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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...

EDITOR'S NOTE — This is another story in an occasional series examining the fault lines within Islam between the forces of moderation and extremism. The consequences of this fight that shook America on Sept. 11, 2001, reverberate today, and the struggle for Islam may be the defining conflict of our era. LOS ANGELES — UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl has a scholarly manner and speaks in soft tones. But listen as he tells his story. A Kuwaiti native, he was fascinated by militant Islam as a young man, then evolved into a moderate champion of democracy and suffered...

The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule. It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn’t born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America’s Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal. When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty chain reaction as he...

ICONOCLAST SPECIAL RANT FOR THE DAY GORE VIDAL & THE MOTHER OF ALL CONSPIRACIES by Denis Schulz Oliver Stone knew his Lee Harvey Oswalds and his Jack Rubys. He could tell the difference between Herbert Hoover and J. Edgar Hoover without a cue card. And he didn't like either one of them. Stone could visualize a grassy knoll before he could see one. And he could imagine a conspiracy with the best of them. The result was JFK, the movie. It was, alas for Ollie, not the Mother of all Conspiracies. Hillary Clinton is more encompassing when it comes...

LONDON, July 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – A U.S. author has launched a blistering attack on U.S. president George W. Bush’s war on terror, a U.K. newspaper reported Wednesday. In his latest book titled Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated, Gore Vidal raised several question marks, U.K. daily newspaper the Daily Mirror reported. The outspoken 76-year-old said the U.S. provoked the September 11 attacks with its own military intervention in countries around the world, the paper said. Staunch democrat Vidal, a former White House aide to John F. Kennedy, insisted the U.S. should...

Disclaimer: Reading this following article can be dangerous to your health. People with a heart condition should not attempt to read it. Also do not attempt to drive or operate heavy machinery. Do NOT open windows, but rather us a bucket to vomit. Opening the window may result in jumping out of it after reading several passages. LONDON, July 15 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Following the attack by U.S. author Gore Vidal on U.S. President George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror, John Pilger launched yet another attack in his book ‘The New Rulers of the World.’ “The rulers...

Tired of seeing the New York Times getting all the headlines with their treason, the Washington Post has decided to join in the fun of betraying its country's most vital national secrets.This self-styled military expert, William Arkin, must surely be aware it is a gross and illegal violation of national security to release code names. (Ask Kissinger about "Umbra.") Of course that didn't stop him from writing a book that does just that a year ago, either.In fact, Mr. Arkin considers himself more of an activist than a journalist. (Not that there is any discernible difference in our one party...

Excerpt from interview with Peter Bergen, author of "The Osama Bin Laden I know: Inside the secret world of Osama Bin Laden" by Frank Stasio on National Public Radio. Peter Bergen: "(Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Osama Bin Laden) had sort of philisophical differences and they competed for money ... they really only came together as the Iraq war heated up and Zarqawi never swore an oath of allegiance to Bin Laden until 2004, two years into the war. So, Colin Powell had, at his famous U.N. presentation, said Zarqawi was the best evidence for this sort of Al Qaeda/Saddam Hussein...

A Republican senator on Saturday accused The New York Times of endangering American security to sell a book by waiting until the day of the terror-fighting Patriot Act reauthorization to report that the government has eavesdropped on people without court-approved warrants. ''At least two senators that I heard with my own ears cited this as a reason why they decided to vote to not allow a bipartisan majority to reauthorize the Patriot Act,'' said Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. ''Well, as it turns out the author of this article turned in a book three months ago and the paper,...

Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, who made the controversial choice last summer to turn over the notes of a reporter threatened with jail for refusing to identify a source, is writing a book about anonymous sources. "Off the Record" is scheduled to be published by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, in 2007. In a decision that brought criticism from his peers in journalism, Pearlstine agreed to comply with a court order to turn over notes by Time reporter Matt Cooper. They were sought by a special federal prosecutor investigating who in the Bush administration leaked the...

Former CIA Officer Sues to Publish Book Detailing Osama Bin Laden's EscapeBy Katherine Shrader Associated Press Writer Published: Jul 28, 2005 WASHINGTON (AP) - The CIA is squelching publication of a new book detailing events leading up to Osama bin Laden's escape from his Tora Bora mountain stronghold during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, says a former CIA officer who led much of the fighting. In a story he says he resigned from the agency to tell, Gary Berntsen recounts the attacks he coordinated at the peak of the fighting in eastern Afghanistan in late 2001, including how U.S. commanders...

WTC Maintenance Worker Announces Plans For Upcoming National 9/11 Truth Speaking Tour While Appearing As Guest On St. Louis Drive-Time Morning Radio Show Wiliam Rodriguez, a man on a mission in memory of 200 friends lost at the WTC, is taking his story directly to the people as he looks for way to by-pass media and government censorship over his 9/11 story that blows the official account of how the towers collapsed "sky high." July 15, 2005 By Greg Szymanski Four long years have passed since 9/11and government officials and media heads are still throwing under the rug eye-witness testimony...

