The Liberal Democrats are also doing well - up 3% - with the Greens, BNP and Respect also gaining.

Elsewhere in Europe early counts suggest governing parties in Germany and France are suffering losses.

Parties of the centre-right Europe-wide are expected to remain the biggest single block in the new parliament but Eurosceptic groups are tipped for striking successes.

Voting to select the UK's 78 MEPs took place on Thursday, although other European countries have held their polls on Sunday.

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The overall turnout across the EU has fallen to an all-time low at 44.6%, with the figure at 47.6% for the 15 long-standing members.

In the UK, the turnout is expected to run at 38% - topping the record of 37% for a European election set in 1989.

The UK Independence Party, which wants the UK to withdraw from Europe, has won 13.1% of the votes in the first three regions.

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Four Arab men posing as journalists were arrested this week when explosives residue was detected on them as they tried to enter the Baghdad headquarters of the U.S.-led administration, a senior U.S. army officer said.

The officer, a top security official in the compound which hosts news conferences given by senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and houses the U.S. consulate, said explosives were found in the men's hotel room after the arrests on Sunday.

They were posing as employees of an international television company and carried fake identification cards and were trying to drive a van into the compound when they were arrested, he said.

"The IDs looked real. But when we called the organization and asked if they were employees, they said they had not heard of them," the army officer, who asked to remain anonymous, told Reuters.

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"The four who were arrested may have just been gathering information on the compound or maybe they were just scouting it out. This case is serious," the officer said. He declined to comment on the nationality of the men.

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Iraq's new Oil Minister Thamir Ghadhban has reportedly said that all coalition advisers will leave Iraqi ministries after the 30 June handover.
Quoted by the UK's Financial Times, he said that the ministry would reassert full control over the country's lucrative oil industry.

However, the new UN resolution on Iraq limits the freedom of action of the interim government about to take power.

Mr Ghadhban also played down attacks by militants on oil infrastructure.

"When sovereignty is regained it means that there will be no more US advisers, not only in the ministry of oil, but in every ministry in Iraq," he was quoted as saying in Thursday's edition of the FT.

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The survey, the first of its kind in Canada, found that 76 per cent of respondents said news organizations are not independent, while only 19 per cent said they are mostly independent.

Five per cent had no opinion or refused to answer.

Young Canadians were even more cynical, with 81 per cent of 19 to 25-year-olds saying news organizations are influenced by powerful groups and individuals, the survey found.

When respondents were asked what outside groups influence the news, 42 per cent said politicians and government; 27 per cent, business and money interests; 12 per cent, media owners; 12 per cent, lobby groups; seven per cent, labour unions, and four per cent, advertisers.

Francophone Quebecers were less likely to mention political and business influences (38 and 27 per cent respectively) and more likely to pinpoint media owners (15 per cent) and labour unions (17 per cent).

The survey was conducted late last year by the Canadian Media Research Consortium, which includes the University of B.C. graduate school of journalism, the York/Ryerson Universities graduate program in communications and culture and Laval University's media studies.

A slim majority of respondents, 52 per cent, said media coverage of the personal and ethical behaviour of political leaders is excessive but a much larger majority, 64 per cent, said criticism of their policies and proposals is not.

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Justice Department lawyers, fearing a crushing defeat before the U.S. Supreme Court in the next few weeks, are scrambling to develop a conventional criminal case against “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla that would charge him with providing “material support” to Al Qaeda, NEWSWEEK has learned.

The prospective case against Padilla would rely in part on material seized by the FBI in Afghanistan—principally an Al Qaeda “new applicant form” that, authorities said, the former Chicago gang member filled out in July 2000 to enter a terrorist training camp run by Osama bin Laden's organization.

But officials acknowledge that the charges could well be difficult to bring and that none of Padilla’s admissions to interrogators—including an apparent confession that he met with top Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah and agreed to undertake a terror mission—would ever be admissible in court.

Even more significant, administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention—that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological “dirty bomb”—has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used against him in court.

The reassessments of Padilla come amid a growing sense of gloom within Justice that the Supreme Court is likely to rule decisively against the Bush administration not just in the Padilla case but in two other pivotal cases in the war on terror: one involving the detention of another “enemy combatant,” Yasir Hamden, and another involving the treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the Padilla and Hambdi cases, the administration is arguing it has the right to hold the two U.S. citizens indefinitely without trial. In the Guantanamo case, the administration argues that foreign nationals being interrogated there do not have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts.

Lawyers within the Justice Department are now bracing for defeat in both the enemy-combatant and Guantanamo cases, both of which are expected to be decided before the Supreme Court ends its term at the end of the month, according to one conservative and politically well-connected lawyer. “They are 99 percent certain they are going to lose,” said the lawyer, who asked not to be identified. “It’s a very sobering realization.”

While Supreme Court forecasts are hazardous at best, the conventional wisdom among former Supreme Court clerks is that recent disclosures about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and internal administration memos disavowing compliance with international treaties involving treatment of prisoners has badly hurt the government’s arguments before the court and turned two key “swing” justices—Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy—against it, the lawyer said.

Insider thinking within Justice has the Supreme Court voting six to three against the administration on Guantanamo and by a perhaps even larger margin in the Padilla and Hamdi cases.

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Former US Marine and initiator of the Human Shield Action to Iraq, Ken O'Keefe, was jailed last night by Israeli authorities attempting to enter the Gaza Strip. He wished to discuss with the people and leaders of Gaza the P10K plan to bring 10,000 western citizens to act as international observers in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. P10K also calls for a cessation of offensive operations from the Israeli Government and the militant Palestinian Resistance, upon the arrival of the 10,000 strong P10K Force.

O'Keefe and P10K coordinator Ian Hodgson were detained by ten Israeli Soldiers at 2pm Thursday as they walked along the beach into Palestinian Gaza from an area of Jewish Settlements at the northern end of the Gaza Strip. Knowing that Israel would refuse entry through the usual checkpoints into Gaza, the pair nearly caught Israeli soldiers off guard with their unconventional approach along the coastline.

O'Keefe said: 'I desperately wanted to discuss this idea with people in Gaza, and would not simply accept Israel's refusal to admit me entry. P10K aims to save life on both sides of the conflict, and uphold international law by ending Israel's illegal and immoral occupation, which is the root cause of Palestinian violence."

"Israeli state terrorism is fueling the conflict; Israel must stop its assassinations, incursions, house demolitions and building of the wall, and fully withdraw its illegal settlements and military from the occupied territories until there can be any movement towards a peaceful resolution of this conflict. Palestinian human rights must be respected, most importantly the right to life, but also the right to travel, which I was denied today."

O'Keefe is being held at Sohar Prison in the Negev region of Israel, close to the Egyptian border. Last night Ammon Golan from Erez Police Station said that O'Keefe would be deported to London in the next two days.

Israel effectively imprisons over a million Palestinian in Gaza, with access granted only to selected media and NGO's. P10K would bring more than 3,500 western citizens into the Gaza Strip to prevent widespread human rights abuses such as the destructive incursions into Rafah two weeks ago.

The P10K plan is explained in full at www.P10K.net.

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The Justice Department is looking for a missing laptop computer that contains sensitive data about Drug Enforcement Administration investigations and confidential informants, Newsweek reported.

The computer doesn't contain the names of the informants, the magazine said, citing an unidentified law enforcement official. It contains more than 4,000 pages of case-file data, including details about the informants' activities, which could enable drug traffickers to figure out their identities, the magazine said.

An auditor for the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General, which was conducting a routine investigation of DEA payments to informants, reported the computer stolen three weeks ago, Newsweek said. The auditor last week changed his story and said that he had accidentally damaged the computer and had thrown it out to avoid embarrassment, the magazine reported.

Investigators are trying to verify the auditor's account, Newsweek said.

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Tuesday's fake crash set off an ever-worsening cascade of simulated events for Indian Point plant operators and emergency responders. By the time the drill ended, a containment building was portrayed as filling with radioactive steam and portions of surrounding counties had been "evacuated" and residents advised to swallow anti-radiation pills. The actual residents, however, had no part in the drill.

Plant owner Entergy Nuclear Northeast and federal regulators have been criticized for not taking terror into account in emergency planning since the World Trade Center attack, 40 miles to the south in lower Manhattan. At the site are the mothballed Indian Point 1 plant and the active Indian Point 2 and 3 plants.

The critics were not assuaged by Tuesday's drill. The scenario did not include a simulated release of radiation into the atmosphere -- an omission that "speaks to the farcical nature of this exercise," said Kyle Rabin, of Riverkeeper, one of the organizations in the Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition.

"We want to know if the public can be protected from a release of radiation," he said.

He also criticized as "unbelievable" the announcement that there were no traffic control problems during the simulated evacuations.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency will evaluate the exercise at a public meeting on Thursday.

The drill began with word that a group of men had been stopped on a Connecticut highway in a car laden with weapons and documents pointing to an attack on Indian Point. Then the North American Aerospace Defense Command alerted the NRC that a 767 cargo jet seemed to be heading for Indian Point.

The "crash" wiped out offsite power to the reactor as it was being shut down. Backup generators failed and a leak of reactor coolant raised the specter of a meltdown.

A fake general emergency was declared, and Westchester County ordered the evacuation and advised those who have potassium iodide to "swallow one dose now." Potassium iodide is meant to inhibit the effect of radiation on the human thyroid.

The scenario of the crash included no damage to the reactor's concrete containment building. Brian Holian, of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said recent studies showed "most plane crashes into containment buildings would not result in significant releases of radiation."

Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano, who has called for a shutdown of the Indian Point plants, took part in the drill but "still feels the evacuation wouldn't work in a fast-breaking scenario of radiation escaping," said his chief adviser, Susan Tolchin.

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The Centers for Disease Control is investigating how live anthrax was mistakenly shipped from Maryland to California, exposing five people to the deadly agent.

Researchers at the Southern Research Institute in Frederick, Md., intended to send dead samples of the bacteria to colleagues at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, Calif., so they could produce antibodies against the disease by injecting the dead anthrax into mice. When nearly all of the mice died, government health officials were notified, and the scientists who had been exposed to the anthrax were given the antibiotic Cipro, The Baltimore Sun reported.

FBI bioterrorism experts based in San Francisco collected the samples from the Oakland hospital Wednesday.

No wrongdoing is suspected, and no criminal investigation is planned, said Bill Carter, a spokesman at FBI's Washington headquarters.

The deadly material was shipped in March but wasn't injected into the mice until months later. On May 28, 10 mice were injected; all 10 died three days later. On June 4, 40 mice were injected; 39 were dead three days later.

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The whole idea of releasing an intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was misguided and has damaged public confidence in the secret service, the former head of MI5 said yesterday.

"I feel the dossier was a mistake," said Dame Stella Rimington. "Formally putting intelligence into the public domain was not, in my view, a sensible thing to do.

"The whole point about intelligence is that it changes. What you think is the case today may be different tomorrow because of new information. The trouble is, if you put something out as a dossier, it is frozen in time."

She added: "That whole episode has probably damaged the reputation of the intelligence service, at least momentarily, in the eyes of the public, which is a great pity."

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Asked whether, as director general, she would have resisted Tony Blair's request for a dossier, Dame Stella said: "I can't say, as I don't know the circumstances . . . but I expect I would have thought: no good will come of this."

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The Central Intelligence Agency has yet to come up with a plan to address what senior officials have described as a major flaw in its operations, despite a pledge four months ago that the problem would be resolved within 30 days.

The problem, which contributed to errors in the agency’s prewar estimates on Iraq, is rooted in procedures that severely limit how much information about human sources is shared with analysts who produce intelligence assessments, according to senior intelligence officials.

In a Feb. 11 speech, a senior CIA official, Jami Miscik, described the problem as an example of ‘‘imperfections in our system’’ and said that George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, had given subordinates 30 days ‘‘to devise a permanent and lasting solution.’’ But this week, a senior intelligence official said that a team headed by the agency’s executive director, A. B. Krongard, was ‘‘still working out the modalities’’ of a new arrangement.

A senior intelligence official said this week that the recently announced departures of Tenet and James Pavitt, the deputy director for operations, meant that it was unlikely that the new arrangements would be worked out soon.

The difficulty of working out a solution reflects a deep gulf between the CIA’s operations directorate, which recruits and run spies around the world, and its intelligence directorate, which is in charge of sifting intelligence from those spies and from satellites and eavesdropping devices and drawing broad conclusions.

In the case of Iraq, analysts who wrote reports stating that the country possessed illicit weapons did so without knowing that some of the central sources they cited were defectors linked to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, according to senior intelligence officials.

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In these and other cases, the prewar assessments about Iraq’s illicit weapons were based on reports from sources who did not have firsthand information about what they described.

That fact, too, was sometimes known by intelligence officers but was rarely shared with intelligence analysts, ac cording to the senior intelligence officials.

In her speech, Miscik said that ‘‘the biggest lesson’’ to have emerged from the apparent mistakes in the agency’s prewar assessments on Iraq was ‘‘the importance of getting the analyst as much information as possible about a source’s access.

‘‘Analysts can no longer be put in a position of making a judgment on a critical issue without a full and comprehensive understanding of the source’s access to the information on which they are reporting,’’ Miscik said in the speech to intelligence analysts at the agency, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times.

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Under the longstanding arrangements that Miscik said would be changed, the directorate of operations typically shields information about sources’ identity, motivations and even access to information from the directorate of intelligence.

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In her speech, Miscik did not cite specific examples in which inadequate sharing of information had led to mistakes in the prewar intelligence on Iraq.

But she said an internal review of that intelligence had found cases in which a single source had been described in different ways, so that an intelligence analyst might believe the same information actually had come from multiple sources.

‘‘In an age where policymakers are relying on intelligence to inform their decision-making, we cannot let these imperfections in our system continue,’’ Miscik said in the speech.

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MONTREAL - A Montreal woman who underwent intense electroshock treatment in a program funded by the CIA 50 years ago has been awarded $100,000.

Gail Kastner was given massive electroshock therapy to treat depression in 1953 at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.

She was told on Wednesday of the compensation award.

She was left out of a federal compensation package in 1994 because her treatment was deemed to have been less intense than that of other victims of the experiments. Her treatment was also found to have had fewer long-term effects.

A Federal Court judge reversed that ruling, and awarded her the same amount Ottawa gave to 77 others as compensation for their treatment.

There were 253 claims rejected.

Dr. Ewan Cameron, who was director of the Allan Memorial Institute, conducted experiments using electroshock and drug-induced sleep. The research was funded from 1950 to 1965 by the CIA and by the Canadian government.

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All 50,000 troops who served in the first Gulf war might have been exposed to low levels of chemical warfare agents during the fighting and its aftermath, a US investigation has suggested.

The implication of a Congressional report that large numbers of civilians and troops in Iraq and neighbouring countries could have been exposed will galvanise the controversy over illnesses suffered by more than 5,000 British veterans since 1991 that have been linked to their service in the Gulf.

The report indicates that possible chemical contamination of troops could have been much more widespread than suggested by previous official government estimates, based on US research for the Pentagon and CIA.

Lord Morris, the Labour peer who has led the campaign on Gulf war illnesses, yesterday demanded answers from the government, saying it appeared the entire British deployment of more than 50,000 troops could have been at risk.

The MoD used the US defence department models to estimate that 9,000 British troops were within the chemical plume that might have been released from the destruction of chemical agents at Khamisaya, in southern Iraq, in March 1991. This figure was revealed in 1999. Previously, the government said no British units would have been affected, although one Briton might have been under a plume.

More than 5,000 British veterans have reported illnesses they believe related to the Gulf war or the inoculations they received before deployment and more than 600 have died. The government has refused to accept any suggestion that there is a "syndrome" but points to its £8.5m research programme to prove its commitment to finding answers.

The government's current position is that the possible level of nerve agent exposure from Khamisaya would have had "no detectable effect" on human health, and the Pentagon still insists the information was the best available and any researcher would know limitations of the data. The CIA also agreed with the report.

But the general accounting office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, last week said the assumptions used by the Pentagon were based on incomplete and uncertain data and that postwar testing to replicate the size of the plume "did not realistically simulate the actual conditions of bombings or demolitions".

The Pentagon, including the bombing of other sites in Iraq, estimated that nearly 102,000 US troops were potentially exposed. But the GAO concluded that, given the significant methodological flaws, neither the Pentagon nor the MoD could know which troops were and which troops were not exposed.

Lord Morris, an honorary member of a US congressional sub-committee investigating undiagnosed illnesses, said: "This is a profoundly significant report not only for US veterans but for ours as well."

He has tabled a parliamentary question to ministers on the issue.

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Speaking on the final day of a three-day conference on Asian security, Najib said his country would not allow American "troops or assets" to set foot in the Strait of Malacca - a narrow 900-kilometer, or 550-mile, waterway straddling Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore that handles a third of the world's trade and more than half its oil.

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"However, what we should avoid is the presence of foreign forces in Southeast Asia to help us deal with this threat," he said, "not because we distrust those outside the region, but because foreign military presence will set us back in our ideological battle against extremism and militancy."

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Actually, if the woman knew what was happening inside the nondescript office building at 3701 Fairfax Drive, she might think it really does matter because the building houses the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Total Information Awareness Program, the “big brother” program Congress thought it killed.

When the woman in line deposited her paycheck at the Bank of America branch, a record of that deposit showed up immediately in the computer databanks in the office across the street, just as financial, travel and other personal transactions of virtually every American do millions of time every minute.

Despite Congressional action cutting funding, and the resignation of the program’s controversial director, retired admiral John Poindexter, DARPA’s TIA program is alive and well and prying into the personal business of Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“When Congress cut the funding, the Pentagon – with administration approval – simply moved the program into a ‘black bag’ account,” says a security consultant who worked on the DARPA project. “Black bag programs don’t require Congressional approval and are exempt from traditional oversight.”

DARPA also hired private contractors to fill many of the roles in the program, which helped evade detection by Congressional auditors. Using a private security firm like Cantwell, instead of the Federal Protective Service, helped keep TIA off the radar screen.

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Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a program manager for DARPA, defends TIA as a necessary sacrifice in the war on terrorism.

“Americans must trade some privacy for security,” he says. “Three thousand people died on 9/11. When you consider the potential effect of a terrorist attack against the privacy of an entire population, there has to be some trade-off.”

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“Basically, TIA builds a profile of every American who has a bank account, uses credit cards and has a credit record,” says security expert Allen Banks. “The profile establishes norms based on the person’s spending and travel habits. Then the system looks for patterns that break from the norms, such of purchases of materials that are considered likely for terrorist activity, travel to specific areas or a change in spending habits.”

Patterns that fit pre-defined criteria result in an investigative alert and the individual becomes a “person of interest” who is referred to the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, Banks says.

[..]

Missouri Congressman William Clay, ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, and Intergovernmental Relations, worries that DARPA is skirting the law by letting private contractors handle the data mining.

"The agencies involved in data mining are trying to skirt the Privacy Act by claiming that they hold no data," said Clay. Instead, they use private companies to maintain and sift through the data, he said.

"Technically, that gets them out from under the Privacy Act," he said. "Ethically, it does not."

[..]

When Congress voted to cut the funded, the operation at 3701 Fairfax Drive should have shut down and Arlington County should have returned the officers assigned there to normal duty. However, the officers remained in place and additional security was added to the detail.

According to construction records on file in the Arlington County building and zoning office, more than 20 high-speed data lines have been installed at the location in the last 18 months. Microwave data antennas are also installed on the roof.

Pentagon spokesmen refuse to discuss what is happening in the building, citing "national security" as the reason.

[..]

“With meaningful pattern recognition, the order of magnitude of errors from inferences is huge, something like ten to the third (power),” says Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and the chairman of information mapping software company Groxis. “There would be an incalculable expense to monitor a thousand wrong hits for one correct inference.”

DARPA tried to interest Groxis in becoming part of the TIA project but the company declined, saying the project was neither feasible nor ethical. Hawken says he knows people with the National Security Agency who refused to work on TIA because of ethical concerns.

(end of excerpt)

It's no secret that the new voting technology--paperless, electronic voting machines--has increased the risk of fraud and incorrect totals. You have only to read the daily newspapers to see story after story of possible tampering and elections gone wrong.

Take Indiana, for instance. WISH TV, an Indiana television station, did a recent in-depth investigation of the election woes plaguing some Indiana counties after some precincts ran out of republican ballots shortly after the polls opened, and after some counties reported thousands more votes than registered voters.

What the WISH-TV news team uncovered was something far deeper even than a lack of ballots. A look beyond the present failings toward the fall election revealed possibilities for tampering that would scare even the most complacent of voters.

Top state election officials tend to work closely with the vendors of voting equipment. Republican Kathy Richardson, an Indiana State Representative who was Indiana's Hamilton County Clerk, purchased $1.3 million worth of electronic voting equipment from MicroVote, and says she plans to purchase $700,000 more. She told WISH-TV, “When you work with a vendor, you develop a relationship.” She works closely indeed. MicroVote's president, James Ries Jr., has donated to Richardson's campaign. Apparently, voting equipment companies don't see that as a conflict.

(end of excerpt)

A popular anti-drug program provided free to schools in San Francisco and elsewhere teaches concepts straight out of the Church of Scientology, including medical theories that some addiction experts described as "irresponsible" and "pseudoscience."

As a result, students are being introduced to somebeliefs and methods of Scientology without their knowledge.

[..]

Narconon's anti-drug instruction rests on these key church concepts: that the body stores all kinds of toxins indefinitely in fat, where they wreak havoc on the mind until "sweated" out. Those ideas are rejected by the five medical experts contacted by The Chronicle, who say there is no evidence to support them.

Narconon was created by L. Ron Hubbard, the late science-fiction writer who founded Scientology, a religion that claims to improve the well-being of followers through courses aimed at self-improvement and global serenity. Narconon operates a global network of drug treatment centers, as well as education programs for elementary, middle and high school students.

Its lectures have reached 1.7 million children around the nation in the last decade, Narconon officials said, and more than 30,000 San Francisco students since 1991. Meanwhile, Narconon's anti-drug message and charismatic speakers earn rave reviews from students and teachers.

[..]

"It's pseudoscience, right up there with colonic irrigation," said Dr. Peter Banys, director of substance abuse programs at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco.

Dr. Igor Grant, professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at UC San Diego, agreed: "I'm not aware of any data that show that going into a sauna detoxifies you from toxins of any kind. " Three other addiction experts contacted by The Chronicle echoed their skepticism.

[..]

"Narconon's orders come from the Church of Scientology's senior management," said Tory Christman, a former church member who worked briefly at Narconon International. "Their programs, policies -- it's all church policy. There's no question about this to anyone involved."

[..]

"Where's the evidence that supports what they're saying?" asked Dr. Timmen Cermak, medical director of Ohlhoff Recovery Programs in San Francisco and Marin County and author of "Marijuana: What's a Parent to Believe?"

"They're certainly spouting this as though it's proven, but it's not considered important enough to be talked about within the addiction medicine field," he said. "It's irresponsible."

[..]

"The longest we know that THC (the active substance in marijuana) stays in the fat is about a month. For ecstasy and LSD, we're talking about a day or two," said Dr. Neal Benowitz , head of clinical pharmacology at UCSF.

Nor is there evidence that drugs in fat cause cravings or flashbacks, said Banys, of San Francisco's VA Medical Center. "You could also say that craving is caused by evil spirits, which cause you to do bad things and therefore it's demonic possession. You couldn't prove it wasn't, and it seemed to make sense. But that's the use of metaphor, not science."

Banys said research shows that cravings are associated with dopamine, a neurotransmitter. And Cermak said flashbacks are thought to be prompted by "re- exposure to the drug-taking situation, or a reasonable facsimile (that) causes the brain to begin experiencing some of the same chemical changes that administering the drug itself produces."

Drs. Benowitz, Banys and Cermak dismissed the idea that niacin and sauna can rid the body of drugs, as did Dr. David Smith of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic and Dr. Igor Grant at UC San Diego.

(end of excerpt)

American travelers are finding blades planted in their luggage, and it looks as if federal workers - make that employees - are culpable.

"The question I have is, 'What's the point of tossing items into people's suitcases?'" David Grindle of Bloomington, Ind., told the Herald-Times. "Is the TSA doing this on purpose in an attempt to catch someone else? I wish I knew."

After Grindle and his family returned from an airline trip to Florida, they found wire cutters in one of their bags, along with a note that said a screener from the Transportation Security Administration had inspected the suitcase.

The family immediately thought of Dorrine and George Theodore, also residents of Bloomington, who found a knife with a 10-inch blade - and a note from the TSA - in their luggage after they flew home from California last month.

"I've been to Europe, where they search your bags in front of you, and I have no trouble with that," Grindle said. "But it makes me nervous having my bags searched without me being present, especially when inspectors are flipping things in my bags that don't belong to me. What would stop them from putting illegal drugs in my bag?"

TSA mouthpiece Chris Rhatigan said the reports mystified her. "If I could answer that question, I'd be rich. They could have been honest mistakes. Perhaps the bags somehow popped open during their travels, and someone dropped something inside. I honestly don't know."

(end of excerpt)

The residents of Jenin refugee camp have begun returning to homes destroyed during Operation Defensive Shield. The homes are being rebuilt by UNRWA with a $29 million grant from the United Arab Emirates.

Construction of 100 of the 530 housing units detroyed by the IDF in April 2002 has been completed, and 70 families have returned to their homes, which are better designed than the previous buildings. UNRWA officials say they hope the entire camp will be rebuilt by the end of the summer.

