The Republican Party's big spenders were rewarded with a barbecue lunch with President Bush on Friday at a $750,000 fundraiser at a ranch neighboring the president's Texas home.

The fundraiser was closed to the public and the press, but the Republican National Committee reported that the attendees included 350 people who have each raised at least $15,000 for the party this cycle.

While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology.

Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of steps by the Homeland Security Department that has left lawmakers and some of the department's own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terror technologies.

[snip]
Lawmakers and recently retired Homeland Security officials say they are concerned the department's research and development effort is bogged down by bureaucracy, lack of strategic planning and failure to use money wisely.

The department failed to spend $200 million in research and development money from past years, forcing lawmakers to rescind the money this summer.

The administration also was slow to start testing a new liquid explosives detector that the Japanese government provided to the United States earlier this year.

The British plot to blow up as many as 10 American airlines on trans-Atlantic flights was to involve liquid explosives.

[snip]

The administration's most recent budget request also mystified lawmakers. It asked to take $6 million from Homeland S&T's 2006 budget that was supposed to be used to develop explosives detection technology and instead divert it to cover a budget shortfall in the Federal Protective Service, which provides security around government buildings.

This is the deranged shit Lieberman said today

"I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War," Mr. Lieberman said.

It's unhinged shit like this which cost you your job, Joe. Al Qaeda is some motherfuckers in a cave and halfwit wannabe James Bonds. It is not Grossdeutschland crossing the Dniper and blowing away T-34's and it's not the Group of Soviet Forces Germany.

To compare them to massive industrial societies with the power to conquer a continent is desperately sad.

If the enemy is so evil, where is the draft, where is the tax hikes to fight this war?

Because he's full of shit and so are the GOP. There arent three DD-214's between Bush and his advisors. They know about the Army from war movies and games, and asskissing staff officers. Not one has been hit with a pugil stick or hiked through the mud. But they know more than the generals. Dick Cheney thinks he's a tough man because he comes up with hairbrained plans like dropping the 82nd ABN on Baghdad Aiport as if Arnhem never happened.

The pundits and the Bushies are cowards bathed in the blood of soldiers and the innocent. And they think the sacrifice of others redeems them. Joe Lieberman sounds insanely desperate when talking about his war. He wouldn't fight in Vietnam, even opposed it. I wonder if he's been to the funerals of any Iraq War dead, visited any VA hospitals

Operation Yellow Elephant revealed the future of the GOP to be soulless fucking cowards, one and all. Ask them to enlist, they would rather suck dicks in San Quentin first. They want no part of the war they cheer on. They think they're tough men by kicking a woman when she's down or punching Joan Jett. They want no part of brain surgery, missing limbs and PTSD. But on they cheer.

The Democrats need to cut this bullshit and say the obvious, Bush and his war are a failure and as long as they are running it, we will continue to fail. The War on Terror is a war of failure, where we squander precious lives in Iraq to prove George Bush was a better man than his daddy.

Cut and run? Shit, the people bitching about this have no stake in either. It's not their kids flying into Dover seven days a week and making the ride to Walter Reed. We need to get out of Iraq, yesterday. The Iraqis can choose to kill each other or not, but it is their choice, not ours. Pretending otherwise gets more people killed.

Have you spoken with any of your sources in government, or now out of government, and if so, what are they saying?

Well, they're saying a variety of things. They're saying this sort of event would actually fit with the general thinking as to what al-Qaida has planned for a so-called second wave to 9/11: numerous airplanes blowing up over the airspace of the United States would, in the mind of the terrorism experts I'm talking to, comport with our view as to al-Qaida's playbook in terms of a second-wave attack to follow 9/11. It would be very visible, there would be lots of casualties, and planes blowing up over large urban areas would of course create havoc.

I thought one of the really fascinating points in your book was that al-Qaida may not have been thwarted from attacking us after 9/11, but they may have made a strategic decision to focus their efforts elsewhere. Are you hearing, or do you think, that this is a strategic shift back to the American mainland?

Well, the thinking is that al-Qaida has the ability to attack us at any time or place of their choosing, that we should not view the passage of time as a kind of proxy for victory and view it in any kind of self-satisfied way, that we're doing something that's stopping them from this next destructive moment. What we know about al-Qaida is that they think very long-term. We think in news cycles; they think in decades.

They have spent a good deal of energy thinking about what is appropriate to follow 9/11. It could take years for them to come up with something that is a sufficiently destructive next act in this drama that they are driving. If the next attack is bigger than 9/11, what it does is create an upward arc of terror and anticipation between that second act and whatever follows, however many years later. I think the other thing that's important here, that the book shows, is really, more than anything else, discretion. They're making decisions. They may not have actually been trying to attack the United States in these ensuing years. Even though folks in government have sort of been taking some credit for the fact that there hasn't been an attack, I think they know better.

The president, in his remarks today, said that the country is safer than it was prior to 9/11. Do you think that's true?

I am not ready to make that claim. And I think the president probably knows that he shouldn't make that claim with any real enthusiasm.

Why is that?

