Last December, the FBI arranged for an undercover informant posing as an Al Qaeda terrorist to meet with alleged ringleader Narseal Batiste, who authorities say had already recruited six men to help bring down the landmark 110-story Chicago office tower.

But in March, in an effort to solidify his "terrorist credentials," the informant suggested the men widen their aims to attack FBI offices in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington and New York, a law enforcement source said.

Batiste and his followers readily agreed, even taking an Al Qaeda oath at the suggestion of the informant, Justice Department sources said. Soon, Batiste and the agent began a surveillance operation of the FBI office in Miami - while the bureau watched their every move, sources said.

"The FBI made sure the informant suggested Bureau buildings and not, say, airports, in order to maintain an element of control," said a law enforcement source. "The FBI knew exactly what was going on and was in complete control."

The terror suspects never performed reconnaissance on the Sears Tower or any other FBI office, including the one in lower Manhattan that was also targeted in a 1993 plot to blow up New York landmarks. They also never acquired any of the explosives to carry out their attacks, authorities said.

The Justice Department said Steven Green, 21, a former private with the US Army's 101st Airborne Division, could face the death penalty if convicted of the latest alleged atrocities tainting the image of US soldiers in Iraq.

Green is charged with entering a house near Mahmudiyah where he allegedly raped and killed a woman and killed three of her relatives -- another woman, a man and a child.

"We are going to get to the bottom of these allegations. Anything that comes to light in that regard, we investigate," General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CBS television.

The arrest and charges filed against Green led the news in the United States on Tuesday, Independence Day, a national holiday that underscores the importance of justice and democracy as enshrined in the US constitution.

President George W. Bush celebrated the Fourth of July at Fort Bragg, a military base in North Carolina, where he praised US soldiers who have served or continue to serve in Iraq.

In an unusual ocurrence, he mentioned the exact number of US troops killed in Iraq, saying that he was "not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain by pulling out before the job is done."

Green's rape and murder charges were not the first case of abuse to shake the US military. Americans remember photographs of prisoner abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.

The military has just wrapped up an investigation into a suspected massacre by US marines of civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha last November.

The conclusions of the probe have not yet been made public.

Pace reminded the CBS audience that 99.9 percent of American fighting men and women were serving with honor and dignity.

"It is unacceptable that anybody would do anything like these folks are accused of," he said. "But if they have, they will be dealt with, and the vast majority of American servicemen and women should be proud of how they're serving this nation."

Green is subject to civilian prosecution under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which allows crimes committed abroad by US soldiers to be prosecuted as if they had been committed on US soil.

If convicted, he could face execution for the murders or up to life in prison for the rape. He could also be sentenced to pay a fine of 250,000 dollars.

However, some have already called for his trial to be held in Iraq where the crimes were committed.

Iraq's Justice Minister Hashem al-Shibli on Tuesday told AFP, "I urge the United Nations Security Council to intervene and stop such heinous and immoral crimes."

He said the UN should also empower Iraq "to pursue such cases as per its law for crimes committed on its territory."

At present, coalition troops cannot be tried in Iraq for breaking its laws.

On Tuesday, Iraqi lawmaker Safiya al-Sehel urged a probe by local authorities into the crimes committed on March 12 near the town of Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.

"We call upon the prime minister and the interior minister to launch a probe by Iraqi authorities into this crime and punish those responsible as this is an issue of Iraqi honour," she told reporters.

The Green trial comes as Iraqi Shiite leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim demanded that an amnesty proposed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki be extended to insurgents who attacked US soldiers. The prime minister's proposal does not go that far.

These different views on crimes and amnesty put Washington in a difficult position. A White House spokesman said the United States would not impose conditions on Iraq's amnesty proposal, which it supports.

"She didn't have any information," Perry said. "She was trying to make Blackwater think she had sensitive, pertinent documents and important information that would hurt them."

Holdren-Nowacki said the extortion allegations are untrue. She also said she has information related to the deaths of four security guards working under contract with Blackwater who were killed in Fallujah, Iraq, in May 2004.

After their deaths, the Blackwater contractors' bodies were mutilated, and the charred remains were strung up on a bridge. The men's families have sued Blackwater, alleging that the contractors weren't properly equipped or trained for their mission.

"I will be more than happy to talk to media after my court appearance on Friday," Holdren-Nowacki said. "I've got a lot to say, and some of it will be of interest to the family members of the contractors who died."

Her employment with Blackwater ended in April. Associate counsel Andy Howell declined to say whether Holdren-Nowacki had quit or was fired.

Blackwater provides security for State Department officials in Iraq, trains military units from around the world, and does work for corporate clients.

Thomas's testimony explains why he agreed to the interview without legal representation, by detailing the atmosphere of his previous six interrogations.

He says a Pakistani officer threatened to execute him, saying "we'll strip you, pour water over you and electrocute you if you don't tell the truth".

An American officer he believed was from the CIA threatened to send agents to rape his wife saying, "she must be lonely by now".

He says an American official asked him to act as a spy in Al Qaeda safe houses and when he refused, threatened to torture him and to send agents to rape his wife.

Thomas's testimony states: "When there's a superpower on one side of a little table and you're with handcuffs behind your back, you have no choice but to cooperate."

Of the thousand pages of documents released today, information said to be sensitive to national security remains blacked out.

The subpoena, issued Friday, was necessary because lawmakers got no response from a March 7 letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld requesting the information, according to a statement from Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., chairman of the panel's national security subcommittee.

"If the department won't even return a call, after three months ... we really have no choice but to subpoena the material and compel their attention to our request," added the committee chairman, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who signed the subpoena.

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros said Wednesday the Pentagon already has provided much of this information to the House Armed Services Committee and given Davis' committee many of those documents. They are "responsive in the matter under discussion," Ballesteros said.

Provance has said his rank was reduced for disobeying orders not to speak about mistreatment he saw at Abu Ghraib. He was one of five government whistleblowers who testified before Congress in February, saying they faced retaliation for calling attention to alleged government wrongs.

The subpoena, issued at the request of Shays and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the committee's top Democrat, gives the Pentagon until 5 p.m. July 14 to produce the documents.

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as "Osama's endorsement of John Kerry." But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin-Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term.

This stunning CIA disclosure is tucked away in a brief passage near the end of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why bin-Laden wanted Bush to stay in office.

According to Suskind's book, CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin-Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ...

"Their [the CIA's] assessments, at day's end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today's conclusion: bin-Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection.

"At the five o'clock meeting, [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: 'Bin-Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.'"

McLaughlin's comment drew nods from CIA officers at the table. Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, suggested that the al-Qaeda founder may have come to Bush's aid because bin-Laden felt threatened by the rise in Iraq of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; bin-Laden might have thought his leadership would be diminished if Bush lost the White House and their "eye-to-eye struggle" ended.

But the CIA analysts also felt that bin-Laden might have recognized how Bush's policies - including the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the endless bloodshed in Iraq - were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.

"Certainly," the CIA's Miscik said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years," according to Suskind's account of the meeting.

As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts drifted into silence, troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. "An ocean of hard truths before them - such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin-Laden would want Bush reelected - remained untouched," Suskind wrote.

One immediate consequence of bin-Laden breaking nearly a year of silence to issue the videotape the weekend before the U.S. presidential election was to give the Bush campaign a much needed boost. From a virtual dead heat, Bush opened up a six-point lead, according to one poll.

Symbiotic Relationship

The implications of this new evidence are troubling, too, for the American people as they head toward another election in November 2006 that also is viewed as a referendum on Bush's prosecution of the "war on terror."

