Betsey's Loyal Minion

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Iran's new president has repeated a remark from a former ayatollah that Israel should be "wiped out from the map," insisting that a new series of attacks will destroy the Jewish state, and lashing out at Muslim countries and leaders that acknowledge Israel.

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Ahmadinejad quoted a remark from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran's Islamic revolution, who said that Israel "must be wiped out from the map of the world."

The president then said: "And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism," according to a quote published by IRNA. ( Yeah, good luck with that. )

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He also described Israel's disengagement from Gaza as a "trick" meant to make "Islamic states acknowledge the Zionist regime of Israel," according to the report.

The United States and Israel are sowing "discord among warring forces in Palestine and other parts of the Islamic world," the report paraphrased Ahmadinejad as saying.

In the process, such attempts were forcing Muslim nations to normalize relations with Israel, he said.

Ahmadinejad is quoted as saying, "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury."

Sen. John Kerry says President Bush should bring home 20,000 troops from Iraq over the Christmas holidays if the December parliamentary elections there are successful.

Defeated by Bush (Thank God, despite what I think of Bush) last year and a potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Kerry called for a "reasonable time frame" for pulling back troops rather than a full-scale withdrawal advocated by some Democrats. He said it could be completed in 12 to 15 months.

"It will be hard for this administration, but it is essential to acknowledge that the insurgency will not be defeated unless our troop levels are drawn down ... starting immediately after successful elections in December," Kerry said in a speech Wednesday at Georgetown University.

The presence of 159,000 U.S. troops in Iraq is deterring peace efforts, said Kerry, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"To undermine the insurgency, we must instead simultaneously pursue both a political settlement and the withdrawal of American combat forces linked to specific, responsible benchmarks," he said. "At the first benchmark, the completion of December elections, we can start the process of reducing our forces by 20,000 troops over the course of the holidays."

Kerry, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, has been a strong critic of Bush's handling of the war, accusing the president of misleading the public into going to war.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

Records turned over as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit also indicate that the FBI has investigated hundreds of potential violations related to its use of secret surveillance operations, which have been stepped up dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but are largely hidden from public view.

In one case, FBI agents kept an unidentified target under surveillance for at least five years -- including more than 15 months without notifying Justice Department lawyers after the subject had moved from New York to Detroit. An FBI investigation concluded that the delay was a violation of Justice guidelines and prevented the department "from exercising its responsibility for oversight and approval of an ongoing foreign counterintelligence investigation of a U.S. person."

In other cases, agents obtained e-mails after a warrant expired, seized bank records without proper authority and conducted an improper "unconsented physical search," according to the documents.

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The records were provided to The Washington Post by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group that has sued the Justice Department for records relating to the Patriot Act.

David Sobel, EPIC's general counsel, said the new documents raise questions about the extent of possible misconduct in counterintelligence investigations and underscore the need for greater congressional oversight of clandestine surveillance within the United States.

"We're seeing what might be the tip of the iceberg at the FBI and across the intelligence community," Sobel said. "It indicates that the existing mechanisms do not appear adequate to prevent abuses or to ensure the public that abuses that are identified are treated seriously and remedied."

FBI officials disagreed, saying that none of the cases have involved major violations and most amount to administrative errors. The officials also said that any information obtained from improper searches or eavesdropping is quarantined and eventually destroyed.

New details of how dark the scandal could prove to be have emerged from the private sale of IHC on June 3, 2005, just as the procurement scandal was about to break. It now appears that while doing business with the U.N., IHC had links both to Saddam Hussein’s old sanctions-busting networks, and to a Liechtenstein-based businessman, Engelbert Schreiber, Jr., known among other things for his ties to a figure designated by the U.N. itself as a financier of Al Qaeda.

Cindy Sheehan, the military mother who made her son's death in Iraq a rallying point for the anti-war movement, plans to tie herself to the White House fence to protest the milestone of 2,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq.

"I'm going to go to Washington, D.C. and I'm going to give a speech at the White House, and after I do, I'm going to tie myself to the fence and refuse to leave until they agree to bring our troops home," Sheehan said in a telephone interview last week as the milestone approached.

"And I'll probably get arrested, and when I get out, I'll go back and do the same thing," she said.

The death toll among U.S. military forces since the March 2003 invasion stood at 1,996 on Sunday.

The milestone's approach prompted plans for hundreds of other demonstrations across the United States, but for Sheehan, each military death in the Iraqi war has been a tragedy.

"To me, every single member since Number One has been tragic and needless and unnecessary," she said. "My son was somewhere around 615, and I've been working so hard for peace since my son was killed and now almost 1,400 more soldiers have been killed since Casey died."

Army Specialist Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004.

Beyond Sheehan's plans, a candlelight vigil is planned at the White House to mourn the 2,000-death milestone. Hundreds of other demonstrations are scheduled for the day after the milestone number is reached.

"I hope that this milestone marks the point when the American people realize the U.S. military is not going to stop the violence in Iraq, and they instead start demanding a political solution to this problem," Sean O'Neill, a U.S. Marine who served in Iraq, said in a statement.

'HUMAN COST OF A LIE'

The American Friends Service Committee was helping coordinate activists to protest the Iraq war.

"On the day after the 2,000th reported U.S. military death in Iraq, people will gather in communities across the U.S. to say that the countries pro-peace majority wants Congress to stop the deaths by stopping the dollars that are funding the war," a coalition of anti-war groups said online at www.afsc.org.