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Alexandria, Va. (AP) -- The Justice Department may have hoodwinked a defendant in a high-profile terrorism case into thinking his plea bargain would protect him from further prosecutions, a federal judge said Monday. Monday's hearing in U.S. District Court was the latest in which Judge Leonie Brinkema questioned the Justice Department's tactics in pursuing a criminal contempt case against former professor Sami Al-Arian, once accused of being a leading Palestinian terrorist. Brinkema gave Al-Arian's lawyers 10 days to file papers seeking dismissal of the case on the grounds that prosecutors failed to keep promises made under the plea bargain. She...

Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, has been caught in a lie. Khalidi concluded a January 8, 2009, op-ed that appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune with the following quote ascribed to former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon: The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people. The problem is Ya'alon never made this statement and both publications have since had to excise it from the op-ed and issue corrections. Here's the New York Times: An Op-Ed...

Even as Israelis and Palestinians plunged deeper into conflict, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama remained silent, refusing to budge from his one-president-at-a-time mantra. Obama takes office on Jan. 20 but has not commented on the Middle East crisis since Israel launched attacks on Gaza nine days ago. His advisers insist that only President George W. Bush can speak for America until then. The Palestinian death toll in nine days of Israeli attacks has risen to more than 500. Hamas, which ended a six-month ceasefire, has fired rockets deeper into Israel than ever before, hitting major cities and killing four Israelis. While...

Rep. Dennis Kucinich has parted ways with his Democratic colleagues and called for a United Nations investigation into what he calls Israel’s “disproportionate” attacks on Gaza. Referring to Israel’s air assault on Hamas targets in Gaza, the Ohio legislator issued a statement saying: “All this was, and is, disproportionate, indiscriminate mass violence in violation of international law. Israel is not exempt from international law and must be held accountable.” The perpetrators of the rocket barrages aimed at Israeli population centers should be brought to justice, said Kucinich, adding that Israel “cannot create a war against an entire people in order...

In the end, the shame of Vice President Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting. Although firmly ensconced, even in the popular imagination, as an example of evil incarnate - nearly a quarter of those polled rated him the worst vice president in U.S. history, and another 41 percent as "poor" in this week's CNN poll - Cheney exudes the confidence of one fully convinced that he will get away with it all. And why not? Nothing, not his suspect role in the Enron debacle, which foretold...

May 15, 2008 Reid Rejects President's Reckless And Irresponsible Remarks Calls on President to Explain Inconsistency Between Administration Actions and His Words Today Washington, DC—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made the following statement today in response to President Bush’s remarks before the Israeli Knesset: “Not surprisingly, the engineer of the worst foreign policy in our nation’s history has fired yet another reckless and reprehensible round. More than seven years into his Presidency and in the sixth year of the directionless Iraq war, President Bush has yet to learn that his brand of divisive partisan rhetoric is precisely what has made...

Michael Moore is taking America's temperature again. Moore, who won the top honor at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival with "Fahrenheit 9/11," plans a followup to resume his examination of the nation's status in the world in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. "Fahrenheit 9/11," the only documentary to top $100 million domestically at the box office, was a harsh, hilarious critique of George W. Bush and his administration in the wake of the attacks. The as-yet-untitled followup will have a longer-term approach, film executives overseeing the project said Wednesday. "That movie was about a moment in time, a...

Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.” Things have not gone according to plan. Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab-American. Since the school opened in Brooklyn last fall, children have been suspended for carrying weapons, repeatedly gotten into fights and...

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee on Monday threatened to serve subpoenas on former Attorney General John Ashcroft and two others associated with the Bush administration's interrogation policies if they don't agree to testify. If the three — including John C. Yoo, the former assistant deputy attorney general, and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff — do not reply by Friday, "I will have no choice but to consider the use of compulsory process," Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., wrote in letters to them. That's Washington-speak for issuing congressional subpoenas, tough talk that Conyers has leveled at...

A senior Senate Democrat said Tuesday that he wants to use a major defense policy bill to expand federal hate crimes laws to protect gays, bring troops home from Iraq and force Baghdad to pay more toward reconstruction costs. The effort would raise the flag on major issues favored by the party's base. But only the reconstruction provision is considered to have a chance at passing — and even that proposal's prospects would depend heavily on Republican cooperation. Slim margins in Congress, particularly in the Senate where 60 votes are needed to overcome procedural hurdles, have kept Democrats from enacting...

BAGHDAD, (AP) -- The U.S. military says it will release Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein after more than two years in custody. The statement said Hussein will be freed Wednesday now that Iraqi judicial committees have granted him amnesty for all allegations. Hussein has been in custody since April 12, 2006 when he was detained by U.S. Marines for alleged links to insurgents.

Honolulu (AP) -- A federal judge has ordered the Navy to take additional precautions when conducting sonar exercises off Hawaii that environmentalists say can seriously injure or kill marine mammals. U.S. District Judge David Ezra said Friday the Navy cannot conduct exercises within 12 nautical miles, or 13.8 miles, of the shoreline, where species that are particularly sensitive to sonar, such as the beaked whale, are found. Among other requirements, the Navy must look for marine mammals for one hour each day before using sonar, employ three lookouts exclusively to spot the animals during sonar use and stop sonar transmission...

History professor and former president of the Middle East Studies Association, Joel Beinin, went on "extended leave" from Stanford in 2006 due to what he described as the university's "minimal institutional interest in the study and teaching of the modern Middle East." Since that time, Beinin has been serving as director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt. But was it scholarly concerns or mounting criticism that caused Beinin to leave Stanford for AUC? In a 2006 interview with Egypt Today, Beinin was portrayed as a victim of "conservative reaction" on the part of Middle...

Georgetown professor John Esposito, director of the Saudi-financed Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding has a reputation as an apologist for radical Islam. And it's one he lived up to with a Stanford University speech last week titled, "Dying for God? Suicide Terrorism and Militant Islam." Esposito claimed that Islamic terrorism grows primarily out of a sense of political and economic grievance and, of course, "occupation" on the part of "neo-colonial powers." This spin allowed him to deflect responsibility for Islamic terrorism to the West while negating the need for self-reflection among Muslims.When an attendee asked him why...

San Francisco -- For the second time this week, a federal court found today that a Navy anti-submarine training program threatened to subject whales and other sea creatures to harmful blasts of sonar and ordered protective measures in several sensitive zones, including one near Monterey Bay. The ruling by U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte of San Francisco applies to the Navy's use of low-frequency sonar in submarine detection exercises conducted in large areas of the world's oceans. She said Navy officials, who had agreed to restrictions after she issued a similar ruling in 2002, failed to take adequate precautions when seeking...

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that an Islamic charity's lawsuit alleging it was illegally wiretapped by federal investigators cannot go forward because the key piece of evidence is protected as a state secret. In a near-fatal blow to the case filed by the now-defunct U.S. arm of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that a top secret call log accidentally turned over to Al-Haramain's lawyers by the U.S. Treasury Department can't be used as evidence. Al-Haramain, which was labeled by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, alleged it had been illegally...

Nobody can dispute that Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war from the start and, with striking prescience, predicted U.S. troops would be mired in a costly conflict that fanned "the flames of the Middle East." But nobody should accept at face value the Illinois senator's claim that he was a "courageous leader" who opposed the war at great political risk. The truth is that while Obama showed foreign policy savvy and an ability to keenly analyze both sides of an issue in his October 2002 warnings on Iraq, the political upside of his position rivaled any risk. And, once elected...

Invoking the war in Iraq, the chief UN nuclear inspector criticized talk of attacking Iran as "hype" Monday, saying such options should only be considered as a last resort and only if authorized by the UN Security Council. "I would not talk about any use of force," said Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in an indirect response to French warnings that the world had to be prepared for the possibility of war in the event that Iran obtains atomic weapons. Saying only the UN Security Council could authorize the use of force, ElBaradei urged the...

SACRAMENTO, (AP) -- A California man convicted of attending an al-Qaida camp in Pakistan was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison Monday for supporting terrorists, concluding a case that divided a Central Valley farming community. U.S. District Court Judge Garland Burrell Jr. imposed the sentence against Hamid Hayat on his 25th birthday, saying he had "attended a terrorist training camp, returned to the United States ready and willing to wage violent jihad when directed to do so." Hayat faced up to 39 years in prison after his April 2006 conviction on one count of providing material support to terrorists...

ASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate Democratic leader Tuesday urged a Bush-appointed judge to recuse himself from cases involving enemy combatants and requested an explanation about information that might contradict his testimony about the White House's detainee policy. "It appears that you misled me, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the nation," Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois wrote to Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He urged Kavanaugh to remove himself from "all pending and subsequent cases involving detainees and enemy combatants." Kavanaugh's court gets more detainee cases than any other. "Your...