"CHICAGO (Reuters) - A prominent Republican fund-raiser for President George W. Bush in Ohio has been charged with illegally funneling money to Bush's re-election campaign, a federal prosecutor said on Thursday.
A federal grand jury in Toledo charged Thomas Noe with making illegal contributions in the names of others to the Bush campaign and with making false statements to the Federal Election Commission"
"...Fitzgerald didn't charge Scooter Libby with mistakenly making a few unimportant false statements to the grand jury. He charged him with deliberately constructing a false story about how he learned about Valerie Plame, and then repeatedly telling this story to both FBI agents and the grand jury. That story was a lie, and it was a premeditated lie designed to cover up the fact that he had engaged in a long and persistent effort to uncover information about Joe Wilson's wife and disseminate it to reporters.
Libby could have told the truth, but then he would have had to admit his role in outing a CIA agent in order to score political points against a critic of the administration. He didn't want that campaign to become public, so he invented a cover story, repeated it under oath, and stuck to it on multiple occasions.
It's serious stuff, and that's what this is all about."
"Plucked from New York in 2001 to run the Chicago office of the Justice Department, the Brooklyn-born son of Irish immigrants, has a reputation as an incorruptible prosecutor in the mold of Chicago crime-fighter Eliot Ness, who took on Al Capone's criminal empire.
Fitzgerald has won convictions of the 1993 bombers of New York's World Trade Center and members of the Gambino crime family, and he secured an indictment of al Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden, whom Fitzgerald has said he would like to try some day."
"The 42-year-old woman used rope to hang herself across the street from some homes on a moderately busy road late Tuesday or early Wednesday, state police said.
The body, suspended about 15 feet above the ground, could be easily seen from passing vehicles.
State police spokesman Cpl. Jeff Oldham and neighbors said people noticed the body at breakfast time Wednesday but dismissed it as a holiday prank. Authorities were called to the scene more than three hours later.
'They thought it was a Halloween decoration,' Fay Glanden, wife of Mayor William Glanden, told The (Wilmington) News Journal.
'It looked like something somebody would have rigged up,' she said."
"Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked the grand jury investigating the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson to indict Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, lawyers close to the investigation tell RAW STORY.
Fitzgerald has also asked the jury to indict Libby on a second charge: knowingly outing a covert operative, the lawyers said. They said the prosecutor believes that Libby violated a 1982 law that made it illegal to unmask an undercover CIA agent."
"WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA officer's identity met for three hours Wednesday with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and adjourned for the day without announcing any action.
Fitzgerald is known to be putting the finishing touches on a two-year criminal probe that has ensnared two senior White House aides.
After the grand jury left for the day, federal prosecutors conferred for about an hour in the grand jury area of the federal courthouse.
There was no word on whether Fitzgerald planned to make any announcement or whether the grand jury planned to meet again."
"After W. was elected, he sometimes gave visitors a tour of the love alcove off the Oval Office where Bill trysted with Monica - the notorious spot where his predecessor had dishonored the White House.
At least it was only a little pantry - and a little panting.
If W. wants to show people now where the White House has been dishonored in far more astounding and deadly ways, he'll have to haul them around every nook and cranny of his vice president's office, then go across the river for a walk of shame through the Rummy empire at the Pentagon."
"Start with three Bush aides from Texas, called 'The Iron Triangle,' who firmly believe that winning is more important than telling the truth and politics is about marketing your corporate policies to a gullible public: Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh. Add a father who was the last President to control the Republican Party and its corporate backers. Take control, through meetings under the radar and coded promises, of the Christo-Right, a large slice of the nation that firmly belives that its vision of a U.S. theocracy is more important than the beliefs of our founding fathers.
Beat down your more moderate Republican opponents with racist slurs and lies by your footsoldiers. Make use of the corporate mainstream media for purposes of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation. Control the voting results in key states through intimidition and abuse of voting procedures. Make use of the political codependence of the opposing party and its willingness to help the less fortunate. Wait for natural and man-made disasters in order to employ your previously-constructed fascist policies, which include calling those who disagree traitors to the country.
Reward those who back you with tax cuts and government contracts, punish those who disagree with you by cutting government aid, dismantleing/weakening beneficial programs, and creating massive deficits. Use the deficit as an excuse to screw those without power. Take power from the states and shift unfunded financial responsibilities to them. Reward both citizens and members of the media who support your aims and cut off access to those who don't, including public meetings. Everything described above should be employed with respect to foreign countries, but more forceful methods of changing behavior could be threatened or employed. Lie, lie, lie. --Jerry Politex, October 26, 2005"
"Bush, who contends that setting a date for troop withdrawal would aid the enemy's cause, said that to fight Islamic radicals, the U.S. must work to prevent terrorist attacks before they occur, keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of 'outlaw regimes' and deny radical groups the support and sanctuary of such governments.
'State sponsors like Syria and Iran have a long history of collaboration with terrorists and they deserve no patience from the victims of terror,' he said. 'The United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them. Any government that chooses to be an ally of terror has chosen to be an enemy of civilization and the civilized world must hold those regimes to account.'"
"WASHINGTON - At least 21 detainees who died while being held in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were killed, many during or after interrogations, according to an analysis of Defense Department data by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The analysis, released Monday, looked at 44 deaths described in records obtained by the ACLU. Of those, the group characterized 21 as homicides, and said at least eight resulted from abusive techniques by military or intelligence officers, such as strangulation or "blunt force injuries," as noted in the autopsy reports."
"NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 23 - When the Army Corps of Engineers started to design a flood wall on the 17th Street Canal here in the early 1980's, deep probes found what geologists viewed as a potentially weak layer of peat soil about 15 feet below sea level in the area where the wall collapsed during Hurricane Katrina.
Yet in building the wall, corps officials acknowledge, they did not drive the steel pilings - the main anchors for the structure - any deeper than 17 feet.
Several outside engineers who have examined the designs say the decision not to hammer the pilings deeper and into firmer ground left the support for the flood wall dangerously dependent on soil that could easily have given way under the immense pressure from floodwaters. "
"I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. So they go to something that trips someone up because they said something in the first grand jury and then maybe they found new information or they forgot something and they tried to correct that in a second grand jury.
I think we should be very careful here, especially as we are dealing with something very public and people's lives in the public arena. I do not think we should prejudge. I think it is unfair to drag people through the newspapers week after week after week, and let's just see what the charges are. Let's tone down the rhetoric and let's make sure that if there are indictments that we don't prejudge."
"In January 2003, after winning election as majority leader, Frist was asked on CNBC whether his HCA holdings made it difficult for him to push for changes in Medicare, a federal health program for seniors that added to the hospital company's revenue.
'I think really for our viewers it should be understood that I put this into a blind trust,' Frist replied. 'So as far as I know, I own no HCA stock.' He added that the trust was 'totally blind. I have no control.'
Two weeks before that interview, M. Kirk Scobey Jr., a Frist trustee, informed the senator in writing that one of his trusts had received HCA stock valued at between $15,000 and $50,000."
"WASHINGTON -- Stung by his recent indictment in Texas, Tom Delay is trying to turn his legal woes into a financial boon for his re-election. The former House majority leader is using his congressional campaign to distribute to voters derogatory information about the prosecutor who brought the charges against him and to solicit donations for his re-election.
Contributors, voters and others who sign up can get regular e-mails and an electronic "toolkit" from DeLay's campaign with the latest disparaging information his legal team has dug up on Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle."
"The vice president remains Bush's most trusted political confidant. Even so, the Daily News has learned Bush has told associates Cheney was overly involved in intelligence issues in the runup to the Iraq war that have been seized on by Bush critics.
Bush is so dismayed that 'the only person escaping blame is the President himself,' said a sympathetic official, who delicately termed such self-exoneration 'illogical.'"
"The eighth hurricane to strike Florida in 15 months made landfall around 6:30 a.m. EDT near Cape Romano, an uninhabited island south of Naples in Collier County on Florida's southwest coast. Wilma moved northeast at 25 mph, and devastating winds reached Florida's east coast by midmorning.
Gusts exceeded 100 mph in suburban Fort Lauderdale and Miami, where winds howled in the bunker-like National Hurricane Center. A Coral Springs man died when a tree fell on him, Broward County spokesman Carl Fowler said."
"Top administration officials are expected to learn from Fitzgerald as early as Monday whether they will face charges as the prosecutor winds up his nearly two-year investigation, the lawyers said.
Fitzgerald could convene the grand jury as early as Tuesday to lay out a final summary of the case and ask for approval of possible indictments, legal sources said."
"As of Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005, at least 1,996 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 1,547 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers. The figures include five military civilians.
[...]
The British military has reported 97 deaths; Italy, 27; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 17; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Slovakia, three; Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, two each; Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia one death each.
Since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 1,857 U.S. military members have died, according to AP's count. That includes at least 1,438 deaths resulting from hostile action, according to the military's numbers."
"Experts think the country's increasingly regional-oriented politics will fuel the insurgency and even spread it further inside Iraq. Others put forward a simple, disquieting scenario: So long as U.S. and other foreign troops remain in Iraq, the insurgency will continue.
'It will become more chaotic,' predicted Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm, Sweden. 'It is obvious that the United States is in Iraq to stay. If this is the case, the Shiites will likely join the Sunnis in the fight.'"
