A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people."

The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could “validate” the President’s war on terror and allow Bush to “unite the country” in a “time of national shock and sorrow.”

The memo says such a reversal in the President's fortunes could keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections.

GOP insiders who have seen the memo admit it’s a risky strategy and point out that such scenarios are “blue sky thinking” that often occurs in political planning sessions.

“The President’s popularity was at an all-time high following the 9/11 attacks,” admits one aide. “Americans band together at a time of crisis.”

Other Republicans, however, worry that such a scenario carries high risk, pointing out that an attack might suggest the President has not done enough to protect the country.

“We also have to face the fact that many Americans no longer trust the President,” says a longtime GOP strategist. “That makes it harder for him to become a rallying point.”

The memo outlines other scenarios, including:

--Capture of Osama bin Laden (or proof that he is dead);

--A drastic turnaround in the economy;

--A "successful resolution" of the Iraq war.

GOP memos no longer talk of “victory” in Iraq but use the term “successful resolution.”

“A successful resolution would be us getting out intact and civil war not breaking out until after the midterm elections,” says one insider.

The memo circulates as Tuesday’s disastrous election defeats have left an already dysfunctional White House in chaos, West Wing insiders say, with shouting matches commonplace and the blame game escalating into open warfare.

“This place is like a high-school football locker room after the team lost the big game,” grumbles one Bush administration aide. “Everybody’s pissed and pointing the finger at blame at everybody else.”

Bush 2. How depressing, corrupt, unlawful and tragically absurd the administration's world view actually is...how low the moral bar has been lowered...and (though I know I'm capable of intellectually lazy notions of collective guilt) how complicit our silence as citizens is...Nixon, a true fiend, looks like a paragon of virtue next to the criminally incompetent robber barons now raiding the present and future.

But where are the Dems? American foreign policy is in chaos. We are now left in the surreal position of having to condemn American-sponsored torture as official policy while a deranged President Bush orders his staff to attend ethics briefings -- a "refresher course" -- from the White House counsel. The very idea of America is in chaos and this chaos has created a vacuum. One question for any Democrat: Who will have the balls to get us out of Iraq? If the Democrats don't step up and fill this vacuum, the Republicans will. They will take us out of Iraq. And then the Democrats will be left holding the bag -- first as the enablers who let the Republicans take us into an unnecessary and immoral war, and then as the whipping boys who stood by while the Republicans kept justifying what was clearly an unnecessary and immoral war. They were so worried about positioning themselves as hawks, not being seen as soft on terror and war, that they lost the capacity for outrage when the person responsible for a legal memo that denied the validity of the Geneva Conventions was appointed Attorney General. And it was downhill from there.

[snip]

Yes, there is a difference between the McCain/Hagel Repubs and the neo-con/White House Iraq Group lunatics. But it's also good to remember: no matter what he does from here on out, McCain stood by the president, a man (and his machine) who smeared him viciously on the 2000 campaign trail, and then, at the GOP convention four years later, campaigned for him when we were well on to this disastrous course. And thinking men -- of which McCain is surely one -- knew the neo-cons were exploiting 9/11 for their hideous misadventure in Iraq, and knew this was an administration that would not allow photos of the dead. Etc. etc. etc. Every man who stood by Bush should be forced to answer for it. 

The problem isn't with Jon Stewart, who's a hero. The problem is that he's the only one (with ratings at least; none of the right-wing heavyweights are going on the Al Franken show, are they?). And we are pouring too much concrete under his pedestal. But I must admit that he's far too polite to the architects and enablers of the tragic last five years. If I hear one more asshole say, "The issue isn't whether I would send my own children to Iraq, this is an all-voluntary army...National security is at stake... There are monsters in this world." Well, thanks for telling us that -- and for lying about the war and profiting from it. And trying to privatize Iraq so corporate interests could have a free-market laboratory without all those pesky questions about "who owns what" and "who gets a piece of the action." (See Naomi Klein's excellent Baghdad Year Zero.) 

This is indeed a league of bastards -- these men are human scum. There were many who would have given their life to fight al-Qaeda. Many parents would have sent their children on that cause. It is the issue...of course that is the issue... Here's an American thought: Arab life has as much intrinsic value as American life. We are SUPPOSED to be better than the horrible regimes we must fight (not choose to fight). Due process is a fundamental tenet of civilization. The law is supposed to be better than us.

We have veered so badly away from sanity that re-reading an Eisenhower speech or two puts him to the left of Howard Dean.