WASHINGTON, July 1 - For nearly two years, the investigation into the leak of a covert C.I.A. officer's name has unfolded clamorously in the nation's capital, with partisan brawling on talk shows, prosecutors interviewing President Bush and top White House officials, and the imminent prospect that reporters could go to jail for contempt of court. But the woman at the center of it all, Valerie E. Wilson, has kept her silence, showing the discipline and discretion that colleagues say made her a good spy. As her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, has become a highly visible critic of the administration...

A new Islamic advocacy group in Boca Raton is under scrutiny for its ties to William W. Baker, a former chairman of the neo-Nazi political party of presidential candidate David Duke who was run out of town last year when he attempted to speak at Florida Atlantic University. Local Jewish and civic leaders said Friday they were alarmed that the Assadiq Islamic Education Foundation, whose headquarters are listed at 831 E. Palmetto Park Road in Boca, had invited Baker back to Boca as featured speaker at an April 30 banquet at the Boca Marriott. Invited by Muslim students to speak...

Matt Damon and George Clooney come back together for political thriller Matt Damon and George Clooney, who are currently working together on Steven Soder-bergh's Ocean's Eleven sequel - Ocean's Twelve, will reteam for the Stephen Gaghan-helmed political thriller Syriana. In addition, Amanda Peet is in final negotiations to join the project. Set up at Warner Bros., Clooney and Soderbergh's studio-based Section Eight will produce the project with shooting slated to begin during the summer. Gaghan adapted the script, which is loosely based on the Robert Baer non-fiction novel See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in the...

Tin SoldierAn American Vigilante In Afghanistan, Using the Press for Profit and Glory By Mariah Blake In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two months conducting a series of raids with his team, which he called Task Force Saber 7. By late June, he claimed to have captured the...

<p>March 22 (Bloomberg) -- No laws were broken when the U.S. Treasury Department released documents to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who presented them to an author to write a critical book on President George W. Bush, the department's inspector general said in a report.</p>

<p>WASHINGTON -- Sensitive national-security information was mistakenly released by the Treasury Department to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, but no criminal statutes were violated, records show.</p> <p>Mr. O'Neill drew on some of the material -- part of a cache of 19,000 documents -- for a memoir released in January that was critical of President Bush. When a document stamped "Secret" was displayed on a CBS "60 Minutes" episode concerning the book, the Treasury Department sought an investigation.</p>

US spy chiefs ordered agents to deliver Osama bin Laden's severed head in a box of dry ice and hoist heads of other Al-Qaeda leaders on pikes, a retired field officer has disclosed. As America reeled in shock days after the September 11 attacks in 2001, former CIA officer Gary Schroen was sent to Afghanistan to help the opposition Northern Alliance to topple bin Laden's hosts the Taliban. He told National Public Radio in an interview broadcast on Monday and Tuesday that he stopped by the office of then-CIA counterterrorism director Cofer Black for final instructions. He said he was...

The Clinton Administration had located Osama Bin Laden dead to rights in their sights and failed to fire a shot at him though he had been responsible for attacks on U.S. embassies and other al Qaeda murders. President Clinton’s State Dept. even turned down offers in 1996 and 1997 from the Sudan to turn over Bin Laden on a silver platter to American jurisdiction but Clinton declined the offers. Richard Minter in his book “Losing bin Laden” asserts that the State Dept. scuttled the chance to capture Bin Laden and that this no doubt could have prevented the 9/11 attacks...

A High-Risk Nuclear Stakeout The U.S. took too long to act, some experts say, letting a Pakistani scientist sell illicit technology well after it knew of his operation. By Douglas Frantz, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — Nuclear warhead plans that Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan sold to Libya were more complete and detailed than previously disclosed, raising new concerns about the cost of Washington's watch-and-wait policy before Khan and his global black market were shut down last year. Two Western nuclear weapons specialists who have examined the top-secret designs say the hundreds of pages of engineering drawings and handwritten notes...

As George W. Bush was first moving onto the national political stage, he often turned for advice to an old friend who secretly taped some of their private conversations, creating a rare record of the future president as a politician and a personality. In the last several weeks, that friend, Doug Wead, an author and former aide to Mr. Bush's father, disclosed the tapes' existence to a reporter and played about a dozen of them. Variously earnest, confident or prickly in those conversations, Mr. Bush weighs the political risks and benefits of his religious faith, discusses campaign strategy and comments...

Friday, February 18, 2005 MEDIA MATTERSEhrlichman ID'd Kissinger as Watergate 'Deep Throat' Powerful Nixon aide 'believed it very strongly,' 'was absolutely convinced' Posted: February 18, 20058:58 p.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com The identity of "Deep Throat" – the mysterious source that helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break open the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon's presidency – has never been revealed, although it's been the object of much speculation over the past 30 years. Henry Kissinger Now, it turns out that one of Nixon's top aides, John Ehrlichman, who spent time in prison for his role in...

OSLO, Norway -- A scientist considered the father of Iraq's nuclear program said Thursday that his nation would have developed atomic weapons in the early 1990s had Saddam Hussein not ordered the invasion of Kuwait. The invasion sparked the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which drove Iraq out of Kuwait and marked the end of Baghdad's nuclear and biological weapons program, said Jafar Dhia Jafar, the scientific head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program. "By the end of 1990, about 8,000 people were involved directly or indirectly in the nuclear program," said Jafar, presenting his new Norwegian-language book, "Oppdraget", which...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing miniskirts and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man’s face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider’s written account. A draft manuscript obtained by the Associated Press is classified as secret pending a Pentagon review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk. It’s the most revealing account so far of interrogations at...

Description: Clayton Swisher talks about the 2000 Camp David summit between Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat, and Bill Clinton and argues that the popular understanding of what happened there is inaccurate. Mr. Swisher says that while Mr. Arafat is largely blamed for spoiling the negotiations, the U.S. and Israeli teams were just as, if not more, responsible for the talks falling apart. He also challenges reports that claim that Mr. Arafat was offered upwards of 98 percent of the occupied territories in exchange for peace. This event was held at American University in Washington, DC. Includes Q&A. Author Bio: Clayton Swisher,...

As the Senate Judiciary Committee voted today on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, we hear a speech by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh on torture from Guantanamo to Abu Gharib to Vietnam.Hersh is the author of 'Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Gharib.' He spoke last month at the Wise Free Synagogue in New York.'The amazing thing is that we have been taken over by a cult of eight or nine neo-conservatives that have somehow grapped the government.' 'Just how and why they did it so efficiently, we will have to wait for much later...

It is rare to have books exploring the legacy of a presidential administration still in its first term. It is rarer still to have the number of insider accounts that Americans have access to in 2004. “These books appear to be painting history before our eyes,” said Charlotte Abbott, news editor of Publishers Weekly. “No one in the industry of publishing can remember a time since Watergate when so many political books have come out and the public has been interested – and a lot of those Watergate titles came out after.” One of the reporters who first exposed Watergate,...

Democrats, reeling from the Republicans' success at courting churchgoers, are focusing new attention on a religious and political anomaly: Jim Wallis, one of the few prominent left-leaning leaders among evangelical Protestants. At the start of the Congressional session, Senate Democrats invited Mr. Wallis to address their members at a private session to discuss issues. A group of about 15 House Democrats invited him to a breakfast discussion about dispelling their party's secular image. And NBC News has enlisted him to appear as a guest during its inauguration coverage opposite Dr. James C. Dobson, one of the most prominent evangelical conservatives....

Afghan forces arrested three Americans, including a purported former Green Beret, after raiding a jail they were allegedly running in the Afghan capital and finding prisoners hanging from their feet, officials said Thursday. The U.S. military, facing a widening inquiry into prisoner abuse, quickly distanced itself from the three, who had been posing as American agents before being detained Monday. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday "the U.S. government does not employ or sponsor these men." Afghan officials also dismissed claims by the apparent ringleader, Jonathan K. Idema, that he was a "special adviser" to their security forces, saying...

The U.S. is engaged in a bloody war in Iraq for the purpose of eliminating the remnants of a terrorist regime, foreign terrorists, and bringing democracy to Iraq and the region. It is a big gamble that has put radical Islam on the defensive around the world. But shocking evidence demonstrates that controversial former U.S. Marine and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who now writes for the anti-American Arab "news" organization Al Jazeera, was involved in a controversial effort to stop the war by enlisting prominent personalities in a "peace" campaign.

<p>Among the disclosures in Bob Woodward's new book, "Plan of Attack," is that Secretary of State Colin Powell had reservations about going to war in Iraq.</p> <p>This comes as no great surprise, though we do wonder what President Bush thinks of a Cabinet officer who uses a book to distance himself from the boss on an issue that is central to his re-election campaign. The last ranking official who used Mr. Woodward to pad his own reputation at the expense of the President was budget director Richard Darman as George H.W. Bush was running for re-election. If Mr. Powell disagreed so passionately about Iraq, the more honorable path would have been to resign -- before the war.</p>

Sean says, he will comment on Woodwar's book.

The buzz in the publishing world this week has been about the auction, currently underway, for the memoirs of former CIA director George Tenet. The bidding — which should end early next week — could bring in as much as $5 million for the Bush administration defector. Whatever publisher wins, there's at least one person who can't lose — Robert Barnett, the D.C.-based attorney who represents Tenet. A senior partner of the D.C. firm Williams & Connelly, Barnett — who insists that journalists call him an attorney, not an agent — has become the go-to-guy if you think you've got...