News at 11:00.

Like his nephew Ramzi Yousef (three years KSM’s junior), KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] grew up in Kuwait but traces his ethnic lineage to the Baluchistan region straddling Iran and Pakistan.Raised in a religious family, KSM claims to have joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age 16....
KSM transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, which he attended with Yousef’s brother,another future al Qaeda member. KSM earned a degree in mechanical engineering in December 1986.3....

KSM plunged into the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad soon after graduating from college. Visiting Pakistan for the first time in early 1987, he traveled to Peshawar,where his brother Zahid introduced him to the famous Afghan mujahid Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, head of the Hizbul-Ittihad El-Islami (Islamic Union Party). Sayyaf became KSM’s mentor and provided KSM with military training at Sayyaf’s Sada camp. KSM claims he then fought the Soviets and remained at the front for three months before being summoned to perform administrative duties for Abdullah Azzam.....
In 1992, KSM spent some time fighting alongside the mujahideen in Bosnia and supporting that effort with financial donations. After returning briefly to Pakistan, he moved his family to Qatar at the suggestion of the former minister of Islamic affairs of Qatar, Sheikh Abdallah bin Khalid bin Hamad al Thani. KSM took a position in Qatar as project engineer with the Qatari Ministry of Electricity and Water. Although he engaged in extensive international travel during his tenure at the ministry—much of it in furtherance of terrorist activity—KSM would hold his position there until early 1996, when he fled to Pakistan to avoid capture by U.S. authorities....
In 1994, KSM accompanied Yousef to the Philippines,and the two of them began planning what is now known as the Manila air or "Bojinka" plot—the intended bombing of 12 U.S. commercial jumbo jets over the Pacific during a two-day span....
In January 1996, well aware that U.S. authorities were chasing him, he left Qatar for good and fled to Afghanistan, where he renewed his relationship with Rasul Sayyaf....
KSM briefed Bin Ladin and Atef on the first World Trade Center bombing, the Manila air plot, the cargo carriers plan, and other activities pursued by KSM and his colleagues in the Philippines. KSM also presented a proposal for an operation that would involve training pilots who would crash planes into buildings in the United States. This proposal eventually would become the 9/11 operation.....

"U.S. counterterrorism authorities have long believed that Qatar's interior minister, Sheik Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, has sheltered terrorists -- including the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 hijacking plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- in and around his farm compound near the capital of Doha.
One former CIA agent familiar with the situation described al-Thani as a potential danger to U.S. troops operating out of Central Command headquarters in Doha -- especially if the war in Iraq drags on or incites Muslim hostilities in the region. Under an arrangement with the government of Qatar, the U.S. government's forward command and control center is based in Doha......
Since 1995, U.S. officials also have been familiar with al-Thani for another reason: his support of radical Muslim fundamentalists, including mujaheddin who fought for jihad, or holy war, against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and in other conflicts....."

In this election year, there are significant parallels between the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Enacted in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the PATRIOT Act has augmented the power of federal authorities to pry into the affairs of innocent Americans. In the summer of 1798, the United States Congress passed and President John Adams signed similar legislation. At base, the Alien and Sedition Acts prohibited criticism of the federal government and gave President Adams the power to deport any alien he viewed as suspicious. Americans found guilty of sedition faced prison terms of up to five years and hefty fines. In certain circumstances, aliens remaining in the United States could be imprisoned “so long as, in the opinion of the President, the public safety may require.”

This legislation made a mockery of the First Amendment and deprived aliens of basic due process of law. The Alien and Sedition Acts were the federal government’s first direct assault on American civil liberties. From this assault and the response, we can learn lessons relevant to our own time.

[..]

To combat the Acts, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. In these Resolutions, Madison and Jefferson accused Congress of exceeding its powers and declared the Alien and Sedition Acts void. Times were so tense that Madison and Jefferson hid their authorship because they feared prosecutions under the dreaded Sedition Act. The Acts were seen as such a danger to liberty that there was also some discussion of resisting the measures by force and secession.

Fortunately, drastic measures were not needed because the people had a very powerful weapon at their disposal: the ballot box. [...] However, when both parties offer the people candidates with indistinguishable views on issues relating to fundamental liberties, the franchise is an impotent weapon. And if democracy so falters, the people are left with few attractive options in defense of their freedoms.

KARACHI - When US Central Command commander General John Abizaid visited Islamabad last week, his first priority was not Pakistan sending troops to Iraq, but the arrest of high-value al-Qaeda targets. Almost magically, just days later, a Tanzanian al-Qaeda operative, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was arrested in the Punjab provincial city of Gujrat. He is wanted in the United States in connection with the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. He was one of the United States' 22 most-wanted terrorists, and had a US$5 million bounty on his head….

Dr Aafia Siddiqui, in her mid-30s, has a PhD in neurological sciences from the US. She is believed to have Pakistani and US nationality. She is wanted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as an "al-Qaeda operative and facilitator" and in connection with "possible terrorist threats" in the US. September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (caught in Pakistan) is believed to have told authorities about Aafia. She disappeared, with her three children, a few months ago in Pakistan. Asia Times Online sources claim that she is in the custody of the ISI. All calls by her family and humanitarian groups for her to be produced in court have been ignored. Acquaintances of Aafia say she was an ISI contact and played an active role as a "relief worker" in Chechnya and Bosnia - a role the government now does not want to reveal. She has also been connected with different Arab non-governmental organizations in the US, through which she also helped to supply aid and funds to Chechens....

"the veterans of the Mooj’s holy war against the Soviets began arriving in the United States—many with passports arranged by the CIA. Bonded by combat, full of religious zeal, the diaspora of young Arab men willing to die for Allah congregated at the Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., a dreary inner-city building that doubled as a recruiting post for the CIA seeking to steer fresh troops to the mujahedin…….
Within minutes of each other [in August 1998], truck bombs blew up the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.....
Actually, the CIA had a sometime informer among the embassy bombers. Ali Mohamed was a former Egyptian Army officer who enlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to Fort Bragg, N.C., in the early 1980s to lecture U.S. Special Forces on Islamic terrorism. In his free time, he was a double agent. On the weekends he visited the Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn....Ali Mohamed went to Afghanistan to fight with the Mooj, but after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he flipped back, telling the Feds about bin Laden’s connection to some of the bombers..... "

[Oct. 1994]"The Al-Kifah, or Struggle, Refugee Center in New York, which used to recruit and raise funds for Mujahedeen headed for Afghanistan, last year announced it was switching its operations to Bosnia. It was established in the mid-1980s by Egyptian Mustafa Rahman as a joint venture with Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, spiritual leader of Gamaat al-Islamiya."

THE CIA AND THE SHEIK: "According to a very high-ranking Egyptian official, when the sheikh moved to Brooklyn in May 1990, he worked closely with the CIA, helping to channel a steady flow of money, men, and guns to mujahedeen bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Lionel Richie's daughter Nicole's choice of intimate body piercing left her highly embarrassed recently, when she had to show her breasts to airport security.

The aspiring singer, who stars in hit reality show The Simple Life alongside her best pal Paris Hilton, was travelling from Reno, Nevada to New York City when her nipple piercing triggered off metal detectors at a security checkpoint.

She recalls:[...]"So they brought in two female officers and took me not to necessarily the most private place in the airport and made me take off my top. Thank God I'm not a shy person, but what if I was shy?

"You know what, you guys are letting lighters on the plane and stuff like that, but I can't have a nipple ring? What am I gonna do - poke someone in the eye with it?"

Halliburton Co. and other U.S. contractors are being paid at least $1.9 billion from Iraqi funds under an arrangement set by the U.S.-led occupation authority, according to a review of documents and interviews with government agencies, companies and auditors.

Most of the money is for two controversial deals that originally had been financed with money approved by the U.S. Congress, but later shifted to Iraqi funds that were governed by fewer restrictions and less rigorous oversight.

The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday recommended for the first time that the federal government require passenger vehicles to be equipped with black boxes that record speed, seat belt use, braking and other factors.

The American Library Association (ALA) today welcomed the Department of Justice's decision to rescind its request that the Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents instruct depository libraries to destroy all copies of five Department of Justice publications addressing forfeiture. The Justice Department claimed that the documents are "training materials and other materials that the Department of Justice staff did not feel were appropriate for external use." ALA disagreed with this categorization of the public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, and with the instruction to destroy them. ALA trusts that there will be no repetition of such unjustified instructions to destroy government information.

Michael Gorman, President-Elect of the American Library Association, said, "We had concerns about the Department of Justice request to destroy documents that have been in the public domain for four years. To obtain an official rationale from the Department of Justice about the nature of these public documents, the American Library Association submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the withdrawn materials, which will now be moot." Carol Brey-Casiano, President of the American Library Association added, "Our only interest in this issue is that we want to ensure that public documents remain available to the public."

The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents that were to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA).

