NightBlogger

On June 4, 1963, a little known attempt was made to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the government at interest. On that day President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110 that returned to the U.S. government the power to issue currency, without going through the Federal Reserve. Mr. Kennedy’s order gave the Treasury the power “to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury.” This meant that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury’s vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation. In all, Kennedy brought nearly $4.3 billion in U.S. notes into circulation. The ramifications of this bill are enormous. With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Kennedy was on his way to putting the Federal Reserve Bank of New York out of business. If enough of these silver certificates were to come into circulation they would have eliminated the demand for Federal Reserve notes. This is because the silver certificates are backed by silver and the Federal Reserve notes are not backed by anything. More

Iran must decide between confrontation and co-operation in the dispute over its nuclear plans, the US has warned. At talks in Geneva, envoys from the US, EU and UN asked Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment in return for a pledge not to introduce new sanctions. Iran gave no guarantees it would halt its activities, so the diplomats gave Tehran two weeks to provide an answer. The meeting was the first time US and Iranian officials have held face-to-face talks on the nuclear issue. Senior US official William Burns was present at the Geneva talks - although he made no public comment. Instead, state department spokesman Sean McCormack issued a strongly-worded statement in Washington. More

Dave Lindorff
The sorry performance of the US corporate media, which blacked out stories questioning the official line on the so-called “Iraq Threat” until the nation was deeply mired in to pointless, bloody war in that country, and which has almost completely ignored a three-year, nation-wide movement calling for the impeachment of the president and vice president, has continued.

Search far and wide, and you will find no reporting on the fact that Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has filed a total 36 proposed articles of impeachment against President Bush, is finally going to get to formally present his case to the House Judiciary Committee, beginning on July 25. Although this is not an impeachment hearing, it is putting impeachment “on the table,” from which it has been banned for two years by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Although the House last week voted 251-166 to send Kucinich’s articles to the Judiciary Committee for hearings, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the nation’s television news organizations ignored this breakthrough (which included 24 Republicans voting for the measure). Only USA Today, at least in its online edition, even mentioned it, with a headline saying “Pelosi cracks door open on impeachment resolution”–and that was just a five-sentence story. More

Source: The Guardian
In a submission to the UN in May, the Pentagon said that no more than eight youths, aged 13 to 17 at time of capture, were held at Guantánamo Bay. But a prisoner list released in 2006 in response to US freedom of information act litigation names 21 inmates under 18 when they arrived. A separate defence department admission brings the total to 22. Testimonies collected by the charity Reprieve, which represents 30 inmates at Guantánamo, indicate the actual number is much higher.

Guantánamo’s child prisoners came from all over the world: they were Afghan, Yemeni, Saudi, Russian, Uighuri, and Canadian. Five of them are still there. They are: Mohammed el Gharani, aged 14-15 when he was seized while praying in a Karachi mosque; Hassan bin Attash, aged 16-17 when seized in Pakistan, and rendered to Jordan where he endured 16 months of torture before being transferred; Faris Muslim Al Ansari, an Afghan-Yemeni who was 17 when captured; Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan who was 17 when seized and faces trial by military commission; and Omar Khadr. Saudi citizen Yasser Talal Al Zahrani, 17 when captured, joined a prison-wide hunger strike in 2005. He was found dead in his cell in June 2006 after apparently killing himself.

Webster G. Tarpley
…the United States and NATO now escalating the hopeless and unwinnable Afghan war, and is preparing to send US and NATO forces on the ground to seize parts of Pakistan, a country which is almost 3 times more populous than Iran, and possesses a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver it. The Bush-Cheney-neocon era in foreign policy is over, and the Brzezinski-Trilateral-Rockefeller-Soros phase of aggression has begun; the US hit list now features Chinese allies like Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan. Brzezinski is striving to put together some huge provocation for the Beijing Olympics, to make the Chinese government lose face and begin disintegrating. The ultimate targets of the new Obama-Brzezinski foreign policy are Russia, China, and the other members and friends of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the main pole of resistance in the world to the designs of Washington and London. The stakes are now much higher than a mere conventional clash in the Persian Gulf. Brzezinski’s adventurism goes far beyond that of the neocons, and objectively places the danger of a thermonuclear exchange on the world agenda. Watch for the Polish-Czech-Lithuanian missile crisis, a Balkan crisis, and a crisis between Georgia and Russia to point the world in this ominous new direction.

