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(02/07/08 5:00am)
Joe Jackson has been recording music since 1979, when he released his debut album Look Sharp!, which had the hit "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" Although he has been releasing music on a fairly steady basis since then, that song has proven to be his biggest hit. It will most likely be the song he's always known for, but his sound has evolved a great deal since then.\nRain is his first album since 2004's Afterlife, and piano dominates the new album's sound. This release is full of jazz, pop and rock elements. \nRain starts off strong with jazz piano and Jackson's yearning vocals on "Invisible Man," which quickly turns into a sweet, soft, piano melody that sounds like Five for Fighting meets Jim Brickman, with a touch of jazz and melancholy thrown in. The Five for Fighting-esque piano themes continue with "Rush Across The Road," a fairly soft song that teeters between mid-tempo piano rock and soft pop.\n"King Pleasure Time" is the fastest song on the CD, a just-under-three-minute tune that sounds like the rockabilly piano of Jerry Lee Lewis mixed with the echoing vocals of David Bowie. The song's echoed vocals and repeating bass line drive most of the song like the piano does on the rest of the album.\nA common theme for this album is for a mid-paced jazz song to quickly turn into a soft, heartfelt melody, then back again. One of these songs, "Too Tough," starts out like a typical jazz piano tune, then quickly softens into a piano melody. Rainy-day jazz would be a good way to describe this piano-filled album.\nRain has a few low points, such as "Solo (So Low)," and "Good Bad Boy," which drone on in melancholy jazz lite. However, most of the album has an upbeat feel with strong melodies and rhythmic changes. Jackson may have departed from the hits that made a name for him, but he still upholds his reputation as a talented musician.
(09/26/07 2:28am)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to consider the constitutionality of lethal injections in a case that could affect the way inmates are executed around the country.\nThe high court will hear a challenge from two inmates on death row in Kentucky – Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr. – who sued Kentucky in 2004, claiming lethal injection amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.\nBaze has been scheduled for execution Tuesday night, but the Kentucky Supreme Court halted the proceedings earlier this month.\nThe U.S. Supreme Court has previously made it easier for death row inmates to contest the lethal injections used across the country for executions.\nBut until Tuesday, the justices had never agreed to consider the fundamental question of whether the mix of drugs used in Kentucky and elsewhere violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.\nAll 37 states that perform lethal injections use the same three-drug cocktail, but at least 10 states suspended its use after opponents alleged it was ineffective and cruel, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.\nThe three consist of an anesthetic, a muscle paralyzer, and a substance to stop the heart. Death penalty foes have argued that if the condemned prisoner is not given enough anesthetic, he can suffer excruciating pain without being able to cry out.\nU.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger ruled last week that Tennessee’s method of lethal injection is unconstitutional and ordered the state not to execute a death row inmate using that method. The state is still deciding whether to appeal the judge’s ruling, but agreed to stop a pending execution.\nA ruling from California in the case of convicted killer Michael Morales resulted in the statewide suspension of executions.\nStates began using lethal injection in 1978 as an alternative to the historic methods of execution: electrocution, gassing, hanging and shooting. Since the death penalty resumed in 1977, 790 of 958 executions have been by injection.
(08/23/07 3:47am)
WASHINGTON – Opening a new front in the Bush administration’s battle to keep its records confidential, the Justice Department is contending that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.\nThe department’s argument is in response to a lawsuit trying to force the office to reveal what it knows about the disappearance of White House e-mails.\nThe Office of Administration provides administrative services, including information technology support, to the Executive Office of the President. Most of the White House is not subject to the FOIA, but certain components within it handle FOIA requests. Last year the Office of Administration processed 65 FOIA requests.\nHowever, the Justice Department maintained in court papers filed Tuesday that the Office of Administration has no substantial authority independent of President Bush and therefore is not subject to the FOIA’s disclosure requirements.\nRegarding the Bush administration’s conduct, “this behavior is perfectly consistent with the way they have handled freedom of information issues over the past six years,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “When they don’t want to comply with the law, they just shamelessly argue they are not subject to the law. It’s arrogant and disrespectful to citizens.”\nIn its filing in U.S. District Court, the Justice Department said, “to be sure, OA currently has regulations implementing FOIA and has not taken the position” previously that it is exempt from the Freedom Of Information Act. To justify a change, the court papers rely on a court ruling in the 1990s that the National Security Council was not subject to FOIA. Previously, the NSC had handled FOIA requests.\nThe Office of Administration has prepared estimates that there are at least 5 million missing White House e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005, according to the lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a private advocacy group.\nThe White House has said it is aware that some e-mails may not have been automatically archived on a computer server for the Executive Office of the President.\nThe e-mails, the White House has said, may have been preserved on backup tapes.\n“The Office of Administration is looking into whether there are e-mails not automatically archived; and once we determine whether or not there is a problem, we’ll take the necessary steps to address it,” said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.\nThe first indication of a problem came in early 2006 when special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald raised the possibility that records sought in the CIA leak investigation involving the outing of Valerie Plame could be missing because of an e-mail archiving problem at the White House.\nThe issue came into focus early this year amid the uproar over the firing of U.S. attorneys. It turned out that aides to Bush improperly used Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts for official business and that an undetermined number of e-mails had been lost in the process.\nThe Justice Department Web site, which lists all FOIA contacts inside the government, identifies seven units inside the Executive Office of the President as responding to FOIA requests, including the Office of Administration.\nThe Office of Administration “has certainly acted like an agency in the past,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, a private group advocating public disclosure of government secrets.\nFuchs’ organization filed a request in February 2006 after Fitzgerald revealed that e-mails might be missing. When the Office of Administration finally denied the private group’s request in June of this year, the office said it was not an “agency” as defined by the Freedom of Information Act and was therefore not subject to the law’s requirements.\nThe administration has been resisting disclosure of information on an array of fronts.\nIn September 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney’s lawyer instructed the Secret Service that it “shall not retain any copy” of material identifying visitors to the vice president’s official residence. The lawyer, Shannen Coffin, wrote the letter as The Washington Post sought copies of Cheney’s visitors.\nThe letter regarding the vice president’s residence was in addition to an agreement quietly signed between the White House and the Secret Service when questions were raised about visits to the executive compound by convicted influence peddler Jack Abramoff.\nThat agreement, which didn’t surface publicly until late last year, said White House entry and exit logs were presidential records not subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
