From NY Times
By Carl Hulse and Raymond Hernandez

Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail traffic between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret and allowed Mr. Foley to remain head of a Congressional caucus on children’s issues, Republican lawmakers said Saturday.

The exchanges began with what Republicans now describe as an overfriendly e-mail message from Mr. Foley to the unidentified teenager. But news reports about the exchanges have led to the disclosure of e-mail correspondence with other former pages in which the discussions became more and more sexually explicit.

The revelations set off a political upheaval, with Democrats and some Republicans alike calling for a full investigation of Mr. Foley’s conduct and whether House leaders did enough to look into it.

Among those who became aware of the communication in the fall of 2005 between Mr. Foley and the 16-year-old page, who worked for Representative Rodney Alexander, Republican of Louisiana, were Representative John A. Boehner, the majority leader, and Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Mr. Reynolds said in a statement Saturday that he had also personally raised the issue with Speaker J. Dennis Hastert earlier this year.

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From Yahoo News
By Patrick Quinn

The U.S. military said a captured al-Qaida suspect and members of his cell were “in the final stages” of planning an attack on the Green Zone. An unprecedented curfew prompted by the arrest left millions of Baghdadis stranded at home on Saturday without supplies during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The U.S. military said the suspected al-Qaida in Iraq member was arrested late Friday at the home of senior Sunni Arab political leader Adnan al-Dulaimi, where he was working as a personal bodyguard.

Al-Dulaimi is a member of the Iraqi Accordance Front — the largest Sunni coalition in the 275-member parliament, where it holds 44 seats — and the military was quick to distance the politician from the raid, stressing that he was “not the target.”

After the arrest, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was advised by the U.S. military to shut down the capital and order its 7 million residents to stay at home.

The curfew was rare both in its scope and severity, catching many residents of Baghdad by surprise. Many people are fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, eating and drinking only after sunset, and they were caught without supplies and fresh bread — a Baghdad staple. Most residents did not have a chance to shop on Friday because of a regular, weekly vehicle curfew to prevent attacks against mosques during prayers.

The U.S. military said the suspected terrorist, identified as Khudhir Farhan, and seven members of his al-Qaida cell “were in the final stages of launching a series” of car bomb attacks “possibly involving suicide vests.”

“The detained individual is suspected of involvement in the planning of a multi-vehicle suicide operation inside Baghdad’s International Zone,” the military said, referring to the heavily fortified Green Zone.

Read More Cufew

From NY Daily News
Book slams Rummy, Colin & others in bitter fighting over war
By Corky Siemaszko

While U.S. forces were battling in Baghdad, another war was being waged inside the West Wing.

In “State of Denial,” Bob Woodward describes a White House riven by rivalries where the President’s closest advisers were at one another’s throats - nearly literally in one instance - over how to wage war in Iraq.

There were “surreal” meetings where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to look at each other while making their presentations to a fidgety President, Woodward writes.

Powell and Rumsfeld were like “bulls” who “staked out their ground, almost snorting defiantly, hoofs pawing the table, daring a challenge that never came,” Woodward wrote. “And the President, whose legs often jiggled under the table, did not force a discussion.”

he bad blood between Powell and Rumsfeld spilled over to their underlings. At one point, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage “barked” at Rumsfeld’s man, ex-Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith.

“It was almost as if Armitage wanted to reach across the table and snap Feith’s neck like a twig,” Woodward wrote. “Armitage’s knuckles even turned white.”

Read More Wild Animals

From OP Ed News
By Jayne Lyn Stahl

The Democrats may have found the way to win back the Senate from those whose campaign for “family values” has just hit a major speed bump. As you know, Florida Republican Rep. Mark Foley resigned from Congress yesterday after the discovery of some e-mails he wrote to a former teenage male page. One much publicized Foley missive to the 16 year old former congressional page asks: “You in your boxers, too? Well, strip down and get naked.” This isn’t the first instance of congressional impropriety. In 1983, two members of the House were censured for their dalliances with teenage pages. (AP) But, as the president likes to remind us, that was before 9/11, and with FCC, as well as governmental emphasis on “indecency fines,” this could well be the biggest boon for a Democratic takeover of Congress we’ve ever seen, that is, if the Dems take a lesson from Bill Clinton, and start speaking up.

There is more than a little irony in the fact that the suggestive e-mail was sent from the 52 year old congressman who represents Palm Beach County, also presides over the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, and has been actively engaged in efforts to eradicate Internet child pornography. Further, it was Rep. Foley who asserted that “We track library books better than we do sexual predators,” a statement which, no doubt, has come back to haunt him today.

This is not about the congressman’s sexuality, or his attempts to seduce young boys; this is about his duplicity, and the hypocrisy of the party he represents.

Read More Smoking Shorts

From Common Dreams
By Diego Cevallos

Thousands of local residents, teachers and social activists in the front line of a historic movement against local authorities in the capital of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca are preparing to resist a police operation they believe may be imminent.

“Our companions are very tense. We demand that force should not be used, nobody wants blood in the streets,” Florentino López, spokesman for the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO), a variegated social movement bringing together radical and reformist trade unions and leftist political forces in the state, told IPS from Oaxaca, the state capital.

Sources close to President Vicente Fox’s government told IPS that police plans are laid to put an end to the conflict, which has already lasted 129 days, after attempts failed at negotiation between APPO and representatives of state Governor Ulises Ruiz, who is accused of corruption and human rights abuses.

A police crackdown in Oaxaca “is not planned, but neither is it ruled out,” said Interior Minister Carlos Abascal, who in the past few days has been meeting members of the business community, opinion leaders and church representatives to discuss the conflict.

López confirmed that the “peaceful resistance” movement’s barricades in the centre of Oaxaca have been reinforced and extended since Monday, and that “many compañeros” have armed themselves with incendiary bombs, sticks and stones.

Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the city, the military and police presence has also been beefed up, according to various reports.

“The situation is explosive and could flare up at any time,” Wilfredo Mayrén told IPS.

Read More Crackdown Feared

From BBC News
Violence has been escalating in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul over recent months. After a suicide bomber killed at least 12 people outside the interior ministry, residents of the city describe how the bloodshed has injected fear into daily life.

MUSTHAQ HABIBI, 22, CONSTRUCTION TRADER
Mushtaq Habibi rushed to the scene of Saturday’s explosion
It was about 8am when I heard the bomb. I was some distance away and drove to the scene of the explosion.

It happened on a really busy street. By then the police had covered the area and wouldn’t let us go close, but I did see that people were in a bad condition.

Blood was spattered on the streets. I saw the wreckage of a car. I’ve never experienced such a horrible incident. There is a school very nearby. I heard that children were injured.

When I got there, police were sweeping the blood from the street. When I saw that happening, I thought: “Is this our future now?”

Read More Fear

From Washington Post
Explicit Online Notes Sent to Boy, 16

By Charles Babington and Jonathan Weisman

Six-term Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) resigned yesterday amid reports that he had sent sexually explicit Internet messages to at least one underage male former page.

Foley, who was considered likely to win reelection this fall, said in a three-sentence letter of resignation: “I am deeply sorry and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida I have had the privilege to represent.”

The resignation rocked the Capitol, and especially Foley’s GOP colleagues, as lawmakers were rushing to adjourn for at least six weeks. House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post last night that he had learned this spring of inappropriate “contact” between Foley and a 16-year-old page. Boehner said he then told House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Boehner later contacted The Post and said he could not remember whether he talked to Hastert.

It was not immediately clear what actions Hastert took. His spokesman had said earlier that the speaker did not know of the sexually charged online exchanges between Foley and the boy.

Read More Page Scandal

From Reuters
By Caren Bohan

U.S. President George W. Bush on Saturday challenged what he called public “misimpressions” about Iraq as he battled a gloomy assessment of the war in an intelligence report and the fallout from a book portraying him as in denial over it.

With five weeks to go before midterm congressional elections, and Democrats seizing on both revelations, Bush said the leaks of a U.S. intelligence report indicating the Iraq war had increased the threat of terrorism created “a lot of misimpressions about the document’s conclusions.”

The president has since declassified 3-1/2 pages of the National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the 16 U.S. spy agencies.

The report’s judgment that the Iraq war has become a “cause celebre” for Islamic extremists was seen by Democrats as bolstering their campaign argument that Bush’s policies in Iraq had put Americans at greater risk.

Read More “Misimpressions”

From Time
Thanks to his previous work against pedophiles, the Florida congressman who sent possibly inappropriate emails to a teenager had little choice but to resign. Now the GOP has yet another vulnerable seat to defend

By Tim Padgett

Opinion may be divided over whether the e-mails Florida Representative Mark Foley sent a teen-age male congressional page last year were inappropriate or even constituted outright sexual harassment. But most observers would agree that what was almost as surprising as the allegations themselves was how swiftly the six-term Republican congressman from West Palm Beach quit a thriving career on Capitol Hill after the e-mails were aired Thursday night on the ABC evening news. And a big reason for his abrupt exit, say Florida pundits, is that Foley, 52, was staring at the elements of a perfect political storm that not even a candidate from a hurricane-prone state could withstand in today’s nasty election climate: not only possible accusations of pedophilia, but also the possible stain of gross hypocrisy, given Foley’s high-profile legislative crusade against child sex offenders.

Read More Swift Fall

From Spokesman Review
By Robert Scheer

You would think that a consensus report from all 16 U.S. intelligence services concluding that he has blown the war on terror would be a really big deal to the president. But that assumes that George W. Bush values intelligence.

Clearly, he does not. So the news that a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concludes the threat of terror against the United States has increased since 9-11, largely thanks to his irrational invasion of Iraq, has not disturbed Bush’s branded “What, me worry?” countenance.

Instead, predictably, the administration’s response to the leaked conclusions of the shared assessments of both civilian and military intelligence agencies was the same old historically ignorant claptrap that leaves U.S. policies completely out of the equation.

“Their hatred for freedom and liberty did not develop overnight,” said White House spokesman Peter Watkins. “Those seeds were planted decades ago.”

What seeds are those? It was “decades ago” that the CIA encouraged Muslim fanatics worldwide to go to Afghanistan to fight a holy war against a secular regime backed by the Russians. The end result of that engagement was “ after their troop withdrawal and the consequent U.S. attention deficit “ a devolution into civil war, warlordism and, eventually, the takeover of the country by Osama bin Laden’s friends, the religiously extreme and oppressive Taliban. Sound familiar?

It should: The same deadly process has been taking place under Bush’s watch in Iraq since our idiotic invasion in 2003.

Read More Check Bush