One change already has been announced: Chief of staff Andy Card officially will leave April 14 and is being replaced by Josh Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Under one scenario, Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, would replace McClellan, Republican officials said.

But other GOP strategists said they believe McClellan's position is secure because of his close relationship with President Bush going back to Texas. McClellan was a communications aide to the president when he was governor of the Lone Star state.

Despite the administration's public comments of support for Snow, sources inside and outside the White House have said Bush has been ready to replace the treasury chief for the past year and has been searching for an "acceptable alternative."

Others are expected to survive the shake-up. Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, Vice President Dick Cheney's team, and Joe Hagin, Bush's deputy chief of staff, likely will stay, administration sources said.

The White House press office declined to comment on personnel decisions.

The changes would come during a tough stretch of time for the president, whose poll numbers have dropped, in particular because of growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq.

Focus on Congress, communications

In his new role as chief of staff, Bolten is focusing on improving White House communications and legislative affairs to regenerate the administration's message and performance, said sources familiar with his thinking.

"There are two positions he is anxious to turn -- Scott's position and legislative affairs," said a source with close ties to the White House.

"It's not about who but what is broken. He does not view it ... in terms of personalities, that's the way Josh thinks," another source said. "Josh keeps his counsel fairly close. He's very logical, and the logical place to start looking is communications."

Numerous Republican officials said the discussion is focused on McClellan.

"There is a lot of dissatisfaction with the state of communications, the daily communication from the podium, the congressional communications and strategic communications from both in and outside the White House," said one White House insider.

Another such insider said, "It is something the president would have to decide directly. While Josh Bolten wouldn't have to get permission to get rid of others, the president really likes McClellan. They go back all the way back to Texas. And Scott has no real intention of leaving."

Several Republican officials said one idea under consideration would be to have Bartlett take over McClellan's spot.

"Dan would have to let go of significant responsibilities. All the chairs would shift if that happened," said one GOP official.

Sources with close ties to White House Communications Director Nicolle Wallace dismissed speculation she might leave. Recent reports revealed her husband, who has post at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, moved to New York last week.

'Elder statesman-type' sought for legislative liaison

Bolten is looking for a strong "elder statesman-type" to reach out to lawmakers, and many Republicans have complained the White House has dealt with Congress "as a transmitter but not receiver."

"The Bush White House has dealt with Congress in a highhanded way, and people are angry. But there is no magic cure," said one Republican official.

The future of Candida Wolff, head of legislative affairs, is unclear.

Many White House insiders said "she is not the problem," describing her as a "nice, smart, hard worker," but they said she is "too junior" to turn around the administration's poor relationship with some senior Republicans.

Some prominent names mentioned for the position include former Rep. Bill Paxon, a New York Republican, and former Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican.

Paxon, a lawmaker from 1989-99, is described as "someone everyone likes" and "after 10 years or so out of the spotlight might be ready to roll again."

Gramm, who stepped down in 2002, is described as "someone who would be a great play for the base but not a strong on the communications front."

Sources close to former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tennessee, and GOP adviser Vin Weber are no longer on the short list for legislative liaison.

Sources: Dissatisfaction with Snow not new

GOP sources said that even before the change in chief of staff was announced, Bush had been trying to find a replacement for Snow.

A couple of weeks ago, Bush offered the job to Time Warner Chairman and CEO Dick Parsons, who turned down it, sources said. (Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.)

Sources said the White House has had difficulty getting someone to accept the position.

Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick has expressed interest but is said not to be close to the president. Gramm has also expressed interest.

While those close to Snow dismiss talk of his imminent departure as rumor, one acknowledged "he's not going to be turning down the lights in January 2009 for the next guy to come in. ... He's going to leave at some point in time when it makes sense, but now he's focusing on his work."

But many White House and Republican officials are not so diplomatic.

"You've got an economic team that can't communicate about the economy. You've had two terrible secretaries. He's seen as really bad," an official said.

We're about to find out. "United 93" is the first feature film to deal explicitly with the events of September 11, 2001, and is certain to ignite an emotional debate before and after it opens on April 28. Is it too soon? Should the film have been made at all? More to the point, will anyone want to see it? Other 9/11 projects are on the way as the fifth anniversary of the attacks approaches, most notably Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," starring Nicolas Cage, opening Aug. 9. But as the harbinger, "United 93" will take most of the heat, whether it deserves it or not.

