In the settlement agreement, which requires approval by a federal judge in Brooklyn, lawyers for the government said that the officials were not admitting any liability or fault. In court papers they have said that the 9/11 attacks created "special factors," including the need to deter future terrorism, that outweighed the plaintiffs' right to sue.

"A settlement like this is not a precedent, but it's a form of accountability," said Gerald L. Neuman, a law professor at Columbia University who is an expert in human rights law and was not involved in the case. "When the government finds it necessary to settle, that changes the government's incentives. It doesn't mean the government will settle future cases that it makes different calculations about," like another lawsuit, brought as a class action on behalf of hundreds of detainees, that is pending before the same judge.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said officials would not comment on the agreement. But lawyers who represent both the Egyptian, Ehab Elmaghraby, who used to run a restaurant near Times Square, and the second plaintiff, a Pakistani who is still pursuing the lawsuit, described the outcome as significant.

"This is a substantial settlement and shows for the first time that the government can be held accountable for the abuses that have occurred in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and in prisons right here in the United States," said one of the lawyers, Alexander A. Reinert of Koob & Magoolaghan.

The lawsuit accuses Mr. Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, of personally conspiring to violate the rights of Muslim immigrant detainees on the basis of their race, religion and national origin, and names a score of other defendants, including Bureau of Prison officials and guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

A 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general found widespread abuse of the noncitizen detainees at the Brooklyn center after 9/11, and in recent months, 10 of the center's guards and supervisors have been disciplined.

Mr. Elmaghraby, who spent nearly a year in detention, and the Pakistani man, Javaid Iqbal, held for nine months, charged that while shackled they were kicked and punched until they bled. Their lawsuit said they were cursed as terrorists and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one in which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed.

In a telephone interview from his home in Alexandria, Egypt, Mr. Elmaghraby, 38, said he had reluctantly decided to settle because he is ill, in debt and about to have surgery for a thyroid ailment aggravated by his treatment in the detention center.

"I wish I come to New York, to stay in the court face to face with these people," he said in imperfect English, adding that he had always expected the courts to uphold his claim. "I lived 13 years in New York, I see a lot of big cases on TV. I think the judges is fair."

The government had argued that the lawsuits should be dismissed without testimony because the extraordinary circumstances of the terror attacks justified extraordinary measures to confine noncitizens who fell under suspicion, and because top officials need governmental immunity to combat future threats to national security without fear of being sued.

The federal judge, John Gleeson of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, disagreed, writing in his decision last September, "Our nation's unique and complex law enforcement and security challenges in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do not warrant the elimination of remedies for the constitutional violations alleged here."

In all, 762 noncitizens were arrested in the weeks after 9/11, mostly on immigration violations, according to government records. Mr. Elmaghraby and Mr. Iqbal were among 184 identified as being "of high interest" to investigators and held in maximum-security conditions, in Brooklyn and elsewhere, until the F.B.I. cleared them of terrorist links. Virtually all were Muslims or from Arab countries.

That in itself is not evidence of discrimination, government lawyers wrote in the brief they filed on Friday with the Appellate Division, Second Department, because "the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the Sept. 11 attacks were Muslims from certain Arab countries" who "viewed themselves as conducting a religious war."

"There were no clear judicial precedents in this extraordinary context," the appeal brief said, calling the policy of holding people until they could be cleared "a bona fide response to a national catastrophe."

Unlike the detainees covered by the class-action lawsuit, who were held on immigration violations alone, Mr. Elmaghraby and Mr. Iqbal eventually pleaded guilty to minor federal criminal charges unrelated to terrorism: Mr. Elmaghraby to credit card fraud, Mr. Iqbal to having false papers and bogus checks. But they maintain that they did so only to escape the abuse. They were deported in 2003 after serving prison terms.

Mr. Iqbal was one of several detainees who returned to New York this year to give depositions in their lawsuits under conditions of extraordinary security, including the requirement that they be in constant custody of federal marshals and not call anybody. Mr. Elmaghraby did not come because of his ill health and because the settlement was close, said one of his lawyers, Haeyoung Yoon of the Urban Justice Center.

