Free Internet Press Newsletter - Friday August 24 2007 - (813)

Friday August 24 2007 edition
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National Intelligence Estimate Cites 'Uneven' Security Gains, Faults Iraqi Leaders 2007-08-23 22:42:44 Intellpuke: There are three items here on the newly released National Intelligence Estimate report on Iraq. The first if by the Washington Post, the second is a link to the NIE report in PDF format, and the third is the Manchester, England-based Guardian newspaper's article on the NIE report. As you will read, the two reports are significantly different. The Washington Post report follows: The U.S. intelligence community Thursday provided a mixed picture of the security situation in Iraq but cautioned that a drawdown of U.S. forces there and a scaled-back mission for the remaining U.S. troops "would erode security gains achieved thus far." The addition of 30,000 U.S. troops in Iraq over the past several months has so far brought "uneven improvements in Iraq's security situation," according to declassified key judgments of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, an update of a January assessment. "The level of overall violence ... remains high; Iraq's sectarian groups remain unreconciled ... and to date Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively," said the new report. Read The Full Story White House Declares Itself Exempt From Freedom Of Information Law 2007-08-23 22:41:50 The Bush administration argued in court papers this week that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act as part of its effort to fend off a civil lawsuit seeking the release of internal documents about a large number of e-mails missing from White House servers. The claim, made in a motion filed Tuesday by the Justice Department, is at odds with a depiction of the office on the White House's own Web site. As of Wednesday, the site listed the Office of Administration as one of six presidential entities subject to the open-records law, which is commonly known by its abbreviation, FOIA. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit group, filed a lawsuit in May seeking Office of Administration records about the missing e-mails, including when they were deleted from government computer files. CREW said it understood that internal White House documents had estimated at least 5 million e-mails were missing from March 2003 to October 2005. Read The Full Story Editorial: The C.I.A. Report 2007-08-23 22:41:19 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Thursday, August 23, 2007. The C.I.A. inspector general’s report on the agency’s failures before Sept. 11 was devastating - but not because it showed that America’s spies missed the rise of al-Qaeda. George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, rang the al-Qaeda alarm. He sent a memo to the entire intelligence community saying that he wanted no effort spared in the “war” with Osama bin Laden. He took on the president’s closest advisers to agitate for a strike on an al-Qaeda base in Afghanistan. The disturbing thing was that this all happened under President Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush won the White House, Mr. Tenet seems to have shifted his priorities. The C.I.A. chief suddenly seemed consumed with hanging on to his job. The Bush team was so busy in 2001 trying to upend America’s global relationships according to a neo-conservative agenda that the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, did not see any urgency in reports that al-Qaeda was determined to strike in the United States. Mr. Tenet later helped hype the “slam dunk” intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify diverting the military from the war of necessity against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to the war of choice in Iraq. Read The Full Story Pakistani Court Rules That Former Prime Minister And Musharraf Rival Can Return From Exile 2007-08-23 22:36:15 Pakistan's Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for former prime minister Nawaz Sharif to return to the country after seven years in exile, a decision that dealt a major blow to President Pervez Musharraf as he struggles to hold onto power. Musharraf had fought hard to block the return of Sharif, a political nemesis and the man he ousted in a 1999 military-led coup. Government lawyers argued in court that Sharif had agreed in 2000 to spend 10 years in exile in Saudi Arabia rather than serve the life sentence in prison imposed on him when Musharraf took over. The court ruled Thursday that the exile agreement was not legally binding, and that Sharif has "an inalienable right to enter and remain in the country as a citizen of Pakistan." Read The Full Story Fist Fight Breaks Out In Bolivian National Congress 2007-08-23 22:35:29 Bolivia's national congress this week descended into a bout of fighting, with congressional members hitting and kicking each other in an argument over control of the judiciary. The brief but bruising fight was broadcast on television and boosted widespread tension concerning ambitious attempts by President Evo Morales to overhaul the state. The violence flared in the lower house when opposition congressmen tried to stop supporters of Morales from bringing corruption charges against the country's highest court. Article continues The president says