The real United 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field after 40 passengers and crew fought back against the terrorists who had hijacked the plane. Writer-director Paul Greengrass ("The Bourne Supremacy") has gone to great lengths to be respectful in his depiction of what occurred, proceeding with the film only after securing the approval of every victim's family. "Was I surprised at the unanimity? Yes. Very. Usually there are one or two families who are more reluctant," Greengrass writes in an e-mail. "I was surprised and humbled at the extraordinary way the United 93 families have welcomed us into their lives and shared their experiences with us." His team's research was meticulous. "They even went so far as to ask what my mother had been wearing on the plane," says Carole O'Hare, whose 79-year-old mother, Hilda Marcin, died on the flight. "They were very open and honest with us, and they made us a part of this whole project." Universal, which is releasing the film, plans to donate 10 percent of its opening weekend gross to the Flight 93 National Memorial Fund. That hasn't stopped criticism that the studio is exploiting a national tragedy. O'Hare thinks that's unfair. "This story has to be told to honor the passengers and crew for what they did," she says. "But more than that, it raises awareness. Our ports aren't secure. Our borders aren't secure. Our airlines still aren't secure, and this is what happens when you're not secure. That's the message I want people to hear."

It's unclear whether Americans will pay $9.50 to hear it. The A&E cable movie "Flight 93" drew 5.9 million viewers in January, the highest-rated show in the channel's history. But movies are different. "I don't want anyone to go who doesn't want to have this experience," says Adam Fogelson, Universal's president of marketing. "But when I see what's on screen, I feel comfortable that a lot of people will." Audiences seem to be split on the issue. "I don't think that's a movie I really want to see," says Jackie Alvarez, 73, of San Ramon, Calif., after seeing the trailer. "It gave me the creeps. It's way too soon." But 17-year-old Antoine Richardson of Memphis, Tenn., is looking forward to it. "I don't think it's exploitative or too soon," he says. "It helps us remember." As if any of us could forget.

Their names and ages were not immediately released.

"There were two individuals that were placed in a car -- two kids -- and the car was set on fire," police Sgt. Lee Sands said.

"We believe the person responsible for this crime is the children's father."

The 54-year-old father was found near the SUV with severe burns on his face, hands and legs, authorities said.

He was hospitalized in critical condition and being questioned by police.

Three justices who voted not to hear the case - Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and John Paul Stevens, along with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. - filed an unusual opinion explaining their position. They noted that Mr. Padilla, who is now out of military custody and awaiting trial in federal district court in Miami on terrorism-related charges, was entitled to a criminal defendant's full range of protections, including the right to a speedy trial.

Most significant, the three justices warned the administration that the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, stood ready to intervene "were the government to seek to change the status or conditions of Padilla's custody."

The comment was clearly a reference to the sequence of events last fall, when the administration, days before it was due to file a brief in response to Mr. Padilla's Supreme Court appeal, announced that it had obtained a grand jury indictment and planned to shift him to civilian custody.

The administration then filed a brief arguing that the appeal had to be dismissed as moot, since Mr. Padilla was getting the relief he requested when he filed his original petition asking to be released from custody or charged with a crime.

The Miami indictment charges him with providing material support to terrorists as part of a cell that is said to have sent money and recruits overseas. He is being held without bail; a trial is scheduled for Sept. 9.

In simply turning down Mr. Padilla's appeal, Padilla v. Hanft, No. 05-533, the court did not make a formal determination that the case was moot. But Mr. Padilla's transfer from military custody to the civilian justice system rendered his legal claims, "at least for now, hypothetical," Justice Kennedy said in the explanatory opinion, which the two other justices signed.

"Even if the court were to rule in Padilla's favor, his present custody status would be unaffected," Justice Kennedy said.

In shifting Mr. Padilla to civilian custody, the government said that it reserved the right to redesignate him as an enemy combatant and send him back to military custody. His lawyers argued that for that reason, the Supreme Court should hear his case.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed, filing an opinion on Monday dissenting from the court's refusal to hear the case.

"Nothing the government has yet done purports to retract the assertion of executive power Padilla protests," Justice Ginsburg said, adding that "nothing prevents the executive from returning to the road it earlier constructed and defended." She said she was "satisfied that this case is not moot."

