…But Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told a news conference in Washington that the plotting of the seven, who were called part of a “a home-grown terrorism cell,” never went beyond the earliest planning stages.

“There was no immediate threat,” Gonzales said, acknowledging the defendants never had any contact with al Qaeda and did not have any weapons. “They didn’t have the materials required.”

An indictment handed up against the men by a grand jury in south Florida said they pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda in order to “wage war” against the U.S. government and build an Islamic army.

It said at least one of them plotted to blow up the 110-story Sears Tower, the tallest building in the United States.

But Deputy FBI Director John Pistole said at the Justice Department news conference that the discussions to attack the Sears Tower were “aspirational rather than operational.”
reuters.com

Were Sears Tower “Terrorists” Set Up?
Sears Tower “Terrorists” were arrested at a Masonic Lodge?

TRANSCRIPT
COOPER: All right Mike Brooks working his sources. I want to go now to Brian Andrews from our affiliate WFOR who is in Miami. He also has some new information. He’s spoken to a woman who said she’s the godmother of a suspect arrested today. Brian, what have you heard?

BRIAN ANDREWS, WFOR CORRESPONDENT: Anderson we’re out here at the FBI offices in North Miami Beach. This is one of the buildings that our federal sources are telling us this group wanted to blow up as part of their plot.

As we got here to the FBI building we ran into family members of one of the defendants who was arrested this afternoon who is still inside being processed before being taken down to the federal detention center.

We’re being told by his family that he’s a 32-year-old guy named Nassir Baptiste (ph). He goes by the name of Prince Manner. He’s one of the elders at this Masonic lodge raided earlier in the day by the FBI. That’s where the five people were taken into custody. His family and friends tell us that he’s a nice guy, he’s a construction worker, he’s married, and they say they have no idea what he would be doing with al Qaeda

ANDREWS: What do you make of this?

ARIANE WEBSTER, SUSPECT’S GRANDMOTHER: I’m — truly down in my heart I believe that’s a stone lie. I been knowing Nassir (ph) better than five years. I never know him to get in any trouble. I never know him to have any problem with anybody. I always know him, he taught my son how to do karate. I have a son that is 18 years old. When he first met my son, my son was only about …

ANDREWS: So you don’t think he’s a terrorist, as the government’s alleging?

WEBSTER: No, I don’t. I really don’t believe that.

MASTER G.H.G. ATHEA, SUSPECT’S FRIEND: Someone along the line offered to him some funds to do whatever he wanted to do if that’s what he wanted to do. As far as some subversive work. And said they would give him whatever he needed.

ANDREWS: So somebody had approached him to give him money to blow up buildings?

ATHEA: To do whatever he wanted to do. But that was far from his mind. So he had no desire to interact with these men to accept anything they had to offer.

ANDREWS: So bottom line here, is your friend a terrorist?

ATHEA: No, he’s not. Absolutely not.

COOPER: Hmm. Sort of raises more questions than it answers. Not quite sure the point of what that guy was saying. We’ve lost reporter Brian Andrews to ask him. Pat, what do you make of what you just heard?

local Miami news station…

Indictment: Suspects wanted to ‘kill all the devils we can’
…The family of Stanley Grant Phanor, who also is named in the indictment, said Friday that Phanor is innocent of all charges and is a practicing Roman Catholic — not a Muslim. (Full story)

“They all call themselves brothers and they are well-mannered,” his older sister, Marlene Phanor, said. “All they were trying to do was clean up the community. We are Catholic. He’s Catholic.”

Gina Lemorin, a sister of Lyglenson Lemorin, another of the seven indicted men, said her brother was involved with the group to study religion.

She said her brother had been with the group in Miami doing construction work, but once the group began practicing “witchcraft” he left and moved to Atlanta, Georgia, about four months ago.

Lemorin has children who live in Atlanta, she said, and he “is not a terrorist.”

Lemorin, 31, was arrested Thursday in Atlanta, the same day four of the other suspects were arrested in Miami.

Phanor was already in state custody in Florida on a firearms charge, and Patrick Abraham, a Haitian, has been in the custody of immigration officials since his arrest in May for allegedly overstaying his visa, U.S. officials said.

Lemorin appeared in court Friday afternoon. The slender, bearded man wore a white T-shirt and black pants and had his hands cuffed behind his back during the hearing.

“There’s less than meets the eye here,” said his public defender Jimmy Hardy. “The only al Qaeda person was the undercover guy.”

