Politicians Race to Avoid All-Out War Between Feuding Shiite Factions

The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki backed off its ultimatum to the Mahdi Army militia of fiery Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Friday, giving the group's members 10 more days to lay down their weapons in return for amnesty and financial rewards.

The move comes as US forces began launching airstrikes in both Baghdad and the southern oil port of Basra, joining Iraqi forces in their recent effort to cripple Mr. Sadr's militia, which the Pentagon accuses of links to Iran.

The softening of Mr. Maliki's position comes after what started on Tuesday as an operation limited to Basra but quickly escalated into a confrontation with Mr. Sadr's powerful and well-armed militia in Baghdad and most of the predominantly Shiite southern cities. Iraq's Parliament held an emergency session Friday and set up a committee to mediate an end to the deadly clashes that now risk drawing US forces to the government's side in an all-out war that would shatter some of the security gains achieved in recent months.

Maliki's concession also follows a late night meeting on Thursday in Baghdad by Shiite politicians trying to broker a solution to the crisis. Former deputy prime minister Ahmad Chalabi and former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari met members of Parliament from Sadr's political wing, who have labeled Maliki the "new dictator" and call for his resignation. Notably absent from this meeting were senior politicians from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) party and its affiliates, which are strongly backing the Maliki-led offensive against its archrival Sadr's armed wing.

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Pulitzer Prize Winner Hersh: 'U.S. In Real Trouble in Iraq'

When the American government says the US is winning in Iraq and is not torturing prisoners, they are just words, Hersh told his audience of journalism students in Regina, Canada. "We are in real trouble [in Iraq]."

Pointing to the changes reporting has undergone since the Vietnam War, the award-winning journalist explained that reporters are now imbedded with troops who cloud their judgment and therefore do not touch the same kind of issues.

"It has led to a lot of lousy reporting," continued Hersh. "I don't think it is bad for a journalist to come back (from covering a war) and say it s***s."

Hersh said media outlets spread 'fake' news and suggested his audience resort to translations of local media sources when learning about issues concerning the Middle East.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Myron Hersh first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War.

Call For New 9/11 Investigation Reaches Crescendo

By Paul J. Watson / Prison Planet

Calls for a new 9/11 inquiry are reaching a crescendo, with well-respected authorities and celebrities alike adding their voices to the cause, as the official 9/11 story crumbles under the weight of revelations of White House ties to the 9/11 Commission, and other cover-ups on behalf of authorities staffed with investigating the attacks.

The corporate media's insistence on ignoring hundreds of professional experts who are calling for a new 9/11 investigation has spurred many celebrities to use their public platforms to speak out, knowing that the press will at least have to address the issue.

The latest to do so is top comedian Margaret Cho, who told the Alex Jones Show yesterday that the public were going to become very angry when it was fully disclosed that the attacks were a conspiracy, concurring with fellow comedian George Carlin who also questioned the official story last year.

The path was trailblazed by Charlie Sheen in March 2006 when he spoke of his doubts about the official story and questioned the collapse of WTC Building 7. Sheen was endlessly smeared for weeks after but he prompted a national debate about 9/11 and the 9/11 Truth Movement enjoyed what many consider to be its most productive year.

In September 2006, former Governor, actor and wrestling star Jesse Ventura questioned 9/11 during an on-camera interview with Alex Jones and also cited Operation Northwoods and the Gulf of Tonkin as examples of how the government has planned and carried out staged war provocations in the past.

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GMO & Morgellons Disease: GM Plants Causing a New Human Disease?

By Barbara H. Peterson / Global Research

Since the Clinton administration made biotechnology "a strategic priority for U.S. government" (1) , giant transnational agri-business concerns have aggressively taken over the global food chain by flooding it with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) without regard for the consequences to the earth or its inhabitants. This takeover not only has the potential for global economic devastation, but threatens the earth’s population with far-reaching health concerns as well. One health concern that seems to coincide with the GMO revolution is Morgellons disease. What if the advent of Morgellons disease has something to do with the ingestion of GMO foods?

Little information has been revealed concerning the long-term health effects of GMO crops on humans or animals, and even less information can be had regarding research correlating Morgellons with GMO foods. This is suspicious right off the bat, because it would seem that there would be a natural curiosity regarding a link between Genetically Modified Organisms that people ingest regularly and inorganic fibers that protrude from a person’s skin. This would be right up a geneticist’s alley, and quite worthy of intensive research. So, why aren’t there a ton of published studies? Why is it so difficult finding anything related to this? Could it be that companies such as Monsanto have enough clout to effectively squash these stories?

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Tapes’ Destruction Hovers Over Detainee Cases

When officers from the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting harsh interrogations in 2005, they may have believed they were freeing the government and themselves from potentially serious legal trouble.

But nearly four months after the disclosure that the tapes were destroyed, the list of legal entanglements for the C.I.A., the Defense Department and other agencies is only growing longer. In addition to criminal and Congressional investigations of the tapes’ destruction, the government is fighting off challenges in several major terrorism cases and a raft of prisoners’ legal claims that it may have destroyed evidence.

“They thought they were saving themselves from legal scrutiny, as well as possible danger from Al Qaeda if the tapes became public,” said Frederick P. Hitz, a former C.I.A. officer and the agency’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, speaking of agency officials who favored eliminating the tapes. “Unknowingly, perhaps, they may have created even more problems for themselves.”

In a suit brought by Hani Abdullah, a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal judge has raised the possibility that, by destroying the tapes, the C.I.A. violated a court order to preserve all evidence relevant to the prisoner. In at least 12 other lawsuits, lawyers for prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere have filed legal challenges citing the C.I.A. tapes’ destruction, said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer representing 16 prisoners.

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MoD Admits Troops Abused Iraqi Prisoners

By Luke Baker / Reuters

The Ministry of Defense will admit on Friday that British troops tortured and breached the human rights of nine Iraqi men they detained in southern Iraq in 2003, opening the way to potentially large compensation claims.

The decision follows years of legal wrangling in which the family of Baha Musa, an Iraqi hotel worker who was beaten and died in British custody, and eight other Iraqis who survived the beatings, have sought justice.

The ministry, which will make the admission in the High Court, said on Thursday it was doing so to try to smooth the process of paying compensation to Musa's family and the eight other Iraqis and end lengthy court proceedings.

The case was one of the British military's darkest episodes in Iraq. All nine detainees suffered 36 hours of violent interrogation before Musa died with 93 injuries to his body, including a broken nose and ribs.

"I deeply regret the actions of a very small number of troops and I offer my sincere apologies and sympathy to the family of Baha Musa and the eight others," armed forces minister Bob Ainsworth said in a statement issued along with the ministry's admission of its breach of human rights.

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Husband & Wife Deployed To Iraq Leaving 1-Year-Old For Year

A U.S. Army married couple in Florida being deployed together to serve their country will have to be away from their 1-year-old son for a year. Yvette and William Sims will soon be heading to Iraq as members of the Army Reserve's 345th combat-support hospital. While that means they'll be together overseas, it also means the couple only has a few more play dates with their 1-year-old son, Connor.

"It's going to be heartbreaking to leave him," Yvette Sims said. "We're going over there, of course, to support the mission over there and to take care of soldiers."

The Sims have been deployed in the past, but have never gone together. The Sims said Connor will celebrate his second birthday with other family members, but his greatest present won't come until this time next year when his parents return home just in time for his third birthday. "I'm just hoping that he's proud of us and what we've done," Sims said.

Source: http://www.local6.com/news/15729725/detail.html

Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice

In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush and his top advisors declared that the struggle against terrorism would be nothing less than a war–a new kind of war that would require new tactics, new tools, and a new mind-set. Bush’s Law is the unprecedented account of how the Bush administration employed its “war on terror” to mask the most radical remaking of American justice in generations.

On orders from the highest levels of the administration, counterterrorism officials at the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA were asked to play roles they had never played before. But with that unprecedented power, administration officials butted up against–or disregarded altogether–the legal restrictions meant to safeguard Americans’ rights, as they gave legal sanction to covert programs and secret interrogation tactics, a swept up thousands of suspects in the drift net.

Eric Lichtblau, who has covered the Justice Department and national security issues for the duration of the Bush administration, details not only the development of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program–initiated by the vice president’s office in the weeks after 9/11–but also the intense pressure that the White House brought to bear on The New York Times to thwart his story on the program.

Bush’s Law is an investigative report on the hidden internal struggles over secret programs and policies that tore at the constitutional fabric of the country and, ultimately, brought down an attorney general.

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Eric Lichtblau received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, for his stories on the NSA's wiretapping program. He has worked in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, covering the Justice Department, since 2002. From 1999 to 2002 he covered the Justice Department for the Los Angeles Times. He is a graduate of Cornell University and lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

FBI's $500 Million Wiretap Retrofitting Fund Empty

The FBI has gone through nearly all of its $500 millon budget for making old telephone switches wiretap friendly, but an FBI survey showed that nearly 40 percent of the nation's switches still aren't up to federal wiretapping standards, according to a new report from the Justice Department's inspector general.

