NEW YORK (Reuters) – Vice President Dick Cheney argued in the weeks after the September 11 attacks that the National Security Agency should intercept domestic telephone calls and e-mails without warrants as part of its war on terrorism, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions.

Cheney and his top legal adviser, David Addington, believed the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take such sweeping measures to defend the country, The newspaper said, citing two senior intelligence officials who spoke anonymously.

NSA lawyers opposed the move and insisted that any eavesdropping without warrants should be limited to communications into and out of the country, a position that ultimately prevailed, the Times said.
reuters.com

The National Security Agency and other U.S. government organizations have developed hundreds of software programs and analytic tools to “harvest” intelligence, and they’ve created dozens of gigantic databases designed to discover potential terrorist activity both inside the United States and overseas.

These cutting edge tools — some highly classified because of their functions and capabilities — continually process hundreds of billions of what are called “structured” data records, including telephone call records and e-mail headers contained in information “feeds” that have been established to flow into the intelligence agencies.
washingtonpost.com

‘People Are Going to Be Shocked’
…A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said Thursday he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. É

Qwest’s Refusal of N.S.A. Query Is Explained
WASHINGTON, May 12 Ñ The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws, a lawyer for the telephone company’s former chief executive said today.

In a statement released this morning, the lawyer said that the former chief executive, Joseph N. Nacchio, made the decision after asking whether “a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request.”

Mr. Nacchio learned that no warrant had been granted and that there was a “disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process,” said the lawyer, Herbert J. Stern. As a result, the statement said, Mr. Nacchio concluded that “the requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act.”

Gee there’s somebody looking at the law. What a world.

Within the last week, Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.

Details of Rove’s discussions with the president and Bolten have spread through the corridors of the White House where low-level staffers and senior officials were trying to determine how the indictment would impact an administration that has been mired in a number of high-profile political scandals for nearly a year, said a half-dozen White House aides and two senior officials who work at the Republican National Committee.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources confirmed Rove’s indictment is imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove’s situation. A spokesman in the White House press office said they would not comment on “wildly speculative rumors.”
truthout.org

Cheney the Focus of CIA Leak Court Filing
n a new court filing, the prosecutor in the CIA leak case revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten references to CIA officer Valerie Plame -albeit not by name -before her identity was publicly exposed.

The new court filing is the second in little more than a month by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald mentioning Cheney as being closely focused with his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, on Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who is married to Plame.

With the two court filings, Fitzgerald has pointed to an important role for the vice president in the weeks leading up to the leaking of Plame’s identity.

In the latest court filing late Friday, Fitzgerald said he intends to introduce at Libby’s trial in January a copy of Wilson’s op-ed article in The New York Times “bearing handwritten notations by the vice president.” The article was published on July 6, 2003, eight days before Plame’s identity was exposed by conservative columnist Bob Novak.

The U.S. is violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

That view, far from exotic or extreme, was expressed repeatedly by arms control experts and international officials at the month-long NPT review conference held at the U.N. in May. It is embraced by U.S. establishment figures such as former President Jimmy Carter and Kennedy-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

In a Washington Post op-ed (3/28/05), a month before the conference opened, Carter wrote: “While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons.”

McNamara was quoted earlier this year (Foreign Policy, 5-6/05) bluntly declaring the U.S. a nuclear outlaw: “I would characterize current U.S.nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous.”
zmag.org

Fara Mansoor is a fugitive. No, he hasn’t broken any laws in the United States. His crime is the truth. What he has to say and the documents he carries are equivalent to a death warrant for him, Mansoor is an Iranian who was part of the “establishment” in Iran long before the 1979 hostage taking. Mansoor’s records actually discount the alleged “October Surprise” theory that the Ronald Reagan-George Bush team paid the Iranians not to release 52 American hostages until after the November 1980 Presidential elections.

Mansoor’s meticulous documents, shared exclusively with this magazine, shows a much more sinister plot, the plot to take the hostages in the first place. “For 15 years the truth about the nature and origins of the Iranian hostage crisis has been buried in a mountain of misinformation,” Mansoor states. “Endless expert analysis has served only to deepen the fog that still surrounds this issue. We have been led to believe that the ‘crisis’ was a spontaneous act that just sprang out of the ‘chaos’ of the ‘Islamic Revolution’. Nothing could be further from the truth!”

“To really understand the hostage crisis and ‘who done it’, one has to look not only with a microscope, but also a wide angle lens to have a panoramic view of this well scripted ‘drama’,” Mansoor states. “That ‘drama’ was the result of large historical patterns, models, and motives. Once its true nature is understood, it will be clear how Iran/Contra happened. Why Rafsanjani has been trying to ‘move toward the West,’ and why Reagan called him a ‘moderate’. And why, during the Gulf War, James Baker said, ‘we think Iran has conducted itself in a very, very credible way through this crisis'” Mansoor emphasizes that the “October Surprise” myth has served as dangerous misinformation.

