Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged yesterday that Pentagon officials met secretly with a discredited expatriate Iranian arms merchant who figured prominently in the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s, characterizing the contact as an unexceptional effort to gain possibly useful information

Last night, a senior defense official disclosed that another meeting with the Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, occurred in June in Paris. The official said that, while the first contact, in late 2001, had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism, the second one resulted from "an unplanned, unscheduled encounter."

Ghorbanifar, Shackley reported, had been another SAVAK agent and was now an international deal maker. Shackley described Ghorbanifar as “a ‘wheeler dealer’ and [one who] could play both ends against the middle for a profit in a business deal”

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The CIA, it seems, had decided by 1983 or earlier to have nothing more to do with him on the grounds that he was untrustworthy. Ghorbanifar, however, came back to haunt the CIA. In March 1984, after Ghorbanifar had allegedly fabricated information concerning an assassination plot against US presidential candidates, he was given and failed a polygraph test. In June 1984, he was examined again in relation to information he claimed to have about the whereabouts of the US hostages in Lebanon –with the same results. In July 1984, the CIA issued a “burn notice” to other government agencies to stay away from him.

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The CIA profile summed up his record skeptically: “He had a history of predicting events after they happened and was seen as a rumormonger of occasional usefulness. In addition, the information collected by him consistently lacked sourcing and detail notwithstanding his exclusive interest in acquiring money."

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Whatever the plan, there was still Manucher Ghorbanifar. His chief capital was his wits. His stock-in-trade was his ability to tell others what they wanted to hear or believe. He was so shady that he inevitably aroused suspicion that he was congenitally incapable of telling the truth or dealing in good faith.

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The Americans knew what he was, a liar and duplicitous sneak … They were surprised not that he had lied but that he had lied so blatantly, as if a mere lie was not enough to explain how he had taken them in.

If the DLC wants to hang the "tax and spend" liberal tag on Dean, they're wrong. I've lived in Vermont for all of Dean's 11-year tenure as governor. Even though Vermont is the only state that doesn't mandate a balanced budget, Dean did it every year. The result is that Vermont is almost alone in not having a budget deficit and the state has one of the best bond ratings in the nation.

WHAT FRED DOES BEST: It was Mort’s aggressive spinning that grabbed us the most, although Fred ran to make the most desperate remark. On last night’s Special Report, Brit Hume started the panel in orderly fashion; he read off six “false impressions” about Iraq which Al Gore had blamed on the Bush Admin. “Well, some of it was true,” Juan Williams said, agreeing with the things Gore said. And that’s when Barnes began his faking. No, we really aren’t making this up. Yes, the corrupted man said it:

WILLIAMS: Well, some of it was true.
BARNES: I didn’t notice any.

WILLIAMS: Well, I think it’s true when [Gore] says that President Bush led us to believe that somehow Saddam Hussein might have had connections to Al Qaeda—

At this point, Fred cut Williams off. Try to believe that this fake, phony man has reached the point where he’ll actually say this on television:

BARNES (continuing directly): I think Bush said exactly the opposite, consistently! Exactly the opposite!

Including the myth, I think Juan you just repeated, a myth about Bush having said there was an immediate or imminent threat. In fact, he said exactly the opposite and argued in public against anyone thinking that he's talking about an imminent threat. He said this is why we need to have a pre-emptive war. If it is an imminent threat, then we're already in trouble. And of course, if it is an imminent threat, everybody would be in favor of dealing with an imminent threat. He said because with terrorists you don't know whether they're an imminent threat or not. You have to attack preemptively when you haven't seen this threat develop right on your border.

KONDRACKE: That was almost an afterthought in the speech. It came way in the end; a "by the way." But this is a typical Gore exaggeration of the alleged exaggerations of the Bush administration. I mean, Saddam -- the Bush administration never argued that, as a main point of the case, that Saddam definitely was involved in 9-11. They hinted at it.

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KONDRACKE: Yes. And the administration said that he had terrorist connections because that there were al Qaeda people involved -- in Iraq and stuff like that. But they never made the cases that there was a link, close link between the two of them. The Bush administration never said that Saddam was on the verge of giving weapons of mass destruction to Usama bin Laden. It was the case that he could, that he might someday. So, you know this is just Al Gore, again, going over the top.

COULD GEORGE W. BUSH GO TO JAIL? Did you know it's illegal to make false statements before Congress, even if you aren't under oath? It's punishable by five years in jail. That's how they got most of the Iran-Contra conspirators.

Seems like there were quite a few false statements in President Bush's State of the Union speech

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.

SEC. RUMSFELD: I'd be happy to give you that information in the closed session, which is supposed to follow this one. But there is no question but that there are al Qaeda in Iraq in more than one location. There have been for a good long period. And the implication or suggestion that a vicious, repressive dictatorship that watches almost everything that happens in this country could be unaware of al Qaeda operatives functioning in their country.

"In one of the most brazen and well-organized attacks in recent months, 40 suspected Taliban fighters armed with assault rifles shot up a government office in southern Afghanistan yesterday, killing six Afghan soldiers and a driver for a U.S. aid organization."

"The Bush administration made a broad pledge yesterday to spread democracy and free markets to the Middle East …"

"[Rice] offered few details of a project whose prospects have been greeted with widespread skepticism, particularly in the Middle East itself, where the depth of the administration's spoken commitment to Arab democracy remains unproved."

In determining whether a scheme to defraud exists, you are entitled to consider not only the defendant's words and statements, but also the circumstances in which they are used as a whole. A defendant's actions can constitute a scheme to defraud even if there are no specific false statements involved. The deception need not be premised upon words or statements standing alone. The arrangement of the words or the circumstances in which they are used may create an appearance which is false or deceptive, even if the words themselves fall short of this. Thus, even if statements as part of the scheme are not literally false, you may consider whether the statements taken as a whole were misleading and deceptive. Evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that a scheme was reasonably calculated to deceive is sufficient to establish a scheme to defraud.

The fraudulent nature of the "scheme or artifice to defraud" is measured by a non-technical standard. Thus, schemes are condemned which are contrary to public policy or which fail to measure up to the reflection of moral uprightness, of fundamental honesty, fair play and right dealing in the general and business life of members of society.

"Houston as a whole reported a 1.5 percent annual dropout rate, though education experts estimate that the true percentage of students who quit before graduation is nearer 40 percent."

The notoriety of Cambodia's horrific past can have the effect of making any subsequent regime or leader look good by comparison. There is also the temptation to measure this Cambodian election simply in relation to the previous election. Were fewer people killed? Was there less intimidation? Did the opposition have more access to the media? Or, as I heard many times, particularly from European observers, aren't things "better" this time?

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But the correct question for the international community should really be: Did Cambodia meet recognized international standards for the conduct of free and fair elections? Despite the many improvements, the answer is no.

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There isn't one election standard for Cambodia and another for the rest of us. The international community must continue to follow the implementation of the election results, encourage further reforms that reflect accepted democratic standards and call on the Cambodian government to thoroughly investigate the allegations of political misconduct and ensure the punishment of the guilty. The Cambodian people deserve no less.

I remembered all that last month when everybody was looking for who ought to be held responsible for the false statements in the President's State of the Union Address. And I've just about concluded that the real problem may be the President himself and that next year we ought to fire him and get a new one.

But whether you agree with that conclusion or not, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican -- or an Independent, a Libertarian, a Green or a Mugwump -- you've got a big stake in making sure that Representative Democracy works the way it is supposed to. And today, it just isn't working very well. We all need to figure out how to fix it because we simply cannot keep on making such bad decisions on the basis of false impressions and mistaken assumptions.

Earlier, I mentioned the feeling many have that something basic has gone wrong. Whatever it is, I think it has a lot to do with the way we seek the truth and try in good faith to use facts as the basis for debates about our future -- allowing for the unavoidable tendency we all have to get swept up in our enthusiasms.

That last point is worth highlighting. Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we're all used to that. I've even been guilty of it myself on occasion. But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.