The US government is now being run by the Principals’ Committee, an interagency cabal that includes Defense Secretary Gates, Secretary Of State Rice, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, and other operatives of the Trilateral Wall Street financier faction. It is clear that under the new policy, Iran will be able to continue to process uranium: ‘The Bush administration’s decision to send a senior American official to participate in international talks with “More news and information about Iran.” Iran this weekend reflects a double policy shift in the struggle to resolve the impasse over the country’s nuclear program. First, the Bush administration has decided to abandon its longstanding position that it would meet face to face with Iran only after that country suspended its uranium enrichment, as demanded by the “More articles about Security Council, U.N.” United Nations Security Council. Second, an American partner at the table injects new importance to the negotiating track of the six global powers confronting Iran - France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China and the United States - even though their official stance is that no substantive talks can begin until uranium enrichment stops. The increased engagement raised questions of whether the Bush administration would alter its stance toward Iran as radically as it did with North Korea, risking a fresh schism with conservatives who have accused the White House of granting concessions to so-called rogue states without extracting enough in return.’ (New York Times, July 17, 2008) This gambit of appeasing Iran is being done in the hopes of turning Iran against Russia and China ­ a project of incalculable folly. Brzezinski is glad to see the Iranians have nukes, because he thinks he can keep them, pointed at Moscow. More

Kucinich Impeachment Battle No Longer So Quixotic
Video by the American News Project

In a stunning development which fell with the silence of a feather yesterday, nine Republicans broke with their iron-fisted party to put country first, and voted to send Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s article of impeachment HR 1345 to the Judiciary, where Chairman John Conyers will hold a hearings on abuses of power by the Bush administration, according to the Congressional Quaterly’s CQToday. The final vote was: Yea 238 - Nay 180.

The nine Republicans are:

Congressman Kevin Brady (TX), Congressman Wayne Gilchrest (MD), Congressman Walter B. Jones (NC), Congressman Don Manzullo (IL), Congressman Tim Murphy (PA), Congressman Ron Paul (TX), Congressman Dave Reichert (WA), Congressman Christopher Shays (CT)

One of the Republicans, Walter Jones, represents Camp LeJeune in North Carolina, one of the largest Marine bases in the country, and one which has borne heavily the sacrifice of the Iraq War. More

Lawyers of Omar Khadr, a Canadian Guatanamo Bay prisoner, have released video footage of the young man being interrogated by Canadian officials in a bid to raise awareness of the man’s plight. This is the first time such footage has been released and it seems the prisoner was filmed through ventilation shafts in the interrogation room. If the video footage, filmed in February 2003, shows no scenes of torture and abuse, it portrays a very distressed young man pleading for help and having a nervous breakdown. In one of the eeriest scenes, the 16-year-old teenager, is left, sobbing and apparently repeating the words “help me” or “ya omi” (oh mummy). Khadr accuses his interrogators, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) agents, of not “caring about him.” When Khadr says he wants to go back to Canada, one interrogator says there is “not anything [he] can do about that.” More

According to this recent debate in the House, since 1825 there has been three secret sessions. The last one before the one on March 13 took place in 1983.

These audio clips are from a broadcast of the Michael Herzong show and explores what Herzong claims is the true nature of the secret meeting: Martial Law and the imminent collapse of the American economy in late 2008.

President Bush has asserted executive privilege to protect information that a House panel has subpoenaed on the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, the White House said Wednesday. A House committee chairman, meanwhile, held off on a contempt citation of Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who sought the privilege claim, as a courtesy to lawmakers not present. Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, rejected Mukasey’s suggestion that Vice President Dick Cheney’s FBI interview on the subject should be protected by the privilege claim. More

Raw Story
A federal court has issued two rulings, the New York Times reports: One favoring President Bush’s indefinite detentions of “enemy combatants,” and another granting one of said “enemy combatants” the opportunity to challenge his detention in court. The court effectively ruled that President Bush has the same right to indefinitely detain a civilian on American soil as he does an enemy soldier on a battlefield. More

