Amerikanska

CONCORD, N.C. -- A family in Concord is grieving the loss of their son who was killed Monday in Iraq when a U.S.-trained member of the Iraqi army suddenly opened fire, killing 22-year- old James McClamrock and another U.S. soldier.

McClamrock's father is the pastor of the Concord ARP Church on Union Street, one of the oldest churches in Concord.

The family left their home on the church grounds Wednesday afternoon, headed to the U.S. Air Force base in Dover, Delaware, where their son's body is to be returned to U.S. soil.

McClamrock's great-aunt, Flora Hurlocker, spoke for the family Wednesday afternoon.

"He was one of six children,” she says. “But he was very loved and very special to all of us."

Among those who stopped by the family's home to pay their respects was Concord Mayor Scott Padgett.

"My job, and our job as neighbors here in this city, is to show support for this family in every way we can and I'm sure our citizens will do that," Padgett says.

McClamrock was in the town of Luz, north of Baghdad, when the Iraqi soldier opened fire.

Other U.S. forces then killed the Iraqi soldier.

There is no word on when funeral services will be held. A special prayer service is scheduled for McClamrock tonight at Concord ARP Church.

When asked how best she would remember James, his great-aunt told a story about James talking to his mother from Iraq.

"His mother was asking if he needed something for his friends. She was going to send a box,” she remembers. “He said, 'All they need is Jesus.'"

Twelve American soldiers face trial over an secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven other soldiers are accused of covering up the killings as well as a violent assault on a new recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province. According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November Other soldiers later told the army's criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and before long was remarking on how easy it would be to "toss a grenade at someone and kill them".

One soldier said he believed Gibbs was "feeling out the platoon".

According to investigators, Gibbs, 25, shortly afterwards hatched a plan with another soldier, Jeremy Morlock, 22, and other members of the unit to form a "kill team". While on patrol over the following months they allegedly killed at least three Afghan civilians.

According to the charge sheet, the first target was Gul Mudin, who was killed "by means of throwing a fragmentary grenade at him and shooting him with a rifle", when the patrol entered the village of La Mohammed Kalay in January.

Morlock and another soldier, Andrew Holmes, were on guard at the edge of a poppy field when Mudin emerged and stopped on the other side of a wall from the soldiers. Gibbs allegedly handed Morlock a grenade who armed it and dropped it over the wall next to the Afghan and dived for cover. Holmes, 19, then allegedly fired over the wall.

Later in the day, Morlock is alleged to have told Holmes that the killing was for fun and threatened him if he told anyone.

The second victim, Marach Agha, was shot and killed the following month. Gibbs is alleged to have shot him and placed a Kalashnikov next to the body to justify the killing.

In May, Mullah Adadhdad was killed after being shot and attacked with a grenade.

The Army Times reported that a least one of the soldiers collected the fingers of the victims as souvenirs and that some of them posed for photographs with the bodies.

Five soldiers – Gibbs, Morlock, Holmes, Michael Wagnon and Adam Winfield – are accused of murder and aggravated assault among other charges. All of the soldiers have denied the charges. They face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.

The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug while on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians at checkpoints or while on patrol.

The soldier, who was straight out of basic training and has not been named, said he witnessed the widespread smoking of hashish and drinking of smuggled alcohol but initially did not report it out of loyalty to his comrades. But when he returned from a week-long assignment at an army headquarters and discovered soldiers using the shipping container in which he was billeted to smoke hashish he reported it to a sergeant he trusted. Two days later, several members of his platoon, including Gibbs and Morlock, accused him of "snitching", gave him a severe beating and told him to keep his mouth shut. However the soldier reported the beating and threats to his officers and then told investigators what he knew of the "kill team".

Following the arrest of the original five accused in June, seven other soldiers were charged last month with attempting to cover up the killings, blocking the investigation and violent assault on the soldier who reported the smoking of hashish. The 74 charges against the 12 soldiers include accusations of illegal drug and alcohol use.

The charges will be considered by a military grand jury later this month which will decided if there is enough evidence to proceed with a court martial.

Army investigators say Morlock has admitted his involvement in the killings and given details about the role of others including Gibbs. However, his civilian lawyer, Michael Waddington, is seeking to have that confession suppressed because he says his client was interviewed while under the influence of prescription drugs taken for battlefield injuries and that he was also suffering from traumatic brain injury.

"Our position is that his statements were incoherent, and taken while he was under a cocktail of drugs that shouldn't have been mixed," Waddington told the Seattle Times.

KABUL - Fears over the future of ailing Kabul Bank grew violent Wednesday as state police beat back crowds of frustrated Afghan government workers attempting to withdraw their salaries on the final day before a four-day national holiday.

More than 500 government employees, including local police officers, Afghan National Army soldiers and teachers, mobbed the sole Kabul Bank branch that remained open, only to be kept at bay by armed police from the country's National Directorate of Security. The crowds pressed in so closely that the NDS police started punching and shoving people to keep them back. The guards also threatened to destroy the cameras of journalists attempting to take pictures of the scene. A cameraman was punched before jumping into a car and speeding off.