"His circumstances made it extremely difficult for him to continue," Ms. Yoon said. "But I also feel this is really the beginning of justice for what happened in New York and the United States after Sept. 11, the mass arrests, detention and basically disappearance of an entire community."

Mr. Elmaghraby, who had a weekend flea market stand at Aqueduct Raceway in Queens, was picked up on Sept. 30, 2001, in his apartment in Maspeth, Queens, when federal agents were investigating his landlord, apparently because years earlier the landlord, also a Muslim, had applied for pilot training. Mr. Elmaghraby says his wife, an American citizen, left him after being threatened with arrest by an F.B.I. agent when she arrived at his first court hearing.

Mr. Iqbal was arrested in his Long Island apartment on Nov. 2 by agents who were apparently following a tip about false identification cards. In his apartment they found a Time magazine showing the World Trade Center towers in flames and paperwork showing that he had been in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, picking up a work permit from immigration services.

The inspector general's report said that little effort was made to distinguish between legitimate terrorism suspects and people picked up by chance, and that clearances took months, not days, because they were a low priority. Among the abuses described in the report - many of them caught on prison videotape - were beatings, sexual humiliations and illegal recording of lawyer-client conversations.

After the report was released, Mr. Ashcroft said he made "no apologies" for finding every legal way to protect the public. Still, officials pledged to improve the system and punish abuses.

Traci L. Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said that its own investigation began in April 2004, after federal officials declined to prosecute.

She would not identify the 10 employees disciplined, but said that two had been fired and two demoted, and that the others had received suspensions ranging from 2 to 30 days. She listed the offenses as "lack of candor, unprofessional conduct, misuse of supervisory authority, conduct unbecoming, inattention to duty, failure to exercise supervisory responsibilities, excessive use of force, and physical and/or verbal abuse."

Because of the secrecy surrounding the cases, however, the taint of suspicion has been almost impossible for former detainees to dispel, their lawyers said. In one of the court hearings leading up to the return of the former detainees for depositions, for example, the federal magistrate asked what made them different from anyone else suing the government, "other than their ethnicity."

Ernesto H. Molina Jr., a Justice Department lawyer representing Mr. Ashcroft, replied, "That they came under the umbrella of a terrorist investigation, your honor."

In mid-February in Madrid, the Windsor Tower (see above) burned for over 20 hours, which led to a fire stronger and hotter than that in the WTC, but even the collapses of the Windsor Tower caused by the very strong and long-enduring fire were minimal and limited to the upper floors. If either of the WTC tower had started to collapse because of fires the collapse would have been limited to only a few of the floors and then stopped.

The impossibility of a gravitational collapse is closer seen in other documents. A collapse would produce large pieces, and does not explain reports of fine dust from concrete, huge amounts of dust and pieces of steel ejected outwards.

Destruction of the towers by explosions is clear according to the photographs and reports of the eye witnesses. In the picture below, a range of cutting charges have just exploded in the down left sector and a typical white cloud is formed outwards from the wall. Down right, explosions are seen as well. Even a flame is seen.



In video tapes taken of the so-called collapses of the WTC, more explosions of these cutting charges can be seen. The explosions advance quickly, with a gap of a couple of floors, cutting the strong steel pillars in the outer wall. The explosions are timed so that it appears that the tower collapses occur in the same timing as in a gravitational collapse. The explosions are not completely synchronized in timing, probably a few charges are triggered by radio, and other charges explode out of the impulses of one of these charges (infrared, pressure wave).

More challenging problems to the demolition men, however, were the central cores of the buildings and the 47 steel pillars more robust than the ones on the outer rounds. The pillars of the central cores were made of steel even 100 + 100 mm thick, thicker than the side armours of a battle tank. Cutting those, even with explosives, is extremely difficult. One would need to surround the whole pillars, every single pillar on every floor intended to get blasted, with powerful cutting charges. These charges would have needed to be placed in such a way that the users of the skyscrapers could not notice these preparations.

As seen in the following pictures, the cores of the towers were not distracted by thousands of powerful cutting charges but by a modern thermonuclear explosive, a small hydrogen bomb. In the picture below, a hydrogen bomb explosion, the bomb having been placed in the cellar and directed to the core, has reached the roof of the tower and the upper parts of the outer walls. On its way up the waves of fire pressure partially penetrated about 100 floors of concrete and steel. Over ten million degrees of heat caused by a hydrogen bomb sublimised all water within the concrete in a moment. Water exploded extremely quickly into 24-fold volume and totally pulverized the concrete. Even people and computers that were in the buildings disappeared turning into heat and light. That is why almost nothing of them was found in the ruins.

Burning radiation is absorbed in steel so quickly that steel heats up immediately over its melting point 1585 °C (approx. 2890 °F) and above its boiling point around 3000 C (approx. 5430 °F). In the pictures down below, super hot groups of steel pillars and columns, torn from wall by pressure wave, are sublimized. They immediately turn into a vaporized form, binding heat as quickly as possible. Bursts upwards, even visible in the picture below, are not possible for a gravitational collapse or for cutting charges which are used horizontally.

[Go to linked site to view photos and explanations]

In a speech to an audience in Chicago early in 1999 Blair labelled Saddam Hussein a "dangerous and ruthless" man, argued that genocide "can never be a purely internal matter" and insisted that "armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators."

When intervention is required: "We cannot walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with larger numbers."

As the Prime Minister once remarked, when it comes to foreign policy: "Neoconservatism is merely progressive politics by another name."

Blair's decision to stay with the US on Iraq in the face of enormous domestic political opposition was only the latest of his demonstrations of solidarity with America. Before that, and immediately after the attack on the World Trade Centre, he flew to America to offer his condolences at a Mass at St Patrick's Cathedral, and attended a joint session of Congress to demonstrate publicly Britain's determination to join America's War on Terror. Bush pledged eternal gratitude. And proceeded to ignore Blair's loyalty and his own pledge.

First came steel tariffs, hardly a proper reward for a trading partner's loyalty. Then came the awarding of contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, a process in which the Bush Administration made no distinction between nations that had supported the German-French onslaught on American policies and allies such as Britain and Poland.

There is more of this sort of thing - most lately, cancelling plans to purchase Rolls-Royce engines for new fighter planes and refusing to share sensitive technology with Britain - but you get the idea.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has not been content with mere inattention to the commercial interests of its most loyal ally. It has been equally inattentive to the Prime Minister's political interests. For more months than was decent, the White House refused to appoint an Ambassador to Great Britain, denying Blair an on-site spokesman to help to defend the Anglo-American position on Iraq. Then, earlier this month, Bush compounded that felony. The Tories are on a political upswing just as Blair is entering one of the most difficult periods of his tenure in Downing Street, during which he has continued his support for Bush's War on Terror by pushing for longer detention periods for suspected terrorists, identity cards and curbs on glorification of terror. In the excruciatingly difficult trade-off between civil liberties and national security, Blair has come down on the side of security, the Tories on the side of civil liberties. While a top Tory contingent was seeking the prestige that a visit to the White House can confer, their colleagues were voting to make America's War on Terror more difficult, and to embarrass the Prime Minister.

Bush, ignoring that prestige for the Tories can do Blair no good, played along with what can only be described as Tory hypocrisy.

Messrs Hague, Fox and Osborne were granted audiences with Administration officials, enabling them to claim that the Bush team recognises them as a future government.

At the same time as the Tory front-benchers were cosying up to the Bush team, they were signalling voters back home that they have no sympathy for Bush's foreign or domestic policies, announcing to the British press (the US press showed no interest in their visit) that they planned to remonstrate with their American hosts for the Administration's failure to sign the Kyoto protocol, and to chastise the Bush team for its inept handling of the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. The best of all worlds: recognition by the world's sole superpower, from whose leaders the Tory three then distance themselves lest they antagonise the anti-Bush, anti-war voters to whom the newly liberal Conservatives are appealing.

