As many of you know, Signs of the Times is not supported by major funding like many other news sites, and is not affiliated with any government, political group, corporation, or news agency. SOTT is financed by any donations we receive as well as money out of our own pockets. The benefit of this setup is that we do not have any sponsors that might introduce unwanted bias into our work. The obvious and major drawback is that we do not have the funding to do all the things we would like to do for our readers.

Almost one year ago, SOTT created the Pentagon Strike presentation, which has now been viewed by well over 300,000,000 people worldwide, and is available in nine different languages. Recently, we wrote and produced the song You Lied, performed by Away With the Fairys. We also recorded our first ever podcast, beginning a project which we had been trying to get off the ground for over a year.

A SOTT editor poses next to his computer

To produce the Signs page, we work very long days (often upwards of 14-16 hours) without pay. We do it because we love it, and because our readers often write to tell us how they have benefited from our work. In order to continue expanding our work and deepen our analysis and understanding of our world, we need to enlarge our library. There are many books we would like to have that we cannot afford. With our increasing use of sound files and our future projects that include video, we have and will continue to incur higher bandwidth costs. As well, the Signs page and related projects are created on several computers which are each upwards of five years old. They are very slow, increasingly unreliable, and won't support regular podcasts and videos.

Unfortunately, we do not have the financial means to purchase the books we need, much less new equipment. Current donations only support our basic needs and living expenses.

In order to continue producing the Signs page, the podcast, Flash presentations, and expand our operations further, we need your support.

At the moment, we are preparing six Signs of the Times Commentary books. These books are collections of SOTT commentary grouped according to theme. They will be available for sale soon, and any proceeds will go towards helping to cover our increasing operating costs.

Our target, based on estimated costs for all the necessary materials, upgrades, and operating costs for the coming year is 28,000 euros.

-- Here's How You Can Help Signs of the Times --

Any donation you can make will help us to continue to produce and improve the Signs page.

If you donate 50 euros (approximately US$60; click here for current exchange rate), you will be a Bronze Supporter.

Bronze Supporters will receive a complementary copy of the 911 Conspiracy Signs Commentary book.

If you donate 100 euros, you will be a Silver Supporter.

Silver Supporters will receive a complementary copy of 911 Conspiracy, US Freedom, and The Media.

Donations of 175 euros will qualify you as a Gold Supporter.

Gold Supporters will receive the entire set of six commentary books: 911 Conspiracy, The Human Condition, The Media, Religion, US Freedom, and The Work.

Donations of 250 euros will qualify you as a Platinum Supporter.

Platinum Supporters will receive the entire set of six commentary books: 911 Conspiracy, The Human Condition, The Media, Religion, US Freedom, and The Work. In addition, they will receive one other book of their choice free from our bookstore.

We have more projects like our podcast in the works - but we need your help to make them a reality!

Thank you in advance from the editors and the rest of the team at Signs of the Times!

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush nominated conservative judge John Roberts to the US Supreme Court, a move that could shape the outcome of battles over volatile issues like abortion for decades.

Republicans welcomed the choice of a candidate with a reputation as a brilliant lawyer with right wing credentials. But senior Democrats expressed doubts, setting the scene for a Senate battle over Roberts' confirmation.

"The decisions of the Supreme Court affect the life of every American," the president said in a televised address from the White House, with the 50-year-old federal appeals court judge at his side.

"A nominee to that court must be a person of superb credentials and the highest integrity, a person who will faithfully apply the constitution and keep our founding promise of equal justice under law. I have found such a person in Judge John Roberts," said Bush.

Bush shrugged off pressure to pick a woman to replace Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate conservative who was the first woman to serve on the court and often cast the deciding vote in controversial decisions.

The president urged the Senate, where his Republican party has 55 of the 100 seats, to confirm Roberts by the first week of October, when the Supreme Court opens a new session.

"This confirmation can be done in a timely manner," said Bush. "So I have full confidence that the Senate will rise to the occasion and act promptly on this nomination."

But the nomination immediately opened a new partisan divide. "We know Judge Roberts is no Sandra Day O'Connor, and the White House has sent a clear signal," said John Kerry, the Democratic senator who fought Bush for the presidency last year.

"There are serious questions that must be answered involving Judge Roberts' judicial philosophy as demonstrated over his short time on the appellate court."

Other Democrats promised intense scrutiny of Roberts stand on issues such as abortion.

The top Democrat in the Senate, Harry Reid, set the stage for tough questioning by saying the nominee had "suitable legal credentials" but required more scrutiny.

Leading US dailies said Wednesday Bush's nomination should be carefully vetted by the Senate to determine exactly what if any ideological leaning he might have.

"If he is a mainstream conservative ... he should be confirmed. But if on closer inspection he turns out to be an extreme ideologue with an agenda of stripping away important rights, he should not be," said The New York Times.

While The Washington Post considers Roberts "a man of substance and seriousness" whose nomination "is not a provocation to Democrats," it cautions that "nobody really knows what (he) believes, because he has been unusually careful about not discussing his views."

"So sphinx-like has he been," added the Post editorial, "that some conservatives have suggested he might ... not be a real conservative at all."

Comment: Dream on... Bush nominated him.

Roberts "has a thin record on controversial subjects ... (that) gives the other side so little to work with," said the Times, while USA Today said that "while certainly conservative," Roberts' legal record "is largely opaque."

For this reason, the three newspapers agree that Roberts deserves a careful confirmation hearing by the Senate.

Of special concern, said the Post, are Roberts' views on abortion rights and "the balance of power between the federal government and the states."

"If extremists take control of the Supreme Court," warned the Times, "we will end up with an America in which the federal government is powerless to protect against air pollution, unsafe working conditions and child labor."

Comment: Well, golly! By all means, give the federal government whatever powers they want! The last thing America needs is a Supreme Court that dares to disagree with the fuhrer! Extremists will take over the Supreme Court, but not to prevent the Bush Reich from exercising their power... After all, Bush is the one who chose Roberts.

For this reason, said the Post, "such a substantial picture of a nominee will require a serious and dignified confirmation process."

"He should be asked in detail his views of how the Constitution should be interpreted," said USA Today.

The nomination was Bush's first chance to reshape the ideological balance of the court, which has immense influence over the lives of Americans as the final arbiter of the constitution and court of last resort.

Because justices serve for life or until they retire, they regularly decide critical and controversial political and legal issues long after the president who picked them is gone.

Roberts' last notable decision came only last week when his appeals court overturned a lower court decision that the special military tribunals for suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo detention camp in Cuba were illegal.

The decision was a victory for the Bush administration in its handling of the "war on terrorism" detainees. But a new appeal is now expected to go to the Supreme Court.

Comment: And here we have our answer as to where Roberts stands. No wonder Bush is pushing for a quick confirmation...

Roberts graduated from Harvard Law School in 1979, was a clerk to arch-conservative US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, served in president Ronald Reagan's White House, and was a senior federal prosecutor under Bush's father, former president George Bush.

"He is regarded by many people as the best supreme court litigator of his generation," said James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern University in Illinois, who added that Roberts conservative creed could lead to a "nasty fight" in the Senate.

O'Connor's retirement opened the first vacancy on the Supreme Court in 11 years. The last justice appointed was the liberal Justice
Stephen Breyer, who was named by president Bill Clinton.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is now the sole woman on the nine justice Supreme Court bench.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush named federal appeals judge John G. Roberts Jr. to fill the first Supreme Court vacancy in a decade on Tuesday, delighting Republicans and unsettling Democrats by picking a young jurist of impeccably conservative credentials. [...]

In brief remarks, Roberts said he has argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court in a career as a private attorney and government lawyer. "I always got a lump in my throat whenever I walked up those marble steps to argue a case before the court, and I don't think it was just from the nerves," he said. [...]

While he lacks national name recognition, the Harvard-educated Roberts is a Washington insider who has worked over the years at the White House, Justice Department and in private practice. [...]

"He has been a judge for only two years and authored about 40 opinions, only three of which have drawn any dissent," said Wendy Long, a lawyer representing the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, adding that his record appears to suit Bush's desire to nominate a judge who will apply the law, as written, and leave policy decisions to the elected branches of government. [...]

Bush did not ask Roberts any questions about abortion, gay marriage or other specific issues that might come before the Supreme Court, the official said.

So now we know: it's John Roberts for the Supreme Court. The main focus of debate on the pick will undoubtedly be Roberts' statement on abortion, while serving as deputy solicitor general Bush I, declaring that Roe v. Wade was wrong. This is the only "controversial" angle cited by the NY Times' loving – not to say groveling – profile this morning, which then goes on to give Roberts an alibi, if he wants it: that he was only dutifully stating the government's position at the time.

But all of this is a smokescreen. The NY Times doesn't even mention Roberts' most dangerous decision, issued just last Friday, when, as part of a panel of appeals judges, he upheld Bush's outrageous claim of dictatorial powers: the right to dispose of anyone he arbitrarily designates an "enemy combatant" as he sees fit; in this case, sending them to the kangaroo court "military tribunals" he has concocted.

I'm writing more extensively on this case for the Moscow Times later this week, but here's the gist: Roberts' decision is part of an on-going process of elevating the president beyond the reach of law -- essentially a slow-rolling coup d'état, replacing the old American Republic (or what's left of it) with an authoritarian "Commander-in-Chief State." (Deep Blade has more examples of this process here.) How so? Here's a preview of the column:

"The principle of arbitrary rule by an autocratic leader is being openly established, through a series of unchallenged executive orders, perverse Justice Department rulings and court decisions by sycophantic judges who defer to power – not law – in their determinations. What we are witnessing is the creation of a "Commander-in-Chief State," where the form and pressure of law no longer apply to the president and his designated agents. The rights of individuals are no longer inalienable, nor are their persons inviolable; all depends on the good will of the Commander, the military autocrat.

