Italian media have published classified sections of an official US military inquiry into the accidental killing of an Italian agent in Baghdad.

The 40-page report was censored by the Pentagon before being officially published on Saturday.

Italy has refused to accept the US report's findings and is to publish its own version of events later this week.

Details of the official report were published in newspapers on Sunday with censored material restored in full.

A Greek medical student at Bologna University who was surfing the web early on Sunday found that with two simple clicks of his computer mouse he could restore censored portions of the report.

He passed the details to Italian newspapers which immediately put out the full text on their own websites.

The missing text contains the names and ranks of all of the American military personnel involved in the killing of Nicola Calipari, the Italian agent who was given a state funeral and awarded Italy's highest medal of valour.

It also reveals the rules of engagement in operation at the military checkpoint near Baghdad airport which have been contested by the Italian authorities.

The censored sections include recommendations that the American military modify their checkpoint procedures to give better and clearer warning signs to approaching vehicles.

The official Italian report on the incident expected to be published this week will accuse the American military of tampering with evidence at the scene of the shooting.

The Americans invited two Italians to join in their inquiry, but the Italian representatives protested at what they claimed was lack of objectivity in presenting the evidence and returned to Rome.

Relations between Rome and Washington remain tense.

DIFFERING ACCOUNTS

US military:
- Car approaches checkpoint at high speed
- Troops attempt to tell driver to stop with arm signals, lights and warning shots
- Soldiers shoot into engine

Italian government:
- Italy makes all necessary contacts with the US for safe passage
- The driver stops immediately when a light flashes 10m away
- At the same time, shots are fired into car for 10-15 seconds

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
By Lewis H. Lapham
The Penguin Press, 2004
178 pages, US$19.95 (hb)

When the US went to war against Iraq, a majority of people in the US opposed the invasion but their voices, writes Lewis Lapham, "couldn't make it past the security guards at the White House or CNN" and were muted to faint echoes "in literary journals of modest circulation, in the letters to the editors of the Washington Post or the New York Times, among a scattering of guests on National Public Radio, in the farther reaches of the Internet".

Lapham is the editor of Harper's Magazine, one of those "literary journals of modest circulation" that carried the voices of dissent, and in his latest book of essays, Gag Rule, he continues his erudite and scathing assault on lying governments, their gagging of dissent, and their faithful media lap dogs.

As US President George Bush's administration primed a reluctant population for war, the corporate media performed their patriotic duty with natural, and long-practised, skill, "content to forgo any moral or legal questions in favour of their obsession with the logistics - timing, troop numbers, tactics". Their camera lenses could see only khaki.

When former Secretary of State Colin Powell played the United Nations in February 2003, "every newspaper in the country" ran rave reviews. Their political theatre critics were awestruck as "the Secretary held up air force surveillance photographs requiring the same kind of arcane exposition that New York art critics attach to exhibitions of abstract painting". They marvelled at other theatrical effects involving vials of white powder and "satellite telephone intercepts of Iraqi military officers screaming at each other in Arabic". All the while, they evaded the question, "why does America attack Iraq when Iraq hasn't attacked America?".

The "Secretary's powerpoints", notes Lapham, "didn't add to the sum of a convincing argument but then neither had the advertising copy for the Spanish-American War or the sales promotions for the war in Vietnam". But the "agitprop" was good enough for the major US news media, which dismissed the unprecedented mass global protests 10 days after Powell's exhibition, as the inconsequential, anti-US stammerings of uninformed ageing hippies, Hollywood celebrities and focus groups.

When the invasion began and Saddam Hussein's reputed "weapons of mass destruction" failed to materialise, the corporate media, confident in their powers of propaganda, regurgitated the White House's changed rationale for war from removing "the totalitarian menace threatening all of Western civilisation" to liberating the Iraqi people. "One excuse for war was as good as any other." What price truth compared to oil?

The "demonstration effect" of the war, however, was genuine - delivering a shock and awe precedent to other disobedient regimes and/or peoples (Syria, Iran, North Korea) and to detractors (France, Germany). "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business", was the crudely accurate annotation of the resident "scholar" in the "Freedom Chair" at the American Enterprise Institute.

As war became occupation, attorney-general John Ashcroft capitalised on the opportunity with his message, as Lapham puts it, that "if America was to be kept safe from further harm, then the laws must become more vigilant, not less", because "the continuing bloodshed on the streets of Baghdad" is "indicative of terrorists lurking under the Brooklyn Bridge, driving bomb-laden trucks north to Boston, south to Tallahassee". Seguing seamlessly, and shamelessly, between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the Bush administration invoked "national security" in the cause of "deleting another few paragraphs from the Bill of Rights" in the grand tradition of previous US governments.