UNRWA decided, after a debate on the issue, to take 15 percent of the original area of each destroyed house and use the area to widen roads so that in the future it would be possible for Israeli tanks to pass more easily.

Many residents opposed this, saying it should be made more not less difficult for Israeli tanks to enter the camp. UN officials decided it would be wiser to leave wider roads so that the houses would not be destroyed again.

In addition, UNRWA moved 100 families to a new area on the outskirts of the camp where new houses were built for them, once again in anticipation of the necessity to leave more space for tanks.

"We have lost the right of return," said one of the camp's committee members this week when he saw the new homes.

(end of excerpt)

The conciliatory tone by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr came during a sermon read by an aide to a congregation in Kufa, scene of recent fighting between his al-Mahdi Army militia and U.S. forces.

In the sermon, the fiery young cleric said, "I support the new interim government" and asked his followers to "help me take this society to the path of security and peace."

"Starting now, I ask you that we open a new page for Iraq and for peace," the message said.

[..]

In an interview Friday night with Al Arabiya television, Mr. al-Sadr's spokesman, Ahmed al-Shibani, said the cleric was ready for a dialogue with the interim government "on condition that it works to end the occupation and clearly announces to the Iraqi people and to the world that it rejects the occupation."

"It has to put a timetable for the end of the occupation," Mr. al-Shibani said. "This is the main and principled way to recognize this government and cooperate with it."

(end of excerpt)

The FBI bulletin said the Earth Liberation Front reportedly was planning a "day of action and solidarity" that could include acts of eco-terrorism, according to Tor Bjornstad, a police commander in Olympia, one of 10 cities named as possible targets.

The others were Eugene; Ore.; San Francisco; Modesto, Calif.; Morgantown, W. Va.; Portland, Maine; Worcester, Mass.; Lake Worth, Fla.; and Lawrence, Kan., Bjornstad said.

The general warning was part of a weekly intelligence bulletin the FBI distributed to some 18,000 law enforcement agencies on Wednesday, said Bill Carter, a spokesman in the FBI's Washington, D.C., headquarters.

No specific targets were identified in the bulletin, Bjornstad said. He said his department contacted what it considered potential targets, including auto dealerships, building contractors and the Port of Olympia, which exports timber.

"We have to take it seriously, and one of the reasons is that this group has claimed credit for a fair amount of criminal activity in the past several years," Bjornstad said.

[..]

A Web site titled "International Day of Action & Solidarity with Jeff 'Free' Luers" featured a list of events planned for Saturday, including protests at SUV dealerships.

Jeff Luers is serving a 22-year sentence in Oregon for a 2000 arson at an auto dealership and an attempted arson at an oil company.

(end of excerpt)

The chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff and the prosecutor handling charges against suspected Sept. 11 terrorists in Germany will testify next week in the final hearing of the commission investigating the attacks.

The hearing next Wednesday and Thursday will track the development of the plot from its origins in the 1990s. On the second day, the 10-member panel will review the national emergency response by the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. air defenses on the day of the attacks.

Among the questions the panel wants answered: What was the federal government's protocol for responding to the Sept. 11 attacks? How well did the government perform that day? Are federal officials now ready in the event of future attacks?

"We will attempt to close the circle," said Thomas Kean, the commission's Republican chairman. "We will look back to the roots and growth of al Qaida, its previous attacks on the United States, its financing and international support, and how it plotted such detailed and intricate attacks on our soil."

"The commission will then turn again to the day of Sept. 11, 2001, to examine how the federal government learned of and responded to the attacks," he said in a statement.

Scheduled to testify in addition to Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, are top law enforcement and intelligence experts on al Qaida, including Matthias Krauss, who is handling the prosecution of the al-Qaida cell in Hamburg, Germany, that was key to the hijacking plot.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a former attorney in New York who prosecuted alleged terrorists in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, also will testify.

Speaking on the emergency response will be Myers and officials from the FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.

Relatives of Sept. 11 victims have said they want to know whether military jets could have been scrambled sooner after the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. on that fateful day. They believe quicker notification could have prevented American Airlines Flight 77 from crashing into the Pentagon more than 50 minutes later, killing 184 people.

(end of excerpt)

U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow met this week with executives from the Russian oil producer Yukos, Gazprom and Transneft, Russia's oil pipeline monopoly, just 10 days after Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met with Kremlin officials and Russian companies. Their hope is to increase Russia's energy exports to the United States and accelerate Gazprom's projects to liquefy gas in the Arctic.

The United States is so serious about natural gas deals with Russia that the U.S. Export-Import Bank may help finance a $15 billion project to develop Russia's giant Shtokman gas field.

"The subject of investment has been discussed, including in the context of proposals which U.S. ExImBank may put forward," Russia's deputy industry and energy minister, Ivan Materov, said this week. Materov also said Russia was interested in large American energy companies participating in the project.

His American counterpart, McSlarrow, said liquefied natural gas projects have emerged as one way to stave off an anticipated shortfall in North American natural gas supply.

"Under everybody's scenario, LNG imports will have to increase," said McSlarrow, at a news conference this week. "I think Russia realizes that it ought to be a major player when it comes to LNG."

The Shtokman deposit, on the shelf of the Barents Sea beyond the Arctic Circle, has estimated reserves of 3.2 trillion cubic meters of gas and 31 million tons of gas condensate.

Gazprom wants to sign a deal to develop Shtokman and build a liquefied gas plant, and potential partners mentioned in press reports include Norsk Hydro, Houston-based ConocoPhillips, as well as ChevronTexaco, Exxon Mobil and Shell.

But industry analysts said they are skeptical about liquefied gas plant projects between Gazprom and U.S. companies, given the delays on other energy projects in Russia.

"There is clearly interest in the U.S. on Russian energy exports to the West — whether gas or oil," said Stephen O'Sullivan, co-head of research at the United Financial Group. "There is a lot of talk, but not practical support for projects like an oil pipeline to Murmansk to go ahead."

(end of excerpt)

But Karzai called heroin production in Afghanistan a "massive problem" and asked for renewed help from the United States and other nations, insisting that "this is a struggle we cannot succeed in alone."

He said the new growth in the country's drug trade would require "sustained" international assistance to correct.

Later Thursday, while speaking at a Chicago Council on Foreign Relations event, Karzai said Afghanistan was once known for producing the highest quality fruit. But he said in recent years he has seen farmers destroying pomegranate orchards and replacing them with poppy fields. "We have to reverse that trend," he said to the nearly 1,100 people who gathered to hear him speak at the Fairmont Hotel.

The U.S., with 20,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, is leading international military efforts there. Karzai called for NATO to follow through on promises to provide soldiers--perhaps 5,000 or 6,000 more--to secure the country before elections, now set for September after being delayed three months.

"We have concerns about the ability of the Afghan state structure to be able to provide for Afghanistan's people a climate for free elections," Karzai said. Right now, "we do not have that capability for ourselves."

Elections have been pushed back, he said, largely because of technical difficulties in organizing voter registration. In the past month, he said, the number of registered voters has risen from a little under 1 million to 3.5 million. By September, he said, the number of total registered voters should reach 6.5 million to 7 million.

But Karzai urged that NATO troops remain in Afghanistan after the elections, in part to help push the long-delayed disarming of regional militias and to improve "the security of daily life" that is now threatened by warlords.

In the more than two years since the fall of the Taliban, Karzai has sought to co-opt leaders of the divided country's powerful militias and persuade them to lay down their arms. But in a nation where guns have long been a part of the culture and influence is backed up by firepower, the process has so far produced few results, other than skepticism by many Afghans that the president is serious about taking on the warlords.

Karzai insisted Thursday that organized terrorism has largely been rooted out of Afghanistan, and that the country faces mainly "individuals seeking targets of opportunity." One of those targets is Karzai, who survived an assassination attempt in Kandahar in 2002.

The continued attacks are happening "not because they are strong," he said, but rather "because we are weak."

(end of excerpt)

At least five soldiers objected last fall to abuses they saw at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. One demanded to be reassigned, saying the behavior he witnessed there "made me sick to my stomach."

Up the chain of command, the noncommissioned officers who heard such complaints did little to stop the mistreatment, according to Army records obtained by The Associated Press.

One of those same NCOs, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick, is accused of stomping on prisoners' toes and punching another prisoner so hard in the chest that he remarked, "I think I might have put him in cardiac arrest." Frederick is among six soldiers facing courts-martial. Another soldier pleaded guilty last month.

The military's full-blown investigation into beatings and humiliations at Abu Ghraib began in January, after one soldier wrote an anonymous letter to superior officers about troubling photographs. That soldier, Spc. Joe Darby, came forward later to talk to Army investigators and eventually became known as the whistle-blower who uncovered the scandal.

Internal Army documents show that others, too, condemned the abuse they saw at the prison, although their complaints failed to prevent further mistreatment.

A diminutive platoon leader, Sgt. 1st Class Shannon Snider, once barked so loudly at soldiers stomping on prisoners' toes that one witness later told investigators, "I never thought that that voice could come out of somebody so little." Then Snider left the room and the abuse continued, the records say.

The fact that earlier complaints apparently went nowhere adds to the uncertainty over a key question in the Abu Grhaib scandal: Did superior military police or intelligence officers encourage or condone the abuses?

A report from Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba says yes. Taguba wrote that commanders of both the military police and intelligence troops at the prison knew or should have known about the abuse. His report also says military intelligence officers unsuccessfully pressured one military dog handler to sic his animal on prisoners.

Some of the six enlisted soldiers awaiting trial will try to use that command inaction as part of their defense. Since other soldiers got little response to repeated objections to abusive practices, the defense lawyers will argue, those involved in the mistreatment figured it was approved by commanders.

"It's telling that another person ... did complain to their superior officer and was told, 'There's nothing wrong. You have to go forward'," said Mary Rose Zapor, a lawyer for Pfc. Lynndie England, one of the accused soldiers. "Had my client known she could complain, it wouldn't have made any difference."

One of the soldiers who complained most vigorously was Spc. Matthew C. Wisdom, a fellow military police soldier assigned to the Abu Ghraib cellblock where most of the worst abuses happened. No one answered the telephone at Wisdom's home in Richmond, Va., this week.

Wisdom told investigators he witnessed some of the abuses of Nov. 8, the night prisoners were forced to masturbate and were stacked, naked, into a human pyramid.

Wisdom complained to at least three sergeants in his chain of command, who agreed to remove him from the cellblock.

"It made me sick to my stomach, sir, disgusted," Wisdom told a judge last month during a hearing to take the guilty plea of Spec. Jeremy Sivits.

One of Wisdom's commanders, Sgt. Robert F. Jones, took the complaint to a higher-ranking noncommissioned officer -- Frederick.

"Frederick assured me that everything would be taken care of," Jones told Army investigators.

But Frederick was accused by one soldier of stomping on the toes of prisoners and punching another prisoner in the chest for no discernible reason that November night. Frederick is facing military charges in connection with the abuse.

Another soldier who complained was Sgt. Stephen C. Hubbard, who happened to see some of the abuse pictures on another soldier's computer. Hubbard complained to Staff Sgt. Robert J. Elliott, who demanded proof, according to statements to Army investigators.

"I threatened to go to (the) commander with info," Hubbard told investigators, saying he was upset that former Pennsylvania prison guard Spc. Charles Graner Jr. had been returned to the cellblock despite complaints about him.

Hubbard also said he complained to Snider, who was accused by Wisdom of tossing one prisoner into a pile of bodies.

The investigators' records obtained by The AP do not say what, if anything, happened after Hubbard's complaints.

Staff Sgt. Reuben Layton, a medic at the prison, told investigators he saw Graner hit a wounded detainee. Layton said he ordered Graner to remove handcuffs from the prisoner but did not report the incident.

Taguba cites two others who did not go along with abuses. The report says 1st Lt. David O. Sutton stopped an abusive act and reported it to his chain of command.

Taguba also hailed Master at Arms 1st Class William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, for refusing to participate in abuses despite "significant pressure from the MI (military intelligence) personnel at Abu Ghraib."

(end of excerpt)

McALESTER, Okla. -- Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols was again spared the death penalty Friday when jurors who convicted him of 161 state murder counts deadlocked over his sentence, six years after a federal jury reached a similar impasse.

The hung jury denies prosecutors the death sentence they first demanded nearly a decade ago while the bodies were still being pulled from the twisted ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

Jurors announced they could not reach a verdict after deliberating for about 19 1/2 hours over three days. Nichols will be sentenced by Judge Steven Taylor, who is required by law to sentence Nichols to life in prison.

Taylor asked jury foreman Peter Mills if more deliberations could bring about a decision. Mills said that would not help.

"Three days you have worked on this," Taylor told the jury. "And sometimes this is how cases end. The law anticipates that juries may not reach unanimous conclusions.

"I don't want any of you to leave the building tonight feeling that you have let down the system. You've done your job," Taylor said. "I am very proud of you. I commend you."

The deadlock was a blow to state prosecutors and victims' family members who said death was the appropriate punishment for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

The jury, which convicted Nichols on May 26, began deliberating in the trial's sentencing phase Wednesday, after a week of emotional testimony. Nichols, 49, faced sentences of life in prison or death by injection.

Taylor set the sentencing for Aug. 9.

(end of excerpt)

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set aside the convictions of a Reno couple and ordered a federal judge to let jurors testify about their reactions to Internal Revenue Service officers who attended the trial. If the judge decides one or more jurors may have been intimidated, he can order a new trial; if not, the convictions are to be reinstated.

The couple, Martin and Nanja Rutherford, were convicted by a Reno federal jury in 2001 of willfully filing a false tax return for 1992 and failing to file a tax return for 1993. They were sentenced to five months in prison and ordered to pay $145,000 in fines and restitution but have remained free during their appeals.

During the trial, the court said, between seven and 10 current and former agents of the IRS and the Justice Department sat behind the prosecution table and talked occasionally with the prosecutors.

After the trial, three jurors submitted statements saying they were aware of the agents, and one juror said they seemed to be continually glaring at the jury. Two of the statements said jurors discussed the agents' presence, the power of the IRS and the possibility of retaliation against jurors who voted for acquittal.

U.S. District Judge Edward Reed denied a new trial on the grounds that there was no proof the agents were trying to influence the jury. But the appeals court said the agents' intent was irrelevant if their conduct affected the jury.

Although jurors can't be asked why they voted to convict, "a juror's testimony concerning his fear that individuals would retaliate against him if he voted to acquit (or convict) would be admissible,'' Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in the 3-0 ruling that ordered Reed to hold a new hearing.

The ruling delighted Kevin Mirch, the Rutherfords' lawyer. "Jurors came up to us (after the trial) and said the IRS was loading up the courtroom and they were nervous that they would get audited if they acquitted them,'' he said.

(end of excerpt)

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S.-led coalition leaders ordered an investigation Friday into whether the expansion of a military camp damaged archaeological sites around the ancient city of Babylon.

L. Paul Bremer and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez dispatched a team of archaeologists to assess the site at Camp Alpha, which was set up to provide security in the area 50 miles south of Baghdad, a statement issued by the coalition said.

The two leaders ordered all contractors working in or around the vicinity of the Babylon site to halt any activities that could damage archaeological sites and ordered that planning begin for the relocation of any troops in the immediate area.

(end of excerpt)

At the Supreme Court, the least significant and least noticed cases sometimes say the most about the institution and our system of justice. Dretke v. Haley, decided last month with no fanfare, is just such a case. Unfortunately, the story it tells is of an institution and a system remarkably unconcerned with the common call simply to do the right thing.

Everyone involved in Michael Wayne Haley's case - the State of Texas, which prosecuted him; the lower federal court judges who heard his case; and all the U.S. Supreme Court's Justices - recognize that he's been in jail more than six years for a crime carrying a maximum sentence of two years.

The lower federal courts ordered Haley released. But Texas, despite agreeing that Haley is serving time under an unlawful sentence, still appealed to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in jail. And the Supreme Court, rather than setting him free, doomed him to another long round of litigation in the lower courts.

How does this happen? The story of Haley's case illustrates how hard it can be to correct, through our system, what is really a simple and straightforward injustice.

(end of excerpt)

ENGLAND fans will be allowed to smoke dope before Sunday’s crunch clash with France — to keep them calm.

Cops in Lisbon plan to crack down on drunk supporters while turning a blind eye to those spotted puffing on a spliff.

Pot-smoking fans have been assured they will not be arrested, cautioned — or even have their drugs confiscated.

Last night experts said the Portuguese police’s “Here We Blow” policy would reduce chances of a punch-up between rival fans.

Alan Buffry of the Legalise Cannabis Alliance said: “If people are drinking they lose control, if they smoke cannabis they don’t.

“Alcohol makes fans fight. But cannabis smokers will be shaking hands and singing along together.”

Dutch police used a similar policy in Euro 2000 and England’s hooligan element were too stoned to fight.

A Lisbon police spokeswoman said: “If people cause a problem through drugs and become a menace then police will take action. But when this doesn’t happen why should the police be the ones making the fuss?”

(end of excerpt)

Martha Stewart's lawyers on Thursday asked a federal judge to toss out her conviction for obstructing justice and grant her a new trial, arguing that false testimony by a government witness was "vital to the prosecution's case."

"No conviction should be premised on the perjured testimony of any government official," they said in a statement.

Stewart faces up to 16 months in prison for hindering probes into why she sold her ImClone Systems Inc. stock a day before federal regulators rejected the company's colon cancer drug.

Prosecutors accused their own witness, Larry Stewart, former forensic scientist for the Secret Service, of lying at her trial. He is charged with perjury.

(end of excerpt)

A former Qwest executive facing a second trial over an alleged scheme to improperly book nearly $34 million in revenue has been named in a new indictment that narrows the scope of the government's case.

A federal grand jury late Wednesday indicted Thomas Hall, a former senior vice president of sales, on three counts of wire fraud and one count of securities fraud.

The charges, disclosed Thursday, supersede a 2003 indictment accusing Hall and three other former Qwest Communications International executives of 12 counts including conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud.

''We're pursuing less counts as part of our streamlined case against the defendant,'' U.S. attorney's office spokesman Jeff Dorschner said. ''The refined version is based on the government's experience from the first trial.''

(end of excerpt)

Italian and French authorities denied Thursday that a terror suspect arrested in Milan and believed to be a key figure behind the Madrid train bombings was planning an attack on the Paris subway.

Authorities have said that Rabei Osman Ahmed was planning an attack, but gave no details. Italian news reports have indicated Paris Metro as the target.

The reports said Osman Ahmed was recorded asking about the Paris subway and its security. Italian dailies Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica cited what they said were transcripts of telephone conversations in which Osman Ahmed appeared to organize logistics for another suspect who was on his way to the French capital.

``We categorically deny the reports,'' said a joint statement issued by the Milan prosecutors leading the probe, Maurizio Romanelli and Armando Spataro, and referring to the alleged Paris plot.

The prosecutors also denied all other reports ``concerning the identification of any other specific target'' - a reference to reports pointing to a NATO base in Belgium and to a chemical attack in the United States.

In Paris, police said an analysis of intelligence from Italy following Osman Ahmed's arrest shows that no attack on Paris Metro was being prepared.

They also noted that the French terror alert security level has gone down a notch since the close of D-Day ceremonies, which means that ``there is not currently a direct threat to our country and to Paris in particular.''

(end of excerpt)

Denmark said Thursday it opened an investigation into claims by a translator for Danish and U.S. troops in Afghanistan that he witnessed incidents of torture and killing of prisoners in American custody two years ago.

Denmark's military prosecutors will determine whether the claims can be substantiated, said Cmdr. Torben Martinsen, a spokesman for the Defense Command, the country's top military authority.

Martinsen refused to release details about the Danish translators claims, including the number of alleged victims. The man was not identified by name nor was it known if he was a military man or civilian working with the 100 Danish soldiers on assignment in Afghanistan in 2002.

[..]

The translator worked in Kandahar, the main U.S. military base in southern Afghanistan, where he "assisted the Americans' questioning of prisoners," Danish Defense Minister Soeren Gade said.

The U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen declined to comment on the report.
In May, a Danish medic working in Iraq claimed that British troops in September 2003 had beaten two Iraqis during a field interrogation, including one who allegedly died.

Gade said Britain's Royal Military Police will send an investigator to Denmark to gather information as part of a British probe. Denmark's nearly 500 troops in southern Iraq are under British command.

(end of excerpt)

Colombian officials said Thursday they are willing to suspend an offensive against left-wing rebel groups if the rebels agree to a cease-fire.

"They must first agree to the cease-fire," said an official of President Alvaro Uribe, the right-wing leader who has both battled and sought negotiations with Colombia's Marxist rebels.

Officials for the president reportedly disclosed the proposal to the foreign media in Bogota, El Tiempo reported in their online edition.

Thursday's offer follows a similar one made last week by Uribe, who said during a trip to Mexico he was willing to negotiate a peaceful resolution with the left-wing rebel group the National Liberation Army, or ELN -- even if the rebels do not put down their arms during the talks.

(end of excerpt)

But, faced with opposition from NATO allies France and Germany as well as Russia, he was forced to acknowledge that his suggestion of a day earlier for the alliance to play a greater role by sending troops was "unrealistic."

"I don't expect more troops from NATO to be offered up," Bush said. "That's an unrealistic expectation."

French President Jacques Chirac, who had dismissed Bush's idea shortly after it was first made, renewed that opposition at summit's end, saying Paris had "clearly indicated that we could not accept a mission of this type for NATO."

"Any interference by NATO in this region appears to us to run great risks, including the risk of a confrontation between the Christian West and the Muslim East," Chirac said.

[..]

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country along with Japan is the only non-NATO member of the G8, also poured cold water on the troop idea, suggesting that the alliance was seeking to replace its Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, with a new one.

"NATO needs an enemy," he said. "In the past, it had one. Perhaps it is looking for one now. For Iraq, it would be better if the role was limited to the United Nations."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's top ally in Iraq, appeared mystified by the suggestion that a new disagreement had arisen but was quick to predict that any differences would be resolved.

"I am not quite sure where this disagreement has surfaced, but I think the disagreement will be overcome," he told reporters, calling the presence of a large number of NATO forces in Iraq impractical.

(end of excerpt)

The U.S. government acknowledged Thursday that a recent report declaring a decline in terrorism in 2003 was wrong.

The report, released in April and touted by top administration officials as a sign of the success of the war on terrorism, was based on faulty data, said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

In fact, he told reporters, the corrected report will show "a sharp increase over the previous year." The corrected version is not yet completed, he said.

Secretary of State Colin Powell denied the errors were the result of an effort to make the administration look good.

"Of course not," he told reporters. "I'm very disturbed that there were errors in the report."

Given that officials touted the original report as a positive, reporters asked Powell whether the corrected report indicates the war on terrorism is not working.

"Nobody has suggested that the war on terrorism has been won," responded Powell. "The president has made it clear that it is a war that continues and that we have to redouble our efforts."

The government's goal in releasing the corrected report "is to give the American people the facts," he said.

Boucher, facing similar questions, said, "When we're sure we have the new facts, the right facts, we will prepare an appropriate analysis and give you our assessment at that moment."

(end of excerpt)

From the Inner Harbor to the Bay Bridge, local and state homeland security authorities are beginning to build a regional network of 24-hour surveillance cameras that will first go live this summer in Baltimore.

The closed-circuit video surveillance system of public spaces will begin in the Inner Harbor by summer's end, and a $2 million federal grant accepted by the city yesterday will expand the cameras into downtown's west side by early November.

"We're trying to build a regional network of cameras," said Dennis R. Schrader, director of homeland security for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.

What of privacy concerns raised by groups opposed to cameras constantly monitored by retired police officers or college students?

"We're at war," Schrader said.

The network is part of a comprehensive strategy in the Baltimore area to spend $25 million in homeland security grants this year and next to improve regional cooperation on terrorism concerns. The idea stemmed from a regional group of leaders that is jointly acquiring decontamination equipment and backups for 911 and power systems.

The network of cameras will be placed in downtown's west side because it has light rail and Amtrak lines, federal and state government buildings, and many cultural institutions.

(end of excerpt)

However, Utah holds steady on its test scores — well above the national average in science, and is slightly above average in reading and math, Petersen said.

"Considering the resources spent, it's a remarkable bargain the taxpayers are getting," Petersen said.

(end of excerpt)

Misguided U.S. training of Iraqi police contributed to the country's instability and has delayed getting enough qualified Iraqis on the streets to ease the burden on American forces, the head of armed forces training said Wednesday.

"It hasn't gone well. We've had almost one year of no progress," said Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who departs Iraq (news - web sites) next week after spending a year assembling and training the country's 200,000 army, police and civil defense troops.

"We've had the wrong training focus — on individual cops rather than their leaders," Eaton said in an interview with The Associated Press.

A credible, well-equipped national security force is crucial to America's plans to pull its 138,000 troops out of Iraq, along with the 24,000 soldiers from Britain and other coalition countries.

As U.S. occupation leaders prepare to hand power to an Iraqi government in less than three weeks, Iraq's own security forces won't be ready to take a large role in protecting the country. A U.N. Security Council resolution approved Tuesday acknowledges Iraq's lack of a developed security force and provides a continued multinational troop presence until 2006.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy U.S. defense secretary, wrote in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal that the Iraqi army — including the Taji-based Iraqi National Task Force, which focuses on internal strife — will begin assuming some security duties over the next few months.

Iraqi forces could soon "take local control of the cities," with U.S. troops moving into a supporting role, Wolfowitz wrote.

In April, Iraqi security forces failed their first big test, when about half the police and military forces deserted during rebel uprisings in Fallujah, Najaf, Karbala and elsewhere.

