Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday the world faces "a new type of fascism" and likened critics of the Bush administration's war strategy to those who tried to appease the Nazis in the 1930s.

In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration's critics as suffering from "moral or intellectual confusion" about what threatens the nation's security. His remarks amounted to one of his most pointed defenses of President Bush' war policies and was among his toughest attacks on Bush's critics.

Speaking to several thousand veterans at the American Legion's national convention, Rumsfeld recited what he called the lessons of history, including the failure to confront Hitler. He quoted Winston Churchill as observing that trying to accommodate Hitler was "a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last."

"I recount this history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism," he said.

"Can we truly afford to believe that somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased?" he asked.

"Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America — not the enemy — is the real source of the world's troubles?"

Rumsfeld spoke to the American Legion as part of a coordinated White House strategy, in advance of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, to take the offensive against administration critics at a time of doubt about the future of Iraq and growing calls to withdraw U.S. troops.

With the Iran-Iraq war escalating, President Ronald Reagan dispatched his Middle East envoy, a former secretary of defense, to Baghdad with a hand-written letter to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and a message that Washington was willing at any moment to resume diplomatic relations.

That envoy was Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld's December 19-20, 1983 visit to Baghdad made him the highest-ranking US official to visit Iraq in 6 years. He met Saddam and the two discussed "topics of mutual interest," according to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. "[Saddam] made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world," Rumsfeld later told The New York Times. "It struck us as useful to have a relationship, given that we were interested in solving the Mideast problems."

Just 12 days after the meeting, on January 1, 1984, The Washington Post reported that the United States "in a shift in policy, has informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the 3-year-old war with Iran would be 'contrary to U.S. interests' and has made several moves to prevent that result."

In March of 1984, with the Iran-Iraq war growing more brutal by the day, Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad for meetings with then-Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. On the day of his visit, March 24th, UPI reported from the United Nations: "Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers in the 43-month Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq, a team of U.N. experts has concluded... Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, U.S. presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with Foreign Minister Tarek Aziz (sic) on the Gulf war before leaving for an unspecified destination."

The day before, the Iranian news agency alleged that Iraq launched another chemical weapons assault on the southern battlefront, injuring 600 Iranian soldiers. "Chemical weapons in the form of aerial bombs have been used in the areas inspected in Iran by the specialists," the U.N. report said. "The types of chemical agents used were bis-(2-chlorethyl)-sulfide, also known as mustard gas, and ethyl N, N-dimethylphosphoroamidocyanidate, a nerve agent known as Tabun."

Prior to the release of the UN report, the US State Department on March 5th had issued a statement saying "available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons."

Commenting on the UN report, US Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was quoted by The New York Times as saying, "We think that the use of chemical weapons is a very serious matter. We've made that clear in general and particular."

Compared with the rhetoric emanating from the current administration, based on speculations about what Saddam might have, Kirkpatrick's reaction was hardly a call to action.

Most glaring is that Donald Rumsfeld was in Iraq as the 1984 UN report was issued and said nothing about the allegations of chemical weapons use, despite State Department "evidence." On the contrary, The New York Times reported from Baghdad on March 29, 1984, "American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name."

 . . .  

Throughout the period that Rumsfeld was Reagan's Middle East envoy, Iraq was frantically purchasing hardware from American firms, empowered by the White House to sell. The buying frenzy began immediately after Iraq was removed from the list of alleged sponsors of terrorism in 1982. According to a February 13, 1991 Los Angeles Times article:

"First on Hussein's shopping list was helicopters -- he bought 60 Hughes helicopters and trainers with little notice. However, a second order of 10 twin-engine Bell "Huey" helicopters, like those used to carry combat troops in Vietnam, prompted congressional opposition in August, 1983... Nonetheless, the sale was approved."

In 1984, according to The LA Times, the State Department—in the name of "increased American penetration of the extremely competitive civilian aircraft market"—pushed through the sale of 45 Bell 214ST helicopters to Iraq. The helicopters, worth some $200 million, were originally designed for military purposes. The New York Times later reported that Saddam "transferred many, if not all [of these helicopters] to his military."

In 1988, Saddam's forces attacked Kurdish civilians with poisonous gas from Iraqi helicopters and planes. U.S. intelligence sources told The LA Times in 1991, they "believe that the American-built helicopters were among those dropping the deadly bombs."

