Galloway Senate testimony PDF goes AWOL (vnunet.com)
"The website for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs has removed testimony from UK MP George Galloway from its website. All other witness testimonies for the hearings on the Oil for Food scandal are available on the Committee's website in PDF form. But Galloway's testimony is the only document not on the site. 'I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him,' Galloway told the Committee. 'The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns.' Press representatives for the Committee had no comment."

See also: George Galloway's FULL senate testimony

Hanford likely caused cancer downwind, jury decides (Seattle Times)
"A federal jury yesterday found that the Hanford factories that produced plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal probably caused cancer in two people living in nearby towns. The decision by the jury in Spokane is a historic first for those who have accused the federal government and contractors of sickening people by secretly releasing radiation - affirming the claims of at least some 'downwinders.' A jury has never before said a U.S. nuclear-bomb plant sickened citizens living downwind."

Military pilots' reckless flying is costly to U.S. (The Seattle Times)
"Skimming low over hills in eastern Afghanistan, the 11 Marines packed into an Army Black Hawk helicopter asked for an exciting flight on an otherwise dull mission, demonstrating for visiting dignitaries how troops are sped into battle. "Fly hard," the Marines urged. The cockpit responded, "You asked for it." Climbing and swooping, the Black Hawk pilot crested a 400-foot hill then deliberately nosed into a dive so steep and abrupt that everyone inside felt weightless. A wheel chock rose off the floor like a magician's prop and flew forward into the cockpit, jamming the controls. In the horrific, tumbling crash that followed, a crew chief in the doorway died. Everyone else was injured. The $6 million helicopter was destroyed. The accident last summer was among the latest in a series of crashes in the military that were blamed on recklessness, not enemy gunfire or faulty equipment."

Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of 'mistaken identity' (Sunday Times - Times Online
"The capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as "a critical victory in the war on terror". According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists' third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as "among the flotsam and jetsam" of the organisation. Al-Libbi's arrest in Pakistan, announced last Wednesday, was described in the United States as "a major breakthrough" in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Bush called him a "top general" and "a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network". Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was "a very important figure". Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI's most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department "rewards for justice" programme."

The Secret Downing Street Memo (Cryptome)

FBI linguist won't deny 911 drug money tied to election coffers (Tom Flocco)
"Campaign coffers profit from 911, coke and courts: FBI linguist won't deny intelligence intercepts tied 911 drug money to U.S. election campaigns. Former FBI contract translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and her attorneys were ordered removed from the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse so that a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel could discuss her case in private with Bush administration lawyers. Sibel Edmonds was fired for reporting information she uncovered in the FBI's translation unit In an exclusive interview on Saturday, we asked Edmonds if she would deny that laundered drug money linked to the 911 attacks found its way into recent House, Senate and Presidential campaign war-chests, according to what she heard in intelligence intercepts she was asked to translate. "I will not deny that statement; but I cannot comment further on it," she told TomFlocco.com, in a non-denial denial. Edmonds is appealing the Bush administration's arcane use of "state secrets privilege," invoked last year to throw out her U.S. District Court lawsuit alleging retaliation for telling FBI superiors about shoddy wiretap translations and allegations that wiretap information was passed to the target of an FBI investigation." "Tom, I'm telling you that not a single newspaper covered what happened to me on Thursday when I went into court," said the exasperated translator, adding, "[Judge David] Ginsberg kicked everyone out, cut off my lawyer's arguments and told us 'we have questions to ask the governments attorneys that you cannot hear.' " Criminal evidence in Edmonds' explosive case is apparently getting too close to Washington officials, since the former contract linguist also told us she would not deny that "once this issue gets to be...investigated, you will be seeing certain [American] people that we know from this country standing trial; and they will be prosecuted criminally," revealing the content of the FBI intercepts she heard indicates that recognizable, very high-profile American citizens are linked to the 911 attacks. Edmonds implied that legislators and even lobbyists were benefiting from laundered narcotics proceeds in an earlier interview with the Baltimore Sun, "...this money travels. And you start trying to go to the root of it and it's getting into somebody's political campaign, and somebody's lobbying. And people don't want to be traced back to this money."

Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran (Michel Chossudovsky / globalresearch.ca)

Blair hit by new leak of secret war plan - (Times Online)
"A SECRET document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification."