A US intelligence Web site, Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc), in an article titled "Russia: Disrepair or Sabotage at Southern Pipeline?" drew the attention of its readers to the fact that "in early 2006, the Chechnya-based militant group Caucasian Mujahideen declared it would sabotage operations against Russian energy infrastructure".

No information in regard to the explosion was available from the Volga Front Military Command Headqurters of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria's Armed Forces before the filing of this report

Sens. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) have introduced legislation that would permit unmarried federal employees to apply for health, dental and vision insurance, retirement and other benefits for their domestic partners.

The senators said that many companies and state and local governments offer domestic-partner benefits and that it is time for the federal government to do the same.

Cox Cable representatives forwarded a letter they received from Phoenix lawyer Rhonda Barnes complaining about the commercials attacking Giffords’ liberal record and urging them to remove the ads from the airwaves.

“The truth hurts,” said Minuteman PAC spokesman Rick Shaftan. “Every word in our ads is true and Giffords knows it. Gabrielle Giffords has gone through this campaign so far pretending to be a moderate when in fact she is one of the most far out left-wing liberals running for Congress this year, and especially on immigration and border security issues.”

“Giffords knows she can’t win this election if voters learn the truth about her liberal, pro-amnesty, pro-illegal alien record,” Shaftan said. “She wants these ads off the air because she knows the truth hurts.”

POINT BY POINT:

Click (http://www.minutemanpac.com/mm/graf_thinker.wmv) to see the backup for facts in the ad “Thinker” running on cable systems throughout Tucson and Southeast Arizona.

A new group called Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good said yesterday that it will distribute at least 1 million voter guides before the Nov. 7 elections, emphasizing church teachings on war, poverty and social justice as well as on abortion, contraception and homosexuality.

The 12-page booklet, called "Voting for the Common Good: A Practical Guide for Conscientious Catholics," is part of a broader effort by liberal and moderate religious groups to challenge the Christian right on moral values, said Alexia Kelley, the group's executive director and a former employee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In Roman Catholic parishes, the group Catholic Answers, based in California, had the field largely to itself in 2004, when it distributed 10 million copies of its "Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics." This year, as in the past, the Catholic Answers guide urges Catholics to base their votes on five "non-negotiable" issues: abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning and same-sex marriage.

Both guides are available on the Web sites of their respective producers, http://www.catholic.com and http://thecatholicalliance.org .

The House-Senate compromise bill provides $378 billion for core Pentagon programs, about a 5 percent increase, though slightly less than President Bush asked for. The $70 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan is a down payment on war costs the White House has estimated will hit $110 billion for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.

Congress has now approved $507 billion for Iraq, Afghanistan and heightened security at overseas military bases since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to the Congressional Research Service. The war in Iraq has cost $379 billion and the conflict in Afghanistan now totals $97 billion.

It was two Supreme Court decisions, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that compelled the creation of this legislation. The Hamdi decision held that a prisoner has the right of habeas corpus, and can challenge his detention before an impartial judge. The Hamdan decision held that the military commissions set up to try detainees violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions.

Dear Senator:

The American Civil Liberties Union strongly urges you to oppose S. 3930, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, unless amended to ensure that:

• the President will have no authority to authorize any of the acts prohibited by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual on Interrogations, which reinforces the Common Article 3 prohibitions;

• the courts are not stripped of their historical and constitutional role as a check on the Executive Branch, in ensuring that the protections of the Constitution and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions are enforced;

• government officials who authorized or ordered illegal acts of torture and abuse will not receive retroactive immunity;

• no one can be convicted on the basis of evidence that was literally beaten out of a witness or obtained through other abuse by either the federal government or by countries such as Syria, Jordan, or Egypt that tortured and abused persons sent to them by the federal government;

• at minimum, those acts which violate the McCain anti-torture amendment remain criminal acts under the War Crimes Act.

Unless Congress makes these five changes to the legislation, we urge you to vote “no” on the legislation.

More than 200 organizers from 27 states and 51 different organizations met at the University of Michigan-Dearborn for the 5^th Annual National Organizers' Conference of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation to network, prioritize, and strategize for the upcoming year.

This report can also be accessed as a PDF document by clicking here:

The neoconservative Bush administration will attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of U.S. (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East.

The U.S. has lost the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Generals in both war theaters are stating their need for more troops. But there are no troops to send.

In the late 1980s, I was the first western journalist allowed into the world’s most dreaded prison, Moscow’s sinister Lubyanka. Muscovites dared not even utter the name of KGB’s headquarters, calling it instead after a nearby toy store, “Detsky Mir.”

I still shudder recalling Lubyanka’s underground cells, grim interrogation rooms, and execution cellars where tens of thousands were tortured and shot. I sat at the desk from which the monsters who ran Cheka (Soviet secret police) — Dzerzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria — ordered 30 million victims to their deaths.

Prisoners taken in the dead of night to Lubyanka were systematically beaten for days with rubber hoses and clubs. There were special cold rooms where prisoners could be frozen to near death. Sleep deprivation was a favourite and most effective Cheka technique. So was near-drowning in water fouled with urine and feces.

I recall these past horrors because of what this column has long called the gradual “Sovietization” of the United States. This shameful week, it became clear Canada is also afflicted.

How can Bush administration war plans be reconciled with expert opinion that the consequences would be too dire for the US?

Perhaps the answer is that what appears as irrationality to experts is rationality to neoconservatives. Neocons seek maximum chaos and instability in the Middle East in order to justify long-term US occupation of the region. Following this line of thought, neocons would regard the loss of a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf as a way to solidify public support for the war. US public anger at the Iranians could even result in US public support for a military draft in order to win "the war on terror."

The Bush administration could bring Congress around by announcing a "Gulf of Tonkin" incident or by orchestrating a "terrorist attack." However, this is unnecessary as Bush has prepared the ground for bypassing Congress with his propagandistic allegations that Iran, by arming Iraqi insurgents, sponsoring terrorism, and building nuclear weapons, is the major part of the ongoing "war against terrorism." Now that Iran is blamed for rising violence in Iraq, an attack on Iran follows as a matter of course. All Bush has to do is to continue with his lies in order to bring the American public to a new war hysteria.

THERE IS no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?

The conclusion of U.S. intelligence analysts that the Iraq war has increased the threat from terrorism is only "a fraction of judgments" in a newly disclosed National Intelligence Estimate, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte said yesterday.

The NIE, completed in April, reflects the consensus view of 16 government intelligence services, including the CIA. The Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the classified document concludes that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has fueled Islamic extremism and contributed to the spread of terrorist cells.

Under the sponsorship of the Canadian based North American Forum on Integration, students met in the Mexican Senate for five days in May in an event dubbed "Triumvirate," with organizers declaring "A North American Parliament is born."

McGreevey, who stepped down in 2004 after declaring he was gay, published a memoir this month titled “The Confession.”

In it, he details an affair he said he had with Golan Cipel, an Israeli whose appointment to serve as homeland security adviser in New Jersey raised eyebrows.

Two interesting reports explain in detail why America simply cannot win wars against guerrilla terrorism. A Washington Post report details the conflict between Special Forces and regular Army units in Iraq. The Special Forces officers and sergeants speak some Arabic, know the culture, have patience over endless cups of tea, look at the long view, and succeeded in getting a major tribe with 300,000 members to take up arms and work with American forces. The regular Army colonel wants to "win" the battles, do body counts, and primarily protect the lives of his men. He is impatient with slow and incompetent tribal ways, and is losing the war. His soldiers are isolated and afraid, hate being in Iraq, brutally arrest the tribesmen, despise the locals, kill and destroy indiscriminately, and create more enemies for America. The report is well worth reading in detail to understand how hopeless the war is.

Of course an additional factor is the criminal incompetence of the initial occupation strategies, such as dismissing all government officials, police, and military from their jobs, and then bringing incompetents and "kids" (even Heritage Foundation interns) to staff the occupation. But this simply reflects the larger issue – that the American system is incapable of intelligent postwar planning. Look how we fought the Second World War to give half of Europe (and Manchuria) to communists, thereby making them into a greater threat than Hitler. Now, we're losing our allies and making ourselves into the enemy of most of the Muslim world, nearly a quarter of the human race.

And don't imagine that this [Camp Bucca, Camp Cropper, Guantanamo detentions] is an anomaly, applicable only to imprisonment abroad. Almost anywhere you look, the facts on the ground tell a story at odds with what's important, what's real as we Americans imagine it. Let's take, for instance, what's now referred to as the Intelligence Community or IC, a collection of at least 16 agencies, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Consider then just one recent piece about the IC by Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times, headlined Spy Agencies Outsourcing to Fill Key Jobs.

As Miller points out, the overall intelligence budget has gone up about $10 billion a year in recent years and for that we've got an upgrading (or at least upsizing) of almost every one of those 16 agencies plus a whole new, sprawling layer of intelligence bureaucracy headed by John Negroponte, our intelligence tsar, who runs the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence (not even included in the count above). Miller reports another interesting fact-on-the-ground as well: Enormous numbers of private contractors are flooding into the IC.

The question of how to sustain the high level of forces abroad became more acute this week as General John P. Abizaid, the senior American commander in the Middle East, said that the number of troops in Iraq, currently at more than 140,000, could not be expected to drop until next spring at the very earliest.

That disclosure comes amid many signs of mounting strain on active Army units. So many are deployed or only recently returned from combat duty that only two or three combat brigades — perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 troops — are fully ready to respond in case of unexpected crises, according to a senior Army general.

An internal Army document that was provided to The New York Times notes that the demand for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has greatly exceeded past projections that predicted earlier troop reductions. According to the document, the Army needs $66.1 billion to make up for all of its equipment shortfalls. Referring to the units that are to deploy next to Iraq and Afghanistan, or are in training, the document shows a large question mark to indicate their limited readiness.

Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, Founder and President/The Israel Project

Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi (pictured left with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert) is the founder and president of The Israel Project (TIP), an international non-profit organization devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace. TIP has offices in Washington and Jerusalem.

Mizrahi meets regularly with top Israeli leaders such as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, author Natan Sharansky, Ambassador Daniel Ayalon and many others. She also works frequently with pro-Israel organizations including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish federations, Jewish community relations councils and Hillel organizations.

Mizrahi previously served as a foreign affairs legislative assistant to the U.S. Congress. She studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has degrees in International Relations and Judaic Studies from Emory University. Her work earned her recognition as a "Point of Light" by President H. W. Bush. Mizrahi also has been honored with the Louis D. Brandeis Award by the Baltimore Zionist District. The Forward newspaper has twice listed Mizrahi in its "Forward 50" most influential Jews in America.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo. and the chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus as well as author of the new book, "In Mortal Danger," may be the only elected official to challenge openly the plans for the new superstate.

Responding to a WorldNetDaily report, Tancredo is demanding the Bush administration fully disclose the activities of the government office implementing the trilateral agreement that has no authorization from Congress.

Tancredo wants to know the membership of the Security and Prosperity Partnership groups along with their various trilateral memoranda of understanding and other agreements reached with counterparts in Mexico and Canada.

Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the Minutemen, welcomed Tancredo's efforts.

"It's time for the Bush administration to come clean," Gilchrist said. "If President Bush's agenda is to establish a new North American union government to supersede the sovereignty of the United States, then the president has an obligation to tell this to the American people directly. The American public has a right to know."