Discovery of the items last week aboard Southwest planes that landed in New Orleans and Houston triggered stepped-up inspections of the entire US commercial air fleet - roughly 7000 planes. But after consulting with the FBI, the TSA rescinded the inspection order. No other suspicious bags were found in the inspection.
A US college student told federal authorities he placed box cutters and other banned items aboard two Southwest Airlines planes nearly five weeks before they were found.

CIA analysts have concluded it was likely al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden made an audiotape that aired Saturday threatening suicide attacks against the United States and its allies, including Australia, to avenge the occupation of Iraq, a CIA official said today. "We assess the voice was likely that of Osama bin Laden," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
mr ed wtf??????????



Mr Goh said his own view was that Australians could not be regarded as "indigenous Asians".
"Over time, when there's more Asians going to Australia and the population tips 50 per cent non-whites, and the rest white, they are immediately regarded as Asian," he said.


Princess Diana wrote months before her death that she feared someone was planning to harm her in a staged car accident, a newspaper reported Monday.
A forthcoming book by Diana's one-time butler, excerpted Monday in The Daily Mirror newspaper, quoted the princess as writing that "this particular phase in my life is the most dangerous."
She reportedly wrote to Paul Burrell that someone was planning "an accident in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry."


the First Father, former President George H.W. Bush, has given his own most treasured award to Senator Edward Kennedy -- is nearly as astonishing.
When it was announced (with amazingly little fanfare) that the pugnaciously anti-Iraq war Democrat Kennedy had been awarded the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service, so many jaws dropped all over Washington that usually voluble politicians were only heard swallowing their real thoughts.

White men are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action this country has ever seen

The entire nation owes radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh a debt of gratitude, Libertarians say, because his ordeal has exposed every drug warrior in America as a rank hypocrite.
"One thing we don't hear from American politicians very often is silence," said Joe Seehusen, Libertarian Party executive director. "By refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh, every drug warrior has just been exposed as a shameless, despicable hypocrite.
"Republican and Democratic politicians have written laws that have condemned more than 400,000 Americans to prison for committing the same 'crime' as Rush Limbaugh," Seehusen pointed out. "If this pill-popping pontificator deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card, these drug warriors had better explain why."

Why aren't federal DEA agents storming Limbaugh's $30 million Florida mansion in a frantic search for criminal evidence? Why haven't federal, state, and local police agencies seized the celebrity's homes and luxury cars under asset-forfeiture laws?


BBC reporter Mark Daly, 28, who managed to obtain a job as a police constable, secretly filmed the alleged Ku Klux Klan incident in his room at the Bruche National Police Training Centre near Warrington, Cheshire, which trains newly-recruited officers from forces across the country.
The recruit wearing the mask says about the Asian officer: "I haven’t even f****** started with him yet. He’ll regret the day he was born a Paki." Asked by Daly to explain his ultimate aim, the recruit adds: "To eradicate the whole f****** country of people like him."
Another officer talked about murdering the Asian man, saying: "I’d kill him. I’d pull my f****** hood on my head and chase him down the road."

"We didn't expect to live. Nobody out there with any brains expected to live. The way to live is to kill because you don't have to worry about anybody who's dead," William Doyle, a former Tiger Force sergeant now living in Missouri, told the newspaper.

"Abu Zubaydah supposedly claimed that Pakistani air force chief Mushaf Ali Mir made a deal with bin Laden in 1996 to support al Qaeda, and that this deal had the blessing of the Saudis, and in particular four Saudi princes: Prince Ahmad bin Salman, Prince Sultan al-Saud, Prince Fahd al-Kabir, and Prince Turki bin Faisal. To back up the claim, Posner cites the fact that the results of the interrogation were conveyed to the Saudis a month after the interrogation, and, shortly after the issue was raised, Prince Ahmed, Prince Sultan and Prince Fahd all died within a few days of one another."
There is currently a tremendous neocon propaganda campaign going on against the leaders of Saudi Arabia. The Posner story just appears to be another aspect of it. It is unclear whether Posner is part of the propaganda war or has just been taken in by the neocons. As I've said before, the neocons are insane
Unless the neocons are stopped, any idiot can see that this is going to lead to complete disaster (a very large multiple of the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq).
The propaganda campaign has been so successful, the neocons even have Michael Moore parroting it. The main trick was to leave the Saudi matters out of the published 9-11 report, so people could think the worst of the Saudis, and then slyly make people believe that it was left out because Bush was protecting his Saudi business friends. A brilliant strategy! All of this propaganda works only because Americans are still afraid to admit who was really behind 9-11. A hint: the Saudis don't run NORAD.

"In 1989, when I was tortured, approximately 80 governments were engaged in torture; today there are more than 150 governments. Torture, whether we like it or not, is the plague of the 21st century and it is not going to go away," Ortiz told a group of Chicagoans on Thursday night. "Torture is a form of terrorism."

WASHINGTON -- The Saudi government has been paying for lawyers, and in some cases for bond, for hundreds of its citizens who have been detained, prosecuted, or questioned inside the United States during the crackdown on terrorism. The FBI openly calls the practice tantamount to "buying off" witnesses.

The White House made it clear this week it would not willingly accept significant changes to the original request. A formal statement of administration policy expressed strong opposition to including new health benefits for National Guard personnel and reservists. The Senate added them anyway.
"I believe in this president. I believe in this military," Stevens said during the closing minutes of Senate debate. "Those who vote against this bill will be voting against supporting our men and women in the field. They're still in harm's way."
Standing just a few feet away, the Appropriations committee's top Democrat, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, fired back.
"I defy that statement and I hurl it back into the teeth of the senator from Alaska," Byrd said.


Enzi noted that Cheney has put his assets in a blind trust, which means that he has handed over the day-to-day management of them to someone else. He also noted that Cheney has promised to donate after-tax proceeds from the exercise of his Halliburton stock options to the Capital Partners for Education, the George Washington University Medical Facility Associates and the University of Wyoming.


People of "respectability and high social status," Sutherland asserted, broke laws as often as members of the lower classes, but the government, media and public didn't think of them as criminals. Until scholars accepted that affluent and reputable people also steal, Sutherland argued, they would never truly understand the criminal mind.
two cases being decided in a Georgia court ended so differently. In one case, an embezzler had stolen $4.6 million from a bank. In the other, three men had robbed a bank of about $14,000. The embezzler was sentenced to 10 years in jail; the robbers received 16 years each.

Wherever there's good news, there is Caraccilo, a one-man harbinger of hope. If the story of the Iraqi invasion is a narrative of liberation and steady success, then he is its central hero
The quick disavowal by the Pentagon to the contrary notwithstanding, it is hard to believe that he plays this role free-lance.

The ranch in British Columbia is gone. So is the company jet, the hundred-million-dollar credit line, and the 118-foot yacht archly dubbed Aquasition, with its oversize main salon and exercise room. Bernard J. Ebbers
What is emerging from those probes is a portrait of corporate corruption and boardroom incompetence far exceeding the first headline-grabbing disclosures of accounting fraud at WorldCom little more than a year ago.
When an employee pointed out a large discrepancy in WorldCom's financial reports, general accounting manager Buford Yates Jr. allegedly said, "Show those numbers to the damn auditors and I will throw you out the [expletive] window."
Unlike the complex machinations at Enron, where executives relied on abstruse business partnerships to hide the company's growing liabilities, WorldCom executives simply deleted hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses, or mischaracterized other expenses as capital costs, according to investigators.
"WorldCom was really not that complicated; they just lied," says Barbara Roper
Thornburgh was particularly critical of Stiles A. Kellett Jr., chairman of the board's compensation committee, for approving loans totaling more than $50 million from the company to Ebbers at the time Ebbers agreed to lease a company Falcon 2OF-5 twin-engine jet to Kellett at below-market rates.

An elite unit of American soldiers mutilated and killed hundreds of unarmed villagers over seven months in 1967 during the Vietnam War, and an Army investigation was closed with no charges filed

To Bolivians marching in the streets, "free" trade of natural gas or other resources from their impoverished country to California is just another name for theft.

Pentagon hard-liners pressing for change of government in Iran have held secret, unauthorised meetings in Paris with an arms dealer who was a main figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.
The senior official and another Administration source said the ultimate objective of Mr Feith and a group of neo-conservative civilians inside the Pentagon is change of government in Iran.