Bush Delivers Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Bush, on his first visit to this oil-rich kingdom, delivered a major arms sale Monday to a key ally in a region where the U.S. casts neighboring Iran as a menace to stability.

Bush's talks with Saudi King Abdullah, which began over dinner and were continuing with late-night meetings, also were expected to cover peace between Israelis and Palestinians and democracy in the Middle East.

Coinciding with Bush's trip, the Bush administration in Washington notified Congress on Monday that it will offer Saudi Arabia the chance to buy sophisticated Joint Direct Attack Munitions _ or "smart bomb" _ technology and related equipment, the State Department said. The administration envisions the transfer of 900 of the precision-guided bomb kits, worth $123 million, that would give the kingdom's armed forces highly accurate targeting abilities.

The proposed deal follows notification of five other packages to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, bringing to $11.5 billion the amount of advanced U.S. weaponry, including Patriot missiles, that the administration has announced it will provide to friendly Arab nations, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. Administration officials say the total amount of eventual sales as part of the Gulf Security Dialogue is estimated at $20 billion, a figure subject to actual purchases.

The arms packages are an important part of the U.S. strategy to bolster the defenses of oil-producing Gulf nations, such as Saudi Arabia, against threats from Iran. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, which have majority Sunni Muslim populations, harbor deep suspicions about Shiite Iran's apparent designs to establish itself as a major power.

Congress already has been briefed on all the packages, which also include the sale of the Navy's Littoral Combat system. Lawmakers mostly see the deals as critical to maintaining relations with war-on-terror allies. Some are opposed to the JDAMs portion out of concern that it gives Saudi Arabia the ability to attack Israel, but are unlikely to muster the two-thirds majority needed, within an allowed 30-day period, to block the sales.

The administration has assured lawmakers in closed briefings in recent months that there would be proper restrictions on the JDAMs sales to ensure they would not threaten to Israel. Israel, which has been sold JDAMs technology by the U.S. as well, also has said it does not oppose the deal.

White House counselor Ed Gillespie said he did not know if the president and the king had discussed rising oil prices, but he said the subject has come up on this trip, particularly in terms of Bush's goals for developing alternate fuels and sources of energy, including nuclear power. The Saudis are responsible for almost one-third of OPEC's total output. Gillespie said Mideast leaders "talked about the nature of the market and the vast demand that's on the world market today for oil," something he called "a legitimate and accurate point."

Another item for possible discussion were the democratic principles Bush has promoted during his trip. While Abdullah has tried to push some reforms on education and women's rights and there have been limited municipal council elections, the king has been cautious and limited in his efforts. He apparently has been hampered by others in the royal family worried that fast changes could upset the country's conservative clerics and citizens.

After arriving Monday afternoon in Riyadh from Dubai, Bush expected to hear Abdullah urge him to keep up the pressure on Israel to halt settlements in Palestinian territories. The administration was able to persuade the Saudis to participate in the U.S.-sponsored Mideast peace conference in Annapolis, Md., in November.

Bush enjoyed a warm embrace from Abdullah. He was staying a night at the monarch's ranch _ a rare show of hospitality to a visiting dignitary that reflects Bush's hosting of Abdullah twice at his own ranch in Crawford, Texas.

And the king greeted Bush at the base of the steps of Air Force One _ a gesture the president never affords foreign leaders visiting the U.S. A band played each country's national anthem as the leaders walked on a red carpet behind a high-stepping uniformed officer carrying a gold sword.

After dinner in the King's Palace, Bush and Abdullah walked through a large central atrium and picked up cups of Arabic coffee to take into their meetings. Sitting side by side in chairs, Abdullah presented Bush with a gold necklace adorned with a large medallion _ the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit, the country's highest honor, named after the founder of the modern Saudi state.

The award was placed around Bush's neck and the two exchanged the region's traditional double kiss. "I am honored," Bush said.

The hospitality masked Bush's deep unpopularity among ordinary Saudis.

A recent poll conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow, a bipartisan group whose goal is undermining world support for terrorism, found only 12 percent here view Bush positively _ lower than Iran's president or even al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden _ and more think warmly toward Iran than America. Top among the reasons are the chaos in Iraq that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and the widespread Arab feeling that the United States is biased toward Israel and not serious in seeking Mideast peace.

A rare cold front brought clouds and rain to Riyadh for the visit. Tight security was evident: Hundreds of police cars have deployed along major roads and sharpshooters are on some rooftops. In one neighborhood, police using loudspeakers demanded that cars be removed from some streets as two helicopters hovered overhead.

Earlier in Dubai, Bush got a flavor of the cosmopolitan banking and business hub, whose glass skyscrapers and booming construction have turned it into the capital of Middle East hustle. The soaring Persian Gulf city-state was Bush's second stop in the seven-state United Arab Emirates federation. On the first, in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, he delivered a gentle lecture on democracy to authoritarian Arab allies and attended an opulent picnic at a desert horse camp.

Bush engaged in a day of cultural diplomacy in Dubai. He stopped at the historic home of the city-state's former ruler, now a museum, where a group of girls performed to Arabic music.He had lunch on cushions set in a circle with students of the Dubai School of Government. And he attended a gathering of a young leaders' group, in a conference room atop one of Dubai's signature buildings, the luxury hotel Burj Al Arab that is shaped like a tall ship sail.

Dubai is caught in the middle of the West's efforts to crack down on business in and out of Iran to protest its nuclear ambitions. Dubai, with a powerful Iranian business community, is eager to maintain its lucrative financial ties with Tehran, but wary of angering the United States and the United Nations

US drafting plan to allow government access to any email or Web search

RAW STORY Published: Monday January 14, 2008

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a "walk in the park," according to an interview published in the New Yorker's print edition today.

Debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “will be a walk in the park compared to this,” McConnell said. “this is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

The article, which profiles the 65-year-old former admiral appointed by President George W. Bush in January 2007 to oversee all of America's intelligence agencies, was not published on the New Yorker's Web site. (It can be read here in pdf).

McConnell is developing a Cyber-Security Policy, still in the draft stage, which will closely police Internet activity.

"Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the autority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search," author Lawrence Wright pens.

“Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation, he said," Wright adds. "Giorgio warned me, 'We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'"

A zero-sum game is one in which gains by one side come at the expense of the other. In other words -- McConnell's aide believes greater security can only come at privacy's expense.

McConnell has been an advocate for computer-network defense, which has previously not been the province of any intelligence agency.