Russia’s cut in oil supplies coincided exactly with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit to sign the radar base deal last Tuesday. As the ink dried on that agreement, which will provide radar control for a US silo of interceptor missiles due to be based in Poland, oil flow through the Druzhba ­ Friendship - pipeline began to ebb. Two days later, Prague was forced to protest after Russia threatened a “military response” to the deal ­ interpreted as retargeting and redeployment of its own missile arsenal. More

by: Alegre
Tue Jul 15, 2008 at 16:52:28 PM EDT
There are unconfirmed reports, based on phone banking efforts to reach out to Super Ds, that eight previously Obama SDs expressed that, given the opportunity, they would vote for Hillary at the convention. I heard about an interview Will Bower of PUMA did recently, where he said delegates are starting to say they’ll vote for Hillary in Denver if the DNC did the right thing and ran an open and fair convention. That means a roll call vote with Hillary’s name put into nomination, and on the ballot. More

THE Church of Scientology has been banned from a Midland shopping centre after a string of complaints that they had been preaching to children. Church leaders understood to be from Birmingham set up a stall at Wolverhampton’s Wulfrun Centre after making a booking under the name Dianetics, the church’s main theory. Bosses ordered preachers to pack up and leave after angry parents said their children had been invited to take part in “stress tests” and then lectured about the religion. More

The Telegraph
In a Wall Street Journal editorial, the leading voice of Washington’s hawks warned that time is running out for efforts to stop the Islamic Republic’s covert nuclear research programme. “We will be blamed for the strike anyway, and certainly feel whatever negative consequences result, so there is compelling logic to make it as successful as possible,” Mr Bolton writes. “At a minimum, we should place no obstacles in Israel’s path, and facilitate its efforts where we can.” Mr Bolton said that further rounds of United Nations sanctions were no longer a realistic deterrent. “We have almost certainly lost the race between giving ’strong incentives’ for Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and its scientific and technological efforts to do just that. Swift, sweeping, effectively enforced sanctions might have made a difference five years ago. No longer.” More

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Former White House adviser Karl Rove on Monday defended his defiance of a congressional subpoena, saying he’s offered lawmakers other ways to question him about allegations of political pressure at the Justice Department. In five letters to the House Judiciary Committee, “my lawyer has offered for me to go up to visit with members of Congress, visit with the staff or respond to written questions without foreclosing any future action by Congress,” Rove said. More

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Former Governor Jesse Ventura slammed the weak dollar policy as part of a war being waged on the middle class in America by the U.S. government as the greenback collapsed to an all time record low against the euro today. Ventura made the comments before his appearance on Larry King Live last night, during which he announced he would not be running for the U.S. Senate. “The dollar has fallen through the floor, there’s half a dozen countries now that have a higher value and more than that than us,” Ventura told The Alex Jones Show. The former Minnesota Governor identified two key factors behind dollar devaluation - the war in Iraq and the ballooning national debt.

“It’s the exact two things that I’ve been harping on for the last 2 months and a half….we must do something about the $9 trillion dollars plus of debt we owe throughout the world,” said Ventura, adding that most people in America were unconcerned about the greenback’s spectacular plummet. Asked why the establishment were not going to reverse the destruction of the dollar, Ventura responded, “Because I don’t think they really care, they’re making their money and they’re in their position.”

“To me it’s clear there is a war on the middle class in America today being waged by our own government - they’re out to destroy what was the American dream and the American dream was the middle class, we were the country where you could get a job and you could support your family….that’s being extinguished greatly today and it seems our illustrious elected officials don’t have a problem with it,” said Ventura. More

Mary Ann Akers
OK, impeachment watchers, tune in to C-SPAN’s House channel at 5 p.m. ET today to watch Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-Ohio) next step in his crusade to impeach President Bush. As Kucinich announced in an e-mail to supporters today, “This afternoon, at approximately 5 p.m. (EDT), the Clerk of the House of Representatives will give the first reading of the Article of Impeachment of President George Bush.” That bill would be the lone article of impeachment — Kucinich chose just one from the 35 articles he introduced last month — charging the president with, as Kucinich puts it, “deceiving Congress with fabricated threats of Iraq WMDs to fraudulently obtain support for an authorization of the use of military force against Iraq.” More

Rachel Maddow reports on the possibility of the Bush administration being prosecuted for war crimes. Jonathan Turley weighs in.

