Democrats have lashed out at former vice-president Dick Cheney, accusing him of abusing his power, amid reports he ordered the CIA to withhold information from Congress about a secret counter-terrorism program.

Lawmakers vowed to hold hearings on the nature of the alleged top secret program and efforts to keep members of the US legislature in the dark.

A senior member of the US Senate, Democrat Kent Conrad, who called the alleged failure to notify Congress about the program “a serious breach” said:

“This is a question of whether the former vice-president of the United States denied certain sensitive information to the intelligence leaders in Congress. That is not acceptable,”

Speaking on Sunday on CNN television, Conrad said Central Intelligence Agency notification to key members of Congress about its secret programs

“is required by law”

“That’s a serious matter,”

Representative Anna Eshoo, a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she would call for the panel to hire an outside counsel to investigate the issue.

The Democrat told The Washington Post in reports published on Sunday:

“We have to know who gave the order for this, who gave the order to conceal this, where did they draw the money for this,”

Eshoo said the committee might have to use its subpoena power to interview some officials who oversaw intelligence issues during the Bush administration.

Officials were vague about the precise nature of the highly secret program.

Two former agency officials told the daily it involved a series of proposals designed to provide US intelligence agencies with a “needed capability” – without providing details as to what was meant.

The latest proposal was aired in the spring of 2008 but was not carried out, the officials said, although they told the newspaper it did not involve interrogations of detainees or surveillance of US-based communications.

Both were highly controversial practices that have been roundly condemned in many quarters, as the United States prosecuted its war on terrorism during the Bush administration.

The New York Times, which broke the story about the role alleged to have been played by Cheney in keeping the CIA program under wraps, reported that CIA chief Leon Panetta ended the program when he learned of its existence on June 23.

Panetta is reported to have revealed Cheney’s role in a closed briefing one day later to the Senate and House intelligence committees.

“Because this program never went fully operational and hadn’t been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial,”

An intelligence official told the newspaper, speaking on condition of anonymity.

News of the alleged program came as lawmakers from both President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party and opposition Republicans are in bitter dispute over whether the CIA informed Congress adequately and comprehensively about sensitive programs.

In May, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi charged that the US spy agency misled lawmakers in 2002 about interrogation techniques widely seen as torture, including “waterboarding”, a simulated drowning method used on terrorism suspects.

On Sunday, senior Republican senator Judd Gregg conceded that in his view,

“if somebody told the CIA not to inform the appropriate members of Congress on information, that’s wrong”.

Nevertheless Gregg said:

“That isn’t a reason to disassemble the CIA and make them a whipping child in the middle.”

The Republic lawmaker said the controversy pointed to a

“continued attack on the CIA and our intelligence gathering organisations which is undermining the morale and capacity of those organisations to gather intelligence”.

Technorati Tags: Central Intelligence Agency, Dick Cheney, Kent Conrad

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Post-election violence in Iran is “deeply shocking”, but G8 leaders nevertheless want to pursue talks to end the nuclear standoff with Tehran, French President Nicolas Sarkozy says, warning Iran that the international community was determined to make progress.

“We want to give negotiation every chance. If that works, then great. If that leads nowhere, then that won’t be without consequences,”

Speaking after a dinner with fellow Group of Eight leaders at which Iran was discussed, Sarkozy condemned what he called Tehran’s “blackmail” over its holding of Western prisoners arrested following a post-election crackdown.

Referring to international attempts to bring the Islamic republic to the negotiating table over its alleged plans to develop nuclear weapons, Sarkozy said :

“The statement of the G8 is unequivocal,”

“Between August and September it’s for them to decide how they want things to evolve. Pittsburgh is the date,”

Indicating Iran had been set an informal deadline to respond to Western overtures before the next G20 summit.

“The Iranian regime refuses all hands offered to them.”

Sarkozy also demanded Iran immediately release 23-year-old researcher Clotilde Reiss, a French citizen arrested in Tehran on July 1 and accused of “spying” over an email she sent to friends describing street protests.