The disclosures in the book, after years of research, and the understanding that is shared by most of the folks right at the very cutting edge of the counterterrorism community, is that the United States mainland is in significant measure indefensible. Al-Qaida will attack at a time and a place of its choosing. They retain capability, they have spores and wannabes and imitators that are very hard to detect because they don't have to be hooked in to any kind of structure or hierarchy, and there is a wide array of people abroad, and I think probably frankly here in the United States, who are auditioning for eternity in the jihadist community.

Is there any danger to that line of thinking, to thinking we've become safer?

To feel safer, to say we are safer than we were -- though it may be politically advantageous -- nudges people, I think, to a kind of complacency, a kind of self-satisfied surety, a feeling that they haven't attacked us in the five years since 9/11 so something must be working. The fact of the matter is, it may mean absolutely nothing that they haven't attacked us in the past five years. As I point out in the book, they may not have been trying to attack us. They are probably waiting for a time and place significant and dramatic beyond 9/11. If we start feeling this sort of self-aggrandizing regard for our abilities and capabilities, we will fall prey to exactly what they are hoping we will: We will be less rigorous.

One of the things that I think is clear about the moment we're in now is that in a way this is a new kind of war, a new kind of conflict we're fighting now, with a kind of global insurgency. We know insurgencies, we've seen many of them through history, and very often it's the case where gleaming armies come down from on high with banners waving and march in to some homeland or other to fight insurgents. It almost never works. Whatever moral claim that the army has made as the trumpets blare soon sinks into the ugliness of destruction, especially amongst civilian populations. In Iraq, in the Israel-Lebanon situation, and in other parts of the globe -- in Afghanistan, to a certain degree -- we are seeing precisely this model. If in not thinking with, let's just say, next-era clarity about the nature of these enemies and what best to do about them -- where we are not involved solely in tactics, which is mostly what has been driving us, tactics where we're often running around like a chicken with no head, and instead thinking about strategy, where actions fall into a larger good, a larger model that essentially bespeaks progress -- we are going to create more and more people around the world who are angry at the United States. The fact is, by virtue of our power, our authority, that's always going to be the case. But if that group, that angry mass of people, grows and grows, and some percentage of them, in this era, are apt to turn to violence, we could be facing a very difficult situation.

[snip]

If our tactics are creating a metastasizing, a growth of that number, then our tactics are not working, plain and simple.

You say in your book that to understand the actions of the U.S. government after 9/11, "it is important to understand ... how desperate they were ... [they] were essentially blind and waiting, with dread, for a 'second wave.'" What we're hearing today is that in the wake of this plot, British Home Secretary John Reid is saying that "we may have to modify some of our freedoms in the short term." Do you see parallels there?

I've said many times, and I say in the book, that the central challenge of this war on terror is to win it with both tactics and some coherent strategy while not compromising those things that make us distinctive as a democracy and distinctive in terms of the long human pageant.

[snip]

Whichever party's in power, whoever's in the White House, power has a way of aggregating itself, and that's why we need checks here that are agreed-upon, that occur during the intervening period between attacks. After the next attack -- and I think it's a matter of when, rather than if -- then the conversation again becomes one dominated by fear. Conversations dominated by fear almost always have outcomes that we later regret.

Wednesday: Days after the White House learns that the London terror plot will be uncovered, Cheney says Lamont victory will encourage "al Qaeda types."

7:42 a.m., Today: The White House announces that the threat level has been raised to ‘Red.’

10:54 a.m. (CDT): The President announces, on his way to a Wisconsin fundraiser for congressional candidate John Gard, that the arrests in London are “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”

12:26 p.m.: The RNC sends out a fundraising email penned by Rudy Giuliani saying “In the middle of a war on terror, we need to remain focused on furthering Republican ideas more than ever before… Please make your commitment felt with a financial contribution for $500, $250, $100, $50, $35 or $25 to the Republican National Committee today.”

2:53 p.m.: Bush official celebrates the terror plot. The AFP reports, "‘Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big,’ said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't ‘look as appealing’ under the circumstances.”

4:22 p.m.: The RNC follows with a statement attempting to elevate the war on terror above those who would crassly use it for politics sake: "On a day when American authorities are working with our allies to stop a global terror plot, instead of focusing on political attacks, we should focus on the fact that we are at war and need every tool to win the War on Terror.”

It comes like a punch to the gut, at times like these, when our leaders blatantly use the nation’s trauma for political gain. We never get used to this. It never feels like business as usual.

On Wednesday, when the administration already knew that British agents were rounding up suspects in what they believed was a plot to blow up planes en route to the United States, Vice President Dick Cheney had a telephone interview with reporters to discuss the defeat of Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut in a Democratic primary. Mr. Cheney went off on a rather rambling disquisition, but its main point was clear: In rejecting Mr. Lieberman, who supported the war in Iraq, the Democrats were encouraging “the Al Qaeda types.” Within the Democratic ranks, the vice president added, “there’s a significant body of opinion that wants to go back — I guess the way I would describe it is sort of the pre-9/11 mind-set, in terms of how we deal with the world we live in.”
[snip]

Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain. We want to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning. To talk about airport security and how to make it better. To celebrate what worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts farther. It would be a blessed moment in modern American history if we could do that without turning this into a political game plan.

