In their bid to get the Patriot Act made permanent when it comes up for renewal later this year, Bush and Attorney General Gonzales are claiming 200 terrorism convictions thanks to new post-9-11 powers. However, a review of the cases by the Washintgon Post June 12 finds that the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with terrorism. Thanks to TruthOut for passing this along:

Our reader Ivo Skoric offers the following observation on news that National Intelligence Director John Negroponte will be appointing his personal intelligence overseer at the FBI:

Now that White House will have its man inside the FBI, actually a top intelligence official inside the FBI, there will be no Mark Felt opportunities any more. No more chances for an independent inquiry into the lawfulness of the political leadership. Deep Throat will remain a part of the imperfect Nixonian history. Not to be repeated under the totalitarian Bush regime.

Jonathan Bennett of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) sends the following observations on follow-up coverage of revleations the Bush White House altered science on global climate change:

On the same day that Bush called for the Patriot Act to be made permanent when it comes up for renewal later this year (see his comments at the National Counter-Terrorism Center), finally some dissension emerges in Congress over the legislation--with the Republicans resorting to outright censorship of some Democratic critics. TruthOut sends the following clip from the AP:

Tentative moves towards peace are reported from Darfur, where the first group of some 200 internally displaced people left Kalma camp near Nyala, the provincial capital of South Darfur, on 20 trucks provided by the Sudanese government. They are part of the total 30,000 displaced people (or 6,000 families) the government plans to return to their areas of origin in West Darfur. With a population of 110,000, Kalma camp is one of the world's biggest camps for displaced people. Its inhabitants had fled attacks on their villages in 2003 and 2004 and walked for days before reaching what they felt was a safer place in South Darfur. The camp was visited by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan two weeks ago. (UNHCR, June 10) Sudan also announced that it has established its own special court to try Darfur war crimes suspects. (Xinhua, June 11) But African Union peacekeepers reported observing a new clash between government forces and the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) near El-Fasher--claims the Sudanese government denied. (PolitInfo, June 11)

Just as Bush is trumpeting claims that Syria is planning to re-intervene in Lebanon, comes a disturbing June 8 story from the New York Sun, claiming that the familiar "regime change" formula is about to be applied to Damascus:

At the State Department, the Bureau of Near East Affairs and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor have asked Congress for explicit legal authority to fund liberal opposition parties inside Syria through regional initiatives that have hitherto focused on reforming American allies such as Jordan and Egypt, two administration officials told The New York Sun.

We noted two weeks ago that police authorities in Edinburgh are refusing to grant permission for an anti-war march during the G8 Summit scheduled for the Gleneagles resort outside the city in July. Now comes this June 10 press release from Britain's Stop the War Coalition, noting that all protests will be barred from the area surrounding the resort:

An interesting commentary from Robert Fisk on watching Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven in Beirut. But we do wish the boy would learn a bit more about the part of the world he has built a career reporting from. The "Arabs of Somalia" aren't—they are Somalis. And he commits the same error again when he notes that Saladin was played by Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, stating: "and thank God the Arabs in the film are played by Arabs." Saladin wasn't an Arab, he was a Kurd. Also, nobody was wearing "sandals" in either the film or the Crusades—those went out with the Roman Empire. Finally, Fisk's presumed thesis that the merciful Islam of Scott's Saladin is the "real" or truly representative Islam ignores all the death threats that Scott received from Islamic fundamentalists when he was filming the movie in Morocco....