USB - United States Of Bush

 Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden's terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.

The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington's risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.

But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense Department official said there was "mounting frustration" in the Pentagon at the continued delay.

The story of how al-Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for "the base", has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government's ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.

"This more or less legalizes the NSA program," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.

Previously, the government needed search warrants approved by a special intelligence court to eavesdrop on telephone conversations, e-mail messages and other electronic communications between individuals inside the United States and people overseas, if the government conducted the surveillance inside the United States.

Today, most international telephone conversations to and from the United States are conducted over fiber-optic cables, and the most efficient way for the government to eavesdrop on them is to latch on to giant telecommunications switches located in the United States.

By changing the legal definition of what is considered "electronic surveillance," the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on those conversations without warrants latching on to those giant switches as long as the target of the government's surveillance is "reasonably believed" to be overseas.

US President George W Bush's assasination in October 2007 - From Channel 4, UK.

LONDON, Sept. 1 — The time is October 2007, and America is in anguish, rent by the war in Iraq and by a combustive restiveness at home. Leaving a hotel in Chicago after making a speech while a huge antiwar protest rages nearby, President Bush is suddenly struck down, killed by a sniper’s bullet.

That is the arresting beginning of “Death of a President,” a 90-minute film that is to be broadcast in October on More4, a British digital television station. And while depicting the assassination of a sitting president is provocative in itself, this film is doubly so because it has been made to look like a documentary.

Using archival film as well as computer-generated imagery that, for instance, attaches the president’s face to the body of the actor playing him, the film leaves no doubt that the victim is Mr. Bush rather than some generic president.

• We are importing too much oil, so the dollar's strength is being sapped as oil prices continue to rise.
• And we are importing too much capital, because we are saving too little and spending too much, as both a society and a government.

• "There is no energy policy and no real effort to reduce our voracious demand of foreign capital.
• The U.S. pulled in 80 percent of total world savings last year [largely to finance our consumption]." That's a big reason why some "43 percent of all U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds are now held by foreigners," Mr. Hormats said.

The new award, called the Close Combat Badge, was unveiled to a private conference of four-star generals convened in Washington this weekend by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, the senior official said. Army and Pentagon officials discussed the badge on the condition that they not be identified by name.

• The first military honor created after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was called the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, and frustrated some in uniform who wanted ribbons that were awarded for specific deployments in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Lest we get carried away that the medals are honoring bravery and things like those, remember that the medals are a cold calculation. They probably get some extra benefits and monetory help, and also help in promotions of the awardees.

Frank has said that it sounded as if Jordan "was saying it was official military policy to take out journalists." But Jordan later "modified" his remarks to say some U.S. soldiers did this "maybe knowing they were killing journalists, out of anger," Frank said. (First things first - just because Mr. Franks says that you can't say it is "official policy" does not mean it is not official policy. You just can't say that - smacks of censorship and propaganda.)

In a memo to the staff, CNN News Group President Jim Walton praised Jordan: "The regard in which he is held by people from every walk of life in virtually every corner of the world has added incalculably to our ability to cover such historic events as the Gulf War and the war in Iraq, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the crackdown in Tiananmen Square and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."

• "Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say," Ms. Mayer wrote.
• As Ms. Mayer pointed out: "Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. ...
• Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish.
• Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and
• many families are not informed of their whereabouts."

• reported to have been
• a co-worker
• of a man in Canada
• whose brother was
• a suspected
• terrorist.

Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow connected to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong.

Our 24/7 news culture sees even a human disaster like the tsunami in Asia as a chance for inspirational uplift, for "incredible stories of lives saved in near-miraculous fashion," to quote NBC's Brian Williams. (The nonmiraculous stories are already forgotten, now that the media carnival has moved on.) In fact, this also applies to Iraq. In the world created by the American media, propaganda, and politics, the daily slaughter in Iraq isn't story of the many many people getting sucked and killed in this whirliwind of Iraq, but it is the story of some of the lucky ones who escape getting killed or miamed. We are back to the days of the gladiators where a public at a certain height of arrogance and power started creating these spectacles of gore and death. It was the equivalent of a movie hall in which an alternate reality was created. The concept of reality in the US administration, which seems to be supported by a simple majority of people is not the same reality that is supported by a majority of people in the rest of the world.