(end of excerpt)

A mass movement and a mountain of disturbing evidence has been growing beneath the radar of U.S. media. The U.S. media (including alternative media) has done an extraordinarily superhuman job of "hearing" "seeing" and "speaking no evil." However, almost immediately after 9-11-2001's horrendous attacks on New York and Washington D.C., many researchers, ordinary citizens, and journalists [who've been given precious little print in U.S. papers or TV] began to smell something rotten . . . not in Denmark . . . but rather, right here in the good ol' US of A.

This movement's early roots began when many people scratched their heads in wonder at "how 4 commercial jet liners could fly hijacked for nearly an hour and a half the morning of 9-11, without any Air Force fighter interceptor jets turning a wheel until it was too late," as stated by acclaimed Canadian TV journalist, Barry Zwicker. Zwicker's powerful documentary "The Great Deception," which suggests top Bush Admin. officials were likely complicit in the 9-11 attacks, aired on Canada's Vision TV network which is viewed by millions of Canadians. Unfortunately Americans in the U.S. have been "protected" from viewing this critical documentary.

Researchers, like Zwicker and others, quickly learned that in 2001 before the 9-11 attacks 62 aircraft had been intercepted by Air Force fighter interceptor jets, and usually within 10 to 15 minutes of going off course. [http://septembereleventh.org/airdefense.php] Yet bizarrely, on 9-11 four commercial jets were hijacked off course for about one and a half hours before the last one crashed into the most highly protected building in the world (the Pentagon). . . yet no interceptor jet intercepted it in all that time. Alarm bells went off with citizens across the U.S. and the world. A number of people including former NYPD detective, Frank Serpico (played by Al Pacino in the movie about his life as an NYPD whistleblower exposing corruption at the New York Police Department), began to express a suspicion of the "official 9-11 story" during a whistleblower awards ceremony nationally televised on C-SPAN.

Then other issues came to light regarding 9-11, and foreknowledge of the attacks.

(end of excerpt)

The Defense Department spent an estimated $100 million for airline tickets that were not used over six years and failed to seek refunds even though the tickets were reimbursable, congressional investigators say.

The department compounded the problem by reimbursing employee claims for tickets the Pentagon bought, the investigators said.

To demonstrate how easy it was to have the Pentagon pay for airline travel, the investigators posed as defense employees, had the department generate a ticket and showed up at the ticket counter to pick up a boarding pass.

The General Accounting Office of Congress issued the findings in two reports on the Pentagon's lack of control over airline travel, copies of which the Associated Press obtained yesterday. A prior report, issued last November, found that the Pentagon bought 68,000 first-class or business-class airline seats for employees who should have flown coach.

(end of excerpt)

The United States next year will begin handing personal data about U.S. air travelers to the security services of foreign countries, including Russia, under a global aviation security plan crafted yesterday at the Group of Eight summit.

Among the initiatives in the plan is "data exchange on visa watch lists and advanced passenger information," a senior administration official told reporters on the condition of anonymity.

"Advanced passenger information" is data available before check-in, through the computerized records of airline booking systems.

The official did not say exactly what data about U.S. citizens might be made available to G-8 partner states, but that it would be more extensive than what the United States now exchanges with Europe.

"The information exchange that we are talking about developing here will go beyond the arrangements that we've made bilaterally with the European Union," the official said.

The data-exchange deal with the European Union -- which has been in practice for more than a year but was not formalized until June 1 -- covers 34 data fields on the so-called PNR, or passenger name record, including name, address, phone details and credit card numbers.

But data covered by the new plan likely will include some kind of unique identifier, such as a passport number, date of birth or Social Security number.

(end of excerpt)

A Saudi graduate student was acquitted today of charges that he used his computer expertise to foster terrorism.

[..]

Al-Hussayen set up and ran Web sites that prosecutors say were used to recruit terrorists, raise money and disseminate inflammatory rhetoric.

His defense maintained that his association with the Web sites was as a Muslim volunteer and computer expert who simply wanted to keep the sites in operation.

Al-Hussayen's attorneys have argued that he had little to do with the creation of the material posted. And they say the material was protected by the First Amendment right to freedom of expression and was not designed to raise money or recruit militants.

But prosecutors cited religious edicts justifying suicide bombings and an invitation to financially support the militant Palestinian organization Hamas in arguing that Al-Hussayen should be convicted.

His supporters also said the government used vague anti-terrorism laws to prosecute Al-Hussayen for his beliefs.

(end of excerpt)

Police arrested six Spaniards in the northern Asturias region Wednesday, accusing them of supplying the dynamite used in the Madrid terrorist attack, officials said.

The suspects included the security guard of a coal mine from which the 440 pounds of explosives used in the March 11 train bombings were stolen, said Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso.

Two other detainees were the wife and brother-in-law of Jose Emilio Suarez, a former miner in Asturias already jailed and charged with multiple murders in the attacks, which killed 191 people.

The six suspects have not been officially charged with a crime but are suspected of supplying the dynamite, Alonso said. The brother-in-law had been arrested once before on March 27, but was released after questioning.

Alonso declined to give details of how the dynamite was passed to the suspected Islamic cell that staged the attacks. But officials previously have said the bombers paid for the dynamite with cash and drugs.

(end of excerpt)

New York police said there was no truth to an e-mail being circulated that the city's subway system would be attacked Friday.

"The police department has received no credible threat information concerning a widely circulated e-mail message that discusses a purported subway attack allegedly planned for Friday, June 11th," Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said in a statement.

(end of excerpt)

KABUL, Afghanistan - Gunmen stormed a camp of Chinese road workers early Thursday and raked them with gunfire as they slept, killing at least 10 in the deadliest attack on foreign civilians since the fall of the Taliban.

The killings follow a string of other attacks on foreign workers that Afghanistan has said are aimed at spoiling national elections slated for September. The United Nations halted voter registration in the area and told staff to stay off the roads.

The road contractors were attacked at about 1 a.m. at their camp in a patch of desert about 120 miles north of the capital, Kabul, officials said.

Mutaleb Beg, the Kunduz police chief, said several assailants killed an Afghan guard and then opened fire on the Chinese men as they slept in two tents. Beg said the camp was unfenced and had two guards, only one of whom had a gun.

``They died in their beds, most of them with stomach and head wounds,'' Beg said by telephone after visiting the scene.

``We told them to take more security, but they said they would do it later,'' he said. ``It was a big mistake.''

Beg said 10 Chinese died, but international peacekeepers who patrol the region said 11 Chinese were killed and 16 wounded.

A spokesman for the NATO-led force, British Squadron Leader Sean McFetrich, said the toll could rise as reports arrive from hospitals treating the wounded.

China's official Xinhua news agency said the killing was ``a terrorist attack'' by a group of about 20 assailants.

(end of excerpt)

While the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was renouncing terrorism and negotiating the lifting of sanctions last year, his intelligence chiefs ordered a covert operation to assassinate the ruler of Saudi Arabia and destabilize the oil-rich kingdom, according to statements by two participants in the conspiracy.

Those participants, Abdurahman Alamoudi, an American Muslim leader now in jail in Alexandria, Va., and Col. Mohamed Ismael, a Libyan intelligence officer in Saudi custody, have given separate statements to American and Saudi officials outlining the plot.

Mr. Alamoudi, has told Federal Bureau of Investigation officials and federal prosecutors that Colonel Qaddafi approved the assassination plan. Mr. Qaddafi's son, in an interview in London, called the accusation "nonsense."

American officials confirm that Mr. Alamoudi and Mr. Ismael have offered detailed accounts of a Libyan plot to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah and that they appear to be credible enough to have launched an American investigation. But the officials said they are still examining the scope of the plot, how far it advanced and whether Colonel Qaddafi was involved.

[..]

Colonel Qaddafi and Crown Prince Abdullah clashed at the Arab summit meeting that immediately preceded the war in Iraq. The two leaders exchanged insults in open session, accusing each other of selling out to colonial powers. An indignant Prince Abdullah glared at Colonel Qaddafi and said, "Your lies precede you and your grave is in front of you."

[..]

Mr. Alamoudi has told prosecutors that he twice met with Colonel Qaddafi, in June and August of 2003, to discuss details of the assassination plan, according to people with official access to his statements. In June, Mr. Alamoudi said, Colonel Qaddafi told him, "I want the Crown Prince killed either through assassination or through a coup." By August, according to Mr. Alamoudi's account, Colonel Qaddafi asked why he had not yet seen "heads flying" in the Saudi royal family.

Mr. Alamoudi's account is critical for federal prosecutors because it ties the terrorist plot that has been said to exist to a head of state. For that reason, Mr. Alamoudi has been questioned in great detail about his two meetings with Colonel Qaddafi, including descriptions of the Libyan leader's farm in Sidra, where they reportedly met in June, and of Colonel Qaddafi's office in Tripoli, where they reportedly met in August.

F.B.I. investigators from the Washington field office are trying to arrange meetings with two of Mr. Alamoudi's associates to whom he confided details of the plot as further corroboration.

The first person to provide Saudi, the British and American authorities with an account of a plot was Colonel Ismael, 36, who was captured by Egyptian police after he fled Saudi Arabia last November in an aborted "drop" of $1 million to a team of four Saudi militants who were prepared to attack Prince Abdullah's motorcade with shoulder-fired missiles or grenade launchers, according to his statements.

Colonel Ismael has said that his orders to be operational commander of the plot came from Libyan intelligence chiefs, Abdullah Senoussi and Musa Kussa, both of whom report directly to Colonel Qaddafi, according to the people who described the statements.

F.B.I. and Central Intelligence Agency officers have twice traveled to Saudi Arabia to interview Colonel Ismael. Investigators are said to believe that the account matches that of Mr. Alamoudi and that, taken together, the accounts could form the basis of a criminal indictment against Colonel Qaddafi on charges of leading a conspiracy that included an American citizen, Mr. Alamoudi.

Mr. Kussa played a leading role last fall with American and British intelligence teams to work out a surrender of Libya's illicit weapons programs.

F.B.I. officials have yet to interview the four Saudis who were to carry out the assassination attempt, but Saudi officials said that they would agree to make them available upon receiving a request.

(end of excerpt)

Last week, Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and Jalal Talabani, who heads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, demanded that Washington ensure the TAL is binding on the new government.

"If the TAL is abrogated, the Kurdistan Regional Government will have no choice but to refrain from participating in the central government and its institutions, not to take part in the national elections, and to bar representatives of the central government from Kurdistan," the two Kurdish leaders said in a joint letter to President Bush.

But Shiites, led by Ayatollah Sistani, have deep reservations about a document that allows a minority group veto over a permanent constitution. Comprising 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million population, the traditionally marginalized Shiite community expects to reap the reward of their superior numbers in the new Iraq.

Sistani warned of "grave consequences" if the TAL was included in the UN Security Council resolution, and thousands of Shiites demonstrated in Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon shortly before the vote in New York.

Haidar al-Sittar, a Shiite student at Baghdad University, says a federal Iraq risks aggravating sectarian or ethnic divisions, citing the example of Lebanon which suffered a 16-year civil war.

"Just like what they [the Americans] did in Lebanon, they aim to do in Iraq by dividing it and starting a civil war," he says.

As top Kurdish leaders met Wednesday to discuss their response to the UN resolution, Nesreen Berwari, a Kurdish member of the interim government, said "Now our future is ambiguous.... The interim constitution would have been the clear and bright road map to all the components of the Iraqi people."

According to Associated Press, Mrs Berwari added that she would resign if asked to do so by the Kurdish leadership.

Even before the row over the UN resolution, the Kurds were unhappy in what they see as an underrepresentation in the new government, says Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish leader and former Governing Council member.

"If I was a party leader and a minister I would withdraw from the government," he says. "The TAL mentions human rights, citizens' rights, women's rights, separation of powers, democracy, federalism, and the Kurdish language.... It's a very good law, and we are disappointed it was not included in the resolution."

The Kurds have enjoyed effective autonomy in northern Iraq since 1991, and many are reluctant to yield their hard-won self-rule to an untested government in Baghdad.

"The Kurdish people suffered during Saddam Hussein's regime. We paid the price and now we want to enjoy democracy," says Osama Hourani, a Kurdish student at Baghdad University. "We all know Kuwait was part of Iraq and they got their independence. We speak a different language and have our own nationality but still we are not allowed this right."

Talk of Kurdish independence causes ripples of concern that spread far beyond the confines of Iraq. Turkey, Iran, and Syria all have sizable, and in some cases restive, Kurdish populations. Turkey has made it abundantly clear that it will not tolerate an independent Kurdistan along its southeast border.

"The Turks and the Iranians don't want Kurdish federalism and they are against Kurdish rights. They think it's a threat to them," Mr. Othman says.

For now, the Kurds say they are willing to remain within a federal and democratic Iraq, playing down their deep-rooted desire for an independent state.

But Mr. Dulame, the Iraqi analyst, says that eventually the Kurds will push for full independence.

"The Kurds are going to create their own state," he says. "It's just a matter of time. What they are doing now is just short-term political maneuvering."

(end of excerpt)

Federal agents on Wednesday charged six Continental Airlines employees in Newark and 10 people Miami, including four airline workers, with smuggling hundreds of pounds of cocaine into the country through Newark Liberty International Airport.

The workers were baggage handlers at the airport who used their positions to divert suitcases of cocaine from customs inspections, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The workers also laundered millions of dollars in profits by taking suitcases filled with cash out of the country, again using their positions to bypass inspection, authorities said.

The employees traveled to Miami, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere to import the drugs and export the cash.

Continental workers at airports in Miami and Puerto Rico have also been implicated in related schemes.

Ten people, including four Continental employees, were charged Tuesday in a cocaine conspiracy indictment issued in Miami.

Continental employees Jose Abreu, Rosa Abreu and Pedro Perez were taken into custody in Miami, and Marisela Diaz was arrested in Puerto Rico. Prosecutors had no information on whether the Abreus were related.

The Miami workers ``had, at one time, assisted the Newark crew,'' said Thomas Manifase, deputy special agent in charge of the Customs Enforcement office in Newark.

The Newark ring operated from January 2000 to August 2003, using large Samsonite suitcases containing 33 to 37 pounds of cocaine, according to a Customs Enforcement complaint filed Wednesday.

``We do expect more arrests,'' Manifase said.

(end of excerpt)

Iraqis are highly sceptical that the US occupation will, as promised, end on 30 June and predict worse fighting to come if real power is not handed over. "I don't believe there will be a transfer of power," said Ali Hashimi, a computer accessories salesman. "It is just a show for the international community."

There was no echo yesterday on the streets of Baghdad of the optimism on display in New York as the UN Security Council voted unanimously to endorse a sovereign Iraqi government. Few people expected a reduction in violence and many said they feared it would get worse.

"We Iraqis are rejecting this decision because it will turn Iraq back to the British occupation period," said Haidar Mahmoud, a shopkeeper. "At that time there was an Iraqi government but it was just a puppet."

[..]

Bassam Najam, a middle-aged driver, said: "In one sense the Americans are transferring power but only to their own agents. The new government are all pawns of the CIA."

[..]

Close by was a concrete barrier on which was pasted a poster, distributed by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), showing a boy holding up a map of Iraq and saying: "On 30 June we are all winners."

I asked the guard if he believed the claim on the poster was true. He studied the words carefully and said, to loud laughter from other security men, "maybe they mean the 3,000th of June".

(end of excerpt)

The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a new resolution on Iraq granting legitimacy to the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi. The resolution gives the new Iraqi government substantially more sovereignty than had been envisaged by the U.S. in the initial draft, and the Bush administration essentially compromised in order to have an achievement for the election season.

The resolution will make it easier for the Allawi government to gain the Iraq seat at the UN and at organizations like the Arab League. It also constrains the U.S. from undertaking major military actions (think: Fallujah) without extensive consultation with the Iraqi government, and it establishes a joint committee of U.S. and Iraqi representatives to carry out those discussions. This military "partnership" was substituted successfully for a stricter French proposal that the Iraqi government have a veto over U.S. military movements in Iraq. Still, the language went far beyond what the U.S. had wanted.

That the U.S. and the UK had to give away so much to get the resolution shows how weak they are in Iraq. The problem is that they have created a failed state in Iraq, and this new piece of paper really changes nothing on the ground (see the next news item, below).

The resolution did not mention or endorse the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) or interim constitution adopted last February by the Interim Governing Council and based on the notes of Paul Bremer. The Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had written Kofi Annan forbidding the UN from endorsing the TAL, on the grounds that it was illegitimate and contained provisions harmful to majority rule.

The Kurds on the other hand were absolutely furious that the UN did not mention the TAL, which they see as their safeguard against a tyranny of the Arab majority. It stipulates that the status quo will obtain in Kurdistan until an elected parliament crafts a permanent constitution next year this time, and that the three Kurdish provinces will have a veto over that new constitution if they do not like it. The Kurdish leaders threatened in a letter to President Bush on Sunday to boycott the elections this coming winter if there is any move to curtail their sovereignty or to rescind or amend the interim constitution. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat's Shirzad Abdul Rahman reports today that the Kurdish street is anxious about the future, feeling that it has been left up in the air.

This entire process is a big win for Sistani. It is now often forgotten that the Bush administration had had no intention of involving the UN in this way in Iraq. The original plan was to have stage-managed council-based elections in May, producing a new government to which sovereignty would be handed over by the U.S. directly. It was Sistani who derailed those plans as undemocratic. When the involvement of the UN was first broached last winter by Interim Governing Council members, the Americans were said to have been "extremely offended." It was Sistani who demanded that Kofi Annan send a special envoy to Iraq. It was Sistani who insisted that free and fair elections must be held as soon as humanly possible. It was Sistani who insisted that the UN midwife the new Iraqi government, and not the U.S. and the UK alone. It was Sistani who insisted that the UN resolution not mention the Transitional Administrative Law.

(end of excerpt)

SAN FRANCISCO - A California National Guardsman says three fellow soldiers brazenly abused detainees during interrogation sessions in an Iraqi police station, threatening them with guns, sticking lit cigarettes in their ears and choking them until they collapsed.

Sgt. Greg Ford said he repeatedly had to revive prisoners who had passed out, and once saw a soldier stand on the back of a handcuffed detainee's neck and pull his arms until they popped out of their sockets.

"I had to intervene because they couldn't keep their hands off of them," said Ford, part of a four-member team from the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion that questioned detainees last year in Samarra, north of Baghdad. He said the abuse took place from April to June.

Ford's commanding officers deny any abuse occurred, and say investigations within their battalion and by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division determined they had done nothing wrong.

"All the allegations were found to be untrue, totally unfounded and in a number of cases completely fabricated," said the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Drew Ryan.

Ford's allegations are being further investigated by the CID, which would not comment on the probe.

(end of excerpt)

An Italian prosecutor said Wednesday he had provided U.S. authorities with transcripts of phone calls between terror suspects, including one that reportedly refers to a woman ready to carry out a chemical attack in the United States.

The two terror suspects were arrested Tuesday in Milan and include Rabie Osman Ahmed, an Egyptian believed to be behind the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, said Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli.

In one of the intercepted phone conversations, Osman Ahmed refers to a woman ready to carry out a chemical attack in America, the ANSA news agency reported.

When asked about the content of the transcripts, Romanelli pointed to news reports that mention the alleged chemical plot. He did not dispute the reports, but he said he would not comment further on the content of the wiretaps.

The wiretaps refer to "small groups ready to carry out suicide attacks," he said. In most cases, the likely location of the attacks was Iraq, he said. The prosecutor gave no further details.

Police arrested Osman Ahmed in Milan on Monday along with the man he was lodging with, a Palestinian identified as Yahia Payumi.

Authorities say Osman Ahmed is a key suspect in the Madrid attacks. The bombings killed 191 people and have been blamed on Islamic extremists with possible links to al-Qaeda.

Italian officials suspect Osman Ahmed was planning further attacks, and they tipped off Belgian counterparts who arrested 15 people Wednesday in coordinated raids.

At least one of the 15 — mostly Palestinian, Jordanian, Moroccan and Egyptian — had previously been in contact with Osman Ahmed, Romanelli said.

The AGI news agency reported Wednesday that the suspects may have been planning an attack on the Paris subway system. Osman Ahmed was recorded asking one of those arrested in Belgium about the Paris Metro and security there, AGI said, citing police sources. Authorities were not immediately available to confirm the report.

Asked about a report in Milan daily Corriere della Sera that the suspects were planning an attack against a NATO base in Belgium, Romanelli said investigators had no information on specific targets.

Isabelle van Heers, spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office in Brussels, said Wednesday that authorities there had "no information which would suggest a target in Belgium."

Viviana Bossi, defense lawyer for the two suspects, said Wednesday that her clients are unclear of the exact charges against them. "They deny they are terrorists," she said.

(end of excerpt)

The number of people signing up for first-time unemployment benefits rose last week.

[..]

The Labor Department reported Thursday that new applications for unemployment insurance increased a seasonally adjusted 12,000 to 352,000 the week ended June 5.

[..]

The number of people drawing unemployment insurance fell 106,000 to 2.88 million for the week ended May 29, most recent period for which that information is available. That was the lowest level in so-called "continued" claims since the week ended May 19, 2001.

(end of excerpt)

EU farmers get 37% of their income from payments. But a greater portion of the EU payments goes to subsidize exports of European goods to Africa and other developing countries.

[..]

Big U.S. farm operations stand the most to gain and lose from a WTO accord. The Agriculture Department said last week that 3% of American farms produce 62% of the country's agricultural goods.

Since 1995, 2.8 million individuals and farm corporations have collected subsidies. But 71% of the money went to just 10% of recipients, says the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit research and watchdog group.

(end of excerpt)

The Pentagon has advised Germany that as part of a global shifting of U.S. military forces, it wants to withdraw its two Army divisions and replace them with fewer, lighter, more mobile troops.

The move would represent a significant change in the U.S. military presence in Europe, where American forces stood guard throughout the Cold War against the threat of a land invasion from the Soviet Union. The Pentagon has no intention of abandoning Europe but wants more flexibility in the way it can move Germany-based forces into other parts of the world like the Middle East, U.S. officials have said.

Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith briefed senior German defense and diplomatic officials last week in Germany on the Pentagon thinking about U.S. troops in Germany.

Feith stressed in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday that there's been no decision on U.S. troops in Germany. He said, however, that planning was "very far along," and "we are going to share our analysis" with the Germans.

A senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the near-final Pentagon thinking on the matter was to withdraw the two American divisions.

Feith said the Pentagon was "pushing forward with cutting-edge capabilities" and that fewer, lighter and more modern units would be moved into Germany.

"It is not a retreat," Feith said. "We are swapping some forces for others."

In the revamping, Feith, who is undersecretary of defense for policy, said the 5th Corps headquarters, which is in Germany and oversees nearly all U.S. Army troops in Europe, would be overhauled but remain a headquarters.

The two divisions in Germany are the 1st Armored and the 1st Infantry. They would be returned to the United States under the Pentagon plan although it was unclear where.

(end of excerpt)

As it prepares to release a report highly critical of the CIA for overestimating the prewar Iraq threat, the Senate Intelligence Committee is beginning a new probe, this time into why U.S. spy agencies failed to foresee the strength of the postwar insurgency there.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., called the new investigation ''phase two'' of the committee's probe of the U.S. intelligence community's performance. ''We're going to look into the prewar intelligence on postwar Iraq,'' Roberts said in an interview. Recalling classified intelligence briefings CIA officials gave the committee before the Iraq war, Roberts said the resistance to the U.S.-led occupation ''was underestimated as to the perseverance of foreign terrorist involvement, Iraqi Republican Guard and Baath Party elements and on down the list.''

[..]

Roberts called the failure to predict violent resistance to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq a major intelligence lapse. With a cursory viewing of the film Lawrence of Arabia, along with a reading of a few books about the British experience in Iraq after World War I, Roberts said, ''you might have expected a different situation'' than the shower-of-flowers scenario that was predicted.

[..]

The CIA is reviewing the report to determine how much of it can be declassified and made public. The committee contends the entire document should be released. Roberts said that since Saddam's regime no longer exists, a detailed disclosure of prewar intelligence on the regime would not damage national security. The CIA, however, is arguing that specific descriptions of intelligence sources and methods should remain classified.

Key findings of the report have been discussed publicly by Roberts and other committee members and addressed in public statements by CIA Director George Tenet. The committee found:

* The CIA had few if any of its own human sources inside Saddam's regime able to provide definitive information about Iraqi weapons programs.

* Most of the Iraqi sources who came forward with information were sponsored by the Iraqi National Congress, a group that had a vested interest in a U.S. invasion that might install its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, in power in Iraq. The INC's sources were unreliable. Often, information provided by allied intelligence agencies came from these same questionable sources.

* The CIA did not have enough analysts to evaluate the huge volume of technical intelligence, such as spy satellite photos and communications intercepts.

* U.S. intelligence analysts engaged in what Roberts called ''an assumption train.'' Iraq once had chemical and biological weapons, Saddam was a habitual liar, there was evidence of suspicious activity, therefore it must still have them, so the reasoning went. ''The information was basically wrong,'' Roberts said.

(end of excerpt)

Iran warned the Group of Eight on Thursday it had no intention of halting its nuclear program despite criticism by G8 leaders of Tehran's cooperation with the United Nations's nuclear watchdog.

"Using peaceful nuclear energy is Iran's natural right and...G8 countries should not expect Iran to abandon this right," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said in a statement carried by state media.

G8 leaders from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia issued a statement on Wednesday accusing Iran of dragging its feet on full disclosure of its nuclear activities.

"We deplore Iran's delays, deficiencies in cooperation and inadequate disclosures," the statement said.