But it takes two to play that game. The Tories' duplicity is matched only by the Bush Administration's ingratitude. Administration officials received the Tory delegation even though its leader, David Cameron, told the Lib Dems "we both agree" on a host of issues, including Iraq. At best, he was unaware of the Lib Dems' preference for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq; at worst, he favours a policy that both the Prime Minister and the President have contended would be a gift to the terrorists.

Of course, the Bush Administration might have been forgiven its insensitivity to Blair's political interests if the visiting Conservatives are as intellectually and politically in tune with their American counterparts as their predecessors once were. But that is far from the case. Bush favours vouchers as a way of improving the education system; Cameron has announced his opposition to such a liberating reform. Bush favours personal healthcare savings accounts as a way to improve the efficiency with which medical care is provided; Cameron specifically rejects the British version, patients' passports, in favour of funnelling more money into the centralised NHS. Bush favours making room in the public square for religion; Cameron does not. Bush instinctively opposes regulations on business; Cameron groups capitalism with communism as two forms of "extremism", and calls for regulation of business to produce more socially responsible behaviour.

Harry Truman once said that, if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog. Americans who appreciate what Blair has meant to the Anglo-American relationship hope that Bush's ingratitude does not send the Prime Minister or his successors shopping for a French poodle or a dachshund.

Ben Bernanke\'s maiden Congressional testimony as chairman of the Federal Reserve was, everyone agrees, superb. He didn\'t put a foot wrong on monetary or fiscal policy.

But Mr. Bernanke did stumble at one point. Responding to a question from Representative Barney Frank about income inequality, he declared that \"the most important factor\" in rising inequality \"is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education.\"

That\'s a fundamental misreading of what\'s happening to American society. What we\'re seeing isn\'t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we\'re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.

I think of Mr. Bernanke\'s position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It\'s the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group - that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don\'t have these skills.

The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.

So who are the winners from rising inequality? It\'s not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.

A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, \"Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?,\" gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn\'t a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that\'s not a misprint.

Just to give you a sense of who we\'re talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn\'t give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it\'s probably well over $6 million a year.

Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it\'s true, but because it\'s comforting. The notion that it\'s all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it\'s just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system - and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.

The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that\'s the real story.

Should we be worried about the increasingly oligarchic nature of American society? Yes, and not just because a rising economic tide has failed to lift most boats. Both history and modern experience tell us that highly unequal societies also tend to be highly corrupt. There\'s an arrow of causation that runs from diverging income trends to Jack Abramoff and the K Street project.

And I\'m with Alan Greenspan, who - surprisingly, given his libertarian roots - has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to \"democratic society.\"

It may take some time before we muster the political will to counter that threat. But the first step toward doing something about inequality is to abandon the 80-20 fallacy. It\'s time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Markos goes off, rightly on, on an article that talks about bloggers being \"extreme\" and \"activists.\" The idea that liberal bloggers are mostly far-left blood-throwing loons has been a common misconception that\'s been repeated by the media, politicians, and pundits.

First problem, you\'re mixing up the conservative blogs with the liberal blogs, and lumping them all together, when in fact both sides are quite different.

The top conservative blogs are very conservative, and do represent the far-right of the Republican party.

But on the liberal side of the blogosphere, things are completely different. On average, I\'d say, the top liberal blogs are not far-left, nor are they conservative Democrats. The top bloggers tend to be middle of the road Democrats (or liberals) who occasionally veer left and right of Democratic center depending on the issue (I for example am very pro gay rights, but I also tend to be more hawkish on foreign and defense policy - though I don\'t appreciate being lied to and tricked into unnecessary wars costing $300 billion and thousands of American lives).

The problem the media, politicians and pundits make when calling the left side of the blogosphere \"extreme\" or \"far left\" is that they confuse anger and activism with a particular wing of politics. They\'re not the same thing. And in today\'s Democratic party, or rather, in today\'s America, to be angry at the way the country is heading, to think President Bush is a failure as a president, is not the same thing as having a particular political affiliation, let alone one to the \"extreme.\"

Those who would call us \"extreme\" confuse our extreme anger with extreme politics. And they\'re two entirely different things.