At the turn of the 20th century, the enemy was social and political reform, and striking coal miners. War against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, and the annexation of Puerto Rico, helped to lance the "anarchistic, socialistic and populistic boil". Love of the flag was aroused against Spain's "fifth-rate colonial power" (described in the words of the McKinley administration as "the most wicked despotism there is today on this earth"). Next, the patriotic pulse was agitated by new demons - Germany in the first world war, which was erroneously said by the Wilson administration to be able to land 387,000 troops, fresh from roasting Belgian nuns over burning coals, on the coast of New Jersey in just 16 days. Hussein's equally mythical ability to launch intercontinental weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes was but a reprise of its alarmist antecedent.

Love, of the patriotic kind, is as blind to political faults as its romantic counterpart is to personal faults. Under first world war espionage and sedition acts, socialists and pacifists were slapped in jail, journals banned from the post, and dissent criminalised. By 1920, after the "Red" had replaced the "Hun" as the new post-war villain, an aspiring deputy of the attorney-general (the future FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover) had compiled dossiers on "two million American citizens suspected of an illicit relationship with the ideas of Karl Marx". Ten-thousand "aliens" were deported for lack of "loyalty".

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) continued to hunt the "red menace" from the late 1930s. Loyalty oaths and blacklists purged Hollywood screenwriters, actors, authors and musicians, such as Charlie Chaplin, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Robeson, Orson Welles, Dorothy Parker and more than 300 others. HUAC's Senator McCarthy fired up the post-war Cold War - he "accepted rumours as evidence and accused anybody and everybody who cou ld be placed at the scene of a subversive thought". Between 1947 and 1954, 6 million US citizens "fell into the nets of government investigations strung together with illegal wiretaps, false testimony and synthetic evidence".

During the '60s, clandestine surveillance of "citizens objecting to the Vietnam War, demonstrating on behalf of the civil rights movement, talking too loudly in favour of women's rights" was in full swing. The CIA and FBI , in a massive law-breaking spree, spied on several millions, opened 500,000 pieces of private mail, infiltrated organisations, jailed and entrapped hundreds and "engaged, when occasion arose, in blackmail, false arrest and assassination".

Now, following 9/11, the spooks have been unshackled from the restrictions that had been placed on them following the expose of their illegal operations in the '60s - "no longer will the FBI's 11,000 agents sit feebly in their chairs ... waiting ‘to sift through the rubble following a terrorist attack'". In the attorney-general's words, they can now "intervene early and investigate aggressively". They have, writes Lapham, a fully renewed "license to commit crimes", disposing of civil rights as "nuisances that get in the way of law enforcement officers rummaging through bank records and lingerie drawers in order to protect the American people from the swarm of terrorists in their midst".

Protection measures are also well in place for Bush. "Free speech areas" are set up when Bush travels the country, so that those wanting to voice dissent are "quarantined behind chain-link fences at a discreet distance fr om the Presidential motorcade (preferably out of earshot and far enough away to avoid notice on the evening news)".

The evening news and the rest of the corporate media are the essential accomplices in the government's stripping of civil liberties. Lapham, who began his professional life as a journalist, observes that "the risk of inde pendent thought" is averted in the newsrooms by a winnowing out of the partisans of truth, and self-censorship by those for whom self-advancement and privileged access to the powerful, are the career rewards. At the apex of the docile are the heavyweight, gold-plated news anchors and media celebrities, "expensive publicists" for political, economic and military power, rather than journalists.

And the point of herding dissent behind the "ropelines of consensus", says Lapham, is to defend (and extend!) the 80% of the wealth held by 10% of the population. There is only one winner from suppression of civil rights, gagging of dissent, and military spending of US$17 trillion since 1950 - the "American ruling class", that elusive beast that Lapham, with deadly wit, beats from its euphemistic cover ("the business community") in the intellectual landscape.

A left-liberal not a socialist, a commentator not an activist, Lapham's preferred weapon is the word, his delivery system the essay. Few, however, wield these arms with more flair, greater relish or better aim, than Lewis Lapham.

GOOGLE has plans that will dramatically improve the results of internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search terms.

The ambitious system is revealed by patents filed in the US and around the world (WO 2005/029368) by researchers based at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

At the moment the company's search engine throws up thousands of "hits" in response to simple entries such as "Iraq", which lead to news websites. These are ranked either in order of relevance or by date, so that the most recent or most focused appear at the top of the huge list.

This means that articles carrying more authority, say from CNN or the BBC, can be ousted from the first page of results, simply because they are not as recent or as relevant to the keyword entered in the search line.

Comment: An article carries more authority simply because it comes from a major news outlet like CNN or the BBC? Google is obviously not interested in the accuracy of the information in an article, or even the popularity of the article, but rather the perceived "authority" of the site from which the article originates.

Now Google, whose name has become synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly.

The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.

Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.

The patent also reveals that the same system could be roped in to rank other search results, not simply news. So sales and services could in the future be listed on the basis of price and the reputation of the company involved.

Considering Google's plan "to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly" (see Google To Implement Bias Towards Mainstream News), I am reminded of George Creel.