As we have reported previously at Consortiumnews.com, a large body of evidence already existed supporting the view that the Bushes and the bin-Ladens have long operated with a symbiotic relationship that may be entirely unspoken but nevertheless has been a case of each family acting in ways that advance the interests of the other. [See "Osama's Briar Patch" or "Is Bush al-Qaeda's 'Useful Idiot?'"]

Before al-Qaeda launched the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks against New York and Washington, Bush was stumbling in a presidency that many Americans felt was headed nowhere. As Bush took a month-long vacation at his Texas ranch in August 2001, his big issue was a plan to restrict stem-cell research on moral grounds.

Privately, Bush's neoconservative advisers were chafing under what they saw as the complacency of the American people unwilling to take on the mantle of global policeman as the world's sole superpower. The neocons hoped for some "Pearl Harbor" incident that would galvanize a public consensus for action against Iraq and other "rogue states."

Other senior administration officials, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, dreamed of the restoration of the imperial presidency that - after Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal - had been cut down to size by Congress, the courts and the press. Only a national crisis would create a cover for a new assertion of presidential power.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda militants were facing defeat after defeat. Their brand of Islamic fundamentalism had been rejected in Muslim societies from Algeria and Egypt to Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Bin-Laden and his lieutenants had even been expelled from the Sudan.

Bin-Laden's extremists had been chased to the farthest corners of the planet, in this case the caves of Afghanistan. At this critical juncture, al-Qaeda's brain trust decided that their best hope was to strike at the United States and count on a clumsy reaction that would offend the Islamic world and rally angry young Muslims to al-Qaeda's banner.

So, by early summer 2001, the clock ticked down to 9/11 as 19 al-Qaeda operatives positioned themselves inside the United States and prepared to attack. But U.S. intelligence analysts picked up evidence of al-Qaeda's plans by sifting through the "chatter" of electronic intercepts. The U.S. warning system was "blinking red."

'Something So Big'

Over the weekend of July Fourth 2001, a well-placed U.S. intelligence source passed on a disturbing piece of information to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who later recounted the incident in an interview with Alternet.

"The person told me that there was some concern about an intercept that had been picked up," Miller said. "The incident that had gotten everyone's attention was a conversation between two members of al-Qaeda. And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the [destroyer USS] Cole [which was bombed on Oct. 12, 2000].

"And one al-Qaeda operative was overheard saying to the other, 'Don't worry; we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'"

In the Alternet interview, published in May 2006 after Miller resigned from the Times, the reporter expressed regret that she had not been able to nail down enough details about the intercept to get the story into the newspaper.

But the significance of her recollection is that more than two months before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA knew that al-Qaeda was planning a major attack with the intent of inciting a U.S. military reaction - or in this case, an overreaction.

The CIA tried to warn Bush about the threat on Aug. 6, 2001, with the hope that presidential action could energize government agencies and head off the attack. The CIA sent analysts to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to brief him and deliver a report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."

Bush was not pleased by the intrusion. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, "All right, you've covered your ass," according to Suskind's book.

Then, putting the CIA's warning in the back of his mind and ordering no special response, Bush returned to a vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.

Al-Qaeda's Gamble

For its part, al-Qaeda was running a risk that the United States might strike a precise and devastating blow against the terrorist organization, eliminating it as an effective force without alienating much of the Muslim world.

If that happened, the cause of Islamic extremism could have been set back years, without eliciting much sympathy from most Muslims for a band of killers who wantonly murdered innocent civilians.

After the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda's gamble almost failed as the CIA, backed by U.S. Special Forces, ousted bin-Laden's Taliban allies in Afghanistan and cornered much of the al-Qaeda leadership in the mountains of Tora Bora near the Pakistani border.

But instead of using U.S. ground troops to seal the border, Bush relied on the Pakistani army, which was known to have mixed sympathies about al-Qaeda. The Pakistani army moved its blocking force belatedly into position while bin-Laden and others from his inner circle escaped.