Markos, for example, was a Ronald Reagan Republican as a kid. So was I. Markos is former military, and I even worked for a Republican Senator. Sure, we\'ve both strayed from our political upbringing, but still, it\'s a bit difficult to pigeonhole us as per se \"extreme\" far lefties. I\'m sure if you go through the bona fides of other \"top\" bloggers on the left, you\'ll run the gamut of those with far-left, center left, and perhaps even \"right\" left (i.e., conservative dems).

And in fact, if you look at many of the top folks on the online left nowadays - Markos, me, David Brock, and Arianna, for example - the one thing many of us share in common isn\'t our far left politics, but rather our being former Republicans who grew fed up with far-right politics. And that fed-up-ness, I think, we share with a growing segment of America, left and center.

Once upon a time, to be a liberal activist was, perhaps, to be per se a VERY liberal activist. That just isn\'t the case any more. Certainly there are many VERY liberal activists, and more power to them, and many of them are bloggers. But today\'s Democratic/liberal/independent activist is, I believe, less motivated by a particular ideology as he/she is by a growing horror as to the direction our country is heading. If anything, rather than being \"extreme\" ourselves, we have become activists and bloggers as a RESULT of the extreme turn that Republican politics has taken over the past few decades, and the extreme direction it has taken our country.

I\'m jet lagging massively, so I may not be enunciating this as clearly as I\'d like, but journalists, politicians and pundits are naive and old-thinking if they believe that liberal bloggers are per se \"liberal,\" meaning to the far-left extreme of the Democratic party. I do believe that only a few of us, if any, are to the far right of the Democratic party, and thank God for that - but only because conservative Democrats aren\'t Democrats at all. Conservative Democrats are pretty much akin to far-right Republicans. The mainstream of Democratic activists is (are?) politically mainstream and lefty Democrats (i.e, a mix). Whereas the mainstream of Republican party activists are far-right and Christian-right (no mix at all).

Thus, please don\'t confuse the current make-up of the Republican party and its activists, and its polarization of power to the far-right extreme, with the current make-up of the Democratic and Independent parties and its activists, with its polarization to the very very very angry of all political stripes.

And somewhere down the line, I\'m going to write a second piece about how \"angry\" does not equal \"crazy.\"

Prosecutors will ask federal Judge Larry Burns to impose the statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The sentencing memorandum includes the California Republican's "bribery menu" on one of his congressional note cards, "starkly framed" under the seal of the United States Congress.

The card shows an escalating scale for bribes, starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value required a $50,000 bribe.

The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went above $20 million.

At one point Cunningham was living on a yacht named after him, "The Dukester," docked near Capitol Hill, courtesy of a defense company president.

'I Broke the Law'

Cunningham was a member of the House Appropriations Committee from 1998 to 2005 and served on the subcommittee that provides funding for the Defense Department.

One of the defense contractors, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty Friday to giving Cunningham more than $1 million in bribes of cash, cars and antiques over four years in exchange for more than $150 million in government contracts for his company, MZM Inc., in Washington, D.C. "I take full responsibility for my actions," Wade told Judge Ricardo Urbina. The four corruption charges carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.

The government's sentencing memorandum against Cunningham also details, with photographs included, the luxury vehicles, yachts, homes, antique furniture and Persian rugs that Cunningham received as bribes.

"In my life, I have had great joy and great sorrow," Cunningham said after admitting his crimes. "And now I know great shame."

Cunningham pleaded guilty Nov. 28 and apologized in a tearful resignation statement. "I broke the law, concealed my conduct and disgraced my office," he said. "I know that I will forfeit my freedom, my reputation, my worldly possessions, most importantly, the trust of my friends and family."

His lawyers say he has since cooperated fully with the widening government investigation of congressional bribery, and they will ask the judge to go outside the sentencing guidelines and impose a lighter sentence than 10 years.