Justices David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer did not sign Justice Ginsburg's opinion, noting only that they, too, had voted to hear the case.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., who voted against hearing the appeal, neither signed Justice Kennedy's opinion nor offered an explanation of their own. It is possible that they objected to the language in the Kennedy opinion about the court's readiness to intervene "promptly to ensure that the office and purposes of the writ of habeas corpus are not compromised" if the administration were to change Mr. Padilla's status once again.

The silence of these three justices was only one of several mysteries surrounding the court's disposition of the case, among the most prominent of the cases generated by the administration's handling of those it has labeled enemy combatants.

One mystery is what took the court so long. Mr. Padilla's appeal had been pending for months, and had been taken up by the justices at their weekly closed-door conference eight times since mid-January. That length of time was hardly needed to produce the four pages of opinions, three for Justice Kennedy and one for Justice Ginsburg, that the court issued on Monday.

Another mystery is the role played by Justice Stevens, who signed Justice Kennedy's opinion rather than provide a crucial fourth vote to his natural allies - Justices Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer. Two years ago, Justice Stevens wrote for Justices Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer in dissent from an earlier ruling in Mr. Padilla's legal saga.

That was a 5-to-4 decision holding that the federal appeals court in New York, which had ordered Mr. Padilla released, lacked the authority to decide the case. The five justices in the majority then required Mr. Padilla to file a new habeas corpus petition seeking release in South Carolina, where he was held in the Navy brig in Charleston.

Justice Stevens, dissenting, criticized the majority as failing to address the merits of Mr. Padilla's case, which he said "raises questions of profound importance to the nation."

In her dissenting opinion on Monday, Justice Ginsburg quoted those words, identifying them as those of Justice Stevens. As a careful writer, not given to wasting words herself, Justice Ginsburg appeared to be sending a signal of her dismay at Justice Stevens's failure to join her in dissent this time.

The two mysteries - the lengthy consideration and the role of Justice Stevens - may not be unrelated. It is possible that the Kennedy opinion was the result of a long negotiation, and that the price Justice Stevens exacted for not giving the dissenters the crucial fourth vote needed to hear the case was insertion of the language that can be read as warning the administration not to presume on the court's patience.

The test may come if Mr. Padilla is acquitted by a jury in the Miami federal case or receives and serves a short sentence. The government would then have to decide whether to set him free or find a way to keep him confined.

The federal court charges against him bear little if any relationship to the accusations the administration made after he was arrested after arriving at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on a flight from Pakistan. He was then described as an operative for Al Qaeda on a mission to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States.

In another development on Monday, the court agreed to resolve a dispute among the lower courts with implications for thousands of deportation and criminal sentencing cases. The question is whether a drug offense that is only a misdemeanor under federal law, but that an individual state's criminal code treats as a felony, is deemed an "aggravated felony" for purposes of immigration law or for adding time to a federal sentence.

The issue is particularly important in immigration law because deportable aliens with "aggravated felonies" on their records are ineligible for administrative discretion, making their deportation essentially automatic, no matter the individual circumstances. To resolve the issue, the court accepted two cases, Lopez v. Gonzales, No. 05-547, and Toledo-Flores v. United States, No. 05-7664.

A new phase of the trial, with harrowing testimony from survivors and relatives of some of the nearly 3,000 people who perished, will begin Thursday, to decide whether the sentence is carried out.

Judge Leonie Brinkema pierced the suffocating tension of the seventh floor courtroom, in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, as she read out the verdict.

She declared the jury had found against Moussaoui on three capital counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and conspiracy to destroy aircraft.

"Ladies and gentlemen, are these ... your unanimous verdicts?" Brinkema asked, drawing nods from the nine men and three women who had deliberated for 19 hours stretched across three days.

Moussaoui, who stunned the trial last week by declaring he had been picked to fly a hijacked airliner into the White House on September 11, 2001, sat in a trance-like state, muttering what seemed to be a prayer as the verdict was read out, a smile playing across his lips.

Before he was led into court, wearing a green prison jumpsuit and white-knit cap, Moussaoui had chanted loudly in an adjacent holding cell. "Allah Akbar" (God is great) and other, undecipherable shouts were heard.

Relatives of some of the September 11 victims, who sat for days watching court testimony, were in the third row of the courtroom.

"We couldn't have a better closing, for all of us, even those who don't believe in the death penalty," said Rosemary Dillard, who lost her husband Eddy in the attacks.

"We know he is guilty."

Abraham Scott broke down as he remembered his wife Janice, who perished at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

"It's very emotional ... it's hard to describe. I thought I would be delighted but I wasn't.