"[Through a series of executive orders and presidential directives, beginning in October 2001] George W. Bush has granted himself the power to declare anyone on earth – including any American citizen – an 'enemy combatant,' for any reason he sees fit. He can render them up to torture, he can imprison them for life, he can even have them killed, all without charges, with no burden of proof, no standards of evidence, no legislative oversight, no appeal, no judicial process whatsoever except those that he himself deigns to construct, with whatever limitations he cares to impose. Nor can he ever be prosecuted for any order he issues, however criminal; in the new American system laid out by Bush's legal minions, the Commander is sacrosanct, beyond the reach of any law or constitution.

"[In last week's decision, Roberts and his fellow judges] ruled that the Commander's abitrarily designated "enemies" are non-persons: neither the Geneva Conventions nor American military and domestic law apply to such human garbage. Bush is now free to subject anyone he likes to the "military tribunal" system he has concocted – a brutal sham that some top retired military officials have denounced as a "kangaroo court" that will be used by tyrants around the world to "hide their oppression under U.S. precedent."

The column will explore the implications of this decision in more detail. But the fact is that Roberts -- this affable "insider," this "regular guy" from Indiana -- will now be implementing the anti-American principle of unlimited presidential authority on the highest court in the land. Too bad the NY Times doesn't think this is controversial.

Meanwhile, regarding the Roberts' nomination, let me cry out with Hamlet: "O my prophetic soul!" I'm not often this right when I peer into the crystal ball, but I do think that Bush's pick is pretty much along the lines I predicted here on July 4, when I wrote:

"For what it's worth, here's my prediction on Bush's Supreme Court nominee: it won't be any of the "hot-button" prospects (Gonzales, Pryor, etc.). It will be some Federalist Society apparatchik who has plugged along for years, quietly, unnoticed, issuing consistently right-wing rulings but with a minimum of overheated Borkian/Scalian rhetoric.

"It will be someone who will evoke this kind of reaction among the "conventional wisdom" clique (Richard Cohen or E.J. Dionne, say): 'At first glance, at least, President Bush has made a surprisingly solid pick for the Supreme Court: a conservative to be sure, but no ideologue, no firebrand. All the lefty bloggers and anti-Bush activists out there may yet dig up some skeletons, of course, but at the moment, we applaud what looks to be an act of genuine statesmanship by the president.'

"This first impression won't last, of course. Unsavoury facts about the nominee's hardcore ideology and slippery ethics will indeed emerge. But that first CW impression will have taken hold, and the subsequent opposition to the nominee will be increasingly portrayed as arcane nit-picking and partisan spin."

I think we'll see things play out along these lines, although given Roberts' impeccable "insider" credentials -- cited so approvingly by the Times today -- the "slippery ethics" angle might not come into play. Unlike some of the other candidates considered by Bush, Roberts never sought an elected judicial post, so we won't have the usual conflict-of-interest contributions that Bushist apparatchiks normally glory in.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon named a new chief defense lawyer on Tuesday for the Guantanamo Bay war crimes trials, called the death penalty unlikely in the first 12 cases and defended as fair a process critics deride as a "kangaroo court."

The trials of foreign terrorism suspects conducted by special panels of military officers at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had been frozen for eight months until a federal appeals panel on Friday reversed a lower-court ruling that these "military commission" proceedings were unlawful.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hemingway, legal advisor in the trial process, told reporters once the court lifts a formal stay on the proceedings, "I think we would be in active hearings in 30 to 45 days."

Of the roughly 520 Guantanamo detainees, 12 have been deemed eligible for trial and four have been charged, with eight more due to be charged soon, the Pentagon said.

Comment: Great. So, at the moment, a whopping 2.3% of the prisoners have actually been charged with a crime. But don't worry - soon that figure will be up to an astounding 3.8%. The other 96.2% of prisoners will be kept in jail in blatant violation of international law until... well, forever! God bless American democracy - coming soon to your country!

Many of the detainees, most of them captured in Afghanistan, have been held for more than three years without charges.

Comment: "Many of the detainees"?? Try almost all of the detainees...

The United States classified them as "enemy combatants" and denied them rights accorded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Marine Corps Lt. Col. Dwight Sullivan, a reservist who worked for the American Civil Liberties Union's Maryland branch for six years, will replace Air Force Col. Will Gunn as chief defense counsel, Hemingway said. The ACLU has criticized the Pentagon's commission trial process.