Unfortunately, I think it is no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that what the country is dealing with in the Bush Presidency is the latter. That is really the nub of the problem -- the common source for most of the false impressions that have been frustrating the normal and healthy workings of our democracy.

Americans have always believed that we the people have a right to know the truth and that the truth will set us free. The very idea of self-government depends upon honest and open debate as the preferred method for pursuing the truth -- and a shared respect for the Rule of Reason as the best way to establish the truth.

The Bush Administration routinely shows disrespect for that whole basic process, and I think it's partly because they feel as if they already know the truth and aren't very curious to learn about any facts that might contradict it. They and the members of groups that belong to their ideological coalition are true believers in each other's agendas.

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Here is the pattern that I see: the President's mishandling of and selective use of the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq is pretty much the same as the way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change, and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals.

In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen in advance of the facts -- policies designed to benefit friends and supporters -- and has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances.

The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to imbed in the public mind mythologies that
grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on, which -- in its purest form -- is that government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible -- except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.

For the same reasons they push the impression that government is bad, they also promote the myth that there really is no such thing as the public interest. What's important to them is private interests. And what they really mean is that those who have a lot of wealth should be left alone, rather than be called upon to reinvest in society through taxes.

Perhaps the biggest false impression of all lies in the hidden social objectives of this Administration that are advertised with the phrase "compassionate conservatism" -- which they claim is a new departure with substantive meaning. But in reality, to be compassionate is meaningless, if compassion is limited to the mere awareness of the suffering of others. The test of compassion is action. What the administration offers with one hand is the rhetoric of compassion; what it takes away with the other hand are the financial resources necessary to make compassion something more than an empty and fading impression.

Maybe one reason that false impressions have a played a bigger role than they should is that both Congress and the news media have been less vigilant and exacting than they should have been in the way they have tried to hold the Administration accountable.

Whenever both houses of Congress are controlled by the President's party, there is a danger of passivity and a temptation for the legislative branch to abdicate its constitutional role. If the party in question is unusually fierce in demanding ideological uniformity and obedience, then this problem can become even worse and prevent the Congress from properly exercising oversight. Under these circumstances, the majority party in the Congress has a special obligation to the people to permit full Congressional inquiry and oversight rather than to constantly frustrate and prevent it.

Whatever the reasons for the recent failures to hold the President properly accountable, America has a compelling need to quickly breathe new life into our founders' system of checks and balances -- because some extremely important choices about our future are going to be made shortly, and it is imperative that we avoid basing them on more false impressions.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the government's just bad at doing the correct math?

Akerlof: There is a systematic reason. The government is not really telling the truth to the American people. Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If so, why's the President still popular?

Akerlof: For some reason the American people does not yet recognize the dire consequences of our government budgets. It's my hope that voters are going to see how irresponsible this policy is and are going to respond in 2004 and we're going to see a reversal.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What if that doesn't happen?

Akerlof: Future generations and even people in ten years are going to face massive public deficits and huge government debt. Then we have a choice. We can be like a very poor country with problems of threatening bankruptcy. Or we're going to have to cut back seriously on Medicare and Social Security. So the money that is going overwhelmingly to the wealthy is going to be paid by cutting services for the elderly. And people depend on those. It's only among the richest 40 percent that you begin to get households who have sizeable fractions of their own retirement income.

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SPIEGEL ONLINE: It seems that the current administration has politicised you in an unprecedented way. During the course of this year, you have, with other academics, signed two public declarations of protest. One against the tax cuts, the other against waging unilateral preventive war on Iraq.

Akerlof: I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign and economic but also in social and environmental policy. This is not normal government policy.

Detailed policy proposals from candidates are close to useless, I think. After all, circumstances change, brilliant policies get turned to mush as they pass through Congress, and — let's be honest here — plenty of policy proposals from candidates are just sops to interest groups. It's hard to tell which ones are really priorities and which ones are just being served up pro forma.