Lemorin, a musician who worked at the Abercrombie & Fitch clothing store, emigrated to the U.S. from Haiti when he was 11 and became a legal citizen in 1993, Hardy told reporters outside the courthouse.

In Miami, five of the other six suspects appeared in a federal court Friday. Phanor was the only Miami suspect who wasn’t at the hearing.

Batiste was joined in court by Abraham, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Augustin and Rotschild Augustine. Hands shackled and wearing tan jail uniforms, the men addressed the court in polite and quiet tones.

Batiste said he would be represented by the public defender’s office and told the court he was self-employed, made $30,000 last year and had four children. The other four defendants agreed to court-appointed attorneys.

Augustine told the court he had $10 in a checking account, and the others said they had no money. Herrera told the court he was employed. An arraignment was set for June 30.

Phanor, 31, the sixth man arrested in Miami, was apparently arrested Tuesday on charges of carrying a concealed weapon.

Phanor has been arrested six times since 1996 for various offenses, including possession of marijuana, driving on a suspended license and carrying a concealed weapon, according to Florida law enforcement records.

Nimmo: Feds Raid Patsy �Terror Cell� in Miami
…In other words, an FBI agent, pretending to be an �Islamic radical� and a putative �al-Qaeda operative,� convinced a handful of patsies to �discuss� the targeting of the Sears Tower in Chicago and supposedly federal facilities in Miami.

In a repeat of the Ottawa theatrical event, the alleged terrorists, with �possible ties with Al Qaeda� (of course), are �teenagers and young adults,� according to the International Security Research & Intelligence Agency, billed as �analysts and experts at your service to identify, analyse and assess any issue related to your safety and your entreprise�s and/or institution�s (sic).� In short, it appears the FBI has exploited the naivet? of kids, more accustomed to blowing up skyscrapers in video games than in real life.

Is this calculated to drive ‘conspiracy theorists’ like me crazy? A Masonic Temple? Are all young black men now on everybody’s internalized ‘terrorist watch list’, along with every other non-white person in the United States? My 65 year-old sister with a Spanish last name now gets the shake-down at airports. We are rapidly spiralling into a waking nightmare.

MEXICO CITY – Mexican leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has a narrow lead over his conservative rival going into the final days of the campaign, two closely-watched polls showed on Friday.

The surveys in the Reforma and El Universal newspapers both gave Lopez Obrador 36 percent support with the rightist ruling party’s candidate Felipe Calderon trailing on 34 percent.

Most polls now show Lopez Obrador slightly ahead but his lead in the two latest ones is smaller than the margin of error and experts say the July 2 vote is still wide open. No more polls can be released after Friday.

Lopez Obrador was a popular mayor of Mexico City and has promised to pull millions of Mexicans out of poverty by ending two decades of free market reforms, boosting welfare programs and launching ambitious infrastructure projects.

A victory for him would strengthen a shift to the political left across much of Latin America in recent years and put a left-wing party in power for the first time in Mexico.

Lopez Obrador’s anti-poverty programs and fiery temperament have raised concerns he might undermine Mexico’s hard-won economic stability and its close ties to the United States.

He insists, however, that he wants good relations with Washington and will do nothing to spook investors.
abcnews.go.com

Yeah anti-poverty programs are tantamount to a terrorist threat.

Somalia’s government and the Islamic group that controls the capital have agreed to end military campaigns at peace talks in Sudan.
The talks come two weeks after the Union of Islamic Courts took control of Mogadishu from an alliance of warlords.

The Islamists also agreed to recognise the legality of the interim government – a key demand – and to further talks.

Sudan’s President Omar al-Beshir described the accord as “the beginning of the end of conflicts in Somalia.”

BBC East Africa correspondent Karen Allen says that earlier this week, the two sides refused to sit in the same room.
bbc.co.uk

What is going on here?

Somalis march against Islamists
Thursday’s march was the latest protest since the Islamic courts militia defeated US-backed regional commanders earlier this month.

About 700 protesters, including children from Quranic schools, marched for three hours through the capital’s streets in the central Sinai district in a demonstration organised by the traditional Sufist group, Ahlu Suna Wal-Jammaa.

“We are Muslims and we do not want these fundamentalists who seized Mogadishu,” said Muumina Ali, a demonstrator.

“Sheikh Sharif’s group are fundamentalists,” shouted another protester, referring to Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which controls Mogadishu and other towns across a swathe of southern Somalia.