A company called Vivísimo has created a "clustering engine" for the 9-11 Commission's Final Report. You can search the report, get the first 200 matching paragraphs clustered into folders, then browse via the folders. For fun, try fumbling through the Libertythink and Awoken 9-11 Archives and plug some keywords in. Funny, there seems to be some things missing...

The Federal Drug Administration issued a ruling Tuesday that essentially begins a final review process that will determine whether hospitals can use RFID systems from the Palm Beach, Fla.-based company to identify patients and/or permit relevant hospital staff to access medical records, said Angela Fulcher, vice president of marketing and sales at VeriChip.

The jailing of two Israeli Mossad agents in New Zealand for stealing the identities of cerebral palsy victims has exposed a wider international passport scam by the spy agency.

On July 14, 2004, two Mossad agents—Uriel Kelman, 31, and Eli Cara, 51—were jailed for six months and fined $100,000 for fraudulently using the Cerebral Palsy Society to obtain passports. The New Zealand authorities are still seeking two other agents...

Within days of the jailing of Kelman and Cara, [New Zealand’s Prime Minister Helen]Clark... immediately suspended diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv and instituted a new rule that will require visiting Israeli diplomats to apply for visas before they can enter her country. She also canceled Foreign Ministry consultations between the two nations scheduled for later this year. In a major snub, she declared that a proposed visit by the Israeli president would not be allowed to take place.
[...]
Mossad’s strategy of scamming passports, even from cerebral palsy victims, has not shocked those who have studied the spy agency. It is believed the Mossad has also targeted other small nations regarded as "inoffensive" in the Arab world—nations like Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Ireland and Norway.

The early so-called funny papers came into being as apart of a revolution of mass communications, as urban newspapers attempted to reach out to a wider segemnt of the population than merely the traditional reading public. To use modern parlance, the funny papers were invented to help "dumb down" newspaper journalism. The innovation worked...

Jimmy Swinnerton's Little Bears if the San Francisco Exmainer is frequently regarded as the first regular use of comic art in an American newspaper... Swinnerton's role as a pioneer in this art form is of special interest to the Boehmian Club, for he later became not only a member of the club, but its president from 1929 to 1931.

The Defense Intelligence Agency is accelerating its investigation of a two-man Pentagon intelligence team -- the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group -- which was tasked to establish links between then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden, according to current and former senior Pentagon officials.

The investigation is trying to determine if the two-man unit leaked sensitive CIA and Pentagon intercepts to the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress, which passed them on to the government of Iran, Pentagon and U.S. intelligence officials said.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said in a recent "Meet the Press" broadcast that the Senate Select Committee was looking into possible "illegal intelligence operations" conducted by the unit without congressional oversight, which is against the law, according to a well-placed congressional staffer.

[...]

The Pentagon team, established just after Sept. 11, 2001, by undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, consisted of two men: Michael Maloof, a former journalist, who during the Reagan administration, worked closely as an investigator with then Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle on matters of Western-technology transfers to the Soviet Eastern bloc, and David Wurmser, a former Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute and former State Department official, according to several Pentagon sources.

While in the new unit, Wurmser's colleague, Maloof, retained close ties with Perle, then chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, these sources said.

Wurmser also was connected with Perle, they said.

Neither Wurmser nor Maloof were intelligence professionals, according to Lang.

Several Pentagon officials said that the Maloof-Wurmser investigation is expected to widen to include scrutiny of "senior people" in the Pentagon's Near East South Asia office, which housed its own intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, according to one former senior Pentagon source.

A domestic centerpiece of the Bush/GOP agenda for a second Bush term is getting rid of the Internal Revenue Service, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The Speaker of the House will push for replacing the nation's current tax system with a national sales tax or a value added tax, Hill sources tell DRUDGE.

"People ask me if I’m really calling for the elimination of the IRS, and I say I think that’s a great thing to do for future generations of Americans," Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert explains in his new book, to be released on Wednesday.

[...]

Now consider that a flat tax, national sales tax, or VAT would not only eliminate the need to do this, it could also eliminate the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) itself and make the process of paying taxes much easier."

Days after 9/11, a senior Pentagon official lamented the lack of good targets in Afghanistan and proposed instead U.S. military attacks in South America or Southeast Asia as "a surprise to the terrorists," according to a footnote in the recent 9/11 Commission Report. The unsigned top-secret memo, which the panel's report said appears to have been written by Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, is one of several Pentagon documents uncovered by the commission which advance unorthodox ideas for the war on terror. The memo suggested "hitting targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive" or a "non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq," the panel's report states. U.S. attacks in Latin America and Southeast Asia were portrayed as a way to catch the terrorists off guard when they were expecting an assault on Afghanistan.

The memo's content, NEWSWEEK has learned, was in part the product of ideas from a two-man secret Pentagon intelligence unit appointed by Feith after 9/11: veteran defense analyst Michael Maloof and Mideast expert David Wurmser, now a top foreign-policy aide to Dick Cheney.

If proof were needed that Tony Blair is off the hook over Iraq, it came not during the Commons debate on the Butler report on July 21, but rather at his monthly press conference the following morning. Asked about the crisis in Sudan, Mr Blair replied: "I believe we have a moral responsibility to deal with this and to deal with it by any means that we can." This last phrase means that troops might be sent - as General Sir Mike Jackson, the chief of the general staff, immediately confirmed - and yet the reaction from the usual anti-war campaigners was silence.

[...]

The absence of anti-war scepticism about the prospect of sending troops into Sudan is especially odd in view of the fact that Darfur has oil. For two years, campaigners have chanted that there should be "no blood for oil" in Iraq, yet they seem not to have noticed that there are huge untapped reserves in both southern Sudan and southern Darfur. As oil pipelines continue to be blown up in Iraq, the west not only has a clear motive for establishing control over alternative sources of energy, it has also officially adopted the policy that our armies should be used to do precisely this. Oddly enough, the oil concession in southern Darfur is currently in the hands of the China National Petroleum Company. China is Sudan's biggest foreign investor.

This past spring, the Illinois General Assembly passed a new bill requiring compulsory mental health screening for children and pregnant women; it was signed into law by Governor Blagojevich. This program will require all pregnant women and children through the age of 18 be tested for mental health needs.
[...]

DRAFT: Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership Preliminary Plan

The federal government warned Sunday of possible terrorist attacks against "iconic" financial institutions in New York City, Washington and Newark, N.J., saying a confluence of chilling intelligence in recent days pointed to a car or truck bomb.

The government said the new intelligence indicated the meticulous planning of al-Qaida. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge identified explosives as the likely mode of attack...

In an unprecedented action, the government named these specific buildings in densely populated areas as potential targets:

_Citigroup buildings and the New York Stock Exchange in New York City.

_The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank buildings in Washington.

_Prudential financial in northern New Jersey.
[...]
Ridge said... protecting these buildings, located in heavily populated areas, would require additional security measures, especially because thousands of cars and trucks travel through these cities daily...

Local and state officials were notified earlier in the day and Ridge said new security procedures were already being put in place...

A Citigroup spokesman cited a company e-mail to employees that said they should expect to see tighter security at all of its New York buildings.

In the capital, the FBI, Secret Service and city police will provide additional security...

"The president made the final decision today agreeing with the recommendation of Secretary Ridge to go ahead and raise the threat level in these select areas," Healy said.
[...]

Leaders of the Green Party ... called for more far-reaching investigation into the failure to discover and prevent the attacks and into the White House's response to the attacks.

"Instead of merely extending the current commission, which Sen. Kerry favors, we need to see a new, independent Commission to continue to the investigation into the 9/11 attacks, with family members of 9/11 victims given a prominent role," said Patrick Driscoll, Green candidate for Congress in California (5th District).
[...]
Greens cite a list of other points that have not been adequately investigated:

-- The role played by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: as John O'Neill, the FBI's former top bin Laden investigator, said shortly before his death in the World Trade Center, "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization can be found in Saudi Arabia"; O'Neill also said that America's failure to stop bin Laden could be traced to oil
[...]
-- The influence of the Saudi ruling family on U.S. policy: the House of Saud has been a major source of funding for both terrorists and for Bush family investments ($1.4 billion); both the Clinton and Bush administration impeded FBI investigations into Saudi Arabia

-- The role of the Pakistani Intelligence Service: why did Mahmood Ahmed, Director of Pakistan's secret service, order $100,000 to be wired to lead hijacker Momahmed Atta?

-- How the CIA trained and armed al-Qaeda and other terrorists before 9/11, especially in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union; how Pakistan and the U.S. enabled the Taliban, a totalitarian theocracy, to come to power

-- Details of negotiations that took place between the US government and the Taliban before 9/11 relating to the construction of a pipeline through Afghanistan

-- The extent of FBI and CIA surveillance on the hijackers before 9/11: Several were apparently closely monitored, especially Mohammed Atta
[...]

I will never hesitate to use force ... I will build a stronger military. We will add 40,000 active duty troops...

We will double our Special Forces to conduct terrorist operations, anti-terrorist operations, and we will provide our troops with the newest weapons and technology