President Bush has released the now famous August 6, 2001 memo relating to Osama's plan to attack the U.S.

.... the document said the FBI had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

The Post says the memo could be viewed as contradicting Condi Rice:

"The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers Bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group or Bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives," the document said.

Update: Here's the text of the actual document (pdf). Here it is in html. [hat tip Poppy]

Bump and Update: The militants are now threatening to kill and mutilate the American hostage, Thomas Hamill, if their terms aren't met within 12 hours.

"Our only demand is to remove the siege from the city of mosques," a spokesman said in a tape given to the Al-Jazeera television network. "If you don't respond within 12 hours ... he will be treated worse than those who were killed and burned in Fallujah."

Update: The Japanese hostages may be released within 24 hours.

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Original Post

The militant group named Ahmed Yassin brigades now claims to have 30 hostages in Iraq. They are demanding the U.S. withdraw its forces from Iraq in return for release of the hostages. The group claims to have one American and one Canadian. Canada has no forces in Iraq.

On a related note, Colorado lost a much beloved member of the Winter Park ski community Thursday with the death of Michael Bloss in Iraq.

Bloss, an instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, died in a firefight Thursday in Iraq, where the former soldier in British special services had traveled to provide security to private contractors. Back in Wales, Peter Bloss told the BBC that his son must have jumped at the opportunity to provide security in Iraq after his military experience. "As I was originally told, he was escorting these electrical workers who were working on redoing some cables or whatever, and they were attacked by a group of Iraqis," the father said. "And Michael got them to safety and then was shot dead. He spent two years in Northern Ireland during the real troubles and didn't have a scratch, and this happens now in Iraq."

Portland Indy Media has photos of the fighting in Fallujah obtained from Al Jazeera. Not for the faint of heart. Link via Skippy.

In June, 2003, Human Rights Watch released this report (pdf) of its investigation into violent acts involving U.S. troops in Fallujah:

This report documents these first two violent incidents of April 28 and 30, the facts of which continue to be deeply contested by both sides. The conclusions of Human Rights Watch’s investigation challenge some of the assertions made by the U.S. military....The report also highlights some of the difficulties of putting a powerful combat force in a law enforcement role....Human Rights Watch’s findings of excessive use of force by U.S. troops point to the need for a full, independent and impartial investigation of the al-Falluja incidents by U.S. authorities. Such an investigation should aim to determine the full circumstances that led to the killing of as many as twenty Iraqi civilians in these two incidents, and to hold accountable anyone found to have violated international humanitarian law.

Here's some background on Fallujah:

Happy First Blogiversary to Whiskey Bar - and don't miss Billmon's latest analysis of Iraq, Countdown to Failure.

I suppose it's a natural human response: eye for any eye, atrocity for atrocity. But I still find it amazing that the progressive collapse of every single justification offered for this war -- the nonexistent WMDs, Saddam's mythical connection to Al Qaeda, the craving of the Iraqi people for Western-style bourgeois democracy and Big Macs -- has had so little effect on the willingness of the American people to keep fighting it.

....the events of the past week have probably doomed whatever slender chance existed for stabilizing Iraq in the post-June 30 period. It looks like the Coalition is on a countdown to political failure. And political failure will eventually mean military failure as well, since it's hard to see how public support for an indefinite occupation can be maintained indefinitely. ...The only remaining question, it seems, is how much more blood will have to be spilled -- in Iraq, and maybe in America as well -- before the price of that failure has been paid in full.

The New York Times reports Saturday that Bush was briefed at his ranch in August, 2001 about a planned Osama attack in the U.S. :

President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday. The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford.

The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders.

Update: Rittenhouse Review has a wrap-up of editorial reviews on Condi's testimony.

It's not just Fallujah. The early Saturday AP headline is Baghdad Turns to Chaos:

Gunmen running rampant on Baghdad's western edge attacked a fuel convoy, killing a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi driver and causing a fiery explosion that sent up a pall of black smoke. A Baghdad correspondent for Al-Jazeera Arab television said that at least nine people had been killed. Another U.S. soldier was killed in an attack on a base elsewhere in the capital, and large groups of insurgents fought U.S. soldiers in two cities to the north, Baqouba and Muqdadiyah.

This week's toll so far: 46 U.S. soldiers killed. 460 Iraqis killed, 280 in Fallujah.

The Guardian judges the right-wing Iraq pundits. Christopher Hitchens is but one:

He taunted the anti-war marchers and "half the newspaper columnists in England" for their forecasts of doom, confidently claiming that all was well in liberated Baghdad, which had not "become a Stalingrad, with house-to-house resistance". The Arab streets had not risen, "to spit in the face of Zionism and imperialism". He thrilled to the news that the US and its allies had made "a clean sweep of Arab de-Stalinisation".

Anti-war demonstrators who claimed that "there would be heaps and heaps of slaughtered Iraqi civilians, and massive casualties among coalition troops" had been wrong. "Soon it will become evident to the naked eye that the city is substantially undamaged. It will also become obvious that its inhabitants waited patiently through what must have been very stressful days and nights, trusting and being able to tell that the targeting was careful and the intentions honourable."

The moral of the story: "Journalism and propoganda should be separate."

[link via Sean Paul at Agonist who is doing a great job of reporting current events in Iraq despite the paucity of official news reports.]

Diane Carman of the Denver Post interviewed Condoleezza Rice's former professor , Arthur N. Gilbert, at the University of Denver International Studies Program. Interestingly, the former Director of the Program was Josef Korbel, the father of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In fact, Korbel was the reason Rice changed her major from music to international studies.

Professor Gilbert has some flattering things to say about Condi personally, but is harshly critical of her stance on Iraq.

Gilbert is puzzled by what has become of this bright, diligent student...he believes she has failed to heed the lessons of the past. To a historian, this is unconscionable. When the Bush administration exploited the nation's anxiety over 9/11 to justify invading Iraq, Gilbert said, "it was the worst foreign policy decision made in living memory. "It worries me that with all this focus on 9/11, it's taking the grave situation in Iraq off the front page," he said, referring to the hearings. "Iraq is a catastrophe beyond measure."

The fact that Rice is capable of defending the decision to go to war is a "terrible failure of education, of picking up what your education should have led you to."....Whether Rice shared the neoconservatives' obsession with Iraq or was just being a "good soldier," Gilbert said, Iraq will be her disastrous legacy. "It was such a horrendous mistake, knowing what she should have known.... He shakes his head. Rice should have known better than to send our troops to Iraq, he said.

For anyone interested in watching this week's oral argument in the Rush Limbaugh case concerning the privacy of his medical records, you can watch it online here at his lawyer Roy Black's website. The firm has a page devoted to Rush, with transcripts, briefs, pleadings, news articles and press releases.

It's great not to be under a gag order. We think these types of webpages soon will be de rigeur in high profile cases.

Enron's former CEO Jeffrey Skilling was taken by NY police to a hospital at 4 a.m.

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was taken to a hospital early Friday after several people called police saying he was pulling on their clothes and accusing them of being FBI agents, a police source told The Associated Press. Police found Skilling at 4 a.m. at the corner of Park Avenue and East 73rd Street and determined he might be an "emotionally disturbed person," said the source, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity.Police did not charge Skilling with a crime. They took him to New York Presbyterian Hospital for observation. Hospital officials did not immediately return calls for comment.

Skilling was at two bars in Manhattan - American Trash and The Voodoo Lounge - where he allegedly ran up to patrons and pulled open their clothes, the source said. "He was shouting at them 'You're an FBI agent and you're following me,'" the source said. Skilling allegedly did the same thing to people on the street, the source added. He was with his wife at the time. Skilling was described as being intoxicated and highly uncooperative when he was approached by police, the source said.

Skilling is on bail awaiting trial on charges of insider trading and fraud-related crimes.

by TChris

Contending that the prosecution withheld key evidence, lawyers for former NBA player Jason Williams, on trial for manslaughter, want the judge to dismiss the charge. The defense also wants the judge to rule that Williams can't be tried again. Prior commentary about Williams' case is here.

On the last day of testimony in Williams' two month long trial, the prosecutor acknowledged that he had not provided the defense with photographs and notes created by the prosecution's expert witness while examining the gun Williams fired. Shortly before a prosecution expert gave rebuttal testimony, the defense learned for the first time that the expert had disassembled the gun to examine it. Whether the gun might have misfired is critical to Williams' defense, and the disassembly might have altered the weapon's condition, rendering subsequent examinations useless. The defense also contends that the examination occurred in secret, in volation of an agreement that defense experts would be present whenever the gun was tested.

The prosecutor is willing to reopen the evidence, but the defense says the prosecution deliberately withheld the information. They want the judge to dismiss the case without the possibility of retrial. The judge will hear argument on the motion Monday.