"After being shot at, I felt very threatened and swore to the man that I was an American and that I was on his side," Somodevilla said. "Yeah, John Walker [Lindh, the so-called American Taliban] made a lot of promises too," the American interrogator snapped back. "What have you done for your country?"

times: Despite Iraq and higher taxes, meddlesome regulation and gridlocked transport, failing schools and street crime, feuding with Chancellor Gordon Brown and all the other things so obviously wrong with Britain today, Blair remains the most popular prime minister in the history of modern opinion polling.

Silver is shaping up as the new safe haven for investors, hitting close to a 5 1/2-year high in spite of concerns that its main market is declining.
Silver, while never having the glamour of gold, has appealed to some investors – most notably, Warren Buffet – because, unlike gold, it also has a range of industrial uses.

Nevertheless, their key role in the Libyan program is embarrassing for General Musharraf and strengthen demands from US hawks for a firmer line on Pakistan. "We should get tougher," Pentagon defence policy board member Kenneth Adelman said.

They said the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, would control the rising cost of housing vouchers for the poor, require some veterans to pay more for health care, slow the growth in spending on biomedical research and merge or eliminate some job training and employment programs. The moves are intended to trim the programs without damaging any essential services, the administration said.
Administration officials said they expected Mr. Bush to seek increases of $1 billion, or 10 percent, for the education of children with disabilities and $1 billion, or 8 percent, in Title I grants for schools with high concentrations of students from low-income families.
The budget also seeks money to train more nurses, to encourage sexual abstinence among teenagers and to recruit "volunteers in homeland security," who can respond to emergencies, including terrorist attacks.

Pakistan — and those it empowered with knowledge and technology they are now selling on their own — has emerged as the intellectual and trading hub of a loose network of hidden nuclear proliferators.

It became evident that Yee's arrest was part of a broader crackdown at Guantánamo when the military announced that it had previously arrested Airman al-Halabi, also on suspicion of espionage. Airman al- Halabi had not only dined with Captain Yee, once alone, but was a volunteer aide in the chapel, a spare wooden building outside the prison facility. The airman is from Syria.
The military also dropped a charge that Airman al-Halabi had, without authorization, given pieces of baklava to some detainees.
For his part, Captain Yee was placed in solitary confinement in a naval brig for 76 days, much of the time in leg irons and manacles. One of his lawyers, Eugene R. Fidell, said that Captain Yee's jailers would not tell him the time of day or the direction of the compass points to help him pray to Mecca for most of that time.
Army officials said there had been about 60 cases of adultery prosecuted in the last two years, always as part of some larger set of criminal charges, like rape.


However, there was a separate security scare in the US capital yesterday when local police reported a "a possible hazardous substance" in the Capitol building. It was evacuated but the incident proved to be a false alarm.

As a result, terrorists are free to act at will on a worldwide basis while the U.S. searches for a way out of the Iraqi morass and while most of the rest of the world watches from the sidelines.

I found something that connected the dots in a press release about a Stanford study on antidepressant side effects. The researchers had identified a genetic marker that explained why some people couldn't tolerate specific medications. I suspected that I was one of those people.

These are the stakes in the Jose Padilla case, and we can say without any fear of exaggeration that it may be the most important case in the history of the American judicial system. Nothing else even comes close.
President Bush's rationale for this draconian action was summarized in his pronouncement concerning Padilla, "He's a bad guy".

he is sworn to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States". He has no higher duty.
The Padilla affair is a test case. Obviously, Padilla is no great threat to the general public and could be as easily processed through the criminal courts as dumped in a Navy brig. The real purpose of his detention is to create the precedent for dispatching dissidents or potential enemies of the state when things begin to deteriorate, or when they decide to "ramp-up" for other unpopular conflicts.

Many simply cannot face the grim fact that we may be seeing the end to our form of government. It is all happening so quickly and quietly. Unfortunately, history demonstrates that democracy is the exception rather than the rule.

We should not expect the Bush Administration to give up on the Padilla case because of an unfavorable ruling in court. That simply won't happen. As New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has noted, we are dealing with people "who do not accept the legitimacy of our system". They will not be dissuaded.
Everything we know of the Bush Administration so far suggests that they will not be limited by International law, congressional oversight or the Constitution. Why would they reverse themselves now when so much is at stake?

History outdistances the frameworks we impose on it to render it intelligible.

Who are the Samaritans of today that we should love as ourselves? I'll bet they are the good people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea. I'll bet they are people of the Muslim faith, or people of no faith at all.

If our nascent international justice system wanted to prove its evenhandedness, the next great media war crimes trial would take place in Washington, with the top officials and editors of the leading U.S. news organizations escorted into the dock.
The precedent was set in Rwanda when two former Rwandan media officials - a radio executive and a newspaper editor were jailed for life and a third defendant, an executive with a radio station, received a 35-year prison term after the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found them guilty of genocide, incitement to genocide and crimes against humanity within their own country.

When it comes to rampant hypocrisy, it doesn't get much worse than the Bush Administration's recent sell-out of the people of Taiwan. the country is hands down among the freest in Asia, if not the freest.

From now until next November, we can expect to have a series of dramatically named military actions in Iraq--and occasionally in Afghanistan perhaps--which will each be described as striking a "crippling blow" against the enemy (how many times can you cripple someone?).

a series of heightened domestic alerts, perhaps culminating in a top-level red alert just before Election Day, a move which would allow the government to set up M-16-toting National Guard soldiers at voting booths--a wonderful way to remind the electorate to vote Republican.

What freedoms do they hate? Freedom of speech? Have they not proven to the world that they can speak their mind whenever they wish? Freedom of movement? Have they not freely moved throughout the world? Freedom of assembly? Do they not meet when and where they desire, in whatever country they desire? Freedom of religion? Have they not practiced their religion wherever they assemble, in whatever country they live? How then do they hate our freedoms? Is the answer so simple that they desire to prevent Americans from having the freedoms they enjoy so readily? What does that accomplish but to prevent them from freely moving within the United States as they become victims of their own ends?