My own parents had deep faith, they saw the earth as a gift from God. They took Christ seriously -- the gospel, his words and acts -- and thought it their Christian duty to speak out against the desecration of God's great gifts: life, earth, freedom, and civilization. Nowhere could they find any endorsements of "wars of choice." Jesus was a radical to be sure, but in an opposite way from the war mongers and profiteers who use his name today. I can't get past "thou shalt not kill" and look at this carnage and see any rational way one could say these men follow Jesus Christ. Alas, the money lenders have well and truly invaded the temple.

Target Corp. is defending its policy on filling prescriptions for emergency contraception after the Planned Parenthood Federation of America accused the retailer of disrespecting customers' reproductive rights.

Target allows pharmacists to choose not to fill requests for emergency contraception, also known as Plan B, if it is against their religious beliefs.

The issue has caused an ongoing debate nationwide between people who oppose abortion because of religious beliefs and those in favor of abortion rights.

Emergency contraception primarily delays ovulation long enough for sperm to die without fertilizing an egg. Those who oppose the drug say it could cause an abortion, but medical experts disagree.

Though other retailers have similar policies, Planned Parenthood officials say Target's policy is especially burdensome to customers. If one pharmacist refuses to dispense the drugs, the customer could have to travel to another store to get it.

It's an unnecessary inconvenience and embarrassment to the customer, said Jackie Payne, assistant director of government relations for the Planned Parenthood Federation in Washington. The timing is crucial for emergency contraception and could be a problem especially for women in rural areas, Payne said.

"Basically, they don't want to absorb the burden," she said of Target. "They would rather pass that on to the customer."

But Target defends its policy, pointing out that if the pharmacist refuses to dispense the drug, he or she must pass it on to another pharmacist at the same location. If none is available, the pharmacist must call another Target and make sure the drug is available for the customer.

"We are committed to getting these prescriptions filled," said Lena Michaud, spokeswoman for Target Stores. "But we also have to respect associates with strongly held religious beliefs."

In a company statement, Target officials added that their policy follows recommendations made by the American Pharmacists Association. It's a rare event that a pharmacist's beliefs conflict with a request for emergency contraception, officials said.

"Under no circumstances can the pharmacist prevent the prescription from being filled, make discourteous or judgmental remarks, or discuss his or her religious beliefs with the guest," Target's statement said.

Planned Parenthood officials say if Target allows pharmacists to refuse to fill a prescription, they should think about adopting other ways to satisfy the customer. For example, other retailers have the emergency contraception delivered if pharmacists at the store refuse to fill it.

"All I want (Target) to do is to offer a minimum standard that the customer gets what she needs," Payne said. "And they won't do that."

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

"It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began....More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate who had access to the same intelligence voted to remove Saddam Hussein from power,"

• Almost six in 10 — 57 percent — said they do not think the Bush administration has high ethical standards and the same portion says President Bush is not honest. Just over four in 10 say the administration has high ethical standards and that Bush is honest. Whites, Southerners and white evangelicals were most likely to believe Bush is honest. (Insert your own Bobby Jon Drinkard / Jamie Newton joke here.)
  
  
• More than eight in 10, 82 percent, described Bush as "stubborn," with almost that many Republicans agreeing to that description. (That trait used to be described as "decisive." Now that his "decisiveness" has driven us off a cliff, Americans are singing a different tune.)
  
• His job approval rating remains at his all-time low in the AP-Ipsos poll of 37 percent. (9 points till Nixon.)
  
• Only 42 percent in the new poll said they approve of Bush's handling of foreign policy and terrorism, his lowest rating yet in an area that has long been his strongest issue. (Nothing like continued carnage in Iraq with nothing to show for it.)
  

Many of those who approve of Bush's job performance cited his Christian beliefs and strong values, the second biggest reason for support after backing his policies.

"I know he is a man of integrity and strong faith," said Fran Blaney, a Republican and an evangelical who lives near Hartford, Conn. "I've read that he prays every morning asking for God's guidance. He certainly is trying to do what he thinks he is supposed to do."

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected him from your city,”

“And don’t wonder why he hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for his help because he might not be there,” he said.

Abstract

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

Introduction

It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government's invasive tactics [1]. Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use. In addition, none of the three helmets we analyzed provided significant attenuation to most frequency bands.
We describe our experimental setup, report our results, and conclude with a few design guidelines for constructing more effective helmets.

The lobbyist Jack Abramoff asked for $9 million in 2003 from the president of a West African nation to arrange a meeting with President Bush and directed his fees to a Maryland company now under federal scrutiny, according to newly disclosed documents.

The African leader, President Omar Bongo of Gabon, met with President Bush in the Oval Office on May 26, 2004, 10 months after Mr. Abramoff made the offer. There has been no evidence in the public record that Mr. Abramoff had any role in organizing the meeting or that he received any money or had a signed contract with Gabon.

