http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2602069_pf.html

Prosecutor In CIA Leak Case Casting A Wide Net
White House Effort To Discredit Critic Examined in Detail

By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 27, 2005; A01


The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

Most of the questioning of CIA and State Department officials took place in 2004, the sources said.

It remains unclear whether Fitzgerald uncovered any wrongdoing in this or any other portion of his nearly 18-month investigation. All that is known at this point are the names of some people he has interviewed, what questions he has asked and whom he has focused on.

Fitzgerald began his probe in December 2003 to determine whether any government official knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a CIA employee to the media. Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, has said his wife's career was ruined in retaliation for his public criticism of Bush. In a 2002 trip to Niger at the request of the CIA, Wilson found no evidence to support allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from that African country and reported back to the agency in February 2002. But nearly a year later, Bush asserted in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa, attributing it to British, not U.S., intelligence.

Fitzgerald has said in court that he had completed most of his investigation at a time when he was pressing for New York Times reporter Judith Miller to testify about any conversations she had with a specific administration official about Plame during the week before Plame's identity was revealed.

Miller, who never wrote a story about the matter, is in jail for refusing to comply with a court order to testify. Court records show Fitzgerald is seeking information about communications she had with the Bush official between July 6 and July 13, 2003, when the White House was attempting to discredit Wilson and his allegations.

Fitzgerald appears to believe that Miller's conversations may help him get to the bottom of the leak and the damage-control campaign undertaken by senior Bush officials that week.

Using background conversations with at least three journalists and other means, Bush officials attacked Wilson's credibility. They said that his 2002 trip to Niger was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, but CIA officials say that is incorrect. One reason for the confusion about Plame's role is that she had arranged a trip for him to Niger three years earlier on an unrelated matter, CIA officials told The Washington Post.

Miller's role remains one of many mysteries in the leak probe. It is unclear whom, if anyone, she spoke to about Plame, and why she emerged as a central figure in the probe despite never having written a story about the case. Also murky is the role of Novak, who first publicly identified Plame in a syndicated column published July 14, 2003.

Lawyers have confirmed that Novak discussed Plame with White House senior adviser Karl Rove four or more days before the column identifying her ran. But the identity of another "administration" source cited in the column is still unknown. Rove's attorney has said Rove did not identify Plame to Novak.

In a strange twist in the investigation, the grand jury -- acting on a tip from Wilson -- has questioned a person who approached Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue on July 8, 2003, six days before his column appeared in The Post and other publications, Wilson said in an interview. The person, whom Wilson declined to identify to The Post, asked Novak about the "yellow cake" uranium matter and then about Wilson, Wilson said. He first revealed that conversation in a book he wrote last year. In the book, he said that he tried to reach Novak on July 8, and that they finally connected on July 10. In that conversation, Wilson said that he did not confirm his wife worked for the CIA but that Novak told him he had obtained the information from a "CIA source."

Novak told the person that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA as a specialist in weapons of mass destruction and had arranged her husband's trip to Niger, Wilson said. Unknown to Novak, the person was a friend of Wilson and reported the conversation to him, Wilson said.

Novak and his attorney, James Hamilton, have declined to discuss the investigation, as has Fitzgerald.

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.

In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA official he spoke to "asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties' if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name."

Harlow was also involved in the larger internal administration battle over who would be held responsible for Bush using the disputed charge about the Iraq-Niger connection as part of the war argument. Based on the questions they have been asked, people involved in the case believe that Fitzgerald looked into this bureaucratic fight because the effort to discredit Wilson was part of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy.

Wilson unleashed an attack on Bush's claim on July 6, 2003, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," in an interview in The Post and writing his own op-ed article in the New York Times, in which he accused the president of "twisting" intelligence.

Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to remain in Bush's speech. As part of this effort, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not think Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by prosecutors, but it is not clear whether he appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.

On July 9, Tenet and top aides began to draft a statement over two days that ultimately said it was "a mistake" for the CIA to have permitted the 16 words about uranium to remain in Bush's speech. He said the information "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed."

A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement.

The prosecutors have talked to State Department officials to determine what role a classified memo including two sentences about Plame's role in Wilson's Niger trip played in the damage-control campaign.

People familiar with this part of the probe provided new details about the memo, including that it was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage who requested it the day Wilson went public and asked that a copy be sent to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to take with him on a trip to Africa the next day. Bush and several top aides were on that trip. Carl W. Ford Jr., who was director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the time and who supervised the original production of the memo, has appeared before the grand jury, a former State Department official said.


© 2005 The Washington Post Company

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/feat...ts.html#a004692

Covert Operative: Sen. Roberts Uses the Cover of the Senate to Flame Plame

07.25.2005 Arianna Huffington

Covert Operative: Sen. Roberts Uses the Cover of the Senate to Flame Plame
Sometimes it’s not the crime or the cover-up that does you in. Sometimes it’s the counter-attack.

Plamegate (aka the Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal) is truly opening a window on the soul of the Republican Party… and it’s not a pretty view. We've seen the GOP attack machine in action many times before. But this time, the targets of the smears are intertwined with national security concerns -- putting the attackers in the tricky position of having to choose which comes first, their country or their party.

Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas has clearly chosen the latter. No longer is the smear campaign confined to the surrogates on the margins, now Roberts has opted to use the Senate to do his dirty work. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has decided to hold hearings on whether the CIA’s definition of undercover is too broad. Hmm... I wonder why he’s doing that?

Speaking about the Plame case on CNN, Roberts said “I must say from a common-sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don’t know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert. But, generically speaking, it is a very serious matter.” But not so serious that the Roberts’ committee will be taking testimony on the Plame leaks… just on the question of how, you know, secret a secret agent has to be before, generically speaking, outing that agent should be considered a bad thing.

Josh Marshall nails it when he says that Roberts “is a shame to the office, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the White House political operation.” If you've come to a place in your political career where you can look at the Plame case and decide that the real culprit in the matter is the C.I.A.'s definition of covert -- and that the best course of action for is you is to attack Valerie Plame -- you really need to rethink why it is you went into politics in the first place and whether this is really what you want to be doing with your life.

My guess is that one person who won't be testifying at Senator Roberts' hearings is Larry Johnson, the former CIA analyst who has spoken out on Plame’s behalf. Too bad, because it turns out he's got a very solid grasp of the concept of “undercover” and might be able to enlighten chairman Roberts. You know, generically speaking…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20050726/...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Rep. John Conyers: What About the Ten Week Gap? Rep. John Conyers
Tue Jul 26, 3:40 PM ET

Going back a couple of years, I wrote two letters on September 29, 2003 about Treasongate. The first was a public letter (pdf) -- to the Department of Justice asking for a Special Prosecutor (I think I was the first Member of Congress to ask, but I have no illusions that my letter forced their hand).

The second (pdf) was not a public letter. It was to Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet. I was troubled by reports that the DOJ was, to put it mildly, being less than responsive to the CIA concerns about the leak. The response I received (pdf), reported way back then by Josh Marshall of Talkingpointsmemo on a Friday night (it is amazing how I always get the most valuable responses to my letters on Friday nights), added some stunning detail to the Justice Department's footdragging. Mr. Marshall reminds us about the story today.

The letter indicates that the Central Intelligence Agency was repeatedly stonewalled by the DOJ and, in fact, couldn’t even get their letters answered or calls returned. Here are some details:

-- On July 24, 2003, a CIA attorney left a phone message for the Chief of the Counterespionage Section of the Department of Justice noting his concern with recent stories apparently exposing the identity of Valerie Plame, an employee of the agency working under cover. There was apparently no response from the Department.

-- On July 30, 2003, the CIA reported to the Criminal Division of the DOJ a possible violation of criminal law concerning the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. There was apparently no response from the Department.

-- The CIA again transmitted their concerns by facsimile on September 5, 2003. There was no response.

-- On September 16, in accordance with the Agency’s standard practice in these matters, the CIA advised the Department that it had completed its own investigation of the matter, provided a memorandum setting forth the results of the investigation and requested that the FBI undertake a criminal investigation of the matter.

-- Finally, on September 29, 2003–sixty-seven days after the initial concerns were expressed by CIA employees–the DOJ responded and advised the CIA that the Counterespionage Division had requested that the FBI initiate an investigation of this matter.

Recently, it was revealed that the White House was given a 12-hour “heads up” from the Department of Justice about the investigation at the request of then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. Media reports gave the White House an even earlier forewarning. This, of course, runs counter to every other prosecution I have followed. Typically, and most recently during the Enron investigation, once it is determined that the White House is in possession of relevant information or documents, an immediate notification is sent to the Counsel’s office and the Counsel’s office, in turn, sends an immediate notification to the White House staff to preserve all documents and records. That didn’t happen here.

Why? And what did the White House do during those 12 hours anyway?
Collectively, these disclosures appear to demonstrate that on at least two separate occasions, DOJ personnel acted to permit delays in the investigation, which may have resulted in the loss or destruction of critical evidence. That is why I, and nine of my Judiciary Committee colleagues, have written today to the Department’s Inspector General asking for an immediate investigation to examine the extent that this course of conduct and other delays by the Department are consistent with standards of prosecutorial conduct and integrity. The letter (via Rawstory) is here.

A final twist: Congressional oversight. The Republican Majority in Congress has been absurdly lax in investigating misdeeds by this White House, including this emerging scandal. Yesterday, the Chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees announced they would be holding hearings on this. It appeared the Congress would begin doing the real work needed on this. Maybe they would look at the Justice Department's footdragging on this.

Then I read the fine print (via DailyKos):

“[Sen. Pat Roberts (news, bio, voting record) (R-KS) spokeswoman Sarah] Little said the Senate committee would also review the probe of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Plame case for nearly two years.”

First, it was an attack on Joe Wilson. Then, they attacked his wife. Then, they attacked the press for covering the story. Now, it appears the Republican attack machine has set its sights on the prosecutor.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/feat...ts.html#a004738

Hillary's 'American Dream': Stuck in the Middle With You
Arianna Huffington

July 27, 2005
07.27.2005 Arianna Huffington

Hillary’s ‘American Dream’: Stuck in the Middle With You
So there's a fight brewing in the Democratic Party. And it has nothing to do with John Roberts. Instead, it was prompted by Hillary Clinton assuming her role as head of the DLC’s “American Dream Initiative” and immediately calling for a “ceasefire” in the fight over the direction the party should be taking.

Right. Sure. I believe a little translation is in order. Because in almost every instance where a politician or political group calls for a "ceasefire," or "a stop to the mud-slinging," or "unity," what they’re really saying is: "I'm calling on the other side to stop disagreeing with me, so we can move forward in the only right way. Which is my way."

That’s exactly the tack taken by John Sweeney in trying to keep the AFL-CIO under his sway, calling on workers to maintain “a united labor movement”. But Andy Stern and James Hoffa didn’t take the bait -- and are moving forward with their efforts to remake the labor movement. And does anyone doubt that it will be for the better -- both for working people and for the country -- to have a reinvigorated union movement instead of a united status quo that, over the last 50 years, has gone from representing 35 percent of working people to representing 12.5 percent?

The same holds true for the Democratic Party. What better time to have a battle for the soul of the party than now, when it is faced with the prospect of becoming a permanent minority party -- and still over a year before the 2006 midterms?

According to the DLC, Democrats need to show their willingness to fight terror...by capitulating to the Republicans on pretty much every front. In fact, what the Democrats need is to ignore the siren songs urging them to move toward the victors and, instead, reclaim the Party’s true identity and challenge the GOP head-on on its disastrous pursuit of the war on terror.

It’s hard to have an “American Dream Initiative” headed by someone whose every recent move has been driven by triangulating calculation.

“I have always tried to strike a balance,” Hillary once said. “I think you have to view the world as it is, not as you would wish it to be.” That's a long, long way from RFK’s famous line (quoting Shaw): "Some men see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

Remember, Hillary is the one who, before the 2004 election, cited the president as someone “we owe a debt of gratitude” to for capturing Saddam. Which is playing right into the GOP’s hands. The Democrats will never return to power so long as they allow Republicans to present themselves as the party best suited to keep us safe from terror, instead of exposing all the ways in which they have actually left us much more vulnerable and unsafe than before.

The good news is that the DLC’s disingenuous call for unity was a bust… except in the way it united the progressive blogosphere. Because if there's one thing that can bring progressive bloggers together, it's another clueless call by the DLC for capitulation "unity."

Long gone are the days when the DLC was the only game in town. Now the pushback was instant, with bloggers tearing into the DLC, each sounding different notes but together creating a clear chorus of dissent.

Among the highlights:

HuffPoster David Sirota, nailing the fact that following the DLC path hasn’t exactly paid big dividends at the ballot box over the last 10 years.

Pandagon pointing out that Democrats have been "moving to the center" since 1992. And that, as an electoral strategy, it's failed since 1993!

Markos on the disingenuousness of the "ceasefire" language.

Steve Gilliard making the killer point that “a drunk monkey could have made a mockery of the GOP’s claims to any sort of stewardship on national security."

Oliver Willis dressing down the DLC for playing the blame game while ignoring the major errors of their electoral approach.

Athenae from First-Draft offering the DLC's Will Marshall some loving advice: “What we have to do, Will my love…”

And Chris Bowers at Mydd advising potential Hillary primary opponents that taking her on now means taking on the DLC.

In other words: No, DLC, your call to show how tough we are by capitulating to the Republicans has not gone over well. If the blogs have any say -- and they increasingly do -- we're going to show how tough we really are by being... tough. And progressive.

Ready to rumble?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/feat...ts.html#a004734

Senate Dems: Weaker by the Moment
Doug Heller

Senate Dems: Weaker by the Moment
Given the opportunity to take on President Bush's (and big business's) nominee to head the Securities & Exchange Commission, at Tuesday's confirmation hearing, Senate Dems decided to take a pass. The nominee, Rep. Chris Cox, is about as anti-investor as they get, but for some reason, the Democrats don't seem to have the stomach for this fight. Is there no one on the Hill willing to put Bush's laissez-faire ideologue nominee on the spot, even if the calculation is that Cox will get the appointment? How can you live to fight another day, if you don't fight in the first place?


To get a comedic take on this nomination, watch the video with Greg Germann (Ally McBeal) giving a corporate crook's praise for Cox at stopcox.org.

When President Bush nominated Congressman Chris Cox to head the SEC, he gave Democrats the opportunity to hit one out of the park. We're talking about putting Americans' nest eggs in the hands of a guy whose anti-regulatory credentials should have made him an impossible choice in the wake of Enron, WorldCom and the like. Pensions, 401Ks, college funds: these are things that matter, right?

But instead the Dems struck out today, or, rather, hardly came up to the plate. Senators Schumer and Feinstein fawned over this "colleague on the Hill," whose bottom of the barrel record on investor and consumer issues and top of the heap fundraising from businesses he would regulate at the SEC make him a nominee who could and should be blocked. And none of it compares to his work as a private attorney when he misled regulators about an investment scheme that was used by William Cooper to swindle seniors and other small investors out of $130 million (see the LA Times reporting on this).

But apparently these things don't matter to the Senators interviewing a guy set to become the regulator of the world's largest stock markets.

The truth is, this is bread and butter material -- and the average American is getting toasted.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-0...ning-iraq_x.htm

Poll: USA doubts Iraq success, but not ready to give up
By Susan Page, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Most Americans don't believe the United States will succeed in winning the war in Iraq or establishing a stable democracy there, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll.
But an ambivalent public also says sending troops to Iraq wasn't a mistake, a sign that most people aren't yet ready to give up on the war.

"There's a lot of conflicting impulses here," says Andrew Kohut, director of the non-partisan Pew Research Center. A Pew poll last week also showed crosscurrents in attitudes toward the Iraq war. "People are giving bleak assessments on the one hand, and on the other hand (they're) saying maybe it was still the right thing to do."

The bombings in London this month also have roiled public opinion, intensifying a not-yet-settled debate among Americans about whether the Iraq war has made the United States safer from terrorism.

Strong fears that a family member might become a victim of terrorism spiked in the survey, rising to their highest level since October 2001, just after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Meanwhile, in Baghdad, Iraqi officials continued to draft a constitution, due Aug. 15. Proposals to make Islam the main source of legislation in Iraq has prompted debate and opposition from groups concerned with women's rights.

In the poll:

For the first time, a majority of Americans, 51%, say the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — the reason Bush emphasized in making the case for invading. The administration's credibility on the issue has been steadily eroding since 2003.

By 58%-37%, a majority say the United States won't be able to establish a stable, democratic government in Iraq.

About one-third, 32%, say the United States can't win the war in Iraq. Another 21% say the United States could win the war, but they don't think it will. Just 43% predict a victory.

Still, on the question that tests fundamental attitudes toward the war — was it a mistake to send U.S. troops? — the public's view has rebounded. By 53%-46%, those surveyed say it wasn't a mistake, the strongest support for the war since just after the Iraqi elections in January.

"I think the American people understand the importance of completing the mission," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said when asked about the poll results. "Success in Iraq will help transform a dangerous region."

"Elizabeth Edwards" <elizabeth@OneAmericaCommittee.com> just sent me an eMail, I like to post to the attention of all of you!
Get Involved: Raising The States

--------------------
Bill Shielding Gun Makers From Suits Gains Support
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Proponents say the Senate could pass the NRA-backed legislation this week. Opponents contend that it would set a disturbing precedent.

By Mary Curtius
Times Staff Writer

July 27 2005

WASHINGTON — In a sign of the changing politics of gun control, the Senate appears poised to pass a top priority of the National Rifle Assn. this week, legislation that would shield the gun industry from lawsuits arising from the misuse of its weapons.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines

http://www.geostrategy-direct.com/geostrat...05/07_26/ba.asp

Bush orders FBI to launch National Security Service for domestic intelligence

BACKGROUNDER: Compiled by Bill Gertz


Bush orders FBI to launch National Security Service for domestic intelligence

The FBI has been ordered to create a new domestic intelligence branch to better deal with terrorists and foreign spies.


FBI Director Robert Mueller, left, CIA Director Porter Goss, center, and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, right., listen as President Bush delivers his remarks on the war on terrorism during a visit to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., on July 11. AP Photo/Susan Walsh
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

President Bush announced last week the creation of a new National Security Service within the FBI.
The new NSS will "more completely integrate the bureau's work with the intelligence community," Bush said during a speech.

"The purpose of this change is to strengthen the FBI so it not only investigates terrorist crimes after they happen, but the FBI can be more capable to stop the terrorist acts before they happen," Bush said.

In the past the FBI has resisted efforts at reforms aimed at strengthening its intelligence-gathering capabilities. An intelligence division was created under recent reform legislation, but it is limited to analyzing intelligence and has no authority to task FBI agents or other U.S. intelligence collectors to gather information.

Many FBI agents oppose dedicated intelligence work because they view it as contrary to the bureau's law enforcement mission. The new service will require increased training for intelligence work and a dedicated cadre of counterintelligence and security agents.


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Myers rejects China-led group's call for U.S. pullout from Central Asia

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has rejected calls from a Beijing-backed organization for the United States to set a timetable for the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan.
"Central Asia is important to the United States for lots of reasons, not just for operations in Afghanistan," Myers told reporters last week. "It's important to us for lots of reasons. Security and stability in Central Asia is an important concept, and those that can bring security and stability ought to be welcome in Central Asia."

Myers said the United States has "no territorial design" on Central Asia.

"Part of why we're there is, yes, we need some of the support for Afghanistan," he said.

Myers said a recent statement from the Shanghai Communiqué Organization calling for a U.S. deadline on troop withdrawal was not "particularly useful." The organization is led by China and includes Russia and representatives of Central Asian nations.

"It looks to me like two very large countries were trying to bully some smaller countries. That's how I view it," he said.

China opposes the U.S. stationing of forces in states near its western border, fearing the bases could be used in a future conflict to conduct operations against China.


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Rumsfeld calls moderate Muslims key to winning ideological war against terror

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week that he does not know if new terrorists are being created to replace those being capture or killed in the global war on terrorism.
"No one knows. We know that there are elements to the global war on terror, against the battle — the struggle that's taking place within that religion by extremists versus the moderates."

Moderate Muslims represent an overwhelming majority and extremists are a relatively small but lethal cadre.

The best strategy is offensive, he said, and requires going after terrorists by blocking safe havens where they plan, train and organize attacks on innocent men, women and children.

Also, efforts are needed to make sure that "there are not large numbers of people being brought in to the intake of this terrorist apparatus and network that exists in the world," he said.

"And that battle ultimately is going to be won by people within that religion, by the moderates overcoming the extremists," Rumsfeld said. "Anything that the rest of the world can do to encourage that and to support that — and to see that it succeeds over time — is important. But there's no way for anyone to know what is happening all across the globe among that extremist element that is financing, recruiting, training and then deploying murderers."

Violent Islamists are seeking to reestablish the Caliphate around the globe. "Their purpose is to destroy free people so that they can no longer function as free people and have to change their way of life dramatically, then they are a serious problem for the world. And they are a serious problem for the world," he said.

"I believe progress is being made, but I wouldn't think there's anyone who could answer the question," he said. "It continues to be a question that I think about and worry about."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


U.S. to seek sanctions on Hizbullah

The U.S. government recently drew up a proposal for the UN Security Council to impose an international arms embargo on the terrorist group Hizbullah.
The goal of the embargo will be to prevent arms from reaching Hizbullah terrorists operating in Lebanon.

London's Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al Awsat, quoting French government sources in Paris, said the proposal has been conveyed to U.s. allies, including Britain and France.

The goal would be to disarm Hizbullah in Lebanon, which is moving toward democracy.

Iran is Hizbullah's main arms supplier, along with Syria, which has provided key logistic support for the arms to the Shi'ite terrorist group, which has been blamed for numerous bombings and attacks in the Middle East and around the world.

The report said the French group agreed with disarming Hizbullah but opposed an embargo as inappropriate at the present time.


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Polish link to London bombings

Polish authorities are investigating a British national of Pakistani origin who lives in Lublin, Poland for possible connections to the July 7 London terrorist bombings.
A spokeswoman for the Internal Security Agency, known as ABW, told the official Polish news agency that the suspect was an active member of an organized crime group. No charges were filed against the man.


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Russia alerts jet fighters against intruding jetliner

Russian jet fighter interceptors and surface-to-air missiles were put on alert last week in response to the intrusion into Russian airspace by a Vietnamese civilian jetliner.
The Boeing 767 violated Russian airspace early July 12, a military spokesman told Interfax.

"The 5th air army and air defense units immediately spotted the plane. Its flight was qualified as a violation of flight regulations. Two fighters, three missile units and other forces were prepared for use in the Urals and Moscow air defense zones," Russian Air Force Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Mikhailov said.

The jet, owned by a Vietnamese transport service, was enroute from Hanoi to Russia. Its flight plan was not filed with Russian air traffic control..


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Syrian agents arrested in Iraq

Two Syrian government agents were arrested in Iraq recently and revealed they had dispatched 1,000 terrorists into northern Iraq.
The Irbil newspaper Jamawar reported July 11 that the two men, a former colonel and a former lieutenant colonel, were arrested July 7 near Kask. Both had worked for Syria's Mukhabarat spy service.

The two men had organized the dispatch of terrorists from the Syrian city of Halab to Iraq, particularly Mosul. The terrorists were sent to counter the Iraqi security forces' Lightning operations, which focused on rooting out insurgents in northern Iraq.

Most of the terrorists sent from Syria are Syrians, Egyptians and Sudanese nationals.

NASA Looking At Debris From Shuttle Launch

http://enews.voanews.com/t?ctl=E5BF50:2F72C9D

Video images showed debris falling away, but it wasn't immediately
clear if the spacecraft's sensitive outer skin had been jeopardized
The space shuttle Discovery successfully blasted into orbit Tuesday
morning, but there are questions about some debris which fell from the
spacecraft on take-off.

Discovery and its seven-member crew lifted off Tuesday morning from
the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, more than two years after NASA
grounded shuttle missions due to the Columbia disaster.

As the shuttle roared into orbit on its 12-day mission, video images
showed debris falling away. But it wasn't immediately clear if the
spacecraft's sensitive outer skin had been jeopardized.

At a news conference late Tuesday, NASA officials said a piece of tile
may have come off during liftoff. Tiles have been lost on take-off
during previous flights, without causing any trouble during re-entry.

Dozens of cameras taped Tuesday's launch for any signs of flying
debris, such as the kind that damaged Columbia's wing on its launch
two-and-a-half years ago. The damage led to Columbia's burn-up while
re-entering the atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board.

NASA officials say they will study the tapes carefully to see if the
spacecraft sustained any damage.

Republicans Call for Iraq Exit Plan; Pentagon Confirms Need to Bring Troops Home Says Peace Action

7/27/2005 2:44:00 PM


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: National Desk and Defense Reporter

Contact: Scott Lynch, 301-565-4050 ext. 330 or 703-725-5680 ©, Paul Kawika Martin, 301-565-4050 ext. 316, or 951-217-7285 (cell), pmartin@peace-action.org, Jon Rainwater, 510-849-2272 ext. 106, 510-469-3700 ©

WASHINGTON, July 27 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Peace Action applauded U.S. Army Gen. George W. Casey, head of Multinational Force Iraq today for stating that the U.S. could bring home a "fairly substantial" number of the 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq beginning as early as next spring. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, confirmed at a joint news conference with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that it is time to send U.S. troops home by stating, "we desire speed in that regard."

"President Bush stated that he would bring U.S. troops home when the Iraqi government asked Washington to do so. The Iraqi Prime Minister, over 120 Iraqi Parliamentarians(see note one), Republican congressmen and the American people are asking for a plan to bring U.S. troops home as soon as possible. When will President Bush provide a plan?" asked Paul Kawika Martin, Organizing and Political Director for Peace Action.