A 1994 law known as the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act or CALEA requires all telephone switches installed after 1995 to comply with detailed wiretapping rules, and Congress set aside a half billion dollars for the FBI to dole out to help carriers make older landline switches compliant.

Cell phone switches, however, are all compliant and nearly all FBI surveillance targets cell phones and pagers. In 2005, the feds got some 1800 criminal wiretap court orders, along with nearly 2,200 court orders for anti-terrorism and foreign intelligence wiretaps.

According to a redacted report (.pdf) from the DOJ's Inspector General, the FBI has only a little more than $5000 left in dedicated CALEA funds, which mostly went towards paying switch manufacturers to write wiretapping software and issue licenses to use that software for older switches.

The audit says it is not possible to tell if the money was well-spent, since neither the telecoms nor the switch makers are keen on sharing information.

Though the FBI has a well-earned reputation for bungling large technology projects, the FBI successfully built a sprawling surveillance network that taps into key telecom facilities around the country.

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New Hampshire Joins Montana in Real ID Victory

Détente has arrived in the fight between independence-minded states and a federal bureaucracy keen to claim a unanimous victory in its drive to create a de facto national identity database.

The key? The renegade states send a nice letter that is not a request for an extension of a looming deadline but touts the security of their driver's licenses, which the Department of Homeland Security accepts as an official extension request. That lets DHS save face, even as it backs down from repeated threats to punish the citizens of rogue states.

On Thursday, New Hampshire became the second of the four holdout states to get an unasked-for extension, following the path blazed by Montana's feisty Democratic governor Brian Schweitzer last Friday. Schweitzer told Threat Level he sent DHS "a horse, and if they want to call it a zebra, that's up to them."

The legislators in the Live Free or Die state, like those in Montana, banned the state from complying with the Real ID mandates, citing state's rights, the inequity of unfunded federal mandates, and privacy issues. Under the rules, almost all license holders will have to return to the DMV with notarized "breeder documents" like birth and marriage certificates, and states will have to interlink their databases of digital photos and personal information. Citizens of states that opt out can't use their licenses for federal purposes, such as entering airport screening lines or going to a Social Security office.

DHS says the new licenses will prevent terrorism and identity theft, and Secretary Michael Chertoff says it's one of his top priorities in his last nine months in office.

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Was polonium-210 being smuggled for a dirty bomb?

By Paul Craig Roberts

In the recently published thriller, The Shell Game, Steve Alten weaves a tale of a neoconservative plot to attack Iran. To overcome resistance, a black op group associated with a Republican administration arranges for nuclear devices to be exploded in two American cities, with planted evidence pointing to Iran.

Recent developments make one wonder if fact is following fantasy.

The Bush regime’s propaganda against Iran is going full blast and obviously has a purpose. The foreign press reports that the reason for Cheney’s latest trip abroad is to cajole, threaten, and purchase support for a US attack on Iran.

The Israeli government continues to see an Iranian nuclear weapon on the horizon and to agitate for US action against Iran.

According to John McGlynn in Japan Focus(March 22, 2008), the Bush regime is already attacking Iran with Treasury Department actions to cut off Iran’s banking system from all international banking relationships, thereby preventing Iran from importing and exporting. McGlynn calls the US Treasury’s action a "US declaration of war on Iran."

Cheney’s trip shows that the Bush regime is undeterred by the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion that Iran abandoned several years ago any nuclear weapons program that it might have had. The International Atomic Energy Agency has never found evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Despite all the facts and without evidence, the Bush Regime continues to assert that Iran has a nuclear weapons program that warrants an American attack on Iran.

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Will Kosovo be turned over to the Pentagon?

Predictions made by experts before Kosovo's illegal declaration of independence are coming true - the territory seized from Serbia is turning into a big military base of the United States and NATO.

Thus, George W. Bush ordered arms shipments to Kosovo. Because of this, Moscow insisted on an emergency session of the NATO-Russia Council - it will be held in Brussels on March 28.

Incidentally, Bush issued this order two days after the Moscow visit of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who urged Moscow to promote cooperation, expand consultations, and display more openness in general.

The haste with which the Pentagon is trying to take the fledgling Kosovo under its wing demonstrates the West's lack of confidence that peace will come to the Balkans after Kosovo's cessation. But the West was actively using this rhetoric - the need to put an end to the Yugoslav crisis - in order to justify its support for the Kosovo separatists. There can be no peace when one side is being equipped with weapons against the other. This means pouring more fuel on the fire...