SOME 30 per cent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York's World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published today in the Washington Post newspaper.

While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3000 lives and shocked the world, 95 per cent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks.

But when asked what year, 30 per cent could not give a correct answer.

Of that group, six per cent gave an earlier year, eight per cent gave a later year, and 16 per cent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.

This memory black hole is essentially the problem of the older crowd - 48 per cent of those who did not know were between the ages of 55 and 64, and 47 per cent were older than 65, the poll shows.

The Post telephone survey was carried out July 21-24 among 1002 randomly selected adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

US President George W. Bush seized on a foiled London airline bomb plot to hammer unnamed critics he accused of having all but forgotten the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks

"It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America," he said. "We've taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously we still aren't completely safe."

His remarks came a day after the White House orchestrated an exceptionally aggressive campaign to tar opposition Democrats as weak on terrorism, knowing what Democrats didn't: News of the plot could soon break.

Vice President Dick Cheney and White House spokesman Tony Snow had argued that Democrats wanted to raise what Snow called "a white flag in the war on terror," citing as evidence the defeat of a three-term Democratic senator who backed the Iraq war in his effort to win renomination.

But Bush aides on Thursday fought the notion that they had exploited their knowledge of the coming British raid to hit Democrats, saying the trigger had been the defeat of Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut by an anti-war political novice.

"The comments were purely and simply a reaction" to Democratic voters who "removed a pro-defense Senator and sent the message that the party would not tolerate candidates with such views," said Snow.

The public relations offensive "was not done in anticipation. It was not said with the knowledge that this was coming," the spokesman said.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.

Missouri is the latest front in the Republican Party’s campaign to use photo ID requirements to suppress voting. The Republican legislators who pushed through Missouri’s ID law earlier this year said they wanted to deter fraud, but that claim falls apart on close inspection. Missouri’s new ID rules — and similar ones adopted last year in Indiana and Georgia — are intended to deter voting by blacks, poor people and other groups that are less likely to have driver’s licenses. Georgia’s law has been blocked by the courts, and the others should be too.

Even before Missouri passed its new law, it had tougher ID requirements than many states. Voters were required, with limited exceptions, to bring ID with them to the polls, but university ID cards, bank statements mailed to a voter’s address, and similar documents were acceptable. The new law requires a government-issued photo ID, which as many as 200,000 Missourians do not have.

Missourians who have driver’s licenses will have little trouble voting, but many who do not will have to go to considerable trouble to get special ID’s. The supporting documents needed to get these, like birth certificates, often have fees attached, so some Missourians will have to pay to keep voting. It is likely that many people will not jump all of the bureaucratic hurdles to get the special ID, and will become ineligible to vote.

Not coincidentally, groups that are more likely to vote against the Republicans who passed the ID law will be most disadvantaged. Advocates for blacks, the elderly and the disabled say that those groups are less likely than the average Missourian to have driver’s licenses, and most likely to lose their right to vote. In close elections, like the bitterly contested U.S. Senate race now under way in the state, this disenfranchisement could easily make the difference in who wins.

The new law’s supporters say its purpose is to deter fraud. But there is little evidence of “imposter voting,” the sort of fraud that ID laws are aimed at, in Missouri or anywhere else. Groups in Missouri that want to suppress voting have a long history of crying fraud, but investigations by the Justice Department and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among others, have refuted such claims in the past. If the Legislature really wanted to deter fraud, it would have focused its efforts on absentee ballots, which are a notorious source of election fraud — and are not covered by Missouri’s new ID requirements.

British authorities said Thursday that they had thwarted a terrorist plot to blow up multiple airliners traveling between Britain and the United States, creating "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."

The police said they had arrested 21 people in connection with the plot, which apparently involved plans to smuggle explosives onto aircraft in hand luggage. In response, flights into London Heathrow Airport were canceled and airlines banned hand luggage on departing planes, causing chaos and long delays.

The police did not identify the suspects or their origin, though Paul Stephenson, the deputy metropolitan police commissioner for London, said "community leaders" had been alerted about the police action, using a code word for the British Muslim community.

The authorities did not say how many aircraft had been identified for attack. Sky News put the number at six, while other reports said between three and 10.

"We think this was an extraordinarily serious plot and we are confident that we have stopped an attempt to create mass murder on an unimaginable scale," Stephenson told reporters at Scotland Yard.

He said the people had been arrested in and near London and Birmingham, and added that the searches would continue.

"We believe that these arrests have significantly disrupted the threat, but we cannot be sure that the threat has been entirely eliminated or the plot completely thwarted," Michael Chertoff, the U.S. homeland security secretary, told reporters.

Sixty percent of Americans oppose the U.S. war in Iraq, the highest number since polling on the subject began with the commencement of the war in March 2003, according to poll results and trends released Wednesday.

And a majority of poll respondents said they would support the withdrawal of at least some U.S. troops by the end of the year, according to results from the Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted last week on behalf of CNN. The corporation polled 1,047 adult Americans by telephone.