According to a 2007 conversation in the Oval Office, McConnell told President Bush, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single US bank through cyber-attack and it had been successful, it would have an order of magnitude greater impact on the US economy.”

Bush turned to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, asking him if it was true; Paulson said that it was. Bush then asked to McConnell to come up with a network security strategy.

"One proposal of McConnell’s Cyber-Security Policy, which is still in the draft stage, is to reduce the access points between government computers and the Internet from two thousand to fifty," Wright notes. "He claimed that cyber-theft account for as much as a hundred billion dollars in annual losses to the American economy. 'The real problem is the perpetrator who doesn’t care about stealing—he just wants to destroy.'"

The infrastructure to tap into Americans' email and web search history may already be in place.

In November, a former technician at AT&T alleged that the telecom forwarded virtually all of its Internet traffic into a "secret room" to facilitate government spying.

Whistleblower Mark Klein said that a copy of all Internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access -- via a cable splitting device.

"My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room," Klein. said "And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those Internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the Internet."

"As a technician, I had the engineering wiring documents, which told me how the splitter was wired to the secret room," Klein continued. "And so I know that whatever went across those cables was copied and the entire data stream was copied."

According to Klein, that information included Internet activity about Americans.

"We're talking about domestic traffic as well as international traffic," Klein said. Previous Bush administration claims that only international communications were being intercepted aren't accurate, he added.

"I know the physical equipment, and I know that statement is not true," he added. "It involves millions of communications, a lot of it domestic communications that they're copying wholesale."

Kucinich Invited, Then Uninvited, to MSNBC Debate

Rep. Dennis Kucinich won't be taking part in MSNBC's debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday. It certainly won't be the first time that Kucinich was excluded from a recent Democratic debate. But the difference is Kucinich was initially invited, and had met the criteria, for the MSNBC debate. Then, MSNBC changed the criteria and told Kucinich he was uninvited.

Alternet published a Kucinich press release, which said that 44 hours after Kucinich got a congratulatory letter and invite from NBC to the Nevada debate, they notified him of their changed criteria, and his exclusion.

In the press release, the Kucinich campaign took a shot at the media as a whole: "When 'big media' exert their unbridled control over what Americans can see, hear, and read, then the Constitutional power and right of the citizens to vote is being vetoed by multi-billion corporations that want the votes to go their way."

According to the Los Angeles Times, the original criteria for the debate called for the inclusion of the top four democratic candidates in national polling. With Bill Richardson dropping out of the race last week, that moved Kucinich to fourth place in polls. NBC decided to change the criteria, featuring the top three Dem. candidates: Sen. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama.

Bush Visits His Odious Saudi Friend

By Amitabh Pal, January 10, 2008

How do you punish the principal global purveyor of fundamentalist Islam, someone who backed the Taliban and continues to harshly suppress political freedoms, women and religious minorities?

If you’re President Bush, you reward him with a state visit, of course!

During his current Middle East trip, Bush is looking in on a rogues’ gallery of U.S. allies, from Bahrain and Egypt to the United Arab Emirates and Israel. But King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia occupies the pride of place.

“The government places strict limits on freedom of association, assembly, and expression,” writes Human Rights Watch in its roundup of conditions in the kingdom in 2006. “Arbitrary detention, mistreatment and torture of detainees, restrictions on freedom of movement, and lack of official accountability remain serious concerns. Saudi women continue to face serious obstacles to their participation in society.”

Things haven’t improved since then. In a recent outrageous incident, which received media coverage globally, a woman who was gang-raped was sentenced to 200 lashes because she was meeting with a former boyfriend when they both were abducted and brutalized. The punishment had an undertone of bigotry, too, since the woman was Shiite, a persecuted minority sect under the Wahhabi fundamentalist Sunni rule perpetuated by King Abdullah and his clerics. (In all his benevolence, Abdullah finally pardoned the woman and her ex-boyfriend—sentenced to 90 lashes—after an international uproar.)

In another recent event, the Saudi authorities have jailed an outspoken blogger, Ahmad Fouad al-Farhan. Apparently, he was poking his nose into the detention of political prisoners. The crackdown by Saudi authorities on bloggers like al-Farhan is consistent with their suppression of other forms of independent media. (See the appeal by Reporters Without Borders for his release.)

In November, a Saudi judge sentenced two activists to four and six months in jail, respectively, for the heinous crime of encouraging a public demonstration. And the list goes on.

When I visited Saudi Arabia a few years ago as part of a journalists’ group, Saudi officials repeatedly told us that they couldn’t bring about political and social change because a conservative public would resist it. Turns out that this was hogwash, like most of everything else they fed us. A Gallup Poll conducted last summer found that majorities of both Saudi men and women favor an expansion of women’s rights in the country.

“More than 8 in 10 Saudi women (82%) and three-quarters of Saudi men (75%) agree that women should be allowed to hold any job for which they are qualified outside the home,” the poll says. “Sixty-six percent of Saudi women versus 52 percent of Saudi men agree women should be able to hold leadership positions in the cabinet and the national council.”

The other troubling aspect of my trip was the extent to which U.S. Embassy officials I met were apologizing for the regime. We all know that the Saudis have the United States over an oil barrel. Added to that are the massive defense purchases the kingdom makes and the sizeable investment it has in U.S. treasuries. Plus, there are the multiple ties that the Bush family has with the Saudi monarchs. (Craig Unger’s slightly hyperbolic but basically sound “House of Bush, House of Saud” is the best-known dissection of the U.S.-Saudi relationship.)

All this means that the United States is basically willing to overlook the Saudi regime’s noxious export of Wahhabi fundamentalism around the world and its appalling record at home. A few years ago, Bush accorded King Abdullah the rare honor of hosting him at his Crawford ranch, and is now furthering his friendship by dropping in on his buddy.

What’s a few human rights violations between friends?

How to Pull Out of a Recession—the Fastest and Most Ethical Way, Not the Bush Way

By Matthew Rothschild, January 11, 2008

Even Bush has finally figured out that the economy is facing “some challenges,” as he so delicately put it.

As a solution, he is sure to propose making permanent the tax breaks for the rich that he’s already put in place.

But there are two problems with this: one ethical, the other economic.

The ethical problem is that the top 1% has already made out like bandits. Their slice of the income pie has grown dramatically over the past few years, while the slices for almost everybody else have shrunk.