Frank Rich in the NY Times goes on to say that Mr. Clint Eastwood's film "Million Dollar Baby", (Dirty Harry In That Famous Movie) while also boasting great acting, is the only one among Oscar contenders that challenges America's current triumphalist daydream.

"Million Dollar Baby" has the temerity to suggest that fights can have consequences, that some crises do not have black-and-white solutions and that even the pure of heart are not guaranteed a Hollywood ending.

What makes some feel betrayed and angry after seeing "Million Dollar Baby" is exactly what makes many more stop and think: one of Hollywood's most durable cowboys is saying that it's not always morning in America, and that it may take more than faith to get us through the night.

Female interrogators repeatedly used sexually suggestive tactics to try to humiliate and pry information from devout Muslim men held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a military investigation not yet public and newly declassified accounts from detainees. The prisoners have told their lawyers, who compiled the accounts, that female interrogators regularly violated Muslim taboos about sex and contact with women. Some of the accounts resemble the sexual aspects of the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib. Photographs that became public last year showed a servicewoman there holding naked prisoners on a leash and posing next to a pile of naked prisoners.

• The women rubbed their bodies against the men,
• wore skimpy clothes in front of them, (The military investigation of U.S. detention and interrogation practices worldwide, led by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, confirmed one case in which an Army interrogator took off her uniform top and paraded around in a tight T-shirt to make a Guantanamo detainee uncomfortable, and other cases in which interrogators touched the detainees suggestively, the senior Pentagon official said.)
• made sexually explicit remarks and touched them provocatively,

  at least eight detainees said in documents or through their attorneys.

• Some of the newly declassified accounts of detainees evoke scenes from a rock music video. German detainee Murat Kurnaz told his lawyer that three women in lacy bras and panties strutted into the interrogation room where he was sitting in chains. They cooed about how attractive he was and suggested "they could have some fun," he said. When Kurnaz averted his eyes, he said, one woman sat on his lap, another rubbed her breasts against his back and massaged his chest and a third squatted near his crotch. He head-butted the woman behind him, he said, knocking her off him. All three ran out and a team of soldiers stormed in and beat him, he said.
• The inquiry uncovered numerous instances in which female interrogators, using dye, pretended to spread menstrual blood on Muslim men, the official said. Separately, in court papers and public statements, three detainees say that women smeared them with blood. In a yet-to-be-published book, former Army translator Erik Saar said he saw a female interrogator smear red dye on a Saudi man's face, telling him it was blood. Saar's account was first reported by the Associated Press last month. And Mamdouh Habib, an Australian man released from Guantanamo Bay last month, said he was strapped down while a woman told him she was "menstruating" on his face. One lawyer, Marc Falkoff, said in an interview that when a Yemeni client told him a few weeks ago about an incident involving menstrual blood, "I almost didn't even write it down." He said: "It seemed crazy, like something out of a horror movie or a John Waters film. Now it doesn't seem ludicrous at all."
• Yasein Esmail, a Yemeni detainee, said he had been interrogated more than 100 times since being "kidnapped" in a marketplace in Kabul, Afghanistan, and brought to Guantanamo Bay. He recounted to his lawyer that when he refused to talk in one interview, a female soldier entered wearing a tight T-shirt. "Why aren't you married?" she reportedly asked Esmail. "You are a young man and have needs. What do you like?" Esmail said "she bent down with her breasts on the table and her legs almost touching" him. "Are you going to talk," she asked, "or are we going to do this for six hours?"

Attorneys for detainees scoffed at the Pentagon's insistence that the military can fairly investigate its own personnel. They noted that the Defense Department last fall initially dismissed torture allegations, insisting that detainees were trained at terrorist camps to lodge false claims.

A wide-ranging Pentagon investigation, which has not yet been released, generally confirms the detainees' allegations, according to a senior Defense Department official familiar with the report. While isolated accounts of such tactics have emerged in recent weeks, the new allegations and the findings of the Pentagon investigation indicate that sexually oriented tactics may have been part of the fabric of Guantanamo interrogations, especially in 2003.

• 24 percent of the biology teachers sampled in Louisiana said that creationism had a scientific foundation and that
• 17 percent were not sure. Several surveys have shown that many teachers give at least some instructional time to creationism or intelligent design out of a sense of fairness.