constitutional court judges have overstepped their power by trying to block four of his judicial appointees, but Morales's opponents accuse him of a power grab. Read The Full Story Bush Administration Rule To Expand Mountain Top Coal Mining 2007-08-23 00:24:31 The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams. It has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion. The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand, providing only that mine operators minimize the debris and cause the least environmental harm, although those terms are not clearly defined and to some extent merely restate existing law. Read The Full Story U.S., U.K. Upset Over Pakistan's Release Of Al-Qaeda Suspect 2007-08-23 00:23:58 Pakistan's decision to release a suspect al-Qaeda expert accused of training suicide bombers and plotting to attack Heathrow airport met with surprise and dismay in London and Washington Wednesday, with officials describing the Pakistani computer engineer as a "significant individual". Pakistan's supreme court heard this week that Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, 28, from Karachi, had returned home after three years' detention at the hands of Pakistan's intelligence agencies. His lawyer, Babar Awan, said that all charges had "gone with the wind". Article continues The media has been prevented from interviewing Khan, who remains under tight surveillance. His low-key release contrasted with the clamor that followed his capture in July 2004, which authorities celebrated as a big blow for al-Qaeda. Khan was alleged to have been the conduit for scrambled email communications between the al-Qaeda leaders in the tribal belt and the outside world. Read The Full Story Commentary: How Can This Bloody Failure Be Regarded As A Good War? 2007-08-23 00:23:18 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Seumas Milne and appears in the Guardian edition for Thursday, August 23, 2007. In his commentary, Mr. Milne writes that the Western occupation of Afghanistan has brought neither peace nor development - and it fuels the terror threat. His commentary follows: Enthusiasts for the catastrophe that is the Iraq war may be hard to come by these days, but Afghanistan is another matter. The invasion and occupation that opened George Bush's war on terror are still championed by powerful voices in the occupying states as - in the words of the New York Times this week - "the good war" that can still be won. While speculation intensifies about British withdrawal from Basra, there's no such talk about a retreat from Kabul or Kandahar. On the contrary, the plan is to increase British troop numbers from the current 7,000, and ministers, commanders and officials have been hammering home the message all summer that Britain is in Afghanistan, as the foreign secretary, David Miliband, insisted, for the long haul. "We should be thinking in terms of decades," the British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, declared; Brigadier John Lorimer, British commander in Helmand province, thought the military occupation might last more than Northern Ireland's 38 years; and the defense secretary, Des Browne, last week confirmed that the government had made a "long-term commitment" to stay in Afghanistan to prevent it reverting to a terrorist training ground. Even allowing for the Brown government's need for political cover if it is indeed to run down its forces in Iraq, that all amounts to a pretty clear policy of indefinite occupation - one on which it has not thought necessary to consult the British people, let alone the Afghans. Read The Full Story Federal Prosecutors Hope To Revive Oil Bribery Case 2007-08-23 00:21:24 The U.S. government is seeking to resurrect its case against three men accused of offering hundreds of millions of dollars to top officials in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan to get favorable treatment in oil deals. In papers filed late Tuesday with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, federal prosecutors said U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin was mistaken when she dismissed most of the charges in June. Scheindlin had said most charges in an indictment against Frederic Bourke, Jr., of Greenwich, Connecticut, and David Pinkerton, a Bernardsville, New Jersey, executive with American International Group Inc., were filed after the deadline for charges to be brought had passed. Pinkerton lawyer Barry H. Berke said Wednesday that he and his client "obviously agree with the district court's opinion". A lawyer for Bourke did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment. Read The Full Story Jewish Leader Sounds Alarm After Racist Attack In Germany 2007-08-23 00:20:28 Brutal assault on Indians sparks call to curb far-right. East German xenophobia "scaring off foreign firms". A leading member of Germany's Jewish community has accused the government of failing to control rightwing extremism following an attack on a group of Indian men in an eastern town. Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews said that until a nationwide action plan was launched to tackle the problem, attacks on minorities would only get worse. His remarks followed a brutal attack on eight Indians in the town of Mugeln, near Leipzig, over the weekend. During a town festival the men were chased through the streets by around 50 young Germans, who hurled abuse at them, including the taunt "foreigners out". All of the men were beaten up, one of them seriously. "Yesterday it was colored people, today it's foreigners, tomorrow it'll be homosexuals and lesbians and maybe Jews," Kramer told the German daily newspaper Taz. Prior to the Mugeln incident, police had been braced for trouble in certain east German towns as rightwing extremists commemorated the anniversary of the death of Adolf Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess. Kramer said that parts of former communist eastern Germany were "no-go" areas, which people who looked foreign should be warned against visiting. He accused the government of "delivering the same sentiments" every time there was an attack, but failing to produce results with its anti-extremist strategy. "This isn't hysteria," he said. "This is the bitter truth." Read The Full Story	World Health Organization: World Faces Threat From New Deadly Diseases As Scientists Struggle To Keep Up 2007-08-23 22:42:21 The world will face a new deadly threat on the scale of AIDS, SARS and Ebola within a decade, the world's leading authority on health said Thursday, as it warned that diseases were spreading more quickly than at any time in history. New diseases are emerging at an unprecedented rate, of one a year, and are becoming more difficult to treat, says the World Health Organization's (WHO) annual report. It paints a bleak picture of future health threats, with science struggling to keep up as diseases increasingly become drug resistant. The authors point to passenger flights, now numbering more than 2 billion a year, as being a chillingly efficient mechanism for spreading diseases rapidly across continents. New diseases that pose a sudden threat in one part of the world are only "a few hours away" from becoming a threat somewhere else, the WHO says. "Profound changes have occurred in the way humanity inhabits the planet," said Margaret Chan, the director general of the WHO. "The disease situation is anything but stable. Population growth, incursion into previously uninhabited areas, rapid urbanisation, intensive farming practices, environmental degradation, and the misuse of anti-microbials, have disrupted the equilibrium of the microbial world. The rate of emergence of new diseases, at one year, was "historically unprecedented". Read The Full Story British Troops On Verge Of Long-Awaited Pullout From Basra 2007-08-23 22:41:38 Britain's long-awaited and much-postponed pull-out from the Basra palace, its last remaining base in the Iraqi city, is imminent, sources have told the Guardian. The move, which is symbolically significant and will improve the safety of British troops, is expected to take place within the next two weeks and may come within days, officials say. An announcement will be made by the Iraqis. The decision to hand over the palace to Iraqi forces comes at a time of growing criticism by elements in the U.S.  military of Britain's role in southern Iraq. The criticism is dismissed by British military commanders. "All indications are it shouldn't be far away," Major Mike Shearer, the army's spokesman in Basra, said when asked about the handover of the Basra palace. Privately, defense officials go further, saying a decision in principle has been taken and the 500 British troops based there are on the verge of leaving. Read The Full Story More Iraqis Flee Since Increase In U.S. Troops 2007-08-23 22:41:10 The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves. Despite some evidence that the troop buildup has improved security in certain areas, sectarian violence continues and American-led operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived, the studies show. The data track what are known as internally displaced Iraqis: those who have been driven from their neighborhoods and seek refuge elsewhere in the country rather than fleeing across the border. The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north. Read The Full Story Gunman Who Shot Gov. George Wallace To Be Freed 2007-08-23 22:35:43 Arthur Bremer, the gunman who tried to kill Gov. George C. Wallace, of Alabama, as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, will be released from prison this year, a Maryland prison official said Thursday. In 1973, Bremer was sentenced to serve 53 years for shooting Wallace and wounding three others at a campaign stop in Laurel, Maryland. The bullet that lodged in Wallace’s spine paralyzed his legs, and he used a wheelchair until his death in 1998. Bremer has served 35 years of his original sentence, and managed, through credits for good behavior and steady job performance as a prison clerk, to earn an earlier release date, said Ruth A. Ogle, a program manager at the Maryland Parole Commission. Read The Full Story Bush: There Will Be No Pullout From Iraq While I'm President 2007-08-23 00:24:48 President George Bush sought to buy more time for his Iraq "surge" strategy Wednesday by making a risky comparison for the first time with the bloodshed and chaos that followed the U.S. pullout from Vietnam. Making it clear he will resist congressional pressure next month for an early withdrawal, he signalled that U.S. troops, whom he hailed as the "greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known", will be in Iraq as long as he is president. He also said the