Representatives Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) and Walter B. Jones, Jr. (R-N.C.) introduced "Homeward Bound" H. J. RES. 55 calling for the Bush Administration to provide an exit plan by the end of this year and to start implementing that plan no later than October 2006. Several Republicans have signed on to this bipartisan resolution including Representatives Wayne T. Gilchrest (Md.), James A. Leach (Iowa) and Ron Paul (Texas).

"Not only do we need a plan to bring our troops home, we need to leave no permanent bases and work with the international community to help the Iraqi people rebuild their country that the U.S. devastated," remarked Jon Rainwater, the Executive Director of California Peace Action, which has over 30,000 members in California.

Peace Action is the United States' largest peace and disarmament organization with over 100,000 members nationwide and nearly 100 chapters in thirty states. http://peace-action.org

(note 1) Notes to editors: An original copy and translation of the Iraqi Parliamentary letter available upon request.

http://www.usnewswire.com/

/© 2005 U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/

Pelosi: CAFTA is a Step Backward for Workers' Rights

Contact: Brendan Daly or Jennifer Crider, 202-226-7616, both for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi

WASHINGTON, July 27 /U.S. Newswire/ -- House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders held a news conference this morning after the weekly Democratic Caucus meeting to discuss the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which the House is scheduled to debate late tonight. Below are Pelosi's opening remarks:

"I am excited about what I hear from my colleagues in the House Democratic Caucus. What I hear from them is that they understand the ramifications of CAFTA. This is a small bill economically, but it is a big bill in terms of its impact.

"My colleagues Charlie Rangel and Ben Cardin, who are here with us, will explain some of the aspects of the bill more specifically, but the one point I want to make is that it is a step backward for workers because it removes the requirement that these countries have to abide by international labor standards.

"How could that be the right way to go? We had the opportunity to come together for a CAFTA that would have respected workers' rights and respected the environmental principles as part of a labor agreement, as a trade treaty. The President decided to go another route, a partisan route.

"More than 90 percent of our Caucus is enthusiastically opposed to this, but Democrats stand ready to come together to support a CAFTA that respects labor and environmental principles.

"But if the President wins this vote, he will have expended enormous resources to do so. He has all the power of the presidency, and all we have on the House Democratic side is the fact that we are right. So if the President wins on this, and I do not know that it is certain that he will, it will be a Pyrrhic victory for him, because we will take our message to the American people that we are the ones looking out for them.

"Under the President's Administration, we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs. He is still in the net loss column for manufacturing jobs. So as our manufacturing base erodes, as our industrial base erodes, we have a President who is contributing to the further erosion of that base.

"The American people deserve better. The American people will know in a clear way the difference between how the Democrats are working for them, and how the Republicans are ignoring their aspirations."

http://www.usnewswire.com/

-

22 Years For Millennium Bomb Plot CBS News
The man convicted of plotting to blow up the Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium was sentenced Wednesday to 22 years in prison. Ahmed Ressam's sentence reflected his cooperation in telling international investigators about the internal workings of terror camps in Afghanistan. "There is no doubt about it. With this sentence, Ressam caught a bit of a break from this judge, mostly because the would-be bomber DID help the feds as an informant for many years following his arrest," said CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen. "I think the judge wanted to reward that behavior and he probably did." But Ressam, 38, could have received a shorter sentence had he not stopped talking to investigators in early 2003. Prosecutors argued that his recalcitrance has jeopardized cases against two of his co-conspirators. "This still isn't a light sentence but it is not nearly as long as a lot of people expected. Essentially, the judge gave Ressam time off in advance for his good behavior over many years of providing good information to the feds following his arrest and conviction," Cohen said. Ressam was arrested in Port Angeles in December 1999 as he drove off a ferry from British Columbia in Canada with a trunk full of bomb-making materials. Prosecutors recommended a 35-year sentence; Ressam's lawyers asked for 12 1/2 years. "I'm sure prosecutors are disappointed but they surely shouldn't be surprised," Cohen added. Ressam had been scheduled for sentencing in April. After more than two hours of arguments, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour called it off, giving Ressam three more months to resume cooperation. Coughenour and federal prosecutors want Ressam to testify against his two co-conspirators, Samir Ait Mohamed and Abu Doha, who are awaiting extradition from Canada and Britain, respectively. Coughenour said he hoped to balance the United States' resolve to punish potential terrorist acts with Ressam's cooperation, while reflecting the government's pretrial offer of 25 years. He also said he hoped to send a message that the U.S. court system works in terrorism cases. "We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely or deny the defendant the right to counsel ... our courts have not abandoned the commitment to the ideals that set this nation apart," the judge said in court.
'Millennium bomber' gets 22 years CBC British Columbia (Audio)
Ressam scheduled to be sentenced this morning Seattle Times
CBC News - CTV - Seattle Post Intelligencer - Los Angeles Times - all 422 related »

Why jihadists target the West
Experts differ over whether recent terror is driven by 'who we are' or
'what we do.' By Howard LaFranchi
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0728/p01s01-usfp.html?s=hns


Five-year negotiations lead to modest energy bill
The legislation covers oilfields, the power grid, and daylight savings
time. By Brad Knickerbocker
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0728/p01s02-uspo.html?s=hns


Struggle for a British Islam
A reformist movement aims to counter the radical ideology behind the
7/7 and 7/21 bombings. By James Brandon and John Thorne
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0728/p01s04-woeu.html?s=hns

Rick Santorum
The Senate's third-ranking Republican discusses his reputation and
Washington politics. By David T. Cook
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0728/p20s02-usmb.html?s=hns

Are Stupid White Men Really Stupid?

By Dom Stasi

We must wake up and regain our country from the criminals, fools, and traitors who’ve assumed it.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9573.htm

http://snipurl.com/gion

Frist pulls defense bill to elude votes on handling captives:

The unusual move came after senators, including several leading Republicans, beat back an effort by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to block amendments setting standards for military-prisoner interrogations and delaying base closings scheduled for approval later this year.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctime...ld/12233735.htm

http://snipurl.com/gjq9

Fewer early sign-ups as Army struggles to recruit soldiers:

The Army, which expects to miss its 2005 recruiting goal by about 12,000, already is falling behind for next year.
http://snipurl.com/gjqe

Roberts's Right to Vote against Roe Is Defended:

Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. will be free to vote to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision if he is appointed to the high court, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said yesterday.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/072705Z.shtml



White House denies access to Roberts' tax returns:

The Bush administration will not give Senate investigators access to federal tax returns of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr., White House and congressional officials said Tuesday, a break with precedent that could exacerbate a growing conflict over document disclosure in the confirmation process.
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050727/1040375.asp

http://snipurl.com/gjr7



The GOP is Certain to Win in 2006 — Unless...:

Here’s the very bad news: the Democrats will almost certainly lose in 2006 and again in 2008.
http://www.crisispapers.org/essays-p/certainwin.htm

http://snipurl.com/gjr9



U.S. stands apart from other nations on maternity leave:

Out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-0...ity-leave_x.htm

http://snipurl.com/gjrd



Correction: CNBC story on Julian Robertson:

What did he really say?
http://www.andongkim.com/articles/2005/07/...onandongkim.htm

http://snipurl.com/gjrf

Rice Asked if Bolton Testified in Leak Case By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - A Democratic opponent of John Bolton asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday whether the nominee for U.N. ambassador had testified to a grand jury about the leak of CIA operative's identity.

Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee say they want to determine whether Bolton was truthful when he wrote on a questionnaire for his confirmation hearing that he has not been interviewed in any recent investigations.

In a letter to Rice, Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), D-Del., referenced an MSNBC report from July 21 that Bolton was among State Department undersecretaries who "gave testimony" about a classified memo that has become an important piece of evidence in the leak investigation.

Biden asked Rice to tell the committee "whether Mr. Bolton did, in fact, appear before the grand jury, or whether he has been interviewed or otherwise asked to provide information by the special prosecutor or his staff in connection with this matter."

Several Bush administration officials have been interviewed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in his quest to determine who leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame to reporters and whether any laws were broken.

Plame is the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of President Bush's Iraq policy.

A message left with the State Department was not immediately returned on Wednesday.

California Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has asked the State Department for two different versions of the memo from its bureau of intelligence and research that discussed Plame, a congressional aide said. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because of the investigation's sensitivity.

The memo could have been the way someone in the White House learned — and then leaked — the information that Plame worked for the CIA and played a role in sending Wilson to Africa to explore whether Iraq was interested in obtaining uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.

Part of the questionnaire Bolton filled out in March asked him whether he was "interviewed or asked to supply any information in connection with any administrative (including an inspector general), congressional or grand jury investigation within the past five years."

"He indicated in his form that he had not," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif.

She said it is unclear whether Bolton lied on his questionnaire because senators do not know if he testified before or after he signed the document — or at all.

The latest Democratic request to the administration for information about Bolton comes just two days before Congress is scheduled to leave Washington for a monthlong break.

With the Senate out of session, Bush could sidestep Congress and install Bolton in the U.N. post on a temporary basis.

Democrats have blocked Bolton's nomination for months. They have demanded that the administration turn over certain information about Bolton before they allow his nomination to proceed.

Republicans have twice attempted — and failed — to break the Democratic filibuster. There has been no sign of a breakthrough since the second attempt in June.

The White House has ruled out withdrawing Bolton's name.

07.27.2005 Arianna Huffington

Judy Miller: Do We Want To Know Everything or Don't We?
Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.

But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has "manipulate[d]" and "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.

This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn't the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)… but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn't an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn't to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson's motives. Which Novak did.

This version of events has divided the Times into two camps: those who want to learn everything about this story, and those who want to learn everything as long as it doesn't downgrade the heroic status of their "colleague" Judy Miller. And then there are the schizophrenics. Frank Rich is spending his summer in the second camp, while at the same time writing some of the most powerful and brilliant stuff about the scandal: "This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit… is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped up grounds… That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war."

But this unmasking -- if it is to be complete -- has to include Judy Miller and the part she played in the mess in Iraq. Of course, the division over Miller is nothing new… it predates her transformation into media martyr by many months. For an early look at this riff, check out Howard Kurtz' May 2003 reporting on the way Miller ferociously fought to keep Ahmad Chalabi, her top source on WMD, to herself and the anger it caused at the paper. And also the paper's extraordinary mea culpa from May 2004, in which its editors admitted that the Times' reporting on Iraq "was not as rigorous as it should have been" -- yet steadfastly refused to even mention the less-than-rigorous reporter whose byline appeared on 4 of the 6 stories the editors singled out as being particularly egregious. "It looks," the Times' public admission concluded, "as if we, along with the administration, were taken in." And yet just two month earlier, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller called Miller, who was one of the main reporters "taken in" a "smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless reporter." Nothing about her less than "rigorous" reporting. Nothing about her reliance on Chalabi being less than "well-sourced."

Any discussion of Miller's actions in the Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal must not leave out the key role she played in cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq and in hyping the WMD threat. Re-reading some of her pre-war reporting today, it's hard not to be disgusted by how inaccurate and pumped up it turned out to be. For chapter and verse, check out Slate's Jack Shafer. For the money quote on her mindset, look to her April 2003 appearance on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where, following up on her blockbuster front page story about an Iraqi scientist and his claims that Iraq had destroyed all its WMD just before the war started, Miller said the scientist was more than a "smoking gun," he was the "silver bullet" in the hunt for WMD. The "silver bullet" later turned out to be another blank -- and the scientist turned out to be a military intelligence official.

Amazingly, however, even as her reporting has been debunked -- and her sources discredited -- Miller has steadfastly refused to apologize for her role in misleading the public in the lead up to the war. Indeed, in an interview with the author of Bush's Brain, James Moore, she, in the words of Moore, "remained righteously indignant, unwilling to accept that she had goofed in the grandest of fashions", telling him: "I was proved "expletive deleted"ing right."

As recently as March 2005, in an appearance at Berkeley, she stubbornly refused to express regret. Indeed, she showed that she shares a key attitude with the Bush administration: an unwillingness to admit mistakes when faced with new realities. She even compared herself to the president, saying that she was getting the same information he was getting… and suggested that since he hadn't apologized, why should she? Maybe she's angling for the Tenet treatment: promote faulty intel, get a Medal of Freedom. Miller also echoed the words of Don Rumsfeld ("You go to war with the Army you have") when she justified her flawed reporting on WMD by saying "You go with what you've got". Really? Wouldn't it be better to wait until what you've got is right?

It's nice that Bill Keller is visiting Judy in jail giving updates about how hard this is for her, having to be away from her family and friends. But it would be even nicer if we'd had some acknowledgement from Miller of her complicity in sending 138,000 American soldiers away from their family and friends. And, unlike Miller, they won't be returning home in October. Indeed, as of today, 1,785 of them won't be returning home at all.

This story gets deeper with every twist and revelation, including the reminder (via Podhoretz) that Fitzgerald had a previous run in with Miller over her actions in a national security case, and the speculation (via Jeralyn at Talk Left) that Fitzgerald is considering seeking to put Miller under criminal contempt, rather than the civil contempt she's now under.

But one thing is inescapable: Miller -- intentionally or unintentionally -- worked hand in glove in helping the White House propaganda machine (for a prime example, check out this Newsweek story on how the aluminum tubes tall tale went from a government source to Miller to page one of the New York Times to Cheney and Rice going on the Sunday shows to confirm the story to Bush pushing that same story at the UN).

So, once again, the question arises (and you can't have it both ways, Frank): when it comes to this scandal, do you want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or do you want the truth -- except for what Judy Miller wants to keep to herself?

Posted at 08:17 PM

Gutknecht votes against CAFTA Miami Herald
Rep. Gil Gutknecht voted against the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement early Thursday, making him the only Republican from Minnesota to oppose the deal.
UPDATE 2-US House passes Central American trade pact Reuters
House narrowly passes free-trade pact USA Today
Washington Examiner - CNN - St. Petersburg Times - Minneapolis Star Tribune (subscription) - all 954 related »

Bush seals nail-biter trade deal Australian
US President George W.Bush, in a rare piece of political theatre, walked the corridors of the US Congress yesterday to personally lobby Republican members of the House of Representatives to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Mr Bush's direct action proved the clincher, as the free trade agreement was passed 217 votes to 215, the narrowest of margins but a victory the President hopes will signal renewed momentum for his second-term agenda. The first big free trade bill since US Congress overwhelmingly approved a free trade agreement with Australia last year, CAFTA's approval in the house was always going to a nail-biter, given increasing protectionist talk in Congress prompted by the rise of China and the loss of US manufacturing jobs to it and other developing economies. Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and US Trade Representative Rob Portman joined Mr Bush in Congress yesterday in a closed-door caucus meeting of 231 Republicans in the house, where Mr Bush urged them to approve CAFTA. Usually a president calls congressmen and women to the White House for a bit of arm-twisting, but yesterday's moves on Capitol Hill indicated how important a win was for Mr Bush. CAFTA will reduce trade barriers between the US and six countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. While the trade pact is not big in terms of economic impact for the US -- the six countries involved have a combined economy about the same size as New Zealand's -- the deal is seen by its proponents as an important signal of the US commitment to free trade ahead of the Doha round of global trade talks later this year. Despite a history of protectionist talk out of Congress, US congressmen have not rejected any trade deal negotiated by an American president for almost 40 years. A defeat would have been a big blow to Mr Bush, who has already seen his second term legislative agenda stall. Only about half of the house Republicans had openly pledged their support for the bill and at the final count, just after midnight Washington time, 202 out of 231 Republicans and 15 Democrats voted for the agreement. The US Senate approved the bill last month. Democrats had opposed CAFTA, saying it would not only lead to a loss of jobs but would also do little to prevent the exploitation of Central American workers. Several Republicans from textile- and sugar-producing states also opposed the deal. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said: "Under the President's administration, we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs. He is still in the net-loss column for manufacturing jobs. So as our manufacturing base erodes, as our industrial base erodes, we have a president who is contributing to the further erosion of that base." Mr Bush's sales pitch on CAFTA has shifted in recent months. He had championed the deal on national security grounds, arguing it would help shore up Central America's shaky democracies. But to win the day, Mr Bush has also offered protection to the sugar and textile industries, redolent of the concessions made to US manufacturers to ensure success for the Australian free trade agreement. "Trade creates jobs and lifts people out of poverty," house Speaker and Republican Dennis Hastert said at a news conference yesterday. "And there's nothing like a stable society to fight terrorism and strengthen democracy, freedom and rule of law." The Wall Street Journal yesterday had urged Congress to pass the deal, saying "killing CAFTA would signal to the world that America is afraid of competition and in retreat, both commercially and politically".
CAFTA wins vote in House Chicago Tribune
US House Approves Central American Trade Agreement Bloomberg
Seattle Post Intelligencer - USA Today - BusinessWeek - The Age (subscription) - all 1,169 related »

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2005, Issue No. 71
July 28, 2005


** THE RUIN OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
** KENNEDY ON SECRECY
** SOME MORE CRS REPORTS


THE RUIN OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

The rise and fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan
Project to develop the atomic bomb and later had his security
clearance revoked, is among the most compelling political dramas
of the twentieth century.

The story is brilliantly retold in a new book by Priscilla
Johnson McMillan entitled "The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer."

The Manhattan Project, with its enormous secret budgets, its
compartmentalization and cover stories, was the matrix for the
cold war secrecy system that remains with us today.

