The morning after teams of gunmen carried out a brazen series of attacks across southern Mumbai, killing scores of people and taking hostages in three locations, the situation showed little signs of a quick resolution.

A series of gunshots rang through the air at the Oberoi Hotel Thursday morning, where about 100 members of a specialized unit of the Indian police undertook an operation to rescue four to five foreigners hostages on the 19th floor.

A few blocks away, a series of gunfire sent curious onlookers scurrying for cover at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Shortly afterward, police escorted dozens of people -- who appeared to be mostly westerners -- out of the hotel. A.N. Roy, the police chief of Maharashtra state, where Mumbai is located, said all hostages there had been freed.

A standoff at a third location -- the Cama Hospital for women and infants -- also appeared to have been resolved by Thursday morning, CNN's sister station CNN-IBN reported. It was not immediately known whether gunmen at the hospital fled or were killed.

This sucks.

"I'm completely public about being a racist and Nazi," he says. "I get into fights maybe twice a month, because some niggers will get pissed off with it." Every time a black person enters the bar, he emits a hiss of disapproval.

"I just don't want to be around them," he tells me. "I don't want to look at them, I don't want them near me, I don't want to smell them. And people say, 'Oh people who are racialist you've never hung around black people'... bullshit, I've showered with them, I've lived with them, I don't like them... they're fucking savages, they're tribal motherfuckers, they are different to us, how they think, how they conduct themselves."

Despite his vitriolic racism Fogarty wasn't worried about not being allowed into the army. Military protocol stipulates that each new recruit with suspicious tattoos must write an explanation about the divinity and meaning of their body art. Fogarty's are quite clearly the kind written about in ARP 600-15 -- a Nordic warrior, and a Celtic cross. But this didn't hinder him. "They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo and I made up some stuff and that was that," he says. Fogarty was enlisted and stationed in the 3rd Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, GA, the largest Army installation east of the Mississippi River.

This happened in 1997 even before the new military attitude to tattoos really took hold as troops were needed ever more desperately. It shows that regulations were loose before and have got even looser. Now more Fogarty's are getting through, as the commanders in the army hierarchy admit to a liberalism that wasn't in place previously.

...

The Army tome which deals with all the multifarious obligations that a soldier must uphold in the military is called AR 600-20, or "Army Command Policy". It devotes one of 125 pages to the problem of extremism, and states the policy generally as: "Participation in extremist organizations and activities by Army personnel is inconsistent with the responsibilities of military service".

...

There is no mention that membership itself is prohibited; it is the public display of allegiance that is barred. The options available to a Commander should these rules be transgressed are involuntary separation, reclassification action or bar to reenlistment actions, or other administrative or disciplinary action 'deemed appropriate' by the Commander.

...

Fogarty was dragged away from his girlfriend when he was positioned in Georgia. And the woman, who would later be the mother of Fogarty's first child, born in 1999, grew angry. "She hated that I was in the military," he says. Her anger became so acute that, according to Fogarty, she sent a dossier of pictures to his military command that showed him at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, as well as performing his racist rock for Attack.

"They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures and asked me what they were. I just denied it and said my girlfriend was a spiteful bitch, which is true.

"They knew what I was about, but they let it go because I'm a great soldier, and they knew that."

The person heading the investigation was Command Sgt. Maj. Tommy Dunn. I contacted him and he claimed he couldn't remember who Sgt. Fogarty was. "It's funny," says Fogarty when I tell him, "he gave me medals and everything."

...

Fogarty gives me the latest Attack album, "Survival". The jacket is a picture of him in military fatigues while in Iraq and his songs give a clear indication of his thoughts on his time there. "Eye For An Eye" opens with the lines: "A slow painful death I strive/ Why are you still alive?" The chorus includes the lines: "It's our turn to watch you bleed/ It's our turn to tear you limb from limb... We will leave no survivors of this bloody war.
"
"In Battle" includes the lines "In battle there are no laws... Its kill or be killed, die with the rest... Relief came when I pulled the trigger and watched you die/ I can't stop laughing everytime I remember you start to cry/ Watch you cry!"

"To tell you the truth I hate Arabs more than anybody," he says at Lowry Zoo. "For the simple fact I've served over there and seen how they live. They're just a backward people... them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I'm concerned, their customs, everything to do with the Middle East is just repugnant to me."

But he believes the war can be won. "You have to break these people's will to fight, the only reason they are fighting is that there is some sort of profit to it, or its not that bad, that the Americans are not going to do what they did in World War Two and kill everybody."

Would he nuke Baghdad? "Fuck yeah! ... If we had occupying force cracking down on spitting on sidewalk would you spit on sidewalk if they shot you in the head for it? Go in with iron-fist, this is how you will live, if you don't we'll kill you... Quit pussy footing around, listen to us or die."

...

Fogarty was confident enough of carte blanche from the military that during his break from service in January 2004, he flew not back to see his family in the U.S but to Dresden, Germany to give a concert to 2,500 skinheads, on the army’s budget.

The Bush administration is considering the withdrawal of additional combat forces from Iraq beginning in September, according to administration and military officials, raising the prospect of a far more ambitious plan than expected only months ago.

Just in time for the election!

The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to grant retroactive amnesty to the telecoms that aided the President Bush's five-year secret, warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and to expand the government's authority to sift through U.S. communications, handing a key victory to the Bush administration.

...

Voting record for FISA Amendments Act of 2008

Today, the majority in a federal Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against Center for Constitutional Rights client Maher Arar's case against U.S. officials for their role in sending him to Syria to be tortured and interrogated for a year under the extraordinary rendition program.

Maher Arar is not available to comment in person, but is issuing the following statement: "The Court's 2-1 ruling is outrageous. It basically legitimizes what was done to me, and permits the government to use immigration law as a disguise to send people to torture without regard for due process."

The majority ruled that Mr. Arar's constitutional claims that it was a violation of due process to lock him up for two weeks, obstruct his access to a lawyer and a court, and then to ship him to Syria for the purpose of having him interrogated under torture could not be heard in federal court for two reasons. It concluded that adjudicating the claims would interfere with sensitive matters of foreign policy and national security, and that Arar, as a foreigner who had not been formally admitted to the U.S., had no constitutional due process rights with respect to the government's interference with his access to a lawyer and the decision to send him to Syria to be tortured.

Customs insists that terrorism and child pornography are sufficient justification for electronics searches. And even civil libertarians agree it makes sense for customs to search luggage, which could pose immediate dangers to aircraft and passengers. But, says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, "customs officials do not go through briefcases to review and copy paper business records or personal diaries, which is apparently what they are now doing in digital form. These pda's don't have bombs in them."

Torture doesn't work. In fact, in a counterinsurgency it works against you because it turns the locals against you. That is why the Marines took that guy back to his house. Because they knew we were trying to win that neighborhood's trust, and torturing one of their own was not the way to do it, even if he was working with the Muj. Kill him in open battle, sure, they would understand that, but not torture. It backfires on you everytime. Every story about our hapless spook operators torturing some terror suspect makes every Marine and soldier patrolling through the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan less safe.

It's crazy, but it's coming soon. The armed forces are working out details. Impeachment may be the only way to stop it.

Breaking months of acrimonious deadlock, House and Senate leaders from both parties have agreed to a bill that gives the nation's spy agencies the power to turn a wide swath of domestic communication companies into intelligence-gathering operations, and that puts an end to court challenges to telecoms such as AT&T that aided the government's secret, five-year warrantless wiretapping program.

What a bunch of crap.

Mr. KUCINICH. Madam Speaker, pursuant to clause 2 of rule IX, I rise to give notice of my intent to raise a question of the privileges of the House.

The form of the resolution is as follows:

Resolved, That President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate...