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A leaked government document at the heart of an Official Secrets Act trial contained a “stinking fish” that had the potential to cause political embarrassment to President Bush, a defence barrister told the Old Bailey yesterday. Rex Tedd, QC, acting for David Keogh, a 50-year-old civil servant who read the document and took a copy of it out of his office, said that his client had handed it over to a friend because its contents had preyed on his conscience. The document was a recorded minute, in the form of a letter, of a two-hour meeting about Iraq between Tony...

A civil servant and an MP's researcher have been found guilty of breaching the Official Secrets Act. They leaked an "extremely sensitive" memo about talks on Iraq between Tony Blair and President Bush. Cabinet Office communications officer David Keogh passed the four-page document to Leo O'Connor, a researcher for anti-war Labour MP Anthony Clarke. Keogh was found guilty on two charges and O'Connor on one. The jury heard Keogh, 50, believed the memo exposed President Bush as a "madman". He hoped it could be used to raise questions in the House of Commons. He also wanted it to be passed...

The letter is a photostat, but the gist is that it will now become easier for the illegals to access gov't services. Not stated that way of course.

Bush presents firm front on Iraq By Jon Leyne BBC News, Amman It was billed as a crisis meeting at a crucial time in Iraq's history - although you would never have guessed, watching a disarmingly relaxed President Bush field questions afterwards. Mr Bush rubbished rumours of a loss of confidence in Mr Maliki There was certainly no hint that his project to spread democracy across the Middle East was in the tiniest bit of trouble. "There are reports from Washington that we are looking for a graceful exit," said Mr Bush. "But we will stay until the job...

One of the most ingenious aspects of the false charge of an intentional liberal bias in the news media is the unstated inference that if there is a liberal bias there by necessity cannot be an intentional conservative bias. A new piece of hard evidence that there indeed a conservative bias in at least one quarter of the media, a Rosetta Stone of jaundiced journalism. It’s apparently a printout of a channel's daily editorial memo, marching orders e-mailed to key staffers on how and where to slant the news. And how to adjust the facts to match the political conclusions...

HONOLULU John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped draft memos on treatment of terrorist prisoners, said Monday that in wartime, the question is not whether to give up civil liberties but "how much is enough." Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, drew attention at an American Bar Association convention panel on whether tactics such as the detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and the surveillance of phone calls may erode liberties. Unlike past conflicts, the United States isn't at war with any traditional nation state, Yoo said, but is at war with...

IN THOSE 12 terrible days following the U.S. Supreme Court's Hamdan decision — which thoroughly eviscerated the White House's Orwellian "war on terror" legal framework — the Bush administration's warrior priests went through a brief but intense period of mourning. Donald Rumsfeld rent his garments and ordered the ritual "water-boarding" of 100 Army JAG officers. Alberto Gonzales woke screaming in the night after a chilling visitation from the Ghost of Treaties Quaint. And W pensively re-read "My Pet Goat," wondering how the story that began so sweetly that September day could have turned out so terribly wrong. But John Yoo,...

WASHINGTON, July 11, 2006 – A memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England underscores the department's standing policy of treating detainees humanely and orders commanders responsible for detainee affairs to review their practices to ensure they are in compliance. "The Supreme Court has determined that Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 applies as a matter of law to the conflict with al Qaeda," England stated in the July 7 memo. In a nutshell, Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions ensures humane treatment of detainees, Bryan Whitman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, told reporters today....

Memo reportedly shows location of WMD Text from Saddam regime describes burial to hide from inspectors Posted: June 10, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com A captured document from the Saddam regime but left untranslated by the Pentagon describes the hiding of chemical-weapons materials and the location of their burial in Iraq. Joseph Shahda, who has translated a number of key texts from among the thousands made available on the Internet by the Defense Department, posted his work on the conservative forum FreeRepublic.com. The memo, dated Sept. 15, 2002, is from the General Relations group of one of Saddam's...

'75 Kissinger memo discounted Israel By Calvin Woodward May 27, 2006 The United States reached out to hostile Arabs three decades ago with an offer to work toward making Israel a "small friendly country" of no threat to its neighbors and with an assurance to Iraq that the U.S. had stopped backing Kurdish rebels in the north. "We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel," then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told his Iraqi counterpart in a rare high-level meeting, "but we can reduce its size to historical proportions." A December 1975 memo detailing Mr. Kissinger's probing conversation with Foreign Affairs...

SAN DIEGO -- An American teenager was caught sneaking two illegal immigrants in the trunk of a stolen Acura in September 2004. Chances are he wasn't too worried: It was the third time in two weeks he had been caught smuggling migrants, one or two at a time. After that, the 19-year-old might have given up smuggling, but a fourth arrest two months later suggests he simply got better at it, or luckier. Again, he was released without criminal charges. "This is an example of a kid who knows the system," states an internal Border Patrol document that decries the...

Julie Myers is 36 years old, a lawyer and a political appointee to the Bush administration with limited executive experience. Yet, she is slated to become head of one of the nation's most critical security-related agencies, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Myers appointment, in the wake of FEMA's disastrous handling of the Katrina Hurricane and the resignation of its chief, Michael Brown, has people from both sides of the political aisle raising hackles. "The Bush administration has barely rebounded from the resignation of horse show organizer Michael ‘Heck...

Chertoff delayed federal response, memo shows By Jonathan S. Landay, Alison Young and Shannon McCaffrey Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show. Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to...

William Tate believes he has identified what amounts to the smoking gun in placing responsibility where it belongs for the failure to connect the dots on Atta and his gang. He points to a memorandum issued by Jamie Gorelick in 1995. Writing on whatsinthenews.com, he notes that others have focused on the language of the memo, which clearly states that the wall being errected between justice and defense agencies, preventing intelligence esharing, goes beyond the requirements of the law. But equally important, he avers, is the the list of recipients, particularly a little-noticed entity, the Office of Intelligence Policy Review....

A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a U.S. diplomat assured a top official of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime that international sanctions on that country would be lifted if it expelled Osama bin Laden, newly declassified documents show. A State Department memo dated September 2000 also said the United States did not seek to topple the Taliban despite its record of human rights abuses. The memo was among documents obtained by the National Security Archive, a private research group based at George Washington University, under a Freedom of Information Act request. The group posted the documents on its Web site...

MEMO PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL TO: Bob Mann Communications Director Governor Kathleen Blanco FROM: John Copes DATE: August 4, 2005 RE: web site project It’s been a long time since my last memo, Bob, and it’s not like riding a bicycle, so I’ll simply try to restate and expand upon our conversations concerning various ways to more vigorously advance a coherent strategy to promote the governor’s (and, by extension, Democratic) policies, while blunting the increasingly intense attacks upon her and upon her administration. As we have often discussed, the most serious problem Democrats in Louisiana now face is a Republican Party...

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court nominee John Roberts showed sympathy for the idea of permitting prayer in public schools in 1985, according to a memo released on Monday, writing that a ruling to the contrary "seems indefensible" under the Constitution. As a young lawyer working in the Reagan administration, Roberts wrote he would have no objection if the Justice Department wanted to express support for a constitutional amendment permitting prayer. Referring to a Supreme Court ruling issued earlier that year that struck down an Alabama school prayer law, he said, "The conclusion ... that the Constitution prohibits such a moment of...

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission), an independent, bipartisan commission created by congressional legislation...is chartered to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks...

In September 2000, one year before the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a U.S. Army military intelligence program, known as “Able Danger,” identified a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, NY, one of whose members was 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to “take out that cell,” according to Rep. Curt Weldon, a longtime Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who is currently vice chairman of both the House Homeland Security and House Armed Services Committees. The recommendation to bring down that New York City cell -- in which two other Al Qaeda...

An extraordinary story has emerged involving former Lyndon Johnson aide and now PBS commentator Bill Moyers (search). The story was told in The Wall Street Journal by retired federal appeals judge Laurence Silberman, who reports that when he was acting attorney general under President Ford a memo written by Moyers to the FBI came to light in the press.