"I don't think Moussaoui is totally to blame, even though I think he deserves death. I equally blame the government."

Lorie Van Auken, a 9/11 widow from New Jersey, said she did not think Moussaoui should be eligible for death.

"I don't think he contributed to what happened on September 11th. I think he's been scapegoated," she said.

Also in New York, Charles Wolf, who lost his wife in the World Trade Center, worried that if the jury follows through and says Moussaoui should be put to death, he would be rewarded with the matrydom he craves.

"I don't want to play into his hands, I want to be smarter than that," Wolf said.

The US government, which saw its failure to stop the attacks exposed in a catalogue of bungles, missteps and mistakes highlighted by defense lawyers, savoured a legal victory in the war on terror.

"We are pleased with the jury's ruling in this important case," Justice Department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said in a statement.

"Our efforts on behalf of the victims of 9/11 will continue as we pursue the next phase of this trial," Scolinos said.

A French lawyer representing Moussaoui said defense lawyers would wage an "at all costs" battle to save his life.

"We are going to do all we can in an attempt to convince the jury ... that the death penalty should not be carried out," Francois Roux told AFP in a telephone interview.

The defense team, he said, was working on framing a picture of Zacarias Moussaoui's past, personality and deprived upbringing in France, and would call several French witnesses to testify either in person or by video link.

The jury's decision means they accepted the government's argument that Moussaoui's lies, "with lethal intent", in jail after his arrest in August 2001 directly resulted in the deaths of at least one person on September 11.

Had he told about his knowledge of the plot, authorities would have been able to unroll a massive prevention operation, and would have stood a chance of stopping the attacks, the government claimed.

Defense lawyers had urged the jury not to make the 37-year-old Frenchman a hero, and to deny him the matyrdom on which he appeared to have set his sights.

Defense counsel Edward MacMahon said: "Moussaoui was not involved in the 9/11 plot, no matter what he says."

Moussaoui stunned the trial with his claim that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had ordered him to fly an airliner into the White House on September 11.

The jury will now have to decide whether Moussaoui should be executed or go to jail for life, without the possibility of parole. The new hearings will start on Thursday.

Bogart, wheelchair bound since a 1999 fall that broke her hip and further disabled by breast cancer surgery in 1997 and a major stroke in 2004 that caused dementia, was under strict doctor's orders not to stand without assistance or her walker. She carried a special orthopedic card to alert airport security she had a metal plate in her hip.

Moon had been told by Frontier and TSA staff that screeners would not require Bogart to leave her chair for the security check, so she turned to put her mother's carry-on luggage through the x-ray device. When she turned back, she discovered her mother had been picked out for further screening and was out of her chair, "hobbling" through a glass-walled corridor.

"There were no grab bars," Moon told the Rocky Mountain News. "What I could see really was her fingers trying to hang onto a little ledge."

Moon says she instinctively reached out to assist her mother, fearing another fall and another broken hip.

"Don't touch her!" Moon says the screener warned.

Moon attempted to tell the young screener, a woman in her mid-to-late 20s, that her mother was under doctor's orders not to stand without her four-wheeled walker, but the screener shot back, "You'd better change your attitude. Or do you want me to make it so you don't fly today?"

Bogart, who is also hard of hearing, was allowed to sit briefly, but the screener soon instructed her to stand again and lift her arms, according to Moon. She then reportedly lifted Bogart's arms because the elderly woman couldn't, due to her earlier breast cancer surgery.

Moon says she was told to sit across the room "or else" when she continued to protest.

After the "prolonged search," the pair was cleared to continue to their gate and Moon put her "shocked" mother on the flight to Tennessee for a month's visit with Bogart's youngest daughter.

An angry Moon attempted to complain to Denver's TSA management, but was told to make her complaint to the national office. Supervisors would not tell her the name of the screener who had made boarding her mother so difficult.

"I don't know if she thought my mom had a bomb in her Depends or what," Moon said.

While Moon is still angry and cynical that TSA will do anything about her complaint, a Denver TSA spokeswoman said the agency expects a high degree of professionalism from screeners and Moon's complaint would be investigated. TSA's Office of Civil Rights will soon issue a response, she said.

"When we receive complaints, we take them very seriously, we investigate them and we address any personnel issues as appropriate," she said.

Bogart, now in Nashville, says she doesn't want to see anyone get in trouble.