Technorati Tags: French President, G8, iran, Nicolas Sarkozy

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The wife of the next head of Britain’s spy agency has posted pictures of her husband, family and friends on the social networking site Facebook, details which could compromise security, a newspaper said on Sunday.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service in November. The SIS, popularly known as MI6, is Britain’s global intelligence-gathering organisation.

In what the Mail on Sunday called an “extraordinary lapse“, the new spy chief’s wife, Lady Shelley Sawers, posted family pictures and exposed details of where the couple live and take their holidays and who their friends and relatives are.

The paper said the Facebook page had “virtually no privacy protection” and could therefore be viewed by any of the many millions of Facebook users around the world. They were swiftly removed once authorities were alerted by the newspaper’s enquiries.

Though the Facebook profile for Sir John Sawyers has now been removed, this brings up an interesting question of whether we all have to officially declare what social networks we belong to.

Sir John Sawers, who will be known by the code-name “C” when he takes up his new post, currently serves as Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations.
The newspaper said:

“There were fears that the hugely embarrassing blunder could have compromised the safety of Sir John’s family and friends,”

Publishing the story on its front page and the pictures on a double-page spread, the Mail on Sunday said the information

“could potentially be useful to hostile foreign powers or terrorists”.

It was the latest in a string of security blunders, lapses and leaks by British officials that have embarrassed the government of embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Technorati Tags: Ambassador to the United Nations, Facebook, Gordon Brown, Lady Shelley Sawers, MI6, Secret Intelligence Service, Sir John Sawers, SIS

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Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews just released. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Saddam, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect it [Iraq] from threats in the region”.

The then US president George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. At the time Bush administration officials strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001.

Saddam, who during the interviews was often defiant and boastful, at one point wistfully acknowledged he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq’s weapons stockpile after the 1990-91 Gulf War.

The director of the archive, Thomas Blanton, said he could conceive of no possible national security reason to keep Saddam’s conversations with the FBI secret. An FBI spokesman, Paul Bresson, said he could not immediately explain the reason for the redactions.

The 20 formal interviews took place in 2004, between February 7 and May 1, followed by the casual conversations between May 10 and June 28.

Saddam was later transferred to Iraqi custody, and hanged in December 2006.

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Buckingham Palace says public funding for the Queen and the royal family cost British taxpayers the equivalent of 69 pence each last year.

The Queen’s office published her latest accounts on Monday. It showed that the costs incurred by the royal family were 41.5 million pounds in the year to March 31, an increase of 1.5 million pounds on the previous year.

Public money is used to pay the costs of travel and running homes used by the royal family, including the Queen’s Buckingham Palace residence.

The accounts don’t include the cost of security provided by the police and army.

Figures showed travel costs rose to 6.5 million pounds from 6.2 million pounds.

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Pop legend Michael Jackson is reported to have died of a heart attack after he was rushed to hospital in Los Angeles.

The entertainment TMZ website reports Jackson suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon and paramedics were unable to revive him.

Earlier, a fire department official told the Los Angeles Times that Michael Jackson had been rushed to the hospital.

Steve Ruda told the newspaper on Thursday that Jackson was not breathing when Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics responded to a call at his Los Angeles home about 12:30pm.

The paramedics performed CPR and took him to UCLA Medical Center, Ruda told the paper.

The report of the heart attack was confirmed by the OK! website, which said streets surrounding the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in LA had been blocked off with yellow tape.

TMZ reports that it had spoken with a Jackson family member, who said Michael was in “really bad shape”.

His family were heading to the hospital, the report said.

The story still developing…

http://www.tmz.com/2009/06/25/michael-jackson-dies-death-dead-cardiac-arrest/

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A lawyer for disgraced financier Bernard Madoff has sought a sentence of 12 years or less for his aging client, who he says “has an approximate life expectancy of 13 years”.

In a letter to the judge overseeing the case in New York, lawyer Ira Sorkin said any sentence longer than 12 years would constitute “an effective life sentence” for his client.

Madoff, 71, is due to be sentenced next week in a New York federal court. The former investor, who is accused of perpetrating a $US50 billion fraud, could face up to 150 years in prison.

Sorkin said the court should take into consideration Madoff’s surrender to police, acceptance of responsibility, cooperation with authorities, and the non-violent nature of his offence.

The letter said:

“A prison term of 12 years, just short of an effective sentence, will sufficiently address the goals of deterrence, protecting the public and promoting respect for the law, without being ‘greater than necessary’ to achieve them,”

Sorkin’s letter added that Madoff would describe his “pain” at the suffering his actions caused during an upcoming sentencing hearing.

“Both he and his counsel acknowledge the scope and magnitude of those losses and understand the victims’ calls for reprisal,”

But Sorkin urged the court to:

“set aside the emotion and hysteria attendant to this case and render a sentence that is just and proportionate to the conduct at issue.”

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The Islamic burka is “not welcome” in France because it is not a symbol of religion but a sign of subservience for women, President Nicolas Sarkozy says.

“We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity,”

“That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity.”

“The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience,”

“It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic.”

Sarkozy told a special session of parliament he was in favour of holding the inquiry sought by some French lawmakers into whether Muslim women who cover themselves fully in public undermine French secularism and women’s rights.

But the president added :

“we must not fight the wrong battle, in the republic the Muslim religion must be respected as much as other religions”

France has Europe’s biggest Muslim population estimated at several million.

The proposal to hold an inquiry has won support from many politicians from both the left and right, but France’s official Muslim council accused lawmakers of wasting time focusing on a fringe phenomenon.

Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM), said last week:

“To raise the subject like this, via a parliamentary committee, is a way of stigmatising Islam and the Muslims of France,”

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The Italian Government is bracing for a fresh of wave of scandal after prosecutors investigating a cash-for-contracts rort allegedly unearthed wiretaps suggesting payments to young women to attend Silvio Berlusconi’s house parties.

The investigators had been probing claims of favouritism and corruption in the awarding of lucrative public health-care tenders in the south-eastern port city of Bari and had focused attention on a company owned by two brothers who are well-known local entrepreneurs. The company, Tecnohospital, has won a series of important contracts in a relatively short time. One of the owner-brothers, Giampaolo Tarantini, is believed to have been heard on the phonetaps discussing the parties he had attended at the Prime Minister’s Roman and Sardinian residences.

Local investigators have now brought in several young women for questioning in a bid to work out if the taped discussions were purely boastful or serious inducements to prostitution.

News of the investigation has emerged at the same time as an explosive front-page interview with a young blonde, Patrizia D’Addario, who told Corriere Della Sera that she attended two parties at the Prime Minister’s Roman residence — one on the night that Barack Obama was elected US President.

Ms D’Addario claimed that she was offered the opportunity to stand in a local poll as a candidate for a party associated with Mr Berlusconi’s proposed new People of Freedom Party and that she has both proof of the trips — and tapes of the evenings. The newspaper itself urged readers to exercise caution when reading the interview.

But yesterday La Repubblica appeared to confirm that she was indeed a candidate for the Apulia First party, which fought a local election recently and published a series of photos of her campaigning alongside both the Prime Minister and one of Mr Berlusconi’s ministers, Raffaele Fitto, late last year.

Ms D’Addario, who does not state her age or occupation, said she had been asked to attend the dinner party at Palazzo Grazioli by a friend in Bari and had been introduced by a man called “Giampaolo”. She said she agreed to attend the event for payment and described the evenings in detail, saying she had worn a recording device on both occasions.

She said she was picked up from her hotel on both evenings by “Giampaolo” and she and two other young women travelled to the Prime Minister’s residence in a limousine with darkened windows.

There she was told she had to adopt the name Alessia and found another 20 or so young women drinking champagne. She said the Prime Minister sang, told jokes and showed videos including footage of his Sardinian villa and his meeting with George Bush. She described a second evening in which she spent the night and insisted she had recordings and proof of both encounters.

In a written statement issued yesterday, Mr Berlusconi has categorically denied the allegations saying he would not allow such “garbage” to distract him from the business of government. He bitterly attacked the newspaper – and Italian journalists – claiming the printed press was

“full of falsehoods and rubbish”.

“I will not be affected or moved by these assaults on me and will continue to work, as always, for the good of my country,”

Technorati Tags: house parties, Italian Government, Silvio, Silvio Berlusconi, young women

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Air France has replaced the air speed sensors on its entire fleet of Airbus A330 and A340 long-haul aircraft, a pilots’ union official says. The company had been under pressure from pilots who feared the devices could be linked to the crash of Flight 447.

In the deep waters of the mid-Atlantic, a Dutch ship began trolling with a high-tech US Navy listening device on Monday in search of the flight data and voice recorders. Investigators say information from those black boxes may be key to determining what caused Flight 447 to crash into the ocean with 228 people on board.

Experts looking into the May 31 crash of the four-year-old Airbus A330 jet have so far focused on the possibility that external speed monitors – called pitot tubes – iced over and gave false readings to the plane’s computers.

Air France had begun replacing the tubes on its A330 and A340 jets before the accident, but had not yet changed them on the plane that crashed.

After pilot complaints, the airline pledged to speed up the switch and it has now equipped all planes with the new sensors, said Erick Derivry, a spokesman for the SNPL pilots’ union.

Derivry stressed it is still “not proven or established” that the old sensors caused the accident.

Airbus chief executive Tom Enders defended the A300 on Monday as his company sought to sell more of the planes at the Paris Air Show.

“Their record is very, very impressive,”

“(They have) more than 16 million flight hours, more than 3 million flights, and this is so far one of the safest commercial aircraft built.”

“We are supporting the investigation as much as we can and we very much hope that the recorders will be found soon, so that we find out what really happened,”

At sea, searchers began towing a US Navy Towed Pinger Locator in a grid pattern in hopes of detecting emergency beacons from Flight 447’s black boxes, which could be lying thousands of metres below the ocean surface. The sounds begin to quickly fade 30 days after a crash.

The initial search spans 5,200 sq km of the Atlantic, said US Air Force colonel Willie Berges, commander of the American military forces supporting the search.

French military officials also are using nuclear submarine to hunt for the black boxes and a second Dutch ship carrying another pinger locater was to arrive on Monday afternoon.

“We have a limited amount of time to cover the search area,”

Berges said, but added the hunt will go on even if no pings are detected beyond the 30-day timeframe.

In Geneva, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said French president Nicholas Sarkozy assured him the French government would compensate the families of crash victims. The two leaders were attending the International Labour Conference.

Silva told reporters, speaking through a translator:

“He (Sarkozy) said that they will take the responsibility to pay the indemnity for all the families that suffered with the crash, the Brazilian and French families and of other countries,”

An Air France spokesman, however, said the airline and its insurance company – not the government – are handling compensation. The official, who declined to name the insurance company, spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorised to discuss the matter.

A spokeswoman for the French transport ministry also denied the government would pay compensation, saying this would be handled by Air France’s insurance. She was speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with ministry policy.

The French presidential palace in Paris and the French mission in Geneva would not immediately comment.

Experts say the evidence uncovered up until now points to at least a partial midair break-up of the plane, with no evidence so far of an explosion or terrorist act.

French ambassador Pierre-Jean Vandoorne, a liaison between the victims’ families and authorities, said on Monday he met in Recife with leaders of Brazil’s search effort and was told they were keeping up their effort.

He said Brazilian and French aviators have spent 1,000 flight hours looking for victims and debris.

Brazilian authorities say they have recovered 43 bodies and another six have been found by French ships.

Vandoorne would not comment on the nationality or any other details of the bodies pulled from the ocean. Coroners say victims’ dental records and DNA samples from relatives will be needed to confirm the identities of the 16 bodies examined so far.

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