John Boehner errrrrr Roy Orbison
“Crying”

A couple words for Lindsay Graham. We’re not fighting a WAR. There is NO war.
A couple words to Levin: Don’t pussy out. Stick to your guns.

WASHINGTON –Senate Democrats are backing a bill that would grant new rights to terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including access to a lawyer regardless of whether the prisoners are put on trial.
The proposal, approved this week by the Senate Armed Services Committee, also would narrow the definition of an enemy combatant and tighten restrictions on the types of evidence used to prosecute and keep a person detained.

The bill is aimed primarily at increasing legal protections for the hundreds of people captured by the United States and held for years on suspicion of terror ties without a trial. Only those selected for prosecution — typically the most high-profile suspected terrorists — are guaranteed legal counsel and other rights when they go to court.

The legislation has raised red flags at the White House as potential veto bait and among congressional Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said he was concerned that aspects of the bill may go too far.

“Any changes have to meet the test for me that they will not compromise our ability to wage war,” said Graham, R-S.C., in a telephone interview Friday.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, tucked the new detainee measure into a $649 billion defense policy bill for budget year 2008, which begins Oct. 1.

Read more at Boston.com

Good article at Harpers……..

An extremely important item appears in Steve Clemons’s The Washington Note today concerning the internal maneuverings inside the administration over a possible military confrontation in Iran. ABC News previously recounted that President Bush, overruling the advice of Vice President Cheney, had opted to go with a series of covert operations against Iran. The fact of the covert operations, of course, is nothing new-I-d say it’s a commonplace, in fact, widely reported in the press in Europe and the Middle East for sometime, and routinely recited without a denial in discussions with Washington intelligence pros. The news was Cheney’s advocacy of more military measures, and even more significantly that it was rebuffed by Bush.

Cheney has had a virtually pathological obsession with laying the path for a war against Iran. But what we-re seeing now is the first really serious foreign policy consequence of the realignment following the demission of Donald Rumsfeld and what is widely suggested to be a more cautious attitude towards Cheney after the conviction of Scooter Libby. But the point to worry about is this: will Cheney accept his commander-in-chief’s decision, or will he plot behind the scenes to achieve his passion-another war, far more dangerous still, in the Middle East? Clemons writes:

The person in the Bush Administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well-as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging. Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney’s national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush’s tack towards Condoleezza Rice’s diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously. This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an “end run strategy” around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small’scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

Continue reading at Harpers

5 More U.S. deaths in Iraq today………. 101 this month.

26-May-2007 5 | US: 5 | UK: 0 | Other: 0
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Baghdad Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Salah Ad Din Province Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Salah Ad Din Province Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Salah Ad Din Province Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack
US NAME NOT RELEASED YET Al Anbar Province Hostile - hostile fire

from Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Former Vice-President Al Gore: “My position is that all television is bad except my network, Current TV, and The Daily Show, and whatever show I happen to be watching at the time,” Gore joked, before adding, “But in all seriousness, the television news programs have probably spent a lot more time on Britney Spears- shaving her head, and Paris Hilton going to jail, and Anna-Nicole Smith’s estate lawyers and Joey Buttafuoco, and all this stuff, than they have spent giving us the facts - for example, telling us before the invasion of Iraq, that actually Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack of 9/11.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2O1TLoqHk

from THINK PROGRESS

In his commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy this week, President Bush discussed “2-year-old information, declassified by the White House a day earlier,” which asserted that Osama bin Laden had instructed al Qaeda in Iraq to attack the United States. Using the intel to stoke fears of terrorism, Bush argued for the continuation of his stay-the-course policy in Iraq, claiming “Al Qaeda’s leaders inside and outside of Iraq have not given up on their objective of attacking America again.”

As ThinkProgress noted, President Bush has a history of selectively declassifying intelligence that works to his political advantage. Counterterrorism experts now tell Newsweek that “the president’s characterization of the intelligence may have been incomplete” and that he appears to have “ignored contradictory reporting about what actually happened.”

Here are a few examples of Bush’s “incomplete” intelligence:

1) BUSH MYTH: Zarqawi was a top al Qaeda operative before the war. A Senate Intelligence Committee report published last September said that the CIA learned “A-from a senior Al Qaeda detainee- that before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi had actually A-rebuffed several efforts by bin Laden- to recruit Zaqawi to work with Al Qaeda.” But in reality, it was only “after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that Zarqawi permanently set up operations inside the country and then formed much closer ties between his Iraqi insurgent organization and the central leadership of Al Qaeda.”

2) BUSH MYTH: Zarqawi “welcomed” bin Laden’s orders. “A U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with the original intelligence told Newsweek that some of the intel showed that Zarqawi actually resisted bin Laden’s instructions at the time, sending word back to the Al Qaeda leader that he had his hands full orchestrating attacks against U.S. forces inside Iraq.”

3) BUSH MYTH: Bin Laden wants to use Iraq to launch attacks against the West. Rand Beers, a former national’security aide who served under both Clinton and Bush, pointed out that “most of the recent intelligence reporting on terror plots aimed at the U.S. shows that the plans were hatched in Pakistan, not Iraq, and were initiated during the same time frame (in 2005) that bin Laden was ordering Zarqawi to open up a cell.”

Once again, President Bush has been caught fixing intelligence around his policies instead of shaping his policies around intelligence.

By OLIVIA MUNOZ, Associated Press Writer

FRESNO, Calif. - Sightings of the light brown apple moth - which can ruin everything from tomatoes to citrus fruit to alfalfa - have shot up into the thousands since the insect was first discovered in the San Francisco Bay area three months ago, agriculture officials said Friday.

The half-inch moth with an indiscriminate appetite has prompted a federal quarantine, brought together scientists from around the world and worried farmers in California, where agriculture brings in more than $30 billion in revenue a year.

Many fear the pesky little moth’s habits: chomping on the leaves of more than 250 plants species and ruining crops from the inside out by burrowing when it’s in caterpillar form.

The quarantine, imposed earlier this month on eight counties in California’s north and central coastal areas as well as the entire state of Hawaii, restricts the interstate movement of nursery stock, cut flowers and other plants. The moths usually spread by laying their eggs in nursery plants, or traveling hidden inside fruit or plant clippings.

About 80 percent of the moths trapped so far have been in Santa Cruz County, though the first report came in February when a retired entomologist spotted one in his Berkeley backyard. It was fortunate the unremarkable-looking light brown apple moth appeared in the yard of an expert, said Larry Hawkins, a spokesman for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service does a poor job in identifying tax-exempt groups that may have links to terrorists, according to a report released Friday.

IRS investigators look at paper documents and use a limited terrorist watch list to pinpoint possible ties between charitable and other nonprofit groups and terrorists, said the office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which does independent oversight of the tax agency.

As a result, it said, “There is a risk that these charities will not be reported to the federal government authorities fighting terrorism.”

“The IRS clearly needs to use a more inclusive terrorist watch list and to computerize its tracking system as soon as possible,” said Inspector General J. Russell George. “This nation is at war, and we must use all the tools available to us to stop the flow of U.S. dollars to our enemies.”

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., responding to the report, said that “shutting down terrorist financing is one of the biggest challenges facing our country in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. It’s disturbing that the Treasury Department does not require the IRS to use the most basic tool for fighting terrorism financing: a comprehensive watch list.”

Baucus, in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, noted that IRS personnel told the Treasury Inspector General that they mainly look for “Middle Eastern’sounding names” when considering which tax filings to flag for further review.

“Beyond the potential for discrimination, the process raises concerns that the IRS is allowing individuals with terrorist connections to avoid detection simply because their names do not fit into a narrow predetermined profile,” he wrote.

The report said that in fiscal year 2006 there were about 1.6 million tax-exempt organizations, excluding churches, with $2.4 trillion in assets and $1.2 trillion in annual revenues. In tax year 2003, the latest year figures were available, these organizations filed about 300,000 returns subject to review for possible terrorist connections.

read more at Yahoo! NEWS

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran said Saturday it has uncovered spy rings organized by the United States and its Western allies, claiming on state-run television that the espionage networks were made up of “infiltrating elements from the Iraqi occupiers.”

The Intelligence Ministry has “succeeded in identifying and striking blows at several spy networks comprised of infiltrating elements from the Iraqi occupiers in western, southwestern and central Iran,” said the statement, using shorthand for United States and its allies.

The broadcast did not elaborate, saying further details would be published within days.

Meanwhile, the state IRNA news agency said the uncovered networks “enjoyed guidance from intelligence services of the occupying powers in Iraq” and also that “Iraqi groups” were “involved in the case.”

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Iran has often accused the United States and Britain of trying to undermine the security of the Islamic Republic.

The allegations Saturday come two days before American and Iranian ambassadors are to meet in Baghdad to discuss ways to ease the crisis in Iraq. It remains unclear how the announcement will affect those talks, although it clearly reflects a toughening of Iran’s stand.

More at Yahoo News

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. and British forces battled Mehdi Army fighters in Baghdad and the southern city of Basra after their leader, Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, made a rare public appearance and called on U.S. troops to get out of Iraq.

Five gunmen were killed in an air strike during a pre-dawn raid on Saturday in the cleric’s Sadr City stronghold in Baghdad, the U.S. military said. A militant leader suspected of ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards was captured.

In the southern oil hub of Basra, the British military said “a number” of militia fighters were killed in an air strike overnight after they attacked British troops with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machineguns.

The attacks were believed to be in retaliation for the killing of the top Mehdi Army commander in the city on Friday by British-backed Iraqi special forces, the British military said in a statement.

A Reuters reporter saw eight coffins at a funeral for those killed in Basra. A hospital official said 22 others had been wounded. Residents said a helicopter had attacked a group of civilians protesting against the death of the Mehdi Army leader.

The fighting came a day after Sadr appeared in public for the first time in months and repeated his demand for a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal. U.S. officials say he has been in hiding in Iran, but his aides say he never left Iraq.

Continue reading at Reuters