Iran strongly denies Washington's assertion that it is building a secret nuclear arms capability. Tehran says its nuclear program will be used exclusively to generate electricity.

Asefi described the G8 statement as "illogical."

"Iran has shown its full commitment to the non-proliferation of atomic weapons in practice and its wide and transparent cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is proof of that," Asefi said.

IAEA governing board members are due to discuss Iran's nuclear program next week based on an IAEA report which, while praising Tehran's increased cooperation, said it could still not confirm Iran's nuclear aims were entirely peaceful.

(end of excerpt)

Shiite gunmen seized a police station Thursday in Najaf in the first outbreak of fighting since an agreement to end weeks of bloody clashes between U.S. troops and militia forces. Four Iraqis were killed and 13 were injured, hospital and militia officials said.

Gunmen loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took control of the Ghari police station just 250 yards from the Imam Ali Shrine, witness Mohammed Hussein said. The station was looted and police cars were burned.

``We sent a quick-reaction unit to assist the policemen defending the station, but they were overwhelmed by al-Sadr fighters,'' Najaf Gov. Adnan al-Zurufi said. ``We will solve this problem as soon as possible. We will ask for the help of the Americans, if necessary.''

U.S. forces were not involved in the clashes, and it was unclear whether the violence marked the end of the cease-fire in Najaf, mediated by Shiite leaders and al-Sadr's militia, or resulted from police attempts to crack down on petty crime in the city.

Police and witnesses said trouble started when authorities tried to arrest some suspected thieves at the bus station near the main police headquarters.

Masked attackers - possibly including militia members - responded with machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades near the headquarters building. One gunman was killed when police returned fire, and other fighters then attacked the building.

Fighting later moved to the second police station.

Al-Sadr spokesman Qais al-Khazali said he was trying to intervene and stop the violence.

``We are trying to convince them to stop shooting,'' al-Khazali said. ``We are still committed to the truce.''

Two of the four dead were al-Mahdi fighters, and several others were injured, al-Khazali said.

(end of excerpt)

When Chad Taylor noticed his son was apparently experiencing serious side effects from Ritalin prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, he decided to take the boy off the medication. Now, he says he may be accused of child abuse.

In February, 12-year-old Daniel began displaying some symptoms that his father suspected were related to the use of Ritalin.

"He was losing weight, wasn't sleeping, wasn't eating," Taylor told ABC News affiliate KOAT-TV in New Mexico. "[He] just wasn't Daniel."

So Taylor took Daniel off Ritalin, against his doctor's wishes. And though Taylor noticed Daniel was sleeping better and his appetite had returned, his teachers complained about the return of his disruptive behavior. Daniel seemed unable to sit still and was inattentive. His teachers ultimately learned that he was no longer taking Ritalin.

School officials reported Daniel's parents to New Mexico's Department of Children, Youth and Families.Then a detective and social worker made a home visit.

"The detective told me if I did not medicate my son, I would be arrested for child abuse and neglect," Taylor said.

A spokesman for New Mexico's Department of Children, Youth and Families told KOAT-TV that they could not comment on the case because of state confidentiality laws. John Francis, a detective for the Rio Rancho Department of Public Safety, said that Taylor was not threatened but told KOAT-TV that parents could be charged in situations like his.

"People can be charged with child abuse, child neglect or various other crimes involving a child," he said.

(end of excerpt)

"I used a 20-pound brick of uranium as a doorstop in my office," American nuclear physicist Peter D. Zimmerman, of King's College in London, said to illustrate the point.

Zimmerman, co-author of an expert analysis of dirty bombs for the U.S. National Defense University, said last week's government announcement was "extremely disturbing — because you cannot make a radiological dispersal device with uranium. There is just no significant radiation hazard."

Other specialists agreed. "It's the equivalent of blowing up lead," said physicist Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of American Scientists.

[..]

But it wasn't until Deputy Attorney General James Comey's briefing for reporters last week that authorities said Padilla had uranium in mind for his radiological dispersal device, or RDD, the technical term for such a weapon. Comey said the detainee disclosed he'd also been sent to set off natural gas explosions in U.S. apartment buildings.


"Just saying the word `uranium,' the public automatically assumes, `Oh, it sounds bad,'" said physicist Charles Ferguson of the Washington office of California's Monterey Institute of International Studies. He co-authored one of the most detailed reports on the dirty-bomb threat.

Those studying the RDD potential envision a combination of explosives with a lethal radioisotope, such as cesium-137, diverted from use in cancer radiotherapy, for example, or from machines that irradiate food. Particularly if in powder form, it could spew intense radioactivity over a section of a city, making it uninhabitable.

Radiation from uranium, on the other hand, is billions of times less intense than that of cesium-137, cobalt-60 and other radioisotopes. It's not radioactivity but another property of uranium — its ability in some forms to sustain atomic chain reactions — that makes it a fuel for nuclear power and bombs.

The Justice Department didn't respond directly when asked this week whether it had consulted with experts and knew that uranium wouldn't make a dirty bomb.

[..]

Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman, said Wednesday of the dirty-bomb allegation that U.S. authorities "should have known that this was nonsense."

"When they frightened everybody, what were they trying to do, if they knew better? To show the administration is on top of things?" she asked.

She wants the government to attempt to indict and try her client. "Maybe the problem is the evidence is so weak, it's laughable," she said.

[..]

Spokesman Corallo reaffirmed this week that it was Padilla who said uranium would be used.

"If that's what he planned," physicist Oelrich said of Padilla, "it shows he doesn't know what he's talking about and hasn't done even rudimentary homework."

He wasn't the only one, according to a Justice Department summary of interrogations.

It said Abu Zubaydah, a top al-Qaida lieutenant now in U.S. custody, also envisioned a uranium device when urging Padilla to mount a U.S. attack. At another point, however, the summary said Zubaydah told Padilla the dirty bomb was "not as easy to do as they thought."

Padilla claims "he was never really planning to go through with" any of the terrorist assignment, Comey told reporters.

As a heavy metal, like lead, uranium poses one health risk: If ingested or inhaled, it can damage kidneys or other organs. But unlike radioisotopes, byproducts of nuclear reactors, uranium doesn't emit penetrating gamma rays that cause acute radiation poisoning. Instead, it slowly radiates weak alpha particles, which don't even penetrate skin.

(end of excerpt)

A former US marine said he hoped to garner support from 10,000 Westerners to act as international observers in the Palestinian territories and help bring peace with Israel.

The P10K Force will "expose the truth about the conflict and document human rights violation", Ken O'Keefe, who led the "Human Shield" anti-war movement in Iraq during the US-led invasion, told a Jerusalem press conference.

"It will effect a ceasefire from the militant Palestinian resistance that uses violence and call for Israel to honor the truce in order to assure security for its citizens," he said, adding he had contacts with hardliners, including the Islamic group Hamas.

The 10,000-strong movement, to be financed through donations and to be sent to the Palestinian territories in September, would "compel justice, not vengeance", he said.

The observers will use non-violent means in working for the respect of international law, "thereby ending the unlawful (Israeli) occupation", and bringing about peace, he said.

O'Keefe said he was confident "the numbers of participants in P10K will swell, possibly beyond 10,000" despite Israel's expulsion of dozens of foreign peace activists since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising.

"Everyone is calling for a withdrawal from the Palestinian territories but P10K is set up to do something rather than calling for it," said the heavily-tattooed and eloquent O'Keefe who joined the Marine Corps in 1989, when he was 19.

He renounced his US citizenship in 2001 over strong "political disagremeents".

O'Keefe, who fought in the 1991 Gulf War, said he would mobilize citizens from Europe and North America because "the truth is that Western nations are responsible for supporting brutal leaderships".

He also went on to slam Israel's "occupation that is responsible for violence resistance ... and denial of human rights".

Fending off criticism for his pro-Palestinian stance, O'Keefe insisted the movement would "save both Israelis and Palestinians lives" and bring peace to the two peoples.

The Palestinians and several European nations have long called for the dispatch of international observers to the West Bank and Gaza to help put an end to the four-year-old intifada.

Their calls have remained unheeded owing to the US and Israel's fervent opposition to such a force.

(end of excerpt)

``We believe NATO ought to be involved,'' Bush said about the 15 NATO nations that have forces in Iraq. ``We will work with our NATO friends to at least continue the role that now exists, and hopefully expand it somewhat.''

[..]

Asked if he wanted to see a larger role for NATO, Bush said, ``I think NATO ought to stay involved and I think we have a good chance of getting it done.''

Bush did not elaborate, but administration officials said that the United States would like to see NATO get involved in training the new Iraqi army, in addition to having NATO members currently in Iraq remain there.

[..]

And an administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity after Bush's meeting with Blair, said the United States understands there are constraints on NATO's possible role given France and Germany's continued hesitation to put troops in Iraq.

(end of excerpt)

As Americans mourn the passing of president Ronald Reagan, almost forgotten is the decisive part his administration played in the survival of Iraq’s president Saddam Hussein through his eight-year war with Iran.

US soldiers now fighting the remnants of Saddam’s regime can look back to the early 1980s for the start of a relationship that fostered the rise of the largest military in the Middle East, one whose use of chemical weapons set the stage for last year’s war.

Reagan, determined to check arch-foe Iran, opened a back door to Iraq through which flowed US intelligence and hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees even as Washington professed neutrality in Baghdad’s war with Tehran.

It was complemented by French weaponry and German dual-use technology that experts say wound up in Iraq’s chemical and biological warfare programs.

Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan’s special Middle East envoy, is credited with establishing the back channel to Saddam on a secret trip to Baghdad in December 1983.

Washington had plenty of motives to help Saddam stave off an Iranian victory. Not only was the United States still smarting from the 1980 hostage-taking at the US embassy in Tehran, but its embassy and a marine barracks in Beirut had been struck with truck bombings earlier in 1983.

In fact, the United States had begun to tilt in favor Baghdad even before Rumsfeld’s arrival in Baghdad.

In February 1982, the State Department dropped Baghdad from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, clearing the way for aid and trade.

A month later, Reagan ordered a review of US policy in the Middle East which resulted in a marked shift in favor of Iraq over the next year.

“Soon thereafter, Washington began passing high-value military intelligence to Iraq to help it fight the war, including information from US satellites that helped fix key flaws in the fortifications protecting al-Basrah that proved important in Iran’s defeat in the next month,” wrote Kenneth Pollack in his recently published book ”The Threatening Storm.”

Economic aid poured into Iraq in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loan guarantees to buy US agricultural products, indirectly aiding the war effort.

Washington approved sales of UH-1H helicopters and Hughes MD-500 Defender helicopters. Though sold as civilian aircraft, nobody objected when they were quickly converted for military use.

A May 9, 1984 memo unearthed by the National Security Archive, a Washington research organization, noted that US policy for the sale of dual-use equipment to Iraq’s nuclear program also was reviewed.

The memo said its “preliminary results favor expanding such trade to include Iraqi nuclear entities.”

By March 1985, the United States was issuing Baghdad export permits for high tech equipment crucial for its weapons of mass destruction programs, according to Pollack.

US allies also were active in Iraq.

“By 1982, Iraq accounted for 40 percent of French arms exports,” wrote Pollack. “Paris sold Baghdad a wide range of weapons, including armored vehicles, air defense radars, surface-to-air missiles, Mirage fighters, and Exocet anti-ship missiles.”

“German firms also rushed in without much compunction, not only selling Iraq large numbers of trucks and automobiles but also building vast complexes for Iraq’s chemical warfare, biological warfare, and ballistic missile programs,” he wrote.

The aid came despite clear evidence as early as mid-1983 that Iraq was using chemical weapons on Iranian forces.

Washington said nothing publicly, but noted “almost daily” Iraqi use of chemical weapons in internal reports.

“We have recently received additional information confirming Iraqi use of chemical weapons,” a November 1, 1983 State Department memo said. “We also know that Iraq has acquired a CW production capability, primarily from western firms, including possibly a US foreign subsidiary.”

It said “our best present chance of influencing cessation of CW use may be in the context of informing Iraq of these measures.”

Washington did not publicly denounce Iraqi use of chemical weapons until March, 1984 after it was documented in a UN study. The Reagan administration opened full diplomatic relations with Baghdad in November, 1984. Iraqi chemical attacks continued not only on Iranian forces but also on Kurdish civilians, notably at Hallabja in 1987.

For its support, Pollack wrote, Washington got a bulwark against Iran, cheap oil and Iraqi support for peace neogtiations with Israel.

But when the Iran-Iraq war ended, Baghdad was left with huge debts and a large and menacing military looking for easy prey.

(end of excerpt)

Driving is already out while the Democratic National Convention's in town, and if you plan to take the T, leave your backpacks, briefcases and lunchbags at home.

That's the word from MBTA Police, who plan to inspect all bags at entry points to the T or on the trains themselves during D-Week, at the end of July.

They will warm up in early July with an already controversial plan for ``random'' bag searches, T police Chief Joseph Carter said, citing post-Madrid bombing concerns about terrorist attacks on mass transit.

``What we're looking at with the DNC is that we'll ask the public not to bring bags,'' Carter said. ``There will be people who obviously can't live to that standard. They'll have to understand their bags will be subject to inspection.''

He acknowledged that could mean lines at T entrances. But he said he hopes people will avoid commuting that week.

Carter said officers will be trained to conduct random searches without profiling, while singling out anyone acting suspiciously. But the T's effort to develop a bag-check policy already is drawing fire.

MBTA cop union President Robert Powers said he is concerned random checks will mean lawsuits.

``The only way we can search is with probable cause,'' Powers said. He added he doubts all bags on the T can be checked: ``We have a million people a day with backpacks, briefcases and lunch bags. Are we going to check all of them?''

[..]

``I think they shouldn't have the Democratic National Convention,'' said Hemant Shah of Malden. ``I have mixed feelings about it.''

``I think it's ridiculous because it will hold people up,'' said Erika Ramos of Dorchester, but she added, ``With everything going on, if it's necessary, it's OK.''

Wendy Bugden of Quincy agreed: ``If it will make things safer, then I don't mind.''

(end of excerpt)

After Land Reform Minister John Nkomo said in the pro-government Herald newspaper that all land would be nationalized, some analysts said they feared the move could further destabilize the country's agricultural system and create more food shortages.

"Ultimately all land shall be resettled as state property. " Nkomo said in an interview published Tuesday in The Herald, calling on all land owners to come forward to be approved for 99-year leases.

The announcement comes after the United Nations estimated Zimbabwe would produce only about half its 2 million-ton grain requirements this year. The government insists it will produce 2.3 million tons this year.

The Zimbabwe government is sensitive to questions on grain production because of accusations by critics that the land-reform policy introduced four years ago has led to a catastrophic drop in food production.

Under the policy, white-owned farms were seized and given to black Zimbabweans, but critics say the land went to government allies and is often unused or underused, undermining the agricultural output which once accounted for 40 percent of the country's foreign earnings.

Despite reports of looming food shortages, President Robert Mugabe scoffed at suggestions that his country needed food aid in a recent interview with Sky TV news: "We have enough," he said, insisting that Zimbabwe would "definitely not" import grain this year.

However, the authoritative journal Africa Confidential reported that Zimbabwe had been quietly importing tens of thousands of tons of grain this year. The South African Grain Information Service confirmed that Zimbabwe shipped in 22,000 tons of wheat and 149,000 tons of corn this year.

Mugabe's government recently asked teams from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program to leave the country midway through their reports on the harvest.

Government critics warned yesterday that if the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front nationalized land, it could manipulate the distribution of leases and even deprive political enemies of their land leases at a whim.

Quoted in The Herald, Nkomo said land would be converted to 99-year leases, which could be used as collateral for loans to develop land.

But independent Harare-based economic analyst John Robertson said it was unlikely that banks would make loans because the government could take back leases whenever it wished.

(end of excerpt)

Washington, DC, June 7, 2004 - Former CIA Director George Tenet committed perjury in his April 14 testimony before the 9/11 Commission when he claimed he had not met with President Bush in the month before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. That misrepresentation in Tenet's testimony was noted within hours by Agence France-Presse. [Story reproduced below, & available at: HERE]

The following day, AP reported the CIA issued what was described as a correction after the Director "misspoke." The Agency asserted that its records showed Tenet meeting with Bush on August 17 and 31, and then on at least six occasions in September prior to Tuesday, the 11th. [Reproduced below, & available HERE]

However, that CIA announcement omits mention of the visit that then DCI Tenet apparently made to the President's Crawford, Texas ranch on August 24. The White House website on August 25 quotes a remark made by George W. Bush that he met with Tenet the previous day.

In a verbatim transcript, the President is quoted during an impromptu walking tour of Bush's Crawford, TX ranch that he had met the day before with CIA Director and newly appointed members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Rice were also present at a Presidential press conference in Crawford on the 24th, according to the White House press notice issued that day. In the August 25 transcript, the President Bush states to reporters and visitors:

THE PRESIDENT: " . . . Yesterday, we spent -- well, they arrived at 10:00 a.m. It took a while to get the press conference. We got back here at about 11:30 a.m. and met until 5:15 p.m. I think they left. That's the longest meeting I've had in a long time, on a very important subject . . .

Q When you have those business meetings, like the Joint Chiefs briefing, do you like to keep it separate from the living quarters on the ranch?

THE PRESIDENT: Actually, you know, what we call the governor's house, the place where you all came out during the -- that's where we went. Condi and Karen Hughes stayed there. And right across the street from that is a -- it's a nice looking government doublewide. (Laughter.) And that's where the mil aide, the nurse, the WHCA head, the doc, they stay.

The CIA briefings, I have on our porch, the end of our porch looking out over the lake. When Tenet came up, that's where we visited, out there.

You know, everybody wants to see the ranch, which I'm proud to show it off. So George Tenet and I -- yesterday, we piled in the new nominees for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice Chairman and their wives and went right up the canyon. "[Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/08/20010825-2.html]

The "very important subject" discussed for almost six hours by Bush with his core national security team would likely have been the CIA's action the day before placing four wanted Al-Qaeda terrorists on the "watchlist" of persons to be detained if located in the US. On August 23 the Agency sent "cables to the State Department, the FBI, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, requesting that 'four bin Laden related individuals' including Almidhar and Alhazmi, be placed on the watchlist." (Washington Post, A8, September 21, 2002) Two of those - Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi - subsequently led the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon.

The pair had been the subject of CIA-directed surveillance since at least late 1999, when they were followed by the CIA to an Al-Qaeda planning session in Kuala Lumpur, at which they were observed meeting with a ranking terrorist operations director and Mohamed Atta's roommate, Ramzi Binalshibh, who subsequently wired money to them from Germany. Binalshibh also sent funds to Zacarias Moussaoui, who in October 2000 stayed at the same Al-Qaeda safehouse in Malaysia while on his way to the United States. On August 15, Moussaoui was arrested by the FBI at a Minnesota flight school.

If Tenet did not take the opportunity to discuss these events with the President, he committed one of the worst acts of derelection of duty in CIA history. Former DCI George Tenet is generally held to be a thorough and responsible intelligence executive. It is simply implausible that Tenet and Bush did not discuss the 9/11 hijackers when they met in Crawford on August 24.

A special prosecutor needs to be appointed to investigate CIA Director Tenet's apparent perjury on April 14 and the Agency's material misrepresentation of fact in its statement the next day. The former CIA Director and the President need to reveal publicly, and under oath, what was discussed at their numerous meetings in the weeks before 9/11, and why this has been concealed.

(end of excerpt)

For the first time since 9/11, airlines are flying high. Airports are teeming, planes are full, and commercial travel in April topped traffic for the same month in 2000.

Yet two vestiges of the post-9/11 downturn remain: steep losses by most airlines and a federal bailout program that has pumped $6.5 billion into the industry. Last week, the airlines were back on Capitol Hill seeking new relief from taxes and insurance costs. Their hat-in-hand request comes as the federal Air Transportation Stabilization Board mulls whether to grant a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to teetering United Airlines.

Another bailout would only waste more taxpayer money without solving a problem of the industry's own making before 9/11: In an era of cutthroat competition from discount airlines, many major airlines can't operate profitably, even in boom times.

Addressing that problem is the job of the marketplace, not Washington. More federal subsidies would only postpone what ailing airlines need to do — cut costs, obtain private loans or go out of business.

A one-time $5 billion cash infusion immediately after 9/11, while overly generous, could be justified for an industry ordered shut for four days. But 33 months and another $1.5 billion later, the federal program is still around to prop up sputtering carriers.

Experience since 9/11 argues that another shot of federal cash would be wasted.

(end of excerpt)

The film will be released by a partnership of Lions Gate Films, IFC Films and the Fellowship Adventure Group, which was formed by Harvey and Bob Weinstein specifically to market Moore's film.

Moore's film, which recently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, criticizes President Bush's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and connects the Bush family with Osama bin Laden's.

The Weinsteins, who run Miramax Films, bought the rights to the movie from The Walt Disney Co., which owns Miramax and refused to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11.

The Weinstein brothers will personally finance and control distribution and marketing, they said yesterday.

(end of excerpt)

Clear Channel Communications Inc., the largest U.S. radio station owner, is near an agreement with federal regulators to pay about $1.75 million to settle indecency complaints, according to newspaper reports Wednesday.

An agreement between the company and the Federal Communications Commission could be announced later this week, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal said.

A Clear Channel representative was not immediately available to comment on the reports.

The proposed penalty would represent the biggest negotiated fine between a broadcaster and the FCC, the Times said.

The largest penalty previously secured by the commission against a broadcaster involved Infinity Broadcasting, which agreed in 1995 to pay $1.7 million to settle complaints against shock jock Howard Stern, the newspaper said.

Follow the news that matters to you. Create your own alert to be notified on topics you're interested in.

Clear Channel is expected to admit that some of the material it broadcast on its stations, including segments of a Stern radio show during which anal sex was discussed, was indecent, the Times said, citing a person close to the settlement negotiations.

(end of excerpt)

President George Bush claimed a diplomatic victory last night after securing international agreement for a UN resolution backing a provisional Iraqi government due to take office at the end of the month.

The UN Security Council unanimously backed the resolution last night.

The text of the negotiated resolution does not explicitly give the caretaker government in Baghdad a veto over individual operations by a US-led multinational force, but it will have to be consulted and it will also have the right - in theory - to order the total withdrawal of foreign troops at any time.

[..]

The deal was sealed after the UN-designated Iraqi Prime Minister, Mr Iyad Allawi, and the US Secretary of State Colin Powell, wrote to the Security Council outlining a common view of how foreign forces should operate, and pledging to set up a joint forum to negotiate controversial actions.

But there remains ambiguity over the powers of the caretaker government due to assume sovereignty on June 30th.

The text of the resolution gives the multinational force "the authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq".

France and other Security Council members had called for the caretaker government to have the right to block "sensitive" operations like the siege of Falluja or any offensives on Islamic holy sites.

But the final draft only calls for Iraqi leaders and US force commanders to reach agreement. It does not stipulate what should happen if they do not.

The interim government could call on the UN to terminate the multinational force's mandate before its renewal in a year's time, but total withdrawal of foreign troops would almost certainly strip Iraqi leaders of their protection.

A French official claimed yesterday that Paris had won "90 per cent of what we asked for".

"The resolution doesn't say what happens if there is disagreement over sensitive operations and the remaining ambiguity is regrettable," the official conceded.

"But we think it is a good resolution."

(end of excerpt)

The US administration yesterday signalled it would press other members of the Group of Eight industrialised nations to relieve Iraq of its $120bn (£65bn) external sovereign debt, as President George W. Bush celebrated the prospect of closer international co-operation.

The US will also push its case on relieving Iraq of its external sovereign debt, officials said. A Bush administration official noted that the International Monetary Fund had said the "vast majority" of Iraq's debt needs to be forgiven and added that the US would back that position.

(end of excerpt)

Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said on Tuesday the operation was aimed at a "dangerous group of terrorists close to al Qaeda" which had been planning more attacks.

Police arrested at least three people in coordinated raids which spanned France, Belgium and Spain as well as Italy.

Police in Milan arrested Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, known as "Mohamed the Egyptian", and at least one other man linked to the March 11 bombings that killed 191 people in the Spanish capital.

"(Ahmed) is considered one of the masterminds of March 11," a Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman said. Pisanu said the man was one of the "principle executors" of the Madrid bombings.

Ahmed has been linked to a Tunisian man, now dead, whom investigators identified as the ringleader of the suspected Islamic militants behind the attacks, the Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman said.

Spanish authorities said at least one person was arrested in Belgium, but Italy's Ansa news agency said the number of people detained in Belgium was about a dozen.

Another person was being held in police custody in Milan.

(end of excerpt)

The Imam of the Sunni Mosque of Abu Hanifah in Baghdad sharply attacked the newly appointed puppet so-called “government” of Iraq in a Friday sermon. Shaykh Ahmad as-Samarra’i said that it was the “embodiment of American hegemony” in Iraq and that a transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis could not take place in the shadow of an American veto.

The Sunni religious leader said, “they call this ‘an election,’ but it isn’t an election. It’s nothing but American hegemony. Whomever they [the Americans] want is a part of it; whomever they don’t want is kicked out.”

Agence France Presse (AFP) reported Shaykh as-Samarra’i as asking, “Where is the ‘Iraqi sovereignty’ if decisions having to do with security matters are subject to an American veto? Where is the ‘Iraqi sovereignty’ when the US says that its forces are going to remain in Iraq?”

The Shaykh went on: “They promise us that after seven months there will be a new legal code and an election. But how can this come about when [American] hegemony dominates those who write, when there is supervision over every committee. . . . They want to have a joke at our expense.”

“There is no sovereignty if security affairs are in other hands than ours. There is no sovereignty if military affairs are in other hands than ours. There is no sovereignty if the oil affairs are in other hands than ours,” reiterated the Imam of the Abu Hanifah mosque.

Muqtada As-Sadr: US-Appointed “Prime Minister” Is A CIA Agent. New Iraqi “Government” Has No Authority

In a Friday sermon delivered on his behalf by Jabir al-Khafaji in the Mosque of al-Kufah, Shi‘i religious leader Muqtada as-Sadr attacked the newly installed American puppet “government.” According to al-Jazeera satellite TV, as-Sadr described Iyyad ‘Allawi, the newly appointed puppet so-called “prime minister,” as an “American CIA agent.”

Agence France Presse (AFP) quoted as-Sadr as sharply rejecting the new puppet so-called “government”, saying that it had no authority over him. As-Sadr said, “I declare that I will have nothing to do with this government until Judgement Day because the people reject it.” As-Sadr added, “our government must be legally elected. The Iraqi people will never accept a government appointed by the occupier.”

As-Sadr declared: “I can’t imagine any rational person or any religious authority accepting this appointment. I will have nothing to do with this government”.

(end of excerpt)

Sibel Edmonds, whose closed-door revelations to Congressional inquiries have been declared state secrets, says that as a result, FBI investigations were ordered terminated.

"There are certain points..., where you have your drug related activities combined with money laundering and information laundering, converging with your terrorist activities," Ms. Edmonds told BreakForNews.com.
(Interview - 7:00 min.)

"Certain investigations were being quashed, let's say per State Department's request, because it would have affected certain foreign relations [or] affected certain business relations with foreign organizations," she said in an exclusive interview. (Interview - 4:00 min.)

"And, as it has been asserted within the state secret privilege... That was something the State Department did not want to have." (Interview - 15:30 min.)

Edmonds also indicated that the FBI's translation service had been penetrated by an intelligence group not linked to any government.

"Intelligence is also gathered by certain semi-legitimate organizations --to be used for their activities," said Edmonds. "It really does not boil down to countries anymore...[ ] When you have activities involving a lot of money, you have people from different nations involved.... It can be categorized under organized crime, but in a very large scale."

[..]

"You have [a] network of people who obtain certain information and they take it out and sell it to... whomever would be the highest bidder. Then you have people who would be bringing into the country narcotics from the East, and their connections. [It] is only then that you really see the big picture."

"And you see certain semi-legitimate organizations that may very well have a legit front, but with very criminal illegitimate activities --who start coming at you from these investigations."

"And the picture becomes, actually, very clear. Crystal clear."

[..]

In December, 2001, a fellow translator with top security clearance tried to recruit Edmonds to a semi-legitimate intelligence network --part of an organization which was itself already a target of FBI investigations.

When Edmonds reported the recruitment approach to her superiors she was fobbed off.

The translator was working on FBI material related to those investigations. Because of that translator's activities, two top targets of FBI investigations left the United States.

[..]

"Over two years have passed," she says. "I'm hoping there will be at least one.. just one Congressman, one Senator, who will be willing to take a stand, and come forward, and put out this information.... And I'm still looking for that one courageous person."

Such a representative will be the exception to the current rule. By way of illustration, Edmonds quotes a recent communication from an unnamed representative:

"Sibel Edmonds will not make any friends in the Congress, if she continues pressuring us and if she continues demanding action. That's not how she will not make friends here -she will make only enemies."

With friends like that --who needs enemies.

"If they don't want to be pressured, then they should not run for office," says Edmonds.

(end of excerpt)

Since the passage of the “Iraq Liberation Act” in 1998, the US government has spent more than 40 million taxpayer dollars on the Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmed Chalabi. As we now know, Chalabi in turn fed the US government lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda in the hope that the US would invade Iraq, overthrow Saddam Hussein, and put him in power. To hedge his bets, it appears he made a few deals with the Iranians, delivering US intelligence to that country. How’s that for gratitude? Now we see that the US has raided the house of Ahmed Chalabi and seized his papers and computers to see how much damage he may have caused the US with his Iranian dealings.

Round and round we go, and we never seem to learn. Regime change plans, whether by CIA operations or by preemptive war, almost always go badly.  American intervention abroad- installing the Shah of Iran in the fifties, killing Diem in South Vietnam in the sixties, helping Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the eighties, and propping up dictators in many Arab countries- has had serious repercussions for American interests including the loss of American life.

It is clear that interventionism leads to the perceived need for more interventionism, which leads to more conflict and to increased resentment and anti-Americanism. It is an endless cycle and the American taxpayer is always left holding the bill. This policy has huge dollar costs at home, which contributes to huge deficits, higher interest rates, inflation, and economic dislocations. War cannot raise the standard of living for the average American.

The day is fast approaching when we no longer will be able to afford this burden. For now foreign governments are willing to loan us the money needed to finance our current account deficit, and indirectly the cost of our worldwide military operations. But economic law eventually will limit our ability to live off others by credit creation. Eventually trust in the dollar will be diminished, if not destroyed. At that point it will become painfully obvious to even the most strident supporter of our interventionist foreign policy that the super-power has become a super-debtor, its power and influence greatly diminished, and its people much poorer and more vulnerable.

It is not too late to change course. The United States can again be viewed as the shining city on the hill and an example to other nations by re-embracing the kind of foreign and economic policies that made us wealthy and admired across the globe in the first place. This means less government, less taxation, and no foreign meddling. Regaining our economic security will go much further toward guaranteeing our national security in the future.

(end of excerpt)

- Turkey has recalled two senior diplomats from Israel, just days after Ankara's foreign minister hinted it might make such a move to protest Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza.

[..]

Last week, Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan compared Israel's actions against Palestinians to the treatment of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition.

Israeli media reported Tuesday that Turkey's ambassador in Tel Aviv, Feridun Sinirlioglu, and Jerusalem Consul General Huseyin Bicakli had been summoned home in recent days.

A Turkish official in Ankara, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the diplomats were returning to Turkey for a few days as part of ``regular consultations.'' He declined to say whether the decision was in response to Israeli policies.

A spokeswoman at the Turkish Embassy Tel Aviv, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the consultations in Ankara were aimed at helping to find ways to reduce Israeli-Palestinian tensions. She said the diplomats would probably return Thursday. ``This is not a protest,'' the spokeswoman said.

Israeli diplomats also played down the move. ``It's perfectly routine. ... There is absolutely no problem,'' a Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Last week, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said he was considering upgrading Turkey's diplomatic representation to the Palestinian territories by appointing an ambassador, and hinted he might recall the ambassador and consul-general for ``one or two days'' for consultations in protest of Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

He said Turkey's criticisms of Israeli policies were ``the warnings of a friend.''

``We want to maintain healthy relations with Israel, but we say that their policies are wrong,'' Gul told the NTV television network.

(end of excerpt)

The lead prosecutor in the nation's first trial based on post-Sept. 11 terrorism investigations is the subject of two federal probes, one of them criminal, according to court documents.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino is being investigated by the Justice Department. The probe stems from a court-ordered review of all documents in the case that led to the conviction of two North African immigrants on terrorism charges.

The criminal probe was disclosed in a court filing on Friday.

Convertino lawyer William Sullivan said he does not expect the review to reveal anything.

[..]

The criminal investigation stems from charges that the government did not provide defense attorneys in the Detroit case some evidence, including a letter alleging that a prosecution witness lied, until long after a trial had ended.

Months before the government turned over the letter, a jury found two defendants guilty of document fraud and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism. A third man was found guilty of document fraud but acquitted of the terrorism charges. A fourth was acquitted on all counts. A federal judge is considering whether to overturn the convictions.

U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen ordered federal prosecutors to conduct a thorough review of all the documents in the case to ensure that defense lawyers got the material to which they were entitled.

[..]

Convertino, in turn, filed a lawsuit in February against Attorney General John Ashcroft saying the department improperly interfered with the prosecution of terrorism suspects and exaggerated its performance in the war on terrorism.

(end of excerpt)

On Saturday gunmen attacked civilian security in two four-wheel-drive vehicles and killed four--two Americans and two Poles--on the airport road. The US also no longer controls the road from Baghdad to Fallujah, the city that Marines besieged in April but did not capture. The city is still under the control of the resistance.

(end of excerpt)

On Friday, an armored sport-utility vehicle carrying this Washington Post reporter and his driver was attacked close to Fallujah on the main highway to Baghdad.

Four men in an orange-and-white taxi pumped dozens of bullets from AK-47 assault rifles into the vehicle for more than two minutes, each round causing a loud thump on the vehicle's metal plating and reinforced windows.

They shot from behind, from in front and from the sides, where their determined frowns and mustached faces were clearly visible, as they and we weaved down the highway at 90 mph.

The fusillade stopped when the SUV, its back tires missing and its rear windows shattered, spun out of control. The gunmen sped down the road, evidently thinking their mission was accomplished. Neither the driver nor the reporter was injured.

[..]

Under an agreement made last month with U.S. Marine commanders, a new force called the Fallujah Brigade, led by former officers from Saddam Hussein's demobilized army, was to safeguard the city. The unruly gunmen -- many of them insurgents who battled the Marines through most of April -- were supposed to give way to Iraqi police and civil defense units.

Instead, the brigade stays outside of town in tents, the police cower in their patrol cars and the civil defense force nominally occupies checkpoints on the city's fringes but exerts no influence over the masked insurgents who operate only a few yards away.

(end of excerpt)

In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney hid out at "Site R," an underground bunker seven miles from Camp David, deep beneath Raven Rock Mountain on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, says intelligence expert James Bamford in a new book due out tomorrow.

In "A Pretext for War," Bamford describes Cheney's secure location as "a secret world of five buildings, each three stories tall, computer-filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir," according to a review in the June 14 issue of Time magazine.

(end of excerpt)

For over two years Attorney General John Ashcroft has been relentlessly engaged in covering up my reports and investigations into my allegations. He has asserted the rarely invoked State Secret Privilege in my court proceedings, and has used it to quash a subpoena request for my deposition from attorneys representing 9/11 family members on information regarding 9/11.

Ashcroft is not protecting 'national security' or 'state secrets' of the United States. On the contrary, he is endangering our national security by covering up facts and information related to criminal and terrorist activities against this country and it's citizens. Ashcroft is fully aware that making this information public will bring about the question of accountability, will expose serious criminal activities, and his complicity in covering up.

On Monday, June 14, 2004, at 10:00 AM, Judge Reggie Walton is expected to issue his ruling on the state secret privilege assertion by AG Ashcroft, which is intended to gag me. The hearing will be held in US District Court for the District of Columbia, located at 3rd and Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC, Judge Walton's courtroom. Please attend if you can, since by your presence both the court and Ashcroft will understand that this attempt to cover up will not go unnoticed.

I will be there, in front of the Court's Constitution Avenue entrance, at 9:30 AM, and will be joined by Daniel Ellsberg to make press statements and to meet with all of you.

DC Court with map
http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/location.html

Hope to see you there,

Sibel D. Edmonds

P.S. Look for 60 Minutes to do another segment on this case next Sunday.

(end of excerpt)

Among the 100 or so invitees to the annual Bilderberg conference under way Sunday in a northern Italy resort is potential U.S. vice president John Edwards.

Reporters generally are not invited and those who are observe the conference group's general pledge of secrecy, reinforcing the view of conspiracy theorists that the elite gathering is up to no good, London's The Guardian newspaper reported.

Sen. Edwards is regarded in Democratic circles as a good performer in his battle with Sen. John Kerry for the nomination to be presidential candidate and so is expected to be a finalist when Kerry chooses a running mate.

Other invitees are Mrs. Bill Gates and likely are regulars Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and U.S. Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld.

The Bilderberg tradition began in 1954 as a transatlantic post-war sounding board.

(end of excerpt)

Next month, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority will become the first transit agency in the nation to institute a permanent policy of randomly inspecting passenger bags and packages on subway and commuter trains, MBTA police officials disclosed yesterday.

The stop-and-search procedure, largely prompted by the March 11 train bombings that killed 191 people in Spain, will involve explosive-sniffing dogs and all 247 uniformed MBTA police officers, and is set to be in place for July's Democratic National Convention, MBTA T Police Chief Joseph Cartercq told the Globe.

"I have no trepidation about being first,'' Carter said. "I don't want to be the first to do an interview about having a serious incident that may have some terrorist indications to it. I want to be in a position to prevent and detect and apprehend someone prior to them causing damage. We want to do this to encourage people to feel safe on the MBTA, to utilize public transportation.''

The policy was made public only weeks after the MBTA announced a controversial decision to begin requesting identification from T passengers police perceive as acting ``suspiciously.''

[..]

Last month, the US Transportation Security Administration unveiled a pilot program to screen the bags of all passengers at a single Maryland Rail Commuter station in suburban New Carrollton.

But the MBTA policy would be far more ambitious -- and in the eyes of civil libertarians, far more invasive -- as police conduct random inspections of bags and briefcases that are not tied to suspicious behavior. The policy is being developed in coordination with the TSA and with several other transit agencies in the United States and abroad, Carter said. It is not yet fully developed, he added.

MBTA Deputy Police Chief John Martino, who is overseeing the development and implementation of the policy, said police, some accompanied by explosive-sniffing dogs, will randomly pick out riders for inspection throughout the transit system daily. If the dogs are present -- there are only four used by the force currently -- riders would not have to open their bags, but make them available for the dogs to sniff, Martino said.

If no dogs are present, "a brief opening and a quick look in will usually be enough to judge if there's any cause for alarm," Martino said. "Wherever possible, we would use an explosive-detection canine that would just sniff -- no requirement to open them at all in that case."

[..]

Martino said, however, that the number of inspections would increase dramatically during the convention at the end of July, just as thousands of commuters who normally drive to work will cram onto subways and commuter rail trains because of extensive road and highway closures. He also said riders can expect the number of inspections to increase whenever the US Homeland Security Department changes the color-coded threat advisory to orange or red, the highest levels.

Martino would not specify how many bag inspections will be conducted, either during the convention or at times when the threat level is not elevated.

[..]

T riders told by a reporter about the bag inspection policy yesterday reacted with a mixture of terrorism-weary resignation, annoyance, and in some cases, skepticism that police officers were capable of carrying out a truly random search system.

Alejandro Roberts, 25, a filmmaker from Dorchester interviewed at the JFK-UMass Red Line station, said he would be upset if such a search were to make him late for an appointment, but expressed greater worries about the specter of racial profiling.

Pamela Pratt, 46, a hospital supervisor from Randolph, said , "We all know who will be stopped -- black people like me or my brothers."

Other passengers, however, said they understood that they may have to give up some privacy to protect against attacks such as those that occurred in Madrid.

"It's a gray area," said Caleb Charland, 23, a Dorchester photographer. "I don't want people searching my bags, but if it increases safety, I understand."

Carter, who confirmed that the agency was developing the plans, said T officials have not announced the policy because he and other police officials are still working out the details on how to balance security and privacy concerns.

"Everything we do here is to protect and uphold and defend the constitutional rights of everyone, particuarly our patrons on the system," Carter said. "That is one of the reasons why the policy is not something that is just sitting there, ready for us to publish tomorrow morning. . . . How do we do this to make sure constitutional rights are in place? We don't want to abridge those rights, but in this era, we need the highest degree of security."

Carter said he is determined to have the baggage inspection procedure in place for the Democratic convention, which has been deemed a special "national security" event by the US Secret Service.

"We're on a very tight clock here; we're working feverishly to come to a finalized policy," Carter said. "We will meet with various groups, particularly the leading civil rights groups about this, but we will not be deterred in ensuring we have the highest level of security for the convention."

Carter and his deputies said the cost of the new program would be minimal because the force, including canine units, is already patrolling stations.

Last month, T police announced that the entire force has been receiving counterterrorism training that includes spotting suspicious behavior.

[..]

Martino said the T Police Department is seeking to double the size of the dog unit to spread the baggage inspections across the vast transit system.

For now, however, Deputy T Police Chief Thomas McCarthy, who oversees intelligence operations, expressed confidence that the heightened presence of police officers will send a message that the MBTA is not a good place for terrorists to attack.

"You send a message that we're a harder target than some other place," McCarthy said. "That will hopefully make it safer."

(end of excerpt)

When Jack Roche telephoned Australia's intelligence agency in July 2000, he offered a tantalizing story: He had been to Afghanistan and ate lunch with Osama bin Laden. He had received training in explosives and plotted with Al Qaeda leaders to carry out a bombing in Australia.

A Muslim convert, Roche was prepared to become an informant, his attorney says, and provide information about Al Qaeda; its Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiah; and their goal of staging an attack in a Western country.

But at the time — 14 months before the Sept. 11 attacks — no one was interested.

It wasn't until 2 1/2 years later that authorities decided to take Roche seriously and arrested him on terrorism charges. Last week he was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring with Al Qaeda leaders to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra.

[..]

According to evidence presented in court, Australian and U.S. authorities bungled at least six chances to learn what Roche knew, including the whereabouts of alleged terrorist mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who, it is said, was even then plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. authorities had been trying to catch Mohammed since the mid-1990s.

"He had their phone numbers," said Hylton Quail, Roche's lawyer. "He had their e-mail addresses. He knew where they lived. He knew how they worked. He was like a spy who tried to come in from the cold and found the door was locked."

Roche, now 50, says he first telephoned the U.S. Embassy in Canberra to offer intelligence on Al Qaeda and was told to contact Australian authorities. An embassy official says Roche may have called, but the embassy has no record of it. Roche subsequently called the Australian Security Intelligence Organization three times to give information, but the agency never pursued his offer.

Prime Minister John Howard acknowledged last week that authorities had made a "very serious mistake" in turning Roche away.

(end of excerpt)

IRVINE, CALIFORNIA -- As much as one-quarter of the former El Toro Marine base is so polluted it cannot immediately be sold for development, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The contamination--including a plume of polluted groundwater under about 350 acres--could complicate efforts to turn the 4,700-acre property into a mix of homes, offices, parkland and recreational facilities.

The Los Angeles Times reported on the findings by state and federal officials. It was unclear who would be responsible for the cleanup or how long it could take.

Federal law prohibits the Navy from selling land that is polluted or suspected of being polluted.

(end of excerpt)

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) records point to "a dramatic rise" in the smuggling of radiological substances, the raw material for this bomb, the British science weekly says in next Saturday's issue.

"In 1996, there were just eight of these incidents, but last year there were 51," the report says.

"Most cases are believed to have occurred in Russia and elsewhere in Europe. Smugglers target the radioactive materials used in factories, hospitals and research laboratories, which are not guarded as securely as those used by the nuclear industry."

A "dirty bomb" is not a nuclear bomb. It would use conventional explosive to disgorge radioactive material over a wide area, unleashing panic and making the area unusable.

Since 1993, there have been 300 confirmed cases of illicit trafficking in radiological materials, 215 of them in the past five years.

But, according to the IAEA documents, the true figure may be far higher. There have been 344 further suspected cases of trafficking over the past 11 years that have not been confirmed by any of the 75 states that monitor this activity.

The agency adds that there are still a thousand radioactive sources that are unaccounted for in Iraq. And of 25 sources stolen from the Krakatau steel company in Indonesia in October 2000, only three have been recovered.

A terrorist attack of this kind is "a nightmare waiting to happen," Frank Barnaby, a nuclear consultant and former British nuclear military scientist, was quoted by New Scientist as saying.

"I'm amazed that it hasn't happened already."

And last year, Eliza Manningham-Buller, director-general of the British counter-intelligence agency MI5, said a crude radiological attack against a major western city was "only a matter of time," the report said.

(end of excerpt)

A BELFAST man today denied reports that he was a British agent who had worked inside the Provisional IRA for more than 25 years.

Joseph Patrick Haughey, (51), convicted in 1981 of hijacking and falsely imprisoning a taxi driver, was named in a Sunday newspaper as a leading IRA member who had worked for RUC Special Branch and MI5 since the 1970s.

Media speculation at the weekend has dubbed the existence of an alleged new top-level informer within the Provos as a "second Stakeknife".

In a statement issued through his solicitor today, Haughey made an "outright denial" of the allegations.

He also named a Co Down man as the source of the allegations.

According to reports at the weekend, Haughey was named last week on the same 'spook-watching' website which had first identified Freddie Scappaticci as the British secret agent Stakeknife.

In the statement today, Haughey said: "I deny categorically any suggestion that I was ever an informer or that I ever co-operated with British intelligence or the RUC."

(end of excerpt)

MI5 spent almost three decades spying on left-wing journalist Claud Cockburn, but never uncovered the source of his many leaks which infuriated the Whitehall establishment.

Files released yesterday to the National Archives at Kew reveal that from the 1930s onwards, MI5 opened his mail, bugged his telephone calls and searched his luggage every time he entered or left the country.

But they were forced to admit defeat in their efforts to find out who was supplying information for his magazine, The Week, a forerunner of Private Eye.

MI5 could not even be certain whether Mr Cockburn, an avowed Communist, was working for Comintern - the international arm of the Soviet Communist Party.

(end of excerpt)

President Hamid Karzai on Thursday strongly defended his recent meetings with former Islamic militia leaders, saying he had no intention of forming a coalition with them if he is elected president in September.

Karzai also said the security situation in Afghanistan was "quite all right," despite the killing of three European medical workers Wednesday and a series of recent attacks that have left dozens of people dead, including aid workers, election monitors, Afghan police officers and foreign military forces.

[..]

"These figures are part of the reality of this country. We talk today and we will talk tomorrow," he said. He denied he was forming a new political alliance with the militia leaders, who are mistrusted by many Afghans because of their role in the destructive civil war of the 1990s.

"There is no coalition. There will not be a coalition . . . but negotiating, talking to all Afghans, that is my job," Karzai said. "It's a very legitimate thing. . . . Negotiations will solve more problems than violence."

Karzai said the militia leaders had brought him a proposal that included many areas of agreement, including the need for national unity and disarmament.

[..]

Karzai insisted that there were no serious security problems in Afghanistan, only a few incidents that he said were "not an alarming thing."

[..]

More than 700 people have been killed nationwide in political violence and terrorist attacks since August, causing elections scheduled for this month to be postponed and prompting U.N. officials to question whether the vote could be protected when it does take place.

Karzai said he would consider amending the new election law after rival candidates protested this week against the requirement that they collect and copy 10,000 voter registration cards.

(end of excerpt)

Referring to the ongoing talks in Kabul between Hamid Karzai and a number of former Mujahideen leaders, groups and commanders on the post-elections composition of the government, Mr Rabbani said that he has put forth some conditions to Mr. Karzai and if he accept these conditions, they would support his candidature for the presidential polls.

Mr. Rabbani made these observations at a meeting of Jamiat-e-Islami in Kabul, according to BBC reports.

Nearly four hundred Jamiat-e-Islami men have assembled in Kabul to devise strategy in the prevailing condition and announce new polices.

[..]

The JI chief, Burhaunddin Rabbain was expected to announce his party's policies in his speech but he largely concentrated on common issued like Islam and democracy.

However, his remarks about the latest negotiations between president Hamid Karzai and the leaders and commanders of the former Mujahideen were of great importance.

According to him, more than twenty conditions have been submitted to President Hamid Karzai in return of their support to his candidature in the forthcoming presidential elections.

The important conditions are considerable share to the Mujahideen in the next government and respect to the Islamic value.

Mr. Rabbani said that Mr. Karzai would not be able to win the elections without their support. He added that he thinks, they enjoy popular support and if the United Front does not back any candidate, no one would be able to win the pools.

Mr. Rabbani said that he would announce his final stance after President Karzai accepts all of their condition.

It is pertinent to note that a number of observers and common youths consider the latest agreement between President Karzai and former Mujahideen leader as an attempt for the formation of another interim government in Afghanistan through undemocratic means. They said if pre-bargaining is made, then what is the need of elections?

(end of excerpt)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai signalled on Thursday he would amend an election law that required presidential candidates to collect copies of 10,000 voters' cards before they can register for the September polls.

[..]

Several rival presidential candidates denounced the law Karzai enacted last week as undemocratic since it requires candidates to collect copies of the registration cards of 10,000 voters to enter the election.

The candidates said this contravened a new constitution approved in January which calls for a secret ballot.

"It is rational," Karzai said in reply to a reporter's question when asked if he intended to amend the law.

"Discussions and consultations were held in the cabinet about the (collection) of 10,000 cards, but now we see that protests exist. From my point of view, this is very important.

"I think we (need) to discuss over it. The cabinet will discuss over it fully."

[..]

More than 700 people have been killed countrywide mostly in Taliban attributed attacks since last August, despite the presence of a U.S. led force now numbering nearly 20,000 and thousands more NATO-led peacekeepers.

(end of excerpt)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, facing autumn elections, plans to cut the size of his fractious cabinet to 20 from 29 as part of his first major reform drive since taking office late in 2001, an official said.
But the plan needs the approval of the cabinet, some of whose members are drawn from armed factions that have defied Karzai's orders in the past, says a report of Reuters.

"The proposed plan consists of two parts," a palace official, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

"Initially, ministries will be cut to 20 from 29 and later on the cabinet size will be further reduced. The overall aim is to bring coherence and effectiveness in the government."

Some ministries will be merged as part of the plan, he said, expressing the hope there would be no opposition to the reform, the first major overhaul since Karzai came to power in 2001 after U.S.-led troops overthrew the Taliban.

(end of excerpt)

Australia and the United States are moving closer to agreeing on establishing a joint military training base in northern Australia, Defense Minister Robert Hill said Monday.

