It may be the Bush-era version of "What did he know, and when did he know it?", the famous question that dogged Nixon through the Watergate break-in scandal. Before the court of public opinion, White House spokespeople have long maintained President Bush had no involvement in the firing of nine U.S. Attorneys, the central decision that mushroomed into one of the biggest scandals in eight years of the Bush administration. "here is no indication that the President knew about any of the ongoi...

Russia occupies Georgia, world pressure mounts 14 Aug 2008 22:17:55 GMT Source: Reuters * Russia forces deploy around three Georgian towns * U.N. calls for halt to lawlessness in Georgia * U.S. Gates says Russia's behaviour has major implications * U.S., Poland sign missile shield deal amid Georgia crisis * U.S. envoy urges Russia to lift sea blockade of Georgia By Matt Robinson GORI, Georgia, Aug 14 (Reuters) - Russian troops and armour deployed around three Georgian towns on Thursday, ...

Fox: John McCain Has Known Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili "For 25 Years" — Since Saakashvili Was 16 Years Old? Fox is pulling out all the stops to try to make John McCain look presidential and worldly in the face of the conflict in Georgia. As a matter of fact, one would think he is the president. Over the course of three segments on the issue today (August 12, 2008) on Your World w/Neil Cavuto, George Bush was mentioned only once, in passing, in a negative way. But, one wonders if the...

By ANNE GEARAN AP Diplomatic Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- There's more than meets the eye to the frantic U.S. efforts Friday to talk Russia and U.S. ally Georgia out of war over an obscure mountain tract most Americans have never heard of. A look at the map and your gas credit card bill shows why. South Ossetia is claimed by Georgia, the former Soviet republic that cast its lot with the United States and the West to the eternal irritation of Moscow. The breakaway province has been under Russia's...

Capitol Hill Questions FBI Anthrax Investigation: Where's The Polygraph? By Andrew Tilghman - August 8, 2008, 9:19AM Concerns about the FBI's circumstantial case against military microbiologist Bruce Ivins are reaching Capitol Hill. Last night, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) sent a three-page letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller III, asking them to respond to 18 questions about virtually every aspect of the probe. In the House, Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat wh...

KARACHI (AFP) - A female Pakistani neuroscientist was due in a US court Tuesday after being extradited to the United States on charges of shooting at American soldiers while in detention in Afghanistan. The case of Aafia Siddiqui has caused outrage in Pakistan, where her family angrily insisted that the US-educated 36-year-old was innocent and accused US forces of secretly holding her for the last five years. Siddiqui, who has three children, disappeared from the southern Pakistani port city ...

KABUL, Afghanistan — Six years after being driven from power, the Taliban are demonstrating a resilience and a ferocity that are raising alarm here, in Washington and in other NATO capitals, and engendering a fresh round of soul-searching over how a relatively ragtag insurgency has managed to keep the world’s most powerful armies at bay. Officials here are alarmed that the Taliban has been able to keep the most powerful armies at bay. The mounting toll inflicted by the insurgents, including ni...

The mainstream American corporate press has once again proven itself to be no better than the state controlled media in places like Communist China or Zimbabwe, by steadfastly refusing to print even a mention of the huge story concerning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh's recent comments that the vice president wanted to carry out a false flag operation to provoke a war with Iran. The outright complicity of the corporate media in blackballing this story reminds us how the neocon cabal in the W...

'Intel spin' by US hardliners sparked NKorean crisis: book 1 hour ago WASHINGTON (AFP) — In circumstances echoing the Iraq war controversy, hardliners in US President George W. Bush's administration spun intelligence and triggered a nuclear crisis with North Korea, says a new book to be released this week. Intelligence on a North Korea effort to acquire components for uranium enrichment was politicized to depict the hardline communist state running a full-fledged production facility capable of...

