Dick Cheney is a Traitor, an evil and wicked man, yet the foolish and damned “conservatives” are seduced to believe him to be a God fearing Christian, when he is anything but. Here, we see him admit to his dishonesty. What a shame unto the foolish of the Republic who constantly refuse to see their leaders for who they are and even admit to being.

An interview held in 2004, part of a Dutch documentary produced by VPRO Backlight.

Hotel security video shows 9/11 Pentagon blast, but no plane

WASHINGTON — A hotel security camera video released by the U.S. government showed the explosion that followed the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, but the low-quality recording did not capture an image of the 757 jetliner.

The video, recorded by a security camera at the Doubletree Hotel in Arlington, was released to public interest group Judicial Watch and others who filed a lawsuit seeking the tape and other videos from that day. (more…)

The gulf’s two military powers, Sunni-Muslim Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, are lining up behind their warring religious brethren in Iraq in a potentially explosive showdown, as expectations grow in both countries that America is preparing a pull-out of its troops.

The Saudis are understood to be considering providing Sunni military leaders with funding, logistical support and even arms, as Iran already does for Shia militia in Iraq.

The strategy — outlined in an article last week by Nawaf Obaid, a senior security adviser to the kingdom’s government — risks spiralling into a proxy war between Saudi and Iranian-backed factions in the next development in Iraq’s vicious sectarian conflict. (more…)

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has begun a calculated series of meetings with top New York Democratic officials to signal that she is likely to run for the presidency in 2008 and to ask for their support if she does, according to one state Democratic official who spoke with her and two others who have been briefed on her plans.

Senator Clinton met last week with Charles B. Rangel, the dean of the New York Congressional delegation, in what her advisers said was an effort to meet with most New York Congressional Democrats by the end of this month to discuss her plans.

On Friday, she also spoke with Herman D. Farrell Jr., the chairman of the State Democratic Party, Mr. Farrell said, and she plans to meet with Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer as early as today. Mr. Farrell confirmed that Senator Clinton briefed him on her 2008 intentions; Mr. Rangel declined to describe their conversation. (more…)

Fifteen years after the end of the 1991 war with Iraq, a Texas researcher is in line to get as much as $75 million in federal funding to press his studies of “Gulf War syndrome,” even though most other scientists long ago discounted his theories.

Epidemiologist Robert W. Haley has been trying for 10 years to prove that thousands of Persian Gulf War troops were poisoned by a combination of nerve gas, pesticides, insect repellents and a nerve-gas antidote. With the help of $16 million in past funding obtained by his backers in Congress and the Pentagon, Haley has argued that his “toxicity hypothesis” is the best explanation for the constellation of physical complaints that many veterans reported after returning from the Gulf.

Haley and his supporters, who also include a powerful cluster of veterans and government advisers, are undeterred by the scientific consensus against him. (more…)

TOKYO — North Korea has offered Russia exclusive rights to its natural uranium deposits in exchange for Moscow’s support at six-party talks aimed at denuclearizing Pyongyang, a report said Sunday.

Russia had requested that North Korea give Moscow exclusive rights to import Pyongyang’s natural uranium, with plans to profit by enriching and exporting it as nuclear fuel to China and Vietnam, the Tokyo Shimbun reported in a dispatch from Vladivostok in eastern Russia.

The two countries have been secretly in talks since 2002 on the deal, but Pyongyang only recently showed a positive attitude on the deal, demanding Russian support its position in the stalled six-party talks as a precondition for the deal, the newspaper said, citing unnamed Russian government sources. (more…)

The Israeli government on Sunday approved the creation of a new ministry for strategic affairs, to be headed by a controversial ultra-nationalist and deal mainly with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a senior cabinet official said.

During the weekly cabinet meeting, “all the ministers approved the decision to form the ministry for strategic affairs” under Avigdor Lieberman, whose Yisrael Beitenu party joined Prime Minister’s Ehud Olmert’s government in October, the official said on condition of anonymity.

The ministry will be responsible “for coordination between the different bodies regarding the different strategic threats Israel is facing,” most notably Iran’s nuclear programme, which the Jewish state and the United States believe is aimed at acquiring a nuclear bomb, despite Tehran’s denials. (more…)

WASHINGTON — Two court decisions in two days have seriously jeopardised President George W Bush’s authority to carry out pre-emptive actions against anyone he suspects to be a terrorist or a collaborator inside the United States.

In the first judgment given by a known radical judge in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Bush’s authority to designate groups as “terrorist organisations” was struck down while in another case in Portland, Oregon, the Bush administration on Wednesday agreed to pay two million dollars to a Muslim who was wrongly arrested and jailed by the FBI, suspected of being a terrorist.

Analysts said both the decisions hit the Bush strategy of dealing harshly with potential suspects hard, especially if they were Muslims or they belonged to any organisation which had suspected links to any terrorist outfit outside the US. (more…)

Five years ago this month Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, tried to blow up a transatlantic flight. Here Jacqui Goddard gives an exclusive account of his days in the Alcatraz of the Rockies

At six feet four inches tall, Richard Reid makes a forbidding figure, even from behind the iron grates, steel doors and automated locks that separate him from his prison guards in this place they call Terrorist Central.

Hunched on a stool that is moulded to the floor of his broom-cupboard-sized cell, he turns the pages of the newspaper spread out on the concrete desk before him, soaking up stories and pictures from an outside world that he will never see again. (more…)

Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction.

“In my view it is time for a major adjustment,” wrote Mr. Rumsfeld, who has been a symbol of a dogged stay-the-course policy. “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

Nor did Mr. Rumsfeld seem confident that the administration would readily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from shifting course he suggested the administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations. (more…)

The FBI has been dragged into the investigation of Alexander Litvinenko’s death after details emerged that he had planned to make tens of thousands of pounds blackmailing senior Russian spies and business figures.
The Observer has obtained remarkable testimony from a Russian academic, Julia Svetlichnaja, who met Litvinenko earlier this year and received more than 100 emails from him. In a series of interviews, she reveals that the former Russian secret agent had documents from the FSB, the Russian agency formerly known as the KGB. He had asked Svetlichnaja, who is based in London, to enter into a business deal with him and ‘make money’.

Litvinenko also handed a series of pictures of himself to Svetlichnaja that are published by The Observer today. One shows him with murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another serving as an army officer in an elite Russian army unit two decades ago and the third draped in the Union flag celebrating getting his British passport just before he was poisoned. (more…)

A multi-million pound propaganda war to force the British people to love the European Union and Brussels bureaucrats is to be launched by Tony Blair as part of his legacy as Prime Minister, it has been revealed.

The operation to overcome strong opposition to the EU in Britain and soften them up in the event of fresh moves to forge closer links with Brussels was secretly agreed by Mr Blair and his Ministers at last week’s Cabinet meeting.

Details of the plan, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, show how the Prime Minister is so frustrated at his failure to persuade voters that the EU is a good thing, he is to spend a fortune from public funds in a final attempt to brainwash them before he resigns next year. (more…)

• Method used only at higher levels
• Blocks set using a limestone slurry

How the Egyptians really built a Pyramid

The Ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study.

The research, by materials scientists from national institutions, adds fuel to a theory that the pharaohs’ craftsmen had enough skill and materials at hand to cast the two-tonne limestone blocks that dress the Cheops and other Pyramids.

Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist. (more…)