Australia's conservative government, which sent troops to U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, agreed in January to look at a proposal from Washington to jointly upgrade an existing training base in Queensland state or the Northern Territory.

Hill said Australian and U.S. defense forces would use the center for air, sea and land exercises.

"It's to enhance mutual capability, ensure inter-operability and to assist a critically important ally," Hill told Australian radio Monday after talks with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Singapore over the weekend.

Hill said an in-principle agreement could be signed at annual ministerial talks in Washington next month.

(end of excerpt)

NAZRAN, Russia -- The young men started disappearing a few months ago, one by one, often with no trace. Prosecutor Rashid Ozdoyev suspected a dark conspiracy: Maybe the abductions were the work not of ordinary criminal gangs but of Russia's top law enforcement agency.

Then Ozdoyev himself disappeared. Shortly after he got off an airplane from Moscow, where he had delivered a report criticizing alleged abuses by the agency, the Federal Security Service, Ozdoyev climbed into his car, drove off and has not been seen since.

[..]

"It looks like the special services took him," Mikhail Akhiliyev, a friend and fellow prosecutor, said in a hushed conversation in a corridor of the prosecutor's office building, where that is not the official theory. "Everybody says we don't know anything. It's like a wall. There's no Rashid."

A spokesman for the agency, known by its Russian initials FSB, disputed allegations that it was behind the disappearance.

[..]

"We have a Bermuda Triangle here," said a stout bodyguard for another Ingush prosecutor, a handgun tucked into his belt. In reality, he confided, far more than 40 people have disappeared. He asked not to be identified: "We watch what we say. The less we say, the safer it is."

The only person who seems to be aggressively looking for Rashid Ozdoyev is his father, Boris, who is convinced that his 27-year-old son fell victim to the FSB and that no one else wants to prod too hard out of fear that they would be next. "It's absolutely outrageous," said Boris Ozdoyev. "The power of the FSB is enormous."

"How do they differ from terrorists?" he asked, complaining that FSB agents operate outside the law. "The only difference is they have a state krysha," a Russian term for "roof" that has come to mean mafia-style protection.

Boris Ozdoyev, 60, is no anti-establishment radical. A judge for two decades in Soviet times and later a member of Ingushetia's regional parliament, Ozdoyev and his family have devoted their lives to maintaining order in their oil-rich mountainous region. A second son is an officer of the FSB.

When Rashid disappeared in March, he had 10 years of government service and had risen to be the chief prosecutor's deputy. Working in a modest office at the end of the hall on the third floor of the prosecutor's headquarters, he had filed three reports sharply critical of the FSB in the previous six months, according to his father, who said he urged him not to do so for his own safety.

One of the reports -- a two-page memo sent to Col. Sergei Koryakov, local head of the FSB, late last year and reviewed by a reporter -- accused the agency of dropping the ball on investigating three explosions in Ingushetia in 2002. The FSB is sometimes accused of staging terrorist acts for political reasons, then covering up its involvement.

The most recent report, according to Boris Ozdoyev, was a 14-page paper outlining FSB abuses. His son delivered it to Moscow, then flew back to Ingushetia on March 11. He brought with him a DVD of "The Last Emperor" and planned to drive to the home of his friend, Mikhail Akhiliyev, to watch it. He never made it.

"We drove around, asking around. Nothing," said Akhiliyev. "No car. No him."

Boris Ozdoyev said his investigation into Rashid's disappearance points the finger directly at Koryakov. Ozdoyev said his other son found Rashid's missing car, a green Lada, covered by a tarp at an FSB garage, but it was later moved. Ozdoyev said he then picked up rumors that the kidnappers were FSB officers.

So, following the customs of local Ingush society, Ozdoyev and other male elders from his family convened a council meeting with one of the FSB officers and his relatives. At the meeting, Ozdoyev said, the FSB officer admitted involvement and said the operation was ordered by Koryakov.

"They staged an accident and stopped [Rashid's] car," Ozdoyev said. Then the abductors grabbed Rashid, stuffed him into another vehicle and drove him away while others removed the green Lada from the scene, Ozdoyev recalled the FSB officer telling the group. "He didn't know why. He was personally ordered by Col. Koryakov."

Musa Ozdoyev, 65, a retired economist and Boris's cousin, confirmed in an interview that he was at the council meeting and heard the FSB officer admit his involvement. "He was sitting in the [other] car. He said, 'I was playing the role of driver.' The others took care of the rest," Musa said.

[..]

So far, the official investigation of Rashid Ozdoyev's disappearance has wound up in a dead end. The chief investigator, Nurdi Doklayev, said he could not rule out FSB involvement but could not interview Koryakov or other officers because the agency had disavowed any knowledge about the disappearance in writing. "I have an official answer from them that they don't have any information," Doklayev said. "How can I go to them when I don't have any evidence?"

Doklayev said he doubted Ozdoyev's reports would have inspired the FSB to kidnap him because they were not that important. "If we disappeared for writing reports there wouldn't be any of us here," he said. But he said that Ozdoyev's family, with a son in the FSB, should be able to solve the crime itself.

(end of excerpt)

The failure of international forces to curb Afghanistan's soaring poppy production threatens to destabilize the entire Central Asian region and bankroll a new generation of terrorists, Kazakhstan's foreign minister said yesterday.

[..]

"Our concern is that there have been so many conferences, so many organizations formed to fight drugs and terrorism, but nothing concrete gets done," Mr. Tokayev told editors and reporters of The Washington Times in an interview at the Kazakhstan Embassy.

"My feeling is that the real terrorists are watching those conferences and speeches, and they're laughing at us," he said.

[..]

"The terrorists use the money from drugs to increase their power and fight off government efforts to eradicate new crops. It's a vicious cycle and a very dangerous one for us."

The NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan will miss a late June deadline to expand its forces beyond the capital of Kabul to a number of provinces.

(end of excerpt)

Days after the Pentagon released its annual report highlighting China's steady military buildup, defense officials have disclosed new details of plans to beef up U.S. military forces in the Pacific.

Officials say several more attack submarines will be deployed at the U.S. base at Guam. In the past, the base has been used mostly as a major supply depot and bomber airfield.

Under a force-restructuring plan being worked out by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Pacific Command, Guam is slated to become a major strategic operational hub for naval forces keeping an eye on China.

"We need to be able to get to the Taiwan Strait faster than we can right now," one official said.

Guam has three attack submarines that were recently moved to the island. As many as three more submarines could be deployed there by 2006, officials said.

The other major power projection effort in the Pacific will be the deployment of another aircraft carrier closer to Asia. Officials tell us Guam does not have the infrastructure to support a carrier battle group.

Plans call for deploying a group from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, we are told. The carrier battle group would be able to augment the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier group based in Japan.

(end of excerpt)

Enron Corp. traders openly discussed manipulating the California power market and joked about stealing from grandmothers during the Western energy crisis in 2000-01, according to transcripts of telephone calls filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The transcripts, some littered with profanity, were filed by a public utility district near Seattle.

The calls are central to the Justice Department's investigation of Enron's trading practices.

[..]

According to the Snohomish County Public Utility District, which obtained tapes of trader conversations from the Justice Department and transcribed them, traders openly discussed creating congestion on transmission lines, taking generating units offline to pump up electricity prices and overall manipulation of the California power market.

For example, in one transcript a trader asks about "all the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers of California."

To which the Enron trader responds, "Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she's the one who couldn't figure out how to ... [expletive] vote on the butterfly ballot."

In another transcript, an Enron trader identified as David discusses shutting down a steamer from a generating unit to increase prices.

"If we shut it down, could you bring it back up in three – three or four hours, something like that?" David asks.

"Oh, yeah," another trader says.

"Well, why don't you just go ahead and shut her down, then, if that's OK," David says.

A lawyer for the utility district hopes to recoup as much as $2 billion in what he calls unjust profits.

(end of excerpt)

# posted by Stonecutters @ 6/06/2004 07:31:00 PM | Link To This Post |  0 comments

Southern lawmakers relied on election-year politics and old-fashioned vote trading to secure a deal Friday that would pay tobacco farmers nearly $10 billion to give up a federal quota program that has propped up their prices.

The buyout, sought for years by the growers and politicians who represent them, was included in a corporate tax bill unveiled by Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

The measure would pay $9.6 billion over five years to an estimated 400,000 owners for giving up "allotments" that dictate how much they can grow each year.

Thomas said his committee will act on the legislation next week and that it will likely be taken up in the full House the following week.

Keith Parrish, executive director of the National Tobacco Growers Association, predicted up to half the nation's tobacco farmers will quit growing the crop upon a buyout. The government has been reducing the amount of tobacco farmers can sell in recent years due to declining cigarette sales and an increased reliance on cheaper imports.

Farmers have been clamoring for a buyout for years. But Republicans' narrow control of the House and Senate and the possibility that they could lose it this fall boosted its momentum.

"I think the fate of the election, at least in the South, is in large part resting on this one issue," Parrish said.

(end of excerpt)

A group of airline executives appeared Thursday to have won an incremental victory in preventing the Bush administration from requiring the industry to pick up an additional $435 million in airport security costs.

The extra amount would have more than doubled what the troubled airlines pay for passenger and baggage screening to $750 million annually.

But a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee declined to include the increase as it drafted a $32 billion Department of Homeland Security spending bill for fiscal 2005. While the move represented an interim victory for the industry, the proposal is not dead, as the spending bill faces many legislative steps.

"We are very pleased that the subcommittee did not include a provision that would be in essence a 138 percent tax on the airlines," said Mary Frances Fagan, a spokeswoman for American Airlines Inc. of Fort Worth. "We are hopeful the Senate will do the same."

(end of excerpt)

Campaign finance laws passed two years ago forbid unlimited "soft money" donations that were once funneled to the parties. But the $5 million given by Sustainable World and its wealthy founder, Linda Pritzker of the Hyatt Hotel family, to the Joint Victory Campaign represents what's being called the new soft money in presidential politics.

Named for the part of the tax code under which they're organized, these 527 organizations – of which there are hundreds – will spend millions on television and radio ads and political mail, trying to influence the outcome in November without directly endorsing any candidates. And it's all legal, despite the much-touted campaign finance reform known by the names of its Senate sponsors, John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

"Certainly a large chunk of the soft money that used to go to the political parties is now flowing to 527 groups," said Steven Weiss of the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog agency that has called on the Federal Election Commission to regulate such groups.

When liberal groups, such as MoveOn.org, started buying anti-Bush ads, Republicans filed a complaint with the FEC, saying that the 527s amount to a "shadow party" that can evade laws on soft-money spending.

Last month, the FEC postponed ruling for at least 90 days, essentially leaving the issue alone for this election cycle.

Republicans had been waiting for the FEC to rule before donating much to the few conservative 527 groups.

(end of excerpt)

Meetings of the Portage County Board of Elections rarely attract a crowd.

But when the board met last week to talk about how voters would cast ballots in November, so many people showed up that the session was moved to a larger room--one cluttered with storage boxes, clipboards and floor-to-ceiling stacks of collapsible polling booths.

The county has been offered $1.4 million in federal money to purchase state-of-the-art electronic voting machines, a more accessible method the National Federation of the Blind wants to force, filing a lawsuit against Portage and other Ohio counties.

But change has been anything but easy. Instead, there is a newfound fondness for the punch-card ballot, which became the notorious icon for the controversial 2000 presidential election.

Armed with reports from computer scientists and news accounts of problems involving touch-screen voting, nearly two dozen area residents turned out to lobby against the new technology. The board voted 4-0 to put off the purchase.

So this county, like at least a third of those in the electoral battleground of Ohio, will use punch-card ballots in November.

[..]

At the center of the current debate is an effort pushed by computer scientists, politicians and grass-roots activists to require manufacturers of electronic voting machines to equip them with printers to generate a voter-verified paper trail.

The paper records, either in a form resembling a cash register tape or an actual printed ballot, allows voters to verify their choices while providing documentation for recounts--which some say is necessary because the technology is still far too vulnerable to fraud or malfunction.

[..]

About 50 million Americans--nearly a third of the nation's registered voters--are expected to use electronic voting machines in November, more than double the number who used them in 2000.

[..]

Some states, including Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, have passed laws requiring a paper record or receipt by 2006 for every vote cast on electronic voting machines.

Nevada, where touch-screen voting will be the norm this November, is requiring the installation of printers for the presidential election.

And Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) is sponsoring legislation that would require voter-verified paper trails nationwide.

[..]

Meanwhile, advocates for the blind and disabled, who generally support electronic voting, oppose paper trails because they would require assistance to verify the paper record.

(end of excerpt)

Following urgent measures that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has taken to maintain troop strength in Iraq, government officials are fending off a wave of fears about a possible military draft.

The Pentagon, the Selective Service System and news outlets have received a flurry of e-mails inquiring about a supposed secret plan to bring back the draft after the November elections, so 18-to-25-year-olds could be inducted in 2005.

Reports also have circulated that the administration plans to change the law that limits any possible draft to men to allow for the induction of women.

[..]

A draft would be so unpopular that few politicians will acknowledge even contemplating it.

[..]

Still, the Selective Service System, which would handle a draft, has been compelled to post a statement on its Web site asserting that despite the rumors, it "is not getting ready to conduct a draft for the U.S. Armed Forces--either with a special-skills or a regular draft."

"Both the president and the secretary of defense have stated on more than one occasion that there is no need for a draft for the war on terrorism or any likely contingency, such as Iraq," the Selective Service statement said. "Additionally, the Congress has not acted on any proposed legislation to reinstate a draft."

[..]

The draft was ended in 1973 during the wind-down of the Vietnam War. Men ages 18 through 25 still must be registered with Selective Service, and 15 million of them currently are in the draft pool.

Selective Service spokesman Pat Schuback said top officials of his agency have discussed including women in a draft of medical specialists with key job skills. That would require Congress to change the law.

[..]

Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, spokesman for the Army's personnel branch, said he knew of no change in the Defense Department's policy of maintaining an all-volunteer military.

"We haven't done any preparations for a draft," he said.

Asked at a Pentagon town meeting with military personnel last month if there would be a draft after the election, Rumsfeld replied, "I don't think so.

"We don't need a draft," he added. "We're able to attract and retain all the people we need. . . . So I can't imagine that this country would go back to a draft."

But with combat in Iraq and Afghanistan likely for the foreseeable future, the U.S. military--especially the Army--is becoming strained.

[..]

A bill introduced in January 2003 by retiring Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) would require all men and women 18 through 25 to "perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security."

The measure was referred to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where it has yet to be acted upon.

Another bill introduced in the House in January 2003, would likewise require draft-age men and women to perform military or civilian national security service.

That bill was sponsored by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), who said his bill would address the unfairness of having minorities shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden of military service.

He said the bill was meant to demonstrate his opposition to the war in Iraq and to emphasize that "there should be a more equitable representation of all classes of Americans making the sacrifice for this great country."

That bill was sent to the House Armed Services Committee and never acted upon. Also dormant in that committee is a measure by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) that would abolish the Selective Service System.

(end of excerpt)

On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, French President Jacques Chirac rejected President Bush's statements comparing the war in Iraq with the liberation of Europe from the Nazis in World War II.

With Bush at his side at a joint news conference, the French president said he understood why Bush made the comparison, but he added, "It is very difficult to compare historical situations that differ, because history is not repetitive."

[..]

But Chirac's remark came at an awkward moment because Bush will visit Normandy on Sunday to commemorate the D-Day anniversary. Earlier in the news conference, Chirac said the French people are "deeply grateful" for the sacrifice of American soldiers in World War II.

(end of excerpt)

Fighters loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr began to withdraw Saturday from the centers of Najaf and Kufa, where they have caused disturbances since April.

At the same time, Sadr met with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric, according to several reports.

Shiite leaders and American officials said the armed followers of Sadr, known as al-Mahdi Army, had cleared out of many parts of Najaf and that they appeared to be making preparations to leave altogether. The Shiite leaders said U.S. forces, who encircled the city in recent weeks, also had cleared out of the city center and areas near the Imam Ali Shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam.

The withdrawal, coupled with the apparent meeting of the rival clerics, who are vying for influence in the new Iraq, gave rise to hopes that the 2-month-old rebellion led by Sadr, whose followers at one point controlled a half-dozen cities in southern Iraq, might be coming to an end.

"The people of Najaf are walking the streets, the cars are moving on every avenue, the Iraqi police have moved back in," said Adnan Ali, a senior official with the Dawa Party, whose leaders were directly involved in the negotiations. "This is a good step forward."

[..]

As in other cities in southern Iraq, Sadr's fighters were allowed to walk off with their guns, suggesting there was little to guarantee that they would not rise up again or that the truce would hold.

As a condition of the withdrawal, Iraqi officials agreed to suspend the execution of the arrest warrant issued for Sadr for his suspected role in the murder of a rival cleric last April.

(end of excerpt)

The Army reported on Friday 16 more criminal investigations into possible misconduct by U.S. soldiers against detainees and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The revised figures brought to 85 the number of inquiries by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division into detainee deaths and alleged assaults and thefts by U.S. soldiers in the region over the past year and a half. Counting 22 other investigative actions by commanders in the field, the cases now total 107 and have involved at least 111 Iraqis and Afghans, Army officials said.

[..]

In releasing the updated figures, the Army provided no information about the people, places or times involved. In the past, military officials have cited concerns about privacy and judicial process to justify keeping disclosures to a minimum.

Friday's tally identified many of the investigations as completed. But even for those, the Army offered nothing that would shed light on any of the outcomes.

"I have absolutely no idea whether anyone was charged or not in most of them," an Army spokesman said. "CID is not disclosing any more details at this time."

The new numbers were based on data available as of May 28. They showed 36 death investigations, an increase of three over the last report two weeks ago. Of those, 31 involved Iraqis and five Afghans.

Cases of alleged abuses totaled 49--45 of them involving Iraqis. The investigations in Iraq divided into 24 assault cases, two sexual assault cases and 19 theft cases. The investigations in Afghanistan included one sexual assault case and three other assault cases.

(end of excerpt)

Iraq's new prime minister told the U.N. Security Council his government will retain control of the country's armed forces and coordinate joint military operations and security policy with the U.S.-led multinational force, according to a letter obtained Sunday by The Associated Press.

Iyad Allawi sent the letter as the council held a special meeting Sunday to discuss his view of the relationship and a letter of response from U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell who pledged that the American commander of the multinational force "will work in partnership with the sovereign government of Iraq in helping to provide security."

[..]

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Sunday an agreement on a new resolution could come within the next two days. Richard Grenell, spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations refused to give a date but said: "This process is coming to an end and we are hopeful for a vote soon."

(end of excerpt)

A man who fought with several people and bit a bystander died after sheriff's deputies used pepper spray on him, authorities said.
An autopsy was scheduled to determine the cause of death.

Callers told a dispatcher Friday afternoon that a man was behaving erratically, Broward County sheriff's spokeswoman Liz Calzadilla said.

Deputies and paramedics found Derek Kendrick struggling with neighbors who were trying to hold him down, Calzadilla said.

He "was extremely combative and when deputies got closer to try to restrain him, he turned and bit a bystander," Calzadilla said.

The deputies used their spray, and Kendrick was taken to Broward General Medical Center.

Kendrick, 36, died while being treated at the hospital, she said. She would not give specifics about his condition, citing medical privacy laws.

(end of excerpt)

The United States and Britain revised their Security Council resolution on transferring sovereignty to Iraq on Friday, giving the country's new interim government authority to order the U.S.-led multinational force to leave at any time.

The previous draft introduced Tuesday declared the council's readiness to terminate the force's mandate by January 2006 or at the request of the transitional government formed after elections held by Jan. 31, 2005.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told the U.N. Security Council on Thursday that the incoming government wants the multinational force to stay to prevent civil war, and he told The Associated Press on Friday that he could not foresee its departure before power is transferred to the transitional government early next year.

(end of excerpt)

Rep. Jim Moran has ticked off plenty of people in his long political career — he's been the target of an ethics investigation and once got into a shoving match with a fellow congressman.

But it's his remarks last year about Jewish support for the Iraq war that have led to the most serious challenge he has faced in 14 years in Congress.

His opponent in Tuesday's primary — former Capitol Hill staffer and lobbyist Andrew Rosenberg — has raised more money than nearly any other primary challenger in the country and has attracted high-level Democratic consultants Robert Shrum and Tad Devine, who also work for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

[..]

Rosenberg's challenge was prompted to by comments Moran made in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

Said Moran: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going and I think they should."

Many considered the remarks anti-Semitic, and the allegations received a boost this past week when Moran's longtime pollster, Alan Secrest, said he quit over anti-Semitic comments Moran made at a private campaign meeting.

[..]

Moran said he's frustrated that his vote against the war has received less attention than his comments about the war. "It's an easy stance now that the war has gone bad, but I wasn't following the political winds," he said.

(end of excerpt)

U.S. Army Spc. Israel Rivera had just returned to duty at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last October after minor surgery to remove shrapnel from his face. He was checking his e-mail, he recalls, when another military intelligence soldier approached.

"Hey Izzy, did you hear about those detainees that raped that one kid?" asked the other soldier, Spc. Armin J. Cruz.

Rivera hadn't heard of the incident and asked what was going to happen to the prisoners. Cruz, Rivera said, responded with an invitation: "Do you want to go see what's happening?"

[..]

In a telephone interview with The Times, Rivera described his involvement in the case for the first time, saying that he visited the cellblock largely out of curiosity and that he was stunned by what he saw: detainees being stripped naked, made to crawl on their stomachs and chained into a ball of limbs and flesh on the prison floor.

Rivera, 20, is the first military intelligence soldier to come forward publicly and say that he witnessed a fellow intelligence soldier, Cruz, taking part in the abuse of prisoners in the isolation cellblock at Abu Ghraib. Cruz has also been cited in testimony by Sgt. Samuel J. Provance III, another intelligence officer, who said Cruz "was known to bang on the table, yell, scream, and maybe assaulted detainees during interrogations in the booth."

[..]

He insisted that his superiors did not know about the abuse, let alone sanction it.

Rivera said that as he got ready to leave the cellblock amid anguished pleas for help from the prisoners, Cruz stopped him to make sure he didn't plan to talk.

"Before I walked out of that bay, he looked at me and asked me, 'Izzy, you're not going to tell anybody, are you?' " Rivera said, speaking by telephone from Baghdad this week.

"And I looked at him and I said: 'No, absolutely not, Cruz. You have nothing to worry about.' "

Rivera said he never informed his superiors and still hasn't shared his account with military investigators.

When he met with an Army Criminal Investigation Division agent in January, he refused to talk unless he was provided with an attorney.

"The big reason I'm doing this [speaking publicly] is there's a big sense of guilt that I have," Rivera said. "I didn't know there was a huge conspiracy [of abuse at Abu Ghraib], but I did know about that one night…. I should have said to my sergeant, 'Hey Sergeant, I saw this,' and a lot of it would have been dealt with if I had."

[..]

Rivera said he had not been charged and was not certain of his legal status.

[..]

Rivera said that was not the case. "Anyone who says this was condoned by MI — no, absolutely not," he said, adding that Cruz knew about the activities in the cellblock only because he was friends with an MP, Spc. Sabrina Harman, who has since been charged.

(end of excerpt)

President Bush said Friday he had chosen former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

If confirmed by the Senate, Danforth, a Republican who is a popular figure among both Republicans and Democrats, would succeed the current ambassador, John Negroponte, who will become ambassador to Iraq.

Since 2001, Danforth has been Bush's special envoy to war- torn Sudan, where he has tried to mediate a peace agreement. He served in the Senate for 18 years and was on Bush's short list as a possible vice presidential choice in 2000.

[..]

A lawyer with a practice in St. Louis, Danforth, 68, is a former attorney general of Missouri. An heir to the Ralston Purina fortune, he is also a licensed Episcopal minister and a graduate of Princeton University and Yale University's law school.

Bush nominated Negroponte in April to be the ambassador to Iraq's interim government, which is to gain sovereignty on June 30.

Easy Senate confirmation of Danforth seems likely, given his background as a senator and as a troubleshooter.

[..]

During the Clinton years, he acted as special counsel appointed by then-Attorney General Janet Reno. He conducted a 14-month inquiry into the deaths in 1993 of about 80 Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. His investigation cleared the FBI of wrongdoing.

(end of excerpt)

While Wi-Fi is hot, security is not.

Even the makers of Wi-Fi routers, access points and other gadgets privately say that as many as 80 percent of home users don't bother to enable basic encryption or other protections against connection theft, eavesdropping and network invasion.

Experts say that while Wi-Fi hardware makers have made initial setup easy, the enabling of security is anything but. Meanwhile, average users are no longer tech savvy. The gadgets are mainstream, appearing on the shelves of Wal-Mart and other mass retailers.

During his wardrive, Outmesguine counted 3,600 hot spots, compared with 100 on the same route in 2000. Worldwide, makers of Wi-Fi gear for homes and small offices posted sales of more than $1.3 billion in 2003, a 43 percent jump over 2002, according to Synergy Research Group.

The result? A lot of wide-open networks that offer anyone within range of the Wi-Fi signal free access to a high-speed Internet connection. Any hacking is unlikely to be noticed, while illegal activity would be traceable only to the name on the Internet account.

To make matters worse, users who don't secure their networks are often the very people who don't keep their computers up to date with the latest security patches and antivirus software.

"What we probably really have here is a whole bunch of very vulnerable systems exposed to attack or infection over a network that has no access control," said Al Potter, manager of technical services at the security firm TruSecure's ICSA Labs.