03 August 2008 RIYADH: In yet another blow to the American terrorist surveillance program, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation (AHIF) has refiled a lawsuit in San Francisco federal court accusing the Bush administration of illegal wiretapping. The suit follows the recent dismissal by a US court of the original lawsuit filed by the Oregon-based American branch of the now-defunct AHIF, which was declared a terrorist organization by the US Treasury Department in 2004. "The refiling of the suit h...

Rights groups fear feds' new terror profile U.S. says some Arab, Muslim men who regularly travel abroad may face more scrutiny. DEARBORN -- Border guards recently began detaining Wissam Charafeddine every time he crosses from Windsor into the United States. Without explanation, he has been handcuffed in front of his parents and held apart from his pregnant wife for hours in isolated detention. Charafeddine says he has done nothing wrong, "not even a driving ticket." But authorities, who alway...

Inspector: Iraqi corruption a 'second insurgency' Inspector general, a former Austinite, survives inquiry into his own office's ethics. By Ken Herman WASHINGTON BUREAU Monday, August 04, 2008 ARLINGTON, Va. — After 19 trips to Iraq, 244 audits and 18 quarterly reports to Congress, is the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction encouraged or discouraged about whether Iraq will be a functioning democracy anytime soon? "Get rid of the 'anytime soon,' and I would say encouraged," St...

The Bush administration may leave the region the same way it found it, with Al Qaeda entrenched and U.S. intelligence officials frustrated. By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer July 27, 2008 WASHINGTON -- Although the "war on terrorism" remains a consuming focus of the U.S. government, the Bush administration appears poised to leave behind a situation not unlike the one it inherited nearly eight years ago: a resurgent Al Qaeda ensconced in South Asia, training new recruits, plotting ...

Source: AP WASHINGTON (AP) — House leaders on Thursday announced the six members and two alternates who will make up the Office of Congressional Ethics, an outside independent group created to restore integrity to a flawed ethics process. With the creation of the new office, said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who selected members of the bipartisan office with Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, "we bring a new element of transparency and accountability to the ethics process." The office...

DOJ Memo Allowed Severe, But Short-Term, Mental Pain in Interrogations Posted 49 minutes ago By Debra Cassens Weiss Newly released documents confirm that a secret Justice Department memo authorized waterboarding by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002, according to a press release by the American Civil Liberties Union. The memo allowed harsh interrogation techniques causing severe mental pain that is not long-lasting. The August 2002 Justice Department memo (PDF) was released as part of a...

Source: AP Memo: 'Good faith' protects against torture charge By PAMELA HESS and LARA JAKES JORDAN – 34 minutes ago WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department in 2002 told the CIA that its interrogators would be safe from prosecution for violations of anti-torture laws if they believed `in good faith' that harsh techniques used to break the will of prisoners, including waterboarding, would not cause "prolonged mental harm." The newly released but heavily censored memo approved the CIA's harsh ...

Mocking Mukasey The attorney general warns that Gitmo prisoners could go free on U.S. streets. The Dems aren't buying it. Raising the prospect that Guantánamo Bay inmates might be unleashed onto the streets of American cities, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Wednesday there is an "urgent" need for Congress to enact a new law governing how federal courts handle legal challenges from detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba. But Mukasey's plea for quick passage of a significant new counte...

Source: AP WASHINGTON - Top Pentagon leaders are expected soon to recommend to Defense Secretary Robert Gates which additional U.S. troops could be sent to Afghanistan over the next month or so, according to a senior military official. The units are likely to be small and could include engineers, ordnance disposal troops and other support forces needed to shore up fighting needs and the training of Afghan forces. Officials have not ruled out identifying a larger, brigade-sized unit before the...

Source: Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Wednesday sought to play down the seriousness of growing violence in Afghanistan but declined to say the United States and NATO were winning their fight against Taliban insurgents. On a day when President George W. Bush visited the Pentagon to discuss Iraq and Afghanistan with top officials, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said decisions on more troops for Afghanistan may have to be left to Bush's successor. "It is a mixed picture...