In response to the gassing, sweeping sanctions were unanimously passed by the US Senate that would have denied Iraq access to most US technology. The measure was killed by the White House.

Senior officials later told reporters they did not press for punishment of Iraq at the time because they wanted to shore up Iraq's ability to pursue the war with Iran. Extensive research uncovered no public statements by Donald Rumsfeld publicly expressing even remote concern about Iraq's use or possession of chemical weapons until the week Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, when he appeared on an ABC news special.

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

Vashti McCollum, 93, Who Brought Landmark Church-State Suit, Is Dead

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Vashti McCollum, whose lawsuit to stop religious instruction on school property led to a landmark ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 1948 to protect the separation of church and state in education, died Sunday in Champaign, Ill. She was 93.

Her death was confirmed by her son James, whose refusal as a fifth grader to attend voluntary religious instruction led to the lawsuit.

Mrs. McCollum, who called herself an atheist in Illinois court proceedings but later preferred the word "humanist," said her son was ostracized and embarrassed by his schoolmates because she refused to let him attend the religion classes at his public school in Champaign. The classes for Protestants were on school premises; Jews and Roman Catholics went to religious buildings elsewhere.

She also contended that the classes were a misuse and waste of taxpayers' money, discriminated against minority faiths and were an unconstitutional merger of church and state.

After losing in two Illinois courts, Mrs. McCollum won an 8-to-1 decision by the Supreme Court. Justice Hugo L. Black, who wrote the majority opinion, said the practice in Champaign was "beyond all question" using tax-established and tax-supported schools "to aid religious groups to spread their faith," and, he added, "It falls squarely under the ban of the First Amendment."

A critical issue in the case was whether the Constitution's ban on establishing religion meant that all sects must be treated equally, as lawyers for Champaign argued was the case in their schools — or whether it required strict neutrality between belief and unbelief, Mrs. McCollum's contention. She won.

"The First Amendment rests upon the premise that both religion and government can best work to achieve their lofty aims if each is left free from the other in its respective sphere," Justice Black wrote.

The case was also important because it extended the First Amendment's protections to the states by using the due process clause of the much later 14th Amendment as justification. As such, all other cases that test Jefferson's wall of "separation of church and state" — including school prayer, aid to parochial schools and sectarian religious displays on public property — descend from this case.

The language used in comments immediately after the Supreme Court's ruling would percolate in debates for decades. The Catholic bishops, for example, accused the court of making a religion of secularism.

In 1952, the Supreme Court revisited the issue of religious instruction in Zorach v. Clauson. The 6-to-3 ruling in that case held that a New York program allowing religious education during the school day was permissible because it did not use public school facilities or public money.

Vashti Ruth Cromwell was born in Lyons, N.Y., on Nov. 6, 1912, and grew up in Rochester. She was named for the queen of the Persian King Xerxes depicted in Esther 1 in the Bible who refuses to obey her husband's order and is divorced for her spunk.

Her father, Arthur G. Cromwell, was an architect who read the works of atheists like Spinoza and Thomas Paine, then read seven versions of the Bible. After letting the conflicting ideas germinate for years, he had become a vocal atheist by the time his two daughters were in college, James McCollum said.

Mr. Cromwell was president of the Rochester Society of Free Thinkers and had persuaded the state education commissioner to end religious instruction in the schools of the one county in which it was permitted before his daughter filed suit to accomplish the same thing.

Vashti Cromwell received a scholarship to Cornell, but the money ran out during the Depression and she transferred to the University of Illinois, where she majored in political science and took courses at the law school. At the university, she met John Paschal McCollum, a professor of vegetable crops in the horticultural department, and they married in 1933.

After her children were older, Mrs. McCollum earned a master's degree in mass communications at the university.

She is survived by her sons James, of Emerson, Ark., Dannel, of Champaign, and Errol, of Moline, Ill.; her sister, Helen Curtis, who lives in a Rochester suburb; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

James McCollum, the oldest son, said that he at first had wanted to attend the religion classes, but that his mother objected. After a few months, he was allowed to go, but found the classes childish and "silly." The next year, he said, he told his parents he did not wish to attend.

His mother talked with the school system's superintendent, but he said there was nothing he could do. She was careful to say that she was making no criticism of religion, The New York Daily News reported in 1945.