White House and State Department officials described Mr. Bush's meeting with President Bongo, whose government is regularly accused by the United States of human rights abuses, as routine. The officials said they knew of no involvement by Mr. Abramoff in the arrangements. Officials at Gabon's embassy in Washington did not respond to written questions.

"This went through normal staffing channels," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, who said the meeting was "part of the president's outreach to the continent of Africa."

A document from Mr. Abramoff's files that was released last week by a Senate committee shows that in the summer of 2003 he pushed to sign President Bongo as a client, even offering to travel to Gabon immediately after an August golfing vacation to Scotland "with the congressmen and senators I take there each year."

The documents also show that Mr. Abramoff and his colleagues drew up a draft contract that called for $9 million in fees to be paid to GrassRoots Interactive, the small Maryland lobbying company that his former colleagues say he controlled.

Documents, including copies of canceled checks, show that millions of dollars flowed through the company's accounts in 2003, the year it was created, including at least $2.3 million to a California consulting firm that used the same address as the law office of Mr. Abramoff's brother, Robert. A separate check for $400,000 was made out to Kay Gold, another Abramoff family company.

When he first approached Gabon, Mr. Abramoff was not new to issues involving West Africa.

He had been a Washington lobbyist for President Mobutu Sese Seko, the repressive leader of neighboring Congo, called Zaire at the time. He also had connections to Gabon through a former business partner, David Safavian, who was a registered agent in Washington for President Bongo. Mr. Safavian, a former White House budget official, was arrested in September on charges of lying about his ties to Mr. Abramoff.

The three-page letter released by the Senate panel was written to Mr. Bongo on Greenberg Traurig stationery and dated July 28, 2003; Mr. Abramoff suggested that he had unusual influence to arrange a meeting with President Bush.

"Without advance resources, I have been cautiously working to obtain a visit for the president to Washington to see President Bush," Mr. Abramoff wrote. "As you know, we were, in advance of the war in Iraq, able to secure a tentative date for this meeting; however, the war canceled all such scheduled visits."

Mr. Abramoff said he was willing to travel to Gabon to meet with Mr. Bongo to discuss the contract if the government would arrange for a private plane.

"It must be on the basis by which I travel anywhere, being in a private aircraft, which bears a substantial cost unfortunately," he said. "I am confident that we will have a long, productive and warm relationship, but good relationships are built on firm understandings at the outset."

Other documents obtained by The New York Times show that Mr. Abramoff and his colleagues prepared two draft agreements, both dated Aug. 7, 2003, that outlined the lobbying plan for Gabon.

One called for GrassRoots to receive $9 million in lobbying fees; the other called for Greenberg Traurig to receive $1 million, all of it in 2003.

A spokeswoman for Greenberg Traurig said the firm had no comment. "We don't comment on whom we do or don't represent," said Jill Perry, a spokeswoman for the firm, which forced Mr. Abramoff to resign last year.

On the street in Iraq, people give nicknames to the big longtime-expatriate politicians whom the Americans brought back to Iraq. They call former transitional Prime Minister Iyad Allawi "Iyad the Baathist" because of his background in that party. And they call Ahmad Chalabi "Ahmad the Thief." How appropriate that Chalabi has again made a splash in a Washington, D.C., that looks increasingly like a kleptocracy itself.

On the surface Chalabi ought to be finished in Iraqi politics. But until Dec. 15, he is a deputy prime minister. His meetings in Washington this week with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley acknowledge his high political office -- even though not so long ago the Bush administration tried to destroy him. What accounts for the turnabout in his political fortunes in the United States? Credit the shifting political winds in Iraq -- and perhaps yet more savvy back-channel dealings by Chalabi with the Bush administration. It can't be because of his rap sheet, whole reams of pages long.

Chalabi provided copious amounts of false intelligence to the United States in the late 1990s and through the run-up to the Iraq war. The defectors, con men and crooks he supplied to the CIA and the Pentagon made all sorts of extravagant and ridiculous claims that were eagerly swallowed by the hawks in the Bush administration.

One source, known as "Curveball," alleged that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs, which is a contradiction in terms. One can only imagine what would have happened to Saddam's biologists, experimenting with dangerous microbes, when the trailer had a flat tire or hit a pothole. Chalabi's source nevertheless succeeded in getting such absurdities included in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003.

Chalabi was convicted of massive bank fraud in Jordan in the early 1990s. He was given millions by the State Department and the CIA for the overthrow of Saddam, funds he never properly accounted for. When those agencies dropped him as a result, he cultivated contacts in the Pentagon instead.

In the spring of 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, had a secret plan to install Ahmad Chalabi as a soft dictator of Iraq and to arrange some sort of phony elections that would make it look as though he had a mandate. Larry Diamond, in his book "Squandered Victory," writes that their plan was foiled by the State Department, which found out about it. The State Department convinced George W. Bush that it would be a disaster, and he agreed to send to Iraq a former State Department official, Paul "Jerry" Bremer to forestall such Pentagon flights of fancy.

By the spring of 2004, serious charges were launched against Chalabi, presumably at Bremer's behest. He was accused of passing top-secret information to the Iranian government: that the United States had broken Iranian encryption codes. That is, before Chalabi allegedly spilled the beans, U.S. intelligence had deep access to what Iranian government officials said among themselves. After the Chalabi incident, Iran became more opaque to the United States, which already struggled to find out about what was going on inside the country. Chalabi was also charged with having in his possession counterfeit bills.

He managed, however, to survive the indictment. Soon after his indictment the Americans "transferred sovereignty" to the appointed government of Iyad Allawi. Further prosecution of Chalabi would have undertaken by the new government, which apparently was not keen to follow up. It remains unclear how it transpired or who was behind it, but gradually the judge in the case was marginalized and reassigned.

By the fall of 2004, Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress had joined the major Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, and he gained the no. 10 spot on the party slate. The UIA, which was endorsed by the spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, won 51 percent of the 275 seats in the Iraqi Parliament and was able to form a government in coalition with the Kurdistan Alliance. Chalabi managed to get himself installed as a deputy prime minister. He then parlayed that position into oversight of foreign contracts proposed for Iraq.

[snip]

That Chalabi, a wily schemer and convicted crook, should continue his sleazy attempts to get control of Iraq's billions in petroleum revenues is completely unsurprising. That a scandal-ridden Bush administration should warmly welcome the fraudster to Washington yet again and have him hobnob with top officials shows profound disrespect for U.S. troops risking their lives in Iraq. Chalabi lied to and manipulated the American public, reportedly passed top-secret information to Iran, and for a while allied with Muqtada al-Sadr. Officials in the administration are apparently hoping that the American public won't notice that they are playing the same old games, with U.S. foreign policy and with Iraq. As we know all too well by now, they are disastrous games.

Congress is moving to curb some of the police powers it gave the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including imposing new restrictions on the FBI's access to private phone and financial records.

A budding House-Senate deal on the expiring USA Patriot Act includes new limits on federal law enforcement powers and rejects the Bush administration's request to grant the FBI authority to get administrative subpoenas for wiretaps and other covert devices without a judge's approval.

Even with the changes, however, every part of the law set to expire Dec. 31 would be reauthorized and most of those provisions would become permanent.

Under the agreement, for the first time since the act became law, judges would get the authority to reject national security letters giving the government secret access to people's phone and e-mail records, financial data and favorite Internet sites.

Holders of such information — such as banks and Internet providers — could challenge the letters in court for the first time, said congressional aides involved in merging separate, earlier-passed House and Senate bills reauthorizing the expiring Patriot Act.

The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because the panel has not begun deliberations.

Under the 2001 law, the FBI reportedly has been issuing about 30,000 national security letters annually, a hundred-fold increase since the 1970s, when they first came into existence under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Last year, a federal judge in New York struck down the national security letter statute as unconstitutional because he said the law did not permit legal challenges to the letters or a gag rule on recipients of the letters. The administration has appealed.

Civil libertarians lauded the deal's preliminary terms, saying recent accounts of the FBI's aggressive use of national security letters have lent credibility to their call for caution.

"Without those checks and balances, there will be abuses," said former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., of Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances.

The Bush administration contends there have been no abuses.

"In the four years since the passage of the USA Patriot Act there has not been a single verified abuse of the act's provisions, including in the department's own inspector general's report to Congress," said Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse.

According to a printout from a computer controlled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice, I am an enemy of the state.

The printout, shown to me recently by a friend who works for Justice, identifies me by a long, multi-digit number, lists my date of birth, place of birth, social security number and contains more than 100 pages documenting what the Bureau and the Bush Administration consider to be my threats to the security of the United States of America.

It lists where I sent to school, the name and address of the first wife that I had been told was dead but who is alive and well and living in Montana, background information on my current wife and details on my service to my country that I haven’t even revealed to my wife or my family.

Although the file finds no criminal activity by me or members of my immediate family, it remains open because I am a “person of interest” who has “written and promoted opinions that are contrary to the government of the United States of America.”