“How many more hearings do we need to have to prove this administration has violated the Constitution, taken the law into its own hands, and condoned torture?” asked Kucinich, D-Ohio, author of some three dozen articles of impeachment. “These articles of impeachment are about accountability,” Kucinich said in an interview. “I think our country is at risk. We’re setting a terrible precedent for future administrations if we choose to turn a blind eye to the crimes committed by this administration. “We need to send a message to the next President that if he conducts himself in a similar capacity it would be met with a response from the Congress that you are going to be held to account. … There is a point at which you reduce Congress to a debating society.” Last month, Kucinich stunned colleagues when he introduced an impeachment resolution on the House floor and then spent nearly five hours reading the 35 articles, alleging that President Bush was guilty of a wide range of crimes. More

TEHRAN - Iran’s president said that even before its enemies “get their hands on the trigger” the country’s military would “cut” them off, media said Sunday, in an escalating war of words that has stoked Middle East tension. The comments by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came a day after a senior Iranian official said Iran would strike Israel and U.S. bases in the region if the Islamic Republic was attacked over its disputed nuclear program. U.S. leaders have not ruled out military options if diplomacy fails to assuage fears about Iran’s nuclear activities, which Tehran says is only to produce electricity. More

Glenn L. Carle
I spent 23 years in the CIA. I drafted or was involved in many of the government’s most senior assessments of the threats facing our country. I have devoted years to understanding and combating the jihadist threat. We do not face a global jihadist “movement” but a series of disparate ethnic and religious conflicts involving Muslim populations, each of which remains fundamentally regional in nature and almost all of which long predate the existence of al-Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden and his disciples are small men and secondary threats whose shadows are made large by our fears. Al-Qaeda is the only global jihadist organization and is the only Islamic terrorist organization that targets the U.S. homeland. Al-Qaeda remains capable of striking here and is plotting from its redoubt in Waziristan, Pakistan. The organization, however, has only a handful of individuals capable of planning, organizing and leading a terrorist operation. Al-Qaeda threatens to use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, but its capabilities are far inferior to its desires. Even the “loose nuke” threat, whose consequences would be horrific, has a very low probability. For the medium term, any attack is overwhelmingly likely to consist of creative uses of conventional explosives.

No other Islamic-based terrorist organization, from Mindanao to the Bekaa Valley to the Sahel, targets the U.S. homeland, is part of a “global jihadist movement” or has more than passing contact with al-Qaeda. These groups do and will, however, identify themselves with global jihadist rhetoric and may bandy the bogey-phrase of “al-Qaeda.” They are motivated by hostility toward the West and fear of the irresistible changes that education, trade, and economic and social development are causing in their cultures. These regional terrorist organizations may target U.S. interests or persons in the groups’ historic areas of interest and operations. None of these groups is likely to succeed in seizing power or in destabilizing the societies they attack, though they may succeed in killing numerous people through sporadic attacks such as the Madrid train bombings. More

According to journalist Jason Leopold, sources at former Cheney company Halliburton allege that, as recently as January of 2005, Halliburton sold key components for a nuclear reactor to an Iranian oil development company. Leopold says his Halliburton sources have intimate knowledge of the business dealings of both Halliburton and Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies.

Additionally, throughout 2004 and 2005, Halliburton worked closely with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the board of directors of Iran-based Oriental Oil Kish, to develop oil projects in Iran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team. Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July 2005 for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran’s nuclear secrets. Iranian government officials charged Nasseri with accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton for this information.

In an attempt to curtail Halliburton and other U.S. companies from engaging in business dealings with rogue nations such as Libya, Iran, and Syria, an amendment was approved in the Senate on July 26, 2005. The amendment, sponsored by Senator Susan Collins R-Maine, would penalize companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by setting up offshore subsidiaries as a way to legally conduct and avoid U.S. sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). More

Times Online
President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official. Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread scepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an “amber light” to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.

“Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you’re ready,” the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support. Nor is it certain that Bush’s amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran’s test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets. More

U.S. war planners want an obedient client state that will house major U.S. military bases, right at the heart of the world’s major energy reserves.
Noam Chomsky
The deal just taking shape between Iraq’s Oil Ministry and four Western oil companies raises critical questions about the nature of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq — questions that should certainly be addressed by presidential candidates and seriously discussed in the United States, and of course in occupied Iraq, where it appears that the population has little if any role in determining the future of its country. Negotiations are under way for Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners decades ago in the Iraq Petroleum Company, now joined by Chevron and other smaller oil companies — to renew the oil concession they lost to nationalization during the years when the oil producers took over their own resources. The no-bid contracts, apparently written by the oil corporations with the help of U.S. officials, prevailed over offers from more than 40 other companies, including companies in China, India and Russia. More

Revisionist Review
Anyone who lived on the West Coast during the phony energy crisis of 2000 and 2001 cannot help thinking of Texas and two of its worst products — Enron and a politician… named (Phil Gramm)…What happened during the great energy heist at the start of the new century was like an extended bad dream, part “Twilight Zone” and part “Chinatown,” the extraordinary 1974 film about water manipulation and long-buried secrets. The price of energy spiked — tenfold, a hundredfold — despite low demand. Californians became the most efficient users of power in the nation, and still suffered through dozens of rolling blackouts. None of it added up.

…We now know, of course, that the problem eight years ago was caused by manipulation by Enron and other speculators who gamed a faulty system, sticking it to Grandma Millie while laughing at how easy it was to rob 40 million people.

Now consider the present dilemma: oil doubling over the last year, gas at $4.50 a gallon in places and the oversized influence of speculators in a market where few used to tread. Big investors are free to run up oil futures contracts thanks in part to former Senator Phil Gramm. He is the Texas Republican who co-sponsored the so-called Enron loophole in 2000 at the behest of what was later found to be one of the nation’s biggest criminal enterprises. More

Christopher King
As provocation, I would have thought that a much better example was the approval recently given by the US Congress for a USD 400 million package for clandestine operations against Iran. More an act of war, really. Clandestine operations apparently means supporting terrorist groups, subversion, sabotage, kidnapping and assassination within Iranian territory. What would be the USA’s reaction if, say, China were to openly allocate similar funds and undertake similar activities against the USA? After years of American intervention in its affairs, sponsored war against it together with current lies and threats, Iran’s missile test seems a very sensible and modest defensive measure.

This is reminiscent of the USA’s attitude to water-boarding. It’s merely “enhanced interrogation” when the USA does it but if anyone else waterboards a US citizen, President Bush will seek the death penalty. Surely, this says something about the president’s mentality and American ethics.

Still considering provocation, however, wasn’t Israel’s recent rehearsal of an attack on Iran provocative? No? Or the USA’s agreement with the Czech Republic for the installation of a missile system component on Russia’s border? Condoleeza Rice says that these missiles won’t be aimed at Russia and I think that she’s right. The purpose of this missile system is puzzling because Condoleeza’s statement that it protects the US and European Union from Iran and other rogue states is obviously nonsense. Militarily, it’s useless. However, if it can irritate Russia into retaliatory missile deployment and cold-war rhetoric, this gives multiple perceived benefits for the USA:

► Ability to blame Russia for more military spending, giving profits for firms such as Haliburton
► Ability to sour relations between the EU and Russia and disrupt further rapproachment
► Distract from US violence in the Middle East by giving Europeans problems nearer home to worry about
Read More

Interview with Dennis Kucinich regarding the Federal Reserve and Impeachment. Kucinich explains his introduction of Articles of Impeachment is in no way symbolic. “George Bush has committed offenses that should cause him to be impeached and removed from office. On the Federal Reserve: “The Federal Reserve is not federal and whatever they have in reserve doesn’t belong to the people.The Federal Reserve is there to protect the position of the banks.”

Former White House adviser Karl Rove defied a congressional subpoena and refused to testify Thursday about allegations of political pressure at the Justice Department, including whether he influenced the prosecution of a former Democratic governor of Alabama. Rep. Linda Sanchez, chairman of a House subcommittee, ruled with backing from fellow Democrats on the panel that Rove was breaking the law by refusing to cooperate — perhaps the first step toward holding him in contempt of Congress. Lawmakers subpoenaed Rove in May in an effort to force him to talk about whether he played a role in prosecutors’ decisions to pursue cases against Democrats, such as former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, or in firing federal prosecutors considered disloyal to the Bush administration. More

The Public Record
Two years before the invasion of Iraq, oil executives and foreign policy advisers told the Bush administration that the United States would remain “a prisoner of its energy dilemma” as long as Saddam Hussein was in power. That April 2001 report, “Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century,” was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations at the request of Vice President Dick Cheney. In retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world’s second largest oil reserves.

“Iraq remains a de-stabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East,” the report said. “Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. Therefore the U.S. should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.” The advisory committee that helped prepare the report included Luis Giusti, a Shell Corp. non-executive director; John Manzoni, regional president of British Petroleum; and David O’Reilly, chief executive of ChevronTexaco.

Those companies now stand to earn tens of billions of dollars in no-bid contracts in a U.S.-brokered deal that was recently announced to drill Iraq’s untapped oil fields. James Baker, the namesake for the public policy institute, was a prominent oil industry lawyer who also served as Secretary of State under President George H.W. Bush and was counsel to the Bush/Cheney campaign during the Florida recount in 2000. Ken Lay, then chairman of the energy-trading Enron Corp., also made recommendations that were included in the Baker report. At the time of the report, Cheney was leading an energy task force made up of powerful industry executives who assisted him in drafting a comprehensive “National Energy Policy” for President George W. Bush. More

Bob Ostertag
The current dust-up in the Obama camp over this week’s FISA vote may have real consequences for the rest of this campaign. As you may know, the largest “group” on the Obama campaign’s social networking site, MyBarackObama.com, is now a group assembled to protest Senator Obama’s reversal of his promise to filibuster against the FISA legislation up next week. Reading through the blogoshpere, many commenters appear baffled at the intensity of the passions involved, and criticize the protestors for making such a fuss over “just one issue.” But there are good reasons why core activists have taken a strong stand, and why the campaign may look different after this is over. More

IRAN has warned it will “set fire” to Israel and US forces in response to any attack over its nuclear drive, as the world’s leading industrial powers told Tehran to freeze uranium enrichment. Leaders of the Group of Eight nations at a summit in Japan today urged Iran to fully comply with UN Security Council resolutions “in particular to suspend all enrichment-related activities”. They also urged Tehran to respond positively to a new package by six major powers aimed at bringing an end to the five-year-old nuclear standoff which has led to a string of sanctions against Iran. The United States and its top regional ally Israel have never ruled out military action against Iran over its nuclear drive, which the West fears could be aimed at building an atomic bomb. There has been concern a strike could be imminent after it emerged Israel had carried out manoeuvres in Greece that were effectively practice runs for a potential strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. More

A House panel Tuesday threatened Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey with contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena demanding FBI reports of an interview of Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the disclosure of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s covert status. In a letter to Mukasey, Henry A. Waxman , D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said his committee will take up a contempt resolution July 16. “You have neither complied with this subpoena by its returnable date nor asserted any privilege to justify withholding documents from the committee,” Waxman wrote. Waxman said the committee would no longer seek access to the FBI report on an interview with President Bush as originally sought “in deference to your concerns and in a further attempt at accommodation.” More

Members of Vice President Cheney’s staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official on the health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said today. In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett said an official from Cheney’s office edited out six pages from the testimony of Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last October. More

Al Jazeera
Russia has said it will use military means if the United States deploys a missile defence shield close to its borders. The foreign ministry said: “If the real deployment of an American strategic missile defence shield begins close to our borders, then we will be forced to react not with diplomatic methods, but with military-technical methods.” Earlier on Tuesday, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, signed an accord in Prague confirming the deployment of a radar base in the Czech Republic. More

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category. Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008. More

Source: AFP News
Iran would launch attacks against Israel and the US navy in the Gulf as its first response against any American attack over its nuclear programme, an aide to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday, according to the Fars news agency.

(Reuters) - Iraq will not accept any security agreement with the United States unless it includes dates for the withdrawal of foreign forces, the government’s national security adviser said on Tuesday. The comments by Mowaffaq al-Rubaie underscore the U.S.-backed government’s hardening stance toward a deal with Washington that will provide a legal basis for U.S. troops to operate when a U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year. More

Source: BBC
The US has imposed new financial sanctions on Iranian individuals and companies suspected of involvement in the country’s nuclear programme. A senior defence ministry scientist and several companies thought to be linked to Iran’s arms industry were among those placed on the restricted list. The move will ban US companies from trading with those on the list, who will also have US assets frozen. It came as G8 leaders called for Iran to halt uranium enrichment work. Western leaders have been attempting to convince Tehran to stop enriching uranium, which it has continued despite the imposition of sanctions by the UN and the European Union. Iran denies Western assertions that it is developing nuclear weapons and insists its nuclear programme is intended for peaceful purposes. Correspondents say the latest sanctions move is intended to increase the pressure on Tehran to comply with the calls to end enrichment.