She then sued with the help of a local Unitarian minister and financial support from a group of Jewish businessmen in Chicago. Her opponents, in addition to the City of Champaign, were church federations.

A dramatic moment during the initial trial of the case came when Mrs. McCollum's father said he did not believe in God, and a gasp went up from the crowd. Later, James McCollum said the same thing. Both "affirmed" that they would tell the truth instead of swearing by God. Mrs. McCollum called herself "a rationalist or an atheist."

Time magazine observed that the trial shared "features that made the Scopes 'monkey trial' a sideshow'' of the 1920's.

In the three-year legal battle, Mrs. McCollum received physical threats and was fired from her job as a dance instructor at the university. At Halloween, a mob of trick-or-treaters pelted the McCollum family with rotten tomatoes and cabbages. The family cat was lynched.

Mrs. McCollum wrote a book on the case, "One Woman's Fight," became a world traveler and served two terms as president of the American Humanist Association.

"We don't bother ourselves with the question of whether there is or isn't a God," she said in a speech in 1948.

The most comprehensive examination of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was conducted by the 9/11 Commission, chaired by Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton. Now Kean, a former governor of New Jersey, and Hamilton, a former congressman from Indiana, have written "Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission."  . . . The book offers little new information on the actual attacks, but provides a keyhole view of the commission's bureaucratic war with a White House obsessed with secrecy and control. Months after the commission's creation, the staff was still battling the White House and the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee to get a look at an earlier 9/11 investigation by Congress, the Joint Inquiry report, protected under a dubious claim of "congressional privilege." "This was frustrating," the exasperated Kean and Hamilton complain, "particularly since we were a creation of Congress." They add, "We were hung up with both Congress and the Bush administration over the documents that were mandated to be the starting point of our investigation." Things only got worse.

The man standing at the gate was Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel and now the attorney general. In public, George W. Bush was a president deeply concerned about getting to the bottom of the most deadly attack on American soil in the country's history. But in private, he ordered his lawyer to throw up every roadblock possible. In shirtsleeves behind the coffee table of his second-floor West Wing office, Gonzales spoke to the members of the commission as if they were bringing an insurance claim. "He never referred to the president by name or title," Kean and Hamilton report, "but rather always said 'client' — 'Let me take this back to my client,' or 'I've got to protect my client.'" The biggest battle came over access to the White House morning intelligence report, the President's Daily Brief, especially the one dated Aug. 6, 2001, barely a month before the attack. Titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the document noted that the F.B.I. was investigating suspicious Qaeda activity on American soil "consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." When finally asked to provide the commission with his own testimony, the president said at first that he could spare only an hour of his time — and then with just the two chairmen. Later it was made clear that no recordings or transcripts would be permitted.

. . .

The White House gave in to the demand to meet with the full membership, but there was no way the president was going to testify publicly, or under oath. In fact, he insisted that he and Vice President Dick Cheney appear together, a move that led many skeptics to speculate that they wanted to ensure they kept their stories straight. Because of the insistence on secrecy, whatever was said in the room was largely lost to history.

Northwest's dumpster-diving tips crash

Associated Press
Published August 17, 2006

ST. PAUL -- Getting money advice from a bankrupt airline wasn't the thing that most offended some soon-to-be laid-off Northwest Airlines Corp. employees. It was the dumpster-diving tips.

Northwest is laying off its customer service workers and baggage handlers at many smaller airports as it reorganizes under bankruptcy protection.

Earlier this month, it sent workers in Bismarck, N.D.; Bozeman, Mont.; and Austin, Texas, a handbook with tips for handling their layoffs. It included 101 money-saving ideas such as, "Don't be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash."

Other tips included using old newspapers for cat litter, asking friends and family for hand-me-down clothes and asking a doctor for free prescription drug samples.

"I realize that some person probably thought they were doing a world of good," Bryan Dalzell, a Northwest customer service agent for 27 years and a union steward in Bismarck, N.D., told the St. Paul Pioneer Press Wednesday. "It came across to us, after losing our jobs after a lifetime of work, as patronizing and rather insulting."

Employee outrage prompted Northwest to change parts of its handbook, called "Restructuring Q&A and Employee Support," and remove the list of money-saving tips from its internal Web site. Northwest said an outside company assembled the information, which was first reported Saturday by the Bismarck Tribune.

"We do realize that some of the information in there might be a bit insincere and, for that, we do apologize," spokesman Roman Blahoski said. "There are some tips in there that are very useful and there are some tips that, looking back, were a bit insensitive."

Jackie Diebel, a Northwest worker in Bismarck, said she wept when faced with the reality of her pending layoff in November and the company's suggestions.

"How condescending to tell people to move to a cheaper place to live and if you go on a date to take a walk in the woods. Give me a break," said Bobby De Pace, president of the International Association of Machinists district that includes Northwest. "This is one of the worst things about how they treat their employees in the worst of times."

The layoffs are part of a labor contract ratified in June that also cut the wages of remaining ground workers by 11.5 percent. The deal saves Northwest $190 million a year in labor costs.

Marine didn't suspect Haditha wrongdoing

Sat Aug 19, 9:15 AM ET

The Marine officer in charge of troops suspected of killing 24 Iraqi men, women and children told investigators he did not initiate an inquiry into the carnage because he did not consider the deaths unusual, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

In a sworn statement given to military investigators in March, Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani said: "I thought it was very sad, very unfortunate, but at the time, I did not suspect any wrongdoing from my Marines." Chessani was commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines.

"I did not have any reason to believe that this was anything other than combat action," he added.

The Post said it obtained a copy of Chessani's statement.

Reached by telephone late Friday, Marine Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a spokesman on the Haditha case, said he had not seen the report and could not comment.

The Marine Corps has been investigating whether its troops deliberately killed the Iraqis in Haditha. The Marines also are looking into whether efforts were made to cover up the incident. Initially, the Marine Corps reported that 15 Iraqis had died in a roadside bombing or were caught in crossfire between Marines and insurgents. Survivors of the encounter and human rights groups, however, claimed that 24 Iraqi civilians had been deliberately shot to death by Marines.

The New York Times reported Thursday that military investigators have concluded that the Marines destroyed or withheld evidence.

 . . .

Because attacks were so common, Chessani told investigators he saw the incident as part of a "complex attack" staged by the enemy, according to the newspaper. "I did not see any cause for alarm," he said.

The Haditha case is among recent cases of alleged atrocities against Iraqi civilians. Five soldiers and a former solider have been charged with raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her relatives in Mahmoudiya. Seven Marines and one Navy corpsman have been charged with premeditated murder in connection with the killing of an Iraqi man in Hamdania on April 26.  

Civilian Killings Went Unpunished

Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai.

By Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson, Special to The Times
August 6, 2006

The men of B Company were in a dangerous state of mind. They had lost five men in a firefight the day before. The morning of Feb. 8, 1968, brought unwelcome orders to resume their sweep of the countryside, a green patchwork of rice paddies along Vietnam's central coast.

They met no resistance as they entered a nondescript settlement in Quang Nam province. So Jamie Henry, a 20-year-old medic, set his rifle down in a hut, unfastened his bandoliers and lighted a cigarette.

Just then, the voice of a lieutenant crackled across the radio. He reported that he had rounded up 19 civilians, and wanted to know what to do with them. Henry later recalled the company commander's response:

Kill anything that moves.

Henry stepped outside the hut and saw a small crowd of women and children. Then the shooting began.

Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying.

Back home in California, Henry published an account of the slaughter and held a news conference to air his allegations. Yet he and other Vietnam veterans who spoke out about war crimes were branded traitors and fabricators. No one was ever prosecuted for the massacre.

Now, nearly 40 years later, declassified Army files show that Henry was telling the truth — about the Feb. 8 killings and a series of other atrocities by the men of B Company.

The files are part of a once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known.

The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre.

Though not a complete accounting of Vietnam war crimes, the archive is the largest such collection to surface to date. About 9,000 pages, it includes investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass.

The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.

Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.

Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task force, says he once supported keeping the records secret but now believes they deserve wide attention in light of alleged attacks on civilians and abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

"We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past," says Johns, 78.

Among the substantiated cases in the archive:

•  Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died.

•  Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted.

•  One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.

Investigators determined that evidence against 203 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges. These "founded" cases were referred to the soldiers' superiors for action.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 — A federal judge in Detroit ruled today that the Bush administration's eavesdropping program is illegal and unconstitutional, and she ordered that it cease at once.