The protest comes as Somalia’s interim government and the Islamist movement are holding direct high-level talks in Sudan, mediated by the Arab League and the Sudanese president.

…The U.S. Iraq command yesterday still was compiling an exact chronology of what happened at the checkpoint and why three junior enlisted soldiers were left alone in one of the most dangerous areas of Anbar province.
washingtontimes.com

Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago, an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table — including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.

But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax with a cover letter certifying it as a genuine proposal supported by key power centers in Iran, former administration officials said.

…”At the time, the Iranians were not spinning centrifuges, they were not enriching uranium,” said Flynt Leverett, who was a senior director on the National Security Council staff then and saw the Iranian proposal. He described it as “a serious effort, a respectable effort to lay out a comprehensive agenda for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement.”
washingtonpost.com

Iran rejects US ‘pressure’ on nuclear issue
…”If they want to put this prerequisite, why are we negotiating at all? Mr Bush is like a mathematician. When the equation becomes very difficult to work out, he likes to wipe it out altogether … the pressure they are putting on us is reason enough for us to be suspicious.”

…And there were a lot of woman that started to speak to me and children and then also men. So they were telling me the story, the stories. Some stories I knew before about the use of this white phosphorus. And another time, in Fallujah always, they told me about the use of napalm. And at the time it seems to be just propaganda of Iraqis, but then the use of napalm was confirmed by the Pentagon.
democracynow.org

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government gained sweeping access to international banking records as part of a secret program to choke off financial support for terrorism, officials confirmed Thursday.

Treasury Department officials said they used broad subpoenas to collect the financial records from an international system known as Swift. Stuart Levey, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, called the subpoenas “a legal and proper use of our authorities.”
washingtonpost.com

A Democrat proposal in the United States to raise the country’s minimum wage for the first time in a decade failed to pass the Senate this week.

The proposal was for a three-step increase in the current minimum wage of $5.15 to $7.25 an hour. The Republican-controlled Senate voted 52-46, eight short of the 60 needed to pass the bill.
hrreporter.com

CEOs earn 262 times pay of average worker

The French president, Jacques Chirac, unveiled his great cultural legacy to the country yesterday, a new museum for indigenous art which he promised would inspire “peace and tolerance” in the world.

But even as Mr Chirac announced in the presence of the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, that he was giving a voice to “peoples humiliated and scorned”, questions lingered over whether the museum was rehashing colonial cliches, why exhibits appeared to be scantily labelled and whether the �230m (�160m) project, which has already overrun and overspent, would be finished before opening to the public on Friday.

The Mus�e du Quai Branly – the biggest museum to be built in Paris since the Pompidou centre in 1977 – is Mr Chirac’s attempt to cast himself as the defender of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. A long-time fan of indigenous artefacts, he also wanted to leave Paris with an architectural imprint to rival Fran�ois Mitterand’s legacies, such as the glass pyramid at the Louvre. Asked this week whether the museum would one day become known as “Mus�e Chirac”, the 73-year-old president said he would be honoured if it did.

Controversy has surrounded the 11-year project from the start. It was initially to be called a museum of “primitive” or “primary” arts but was instead named after its location as the term was considered demeaning.

The historian Gilles Manceron said this week that the museum, designed around a jungle theme, still risked perpetuating colonial stereotypes and that non-European art should be shown alongside European works and not ghettoised.

Jean Nouvel, the celebrated Paris architect who designed the interlinking buildings on the banks of the Seine, described his museum on stilts as “a snake or a lizard into which you walk and discover not so much a building as a territory – a zoo really”.
guardian.co.uk

CAIRO, Egypt – The new leader of al-Qaida in Iraq killed two U.S. soldiers whom the group abducted last week, an insurgent umbrella group said in a Web statement posted Tuesday. The statement, which could not be authenticated, said the two soldiers were “slaughtered,” suggesting they had been beheaded by Abu Hamza al-Muhajer.

The Arabic word used in the statement, “nahr,” is used for the slaughtering of sheep by cutting the throat and has been used in past statements to refer to beheadings.

The claim of responsibility was posted on an Islamic militant Web site where insurgent groups regularly post statements.

If true, it would be the first act of violence attributed to al-Muhajer since he was named al-Qaida in Iraq’s new leader in a June 12 Web message by the group. He succeeded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike on June 7.
thestate.com

This story raises a horrifying possibility. It is a mistake to put anything past them.