As long as a candidate has policy preferences that are in the right general area ... then electability is key. And that's not just because I want a candidate who can win (although I do), it's also because "electability" is largely synonymous with trustworthiness and good judgment. As long as a candidate's heart is roughly in the right place, what I really want is someone who I trust to do the right thing when the unexpected happens, someone who demonstrates good judgment when the pressure is on, and someone with the political skills to push his agenda through Congress. That in turn means a person that the electorate trusts. Someone who is electable.

Don't trust Republicans to tell you which Democrats are electable and which ones aren't. You should listen to genuine centrists and moderates whose votes are crucial, but George Will and his friends are far too ideologically blinkered to understand what makes a Democrat appealing and what doesn't, and they probably wouldn't tell you even if they did.

Electability is not even close to synonymous with trustworthiness and good judgment. It is synonymous with the IMAGE of trustworthiness and good judgment.

In a new and troubling phase of its campaign to undermine the International Criminal Court (ICC), the U.S. government is now punishing some of its closest allies, including Latvia, by jeopardizing their military capacities, Human Rights Watch said today.

The United States recently withheld military assistance from 35 democratic countries because of their resistance to bilateral immunity agreements (BIAs), which exempt U.S. citizens from the first global court to try those accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. These agreements, in the form requested by the United States so far, are not only contrary to article 98(2) of the ICC treaty but also to international law as they defeat the “object and purpose” of the Rome Statute.

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The United States’ punitive measures often go above and beyond the mere implementation of the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), a piece of anti-ICC legislation passed by Congress last year.

A senior Latvian diplomat told Human Rights Watch that the Bush Administration has even decided to withhold $2.7 million in promised supplemental funding to support Latvian troops in Iraq. At the same time, the United States will still financially support Lithuania’s participation in Iraq although additional military aid is still being withheld.

Ashcroft will starting pushing the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act later this month in a 10-day, 20-state Victory tour that includes a stop in New York...Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is expected to introduce the Victory Act next month. If passed, the feds would be allowed to:

Clamp down on Arab hawala transactions, where cash exchanged in an honor system has been funneled to terrorists.

Get business records without a court order in terrorism probes and delay notification.

Track wireless communications with a roving warrant.

Increase sentences for drug kingpins to 40 years in prison and $4 million in fines.

That is exactly the tactic employed by Balkin in bringing up the Fourteenth Amendment-- the bane of originalists due to its vague and open ended text and sketchy history.

For now, let's get back to the Fourteenth Amendment. As most legal geeks know, due to the vague nature of the Fourteenth Amendment's text and the inconclusive nature of the history surrounding the debate and ratification of the amendment, the Supreme Court has--over an extended period of time--developed a substantial body of jurisprudence on what it considers the scope and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to be.

Although it is often difficult to discern the original meaning of an enactment--and that difficulty is exacerbated here by the tensions that surrounded Reconstruction - it hardly follows that we can know nothing about meaning. With the Fourteenth Amendment, however, we know a good deal, contrary to the conservative doubts.

Clearly, whatever they may have thought the Fourteenth Amendment meant, those who ratified it meant at least to do that, to ratify the amendment. Given that much, we can say at least this: when a constitutional provision is (as the Privileges or Immunities Clause was) clearly defined (in Blackstone), adjudicated (in Corfield), and explained by its authors (Bingham, Howard, and others), the subjective thoughts or motives of those who ratify it are really beside the point.

We are not talking here about some monumental historical mistake whereby the provision meant one thing and those who ratified it thought it meant something entirely different. We are talking rather about a fairly straightforward matter: by their votes the ratifiers revealed their intent to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment as commonly understood at the time, whatever their subjective and varied intentions or understandings may have been. In an imperfect world, that is the best we can do. Thus, we must look, in the end, to objective evidence of original understanding, not to subjective intent. Doing so makes plain what the Privileges or Immunities Clause was meant to accomplish.

Individuals exchange their self-defined, self-enforced natural rights for civil rights that, in principle at least, are more clearly, more surely, and more universally defined and enforced by the community. We see that theory in the above passage from Blackstone. When we enter civil society, our natural rights to be immune from the transgressions of others become civil rights to continue being so immune. We "give up" certain of our natural rights, however, such as the right to define and enforce our rights (except in limited situations); in exchange we acquire the privileges of having our rights defined universally and of having them enforced by government.