The Serbs have already got the message. In the city of Kosovska Mitrovica (in northern Kosovo), they desperately rushed to defend their last shelter - a courthouse. Previously, it was the venue of Serbian justice, but now it is occupied by international lawyers who will turn it over to their Albanian colleagues. Blood was spilled there during clashes with peacekeepers. There are numerous rallies in Belgrade supporting the Serbian minority in Kosovo.

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Dozens Killed Spying for U.S. Government

Extremists in Pakistan's western tribal areas have killed dozens of people suspected of providing intelligence to the United States and its allies in recent months, according to local officials and tribal elders. The killings, some of them carried out in brutal fashion and videotaped as warnings to would-be spies, come as the U.S. government has escalated airstrikes in the region.

Officials and tribal elders say most of the victims have been Afghan refugees who can easily cross the porous border with Pakistan. Extremists have killed accused spies since the start of military operations against al-Qaeda fighters and their tribal supporters in 2001, but the recent deaths represent a marked increase in such cases.

"I don't know how much truth lies in these accusations against particular individuals. But looking at the increasing frequency of such incidents, we have also started thinking that the United States may be using Afghan refugees in this area as their informants for information about local as well as foreign militants," one official said on condition of anonymity.

The official added that the Afghans may be working for the Afghan government, outside U.S. command. But "that is considered to be like spying for the United States in this region," he said.

On Tuesday, local officials near Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan, found the body of an Afghan refugee, Abdullah Jan. Attached to the body was a note that warned, "Anyone working as an American spy will meet the same fate."

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Government Printing Office Profits Go to Bonuses and Trips

When the government's main printing agency booked $100 million in unexpected profit it went on a spending spree: large bonuses to top managers, trips to Paris and Las Vegas, and an official photo of the boss that cost $10,000.

The bonuses, some nearly as high as $13,000, and travel are raising questions among congressional investigators and Government Printing Office officials about whether the agency is misusing its newfound wealth and whether it received the proper authority for some of the larger compensation payments from the Office of Budget and Management.

Additionally, investigators are looking into whether Public Printer Robert C. Tapella paid close to $10,000 for photographs of himself for his office and during his swearing-in ceremony in November.

The spending comes as GPO recorded record profits of about $100 million over the past 16 months by selling blank passports produced by its printing and binding services to the State Department at more than twice the cost. The investigation also has raised security concerns about the use of overseas companies for components and assembly of the computerized electronic passports.

GPO spokesman Gary Somerset said the process for "goal-based performance" bonuses began five years ago and enables employees "to earn bonuses based on performance of the agency as a whole" as well as individual job performance.

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Did the Government Entrap the 9/11 Hijackers?

We've all seen it on television. The defense attorney argues his client was "entrapped". That is, that it wasn't the defendant's idea to commit the crime, but that the police planted the idea and urged him to do it.

Many of us have heard allegations that post-9/11 arrests of suspected Al Qaeda members were based on very thin information. Did you realize that all or virtually all of these arrests occurred due to entrapment? For example:

• PBS' Frontline ran a special report focusing on the the alleged Al Qaeda plot in Lodi, California, which showed -- based upon interviews with top law enforcement officials involved in the case -- that the bust amounted to little more than entrapment and coerced and fabricated confessions from two men who, in fact, had nothing to do with the terrorist group

• The Washington Post ran a story about one alleged threat entitled "Was it a terror sting or entrapment?", showing that the U.S. government lent material support to the wanna-be terrorists, and put violent ideas in their heads

• Raw Story reports that the alleged terrorist group that is alleged to have planned to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower was non-violent before a government informant infiltrated the group and planted violent ideas in their heads

• There are numerous other instances of entrapment of peaceful or mentally incompetent people who are then arrested as "terrorists" (see this, this and this)
  

But surely 9/11 was different, right?. Without doubt, the hijackers were bloodthirsty militant Muslims who, solely due to their crazy beliefs and dark hearts, decided to attack and kill Americans. Right?

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Basra Oil Pipe Ignited as Iraq Fighting Worsens

An attack on an Iraqi oil pipeline has crippled the country's main crude pumping terminals, as fighting between Shi'ite factions and the security forces engulfed the south and centre of the country.

A fire was reported on the Zubair-1 pipeline, the main revenue earner for the Iraqi state, near Basra. The attack effectively brought all exports through Iraq's southern terminals to a halt.

The police chief in the central city of Kut said 44 people died in clashes between followers of the powerful Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Iraqi military supported by US forces.

In Baghdad and across the country followers of Sadr staged mass demonstrations to denounce the government, which on Tuesday launched a military operation targeting militias in Basra.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have joined mass rallies in the Sadr City, Kadhimiya and Shula districts of Baghdad, an interior ministry source said.

