Free Internet Press Newsletter - Sunday June 24 2007 - (813)

Sunday June 24 2007 edition
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Ex-Surveillance Judge Faults Warrantless Taps On Americans 2007-06-24 02:03:59 A federal judge who used to authorize wiretaps in terrorism and espionage cases Saturday criticized President Bush's decision to order warrantless surveillance after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "We have to understand you can fight the war [on terrorism] and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war," said Royce C. Lamberth, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, D.C.,  and a former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, speaking at the American Library Association'sannual convention. Lamberth, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, expressed his opposition to letting the executive branch decide on its own which people to spy on in national security cases. Read The Full Story Commentary: Lay Off America - Its Heart Is In The Right Place 2007-06-24 02:03:36 Intellpuke: The following commentary is by The Observer columnist Carol Sarler. It appears in the Manchester, U.K.-based The Observer's edition for Sunday, June 24, 2007. What can I say? I like the title and the column and thought it merited a broader audience. Carol Sarler's commentary follows: Once again, this time for a report commissioned by the broadcaster itself, the ostensibly neutral BBC stands accused of a sneaky preference for dressing to the left. Much of the evidence for this is, at best, wobbly, but one witness employee, Washington correspondent Justin Webb, needs to be heard. The organization, he peeved, is anti-American; it treats the U.S. with scorn and derision and accords it "no moral weight". He is, thus far at least, correct. The last 10 years have seen American stories relegated to a slew of "and finally"  freak shows, a vast country's talents reduced to synchronized gas-guzzling as choreographed by Paris Hilton. The trouble is that it is not just the BBC; disdaining Americans has become a national sport, regardless of the fact that it requires the skill of all sports involving fish, guns and barrels. Everybody knows the check-list, only their priorities vary: stem cells, lethal injections, indelicate warfare, creationism, the second amendment, Wal-Mart, reproductive choice, pointy white hoods, chewing tobacco and obscene chocolate. We may add personal quibbles: that they call this paper The London Observer, on the solipsistic basis that if all their newspapers are mono-citied, then so must be everyone's. Or that now they finally screen Formula One, they go to ad breaks during clusters of pitstops because, apparently, stationary cars are boring. Jeez. Read The Full Story Karzai Decries Civilian Deaths, Says Recent NATO, U.S. Operations 'Careless' 2007-06-24 02:02:39 Afghan President Hamid Karzai chastised U.S. and NATO-led troops Saturday for their "careless operations" and accused them of killing more than 90 civilians in the past 10 days, as fresh reports emerged of more noncombatant deaths. Using some of his strongest language yet against the foreign forces that occupy his country, Karzai asserted that "Afghan life is not cheap and it should not be treated as such." "We do not want any more military operations without coordinating them with the Afghan government," a visibly angry Karzai said at a news conference in Kabul, the capital. "From now onwards, they have to work the way we ask them to work in here." Read The Full Story Fundraising Gap Likely To Persist For Presidential Campaigns 2007-06-23 14:42:23 Twelve weeks ago, after raising less money than two other Republican candidates in the first three months of 2007, Sen. John McCain, of Arizona, the early favorite for his party's presidential nomination, declared that it was his fault, said he hoped "to get better" at it and reorganized his finance team. This week he said it hasn't worked out too well, acknowledging that raising money is "very tough" and allowing that "we weren't going to win this campaign on money anyway." On the Democratic side, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina had vowed that he, too, would improve on a weak first-quarter showing but, this week, Joe Trippi, a senior aide, e-mailed supporters with news that the campaign is only two-thirds of the way to its relatively modest fundraising goal. Read The Full Story German Officials Report Increased Threat Of Terrorist Attacks 2007-06-23 14:41:46 Germany faces a heightened threat of terrorist attacks because of its military involvement in Afghanistan,  government security officials in Frankfurt said Friday. The danger level, they warned, was comparable to the months before the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Three German residents, believed to be radical Islamic militants, were arrested in Pakistan in recent days, according to the German Federal Criminal Police. Officials here suspect them of traveling to the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan to enter terrorist training camps. “This tells us that German interests are in danger of being attacked, for example, by suicide bombers,” a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Christian Sachs, said in a telephone interview. Read The Full Story Israelis Arrest Senior Hamas Activist 2007-06-23 14:41:04 Israeli troops on Saturday arrested the founder of the Hamas military wing in the West Bank, as part of a widening crackdown on the Islamic militants following Hamas' bloody takeover of Gaza. The Hamas activist, Saleh Aruri, was taken from his West Bank home before dawn, said his wife. Aruri had served 15 years in an Israeli prison and was released in March. Hamas alleged in a statement that its political rival, the Fatah movement of moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, is coordinating with Israel in an attempt to crush Hamas in the West Bank. Israeli military officials said Aruri resumed involvement in violent Hamas activity in recent months. Read The Full Story Justice Department's Third-In-Command Resigns 2007-06-23 01:28:49 The Justice Department's third-in-command announced his resignation Friday, becoming the sixth aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to leave amid the political uproar over the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year. William W. Mercer - who had been acting associate attorney general since September - withdrew his nomination for the job just days before he was scheduled to appear at a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Tuesday. Mercer said he will return to his regular assignment as the U.S. attorney in Montana, writing in a letter to Gonzales that there was "no end in sight" to his nomination because of opposition from Senate Democrats. "After much consideration, I have concluded that it is highly unlikely that both the Judiciary Committee and the Senate will take prompt action on my nomination in the near term, if ever," Mercer wrote. Read The Full Story An Ex-Member Calls Detainee Panels Unfair 2007-06-23 01:28:00 A military officer and former member of a Pentagon unit that decided to indefinitely imprison some detainees from Afghanistan and Iraqhas said in a sworn affidavit that the process of reviewing their cases was "fundamentally flawed" and that the results were influenced by pressure from superiors rather than based on concrete evidence. Stephen Abraham, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and a lawyer, said the military placed too much weight on unsubstantiated statements by intelligence agencies in deciding that the detainees were enemy combatants, according to his affidavit. That conclusion meant that the detainees could be kept in a prison in Guantanamo as long as the U.S. military wished. Abraham, who helped review government intelligence about detainees in 2004 and 2005 and served on a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, is the first person who played such a role to publicly challenge the fairness of the reviews. He said in an interview Friday that he felt compelled to disclose his misgivings after reading public claims about the fairness of the process made by Rear Adm. James M. McGarrah, who oversaw it. Read The Full Story Go Back And Stand Up To The French, Brown Orders Blair 2007-06-23 01:25:55 Gordon Brown, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer and the man who will succeed Tony Blair as prime minister in a few days, dramatically intervened in a crucial European summit Friday to overrule the prime minister in his last week in office and demand that Britain challenge a French move to dilute Europe's commitment to a free market. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, triggered a row at the Brussels meeting by watering down a pledge to maintain "free and undistorted competition" in the operation of the single European market. Brown, who was not attending the summit, intervened with Tony Blair after the prime minister assented to the French demand. He phoned Blair three times in Brussels as he digested the potential impact of the Sarkozy coup. A chastened prime minister was forced to go back to the negotiating table to demand a new "protocol" to guarantee that the E.U.'s powers to regulate cartels and anti-trust issues were not impaired. Read The Full Story Puzzling Over Putin's Remarks On Succession 2007-06-23 01:21:50 Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to quietly delight in stoking the fevered speculation about who will succeed him when he steps down, as he has promised to do, following presidential elections in March. Now Moscow is suddenly chattering about a new, unnamed prospect - the loyal place-holder. Under that scenario, which Putin recently toyed with publicly, a new leader would keep his seat warm until 2012 - or even sooner, as some have suggested, if Russia's next president were suddenly afflicted with nervous exhaustion or some other condition that forced him - or her - to resign. The Russian constitution only prevents Putin from serving more than two consecutive terms. "Theoretically it's possible," Putin said when asked at the recent Group of Eight summit in Germany if he might run in 2012. "The constitution does not forbid it." Read The Full Story	Editorial: White House Of Mirrors 2007-06-24 02:03:48 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Sunday, June 24, 2007. President Bush has turned the executive branch into a two-way mirror. They get