Four days after blasting 78-year-old hunting partner Harry Whittington in the face, neck and chest with birdshot, vice president Dick Cheney emerged from his fortified bunker to make a snarling, unapologetic taped announcement to Fox News' Brit Hume that basically amounted to what he did on his own time was his own business. Dick said shooting Harry the previous Saturday was one of the worst days of his life -- which is quite an admission considering the fate of those who have been in Dick's crosshairs over the years.

Harry, no longer Dick's friend but a mere "acquaintance," emerged from the hospital two days later to apologize to the media for the delay he had caused by having an operation, a heart attack and a shotgun pellet in his heart. Harry begged Dick and his family to forgive him for the trouble he and his family had caused them. "We all assume certain risks in whatever we do, whatever activities we pursue," Harry said. "And regardless of how experienced, careful and dedicated we are, accidents do and will happen -- and that's what happened last Friday..."

Last Friday? Now -- if you're a reporter, wouldn't you be a teeny bit interested in whether the shooting occurred on Friday rather than Saturday? Wouldn't you wonder why it took three hours to get Harry to a hospital 20 minutes away when Dick's ambulance was on the scene, why it took four days -- perhaps five -- for Dick to go public? Perhaps it would even cross your mind that Dick might be waiting to see which story he should peddle. If Harry died, he could send ranch owner Katharine Armstrong out to say she had seen it all and it was poor, dead Harry's fault. If he survived, Dick would suck it in and somberly tell a sympathetic Hume -- "Ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry..."

But even then, Dick and Katharine couldn't keep their stories straight. Katharine first said she was sitting in a car and wasn't aware of an accident until she saw the Secret Service guys running toward the group. Then she remembered she was right there at Dick's elbow and saw the whole thing, a bonafide eye-witness and the only one qualified to deal with the media. According to Katharine, there was "zero, zippo" drinking that day, but then she remembered there might have been a "few" beers consumed, and even Dick admitted he "popped a top" at the pre-hunt barbeque.

Members of the press corps might wonder why Dick chose to return to the house and fix himself a cocktail rather than accompany his victim to the hospital. They might also be interested in comments made by Dick's Secret Service agents who say Dick was "clearly inebriated" when he bagged Harry. Capitol Hill Blue's Doug Thompson reports, "According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up."

Thompson says the agents reported that members of the hunting party, including Dick, consumed alcohol "before and during the hunting expedition," and their report also noted that "Cheney exhibited 'visible signs' of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions."

But reporters don't ask such questions in Dick's world. Those who are not house-broken are, at a minimum, paper-trained. They don't ask questions in the house or even close to the house for fear of tracking the resulting mess in on the rug. Their yapping and barking on-camera at White House press secretary Scott McClellan concerned just one issue -- they should have been told first. "We have cell phones," they wailed. "We have Blackberries! We're the press corps -- we should have been given the story before a local newspaper!"

There's a big difference between being "given" a script to copy and hitting the investigative trail to dig up what really happened. Apparently, no one in the mainstream media dared question Dick's final taped account. Not one questioned the 14-hour delay in the Kenedy County Sheriff's Department getting access to Dick nor wondered why the Sheriff would send a deputy to dutifully jot down Dick's account and take depositions from other parties without asking pertinent questions about alcohol consumption, or why Dick can't get it straight whether he "turned right," as he said several times, or "counter-clockwise" as he is saying now.

While reporters were frenziedly chasing their tails, Internet reporter Joseph Ehrlich wrote an excellent piece wherein he addressed both questions and answers in this tangled affair. Ehrlich meticuously laid out the timeline, the elaborate behind-the-scenes machinations, and Dick and Katharine's ridiculous efforts to cover up what actually occurred, to include having the Secret Service bump the time of the shooting to 5:50 PM to put the sun in Dick's eyes when he pulled the trigger. Ehrlich even quotes Harry's daughter who, in a strange revelation, said that after her father was shot, he lay there for such a long time "he was unsure whether he was being taken to the hospital or the morgue."