If Project leader Oppenheimer was the "father" of the atomic
bomb, who did more than any other individual to ensure the
success of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, then the 1954
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) hearing which resulted in the
loss of his security clearance was an oedipal revolt writ large.

Of course, the story is complicated and enriched by Oppenheimer's
human failings, as well as his real security infractions and his
admitted pre-war membership in "nearly every fellow-traveling
organization on the West Coast" (though he denied being a member
of the Communist Party).

In Priscilla McMillan's account, based on two decades of
interviews and archival research, secrecy is integral to the
story at every stage, from the internal government debates over
the pursuit of a hydrogen bomb to the illegal monitoring of
Oppenheimer's conversations with his attorney.

"In the case of Robert Oppenheimer," writes Ms. McMillan, "the
deviations from what we consider basic rules of our democracy
were so egregious that even today, half a century later, the
story still stirs our consciences and makes us wonder what it
was all about. It was about many things. One of them was our
government's decision to move to a new and deadlier level of the
nuclear arms race without telling the American people."

"This book is a look at the people and events that led to the
destruction of J. Robert Oppenheimer."

"There are stories like it today."

"The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern
Arms Race" by Priscilla J. McMillan has just been published by
Viking. See:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067...1261678-4756712

Priscilla McMillan is a Harvard historian, a former FAS Council
member, a Secrecy News colleague since the secrecy battles of
the early 1990s, and author of the enduring classic "Marina and
Lee" about the JFK assassination.


KENNEDY ON SECRECY

"We need to return to our core values of openness and
accountability," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) on the
Senate floor yesterday.

Sen. Kennedy took the better part of an hour during the Senate
debate on a gun liability law to lambaste the Bush White House
for its secrecy policies, covering everything from
overclassification to the CIA leak case to the Vice President's
Energy Task Force, and much more.

"Under the Bush administration, openness and accountability have
been replaced by secrecy and evasion of responsibility. They
abuse their power, conceal their actions from the American
people, and refuse to hold officials accountable."

Sen. Kennedy made at least two commonplace errors when he stated
that "Last year, a record 15.6 million documents were classified
by the Bush administration."

According to the Information Security Oversight Office, there
were 15.6 million classification *decisions* in FY 2004, which
does not translate directly into 15.6 million classified
*documents* (it could be much more). And though this represents a
huge increase over recent years, it is not a record high number.
The ISOO reported more than 22 million classification actions
in FY 1985.

See Sen. Kennedy's July 27 remarks on secrecy here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2005/s072705.html


SOME MORE CRS REPORTS

Recent reports of the Congressional Research Service include the
following.

"Pakistan-U.S. Relations," updated July 26, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IB94041.pdf

"Pakistan: Chronology of Events," updated July 25, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS21584.pdf

"Supreme Court Appointment Process: Roles of the President,
Judiciary Committee, and Senate," updated July 6, 2005:

http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/50146.pdf

"Women in Iraq: Background and Issues for U.S. Policy," updated
June 23, 2005:

http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/50258.pdf

"D-Day: The French Jubilee of Liberty Medal and the 60th
Anniversary Commemoration on June 6, 2004, and Events for June
6, 2005," updated May 27, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS20900.pdf

"Navy Trident Submarine Conversion (SSGN) Program: Background and
Issues for Congress," updated May 25, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RS21007.pdf

"Republic of the Marshall Islands Changed Circumstances Petition
to Congress," updated May 16, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL32811.pdf

"Sri Lanka: Background and U.S. Relations," updated May 16, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL31707.pdf

"Exemptions from Environmental Law for the Department of Defense:
An Overview of Congressional Action," May 16, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22149.pdf



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Bush team wants to play down military aspects and focus on the 'struggle against violent extremism.'

http://csmonitor.com/2005/0728/dailyUpdate.html

Shuttle Docks with Space Station

http://enews.voanews.com/t?ctl=E5F3E7:2F72C9D

But NASA grounds shuttle fleet after large piece of insulating foam
broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during launch, raising fears
problem that doomed Columbia in 2003 could happen again

Space shuttle Discovery prepares to dock with International Space
Station, July 28, 2005The U.S. space shuttle Discovery has docked with
the International Space Station, but it will be the last time a
shuttle visits the outpost for a while. The space agency NASA is
grounding the shuttle fleet because a large piece of insulating foam
broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during Tuesday's launch,
raising fear that the problem that doomed the orbiter Columbia in 2003
could happen again.

Discovery eased very up under the space station and closed in on its
target very slowly.

Shuttle pilot Jim Kelly confirmed the connection to mission control in
Houston.

"Houston, Alpha-Discovery, we have contact and capture. The shuttle is
in free drift."

The shuttle's seven astronauts will spend eight days with the
station's three-man crew resupplying the space laboratory and hauling
out two-and-a-half years worth of accumulated trash.

It has been that long since a shuttle has connected to the station
because of the flight moratorium after Columbia disintegrated in
orbit. Now, in a major setback to America's manned flight program,
NASA has grounded all shuttle flights again.

It acted after launch photographs showed that a sizable chunk of hard
insulating foam fell away from Discovery's external fuel tank during
lift off on Tuesday. This was the very problem NASA spent two years
and one billion dollars to correct. It was such a piece of foam that
punctured a hole in Colombia's wing upon liftoff, causing it to burn
up in the searing heat of re-entry and killing all seven astronauts on
board.

Shuttle program manager Bill Parsons says the debris in the latest
launch does not seem to have damaged Discovery in any way, but he and
other mission managers put shuttle launches on hold so engineers can
pursue further fixes.

"Until we're ready, we won't go fly again," he said. "Now, I don't
know when that might be. So, I'll just state that right up front.
We're just in the beginning of this process of understanding. This is
a test flight."

High-resolution space station cameras photographed Discovery's
underside as it neared the outpost to look at a pit believed to have
been made by debris in a protective surface tile during Tuesday's
launch. The images should give engineers a closer look at any
potential damage, according to deputy shuttle manager Wayne Hale.

"Are we concerned about this? We are treating it very seriously," said
Mr. Hale. "Are we losing any sleep over it? Not yet."

Mr. Hale says NASA officials will spend the next few days coming up
with a plan either to have the astronauts try to repair the heat tiles
or to return to Earth on schedule August seventh with things the way
they are.

Bush Wins Major Victory on Central America Trade Vote

http://enews.voanews.com/t?ctl=E5F3F0:2F72C9D

There were sharp exchanges between Democrats and Republicans over
legislation which aims to eliminate trade barriers between US and six
Latin American countries After some of the most heated Congressional
debate ever on a trade issue, the House of Representatives has
narrowly approved the Central American Free Trade Agreement - 217 to
215 - giving President Bush a major victory. There were sharp
exchanges between Democrats and Republicans over the legislation which
aims to eliminate trade barriers between the United States, and six
Latin American countries.

In the final hours, President Bush made an unusual visit to Capitol
Hill trying to persuade still undecided members of his Republican
Party to vote for CAFTA.

That is a measure of how important the agreement is to the president
and members of his Republican Party, who call the accord critical to
the U.S. economy and to stabilizing fragile democracies.

Eighty percent of goods from Central America already enter the United
States duty free. CAFTA would eliminate or gradually phase out
remaining tariffs with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras
and Nicaragua and includes a separate pact for the Dominican Republic.

CAFTA nations import about $15 billion in American goods. The Bush
administration says the agreement will increase U.S. agricultural and
manufactured exports to the region by at least $2 billion

Debate pitted the most fanatic of free-trade advocates against
lawmakers who see CAFTA as a giveaway to multinational corporations,
and a disappointment in the area of labor standards.

Congressman Bill Thomas, Republican chairman of the House Ways and
Means Committee, accused Democrats of arrogance.

"As you make the arguments that you make so shamefully, so
disrespectfully and so arrogantly about the governments, freely
elected [and] supported by their people, just remember they want a job
too," he said. "They love their children. They are respectful of you.
Be respectful of them."

That brought this response from Democrat Charles Rangel.

"Arrogance? How can we have a bill say that we're helping these people
to make certain that they stave off Communism and that they become
indeed a Democratic country and, at the same time, exclude them from
participating?" he said. "Yes they want CAFTA; yes the Dominicans want
to have a Dominican free-trade agreement; but they want to be a part
of it and they want their people protected."

The Bush administration made significant progress in the final hours
leading to House debate, persuading Republicans from key
textile-producing states who had been wary about negative effects of
CAFTA.

After Mr. Bush's visit to Congress, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay
accused Democrats of politicizing the debate over a crucial trade
agreement:

"The president is looking out for the national interest. And it is in
the national interest that CAFTA passes," he said. "It is good for our
national security, in supporting these fledgling democracies at our
back door. It is good in our effort against illegal immigration. It is
good for our economy."

