Iran Accuses U.S., Britain In Fatal Blast

Iran's Intelligence Ministry has accused the United States and Britain of involvement in an April 12 bomb attack at a religious center in the city of Shiraz that killed at least 12 people and wounded 202.

The suspects "have ties to the U.S. and Great Britain," Intelligence Minister Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei told local reporters on Wednesday. "Iran's Foreign Ministry had previously notified these countries, but no action was taken to prevent their terrorist activities, and they were instead supported," he said, referring to the suspects.

"We had nothing to do with it," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in Washington. Britain has also denied such accusations in the past.

The main suspect was arrested at an airport in a province around the Caspian Sea, carrying weapons and cyanide, Ejei said. Five other people have been arrested, he said. The group that organized the attack was formed years ago and was planning to carry out more bombings in Iran, he said.

Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi said the suspects were "monarchists," referring to supporters of the family of the last shah of Iran, who fled the country during the 1979 revolution. Former crown prince Reza Pahlavi lives in the United States and promotes a change of government in Iran.

The ex-monarch's family still has supporters in Iran, but they are not known to be politically active.

Click to read more ...

Judge Plans To Review Opinion on CIA Tactics

A federal judge in New York intends next week to review one of the Bush administration's most controversial legal opinions related to detainee interrogations, to decide if it has appropriately been withheld from public view.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York said in an order yesterday that on Monday he intends to review an Aug. 1, 2002, memo on specific CIA interrogation techniques, marking an unusual review outside the executive branch.

The 2002 memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel accompanied a broader document on the definition of torture that has already been released publicly and disavowed by the administration.

The second, still-classified memo focuses on the specific interrogation techniques that were deemed legally permissible at the CIA, according to court documents and intelligence officials. The memo was authored by then-OLC deputy John C. Yoo and includes discussion of waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning that the CIA has acknowledged using on three al-Qaeda suspects in its custody, officials have said.

Hellerstein had previously ruled that the memo could be properly withheld by the government because it was subject to attorney-client privilege.

Click to read more ...

F.B.I. Says the Military Had Bogus Computer Gear

Counterfeit products are a routine threat for the electronics industry. However, the more sinister specter of an electronic Trojan horse, lurking in the circuitry of a computer or a network router and allowing attackers clandestine access or control, was raised again recently by the F.B.I. and the Pentagon.

The new law enforcement and national security concerns were prompted by Operation Cisco Raider, which has led to 15 criminal cases involving counterfeit products bought in part by military agencies, military contractors and electric power companies in the United States. Over the two-year operation, 36 search warrants have been executed, resulting in the discovery of 3,500 counterfeit Cisco network components with an estimated retail value of more than $3.5 million, the F.B.I. said in a statement.

The F.B.I. is still not certain whether the ring’s actions were for profit or part of a state-sponsored intelligence effort. The potential threat, according to the F.B.I. agents who gave a briefing at the Office of Management and Budget on Jan. 11, includes the remote jamming of supposedly secure computer networks and gaining access to supposedly highly secure systems. Contents of the briefing were contained in a PowerPoint presentation leaked to a Web site, Above Top Secret.

Click to read more ...

Robert Fisk: Gun battles as Hizbollah claims Lebanon is at war

If you want to fight us, you'll have to fight us. This was Sayed Hassan Nasrallah's message to the Lebanese government yesterday and his words were followed within seconds by two massive gun battles in the streets of Beirut.

He had spoken in that careful, thought-through, distressing way in which he always threatens the Hizbollah's enemies. He even swapped the names of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, with that of the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt – calling Jumblatt the real prime minister and Siniora his deputy – and blamed both for trying to set up a CIA-Mossad base at Beirut airport. What other reason could there be, he asked, for the two men to demand the dismantlement of Hizbollah's communications system and the suspension of the head of airport security? This was "a Lebanese government declaration of war against the resistance". Well, maybe. But Nasrallah still wants the Hizbollah's enemies to be the Israelis – not his Lebanese opponents.

So what happened in the minutes after he spoke? At least one Shia Amal gunman started shooting at an office belonging to Sunni supporters of the government, some of whom may have been the youths apparently brought down from Tripoli for just such a battle. The Lebanese army was not fully engaged on the streets last night but its armoured vehicles were driving between the sectarian interfaces and apparently taking fire from both sides.