Such a ghoulish remark is more than passing strange, yet the media failed to pick up on it. Little attention has been given to poor Harry other than he is a 78-year-old Austin attorney, and the victim of yet another Dick Cheney "accident."

In truth, Harry, like those with whom he cavorts, is a multi-millionnaire, and a major Republican player and donor. Bush appointed Harry to chair the Texas regulatory Funeral Service Commission in 1999, just in time to force the commission to settle a whistleblower lawsuit shortly before the 2000 election. Harry managed to keep Bush out of the courts and out of jail in the burgeoning Funeralgate scandal that theatened to engulf not only Bush but Robert Waltrip, owner of Service Corportion International (SCI), the largest funeral corporation in Texas; Joe Albaugh, Bush crony, campaign manager and former FEMA director; Texas Attorney General (now Senator) John Cornyn; and, of course, Bush counsel (now U.S. Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales.

Dick's world is an incestuous world whose core is Texas power and money -- lots of it. As Sydney Blumenthal writes in Salon, both Dick and Karl Rove literally owe their present positions to Katharine and her family. "Anne Armstrong, Katharine's mother, was on the board of Halliburton that made Dick Cheney its chief executive officer," Blumenthal said. "Tobin Armstrong, Katharine's father, financed Karl Rove & Co., Rove's political consulting firm." Blumenthal says Katharine is a lobbyist for Houston law firm Baker Botts, founded in the 19th Century by the family of James A. Baker, former secretary of state, Poppy Bush's buddy and the architect of the 2000 presidential coup d`etat that gave the presidency to Bush and Dick.

The people who inhabit Dick's world possess such power they can silence an entire White House press corps in mid-yelp -- such arrogance they can turn away law enforcement officers and delay an investigation until a more convenient time, even though a man has been shot in the face. Bill Moyers, formerly of PBS, now President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, very succinctly sums them up...

"It is a Dick Cheney world out there," Moyers writes, "--a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together, dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together, all the while carving up the world according to their own interests."

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net

Now, a short, oversimplified history of money is in order. At the end of World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement stipulated that the U.S. dollar would be redeemable in gold – for foreigners. In other words, any foreign government or business that got antsy about the value of the dollar and held a bunch of them could redeem them for gold at a predetermined rate.

Thanks to the spendthrift ways of our federal government, by the Nixon administration Europeans had such large claims against American gold that President Nixon unilaterally abrogated the agreement. No, he said, you can't redeem your dollars in gold, and the value of the dollar will simply float on the open market.

Shortly thereafter, another agreement was made with the oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf that in exchange for protection, they would always sell their oil for dollars. Thus was born the petrodollar. This allowed the U.S. to continue its spendthrift ways and, in effect, pass on its inflation to the rest of the world. The dollar was and remains the world's reserve currency.

Now, if the Iranian market in euros is successful, then more and more people might decide that they don't need to hang on to their dollars and might start dumping them for euros or some other currency or commodity. That could, in effect, toss inflation back to the U.S. – and not just creep-along inflation, but sudden and painful inflation.

Unlike foreigners, Americans are captive of legal-tender laws. These laws say you have to accept the Federal Reserve note as payment for all debts and goods and services, no matter how worthless it becomes. Remember, a fiat currency like ours, backed up by nothing, has no inherent value. Its value is determined only by its purchasing power. If the U.S. currency is greatly devalued, Americans might find themselves in the same position as the German people in the old Weimar Republic.

If you get a Social Security check for $400 and all of a sudden it will only buy you $50 worth of goods and services, the U.S. government can say to you, "Tough beans, peasant." Remember, the more devalued a currency becomes, the higher the prices people will demand. The poor Germans in the 1920s got to the point where they needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough inflated currency to the market to buy a loaf of bread.

Now, a respected Arab journalist does not believe that America's hostility to Iran has anything to do with the bourse, scheduled to open in March. Her reason for that statement is that she is sure Bush has no understanding whatsoever of world financial affairs. I tend to agree with her. I think our hostility toward Iran is made in the same place our hostility toward Iraq was made – in Israel.