Then, instead of staying focused on bin-Laden and his fellow fugitives, Bush moved on to other objectives. Bush shifted U.S. Special Forces away from bin-Laden and al-Qaeda and toward Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Many U.S. terrorism experts, including White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, were shocked at this strategy, since the intelligence community didn't believe that Hussein's secular dictatorship had any working relationship with al-Qaeda - and had no role in the 9/11 attacks.

Nevertheless, Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, ousting Hussein from power but also unleashing mayhem across Iraqi society. Soon, the Iraq War - combined with controversies over torture and mistreatment of Muslim detainees - were serving as recruitment posters for al-Qaeda.

Under Jordanian exile Zarqawi, al-Qaeda set up terrorist cells in central Iraq, taking root amid the weeds of sectarian violence and the nation's general anarchy. Instead of an obscure group of misfits, al-Qaeda was achieving legendary status among many Muslims as the defenders of the Islamic holy lands, battling the new "crusaders" led by Bush.

Back in the USA

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the 9/11 attacks had allowed Bush to reinvent himself as the "war president" who operated almost without oversight. He saw his approval ratings surge from the 50s to the 90s - and watched as the Republican Party consolidated its control of the U.S. Congress in 2002.

Though the worsening bloodshed in Iraq eroded Bush's popularity in 2004, political adviser Karl Rove still framed the election around Bush's aggressive moves to defend the United States and to punish American enemies.

Whereas Bush was supposedly resolute, Democrat Kerry was portrayed as weak and indecisive, a "flip-flopper." Kerry, however, scored some political points in the presidential debates by citing the debacle at Tora Bora that enabled bin-Laden to escape.

The race was considered neck-and-neck as it turned toward the final weekend of campaigning. Then, the shimmering image of Osama bin-Laden appeared on American televisions, speaking directly to the American people, mocking Bush and offering a kind of truce if U.S. forces withdrew from the Middle East.

"He [Bush] was more interested in listening to the child's story about the goat rather than worry about what was happening to the [twin] towers," bin-Laden said. "So, we had three times the time necessary to accomplish the events. Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked."

Though both Bush and Kerry denounced bin-Laden's statement, right-wing pundits, bloggers and talk-show hosts portrayed it as an effort to hurt Bush and help Kerry - which understandably prompted the exact opposite reaction among many Americans. [For instance, conservative blog site, Little Green Footballs, headlined its Oct. 31, 2004, commentary as "Bin Laden Threatens U.S. States Not to Vote for Bush."]

However, behind the walls of secrecy at Langley, Virginia, U.S. intelligence experts reviewed the evidence and concluded that bin-Laden had precisely the opposite intent. He was fully aware that his videotape would encourage the American people to do the opposite of what he recommended.

By demanding an American surrender, bin-Laden knew U.S. voters would instinctively want to fight. That way bin-Laden helped ensure that George W. Bush would stay in power, would continue his clumsy "war on terror" - and would drive thousands of new recruits into al-Qaeda's welcoming arms.

"These lawmakers have only one idea: that is to think up as many repressive amendments to the law as possible," said Oleg Panfilov, head of the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, a lobby group.

The measure would cover incidents like the Beslan school siege in September 2004 when 331 people-half of them children-were killed.

Media reports about a chaotic rescue operation embarrassed the Kremlin. One journalist said authorities had her poisoned to stop her reporting on the siege.

They also confirm that the corporation held a list of "subversive organisations" and that evidence of certain kinds of political activity could be a bar to appointment or promotion.

The BBC's reliance on MI5 reached a peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The papers show that senior BBC figures covered up these links in the face of awkward questions from trade unions and the press. The documents refer to a "defensive strategy" based on "categorical denial". One file note, dated March 1, 1985, states: "Keep head down and stonewall all questions."

It is only now, after a request by London's The Sunday Telegraph under the Freedom of Information Act, that it has finally been willing to release details of the vetting operation.