It was a dark and distressing speech by the secretary general of Hizbollah, which came less than 24 hours after the Grand Mufti, Mohammed Kabbani, furiously referred to the Hizbollah as "armed gangs of outlaws that have carried out the ugliest attacks against the citizens and their safety".

Click to read more...

McCain Refuses to Repudiate Pastor That Spews Lies and Deceit About Islam

By Alicia Hope / Gangster Government

Mother Jones posted a story called McCain's Pastor Problem: The Video and it exposes the hypocrisy of John McCain and the media. In a nutshell, the Reverend Rod Parsley teaches his flock that Islam is a demonic religion, that Islam should be destroyed and that 9/11 was caused by the verses of the Qur'an. Does the good Reverend know that Thomas Jefferson read and owned a Qur'an? Does the Reverend Rod Parsley know that the constitution grants freedom of religion? Maybe, the good reverend doesn't know that 9/11 was an inside job! Maybe, he doesn't understand that UBL couldn't have caused molten metal at all 3 WTC buildings! Maybe, the reverend doesn't know about the Cheney stand down order! Maybe, he doesn't understand the science of free fall collapse or how the path of least resistance is always taken by objects moving through a system. We need to educate this man to the real evil that threatens to destroy the world if people like him don't wake up!

This article isn't meant to convert anyone or cause division but it is meant to forge an understanding! Too many Christians are in the dark about Islam and this is an attempt to show how Islam respects the Bible, Jesus(PBUH) and all of the prophets in that book. Hopefully, Christians and others will keep an open mind about Islam and begin to understand that we need each other to defeat the NWO and their beast system(HAARP, Project Blue Beam, microchips, chemtrails, forced vaccinations, Morgellons, AIDS, etc)!

"There is no coercion in religion," the Qur'an emphatically teaches, and -- following this decree -- throughout history Islam has been the most tolerant of the three great monotheistic religions. Americans have been taught that Islam was "spread by the sword," but that is a misnomer! Islam did spread as a result of being taken into conquered territories and then spread even farther through merchants from the Far East who took this wonderful new religion home to Indonesia, the Philippines and other Eastern nations. Muslims do not believe that they are the only ones who will make it to heaven. This is never mentioned on the nightly corporate news! It might destroy their evil agenda! So read it for yourself!

Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.[Qur'an 2:62]

Click to read more ...

Pentagon Drops Post in Pakistan for Top General

When the Pentagon announced in March that Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan, it reflected the military’s aim to put a crisis-tested veteran in a critical job at a pivotal time in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

But nearly two months later, the military has quietly canceled the assignment of General Hood, a 33-year Army veteran who was excoriated in the Pakistani news media for one of his previous jobs: commander of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

During General Hood’s command from 2004 to 2006, military authorities force-fed with tubes detainees who were engaging in hunger strikes at the Guantánamo prison, a step they justified as necessary to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide to protest their indefinite confinement. Also during General Hood’s tenure, reports that an American guard may have desecrated a Koran stirred wide protests in the Islamic world.

The decision to withdraw General Hood’s assignment has not been announced, but it appears to reflect the widening shadow that the military prison at Guantánamo is casting over American foreign policy. While the United States considers Pakistan a close ally in its counterterrorism efforts, the accounts by Pakistanis who have returned to Pakistan after being held at Guantánamo Bay have added to anti-American sentiment in the country.

Several leading Pakistani military and foreign affairs commentators denounced General Hood’s selection in recent weeks, calling on their new government to block his appointment.

Click to read more...

The Security Archive, Spilling Government Secrets

By Peter Carlson / Washington Post

Stoned on speed, Elvis Presley arrived at the White House wearing a purple velvet suit and bearing gifts for President Richard Nixon -- a Colt .45 pistol and some silver bullets.

It was Dec. 21, 1970, and Elvis had a mission: He wanted Nixon to give him a federal narcotics agent's badge so he could carry dope and guns wherever he went. Nixon didn't give Elvis the badge, but he did pose for pictures with the King of Rock-and-Roll.

Nineteen years later, newspapers reported that the Elvis-Nixon photos were the most requested pictures in the federal government's vast photo collection, and Tom Blanton responded the same way he responds to so many other interesting news stories: He filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

"When the president meets with anybody, there's a whole paper trail, so we filed a FOIA request and got the entire file released," says Blanton, who is the director of the National Security Archive, a private research group devoted to prying documents out of the federal government's files and making them public.

The fruits of Blanton's Elvis-Nixon FOIA turned out to be gloriously goofy: There was Elvis's handwritten letter to Nixon requesting a meeting and bragging that "I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse." And a White House staffer's memo suggesting that Nixon ask Elvis to "record an album with the theme 'Get High on Life.' " And the official notes of the historic meeting: "Presley immediately began showing the President his law enforcement paraphernalia, including badges from police departments . . . ."

Blanton posted the documents on the National Security Archive's Web site, and for years they were the most downloaded items on the site.

Click to read more...

Super Delegate Selling Vote For $20 Million

A Democrat super delegate who is a prominent national party member is selling his vote for $20 million and says the money will be used to register and educate Mexican-American voters long neglected by the party.

The California delegate, a retired lawyer who heads the voting rights committee of the Democratic National Committee’s Hispanic Caucus, admits most people might think of him as “some crazy guy in California” for the hefty price tag on his vote. He says the reality is that his own party is crazy for not aggressively pursuing Mexican-American voters.

So Sacramento super delegate Steven Ybarra, a renowned Chicano advocate, publicly warned the two candidates—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—battling for the Democratic nomination that his vote is not free. He also wants to alert them that the nation’s large Mexican-American voters are the key to the White House.

Ybarra, who once served as chair of the Democratic Party’s Chicano Latino Caucus, also made the news in February when he blasted Clinton for removing campaign manager Patti Solis, accusing the New York senator of being disloyal to Hispanics because Solis is of Mexican descent.

He circulated a strongly worded electronic mail that pointed out Clinton’s hypocrisy for depending on Latino voters in the Texas, Ohio and California primaries yet replacing her campaign’s highest ranking Hispanic with a black woman, Maggie Williams.

Click to read more ...

Pentagon's Propaganda Documents Go Online, but Will the TV Networks Ever Report this Scandal?

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated US law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers -- most of them with financial ties to war contractors -- into the TV networks as "message surrogates" for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences.

News of the Pentagon's online posting of the documents came from Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who notes that NSNS provided the New York Times "limited information about a military office early in the reporting process."

Here is the official Pentagon website with the 8,000 pages of documents, the most interesting and revealing of them previously secret and only available to the Pentagon and the New York Times:

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/

Click to read more ...

Retaliation by Bush Administration Against FEC Official?

The Bush administration has sidelined a federal official who raised legal questions about whether John McCain, Republican senator, could raise private funds in his presidential bid.

The White House late on Tuesday nominated Donald McGahn, who once served as an attorney for former majority leader Tom DeLay, to replace David Mason, a fellow Republican, as the chairman of the Federal Election Commission.

Mr Mason raised hackles in some Republican circles early this year when, in response to a query by Mr McCain’s campaign, he questioned the legality of a decision by the campaign to withdraw from the public financing system during the Republican primary.

The move to replace Mr Mason drew scrutiny from Democrats and public advocates who yesterday accused the administration of throwing Mr Mason “under a bus” in order to protect the presumptive Republican nominee for the White House.

“President Bush’s dumping of Mason can only be viewed as a bald-faced and brazen attempt to wrongly manipulate an important enforcement decision by the nation’s campaign finance enforcement agency,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a non-profit group that tracks money in politics.

Click to read more ...

Sexual Abuse at the British Embassy in Baghdad

An Iraqi cleaner and two cooks claim that a culture of sexual harassment, abuse and bullying exists at the British Embassy in Baghdad.

The middle-aged cleaner told The Times that a British contractor with KBR, the company hired to maintain the embassy’s premises, offered to double her daily pay if she would stay the night with him. When she refused, she said, her pay was cut and she was later dismissed.

The Iraqis accuse the embassy of leaving the abuse unchallenged and failing adequately to respond to complaints against several British managers for KBR. The company was allowed to conduct its own inquiry, an arrangement criticised as a very serious conflict of interest.

The complainants – the cleaner and two male cooks who worked in the embassy canteen – say that some KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly, paid or otherwise rewarded them for sex and dismissed those who refused or spoke out.

The British Embassy heard the complaints initially but left KBR to investigate; a KBR report found that there was no case to answer.

The three Iraqis lost their jobs at the embassy, in the Green Zone. They spoke to The Times in the hope that the Foreign Office would conduct an independent inquiry.

Click to read more...

FBI Seeking Records of 2004 Condoleeza Rice Ethics Probe

FBI agents investigating government watchdog Scott Bloch have subpoenaed any records that would reveal whether concerns about the 2004 elections prompted him to clear Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of ethics violations.

Bloch, the U.S. special counsel who investigates federal employee whistleblower complaints, found no merit to allegations that Rice, then President Bush's national security adviser, timed some of her trips to boost Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.

The FBI is investigating whether Bloch obstructed justice by destroying computer files to hinder an outside inquiry into allegations that he retaliated against employees who opposed his policies. He's also suspected of making false statements to investigators.

FBI agents, who searched Bloch's office and home Tuesday, subpoenaed 17 of his current and former employees to appear before a federal grand jury and asked them to bring any documents related to possible tampering of records in the office's electronic investigative tracking system, McClatchy has learned.

Officials with knowledge of the investigation also told McClatchy that the FBI has subpoenaed records about the decision to assign Rice's case to an investigator. The officials asked to remain anonymous because they weren't authorized to discuss the investigation.

It's unclear whether the FBI is looking into Bloch's decision to clear Rice or whether agents are seeking evidence in separate obstruction and false-statements investigation.

Click to read more ...

Once-Secret Memos Question Clinton's Honesty

By Jerry Seper / Washington Times

A decade before Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton admitted fudging the truth during the presidential campaign, federal prosecutors quietly assembled hundreds of pages of evidence suggesting she concealed information and misled a federal grand jury about her work for a failing Arkansas savings and loan at the heart of the Whitewater probe, according to once-secret documents that detail the internal debates over whether she should have faced criminal charges.

Ordinarily, such files containing grand jury evidence and prosecutors' deliberations are never made public. But the estate of Sam Dash, a lifelong Democrat who served as the ethics adviser to Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr, donated his documents from the infamous 1990s investigation to the Library of Congress after his 2004 death, unwittingly injecting into the public domain much of the testimony and evidence gathered against Mrs. Clinton from former law partners, White House aides and other witnesses.

The documents, reviewed by The Washington Times, identify numerous instances in which prosecutors questioned Mrs. Clinton's honesty, an issue that continues to dog her on the campaign trail after she was forced to acknowledge earlier this year exaggerating a story about coming under sniper fire as first lady during a visit to Bosnia in 1996.

Click to read more...

Unplug Your Mind: The Big Brother Matrix of Reality

Is your reality controlled by a powerful elite?

Was The Matrix trying to tell us something?

You decide!

FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret 'National Security Letter', Loses

The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the order public, civil liberties groups announced Wednesday morning.

On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a controversial National Security Letter (.pdf) on the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle, asking for records about one of the library's registered users, asking for the user's name, address and activity on the site.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive's lawyers, fought the NSL, challenging its constitutionality in a December 14 complaint (.pdf) to a federal court in San Francisco. The FBI agreed on April 21 to withdraw the letter and unseal the court case, making some of the documents available to the public.

The Patriot Act greatly expanded the reach of NSLs, which are subpoenas for documents such as billing records and telephone records that the FBI can issue in terrorism investigations without a judge's approval. Nearly all NSLs come with gag orders forbidding the recipient from ever speaking of the subpoena, except to a lawyer.

Brewster Kahle called the gag order "horrendous," saying he couldn't talk about the case with his board members, wife or staff, but said that his stand was part of a time-honored tradition of librarians protecting the rights of their patrons.

Click to read more...

Bilderberg attendee is not just a super-delegate...he's mega-delegate!

Sen. John Edwards' fantastic "performance" at the super-secret Bilderberg meeting in Italy may have been a key reason for his selection as John Kerry's vice presidential running mate back in 2004.

John Edwards is a member of the elite of the elite, not merely one of the 795 super-delegates who could decide the outcome of this race, but a mega-delegate who could shape the views of the others.

Why is it that a member of Bilderberg gets to decide the Democratic nominee? Bilderberg works incessantly to usurp power from the American people using stealth techniques and nefarious strategies. How many other super-delegates or mega-delegates are Bilderberg members?

In a contest that cries out for a big name such as his to tip the balance in the direction of one candidate or another, Mr Edwards has remained quietly on the sidelines.

The Democratic party leadership on Capitol Hill — Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader — have been similarly stubborn in their neutrality.

You'll note that the Republicans, who are supposed to be ideological elitists, don't really have "super-delegates" just a few Republican National Committee members who are automatically given delegate status (and the GOPers have a much smaller National Committee than the Dems).

