A powerful banking group with close links to the Pentagon, which has also invested money on behalf of the Bin Laden family, is in talks to bail out beleaguered Daily Telegraph owner Conrad Black.

The revelation suggests that Britain's bestselling broadsheet - coveted by rival newspaper barons because of its political influence - may not go under the hammer after all, as Lord Black tries to quell a shareholder rebellion in the face of allegations that he and several acolytes pocketed millions of dollars that was not theirs to take. . . .

The Carlyle Group, known as the Ex-Presidents Club because of the number of former world leaders it employs, is considering taking a stake in Hollinger International, which owns the Telegraph titles, the Jerusalem Post and the Chicago Sun-Times, according to those close to the firm.

'It's unusual for a group of assets to come to the market like this. We would look to sell off the Jerusalem Post and Hollinger's stake in the New York Sun. Conrad [Black] would have to step out of management, but that does not mean he would have to let go of his equity stake,' said a Carlyle source. 'Ideally, we would look to take a 25-40 per cent stake. That would allow us to put people on the board,' the source added. . .

Carlyle, - which employs former Prime Minister John Major as a director, boasts George Bush Snr and his Secretary of State, James Baker, as advisers, and is headed by Frank Carlucci, Ronald Reagan's Defence Secretary - has invested in media firms previously. The group once owned 40 per cent of France's Le Figaro, and more recently acquired part of French conglomerate Vivendi's publishing assets.

It also part-owns Qinetiq, the Government's privatised defence research laboratories, and CSX Lines, a logistics firm that specialises in shipping heavy equipment for the military. In the past, Carlyle has owned Vinnell, a company that trained the Saudi army.

[Carlyle], despite being only 15 years old, manages more than $14 billion in funds on behalf of investors such as George Soros and the Bin Laden family. . .

Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger sit on the Hollinger board. Black himself is a member of the secretive Bilderberg group, an organisation comprising the world's leading businessmen and politicians, which some have accused of being an alternative world government.

Kean’s Commission has selected four representatives as its review team to “examine the core group of Presidential Daily Brief articles made up of those that are plainly critical to the Commission’s investigation . . .

Chairman Kean, Vice Chairman and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, and Staff Executive Director Philip Zelikow will review Bush’s sensitive PDBs. . . . Only Kean, Hamilton, Gorelick, and staff member Zelikow may view their own notes--and only at the White House.

Jamie Gorelick currently serves as a Bush Administration Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) National Security Advisory panel member and also as a member of President Bush’s Review of Intelligence panel, thus providing the CIA with a direct or circuitous liaison on the Commission while also affording the Bush Administration with a direct link to the Commission and its flow of evidence procurement. . . .

Commission member and former congressman Tim Roemer revealed on a C-Span Washington Journal broadcast on Monday that the Commission had started to take testimony under oath behind closed doors, but not at the public hearings, indicating that the Commission was interviewing key players--requiring sworn testimony as opposed to current public hearings involving individuals unconnected to the actual attacks. . . .

Roemer told TomFlocco.com that “9-11 insider trading is on our list of issues to be covered and we plan to deal with it.”  This, when we asked whether the commission would investigate the billions in pre-attack profits of death via criminal insider trading in world-wide securities markets. . . .

9/11 Citizens Watch Co-Founder Kyle Hence said "NSA 'minders' have been allowed to sit in on interviews and testimony taken by Commission staff; and Chairman Kean has been unwilling or unable to refuse this potential intimidation of witnesses." . . .

Former Georgia Senator and Commission member Max Cleland did not attend the hearing.  Speculation by more than a few surrounded whether the Vietnam War hero was asked to stay home for remarking on CNN that “President Bush was scamming America” by denying public access to sensitive 9/11 intelligence documents in what amounts to a murder investigation.

It has emerged two intelligence warnings were ignored that the British Consul and the HSBC Bank in Istanbul were prime Al Qaeda targets. The warnings came from the CIA and Mossad. . . .

President Bush was in London when the Istanbul attacks happened. He . . . immediately ordered Americans to be once more warned they are facing an unprecedented security threat.

Over 50 people died and 700 were injured, many seriously, in the Istanbul truck bombings.

Both targets had been identified by the CIA and Mossad – as “soft targets” and in need of “urgent protection upgrading”.

Their first warnings had been passed on to MI6 last May.

The second warning came only a week ago after suicide bombers partly destroyed two Istanbul synagogues.

British Consul-General Robert Short was working on a security review for MI6 when he died in the bombing.

His report was due to be in the hands of MI6 chief Richard Dearlove this week.

So sensitive were its contents that Short had asked his personal assistant, Lisa Hallworth, 38, to personally encrypt it after typing the document. She also died in the blast.

They were together in Short’s temporary office on the first floor of the consulate gatehouse when the car bomber – in a green van bearing the logo of a local food catering company – detonated his 500-pound bomb only yards from them. . . .

Short, fluent Turkish speaker, he had developed good connections with Turkish intelligence, MIT.

Was there a more sinister reason for the failure of Turkish intelligence to anticipate the attacks virtually on the doorstep of its own headquarters?

Mossad analysts have told me that help may have come from Absar al-Islam. It has links with a shadowy group called Great Islamic Raiders of the Orient (IBDA-C). Backed by Iran, this group is violently anti-Christian.

Washington ordered its own consulate in the city to relocate to the suburbs. A team of US security experts quickly turned the building into a secure fortress, bristling with bomb-proof windows and a range of sophisticated electronic defences to warn of and repel any attack. All approaches were heavily guarded.