It is important to notice, however, that natural rights are never really given up; they are merely transformed. Most natural rights, and the rights we create through contract, just take on the label "civil rights"; we continue having and exercising those rights as we did in the state of nature. We "give up" only what Locke calls the "executive power" that each of us has in the state of nature--the power to define and secure our rights. Through the social contract we create government, then empower that government to exercise the executive power for us--a power that in civil society goes by the name, appropriately, of "police power."

Yet even then we retain the executive power in some situations--in the face of imminent danger, for example, when self-defense is required. And if all else fails, we retain the right "to alter or to abolish" the government we create, as the Declaration goes on to make clear. It is important to notice also that when we yield to the community the right to define our rights--thereby authorizing the recognition of more clearly, more surely, and more universally defined legal rights--we are not saying that whatever the community--some majority, or some court--says those rights are is what they are. The community may be final; it is not infallible.

Thus, our rights remain grounded ultimately in reason; they do not, through the social contract, become a function of mere will, majoritarian or otherwise.

Those who framed the Fourteenth Amendment intended first to overturn the power of states to define "citizenship" - a power Taney had formulated in the Dred Scott case. But they did not stop there. Michael Kent Curtis of Wake Forest University has shown that they said repeatedly that the purpose of the amendment was not simply to define U.S. citizenship but to include under that privilege, for blacks and whites alike, a broad array of rights against state interference.

The Civil War generation meant to rewrite, in this limited way, the relationship between the federal government and the states. Once that was done, through the Constitution, the Court had no authority to impose its views on the matter--especially since the rewrite brought the Constitution into conformity, at last, with its underlying moral theory. The Court's job, rather, was simply to apply that law, as conservatives today rightly remind us.

Several members of the Court were concerned about the effect the Civil War Amendments might have on our federal structure. As expressed in Miller's opinion for the Court, the Fourteenth Amendment threatened to "radically [change] the whole theory of the relations of the state and Federal government"; if that happened, it would "fetter and degrade the state governments" by transforming the federal government into a "perpetual censor upon all the legislation of the states." Thus, the majority was trying to protect the states' reserved powers, notwithstanding the history and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In fact, a few years after Slaughterhouse was decided, an influential legal scholar of the day, Christopher Tiedeman, wrote approvingly of the Court as having "dared to withstand the popular will as expressed in the letter of the amendment" in order to save the federal structure of the government and the reserved powers of the states. Such judicial resistance to popular will--expressed through constitutional amendment, no less--is exactly what conservatives today decry, of course, as they shout "judicial activism."

Percentage of Americans who think Bush "deserves re-election" next year: 36% (Fox News, 8/1/03)

Percentage of Americans who think same-sex marriage should be legal: 40% (CBS/NYT, 7/30/03)

Stepping up the Justice Department's battle with federal judges over sentencing guidelines, Attorney General John Ashcroft has directed government lawyers to report on judges who give out softer sentences and to start appealing those sentences in far higher numbers.

The move, circulated in an internal memo last week, was anticipated under a measure known as the Feeney amendment, adopted by Congress in April to strengthen judges' adherence to new, stricter sentencing guidelines. Many judges, including U.S. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, view the new rules as a further attack on their independence.

"The Justice Department is telling us that every defendant should be treated in the same way, that there should be no flexibility to deal with individuals," says U.S. District Judge John S. Martin Jr. of Manhattan. Judge Martin announced his resignation from the bench in June, citing judges' increasingly limited sentencing discretion.

Judges' criticism of the Justice Department and the Congress has been at a fever pitch since President Bush signed the Feeney amendment into law. The measure makes it easier for appeals courts to lengthen sentences set by judges that are shorter than those in the federal guidelines. It puts federal judges on notice that they'll be challenged on such sentences and be reported to Congress for giving them.

