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WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 (UPI) -- Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was investigating the man who allegedly planned the Sept. 11 airplane hijackings and attacks on New York and Washington when he was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, according to two former Central Intelligence Agency officials. Bob Baer, a former case officer in the agency's Directorate of Operations, said he provided Pearl with unpublished information about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has since been accused by American officials of being one of the masterminds of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a top aide to Osama bin Laden. Mohammed is...

You've heard what the politicians and news pundits described it. Now read how it really took place by the team that actually killed Bin Laden: _________________________________________________________ Osama Bin Laden was killed within 90 seconds of the US Navy Seals landing in his compound and not after a protracted gun battle,according to the first account by the men who carried out the raid. The operation was so clinical that only 12 bullets were fired. The Seals have spoken out because they were angered at the version given by politicians, which they see as portraying them as cold-blooded murderers on a “kill...

A former staffer for Bay State Sen. John F. Kerry has been charged with leaking the names of CIA operatives, including one who was involved in the interrogation of terror suspects held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and Kerry’s office.

A former CIA officer was charged Monday with illegally leaking the identity of a covert officer and other classified information to journalists. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and author who defended waterboarding, was charged by the Department of Justice with one count of illegally disclosing a covert officer’s identity and two counts of violating the Espionage Act for illegally leaking classified national defense information. He was also charged with making false statements for allegedly trying to trick the CIA’s Publications Review Board to let him use information in his 2010 book, The Reluctant Spy. The investigation led by U.S....

The U.S. Department of State has bought more than $70,000 worth of books authored by President Obama, sending out copies as Christmas gratuities and stocking “key libraries” around the world with “Dreams from My Father” more than a decade after its release. The U.S. embassy in Egypt, for instance, spent $28,636 in August 2009 for copies of Mr. Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir. Six weeks earlier, the embassy had placed another order with the same book seller, Kalemat Arabia, for more than $9,000 for copies of the same book, federal purchasing records show. Around the same time, halfway around the world,...

The State Department has spent $70,000 in taxpayer money to buy copies of Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My Father. One embassy in Indonesia spent more than $3,800 buying copies of Obama’s other book The Audacity of Hope. Again, all with taxpayer money — all while Obama profits from the purchases. But hey, it most be common place to buy books written by presidents to hand out as gifts and put in libraries, right? Nope. A search by the Washington Times of the federal database found no examples of the State Department purchasing books by President Clinton or President Bush....

Ex-CIA Officer Indicted for Leaking Classified Info to New York Slimes Reporter Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer, was indicted today for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen. The indictment shows that the federal government had access to their e-mail and phone contacts going back several years. Sterling served on the Iran desk of the CIA in the 1990s, and oversaw a classified program aimed at sabotaging the development of its nuclear programming. He left the CIA in 2000 and sued for racial discrimination (he is African American) in a case that went all the way...

A former CIA officer was arrested on Thursday on charges of illegally disclosing national defense information about Iran to a New York Times reporter who wrote a book. The U.S. Justice Department said Jeffrey Sterling, 43, was charged with six counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and one count of unlawfully keeping national defense information, mail fraud, unauthorized conveyance of government property and obstructing justice.

Obama gets three-book deal worth $1.9 million December 17, 2004 — U.S. Sen.-elect Barack Obama, who saw a book he wrote a decade ago jump onto best seller lists after his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention this summer, has landed a three-book deal worth $1.9 million. Crown Publishing Group and Random House Children's Books, both divisions of Random House Inc., announced Friday that Obama will write two books for adults as well as a children's book he will work on with his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters. "Writing is something that Senator Obama obviously enjoys as...

Obama may earn millions from taxpayer-funded schools in his new book deal. Five days before taking the oath of office, President-elect Barack Obama signed a book deal with Crown Publishing Group to publish a version of his best-selling book, "Dreams from My Father", aimed at middle school and young adult age groups. Obama would receive a $500,000 advance payment against royalties, plus ongoing royalty payments. Some in the media have questioned the propriety of this deal from the angle that the President might be unduly influenced by Bertelsmann AG, the German based media publishing empire which owns Random House, which...