Opposition Democrats say CAFTA contains weaker standards and
enforcement provisions on worker's rights and was negotiated by the
governments, over the objections of indigenous labor, human rights and
other groups.

Republicans contend the agreement contains provisions aimed at
ensuring adherence to and strengthening of domestic labor laws.

Congressman David Dreier accused Democrats of twisting the facts. "The
Democratically-elected parliaments in El Salvador, Guatemala and
Honduras all have had votes on this issue," he said. "It was 49 to 30
in the democratically-elected parliament of El Salvador, 126 to 12 in
the democratically-elected parliament of Guatemala, and 100 of 128
legislators in Honduras were supportive of CAFTA."

China's growing influence in Western Hemisphere trade was a key part
of the debate. Supporters insist CAFTA will help slow growing Chinese
economic influence in the hemisphere. Opponents maintain it will lead
to more job losses and worsen the U.S. trade deficit.

Earlier, the House approved a Republican-backed bill aimed at stepping
up pressure on Beijing over its trade practices - a move designed in
part by Republicans to ease the way for a successful vote on CAFTA.

The U.S. Senate approved CAFTA at the end of June, voting 54 to 45 in
favor of the accord.

US, Five Asia-Pacific Nations Announce Partnership to Curb Pollution

http://enews.voanews.com/t?ctl=E5F3F1:2F72C9D

Partnership to develop new energy technologies to reduce pollution and
curb global warming without hurting economic development The United
States and five major Asian nations have announced a partnership to
develop new energy technologies to reduce pollution and curb global
warming without hurting economic development. The plan was officially
unveiled Thursday at a ministers' meeting in Laos.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer announced the
Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development. He says it will develop
and disseminate clean energy technologies among some of the biggest
polluters in the developing and the industrialized world.

"We all recognize the Asia-Pacific region's increasing energy needs.
We all recognize the fundamental importance of economic development,"
he said. "And we all recognize the importance of addressing
environmental issues."

The partnership brings together the world's two largest polluters -
the United States and China - and four other major Asian economies:
Japan, India, Australia and South Korea. Together these six countries
contribute more than one-half of the world's so-called greenhouse
gases that contribute to global warming.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick says the partnership
will allow industrialized partners to gain a better understanding of
the challenges facing developing nations.

"We have to listen to our developing country colleagues about some of
their particular problems," he said. "India and China in particular
both have huge development challenges, of which energy is a critical
component."

Mr. Zoellick underscores that the new partnership is not meant to
replace or undermine the Kyoto Protocol, but complement it.

The Kyoto Protocol requires 35 industrialized nations to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by five percent by the year 2012. The United
States and Australian governments have refused to ratify the treaty
because it does not mandate pollution curbs in developing nations like
China and India.

The new partnership is voluntary, does not have deadlines or pollution
reduction targets and cannot enforce compliance.

Despite this, India's Foreign Minister Raoul Inderjit Singh says the
partnership will encourage environmental policies that do not hurt
economic growth in less wealthy nations.

"The vision statement refers to the Delhi Declaration which made a
significant departure from previous declarations by emphasizing the
importance of sustainable development and the need for looking at
development when considering any climate change approach," said Mr.
Singh.

Environmental activists were quick to criticize the six-nation pact as
lacking. They say strict targets are needed to cut pollution, which
harm the eco-systems around the world.

Meetings Signify a Shift in Approach to Talks
(Glenn Kessler, Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5072702002.html

Thursday, July 28
During a flight to Africa two years ago, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met with President Bush to discuss the crisis over North Korea's nuclear programs. A key point was that the State Department's chief negotiator at disarmament talks needed to be able to talk one on one with North Korean officials. Powell ultimately won permission for one brief meeting, on the side of a room filled with officials from other countries. But Powell's negotiator, James A. Kelly, was permitted only to say the same thing to any question raised by the North Koreans: Go back and read my prepared statement.

But now, almost unnoted, an important shift has taken place in the Bush administration's approach to North Korea: The ban on genuine one-on-one talks has been all but abandoned. "Secretary Rice has implemented a subtle but important shift in U.S. policy," said Joseph Cirincione, director of nonproliferation policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "There is no question that the lack of flexibility for the negotiators precluded any possibility of getting a deal for the past three years. Clearly, we are now in a period of give-and-take and genuine negotiations."

North Korea Seeks U.S. Aid Before It Halts Its Nuclear Program
(Jim Yardley, New York Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/internat...ia/28korea.html

Thursday, July 28
North Korea on Wednesday criticized an American plan to defuse the nuclear crisis, saying the proposal demands too many steps toward dismantling the country's nuclear program before providing any corresponding aid or energy assistance, a senior United States official said in a background meeting with reporters.

North Korea's criticism of the American plan, first proposed in June 2004 before the talks broke off, was not unexpected, noted the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the private nature of the discussions. But it underscored the "fundamental differences" between the countries as participants in the six-nation nuclear talks took on the difficult task of finding common ground to resolve the crisis, now in its third year.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/ne...t_id=1000999479


'NY Times' Explores Role of Miller and Pincus in Plame/CIA Case

By E&P Staff

Published: July 28, 2005 7:45 AM ET

NEW YORK In its regular coverage of the Valerie Plame/CIA leak affair, The New York Times has not probed deeply into the involvement of its own jailed reporter, Judith Miller. Thursday, however, the paper offers some new details in a story by Douglas Jehl that mainly focuses on another oft-ignored figure, The Washington Post's Walter Pincus.

But Jehl didn't get much cooperation from his own paper.

Miller has refused to reveal her source. Pincus testified to the grand jury, but has not publicly revealed his source in the Plame leak.

Jehl reveals that at the time of the Plame leak, "Ms. Miller was working primarily from the Washington bureau of The Times, reporting to Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times.

"In e-mail messages this week, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, and George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of the newspaper, declined to address written questions about whether Ms. Miller was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson's trip, whether she tried to write a story about it, or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson."

The rest of the Jehl article seems to have been sparked by an article in the summer issue of the Nieman Reports. In it, Pincus "makes clear that his source had volunteered the information to him," something that people close to Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby have said they did not do in their conversations with reporters.

Jehl observes that while Pincus has not identified his source to the public, a review of his own accounts "and those of other people with detailed knowledge of the case strongly suggest that his source was neither Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, nor I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and was in fact a third administration official whose identity has not yet been publicly disclosed."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/politics...html?oref=login

Case of CIA Officer's Leaked Identity Takes New TurnCase of C.I.A. Officer's Leaked Identity Takes New Turn

By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: July 28, 2005
WASHINGTON, July 26 - In the same week in July 2003 in which Bush administration officials told a syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter that a C.I.A. officer had initiated her husband's mission to Niger, an administration official provided a Washington Post reporter with a similar account.

The first two episodes, involving the columnist Robert D. Novak and the reporter Matthew Cooper, have become the subjects of intense scrutiny in recent weeks. But little attention has been paid to what The Post reporter, Walter Pincus, has recently described as a separate exchange on July 12, 2003.

In that exchange, Mr. Pincus says, "an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention" to the trip to Niger by Joseph C. Wilson IV "because it was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, an analyst with the agency who was working on weapons of mass destruction."

Mr. Wilson traveled to Niger in 2002 at the request of the C.I.A. to look into reports about Iraqi efforts to buy nuclear materials. He later accused the administration of twisting intelligence about the nuclear ambitions of Iraq, prompting an angry response from the White House.

Mr. Pincus did not write about the exchange with the administration official until October 2003, and The Washington Post itself has since reported little about it. The newspaper's most recent story was a 737-word account last Sept. 16, in which the newspaper reported that Mr. Pincus had testified the previous day about the matter, but only after his confidential source had first "revealed his or her identity" to Mr. Fitzgerald, the special counsel conducting the C.I.A. leak inquiry.

Mr. Pincus has not identified his source to the public. But a review of Mr. Pincus's own accounts and those of other people with detailed knowledge of the case strongly suggest that his source was neither Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, nor I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and was in fact a third administration official whose identity has not yet been publicly disclosed.

Mr. Pincus's most recent account, in the current issue of Nieman Reports, a journal of the Nieman Foundation, makes clear that his source had volunteered the information to him, something that people close to both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said they did not do in their conversations with reporters.

Mr. Pincus has said he will not identify his source until the source does so. But his account and those provided by other reporters sought out by Mr. Fitzgerald in connection with the case provide a fresh window into the cast of individuals other than Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby who discussed Ms. Wilson with reporters.