Congress gave the Justice Department, which championed and wrote the legislation, 90 days to come up with a plan to enforce the rules, a deadline that arrived last week. Lawmakers gave the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency created by Congress in 1987 to create federal sentencing policies and practices, 180 days to formulate its own response.

Mr. Ashcroft's order directing U.S. attorneys to appeal far more "downward departures" by judges -- meaning sentences shorter than the guidelines -- adds fuel to an already bitter dispute between the federal judiciary and the administration.

Mr. Rehnquist has warned that the Feeney amendment will "seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and responsible sentences." But the Justice Department and members of the House Judiciary Committee believe that judges have been flouting sentencing guidelines for years and that legislation was required to end the practice.

Now we are all thinking like crazy about it, and finding that it is not easy to say why marriage ought to be restricted to the union of one man with one woman. Why should not any assemblage of people, of any mix of sexes, in any numbers, mutually contract to share their living quarters, commingle their finances, raise their children, and bequeath their property, in any way they please? Well, I have answers, and I am sure you do too, but we both know that our answers are unpersuasive to a lot of people. As with the mechanical habit of driving a car, the social habit of marriage needs to be internalized when young, and thereafter not thought about too much.

But that, of course, is the pre-postmodern way of doing things. We are all intellectuals today, encouraged to think about everything all the time — think, and analyze, and "deconstruct." Every man a philosopher, all worshippers at the Temple of Reason. Now, reason is certainly a very fine thing. I spent much of 2002 hobnobbing with mathematicians, and I think you will walk a long mile to find someone who has more respect for the power of reason than I have. However, there are regions of life, thought and behavior that are beyond reason's scope, and ought to stay there.

French troops on helicopter patrol over the lush green savannah of troubled northeastern Congo stopped a massacre in progress Tuesday in a remote village, although nine villagers died, residents said

The attack began before dawn when Lendu tribal fighters armed with automatic weapons and machetes raided this tiny village of the Hema tribe from two directions, chief Nguna Manasse said.

The attackers came in two waves, Manasse said. The first, dressed in military uniforms, fired on fleeing villagers; the second in civilian clothes hacked the wounded with machetes.

''There were so many of them, I could not count because we were running,'' Manasse said after he and other residents ventured back to the village 12 miles south of Bunia, the capital of troubled Ituri province.

The sound of the helicopters drove off the attackers, he said.

WOOD: "Well, I think two things here. One is, you can't separate the marriage institution as being religious from the aspect that it's also civil. It's both. That's the reason, as I said, you had the pope speaking out …"

SANTORUM: "... every civilization in the history of man has recognized a unique bond. Why? Because -- principally because of children. I mean, it's -- it is the reason for marriage."

WOOD: "…every civilization throughout history has said (heterosexual marriage) is best for raising children. And, Bob, that's really what this is about. Marriage is not just about what the two adults want to do, or what three or four adults want to do, it's about what's best for children."

"When I first encountered Gene at a ... convocation a couple of years ago, he put his hands on me inappropriately every time I engaged him in conversation. NO GAY MAN HAS EVER BEHAVED TOWARDS ME THIS WAY" [Punctuation as written.]

Defining treason down: From the inimitable Ann Coulter

What are we to make of people who promote the idea that America is in the grip of a civil-liberties emergency based on 100 hazy stories of scowls and bumps and one-week detentions? Manifestly, there is no civil-liberties crisis in this country. Consequently, people who claim there is must have a different goal in mind. What else can you say of such people but that they are traitors?

Indeed, what else can you say? "I disagree with them"? "They are mistaken"? "It's good that people are watching out for civil rights abuses, but they're exaggerating matters somewhat"? No, of course not -- in fact, if you respond to obvious traitors with such inadequate reactions, why, then, I bet you must be a traitor, too!

Opposition candidate for Rwanda's presidency, Faustin Twagiramungu, has expressed concern over the 25 August poll being free and fair, saying that supporters of incumbent President Paul Kagame were making his supporters "fearful" of openly backing him.