And it will remain active because the government of the United States, under the far-reaching provisions of the USA Patriot Act, can compile and retain such information on any American citizen. That act gives the FBI the authority to collect intimate details about anyone, even those not suspected of any wrongdoing.

My file begins on September 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. A Marine guard standing post at the Navy Yard in Washington jotted down the license number of my Jeep Wrangler after I was spotted taking pictures of armed guards at the locked-down military facility.

That night, I found a card stuffed under my door from Agent John Ryan of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. I chuckled at the time because the lead character in Tom Clancy’s novels is named John P. Ryan.

I called Agent Ryan the next day. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing taking photos of a military facility. I explained that I was a journalist and taking pictures was what I did for a living. I directed him to a web site where he could find some of the photos I shot of the Navy Yard’s side gate on that day. He asked for additional information, including date of birth and social security number, which I provided, and then hung up.

I thought the matter was dead until a few weeks ago when an old friend from Washington called, said he was in the area, and suggested lunch. At lunch, he showed me the 100-plus pages of the file on me that grew out of that first encounter with Agent Ryan of NCIS.

“Much of this information was gathered through what we call ‘national security letters,’” he said. “It allows us to gather information from a variety of sources.”

[snip]

According to my file, the banks where I have both business and checking accounts have been forced to turn over all records of my transactions, as have every company where I have a charge account or credit card. They’ve perused my book borrowing habits from libraries in Arlington and Floyd Counties as well as studied what television shows I watch on the Tivos in my house. They know I belong to the National Rifle Association, the National Press Photographers Association and other professional groups. They know I attend meetings of Alcoholic Anonymous on a regular basis and the file notes that my “pattern of spending” shows no purchase of “alcohol-related products” since the file was opened in 2001.

In the past, when information collected on an American citizen failed to turn up any criminal activity, FBI policy called for such information to be destroyed.

But President George W. Bush in 2003 reversed that long-standing policy and ordered the bureau and other federal agencies to not only keep that information but place it in government databases that can be accessed by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.

In October, Bush also signed Executive Order 13388 which expands access to those databases to “appropriate private sector entities” although the order does not explain what those entities might be. In addition, the Bush Administration has successfully blocked legislation and legal actions that have tried to stop the expansion of spying and gathering of information on Americans.

Election day voting is going on across the Old Dominion, but everything has not gone smoothly in Roanoke County.

News 7 has received calls from several voters in at least four different precincts who say their votes for Tim Kaine were not recorded or took several attempts to go through.

They contend the electronic touch screens repeatedly indicated they were voting for Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore instead of registering their intended vote for his Democratic opponent Tim Kaine.

Roanoke Co. Registrar Judy Stokes says she doesn't want to say the problem is operator error on the part of the voters, but she points out the touch screens are sensitive. She says anyone who is having difficulty voting should ask one of the poll workers for assistance.

State election officials have been told of the problem. They believe if there is a problem, it could have been caused by the way the machines were stored.

The Kaine compaign is reportedly watching the situation in Roanoke County.

Voting so far on new touch-screen machines has not been quite as seamless as local board of elections officials had hoped.

Lucas County Board of Elections director Jill Kelly said some voters left the precincts this morning without voting because the machines were not up and running. She urged people who had problems to return and cast their ballots.

“The places where there were problems have been resolved,” she said. “It really wasn’t a technology problem, it was a people problem.”

Ms. Kelly said that several of the county’s 2,000 trained poll workers had to be talked through some problems during the morning.

Poll workers at the Sylvania Senior Center could not find the machine’s memory cards and at the Toledo Board of Education building the voting machines could not be found. Those issues were resolved, Ms. Kelly said. And those coming to vote where machines were not yet up and running were given provisional ballots.

She denied reports that voters in some precincts were given the wrong ballot issues to consider. She added that as of about 9 a.m., the calls from the 495 precincts died down significantly.

Wood County residents in some precincts arrived at 6:30 a.m. only to find that the machines were not yet up and running, said elections director Terry Burton. But all precincts had at least one machine up by 6:40 a.m. and all machines in the majority of the county were available for voters by about 7:30 a.m., he said.

Mr. Burton said the problems were attributable to human error rather than to malfunctions in the machines.

“It was really a confidence issue,” he said of the poll workers. “After calming them down and walking them through the steps, we were able to get the machines up and working.”

Emilia DiSanto, chief investigator for committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), arrived at her suburban Virginia home after work Wednesday about 6:30 p.m. As she was unloading belongings from her car, a 6-foot-1-inch white man dressed in black struck her repeatedly with an unidentified object believed to be a baseball bat.

