[The Washington Post]
Two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser and said he needed to see her right away. Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk.

[BBC News]
Police commissioner AN Roy alleges Pakistan's intelligence agency was behind the train blasts in Mumbai in July that killed 186 people.

[The New York Times]
The Senate has approved (80-19) the building of 700 miles of fence along the nation’s southwestern border, fulfilling a demand by conservative Republicans to take steps to slow the flow of illegal immigrants.

[The Washington Post]
It's official! On one of the darkest days in American history, the Senate approves the bill authorizing the government and military of the United States of America to torture political detainees, 65-34. This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American, said Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

[The Washington Post]
Database of U.S. senators which allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds which will notify you every time they vote. See how well your senator is/is not representing you!

[Guardian Unlimited]
Romania and Bulgaria to be permitted to join the EU on January 1, 2007.

[The New York Times]
The first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, representing a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe. It finds that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

[The Washington Post]
Vladimir Bukovsky: So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading" (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

[Yahoo! News]
2973. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the 9/11 terrorist attacks which killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

[BBC News]
The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, calls Bush "the devil" before the United Nations General Assembly.

[The Washington Post]
Voting almost completely along party lines, the House voted 228 to 196 for a bill that would require all who register to vote in federal elections to show photo identification that proves they are U.S. citizens. The Senate, meanwhile, voted 94 to 0 to take up a measure passed by the House last week to build 700 miles of double-layered fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border.

[Spiegel Online]
The political goal of the Islamists is clear: any dispute between Christianity and Islam must obey the rules handed down by political Islamism. Bending to this demand would be a mistake—indeed it would be tantamount to turning one's back on freedom of expression and opinion. What will come next? Perhaps a complaint that Allah feels insulted by the numerous European women who don bikinis during a summer trip to the beach. It could be anything really—militant Islamists will always find something. But the response needs to be firm. Freedom of speech, after all, is a vital value and needs to be defended.

[Salon.com]
Bush ran as a moderate, tacked right and governed ineffectually—before 9/11. Since then he's become the most radical American president in history—and arguably the worst.

[The Washington Post]
CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a government-reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil judgments and legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing. The new enrollments reflect heightened anxiety at the CIA that officers may be vulnerable to accusations they were involved in abuse, torture, human rights violations and other misconduct, including wrongdoing related to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

[AOL News]
Ten Nobel Peace Prize laureates condemn actions of the United States and call for peace. When someone claims he has a vision from God to bring war to Iraq, this is a kind of terrorism.

[The Washington Post]
In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law. Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. Secretary-General and the U.S. Supreme Court.

[The Christian Science Monitor]
The US Department of Energy is quitting the hydropower and geothermal power research business.

[Wired News]
A bill radically redefining and expanding the government's ability to eavesdrop and search the houses of U.S. citizens without court approval has passed a key Senate committee and may be voted on by the full Senate as early as next week.

[Yahoo! News]
Colin Powell says that Congress must not pass Bush's proposal to redefine U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions, a treaty that sets international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war. The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.

[PhysOrg.com]
A group of Princeton computer scientists said they created demonstration vote-stealing software that can be installed within a minute on a Diebold electronic voting machine. The software can fraudulently change vote counts without being detected.

[Christian Science Monitor]
After 2005's bribery and corruption scandals, Congress moves to list US federal expenditures on a searchable database. From wartime contracts for Halliburton to earmarks for the Punxsutawney Weather Discovery Center (think "famous groundhog") in Pennsylvania, all will be listed on a searchable database.

[The Raw Story]
U.S. Representative John Murtha, the ranking Democrat on the House panel for defense spending, introduced a resolution on Wednesday demanding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resign over the conflict in Iraq, accusing Rumsfeld of misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, failing to properly develop post-war strategies for stabilizing the country and sending US troops into battle without proper equipment.

[Common Dreams]
9/11 was a crime—a crime against humanity—and terrorism is best dealt with as crime on an international level. What has worked in stopping terrorism is just what has worked in stopping international crime—like the recent police work in England. What has failed is the war approach, which just recruits more terrorists. In Iraq, the war was over when we defeated Saddam's army. Then the occupation began. Our troops are dying because they are not trained be occupiers in hostile territory on the cusp of a civil war. Bush is an occupation president, not a war president, and his war powers should be immediately rescinded. Rep. Lynn Woolsey's resolution to do just that (H.R. 5875) should be taken seriously and made the subject of national debate.

[BBC News]
Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has asked for more international troops in Afghanistan.

[dailypress.com]
The U.S. has lost one-third of Iraq to al-Qaeda, says the chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq, and there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.

[The New Citizenship Project]
Bush wants to retroactively exempt himself from the US Warcrimes Act of 1996 in order to escape prosecution.

[dailypress.com]
Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq. In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.