(06/28/07 4:59pm)
WASHINGTON – A high school student’s “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner got slapped down by the Supreme Court in a decision Monday that restricts student speech rights when the message seems to advocate illegal drug use.\nThe court ruled 5-4 in the case of Joseph Frederick, who unfurled his handiwork at a school-sanctioned event in 2002, triggering his suspension and leading to a lengthy court battle.\n“The message on Frederick’s banner is cryptic,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. But the school principal who suspended him “thought the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one,” Roberts said in the majority opinion.\nIn a concurrence, Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy said the court’s opinion “goes no further” than speech interpreted as dealing with illegal drug use.\n“It provides no support” for any restriction that goes to political or social issues, they said.\nIn dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said the ruling “does serious violence to the \nFirst Amendment.”\nStudents in public schools don’t have the same rights as adults, but neither do they leave their constitutional protections at the schoolhouse gate, the court said in a landmark speech-rights ruling from the Vietnam era.\nThe court has limited what students can do in subsequent cases, saying they may not be disruptive or lewd or interfere with a school’s basic educational mission.\nFrederick said his banner was a nonsensical message that he first saw on a snowboard. He intended it to proclaim his right to say anything at all.\nFrederick displayed his handiwork on a winter morning as the Olympic torch made its way through Juneau, Ala., en route to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.\nSchool principal Deborah Morse said the phrase was a pro-drug message. Frederick denied that he was advocating drug use and brought a federal civil rights lawsuit.\nFormer independent counsel Ken Starr, whose law firm represented the school principal, called it a narrow ruling that “should not be read more broadly.”\nTaking issue with that, Steven R. Shapiro, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “It is difficult to know what its impact will be in other cases involving unpopular speech.”\nThe Students for Sensible Drug Policy said it was sad that the court thought there should be a drug exception to the First Amendment.\nIn their concurrence Alito and Kennedy said that the decision “goes no further than to hold that a public school may restrict speech that a reasonable observer would interpret as advocating illegal drug use.”\nNor does it address political or social issues such as the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use, Alito and Kennedy said, embracing language from Stevens’ strong dissent.\nStevens said the First Amendment protects student speech if the message itself neither violates a permissible rule nor expressly advocates conduct that is illegal and harmful to students.\n“This nonsense banner does neither,” Stevens said.\nJustice Stephen Breyer said the court should not have decided the First Amendment issue, but should have simply held that Frederick’s claim for monetary damages because school officials have qualified immunity in carrying out their duties.
(03/21/07 4:00am)
WASHINGTON – The White House offered Tuesday to make political strategist Karl Rove and former counsel Harriet Miers available for congressional interviews – but not testimony under oath – in the investigation of the firing of eight federal prosecutors.\nSen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he would still press for White House aides to testify under oath but that White House counsel Fred Fielding “indicated he didn’t want to negotiate” whether Rove and others would have to appear in a full hearing. “That doesn’t mean we’re not going to try,” Schumer said.\nThe White House move was announced after the Senate voted overwhelmingly to end the Bush administration’s ability to unilaterally fill U.S. attorney vacancies. That had come as a backlash to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of the prosecutors.\nGonzales got a morale boost with an early-morning call from President Bush, their first conversation since a week ago when the president said he was unhappy with how the Justice Department handled the firings.\nThe White House said Bush planned a statement late Tuesday afternoon upon his return from a trip to Kansas City, Kansas.\nWhile some lawmakers have called for Gonzales to resign, Bush intended to make a statement of support for him to remain as attorney general, the White House said. The president was also to talk about his position on the offer made to Congress, a subject on which he feels strongly.\nThe White House offered to arrange interviews with Rove, Miers, deputy White House counsel William Kelley and J. Scott Jennings, a deputy to White House political director Sara Taylor, who works for Rove.\n“Such interviews would be private and conducted without the need for an oath, transcript, subsequent testimony or the subsequent issuance of subpoenas,” Fielding said in a letter to the chairman of the House and Senate judiciary committees.\nIn the letter, Fielding said more than 3,000 documents released by the Justice Department “do not reflect that any U.S. attorney was replaced to interfere with a pending or future criminal investigation or for any other improper reason.”\nSchumer said, “It’s sort of giving us the opportunity to talk to them but not giving us the opportunity to figure out what really happened here.”
(04/07/06 5:23am)
WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide told prosecutors President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case.\nBefore his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on information and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure, the court papers say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8, 2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.\nThere was no indication in the filing that either Bush or Cheney authorized Libby to disclose Valerie Plame's CIA identity.\nThe disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.\nBush's political foes jumped on the revelation about Libby's testimony.\n"The fact that the president was willing to reveal classified information for political gain and put the interests of his political party ahead of America's security shows that he can no longer be trusted to keep America safe," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said.\n"The more we hear, the more it is clear this goes way beyond Scooter Libby," said New York Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer. At the very least, President Bush and Vice President Cheney should fully inform the American people of any role in allowing classified information to be leaked."\nLibby's testimony also puts the president and the vice president in the awkward position of authorizing leaks -- a practice both have long said they abhor, so much so that the administration has put in motion criminal investigations to hunt down leakers.\nThe most recent instance is the administration's launching of a probe into who disclosed to The New York Times the existence of the warrantless domestic surveillance program authorized by Bush shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.\nThe authorization involving intelligence information came as the Bush administration faced mounting criticism about its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason the Bush administration had given for going to war.\nLibby's participation in a critical conversation with Miller on July 8, 2003, "occurred only after the vice president advised defendant that the president specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the National Intelligence Estimate," the papers filed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald stated. The filing did not specify the "certain information."\n"Defendant testified that the circumstances of his conversation with reporter Miller -- getting approval from the president through the vice president to discuss material that would be classified but for that approval were unique in his recollection," the papers added.\nThe court filing was first disclosed by The New York Sun.
(11/04/05 4:40am)
WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff pleaded not guilty Thursday in the CIA leak scandal, marking the start of what could be a long road to a trial in which Cheney and other top Bush administration officials could be summoned to testify.\nI. Lewis "Scooter" Libby entered the plea in front of U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, a former prosecutor who has spent two decades as a judge in the nation's capital.\n"With respect, your honor, I plead not guilty," Libby told the judge.\nLibby, who is recovering from a foot injury, leaned his crutches against a podium from which lawyers normally question witnesses or address the court. He stood with his newly expanded legal team at the table reserved for the defense.\n"He wants to clear his good name, and he wants a jury trial," one of Libby's new lawyers, prominent trial attorney Ted Wells, said later outside the courthouse.\nDuring the 10-minute arraignment, Walton set Libby's next court appearance for Feb. 3 and learned from the lawyers they had no idea when they would be ready for trial.\nSpecial Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald estimated it would take two weeks for the government to present its case against Libby, and the timing would depend upon pretrial motions by his attorneys.\nWilliam Jeffress, one of the lawyers Libby hired this week to bolster his defense team, told the judge, "It may be a little early" to predict when they would be ready for trial. Jeffress said several First Amendment and national security issues would have to be resolved by the court before a trial could be held.\nAmong the issues is whether journalists will be compelled to testify during the trial and how quickly Libby's lawyers will receive security clearances so they can review classified documents that might prove useful in his defense.\nLibby signaled his determination to fight the charges after Friday's grand jury indictment and in the past few days has hired Jeffress and Wells -- two well-known defense lawyers -- to assist in his defense.\nWells won acquittals for former Agriculture Secretary Michael Espy and former Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan. He is a partner at the New York-based firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.\nJeffress is from the firm Baker Botts, where Bush family friend and former Secretary of State James A. Baker is a senior partner. Jeffress has won acquittals for public officials accused of extortion, perjury, money laundering and vote-buying, his firm's Web site says.\nLibby was charged with lying to investigators and the grand jury about leaking to reporters the CIA identity of the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. Valerie Plame's name was published by conservative columnist Robert Novak after Wilson accused the administration of twisting intelligence in the run-up to the war to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.\nThe indictment said Libby got information about Plame's identity in June of 2003 from Cheney, the State Department and the CIA, then spread it to New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. Libby told FBI agents and a federal grand jury that his information had come from NBC reporter Tim Russert.\nRussert said he and Libby never discussed Wilson or his wife.\nMiller, who never wrote a story, said Libby told her about the CIA connection of Wilson's wife. Cooper said Libby was one of his sources for a story identifying the CIA connection of Wilson's wife.\nLibby attorney Joseph Tate said inconsistencies in recollections among people regarding long-ago events should not be charged as crimes. Libby is accused of one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of lying to FBI agents and two counts of perjury before a federal grand jury.\nSenate Democrats seized on the Libby indictment to put the Bush administration on the defensive, focusing attention on the possible manipulation of prewar intelligence on Iraq and the failure by Senate Republicans to promptly investigate the issue.\nDemocrats are pressing for the intelligence committee, among other things, to examine the administration's strongly worded prewar statements on the Iraqi threat and whether they match up with the actual intelligence.\nIt also wants to scrutinize the role of the prowar Iraq National Congress, an exile group run by Ahmad Chalabi, in feeding information from defectors to the Pentagon and to Cheney's office.\n"Any line of questioning that has brought us too close to the White House has been thwarted," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee. "We have been undermined, avoided, put off, and vilified by the other side"
(07/18/05 3:24am)
WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide was among the sources for a Time magazine reporter's story about the identity of a CIA officer, the reporter said Sunday.\nUntil last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two years that vice presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove were not involved in the leaks of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity.\nThe White House refused last week to repeat those assertions when it was revealed that Rove had told Time reporter Matt Cooper that the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson apparently works at the CIA and that she had authorized his trip to Africa. The CIA dispatched Wilson to check out a report that the government of Niger had sold yellowcake uranium to Iraq for nuclear weapons.\nCooper said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he spoke to Libby after first learning about Wilson's wife from Rove.\nAccording to Cooper, Libby and Rove were among the government officials referred to in Cooper's subsequent Time story that said Wilson's wife was a CIA official and that she was involved in sending her husband on a trip to Africa.\nCooper's article was headlined, "A War on Wilson?"\nOn Sunday, Cooper also said there may have been other sources for that information. He declined to elaborate.\nIn a first-person account in the latest issue of Time, Cooper said Rove ended their telephone conversation with the words, "I've already said too much." Cooper speculated that Rove could have been worried about being indiscreet or "it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else."\nRepublicans are responding to the revelations about Rove's role in the leak by saying that the deputy White House chief of staff first heard about Wilson's wife from a reporter.\nThe chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, told NBC that the disclosure about getting the information from a reporter vindicates Rove and that Democrats who have called for Rove's dismissal should apologize.\nBut John Podesta, former White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, said the White House's assurance in 2003 that Rove was not involved in the leak "was a lie." Rove's credibility "is in shreds," said Podesta, who appeared with Mehlmen.\nWilson was the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.