"We demand the downfall of the [Nouri al-Maliki] government. It does not represent the people. It represents Bush and Cheney," said Hussein Abu Ali, a Sadr City resident.

Commanders of the Mahdi army, Sadr's militia, declared that they could withstand any assault the government and its US army allies could mount.

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Pentagon Holds Thousands of Americans 'Prisoners of War'

Sgt. Kristofer Shawn Goldsmith was one of the many soldiers and Marines, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, who gave testimony at last weekend's Winter Soldier investigation. They spoke from personal experience about what the American military is doing in those countries. They gave examples of what they had done, what they had been ordered to do, what they had witnessed, how their experiences had wounded them, both physically and psychically, and what kind of care and support they have, or most often have not gotten since coming home.

The panel Goldsmith was on was called "The Breakdown of the U.S. Military," so he surprised the audience when he said that he was going to talk about prisoners of war.

He was not, however, going to talk about the three soldiers listed as missing in action on the Department of Defense website. He was referring to those who have been the victims of stop-loss, the device by which the president can, "in the event of war," choose to extend an enlistee's contract "until six months after the war ends." The "War on Terror" is this president's excuse for invoking that clause. Because that war will, by definition, continue as long as we insist that there is a difference between the terror inflicted on our innocents and the terror inflicted on theirs, American soldiers are effectively signing away their freedom indefinitely when they join the military. They are prisoners of an ill-defined and undeclared war on a tactic -- terrorism -- that dates back to Biblical times and will be with us indefinitely.

According to U.S. News and World Report, there are at least 60,000 of them.

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Post 9/11 Air Safety Proposal: Shock-Bracelets Controlled by Flight Crew

Before you watch the YouTube clip, remember that on the 9/11 flights, there were no Arabic names on the flight manifests! Check for yourself! Flight 11, Flight 175, Flight 77, and Flight 93. I thought the government said the hijackers brought their tickets like everyone else. Why aren't their names on the manifests? How is it that some of the hijackers trained at SECURE U.S. military bases? It's unbelievable!!! Now, they're trying to use 9/11 to sell us on shock-bracelets! What if we decide not to fly or better yet, maybe we should fly out of this cage...never to return!!!

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US Treasury Plans Banking Reform

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has revealed his department is working on a "blueprint for regulatory reform" in an effort to avert further market turmoil in the wake of investment bank Bear Stearns' collapse.

"This latest episode has highlighted that the world has changed," he said. "These changes require us all to think more broadly about the regulatory and supervisory framework."

He said the move by the Federal Reserve to open its lending to securities firms on the same terms as regulated banks was appropriate, but as an emergency measure.

He warned: "Despite the fundamental changes in our financial system, it would be premature to jump to the conclusion that all broker-dealers or other potentially important financial firms in our system today should have permanent access to the Fed's liquidity facility. Recent market conditions are an exception to the norm."

Leaders of the US Senate Finance Committee yesterday asked Mr Paulson's department, the Federal Reserve, JP Morgan Chase and Bear Stearns for more details about JP Morgan's plan to buy Bear Stearns.

Democrat Max Baucus, chairman of the committee, said: "Economic times are tight on Main Street as well as on Wall Street, and we have a responsibility to all taxpayers to review the details of this deal."

With support from the Fed and the Treasury, Bear Stearns has agreed to be sold to JP Morgan for about $10 a share. As part of the deal, the Fed agreed to guarantee up to $29bn of Bear's assets.

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Was Bailout Illegal? Should Bankers Be Jailed?

Congress should conduct an investigation into the criminality of the Federal Reserve and Treasury's bailout of the vaporized speculative "investment" bank Bear Stearns on March 16.

The Emergency Banking Act, passed by Congress on March 9, 1933, provides for government assistance to protect vital banking functions. That assistance is restricted to commercial banks.

Chartered commercial banks make up a vital part of our overall economy, but brokerage houses and investment banks such as Bear Stearns are strictly part of the speculative apparatus that has looted the economy and the population blind. That the Fed stepped in to provide tens of billions of dollars, or more, to save Bear Stearns, is prima facie criminal.

Lyndon LaRouche charged on March 18 that the bailout represented a case of money laundering that should be prosecuted.

"It smells like another filthy Goldman Sachs scheme," LaRouche said. "I think it is time to increase the social status of our Federal prison population—by sending all those responsible for this abomination to jail.... These guys are cheating."

LaRouche added that the bailout scam "is an obstruction of our plan—the Homeowners and Bank Protection act and the three steps needed to survive," that he had identified in his March 12 webcast.

So far, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Senate Finance Committee are planning to investigate the actions of the Federal Reserve in providing the bailout of Bear Stearns, MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal reported on March 19.