Nevertheless, we as Americans should be more concerned about the fate of the dollar than the fate of Iran or Israel. The present monetary system, based on a fiat dollar and a privately owned central bank misnamed the Federal Reserve System, is a handy way to rob the American people of the fruit of their labor.

Even creeping inflation that we have suffered since World War II in effect steals money from our paychecks, our pension checks, our savings accounts and our insurance policies. Many years ago, when I bought a $10,000 life-insurance policy, $10,000 was a good sum of money. Today it will buy about $2,000 worth of goods and services. The federal process of deficit spending and monetizing the debt has stolen the remaining $8,000.

The federal deficit and the huge trade deficits do mean something. They mean we are heading for big trouble that we won't be able to bomb our way out of.

© 2006 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

DeStefano, whose administration has worked on the deal since December, said Wednesday that Rell shouldn't hesitate, even if Chávez is a harsh critic of the Bush administration.

"She's clearly more concerned about George Bush's politics than about the needs of families in Connecticut," DeStefano said.

But Rell, a Republican who has kept her distance from President Bush, said she is awaiting an opinion from Attor-ney General Richard Blumenthal as to the legality of Connecticut's involvement.

"If there is no problem, if it's perfectly OK, it may be something that we would like to pursue as a state," Rell said. "Anytime we can get reduced oil we would like to take advantage of it."

Rell is the latest elected official in the Northeast to struggle with how to respond to the largesse of Chávez, who since last fall has enjoyed filling a need unmet by the Bush administration – helping the U.S. poor cope with increased oil prices.

Chávez' offer of low-priced oil in Boston, Philadelphia, New York and other cities has been derided as grandstanding by congressional critics, but welcomed by those who oversee dwindling fuel-oil assistance programs.

By consulting the Democratic attorney general, the Republican governor will have some political cover for her eventual decision, which is sure to become a gubernatorial issue no matter what she decides.

If she endorses the oil deal, Rell is setting up DeStefano to claim credit for securing 4.8 million gallons of oil that would help 24,000 families each save a couple hundred dollars this heating season.

A negative response would leave Rell open to criticism that she kept aid from the poor, perhaps for fear of insulting Bush.

DeStefano, who is competing with Stamford Mayor Dannel P. Malloy for the Democratic nomination, is already critical.

"Instead of putting pressure on Big Oil, which is enjoying record profits, she is standing in the way, parroting Bush," DeStefano said. "To me that is inexplicable."

Rell, who called the popularly elected Chávez a "dictator," raised national and international political concerns in her letter requesting a legal opinion from Blumenthal.

"For Connecticut to accept discounted oil from, essentially, the government of Venezuela may be extremely distasteful because of that nation's strident criticism of the United States government," Rell said in her letter. "On the other hand, the U.S. already imports plenty of oil from Venezuela at regular prices."
Chávez led a failed coup attempt in 1992, then was elected president in 1998 – and quickly became antagonistic to the United States. He has courted Cuba, Iraq and Libya and may be best known to the American public as the leader Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson wanted the U.S. to assassinate.

To help with aid to the Connecticut poor, Venezuela would provide the oil at a 40 percent discount to Citizens Energy, the nonprofit corporation run by former U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II in Boston. Citizens would sell the oil at market prices, then use the proceeds to underwrite energy aid to Connecti-cut families. Citizens has done similar deals throughout the Northeast.

Kennedy is poised to come to Connecticut to launch the program with representatives of Citgo, a Vene-zuelan oil subsidiary, said DeStefano's spokesman, Derek Slap.

To administer the aid, they need the participation of 12 private nonprofit agencies that already administer a state energy assistance program. Such participation would be expedited by Rell's endorsement.

DeStefano said Rell's focus should be local, not national or international.

"To start talking about 'dictator Chávez,' I mean it's bizarre," he said. "Rell goes to work every day in a city with the second-highest child poverty rate."