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KABUL: Less than a year after his release from Guantanamo Bay, a former Taliban envoy has written a book on his "humiliation" with the hope it will add pressure on the United States to wind up the controversial prison. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan and the face of the regime at the time of its fall, spent nearly four years in US detention before being released and handed over to Afghan authorities in September 2005. "I have been humiliated and tortured. By depicting the oppression that is going on in Guantanamo, I have tried to...

HOUSTON - Andrea Yates believed that cartoon characters told her she was a bad mother who fed her children too much candy, a jail psychiatrist testified Thursday. Dr. Melissa R. Ferguson, who talked to Yates the day after her arrest in the bathtub drownings of her five children, said the defendant suffered from a major depressive disorder and was psychotic, picking at her lip until it bled. Ferguson was the first defense witness in the second murder trial for Yates, who has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity. She is being retried because her 2002 conviction was overturned last year...

CBS/AP) An Iraqi man who was one of the first people on the scene of the U.S. airstrike targeting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said he saw American troops beating a man who had a beard like the al Qaeda leader. The witness, who lives near the house where al-Zarqawi spent his last days, said he saw the man lying on the ground near an irrigation canal. He was badly wounded but still alive, the man told Associated Press Television News. U.S. troops arriving on the scene wrapped the man's head in an Arab robe and began beating him, said the local...

June 8, 2006 — The world is reacting in various ways to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. While reactions in the United States express relief, resolve and a hope for peace, reactions overseas remain mixed. "If Sheik al-Zarqawi has died, he will go to heaven, God willing, and there will be 200 million al-Zarqawis after him" — ominous words from one Islamic extremist Web site posted in an al-Qaeda clearinghouse shortly after the news of al-Zarqawi's death. But laments over the demise of al-Zarqawi are not confined to Web sites — they're also on overseas airwaves. On Arabic-language networks...

Haditha - The scandal - Now on your local news stand

NEW YORK - On a March morning in 1968, American troops swept into a village on South Vietnam's central coast in search of communist guerrillas. Instead, they found unarmed civilians — and gunned them down, leaving bodies huddled in ditches. Nearly four decades later, the notorious name of that hamlet — My Lai — has been summoned from memory again, as the U.S. military investigates allegations of mass civilian killings by a group of Marines in the western Iraqi town of Haditha. While the numbers differ — upward of 300 at My Lai, compared to 24 at Haditha — some...

San Francisco, Calif. (KCBS) -- U.S Senator Barbara Boxer plans to introduce a resolution in the Senate calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq within six months, if not earlier. The California Senator, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held a news conference today at San Francisco's War Memorial Building. KCBS Reporter Barbara Taylor said the resolution conveys both strong language and a sense of irony, noting that each goal set by the Bush Administration has been met, whether it's eliminating Saddam Hussein or democratic elections. The senator said there's simply no more reason to be...

Al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has appeared in a video saying that Iraqi insurgents have "broken the back" of the US military. He praised "martyrdom operations" carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq in the video, posted on an Islamist website. And he called on the people and army of Pakistan to fight against President Musharraf's administration. This is the third message from prominent al-Qaeda leaders to emerge within a week. A tape from Osama Bin Laden was broadcast on 23 April, followed two days later by a message from Iraqi insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The revolt by retired generals who publicly criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has opened an extraordinary debate among younger officers, in military academies, in the armed services' staff colleges and even in command posts and mess halls in Iraq. The discussions often flare with anger, particularly among many midlevel officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and face the prospect of additional tours of duty. "This is about the moral bankruptcy of general officers who lived through the Vietnam era yet refused to advise our civilian leadership properly," said one Army major in the Special Forces who has...

A group of Exxon Mobil Corp. shareholders said on Wednesday it has filed a resolution accusing the oil company of discrimination against women for sponsoring the Masters golf tournament. ADVERTISEMENT The leading proponent of the resolution, which now must be voted on by shareholders, is Martha Burk, head of the National Council of Women's Organizations. She has waged a long-running battle with the Augusta National Golf Club, host of the Masters, over its refusal to admit women as members. Exxon confirmed the resolution had been filed and will appear in the company's proxy, which will be filed with U.S. regulators...