[snip]

According to trends, the number of poll respondents who said they did not support the Iraq war has steadily risen as the war stretched into a second and then a third year. In the most recent poll, 36 percent said they were in favor of the war -- half of the peak of 72 percent who said they were in favor of the war as it began.

Sixty-one percent, however, said they believed at least some U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of the year. Of those, 26 percent said they would favor the withdrawal of all troops, while 35 percent said not all troops should be withdrawn. Another 34 percent said they believed the current level of troops in Iraq should be maintained.

Asked about a timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq, 57 percent of poll respondents said they supported the setting of such a timetable, while 40 percent did not and 4 percent had no opinion. Only half the sample, or about 524 people, was asked the timetable question.

Looking forward, I salute the patriotism and wisdom of Congressman Murtha and others who emphasize that “stay the course” is not a winning strategy for Iraq or America. Our best chance of success requires that the Iraqis take control of their own destiny. America should make clear that we have no designs upon their oil and no plans for permanent bases. While we will continue to provide logistical and training support as long as we are asked, our frontline military troops should begin to be redeployed and our troops should start heading home.

I am committed to this campaign, to a different kind of politics, to bringing the Democratic Party back from Ned Lamont, Maxine Waters to the mainstream, and for doing something for the people of Connecticut.

Lieberman's statements from the beginning have made it clear that, in his mind, any dissent from Bush's war policy constitutes a) "weakness on national defense," b) is a clear sign that Democrats "lack national security" credibility, and c) means that Dems "have yielded to the extremists" (despite the fact that new polls reveal those "extremists" agree with 60% of all Americans about the war).

Democrats are "extremist "and "weak on national security?" That's straight out of the Rove playbook.

Now the Republicans and their media associates are having a field day with Joe's loss, at the expense of the Democrats. Why would a Democrat - any Democrat - be willing to cause such harm to his own party? Unless he were being guided by a Republican ...

Lieberman immediately went savagely negative, and attacked Lamont for his own greatest weakness - a classic Rove strategy.

Joe came out swinging - below the belt. That's Rove's style all the way.

Lieberman's first campaign move was to launch the infamous (and stunningly inept) "bear ad," which - astonishingly - accused Lamont of being a Republican's tool! (In this case, former Sen. Lowell Weicker was the "big bear" to Lamont's "cub.")

Then, Lieberman and his supporters accused Lamont and his backers of running a "hate" campaign - while simultaneously spewing the most vitriolic campaign rhetoric in recent memory. (Lamont supporters were described as "Stalinist," "haters," "purgers," "fascists," and - if they were Jewish - as "bad Jews.")

Take you greatest weakness and label your opponent with it. Classic Rove.

It appears as though joe2006.com was DoS’d this morning, hit with a huge influx of traffic, or both. All 74 websites (reg. wall) on the joe2006.com server were unreachable, including the company joe2006.com appears to be hosted with: myhostcamp.com. Myhostcamp.com rents one server from The Planet. I contacted The Planet this morning and they wouldn’t disclose any more information.

The joe2006.com server is running cPanel 10, which explains why Rob of DailyKos found a lot of open ports. The “Suspended Account” page that many saw could have been triggered not only by a delinquent bill: over-usage of bandwidth and over-usage of storage are other possibilities. To my knowledge, cPanel displays the same page by default, no matter the cause.

Joe2006.com was setup by Dan Geary who has an e-mail address at Hotmail and no discernable website. Likely, someone in the Lieberman camp knew Geary to be “technical” and someone who could help out. I’ve never heard of myhostcamp and I’ve been working with websites and website providers a long time, making it possible that Geary personally knows, or is even involved with, the myhostcamp.com hosting company.

While it’s possible that someone actually hacked joe2006.com, from what I’ve seen, this seems to be the least likely option. More likely, this whole episode started last night with a simple over-usage of bandwidth. In the rush to get the server back up, a temporary site using minimal bandwidth was likely uploaded — “Vote for Who You Know, Vote Joe.” I looked at the source code on this particular page, and it didn’t appear to be coded by a hacker — the code was much too fancy. (Who ever heard of a W3C-compliant hacker?) Probably, the page was put together in DreamWeaver or FrontPage. My instinct tells me FrontPage since cPanel can be setup with FrontPage Extensions. (Nevermind that a hacker would be more likely to say something obnoxious about or denigrating of Lieberman.)

Because joe2006.com appeared to have been hacked (a sensible guess when the site went down on election eve), bandwidth problems were complicated by the ensuing deluge of hits, finally bringing down the entire server this morning. Drudge links and heavy traffic tend to do this when there isn't a backup plan in place. The site has been up and down ever since.

As for a staged operation, that seems unlikely given all of the above. This looks to be simply the work of an inexperienced technical consultant, but that’s just my guess.