Sullivan, a University of Virginia law school graduate who works as a lawyer in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, will oversee military lawyers assigned by the Pentagon to defend detainees. Like Gunn, who is retiring from the military, Sullivan will neither directly represent nor argue on behalf of any defendant at trial.

Hemingway said the Pentagon will name a new chief prosecutor later this week to replace Army Col. Robert Swann, also retiring from the military, and will expand from 40 to 65 the number of people in its office handling the trials.

DEATH PENALTY

The Pentagon previously said it will not seek the death penalty against the four men already charged: Yemenis Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul, Australian David Hicks and Sudanese Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi.

Hemingway said he had not seen any evidence that would lead him to recommend the death penalty against any of the 12 men deemed eligible for trial. Hemingway makes recommendations on charges and capital punishment to John Altenburg, the Pentagon official who runs the trial process. Hemingway did not rule out seeking the death penalty in a future case.

Responding to critics, Hemingway said, "Commissions, from our point of view, provide for a full and fair hearing that takes into account our national security interests."

Amnesty International official Jumana Musa noted the Pentagon created a new legal system from scratch rather than using the respected military justice system. The new system allows evidence obtained through torture or hearsay, keeps defendants ignorant of certain evidence against them, and permits no independent judicial review, she added.

"You can call it a kangaroo court. You can call it a star chamber," Musa said. "The idea that somehow you absolutely can't try these people unless you have this completely substandard system of justice that's basically set up to convict on little to no evidence is ludicrous."

Hemingway said, "If you make a fair comparison with our rules and procedures, they compare favorably to the rules and procedures of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and, from my point of view, also the International Criminal Court."

The Pentagon has said the Hamdan and Hicks cases, suspended by the lower-court ruling, will proceed first.

RICHMOND, Va. -- A lawyer for Jose Padilla, an American accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb," went before a federal appeals court Tuesday and demanded the U.S. government either charge his client with a crime or set him free.

But a Bush administration lawyer told the court that the president must have authority to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists who come to the United States intent on killing civilians.

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member and Muslim convert suspected of being an al-Qaida operative, was seized in 2002 after flying from Pakistan to Chicago on what authorities said was a scouting mission for a plot to set off a conventional bomb laced with radioactive material. Padilla also is suspected of planning to blow up apartment buildings in several cities by filling them with natural gas.

President Bush declared Padilla an "enemy combatant," a designation that allows the military to hold someone indefinitely without charges. Padilla is in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., and has been held for the past three years.

At issue before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is whether Padilla - an American seized on U.S. soil - should have been designated an enemy combatant.

"I may be the first lawyer to stand here and say I'm asking for my client to be indicted by a federal grand jury," Padilla's lawyer, Andrew Patel, told a three-judge panel of the court, widely regarded as the most conservative in the nation.

Patel later told reporters that the government should "put up or shut up - it's that simple."

In a packed courtroom under tight security, Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig pressed Bush administration lawyer Paul Clement on whether the government was suggesting that the battlefield in the war on terror now includes U.S. soil.

"I can say that. I can say it boldly," Clement said. [...]

WASHINGTON - A State Department memo that has caught the attention of prosecutors describes a CIA officer's role in sending her husband to Africa and disputes administration claims that Iraq was shopping for uranium, a retired department official said Tuesday.

The classified memo was sent to Air Force One just after former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson went public with his assertions that the Bush administration overstated the evidence that Iraq was interested in obtaining uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.

The memo has become a key piece of evidence in the CIA leak investigation because it could have been the way someone in the White House learned - and then leaked - the information that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and played a role in sending him on the mission.

The document was prepared in June 2003 at the direction of Carl W. Ford Jr., then head of the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research, for Marc Grossman, the retired official said. Grossman was the Undersecretary of State who was in charge of the department while Secretary Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were traveling. Grossman needed the memo because he was dealing with other issues and was not familiar with the subject, the former official said.

"It wasn't a Wilson-Wilson wife memo," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way. "It was a memo on uranium in Niger and focused principally on our disagreement" with the White House.

Armitage called Ford after Wilson's op-ed piece in The New York Times and his TV appearance on July 6, 2003 in which he challenged the White House's claim that Iraq had purchased uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Armitage asked that Powell, who was traveling to Africa with Bush, be given an account of the Wilson trip, said the former official.

The original June 2003 memo was readdressed to Powell and included a short summary prepared by an analyst who was at a 2002 CIA meeting where Wilson's trip was arranged and was sent in one piece to Powell on Air Force One the next day.

The memo said Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and suggested her husband go to Niger because he had contacts there and had served as an American diplomat in Africa. However, the official said the memo did not say she worked undercover for the spy agency nor did it identify her as Valerie Plame, which was her maiden name and cover name at the CIA.

Her identity as Plame was disclosed first by columnist Robert Novak and then by Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. The leak investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is looking into who in the Bush administration leaked Plame's identity to reporters and whether any laws were broken. [...]

The past two weeks have brought revelations that top presidential aide Karl Rove was involved in leaking the identity of Plame to Novak and to Cooper.

The former State Department official stressed the memo focused on Wilson's trip and the State Department intelligence bureau's disagreement with the White House's claim about Iraq trying to get nuclear material. He said the fact that the CIA officer and Wilson were husband and wife was largely an incidental reference.

The June 2003 memo had not gone higher than Grossman until Wilson's op-ed column for The New York Times headlined "What I Didn't Find In Africa" and his TV appearance to dispute the administration. Wilson's article asked the question: "Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion?"

And Joe Wilson has no right to complain. And I think people like Tim Russert and the others, who gave this guy such a free ride and all the media, they're the ones to be shot, not Karl Rove.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jul 19 (OneWorld) - The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has amassed at least 3,500 pages of internal documents from political protest groups in what the targets say amounts to political surveillance of some of President George W. Bush's leading critics.

The FBI has obtained 1,173 pages of internal documents on the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) since 2001, the rights watchdog and prominent administration critic said Monday. Federal agents also have collected some 2,383 pages from environmental group Greenpeace, a leading voice of anti-Bush protest, the ACLU added.

The figures have emerged as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) brought by the ACLU and other groups alleging that the FBI is engaging in politically motivated spying against law-biding organizations.

''We now know that the government is keeping documents about the ACLU and other peaceful groups,'' said Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director. ''The question is why.''

The ACLU, in court documents, has contended that joint terrorism task forces set up across the country and led by the FBI are structured and funded in ways that facilitate violations of groups' and individuals' rights to assemble and speak freely.

The organization said it filed its FOIA requests in response to widespread complaints from students and political activists who said FBI agents were questioning them in the months leading up to the 2004 political conventions.

The FBI and Justice Department have said that any such intelligence-gathering was aimed at preventing criminal activity, not silencing speech.

Documents obtained through lawsuits also showed the FBI was monitoring groups' Web sites and had prepared an internal report on at least one anti-war protest organization, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), and its efforts to organize a demonstration in the run up to the 2004 Republican National Convention, the ACLU said.

''The UFPJ report underscores our concern that the FBI is violating Americans' right to peacefully assemble and oppose government policies without being branded as terrorist threats,'' said Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director. ''There is no need to open a counterterrorism file when people are simply exercising their First Amendment rights.''

The ACLU is seeking FBI surveillance files on itself, Greenpeace, UFPJ, Code Pink, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Muslim Public Affairs Council.

The Justice Department has said it will take up to a year to review the material the ACLU seeks. The civil rights group has accused the government of stalling and has asked a judge to order federal agents to turn over the documents sooner.

The FBI's ability to monitor political protest groups had been curtailed since the 1970s amid outrage over a decade's worth of abuses under then-agency director J. Edgar Hoover.

Many of the restrictions were lifted or relaxed after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, however, despite some lawmakers' stated concerns that the expanded police powers granted under the USA Patriot Act, in particular, could prompt civil rights violations and result in the targeting of legitimate and legal dissent.

Key Patriot Act provisions are scheduled to expire on Dec. 31. Bush was scheduled to speak about the law in Baltimore, Maryland, Wednesday, as part of a sustained White House campaign to make permanent the law's expanded powers.

Critics have said the powers infringe on citizens' civil liberties but Bush has described the Patriot Act as ''one of the important tools federal agents have used to protect America.''

New provisions would allow federal authorities to subpoena records from businesses, hospitals, and libraries.

A novel coalition of conservatives and liberals normally at each other's throats over the nature of government and free speech have made common cause to oppose key parts of the antiterrorism law.

The ACLU, long vilified by conservatives, has joined forces with right-wing groups the American Conservative Union, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Free Congress Foundation to spearhead the ''Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances'' coalition.

The coalition, formed in March, has lobbied Congress to roll back provisions allowing law enforcement agents to look at library users' records and to conduct unannounced searches of homes and private offices.

Short for the ''Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,'' the USA Patriot Act originally passed by 357-66 in the House of Representatives and 98-1 in the Senate.

The Bush administration proposed the law, shepherded it through Congress, and enacted it in the immediate aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the U.S. Senate's evacuation because of anthrax.

The measure passed with neither chamber issuing the usual reviews of proposed legislation. ''As a result, it lacks background legislative history that often retrospectively provides necessary statutory interpretation,'' according to a detailed analysis of the law prepared by the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Grassroots opposition to the law has grown, according to the ACLU. Some 375 local and state governments representing more than 56 million Americans have passed resolutions opposing the measure or some of its provisions.

While many of these resolutions have no practical effect, proponents have said the measures serve to notify federal policymakers and agencies of public disapproval. Most of the resolutions called upon Congress to bring the Patriot Act back in line with the U.S. constitution.

"Karl Rove is loyal to President Bush," a correspondent wrote as Treasongate broke. "Isn't that a form of patriotism?" Not in a representative democracy, I replied. Only in a dictatorship is fealty to the Leader equal to loyalty to the nation. We're Bush's boss. He works for us. Unless that changed on 9/11 (or 12/20/00). Rove had no right to give away state secrets, even to protect Bush.

Newly loquacious Time reporter Matt Cooper has deflated half a dozen Rove-defending talking points since we last visited. Republicans, for instance, have argued that Rove had merely confirmed what Cooper already knew: that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. That claim evaporated in Cooper's piece in the magazine's July 25 issue: "This was the first time I had heard anything about Wilson's wife."

"I've already said too much," Cooper quotes Rove as he ended their 2003 conversation.

Rove may avoid prosecution under the Intelligence Identities and Protection Act, says John Dean, counsel at the Nixon White House. "There is, however, evidence suggesting that other laws were violated," he says, alluding to Title 18, Section 641 of the U.S. Code. The "leak of sensitive [government] information" for personal purposes--say, outting the CIA wife of your boss' enemy--is "a very serious crime," according to the judge presiding over a similar recent case. If convicted under the anti-leak statute, Rove would face ten years in a federal prison.

Even if Rove originally learned about Plame's status from jailed New York Times journalist Judith Miller, Dean continues, "it could make for some interesting pairing under the federal conspiracy statute (which was the statute most commonly employed during Watergate)." Conspiracy will get you five years at Hotel Graybar.

Rove's betrayal of a CIA WMD expert--while the U.S. was using WMDs as a reason to invade Iraq--is virtually indistinguishable from Robert Hanssen's selling out of American spies. Both allowed America's enemies to learn the identities of covert operatives. Both are traitors. Both are eligible for the death penalty.

And he's not the only high-ranking Bush Administration traitor.

In last week's column I speculated that Treasongate would almost certainly implicate Dick Cheney. Now, according to Time, Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby is being probed as a second source of leaks to reporters about Plame.

We already know that Rove is a traitor. So, probably, is Cheney. Since George W. Bush has protected traitors for at least two years; he is therefore an accomplice to the Rove-Libby cell. We are long past the point where, during the summer of 1974, GOP senators led by Barry Goldwater told Richard Nixon that he had to resign. So why aren't Turd Blossom and his compadres out of office and awaiting trial?

Democrats are out of power. And, sadly, Republicans have become so obsessed with personal loyalty that they've forgotten that their first duty is to country, not party or friend. Unless they wake up soon and dump Bush, Republicans could be permanently discredited.

Bush sets the mafia-like tone: "I'm the kind of person, when a friend gets attacked, I don't like it." His lieutenants blur treason with hardball politics--"[Democrats] just aren't coming forward with any policy positions that would change the country, so they want to pick up whatever the target of the week is and make the most out of that," says GOP House Whip Roy Blunt--and blame the victim--Rove, absurdly argues Congresswoman Deborah Pryce, was innocently trying to expose Wilson's "lies."

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds Bush's credibility at 41 percent, down from 50 in January. Given events past and present, that's still a lot higher than it ought to be.

We don't need a law to tell us that unmasking a CIA agent, particularly during wartime, is treasonous. Every patriotic American--liberal, conservative, or otherwise--knows that.

WASHINGTON (CP) - Canadian teen Travis Biehn faces sentencing Wednesday on two bomb-related charges in a case that sparked emotional debate about whether he's a dangerous kid who hates Americans or the victim of a tough anti-terror climate.

Biehn, 17, was convicted last month in a Pennsylvania juvenile court of threatening to blow up his school and gathering the material to do it.

He faces a range of penalties from probation, community service or counselling to jail until he's 21 years old. Prosecutors say Biehn is clearly a threat to public safety.

But defence lawyer Bill Goldman said he's confident two doctors who performed psychiatric evaluations on Biehn will recommend probation at the sentencing hearing in Doylestown.

Goldman filed a motion with the judge last week to have the convictions overturned and the teen's record cleared, arguing prosecutors didn't prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.

If that doesn't work, he said, the family will appeal to a higher court on the incendiary devices conviction, a felony that will dog Biehn for life.

"The facts just weren't there to support what's happened to him," said Goldman, who accuses District Attorney Diane Gibbons of publicly trying the youth before his trial and stirring nationalistic sentiment in a bid to get re-elected.

Biehn has been in custody in affluent Bucks County near Philadelphia since his arrest June 2, days after he reported a bomb threat had been scrawled on a school bathroom.

Police raided his home, finding several kilograms of potassium nitrate, tubing, fuses, lighter fluid and other items.

His family, originally from Newfoundland, says he and father Brant often used the materials to make harmless smoke bombs and fireworks for neighbourhood gatherings and burned a tree stump in the backyard to make way for a fish pond.

The arguments were discounted by Judge Kenneth Biehn, who is no relation, at a one-day trial where supporters were stunned when the boy was led away in shackles.

Others in the community said Biehn should get a hefty jail term and then be deported.

Gibbons, who noted that Biehn wore an "I am Canadian" T-shirt to his first court appearance, told reporters he was an angry kid who would rather be living in Canada.

"He's a pretty dangerous kid," Gibbons said after Biehn's conviction last month.

"He's obviously an unhappy kid and he's obviously an angry kid. What made him angry enough to do this, I don't know."

Sentencing, she said, would be up to the judge. Gibbons did not return phone calls this week.

"I'm nervous about the hearing," said the teen's mother, Annette. "The ball is still in the judge's court and he can sentence him to prison. It would just be horrific. The child is innocent."

She said she's furious that her son has waited more than a month for sentencing instead of the 20 days stipulated for incarcerated juveniles convicted of offences.

At Biehn's trial, prosecutors admitted no one saw him write the bomb threat. But when a search of his bedroom in suburban Buckingham yielded boxes of material, they said no other conclusion was plausible than the boy's intent to make a bomb.

Police witnesses and bomb experts said the teenager had most of the elements except a large quantity of something to ignite it.

But the magnetite thermite used to burn the stump in the Biehn's backyard couldn't have done the trick, said Goldman, who has marshalled chemistry professors to back him up.

Some family supporters blamed "hysteria" generated by the Columbine school killings and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for such strong public reaction in the case.

The Biehns moved to the United States in 1997, where Brant works as a marketing director for the giant pharmaceutical company Merck.

A North Korean defector who survived 10 years in a prison labor camp said he told President Bush last month that the United States should do more to help those who flee the communist regime.

"The people who are at the camps, the [North Korean] government wants to kill them all," Kang Chol-hwan said in an interview with The Washington Times. "Instead of executing them, they kill them slowly, making them work in forced labor. That was the hardest part."

Mr. Kang, 37, said prisoners are fed very small portions of corn and salt that make it "impossible to survive" without additional food. As a result, prisoners survive by eating cooked rats and snakes, and live lizards, he said.

Nongovernmental groups estimate that as many 300,000 North Koreans are in China after fleeing across the border. About 10,000 have fled to South Korea.

Totalitarian repression and the collapse of the food production and distribution system in the late 1990s resulted in widespread starvation and forced many of North Korea's 23 million people to risk being shot as they crossed the border into China.

Mr. Kang said that when he crossed in 1992, it was easier than it was today, when triple fences and more guards have been deployed to block the defections.

Mr. Kang said North Korea is becoming more unstable as food and energy shortages are growing. At least 1 million people are thought to have starved in North Korea as the result of famine and government mismanagement since the late 1990s.

Foreign aid -- primarily from China, South Korea and Japan -- is helping to keep the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il from collapsing completely, he said.

Mr. Kang said about 200,000 North Koreans are in the prison labor camp system throughout the country. All in the camps are malnourished, and unless their will is strong, they eventually die, he said.

Mr. Kang said he agreed to meet the president after a White House National Security Council official told him that Mr. Bush had read his book and became interested in the human rights problem there.

The book, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang," is an account of Mr. Kang's 10-year prison work camp experience from age 10 to 20. He disclosed in detail the systematic torture, beatings, public executions and starvation in his camp.

Mr. Kang said he never expected to meet Mr. Bush, but on June 13, he spent 40 minutes in the Oval Office discussing North Korea and human rights and other issues.

A defector claiming to have been in the North Korean parliament says the communist state has produced a nuclear bomb and attempted to sell missiles to Taiwan, a South Korean magazine reports.

South Korean intelligence authorities declined to comment on the report in the Monthly Chosun, which said that the defector, a man believed to be in his 70s using the alias Kim Il-Do, defected to the South in May.

"North Korea has built a one-tonne nuclear bomb by using four kilogrammes of plutonium," he was quoted as telling the National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea's spy agency.

The North was now seeking to miniaturize the bomb to make it more reliable as a weapon, he reportedly said. The man claimed he had been in the North's parliament and had worked for the Marine Industrial Institute. [...]

The slaughter of hundreds of civilians by suicide bombers shows that a "genocidal war" is threatening Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most influential Shia cleric, warned yesterday.

So far he has persuaded most of his followers not to respond in kind against the Sunni, from whom the bombers are drawn, despite repeated massacres of Shia. But sectarian divisions between Shia and Sunni are deepening across Iraq after the killing of 18 children in the district of New Baghdad last week and the death of 98 people caught by the explosion of a gas tanker in the market town of Musayyib. Many who died were visiting a Shia mosque.

There are also calls for the formation of militias to protect Baghdad neighbourhoods. Khudayr al-Khuzai, a Shia member of parliament, said the time had come to "bring back popular militias". He added: "The plans of the interior and the defence ministries to impose security in Iraq have failed to stop the terrorists."

Against the wishes of the Grand Ayatollah, who has counselled restraint, some Shia have started retaliatory killings of members of the former regime, most of whom but not all are Sunni. Some carrying out the attacks appear to belong to the 12,000-strong paramilitary police commandos. Mystery surrounds many killings. A former general in Saddam Hussein's army called Akram Ahmed Rasul al-Bayati and his two sons, Ali, a policeman, and Omar were arrested by police commandos 10 days ago. Omar was released and one of his uncles paid $7,000 for the release of the other two. But when he went to get them he saw them taken out of a car and shot dead.

Fear of Shia death squads, perhaps secretly controlled by the Badr Brigade, the leading Shia militia, frightens the Sunni. The patience of the Shia is wearing very thin. But their leaders want them to consolidate their strength within the government after their election victory in January.

The radical Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia twice fought US troops, has called for restraint. "The occupation itself is the problem," he said. "Iraq not being independent is the problem. And the other problems stem from that - from sectarianism to civil war. The entire American presence causes this."

The suicide bombings show increasing sophistication. The casualty figures from Musayyib were so horrific because the bomber blew himself up beside a fuel tanker which had been stolen two days earlier and pre-positioned in the centre of the town.

The number of Iraqi civilians who met violent deaths in the two years after the US-led invasion was today put at 24,865 by an independent research team.

The figures, compiled from Iraqi and international media reports, found US and coalition military forces were responsible for 37% of the deaths, with anti-occupation forces and insurgents responsible for 9%. A further 36% were blamed on criminal violence.

Civilian deaths attributed to US and coalition military forces peaked in the invasion period from March to May 2003 - which accounts for 30% of all civilian deaths in the two-year period - but the longer-term trend has been for increasing numbers to die at the hands of insurgents.

Figures obtained last week from the Iraqi interior ministry put the average civilian and police officer death toll in insurgent attacks from August 2004 to March 2005 at 800 a month. [...]

BAGHDAD - More than two dozen doctors walked out of one of Baghdad's busiest hospitals on Tuesday to protest what they said was abuse by Iraqi soldiers, leaving about 100 patients to fend for themselves in chaotic wards.

Physicians said the troubles started when soldiers barged into a woman's wing at Yarmouk hospital, opened curtains and conducted searches as patients lay in their beds on Monday.

A 27-year-old internal medicine specialist said a soldier began intimidating and abusing him.

"Before he left he said, 'Why are you looking in disapproval?' Then he came and punched me lightly on my arm before sticking his rifle into my stomach and cocking it," the doctor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, told Reuters.

"I stayed quiet but relatives of the patients told him to calm down before pulling him out of the room. Just then, four more soldiers came in and pointed a rifle at my head. At that point I became scared and begged them to leave me alone."

Ministry of Defense officials were not available for comment on the incident despite repeated requests.

GOVERNMENT PROMISES

Iraq's mayhem has spread even to hospitals, which are overwhelmed by victims of suicide bombings and shootings whose blood is mopped up off the floor after every attack.

The new Shi'ite-led government has promised Iraqis that security forces will be built up to protect them from guerrillas, who have killed thousands of people with suicide and car bombings.

Iraqis had hoped that January elections would deliver a new era of democracy, free of the abuses committed by Saddam Hussein's security forces.

But some say the country's new security forces are too aggressive, randomly rounding up suspects and abusing them during detentions. The government says security forces are under strict orders to respect human rights.

About 30 doctors staged the strike, leaving around 100 bewildered patients behind, including a young boy of about 10.

Suffering from a gunshot wound to his leg, Muhammad Hashim lay quietly in the back of an ambulance which rushed him to Yarmouk from a town 30 kilometers southwest of Baghdad. But the strike forced his angry father to take him to another hospital.

Yarmouk, a run-down, sparsely equipped building, has treated many of Baghdad's worst cases. Overcrowded with patients and staff, it's emergency room hosts a frenzy of activity every day.

Nevertheless, doctors said they would press on with a strike to draw attention to army and security forces, whose wounded comrades are often treated at Yarmouk and other hospitals.

"We know the citizens may be a little upset but we have our rights too and we can't operate and provide a service to people if we feel under threat," said Asaad Hindi, standing outside the hospital with other physicians.

"One doctor was humiliated and sworn at. Other doctors who were afraid hid in a room. The last time this happened we complained to officials at the defense and interior ministries."

Relatives of some patients grew frustrated.

Khalid al-Girtani said he was angry because his 57-year-old father Mahmoud had been ignored all day.

"My father has a stroke and no doctor is here to see him, just look at him! This is ridiculous," he said as his father lay in bed with breathing tubes in his nostrils.

Some patients sympathized w