The Energy Department spent $330 million in taxpayer money to reimburse its private contractors for legal bills over a 51/2-year span, including for lawsuits they lost and settlements of sexual harassment and whistleblower allegations, congressional investigators reported Monday.

Two months later, the FBI cleared Benatta of any connection to terrorists. But Benatta was never told that he had been cleared, and he remained in solitary confinement without legal representation for five more months.
"One thing we need to find out is, how many more Mr. Benattas are there in custody?" said Elisa Massimino of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "How many people have, either intentionally or not, been slipped through the cracks and are being held without charge and without access to counsel?"

Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for 'lending' their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed.
These papers endorsing certain drugs are paraded in front of GPs as independent research to persuade them to prescribe the drugs.
'Medical writing agencies go to great lengths to disguise the fact that the papers they ghostwrite and submit to journals and conferences are ghostwritten on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and not by the named authors,' she wrote. 'There is a relatively high success rate for ghostwritten submissions — not outstanding, but consistent.'
'They are no more than infomercials paid for by drug firms.'

"The source said Saddam neither prayed not read the Qur’an, it added."

The Bushies apparently thought it would be clever revenge to reveal that Plame had helped Wilson to get this assignment. (What kind of man lets his wife send him out for uranium?)

American Christian missionaries have declared a "war for souls" in Iraq, telling supporters that the formal end of the US-led occupation next June will close an historic "window of opportunity".
Jerry Vines, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention, has described the Prophet Mohammed as a "demon-obsessed paedophile". Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and the head of Samaritan's Purse, a big donor to Iraq, has described Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion".
The US Agency for International Development has said that the government cannot rein in private charities. "Imagine what the US Congress would say to us," said a spokesman in April.
In Baghdad last month Mr Hanna met two other American missionary teams. One, from Indiana, had shipped in 1.3 million Christian tracts. "A US passport is all you need to get in, until the new Iraqi government takes over. What we thought was a two-year window, originally, has narrowed down to a six month window," said Mr Hanna, an evangelical minister and editor of Connection Magazine, a Christian newspaper in Ohio.
He describes Islam as "false". He cited St John's Gospel, saying: "Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist." Mr Hanna concluded: "The Muslim religion is an antichrist religion."

The prime contractor in that now-notorious contract is Kellogg Brown & Root, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Halliburton. KBR, in turn, has subcontracted work to two other wholly-owned Halliburton subsidiaries, Halliburton Energy Services and Landmark Graphics. So, according to the expert, Halliburton Energy Services and Landmark Graphics can conceivably charge up to the top rate from their price book and KBR can mark that up an additional 3-5%.

Seven international flights have now been canceled since last Saturday after the Bush administration began an aggressive approach to defending American airspace when the nation was put on orange or "high" alert on Dec. 21. Administration officials said no arrests had been made in connection with any of the more than a dozen international flights subjected to rigorous scrutiny. And officials have acknowledged that even now, they are uncertain whether they have succeeded in foiling a terrorist plot.

In another indication of the turmoil resulting from the increased security measures, an American official said that the cancellation of the British Airways flights was not in response to United States safety concerns, but rather was prompted by the refusal of British pilots to fly with armed marshals on board.

In addition to the flight cancellations, foreign airliners have been escorted into American airspace by F-16 military fighters, and a Mexican flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles was turned around in mid-air.
(mred - why is this still in the story? dont we now know that it didnt happen?)

President Bush had one threshold question for Tom Ridge, his secretary for homeland security, as they met at the White House situation room on Dec. 22. "Would you let your son or daughter fly on that plane?" he asked Mr. Ridge, according to a senior administration official privy to the conversation. "Absolutely not," the secretary responded. "Well," Mr. Bush said, "neither would I."

The holiday period was also a time of particular concern, in part because Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe bomber," had tried to detonate an explosive on a flight from Paris to Miami on Dec. 22, 2001.

Daniel Benjamin, a former counterterrorism specialist with the National Security Council, said he spoke with officials who "thought the orange alert was easily justified based on the available intelligence, and one person could even have imagined it going higher" to a red alert, which has never happened under the current threat system.

At a White House press conference last month, the president ruled out any "blanket amnesty," a policy favored by many in Mexico, the homeland of almost half of the illegal immigrants now hiding in this country. But there are hints that Mr. Bush wants a system that would give illegal immigrants who work an opportunity to get in line for legal status.