Those who are most supportive of Lieberman and angry about the challenge he faces are people like David Frum and David Brooks. Why would hard-core Republican neoconservatives be so emotionally attached to defending Democrat Joe Lieberman? Why do pro-Bush, highly conservative Republicans such as blogger Mark Coffey proclaim themselves to be "huge fans" of Lieberman? Because far more than he is a Democrat or a "liberal," Joe Lieberman is a neoconservative and therefore -- on the issues that matter most -- is their ideological and political compatriot. In the 1990s, Joe Lieberman's positions on the dominant issues of the day may have rendered him "moderate to conservative," but on the issues that matter most now -- in light of the ideological realignment we have had in the wake of 9/11 -- he is nothing of the sort. He is a neoconservative, and therefore the political enemy of those who oppose that philosophy. Why would opponents of neoconservatism possibly support the re-election of a neconservative?

Much of the criticism directed at the challenge to Joe Lieberman is based on the premise that dissatisfaction with Lieberman is driven merely by one little issue - Iraq. But that argument is at once both factually false and absurd. Lieberman is supportive of the neonconservative agenda almost across the board. And this ideological conflict, far from being one little issue, is really the issue, and Joe Lieberman is on the other side, politically and ideologically, from those who are opposing his re-election. He has even adopted the neoconservative rhetoric of equating criticisms of George Bush with undermining American interests and national security. What could be more legitimate than urging the defeat of an elected official who has enthusiastically embraced and promoted a disastrous and destructive philosophical approach to the most significant foreign and domestic issues our country faces?

The nation's governors on Saturday launched a bipartisan drive to block a move to expand the president's authority to take over National Guard troops in case of natural disaster or homeland security threats.

At a closed-door luncheon on the opening day of the annual summer meeting of the National Governors Association, the chairman, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R), told colleagues that a provision in the House-passed defense authorization bill would end the historic link between the states and their Guard units.

[snip]

Huckabee told reporters that the move to shift control of the Guard to the president during national emergencies "violates 200 years of American history" and is symptomatic of a larger federal effort to make states no more than "satellites of the national government."

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, the senior Democrat, called the proposal "one step away from a complete takeover of the National Guard, the end of the Guard as a dual-function force that can respond to both state and national needs."

The provision was tucked into the House version of the defense bill without notice to the states, something Vilsack said he resents as much as the proposal itself.

Under the provision, the president would have authority to take control of the Guard in case of "a serious natural or manmade disaster, accident or catastrophe" in the United States.

"If Israel attacks Syria by any means, on the ground, in the air, our leadership ordered the armed forces to reply immediately"
Walid Muallem, Syrian foreign minister

SYRIA'S foreign minister yesterday offered to join militant group Hezbollah in its fight against Israel and said a regional war would be "most welcome" as more than 30 people in Israel and Lebanon were killed on one of the worst days since the conflict began.

Hezbollah launched a major barrage at northern Israel yesterday and a single missile killed 12 reservist soldiers in the kibbutz of Kfar Giladi in the Shiite militia's deadliest attack of the nearly one-month-old confrontation. Scores more were injured in numerous other attacks across northern Israel.

Meanwhile, Israeli air strikes killed 19 people in southern Lebanon, including six Lebanese soldiers, as fighting continued despite a US-French draft UN Security Council resolution to halt the hostilities.

Lebanon yesterday rejected the resolution and asked the UN Security Council to revise the draft to include a demand for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon.

But as the attempts at diplomacy continued, Syria's foreign minister, Walid Muallem, defiantly trumpeted his country's support for Hezbollah and warned that Syria was ready for "the possibility of a regional war if the Israeli aggression continues".

"If you wish, I'm ready to be a soldier at the disposal of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah [the Hezbollah leader]," he said.

He was speaking after crossing into neighbouring Lebanon in the first visit by a senior Syrian official since Damascus - under international and Lebanese pressure - ended a 29-year military presence there last year.

Asked if he feared the conflict in Lebanon could spill over into a regional war, Mr Muallem said: "Most welcome.

"If Israel attacks Syria by any means, on the ground, in the air, our leadership ordered the armed forces to reply immediately," he added.

Mr Muallem also lashed out at the draft UN resolution, describing it as a prescription "for the continuation of the war".

He said: "It's not fair for Lebanon, therefore it's a plan for the possibility of the eruption of civil war in Lebanon and nobody, nobody, nobody has anything to gain from that happening, except Israel."

Damascus has called up several reserve units in recent weeks and dispatched special forces and anti-aircraft units towards its border with Lebanon.

Syria has been jittery since Israeli jets buzzed Damascus early in the conflict and recently bombed Hezbollah positions and roads near the border.

Tensions soared on Friday, when 23 Syrian farm workers were killed by an Israeli air raid as they picked peaches in the village of Qaa in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa valley.

"This new massacre is a racist, fascist and terrorist act committed with American weapons," Syria's information minister, Mohsen Bilal, said.

Yesterday brought further death and destruction on both sides of the border, with Israel experiencing its worst day so far.

A Katyusha rocket fired by Hezbollah guerrillas hit a crowd of Israeli soldiers in Kfar Giladi, killing 12 of them and wounding ten others.

The attack was part of a barrage of 35 missiles in that area within half an hour that caused fires with huge plumes of smoke and damaged a synagogue.

An official from Kibbutz Kfar Giladi said he had warned the troops to take cover before the explosion, but that they had ignored him.

There were reports that a brigadier-general, Guy Zur, was among those wounded in the blast.

Eli Peretz, in charge of the local ambulance services, said: "An entire group was hit, some very severely.

Those lightly wounded fled in all directions. We evacuated the seriously wounded by helicopter. Since the beginning of this war, and in fact in all my years of service, I have never seen a worse incident."

The decades-long decline in the U.S. abortion rate slowed yet again in 2003, adding to mounting evidence that the nation is failing to help women prevent unintended pregnancies and reduce the need for abortion, according to a new analysis by the Guttmacher Institute. The Institute estimates that in 2003 there were 20.8 abortions for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. Between 2000 and 2003, the abortion rate declined by an average of only 0.8% per year; the 0.6% decline in 2002–2003 was the smallest in those three years. By comparison, the abortion rate declined by 3.4% per year in the early and mid-1990s.

“The new data confirm that the decline in the U.S. abortion rate has stopped almost completely,” says Dr. Sharon L. Camp, Guttmacher president and CEO. “This troubling development is no surprise, given that unintended pregnancy rates have come to a near-standstill as well, and have actually worsened dramatically for low-income women.”

Guttmacher Institute researchers reported in May that while the overall rate of unintended pregnancy in the U.S. remained unchanged between 1994 and 2001, rates increased by 29% among poor women, even as the rate declined by 20% for more affluent women.

“These trends are alarming, and should be a wake-up call to policymakers at the federal and state levels to do more to help women, especially those at greatest risk, avoid unwanted pregnancies,” argues Dr. Camp. “There is an urgent need to strengthen evidence-based policies that have been proven to reduce unintended pregnancy and the need for abortion. These include improving public funding for contraceptive services for poor women at the state and federal levels by expanding Medicaid eligibility and Title X funding, and ensuring that the Food and Drug Administration acts on its own experts’ advice to grant over-the-counter status for the emergency contraceptive Plan B without further delay.”

Of the 66.3 million U.S. women of reproductive age, 34.4 million were in need of contraceptive services and supplies in 2004, because they were sexually active and able to become pregnant, but did not wish to become pregnant. In turn, about half of these women–17.4 million–were in need of publicly funded contraceptive services and supplies, an increase of one million women since 2000, according to new Guttmacher Institute data analyzed with support from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Nationwide, the number of women in need of publicly funded contraceptive services–those who are in need of contraceptive services and supplies and either have incomes below 250% of the federal poverty level or are younger than 20–increased by 6%. Meanwhile, the number of women of reproductive age and the total number of women in need of contraceptive services each rose by only 1%, indicating that the broader economic trends of the period, rather than population growth, drove the change.

Poor and minority women were disproportionately affected by this change. Between 2000 and 2004, the number of poor adult women (with incomes under 100% of poverty) in need of contraceptive services increased by 15%. In contrast, the number who were low income (100–249% of poverty) increased by only 3%, and the number who were higher income (at or above 250% of poverty) declined by 3%. Similarly, the number of women in need who were Hispanic increased by 14%, while the number who were black increased by 4% and the number who were white declined by 2%.

The theocrats have also intimidated scientists, stalled over-the-counter sales of an emergency contraceptive called Plan B, and used their political connections to get federal funds for their so-called pregnancy resource centers, where they wrongly inform pregnant women that abortions are linked to breast cancer and infertility. Several family planning experts say that same group of rigid ultraconservatives is now working to limit access to contraceptives.

They "are increasingly trying to portray contraceptives as ineffective and trying to redefine some of the most popular and effective methods as abortion -- such as birth control pills and emergency contraception," said Cynthia Dailard, senior public policy analyst for the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which advocates family planning.

If these Christianists were genuinely interested in curbing abortions, they'd support the use of contraceptives. But their goal is to turn back the clock, to bring back the days when women had no control over reproduction. Like right-wing Muslims, they rage against modernity itself.

"Fostering the Culture of Life does not only mean respect for life from conception until natural death. It means also repudiation of contraception, the root cause of all other attacks on human life. Contraception, which shows a willingness to sacrifice life to lust, is a fuse that ignites a whole chain of evils destructive of a just society, from abortion to euthanasia.

"Worse than the ten plagues which devastated Egypt, the contraceptive mentality is a multi-pronged attack on society. It tends to permeate more and more social structures and even creates its own institutions.

"The contraceptive mentality diminishes the level of love in society and increases the level of selfishness and lust. In education, it promotes sex-education and the resultant corruption of the young. In hospital care, it leads to sterilization, abortion and euthanasia." -- Msgr. Vincent Foy

"We see contraception and abortion as part of a mind-set that's worrisome in terms of respecting life. If you're trying to build a culture of life, then you have to start from the very beginning of life, from conception, and you have to include how we think and act with regard to sexuality and contraception." -- Edward R. Martin, Jr., attorney for Americans United for Life

"The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.. . .A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies." -- R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

By beginning its public discourse with talk of invasion and regime change, the administration raised doubts about their bona fides on the most legitimate justification for war--that in the post-September 11 world the unrestrained threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein is unacceptable, and his refusal to allow U.N. inspectors to return was in blatant violation of the 1991 cease-fire agreement that left him in power. By casting about in an unfocused, undisciplined, overly public, internal debate for a rationale for war, the administration complicated their case, confused the American public, and compromised America's credibility in the eyes of the world community. By engaging in hasty war talk rather than focusing on the central issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the administration placed doubts in the minds of potential allies, particularly in the Middle East, where managing the Arab street is difficult at best.