consequences of leaving "without getting the job done would be devastating", and "the enemy would follow us home". Bush's speech came on the day that the U.S. suffered one of its highest daily death tolls since the 2003 invasion, with 14 troops killed when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed. In a speech to army veterans in Kansas City, Bush invoked one of the U.S.'s biggest military disasters in support of keeping troops in Iraq: "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people', 're-education camps' and 'killing fields'." Read The Full Story Hundreds Flee Flooding In Ohio 2007-08-23 00:24:16 Firefighters and volunteers steered boats through streets awash in waist-deep water Wednesday, plucking residents and pets from porches as flooding that has swamped the Upper Midwest and Plains reached Ohio. The rising water forced at least 500 people forced to flee their homes in several northern Ohio towns. It also prompted authorities to move about 130 inmates from the county jail in Findlay to a regional prison. Many neighborhood rescuers showed up with canoes and kayaks wanting to help during Findlay's worst flooding in nearly 100 years. Three men in a fishing boat ferried a woman and her 2-week-old daughter, along with the family dogs. The Blanchard River was 7 feet above flood stage Wednesday at Findlay, the highest level it has reached since a 1913 flood, and could rise another half-foot or more, said the National Weather Service. Read The Full Story Foreign Aid Groups Face Terror Probes By U.S. 2007-08-23 00:23:39 The Bush administration plans to screen thousands of people who work with charities and nonprofit organizations that receive U.S. Agency for International Developmentfunds to ensure they are not connected with individuals or groups associated with terrorism, according to a recent Federal Register notice. The plan requires that the organizations give the government detailed information about key personnel, including phone numbers, birth dates and e-mail addresses, but the government plans to shroud its use of that information in secrecy and does not intend to tell groups deemed unacceptable why they are rejected. The plan has aroused concern and debate among some of the larger U.S. charitable organizations and recipients of AID funding. Officials of InterAction, representing 165 foreign aid groups, said last week that the plan would impose undue burdens and has no statutory basis. The organization requested that it be withdrawn. Read The Full Story Armed Militias Seizing Control Of Iraq's Electrical Grid 2007-08-23 00:21:51 Armed groups increasingly control the antiquated switching stations that channel electricity around Iraq, the electricity minister said Wednesday. That is dividing the national grid into fiefs that, he said, often refuse to share electricity generated locally with Baghdad and other power-starved areas in the center of Iraq. The development adds to existing electricity problems in Baghdad, which has been struggling to provide power for more than a few hours a day because insurgents regularly blow up the towers that carry power lines into the city. The government lost the ability to control the grid centrally after the American-led invasion in 2003, when looters destroyed electrical dispatch centers, the minister, Karim Wahid, said in a news briefing attended also by United States military officials. Read The Full Story Stronger Hurricane Dean Rakes Mexico For Second Time 2007-08-23 00:21:05 A sprawling Hurricane Dean slammed into Mexico for the second time in as many days Wednesday and quickly stretched across to the Pacific Ocean, then weakened as it drenched the central mountains with rain that flooded houses along the coast. Coming ashore with top sustained winds of 100 mph, Dean's center hit the tourism and fishing town of Tecolutla shortly after civil defense workers loaded the last evacuees onto army trucks and headed to inland shelters. There was no escaping the wide storm's hurricane-force winds, which lashed at a 60-mile stretch of the coast in Veracruz state. ''You can practically feel the winds, they're so strong,'' Maria del Pilar Garcia said by telephone from inside the hotel she manages in Tuxpan, a town some 40 miles north of where Dean made landfall. ''I hope this passes quickly and the rivers don't overflow.'' Read The Full Story Burma Cracks Down As Fuel Protests Gather Pace 2007-08-23 00:20:07 Armed police intervene to break up demonstration. Widespread hardship as natural gas prices increase 500%. At least eight Burmese pro-democracy activists were seized on the streets of Rangoon Wednesday as armed police and supporters of the junta intervened to disperse hundreds of demonstrators protesting at a dramatic hike in fuel prices and growing economic hardship. Around 300 marchers walked from the commercial capital's outskirts as thousands - some cheering - looked on. The latest in a growing series of protests came hours after 13 leading activists, including the senior leadership of the 88 Student Generation group, were arrested in the most serious clampdown by the Burmese junta in a decade. Houses of the group's leadership were searched and documents removed in the night raids. Official Burmese media reported that the activists could face jail terms of 20 years. Read The Full Story
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