Apart from the sheer mass of the Clintons’ earnings, perhaps the most intriguing revelation contained in the release of the Clinton tax data last week was that Bill Clinton received a whopping $15 million advance in 2001 for what would become his autobiography, My Life. As even the New York Times noticed, this was significantly “larger than previously thought” — or, more exactly, than previously reported. For example, an August 7, 2001 article in the Times puts the figure vaguely at “over $10 million.” A Wall Street Journal report from the following day cites a more concrete figure of “close...

WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has said in an interview he had signed deals for his autobiography worth more than one million pounds(($A1.57 million). Assange told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper that the money would help him defend himself against allegations of sexual assault made by two women in Sweden. "I don't want to write this book, but I have to," he said on Sunday. "I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat." The Australian said he would receive the equivalent of $A800,000 from Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher,...

(NewsCore) - There's no silencing Stanley McChrystal. The controversial retired general, who was infamously axed as head commander of the US mission in Afghanistan, will lay out his vision of leadership in a no-holds-barred memoir set for release next year, publisher Portfolio/Penguin announced Wednesday.

The conflict that raged throughout the former Yugoslavia was met by a wall of silence when it came to important issues. These important issues apply to America and the United Kingdom supporting Islamists in a brutal civil war in Bosnia and then installing a new nation by ignoring international law in Kosovo. Also, is it credible to believe that the vast majority of major news agencies and national governments did not know about thousands of Islamists in Europe who were sent to slit the throats and behead Orthodox Christians? Shoeless Holbrooke sits with Muslim Albanian gunmen that ran the organ...

Reading "Masters and Commanders," Andrew Roberts's magnificent account of British and American leaders in World War II, I was struck by how many of them, working prodigious hours and under great strain, were struck down by heart attacks while in their 60s. This doesn't happen anymore, I thought, with the blood pressure and cholesterol medicines many of us routinely take. But it does, as we were reminded by the sudden death at age 69 this week of Richard Holbrooke, who was working prodigiously as Barack Obama's special representative for AfPak, i.e., Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke was known in cynical Washington...

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

The Two Faces of Feisal RaufWhat's wrong with What's Right With Islam. This is part two of a two-part series. You can read part one here.The problems with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s book What’s Right with Islam begin with the title. As Andrew McCarthy noted on National Review Online, the book, whose full title is now What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West, was previously called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America; before that, it was published in Malaysia as A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of...

MI6 hired Al Qaeda men to kill Gaddafi: ex-official By Martin Bright LONDON: The British government will this week go to unprecedented lengths to stop a renegade counter-intelligence officer, David Shayler, from making his most devastating claim yet : that the Libyan Islamic cell paid by British intelligence agents to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in February 1996 were members of Al Qaeda. The Libyan cell is believed to have included one of Osama bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants, Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government's most wanted list with a reward of $25 million for his capture. Al-Liby lived in...

Startling revelations by French intelligence experts back David Shayler's alleged 'fantasy'about Gadaffi plot Martin Bright, home affairs editor Sunday November 10, 2002 The Observer British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The latest claims of MI6 involvement with Libya's fearsome Islamic Fighting Group, which is connected to one of bin Laden's trusted lieutenants, will be embarrassing to the Government, which described similar claims by renegade MI5 officer David Shayler as 'pure fantasy'. The...

The Prince of Wales says he believes he has been placed on Earth as future King ‘for a purpose’ - to save the world. Giving a fascinating insight into his view of his inherited wealth and influence, he said: ‘I can only somehow imagine that I find myself being born into this position for a purpose. ‘I don’t want my grandchildren or yours to come along and say to me, “Why the hell didn’t you come and do something about this? You knew what the problem was”. That is what motivates me.‘I wanted to express something in the outer world...

Hank Paulson tells how he brought us back from the brink of financial collapse by bending the rules of the free market. Stop sniping at Hank Paulson. The former Treasury Secretary saved the day by overcoming his predilection for free market capitalism and he didn't do it to save Goldman Sachs, his and my alma mater. His pragmatic boldness helped save the capitalist system from a possible total collapse.Read On The Brink, Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System (Business Plus, $28.99) and get Paulson's take on the whole affair. The facts are these: In...

Russia proposed to China that the two nations should sell Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 to force the US government to bail out the giant mortgage-finance companies, former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson has claimed. The allegation is in his memoir On the Brink in which he also suggests that Alistair Darling, the UK chancellor, blocked a rescue takeover of Lehman Brothers by Barclays Bank when he refused to support special treatment by UK regulators. “Russian officials had made a top-level approach to the Chinese, suggesting that together they might sell big chunks of their GSE holdings...

Former President Bill Clinton came within minutes of being assassinated in the Philippines by terrorists controlled by Osama bin Laden, a new book has revealed. ...Marisa Porges, a former government counter-terrorism advisor and an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, said the assassination plot, if true, would suggest al Qaeda was more developed than some thought it was prior to 9/11”.

The United Nations says it can end poverty, stop global warming, and end the threat of contagious disease while also unlocking $7 trillion of hidden wealth from developing nations in the process. If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. In a new book launched with great fanfare at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, The New Public Finance: Responding to Global Challenges, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) claims to offer “innovative financial mechanisms that could dramatically reduce the cost of managing global risks can now be implemented by governments across the world.”...

CBSNews.com Exclusive: An Excerpt from "Sarah From Alaska" -- a New Book Telling the Inside Story of Palin's Campaign for VP (CBS) In "Sarah From Alaska," Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe draw on their experiences as embedded campaign reporters, the many weeks they spent reporting in Alaska during Palin's last days as governor, and exclusive interviews with almost 200 former McCain/Palin staffers, top political minds, friends, and foes in Alaska to tell the remarkable behind-the-scenes story of Palin's political career and the events leading to her surprising resignation. The authors share new insights and bring to light illuminating stories...

Vote of Confidence A huge black turnout in November 1992 altered Chicago's electoral landscape—and raised a new political star: a 31-year-old lawyer named Barack Obama. By Gretchen Reynolds A huge black turnout in November 1992 altered Chicago's electoral landscape-and raised a new political star: a 31-year-old lawyer named Barack Obama. In the final, climactic buildup to November's general election, with George Bush gaining ground on Bill Clinton in Illinois and the once-unstoppable campaign of senatorial candidate Carol Moseley Braun embroiled in allegations about her mother's Medicare liability, one of the most important local stories managed to go virtually unreported: The...

Ralph Nader has been many things: lawyer, consumer-rights bulldog, political activist and perennial third-party presidential candidate. He has now added a new title to his business card: fiction writer. His latest book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, is a 700-page populist fantasy in which a small group of billionaires and media moguls — led by Warren Buffett and including Ted Turner, George Soros, Bill Cosby, Yoko Ono and Phil Donahue — pool their massive resources to reform the U.S. With the help of a $15 billion war chest and a p.r. campaign starring a talking parrot, the group successfully...

If Matt Latimer’s new book had been released a few weeks ago, the Tea Party marchers would have hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him -- laughing and cheering -- all the way up Capitol Hill. Laughing, because Latimer’s new book,Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor, renews conservatives’ license to chuckle at ourselves. Cheering, because it lifts the burden of George W. Bush from our shoulders. There are only two kinds of people who won’t like this book. First are the liberal media who tied the Gordian knot that binds conservatism to Bush. As Byron York reported in...

Bush was preparing to give a speech to the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. The conference is the event of the year for conservative activists; Republican politicians are required to appear and offer their praise of the conservative movement. Latimer got the assignment to write Bush's speech. Draft in hand, he and a few other writers met with the president in the Oval Office. Bush was decidedly unenthusiastic. "What is this movement you keep talking about in the speech?" the president asked Latimer. Latimer explained that he meant the conservative movement -- the movement that...

August 14, 2005 -- LONDON — The $21.3 billion United Nations oil-for-food scandal has now widened to include the brother of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Kobina Annan, the Ghanaian ambassador to Morocco, is said by investigators to be "connected" to an African businessman at the center of the scandal. The probe into Kobina's dealings are at an early stage and he has not been interviewed. However, investigators are understood to suspect that Michael Wilson, an African businessman, and Kobina had a business relationship at the time of the scandal. A source close to the investigation said: "We believe Kobina Annan...

Bidding for the serial rights to Bill Clinton's memoir, "My Life" has reached the mid-six figure range, but publisher Knopf may end up selling to no one. So far, informed sources said, Jann Wenner and his flagship Rolling Stone are in the lead with an offer believed to be around $500,000. At the same time, another source said, "this is a presidential memoir — you're going to want it to debut in Time or Newsweek." Senator Hillary Clinton's memoir went to a joint Time Inc. bid from Time and People last year. A Knopf spokesman said serial rights may end...

George Bush told Tony Blair shortly before the invasion of Iraq that he intended to target other countries, including Saudi Arabia, which, he implied, planned to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Mr Bush said he "wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation, mentioning in particular Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan," according to a note of a telephone conversation between the two men on January 30 2003. The note is quoted in the US edition, published next week, of Lawless World, America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules, by the British international lawyer Philippe...

-snip- McCain made his first million the old-fashioned way: he married the daughter of a wealthy businessman. But Barack Obama, the son of an absent African father and a mother who relied on government-issued food stamps to feed her children, became a millionaire in a more modern manner – on the back of a book deal. It happened circuitously. In 1990, Obama was already enough of a celebrity – the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review – for the New York publishers Simon & Schuster to offer a “six-figure contract” for a proposed autobiography. The only problem...

In an exclusive report linked here for the first time, Zombie has acquired a copy of a long-forgotten book by Barack Obama associate Bill Ayers, wife Bernardine Dohrn, and two other Weather Underground members, dedicated to RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan, written while they were in hiding from the authorities: William Ayers’ forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire.

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days. The FBI denied Rossini...

In 1985, Barack Obama traveled halfway across the country to take a job that he didn't fully understand. But, while he knew little about his new vocation--community organizer--it still had a romantic ring, at least to his 24-year-old ears. With his old classmates from Columbia, he had talked frequently about political change. Now, he was moving to Chicago to put that talk into action. His 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, recounts his idealistic effusions: "Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That's what I'll do. I'll organize black folks....

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein. Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war. The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in...

Excerpt from book: “The anthrax spores in the letter to Daschle were so professionally refined, the Central Intelligence Agency believed the powder must have been sent by an experienced terrorist organization, most probably Al Qaeda, as a sequel to the group’s September 11 attacks. During a [October 17] meeting of the White House’s National Security Council that day, Cheney, who was sitting in for the President because Bush was traveling abroad, urged everyone to keep this inflammatory speculation secret. ... They thought Cheney had already been lethally infected. ... *** Cheney in particular was so stricken by the potential for...

You called Scott McClellan last night. What did you ask him? ARI FLEISCHER, FORMER W.H. PRESS SECRETARY: Well, I did. Actually it was before the story broke about the book. So, it was a social call and Scott brought up the book. We talked about it and he told me he thought it was going to be an honest, brutal, I mean honest, blunt book — he didn't say brutal. And I'm not sure I thought it was going to be as bad as it sounds like it is. HEMMER: What do you mean? FLEISCHER: From what I'm hearing from...

MI6 plotted to murder Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in a staged car accident in a tunnel five years before Diana, Princess of Wales died in a similar crash, a renegade former spy has told the inquest into her death. Richard Tomlinson, who worked for MI6 in the early 1990s, told the High Court he had seen a two page document, drawn up in 1992, detailing three plans to kill Mr Milosevic. Diana inquest: MI6 plotted tunnel murder One plan was to use a strobe light to blind Mr Milosevic’s chauffeur The first involved using a Serb opposition paramilitary group, which...

Megachurch Aims to 'Disturb' Christians Saddleback Church’s AIDS summit kicked off Wednesday with hopes to “disturb” the hearts of those in attendance and mobilize congregations around the world to defeat the global pandemic. Thu, Nov. 29, 2007 Posted: 12:44:21 PM EST Saddleback Church’s AIDS summit kicked off Wednesday with hopes to “disturb” the hearts of those in attendance and mobilize congregations around the world to defeat the global pandemic. The third annual Global Summit on AIDS and the Church has attracted about 1,000 people to the southern California megachurch to learn how churches and individuals can help fight the deadly...