He told reporters on Tuesday in the capital, Kigali, that local government officials and Kagame's supporters were harassing his supporters and had detained some of his agents who were on the campaign trail across the country.
Twagiramungu, 58, is considered the strongest opponent to Kagame in the country's first presidential poll after the 1994 genocide of 1994. Two other candidates are also contesting the presidency.

He said he had received reports that the police had arrested some of his agents "under the guise of fomenting ethnic divisions within the population to win him votes".

"Ethnicity is being used as a shield to openly silence, intimidate and harass my supporters," he said. "I don't mind RPF [Rwanda Patriotic Front] supporters backing their candidate [Kagame] but let them stop harassing my campaign agents."

- minimizing the genocide

- claiming that there had been a double genocide in 1994, meaning that the RPF had deliberately set out to eliminate Hutu in the same way that Hutu Power proponents had sought to eliminate Tutsi

- opposing compensation payments to genocide survivors

- opposing the ceremonial reburial of bodies of genocide victims

The Rev. Tim O’Brien, passed over when House GOP leaders made their selection of a new chaplain, charged that anti-Catholic bias was at work.

“I am convinced that if I were a mainline Protestant minister and not a Catholic priest, I would be the candidate,” he said Wednesday in a telephone interview.

Democrats say the two top GOP leaders, House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, overruled the work of a special committee composed of nine lawmakers from each party, which reviewed candidates and recommended O’Brien.

Instead, the Republican leaders chose a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Charles Wright, who has served pastorates in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Washington.

But Republicans deny any anti-Catholic bias

"I have never seen a more cynical and more destructive political campaign. That such a campaign should be waged in connection with the selection of the House chaplain brings shame on the House."

The voters ... went to the polls and 100 percent of them voted for Kim Jong Il, General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea said a report on the results of the election [held yesterday}

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This is an expression of the absolute support and trust of all the servicemen and the people in him and a striking manifestation of the revolutionary spirit and indomitable will of them to vigorously advance under the uplifted banner of Songun, single-heartedly united around the party, the report noted, and continued:

Kim Jong Il has comprehensively developed and enriched the immortal Juche idea and set forth new original idea and theory indicating the road for the victory of socialism and thus provided the great guiding idea of the revolution in our times.

He has successfully embodied them and thus helped convert the country into an invincible country powerful in ideology, politics and military terms.

He established the state political system putting stress on national defence on the basis of the original Songun idea and developed the People's Army into an ever-victorious strong army of the leader and the party, thus putting them up as the core unit and the driving force of the Songun revolution. This has made it possible for the People's Army to reliably guarantee the cause of national reunification and the revolutionary cause of Juche with arms as the protector of the country and the creator of the people's happiness, displaying its ever-victorious spirit and dignity.

He has wisely led the work of enhancing the function and role of the people's power to meet the requirements of the developing revolution in the Songun era so that the people's power of the DPRK could fulfil its mission as the defender of the independent rights of the popular masses, the organizer of creative ability and householder responsible for the people's living.

He has consolidated the single-hearted unity of the revolutionary ranks with the headquarters of the revolution as its core and aroused the whole party, the whole army and the entire people to brave the raging storm of the revolution and bring a new turn in building a great prosperous powerful socialist nation of Juche.

Our republic will throw brilliant rays as the fortress of socialism of Juche, the lodestar of national reunification and the beacon of hope instilling conviction of victory and courage into the world progressives aspiring after independence as it holds in high esteem Kim Jong Il at the head of the party and the revolution.

North Korea has told children of a Japanese couple kidnapped by the communist state that their parents, who returned to their homeland last year for the first time in nearly quarter of a century, are currently "detained" in Japan, it was learned Sunday.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), expanding a fight among Democrats, attacked former Vermont governor Howard Dean and several other rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, arguing that they have embraced extreme left ideas that threaten to return the party to political exile.

Saying he is in a fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, Lieberman said policies rooted in the "vital center" of the political spectrum, not what he termed the antiwar and big government policies of his rivals, provide the only hope of defeating President Bush.

A tribunal in a two-year mass trial has convicted 100 people of rape, torture, murder and crimes against humanity in Rwanda's genocide, a state prosecutor said Monday. Eleven people were sentenced to death and 71 to life imprisonment.