Online DVD rental company Netflix on Tuesday sued rival Blockbuster for patent infringement, asking a federal judge in Northern California to shut down Blockbuster's 18-month-old online rental service and award Netflix damages, according to a copy of the filing. Blockbuster declined to comment, saying it had not received a copy of the lawsuit. Netflix, which was founded in 1999, holds two U.S. patents for its business methodology, which calls for subscribers to pay a monthly fee to select and rent DVDs from the company's Web site and to maintain a list of titles telling Netflix in which order to ship...

WASHINGTON - A slim majority of Americans are open to allowing undocumented workers to obtain some sort of temporary legal status to remain in the United States, with stronger support for the idea among Democrats, younger adults and more educated Americans, a new poll finds. Overall, 56 percent of Americans favor offering illegal immigrants a shot at some kind of legal status; roughly two-thirds of those ages 18-34 like the idea and an equal share of those with a college education agree, the AP-Ipsos survey found.

WASHINGTON -- America risks convicting the innocent and letting the guilty evade justice in how it handles detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military attorney defending an Australian terror suspect held at the U.S. prison camp said Monday. Maj. Michael Mori, a Marine Corps lawyer, told an audience at George Washington University that no civilized justice system would accept "information being acquired potentially under torture or questionable methods." Mori spoke after several former detainees recounted their experiences at the camp, which holds roughly 500 prisoners. Most were taken in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept....

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room. In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist,...

Motivated by an important issue — but bloated by self-importance — the Minutemen patrolled the border to stem the tide of illegal immigration. President Bush called them "a vigilante group," a potentially dangerous intrusion into the realm of law enforcement officials. That was almost a year ago, and his words ring truer than ever. Already unnecessary, the Minutemen have been rendered even more superfluous, thanks to a state program dubbed Operation Linebacker, which has allocated nearly $10 million for border security since December. With much of the money going to bolster sheriff's departments from Brownsville to El Paso, the program...

CHICAGO - A northern Illinois resident reported finding a bird’s head in a can of pinto beans, prompting a Chicago-based food company to announce a voluntary recall on Friday.. La Preferida Inc. said in a statement that it was recalling a limited number of its cans as a precaution. The company says the beans were canned by New Meridian Inc. in Eaton, Ind. “There are still many unanswered questions, but we have decided to err on the side of safety,” said David Brand, La Preferida’s director of quality assurance. The company is investigating to determine how the bird head got...

There it is. Turn on the news it should be on right about now. His co-conspirators too.

A truck tire hits a flagged wire, a roadside bomb explodes, a handsome private with shredded leg screams in agony. In the bloody chaos of the moment, his soldier buddies panic. One pukes. Stop the cameras! Sir! "People don't act like that when an i.e.d. (improvised explosive device) goes off. They make us look like idiots. We're not idiots!" said a first lieutenant previewing "Over There," the new TV series from Steven Bochco ("NYPD Blue," "Hill Street Blues") that debuts tomorrow night on FX cable network. It's set in Iraq, hyped as "true to life" by producers and hailed by...

Kay Griggs was a Southern divorcee who rented a room to Marine Corps colonel George Griggs in the late 1980s. She was impressed by his clipped manner, his education, his good looks. Two months later she married him. What she found out about world affairs as George Griggs' wife was astounding. Colonel Griggs was a Marine Corps Chief of Staff, as well as head of NATO's Psychological Operations. He was also, his wife realized, entirely mind-controlled. Kay, a self-declared Christian, became privy to the real workings of the United States military, leadership training, drug-running and weapons sales, and the secret...

WASHINGTON - Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Friday that he regretted any misunderstandings caused by his comments earlier this week comparing American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis. The White House, Senate Republicans and others had called for an apology after Durbin's comments Tuesday. Durbin made the comparison after reading an FBI agent's report describing detainees at the Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as being chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures. "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to...