"This is shameful that these simple police officers are beating up more high-ranking officers," said Abdul Hanan, a policeman who had come to collect his $450 monthly salary. "We are educated people, not animals. We need to get our salaries. I have worked in more than 20 provinces, but I am standing out here unable to get my salary."

The standoff was the latest setback for attempts by President Hamid Karzai's administration to control public fears about the future of Kabul Bank, whose top two executives were forced to resign last week after the discovery of a series of risky off-the-books loans and property investments in Dubai.

Since then, panicked Afghans have removed well more than half of the bank's $500 million in liquid cash, despite assurances from the Karzai administration and Afghanistan's Central Bank that Kabul Bank is solvent and not in need of a government bailout. Kabul Bank, the country's largest private bank, handles payments for 250,000 government employees, and U.S. officials say a meltdown could affect the war effort to defeat the Taliban.

On Tuesday, according to a source in the Ministry of Finance, Karzai ordered that all government funds in the bank - estimated at between $100 million and $150 million - cannot be transferred elsewhere, a bid to ensure the bank is able to continue to pay salaries.

Wednesday was the final day that salaries could be cashed before the four-day Eid al-Fitr, which celebrates the end of Ramadan. Families often spend significant money on food and presents for the holiday.

Abdul Samad, an employee of the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, was among the people demanding their salaries at Kabul Bank. He said he had not been paid in two months.

"I told them if I can't get my money, they will have to sit quietly and we would have no Eid," he said.

While Samad was talking, an NDS guard came over to order him to move back. The guard told the crowd that Abdul Qadir Fitrat, the governor of the Central Bank, was now in charge of Kabul Bank. Fitrat has maintained that the Central Bank is merely approving decisions made by the new chief executive of the bank, Masood Ghazi, a former Central Bank executive.

But Samad yelled at the guard that "those four mafia guys own this bank," referring to ousted chairman Sherkhan Farnood and ousted chief executive Khalilullah Fruzi, among others. The Central Bank has frozen the assets of several of those executives.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - The brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai made nearly $1 million on a Dubai property deal financed with money from Kabul Bank, according to a person familiar with the transaction and a property sales registry.

It was not previously known that the president's brother, Mahmoud Karzai, had benefited financially from Dubai real estate transactions involving Afghanistan's biggest but now deeply troubled bank. Kabul Bank is at the center of a financial and political crisis in Afghanistan following a rush by depositors to withdraw their money. The bank's disarray has cast a pall over President Karzai's administration and his American backers.

Mahmoud Karzai, Kabul Bank's third-biggest shareholder, described himself as a "passive partner" and said he had no role in Kabul Bank's management decisions, including those relating to Dubai real estate. He blamed the bank's sometimes questionable practices on its now-ejected executives. Kabul Bank, which has built a network of branches and ATMs across Afghanistan, has done "good things, but also did stupid things," Karzai said.

Karzai bought a villa on Dubai's Palm Jumeirah, a high-end property development, for 7 million dirhams in July 2007 and sold it to an Iranian buyer in April 2008 for 10.4 million dirhams, for a profit of 3.4 million dirhams, or about $930,000 at current exchange rates.

Karzai said in a telephone interview that he could not recall the details but that the initial purchase involved a loan handled by Kabul Bank's now-ousted chairman, Sherkhan Farnood. "What is wrong with this? I borrowed money from the bank and made an investment," he said. He said he made a profit because he "sold at the peak of the market" but added: "I'm not a rich man."

Karzai became a shareholder in Kabul Bank in March 2007, four months before purchasing the Dubai property with money from the bank. He acquired his 7 percent stake in Kabul Bank with a loan - still outstanding - from the same bank, according to Karzai and other shareholders.

Kabul Bank's unorthodox lending practices form part of a skein of transactions that are under investigation by Afghan authorities as they struggle to hold together a financial institution critical to the country's economy and security. Kabul Bank handles salary payments for soldiers, police and teachers.

Karzai said he purchased his since-sold Palm Jumeirah villa to obtain Dubai residency status so that his children could attend local schools. He said he bought it from Farnood, the then-Kabul Bank chairman, who gave him a loan. This money, said Karzai and a person familiar with the transaction, was later repaid in full.

Kabul Bank has struggled over the past week to stay afloat in the face of waves of depositors trying to pull out their savings. The rush, triggered by news that the Central Bank on Aug. 30 forced Farnood and the bank's chief executive, Khalilullah Fruzi, to resign, now appears to have slowed. Depositors withdrew about $67 million Monday, down from the level of last week, and the withdrawals slowed further Tuesday, the bank said.

Kabul Bank bet heavily on the Dubai real estate market, investing at least $140 million in property in the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which is part of the United Arab Emirates. Most of the purchases, including 16 villas and two apartments, were on Palm Jumeirah, a man-made island in the shape of a palm tree that juts into the gulf.

Nearly all the Dubai property purchased with Kabul Bank funds is registered in the name of Farnood, the former chairman, or that of his wife. Mahmoud Karzai, an American citizen who used to run an Afghan restaurant in Maryland and still has a house in Glenwood, maintains a residence at one of the properties registered in Farnood's name, a $5.5 million seafront villa on Palm Jumeirah. Karzai says he makes a monthly payment on the property.