Source: AP BAGHDAD - The next White House will most likely inherit the difficult negotiations over the long-term status of American military forces in Iraq as disputes linger over setting timelines for expected troop withdrawals, U.S. officials say. U.S. negotiators once hoped to finalize the pact by the end of this month. But the goal has rapidly diminished to finding a stopgap measure by the end of the year. It also appears increasingly likely that the final detailed agreement — spelling o...

Congress Should Demand Answers from Attorney General WASHINGTON - July 23 - The American Civil Liberties Union urges the House Judiciary Committee to demand accountability from Attorney General Michael Mukasey during the Department of Justice oversight hearing scheduled for today. “Mukasey was supposed to come in and clean up the Justice Department, but instead he seems to be intent on burying any evidence of wrongdoing by the Bush administration,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of th...

Congress Admits to Salon: Larger, Illegal Domestic Data Interception, Raising Questions About 9-11, War Crimes By testing - July 23, 2008, 1:21PM TPMM discloses a Salon report showing Members of Congress know about a massive, still not fully disclosed domestic spying operation spanning decades. It appears Members of Congress know some things which have not been disclosed: Evidence linking Members of Congress with war crimes planning and evidence destruction. The Congress turned a blind eye to...

Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate. Editor's note: This article is part of a Salon investigative series on spying inside the United States by the Bush administration. Research support for the article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund. By Tim Shorrock July 23, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- The last several ye...

Massive Domestic Spying Investigation Coming Soon? By Andrew Tilghman - July 23, 2008, 10:37AM After Democrats failed to muster any substantive opposition to the Bush White House's overhaul of domestic spying laws just a few weeks ago, it would be a striking turn of events if the House leadership launched into a massive, multi-decade investigation of how the government has been monitoring its own citizens since the Cold War. But that's what Salon speculates about today in a far-reaching report...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US teams in charge of training security forces in Afghanistan are short of some 2,300 trainers to set up a national police force, team commander Major General Robert Cone said Tuesday. "The Afghan police are several years behind the Afghan Army," the commander of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan said in a video news conference from Afghanistan. There is a "shortage in the police training mission ... right now the number is about 2,300 police trainers...

Source: AP WASHINGTON—A top foreign policy adviser to John McCain has lobbied the National Security Council, Congress and the State Department on behalf of Stephen Payne, the Texas businessman and longtime Republican fundraiser caught up in a controversy over whether he sought to sell access to the Bush White House. According to records on file with Congress, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann lobbied the Senate and House on behalf of Payne's firm, Worldwide Strategic Partners In...

Source: AP BAGHDAD - Iraq's government spokesman is hopeful that U.S. combat forces could be out of the country by 2010. Ali al-Dabbagh made the comments following a meeting in Baghdad on Monday between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama, who arrived in Iraq earlier in the day. The timeframe is similar to Obama's proposal to pull back combat troops within 16 months. The Iraqi government has been trying to clarify its position on a possible troop...

Iraq withdrawal: Obama's plan leaves McCain in precarious position Is Nouri al-Maliki taking sides in the US presidential elections? July 21, 2008 12:24 PM The Barack Obama camp must be delighted: a German newspaper is sticking to its story that the Iraqi prime minister is backing the Democratic presidential candidate's timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq - a stance that embarrasses the Bush administration and scuppers John McCain's line. The row about what Nouri al-Maliki said to Der ...

Top Officials Sought to Defend Interrogation Practices Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft refused to promote an administration insider. By Carrie Johnson Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 17, 2008; Page A04 Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft offered the White House a list of five candidates to lead the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel in early 2003, but top administration officials summarily rejected them in favor of installing a loyalist who would provide the...

Ashcroft faults '02-'03 torture memos Former Justice chief says it wasn't hard to withdraw opinions Associated Press July 18, 2008 WASHINGTON - Former Attorney General John Ashcroft said yesterday that "it was not a hard decision" to withdraw Justice Department legal opinions that approved the use of harsh interrogation methods that critics say amount to torture. Ashcroft, testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee, said he did not necessarily disagree with the conclusions of the tw...