Condoleezza Rice may be willing to compromise at a Middle East negotiating table - but not at a jewelry counter. Coit Blacker, a Stanford professor who is one of the secretary of state's closest friends, recalls going into a shop where Rice asked to see earrings. The clerk showed her costume jewelry. Rice asked to see something nicer, prompting the clerk to whisper some sass under her breath. Blacker remembers Rice tearing the woman to shreds. "Let's get one thing straight," he recalls her saying. "You are behind the counter because you have to work for minimum wage. I'm on...

Taxes, weight gain, depression, loneliness—book advances are like lottery payoffs For those who think they have a book inside them just waiting to be written—and, really, isn’t that pretty much everyone?—landing a book contract would be like winning the lottery. Dreams would come true; doors would open. Anything could happen. “You hear about these big contracts coming in, and it whets your appetite,” said Leah McLaren, a columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail, who landed a book contract with HarperCollins Canada in 2003 for her chick-lit novel, The Continuity Girl. “You start to think, ‘This is my lottery ticket …....

When I went to my office Monday, July 7, 2003, Joe Wilson was not in the forefront of my mind. Frances Fragos Townsend was. She had just been named deputy national security adviser at the White House though her background was in liberal Democratic politics, including Attorney General Janet Reno's inner circle during the Clinton administration. Her appointment was a political mystery of the kind I had been exploring for forty years in my column. I wrote the Townsend column Tuesday morning because I had a busy schedule the rest of the day, including a 3 p.m. appointment with Richard...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Valerie Plame put a glamorous face and a personal story to Democrats' criticism of the Bush administration Friday, telling a House committee that White House and State Department officials "carelessly and recklessly" blew her CIA cover in a politically motivated smear of her husband. Plame, the operative at the center of the leak scandal that resulted in last week's criminal conviction of a former top White House official, created more of a stir by her presence on Capitol Hill than by her testimony. She revealed little new information about the case, which sparked a federal investigation and...

David Kuo WASHINGTON – Top White House political advisers embraced evangelical supporters publicly to get their votes while mocking them privately as "nuts" and "goofy," according to a new book by David Kuo, the former No. 2 man in President Bush's so-called "faith-based" initiatives program. In "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," Kuo also says it's time for conservative Christians to take a time out from politics and to re-evaluate their priorities. The book hits stores today. Kuo quit the White House in 2003. Now he accuses Karl Rove's political staff of cynically hijacking the faith-based initiatives...

Bit h/t to the Commenters at Just One Minute. We bloggers owe our best work to their diligence and tenacity. The following is a complilation of some what they found so far, of what just may be the key to getting to the bottom of a Democratic conspiracy in the Foley Setup. As I previously posted here, there apparently was a promise of a book deal to pages by a Robin Kasaros. Googling her name brought about useful information such as she hosted “House Parties” back in 2005. No, not where you sell Tupperware, but the kind that like to...

WASHINGTON — In a "60 Minutes" interview on April 23, Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA's Europe division, made a sensational charge. He claimed that President Bush and his White House ignored intelligence before the invasion of Iraq indicating that Saddam Hussein had no had weapons of mass destruction. On the CBS-TV show, and in subsequent media interviews that appeared throughout the world, Drumheller said that the White House was excited about the fact that the CIA was getting information straight from Naji Sabri, the then Iraqi foreign minister. But when the White House found out this source...

What is Savage going to talk about today? < read to yourself in Jacky Mason tone > Hate Rush? Hate Hannity? Hate O'Reilly? Why other Talk Show Hosts don't talk about important issues? Bringing Dogs to Work? Book Deal? How to make money off website? Marinara Sauces? Shining statues as a kid?

Former CIA officer Plame signs book deal: Web site Saturday, May 06, 2006 12:47:18 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose identity was disclosed in a press leak that touched off a federal probe, has signed a book deal worth more than $2.5 million, a publishing industry Web site said on Saturday. Publishers Marketplace (http://www.publishersmarketplace.com), where most publishers report details of their book deals, said Plame had signed a deal with Crown, an imprint of Random House, "reportedly for more than $2.5 million." The memoir, entitled "Fair Game," will detail Plame's "role in the American intelligence...