After she screamed to her family inside the house, the assailant fled. DiSanto was transported to Inova Fair Oaks Hospital, where she was treated for significant upper-body injuries. Nine staples were needed to close her head wound.

DiSanto, who declined to comment, has reported back to work.

The attack and the possibility that it was motivated by congressional business have made some people anxious on Capitol Hill.

“This is of obvious concern to anyone working here,” a Senate staffer said. “It’s very disconcerting when you worry about someone resorting to violence. This could be intimidation, and you wonder whether it’s safe to do your job.”

The attack on DiSanto came two days before a bomb threat caused alarm at an Iowa veterans home where Grassley was scheduled to appear.

[snip]

No evidence has surfaced that definitively points to DiSanto’s work on the Finance Committee as the trigger for the attack, but sources say there are a number of clues that suggest it could be.

The assailant was trying to hide his identity, wearing a hood and black gloves. He also did not make any demands before attacking the 49-year-old staffer. A working assumption among investigators is that he was waiting for her to arrive home.

Sources say acts of violence in DiSanto’s neighborhood are rare.

Grassley is known for his aggressive oversight of the public and private sector. Over the past year, he has scrutinized healthcare fraud, organ-donation procedures used by hospitals, drug-safety matters and the use of nonprofit groups related to former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In her line of work, DiSanto “doesn’t make a lot of friends,” an aide said.

Grassley spokeswoman Jill Kozeny said federal and local law-enforcement officials have not ruled out the possibility that the attack was work-related. She said Grassley and DiSanto have discussed the incident.

The only reason why the FBI is involved is because the assault may have been work-related.

THE Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally.

Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly.
His statement was a clear attack on creationist campaigners in the US, who see evolution and the Genesis account as mutually exclusive.

"The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a creator".

This idea was part of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science. Cardinal Poupard said that it was important for Catholic believers to know how science saw things so as to "understand things better".

His statements were interpreted in Italy as a rejection of the "intelligent design" view, which says the universe is so complex that some higher being must have designed every detail.

The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.

National security letters offer a case study of the impact of the Patriot Act outside the spotlight of political debate. Drafted in haste after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law's 132 pages wrought scores of changes in the landscape of intelligence and law enforcement. Many received far more attention than the amendments to a seemingly pedestrian power to review "transactional records." But few if any other provisions touch as many ordinary Americans without their knowledge.

Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect -- a single telephone call, for example -- may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.

Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city.

[snip]

In December the US government formally denied the reports, describing them as "widespread myths". "Some news accounts have claimed that US forces have used 'outlawed' phosphorus shells in Fallujah," the USinfo website said. "Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes.

"They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters."

But now new information has surfaced, including hideous photographs and videos and interviews with American soldiers who took part in the Fallujah attack, which provides graphic proof that phosphorus shells were widely deployed in the city as a weapon.

In a documentary to be broadcast by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, this morning, a former American soldier who fought at Fallujah says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete.

"Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."

Photographs on the website of RaiTG24, the broadcaster's 24-hours news channel, www.rainews24.it, show exactly what the former soldier means. Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.

A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: "A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact."

The documentary, entitled Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, also provides what it claims is clinching evidence that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a new, improved form of napalm, was used in the attack on Fallujah, in breach of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1980, which only allows its use against military targets.

Meanwhile, five US soldiers from the elite 75th Ranger Regiment have been charged with kicking and punching detainees in Iraq.

The news came as a suicide car bomber killed four American soldiers at a checkpoint south of Baghdad yesterday.

The Internal Revenue Service has warned one of Southern California's largest and most liberal churches that it is at risk of losing its tax-exempt status because of an antiwar sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election.

Rector J. Edwin Bacon of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena told many congregants during morning services Sunday that a guest sermon by the church's former rector, the Rev. George F. Regas, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted a letter from the IRS.

In his sermon, Regas, who from the pulpit opposed both the Vietnam War and 1991's Gulf War, imagined Jesus participating in a political debate with then-candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. Regas said that "good people of profound faith" could vote for either man, and did not tell parishioners whom to support.

But he criticized the war in Iraq, saying that Jesus would have told Bush, "Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster."

On June 9, the church received a letter from the IRS stating that "a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church … " The federal tax code prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns and elections.

THE INDICTMENT of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States. He began as a political scientist devoted to caring for the elbow of Donald Rumsfeld. As a congressman, Rumsfeld had reliably voted against programs to help the nation's poor, so (as I recalled in reading James Mann's ''Rise of the Vulcans") it was with more than usual cynicism that Richard Nixon appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the antipoverty agency. Rumsfeld named Cheney as his deputy, and the two set out to gut the program-- the beginning of the Republican rollback of the Great Society, what we saw in New Orleans this fall.