Farnood, at the request of the Afghan Central Bank, has pledged to transfer the titles of the real estate to Kabul Bank.

Kabul Bank's liquid assets, which were about $500 million when the crisis broke, are running dangerously low, but a long holiday that begins Wednesday will give the bank and the Afghan government breathing space. Afghan banks are closed from Wednesday through Sunday, first for an Afghan national holiday and then for the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting and prayer.

Karzai said Kabul Bank suffered from a "concerted attack" by the American media, which he said is being given information by U.S. officials hostile to his brother, the president. The bank, he said, cut corners under the previous management but built up a successful business from scratch. Its misdeeds, he added, are nothing next to those of "thieves" in Afghanistan who are "always stealing."

The Afghan government has vowed that Kabul Bank will not collapse but has so far balked at providing state funds to help prop it up. Washington has ruled out any U.S.-funded bailout of the bank.

BAGHDAD - Two U.S. service members were killed and nine others were wounded when a Kurdish Iraqi soldier sprayed them with gunfire inside an Iraqi army commando base north of Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon, Iraqi and U.S. military officials said.

The two Americans, whose names were being withheld until relatives are notified, were the first U.S. service members to be killed in Iraq since the Obama administration declared combat operations there officially over last week. The incident underscored the dangers still facing the nearly 50,000 U.S. troops still in the country.

Details remained murky Tuesday afternoon while the U.S. military investigated the incident. U.S. troops had escorted their commander to an afternoon meeting at an Iraqi army base in Tuz Khurmatu, 55 miles south of Kirkuk. During the meeting, a man in an Iraqi army uniform opened fire, the U.S. military said, adding that the assailant was shot dead at the scene.

It was unclear Tuesday whether the young shooter, whom Iraqi security officials identified as Soran Rahman Taleh Wali, a Kurdish member of one of the Iraqi army's special forces units, had planned the attack or acted spontaneously. His commander, Staff Col. Ghaleb al-Bayati, said Wali was playing volleyball with U.S. troops inside the base when an argument escalated and Wali fired his weapon repeatedly, Bayati said.

"I'm not ruling anything out, but it seems pretty far-fetched that an altercation like this would be over a volleyball match," said Maj. Lee Peters, a military spokesman for U.S. forces in the north of Iraq. "We think this is an isolated incident, and it hasn't broken our trust with the Iraqi security forces."

Peters said Tuesday night he could not confirm whether the shooter was an Iraqi soldier.

The attack was the second within three days on an Iraqi base where U.S. troops were present. On Sunday, a vehicle loaded with explosives detonated outside an Iraqi army headquarters in Baghdad, and at least four suicide bombers stormed the base, where several American service members are housed. Two gained entry before U.S. and Iraqi forces repelled the assault, which left at least 12 Iraqis dead, most of them soldiers.

In Jumhouriyah, Wali's neighborhood just a few miles from the base in Tuz Khurmatu, neighbors and family members would not speak about the 26-year-old on Tuesday, saying they feared repercussions.

The mostly Kurdish neighborhood had been the target of recent joint U.S. and Iraqi missions to root out members of a Sunni insurgent group, Ansar al-Sunna, said Col. Haywa Rasoul, of the Tuz Khurmatu police. Tuz Khurmatu has a mixed Kurdish, Turkmen and Arab population. Some Iraqi security officials said the raids might have upset Wali, whom they described as short-tempered. Wali's brother is a police officer and his family is respected in the community, Rasoul said.

The U.S. military confirmed that U.S. troops had assisted in an Iraqi mission in the previous 24 hours to detain a man with a warrant out for his arrest, along with several other suspects. But it did not confirm the mission was related to Ansar al-Sunna.

"This is the first incident in which a Kurd killed Americans. We are worried that this might end the honeymoon between the Kurds and the Americans," a Kurdish security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Kurdish Iraqis have been the most steadfast U.S. ally in Iraq.

Since the end of combat operations Tuesday, U.S. troops in the north have fired only a few warning shots, the U.S. military said. This year, at least 20 service members have been killed in Iraq, including in Tuesday's incident, according to iCasualties.org, a Web site that tracks military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 4,400 have died since the war began in 2003.

"This is a tragic and cowardly act, which I firmly believe was an isolated incident and is certainly not reflective of the Iraqi Security Forces in Salah-ad-Din [province]," Maj. Gen. Tony Cucolo, commander of U.S. forces in the northern part of Iraq, said in a statement.

Also Tuesday, a news anchor for the state television network al-Iraqiya was gunned down in the capital in what appeared to be part of an ongoing campaign of assassinations. Gunmen used pistols capped with silencers Tuesday morning to shoot Riyadh Jabbar al-Sarray. Al-Iraqiya declared three days of mourning and replaced their broadcast with his image.

BAGHDAD – An Iraqi soldier fired a barrage of bullets at American troops protecting one of their commanders during a visit to an Iraqi army base Tuesday and killed two of them, the first U.S. servicemen to die since President Barack Obama declared an end to combat operations in the country last week.

Even after the U.S. dramatically reduced the number of troops and rebranded its mission in Iraq, the attack was a reminder that Americans still have to defend themselves in a dangerous country where Iraqi forces only have a tenuous hold on security. Nine Americans were wounded in Tuesday's shooting.