The Democrats, on the other hand, who are supposed to be small-d democrats ideologically and are committed to egalitarianism in rhetoric if not in principle, have a frankly hierarchical delegate-selection process, with the "supers" erected as a bulwark to prevent any kind of populist takeover by the grassroots. The whole process was conceived as a scheme to derail just such a candidate as Obama, and it looks like it just might work like a charm.

Get the riot gear ready!

Amnesty International: Routine Killings of Civilians in Somalia by Ethiopians

Editor's Note: Is Ethiopia being used by the Bush Administration to fight the New World Order's phony terror war on Muslims? The U.S. has quietly poured weapons and military advisers into Ethiopia!

The dire human rights and humanitarian crisis facing the people of Somalia has been revealed in a groundbreaking new Amnesty International report.

First-hand testimony from scores of traumatized survivors of the conflict is included in the report, which exposes the violations and abuses they have suffered at the hands of a complex mix of perpetrators.

These include Ethiopian and Transitional Federal Government (TFG) troops on the one hand, as well as armed groups on the other. For many civilians, there is nowhere to go to escape the violence.

“The people of Somalia are being killed, raped, tortured; looting is widespread and entire neighbourhoods are being destroyed,” said Michelle Kagari, Deputy Director of Amnesty International's Africa Program.

Witnesses told Amnesty International of an increasing incidence of what it locally termed as “slaughtering” or “killing like goats” by Ethiopian troops, referring to killing by slitting the throat. The victims of these killings are often left lying in pools of blood in the streets until armed fighters, including snipers, move out of the area and relatives can collect their bodies.

“The testimony we received strongly suggests that war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity have been committed by all parties to the conflict in Somalia – and no one is being held accountable,” said Michelle Kagari.

Click to read more ...

A Human Rights Crime in Gaza!

By Jimmy Carter

The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world by sea, air, or land. An entire population is being brutally punished.

This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.

Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank are now imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional ten who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.

Regardless of one’s choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic sanctions and restrictions in delivering water, food, electricity, and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees.

Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the encapsulated area, causing high casualties among both militants and innocent women and children. Prior to the highly publicized killing of a woman and her four little children last week, this pattern was illustrated by a previous report from B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organization: 106 Palestinians were killed between February 27 and March 3. Fifty-four of them were civilians who didn't take part in the fighting, and 25 were under 18 years of age.

Click to read more ...

DoD says: Army Running Out of Payroll Cash

In an announcement that puts troops and their families in the middle of a political dispute, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday that the Army will not be able to pay soldiers after June 15 unless Congress approves an emergency war funding bill.

The claim drew a quick rebuke from Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, who is working on such a bill.

Murtha said there is no threat to military paychecks and that it is inappropriate for the Pentagon to try to involve soldiers and their families in a political dispute over how much money is needed to pay for ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and exactly when the money is needed.

However, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was very clear in a meeting with reporters.

“June 15th is the last payroll the Army at this point can make without congressional action,” he said.

Morrell said the Pentagon has “for months” been funding the wars by borrowing from personnel budget accounts. But those accounts “are about to run dry,” he said.

Morrell also said Army payroll accounts “are just running dry faster” and that if Congress does not act by May 26, “we will have to come back to them and ask them for permission to reprogram money so that we can take money from some of the other services — the Navy, the Air Force — and use those payroll dollars to pay the Army.”

Click to read more ...

'03 White House E-Mails Not Found

White House e-mails from a three-month time period in 2003, according to court documents filed this week, raising the possibility that messages sent before and after the invasion of Iraq may never be recovered.

The White House chief information officer, Theresa Payton, said in a sworn declaration that the White House has identified more than 400 computer backup tapes from March through September of 2003 but that the earliest recorded file was dated May 23 of that year.

That period was one of the most crucial of the Bush presidency. The United States launched the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, and President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1.

Payton and other officials said that older e-mails could still be contained on the tapes because of the way the files are dated.

The administration also said it is still searching computer archives for e-mails that have been filed in the wrong "digital drawer." In addition, Payton and other officials have said that any e-mails missing from the White House archiving system might still be available on disaster recovery tapes.

But that did not satisfy an advocacy group suing the administration for e-mail records.

"We're talking about the White House, and documentation of our history that may be lost," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Administration officials had acknowledged last year that thousands of e-mails might be missing from White House servers, but the administration has shifted course in recent months to arguing there is still no clear evidence of a problem. A White House spokesman declined to comment yesterday.

Click to read more ...