The economic problem is that extending the tax cuts won’t do anything in the here and now, because those cuts are already in place for the next two years.

On top of that, the economic stimulus from giving the superrich some more money would be next to nothing compared with the stimulus you’d get if you gave almost everybody else some serious tax relief right now.

It is a good idea to cut taxes in a recession.

But those breaks should go to the people who need them, and who will then turn around and spend the extra money they have.

Another way, other than just relying on the Fed to lower interest rates, is for the government to spend more money on urgently needed domestic projects, like rebuilding bridges, which should be an easy sell, given the St. Paul disaster.

Or, as the progressive economist Dean Baker suggests, the government could focus on environmentally sane options.

“There are many ways to make a stimulus package at least partly green,” he writes. “For example, we can have generous tax credits for people to install more insulation in their homes, solar panels or other improvements that will reduce energy use. This would be an effective way to reemploy many of the construction workers who are losing their jobs. . . . We can also give people money and a powerful incentive to use mass transit by giving transit agencies money to reduce fares. If we gave public transit agencies enough money to reduce transit fares by $1 a trip, over the course of a year this would provide the same stimulus as giving a $500 tax rebate to every user of public transit.”

But the kind of government spending that Bush prefers is on the military, especially the Iraq War.

Look what we could have bought instead of that disaster.

“The $500 billion that Bush has squandered in Iraq could have paid for 4 million new housing units, or hired 8 million new teachers. And the $2 trillion we may end up spending on this war could pay for universal health care for 12 years,” Anita Dances of the National Priorities Project points out in a recent piece for the Progressive Media Project.

What’s more, that domestic spending would have been far better for the economy.

“Not all government spending is equal,” she notes. “Every billion dollars spent on the military results – directly and indirectly – in fewer jobs and lower quality jobs than a billion dollars spent on education, a recent analysis published by the Political Economy Research Institute showed. That is, the effects of military spending ripple through the economy with much less vigor than government spending on other programs. Plus, domestic spending has a longer lasting impact on the economy. A well-educated, healthy workforce, along with investment in infrastructure, will fuel the new industries of tomorrow.”

When facing a recession, we always need to ask: What kind of tax cuts? What kind of deficit spending? For whom, and for what?

Yet another way to ease out of a recession is to increase federal spending to local and state governments, which suffer a budget shortfall during slowdowns but are usually required by law to be in balance. To get there, they then slash their own funding, laying thousands of people off.

We’re seeing that prospect right in front of our eyes in California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a fiscal state of emergency and is calling for 10 percent cuts in almost every department. That will not only send California’s economy into a tailspin but it may drag the entire country’s economy off the cliff.

More fundamental proposals could also lift us out of recession. Economist Robert Pollin spells some of these out in a recent article in New Labor Forum entitled “A People’s Economy Is Possible.”

He calls for the creation of one million new jobs in “health care, education, and energy conservation.” He also advocates “extending public medical insurance” to every single American who doesn’t have it today, and greatly expanding educational opportunities.

Pollin recognizes that this would increase the budget deficit in the short term. But he convincingly argues that this concern is overblown. “The primary problem with the U.S. Treasury’s fiscal stance is not the size of the deficit, per se, but how the money is being spent.”

It is not the time to worry about the budget deficit when a recession is upon us. It is the time to figure how best to kick start the economy in an ethical manner.

And don’t look to Bush for that.

Member of Japanese Diet Doubts Official 9/11 Fairy Tale

Kurt Nimmo
Truth News
Sunday January 13, 2008

Don’t expect the New York Times or CNN to report on Fujita Yukihisa’s grilling of Japanese PM Fukuda over the official 9/11 fairy tale.

Yukihisa is a member of the House of Councillors in the Diet, that is to say the national legislature of Japan, and his questions about the transparent sham that is the official version of events is indeed a big deal — but not as important in America as the travails of Britney. Yukihisa’s presentation was all the more important due to the fact he was the Chief Cabinet Secretary under former PM Junichiro Koizumi in 2001.

Although we don’t yet have an English translation of the video — taped from Japanese television — now appearing on YouTube, the 911.video.de site posted the following, apparently a translation from Japanese:

On January 11th 2008 member of Parliament Yukihisa Fujita of the Japan Democratic party, made a 20 minute long statement at the House of Councillors, the upper house of the Diet (parliament) of Japan. He questioned the official version of 9/11 presented to the Japanese government and the public by the US administration in a session of the defense commission.

He asked the current Prime Minister Fukuda who was the Chief Cabinet Secretary under Koizumi cabinet in 2001.

“How could terrorists attacked the Pentagon?”

He asked whether Terrorism is crime or war. Some Japanese people were killed, so he believes this was a crime, so Japanese police should investigate the real suspect even though Japanese government assumed that the suspect was Al-Queda since Bush told Koizumi so and sent the self-defense force to Iraq. Can Japanese police arrest president Bush if he was one of the suspects?

The statement was made in connection with the discussion about the renewal of the Japanese logistic assistance program for the US navy in the “fight against terrorism”.

US President George W Bush has recently pressed Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to ensure Tokyo resumes crucial naval operations to support the war in Afghanistan. The Japan Democratic party which is in the opposition is blocking the resumption of the mission,which supplies fuel and water to US-led forces operating in the Indian Ocean.

The government wants to continue and to be part of the fight against terrorism. The opposition argues that the operation has not been approved formally by the United Nations. It claims that oil supplied by Japanese ships has been diverted for use in operations in Iraq, an accusation the Americans deny.

The government has made changes to the legislation which authorizes the mission. It has to be renewed every year after approval by parliament. The new law says Japanese ships can only refuel and supply water to vessels on anti-terrorism patrols. Ships involved in military operations — whether they be attacks, rescue operations or humanitarian relief — will not receive Japanese supplies.

Yukihisa Fujita did question Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Minister of Finance Fukushiro Nukaga about the way in which the US government did inform the Japanese government about the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Mr.Yukihisa Fujita stressed that of the 24 people that died on 9/11 only 13 were identified and 11 bodies remain unaccounted for. He pointed out that there was never an official police investigation into the deaths of these japanese nationals.

He then explained that in the USA many people doubt the official version of 9/11 and numerous websites and scientists have collected evidence that contradicts the governments version..

He presented several largescale photographs of:
a) the Pentagon entry and exit hole
b) the flight path towards the Pentagon
c) the exploding WTC towers
d) the WTC 7 collapse.

