Prosecutors said in March they wanted Passaro's stepson, Matthew Michael Newman, 26, to testify about how Passaro beat him beginning when he was 8 years old until he was a teenager. Federal lawyers argued that the alleged beatings would help prove that the former Green Beret knew what he was doing when he used a flashlight to beat the Afghan suspect during interrogations.

Passaro denied his stepson's allegations.

Judge Terrence Boyle, who will oversee Passaro's trial, ruled in an order filed Friday that there were several reasons prosecutors could not use Newman's testimony.

"The evidence concerns acts which allegedly began 18 years ago, and is far too remote in time to justify admission," Boyle wrote.

Even if the alleged child abuse were more recent, Boyle said he would exclude the arguments.

"There is a strong possibility that evidence of defendant's alleged involvement in repeated acts of child abuse would inflame a jury, exposing defendant to significant prejudice which substantially outweighs the probative value of the evidence," Boyle wrote.

Passaro was working under contract to the CIA in 2003 and helping the U.S. military train Afghanistan's armed forces, hunt terrorists and gather intelligence.

Authorities said Passaro kicked and beat an Afghan suspect named Abdul Wali with his fists and a flashlight for two days before the prisoner died in a cell. Wali was being questioned about a series of rocket attacks on a remote firebase housing U.S. and Afghan troops in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Passaro has denied any role in Wali's death. He claims the military made him a scapegoat in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Kennelly ruled in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois on behalf of author Studs Terkel and other activists who said their constitutional rights were violated because of a National Security Agency program of gathering phone company records.

Justice Department attorneys had argued it that would violate the law against divulging state secrets for AT&T to say whether it had provided telephone records to the supersecret spy agency.

The ACLU argued that the practice was no longer secret, because numerous news reports had made it clear that phone records had been given to the agency.

But the judge said the news reports amounted to speculation and in no way constituted official confirmation that phone records had been turned over.

He also said Terkel and the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which sought class-action status, had not shown that their own records had been provided to the government. As a result, they lacked standing to sue the government, he said.

I would feel sorry for the pastors, ministers, priests, and rabbis except for the fact that I just can't and won't. How stupid and positively corrupt can you possibly be to take money in exchange for manipulating your flocks of idiot sheep to the national slaughter? And will you also spy on your flocks and provide reports to your new master?

In exchange for money, have you agreed to pacify and organize your flocks in the event of a national emergency? You certainly have, for you have been ordered to do so. And have you been ordered to offer your buildings, your resources, and your labor forces called congregations to serve your newly declared administrator?

I try to come up with words to describe how I feel about this Executive Order and the churches that have "partnered" themselves to this system. The words don't come minus the fact that the church has completely and irreversibly fallen to the lowest and darkest common denominator, which is the total betrayal of the souls of the faithful. I would pray for your forgiveness, but I don't want to.

Nor do I want to write about this sickening topic. But, I appeal to Christian people to 1) ask your church leaders if they are "faith-based" funded, and 2) to leave those churches and start home-based churches with your friends and family members. Do not support Executive Ordered, Department of Homeland Security churches with your presence or your money. You are being manipulated and reported upon - guaranteed.

You are being told what to do when more "crisis" hits the nation, and will hit the nation, as all is now planned down to our "weather emergencies," which are providing the training and relocation exercises for the real crisis to come - the one that permanently collapses Constitutional America.

The church needs to regroup and gather in homes, where faith is restored, private, and truth is real. Forget the church leadership. They are padding their pockets and socially re-engineering your mind with think tank religion and crisis management, and they're getting paid to do so - much like the public schools and mass media.

Raise your churches in your homes. All you need is a Bible - one will do. Save yourselves and your souls and leave your new and improved church buildings, fancy organs, fundraisers, and colorful windows behind.

As in all Communist countries, the church will survive underground, so to speak, and with genuine prayer. And serve your Constitutional America. Don't give up on freedom - even as it dissolves before your eyes. Be courageous in truth and gather together in truth.

Again and again, I strongly recommend that you contact A.C.E. - Americans for Constitutional Enforcement - at contactus@a4ce.org - and request their Information Packet. Work to preserve your unalienable rights. There is no other choice but to fall - much like the American church. And please remember that faith-based churches are now governmental agencies - just like public schools, mass media, and mass communications - nothing more and nothing less.

A.C.E. will help you, your family, and your neighbors to learn the truth about today's America. What you don't know is allowing for the total destruction of your rights and your individual freedom. What you don't know is rapidly, rapidly destroying your country. Your continued ignorance is why we are falling. Please contact A.C.E. right now. May God bless the American people.

But not in America. We are stuck with the losers who stole the White House and rule through a barrage of propaganda, lies and wedge issue emotional manipulation.

And we have the evidence recorded for us. Take just two examples.

Before Hurricane Katrina hit, there is a video that we all have seen of Bush being briefed about the Hurricane. He didn't ask one question. He was just a passive player.

And then there is the recent tape of him having a "private conversation" with Tony Blair. In this tape, we learn that Bush's plan for stopping the Israeli-Hezbollah war was to tell Kofi Annan to tell Hezbollah to stop their "shi*." And, ever the puppet, Bush thought "Condi" might be going out "there" [to Lebanon and Israel], but he didn't seem certain. It was as though it was a decision that he was just being informed about, not one that he was making. And this is probably usually the case.

Of course, after being informed by an intelligence aide in August, 2001, that al-Qaeda planned attacks in the United States, Bush's response was irritation that his vacation plans might be disrupted, followed by more vulgarity. As journalist Robert Parry noted:

"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 [Ron] 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."

As we have pointed out many a time, Bush just might have prevented 9/11 from happening if he had ordered heightened security steps to prevent hijackings after the August, 2001, briefing, but he was too eager to relax on his month-long vacation.

As Maureen Dowd observes in her July 26 column: "That's what is so frustrating about watching him deal - or not deal - with Iraq and Lebanon. There's almost nothing to watch. It's not even like watching paint dry, since that, too, is a passage from one state to another. It's like watching dry paint."

And America and the world suffer as a result.

Now eighty, he lives in the Hollywood hills in a modest mansion with immodest artwork. I felt I was entering a museum of Renaissance art. A stern painting of the Emperor Constantine was looking down upon us as we sat in his majestic living room. A Buddha statue from Thailand stood nearby. But all was not somber. He had a Bush doll with a 9/11 bill sticking out of it on a table behind us.

His aristocratic pedigree is evident not just in his artistic sophistication but also in his locution. In a war of words, few can contend with Vidal.

"I'm a lover of the old republic and I deeply resent the empire our Presidents put in its place," he declares.

Vidal moved gingerly and was using a cane. A recent knee operation left him less mobile. He says, "The mind is still agile but the knees have grown weak." We sat in upholstered chairs. On a nearby table I saw the galleys of his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation. It will be out this fall. His earlier one, Palimpsest, came out in 1995.

Prolific does not even begin to describe Vidal's literary output. He's the author of scores of novels, plays, screenplays, essays. In 1993, he won the National Book Award for his collection of essays, United States. His recent books (he calls them "pamphlets")-Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War, and Imperial America-have sold in huge numbers. When I asked him what was the point of his work, he said, "I am chronicling America." The prose, whether polemical or fictional, is elegant.

Distantly related to Jackie Kennedy, he does not romanticize JFK. "He was one of the most charming men I've ever known," says Vidal. "He was also one of the very worst Presidents."

He's been a Democratic candidate for the House from New York and for the Senate from California. Today, he ridicules the Democrats for supineness.

He sees a certain continuity in U.S. foreign policy over the last fifty years. "The management, then and now, truly believes the United States is the master of the Earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown," he says. "We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense."

I talked with him on a hot afternoon in mid-April.

Q: In 2002, long before Bush's current travails, you wrote, "Mark my words, he will leave office the most unpopular President in history." How did you know that then?

Gore Vidal: I know these people. I don't say that as though I know them personally. I know the types. I was brought up in Washington. When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what's going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it's trouble. Monkeys make trouble.

Q: Bush's ratings have been at personal lows. Cheney has had an 18 percent approval rating.

Vidal: Well, he deserves it.

Q: Yet the wars go on. It's almost as if the people don't matter.

Vidal: The people don't matter to this gang. They pay no attention. They think in totalitarian terms. They've got the troops. They've got the army. They've got Congress. They've got the judiciary. Why should they worry? Let the chattering classes chatter. Bush is a thug. I think there is something really wrong with him.

Q: What do you think of the conspiracy theories about September 11?

Vidal: I'm willing to believe practically any mischief on the part of the Bush people. No, I don't think they did it, as some conspiracy people think. Why? Because it was too intelligently done. This is beyond the competence of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They couldn't pull off a caper like 9/11. They are too clumsy.

Q: Today the United States is fighting two wars, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, and is now threatening to launch a third one on Iran. What is it going to take to stop the Bush onslaught?

Vidal: Economic collapse. We are too deeply in debt. We can't service the debt, or so my financial friends tell me, that's paying the interest on the Treasury bonds, particularly to the foreign countries that have been financing us. I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars.