THOUSANDS OF DOCUMENTS IN SUPPORT

With thousands of documents to support his position, Mansoor says that the “hostage crisis” was a political “management tool” created by the pro-Bush faction of the CIA, and implemented through an a priori Alliance with Khomeini’s Islamic Fundamentalists.” He says the purpose was twofold:

* To keep Iran intact and communist-free by putting Khomeini in full control.
* To destablize the Carter Administration and put George Bush in the White House.
venusproject.com

ONA MOVE AND LONG LIVE JOHN AFRICA! May 13, 2006 marks twenty-one years since the official bombing and premeditated murder of innocent MOVE men, women, babies and animals. We of MOVE will never allow people (official or unofficial) to forget the horrendous example of this rotten vicious system. An official massacre occurred that day yet nobody was arrested or prosecuted except Ramona Africa, the only adult to survive the massacre. If any unofficial person did one quarter of what officials did on May 12th and 13th of 1985, they would be arrested prosecuted and probably executed. Stanley Tookie Williams was executed for the accusation of killing four people that nobody saw him kill. Everybody saw and knows who murdered our family but none of those who are responsible were ever even arrested. Mumia Abu Jamal sits on death row for the accusation of the murder of one person but officials murdered nine people and numerous animals yet they’re not sitting on death row. Our family, The MOVE 9, have been in prison almost twenty-nine years now on thirty to one hundred year sentences for a murder that everybody, including officials, know they did not commit but these same officials murdered the babies of some of these same MOVE people yet none of these officials are sitting in prison beside MOVE people for murder. What makes this government hallucinate that it can demand that people respect it while demonstrating this kind of vicious example on people. We want people to understand clearly that when you take a stand against an injustice being done to anybody you are really taking a stand to protect yourself and your family by working to stop injustice. Nothing is going to improve for us, the people, unless we work for it. We cannot demand respect from anybody unless we respect ourselves first, respect ourselves enough that we will not allow ourselves to de disrespected. Nothing should be more important to us than our freedom, our security, our health and happiness. We cannot afford to be apathetic, our very lives are at stake.
onamove.com

Islamic militia and gunmen loyal to US-backed warlords swarmed the streets of Mogadishu in a battle which left at least 130 dead, mostly passers-by.

The heavily armed reinforcements arrived in pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns.

Fighters from both sides closed in on each other following a night of artillery exchanges that sent thousands of civilians fleeing the Sii-Sii neighbourhood of northern Mogadishu.

Residents in the Somalia capital described it as the worst fighting in more than a decade of lawlessness. Thousands of families were fleeing the capital.

While tending to his wife in the hospital, Mohamud Jama said his three children were killed when three mortar rounds struck his house.
ww9.sbs.com

INAGBE BEACH, Nigeria (Reuters) – A pipeline explosion killed up to 200 people on the outskirts of Lagos on Friday, leaving charred corpses on a sandy beach where locals tapping the pipe to steal fuel ignited the blast.

The Red Cross said the pipeline blew up in the early hours of the morning while thieves were siphoning fuel into jerry cans for sale on the black market. The massive explosion cooked everything within a 20 meter radius.

Only gray calcinated skulls and bones were left of five people who were closest to the pipeline, which had been dug out of the sand and bore marks of drilling in several places.

About 100 blackened, unrecognizable corpses were strewn on the water’s edge a few meters away, where the golden sand was still steaming hot on Friday afternoon.

Some bodies, charred and bloated, floated in the waters of the creek, which is only about a mile from Lagos city center by boat.

“You can see the corpses. Some are burned to ash. Others are remnants. … We estimate 150 to 200 people died,” Lagos State Police Commissioner Emmanuel Adebayo said at the scene.

Theft of petrol and crude oil from pipelines is common in Nigeria, an oil producing country where the vast majority of people live in poverty.

“This is caused by hunger and greed. If you’ve got no job and you’re hungry you take advantage of anything to feed your family. Anyone who takes this kind of risk is desperate,” said Olanrewaju Saka-Shenayon, a Lagos State government official.
reuters.com

CARACAS, Venezuela – Venezuela’s congress, dominated by supporters of President Hugo Chavez, released a report Thursday recommending the state assume majority control of key heavy oil projects run by companies like Chevron Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. in its oil-rich Orinoco River basin.

Such a move, which Chavez has yet to publicly endorse, would bring all active oil-producing operations run by foreign companies in Venezuela effectively under state control.
news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush, trying to build momentum for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, is considering plans to shore up the Mexican border with National Guard troops paid for by the federal government, according to senior administration officials.

One defense official said military leaders believe the number of troops required could range from 3,500 to 10,000, depending on the final plan. Another administration official cautioned that the 10,000 figure was too high.
apnews.myway.com