Another internal BBC document, dated 1983, confirms: "We supply personal details to the Security Service.

If there is any adverse information known, we receive this information and also, where necessary, an assessment based upon the involvement of the individual. This is presented to us as advice; line management then make the decision as to action."

The documents do not name any of those subjected to vetting.

Senior officials were checked because they had access to confidential government information in relation to their jobs. Thousands of employees were vetted because they were involved in live broadcasts and the BBC was worried about the possibility of on-air bias.

The vetting system, which was phased out in the late 1980s, also applied to television producers, directors, sound engineers, secretaries and researchers and even the spouses of applicants.

The BBC tried on several occasions to be more open about the system, but was blocked by MI5. A memo, dated March 7, 1985, states: "Secrecy of the complete vetting operation is imposed upon us by the Security Service - it is not of our making."

For their part, the security services were increasingly concerned about the number of people being referred to them by the BBC. During the first four months of 1983, they were asked to investigate 619 people.

The BBC declined to comment on the documents.

The visits also aimed to gather information needed to allow France to prevent terrorism, and representatives of other government officials had taken part in these missions to help achieve both these goals, the statement said.

The French trials were made public on Wednesday by a report on The Liberation daily that French agents secretly interviewed six men on trial in France for links with a terrorist network while they were held at a Guantanamo camp.

It published a French diplomatic telegram referring to intelligence agents conducting interviews at least twice during these men's detention on the Caribbean island.

A top French court has already ruled that the detention of suspects in the U.S. naval base was illegal.

A statement from the Milan prosecutor's office said police arrested Marco Mancini, the No. 2 at Italy's Sismi military intelligence agency, and were holding him in jail for his alleged role in the kidnap. Another Sismi official was placed under house arrest.

The suspects are accused of involvement in the 2003 abduction of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Prosecutors say a CIA-led team seized him on a Milan street in broad daylight, bundled him into a van and drove him to the Aviano air base.

He was then flown to Egypt where Nasr says he was tortured under questioning.

An Italian court has already issued arrest warrants for 22 suspected U.S. agents over the abduction. But it was the first time Italian officials have been linked to the investigation.

If an Italian role is confirmed, it would add weight to allegations that European countries colluded with Washington in the secret "renditions," or transfers, of terrorism suspects.

The Rome government said in a statement that Italy's intelligence services had denied playing any role in the kidnapping and that it trusted their loyalty.

But some lawmakers in the new centre-left ruling coalition accused former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of a cover-up during his five-year administration, which ended in April.

Berlusconi, a close ally of President Bush, has fiercely denied his government or Sismi were involved in the kidnapping -- and even once summoned the U.S. ambassador over the matter to request Italian sovereignty be respected.

AL QAEDA, IRAQ

"Mancini's arrest confirms what we've said for a long time -- that is, that the previous government knew about Sismi's involvement in Abu Omar's kidnapping by the CIA," said Giovanni Russo Spena, a senator with the ruling coalition's Communist Refoundation party.

Italian investigators had been wiretapping Nasr before his abduction and accuse him of having ties to al Qaeda and recruiting combatants for Iraq, according to court documents.

They say the kidnapping broke Italian law and ruined a promising investigation.

Several politicians rushed to the defense of Mancini on Wednesday and criticized magistrates for jailing a man they said was on the front line of Italy's fight against terrorism.

"It's shocking and upsetting that a man who millions of Italians depend on for their security ends up in jail," said former centre-right minister Carlo Giovanardi.

Former President Francesco Cossiga said the arrests were likely to be applauded by al Qaeda.

The Abu Omar case is one of the best known examples of alleged CIA secret operations in the U.S.-led "war on terror."

Human rights groups condemn "extraordinary rendition," saying the United States has frequently sent suspects to countries that practice torture.

Washington acknowledges making secret transfers of terrorism suspects between countries, but denies using torture itself against suspects or handing them over to countries that do so.