Free Internet Press Newsletter - Friday July 20 2007 - (813)

Friday July 20 2007 edition
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Bush Administration Claims Justice Dept. Can't Pursue Congress Contempt Charges 2007-07-20 02:55:57 Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege. The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals. Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action." Yet administration officials argued Thursday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts. Read The Full Story Deadly Violence Spreads In Pakistan 2007-07-20 02:55:20 The wave of violence that has gripped Pakistan in recent days spread to new parts of the country and featured more ferocious tactics Thursday, with suicide bombers targeting a mosque, a police academy and a convoy of Chinese engineers in attacks that killed more than 50 people. The strikes yielded the highest single-day death toll since the government stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad  last week. More than 120 people died during the standoff at the mosque, and more than 160 have been killed in the attacks that have followed. The severity of the violence has stunned Pakistanis. It also has left the country groping for direction as the military, pro-democracy moderates and Islamic extremists vie for control in a struggle that appears likely to intensify. The military has vowed a fresh offensive and is moving troops into position, while extremists have declared jihad against the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and his government. Read The Full Story Nuclear Partnership Between U.S., Australia In The Offing 2007-07-20 02:54:48 Australia is negotiating a big nuclear energy plan with the U.S. and is considering whether to join an exclusive American-led club of nations to control the distribution, reprocessing and storage of nuclear fuel worldwide. According to draft plans seen by the Sydney Morning Herald, the ministers for foreign affairs and resources have urged Australian Prime Minister John Howard to announce the joint plan during George Bush's Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation visit in September. "The proposed action plan would help to open the way for valuable nuclear energy co-operation with the United States," the briefing note says. "It would also be consistent with the Government's strategy for the nuclear industry in Australia. An action plan on nuclear energy would also have bilateral advantages further broadening our relationship with the United States. "While the U.S. has not raised the possibility, the action plan may be a possible 'announceable' for President Bush's visit in September." Read The Full Story U.S. Will Allow Most Types Of Lighters On Planes 2007-07-20 02:54:04 Federal aviation authorities have decided to stop enforcing a two-year-old rule against taking cigarette lighters on airplanes, concluding that it was a waste of time to search for them before passengers boarded. The ban was imposed at the insistence of Congress after a passenger, Richard Reed, tried to ignite a bomb in his shoe in 2001 on a flight from Paris to Miami. Lawmakers said that if Mr. Reid had used a lighter, instead of matches, he might have been able to ignite the bomb, but Kip Hawley, assistant secretary for the Transportation Security Administration, said in an interview on Thursday that the ban had done little to improve aviation security because small batteries could be used to set off a bomb. Matches have never been prohibited on flights. Read The Full Story Terror And Political Crisis Beset Pakistan's Musharraf 2007-07-19 21:17:10 A fresh wave of suicide bombings killed 36 people and wounded 54 in Pakistan Thursday as the country braced for a key court verdict that could trigger further instability. The supreme court is due to rule on the protracted struggle between President Pervez Musharraf and the chief justice he removed from office, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, as early as this morning. If Chaudhry is reinstated, it would strike a major blow to General Musharraf's plans for re-election. If not, more protests seem inevitable. Article continues Gen. Musharraf made a fresh appeal for unity Thursday and blamed his woes on "a few misguided elements bent upon killing their fellow Muslims". Yet the evidence suggested a greater problem. Read The Full Story Hot Dog Chili Sauce In Botulism Recall 2007-07-19 21:16:36 Botulism poisoning from commercial canned foods has been virtually eliminated in the United States, making the new cases linked to hot dog chili sauce all the more striking. On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture Department, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were investigating a Castleberry's Food plant in Augusta, Georgia, where the suspect product was canned. Four people have been hospitalized and are expected to survive. Botulism is a muscle-paralyzing disease caused by a toxin made by bacteria commonly found in soil. Typically, commercially canned foods are heated long enough and to high enough temperatures to kill the spores that otherwise can grow and produce the toxin. If canned foods are underprocessed, the bacteria can thrive in the oxygen-poor environment inside the sealed containers. Read The Full Story UPDATE: Not-Guilty Plea In Nuclear Theft Case 2007-07-19 21:16:01 A contract employee at a nuclear materials cleanup site in Tennessee pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges that he stole classified information about enriching uranium to sell to foreign governments. Roy Lynn Oakley, 65, of Roane County, Tennessee, was arrested in January after he allegedly tried to sell the sensitive material to undercover FBI agents, said officials. None of the information made it out of the country or was transmitted to criminal or terrorist organizations, they said. Oakley entered the plea before a federal judge in Knoxville. He was charged with two counts of possessing hardware used in uranium enrichment. He could face up to 20 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. His attorney, Herb Moncier, said Oakley did not take anything important. Moncier said government lawyers, referring to the hardware items, "say they are 'appliances.' We say they are trash." Read The Full Story New Leak Identified At Damaged Japanese Nuclear Plant 2007-07-19 12:18:54 Japanese nuclear inspectors have identified a new radioactive leak at a power plant that was badly damaged in this week's earthquake, compounding concerns about the safety of the country's nuclear reactors. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said radioactive iodine had leaked from an exhaust pipe at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata prefecture on Japan's northwest coast following Monday's magnitude 6.8 earthquake in which 10 people died. The inspectors concluded that the leak posed no threat to human health or the environment, although that claim has yet to be confirmed by agency officials. The plant - the world's largest nuclear generating facility by capacity - will remain closed until its safety can be assured. The Nikkei business newspaper said Thursday that it could remain inactive for at least a year, increasing the likelihood of power cuts when demand for electricity peaks this summer and casting doubt on plans to expand the nuclear power industry. Read The Full Story 36 Killed, 54 Wounded In Pakistan Suicide Bombings 2007-07-19 12:17:59 Suicide bombers hit a convoy of Chinese workers in southern Pakistan and a police academy in the north, killing 36 people and wounding 54 in the latest violence in the week since the army stormed a mosque held by Islamic extremists. The convoy was passing though the main bazaar in Hub, a town in Baluchistan province near the port city of Karachi, when a moving car blew up next to a police vehicle, said officials. Hub Police Chief Ghulam Mohammed Thaib said 29 people were killed, including seven police. About 30 other people were wounded, some critically. "It was laden with very heavy explosives but due to our spacing and our security measures, Allah has been very kind," said Maj. Gen. Saleem Nawaz, a commander of Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Constabulary. Read The Full Story Classified Material Stolen From Nuclear Lab 2007-07-19 12:16:24 A contract employee at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was arrested Thursday on charges of stealing classified data about enriching uranium used in nuclear weapons, said a law enforcement official. The man, who was not immediately identified, does not appear to have any links to terrorists or criminal groups, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the arrest had not yet been publicly announced. The man was arrested after selling the stolen data to FBI agents working undercover in Tennessee, said the official. The materials taken consisted of data and hardware used to make and enhance uranium. They were never transmitted to criminals or terrorists, said the official. Read The Full Story U.S. West Under Highest Wildfire Alert 2007-07-19 01:32:28 International wildfire crews could be called to help fight blazes in the bone-dry West as U.S. officials on Wednesday boosted the nation's wildfire alert to its highest level. "It's driven by a couple of things: The number of large fires we have, and also the fires are occurring in several states and in several geographic areas," Randy Eardley, a spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center here, told the Associated Press. "The resources we have are being stretched thin." The wildfire preparedness level was raised to five as dry lightning blasted and sparked dozens of new blazes in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Utah, where firefighters have been stretched thin by nearly 70 fires bigger than 100 acres burning in 12 states. National Guard units also could be mobilized under new level. Since Monday, there have been more than 1,000 new fires reported across the West, said Eardley. Read The Full Story Bush Government To Poor Voters: We Don't Want You To Vote 2007-07-19 01:32:01 The Justice Department is pressuring 10 states to purge their voter rolls, while states are ignoring laws to help low-income Americans register to vote. State welfare offices across the country are not offering millions of low-income Americans the opportunity to register to vote when applying for public assistance despite a federal law requiring them to do so, according to an analysis of a recent federal voting registration report and experts who say the Department of Justice and states are to blame. "It's huge. It's another area where the administration is failing us," said Donna Brazile, chair of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute, speaking of the Department of Justice's oversight of the nation's voter registration laws. "They are not pushing states to recognize their voter registration responsibilities." At the same time, the Justice Department's Voting Section, which enforces voting rights and supervises elections in some states, is pressuring 10 states to do more to purge voter rolls - or remove ineligible voters - before the 2008 presidential election, according to letters sent to state election officials this spring. Read The Full Story	U.S. Radiation Detector Program Delayed 2007-07-20 02:55:40 A $1.2 billion program to deploy new radiation monitors to screen trucks, cars and cargo containers for signs of nuclear devices has been delayed by questions over whether Department of Homeland Security officials misled Congress about the effectiveness of the detectors. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the contracts for monitors with cutting-edge technology a year ago. He said they would improve radiation scans at borders and ports, while sharply reducing the number of false alarms. Congress had allowed the five-year project to move ahead after Homeland Security assured appropriators that the $377,000 machines would detect highly enriched uranium 95 percent of the time. "What this next generation of detection equipment is going to let us do is make those determinations much more precisely, much more easily and much more quickly," said Chertoff. But the department's Domestic Nuclear Detection Office did not know whether the detectors would work effectively, according to documents and interviews. Read The Full Story Pull Australian Troops Out Of Iraq, Says Former Aussie Prime Minister 2007-07-20 02:55:02 Malcolm Fraser has issued a call for Australia to withdraw its forces from Iraq by Christmas, unless the U.S. makes a serious diplomatic effort to calm the region. The Liberal prime minister from 1975 to 1983 has long been a critic of the invasion, but, until now, has refrained from suggesting any deadline for a troop pullout. He had always argued against a "precipitate withdrawal". His new position highlights the increasingly isolated position of the Prime Minister, John Howard, and his U.S.  counterpart, George Bush, whose Iraq policy this week lost the support of key Republican allies in the U.S. Senate. The Republican Party in Congress is now developing an Iraq withdrawal policy in spite of the pleadings of the President to wait for a progress report from the military in September. Read The Full Story Israel Frees More Than 250 Prisoners 2007-07-20 02:54:22 A top PLO body gave its approval Thursday for President Mahmoud Abbas to hold new presidential and legislative elections, a high-stakes gamble meant to sideline Hamas militants but also bound to set off more confrontations between Palestinian rivals Fatah and Hamas. Hamas, which won parliament elections last year, immediately threatened to derail a new vote. On Friday, Israel started releasing more than 250 Palestinian prisoners in an attempt to bolster Abbas in his power struggle with Hamas. Most of those released were from Abbas' Fatah movement. A first batch of about 120 prisoners were put aboard buses at the Ketziot prison camp in southern Israel's Negev desert early Friday morning, headed for the West Bank. Read The Full Story U.S. Steps Up Efforts To Stop E.U. Firms, Banks Trading With Iran 2007-07-19 21:17:23 An escalating crackdown by the U.S. on foreign companies and banks doing business with Iran is provoking opposition in Britain and Europe, where diplomats say the action could lead to a trade war. Congress wants all international companies to end their investment in Iran and is pushing through a bill that would penalize companies which fail to do so. The British, along with other European governments, see the U.S. approach as draconian and are lobbying against it. The American move reflects frustration at the failure, so far, of western diplomacy to persuade Iran to stop its uranium enrichment program which the U.S., Britain and others suspect is a step towards a nuclear weapons capability. Iran denies it has ambitions to build a nuclear weapon. Read The Full Story Judge Dismisses Plame Lawsuit Against Top Officials 2007-07-19 21:16:50 A federal judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Cheney and other top officials over the Bush administration's disclosure of Plame's name and covert status to the media. U.S. District Judge John D. Bates said that Cheney and the others could not be held liable for the disclosures in the summer of 2003 in the midst of a White House effort to rebut criticism of the Iraq war by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The judge said that such efforts are a natural part of the officials' job duties, and, thus, they are immune from liability. "The alleged means by which defendants chose to rebut Wilson's comments and attack his credibility may have been highly unsavory," wrote Bates. "But there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush administration's handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants' duties as high-level Executive Branch officials." The lawsuit alleged that Cheney; his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; senior White House adviser Karl rove; and then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage violated the couple's privacy and constitutional rights by participating in discussions that led to Plame's identity being publicly revealed. The couple maintained that the leaks to reporters were an illegal effort to retaliate against Wilson, and that they ruined Plame's chance for career advancement and were meant to harass them. Read The Full Story Mixed Reaction In Middle East As Blair Make Debut As Envoy 2007-07-19 21:16:15 Less than a month after leaving office, Tony Blair returned to a new and high-profile international role Thursday as envoy for the Quartet of Middle East peacemakers, which insisted there would be no dealings with the Islamist movement Hamas. Statements in Lisbon, Portugal, by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Portuguese foreign minister for the European Union, underlined the huge difficulty in making real progress towards peace when a key Palestinian player is excluded. The United Nations and Russia make up the rest of the Quartet. "Hamas, I think, knows what is expected for international respectability," said Rice, alluding to demands that it recognize Israel, end violence and accept existing peace agreements. Read The Full Story Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq 2007-07-19 13:26:06 Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order: Read The Full Story Commentary: America Is Just Starting To Wake Up To The Awesome Scale Of Its Iraq Disaster 2007-07-19 12:18:22 Intellpuke: The following commentary by Timothy Garton Ash appears in the Guardian edition for Thursday, July 19, 2007. Mr. Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. He is professor of European studies at the University of Oxford, director of the European studies center at St Antony's college, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and he also contributes to the New York Times and Washington Post. Mr. Ash's column, written from Stanford University, follows: The American  people have decided that their soldiers should come home, but the ghosts of Baghdad will return with them. Iraq is over. Iraq has not yet begun. Two conclusions from the American debate about Iraq, which dominates the media in the U.S. to the exclusion of almost any other foreign story. Iraq is over insofar as the American public has decided that most U.S. troops should leave. In a Gallup poll earlier this month, 71% favored "removing all U.S.  troops from Iraq by April 1 of next year, except for a limited number that would be involved in counter-terrorism efforts". CNN's veteran political analyst Bill Schneider observes that in the latter years of the Vietnam war, the American public's basic attitude could be summarized as "either win or get out". He argues that it's the same with Iraq. Despite George Bush's increasingly desperate pleas, most Americans have now concluded that the U.S. is not winning. So get out. Since this is a democracy, their elected representatives are following where the people lead. Whatever the result of the latest round of Congressional position play - which included an all-night marathon on the floor of the Senate from Tuesday to Wednesday this week as Democrats attempted to outface a Republican filibuster - no one in Washington doubts that this is the way the wind blows. Publicly, there's still a sharp split along party lines, but leading Republicans are already breaking ranks to float their own phased troop reduction plans, together with proposals for partitioning Iraq between Sunni, Shia and Kurds. Bush says he's determined to give the commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, exactly the troop levels he asks for when he reports back this September, and the White House may hold the line for now against a Democrat-controlled Congress. Leading Republican contenders for the presidency are still talking tough. However, the most outspoken protagonist of hanging in there to win in Iraq, John McCain, has seen his campaign nosedive. Read The Full Story FEMA Suppressed Health Warnings For Workers, Katrina Victims 2007-07-19 12:17:04 The Federal Emergency Management Agency has suppressed warnings from its own Gulf coast field workers since the middle of 2006 about suspected health problems that may be linked to elevated levels of formaldehyde gas released in FEMA-provided trailers, lawmakers said Thursday. At a hearing this morning of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, investigators released internal e-mails indicating that FEMA lawyers rejected environmental testing out of fear that the agency would then become legally liable if health problems emerged among as many as 120,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who lived in trailers. FEMA's Office of General Counsel "has advised that we do not do testing," because this "would imply FEMA's ownership of this issue," wrote a FEMA logistics specialist on June 16, 2006, three months after news reports surfaced about the possible effects of the invisible cancer-causing compound and one month after the agency was sued. Another FEMA attorney on June 15 advised, "[d]o not initiate any testing until we give the OK. ... Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them." Read The Full Story Russia Expels Four British Diplomats 2007-07-19 12:16:10 British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Russia's decision to expel four British diplomats Thursday in the dispute over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko was "completely unjustified". The British ambassador in Moscow was called to Russia's foreign ministry Thursday morning to be told of the decision. Miliband said in a statement afterwards: "We obviously believe that the decision to expel four embassy staff is completely unjustified and we will be doing everything to ensure that they and their families are properly looked after." The British government had been braced for a Russian response after Miliband announced on Monday that four Russian diplomats would be expelled from London. Read The Full Story U.S. Military: Insurgent Leader Is Not Real 2007-07-19 01:32:15 In March, he was declared captured. In May, he was declared killed, and his purported corpse was displayed on Iraq's state-run TV, but Wednesday, Omar al-Baghdadi, the supposed leader of an al-Qaeda-affiliated group in Iraq, was declared nonexistent by U.S. military officials, who say he is a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terror group. In reality, an Iraqi actor has been used to read statements attributed to al-Baghdadi, who since October has been identified as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner. Bergner said the information came from a man whom U.S. forces captured July 4 and who was described as the highest-ranking Iraqi within the Islamic State of Iraq. The detainee, identified as Khalid Abdul Fatah Daud Mahmoud Mashadani, has served as a propaganda chief in the organization, a Sunni Muslim insurgent group that claims allegiance to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. According to Bergner, Mashadani helped create Islamic State of Iraq as a "virtual organization" that is essentially a pseudonym for al-Qaeda in Iraq, another group that claims ties to al-Qaeda. The front organization was aimed at making Iraqis believe that al-Qaeda in Iraq is a nationalistic group, even though it is led by an Egyptian and has few Iraqis among its leaders, Bergner told a news conference. Read The Full Story Huge Steam Pipe Blast Kills 1 In New York City 2007-07-19 01:31:38 An underground steam pipe explosion tore through a Manhattan street near Grand Central Terminal on Wednesday, swallowing a tow truck and killing one person as hundreds of others ran for cover amid a towering geyser of steam and flying rubble. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the explosion was not terrorism, though the blast caused a brief panic about a possible attack. "There is no reason to believe whatsoever that this is anything other than a failure of our infrastructure," he said of the 24-inch steam pipe installed in 1924. One person was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital from an apparent heart attack, said Bloomberg. About 30 people were injured, at least four seriously. Authorities could not immediately account for how the most seriously wounded victims were injured. The explosion caused widespread chaos as residents and commuters heard a huge blast - and feared for the worst. Thousands of commuters evacuated the train terminal, some at a run, after workers yelled for people to get out of the building. Read The Full Story
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