Free Internet Press Newsletter - Friday June 8 2007 - (813)

Friday June 8 2007 edition
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U.S. War 'Czar' Offer Grim Iraq View 2007-06-08 02:36:35 President Bush's nominee to be war czar said yesterday that conditions in Iraq have not improved significantly despite the influx of U.S. troops in recent months and predicted that, absent major political reform, violence will continue to rage over the next year. Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, tapped by Bush to serve as a new high-powered White House coordinator of the war, told senators at a confirmation hearing that Iraqi factions "have shown so far very little progress" toward the reconciliation necessary to stem the bloodshed. If that does not change, he said, "we're not likely to see much difference in the security situation" a year from now. Lute's dour assessment mirrored the views of U.S. intelligence officials, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee in a closed session last month that trends in Iraq remain negative and that the prospect for political movement by the nation's feuding Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds appears marginal. The secret intelligence conclusions were disclosed during Thursday's hearing by Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Indiana) and confirmed by a Republican official. Read The Full Story Commentary: In Iraq, The Allies Have Become The Vandals 2007-06-08 02:35:54 Intellpuke: In the following commentary, Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins, a journalist for several publications and an author, writes that British and American collusion in the pillaging of Iraq's heritage is a scandal that will outlive any passing conflict. Mr. Jenkins' column follows: Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on earth. Seen from the base in the desert haze or the sand-filled gloom of dusk, the structure is indistinguishable from the mounds of fuel dumps, stores and hangars. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological site. When the head of Iraq's supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and heritage, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect the site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important monument. Thursday Hussaini reported to the British Museum on his struggles to protect his work in a state of anarchy. It was a heart breaking presentation. Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let someone steal an antiquity; in today's Iraq you are likely to be tortured and shot if you don't. The tragic fate of the national museum in Baghdad in April 2003 was as if federal troops had invaded New York City, sacked the police and told the criminal community that the Metropolitan police was at their disposal. The local tank commander was told specifically not to protect the museum for a full two weeks after the invasion. Even the Nazis protected the Louvre. Read The Full Story Britain's Attorney General Knew Of BAE Payments To Saudi Prince. Then Concealed It. 2007-06-08 02:35:08 British investigators were ordered by the attorney-general Lord Goldsmith to conceal from international anti-bribery watchdogs the existence of payments totalling more than £1 billion ($2 billion) to a Saudi prince, the Guardian  disclosed. The money was paid into bank accounts controlled by Prince Bandar for his role in setting up BAE Systems with Britain's biggest ever arms deal. Details of the transfers to accounts in the U.S. were discovered by officers from the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) during its long-running investigation into BAE. But its inquiry was halted suddenly last December. The Guardian newspaper established that the attorney-general warned colleagues last year that "government complicity" in the payment of the sums was in danger of being revealed if the SFO probe was allowed to continue. Read The Full Story Immigration Bill Setback As Senate Vote Fails To Cut Off Debate 2007-06-07 14:41:53 A fragile bipartisan compromise that would legalize millions of unlawful immigrants suffered a setback Thursday when it failed a test vote in the Senate, leaving its prospects uncertain. Still, the measure - a top priority for President Bush that's under attack from the right and left - got a reprieve when Majority Leader Harry Reid,D-Nevada, said he would give it more time before yanking the bill and moving on to other matters. "We need to complete this marathon," said Reid. His decision set the stage for yet another procedural vote later Thursday that will measure lawmakers' appetite for a so-called "grand bargain" between liberals and conservatives on immigration. Read The Full Story Europe And U.S. Reach Climate Deal - To Do Nothing 2007-06-07 14:41:19 The United States agreed today to “seriously consider” a European proposal to combat global warming by halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, breaking a trans-Atlantic deadlock at a meeting here of the world’s richest industrial nations. The compromise, hammered out in tough negotiations between the United States and Germany, also endorses President Bush’s recent proposal to gather together the world’s largest emitting countries, including China and India, to set a series of national