Q: You're a veteran of World War II, the so-called good war. Would you recommend to a young person a career in the armed forces in the United States?

Vidal: No, but I would suggest Canada or New Zealand as a possible place to go until we are rid of our warmongers. We've never had a government like this. The United States has done wicked things in the past to other countries but never on such a scale and never in such an existentialist way. It's as though we are evil. We strike first. We'll destroy you. This is an eternal war against terrorism. It's like a war against dandruff. There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

But our media has collapsed. They've questioned no one. One of the reasons Bush and Cheney are so daring is that they know there's nobody to stop them. Nobody is going to write a story that says this is not a war, only Congress can declare war. And you can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids. Nothing makes any sense, and the people are getting very confused. The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

Q: You've called the country "The United States of Amnesia." Is this something in our genes?

Vidal: No, it's something in our rulers. They don't want us to know anything. When you've got a press like we have, you no longer have an informed citizenry.

I was involved somewhat with Congressman Con-yers on what happened in Ohio during the last Presidential election.

Conyers is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and he went up there with a bunch of researchers. They went from district to district, and they found out how the election was stolen. He wrote a report that was published by a small press in Chicago. To help out, I said I'd write a preface for him on how the election was stolen. We were thinking that might help. But The New York Times and The Washington Post were not going to review the book about how we had a second Presidential election stolen. They weren't going to admit it.

A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don't know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.

It's so stupid, everything that they say. And the media take on it is just as stupid as theirs, sometimes worse. They at least have motives. They are making money out of the republic or what's left of it. It's the stupidity that will really drive me away from this country.

Q: When were the media better?

Vidal: They've never been much good. They belong to the people who own them. But they were better, the level was higher. There used to be foreign correspondents in other countries. There's nobody abroad now. The New York Times gave up being anything except a kind of shadow of The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post is the court circular. What has the emperor done today? And who will be the under-assistant of the secretary of agriculture? As though these things mattered.

Q: What do you think of the public advertising of one's faith among political leaders? They make a show of going to church and participating in ceremonies.

Vidal: Personally I find it sickening, and very much against what our Founders had in mind. Remember that the country was mostly founded by Brits, and England's always gotten credit for having invented hypocrisy. So we are reflecting our British heritage when we hypocritically talk about how religious we are.

Q: Is the U.S. more like Sparta than Athens?

Vidal: We're not so good as either. We certainly are not warlike. Spartans were based upon military service. We don't want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans. We didn't want to go out and conquer other countries. We wanted to corner wheat in the stock market or something sensible like that. So we are very unbelligerent. We were dragged screaming into World War I. Well, we were slightly enthusiastic about that, but we were very innocent farm people in those days. In World War II, we fought to stay out of that war. And every liberal figure in the United States from Norman Thomas on was anti-war. They were isolationists in the old populist tradition. So we never had a chance of being Sparta.

Q: Talk about the role of the opposition party, the Democrats.

Vidal: It isn't an opposition party. I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party-the property party. It's the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

Q: What can people do to energize democracy?

Vidal: The tactic would be to go after smaller offices, state by state, school board, sheriff, state legislatures. You can turn them around and that doesn't take much of anything. Take back everything at the grassroots, starting with state
legislatures. That's what Madison always said. I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.

Q: Do you see any developments on the horizon that might suggest an alternative?

Vidal: Newton's Third Law. I hope that law is still working. American laws don't work, but at least the laws of physics might work. And the Third Law is: There is no action without reaction. There should be a great deal of reaction to the total incompetence of this Administration. It's going to take two or three generations to recover what we had as of twenty years ago.

David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado. His latest book is "Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics."

It has been nearly three years since the publication of the infamous column by Robert Novak that rattled the US intelligence industry by naming a CIA agent citing several sources, including a White House official.

The fallout from the fingering of Valerie Plame as an operative in the clandestine agency has prompted a federal investigation into the identity of the informants and sparked rumors in the US capital as to who the culprit might have been.

Almost immediately following the 2003 Novak column, word spread through the corridors of power that Karl Rove, a top adviser to US President George W. Bush, was behind the leak.

Earlier this month, Novak finally relented and said that Rove had confirmed the identity of Plame after he has heard it from his primary source, which he did not name.

Rove, perhaps acting directly on the orders of senior Bush officials including Vice President Dick Cheney, named Plame as revenge for the harsh criticism hurled against the administration by her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson.

Wilson was sent to Niger in 2003 to investigate allegations that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire "yellow cake" uranium - the key ingredient for creating a nuclear weapon - from the West African nation.

In President Bush's now infamous state of the union address leading up to the Iraq war, he cited supposed evidence of Hussein's attempts to procure uranium from Niger despite reservations from some administration officials who noted the source of the intelligence regarding the alleged attempts was suspect.

Wilson later confirmed those reservations when he noted in print that he found no evidence of the Niger-Iraq uranium connection that Bush used as a basis for creating a second front in what has now been dubbed by the Pentagon as the "Long War."

With that evidence lacking and US support for the war and the Bush administration dwindling, the White House allegedly sought to discredit Wilson by outing his wife as a CIA agent.

Since then, the Valerie Plame saga has resulted in the imprisonment of one reporter and the dogged questioning of Novak and others over the leak.

Prosecutors and the US media are squabbling over US First Amendment rights - which provide that journalists can protect the identities of confidential sources - and a 1982 law that makes it a felony offense to publicly name a US intelligence operative.

On the other side of the ball, one Bush administration official, former Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby has stepped down. Now, Plame and Bush critics, including several Democratic lawmakers, are calling for the resignation of Rove and a full investigation into the role the vice president, and perhaps Bush himself, had in the naming of Plame.

While Democrats have little chance of investigating the administration while Republicans control the Congress, crucial mid-term election are coming up in November that could return control in the lower house to Democrats if recent opinion polls are correct.

If that is the case, Democrats will most certainly push for a congressional inquiry into the Plame matter and seek testimony from senior Bush officials including Rove, Cheney and perhaps the president himself - a move the notoriously protective White House will certainly fight.

In the meantime, Plame and her husband have initiated a lawsuit against several Bush officials, naming Cheney, Rove and Libby.

The suit claims that after Wilson discredited the Bush doctrine for invading Iraq, the White House sought to "discredit, punish and seek revenge against the plaintiffs that included, among other things, disclosing to members of the press Plaintiff Valerie Plame Wilson's classified CIA employment."

Plame and Wilson are asking for unspecified monetary compensation for the Bush administration's "gross invasion of privacy" and for impeding their ability to earn their respective livings and endangering the lives of their children.

Legal analysts have noted that the lawsuit is creating a second front of public scrutiny that will further tarnish the reputation of a president that is accused by many at home and abroad of deceiving the American people into backing the war in Iraq.

Republicans and Plame critics are calling the suit nothing more than a publicity stunt aimed at pumping up sales of her forthcoming book on the incident.

Regardless of how the suit progresses, the Bush administration is going to face an uphill battle during the next two-and-a-half years. The president's popularity has already taken a severe beating over the apparent lack of progress in Iraq and the failure to curtail the growing insurgency in Afghanistan.

The Plame case will add additional grief to the Bush agenda and could cost him key advisors like Rove if investigators determine he broke the law when confirming her name to Novak.

If Rove goes, the administration that prided itself on its ability to keep its house in order and its secrets to itself will begin unraveling.

Carmen Gentile is a senior international correspondent for ISN Security Watch. He has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan and Bolivia for ISN Security Watch, and Haiti, Venezuela and elsewhere for Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Washington Times and others.

The CIA also revealed it has not yet completed a formal assessment of the damage to national security that may have been caused by Plame's outing in 2003.

The assessment won't be completed until a criminal investigation of the leak has been concluded, Christopher J. Walker, the CIA's director of congressional affairs, said in the July 19 letter to Lautenberg.

For more than a year, Lautenberg and other Democrats have been calling on President Bush to fire presidential adviser Karl Rove and any other aides who discussed Plame's CIA status with reporters - or, at the least, to revoke their security clearances.

So far, only I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, has been charged in the investigation. Libby faces trial in January on perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges for lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned about Plame's CIA status and what he later told reporters.

Rove's lawyer revealed in June that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had decided not to seek criminal charges against the senior White House aide, who was the architect of Bush's presidential election campaigns.

Plame's identity as a CIA officer was classified information when it was revealed in a July 14, 2003, article by syndicated columnist Robert Novak. The Novak column appeared eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.

Earlier this month, Plame and Wilson filed a lawsuit accusing Cheney, Rove, Libby and 10 unnamed administration officials of leaking Plame's identity and wrecking her career to punish Wilson for his criticism of the White House's motives in Iraq.

Plame left the CIA in January and is writing a book about what happened to her.

"We know that members of the administration were leaking classified information, so it makes no sense that no one has had their security clearances revoked," Lautenberg said. "President Bush should not allow anyone who has divulged sensitive information to have continued access to national secrets."

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press