Low-Brow FOX Hit-Piece Fails to Counter Evidence of an Inside Job

Fox News national TV special ‘ Planet Mancow’ featured a slew of pop-culture junkets, a celebrity interview with William Shatner and an attempt to slander 9/11 Truth by putting one of its spokesmen, Infowars’ Kevin Smith, face-to-face with dying fireman Brian Harvey, who rescued victims after the attacks.

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The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney’s residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the “cakewalk” Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. “It was a euphoric moment,” Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that “the president is ultimately responsible” for what Adelman now calls “the debacle that was Iraq.” (more…)

BEALE AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. - They’ve become a fixture in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan, a new breed of unmanned aircraft operated with remote controls by “pilots” sitting in virtual cockpits many miles away.

But the Air Force’s Global Hawk has never flown a mission over the United States.

That is set to change Monday, when the first Global Hawk is scheduled to land at Beale Air Force Base in northern California. (more…)

BHUBANESHWAR, India — India on Sunday successfully test-fired a medium-range nuclear-capable missile with a range of up to 300 kilometers (180 miles), a defense ministry official said.

The Prithvi missile was fired into the Bay of Bengal from the test range in Chandipur in the eastern state of Orissa, the official said on condition of anonymity as he is not allowed to reveal his identity under ministry rules.

India’s Prithvi test comes three days after rival Pakistan carried out a similar test of its nuclear-capable Ghauri missile, also known as the Hatf 5. (more…)

A blood-coagulating drug designed to treat rare forms of hemophilia is being used on critically wounded U.S. troops in Iraq despite evidence it can cause clots that lead to strokes, heart attacks and death in other patients, The (Baltimore) Sun reported for Sunday’s editions.

Recombinant Activated Factor VII, which is made by Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, is approved in the United States for treating forms of hemophilia that affect fewer than 3,000 Americans. It costs $6,000 a dose.

The Food and Drug Administration said in a warning last December that giving Factor VII to patients who don’t have the blood disorder could cause strokes and heart attacks. Its researchers published a study in January blaming 43 deaths on clots that developed after injections of Factor VII. (more…)

In a desperate attempt to stop the barrage of rockets fired by Hamas at Israeli villages, Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, has ordered his security chiefs to [’target’] the Islamic movement’s political leadership.

It’s always ‘in a desperate attempt to stop’ something or another that Palestinians are allegedly doing that israel acts with ruthless and criminal brutality.

Never will israelis admit that their conduct is entirely consistent with and in furtherance of their eternal obsession with establishing Eretz israel. (more…)

After he was arrested in 2002, Jose Padilla was considered so dangerous that he was held without charges in a military prison for more than three years — accused first of plotting a radiological “dirty bomb” attack and later of conspiring with al-Qaeda to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas.

But now, nearly a year after his abrupt transfer into a regular criminal court, the Justice Department’s prosecution of the former Chicago gang member is running into trouble.

A Republican-appointed federal judge in Miami has already dumped the most serious conspiracy count against Padilla, removing for now the possibility of a life sentence. The same judge has also disparaged the government’s case as “light on facts,” while defense lawyers have made detailed allegations that Padilla was illegally tortured, threatened and perhaps even drugged during his detention at a Navy brig in South Carolina. (more…)

LONDON — Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday.

In a wide ranging interview on British Broadcasting Corp. television, Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq’s regional neighbors — including Iran — if any progress is to be made in the region.

“If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi Government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he said on the BBC’s Sunday AM breakfast show. (more…)

Darren Faulkner died after he was Tasered by a DeSoto County Sheriff’s Deputy. Coroner Jeffrey Pounders says Faulkner died from heart failure. Faulkner also had heart disease, and an attorney hired by Faulkner’s family believes the Taser may have had a lot to do with his death.

Attorney Gene Laurenzi believes Faulkner’s death was unnecessary. Faulkner’s family hired Lorenzi to look into the possibility of filing a lawsuit. “He really was a husband and a father. There’s a person here,” said Lorenzi. “The information we have is they were hitting him, they got the cuffs on him and then he was tasered… and the problem I have with this is using the Taser once the guy’s down on the ground.” (more…)

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Thousands wound through the streets of Indonesia’s capital and gathered at a grand mosque Sunday to protest President Bush’s upcoming visit to the world’s most populous Muslim nation, some chanting “War criminal” and “You are a terrorist!”

Bush’s arrival Monday comes amid mounting anger over U.S. policy in the Middle East and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — seen by many here as attacks on their faith. (more…)

Attorney General Gonzales Takes Up Attack on Ruling Against Warrantless Surveillance

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales contended Saturday that some critics of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program were defining freedom in a way that poses a “grave threat” to U.S. security.

Gonzales was the second administration official in two days to attack a federal judge’s ruling last August that the program was unconstitutional. Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday called the ruling “an indefensible act of judicial overreaching.” (more…)

A chief constable has sparked controversy by declaring that men who sleep with 13- to 15-year-olds should not be labelled paedophiles.

Terry Grange, the Association of Chief Police Officers’ (ACPO) spokesman on child protection and managing sex offenders, also says that the term “child pornography” should only apply to images of children aged 13 and under. His views are set out in an interview with The Sunday Times. Mr Grange, chief constable of Dyfed-Powys Police, adds that only those who target prepubescent children should be treated as paedophiles. (more…)

The US Secretary of State gives a stark warning as London and Washington hunt for a solution to the Middle East’s deepening crisis

Iraqis ‘don’t have a future’ if they give in to the sectarian tensions that are tearing apart their society, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during a visit to Vietnam yesterday in one of the starkest warnings on the present violent trajectory of the country.

Her comments emerged amid a tranche of bleak prognoses for the region - including one by America’s most senior military officer in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, who warned that if the world does not find a way to stem the rise of violent Islamic militancy, it will face a third world war.

The sense of crisis engulfing US and UK policy over Iraq came amid an increasingly desperate search in Washington and London for a meaningful strategy that would prevent the country fragmenting into a catastrophic civil war that neighbours now fear would destabilise the entire region. (more…)

BEIJING — A human rights group urged China on Sunday to disclose details surrounding the removal of body organs from executed prisoners for transplants, after health officials recently acknowledged the practice.

Little information about China’s transplant business is publicly available, and critics contend it is profit-driven with little regard for medical ethics. China has long defended the practice as legal.

“This is one of the most critical issues in terms of human rights today in China because it raises a number of areas of concern — China’s criminal justice system, the use of the death penalty, medical ethics and irregularities in the organ trade,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, in a telephone interview. (more…)

Gordon Brown was left defending Britain’s presence in Iraq yesterday as Tony Blair denied he thought that the invasion had been a “disaster”. Interviewed on al-Jazeera on Friday, Mr Blair was asked if he thought that the military intervention had been “pretty much of a disaster”. “It has,” he replied, before blaming the difficulties on al-Qa’ida-inspired insurgents.

But the Prime Minister’s spokesman yesterday insisted that his apparent concession was a “straightforward slip of the tongue”. The fall-out from the gaffe overshadowed the Chancellor’s first visit to Iraq, where he pledged £100m of reconstruction aid over the next three years. Mr Brown had hoped that his visit would reassure soldiers and the serving public that a government led by him will have a clear strategy to bring troops home from a stable Iraq. (more…)