goals for reducing emissions. The agreement does not include a mandatory 50 percent reduction in emissions, a key provision sought by Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, Merkel, the host of the meeting, proclaimed it a “huge success.” Read The Full Story Sunni Insurgent Group Announces Truce With Al-Qaeda In Iraq 2007-06-07 14:36:11 A Sunni insurgent group that waged a deadly street battle last week against the rival group al-Qaeda in Iraq in a Sunni neighborhood of west Baghdad announced Wednesday that the two forces had declared a cease-fire. The Islamic Army of Iraq, a more moderate and secular Sunni group, said it had reached the cease-fire with al-Qaeda in Iraq because the groups did not want to spill Muslim blood or damage "the project of jihad." Last week, the two groups fought for several days in the Sunni neighborhood of Amiriyah, leaving about 30 of their fighters dead. Residents of the neighborhood and leaders from the Islamic Army, which reportedly is made up of mostly Sunnis from the disbanded army of Saddam Hussein, said they had risen up against al-Qaeda in Iraq because it was imposing strict rules on the neighborhood and killing fellow Sunnis without evidence of wrongdoing. Read The Full Story Iraqi Journalist Killed In Mosul 2007-06-07 14:32:05 An Iraqi journalist was shot to death while she was waiting for a taxi Thursday in the northern city of Mosul, according to police and her news agency. Sahar al-Haidari, 45, covered political and cultural news for the independent Voices of Iraq news agency and is the second employee of the organization to be killed in little more than a week. She was attacked by gunmen who pulled up in a car and opened fire as she was waiting for a taxi on the main street of the Hadbaa district, a predominantly Sunni Arab area in northeastern Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, said Brig. Gen. Mohammed al-Wakaa of the provincial police. Read The Full Story Justice Dept. Official: Cheney Urged Wiretaps 2007-06-07 01:50:57 U.S. Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators Wednesday. The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft,who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey. Comey's disclosures, made in response to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committe, indicate that Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program. The program allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and e-mails between the United States and overseas. Read The Full Story Campaign Funds For Alaska Rep. Young; Road Aid To Florida 2007-06-07 01:50:25 It is no secret that campaign contributions sometimes lead to lucrative official favors. Rarely, though, are the tradeoffs quite as obvious as in the twisted case of Coconut Road. The road, a stretch of pavement near Fort Myers, Florida, that touches five golf clubs on its way to the Gulf of Mexico, is the target of a $10 million earmark that appeared mysteriously in a 2006 transportation bill written by Representative Don Young, Republican of Alaska. Young, who last year steered more than $200 million to a so-called bridge to nowhere reaching 80 people on Gravina Island, Alaska, has no constituents in Florida. Read The Full Story Analysis: GOP Hopefuls Shred Bush During Debate 2007-06-07 01:49:13 If there was an unexpected loser in Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, it was President Bush and his administration's record. The Republicans criticized their Democratic opponents, but more surprising was that, on issue after issue, they systematically shredded the president's performance over the past four years. Iraq? Badly mismanaged. Katrina? Bungled. Immigration? The wrong solution. Federal spending? Out of control. At times it got personal. When the candidates were asked how they might use the president should they win the White House, former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, who served as secretary of health and human services during Bush's first term, replied: "I certainly would not send him to the United Nations." The line drew laughs from the heavily Republican audience at Saint Anselm College. Read The Full Story Suspect Arrested In Kansas Teen's Death 2007-06-07 01:48:36 Police on Wednesday arrested a man in the abduction and death of a teenager who disappeared four days ago from a store parking lot. Authorities said 18-year-old Kelsey Smith's body was found across the state line at a lake in Grandview, Missouri. Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass identified the suspect as Edwin R. Hall, 26, of Olathe. He was expected to be charged Thursday with premeditated first-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping. Douglass said Hall was interviewed Wednesday after police acted on a tip that matched Hall and a vehicle to surveillance video from the Target store parking lot where Smith was abducted Saturday evening. Read The Full Story	Global Inflation Fears Continue To Chill Markets 2007-06-08 02:36:22 U.S. stocks plunged for the third consecutive day as fears of rising inflation worldwide swept into the markets. The worries Thursday erupted early in New Zealand, where the inflation-wary central bank boosted interest rates to 8 percent. New Zealand's action came on the heels of a rate increase by the European Central Bank on Wednesday. In the United States, traders pushed the rate on the benchmark U.S. Treasury 10-year note to 5.13 percent Thursday on concern that signs of inflation are creeping into the economy. Investors are worried that the Federal Reserve's next move might be a rate increase, not a cut that they had been counting on for weeks. The major stock indicators fell Thursday by 1.5 percent or more. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 198.94, or 1.5 percent, to finish at 13266.73. It was the worst single-day sell-off since March 13 for the Dow, which comprises 30 blue-chip stocks. Thursday, every component finished in the red. Read The Full Story Isolated Musharraf Backs Down On Media Curbs As Anger Grows On Streets And In Ruling Party 2007-06-08 02:35:34 The Pakistani government was forced into a dramatic reversal Thursday as the political crisis surrounding President Pervez Musharraf deepened, with international condemnation of harsh new media laws and the first signs of serious dissent within his own party. As thousands of people demonstrated in four cities - some in defiance of a ban - the government overturned a decree signed by Musharraf on Monday empowering the government to close television stations, revoke licenses and impose large fines. The decree brought international protests. Human Rights Watch said it would "muzzle" the free press and European ambassadors issued a rare statement of concern. The prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, responded by suspending the decree Thursday. Article continues Musharraf appears increasingly isolated as he battles through the greatest political challenge of his career. Lawyers, journalists and opposition parties were already openly hostile when, two days ago, he rounded on his Pakistan Muslim League party for failing to support him. "You always leave me alone in time of trial and tribulation," he berated followers at a party meeting, according to the News newspaper. Read The Full Story Investigation: CIA Ran Secret Prisons For Detainees In Europe 2007-06-08 02:34:37 The CIA operated secret prisons in Europe where terrorism suspects could be interrogated and were allegedly tortured, an official inquiry will conclude Friday. Despite denials by their governments, senior Polish and Romanian security officials have confirmed to the Council of Europe that their countries were used to hold some of America's most important prisoners captured after 9/11 in secret. None of the prisoners had access to the Red Cross and many were subject to what George Bush has called the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation, which critics have condemned as torture. Although suspicions about the secret CIA prisons have existed for more than a year, the council's report, seen by Britain's Guardian newspaper, appears to offer the first concrete evidence. It also details the prisons' operations and the identities of some of the prisoners. Read The Full Story Putin Suggest New Missile Defense Shield Site - Azerbaijan 2007-06-07 14:41:38 Russian President Vladimir Putin told President Bush Thursday that he would drop his objections to a U.S. missile defense system if Washington substantially altered current plans to base it entirely in Europe and instead involved Russia through a Soviet-era radar system in the central Asian nation of Azerbaijan. The unexpected proposal, made in a meeting between the two leaders on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit here, will be studied by U.S. experts ahead of Bush's planned meeting with Putin in Maine next month, said U.S. officials. The offer came after German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that leaders of the world's major powers had agreed to pursue "substantial reductions" in greenhouse gas emissions. Faced with U.S. resistance, the G-8 nations stopped short of committing themselves to specific numerical targets, but they agreed on a summit text that mentions the goal of some countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, Merkel said. Read The Full Story Rights Groups Call For End To Secret Detentions 2007-06-07 14:41:00 Intellpuke: There are two articles here on the same story. The first is by the New York Times, below that is the article by the Washington Post. Six human rights groups on Wednesday released a list of 39 people they believe have been secretly imprisoned by the United States and whose whereabouts are unknown, calling on the Bush administration to abandon such detentions. The list, compiled from news media reports, interviews and government documents, includes terrorism suspects and those thought to have ties to militant groups. In some suspects’ cases, officials acknowledge that they were at one time in United States custody. In others, the rights groups say, there is other evidence, sometimes sketchy, that they had at least once been in American hands. The list includes, for instance, Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani who is accused of being a member of al-Qaeda and whose capture in northern Iraq in January 2004 was announced by President Bush. At the other extreme, two unnamed Somali nationals are on the list because they were overheard in 2005 by another prisoner - Marwan Jabour - in the cell next to his at a secret American detention center, possibly in Afghanistan. Jabour was later released. Read The Full Story Baghdad's Green Zone Attacks More Frequent, Accurate 2007-06-07 14:35:50 Rusty Barber was sitting at his desk in a comfortable if spartan office inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone  when the first explosion sounded, close enough to rattle the building and his nerves. He got up from his chair, directly in front of a window, and hurried to the building's more protected central corridor. Then the second mortar shell struck. The round decapitated a palm tree just outside Barber's office, spraying shrapnel across the side of the building, splintering Barber's window and peppering the room with bullet-size pieces of razor-sharp metal. One traveled through a wooden closet and destroyed a porcelain sink; one embedded itself in the small refrigerator; one ricocheted off his desk; another struck his computer monitor. "It was a sobering event," said Barber, 42, head of the local office of the U.S. Institute of Peace. In all, about 10 mortar rounds struck different parts of the Green Zone that day in mid-May, killing two Iraqis and wounding 10 people. Ten cars were damaged or destroyed in the barrage at Barber's complex, a short walk from the U.S. Embassy. Read The Full Story Paris Hilton Released From Jail Early 2007-06-07 14:28:42 She's out of the slammer. Paris Hilton was released from county jail early Thursday because of an undisclosed medical condition and will serve the remainder of her sentence confined to her mansion in West Hollywood. The 26-year-old hotel heiress and professional party girl was affixed with "an ankle bracelet and sent home," said Los Angeles County Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore at a press conference outside the women's jail in Lynwood, where Hilton has been since she turned herself on Sunday night after attending the MTV Movie Awards. Read The Full Story Sen. Ted Stevens Told To Keep Records For Graft Probe 2007-06-07 01:50:40 U.S. Sen. Ted Stevesn (R-Alaska), the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, disclosed in an interview that the FBI asked him to preserve records as part of a widening investigation into Alaskan political corruption that has touched his son and ensnared one of his closest political confidants and financial backers. Stevens, who is famous for bringing home federal earmarks for Alaska when he was Appropriations Committee chairman, was not previously known to be linked to the Justice Department's probe, which has uncovered evidence that more than $400,000 worth of bribes were given to state lawmakers in exchange for favorable energy legislation. Investigators have used secret recording equipment, seized documents and cooperating witnesses to secure the indictments of four current and former state lawmakers, including the former state House speaker, shaking the core of Alaska's Republican Party. Two executives of a prominent energy company have pleaded guilty to bribery and extortion charges and are cooperating with the inquiry, which is being run by the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section and includes two federal prosecutors and FBI agents based in Anchorage, Alaska. Read The Full Story Immigration Bill Survives Challenges - For Now 2007-06-07 01:49:47 The plan to overhaul the nation's immigration system survived its most serious challenges Wednesday, when the Senate defeated amendments to disqualify hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from legalization and to extend visas to hundreds of thousands more relatives of U.S. citizens and green-card holders. By beating back challenges to the deal from the right and the left, the fragile bipartisan coalition behind the "grand bargain" showed it is holding together as the legislation nears final passage - though barely. The bill took a decidedly conservative turn last night with the adoption of amendments that would at once declare English the national language and designate English the "common language" of the United States. The Senate also blocked the bill's newly legalized illegal immigrants from receiving the earned-income tax credit, while denying legalized undocumented workers any Social Security benefits they may have earned after overstaying their visa. Read The Full Story Finally, FDA Issues Strictest Warnings On Diabetes Drugs 2007-06-07 01:48:51 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has called for the toughest safety warning on two diabetes drugs, Avandia and Actos, whose health risks have become a focus of Congressional concern. That decision, disclosed on Wednesday by the F.D.A. commissioner at a packed House hearing, comes more than a year after the agency’s safety reviewers strongly recommended just such a step. And it occurs amid a Congressional investigation into why the agency delayed its warnings about Avandia for years. In a written statement, the commissioner, Andrew C. von Eschenbach, said the agency has asked the makers of Actos and Avandia to carry the more prominent warning, a so-called black box warning, of its heart risks because “despite existing warnings, these drugs were being prescribed to patients with significant heart failure.” Read The Full Story
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