In addition to Mr. Pincus, the reporters known to have been pursued by the special prosecutor include Mr. Novak, whose column of July 14, 2003, was the first to identify Ms. Wilson, by her maiden name, Valerie Plame; Mr. Cooper, who testified before a grand jury on the matter earlier this month; Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News, and who was interviewed by the prosecutor last year; Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic reporter for The Post, who was also interviewed last year, and Judith Miller of The New York Times, who is now in jail for refusing to testify about the matter. It is not known whether Mr. Novak has testified or been interviewed on the matter.

Both Mr. Pincus, who covers intelligence matters for The Post, and Mr. Russert have continued to report on the investigation after being interviewed by Mr. Fitzgerald about their conversations with government officials.

Mr. Pincus wrote in the Nieman Reports article that he had agreed to answer questions from Mr. Fitzgerald last fall about his July 12, 2003, conversation only after "it turned out that my source, whom I still cannot identify publicly, had in fact disclosed to the prosecutor that he was my source, and he talked to the prosecutor about our conversation."

In identifying Ms. Wilson and her role, Mr. Novak attributed that account to two senior Bush administration officials. One of those officials was Mr. Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff, according to people close to Mr. Rove, who have said he merely confirmed information that Mr. Novak already had.

But the identity of Mr. Novak's original source, whom he has described as "no partisan gunslinger," remains unknown.

Mr. Cooper of Time magazine, who wrote about the matter several days after Mr. Novak's column appeared, has written and said publicly that he told a grand jury that Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove were among his sources. But Mr. Cooper has also said that there may have been others.

Ms. Miller never wrote a story about the matter. She has refused to testify in response to a court order directing her to testify in response to a subpoena from Mr. Fitzgerald seeking her testimony about a conversation with a specified government official between June 6, 2003, and June 13, 2003.

During that period, Ms. Miller was working primarily from the Washington bureau of The Times, reporting to Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times.

In e-mail messages this week, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, and George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of the newspaper, declined to address written questions about whether Ms. Miller was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson's trip, whether she tried to write a story about it, or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson.

The four reporters known to have been interviewed by Mr. Fitzgerald or to have appeared before the grand jury have said that they did so after receiving explicit permission from their sources, most notably Mr. Libby, who was the subject of the interviews involving Mr. Russert, Mr. Kessler, Mr. Pincus and Mr. Cooper. They have declined to elaborate on their statements, citing Mr. Fitzgerald's request that they and others not speak publicly about the matter.

Mr. Russert, Mr. Kessler and Mr. Pincus have indicated in statements released by their news organizations that their conversations with Mr. Libby were not about Ms. Wilson.

In his article in the Summer 2005 issue of Nieman Reports, Mr. Pincus wrote that he did not write about Ms. Wilson when he first heard the account "because I did not believe it true that she had arranged" Mr. Wilson's trip.

Mr. Pincus first disclosed the July 12, 2003, conversation with an administration official in an Oct. 12, 2003, article in The Washington Post, but did not mention in that article that he himself had been the recipient of the information. He wrote in Nieman Reports that he did not believe the person who spoke to him was committing a criminal act, but only practicing damage control by trying to get him to write about Mr. Wilson.

The Globalization of State Terror

by Mike Whitney

The expression of Bush's maligned vision is now evident everywhere; from the gun-towers over Guantanamo, to the concertina wire surrounding Falluja, to the cement abutments enclosing the White House. The rising wave of militarism has been accompanied by an equal and opposite retreat in civil liberties and personal freedom.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9589.htm

http://snipurl.com/gkgy

Feds move swiftly to exploit 7/7:

Subway riders in New York and Washington are now subject to random searches, because they might have bombs. Forget that a suicide bomber would only detonate his payload upon being approached by a policeman, and take out whatever number of hapless innocents might be near him in these crowded venues.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/27/fe..._london_terror/

http://snipurl.com/gkhv

Florida church speaks out against Islam:

A sign outside a Jacksonville, Fla., church proclaims, "Islam is evil and believes in murder. Jesus teaches peace."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9601.htm

http://snipurl.com/gki8



"Christian" Country Or A nation In Shame?:

The Religious Right has corrupted Christianity beyond recognition
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9588.htm

http://snipurl.com/gkia



Deal for DeLay district added to energy bill, Democrat says:

A top House Democrat is accusing GOP leaders of slipping a provision into a sprawling energy bill to give hundreds of millions of dollars to a private energy consortium in the suburban Houston hometown of House majority leader Tom DeLay -- a consortium that includes energy giant Halliburton Inc. as one of its most prominent members.
http://snipurl.com/gkic



Waxman letter in full: $1.5 Billion Giveaway Secretly Slipped into Energy Bill:

In a letter to Speaker Hastert, Rep. Waxman writes that after the energy legislation was closed to further amendment in the recently concluded conference, a $1.5 billion provision benefiting oil and gas companies, Halliburton, and Sugar Land, Texas, was mysteriously inserted in the text.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9599.htm

http://snipurl.com/gkid

Subcontractor's Story Details Post-9/11 Chaos:

Three years ago, Sunnye L. Sims lived in a two-bedroom apartment north of San Diego, paying $1,025 in monthly rent. Then she landed a dream job, with $5.4 million in pay for nine months of work.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9594.htm

http://snipurl.com/gkie



Roberts's past toes conservative line

his internal memorandums, some of which have become public in recent days, reveal a philosophy every bit as conservative as the policy makers on the front lines of the Reagan revolution and give more definition to his image than was apparent in the first days after President George W. Bush picked him last week
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file...ews/roberts.php

http://snipurl.com/gkjc



U.S. House approves Central American trade agreement:

Republicans, mostly from textile states, jockeyed over who would be allowed to vote against the bill and save face back home. The final count came minutes after midnight.
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file...iness/cafta.php

http://snipurl.com/gkif



The CAFTA Agreement:

How Did Your Representative Vote:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll443.xml

http://snipurl.com/gkig



CAFTA: Which of the 15 Dem Sellouts Should Start Looking For Another Job/Party?

We now know who the 15 Democrats are that each undermined their party and America's middle class by casting the deciding vote for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
http://snipurl.com/gkis



One mother's war:

Mother seeking support cursed at for questioning war; Son escaped suicide bomb
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/one_mothers_war_ohio_728

http://snipurl.com/gkii



ISP 'censored' anti-war email:

A US broadband provider and a security services company have been accused of blocking emails relating to an anti-Iraq war protest.
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/smh65.html

http://snipurl.com/gkil



US under fire over al-Qaeda guide :

The US Department of Justice has come under fire for posting an al-Qaeda training manual on its website.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4722833.stm

http://snipurl.com/gkin

Shuttle flaws test NASA's toolbox prowess
The vehicle's foam problem will be hard to fix. Should fleet be
retired? By Mark Sappenfield
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0729/p01s02-stss.html?s=hns

Longtime union members troubled over dissident split
Despite anger over the division, most agree that reforms are needed. By
Amanda Paulson
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0729/p02s01-uspo.html?s=hns


Key turf war: control of nominee's old papers
Why the White House will withhold some of John Roberts's work. By Peter
Grier
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0729/p02s02-uspo.html?s=hns


From GOP Congress, welcome wins for Bush
With his poll ratings still troubled, the president enjoys a week of
better headlines. By Gail Russell Chaddock
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0729/p03s01-uspo.html?s=hns

Ex-CIA Officer Suing Over Bin Laden Book By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
Thu Jul 28, 1:29 PM ET



WASHINGTON - The CIA is squelching publication of a new book detailing events leading up to Osama bin Laden's escape from his Tora Bora mountain stronghold during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, says a former CIA officer who led much of the fighting.

In a story he says he resigned from the agency to tell, Gary Berntsen recounts the attacks he coordinated at the peak of the fighting in eastern Afghanistan in late 2001, including how U.S. commanders knew bin Laden was in the rugged mountains near the Pakistani border and the al-Qaida leader's much-discussed getaway.

Berntsen claims in a federal court lawsuit that the CIA is over-classifying his manuscript and has repeatedly missed deadlines written into its own regulations to review his book. His attorney, Roy Krieger, said he delivered papers to the U.S. District Court in Washington after hours Wednesday.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigiliano said Bernsten's manuscript is subject to the same pre-publication review as that of all former employees.

"There, the guideline is that it contain no classified information," he said. "In this case, the process is moving forward."

During the 2004 election, President Bush and other senior administration officials repeatedly said that commanders did not know whether bin Laden was at Tora Bora when U.S. and allied Afghan forces attacked there in 2001.

They rejected allegations by Sen. John Kerry, then the Democratic presidential nominee, that the United States had missed an opportunity to capture or kill bin Laden because they had "outsourced" the fighting to Afghan warlords.

"When I watched the presidential debates, it was clear to me ... the debate and discussions on Tora Bora were — from both sides — completely incorrect," said Berntsen, who won't provide details until the agency finishes declassifying his book. "It did not repres