Companies that sell Wi-Fi products want their hardware to be simple and interoperable, especially as more than just computers - wireless TV monitors, digital music receivers, DVD players and game consoles, for example - are wirelessly connecting to home networks.

At the same time, they want to keep support calls and returns low, so they turn off security by default.

"We've been putting friendly front ends in front of technology for a long time," said Peter Evans, vice president of business development at AirDefense Inc., a wireless security firm. "I'm not sure why the industry has not yet made those tools much easier to use."

Yet even knowledgeable consumers find it frustrating to set up security. It can involve punching in dozens of characters as the passphrase for each connected device, and navigating screens filled with a dizzying set of acronyms for encryption and authentication.

Typically, there isn't much explanation about what they are and why they're needed.

Problems grow when consumers try to mix a laptop wireless card from one vendor with a Wi-Fi access point from another. With security turned off, everything works fine. With basic encryption turn on, the headaches begin.

(end of excerpt)

SAN FRANCISCO - "Toxic dust" found on computer processors and monitors contains chemicals linked to reproductive and neurological disorders, according to a new study by several environmental groups.

The survey, released Thursday by Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Computer TakeBack Campaign and Clean Production Action, is among the first to identify brominated flame retardants on the surfaces of common devices in homes and offices.

Electronics companies began using polybrominated diphenyl (PBDEs) and other flame retardants in the 1970s, arguing that the toxins prevent fires and cannot escape from plastic casings.

"This will be a great surprise to everyone who uses a computer," said Ted Smith, director of the Toxics Coalition. "The chemical industry is subjecting us all to what amounts to chemical trespass by putting these substances into use in commerce. They continue to use their chemicals in ways that are affecting humans and other species."

Researchers collected samples of dust from dozens of computers in eight states, including university computer labs in New York, Michigan and Texas, legislative offices in California, and an interactive computer display at a children's museum in Maine. They tested for three types of brominated flame retardants suspected to be hazardous.

The most toxic piece of equipment discovered by the researchers was a new flat-screen monitor in a university in New York, implying that newer equipment isn't necessarily cleaner.

Penta- and octa-brominated diphenyl will be taken off the market by the end of the year. Environmental groups are demanding legislation that would ban deca-brominated diphenyl, too.

PBDEs, which have caused neurological damage in laboratory rats in numerous studies, are related to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). PCBs have been used in fire extinguishers, fluorescent lights and liquid insulators since the 1920s.

PCBs were outlawed in the 1970s...

[..]

Independent researchers who reviewed the new study say consumers shouldn't throw out their computers, and they needn't wear special gloves or minimize exposure to computer monitors. There's no known way to remove dust-born PBDEs, so special wipes or sprays wouldn't reduce chemical exposure.

"The levels in the dust are enough to raise a red flag, but not enough to create a crisis," said Dr. Gina Solomon, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and assistant professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco. "I have an old computer monitor in front of me now, and I'm not about to throw it away. But when I get a new one, it darn well will be free of these chemicals."

The electronics industry has been reducing or eliminating some brominated flame retardants since the late 1990s, when European countries began prohibiting the sale of products that contain the chemicals.

Dell Inc. and many other computer makers continue using a flame retardant related to PBDEs on circuit boards. They use lead, mercury and other toxins in central processing units and monitors. But Dell, along with Apple Computer Inc. and others, stopped using PBDEs in 2002.

"People can be very confident about their new computer purchase," Dell spokesman Bryant Hilton said. "We've worked a lot with suppliers, and we require audits and material data sheets on all our products. It's an important topic to be aware of, and brominated flame retardants are something we've been very focused on and will continue to be focused on."

(end of excerpt)

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr didn't mince words when discussing Iraq's new government.

Al Sadr didn't appear today in the mosque in Kufa where he usually preaches. Instead he sent an aide to deliver the message on his behalf.

Al Sadr insisted he would settle for ``nothing less'' than a fully elected leadership, saying the U.S. has shown ``impertinence and domination'' in appointing a new prime minister and president.

The cleric threatened to stage protests and sit-ins against the U.N. if it doesn't change its policy in Iraq.

Al-Sadr's uprising began when the coalition shut down his newspaper, arrested a top aide and issued an arrest warrant charging him with the murder of a moderate cleric in April 2003.

(end of excerpt)

Sandwich - Army contractors have uncovered what they think is a depleted uranium round at the Cape Edwards military base.

The Cape Cod Times reported that the round found last week was scheduled to be shipped to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland for further analysis.

Army officials have long said depleted uranium was never fired at Camp Edwards. But some activists say the military didn't always monitor defense contractors who improved and developed weapons.

Depleted uranium is radioactive, but the Pentagon considers it a valuable weapon because it can pierce tank armor.

The 20 millimeter round was found during excavation as part of the ongoing Camp Edwards cleanup about a foot deep in the soil.

Army officials say the round is NOT a danger to public health.

(end of excerpt)

Mexican shoemaker Botas Industriales de Piletas SA's exports to the United States have dropped by 90 percent in the past three years as Chinese competitors sell work boots and loafers for $3 less than it costs Piletas to make them.

''We can't compete with those costs," said Abel Saavedra, director of international marketing at the Leon, Mexico, company. ''Basically, it's all about price."

The benefits Mexico gained a decade ago by signing the North American Free Trade Agreement have eroded in the past several years, in part because China began exporting at reduced tariffs after entering the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Chinese sales to the United States surged 52 percent since then, compared with a 1.5 percent rise in Mexican exports. In the previous three years, Mexico had increased sales 58 percent to the United States.

In April, Mexican exports fell 10 percent from the previous month to $14.9 billion, the government said in a report. Exports in April grew 10.2 percent from the same month last year, down from 21 percent growth in March.

Mexico leads a list of developing nations that includes Poland and the Czech Republic that are losing exports to China after having relied on cheap labor in the past decade to boost sales abroad. The average Mexican factory worker earns about $300 a month, triple the average wage in China.

''China has an abundant supply of labor and an abundant supply of capital," said Mohamed El-Erian, who studies China's effect on countries to determine which emerging-market government bonds to buy with the $14 billion he manages at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, Calif. ''If you compete with China as a producer, you see intense competition."

(end of excerpt)

Waltham police say they plan to charge a teacher with assault and battery for allegedly brandishing a jackknife inside a sixth-grade classroom.

Several students at the John W. McDevitt Middle School told police that their computer teacher, Erik J. D'Entremont, threatened a student while holding a pocketknife with an exposed blade. The victim reported the incident at the end of the school day to another teacher, who then alerted authorities.

When confronted by Waltham police, the 37-year-old teacher turned over a jackknife that was stored in his desk.

Waltham police Captain William M. Stanton said the alleged incident occurred in the morning of a recent early dismissal day.

Stanton said the students told police that D'Entremont "walked over to the kid, opened the knife, and threatened him with it. Several kids saw it. There was never any contact between the student and the teacher.

"He was probably joking. No one can imagine why he did what he did," said Stanton.

D'Entremont, who lives in Mansfield, was not arrested at the time, according to Stanton. He has been mailed a summons and is scheduled to appear in Waltham District Court on June 14, the captain said. As of last Thursday, the Waltham District Court had not confirmed that date.

Superintendent Susan I. Parrella confirmed that D'Entremont has been suspended indefinitely, with two days' paid leave and the following days without pay.

"Some of it I can't talk about because it's under investigation," said Parrella. "He is being charged."

(end of excerpt)

A dentist who claims he met three of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Shreveport one year before the attacks has mysteriously fallen ill and is on life support.

Dr. David Graham was driving back to Shreveport from Houston on Saturday night when he became sick. A friend said Graham began suffering organ failure and medical tests show possible poisoning. He is hospitalized in Houston.

Graham is trying to publish a book that claims meetings with the hijackers and another Middle Eastern man who is a federal fugitive here.

Mike Sledge, a friend of Graham, has a manuscript of Graham's book, "The Graham Report: The true story of three 9-11 hijackers who were reported to the FBI 10 months before 9-11." In it, Graham claims he met the hijackers at a home in Shreveport in September 2000 and thought they were plotting an attack on Barksdale Air Force Base. He said he reported them to the FBI.

"Certainly he was digging into some sensitive areas that may easily have caused some people some consternation," Sledge said.

Houston police referred questions to the FBI office in Houston, which did not return calls for comment.

Federal authorities in Shreveport said they are not involved and don't know if there is anything sinister to Graham's illness or if it was suicide attempt or was connected to Graham's personal or business life.

(end of excerpt)

The Dutch Government has called for a significant return of powers from Brussels to European Union member countries, saying that European integration has gone too far and lacks popular consent.

It said it was time to consider returning control of health, culture, social policy, aid to poor regions and the subsidy regime of the Common Agricultural Policy.

The aims were laid out by Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot in a speech in Berlin on Wednesday night. It marks a dramatic departure for a founding member of the European Union that could once be counted on to support every push for closer union.

While Mr Bot endorsed the overall idea of European federalism, he presented a list of demands that go further than those suggested by Michael Howard, the British Conservative Party leader.

Calling on the EU to learn self-restraint, he said it was time to stop shoving fresh treaties down the throats of citizens every couple of years.

"We must realise that there are limits to the degree of integration that Europeans can digest," he said. "People must be given a chance to adjust.

"There is a widespread sense of unease about Europe, about loss of national identity, and about an EU that increasingly intrudes into their everyday lives.

"The European Union is, after all, a union of member states. That is something we should never forget."

(end of excerpt)

Wal-Mart Stores have enjoyed more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments across the United States, according to a new study released by a Washington, D.C.-based research group.

Good Jobs First, a research group monitoring state and local job subsidies, found 244 cases in which Wal-Mart retail stores or the distribution centers that service them have received state or local economic development subsidies. The subsidies amounted to just over $1 billion according to the report released Sunday.

The study, the first comprehensive national examination of subsidies received by the giant retailer, found more than 240 cases in which the construction of new Wal-Mart facilities was assisted by public resources. In addition to 160 retail outlets, the study found subsidies at 84 of Wal-Mart's distribution centers, representing more than 90 percent of the network of huge warehouses the company has built to facilitate its rapid expansion.

The subsidy deals for individual distribution centers ranged as high as $46 million (with an average of $7.4 million), while for retail outlets the largest was $12 million (with an average of $2.8 million). The study was funded in part by the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, but researchers said the union played no role in the research or analysis.

Wal-Mart plans to open more than 300 new or expanded stores in the United States in 2004, the largest number of which will be supermarket-discount store hybrids called supercenters.

(end of excerpt)

Mercenaries accused of planning a coup in an oil-rich African state also worked under contract for the British government providing security in Iraq, raising fears about the way highly sensitive security work is awarded, The Observer has learnt.

The Department for International Development (DfID) signed a £250,000 deal last summer with the South-African based Meteoric Tactical Solutions (MTS) to provide 'close protection' for department staff, including bodyguards and drivers for its senior official in Iraq.

Two of the firm's owners were arrested in Zimbabwe last March with infamous British mercenary and former SAS officer Simon Mann. The men are accused of plotting an armed coup in Equatorial Guinea.

MTS is based in Pretoria and run by former members of South African special forces. Its owners are Lourens 'Hecky' Horn, Hermanus Carlse and Festus van Rooyen. Horn, the firm's Iraq contact when the contract with Britain was signed, is now in Chikurubi prison in Zimbabwe with Carlse.

The pair appeared in court on 23 March accused of forming an advance party for the coup with Mann. It is alleged they arrived in the Zimbabwe to buy weapons for a coup plot in Equatorial Guinea. The trio tried to purchase 61 AK-47 rifles, 45,000 rounds of ammunition, 1,000 rounds of anti-tank ammunition and 160 grenades.

The weapons were allegedly to be used by 70 mercenaries planning an assault in Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea, to kidnap or kill President Obiang. But the arrested men claim they were just hired to guard diamond mines in the Congo.

(end of excerpt)

A train in Maryland was evacuated on Sunday due to a "possible bomb threat," according to local police.

Sgt. Powers with the Maryland State Police (search) said that an Amtrak (search ) train was being held between Mexico Farms, Md., and Cumberland, Md.

Amtrak Spokesman Dan Stessel told Fox News that Amtrak Train 30, the "Three Rivers" train between Chicago and Washington, D.C., was being searched by Cumberland Police with bomb-sniffing dogs.

Two passengers aboard the train were said to have aroused suspicion, which led to the Cumberland Police being notified.

(end of excerpt)

Hospitals in two major Canadian cities have been hit by a superbug which has claimed more Canadian lives than SARS, the Canadian Medical Association Journal reports this weekend.

The bug - clostridium difficile - strikes at the colon, producing a toxin that can cause severe diarrhoea and fever, the Journal reports.

It usually infects people after they've taken antibiotics and in serious cases patients are forced to have their intestines removed.

The Journal said at least 79 people in Montreal and 10 in Calgary may have died after being infected by the bug. Patients in Montreal contracted the infection in 2003 or early 2004.

However, one medical expert disputed the Journal's figures.

Francoise Chagnon, head of professional services at the McGill University Health Centre, told CBC News that only 36 people have so far died from the bug, compared to 44 deaths due to SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in Canada.

Nevertheless, another expert, Sandra Dial, an intensive care physician at the Montreal Chest Institute who helped compile the figures for the Canadian Medical Association said: "It clearly is something worse than we've seen before.

"It's a new situation so I think patients should be made aware."

(end of excerpt)

The unexpectedly small reduction is likely to disappoint the 260,000 businesses covered by this quasi-public state agency based in San Francisco.

But State Fund Executive Vice President Jim Neary said the rate cut "prudently balances'' the desire to pass on savings expected from two recent legislative reforms and the organization's need to strengthen its cash surplus.

[..]

As The Chronicle reported in April, State Fund's financial position has been strained because it had to accept a huge influx of business between 1999 and 2003, as more than 20 private workers' comp insurers went bankrupt after the price war that followed deregulation of rates in 1995.

(end of excerpt)

While Americans are shelling out record prices for fuel, Iraqis pay only about 5 cents a gallon for gasoline -- a benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars subsidies bankrolled by American taxpayers.

[..]

Filling a 22-gallon tank in Baghdad with low-grade fuel costs just $1.10, plus a 50-cent tip for the attendant. A tankful of high-test costs $2.75.

[..]

Although Iraq is a major petroleum producer, the country has little capacity to refine its own gasoline. So the U.S. government pays about $1.50 a gallon to buy fuel in neighboring countries and deliver it to Iraqi stations. A three-month supply costs American taxpayers more than $500 million, not including the cost of military escorts to fend off attacks by Iraqi insurgents.

The arrangement keeps a fleet of 4,200 tank trucks constantly on the move, ferrying fuel to Iraq.

[..]

Iraq's fuel subsidies, which are intended to mollify drivers used to low-priced fuel under Saddam, have coupled with the opening of the borders to create an anarchic car culture in Baghdad.

[..]

Iraq has no sales tax, no registration, no license plates and no auto insurance.

[..]

Analysts say the U.S. gas subsidies can't last forever -- and Iraqis may be in for an unpleasant shock when they end. In the meantime, however, the American taxpayer continues to foot a huge bill.

"The U.S. taxpayer has a right to be indignant, and Iraqis have to be warned about the long-run damages of this," said Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The minute the aid goes out, the party is over. And there's going to be a hell of a hangover."

The U.S. government paid even more last year for Iraqis' gasoline -- between $1.59 and $1.70 per gallon -- when the imports were contracted to Halliburton, the Texas oil services giant formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

(end of excerpt)

Arizona taxpayers pay an estimated $1.3 billion a year for health care, education and prison costs of undocumented immigrants, according to a report released Thursday by a national group backing Protect Arizona Now.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform charges in its report that Arizona spends $810 million annually to educate undocumented immigrants and their children, $400 million for health care and $80 million on prison costs of undocumented immigrants.

Dan Stein, FAIR's executive director, said Thursday in Phoenix that the report used U.S. census data, state agencies' reports and other published materials. But he couldn't specify exactly how the agency reached the conclusions.

(end of excerpt)

Senior Likud ministers have reached a deal with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon regarding his Gaza Strip disengagement plan and intend to support it in the cabinet Sunday, Israel Radio reported.

Based on the new formula, ministers Binyamin Netanyahu, Silvan Shalom and Limor Livnat, will vote in favor of the plan, giving it a large majority of 14 ministers in favor and only seven opposed.

The cabinet began discussing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan Sunday despite a recommendation by Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy to postpone the vote for an additional 48 hours.

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz rejected the proposal to postpone the vote, saying that the vote in the cabinet had serious diplomatic repercussions.

The High Court rejected all five petitions Sunday against Sharon's decision to fire National Union Ministers Benny Elon and Avigdor Lieberman who oppose the plan. The ruling means that the dismissed ministers will not be allowed to join the cabinet meeting.

Benny Elon told channel 2 news that he now considered himself a part of the opposition and would do all he could to see Sharon be removed from his post.

According to the new formula, the plan will be approved by the cabinet but settlements will not be removed until March 2005, when Sharon will have to hold another vote at the cabinet to approve the move. In the nine months until then, the infrastructure for the settlement removal will be prepared.

Two ministers have already spoken at the meeting and another ten are scheduled to speak.

(end of excerpt)

Hundreds of anti-war protesters rallied from the White House to the West Coast on Saturday, calling for an end to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and the immediate withdrawal of American troops.

Protesters chanting "Bring the troops home" gathered in a park across the street from the White House. President Bush was in Europe.

The protesters heard from Michael Berg, whose son, Nicholas, was beheaded by Islamic militants in Iraq.

[..]

Similar anti-war demonstrations were held by hundreds in Los Angeles and San Francisco, organized by International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism).

Actor Danny Glover and people who said they were relatives of troops killed in Iraq expressed outrage at a rally outside the federal building in Los Angeles, before dissipating rapidly in an oppressive afternoon heat.

"We're here to say there will be no empire in our name," Glover told the crowd, saying he meant to send a message both to Bush and the presumed Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

In San Francisco, five people were arrested - two for blocking traffic - as hundreds of anti-war demonstrators marched from City Hall to the waterfront downtown.

[..]

After the speeches, the protesters marched a couple dozen blocks to the Northwest Washington home of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who also was out of town, on a six-day trip to Asia.

A handful of counterdemonstrators traded shouts with the anti-war crowd.

"We feel they're traitors to our country," said Leonard Milnes, 18, of Silver Spring, Md. "You support your armed forces no matter what the cause."

(end of excerpt)

Yet another ill-conceived foreign aid swindle has become law in the form of the "Millennium Challenge Act," a disgraceful bill that sends billions of American tax dollars overseas even as our national debt explodes. The Act combines the worst aspects of bad domestic policy and bad foreign policy, by wasting $2.5 billion taxpayer dollars in 2005 alone while meddling in the affairs of foreign nations. Arrogant is the only word to describe a Congress that cares so little about its own taxpaying citizens while pretending to know what is best for the world.

The very name- Millennium Challenge Act- is highly insulting. It sounds like a PBS fundraising slogan or car company sales pitch. It's like calling an old used car a classic or an antique. Foreign aid welfare is still foreign aid welfare, no matter what jingoistic name is applied. There is nothing new or noble about it. The Millennium Challenge Act is just another shabby federal program that takes your money and gives it to somebody else.

Foreign aid doesn't help poor people; it helps foreign elites and US corporations who obtain the contracts doled out by those foreign elites. Everyone in Washington knows this, but the same lofty rhetoric is used over and over to sell foreign aid programs to a gullible public. During a hearing about the new Act last week, I asked one of the witnesses how much of the $2.5 billion would actually go to US corporations. He enthusiastically answered that much of it would, making no attempt to downplay the corporate interests promoting expansion of our foreign aid programs. Naked corporate welfare is bad enough, but corporate welfare in the guise of helping poor foreigners is indecent.

In many cases, foreign aid money simply distorts foreign economies and props up bad governments. In countries that pursue harmful economic policies, an infusion of US cash only exacerbates and prolongs problems. No amount of money can help nations that reject property rights, free markets, and the rule of law.

In developing countries that pursue sound economic policies, foreign aid money is not needed- the international financial markets will provide the investment capital necessary for economic growth. This capital will be invested according to sound investment strategies - designed to make a profit - rather than allocated according to the whims of government bureaucrats.

Foreign aid encourages socialism and statism. Because it is entirely geared toward foreign governments, it mandates economically devastating "public-private partnerships" in developing nations. If the private sector wants to see any of the money, it must be in partnership with government. Who knows how much of this money is wasted on those companies with the best political connections to the foreign governments in power? Foreign aid invites political corruption by creating a slush fund under the control of foreign governments.

The wisest approach to international economic development is for the United States to lead by example, by revitalizing the economic policies that led us to become wealthy in the first place. This means less government, less taxation, and no foreign meddling. The greatest gift we can send overseas is a demonstration of the freedom and prosperity possible only with limited government and the rule of law.

Americans are the most charitable people on earth. Those who wish to help fight AIDS, famine, and poverty overseas can choose from hundreds of private charities. Americans don’t need a politician or rock star to tell them what causes are important. Most of all, they don’t need to be forced to pay for foreign welfare at the barrel of a government gun.

(end of excerpt)

With President Bush's popularity rankings sinking daily, you might expect the opposition candidate to be hitting him on the issues he's vulnerable on. But it's not happening.

The war in Iraq has been costlier in lives and tax dollars than planned, with no end in sight. Yet Senator Kerry, who voted to let Bush go to war, plans to continue the occupation indefinitely. Not wanting to appear soft on defense (?), Kerry calls for 40,000 additional troops. Why not campaign against the occupation?

President Bush and the Republican Congress have jacked spending up by 30% in just 4 years. Deficits are at record levels, with a cumulative total of $1.4 trillion for the Bush budgets. Yet Senator Kerry plans to increase government spending, and only halve the deficit (Bush promises the same thing.) Why not campaign for a spending freeze, or modest cuts? Democratic voters could still be appeased, if their priorities were funded.

President Bush has undermined civil liberties to an unprecedented extent with the Patriot Act. Yet Senator Kerry voted for the Act, and expresses only moderate concern over portions of it. Why not campaign to repeal the Patriot Act, and protect the Bill of Rights? It is an issue that has united everyone from libertarians to the ACLU.

On the big issues of the day -- war, deficits, and civil liberties -- it appears that Senator Kerry is more a running mate for President Bush than an opponent. Where's the opposition candidate?

Ralph Nader might stake that claim, if he can get on enough ballots, but his appeal is limited to the far left. Who does that leave?

Libertarian Michael Badnarik. He will bring our troops home from Iraq, cut government spending as much as Congress will let him (or veto their overspending, at least), and protect the Bill of Rights with unmatched determination. He will be on all, or nearly all, 50 ballots.

Michael Badnarik is the true opposition candidate in this race.

(end of excerpt)

How well do the agencies that are supposed to guard us from terrorism perform in practice?

The question's come up again in Canberra today with another embarrassing development for the Federal Government.

For much of the day, the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, has been unable to confirm what a witness told the Jack Roche terrorism trial in Perth last week - that he had tried to contact the Federal police in Singapore, to warn of terrorism plans, but they never got back to him.

But this afternoon, Mr Ruddock has confirmed there was a call to the AFP in Singapore.

It's the second such case in recent days. Late last week, it emerged that ASIO failed to return calls from Jack Roche himself and as Louise Yaxley reports, the Federal Opposition says today's confirmation strengthens its case for a royal commission into the nation's intelligence agencies.

[..]

But by this afternoon, Mr Ruddock told Parliament that the call has been discovered.

PHILIP RUDDOCK: I have been advised this afternoon that on further checking a person posted to Singapore in the year 2000 has today identified a diary note, which may relate to the issue. According to that note, he received a voice mail message on the 7th of September 2000 from a man who identified himself as Ibrahim. The message, I am told, was non-specific, but suggested that the caller had information of relevance to the AFP and he left a phone number, requesting that his call be returned.

LOUISE YAXLEY: Ibrahim Fraser had significant information about terrorist plans in this region, including Jack Roche's plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy.

Mr Ruddock told Parliament the AFP officer in Singapore wasn't able to get back in touch with the person to gain any of that information.

PHILIP RUDDOCK: The officer noted in his diary records that he attempted to return that call at 12:40 on the same day, that that attempt, and subsequent efforts to raise someone on the number provided were unsuccessful and therefore that they were unable to speak to Ibrahim. The caller did not make, according to the advice I've been given, any further attempts to contact the AFP.

LOUISE YAXLEY: The AFP spokeswoman was unable to say how many attempts were made to call the number that had been left or whether the officer tried on more than one day.

She was also unable to say if the caller Ibrahim left one number or more than one phone number. She denies a media report that quote, "someone's head had rolled" over the failure to return that call.

(end of excerpt)

Since 1995, the hospitals of the Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical System have seen admission increased from 2.9 million to more than 4.5 million a year. Another 600,000 of America's 25 million surviving male and female veterans will enroll in 2004. This spike in enrollment is nationwide. Nearly 79,000 Minnesota veterans received health care at VA facilities in 2002.

Over the last few years, the VA Medical System has struggled to accommodate the increasing strain on its resources. The system has been forced to eliminate 6,000 hospital beds, just as 235,000 veterans sit on waiting lists for VA care. In addition, the VA reports that many of its facilities have reached capacity with closed enrollment at some hospitals and clinics.

Despite the rising demand for VA health services among veterans, we continue to bear the brunt of budget cuts. The Bush administration underfunded veterans' health care by $2 billion in 2003, and the proposed 2005 budget falls $2.6 billion short of what is needed to fully meet the demands for quality veterans' health care. Minnesota's veterans' health care facilities would need $48.2 million more than proposed to meet the needs of the veterans in this state.