Against this disarray, it is not surprising that tough questions began to be asked and critics began to emerge. Indeed over the course of the last 6 weeks some of the strongest and most thoughtful questioning of our Nation's Iraq policy has come from what some observers would say are unlikely sources: Senators like CHUCK HAGEL and DICK LUGAR, former Bush Administration national security experts including Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, and distinguished military voices including General Shalikashvili. They are asking the tough questions which must be answered before--and not after--you commit a nation to a course that may well lead to war. They know from their years of experience, whether on the battlefield as soldiers, in the Senate, or at the highest levels of public diplomacy, that you build the consent of the American people to sustain military confrontation by asking questions, not avoiding them. Criticism and questions do not reflect a lack of patriotism--they demonstrate the strength and core values of our American democracy.

It is love of country, and it is defined by defense of those policies that protect and defend our country. Writing in the New York Times in early September, I argued that the American people would never accept the legitimacy of this war or give their consent to it unless the administration first presented detailed evidence of the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and proved that it had exhausted all other options to protect our national security. I laid out a series of steps that the administration must take for the legitimacy of our cause and our ultimate success in Iraq--seek the advice and approval of Congress after laying out the evidence and making the case, and work with our allies to seek full enforcement of the existing cease-fire agreement while simultaneously offering Iraq a clear ultimatum: accept rigorous inspections without negotiation or compromise and without condition.

Those of us who have offered questions and criticisms--and there are many in this body and beyond--can take heart in the fact that those questions and those criticisms have had an impact on the debate. They have changed how we may or may not deal with Iraq. The Bush administration began talking about Iraq by suggesting that congressional consultation and authorization for the use of force were not needed. Now they are consulting with Congress and seeking our authorization. The administration began this process walking down a path of unilateralism. Today they acknowledge that while we reserve the right to act alone, it is better to act with allies. The administration which once seemed entirely disengaged from the United Nations ultimately went to the United Nations and began building international consensus to hold Saddam Hussein accountable. The administration began this process suggesting that the United States might well go to war over Saddam Hussein's failure to return Kuwaiti property. Last week the Secretary of State and on Monday night the President made clear we would go to war only to disarm Iraq.

The administration began discussion of Iraq by almost belittling the importance of arms inspections. Today the administration has refocused their aim and made clear we are not in an arbitrary conflict with one of the world's many dictators, but a conflict with a dictator whom the international community left in power only because he agreed not to pursue weapons of mass destruction. That is why arms inspections--and I believe ultimately Saddam's unwillingness to submit to fail-safe inspections--is absolutely critical in building international support for our case to the world. That is the way in which you make it clear to the world that we are contemplating war not for war's sake, and not to accomplish goals that don't meet international standards or muster with respect to national security, but because weapons inspections may be the ultimate enforcement mechanism, and that may be the way in which we ultimately protect ourselves.

This was a war that never should have happened. There was a legitimate war for the United States to fight in Afghanistan, but that was not enough for the administration. The Bush gang wanted a war with Iraq, and less-than-courageous politicians like Mrs. Clinton and many others lined up as enablers to help make that war happen.

Many of the Democrats in Congress supported the war only because they remembered the price paid by party members who stood against the first gulf war, a stand that became an embarrassment when the war was easily won and was therefore popular.

Despite the rationalizations now suddenly on the lips of so many, the problem with the current war in Iraq is not the way it was conducted, but the fact of the war itself. It was launched amid blinding, billowing clouds of deceit. There was never any legitimate reason for the war. Iraq had not attacked the U.S. and there was no imminent threat of attack.

The U.S. went in with guns blazing (“shock and awe”) like Matt Dillon shooting up the dusty streets of Dodge City. Only this was the real world, and the result has been unending tragedy.

The American occupation of Iraq was guaranteed, sooner or later, to provoke a sustained and bloody resistance, and it was inevitable that terror would be the resistance’s most effective tool. It was also certain that if the Shiites were empowered, there would be widespread retaliation for their many years of suffering under Saddam, and then the inevitable counterreaction of the suddenly disempowered Sunnis, and so on.

None of this was a secret. The warnings came from around the world before the first shot was ever fired.

Mrs. Clinton, other Democrats and whatever sensible Republicans may still be out there should be getting together to work out a plan for an orderly withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. This was not a war we were ever going to win. It’s time we brought our involvement to an end.

Americans no longer support this war, and there are few things more empty of meaning than dying in a war that one’s fellow citizens — safe at home — have already given up on.