(07/14/05 3:27am)
WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Wednesday that he will withhold judgment about top aide Karl Rove's involvement in leaking the identity of a CIA agent until a federal criminal investigation into the matter is complete.\n"This is a serious investigation," Bush said at the end of a meeting with his Cabinet, with Rove sitting just behind him. "I will be more than happy to comment on this matter once this investigation is complete.\n"I also will not prejudge the investigation based on media reports," he said, when asked whether Rove acted improperly in discussing CIA officer Valerie Plame with a reporter.\nRove talked about Plame -- without using her name -- in a July 11, 2003, conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper. Cooper wrote an article that identified her.\nBush's statement was a surprise for some White House advisers and senior Republicans who had expected the president to deliver a vote of confidence for Rove, his deputy chief of staff. Two Bush advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was poised to speak for himself at the Cabinet meeting, said shortly before his remarks that the president intended to signal his support of Rove -- without prejudging the merits of the case -- during that picture-taking session. Indeed, they said, he was prepared to do so a day earlier but the question was not posed in the question-and-answer session Tuesday.\nBush said last year he would fire anyone found to have leaked Plame's identity.\nBush refused to directly answer questions about whether he had spoken to Rove about his discussion with Cooper.\n"I have instructed every member of my staff to fully cooperate in this investigation," Bush said. Rove sat stoically behind Bush during the questions about his involvement.\nBush spoke shortly after Cooper showed up at U.S. District Court on Wednesday. The grand jury investigating the leak was meeting and it was expected Cooper would testify. Cooper did not comment while entering the courthouse.\nEarlier, first lady Laura Bush, talking to reporters while traveling in Africa, called Rove "a very good friend" but said she did not want to talk about the investigation.\nCooper had refused to reveal his source for the story but agreed to do so after a confidentiality agreement was waived. That came just before Cooper could have been sent to jail for not cooperating with the investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked her name and whether that constituted a crime.\nAnother reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, is in prison after refusing to disclose her source to investigators.\nIn September and October 2003, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he had spoken to Rove about the Plame matter and that Rove wasn't involved in the leak. McClellan refused for a third day Wednesday to discuss the denials of two years ago, saying that to do so would impinge on the ongoing criminal investigation of the leak.\nRove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, said Rove did not disclose Valerie Plame's name, a point that Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., called a distinction without a difference.\n"The fact that he didn't give her name, but identified the ambassador's wife ... doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who that is," Biden said on CNN's "Inside Politics." "If that occurred, at a minimum, that was incredibly bad judgment, warranting him being asked to leave."\nSens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said it's time for Rove to leave.\nWhite House allies weighed in, with expressions of support for Rove from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa.\nRepublican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said Rove was the victim of partisan political attacks by Democrats.\nAn e-mail by Cooper that surfaced over the weekend in Newsweek magazine said Rove spoke of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson as being someone who apparently works at the CIA and who arranged a trip for her husband to Africa.\nCooper's e-mail said Rove warned him away from the idea that Wilson's trip had been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney.\nThe RNC chairman said Rove "was discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise."\nRove's conversation with Cooper took place five days after Plame's husband suggested in a New York Times op-ed piece that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.\nEight days after the op-ed piece, Plame's name and her connection to the CIA first appeared in a newspaper column by Robert Novak.\nThe column said two administration officials told Novak that Wilson's wife had suggested sending him to investigate whether Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. Cooper's byline appeared on an article a few days later naming Plame.
(04/27/05 5:30am)
WASHINGTON -- Unfavorable court rulings have the news media facing their most serious challenge in more than three decades over protecting the identities of confidential sources.\nThe latest defeat came last week when a federal appeals court in Washington declined to reconsider a three-judge panel's ruling compelling Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and The New York Times' Judith Miller to testify before a federal grand jury about their sources or go to jail for up to 18 months.\nThe two reporters have been called to testify about the leak of an undercover CIA officer's name.\nThe Associated Press and other news organizations are appealing a federal judge's decision finding five reporters in contempt for refusing to identify their sources for stories about nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. Appeals court arguments are scheduled for May 9.\nThe judge said the information from the reporters is needed so Lee, who was wrongly suspected of spying, can pursue his privacy lawsuit against government officials.\nLast year, Providence, R.I., TV reporter Jim Taricani was sentenced to home confinement after he refused a court order to reveal the confidential source of an undercover FBI videotape of an alleged bribe. He served four months.\nThe New York Times and Time are hoping the Supreme Court will intervene and use the case of Miller and Cooper to clarify the law.\nDifferent courts have ruled in different ways on the issue of reporters and their sources, and this is "an ideal time for the Supreme Court to take this case," said Bruce W. Sanford, a partner with the Washington office of Baker & Hostetler who has represented the press on many issues.\nOther experts on the issue of press freedom and the law doubt the high court will accept the case. They say the circumstances in the current leak investigation appear to parallel a landmark case in which the court dealt the media a major setback.\n"There's no particular indication that the court is looking to revisit this area of the law," Georgetown University law professor Richard Lazarus said.\nIn the 1972 Branzburg v. Hayes decision, the court ruled 5-4 that a Louisville, Ky., Courier-Journal reporter had to tell a grand jury the identity of his sources for stories on drug trafficking.\nJournalists pressed state legislatures to enact "shield laws" that handed reporters what the Supreme Court would not -- the right to guard the identity of their sources, a vital tool in investigative reporting. Many states did.\nCongress has not passed a similar law to apply to reporters in federal probes. A bill is pending, but it's unclear whether it has enough support to pass.\nExperts say that in many ways lawyers representing the news media have done a remarkable job over the last three decades turning an essentially adverse ruling in Branzburg to their advantage, arguing with success in many instances that the news media does have a privilege to protect sources.\nThe media's lawyers relied on language in Branzburg by then-Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote a separate concurring opinion that was somewhat sympathetic to the press.\n"It was a classic case of making lemonade out of lemons, and to a large extent it worked; the problem is, now the courts aren't buying it anymore," said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and the law at the University of Minnesota.\nA 2003 case in federal appeals court in Chicago was seen as a turning point, with a three-judge panel concluding, "We do not see why there needs to be special criteria merely because the possessor of the documents or other evidence sought is a journalist."\nThe case involved three Chicago newspaper reporters who turned over to an Irish court taped interviews with an FBI informant.\nTwenty-six media organizations, including The AP, filed court papers calling the ruling a stunning break from long-standing precedent.
(10/25/04 4:16am)
WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush showered $136 billion in new tax breaks on businesses, farmers and other groups Friday, quietly signing the most sweeping rewrite of corporate tax law in nearly two decades.\nAnnouncing the action without fanfare aboard Air Force One, the White House said the new law is good for America's workers because it will help create jobs here at home.\nThe election-year measure is intended to end a bitter trade war with Europe, and supporters said it provides critical assistance to beleaguered manufacturers who have suffered 2.7 million lost jobs over the past four years.\nThe legislation also includes about $10 billion in assistance for tobacco farmers. A Senate provision that would have coupled the assistance with regulation of tobacco by the Food and Drug Administration was dropped by the conference committee that ironed out differences between the two chambers.\nThough the legislation provides new tax breaks, Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation says it has no impact on the deficit because it also closes corporate tax loopholes and repeals export subsidies.\nOpponents disagree, saying it will swell the nation's huge budget deficit with a massive giveaway that will reward multinational companies that move jobs overseas and add to the complexity of the tax system.\nThe centerpiece of the tax legislation is $76.5 billion in new tax relief for the battered manufacturing sector, which has lost 2.7 million jobs over the past four years. Manufacturing in the law is broadly defined to include not just factories but also oil and gas producers, engineering, construction and architectural firms and large farming operations.\nDemocrat John Kerry's presidential campaign says the assertion that the new law is revenue-neutral is bogus because many of the tax breaks in the new law are for only one or two years and likely will be extended by Congress, while revenue-saving offsets are for 10 years.\nThe law will "shut down corporate tax abuses -- without increasing the federal deficit," insisted House Ways and Means Committee chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif.\nThere was no signing ceremony.\n"This legislation will end the European sanctions on American exports, and it will help promote the competitiveness of American manufacturers and other job creators, and help create jobs here in America," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on the campaign trail in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.\nKerry missed the vote on the corporate tax breaks. Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said that "in his first budget, John Kerry will call for the repeal of all the unwarranted international tax breaks that George Bush included in this bill."\nThe handling of the corporate tax bill stood in contrast with Bush's action Oct. 4 when he sat before television cameras on a stage in Des Moines, Iowa, and signed three tax-cut breaks popular with middle-class voters and revive other tax incentives for businesses.\nThe original purpose for the legislation was to repeal a $5 billion annual tax break provided to American exporters that was ruled illegal by the Geneva-based World Trade Organization. Repeal of the tax break was needed to lift retaliatory tariffs on more than 1,600 American manufactured products and farm goods exported to Europe.\nThe tariffs now stand at 12 percent and are rising by 1 percentage point a month.\nThe measure is the most sweeping overhaul of corporate tax law since 1986. It replaces the $49.2 billion export tax break with $136 billion in new tax breaks for a wide array of groups from farmers, fishermen and bow and arrow hunters to some of America's largest corporations. Among the beneficiaries: native Alaskan whalers, importers of Chinese ceiling fans and NASCAR race track owners.
(10/13/04 6:02am)
DENVER -- In a last-minute flurry of accusations before their final debate, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry tried to tie President George W. Bush to record oil prices while the president charged that his Democratic opponent has totally misunderstood the war on terror.\nOn the way to the debate that will range over domestic issues from the economy to health care, Bush is reaching out to military supporters in Colorado Springs, where the War in Iraq is the chief concern.\nBush's campaigning Tuesday in the conservative heart of Colorado is an effort to counter Kerry's surprising bid to win a state that has voted Republican in nine of the past 11 presidential elections. One poll shows Bush ahead in Colorado; another shows the two men in a close race.\n"Kerry is here to try to make up electoral votes he can't get in the South," said Colorado College Political Science Professor Bob Loevy. "John Kerry and the Democrats are setting a tall order for themselves by making a play for Colorado."\nOn Monday, Kerry lashed out at a president who has taken to calling the Democrat a tax-and-spend liberal with a 20-year Senate record of voting in favor of tax increases.\nThe record price of oil "means a lot more profit for this president's friends in the oil industry. But for most middle-class Americans, the Bush tax increase is a tax increase that they can't afford," Kerry said in New Mexico.\nBush, also campaigning in New Mexico, ridiculed Kerry for saying in an interview published Sunday in The New York Times Magazine, "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they're a nuisance."\n"I couldn't disagree more," the president said. "Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive."\nThe Kerry campaign counterattacked, circulating a 2-year-old comment from Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser in the first Bush administration, who said the United States can break the back of terrorism "so that it is a horrible nuisance, and not a paralyzing influence."\nNationally, a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll taken Saturday and Sunday showed Bush and Kerry in a statistical dead heat, with 49 percent for the Democrat and 48 percent for Bush among likely voters. The poll's margin of error was 4 percentage points.\nIn Colorado, Kerry could be helped by the Senate race involving Democrat Ken Salazar, who has the support of more than three-quarters of Hispanic voters in the state, according to recent polls.\n"With the Hispanic vote, you could have a coattails effect for Kerry," says Political Science Professor Andrew Dunham, a colleague of Loevy at Colorado College.\nBush gave a boost to Salazar's opponent, Republican Pete Coors, spending the day in his company and appearing with him at an outdoor rally Monday in the Red Rocks Park in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains near Denver.\nIt is a difficult time for Colorado Springs, where 7,000 troops stationed at nearby Fort Carson are returning to Iraq in the coming months for a second tour of duty. During the first deployment of 12,000 troops last year, more than 40 were killed and more than 500 were wounded.\nFrom Colorado Springs, Bush was heading to Arizona and a Republican Party fund-raiser in Paradise Valley.\nThe final Bush-Kerry debate is Wednesday night at Arizona State University.
(08/05/04 1:07am)
DAVENPORT, Iowa -- President Bush and rival John Kerry campaigned Wednesday in the same crucially important Iowa town, with the president predicting he will win in November because his administration has improved the economy and bolstered national security.\n"The other folks talk a good game. We deliver," the president told thousands of cheering supporters on the banks of the Mississippi River in a state he narrowly lost four years ago.\n"This time we're going to carry it," Bush said.\nBush and Kerry are in a tight race in Iowa, and both candidates are going after voters in Davenport, an area that some political experts say provided Democrat Al Gore the votes he needed to defeat Bush in the state in 2000.\nBush's campaign rally was several blocks away from where Kerry was to hear stories of manufacturing job losses in the state, which have totaled more than 26,000 since Bush took office.\nBush cited the state's relatively low jobless rate, 4.3 percent in June, which has consistently been below the national average, which was 5.6 percent in June. He said that since his presidency began, he has opened up markets overseas for Iowa farmers and has lowered their taxes.\n"I have made the success of Iowa farmers and ranchers a priority, and America is better off for it," the president said.\nBush said his efforts in the war on terrorism, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, have "made America safer."\nThis is the president's fourth trip to Iowa this year. Gore captured Iowa in 2000 by a little more than 4,000 votes after making a well-timed visit to Davenport a week and a half before the election. Gore won the county containing Davenport, 50.8 percent to 46.4 percent for Bush.\nIowa Republicans say they are not surprised that the incumbent president is in a dead heat with Kerry in the state.\n"After what happened in 2000, with the election going to the Supreme Court, that hardened many people's attitudes," former Iowa state Republican chairman Michael Mahaffey said. "Democratic Party activists have been very disgruntled, and they want to make sure they do everything they can to make sure that George Bush is defeated."\nMahaffey's view is that the "passion is more to get George Bush defeated than it is to get John Kerry elected."\nIn the Mankato, Minn., area, Bush was highlighting a national program that provides incentives to landowners to remove environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production and replace it with grass, trees or wildlife habitat. The 2002 farm bill Bush signed would provide $40 billion over the next decade to restore millions of acres of wetlands, protect sensitive habitats, conserve water and improve streams and waterways near farms and ranches.\nKerry's camp sent Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin to Minnesota to criticize Bush's level of support for the conservation program, saying Minnesota has seen fewer acres approved for enrollment in the program.\nOne calculation in the president's visit to rural Minnesota may be the overlap effect on Iowa. Mankato has a television station that broadcasts into Iowa, said political science professor Joseph Kunkel of Minnesota State University in Mankato.\nThe president was visiting a farm in the town of LeSueur, Minn., and a quarry in Mankato.\nBush lost Minnesota in 2000 with 45.5 percent of the vote to Gore's 47.9 percent.\nBush's last visit to the state was in July to Duluth, traditionally considered Democratic territory. Southern Minnesota is more reliably Republican, though Kunkel said Mankato itself is considered more Democratic.
(07/12/04 1:23am)
WASHINGTON -- President Bush says legalizing gay marriage would redefine the most fundamental institution of civilization and that a constitutional amendment is needed to protect it.\nA few activist judges and local officials have taken it on themselves to change the meaning of marriage, Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.\nLeading the chorus of support for an amendment, Bush said, "If courts create their own arbitrary definition of marriage as a mere legal contract, and cut marriage off from its cultural, religious and natural roots, then the meaning of marriage is lost and the institution is weakened."\nHis remarks follow the opening of Senate debate Friday on a constitutional amendment effectively banning gay marriage.\nReflecting the election-year sensitivity of the issue, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Republicans are using the constitutional amendment as a bulletin board for campaign sloganeering.\nSen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, accused Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry of holding inconsistent positions.\nKerry and running mate Sen. John Edwards oppose gay marriage, but support civil unions.\nBush singled out Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court, which called marriage an evolving paradigm. "That sends a message to the next generation that marriage has no enduring meaning, and that ages of moral teaching and human experience have nothing to teach us about this institution," he said.\nThe president urged the House and Senate to send to the states for ratification an amendment that defines marriage in the United States as a union of a man and woman as husband and wife.\nSenate Democrats signaled they will not throw barriers in front of the resolution, paving the way for a vote on the amendment as early as Wednesday.\nA constitutional amendment should never be undertaken lightly, Bush said, "yet to defend marriage, our nation has no other choice."\nThe vote puts some Democrats and Republicans in a difficult position. One senator acknowledged the political risk in trying to walk a line supporting both traditional marriage and gay rights.\n"I intend to be your champion on many issues in the future, if you want me," Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., said in remarks directed at gay and lesbian voters. Smith is a leader in efforts to make attacks against homosexuals a federal hate crime.\nThe Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay political organization, said the president and congressional allies "should focus on the priorities of the American people, not the agenda of their extremist base"
(06/21/04 1:51am)
WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission said Sunday that al-Qaida had much more interaction with Iran and Pakistan than it did with Iraq, underscoring a controversy over the Bush administration's insistence that there was collaboration between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein.\nThomas Kean made the comment even as he and other commissioners tried to steer clear of the debate over one of the administration's primary justifications for invading Iraq.\n"We believe ... that there were a lot more active contacts, frankly, with Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq," said Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey.\n"Al-Qaida didn't like to get involved with states, unless they were living there. They got involved with Sudan, they got involved ... where they lived, but otherwise no," he told ABC's "This Week."\nKean said a commission staff document is an interim report and "we don't see any serious conflicts" with what the administration is saying.\nThat report, released last week, said there were contacts between Osama bin Laden's network and the Iraqi government, but they did not appear to have produced a collaborative relationship.\n"I find it, frankly, shocking that the exaggerations of the administration before the war relative to that connection continue to this day," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., told CNN's "Late Edition."\nOne commissioner, Republican John Lehman, came to the defense of Vice President Dick Cheney, who is the most aggressive promoter of the idea that there were strong Iraqi ties to al-Qaida.\nLehman said new intelligence that "we are now in the process of getting" indicates one of Saddam's Fedayeen fighters, a lieutenant colonel, was a prominent al-Qaida member.\nCheney has said he probably has intelligence the commission does not have and "the vice president was right when he said that," Lehman said on NBC's "Meet the Press."\nLehman said the press was "outrageously irresponsible" to portray the staff report as contradicting what the administration said.\nThe commission's vice chairman, former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, said the White House and the commission agree on the central point: There is no evidence of a collaborative relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.\nAmong the differences between what the White House has asserted and what the commission says it has found are:\n-- Cheney said Iraq deployed a bomb-making expert, a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service, when bin Laden asked for terror training. President Bush said on Feb. 8, 2003 that Iraq had provided al-Qaida with chemical and biological weapons training. "The vice president, I believe, said that there was a response by Iraq to some of Osama bin Laden's requests. We found no evidence of that response," Hamilton said.\n-- Cheney said it's "never been proven" and "it's never been refuted" that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official on April 9, 2001 in Prague, Czech Republic. Hamilton said the commission has a picture of Atta taken in Virginia just a few days before the supposed meeting in Prague, as well as his cell phone records with calls placed in the United States at the time of the meeting. Hamilton noted that such data "is not conclusive proof" on Atta's whereabouts, and Hamilton added that the vice president himself was saying the proof was not clear one way or the other.\nAlong with differences over Saddam's government and al-Qaida, a new question arose over whether Bush or Cheney gave the order on Sept. 11 to shoot down the fourth of the hijacked airliners. Lehman said Bush and Cheney told the commission that the president gave his approval after a discussion with Cheney, who was on the scene in the White House command center. Newsweek magazine reported that commission staffers did not believe Cheney's account that he called Bush to get his approval for the shoot-down order.\nIn response to the flap over how strong Iraq's ties to al-Qaida were, Kean noted that the commission's mandate is confined to the Sept. 11 attacks.\nBut the commission's inquiry has led members into related areas as well, prompting Lehman to level strong criticism at Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, saying they have been paying "a kind of blackmail" and "certainly turned a blind eye for a long period of time to al-Qaida operations and al-Qaida operatives in their countries"
(05/17/04 2:05am)
WASHINGTON -- The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted Sunday to the question of whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment.\nWithin months of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly wrote President Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions.\n"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," Gonzales wrote, according to the report in Newsweek magazine. Secretary of State Colin Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo, according to the account.\nAsked about the Gonzales memo, the White House said, "It is the policy of the United States to comply with all of our laws and our treaty obligations."\nThe roots of the scandal lay in a decision, approved last year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a classified operation for aggressive interrogations to Iraqi prisoners, a program that had been focused on the hunt for al-Qaida, The New Yorker magazine reported.\nThe Pentagon said that story was "filled with error and anonymous conjecture" and called it "outlandish, conspiratorial." National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in a German television interview, said of The New Yorker report, "As far as we can tell, there's really nothing to the story."\nPowell said Sunday that there were discussions at high levels inside the Bush administration last fall about information from the International Committee of the Red Cross alleging prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the focal point of the scandal.\n"We knew that the ICRC had concerns, and in accordance with the matter in which the ICRC does its work, it presented those concerns directly to the command in Baghdad," Powell said on "Fox News Sunday." "And I know that some corrective action was taken with respect to those concerns."\nPowell added, "All of the reports we received from ICRC having to do with the situation in Guantanamo, the situation in Afghanistan or the situation in Iraq was the subject of discussion within the administration, at our principals' committee meetings" and at National Security Council meetings.\nCongressional critics suggested the administration may have unwisely imported to Iraq techniques from the war on al-Qaida.\n"There is a sort of morphing of the rules of treatment," said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. "We can treat al-Qaida this way, and we can't treat prisoners captured this way, but where do insurgents fit? This is a dangerous slope."\nThe abuse scandal goes "much higher" than the young American guards watching over Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Biden said on NBC's "Meet the Press."\nIn early 2002, the White House announced that Taliban and al-Qaida detainees would not be afforded prisoner-of-war status, but that the United States would apply the Geneva Conventions to the war in Afghanistan.\nMichigan Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that the reports that Rumsfeld approved a secret program on interrogation for use in Iraq raise "this issue to a whole new level."\nAsked about the Gonzales memo, Powell said: "I wouldn't comment on the specific memo without rereading it again. But ... the Geneva Accord is an important standard in international law and we have to comply with it."\nPowell, interviewed from Jordan by NBC, left open the possibility of problems up the line from the prison guards who engaged in abuse. "I don't see yet any indication that there was a command-climate problem higher up," the secretary said.\nSen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed concern over the shift in responsibility for the scandal at the prison, where military intelligence personnel were given authority over the military police.\n"We need to take this as far up as it goes," McCain said on "Meet the Press."\nFormer CIA counterterrorism official Vincent Cannistraro said it was a major miscalculation to apply interrogation methods that were specifically designed to extract information from al-Qaida prisoners to Abu Ghraib and other holding centers inside Iraq.\n"It was probably the most counterproductive move that the policy-makers could have made and it showed the complete misunderstanding of the Iraq culture," said Cannistraro.\nThe reasons for importing the techniques, Cannistraro said, were the frustrations at the policy level in Washington that not enough information was being obtained about weapons of mass destruction and the frustration over the lack of information about the resistance in Iraq.
(03/07/02 5:43am)
WASHINGTON -- A final report by Independent Counsel Robert Ray concluded Wednesday that prosecutors had ample evidence for criminal charges against President Clinton in the scandal involving former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. \n"President Clinton's offenses had a significant adverse impact on the community, substantially affecting the public's view of the integrity of our legal system," stated the report. \n"The independent counsel's judgment that sufficient evidence existed to prosecute President Clinton was confirmed by President Clinton's admissions," the report stated. "President Clinton admitted he 'knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers"' about his sexual relationship with Lewinsky.\nIt wasn't until Clinton's next-to-last day in office that he finally put the investigation of allegations of perjury and obstruction in the Lewinsky matter behind him. \nThe president's lawyers cut a deal with Ray that spared Clinton from criminal charges in the Lewinsky controversy. The president admitted that he had made false statements under oath about his relationship with the former White House intern and surrendered his law license for five years. \nThe report stated that "President Clinton engaged in conduct that impeded the due administration of justice by testifying falsely under oath...that he could not recall ever being alone with Monica Lewinsky; and he had not had a sexual affair or engaged in sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky."\nIn response to the report, Clinton attorney David Kendall said, "The investigation of President Clinton from 1994 to 2001 was intense, expensive, partisan and long. There's still no Whitewater report, and there's nothing new in this report. It's time to move on."\nRep. Henry Hyde, who was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when it recommended that Clinton be impeached, said he hoped the report was the final chapter of the Lewinsky matter. "It ought to be. I think we can hopefully put it behind us. I think that's where America wants it -- way back there"
(10/02/01 5:58am)
WASHINGTON -- President Bush claimed progress on several fronts in the war on terrorism Monday as he stepped up a covert battle against Afghanistan's terrorist-harboring Taliban militia. The Taliban's days seem numbered, suggested the president of neighboring Pakistan. \n"We're going to bring these people to justice," Bush said of terrorists during an afternoon visit to the headquarters of the federal agency that oversees disaster aid. \nIn New York, nearly three weeks after the attacks leveled the World Trade Center, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani appealed to the world to stand fast against terrorism. \n"The United Nations must hold accountable any country that supports or condones terrorism or you will fail in your primary mission as peacekeepers," Giuliani told General Assembly representatives from more than 150 countries. \nThe U.S. military buildup continued. The aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk left its base in Tokyo on Monday to join other U.S. forces being positioned for possible action. \nAs Afghanistan appeared to be preparing for war, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, suggested that U.S. military action now seemed inevitable. \n"We have conveyed this to the Taliban," Musharraf told the British Broadcasting Corp. \nU.S. officials had been skeptical that the Taliban would hand over Osama bin Laden, whom they view as the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 suicide hijacking attacks in New York and Washington. But they had given Pakistan time to try to persuade the Taliban. \nMusharraf acknowledged Pakistan had nothing to show for its diplomatic campaign. Asked by BBC if the Taliban's days were numbered, he replied: "It appears so." \nBush claimed progress in efforts to track down and neutralize bin Laden and his followers. \n"It's a campaign that must be fought on many fronts, and I'm proud to report that we're making progress on many fronts," the president said in his address at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. \nHe cited hundreds of arrests here and overseas in the investigation, international cooperation and initial success in seizing assets of bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization. \n"The evildoers struck and when they did they aroused a mighty land," Bush said. "We will not be cowed by a few." \nIn other developments Monday: \n--The administration made plans to announce this week the reopening of Washington's Reagan National Airport, the only airport still closed after the attacks. Officials said privately it would reopen under tightened security, including limits on flights and requirements for armed air marshals on those flights. \n--Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said America's armed forces are ready for the war on terrorism. He spoke at a ceremony honoring Army Gen. Henry Shelton, retiring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Shelton cited "recent evil and barbaric attacks." \nBush said that in the week since he announced a move to freeze assets of bin Laden and 26 other individuals and organizations, some $6 million had been blocked and 50 bank accounts frozen, 30 in this country and 20 overseas. \nHe also noted that some 29,000 American troops have been committed to the anti-terrorism effort. "This is a different kind of war. It's hard to fight a guerrilla war with conventional forces, but our military is ready," Bush said. \nAs part of that effort, Bush approved assistance to groups within Afghanistan that oppose the ruling Taliban militia. \n"The purpose of the mission is to eliminate those who harbor terrorists. ... We will work with a variety of people, all of whom have an interest in establishing an Afghanistan that is peaceful and does not practice terrorism," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. \nThe effort is separate from a United Nations humanitarian program to help Afghans overcome hardships, and from a new U.S. plan to help Afghan refugees who have fled to neighboring Pakistan. A senior White House official said the relief aid to refugees could top $100 million. \nBush also used his speech to announce the arrest over the weekend of a man suspected in a 1986 attack by four gunmen on a plane in Pakistan. The plane was en route from Bombay to New York. In the end, 21 people including two Americans were killed and nearly 200 injured in the assault. \nBush said that while the individual arrested was not linked to the bin Laden organization, "he's an example of the wider war on terrorism and what we intend to do." \nThe White House also announced plans for Bush to travel to New York at midweek to visit schoolchildren, Fleischer said \n"It's been very difficult on children, and the president is very concerned about that," Fleischer said. \nFEMA Director Joe Allbaugh said he will travel separately to New York City on Wednesday. He plans to visit a FEMA field office and address several problems with the cleanup effort at the World Trade Center. \n"This is going to take months, it's going to take three to four months just to get to the ground level," Allbaugh told The Associated Press. "This is going to be better than a year to resolve this debris problem at the sites." \nEarlier, Bush spoke by phone with President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. \nAs part of the repositioning of U.S. forces, the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk left its base near Tokyo on Monday. Navy spokesman Hidemi Nagao said the carrier was participating in the campaign against terrorists, but declined to elaborate and would not say where it was going.
(09/14/01 6:19am)
WASHINGTON -- Searchers found the black box of one hijacked airliner in Pennsylvania and received a signal from the black box of the plane that crashed at the Pentagon, officials said Thursday. Attorney General John Ashcroft said the FBI was working on "thousands and thousands of leads" in the investigation of Tuesday's terror attacks. \nSearch crews will not be able to retrieve the black box at the Pentagon, which could contain information about the last minutes of the hijacked commercial jetliner, until they are able to enter the collapsed area of the Pentagon, where the plane's fuselage rests. \nThey were to begin moving into the collapsed area sometime Thursday night, said Arlington County Fire Capt. Scott McKay. \nWhile there have been no arrests, Ashcroft said, authorities have interviewed many people in connection with the hijacking of four airliners and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. \nA total of 18 hijackers were on the planes, Ashcroft said. There were five on each of two planes and four each on the other two. \nHe said was heartened by the public's interest in tracking down those responsible. \n"The FBI is working thousands and thousands of leads," he said. \nAshcroft said the FBI's 800-number hot line had received 2,055 calls. In addition, its Web site had received more than 22,700 tips, he said. \n"Some of these leads have been helpful to the investigation," Ashcroft said. \nHe noted that authorities were still searching for the flight-data and cockpit voice recorders of all four planes that crashed, two in New York, one at the Pentagon and the other in southwestern Pennsylvania. \nMueller said all 18 hijackers on the four planes were ticketed passengers. \nEarlier, the Justice Department said that at least one hijacker on each plane was trained at a U.S. flight school and that well over 50 people may have been involved in the hijackers' well-financed operation. \nA number of people that could be involved in the plot were detained overnight for having false identifications, Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said earlier Thursday. She declined to say how many were detained or where they are being held. \nOfficials are close to releasing the names and possibly the country of origin of the hijackers. Nearly all have been identified, Tucker said. \nThe FBI's massive investigation stretches from the Canadian border to Florida, where some of the participants learned how to fly commercial planes before the attacks. Tucker said flight schools in more than one state were involved in the training of the hijackers, several of whom had pilots' licenses. \nMultiple cells of terrorist groups participated in the operation and the hijackers had possible ties to countries that included Saudi Arabia and Egypt, said law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. \nOfficials said authorities were gathering evidence that the terrorist cells may have had prior involvement in earlier plots against the United States, and might have been involved with Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. That includes the USS Cole bombing in Yemen and the foiled attack on U.S. soil during the millennium celebrations. \nIn Florida Thursday, FBI agents were interviewing three Saudi Arabian flight engineers who are taking classes at Flightsafety International's flight school in Vero Beach, Fla., company spokesman Roger Ritchie said. He declined to name the engineers. \nThe school does not have simulators for Boeing 767 and 757 aircraft such as the ones involved in Tuesday's attacks, Ritchie said. \nThomas Quinn, a New York-based spokesman for Saudi Arabian Airlines, said many of the airline's pilots came to the United States for flight training. \nAbout 40 of the people involved in the attacks have been accounted for, including those killed in the suicide attacks, but 10 remain at large, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing an unidentified source with knowledge of the investigation. \nSome of those involved in the plot left suicide notes, but they are not believed to have been the hijackers, a government source told The Associated Press. It's unclear whether those who left the notes actually killed themselves.