The crimes were all committed during the 100-day slaughter in mid-1994 in which at least a half-million people were killed, most of them members of Rwanda's Tutsi minority. Political moderates from the Hutu majority were also victims.

Those who received the death penalty were convicted of being planners and masterminds of the slaughter.

The mass trial — the country's biggest so far — ended Aug. 1 and involved 139 defendants, said J.M. Ntete, prosecutor for Butare province. It was conducted in a temporary courtroom in the Mugusa settlement, site of the crimes.

The three-judge tribunal also sentenced 18 people to prison terms ranging from one year to 25 years, and acquitted 39 people.

Since Rwanda began trying those accused in connection with the genocide, more than 400 people have received the death sentence but only 26 have been executed.

Some 120,000 prisoners in Rwanda are awaiting trial on genocide charges in overcrowded jails. Trying to clear the backlog, authorities released some prisoners facing lesser charges to their home areas, where they face trial in local courts.

"The business reality is that despite the fact that Verizon has been profitable,” Lin said, "they've laid off fewer employees than SBC and BellSouth."

The spectacle of senators and House members questioning the president's motives in the decision to use force in Iraq stirred outrage in Washington.

One senior senator declared that attacking the president while Americans are risking their lives in Iraq is "as close to a betrayal of the interests of the United States as I've ever witnessed in the United States Congress. It's unforgivable and reprehensible." The secretary of state called such criticism "very unseemly and unbecoming to members of Congress." The vice president declared: "We need national resolve and unity, not weakness and division, when we're . . . engaged in an action against someone like Saddam Hussein."

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If none of this sounds familiar to you, you're not alone. These statements were not made in defense of President Bush, who has come under a coordinated partisan assault from congressional Democrats. They were made five years ago, by Democrats, columnists and editorial writers outraged that Republicans would question President Clinton's decision to strike Iraq in the midst of impeachment proceedings in Congress.

If anything, the need for unity is greater today than it was in 1998.

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How sad that is not the case. How sad that, while some in Congress openly question the president's motives and attack his policies in the midst of war, the outrage so evident in 1998 is nowhere to be found.

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I am dismayed that so many feel free to engage in partisan attacks on the commander in chief in the midst of war. They risk the appearance of seeking political advantage from the deaths of American soldiers -- something most Americans would find unseemly.

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It's time for all the commentators and politicians who spoke up so passionately against those who attacked President Clinton to stand up and do the same for President Bush -- lest they be accused of hypocrisy.

SANTORUM: Well, that's a separate issue. I mean, the issue here is marriage. And to me, the building block -- and I think, to most people in America, number one, it's common sense that a marriage is between a man and a woman. I mean, every civilization in the history of man has recognized a unique bond.

Why? Because -- principally because of children. I mean, it's -- it is the reason for marriage. It's not to affirm the love of two people. I mean, that's not what marriage is about. I mean, if that were the case, then lots of different people and lots of different combinations could be, quote, "married."

Marriage is not about affirming somebody's love for somebody else. It's about uniting together to be open to children, to further civilization in our society.

And that's unique. And that's why civilizations forever have recognized that unique role that needs to be licensed, needs held up as different than anything else because of its unique nurturing effect on children.

And there isn't a statistic out there that doesn't show that married couples, in a healthy marriage, is the best environment in which to raise stable children and is the best thing, long term, for our society.

So it's not about not recognizing somebody's love for somebody else. That's not what it's about. It's not being discriminatory against anybody. It's talking about the good that marriage is for our culture.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, have signaled to the White House that they intend to step down even if President Bush is reelected, setting the stage for a substantial reshaping of the administration's national security team that has remained unchanged through the September 2001 terrorist attacks, two wars and numerous other crises.

Armitage recently told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that he and Powell will leave on Jan. 21, 2005, the day after the next presidential inauguration, sources familiar with the conversation said. Powell has indicated to associates that a commitment made to his wife, rather than any dismay at the administration's foreign policy, is a key factor in his desire to limit his tenure to one presidential term.