Creel ran the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a warmongering propaganda outfit set up by president Wilson on April 13, 1917. "CPI recruited heavily from business, media, academia, and the art world," writes Propaganda Critic. "Like modern reporters who participate in Pentagon press pools, journalists grudgingly complied with the [CPI's]official guidelines in order to stay connected to the information loop. Radical newspapers, such as the socialist Appeal to Reason, were almost completely extinguished by wartime limitations on dissent."

Of course, nowadays, there is no CPI telling newspapers and web sites what they will publish or post—and there does not need to be because censorship (or propaganda by omission) is a built-in feature of the corporate media and information services, as Google demonstrates. Note Google's assertion that it is simply adjusting the "credibility" of news sources, as if the New York Times and the Washington Post, two "mainstream" corporate newspapers guilty of telling lies about Saddam Hussein's illusory weapons of mass destruction and thus cheerleading Bush's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, are more "credible" than other news sources that told the truth about what Bush and his clique of warmongering Strausscons were up to, indisputable facts borne out after the fact (and generally ignored by the corporate media).

In short, after Google installs its "quality" control algorithm, a search of the words "Fallujah" and "war crimes" will return stories by the corporate media (who have basically ignored the war crimes in Fallujah) and sort those stories at the top of the list while stories by Francis A. Boyle posted in Counterpunch or Christopher Bollyn of the American Free Press will sorted at the distant end of a list of 400,000 results.

In order to use Google effectively in the future, it may be necessary to click on the page numbers at the bottom of the page until you reach the end of the list. Remember, in Bushzarro world, everything is backwards, up is down, night is day, mass murder is democracy, etc. Bushzarro Google, as a large corporate leviathan with a strangle hold on the "search market," will naturally follow these dynamics. In order to find the truth, more work will be required.

Nobody said it would be a rose garden.

WASHINGTON, May 2 - Congress is moving quickly toward setting strict rules on how states issue driver's licenses, requiring them to verify whether each applicant for a new license or a renewal is in this country legally.

A House and Senate conference now taking place has included the requirements, which apply to all 50 states and other jurisdictions that issue licenses, in a supplemental appropriations bill for Iraq, aides involved in the process said on Monday. The draft legislation will be completed in the next few days and is all but certain to pass.

State officials complain that the new requirements will add a costly, complicated burden to the issuance of driver's licenses, which has been their responsibility for almost a century. Civil rights organizations and privacy advocates say that they are concerned that a standardized driver's license would amount to a national identification card and that a central database would be vulnerable to identify theft.

The proposed regulations, intended to deter terrorist attacks, would replace a provision of the intelligence bill passed in December that called on state and federal agencies to develop new rules for licenses. That law did not specifically require states to check the citizenship or immigration status of applicants. [...]

Under the rules being considered, before granting a driver's license, a state would have to require proof of citizenship or legal presence, proof of an address and proof of a Social Security number. It would need to check the legal status of noncitizens against a national immigration database, to save copies of any documents shown and to store a digital image of the face of each applicant.

The licenses issued must include the driver's address and a digital photograph, and would incorporate new authentication features designed to prevent counterfeits. The new law would also require that the licenses of legal temporary residents expire when their visas do. The rules would also apply to renewals, an aide involved in the conference said.

Supporters of the law say it addresses important security problems and note that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers used driver's licenses as identification when checking in for their flights, and that a few had expired visas. [...]

The so-called global war on terrorism does not exist, a high-ranking army officer has declared in a speech that challenges the conventional political wisdom.

In a frank speech, Brigadier Justin Kelly dismissed several of the central tenets of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism, saying the "war" part is all about politics and terrorism is merely a tactic.

Although such wars were fuelled by global issues, they were essentially counter-insurgent operations fought on a local level. This would result in Australian soldiers fighting in increasingly urban environments.

Speaking at a conference on future warfighting, Brigadier Kelly, the director-general of future land warfare, also suggested that the "proposition you can bomb someone into thinking as we do has been found to be untrue".

His speech appears to fly in the face of a comment by the Prime Minister, John Howard, last year that the "contest in Iraq represents a critical confrontation in the war against terror ..."

The brigadier said populations were being cut off from their traditional roots, giving them "aspirations that cannot be immediately met", and fuelling a search for identity.

Terrorists were exploiting local issues - such as ethnic wars - to pursue global ends. From a military point of view, the job was now one of counter-insurgency, he said.

As a result, Australia's future soldiers would fight increasingly close to populations, with the enemy "continuing to retreat into complex terrain".

While success in battle was critical, it would not of itself deliver victory - that would come by winning over the hearts and minds of the local people.

The war of the future would be "out of human control". There was "no alternative" but to engage the population and "convince them of your rightness".

"Our proximity to populations enables us to influence and control the populations, [it] enables us to dominate the environment, generate intelligence and eventually bring the conflict to a resolution," the brigadier told the conference last week.

To fight such a war, a new kind of soldier was needed - one not only proficient in the latest technologies, but who had been educated in "cultural understanding" and sensitivity.

Brigadier Kelly said modern war could be defined as "conflict, using violent and non-violent means, between multiple actors and influences, competing for control over the perceptions, behaviour and allegiances of human population groups".

He said he found it interesting that "if you take out violence out of the first line, it's a description of politics".

Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.

The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt.

Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.

His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world.

He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports.

He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring.

But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco.

Mistaken identity

Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects, has also been quoted in Arab news reports.

He says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver.

Another man with exactly the same name surfaced on the pages of the English-language Arab News.

Meanwhile, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, a London-based Arabic daily, says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi.

He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.

And there are suggestions that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive.

FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.

PERFECT SOLDIERS
The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It
By Terry McDermott. HarperCollins. 330 pp. $25.95

Earlier this year the British writer Gerald Seymour constructed an exceptionally good novel, The Unknown Soldier, around the premise that the men who are drawn into the embrace of al Qaeda are not at all who we think they are. We believe, as one of his characters puts it, that they are "brainwashed," when in fact "Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants . . . have refined a skill in identifying young men of varying social backgrounds and economic advantage who are prepared to make supreme sacrifices for a cause." They are not necessarily loners but are attracted to "the excitement of being a part of that select fugitive family," they have strong "personal self-esteem," they seek "adventure and purpose."

Now, in Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott provides the hard facts behind the fictional picture that Seymour so persuasively draws. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times who has been on the story of the September 2001 terrorist attacks since the day they occurred, McDermott has talked to everyone -- everyone who will talk, that is -- and read everything, the result of which is what may well be, for now at least, the definitive book on the 19 men who brought such devastation and terror to this country nearly four years ago. Clearly written in good, plain English, Perfect Soldiers is a group portrait of ordinary men who were driven to do a surpassingly evil thing.

McDermott takes his title from Dashiell Hammett: "He was the perfect soldier: he went where you sent him, stayed where you put him, and had no idea of his own to keep him from doing exactly what you told him." The last part of that equation is not wholly true of these young men -- Mohamed Atta, for example, was a planner of the Sept. 11 attacks as well as an instrument of al Qaeda's will -- but the overall description is accurate. Having discovered a cause for which they were ready -- indeed, often eager -- to sacrifice their own lives, these young jihadists followed orders as precisely and dutifully as the most assiduously trained U.S. Marine.

They were not born to be soldiers -- none seems to have come from a military background -- and there was little in their early lives to suggest that they would become what they did. The pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, Atta, came from "an ambitious, not overtly religious middle-class household in Egypt" and had led "a sheltered life" until he arrived in Hamburg, Germany, in 1992 to do graduate study in architecture. The pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, was an amiable, "laid-back" fellow from the United Arab Emirates who had joined the UAE army, "not the world's most effective fighting force but one of its most generous, paying [its scholarship] students monthly stipends of about $2,000," which may have been his primary reason for enlisting; this enabled him to go to Hamburg, though there is little evidence that he "had any serious scholarly ambitions."

Hani Hanjour, the Saudi pilot who flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, "had lived in the United States off and on throughout the 1990s, mostly in Arizona, intermittently taking flying lessons at several different flying schools." He was, in the view of one of his flight instructors, "intelligent, friendly, and 'very courteous, very formal,' a nice enough fellow but a terrible pilot." He finally got a commercial license from the FAA but was unable to find work here or in the Middle East. As for Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, he was "the handsome middle child and only son of an industrious, middle-class family in Beirut," a "secular Muslim" family that "was easygoing -- the men drank whiskey and the women wore short skirts about town and bikinis at the beach." At university in Germany he met Aysel Sengün, "the daughter of conservative, working-class Turkish immigrants"; eventually they got married, but he disappeared for long periods, usually without explanation, leaving her frantic.

His disappearances, like changes in the other men's lives, were traceable to his discovery of radical Islam and jihad -- not jihad as "the individual's daily struggle for his own soul," but jihad as a Muslim's " obligation to fight on behalf of his beliefs, against nonbelievers and corrupters of belief." Eventually he too found his way to Hamburg, where he joined many other young Muslims in prayer and discussion, sometimes at a mosque called al Quds (the Arabic name for Jerusalem), sometimes in one of the various group houses where the men lived austerely and piously: "The Hamburg men who joined their plights to that of fundamentalist Islam chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world view, in fact, of a new world." To Atta and a friend who called himself Omar (ultimately he became the backstage coordinator of the 2001 attacks under his real name, Ramzi Binalshibh), "no matter where they fought, their real enemies were the Jews, and ultimately the Americans. 'One has to do something about America,' Omar said."

For all of them, radical Islam and jihad soon became obsessions, eclipsing everything else. Studies were abandoned, families ignored, the outer world denied as they plunged themselves into their fanatical version of faith. As a German investigator put it: "They are not talking about daily life stuff, such as buying cars -- they buy cars, but they don't talk about it, they talk about religion most of the time . . . these people are just living for their religion, meaning for them that they just live now for their life after death, the paradise. They want to live obeying their God, so they can enter paradise. Everything else doesn't matter." Talking one week of Kosovo, the next of Chechnya or Afghanistan, the "men were agreed: they wanted to fight -- they just didn't know which war."

It was, of course, Osama bin Laden who gave them their war. A preview of it had been staged in early 1993, when an ad hoc jihadist group under the leadership of the "master terrorist," Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, a.k.a. Ramzi Yousef, planted a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center's North Tower, "killing six people, injuring 1,000, and causing $300 million in damage." The United States was shocked, but clueless:

"To a considerable extent, America did not recognize the advent of a new age but whether anyone knew it or not, an era of religious terror had arrived. Intermingling religious and political goals had been the norm for most of human history. Islam itself came into the world with secular as well as sacred aims. What had changed in this latest incarnation had more to do with the world it was in than Islam itself. By the latter half of the twentieth century, the movement toward secular government had triumphed almost everywhere except in the Islamic world. The advocates of political Islam became aberrant simply by outlasting the political ambitions and empires of other religions. They might have been mere curious anachronisms had not the modern world provided them the means to wed their old beliefs to new, readily accessible technologies. The outcome of that union is terror on a scale not previously known."

Al Qaeda, McDermott argues, was almost ideally suited to waging this new war. Insisting that "all states in the Muslim world . . . be returned to Muslim doctrine" as they saw it and preaching "violent revolt against insufficiently Islamist regimes in the Middle East," al Qaeda came up with a doctrine perfectly suited to young, pious, single-minded men, and it had the organizational apparatus to mobilize them. It "was never the huge organization its opponents sometimes portrayed," having a core of "at most a couple hundred men," and its operations often were "crude," but its small size was one of its great strengths: "If Al Qaeda were a nation with all of the infrastructure that implies, it would have been more vulnerable to penetration by American intelligence. . . . The September 11 attacks were by far the biggest thing it had ever attempted, but even at that, the number of people involved in the plot could be counted by the handful. The scale helped keep it hidden."

Among that handful were the 15 hijackers who joined the pilots aboard the four airplanes. All but one were from Saudi Arabia, most "were from families headed by tradesmen and civil servants, well-off, but not wealthy," mostly "unexceptionable men," none of whom "stood out for their religious or political activism." As McDermott writes, "that young men from good backgrounds would leave homes and families without fanfare or discouragement was evidence of the broad support within Saudi Arabia for jihad." Contrary to rumor, McDermott says they knew they would die and welcomed martyrdom: "The men were trained in hand-to-hand combat in the Al Qaeda camps [in Afghanistan], taught the physical skills they would need for the sole task given them -- to physically overpower flight crews. The pilots were the leaders. The new men would be the muscle."

All 19 of these "perfect soldiers" now are dead. Whether they are in the paradise to which they believed their attack would deliver them we cannot possibly know, but McDermott's well-told, meticulously researched cautionary tale makes one thing clear: There are more of them. Whether we are more prepared for their next strike than we were for their last is something else we cannot know, but this much is certain: It will happen.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.

(EIRNS) - Executive Intelligence Review and the LaRouche Political Action Committee have been informed by several extremely reliable Washington, D.C. sources that in the past several days, a prominent Republican United States Senator has been confronted by Karl Rove and other White House officials on his alleged "connections with Lyndon LaRouche." The Senator, who is not, in fact, in any way associated with LaRouche, denied the charges, but his denials were not believed by the White House officials. He was pressed by Rove, according to the sources, to issue a public statement denouncing LaRouche, to "prove" his denials. EIR has cross-checked the initial incident report with several other well-informed Washington, D.C. sources, and is satisfied that the essential features of the report are accurate and can be further documented.

Upon being informed of the incident today, Lyndon LaRouche observed that this account of the confrontation with the U.S. Senator, combined with President Bush's public performance on Thursday evening, April 28, makes it clear that the entire White House inner circle has gone stark-raving mad. This insanity and apparent flight-forward reaction to the growing political influence of Lyndon LaRouche and his associates, poses a serious national security threat. At a moment when the United States is facing a global disintegration of the post-Bretton Woods floating exchange rate, dollar- based monetary system, and is also facing an imminent loss of the combined physical productive capabilities of the U.S.A. aerospace/airline and auto industries, such insanity at the top of the Executive Branch of the Federal government is a matter of grave concern. Emergency remedial action is going to be forced upon a reluctant Executive Branch and U.S. Congress by the imminent bankruptcies of both General Motors and Ford. Yet the White House leadership is apparently losing all touch with reality.

LaRouche singled out President Bush's performance during his Thursday evening White House press conference. In response to a reporter's question about his Social Security privatization scheme, the President, in effect, announced the sovereign default of the United States Government, by declaring that the U.S. Treasury Bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund were worthless IOUs. Yet, just seconds later, the President said that worried investors could place their privatized Social Security accounts in bonds, rather than in risky Wall Street stocks.

The President said, according to the official White House transcript of the April 28, 2005 press conference: "Now, it's very important for our fellow citizens to understand that there is not a bank account here in Washington, D.C., where we take your payroll taxes and hold it for you and then give it back to you when you retire. Our system here is called pay-as-you-go. You pay into the system through your payroll taxes, and the government spends it. It spends the money on the current retirees, and with the money left over, it funds other government programs. And all that's left behind is file cabinets full of IOUs."

Then, in response to the same question, the President continued: "People say, well I don't want to have - take risks. Well, as I had a line in my opening statement, there are ways where you don't have to take risk. People say, I'm worried about the stock market going down right before I retire. You can manage your assets. You can go from bonds and stocks to only bonds as you get older."

But the President had just described the U.S. Treasury Bonds in the Trust Fund as "file cabinets full of IOUs." This, LaRouche observed, is clinical insanity. How will the governments of Japan, South Korea and China, who all hold vast reserves of U.S. Treasury Bonds respond to the President's declaration that these are worthless IOUs? Has the President, by his foolishness, triggered a potential pullout of U.S. Treasuries, thereby triggering a near-term dollar crash? How close are we to such a cataclysmic event, as the result of the President's foolishness?

LaRouche added that the credible report of the Rove incident with the Republican U.S. Senator also indicates that others in the inner circle of President Bush are equally mad, and that this pervasive insanity in and around the Oval Office is a matter of immediate grave concern for all Americans, and for leading officials around the world, whose own security is very much tied to the state of mind of the U.S. Presidency. The collective insanity at the White House, LaRouche concluded, can not go ignored, but at the gravest threat to world stability.

WASHINGTON -- Anyone who thought voting for George W. Bush in November meant sticking with the status quo is entitled to be confused.

We're seeing the metamorphosis of a president who, freed from the harness of re-election, is able to follow his bliss. And his bliss lies in change -- not subtle, around-the-edges change, but sweeping, radical change.

In his first term, Bush cut taxes massively. He changed the conditions under which we go to war -- from last resort to pre-emptive self-defense.

Now, he wants to make fundamental changes in Social Security and the income- tax system. [...]

For 60 of the first 100 days of his second term, Bush and his team have been trying to sell the idea of private investment accounts, allowing workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes privately.

Having failed to gain traction on that idea, Bush last week proposed something really controversial -- cutting benefits.

The White House may figure that advocating what amounts to a benefit cut -- even one wrapped up in protecting the poor -- will make private accounts more attractive. No politician wants to take anything away from anybody. [...]

In the Vietnam era, the military said we had to burn the village to save it. Clinton said we needed to change welfare as we know it. Bush now is arguing that we have to destroy Social Security as we know it to save it.

He sounds like a man who doesn't have to face the voters again. Members of Congress do.

Marsha Mercer is Washington bureau chief of Media General News Service. E- mail mmercer@mediageneral.com

PHILADELPHIA (KRT) - Religious conservatives, emboldened by President Bush's re-election and confident of their political clout, are not interested in merely overhauling the judiciary. Ideally, they are seeking a judiciary that would remove the wall of separation between church and state.

This ambition is stated clearly in numerous legal briefs currently on file at the U.S. Supreme Court in connection with a pending case; they seek removal of "a Berlin wall" that is "out of step with this nation's religious heritage." In fact, their leaders argue in interviews that the church-state barrier is a "myth" invented by the high court in 1947, thanks to a twisted interpretation of our founding documents. [...]

Yet their desire to breach the church-state wall - coupled with their incessant attacks on "liberal activist" judges and their success in prodding Republicans to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case - is sparking a backlash that threatens to sow new divisions. As Carlton E. Veazy, a Baptist leader in Washington, charged in a conference call the other day, "We are being led to this theocracy by the Christian right, who will not stop until they take over the government."

Critics think the church-state barrier is being breached already: [...]

One Christian program in northeastern Pennsylvania, financed by Bush's faith-based initiative, requires each worker to be "a believer in Christ and Christian life today" and has spent taxpayer money on construction of church property. The sponsoring Firm Foundation is now being sued in federal court by six local residents who say they don't want government to promote Christianity with their taxes. In response, Firm's lawyer, Steven Aden, says the group has been targeted "simply because it (works) from a faith-based perspective."

All told, there is a growing concern, even among some conservative analysts, that the religious right's Republican allies might pay a political price for their close collaboration. These analysts, for example, cite an April 14 remark by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who assailed the judiciary for trying "to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution." [...]

Those fears are reflected in the latest Gallup poll, which reports that, by a 2-to-1 ratio, Americans now say that the religious right has too much influence on the Bush administration. This poll, conducted immediately after the Schiavo case, contrasts sharply with surveys conducted between 2001 and 2003, when sentiment about the religious right's influence was evenly split.

So it's noteworthy that Bush, in his news conference Thursday night, took issue with religious-right orthodoxy. Christian leaders implied a week ago that those who seek to block Bush's court nominees are not "people of faith." But Bush said, "I don't ascribe a person's opposing my nominations to an issue of faith," and he added that he opposed any religious tests: "If you choose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship."

No Christian leaders took issue with Bush. But they do expect fealty from the GOP.

In the words of conservative Christian strategist Gary Bauer: "We are now at such a crucial time in the culture war. The Left is in full screaming mode, and they are counting on Republican knees to buckle, as they have so many times in the past." He said it's critical to overhaul a judiciary "that is replacing our Judeo-Christian heritage with moral relativism."

Mark Rozell, a political analyst at George Mason University who tracks the religious right, said Thursday: "They feel that the political circumstances won't be this good again - a strongly conservative Congress, a religiously conservative president. They've toiled for nearly 30 years, and the Republicans always said, 'Wait your turn.' They believe the time is now."

And that means it's time to convince Americans that President Thomas Jefferson, in a famous 1802 letter, was not really trying to curb religion when he endorsed "building a wall of separation between church and state." The high court invoked the phrase when it formally erected the wall in 1947. The religious right sees this as regrettable; its members believe the ruling is marred by "numerous and serious historical errors."

In legal briefs filed in a pending Supreme Court case on the posting of the Ten Commandments, religious-right groups point out (accurately) that Jefferson's phrase appears nowhere in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution and that Jefferson wrote the phrase merely as a show of support for Connecticut's Baptists, who were upset that the state government was officially favoring the Congregationalists (independent scholars say the religious right also is correct about this).

But the briefs don't mention 1786, when young Jefferson was the author of a Virginia law separating church from state. This law is cited on his grave, at his request. A preamble excerpt: "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagations of (religious) opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical." Another: "Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry."

Barry Lynn, who directs the Washington-based Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said, "The religious right would love the court to say, 'We've been wrong since the '40s, so now you can do whatever you want.' Failing that, it'll push for 'theocracy lite' - to make sure that you're a second-class citizen if you have different beliefs. But America's sensible center is saying, 'Hold on; going to the edge of the cliff is not what we had in mind.'"

Bush's remarks Thursday night appear to acknowledge the danger of a backlash. But Staver believes, as a matter of principle, that it's worth pushing the high court to renounce the 1947 reasoning that erected the wall between church and state.

"There's an old saying," Staver said, "and it comes from the Book of Proverbs 18:17." That passage reads partly as follows: "He that is first in his own cause seemeth just." The point of this is that Staver and his allies acknowledge the secularists had the first word in the cause. But they intend to have the last word.

A 10-year-old boy in Sherman Oaks, Calif., suffered first-degree burns on his leg and groin area when a cell phone exploded in his pocket, according to a Local 6 News report.

Leobarda Villalobos recently purchased a Motorola phone for her son, Yovani. At some point, the phone exploded in Yovani's pants.

He was treated at the Grossman Burn Center.

The family is trying to determine what could have gone wrong since the cell phone has not been recalled, according to the report.

Motorola officials are not commenting.

VILLAGERS say they are being plagued by a mystery interference which is playing havoc with their cars.

Meopham residents say their lives have been disrupted for two weeks by the strange happening.

They have seen their cars' remote-controlled locking systems go berserk meaning many motorists have been locked out of their own vehicles.

And to add to their fury, the cars' alarms are going off day and night apparently for no reason.

Former maintenance engineer John Broad, 67, said: "We want to get to the bottom of this. Whoever is responsible should sort it out. People are very concerned.

"One bloke even had his car towed away to the dealership for diagnostics but they couldn't find anything wrong with it."

Father-of-two Mr Broad has been having trouble with his Nissan Almeria but the mysterious electronic gremlins are striking a range of cars including Toyotas, Volkswagens and Land Rovers.

He added: "One chap goes to work at 5am and when he's having problems his car's loud alarm wakes up the whole street."

Villagers suspected the Vodafone mast at Meopham train station but the company has said there is no way it is responsible.

News Shopper has reported in the past how motorists have been locked out of their cars because of phone mast interference.

Normally upgraded 3G masts, which allow people to send pictures and videos via their mobiles, are to blame.

In one case, car manufacturer Subaru confirmed its cars can be affected by radiation from masts.

But Vodafone says the Meopham station mast has been operating for many years and there have been no recent alterations or upgrades.

A spokesman said it was highly unlikely the phone mast was affecting the car alarms.

She explained the phone network operated between 900 and 2,100 megahertz which is far removed from the key-fob remote controls for cars, which operate at around 300 megahertz.

She added more likely causes could be radio transmissions from ambulances and police cars, or even amateur radio hams' operating in the area.

Mr Broad said: "It's mystifying.We are at the end of our tether. If any readers can give us a clue as to why this is happening we want to hear from them.

More than 1000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks, baffling scientists.

German scientists still have no explanation for what's causing the combustion, an official said on Wednesday.

Both the pond's water and body parts of the toads have been tested, but scientists have been unable to find a bacteria or virus that would cause the toads to swell up and pop, Janne Kloepper, of the Hamburg-based Institute for Hygiene and the Environment said.

"It's absolutely strange."

"We have a really unique story here in Hamburg. This phenomenon really doesn't seem to have appeared anywhere before," she said.

Sci-fi stuff

The toads at a pond in the upscale neighbourhood of Altona have been blowing up since the beginning of April, filling up like balloons until their stomachs suddenly burst.

"It looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie," Werner Schmolnik, the head of a local environment group, told the Hamburger Abendblatt daily.

"The bloated animals suffer for several minutes before they finally die."

Biologists have come up with several theories, but Janne Kloepper said that most have been ruled out.

The pond's water quality is no better or worse than other bodies of water in Hamburg.

The toads did not appear to have a disease, and a laboratory in Berlin has ruled out the possibility that it is a fungus that made its way from South America, Klopper said.

She said that tests will continue. In the meantime, city residents have been warned to stay away from the pond.

LOS ANGELES, May 2 - A spate of apparently random highway shootings in recent weeks has left at least four drivers dead and several more injured in Southern California and has prompted the authorities to increase undercover police patrols on the region's roadways, the busiest in the world.

Since early March, there have been at least seven shootings on highways in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside Counties, three of them this past weekend alone.

Here in Los Angeles, where most of the shootings have occurred, a police spokeswoman, Sgt. Catherine Plows, said on Monday that a victim of a shooting early Sunday in the San Fernando Valley described his assailants as a group of four or five young Hispanic men with shaved heads. The description led detectives from the police department's gang unit to look into the possibility that the shooting was part of an initiation ritual.

Sergeant Plows said that after being shot, the 19-year-old victim was able to get off the freeway and drive a few blocks before encountering paramedics who had responded to an unrelated accident. The man was treated at the scene and later taken to a hospital, where he was expected to survive.

The police say they do not know whether the other shootings might be gang-related. Highway shootings are not a new phenomenon here or elsewhere in the country, but the frequency of the recent attacks here has put drivers on edge. [...]

In the past, most highway shootings in and around Los Angeles have been ascribed to road rage. The trend gained national attention in the summer of 1987, when, displaying hair-trigger impulses reminiscent of the frontier West, Southern California drivers were responsible for the deaths of at least five of their fellow travelers. More than a dozen people were injured.

More recently, a rash of highway shootings near Columbus, Ohio, that began in May 2003 resulted in the death of a 62-year-old woman and unnerved thousands of travelers. Ten months later, the police arrested Charles A. McCoy Jr., 29, and concluded that he had fired at dozens of vehicles, houses and a school.

Sergeant Plows, the Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman, said Monday that there had been 11 shootings this year on highways in her department's jurisdiction. Two people were killed and 13 were injured, she said.

The shootings appeared to be random, she said, when the demographics of the 15 victims were taken into account: Ten were Hispanic, four African-American and one Filipino, Sergeant Plows said.

Last year, there were 36 highway shootings in Los Angeles, she said, with one death; there were 46 such incidents in 2003, with 4 deaths, and 46 in 2002, 3 of them fatal.

"Not all of them hit the target, and they're not all necessarily car-to-car," Sergeant Plows said, referring to the likelihood that some of the gunmen were standing on firm ground when they fired at the vehicles.

Armando Clemente, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol, said Monday that the agency had increased its highway patrols, in some cases by adding troopers on overtime.

"We're looking for anything out of the ordinary," Officer Clemente said. "Drivers who are overly aggressive, tailgating, making quick, unsafe lane changes - anything that may be an occasion for something not appropriate going on."

Even if it has precedents, Officer Clemente said, the wave of shootings is hardly commonplace. "It is frustrating and it is alarming for us," he said, "and we'll do whatever we can to put an end to this."

Judy Gish, a spokeswoman for Caltrans, the state transportation agency, which oversees 915 miles of freeways and highways in Los Angeles County, said the dozens of cameras on the roadways transmitted live pictures to traffic management centers but did not use videotape, so they were limited in their ability to record crimes as they occur.

Because the gunmen are in most cases in a moving vehicle, police say, escape is quick. Their victims, meanwhile, often crash, sometimes exacerbating whatever injuries they might have suffered. On April 13, James Wiggins, 47, smashed his car into a wall and died on the Harbor Freeway south of downtown Los Angeles after being shot by an unknown assailant. Mr. Wiggins and another man in his car had been on their way to a Bible study class.

MK Mohammed Barakeh (Hadash) was among 10 left-wing activists and a press photographer who were lightly hurt Thursday when security forces dispersed a demonstration against the separation fence close to the West Bank village on Bal'in.