We went into Iraq with bombs falling and guns blazing, insisting all the while that we were bringing the Iraqis the gifts of freedom and democracy. Instead, we gave them terror, chaos and civil war — in other words, a whole new generation of misery and mass death.

Shock and awe, indeed.

In the last year, 15 states have enacted laws that expand the right of self-defense, allowing crime victims to use deadly force in situations that might formerly have subjected them to prosecution for murder.

Supporters call them “stand your ground” laws. Opponents call them “shoot first” laws.

Thanks to this sort of law, a prostitute in Port Richey, Fla., who killed her 72-year-old client with his own gun rather than flee was not charged last month. Similarly, the police in Clearwater, Fla., did not arrest a man who shot a neighbor in early June after a shouting match over putting out garbage, though the authorities say they are still reviewing the evidence.

The first of the new laws took effect in Florida in October, and cases under it are now reaching prosecutors and juries there. The other laws, mostly in Southern and Midwestern states, were enacted this year, according to the National Rifle Association, which has enthusiastically promoted them.

Florida does not keep comprehensive records on the impact of its new law, but prosecutors and defense lawyers there agree that fewer people who claim self-defense are being charged or convicted.

The Florida law, which served as a model for the others, gives people the right to use deadly force against intruders entering their homes. They no longer need to prove that they feared for their safety, only that the person they killed had intruded unlawfully and forcefully. The law also extends this principle to vehicles.

In addition, the law does away with an earlier requirement that a person attacked in a public place must retreat if possible. Now, that same person, in the law’s words, “has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” The law also forbids the arrest, detention or prosecution of the people covered by the law, and it prohibits civil suits against them.

The central innovation in the Florida law, said Anthony J. Sebok, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, is not its elimination of the duty to retreat, which has been eroding nationally through judicial decisions, but in expanding the right to shoot intruders who pose no threat to the occupant’s safety.

“In effect,” Professor Sebok said, “the law allows citizens to kill other citizens in defense of property.”

Cory Maye shot and killed a police officer when that officer burst into his home on December 26, 2001. Cory lived in one side of a duplex. On the other side was a certain Mr. Jamie Smith. In a surprise midnight raid, the officers stormed Smith's side. A local police officer, Ron Jones, went around to break in the other side of the building, into the other unit of the duplex. And on that side lived Cory Jermaine Maye.

Maye was awakened from sleep by the commotion at the door, went into the bedroom and fired at an intruder. This was after the intruder had broken down the back door and entered the living room, and was coming toward the bedroom. The officer was hit by one .380 caliber bullet in the abdomen. He staggered back out of the apartment and died some hours later.

Search warrants had been procured by the police for the side containing Smith, naming him by name. For the side containing Maye the search warrant just said "unknown occupants". Police statements indicate that Maye and was not the target of the raid. Maye claimed he fired in self defense at intruders fearing for himself and his 18 month old daughter. The man he killed, Officer Ron Jones, was the son of the police chief of Prentiss, Mississippi.

Maye was convicted in 2004 by a jury comprised of ten whites and two blacks. He was sentenced to death by lethal injection.

They no longer need to prove that they feared for their safety, only that the person they killed had intruded unlawfully and forcefully

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

"This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence," Massing said.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record) and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record), released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

"I think the Harris Poll was measuring people's surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country," said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such "orphan" munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

"These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. "They weren't deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis."

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra's announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press "didn't give the story the play it deserved." But in some quarters it was headlined.

"Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today ..." was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. "Americans are waking up from a distorted reality," read one posting.

Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi general's book — at best uncorroborated hearsay — claimed "56 flights" by jetliners had borne such material to Syria.

But Kull, Massing and others see an influence on opinion that's more sustained than the odd headline.

"I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest 'factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument," said John Prados, author of the 2004 book "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War."

Administration statements still describe Saddam's Iraq as a threat. Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and "he chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.

The facts are that Iraq — after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections — acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.

As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, "When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity."

"Which isn't true," observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania. But "it doesn't surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies defensible." This president may even have convinced himself it's true, she said.

Americans have heard it. A poll by Kull's WorldPublicOpinion.org found that seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD "finds," and people "assume the issue is still in play," Kull said.

"For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan." The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.

Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD, the analysts say.

"As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to begin with," said the Harris Poll's David Krane.

Iraq is not on track to become another Iran despite the disconcerting images last week of Iraqis burning U.S. flags and chanting "Death to America," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.

"I have no doubt that this is an Iraqi government and an Iraq that is going to be a fierce fighter in the war against terrorism, because they themselves are experiencing the effects of terror on their population," Rice said. "I have no doubt that this is going to be a government that is on the right side in the war on terror."

Mehlman said that if the Democrats win control of Congress in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, party leaders will stop the National Security Agency from eavesdropping on foreign terrorists and will pursue impeachment of the president.

"America faces a critical question," Mehlman said. "Will we elect leaders who recognize we're at war and want to use every tool to win it, or politicians who would surrender important tools we need to win?"

He singled out House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.

"As foreign jihadists call into the United States, do we use [NSA] technology to stop sleeper cells before they hit us? Or do we surrender use of this technology, as Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean would have us do?"