He concluded that the japanese governments support of the “war against terror” is solely based on information provided by the US-administration. He demanded further investigation in the face of the governments drive to support the war more actively.

Yukihisa Fujita was elected to the House of Councillors for the first time in 2007

The Democratic Party of Japan (Minshinto) is a social liberal political party founded in 1998 by the merger of several smaller parties.

It is the second-largest party in the House of Representatives and the largest party in the House of Councillors, and it constitutes the primary opposition to the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party.

Here we have a respected Japanese politician asking on public television if Bush can be arrested in connection with events of September 11, 2001, and the corporate media finds this unworthy of publication or even mention in passing.

But then, of course, the neocon corporate media, snugly in bed with the “defense” industry and long ago sold down the river by the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, has ignored the coming out of former Italian president Francesco Cossiga, who declared the attack was a CIA and Mossad operation. As well, they have ignored former German Intelligence Minister Andreas von Bülow, who stated his informed belief that 9/11 was orchestrated at the highest level of the U.S. government.

Once again, another important news story is relegated to the memory hole.

US Government Threatens Citizens: Comply With Orwellian ID Plan or Pay the Price

AP, January 12th, 2008

Millions of air travelers may find going through airport security much more complicated this spring, as the Bush administration heads toward a showdown with state governments over post-Sept. 11 rules for new driver's licenses. By May, the dispute could leave millions of people unable to use their licenses to board planes, but privacy advocates called that a hollow threat by federal officials.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who was unveiling final details of the REAL ID Act's rules on Friday, said that if states want their licenses to remain valid for air travel after May 2008, those states must seek a waiver indicating they want more time to comply with the legislation.

The deadline is an effort to get states to begin phasing in the REAL ID program. Citizens born after Dec. 1, 1964, would have six years to get a new license; older Americans would have until 2017.

Chertoff said that for any state which doesn't seek such a waiver by May, residents of that state will have to use a passport or certain types of federal border-crossing cards if they want to avoid a vigorous secondary screening at airport security.

"The last thing I want to do is punish citizens of a state who would love to have a REAL ID license but can't get one," Chertoff said. "But in the end, the rule is the rule as passed by Congress."

The plan's chief critic, the American Civil Liberties Union, called Chertoff's deadline a bluff - and urged state governments to call him on it.

"Are they really prepared to shut those airports down? Which is what effectively would happen if the residents of those states are going to have to go through secondary scrutiny," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program. "This is a scare tactic."

So far, 17 states have passed legislation or resolutions objecting to the REAL ID Act's provisions, many due to concerns it will cost them too much to comply. The 17, according to the ACLU, are Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington.

Maine officials said Friday they were unsure if their own state law even allows them to ask for a waiver.

"It certainly seems to be an effort by the federal government to create compliance with REAL ID whether states have an interest in doing so or not," said Don Cookson, spokesman for the Maine secretary of state's office.

Go To Full Story

Original: The Bush Tax: How Much Is It Costing You?

Submitted by boss on Mon, 2006-01-30 01:58.

"Rather than take responsibility for our common future, Bush has shifted costs to states and communities, who then pass them on to you. Across the country, people are seeing their property taxes skyrocket. State college tuition at 4-year schools has increased this year by an average of $579 nationwide. Half a million children have been deprived of health coverage. States and local government have cut vital services, and we're all having to pay more for less. That's the Bush Tax.

Bush is largely to blame for the fiscal crisis that has forced states and communities to raise taxes and slash services. According to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), "A conservative estimate suggests that federal policies are costing states and localities about $185 billion over the four-year course of the state fiscal crisis." Bush has shifted health costs to states and forced states to pay for unfunded mandates for homeland security, election reform, and No Child Left Behind. As a result, states and communities have had no choice but to raise taxes and cut services. That's the Bush Tax. (For details, see the link below to the CBPP report.)"

The Secret Saudi Flight on 9-13 Could be the Key to the Bush-Saudi-Al Qaeda Connection

By Catherine Arnie

About a month after the September 11th attacks, I read an article in the Tampa Tribune by Kathy Steele entitled "Phantom Flight From Florida." The intriguing report told the tale of a flight out of Florida that allegedly took place on September 13 - a day when ALL civilian air traffic in the United States was grounded.

"This was out of a Tom Clancy movie," according to a retired homicide detective who was hired for the flight. Its mission was to spirit the son of a Saudi prince, the son of a Saudi army commander, and another unidentified Saudi from Florida to Kentucky, because "there was a perceived threat, and the family of the person wanted him home right away."

The "person" in danger was the son of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, who is no minor figure in the Saudi Royal family. Rather, Prince Sultan is the kingdom's minister of defense, the third-ranking position in the Saudi Government, whose powers exceed those of even America's super-powerful Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Dan Grossi and Manuel Perez were the two Floridians who were hired to serve as private bodyguards on the flight.

According to the article in the Tampa Tribune, Dan Grossi is a retired Tampa cop who worked in internal affairs and homicide. Perez is a retired FBI man whose experience was in counter-terrorism and bomb-making. Perez now runs a detective agency and the two men provided security for the National Football League at Raymond James Stadium in September of 2001.

The article reported that shortly after the September 11 attack, Lexington police Lt. Mark Barnard received a request from a prominent Saudi Kingdom official for the protection of three young Saudi men in Florida, at least one of whom - Prince Sultan's son - had been studying English at the University of Tampa for three weeks. (Tampa police records listed Sultan Bin Fahad as the individual who specifically requested protection for the three men. That is probably Prince Sultan Bin Fahad, head of the Saudi General Presidency of Youth Welfare. In family-run Saudi Arabia, there is apparently a whole Ministry devoted to keeping Royal youth out of trouble - something the Bush family elders no doubt dream of copying.)

Apparently Barnard then contacted the Tampa police department and two "off-duty" Tampa intelligence detectives were assigned to watch the three Saudis for their protection. At around 11:00 AM on September 13, Dan Grossi received a phone call from the Tampa police detectives who needed help with a problem: escorting the Saudi men they were protecting on a flight to Kentucky.

Grossi and Perez evidently felt they were up to the task, and at 2:30 PM Grossi was contacted by the Tampa Police Department with specific instructions. And by 4:35 PM a plane carrying Grossi, Perez, Prince Sultan's son, the son of an unidentified Saudi military commander, and third unidentified Saudi, was in the air and en route to Kentucky. The private Lear jet flew from Ft. Lauderdale to Tampa, where it parked at Raytheon Airport Services, which owns a private hangar on the outskirts of the Tampa International airport.

(Tampa, of course, is home to General Tommy Franks and the Pentagon's Central Command (CentCom), which now rules Afghanistan and Iraq directly, and indirectly rules the entire oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia through its growing network of Halliburton-supplied military bases. Raytheon, of course, is the massive arms manufacturer that supplied many of the high-tech weapons used in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tampa is also near Venice FL, where Mad Cow Morning News has exposed numerous secrets about the training of 9-11 pilots Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi at shadowy local flight schools. And Tampa is in Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush stole the 2000 election for his brother George, and where Jeb issued Executive Order 2001-261 to prepare the FL National Guard for a terrorist attack on 9-7-01.)

Their destination, according to the two bodyguards, was the Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky, where the three Saudis were to link up with relatives who were in Kentucky to purchase race horses.

Grossi and Perez further stated that upon landing they saw several 747's parked on the tarmac with Arabic writing. The article suggests that at least one of these 747's flew back to Saudi Arabia with the boys, although their Floridian chaperones appear to have left the airport before that occurred. If true, the flight of these 747's would validate at least part of the Michael Moore story about powerful Saudis being allowed to fly out of the U.S. on the second day of the prohibition of all civilian flights.

Perez stated that he was unaware of who their charges were until they landed. Both men told of what a strange feeling it was to fly in an almost empty sky, and Perez recalls asking the pilot, "We're not going to get shot down are we?" - a legitimate fear, given the fact that fighter jets were urgently patrolling the skies looking for any more terrorists.

Regarding the curious fact that the flight had taken place when all other air traffic was still grounded, Dan Grossi said "he was told that clearance for the flight had come from the White House after the Prince's family pulled a favor from former President Bush."

If so, this was no ordinary ex-Presidential favor. In debunking a Michael Moore-inspired Internet rumor about a secret flight of relatives of Osama Bin Laden, Snopes.com describes exactly how restricted the skies were that day:

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered all flights in the United States grounded immediately following the terrorist attacks, and that ban stayed in effect until September 13. (Even then, for that first day commercial carriers were either completing the interrupted flights of September 11 or were repositioning empty aircraft in anticipation of the resumption of full service. New passenger flights did not resume until the 14th.) During that two-day period of full lock-down, only the military and specially FAA-authorized flights that delivered life-saving medical necessities were in the air. The enforcement of the empty skies directive was so stringent that even after the United Network for Organ Sharing sought and gained FAA clearance to use charter aircraft on September 12 to effect time-critical deliveries of organs for transplant, one of its flights carrying a human heart was forced to the ground in Bellingham, Washington, 80 miles short of its Seattle destination, by two Navy F/A-18 fighters. (The organ completed its journey after being transferred to a helicopter.)

After reading the Tampa Tribune article, I distinctly remember blinking and checking the URL to see if I had accidentally clicked on a link to one of those "publications" that spots Elvis, or reports that ninety year old women have just given birth to Bigfoot's baby. But no, this was indeed the Tampa Tribune.

I remember wondering how on earth our government could have authorized a flight out of the country before they even knew who the perpetrators of the attacks were?

And further, why did the families of the young men "perceive a threat" when it wasn't yet clear on the 13th of September exactly WHO had attacked America or where they were from?

According to a transcript on the State Departments website of a statement given by a "Senior White House Official" on September 13 at 5:22 PM it had not yet been announced that Bin Laden was behind the attacks when protection was requested for the three young men.

When this "Senior White House official" was asked if Osama Bin Laden had perpetrated the attacks against the US at 5:22 PM on September 13th, to which he replied: "I think that right now what we need to do is -- as I said, again, this happened 60 hours ago. We don't want to be premature, not because we don't want to name or finger someone, but because we want to make sure that we understand all the connections, not just a connection."

Was Prince Sultan a psychic who somehow mysteriously predicted that 15 of the 19 hijackers would turn out to be Saudi nationals? Or did he perhaps know who was behind the attacks since he was funding charities linked to Al Qaeda?

Now fast forward about a year and a half and imagine my surprise last week when I read a "Newsweek web exclusive" that reported that Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz - THE VERY SAME defense minister of Saudi Arabia - is being sued on the behalf of the victims of 9-11 for his alleged role in the financing of groups suspected to have links to the terrorist attacks of 9-11!

"Wow," I thought, "wasn't this the SAME Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz who had the kid on the Phantom flight?"

After further checking, I discovered that - yes, my friends - they are one and the same!

According to the Newsweek article, when three attorneys from the "prestigious Houston firm" that represents Sultan bin Abdul Aziz filed a motion in court in the Prince's defense, they also inadvertently provided evidence in the form of "stacks of affidavits and canceled checks" that indicated that the Prince had personally authorized the funneling of millions of dollars on the behalf of Saudi Arabian government to organizations that the US has identified and raided as terrorist front operations sympathetic to Osama Bin Laden.

But it gets worse...

The name of the "prestigious Houston Law firm" that is representing this suspected supporter of terrorism?

Why that would be none other than Baker Botts of Houston - as in JAMES Baker, as in THE James Baker: George Herbert Walker Bush's former Secretary of State and George W. Bush's counsel during the 2000 election recounts (you know, "Mr. the votes have been counted and recounted and counted again and even though we still lost we're taking the crown"?)

It seems that in spite of the fact that Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz and his government have been accused of funding charities linked to Al Qaeda, James Baker's firm still feels the need to defend the Prince against those "evil" trial lawyers representing the orphaned families of the 9-11 victims.

But perhaps what is just as shocking to me is the allegation that the son of this SAME Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz was reportedly flown out of the United States when all other planes were grounded following the special orders of Bush's own father!

Moreover, the entire 9-13 mission of the Lear jet is shrouded in mystery. That mission began in Ft. Lauderdale, stopped in Tampa and Lexington, and returned to Tampa to bring Grossi and Perez home. But then the jet flew to New Orleans "to pick up someone who needed a ride to New York." So this plane made AT LEAST 5 flights on 9-13, but the FAA told the Tampa Tribune, "it's not in our logs... it didn't occur." The White House, the State Department, and the National Security Council all refused to answer the Tribune's questions.

Now the Bush administration is refusing to make public an 800-page Congressional report on the attacks of 9-11. In fact, this administration is so hell-bent on keeping the report from the public that they are even "re-classifying" information that was already a part of the public record!

According to a new Newsweek bombshell by Michael Isikoff,

Among the portions of the report the administration refuses to declassify, sources say, are chapters dealing with two politically and diplomatically sensitive issues: the details of daily intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 and evidence pointing to Saudi government ties to Al Qaeda. Bush officials have taken such a hard line, sources say, that they are refusing to permit the release of matters already in the public domain -- including the existence of intelligence documents referred to on the CIA Web site.

As average citizens struggle to carry on their daily business and keep their blood pressure in check in the midst of a new "orange alert," Mr. Bush & Co. are still busy protecting their buddies in Saudi Arabia and lying to the American public.

Why can't we know the truth about who our enemies are, Mr. Bush?

One has to wonder when George W. said, "You're either with us or against us" - just exactly who he meant by "us." "Us" is beginning to look like a Bush-Saudi-Al Qaeda conspiracy, especially when one includes the well-known business ties between George H. W. Bush, James Baker, and the Bin Laden family through the infamous Carlyle Group.

In a scandal this potentially huge - one implicating the President's close family and family lawyer - shouldn't a Special Prosecutor be appointed? If the President was Bill Clinton, the family member was Hillary Clinton, and the family lawyer was Webster Hubbell, the media - not to mention the Republican Party - would be demanding a Special Prosecutor at the top of their lungs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even though the post-Watergate Special Prosecutor law was repealed after Ken Starr's legal lynching of President Clinton, pre-Watergate-style Special Prosecutors can still be appointed by the Attorney General.

Editor's note: the initial version of this article incorrectly identified Bush family consiglieri James A. Baker III of Baker, Botts as the same James A. Baker who serves as Counsel for Intelligence Policy to the Justice Department's Office for Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR). It is not the same person. For a fuller explanation of this error, click here.

Sarkozy cheers French Jews

On U.S., Israel and Syria,
Sarkozy cheers French Jews

Brett Kline

Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon speaks at a recent gala dinner of the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce, about increasing France's trade ties with Israel during President Nicolas Sarkozy's tenure.

Brett Kline

Most French Jews are welcoming the ascendancy of President Nicolas Sarkozy following years of stepped-up anti-Semitism and questions about their safety and future in the country.

Published: 01/07/2008

PARIS (JTA) -- When a 23-year-old French Jew was kidnapped and tortured to death by an anti-Semitic gang outside Paris in February 2006, France’s interior minister was among the masses who turned out for an overwhelmingly Jewish demonstration to protest the grisly murder of Ilan Halimi.

The minister said he took personally the failure by police to find Halimi before he died, and said as much to Halimi’s mother, Ruth.

When that minister -- now France’s president -- announced this week that he was severing diplomatic contacts with Syria because of its nefarious role in Lebanese politics, it was but the latest example of the sort of behavior that has endeared Nicolas Sarkozy to French Jewry.

“The community here is thrilled, and so am I,” said Nicole Guedj, a Jew who is a former minister and member of France’s highest legal body, the Conseil d’Etat. “Nicolas Sarkozy really understands as president of France what the word security means to the State of Israel and says it publicly.”

Since Sarkozy assumed the presidency half a year ago, he has shifted France away from the anti-American sentiment that marked the last few years under Jacques Chirac, hardened the country’s line toward Iran and promised to uphold Israel’s security in pushing for peace in the Middle East while maintaining France’s strong ties to the Arab world.

After years of stepped-up anti-Semitism and questions about the safety and future of Jews in France, most Jews here have welcomed Sarkozy’s ascendancy.

“We have rarely heard such words of support for Israeli security from a French president,” said Meyer Habib, the vice president of the CRIF umbrella organization of French Jewry.

“When the United States issued its report that Iran had stopped working on nuclear missile heads in 2003, the French president immediately said that this does not change a thing,” noted Habib, referring to the recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate.

Sarkozy, Habib said, “is maintaining a tough stance against any nuclear work in Iran, much more so than Chirac would have done, and he has full support on that from the Jews here, who believe that any nuclear warheads would be aimed at Israel.”

Others expressed more ambivalence about Sarkozy, particularly about his invitation to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who spent five days visiting France in December.

Sarkozy’s welcome of the Libyan strongman “bothered many French Jews,” French Jewish fund-raiser Gil Taieb said at a recent charity dinner of the French United Jewish Appeal. Sarkozy “wants to sell nuclear power stations to Gadhafi, who is nuts and dangerous,” he said.

Sarkozy is the baptized Catholic son of a Hungarian aristocrat father and French mother whose father was a Sephardic Jew from Thessaloniki, Greece.

Habib, who met often with Sarkozy during his years as interior minister, said Sarkozy has received anti-Semitic hate mail from French right-wing extremists throughout his political career, starting from when he was mayor of Neuilly, a well-off Paris suburb with a sizable Jewish population.

“Sarkozy has known the feeling of anti-Semitism, though he is not Jewish,” Habib said.

The head of the United French Jewish Social Fund, Pierre Besnainou, who is the former president of the European Jewish Congress, says French Jews also like Sarkozy for his pro-business policies. Among other things, Sarkozy has pushed to do away with France’s mandatory 35-hour work week.

“President Sarkozy is sending out two strong messages to the French: that America is our friend and there is nothing wrong with making money,” Besnainou, a self-made millionaire, said. “This is reassuring for many Jews here who are entrepreneurs.”

Though France has Europe’s largest Jewish community, with some 600,000 people in a total population of approximately 60 million, France has lagged behind Germany, Britain and even Belgium in trade ties with Israel.

At a recent gala dinner of the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon said he wants that to change under Sarkozy.

“Given the new environment and ongoing contact, we want to see France-Israel trade relations double in the next five years,” Ramon said.

Daniel Rouach, founder and editor of IsraelValley, the Web site of the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce, said there has been an upsurge recently in requests by French companies at the commercial division of the French Embassy in Tel Aviv.

“French companies are feeling a sort of political signal from President Sarkozy to look into going to Israel,” said Rouach, who is also a professor at the prestigious ESCO-EAP management school in Paris and at Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology.

Before the 1967 Six-Day War, France was Israel’s largest supplier of weapons. France also built Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility in the Negev Desert.

Not all Jewish community members think it’s wise to embrace Sarkozy so warmly.

“Yes, he is certainly a friend of Israel’s, but he is also the president of France,” said Taieb, who is also a CRIF official.

Jewish fawning over Sarkozy “is excessive,” Taieb said. Instead, he said, Jewish officials should take care to maintain a certain distance.

“We must not be in a position to have to make excuses not to criticize him when necessary,” Taieb said. “Let’s keep some critical distance.”

Roseanne Barr's Wild Tirade Against Obama, Oprah

Roseanne Barr has published a profane rant on her website attacking Barack (misspelled "Barak") Obama as a supporter of "corporate racist anti worker bullshit." Barr also tears into Oprah Winfrey, who allegedly "plays the race card and the gender card" and is a "closeted republican."

Read an excerpt:

barak obama is an empty suit selling "hope" in lieu of Truth. Oprah Winfrey helped to elect Arnold Swartzenegger. I have no doubt that she voted her purse by doing this, as she is a large land owner in California, and that ilk fears Dems because they do not want to pay their "fair share" of Cali tax. Oprah has given us Swartzenegger and Dr. Phil. If that was not offensive enough to decent thinking people, now she brings us Obama. He has no ideas, no plan and nothing to add other than the cynical pacification of the masses with bedtime stories about hope, while calling Unions "special interest groups" that need to be done away with.

Obama votes with Bush constantly funding this terrible endless war.

Oprah, you play the race card and the gender card too.

You are a closeted republican and chose Barak Obama because you do not like other women who actually stand for something to working American Women besides glamour, angels, hollywood and dieting!

When Americans find out that Obama backs right wing corporate racist anti worker bullshit, they will not vote for him, and the victory will go to the most racist right wing republican ever.... Mccain, who is a fascist!

For what it's worth, Barr praises Hillary Clinton as a "seasoned woman politician with 35 years of experience" and John Edwards as "pro union."

The full post is here

Why I Believe Bush Must Go
Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse.

By George McGovern
Sunday, January 6, 2008; B01

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world -- more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies -- especially the war in Iraq -- have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws -- that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law -- and repeatedly violates the law -- thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors."

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

Revolutionary air car runs on compressed air

BBC News is reporting that a French company has developed a pollution-free car which runs on compressed air. India's Tata Motors has the car under production and it may be on sale in Europe and India by the end of the year.

The air car, also known as the Mini-CAT or City Cat, can be refueled in minutes from an air compressor at specially equipped gas stations and can go 200 km on a 1.5 euro fill-up -- roughly 125 miles for $3. The top speed will be almost 70 mph and the cost of the vehicle as low as $7000.

The car features a fibreglass body and a revolutionary electrical system and is completely computer-controlled. It is powered by the expansion of compressed air, using no combustion at all, and the exhaust is entirely clean and cool enough for use in the internal air conditioning system.

Tata Motors is known for its interest in innovation and has been selling compressed gas buses since 2000. It is currently working on producing the world's cheapest car, which will be almost 100% plastic and will sell in India for about $2500.

Tata is also expanding into the world market. It acquired Korea's Daweoo in 2004 and is now the top bidder to purchase the originally British Jaguar and Land Rover lines from the United States' troubled Ford Motor Company.

The following video is from BBC's BBC World, broadcast on January 04, 2008

Charges Against Tasered Woman Dropped
Ohio Woman Was Cuffed, Hit With Stun Gun Repeatedly; Officer Under Investigation

(CBS/AP) Charges were dismissed today against a northeast Ohio woman who was handcuffed and tasered by a patrolman whose actions were recorded by police dashboard video.

The Warren officer who arrested 38-year-old Heidi Gill outside a bar has been fired for lying to investigators in an unrelated traffic stop.

Richard Kovach had refused to testify against the tasered woman on the advice of his attorney. The FBI is currently investigating the matter, and Kovach himself may face federal charges.

A video made from a cruiser shows Kovach using a Taser on the woman as she screams and tries to kick out a rear window of the patrol car.

The officer got a two-month suspension in the stun gun case.

Tracy Timko Rose, the Warren Assistant City Prosecutor, said the city was prepared to go forward with charges against Gill but that Kovach’s unavailability to testify forced them to drop the case.

“Had he been here we would have pursued the matter,” she told CBS Affiliate WKBN “We believe there was probable cause. We believe should he testify the charges would be substantiated. But without his testimony we cannot prove the charges against her.”

Gill’s attorney, Mark Hanni, believes Kovach will face federal charges.

“The torture he put Miss Gill through is just totally unexcuseable and cannot be tolerated in the United States of America,” Hanni told WKBN.

Gill may not be off the hook for good; charges could be reinstated if Kovach is cleared in the investigation.

Expert: Crime of torture could only have been ordered by the president David Edwards and Muriel Kane

It was announced on Wednesday that the Justice Department has opened an official criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA torture tapes. However, rather than appointing an outside special council, Attorney General Mukasey has assigned an assistant US Attorney from Connecticut to handle the proceedings.

At the same time, the chairman and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission are charging in a New York Times op-ed that the CIA obstructed their own investigations in 2003-04 by not disclosing the existence of the tapes.

Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley told Keith Olbermann that as many as six criminal offenses could be involved in the 9/11 Commission charge alone, including obstruction of Congress, obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy.

However, Turley emphasized that the real crime under investigation is not merely obstruction, but the actual torture documented by the tapes. "It is still, even after the last seven year, a crime to torture suspects," Turley commented.

Turley suggested that under those circumstances, the failure to appoint a special prosecutor was a serious problem, because "the investigation will essentially be the Justice Department investigating itself. ... Picking some guy in Connecticut or Cincinnati or Delaware or any other state doesn't make any difference. His boss is Michael Mukasey. And Michael Mukasey's boss is the president of the United States. If torture occurred, he was the guy who ordered it."

Turley suggested that there is a reluctance throughout official Washington, not "just Republicans," to pry into an underlying crime which is potentially far more serious than the burglary which was the start of Watergate. When Olberman asked if the investigation "could still lead to criminal culpability for the president," Turley replied, "Most certainly it can. That original crime could only have been ordered by the president and it leads directly to his office."

Turley finally expressed a concern that the Justice Department might try to "narrow this, define it in a way to avoid torture." He explained, "Nobody in this town wants to talk about it because they know that there's a lot of people in the country that like the idea of torturing these people. And that's just a painful fact. But it's also a painful fact that it's a crime. And when the president says that we got some useful evidence, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's immaterial. Just because it had good results or good motivations, it remains a crime."

