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US details Haditha shoot-out A roadside bomb that killed a US Marine in the restive town of Haditha on Saturday also killed 15 Iraqi civilians and led to intense clashes with insurgents. The powerful bomb detonated as a US military convoy was passing through the town, which is 220 kilometres north-west of Baghdad. The US military says immediately after the blast, gunmen opened fire on the convoy. US and Iraqi soldiers returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another in a firefight. A cameraman working for Reuters in Haditha says bodies had been left lying in the street for hours...

EXECUTIVE SESSION -- (Senate - February 02, 2005) Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, after every war, history is written. There are stories of courage, compassion, and glory, and stories of cruelty, weakness, and shame. When history is written of our war on terrorism, it will record the millions of acts of heroism, kindness, and sacrifice performed by American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other nations. And it will record as well the stunning courage of Iraqi men and women standing in line last Sunday, defying the terrorist bullets and bombs to vote in the first free election of their lives. But...

As if by clockwork, on the day when the United Nations took the U.S. to task - demanding that it close the al-Qaeda isolation and interrogation center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - detainees there staged a full scale riot, ambushing security personnel as they responded to what turned out to be a faked suicide attempt. Guantanamo currently houses approximately 500 high-value suspected terrorists. Camp officials indicated that today's incident was extremely well thought out and planned. Taking place in Camp 4, a medium security compound where prisoners live in groups of 10, the security personnel were lured into the area...

WASHINGTON, April 25 — The Central Intelligence Agency on Tuesday defended the firing of Mary O. McCarthy, the veteran officer who was dismissed last week, and challenged her lawyer's statements that Ms. McCarthy never provided classified information to the news media. But intelligence officials would not say whether they believed that Ms. McCarthy had been a source for a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in The Washington Post about secret C.I.A. detention centers abroad. Media accounts have linked Ms. McCarthy's firing to the articles, but the C.I.A. has never explicitly drawn such a connection (snip) A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise...

Secrets of the CIA A former colleague says the fired Mary McCarthy ‘categorically denies’ being the source of the leak on agency renditions. WEB EXCLUSIVE By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff Updated: 7:07 p.m. ET April 24, 2006 April 24, 2006 - A former CIA officer who was sacked last week after allegedly confessing to leaking secrets has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe, a friend of the operative told NEWSWEEK. The fired official, Mary O. McCarthy, “categorically denies being the source of the leak,” one...

McLEAN, Va. (AP) - A man accused of plotting to assassinate President Bush was indicted Thursday on additional charges that could bring life in prison, and prosecutors now say he also planned to establish an al-Qaida cell in the United States. Prosecutors say Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 24, of Falls Church joined al-Qaida in 2002 while studying in Saudi Arabia and that he discussed possible terrorist operations, including a plot to kill Bush either by shooting or by a suicide bombing.Prosecutors also allege Abu Ali discussed plans to assassinate members of Congress and to hijack aircraft and fly them into...

Tue Mar 14, 9:22 AM ET NEW YORK - The New York Times is investigating questions raised about the identity of a man who said in a Page 1 profile that he is the Abu Ghraib prisoner whose hooded image became an icon of abuse by American captors. The online magazine Salon.com challenged the man's identity, based on an examination of 280 Abu Ghraib pictures it has been studying for weeks and on an interview with an official of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command. The official says the man the Times profiled Saturday, Ali Shalal Qaissi, is not the detainee...

March 7, 2006 Expect Journalistic Tongues to Loosen By Jack Kelly Journalists will be paying rapt attention when Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman go on trial next month for violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were officials of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. They received classified information from Lawrence Franklin, an analyst at the Department of Defense, which they passed on to an Israeli diplomat, and to journalists. They are the first private citizens ever to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Mr. Franklin pled guilty Jan. 20th and was sentenced to more than...

Some Gitmo Prisoners Don't Want to Go Home By BEN FOX, Associated Press Writer SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Fearing militants or even their own governments, some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from China, Saudi Arabia and other nations do not want to go home, according to transcripts of hearings at the U.S. prison in Cuba. Uzbekistan, Yemen, Algeria and Syria are also among the countries to which detainees do not want to return. The inmates have told military tribunals that they or their families could be tortured or killed if they are sent back. President Bush has said the United...

Guantanamo Inmates Despair of Ever Leaving Sunday, March 5, 2006 9:13 PM EST The Associated Press By MIRANDA LEITSINGER GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Ahamed Abdul Aziz has been in the Guantanamo Bay prison for more than three years and, by his account, has been interrogated 50 times without being charged with any crime. He waits with anguish for freedom but fears it will never come. "We are in a grave here," he told his lawyers, echoing the despair felt by many of the roughly 490 prisoners held as suspected terrorists at the U.S. naval base in eastern...

Almost 100 prisoners have died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, according to US group Human Rights First. The details were first aired on BBC television's Newsnight programme. Of the 98 deaths, at least 34 were suspected or confirmed homicides, the programme said. The Pentagon told Newsnight it had not seen the report but took allegations of maltreatment "very seriously" and would prosecute if necessary. The report, which is to be published on Wednesday, draws on information from Pentagon and other official US sources. Torture Human Rights First representative Deborah Pearlstein told Newsnight she was "extremely...

Disclaimer: Reading this following article can be dangerous to your health. People with a heart condition should not attempt to read it. Also do not attempt to drive or operate heavy machinery. Do NOT open windows, but rather us a bucket to vomit. Opening the window may result in jumping out of it after reading several passages. LONDON, July 15 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Following the attack by U.S. author Gore Vidal on U.S. President George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror, John Pilger launched yet another attack in his book ‘The New Rulers of the World.’ “The rulers...

One "plaintiff" in the nuisance lawsuits being filed against the Director of the NSA et al is none other than the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg -- Rachel Meeropol.Lest we forget, the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953 for helping to pass US atom bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. (Most fittingly, Julius's KGB nom de guerre was "Liberal.")True to her roots, Rachel is a Vice President of the New York City chapter of the communist National Lawyers Guild. She is also a fixture in some of the most ultra left organizations out there, such as The Children Of Resistance.Of...

Every year, as we enter a New Year, my mind goes back to Daniel Pearl, the Mumbai-based American correspondent of Wall Street Journal, who met with a brutal end to his young life during a visit to Karachi in January 2002 to enquire, inter alia, into the suspected Pakistani links of international jihadi terrorists. In his keenness to find out the truth, Pearl fell into a treacherous trap laid by a mixed group of Pakistani terrorists belonging to different organisations and orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British resident of Pakistani origin, who had participated in the so-called jihad against the...

Australia's top investigators claim Mamdouh Habib trained as a terrorist before the September 11 attacks. Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib trained as a terrorist in Pakistan before moving to Afghanistan to serve as a mercenary with al-Qaeda, Australia's top policeman has told a parliamentary inquiry. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said Mr Habib received firearms training in Pakistan in the days before September 11, 2001 to prepare him for a border crossing into Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden's terrorist organisation. Habib was arrested by Pakistani police inside Pakistan on October 5, 2001. "The investigators formed the view...

Moments after planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, lawyers in the Justice Department's elite Office of Legal Counsel began crowding into the office of one of the agency's newest deputies, John C. Yoo, to watch the horror unfold on his television set. "We all stood around watching this event and he just seemed very calm, like he wasn't going to let these terrorists stop him from doing his work," recalled Robert J. Delahunty, a friend of Mr. Yoo's who worked in the office. Fearful of another attack and told that all "nonessential personnel" should evacuate, Mr....

Abdullah Khadr, the eldest son of a reputed Canadian Al Qaeda financier, was arrested by the RCMP yesterday on terrorism-related charges at the request of American authorities. The 25-year-old Canadian recently returned from Pakistan where he was held for 14 months without charge. He was arrested last night after agreeing to meet an RCMP officer at a McDonald's near his Scarborough apartment, his relatives said last night. His mother, Maha Elsamnah tried to intervene in the arrest and was also taken into custody, but later released without charges. Khadr's brother, 22-year-old Abdurahman was also at the fast food restaurant and...

The Arnold Schwarzenegger Football Stadium in Austria's second-largest city Graz is to be renamed as a sign of displeasure with the city's most famous son,. A majority of members on Graz City Council voted to rename the stadium after the Austrian-born governor of California approved the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, according to newspaper Kleine Zeitung. The Terminator-turned-governor was born six kilometres outside Graz in the community of Thal. http://www.smh.com.au/news/people/arnies-terminated/2005/12/16/1134676432847.html

Does the political world realize just how big a hawk Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) really is? Lost in the coverage of the former Vietnam prisoner of war’s campaign against torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the war on terror is a true appreciation of McCain’s full-tilt, nothing-less-than-victory support of the war in Iraq. I interviewed McCain recently for a story in The New Republic magazine, and he spoke about the war in a way that was both tougher and more understanding than George W. Bush himself. There are a lot of reasons why we should see the fight through...

The links between Nick Berg and Zacarias Moussaoui, once described as the 20th hijacker of 9/11, opened now room for new speculations, if there are deeper ties between the OKC Bombing'95 and 9/11, than thought before. Apparently Berg knew also Moussaoui's roomates. One of them was Mujahid Menepta, who is connected to both 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 OKC bombing. But Menepta wasn't arrested in Summer 2001, when Moussaoui got caught. The FBI waited until after Sep11th.Why?Berg, Moussaoui and the OK bombing tieshttp://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=269 By Ewing20012004/5/24 On May 18th, 2004, according to Newsmax, Nick Berg's family insisted that...