From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Pete Yost

Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Friday admitted to an extramarital affair while his wife was battling cancer. He denied fathering the woman’s daughter. Edwards told ABC News that he lied repeatedly about the affair with 42-year-old Rielle Hunter but said that he didn’t love her.

He said he has not taken a paternity test but knows he isn’t the father because of the timing of the affair and the birth.

ABC said a former Edwards campaign staffer claims he is the father, not Edwards.

Hunter’s daughter, Frances Quinn Hunter, was born on Feb. 27, 2008, and no father’s name is given on the birth certificate filed in California.

Three weeks ago, the National Enquirer said its reporters caught Edwards visiting Hunter at a California hotel. In the interview, scheduled to air on ABC News’ “Nightline,” Edwards said the tabloid was correct when it reported on his meeting with Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hotel last month.

Edwards was a top contender for the Democratic nomination for president, pursuing his party’s nod even after announcing that his wife, Elizabeth, had a deadly form of cancer.

He placed second in the Iowa caucuses last January but dropped out of the race a few weeks later. He has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential choice for Barack Obama. The former North Carolina senator was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2004.

Read more Affair

From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

Who is Bush to lecture the Chinese—or anyone, for that matter—on human rights?

There he was in Thailand, pressing China to uphold human rights when he has done more than any other President to heap scorn on them.

After 9/11, he said, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to kick some ass.”

And Cheney said, it was time to go over to the “dark side.”

And that’s exactly what Bush and Cheney have done.

They’ve illegally kidnapped hundreds of people and disappeared them into black sites.

They’ve had some of these victims tortured with waterboarding and made many others hang by their arms for hours on end.

They’ve held hundreds of people without charge for years in Guantanamo and at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

And they’ve held thousands of people without charge for years in Iraq, often caging them in brutal containers.

Time and time again, Bush and Cheney and their apologists in the Justice Department have asserted the right to flout international treaties on human rights essentially whenever they feel like it.

They are serial human rights abusers.

Read more Bush

From Wired
By Ryan Singel

Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold opposes border agents searching through Americans’ laptops without cause, and he doesn’t like how Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff articulated the government’s current policy in an interview with Threat Level on Monday.

In that conversation, Chertoff said that in practice, border agents rely on a real suspicion to decide whose laptop to look into or even seize, but that he opposes creating a legal standard for searching Americans’ electronics at the border since it would just lead to too much litigation.

Feingold, an outspoken civil libertarian — the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act — begs to differ.

Secretary Chertoff’s description of the newly published DHS policy on laptop searches was not just misleading – it was flat-out wrong. In an interview with Wired.com, the Secretary stated that “[w]e only do [laptop searches] when we put you into secondary [screening] and we only put you into secondary [screening] … when there is a reason to suspect something.”

But the actual policy that DHS published says the exact opposite. It does not even mention secondary screening, let alone limit laptop searches to those cases, and it expressly states that Americans’ laptops may be searched “absent individualized suspicion.”

Secretary Chertoff’s blatant mischaracterization of the DHS policy contradicts his claim to be engaging in greater “openness and transparency” on this important issue. His statements make it clearer than ever that as we work to protect our national security, Congress must also act to protect law-abiding Americans against highly intrusive searches.

Read more Laptop Searches

From The Baltimore Sun
By Stephen Kiehl and Josh Mitchell

A day after the Justice Department released hundreds of documents purporting to link Bruce E. Ivins to the 2001 anthrax killings, scientists and legal experts criticized the strength of the case and cast doubt on whether it could have succeeded.

Federal investigators presented a raft of circumstantial evidence this week intended to prove Ivins’ guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But officials lacked direct evidence, such as hair fibers, DNA samples or handwriting analysis, that the eccentric microbiologist created the deadly powder in his Fort Detrick lab. Questions also remain about Ivins’ ability to convert the spores stored in his lab into the powder sent through the mail.

More than half a dozen experts in law and bioterrorism pointed out yesterday what they consider major flaws in the government’s case and said they were not convinced that Ivins acted alone in mailing the letters that killed five people - or that he was involved at all. They said that the science that led the FBI to Ivins has not been explained and that the other evidence did not amount to conclusive proof.

Because Ivins committed suicide last week, that evidence will never be tested at trial, but his attorney has repeatedly insisted that the scientist was innocent.

Read more Doubts

From The Raw Story
By David Edwards and Muriel Kane

On Wednesday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart took on Senator John McCain’s insistence that offshore drilling is the answer to our energy problems.

“We need to drill here! We need to drill now!” McCain recently demanded.

“The administration’s own Department of Energy says the effects of drilling now wouldn’t even be felt until 2030,” Stewart objected. “Unless we could somehow whittle that figure down?”

“Oil company executives say that it could be as short a time as one to two years,” McCain has stated. On another occasion, he suggested it could be just “a matter of months.”

“Drilling offshore has already saved us!” Stewart exclaimed. “Cyborgs from the future have been sent here to drill offshore to prevent Osama bin Laden from killing John Connor!”

Stewart acknowledged that even Barack Obama, who was insisting in June that “my job is not to go with the polls,” has now announced that his own plan “does include a limited amount of new offshore drilling.”

“Damn!” said Stewart, but he added, “To be fair, Obama released an energy plan that included a comprehensive list … touching on everything from investing in alternative energy to turning off your lights to making sure your tires are inflated.”

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From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

The U.S. military commission’s split guilty verdict on Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, has drawn praise from the Bush administration and criticism from civil rights groups, but what has been overlooked is the chilling message that “the Hamdan principle” sends about future prosecutions in the “war on terror.”

This new principle holds that anyone – regardless of how tangential a connection to actual acts of terrorism – can be prosecuted through the kangaroo court of the military commissions and be sentenced to a long prison term (or even death). Though Hamdan is a Yemeni, the principle would seem to apply to U.S citizens, too.

In effect, a parallel legal system has been created outside the U.S. Constitution in which the President can order someone locked up indefinitely simply by calling the person an “enemy combatant” and then subjecting the person to what amounts to a “star chamber” proceeding that permits use of secret evidence and coerced testimony.

Though some legal experts insist these special courts don’t apply to U.S. citizens, the language of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and a recent federal court ruling make clear that President George W. Bush’s asserted wartime power to order indefinite detentions covers citizens and non-citizens.

In July, the conservative-dominated U.S. Appeals Court in Richmond, Virginia, opened the door for Bush or a successor to throw American citizens as well as non-citizens into a legal black hole by designating them “enemy combatants,” even if they have engaged in no violent act and are living on U.S. soil.

Read more Hamdan Principle

From Salon
By Joe Conason

If Ron Suskind’s sensational charge that the White House and CIA colluded in forging evidence to justify the Iraq invasion isn’t proved conclusively in his new book, “The Way of the World,” then the sorry record of the Bush administration offers no basis to dismiss his allegation. Setting aside the relative credibility of the author and the government, the relevant question is whether the available facts demand a full investigation by a congressional committee, with testimony under oath.

When we look back at the events surrounding the emergence of the faked letter that is at the center of this controversy, a strong circumstantial case certainly can be made in support of Suskind’s story.

That story begins during the final weeks of 2003, when everyone in the White House was suffering severe embarrassment over both the origins and the consequences of the invasion of Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. No evidence of significant connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the al-Qaida terrorist organization had been discovered there either. Nothing in this costly misadventure was turning out as advertised by the Bush administration.

According to Suskind, the administration’s highest officials — presumably meaning President Bush and Vice President Cheney — solved this problem by ordering the CIA to manufacture a document “proving” that Saddam had indeed been trying to build nuclear weapons and that he was also working with al-Qaida. The reported product of that order was a fake memorandum from Tahir Jalil Habbush, then chief of Saddam’s intelligence service, to the dictator himself, dated July 1, 2001. The memo not only explicitly confirmed that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had received training in Baghdad for “attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy” but also carefully noted the arrival of a “shipment” from Niger via Libya, presumably of uranium yellowcake, the sole export of that impoverished African country.

Read more New Evidence

From The Washington Post
By Dan Eggen

White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers yesterday asked a federal judge to delay an order to cooperate with Congress while they appeal the ruling.

The court filings indicate that Bolten and Miers will continue to resist subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee as the Bush administration heads into its final months.

The plans for an appeal come in response to a ruling last week by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates. He rejected the administration’s broad claims of executive privilege and ordered Bolten and Miers to comply with congressional subpoenas.

Lawmakers are seeking testimony from Miers and documents from Bolten related to the firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. After Bates’s ruling, Democrats announced they would schedule hearings on the issue in September — less than two months before the presidential elections.

Obtaining a delay could head off such hearings until after the elections. The subpoenas also expire at the end of the year.

In their filings yesterday, Bush administration attorneys wrote: “Whatever the proper resolution of the extraordinarily important questions presented, the public interest clearly favors further consideration of issues before defendants are required to take actions that may forever alter the constitutional balance of separation of powers.”

Read more Stalling

From The LA Times
By Jon Wiener

A lot worse things have happened in Iraq, but the removal of the Baath Party archives from the country — 7 million pages that undoubtedly document atrocities of the Saddam Hussein regime — is significant. The documents were seized shortly after the fall of Baghdad by Kanan Makiya, an Iraq-born emigre who teaches at Brandeis University and heads a private group called the Iraq Memory Foundation. Despite protests from the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archives, the documents were shipped to the U.S. in 2006 by Makiya’s foundation and in June deposited with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University under a deal struck with Makiya.

The move was criticized in both countries. The Society of American Archivists said seizing and removing the documents was “an act of pillage” prohibited under the laws of war. Iraq’s acting minister of culture, Akram H. Hadi, issued a statement in late June expressing the Iraqi government’s “absolute rejection” of Makiya’s deal. The documents “are part of the national heritage of Iraq,” the statement declared, and must be returned to Iraq promptly.

Given the hundreds of thousandsof deaths and the millions of refugees, why should anybody care about Iraq’s archives? It comes down to whether you care about what happens to Iraq. It’s part of its cultural patrimony. It’s part of its ability to hold the previous regime accountable.

About 100 million other pages of Iraqi government documents are still in the hands of the U.S. military after being seized during the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction. The documents now at the Hoover Institution were taken from the Baath Party Regional Command Headquarters in Baghdad and are particularly significant because they almost certainly reveal who secretly collaborated with Hussein — politically explosive information.

How did one man get possession of the entire Baath Party archives?

Read more Iraqi History

From Thomas Paine’s Corner
By Mike Whitney

My friend Tom Feeley is in Big trouble. He runs the web site informationclearinghouse.info which updates “news you won’t find in the corporate media” every day. The site is strongly anti-war.

Tom has gotten his share of death threats over the years, but what happened this week is a lot more serious.

Two days ago, Tom’s wife found three well dressed men in their kitchen. The man who did all the talking, told Tom’s wife (I won’t give her name) that Tom must “Stop what he is doing on the Internet, NOW!” As crazy as it sounds, he pulled back his lapel and showed her a gun of some kind which she could not identify. Like I said, Tom has been threatened before, but nothing like this. Four years ago, he was in a parking lot at Long’s Drug store in Southern California and when he tried to open his door to get out, a man in a car next to him opened his door at precisely the same time which prevented Tom from getting out. Then, a 40-ish year old man got out of the passenger side of the vehicle and approached Tom saying, “You need to stop what you are doing on the web”.

Tom said the man was overweight and had his shirt untucked. Tom was taken aback, but (after collecting himself said) “What the fuck? Who do you think you are telling me what I can do?”

The man answered, “Tom, I’m just giving you some good advice. You should take my advice, Tom.”

This is all I know about the incident. Since, then, there have been occassional death threats, but nothing like what happened on Sunday. Tom’s wife is hysterical and has not returned to the house since the incident. She contacted the FBI but the FBI said there was nothing they could do. Tom and his wife separated recently after a 30 year marriage, so he is publishing from a different location.

Read more Censorship