Ousted PM Ismail Haniyeh offers truce with Israel and is willing to have the deployment of some Fatah troops in the Gaza Strip:
- Hamas Leader Haniyeh Offers Gaza Truce (Christian Science Monitor)
GAO head says US continues to undermine itself in Iraq by unnecessarily footing the bill for much of its reconstruction and allowing money to be siphoned off to Sunni and Shi’a militias:
- GAO Comptroller: ‘Significant’ Amount Of U.S. Funds For Iraq Funneled To Sunni And Shiite Militias (Think Progress)
Lawmakers warn that the departure of Adm. William Fallon should not automatically make Bush’s Iran policy more confrontational…
…meanwhile reformist Iranians with strong Revolution creds slam the authoritarian politics of hardliners:
- Khatami: Hard-Liners Undermine Democracy (Associated Press/Wiredispatch)
- Khomeini Granddaughter Slams Hard-Liners (Associated Press/Wiredispatch)
- Iranian Ayatollah Criticizes Election Process, Warns of “Divide” (Deutsch Presse Agentur/Wiredispatch)
Further disclosure of the FBI’s abuse of national security letters elicits cries for institutional reform:
- F.B.I. Made ‘Blanket’ Demands for Phone Records (New York Times)
During the Pentagon’s disclosure of a few of its interrogations, officials admit “only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of interrogations worldwide since 2001 had been recordedâ€:
- Pentagon Cites Tapes Showing Interrogations (New York Times)
Unhappy with Congressional resistance to telecom immunity, despite an alternative proposal allowing the companies to defend themselves in court without the presence of plaintiffs, Bush calls the alternative bill “inadequateâ€:
- Bush Calls Surveillance Bill Inadequate (Washington Post)
- No Telecom Immunity In Wiretap Bill From By Dems (CNN)
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