The attack also showed that even inside the bases of U.S.-trained Iraqi forces, American soldiers can still face danger. Just on Sunday, Americans training Iraqi forces at a military headquarters in the heart of Baghdad had to help fight off a squad of suicide attackers, two of whom managed to breach the compound in an hour-long battle. U.S. helicopters and drones joined the fight, but no American personnel were hurt in that assault.

The Americans attacked on Tuesday were providing security for a commander attending a meeting with Iraqi military personnel at a base near the city of Tuz Khormato, about 130 miles (210 kilometers) north of Baghdad.

The assailant opened fire after an argument and was killed in the shootout that followed, said the city's police chief, Col. Hussein Rashid. He did not provide details on the nature of the argument.

"This is a tragic and cowardly act and is certainly not reflective of the Iraqi security forces," said Maj. Gen. Tony Cucolo, the American commander in charge of U.S. forces in northern Iraq.

Cucolo stressed during the Sept. 1 ceremony marking the formal change in the American mission that his soldiers know the fight is not over. "There are groups here that still want to hurt us," he said last week.

The U.S. military is investigating Tuesday's shooting, and the names of the slain soldiers were being withheld until their families were notified.

At least 4,418 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The American military has reduced its footprint in the country from a one-time high of 170,000 troops to just under 50,000 as of Aug. 31. American troops pulled out of Iraqi cities in the summer of 2009, and soon after U.S. casualties fell significantly.

Under an agreement between Iraq and the United States, all American forces are to leave the country by the end of next year.

The U.S. troops remaining in Iraq until then are tasked with training Iraqi security forces, providing security for some State Department missions and assisting the Iraqi forces in hunting down insurgent groups. But they can be drawn into combat missions if Iraqi forces request their help.

There are also just under 5,000 special forces troops who assist in training and will team up with Iraqi troops on counterterror raids.

U.S. troops in Iraq still carry weapons and are able to defend themselves and their bases. They are also still hit by roadside bombs and mortar and rocket fire on a near daily basis.

U.S. military officials have said Iranian-backed militias are stepping up their attacks against targets in Baghdad in an attempt to make it look like they are driving the Americans out.

While the focus is supposed to be on training, Vice President Joe Biden vowed last week during a trip to Baghdad that the remaining American troops are "as combat ready, if need be, as any in our military."

In Tuesday's attack, however, the danger came from within, when U.S. troops were surrounded by the men they are supposed to be training to take over security for the country.

U.S. troops often work very closely with Iraqi forces, sometimes living and working on the same small bases to improve relations, facilitate training and foster trust between both sides.

That was the case at the Baghdad military headquarters attacked on Sunday by six assailants wearing explosives vests and armed with rifles and grenades.

In a statement posted on a militant website, an al-Qaida front group known as the Islamic State of Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack on the headquarters of the Iraqi Army's 11th Division.

It was the second assault on the complex in less than a month and revealed the punishing gaps that remain in Iraqi security at even the most obvious insurgent targets.

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN) -- An Iraqi soldier opened fire Tuesday on a group of U.S. soldiers in northern Iraq, killing two and wounding nine others, the U.S. military and the Iraqi military said.

They are the first American deaths in Iraq since the U.S. combat mission officially ended last week.

The attack occurred inside an Iraqi army commando compound when the soldier, clad in an Iraqi army uniform, fired on the U.S. soldiers near the Salaheddin province city of Tuz, the U.S. military said. The attacker was shot and killed.

Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Askari, a Defense Ministry spokesman, identified the shooter as Soran Rahman, from the Iraqi army's 4th Division.

Al-Askari said Rahman got into a fight with U.S. soldiers, and then pulled his weapon and fired on them before he was shot dead. The spokesman said a joint U.S.-Iraqi investigation into the incident was under way.

The soldiers were part of a security element for a U.S. company commander who was meeting with members of Iraqi security forces at the compound.

"This is a tragic and cowardly act, which I firmly believe was an isolated incident and is certainly not reflective of the Iraqi security forces" in Salaheddin, said Maj. Gen. Tony Cucolo, commander, Task Force Marne.

In a second attack in Salaheddin province, a U.S. soldier and a number of Iraqis were wounded when a convoy in central Tikrit was hit by grenades early Tuesday afternoon, a U.S. military spokesman said. Soldiers who were in the vehicle that was attacked killed the grenade thrower, he said.

An Iraqi Interior Ministry official and police in Tikrit said that the man threw two grenades at the convoy, damaging a vehicle, and that U.S. forces then opened fire "randomly," killing a civilian and wounding four others.

But a spokesman for the U.S. military issued a statement disagreeing with that assessment, saying the U.S. military believes that the civilians' wounds were caused by the grenade that exploded and not from indiscriminate gunfire.

He said a U.S. military investigation concluded that the civilians' wounds were caused by shrapnel and not from bullets.

Two witnesses identified the body as that of the attacker, the spokesman said.

More than 4,400 U.S. troops died in Iraq during the war. While violence has dropped in the last two years, President Barack Obama said last week that "violence will not end with our combat mission."

"Extremists will continue to set off bombs, attack Iraqi civilians and try to spark sectarian strife. But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals," he said in a speech from the Oval Office on August 31.