"They were all kind except for that one girl. I thought she was a little harsh," she said. "She wouldn't let my daughter help me. And I have a hard time standing very long at a time at all."

Responding to recent allegations of waste, the Red Cross said it is moving to standardize financial controls, hire more investigators to review whistleblower complaints and cede control to churches and faith-based groups in underserved areas.

"Could the Red Cross and the entire nonprofit community have done better? Undoubtedly," wrote Red Cross chairman Bonnie McElveen-Hunter to Senate Finance Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, whose committee is leading the congressional inquiry.

"There is no excuse for the instances of improper conduct which impacted on our performance and response during Hurricane Katrina and on our continued relief and recovery efforts along the Gulf Coast," McElveen-Hunter said.

The reform proposals come as some lawmakers, including Reps. Jim McCrery, R-La., and Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., have questioned whether Congress should rethink its national disaster response plan that gives the Red Cross the primary role and the dollars that flow with it.

Critics said the Red Cross failed to respond quickly enough in some low-income, minority areas, while internally some volunteers and employees have questioned whether charity dollars are being put to their best use.

Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret. flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. He is the recipient of the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President's Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Society of Military Engineers Gold Medal (twice), six Air Medals, and dozens of other awards and honors. His Ph.D. is in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech. He chaired 8 major international conferences, and is one of the country's foremost experts on National Security.

Bowman worked secretly for the US government on the Star Wars project and was the first to coin the very term in a 1977 secret memo. After Bowman realized that the program was only ever intended to be used as an aggressive and not defensive tool, as part of a plan to initiate a nuclear war with the Soviets, he left the program and campaigned against it.

In an interview with The Alex Jones Show aired nationally on the GCN Radio Network, Bowman (pictured below) stated that at the bare minimum if Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were involved in 9/11 then the government stood down and allowed the attacks to happen. He said it is plausible that the entire chain of military command were unaware of what was taking place and were used as tools by the people pulling the strings behind the attack.

Bowman outlined how the drills on the morning of 9/11 that simulated planes crashing into buildings on the east coast were used as a cover to dupe unwitting air defense personnel into not responding quickly enough to stop the attack.

"The exercises that went on that morning simulating the exact kind of thing that was happening so confused the people in the FAA and NORAD....that they didn't they didn't know what was real and what was part of the exercise," said Bowman

"I think the people who planned and carried out those exercises, they're the ones that should be the object of investigation."

Asked if he could name a prime suspect who was the likely architect behind the attacks, Bowman stated, "If I had to narrow it down to one person....I think my prime suspect would be Dick Cheney."

Bowman said that privately his military fighter pilot peers and colleagues did not disagree with his sentiments about the real story behind 9/11.

Bowman agreed that the US was in danger of slipping into a dictatorship and stated, "I think there's been nothing closer to fascism than what we've seen lately from this government."

Bowman slammed the Patriot Act as having, "Done more to destroy the rights of Americans than all of our enemies combined."

Bowman trashed the 9/11 Commission as a politically motivated cover-up with abounding conflicts of interest, charging, "The 9/11 Commission omitted anything that might be the least bit suspicious or embarrassing or in any way detract from the official conspiracy so it was a total whitewash."

"There needs to be a true investigation, not the kind of sham investigations we have had with the 9/11 omission and all the rest of that junk," said Bowman.

Asked if the perpetrators of 9/11 were preparing to stage another false-flag attack to reinvigorate their agenda Bowman agreed that, "I can see that and I hope they can't pull it off, I hope they are prevented from pulling it off but I know darn good and well they'd like to have another one."

A mainstay of the attack pieces against Charlie Sheen have been that he is not credible enough to speak on the topic of 9/11. These charges are ridiculed by the fact that Sheen is an expert on 9/11 who spends hours a day meticulously researching the topic, something that the attack dogs have failed to do, aiming their comments solely at Sheen's personal life and ignoring his invitation to challenge him on the facts.

In addition, from the very start we have put forth eminently credible individuals only for them to be ignored by the establishment media. Physics Professors, former White House advisors and CIA analysts, the father of Reaganomics, German Defense Ministers and Bush's former Secretary of the Treasury, have all gone public on 9/11 but have been uniformly ignored by the majority of the establishment press.

Will Robert Bowman also be blackballed as the mainstream continue to misrepresent the 9/11 truth movement as an occupation of the fringe minority?

Bowman is currently running for Congress in Florida's 15th District.