to see everything Americans do: our telephone calls, e-mail, and all manner of personal information. And we get to see nothing about what they do. Everyone knows this administration has disdained openness and accountability since its first days. That is about the only thing it does not hide. But recent weeks have produced disturbing disclosures about just how far Mr. Bush’s team is willing to go to keep lawmakers and the public in the dark. That applies to big issues - like the C.I.A.’s secret prisons - and to things that would seem too small-bore to order up a cover-up. Vice President Dick Cheney sets the gold standard, placing himself not just above Congress and the courts but above Mr. Bush himself. For the last four years, he has been defying a presidential order requiring executive branch agencies to account for the classified information they handle. When the agency that enforces this rule tried to do its job, Mr. Cheney proposed abolishing the agency. Read The Full Story Iraqi Kurds Await Chemical Ali Verdict 2007-06-24 02:03:11 Kurds bought sheep to slaughter in celebration and stockpiled generator fuel to keep televisions working for Sunday's verdict against Saddam Hussein's cousin, known as Chemical Ali, and others accused in a 1980s crackdown against them. Many in northern Iraq said they anticipate the harshest penalty possible against Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin and the former head of the Baath Party's Northern Bureau Command, who is accused of responsibility for using chemical weapons against Kurds in the late 1980s scorched-earth campaign to crush a rebellion in the north. The case - called Anfal after the codename for the campaign - does not include the deaths of an estimated 5,600 people in a 1988 chemical weapons attack in Halabja, 150 miles northeast of Baghdad. But the impoverished town has become a focal point for the anger over the operation that led to the deaths of 100,000 Kurds and memories of the atrocities remain fresh in the minds of the survivors. Read The Full Story White House Defends Cheney's Refusal Of Oversight On Classified Information 2007-06-23 14:42:34 The White House defended Vice President Cheney Friday in a dispute over his office's refusal to comply with an executive order regulating the handling of classified information as Democrats and other critics assailed him for disregarding rules that others follow. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Cheney is not obligated to submit to oversight by an office that safeguards classified information, as other members and parts of the executive branch are. Cheney's office has contended that it does not have to comply because the vice president serves as president of the Senate, which means that his office is not an "entity within the executive branch." "This is a little bit of a nonissue," Perino said at a briefing dominated by the issue. Cheney is not subject to the executive order, she said, "because the president gets to decide whether or not he should be treated separately, and he's decided that he should." Read The Full Story Roadside Bombs In Iraq Kill 7 U.S. Soldiers 2007-06-23 14:42:03 Roadside bombs killed seven American troops in Iraq on Saturday, including four in a single strike outside Baghdad, said the military, as U.S. and Iraqi troops captured two senior al-Qaeda militants in northern Iraq. Separately, a predawn operation by U.S. forces working with Iraqi informants in Baghdad's main Shiite district of Sadr City netted three other militants suspected of ties to Iran, said the military. The Americans have accused Iran of providing mainly Shiite militias with training and powerful roadside bombs known as explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, that have killed hundreds of U.S. troops in recent months. Read The Full Story Chirac Refuses To Testify In French Dirty Tricks Case 2007-06-23 14:41:32 Having lost the immunity that protected him from prosecution while in office, Jacques Chirac, the former French president, has refused to testify in a political dirty tricks scandal that sought to discredit Nicolas Sarkozy,the current president. The scandal involved false documentation that supposedly showed large sums of money, presumably bribes, passing through secret bank accounts held by Sarkozy and others. Sarkozy claimed at the time that the scandal was orchestrated to ruin his chances for the presidency. In refusing to be interviewed by investigators working on the case, Chirac argued that because he enjoyed immunity while in office, he cannot be made to testify about things that happened during his tenure. Chirac, 74, left power on May 16 after having ruled France for 12 years. His presidential immunity ran out at midnight on June 16, a month after the end of his mandate. Read The Full Story U.S. Commander: Top Al-Qaeda Targets Fled Before U.S. Push In Baquba 2007-06-23 01:29:00 The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with al-Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top al-Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of al-Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004. In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the al-Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” al-Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops - just, he said, as they did in Falluja. Some American officers in Baquba have placed blame for the al-Qaeda leaders’ flight on public remarks about the offensive in the days before it began by top American commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the overall commander in Iraq. General Odierno cast the issue in broader terms, saying al-Qaeda leaders were bound to know an attack was coming in light of President Bush’s decision to pour nearly 30,000 additional troops into the fight in a bid to secure Baghdad and areas around the capital that have been insurgent strongholds. That included Baquba, which lies 40 miles north. Read The Full Story Iraq Push Revives Criticism Of Force Size 2007-06-23 01:28:39 The major U.S. offensive launched last weekend against insurgents in and around Baghdad has significantly expanded the military's battleground in Iraq - "a surge of operations," and no longer just of troops, as the second-ranking U.S. commander there said Friday - but it has renewed concerns about whether even the bigger U.S. troop presence there is large enough. As the U.S. offensive, code-named Phantom Thunder, has been greeted with a week of intensified fighting in areas outside the capital - areas that the U.S. military has largely left untouched for as long as three years - the push raised fears from security experts and officers in the field that the new attacks might simply propel the enemy from one area to another where there are not as many U.S. troops. Since President Bush ordered the troop increase in January, the military had focused on creating a more secure environment in Baghdad. "We are beyond a surge of forces," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno said Friday in a briefing from his headquarters in the Iraqi capital. He did not directly address the size of the force, saying only that the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops over five months "allows us to operate in areas where we have not been for a long time." Read The Full Story U.N. Report Warns Of Wars Triggered By Climate Change 2007-06-23 01:26:34 The conflict in Darfur has been driven by climate change and environmental degradation, which threaten to trigger a succession of new wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage, according to a United Nations  report published Friday. "Darfur ... holds grim lessons for other countries at risk," an 18-month study of Sudan by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) concludes. With rainfall down by up to 30% over 40 years and the Sahara advancing by well over a mile every year, tensions between farmers and herders over disappearing pasture and evaporating water holes threaten to reignite the half-century war between north and south Sudan, held at bay by a precarious 2005 peace accord. The southern Nuba tribe, for example, have warned they could "restart the war" because Arab nomads - pushed southwards into their territory by drought - are cutting down trees to feed their camels. Read The Full Story Britain's Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, Resigns 2007-06-23 01:25:41 Britain's Attoreny General Lord Goldsmith dramatically announced his resignation as attorney general Friday night, days before he was expected to be ousted when Gordon Brown takes over as prime minister. The departure makes it easier for Brown to look afresh at the role of attorney general, a job which many consider to have inbuilt conflicts of interest. Brown is considering stripping the attorney of his role in superintending prosecutions and making the Crown Prosecution Service independent. Such a change would mean no government minister would play a part in deciding whether to prosecute in the loans-for-honors affair, distancing the new administration from the embarrassing saga. Lord Goldsmith said in a statement that he had been "immensely privileged" to serve but had "wanted for some time to move on". He would not be giving up all links with government, and had "agreed with Mr. Brown to carry out a review of the legal and other aspects of citizenship, further details of which will be announced in due course". His surprise announcement, released just before 9:30 Friday night, ends a six-year career dogged by controversy. Read The Full Story Russia's Gazprom Buys Siberian Gas Field From BP 2007-06-23 01:21:19 The state-controlled energy giant Gazprom on Friday bought a vast natural gas field in Siberia from a unit of British-based petroleum conglomerate BP, continuing the Kremlin'spolicy of shifting control of the country's major energy projects from foreign to state hands. The terms of the multifaceted deal, which also created a new investment alliance between Gazprom and BP, were more favorable to BP than analysts and some company executives had predicted. They had feared that BP could walk away with next to nothing. "It could have been a lot worse for BP," said Jonathan Stern of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. "The last thing BP wanted to do is to either get thrown out of the project or walk out on bad terms. They are still in a great position in Russia." Read The Full Story
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