But instead of addressing the veterans' health care crisis, the current administration simply made 164,000 veterans ineligible to enroll in the VA Medical System. Last year, the federal government excluded veterans who earn more than approximately $30,000 per year and who suffer from non-combat injuries from the VA system.

(end of excerpt)

Ravinder Singh, a joint secretary in the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) who had been missing since May 14, is believed to have been spying for the US. He may have defected to America.

Singh, who was being watched by RAW’s counter-intelligence wing for the past one month, came under suspicion after a ‘slip’ by a US diplomat working under cover at the American embassy. The US official, on a routine liaison session with RAW officers, happened to mention Singh’s name.

It led RAW to mount a counter-surveillance operation.

[..]

While the agency is trying to establish what secrets Singh compromised, what is clear is that the spy fled while RAW dithered.

When RAW’s bosses discussed the issue with a former top security official, they were asked not to proceed against Singh legally.

[..]

They said Singh would host dinners and parties for several colleagues from whom he tried to procure secrets.

(end of excerpt)

The leading mouthpiece for the New Democrats' radical interventionist program could be our next president. John Kerry, the frontrunner in the quest for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, has been promoting a foreign policy perspective called "progressive internationalism." It's a concept concocted by establishment Democrats seeking to convince potential backers in the corporate and political world that, if installed in the White House, they would preserve U.S. power and influence around the world, but in a kinder, gentler fashion than the current administration.

(end of excerpt)

Spanish intelligence have opened an enquiry into the activities of a two-strong British naval commando after the pair were discovered transporting military material to the British possession of Gibraltar, authorities in the southern city of Malaga said Tuesday.

Malaga police interviewed the two Royal Navy commandos on May 18 and Malaga sub-prefect Hilario Lopez Luna confirmed at a news conference a story in local daily Sur that an investigation was under way into the incident.

British forces spokeswoman in Gibraltar captain Katherine Prudhoe confirmed the duo's detention.

"When they were being followed in Malaga, they were looking for a place to stay overnight as they could not make it to Gibraltar that day," Prudhoe said.

Sur reported that the pair could have been connected to the presence in the middle of last month at Gibraltar of nuclear submarine HMS Trenchant, which spent five days in port.

But Prudhoe said that was not the case.

"The equipment is unrelated to the nuclear submarine HMS Trenchant. It was for an exercise here," she said.

Sur reported that Malaga police detained the two men in the early hours suspecting they might be trafficking drugs as the area is used by traffickers to smuggle narcotics to southern Spain from north Africa.

Spanish media reports named the men as Andrew William Harry Smith, 26, and Wayne Gordon Athey, 28. The pair spent four hours being interviewed by police and were then released after British military authorities confirmed their identity.

Material found in their Gibraltar-registered vehicle included outboard motors, an inflatable boat, diving equipment and strongboxes bearing Royal Navy insignia.

According to Sur, Royal Navy commanders in Gibraltar confirmed to Spanish authorities the men were on a secret mission to transport material from Britain to Gibraltar in advance of tactical manoeuvres scheduled for May 21 on a nuclear submarine.

(end of excerpt)

Multiple agencies within the Homeland Security Department have outlined how they will conduct security and surveillance operations for the G8 Summit at Sea Island, Ga., June 8-10. National Guard Bureau Chief Lt. Gen. Steven Blum also unveiled a new agreement to put one commander at the summit in charge of both active and Guard forces.

The G8 Summit brings together the leaders of the world's major industrial democracies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

[..]

A special military command structure is being designed for the summit. National Guard Bureau spokesman Reggie Saville said the Office of the Secretary of Defense recently approved giving a National Guard commander dual authority for both active and Guard forces during the event. Saville did not provide more details about the structure.

DHS issued a fact sheet Friday outlining what actions different agencies will take for the G8 summit.

The Secret Service is the lead federal agency for the summit and the two political conventions. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau will provide the second-largest cadre of federal law enforcement personnel for the summit. ICE operations will include deploying special agents and government vehicles. ICE's Federal Protective Service will deploy K-9 explosive detection teams, uniformed officers, intelligence and undercover agents, bicycle and motorcycle officers, rapid response teams and weapons of mass destruction/hazardous materials technicians.

A mobile command vehicle will operate as a primary or backup radio base station for all levels of law enforcement, as well as monitor video cameras from federal facilities, retrieve other types of closed-circuit video signals, and receive real-time aircraft video feeds.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will be in charge of providing emergency management coordination and multiple disaster response teams.

The Coast Guard will lead waterside security. Numerous Coast Guard units will be involved, including boat crews, boarding teams, pilots and crew members, support personnel and helicopters to assist with surveillance, enforcement and any air interdiction efforts.

DHS will also deploy Customs and Border Protection officers and Transportation Security Administration employees to provide physical screening at various sites. Additional surveillance, including random inspections and perimeter security checks, will also take place.

The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which is only minutes from Sea Island, will provide logistical, training and contingency support to numerous federal, state and local agencies.

The DHS Information Analysis and Protection Directorate will mobilize its Homeland Security Operations Center in support of the summit. The center is dispatching three officials to establish a multi-agency command center to provide 24-hour onsite monitoring.

DHS also is implementing an Internet-based counterterrorism communications system for Homeland Security officials, state and local officials and first responders. The Homeland Security Information Network is a secure tool that interacts with the operations center to strengthen the exchange of threat information.

(end of excerpt)

"The North Korean National Security Agency has investigated the train incident and reached the conclusion that rebellious forces had plotted the explosion targeting the train of Kim Jong-Il," the official was quoted as saying.

The security agency obtained evidence that cell phones had been used in the assassination plan, which was why the North's authorities had confiscated and banned mobile phones around the region, the daily said.

North Korea has prohibited use of cell phones across the nation since May 19, Chosun Ilbo reported, quoting other sources including an officer working with a North Korean border guard unit.

(end of excerpt)

Russia's deputy UN ambassador, Alexander Konuzin, said the US-British resolution on Iraq should specify who will be responsible for searching for alleged weapons stores and for maintaining any uncovered by UN monitors before the war.

"What is the situation since no WMDs have been located up to now?" Konuzin asked Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in an open Security Council debate on Thursday.

"It is our opinion the resolution being prepared by the Security Council on Iraq must give a clear answer to the question - who will bear the responsibility for looking for traces of weapons of mass destruction," said Konuzin, whose country opposed the war.

Zebari, who was appearing before the Security Council two days after the new interim Iraqi government was named in Baghdad, said it was too early to broach that question.

"We understand that this issue is still really outstanding and leftover from previous resolutions and we have discussed that among ourselves and the new administration but it's too soon really to address it at this stage," he said.

(end of excerpt)

"Personally, I would have never come in terms with the occupation of my own country," stated George Bush, reports Swiss newspaper Le Temps.

(end of excerpt)

Buying a home can be stressful, expensive and bewildering. “Essentially,” humorist Dave Barry wrote in his 1988 book “Homes and Other Black Holes,” “what you must do, in the Ritual Closing Ceremony, is go into a small room and write large checks to total strangers. According to tradition, anybody may ask you for a check, for any amount, and you may not refuse.” He may have been joking, but the number of checks homebuyers are being asked to write has recently increased by one.

With the passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001, which required that financial institutions create anti-money-laundering compliance programs, anyone purchasing property must be checked against a list of names of known and suspected terrorists. The list has been around since before the September 11 attacks, but increasingly the ritual closing ceremony has involved writing yet another check to the title company that runs the homebuyer’s name against that list.

What’s behind it? The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control maintains the “specifically designated nationals” (SDN) list of people blocked from participating in “any transaction or dealing … in property or interests” within the United States. These people have been identified “to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism,” according to White House Executive Order 13224, which was issued Sept. 24, 2001. Although the blocked-persons list has been around in some form for about a decade, under the order private individuals (be they jewelers, pawnbrokers or suburban families) buying or selling property are now considered “financial institutions” by the government. And the responsibility has fallen to the title companies to check all parties involved in a transaction against the list. “The SDN list has been around for years. Obviously, since 9/11 the use of charities and banks and different organizations for terrorists to move money have brought it more to light in recent days,” says Molly Millerwise, a Treasury spokesperson, explaining why homebuyers in the heartland are considered financial institutions under the jurisdiction of the Office of Foreign Asset Control. Terrorists, she says, use property to launder money.

(end of excerpt)

A US navy battlegroup is to make a ``show of force'' in the oil-rich waters of the Gulf of Guinea, off west Africa, diplomats said Friday, as Washington hones plans to escape its dependence on unstable Middle Eastern supplies by securing more African crude.

The foray by a heavily armed carrier group into the waters off Nigeria, Sao Tome, Equatorial Guinea and other African oil producers, comes at a time when fuel prices are topping the US political agenda and security crises in the Gulf region are pushing demands for greater diversification in energy supplies.

An Abuja-based US diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity that the Gulf of Guinea was ``a place where there is not normally an American presence'' and described the operation as ``a show of force.''

``Operation Summer Pulse '04 aims to demonstrate the capabilities of the US navy; before we only had two or three operations involving aircraft carriers at any one time,'' he said, adding that seven carrier groups are to be deployed in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Guinea.

``The navy wants, through this exercise, to demonstrate to the world that, even with all its current responsibilities, it can still position half-a-dozen aircraft carriers with all the neccessary support ships in the four corners of the world, at the same time,'' he said.

A statement posted on the Pentagon website from Washington, said: ``Beginning this week and continuing through August, the Navy will exercise the full range of skills involved in simultaneously deploying and employing carrier strike groups around the world.

``Summer Pulse '04 will include scheduled deployments, surge operations, joint and international exercises, and other advanced training and port visits,'' it added. The Nigerian military, however, told AFP that it had no knowledge of any upcoming joint programmes in the Gulf of Guinea.

(end of excerpt)

NORVILLE: And Paul Wolfowitz.

CLANCY: Is he really on our side?

NORVILLE: You genuinely ask that question? Is he on our side?

CLANCY: I sat in on—I was in the Pentagon in ‘01 for a red team operation and he came in and briefed us. And after the brief, I just thought, is he really on our side?

(end of excerpt)

"I was overwhelmed by the unbelievable courage of the passengers and crews of all four of these flights," Deborah Burlingame, sister of one of the hijacked pilots.

She spoke after a confidential Justice Department briefing for the families held at a hotel.

"I sat there wistfully wishing that this country could be as united ... and as brave in fighting the terrorists as they were in the fierce few moments of September 11. I was very proud of them," said Burlingame.

[..]

Because the government hopes to introduce the calls as evidence at the trial of alleged September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, those who attended the briefing were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that prohibits them from discussing the contents of the tapes or the briefings. They were not allowed to make recordings or take notes during the session.

"The one thing that the [Justice Department] made irrefutably clear to us was that to the extent we disclose any information, we are only aiding the terrorists," said Hamilton Peterson, whose father and stepmother were on United Flight 93.

But one relative, Alice Hoaglan -- whose son Mark Bingham called her from one of the flights -- recounted for reporters her final call from her son.

"'Mom, this is Mark Bingham. I just want to tell you that I love you. I am on a flight from Newark to San Francisco. There are three guys on board who have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb. You believe me don't you, Mom? I'm calling you from the air phone.' And then we were disconnected," Hoaglan said, her voice breaking.

[..]

CNN learned that calls from just two people -- flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney, both on American Airlines Flight 11 -- were played during the three-hour briefing.

Other calls were summarized verbally by Justice Department prosecutors, and nearly an hour was devoted to questions from relatives and responses from prosecutors.

(end of excerpt)

Mr Kay told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that British and American leaders should simply apologise and admit that they were wrong.

He said Saddam Hussein had intended to reconstitute his weapons programme at some point and had acted illegally.

However, there were no actual WMD stockpiles, he said.

[..]

"Anyone out there holding - as I gather Prime Minister Blair has recently said - the prospect that, in fact, the Iraq Survey Group is going to unmask actual weapons of mass destruction, are really delusional," he said.

"There is nothing there. There is a programme there. There was an intention of Saddam Hussein at some point to reconstitute it.

"There were clearly illegal activities, clear violations of UN Security Council resolutions. We have accumulated that evidence and really have accumulated that evidence to a considerable degree four months ago.

"There are not actual stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction."

Mr Kay repeated his previous assertions that the US-led coalition had been mistaken in its assumption that Saddam Hussein had possessed the banned weapons.

"We simply got it wrong," he said. "Iraq was a dangerous country, Saddam was an evil man and we are better off without him and all of that. But we were wrong in our estimation."

(end of excerpt)

Once more, Americans will be forced to vote for a man instead of a policy. It doesn't say much for self-government that the American people are almost never given a chance to vote on major policy issues.

The trouble is that Sen. John Kerry, as his campaign has developed, is saying essentially this: I support the same goals as President Bush, but I can pull them off better than he can.

What about those Americans who don't share President Bush's goals? What about those who don't think we should have a policy of pre-emptive war? What about those who think we should just pull out of Iraq now? What about those who think America's borders should be sealed? What about those who believe we should be fair-minded in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue instead of giving Israel a blank check?

Well, too bad. You can stay home. Once more, the Democratic Party is proving that it is not really a party of opposition, but rather a tweedledee to the Republican tweedledum. I had some hope and faith in Howard Dean, but unfortunately Kerry has decided to run on the platform "I am not Bush."

That might be OK for fanatic partisans who hate Bush personally and lust to get their hands on all of the presidential patronage. It is, however, a slap in the face to true self-government. The American people are entitled to decide the major policy issues of the day via elections. When both candidates are virtually interchangeable, the people are denied this opportunity, and for all practical purposes, we no longer have a truly democratic country.

In regard to the Iraq War, Kerry has put himself in the position of a prosecutor who says to a murderer, "Well, now that you've already killed this guy, we have no choice but to make sure you get away it." Kerry says the method of going to war and the reasons we went to war were wrong, but since we went to war we have to continue the occupation.

Kerry says the Europeans will like him better than they do Bush. Well, as often as I have criticized Bush for his blunders, I really don't give a hoot whether the Europeans like our choice of presidents or not. It's none of their business. If we wish to elect a party boy who would no doubt get lost on a guided tour of Europe, that's still our choice to make, not theirs.

(end of excerpt)

"Today, in this new era, our close cooperation with allies and friends in Asia is more essential than ever," Rumsfeld said in the keynote address to the Asia Security Conference, which attracted security officials from 21 nations.

"The phenomenon of ideological expansion -- of which terrorism is the weapon of choice -- stands in the way of global political progress and economic prosperity, threatens the stability of the international order, and clouds the future of civil society."

Rumsfeld was speaking after Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong opened the conference on Friday night with a wide-ranging speech that included a blunt warning that the US stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was helping to fuel global terrorism.

"This is too important an issue to dress in diplomatic niceties. The US is essential to the solution but it is also part of the problem," Goh said, with Rumsfeld listening in the audience.

"A more balanced and nuanced approach towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- an approach that recognises that there are equities and inequities on both sides -- must become a central pillar of the global war on terrorism.

"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a rallying cause for terrorism. We know that a solution to it will not end terrorism... but the discomfort that mainstream Muslims feel around the world feel with America's Middle East policies limits their ability to fight the ideological battle."

(end of excerpt)

Former Congressman John Leboutillier reports on a Memorial Day confrontation between Sen. John Kerry and a fellow Vietnam veteran:

Democratic senator - and certain presidential nominee - John F. Kerry gave the middle finger to a Vietnam veteran at the Vietnam Memorial Wall on Memorial Day morning, NewsMax.com has learned.

Ted Sampley, a former Green Beret who served two full tours in Vietnam, spotted Kerry and his Secret Service detail at about 9:00 a.m. Monday morning at the Wall. Sampley walked up to Kerry, extended his hand and said, "Senator, I am Ted Sampley, the head of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, and I am here to escort you away from the Wall because you do not belong here."

At that point a Secret Service officer told Sampley to back away from Kerry. Sampley moved about 6 feet away and opened his jacket to reveal a HANOI JOHN T-shirt.

Kerry then began talking to a group of schoolchildren. Sampley then showed the T-shirt to the children and said, "Kerry does not belong at the Wall because he betrayed the brave soldiers who fought in Vietnam."

Just then Kerry - in front of the school children, other visitors and Secret Service agents - brazenly 'flashed the bird' at Sampley and then yelled out to everyone, "Sampley is a felon!"

(end of excerpt)

The background to American bombing raid on a village wedding party on May 18 that killed the bridegroom along with over 40 other villagers has remained largely a mystery in the international media. After the bomb raid, which the Pentagon claimed was an attempted assault on Resistance fighters in the area of al-Qa'im on the Syrian border, the AP broadcast video of the wedding contradicted the official US storey.

Now an Iraqi resident of the area has come forward with information, published by Quds Press and carried on Mafkarat al-Islam's website, indicating that the real reason for the US attack had been to strike at a village and its elders who were involved not in fighting the occupation, but in helping US troops escape from military service in Iraq.

"The American occupation forces knew full well that we were having a wedding party. They intentionally bombed the wedding because the guests included several tribal chiefs and prominent persons from the western part of Iraq. The occupation forces hated the people of this region because they have been helping occupation soldiers to escape from Iraq," said the uncle of the martyred bridegroom, a local Iraqi resident who gave his name as Abu `Azzam.

"The village of Makr adh-Dhib," Abu `Azzam explained, "is between ar-Rabtah and al-Qa’im, and is 125km from Husaybah on the Iraqi Syrian border. The people who live in the village are of the al-Bu Fahd tribes, a part of the large Arab Dulaym tribal federation in Iraq. They have played a big role in providing the Resistance with supplies, equipment, weapons, everything."

"The American forces came to the village lots of times," Abu `Azzam said, "searching for weapons and Arab Resistance fighters. But they never found anything. But the thing that caused matters to come to a head was that we in Makr adh-Dhib were carrying out organized operations to smuggle American soldiers who wanted to flee the hell in Iraq out of the country. We were able to smuggle large numbers of those soldiers through our ‘windows’, windows that only a small number of people in the village know about. We would smuggle them for a price, that could go as high as $10,000 in some cases, plus the equipment that the soldier carried," Abu `Azzam explained.

(end of excerpt)

The French Jewish community is in an uproar over allegations that Reform Rabbi Gabriel Farhi, who was stabbed on January 3, may in fact have faked the stabbing.

The allegations surfaced in a report this week by the weekly magazine Marianne, which was then picked up by Le Figaro. The journal reported that police officers investigating the stabbing said it is not clear whether Farhi was actually stabbed by an unknown assailant, and they are not ruling out the possibility that Farhi in fact stabbed himself.

The report stunned French Jewry, which for the past two years has been vociferously protesting law enforcement agencies' failure to take effective action against the hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks the community has suffered.

"You can imagine what a destructive effect this affair could have on the Jewish community," said one community leader, who asked to remain anonymous. "For two years we have been screaming about the attacks against us and the rise of anti-Semitism in France. If, God forbid, it turns out that the stabbing was staged, not just Rabbi Farhi is in trouble, all the Jews are in trouble. Who will take us seriously? And that is without even mentioning the enormous shame caused by the thought that four former prime ministers took the trouble to support the rabbi and the Jewish community. What will we do now? Apologize to them?"

The Reform community is backing Farhi fully. When its executive board met Monday night to elect a new president, all 18 members made a point of shaking Farhi's hand and offering their support. "I assure you that if I or my colleagues in the community had any doubts at all, we would not be expressing our support," said Francis Lentschner, the newly elected president. "There is no doubt that the affair has greatly hurt the community, but I'm certain we'll get over it."

(end of excerpt)

The International Atomic Energy Agency, directed by Arab states and Iran, plans to launch a campaign to force Israel to permit international inspections of its Dimona nuclear facility.

Israeli officials said the campaign was meant to be sparked by a spate of articles and television documentaries based on information provided by Israeli nuclear spy Mordechai Vanunu. Vanunu was released from an Israeli prison on April 21 and has been living in a monastery in Jerusalem.

"There has been a feeling within the international community that too much attention has been paid to Iran's nuclear program at the expense of Israel," a senior Israeli official said. "There is a drive to switch the focus from Iran to Israel over the next few months by portraying Israel as an immediate nuclear threat."

IAEA director-general Mohammed El Baradei plans to visit Israel over the next two months, officials said. The visit was expected to take place following the IAEA board of directors's meeting in mid-June to discuss Iranian compliance with international nuclear inspection efforts. The United States has charged that Teheran has violated its pledge to the IAEA.

(end of excerpt)

"In the long run, we are all dead," said Keynes. "Do you have any further questions, Mr. Sherlock Holmes?"

"Perhaps you would be good enough to elucidate a point of economics for me," said Holmes. "I understand you disagree with your fellow economists in holding that government intervention in the marketplace may be a desirable thing?"

"It may often be desirable," said Keynes, "and in any case it is commoner than we believe. The government goes many things whose consequences are not usually noticed, and the economist might well profit from ferreting them out."

"He might indeed," said Holmes. "For example, what would be the consequences of the government imposing severe restrictions upon the supply of a commodity?"

"If the demand remains strong, the price is sure to rise considerably."

"And this would apply, would it not, to a commodity such as drugs, whose distribution has recently been made illegal? What would an economist like yourself say, Mr. Keynes, about the opportunities presented by such an illegal market?"

The two men stood face to face in matching postures. Their heads cocked back, they stared coolly at each other with lips set firm and eyelids narrowed. Then Keynes smiled ironically.

"A properly situated entrepreneur might stand to gain much profit from such a market. Are you thinking of entering it, Mr. Holmes?"

"I am afraid I might find it already crowded," said Holmes. "It is more interesting merely to observe these strange bedfellows, the law that makes commodities illegal, and the illegal businessman who profits from their scarcity. It gives one to wonder if there are not further connections."

(end of excerpt)

A terrorism expert testified Wednesday that Internet postings attributed to a terrorism defendant were published to recruit and encourage financial support for terrorists.

But under cross-examination, the prosecution witness, Reuven Paz, acknowledged that he published some of the same information on his own Web site without being prosecuted, pointing out the difficulty in labeling people and activities as terrorist.

``For some people, terrorists are terrorists, and for others, terrorists are freedom fighters,'' said Paz, an Israeli. ``It depends on where you stand.''

(end of excerpt)

Saudi authorities gave safe passage to three al-Qaida gunmen after the they killed 10 of the hostages they were holding at a hotel in the oil hub of Khobar, a senior security official said.

The Saudi official said upon hearing hostages had been killed, US officials advised the Saudis that letting the militants go would avert a bigger catastrophe.

The US embassy in Riyadh did not have immediate comment on the Saudi official’s account, which dovetailed with witness accounts.

[..]

One reason the Saudi government has given a sketchy account of what happened is that it does not want to be seen as negotiating with terrorists.

The official said Saudi authorities at first turned down the gunmen’s request for safe passage. But then the militants started killing hostages, the official said. He said the Americans, who were in consultation with the Saudis, advised them to let the men go.

(end of excerpt)

Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists, the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing.

Established biometric vendor Veritouch has teamed up with Swedish design company to produce iVue: a wireless media player that allows content producers to lock down media files with biometric security. This week Veritouch announced that it had demonstrated the device to the RIAA and MPAA.

"In practical terms, VeriTouch's breakthrough in anti-piracy technology means that no delivered content to a customer may be copied, shared or otherwise distributed because each file is uniquely locked by the customer's live fingerprint scan," claims the company.

iVue has been developed in partnership with Swedish design house Thinking Materials. Since Veritouch already supplies security authentication systems up to Homeland Defense standards (in partnership with an Israeli defense contractor), we do forsee exciting synergies ahead, should budget cuts force the War on Terror and the War on Piracy to be consolidated into just the one unwinnable "war".

(end of excerpt)

In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”

[..]

“It reminds me of the Nixon days,” says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. “Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.”

In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.

“We’re at war, there’s no doubt about it. What I don’t know anymore is just who the enemy might be,” says one troubled White House aide. “We seem to spend more time trying to destroy John Kerry than al Qaeda and our enemies list just keeps growing and growing.”

Aides say the President gets “hung up on minor details,” micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues.

“This is what is killing us on Iraq,” one aide says. “We lost focus. The President got hung up on the weapons of mass destruction and an unproven link to al Qaeda. We could have found other justifiable reasons for the war but the President insisted the focus stay on those two, tenuous items.”

[..]

"Tenet wanted to quit last year but the President got his back up and wouldn't hear of it," says an aide. "That would have been the opportune time to make a change, not in the middle of an election campaign but when the director challenged the President during the meeting Wednesday, the President cut him off by saying 'that's it George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now."

Tenet was allowed to resign "voluntarily" and Bush informed his shocked staff of the decision Thursday morning. One aide says the President actually described the decision as "God's will."

God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”

“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”

But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”

“The mood here is that we’re under siege, there’s no doubt about it,” says one troubled aide who admits he is looking for work elsewhere. “In this administration, you don’t have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is disagree with the President.”

(end of excerpt)

He has been interviewed as part of a probe into the leaking last year of the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, wife of ex-diplomat Joe Wilson, a vocal critic of the administration in the build-up to the Iraq war, especially claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

[..]

However, intelligence sources have pinpointed the leak as coming from Cheney's office. His chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, has been named in several press reports as a possible suspect. It is also believed that the investigation has pulled phone records from Air Force One as part of their probe. Observers think that Plame's identity was deliberately leaked to conservative newspaper columnist Bob Novak as a way of punishing her husband. 'It came out of Cheney's office. These are a very serious group of people,' said Mel Goodman, a former top CIA officer.

(end of excerpt)