That's when he announced the end of the U.S. combat mission and the beginning of a new American phase in Iraq.

U.S. troops are expected to advise and assist Iraq's security forces, back Iraqi troops in counterterrorism missions and protect American civilians there during a transitional period.

Unless the United States and Iraq forge a new agreement, all U.S. troops are scheduled to depart Iraq by the end of 2011.

The pastor of a tiny, fringe evangelical church in Florida on Tuesday rebuffed a plea for restraint from Gen. David H. Petraeus, who warned that a plan to burn the Muslim holy book could provoke violence against American troops and citizens overseas.

"Instead of possibly blaming us for what could happen, we put the blame where it belongs — on the people who would do it," Pastor Terry Jones of the 50-member Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., told the Associated Press. "We should address radical Islam and send a very clear warning that they are not to retaliate in any form."

Jones also said he was still praying over his decision and hinted that he might change his mind. "We understand the general's concerns and we are taking those into consideration," he told WOFL-TV in Orlando.

A coalition of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders held a news conference in Washington on Tuesday to condemn Jones' statements and other slurs aimed at Muslims nationwide.

"The threatened burning of copies of the Holy Koran this Saturday is a particularly egregious offense that demands the strongest possible condemnation by all who value civility in public life and seek to honor the sacred memory of those who lost their lives on Sept. 11," said a statement by religious leaders organized by the Islamic Society of North America.

Religious leaders warned that Muslims overseas would interpret extremists like Jones as reflecting mainstream American attitudes toward Muslims. In Afghanistan on Monday, protesters made a point of wrapping an effigy of Jones in an American flag before burning both the effigy and the flag.

Reaction in the Arab news media was more muted, with most commentators and government officials calling on U.S. citizens to honor religious freedom and condemn Jones.

Petraeus, who directs U.S. forces in Afghanistan, seemed concerned that Jones' insults would enrage ordinary Afghans whom his soldiers are trying to win over as they battle Taliban religious extremists.

The general said Monday that images of burning Korans "would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan — and around the world — to inflame public opinion and incite violence."

Weeks of anti-Muslim diatribes by Jones have brought unwelcome publicity to Gainesville, a progressive college town of 125,000 that normally would be focused on the University of Florida's football game Saturday. Jones' antics have also fed into a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide as the Sept. 11 anniversary approaches and U.S. troops continue to die in two wars waged in Muslim nations.

The reverend's threat follows angry protests against a proposed Islamic center two blocks from the World Trade Center site in New York. In recent weeks, other protesters have objected to planned mosques or Islamic centers in several states, calling them threats to local security.

In Gainesville, news crews have descended on the small stone-and-frame church, located on the city's northern outskirts. Jones' leathery, mustachioed face has appeared on TV networks beamed worldwide, delivering fiery condemnations of Islam.

City officials in Gainesville, where Mayor Craig Lowe has called the Dove World Outreach Center "an embarrassment to our community," have vowed to try to prevent Jones from burning anything on Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the attacks.

Jones has been denied a burning permit, but says his lawyers have advised him that his 1st Amendment right to express his beliefs supersedes any local ordinance.

Police and other public safety officials will be on hand Saturday to enforce the city's open-burning law, said Bob Woods, Gainesville's communications manager. The ordinance's list of eight classes of items that may not be burned does not specifically include books, but does include paper.

Asked what the city would do if Jones carried out his threat, Woods replied, "We would respond appropriately. It depends on his actions.''

Lowe asked Gainesville residents to join him "in continuing to assert our community's true character" in response to what he called Jones' "offensive behavior."

Jones said he had received more than 100 death threats and now wears a .40-caliber pistol strapped to his hip. FBI agents have visited the preacher to voice concerns for his safety, according to the Associated Press.

The world's leading Sunni Muslim institution, Al Azhar University in Egypt, has accused Jones of fomenting hate and bigotry and has asked American churches to condemn him. Indonesian Muslims have demonstrated outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, threatening violence if any Korans are burned.

In 2005, after a report in Newsweek — later retracted — that U.S. guards at the Guantanamo Bay prison had flushed a Koran down a toilet, deadly riots broke out in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Hundreds of protesters in Afghanistan's capital burned an effigy of President Obama in October 2009, acting on rumors that American troops had desecrated the Koran. U.S. military officials emphatically denied that any copies of the Muslim holy book had been mishandled.

For Muslims, the Koran is the word of Allah. The holy book is treated with deep reverence, and any defiling of it is considered a grave offense.

"The Holy Koran is sacred, just like the Bible is to Christians," Dr. Mohamed Elsanousi, director of community outreach for the Islamic Society of North America, said in an interview. "Desecration of this book is something people will not tolerate."

Elsanousi said his organization has asked Muslims worldwide not to react violently if Korans are indeed burned.

The White House said Tuesday it agreed with Petraeus that burning Korans could endanger U.S. troops overseas, and the State Department called Jones' threat "un-American."

Last week, Jones said burning Korans "is a message that we have been called to bring forth. And because of that, we do not feel we can back down.''

Asked Tuesday about Petraeus' concerns, Jones told the Orlando TV station: "We should be issuing statements to radical Islam telling them this is enough. They better not do anything. If they do, we will answer."

On Labor Day, Jones posed in a dark suit outside his church, next to a portable billboard that read: "International Burn A Koran Day — 9/11/2010 — 6 p.m. to 9 p.m."

Jones has written a book titled "Islam Is of the Devil," and his church has distributed T-shirts bearing the same message. On the church's website, a "Ten Reasons to Burn the Koran" list discusses the plan:

"We are using this act to warn about the teaching and ideology of Islam, which we do hate as it is hateful. The world is in bondage to the massive grip of the lies of Islam."

According to the church, supporters have mailed in Korans to be burned.

There are only a few days left until Congress returns to session, and that means President Obama faces a deadline, of sorts, if he wants to quickly fill vacancies in his administration. Obama has until the beginning of next week to offer recess appointments to nominees or expected nominees to positions that typically require Senate confirmation.

Highlighting the progressive angst about Obama's general unwillingness to exercise his recess appointment power are new website ads, produced by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, pressuring him to give Elizabeth Warren the top slot at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

PCCC has partnered with Credo mobile to petition the White House to let Warren head the CFPB.

Warren is the most high-profile candidate for a recess appointment, but Obama has a much broader problem: he's nominated scores of people to important positions in the government who have languished for weeks or months -- either because the Senate calendar too full or because the GOP is recalcitrant to allow them to be confirmed (or both).

Included in that raft are nominees to the Fed Board of Governors, who could help change monetary policy in ways that will boost employment.

Obama has made few high-profile recess appointments, most recently Donald Berwick who is now running the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Republicans had been blocking Berwick who will play a crucial role in the implementation of the health care law, leaving Obama little choice. But other nominees haven't been so lucky in the past. For instance, after languishing for over a year, with little help from the administration or Senate Democrats, progressive favorite Dawn Johnsen's nomination to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel was withdrawn.

As if to accentuate the point, an Associated Press investigation published today finds that Obama has seen fewer federal judges (who can also be recess appointed) confirmed at this point in his presidency than did Richard Nixon. Throw in retirements, and it turns out that district courts are now more Republican than they were under George W. Bush.

CANBERRA, Australia – Prime Minister Julia Gillard's  center-left Labor Party will form a minority government to rule Australia for a second three-year term, after two independent lawmakers joined her coalition Tuesday in the interest of stable government.

The decision by Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott gives Gillard's party control of 76 seats in the 150-seat House or Representatives and avoids the need for another round of polls, following inconclusive elections late last month.

It also means Gillard can continue with her plans to introduce a 30 percent tax on iron ore and coal miners' burgeoning profits and make Australia's biggest polluters pay for carbon gas emissions.

Abbott's coalition won 73 seats and another independent, Bob Katter, announced earlier Tuesday that he preferred Abbott as prime minister, partly because he opposed the mining and carbon tax plans.

Aug. 21 elections were the first since 1940 to fail to deliver a clear winner.

Windsor and Oakeshott, who have both championed better communications infrastructure for rural areas, said Labor's plan to introduce a 43 billion Australian dollar ($38 billion) high-speed optical fiber national broadband network was a major factor in their decision.

Abbott's Liberal Party had promised a smaller, slower AU$6 billion network with a range of technologies including optical fiber, wireless and DSL.

"What this is, is a hard decision," Oakeshott told reporters in announcing his decision. "There's no question about that. And on my end, it has been an absolute line-ball, points decision, judgment call, six of one, half dozen of the other. This could not get any closer," he added.

Windsor said he believed that Gillard was more likely than Abbott to work constructively with the independents and govern for a full three-year term rather than call an early election.

During intense negotiations with the independents, both Gillard and Abbott had promised that, if they could form a minority government, they would not later call an early election in the hope of winning an outright majority.

Labor won only 72 seats but has enlisted the support of a lawmaker from the Greens party plus three independents.

Liberal Party lawmakers argue that the Greens' influence will make the Labor minority government Australia's most left wing government in years.

Inventories held by wholesalers surged in July by the largest amount in two years while sales rebounded after two straight declines. Inventories rose 1.3 percent in July, the best performance since July 2008 and triple the increase economists had expected. Sales at the wholesale level increased 0.6 percent.

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(click on image to open White House livestream in separate window)

President Obama holds a press conference today at 11am ET. I’ll monitor it here. The press event is supposed to focus on the economy, though that isn’t sexy enough for the media as some dude with a handlebar moustache burning Korans, so that will probably take precedence. And then the media will wonder why the President isn’t “focusing on the economy.”

…The presser is taking place in the East Room. Obama is expected to announce in remarks before taking questions the appointment of Austan Goolsbee as the head of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Obama starts out by criticizing the previous Administration for cutting taxes for millionaires and billionaires, ignoring regulations and leading us to a financial crisis and a deep recession.

Obama walks the tightrope, says even though we’re growing again, progress has been painfully slow. Measures announced this week designed to accelerate job growth in the short term, and produce a foundation for growth in the long term.

He briefly describes the three pieces – making permanent the R&D tax credit, write-offs for business capital expenditures, and a 6-year plan for infrastructure with front-loaded money. Also touts the small business bill, which is virtually assured to pass after George Voinovich announced his support yesterday.

Obama cites the Voinovich shift, and his statement, “We don’t have time to play games.” Obama says he couldn’t agree more. “We weren’t sent to Washington to think about our jobs, we were sent to think about theirs.”

Now announcing Austan Goolsbee’s promotion to the head of the Council of Economic Advisers.

 

The president has been faulting Republicans for refusing to back his economic proposals or support tax cuts for businesses they say would suffer without them. Now he takes his message to an audience of millions, including many who will vote in November's decisive congressional elections, in a nationally televised news conference from the White House.

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Austan Goolsbee (photo: Gery Kodey via CAPAF)

[ed. note: President Obama will announce the choice of Goolsbee in a press conference scheduled for 11am EDT. David will be liveblogging the event.]

Austan Goolsbee, the chief economist during the Presidential campaign and a member of the economic team currently, will become the new head of the Council of Economic Advisers, replacing Christina Romer. If Romer’s tenure on the CEA is any expectation, Goolsbee will spend his time there butting heads with Larry Summers and being stymied on getting his advice to the President.

In fact, that may already be happening. Goolsbee spent a great deal of his early career at the University of Chicago doing academic work on R&D tax credit-style policies, and he found that they don’t really work as stimulus:

Although there appears to be an abiding faith among policy makers that tax incentives can influence the investment decisions of firms and serve as a tool for stabilizing the economy, empirical evidence for the connection is weak. Econometric research has commonly found that tax policy and the cost of capital have little effect on real investment. Economic theory predicts that the marginal user cost of capital should be the primary determinant of investment demand but actual estimates of the price elasticity of nvestment … mostly lie between zero and -0.4… The evidence that investment is only modestly responsive to price has been one of the most robust findings of the empirical investment literature…

In addition to their large revenue costs, investment tax subsidies may give large, unintended rents to capital suppliers without increasing real investment until several years later because of the short-run asset price responses of capital goods. For policy makers interested in using tax policy to stimulate investment or, especially, to smooth business cycle fluctuations, the results are not promising.

He then, according to Jason Furman, helped devise the economic strategy that the President rolled out this week, which includes as a centerpiece a permanent extension of the R&D tax credit. With a claim that it would create jobs.

So he participated in his own humiliation, which is very Japanese of him. [cont'd.]

In Jackie Calmes’ piece she takes pains to say that Geithner and Summers are going nowhere, so that looks to continue. In that piece we also learn that Goolsbee didn’t want to bail out Chrysler:

But Mr. Goolsbee, an amateur comic as well as an economist, was a favorite within the White House, where many colleagues felt he had earned the chairmanship. He has tense relations with Mr. Summers, however, after policy disputes in the early crisis-driven debates over the rescues of the financial industry and Chrysler, among other issues.

Mr. Goolsbee, who has a free-market bent, opposed bailing out Chrysler. He did not prevail, but Mr. Obama personally sought his arguments [...]

Mr. Goolsbee has also been the staff director of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a panel of business, labor and academic officials providing outside perspective. As such he worked closely with Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and shared with him a preference for tougher regulation of the financial industry than Mr. Geithner and others espoused.

I tepidly agree with Goolsbee on both counts, although the Chrysler rescue had implications for the supply chain and in retrospect was the right thing to do. The point is that Summers and Geithner have experience blocking Goolsbee on these matters, and that looks to continue.

 

Firefighters raced to beat back the flames a day after a massive explosion triggered by a ruptured gas line sent 100-foot flames roaring through a hillside community south of San Francisco. At least four people were killed and more than 170 homes were damaged or destroyed.

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LIVE BLOG: The president is expecting questions on the economy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the controversy over a Florida church's on-again off-again plan to burn Qurans.

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The California Republican's "tweet" is a bit of a humorous jab. Palin will forever be linked with something that's often misquoted.

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photo: lucycat2005 via Flickr

Remember that Vanity Fair tell-all in which Erik Prince offered new details about Blackwater ops? Though Michael Hayden has suggested Prince made up some of the details, it seemed to be a form of graymail targeted at those who approved Blackwater ops now under criminal investigation. Apparently, there’s a long form version.

Erik Prince, chairman of the private security firm once known as Blackwater, is writing a memoir that says Democratic officials in two administrations approved of his most sensitive and controversial operations, sources close to the company, now known as XE Services, said. [snip] But two sources, speaking independently, said that Prince will name Democratic officials in both the Clinton and Obama administrations who allegedly approved of clandestine intelligence operations carried out by Blackwater on behalf of the CIA and other government agencies. “He’s going to drop the names of people who, before, were saying, ‘Yeah, go kill Osama Bin Laden’ and stuff like that, but went sideways on him when the investigations began,” said one of the sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity in order to maintain relations with the company.

Now, I’m all in favor of Erik Prince, safe in his haven in UAE, telling the details of what he’s been doing in our name. I’d sure like to know about them. But Prince is nuts to think that anything he’ll reveal by the election will affect the success or failures of the Democrats.

“They think this will destroy the Democratic Party in the elections,” he said of Prince and his friends.

Even supposing Prince provides proof that people in the Obama Administration signed off on assassination … the response to Obama’s targeting of an American citizen for assassination has been a giant, collective yawn. And if Prince were to reveal that Clinton asked Blackwater to assassinate Osama bin Laden before 9/11? Wouldn’t that suggest, first of all, that Blackwater failed to accomplish the task? And wouldn’t it suggest, secondly, that Clinton was more of a bad ass about bin Laden than the Bushies up until the time when it was too late? Furthermore, we know that the Obama Administration continues to employ Blackwater. Sure, learning that Obama employed Blackwater for tasks that should be limited to government employees would piss someone like me off. But the rest of the country would go back to watching Koran burnings and football. The Spy Talk article on Prince’s memoir offers one more curious detail: that Parsons is the leading bidder to buy the company formerly known as Blackwater. Parsons is notable because it was almost certainly the most corrupt, incompetent construction contractor wasting reconstruction dollars in Iraq. Not only that, but it had ties every bit as close as Halliburton did to top members of the Administration.  (cont’d.)

I’d like to connect that news with another of yesterday’s big stories, the news that the Police Academy Parsons built in Iraq has shit raining from the ceiling.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed “the rain forest.”

They’re related, you see, because Parsons also had extraordinary access to Karl Rove. When Parsons signed this contract in 2004, its lobbyist was a woman named Karen Johnson. And in addition to being the business partner of Dick Cheney’s hunting buddy, Katharine Armstrong, Karen Johnson is known to be close to Karl Rove. So close, in fact, that it is rumored they’re lovers. At one point, Karen Johnson was not entirely forthcoming about her ties to the White House. When she first filled out her lobbying disclosure forms for 2004, the year in which she helped Parsons get a contract to build a shit shower instead of a police academy, Johnson forgot that she had been, um, lobbying the White House.

If Parsons were to take over the company formerly known as Blackwater, it would single source all the worst in contracting: cowboys with guns immune from the law, contractors who do shitty (literally) work for inflated amounts of taxpayer dollars, and influence peddling. What a perfect next chapter for Blackwater!

 

Al-Qaida may have been weakened, but there's a growing danger from so-called homegrown terrorists who may be more difficult to spot, according to analysis from a bipartisan think-tank. Read the report.

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Guantanamo detainees (photo: El Enigma via Flickr)

Speaking of the non-existent/invented-by-me-in-a-moment-of-cheekiness campaign to return Jack Goldsmith to the Office of Legal Counsel, check out Goldsmith’s detentions-dilemma op-ed in the Washington Post. Befitting this blighted world, Goldsmith endeavors to find some pragmatic ways out of the terrorism detentions stalemate. Among his basic tradeoffs: keep Guantanamo open and lose the military commissions.

If the political choices facing civil-libertarian and the counterterrorism communities are frozen where they are, then on substantive grounds, there’s a case to be made that civil libertarians should embrace that deal. (Attackerlady may disagree, and I expect a vigorous domestic debate later…) What’s the big problem with Guantanamo: indefinite detentions; military commissions; torture. Torture is gone, but the first two remain. Here’s what Goldsmith argues as an alternative:

[S]top using military commissions, which are a good idea in theory but have for nine years proved unworkable in practice. Military detention and civilian trials provide adequate legal bases for terrorist incapacitation.

So I guess what this means, if Guantanamo is to stay open, is to create the U.S. District Court for Guantanamo Bay. When I was at GTMO for Omar Khadr’s pre-trial hearing, the reporters and the officials openly discussed this possibility over beers as a hypothetical. There are some obvious logistical problems with such a proposal: it’s hard to get court officers and especially a jury to a Naval base on Cuba. But these are problems with the military commissions as well. On balance, perhaps it’s better to simply establish the civilian court, bite the bullet on the complications and work to overcome them, and use it to liquidate through trials the residual GTMO population. That would be a net positive for the rule of law.

Here’s Goldsmith’s substantive point on GTMO:

[G]ive up on closing the Guantanamo Bay facility. The administration has missed its one-year deadline. The symbolic benefits of closure have diminished significantly, because the substitute for detention without trial on the island is detention without trial inside the United States with little if any change in legal rights. The main reason to close the facility is to fulfill a first-week presidential pledge that now, under different circumstances, is too costly.

Really a fair critique! Here’s what drives me bonkers. Goldsmith is totally, totally right that the GTMO-North alternative makes the closure of Guantanamo “symbolic.” I made a similar point to a colleague at the Khadr trial. And then she said something that blew my mind: Yes, but symbols matter. What will it mean for al-Qaeda recruitment if GTMO stays open?

I resisted that point for as long as I possibly could. It seems so much like a cop-out. Symbolism should never trump substance! Thomson, with its indefinite detentions and military commissions, will just become the new symbol — and in the United States, no less! But I had to conclude my colleague was right. Symbols really are important. As journalists, it’s our responsibility to separate the symbols from the substance and to challenge both. But policies that lend themselves to misunderstanding will ultimately be untenable (see: the July 2011 “deadline” for “transition” in Afghanistan). I sympathize deeply with Goldsmith on this point — really, I do — but it’s worth acknowledging that the net costs to the U.S. for keeping Guantanamo open are significant, however much they stem from a symbol.