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AUSTIN — Toll road critics were turned down in their request for wide-ranging transportation department documents, but a judge gave them more time to narrow their request as part of a lawsuit against the state. Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom, led by San Antonio resident Terri Hall, sued the Texas Department of Transportation in September to fight the department's toll road efforts. The group claims the "Keep Texas Moving" promotional campaign violates a ban on state officials using their authority for political purposes. It also wants to stop agency officials from lobbying Congress to allow more tolling. On Thursday,...

Federal immigration agents say they have uncovered another phony immigration document mill in Virginia Beach, according to court documents made public Monday. From an apartment complex in the Pembroke section, illegal immigrants could pay $110 to get papers that looked legitimate enough to gain employment, agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in the court filing. The suspected ring leader of the operation, Armando Gutierrez-Tlaczani, known to friends as "Luis," was ordered jailed without bond Monday after an appearance in U.S. District Court. Gutierrez-Tlaczani was arrested last week and charged with selling phony immigration documents from his apartment, which...

Hillary Clinton’s top advisers charge that the presidential candidate was unfairly targeted by moderator Tim Russert during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Philadelphia. Russert asked Clinton a number of tough questions during the MSNBC-sponsored debate, including one on Social Security and another on the release of documents from the Bill Clinton administration, as she sought to fend off attacks from her Democratic rivals. Mark Penn, Clinton’s senior strategist, said: “Russert made it appear that President Clinton had done something new or unusual” in regard to the release of documents. “I think there will be further clarification.” Penn and Jonathan Mantz,...

HILLARY DOCUMENTS WHILE FIRST LADY ARE SEALED UNTIL AFTER THE ELECTION SANDY BERGER LETTER re: 911 MOVIE Because no Freedom of Information Act request will be effective in having Hillary's first lady documents released until after the next election, perhaps we can get some help for someone with a certain expertise in acquiring documents. That person would, of course, be Sandy Berger. The following appeal of help was sent today via facsimile to Berger at his office at 202.637.8615. Doug from Upland Contributor to FreeRepublic.com www.FreeRepublic.com Mr. Samuel R. Berger Chairman Stonebridge International LLC 555 13th Street, NW Suite...

Fake documents can buy dirty bomb material 12:03 21 July 2007 NewScientist.com news service With all the security measures in place against terrorist attacks, you might think it would be difficult to obtain enough radioactive material from within the US to build a dirty bomb. It turns out that all you need is a little ingenuity and one fake fax. Posing as staff from a construction firm, members of the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a licence to purchase small amounts of substances such as caesium-137, which is found in moisture meters used...

UNITED NATIONS -- In a wide-ranging compendium on Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programs, the U.N. Monitoring, Observation, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) reveals that in late 1989, Saddam's military launched a modified Scud missile that could have carried a nuclear warhead. In a document released on Thursday, UNMOVIC states . . . Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, repeatedly waved off Western concerns about the missile program. Now, it has become clear that such concerns were justified . . .

WASHINGTON - Little-known documents now being made public detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago: wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more. The documents provide a glimpse of nearly 700 pages of materials that the agency plans to declassify next week. A six-page summary memo that was declassified in 2000 and released by The National Security Archive at George Washington University on Thursday outlines 18 activities by the CIA that "presented legal questions" and were discussed with President Ford in 1975. Among them: _The "two-year physical confinement" in the mid-1960s of a Soviet...

Chain's use of database to fire employees who don't check out angers advocates for immigrants You may have already seen the signs popping up at your local Dunkin' Donuts shop: ``We follow the law! This company hires lawful workers only. " The signs, which have begun appearing in shops around Boston, make public the company's participation, starting June 1, in a voluntary federal program that enables employers to quickly check the immigration status of new hires. Dunkin' Donuts is requiring all of its franchisees to participate in the Basic Pilot Program, which allows employers to verify a worker's status using...

I think we should keep track of those companies who are doing a splendid job of NOT hiring illegals! This morning in our local edition of The Arizona Republic Business section there was an article re: the firm stance that Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins has taken with ensuring that NO illegal aliens are hired on at any of their franchises. They are utilizing the federal government's Basic Pilot program to conduct electronic background checks. Franchise owners who don't follow this policy are taken to court.

A spokesman for President Bush says a demand by Republicans for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to follow through on former White House insider Sandy Berger's promise to take a polygraph test regarding the classified documents he took from the National Archives will be studied. The response from Tony Snow came on a question from Les Kinsolving, WND's correspondent at the White House. "Congressman Tom Davis and 17 other Republican House members have called on Attorney General Gonzales, Department of Justice, to administer the polygraph test that Sandy Berger agreed to in paragraph 11 of his plea agreement. And my question,...

A private investigator who worked to get condemned inmates off death row pleaded guilty Monday to forging documents to support their appeals. Kathleen Culhane, 40, admitted that she forged documents to try to stop the executions of four condemned inmates since 2002, including Michael Morales, who was sentenced to death for the 1981 rape and murder of a Central Valley teenager. The plea agreement by the San Francisco-based investigator was entered in Sacramento County Superior Court and settles a case that the state attorney general called the largest fraud ever against the state's criminal justice system. "This case is not...

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department released a list of internal documents Thursday focusing on lawmakers' concerns and media questions about the firings of eight federal prosecutors, but the department resisted congressional demands for copies of the memos. The list of 159 e-mails and memos, spanning nearly three months, at the least demonstrates concern about how the dismissals were being publicly received before they erupted into a firestorm that has resulted in calls for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. The small pile of documents, sent to Capitol Hill on Thursday night, also included e-mails about articles published in The Washington...

Testimony in the case of a Chinese-born engineer accused of stealing U.S. defense secrets revolved Thursday around whether he needed government approval to export a document on a quiet submarine propulsion system to China. Authorities believe Chi Mak, a naturalized U.S. citizen, stole thousands of pages of defense documents from his defense contractor employer, Power Paragon, and gave them to his brother, who passed them along to Chinese authorities over a number of years. He was arrested in 2005 in Los Angeles after FBI agents stopped his brother and sister-in-law as they boarded a flight to Hong Kong. Investigators said...

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday. The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February. The...

Scandal: Last we heard of Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's national security adviser, he was being fined and placed on probation for stealing top-secret documents. Is there more to this tale of purloined papers? Rep. Tom Davis thinks there is. "I'm not convinced that he was acting alone," the Virginia Republican said on the Fox News special "Socks, Scissors, Paper: The Sandy Berger Caper" that aired Saturday night.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22, 2007 — Mimicking the hijackers who executed the Sept. 11 attacks, insurgents reportedly tied to al Qaeda in Iraq considered using student visas to slip terrorists into the United States to orchestrate a new attack on American soil. Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently testified that documents captured by coalition forces during a raid of a safe house believed to house Iraqi members of al Qaeda six months ago "revealed [AQI] was planning terrorist operations in the U.S." At the time, Maples offered little additional insight into the possible terror plot....

WASHINGTON -- While reviewing national security documents from the Clinton Administration in preparation for his appearance before the 9/11 Commission hearings, the Clinton administration's former national security adviser, Mr. Samuel R. Berger, was observed stuffing them in his socks by employees at the National Archives. Soon he was accused of taking these documents -- memos, draft documents, e-mails, that sort of thing -- from the Archives in breech of the law, and he was duly charged. All of this took place a couple of years ago, and those of us who had followed the Clinton high jinks with more diligence...

Did the 9/11 Commission receive all the documents it requested? Davis Releases Berger Report January 9, 2007 By David Marin (202)225-5074 Washington, D.C. – Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Tom Davis (R-VA) released the following statement today on a committee report that sheds important new light on Sandy Berger’s theft of classified documents from the National Archives. The report makes it clear that the full extent of Mr. Berger’s document removal can never be known, and consequently the Department of Justice could not assure the 9/11 Commission that it received all responsive documents to which Mr. Berger had...

Investigation into pilfered documents reveals former president signed letter President Bill Clinton signed a letter authorizing former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's access to classified documents that later came up missing, according to a newly released investigation report by the National Archives and Records Administration. The sensitive drafts of the National Security Council's "Millennium After Action Review" on the Clinton administration's handling of the al-Qaida terror threats in December 1999 suspiciously disappeared after Berger said he intended to "determine if Executive Privilege needed to be exerted prior to documents being provided to the 9/11 Commission." Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft testified...

Former national security adviser Sandy Berger removed classified documents from the National Archives in 2003 and hid them under a construction trailer, the Archives inspector general reported Wednesday. The report was issued more than a year after Berger pleaded guilty and received a criminal sentence for removal of the documents. Inspector General Paul Brachfeld reported that when Berger was confronted by Archives officials about the missing documents, he said it was possible he threw them in his office trash. The report said that when Archives employees first suspected that Berger _ who had been President Clinton's national security adviser _...