A full transcript of Jonathan Turley's appearance on Countdown is available here.

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast on January 2, 2008.

Move to Impeach Cheney Gains Support in Congress

Tim King Salem-News.com

More Democrats signing on to the idea of a Vice-Presidential impeachment, could it really happen?

Vice President Dick Cheney Photo courtesy: blogrunner.com

(SALEM, Ore.) - A House Resolution to impeach U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, Dennis Kucinich's H.R. 799, is gathering more support. The national impeachment continues to grow and generate increasing interest since being referred to the House Judiciary Committee last month, a Kucinich spokesperson said.

As a member of that committee, Representative Robert Wexler and two other committee members, Luis Gutierrez and Tammy Baldwin, have joined together in demanding that the legal action against Cheney moves forward.

Congressman Robert Wexler of Florida is just one elected official who says the charges are too serious to ignore.

"There is credible evidence that the Vice President abused the power of his office, and not only brought us into an unnecessary war but violated the civil liberties and privacy of American citizens. It is the constitutional duty of Congress to hold impeachment hearings"

He went on to say that he believes Vice President Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration have demonstrated a consistent pattern of abusing the law and misleading Congress and the American people.

"We see the consequences of these actions abroad in Iraq and at home through the violations of our civil liberties,” Wexler said.

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, stated in August that published reports identify, "the Vice-President’s willful and repeated disregard for the rule of law, international treaties, environmental protections, and the common good."

Wexler and Baldwin joined Congressman Luis Gutierrez in penning an Op-Ed that calls for committee hearings on a bill to impeach Dick Cheney on a variety of charges that include allegations of manipulating intelligence to boost the case for the war with Iraq, a very serious charge.

The Op-Ed that ran in the Philadelphia Enquirer December 27th (Impeach Cheney now- The allegations that he abused power are credible.) states, "The issues at hand are too serious to ignore, including credible allegations of abuse of power that if proven may well constitute high crimes and misdemeanors under our constitution."

"The charges against Vice President Cheney relate to his deceptive actions leading up to the Iraq war, the revelation of the identity of a covert agent for political retaliation, and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens."

House leaders and the leading Democratic presidential candidates don't support impeachment. One thing they point to is the timeframe and expense that surrounded the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, citing how the business of politics in the U.S. ground to a near standstill as the nation's attention was diverted by the effort to expose the President over a sex act with a White House intern. Gutierrez saying hearings, "need not tie up Congress for a year and shut down the nation."

The White House, in a statement, said Democrats were shirking responsibilities on issues such as childrens’ [sic] health insurance "and yet they find time to waste an afternoon on an impeachment vote against the vice president. … This is why Americans shake their head in wonder about the priorities of this Congress."

But Kucinich and Wexler and others in Congress say they won't be swayed as they utilize an existing arm of the Democratic system to see that impeachment proceedings are brought forward against the elected leader of out nation's second highest political office.

Osama bin Laden is Dead

Who murdered Benazir Bhutto?
The two issues may be related

Murdered by intelligence agency
supported terrorists

When Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan to take a stand for democratic government, 3 million Pakistanis greeted her at the airport.

Now she is dead.

At the 6:15 mark in this video, Benazir Bhutto refers in a matter-of-fact manner to "the man who killed Osama bin Laden."

If this was a misstatement, she did not correct herself, nor did the interviewer call attention to it.

Before she was murdered, there was a previous attack on Bhutto's life. She told David Frost that she was not even allowed to file a police report let alone get a serious investigation of the attack.

She stated that she specifically wanted the source of the financial support of the terrorists traced.

Saeed Sheikh is the man Bhutto refers to in this interview as being the killer of Osama bin Laden.

Saeed Sheikh is charged with killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl who tracked the relationship between Pakistani intelligence and terrorist groups. Saeed Sheikh is also suspected of having wired money to Mohamed Atta on behalf of Pakistani intelligence right before the 9/11 attacks.

George Bush & Company wholeheartedly support the current Pakistani regime.

View this video to understand the Pakistani-US alliance to support and protect terrorist operations in the US and the Middle East

Bogus Neocon Terror War Costs $6,000 Per Second
The Huffington Post December 31, 2007 Phil Plait

Whenever the Bush administration balks at spending money on some needed issue, I always mention on my blog that the Iraq war is costing us 11 million dollars per hour.
I am embarrassed to admit that this figure is wrong. I apologize. It has recently come to light that the Iraq war (plus Afghanistan, a trivial amount by comparison) is actually costing us 20 million dollars per hour .

This new amount was revealed by The Washington Post just the other day, but I have seen precious little mention of it, either in the MSM or on the blogs. I posted about it on my own blog , and was met by the usual and expected troops of equivocators. Remember folks, until we attacked Iraq, there was no connection between that country and terrorism (except, of course, for the very conscious and deliberate conflation of the two by the Bush administration).

So what does 20 megabucks an hour really mean? For one thing, it means we are spending nearly $6,000 every second in Iraq (and Afghanistan, but note that it only gets about 1/5 of the total money, while Iraq gets the other 4/5). In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, if you read moderately quickly, we'll have spent over $50,000. That's comfortably more than the median income of an individual American last year .

I poked around the web a bit to see what this kind of money would fund, but it's almost impossible for the mind to grasp the enormity, the numbingly colossal nature of this expenditure.

The money we spend in Iraq in about 40 minutes would feed one million needy American families for a month . The amount we spend on Iraq in two weeks would give NASA enough money to design, build, launch, and use a Hubble-type telescope for a decade (which includes paying the army of engineers and scientists who would run it). One month worth of Iraq would buy � outright � nearly 23,000 homes in San Francisco , the priciest market in the country.
One hour in Iraq � one short hour, the amount of time I spent putting this blog entry together � could buy over one hundred thousand computers for children in third world nations. An hour and a half would fund Human Rights Watch for a year.

I could go on and on, and you can go right ahead and calculate the numbers for your own favorite cause. But before you go, I want to point out the elephant in the room on this issue.
Where did this number come from? Who calculated that the War on Terror is costing us 20 million dollars every hour, of every day, for the foreseeable future?

Why, it was Ted Stevens , Senator Intertubes his own self.
And why did he release this number? Because he wants more funding for the war .
C'mon, folks. This thing is expensive . Pitch in! We only need 20 million of you to throw a buck in every hour. After all, what else do you have to spend it on?

December 31, 2007
Editorial
Looking at America
There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.