But the British consulate – two buildings and a gate lodge – was not similarly protected. Its entrance was directly on the road and, though guarded, its metal gate offered only token resistance to a truck bomber.

The main buildings were being renovated.

With the Bush visit to London already about to begin, last Tuesday Mossad passed on details to the MI6 officer at the British embassy in Ankara.

An official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7. . . Kokal's body was found at the bottom of a 20 foot window well, 8 floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters near the 23rd and D Street location. Kokal's death . . . has been virtually overlooked by the major media. . . .

Kokal's INR bureau was at the forefront of confronting claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Washington police have not ruled out homicide as the cause of his death. Kokal was not wearing either a jacket or shoes when his body was found. . . .

State Department officials dispute official State Department communiqués that said Kokal was not an analyst at INR. People who know Kokal told the French publication Geopolitique that Kokal was involved in the analysis of intelligence about Iraq prior to and during the war against Saddam Hussein.

Another INR official, weapons expert Greg Thielmann, said he and INR were largely ignored by Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and his deputy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud neo-conservative who recently became Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser. Kokal's former boss, the recently retired chief of INR, Carl W. Ford, recently said that Bolton often exaggerated information to steer people in the wrong directions.

A former INR employee revealed . . . it would have been impossible for Kokal to have gained entry to the roof on his own. INR occupies both a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on the sixth floor that has no windows and a windowless structure on the roof that has neither windows nor access to the roof, according to the former official. The other windows at the State Department have been engineered to be shatter proof from terrorist bomb attacks and cannot be opened.

INR and other State Department officials report that a "chill" has set in at the State Department following Kokal's defenestration. A number of employees are afraid to talk about the suspicious death.

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On a related false paradigm note, the fascists have gotten so out of control that the socialists have to come and fix the problem:

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL SEEKS INVESTIGATION OF MIAMI POLICE...

Washingtonian magazine's Chuck Conconi recalls a joke told recently by Attorney General John Aschcroft:

Mr. Ashcroft is spending the day at an elementary school and after the morning session fields questions from the children. Johnny raises his hand.

"Mr. Ashcroft," he pipes up, "I have three questions for you: Why haven't we gotten Osama bin Laden yet? Why haven't we gotten Saddam Hussein yet? And doesn't the Patriot Act infringe on our civil liberties?"

Before Mr. Ashcroft can answer, the recess bell rings and the children run out to the playground. When they return and sit back down, Susie raises her hand.

"Mr. Ashcroft," she said, "I have five questions for you: Why haven't we gotten Osama bin Laden yet? Why haven't we gotten Saddam Hussein yet? Doesn't the Patriot Act infringe on our civil liberties? Why was recess 20 minutes early today? And where's Johnny?"

Back in May of this year, the House of Representatives passed the "Child Medication Safety Act of 2003" by an OVERWHELMING margin of 425-1. This much needed legislation would END the practice of public schools forcing parents to drug their children with Ritalin and other psychotropic substances. Currently, in many states, parents must face the awful choice of either complying with school officials and drugging their children, or being forced to withdraw their children from school.

The Child Medication Safety Act (S. 1390) was introduced in the Senate in July, BUT HAS YET TO BE PASSED. Senator John Ensign, who introduced S. 1390 states that the bill is "designed to end the practice of forcing or coercing the psychotropic medication of children as a condition of attending school." . . .

It has been documented that Ritalin and other psychotropic drugs have the same damaging effects on the brain as cocaine. Schools should not force these drugs on parents and children!

Call both of your Senators and urge them to pass S. 1390 before another child is forced to take mind-numbing drugs against their parents’ wishes. Senate switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Former Sen. Max Cleland, a Democrat, has been nominated by President Bush to serve on the board of the Export-Import Bank.

As a result he will have to leave the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks. . . .

Cleland has been one of the more outspoken members of the commission, accusing the administration of delaying access to vital documents in an effort to run out the clock on its investigation.

The FBI's use of the Patriot Act to justify its involvement in a non-terrorism case in Las Vegas can be traced to the handiwork of Senate Democrats.

Without specifically mentioining the Vegas case, Monica Goodling, DOJ's deputy director for public affairs, cited for NewsMax Section 314 of the controversial law, which says the act can be applied to activities "that may involve terrorist acts or money-laundering activities." . . .

Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, had already introduced a separate measure to extend the reach of the federal authorities in money-laundering cases. When the Patriot Act was up for debate in the weeks after 9/11, Sarbanes, with the backing of then Senate plurality leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., had his previous proposal incorporated into the new terrorist legislation. . .

This bill makes it a crime to use any false or misleading information in a domain name or email account application, and then send an email. That would make a large fraction of hotmail users instant criminals.

It also makes it a crime to remove or alter information in message headers in ways that would make it harder for a police officer to determine who had sent the email. Anonymizers will be illegal as soon as this bill becomes law.

There are MANY, MANY other things wrong with it -- including the fact that most of its provisions apply to *ALL* commercial email, not just BULK commercial email -- and that it takes zero account of the First Amendment, attempting to list what topics someone can validly send messages about, while outlawing all other topics that relate to commercial transactions.

If it passes, I think I can make a criminal out of just about any company. Companies are liable for spam that helps them, even if they had no part in sending it.

Read the bill yourself: http://news.com.com/pdf/ne/2003/FINALSPAM.pdf And weep. And then call your Congressman.

The closing ceremony constituted the signing of a document by the presidents and prime ministers which affirmed the new integrated arrangement between our countries. Shivers went through my body as I realized this was a new "Hemispheric Constitution."