Democrats took to the Senate floor to lambaste the Bush White House, which had fiercely condemned Clarke on Monday. "We are seeing abuses of power that cannot be tolerated. The president needs to put a stop to it right now. We need to get to the truth and the president needs to help us do that," Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - China has ordered its army on combat alert, ready to strike Taiwan if the island's election dispute intensifies, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post said on Monday.

The Pentagon reversed course Wednesday and told Congress it would look into whether an anti-malaria drug developed by the Army might be causing suicides, one month after asserting the drug could not be a factor.

The Pentagon is studying suicides in Iraq and Kuwait during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Winkenwerder said 21 Army soldiers from units assigned to the operation have committed suicide. Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. James B. Peake told the panel the Army is investigating another five deaths in Iraq as possible suicides, along with six deaths among soldiers in Iraq who returned to the United States and then killed themselves.

The Pentagon has said it does not count suicides among troops who served in Iraq but returned to the United States before killing themselves.

UPI reported that some soldiers involved in a string of murder-suicides at Fort Bragg, N.C., in the summer of 2002 had taken the drug in Afghanistan.

As the Defense Department's top lawyer, William Haynes II has been an architect of some of the Bush administration's most unenlightened policies. Now he has been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Va. His record makes him unworthy of this important judgeship.
The "enemy combatant" doctrine was developed on Mr. Haynes's watch, and it is one of the most dangerous legal developments in years.
Mr. Haynes also helped draft military tribunal rules that lack fundamental due-process guarantees and thus call into question the nation's commitment to the rule of law.
In his work, Mr. Haynes has shown a lack of concern for sensitive constitutional rights that he would be expected to safeguard from the bench. He has lashed out at members of the news media and law professors who "have vehemently, and sometimes shrilly, criticized our detention of enemy combatants." And he has blocked the Senate's investigation of his record.

Moving to censure Mr Howard, Mr Latham said the Prime Minister "did not want the truth out there publicly, so he attempted to muzzle and disparage" Mr Keelty. "This is a Government of control freaks that has gotten well and truly out of control," he said.

If the White House wants to know which foreign leaders support presidential candidate John Kerry, it should check with the CIA, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said yesterday.

Although the intelligence agency is prohibited from domestic spying, Mr. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, suggested that the CIA knows which countries support Mr. Kerry through surveillance at the U.N. building in New York.
"All we have to do is go down the list of members of the United Nations to find out where the support is. The CIA knows it. They work for the president. They can give him the names of all of those countries," Mr. Kennedy told "Meet the Press" in an interview yesterday.