[snip]

Cheney so believed in Cold War bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to refreeze it. As George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was key to America's refusal to accommodate the hopeful new spirit of the age. Violence was in retreat, with peace breaking out across the globe, from the Philippines to South Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and Central America. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war against Panama.

[snip]

When the justification for the huge military machine over which Cheney presided disappeared, he leapt on the next casus belli -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Hussein, a former ally, was now Hitler.

[snip]

The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a ''specific threat" had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.

[snip]

At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to, and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side), Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running, he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney ignited Osama bin Laden's burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney fulfilled bin Laden's purpose by joining him in the war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.

1. Go into your archives.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Post the fifth sentence (or closest to it).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five other people to do the same thing.

...there is an irreducible minimum number of Americans who are so hopelessly, mentally and morally decomposed that it literally does not matter what Dubya does, they will always side with him in the end.

Strafe a pack of snuggly puppies while singing “Wake Up, Little Susie”? Throw burning kittens at homeless children? Beat pregnant women with prosthetic limbs pilfered from wounded veterans? About 1/3 of this country would find a way to call such things “Strong Leadership in Troubled Times.”

Ziad Cattan was a Polish Iraqi used-car dealer with no weapons-dealing experience until U.S. authorities turned him into one of the most powerful men in Iraq last year — the chief of procurement for the Defense Ministry, responsible for equipping the fledgling Iraqi army.

As U.S. advisors looked on, Cattan embarked on a massive spending spree, paying hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi funds for secret, no-bid contracts, according to interviews with more than a dozen senior American, coalition and Iraqi officials, and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The money flowed, often in bricks of cash, through the hands of middlemen who were friends of Cattan and took a percentage of the proceeds.

Although much of the material purchased has proved useful, U.S. advisors said, the contracts also paid for equipment that was shoddy, overpriced or never delivered. The questionable purchases — including aging Russian helicopters and underpowered Polish transport vehicles — have slowed the development of the Iraqi army and hindered its ability to replace American troops, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

Cattan, now facing corruption charges leveled by the Iraqi Justice Ministry, insists that he is innocent of any wrongdoing and the victim of a smear campaign. In interviews in Poland, where he now lives, Cattan said he had worked under pressure from U.S. and Iraqi officials to arm the Iraqi forces as quickly as possible.

"Before, I sold water, flowers, shoes, cars — but not weapons," said Cattan, who signed most of the 89 military contracts worth nearly $1.3 billion to equip Iraqi security forces, according to the documents. "We didn't know anything about weapons."

Cattan's improbable rise and fall raises troubling questions about American oversight of the Iraqi army's development, considered the most important mission in reducing the number of U.S. troops in harm's way.

The portrait that emerges from interviews and documents is a Defense Ministry whose members were picked with the care of choosing a pickup basketball team. U.S.-appointed military advisors often selected inexperienced Iraqis and watched as they cut pell-mell weapons deals that eventually totaled one-third of the entire procurement budget.

"There's no question that Iraq was a threat to the people of the United States."
• White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, 8/26/03

"We ended the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."
• President Bush, 7/17/03

Iraq was "the most dangerous threat of our time."
• White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 7/17/03

"Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States because we removed him, but he was a threat...He was a threat. He's not a threat now."
• President Bush, 7/2/03

"Absolutely."
• White House spokesman Ari Fleischer answering whether Iraq was an "imminent threat," 5/7/03

"We gave our word that the threat from Iraq would be ended."
• President Bush 4/24/03

"The threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction will be removed."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 3/25/03

"It is only a matter of time before the Iraqi regime is destroyed and its threat to the region and the world is ended."
• Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, 3/22/03

"The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."
• President Bush, 3/19/03

"The dictator of Iraq and his weapons of mass destruction are a threat to the security of free nations."
• President Bush, 3/16/03

"This is about imminent threat."
• White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 2/10/03

Iraq is "a serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies."
• Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/31/03

Iraq poses "terrible threats to the civilized world."
• Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/30/03

Iraq "threatens the United States of America."
• Vice President Cheney, 1/30/03

"Iraq poses a serious and mounting threat to our country. His regime has the design for a nuclear weapon, was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/29/03

"Well, of course he is.”
• White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett responding to the question “is Saddam an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?”, 1/26/03

"Saddam Hussein possesses chemical and biological weapons. Iraq poses a threat to the security of our people and to the stability of the world that is distinct from any other. It's a danger to its neighbors, to the United States, to the Middle East and to the international peace and stability. It's a danger we cannot ignore. Iraq and North Korea are both repressive dictatorships to be sure and both pose threats. But Iraq is unique. In both word and deed, Iraq has demonstrated that it is seeking the means to strike the United States and our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 1/20/03

"The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American. ... Iraq is a threat, a real threat."
• President Bush, 1/3/03

"The world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq whose dictator has already used weapons of mass destruction to kill thousands."
• President Bush, 11/23/02

"I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before? When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month...So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?"
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 11/14/02

"Saddam Hussein is a threat to America."
• President Bush, 11/3/02

"I see a significant threat to the security of the United States in Iraq."
• President Bush, 11/1/02

"There is real threat, in my judgment, a real and dangerous threat to American in Iraq in the form of Saddam Hussein."
• President Bush, 10/28/02

"The Iraqi regime is a serious and growing threat to peace."
• President Bush, 10/16/02

"There are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists."
• President Bush, 10/7/02

"The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency."
• President Bush, 10/2/02

"There's a grave threat in Iraq. There just is."
• President Bush, 10/2/02

"This man poses a much graver threat than anybody could have possibly imagined."
• President Bush, 9/26/02

"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02

"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain. And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/18/02

"Iraq is busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue an aggressive nuclear weapons program. These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam Hussein can hold the threat over the head of any one he chooses. What we must not do in the face of this mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or to willful blindness."
• Vice President Dick Cheney, 8/29/02

MR. RUSSERT: But voicing his opinion, as he did there on gay rights, you recall in the campaign back in Rogers County, when you made comments like this, telling a group of local Republicans that-- "[Coburn] told a meeting of local Republicans that `the gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power. They are the greatest threat, that agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom we face today.'"

SEN. COBURN: It's a threat to undermine the family. It does undermine the family. And if you look at the structural problems with our country today, what is happening to us at every level as a nation and in our culture? Our families are falling apart. If you look at how we spend money in the federal government, the increasing amounts that we're spending are to attack--attack--the very problems where the family is falling apart.

Somewhere in a corporate office at Health Net Inc. is someone who needs to meet Jack Zembsch. Jack is 4, he loves SpongeBob SquarePants, and he is going to die.

One doctor in the country just might be able to save Jack, but the nation's largest HMO won't let Jack see him because the doctor is not within its network.

Jack, who lives in Moraga with his parents, Mark and Kim Zembsch, has an extremely rare form of dwarfism called metatropic dysplasia, or MD. It leaves his bones extremely soft, and before long, they'll simply stop growing even as his body continues to get bigger. Eventually, his lungs will be so constricted by his ribs that breathing will become a chore, and an infection could kill him.

That is, if his spine doesn't simply snap from something as simple as a fall.

"There is literally only one metatropic kid born in this country each year," Mark Zembsch says. "Jack fits into the category of you-can't-believe-it rare.''

HMOs never want to hear about rare diseases. And the news that only Dr. William Mackenzie, the nation's acknowledged expert in MD, who works at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware, has any chance of saving Jack is unlikely to make them any happier.

"When you have to fly a patient out to the East Coast, it is the fundamental HMO no-no,'' says Jamie Court, a Santa Monica-based health care advocate and co-author of "Making a Killing,'' a book on the health care system. "It is the M.O. of health care providers to deny access to expensive treatments. They give you the runaround and hope you go away.''

We all know about that. If we haven't been through it, we know someone who has -- the automated telephone merry-go-round, the paperwork snowstorm, the mind-boggling protocols that must be followed to the letter. With weary resignation, we fight and complain and yell until -- grudgingly -- the insurance company pays up.

But, see, this is different. This is a 4-year-old boy. And if he can't have a series of difficult and touchy operations -- by the only doctor in the entire country with the expertise to perform them -- his spine will bend his body until it either crushes his lungs or snaps.

A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al 8Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’

The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

[snip]

Mr. Libi was not alone among intelligence sources later determined to have been fabricating accounts. Among others, an Iraqi exile whose code name was Curveball was the primary source for what proved to be false information about Iraq and mobile biological weapons labs. And American military officials cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group, who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon misleading information in urging war.

The report issued by the Senate intelligence committee in July 2004 questioned whether some versions of intelligence report prepared by the C.I.A. in late 2002 and early 2003 raised sufficient questions about the reliability of Mr. Libi’s claims.

But neither that report nor another issued by the Sept. 11 commission made any reference to the existence of the earlier and more skeptical 2002 report by the D.I.A., which supplies intelligence to military commanders and national security policy makers. As an official intelligence report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, the document would have circulated widely within the government, and it would have been available to the C.I.A., the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies. It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel.