WASHINGTON – In a surprise legal development, suspected “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla has been indicted on criminal charges in Miami and as a result will no longer be an “enemy combatant” in Pentagon custody, according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday.

Padilla was indicted on charges that he conspired to “murder, kidnap and maim” people overseas.

A federal grand jury in Miami added Padilla to a pre-existing indictment against four others. While the charges allege Padilla was part of a terrorism conspiracy, they do not include the government’s earlier allegations that he planned to target the United States by using a radioactive dirty bomb and blowing up apartment buildings using natural gas.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he expected Padilla to be alongside the other four when the case goes to trial next September.

“The indictment alleges that Padilla traveled overseas to train as a terrorist with the intention of fighting a violent jihad,” Gonzales said at a news conference in Washington. Gonzales declined to answer NBC News questions about why none of the allegations involving attacks in America were included in the indictment.

The others indicted earlier are: Adham Amin Hassoun, Mohammed Hesham Youssef, Kifah Wael Jayyousi and Kassem Daher.

Hassoun also was indicted on eight additional charges, including perjury, obstruction of justice and illegal firearm possession.

Hassoun, a Palestinian computer programmer who moved to Florida in 1989, was arrested in June 2002 for allegedly overstaying his student visa. Prosecutors previously described him as a former associate of Padilla.

Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert, has been held as an “enemy combatant” in Defense Department custody for more than three years.

NBC’s Pete Williams reported that Padilla was being transferred from Pentagon custody and into the criminal courts system on Tuesday, ending the long legal battle over whether he should be in military custody.

The Bush administration had resisted calls to charge and try Padilla in civilian courts.

The indictment avoids a Supreme Court showdown over how long the government could hold a U.S. citizen without charges. The high court had been asked to decide when and for how long the government can jail Americans in military prisons.

“They’re avoiding what the Supreme Court would say about American citizens (as enemy combatants). That’s an issue the administration did not want to face,” said Scott Silliman, a Duke University law professor who specializes in national security. “There’s no way that the Supreme Court would have ducked this issue.”

Padilla’s lawyers had asked justices to review his case last month, and the Bush administration was facing a deadline next Monday for filing its legal arguments.

“The ‘evidence’ the government has offered against Padilla over the past three years consists of double and triple hearsay from secret witnesses, along with information allegedly obtained from Padilla himself during his two years of incommunicado interrogation,” his lawyers said in their earlier appeal.

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in 2002 after returning from Pakistan. The federal government has said he was trained in weapons and explosives by members of al-Qaida.

Padilla has been held at a Navy brig in South Carolina. Following the indictment, which was handed up last Thursday, President Bush sent a memo to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordering Padilla transferred to the federal detention facility in Miami.
msnbc.msn.com

My how stupid amd clumsy and inept of them. A total disgrace, on every single level.

Delahunt-Chávez accord to be announced today

WASHINGTON — While most of Congress was spending an August recess tending to local constituents, Representative William D. Delahunt was in Caracas, sitting down to a four-hour, one-on-one dinner conversation with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, one of the Bush administration’s most ardent critics.

That meeting — unusual for a sitting member of Congress and a head of state so critical of the White House — sparked negotiations that led to the official announcement scheduled for today: A US subsidiary of a Venezuelan-owned company will provide 12 million gallons of discounted home heating oil to Massachusetts consumers and organizations serving the poor.

Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat who is emerging as one of his party’s leading voices in Latin American affairs, said he was simply trying to smooth strained US-Venezuelan relations while helping low-income people in his home state.

Critics said Delahunt should not be working so closely with Chávez, an outspoken leftist.
boston.com

Government spokesmen have no comment. The other 9 oil companies fleecing the people have no comment.

…But Tories and Lib Dems warned that they would introduce amendments scrapping the glorification clauses when the legislation reached committee stage. An opposition amendment in the Commons was defeated by just one vote.

“We shall seek to remove the glory glory hallelujah sections from the bill,” said the Lib Dem peer Lord Thomas of Gresford, warning that the wording of the clauses was emotive and could be understood differently by different people.
guardian.co.uk

Too bad. They could nab Tony Blair on this one…

…”We know that American and Iraqi forces … surrounded a house where there was fierce resistance and when the American and Iraqi forces jointly tried to storm the building the occupants blew themselves up, they committed suicide.”

Mr Zebari said only DNA tests could confirm whether Zarqawi was among those killed, and said checks were being made.
guardian.co.uk

At 11:04:45 AM ET Monday CNN was airing Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech live from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington — when a large black ‘X’ repeatedly flashed over the vice president’s face!

The ‘X’ over Cheney’s face appeared each time less than a second, creating an odd subliminal effect.

As this DRUDGE REPORT screen capture reveals, while one ‘X’ flashed over Cheney’s face CNN ran a headline at the bottom of its screen: “CHENEY: I DO NOT BELIEVE IT IS WRONG TO CRITICIZE.”

One top White House source expressed concern about what was aired over CNN.

“Is someone in Atlanta trying to tell us something?”

A CNN spokesman did not return repeated calls late Monday night.
drudgereport.com

Great pic.

…In the two Asian wars, that decline proved irreversible. With Iraq, the additional bad news for President Bush is that support for the war in Iraq has eroded more quickly than it did in those two conflicts.

For Mr. Bush, low support for his handling of the war – now at 35 percent, according to the latest Gallup poll – has depleted any reserves of “political capital” he had from his reelection and threatens his entire agenda. Last week’s bombshell political developments, both the bipartisan Senate resolution calling for more progress reports on Iraq and the stunning call for withdrawal by a Democratic hawk, Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, have not helped.
csmonitor.com

RYE BROOK, N.Y. – Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be “a big mistake.”

The New York Democrat said she respects Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., the Vietnam veteran and hawkish ex-Marine who last week called for an immediate troop pullout. But she added: “I think that would cause more problems for us in America.”

“It will matter to us if Iraq totally collapses into civil war, if it becomes a failed state the way Afghanistan was, where terrorists are free to basically set up camp and launch attacks against us,” she said.
news.yahoo.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S. soldiers fired on a civilian vehicle Monday because they feared it might hold a suicide bomber, killing at least two adults and a child northeast of the capital, American and Iraqi officials said.
news.yahoo.com

And this is NEWS?

If this was therapy, it sure didn’t feel like it. From September to January, Claire Kent spent her days digging up tree stumps from a barren field, her mind and body battered by the elements. The work was part of her “treatment” for the drinking and sex that had landed her at a boarding school for “troubled teens.”

In the Montana woods, Kent and a couple dozen other adolescent girls had been committed by their families to a disciplinary program that included chopping wood, exercising to the point of physical breakdown, and being regularly bullied and insulted by “counselors” – all in the name of what the private treatment industry calls “emotional growth.”
zmag.org

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits — which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.
zmag.org