District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor found that President Bush exceeded his proper authority and that the eavesdropping without warrants violated the First and Fourth Amendment protections of free speech and privacy.

"It was never the intent of the Framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights," she wrote, in a decision that the White House and Justice Department said they would fight to overturn. A hearing will be held before Judge Taylor on Sept. 7, and her decision will not be enforced in the meantime.

In becoming the first federal judge to declare the eavesdropping program unconstitutional, Judge Taylor rejected the administration's assertion that to defend itself against a lawsuit would force it to divulge information that should be kept secret in the name of national security.

"Predictably, the war on terror of this administration has produced a vast number of cases, in which the states secrets privilege has been invoked," Judge Taylor wrote. She noted that the Supreme Court has held that because the president's power to withhold secrets is so powerful, "it is not to be lightly invoked." She also cited a finding in an earlier case by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that "whenever possible, sensitive information must be disentangled from nonsensitive information to allow for the release of the latter."

In any event, she said, she is convinced that the administration could defend itself in this case without disclosing state secrets. Judge Taylor's ruling came in a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of journalists, scholars, lawyers and various nonprofit organizations who argued that the possibility of eavesdropping by the National Security Agency interfered with their work.

Although she ordered an immediate halt to the eavesdropping program, no one who has followed the controversy expects the litigation to end quickly. The White House issued a statement saying "we couldn't disagree more" with Judge Taylor's decision and crediting the surveillance program with saving American lives.

The Justice Department called the surveillance program "a critical tool" against Al Qaeda and said the parties to the suit have agreed to a stay of Judge Taylor's order until the Sept. 7 hearing. On that day, the judge will be asked to prolong the stay of her order pending further appeals, to the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit or perhaps to the Supreme Court.

But for the moment, the ruling by Judge Taylor caused elation among the plaintiffs.

"It's another nail in the coffin of executive unilateralism," said Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the plaintiffs with the A.C.L.U. And Anthony Romero, executive director of the A.C.L.U., said Judge Taylor's ruling "confirms that the government has been acting illegally, in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment.''

The surveillance act was passed by Congress in 1978 in response to disclosures of previous government improprieties in eavesdropping. The act established a secret court to handle applications for surveillance operations, and set up procedures for them to take place while applications for warrants are pending in some limited circumstances and for limited times.

Judge Taylor said "the president has acted, undisputedly, as F.I.S.A. forbids," thus defying the express will of Congress, and she was unpersuaded by the government's stance that it could not defend itself in the lawsuit without doing the country harm.

"Consequently, the court finds defendants' arguments that they cannot defend this case without the use of classified information to be disingenuous and without merit," she wrote.

The judge, who heard arguments in the case in June, brushed aside several assertions made by lawyers for the National Security Agency. She held that, contrary to the N.S.A.'s assertions, the plaintiffs were suffering real harm, and had standing to sue the government.

"Here, plaintiffs are not asserting speculative allegations," she said.

Judge Taylor, appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, did not deal a total defeat to the administration. She dismissed a separate claim by the A.C.L.U. over data-mining of telephone records, agreeing that further litigation could indeed jeopardize state secrets.

But over all, Judge Taylor's decision was a rebuke to the administration, as she made clear in closing by quoting Chief Justice Earl Warren's words in a 1967 ruling: "Implicit in the term 'national defense' is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this nation apart."

July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, reinforcing criticism that the Baghdad security plan started in June by the new government has failed.

An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January.

The rising numbers suggested that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control, and seemed to bolster an assertion many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have made in recent months: that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.

Officials in both parties said they viewed the arrests as critical in determining how they would approach the fall campaign, with Republicans saying it could be a turning point in a year in which they have been on the defensive over the war in Iraq and other issues.

The developments played neatly into the White House-led effort, after Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, lost on Tuesday to an antiwar primary challenger, to remind voters of the threats facing the nation and to cast Democrats as timid on national defense.

The arrests were announced less than 24 hours after Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republican officials suggested that Mr. Lieberman's defeat reflected the world view of a Democratic Party that was not prepared to lead the nation in such dangerous times.

Mr. Cheney, who a spokesman said had been kept abreast of the investigation, suggested in his remarks Wednesday that the outcome of a Democratic primary in Connecticut could embolden " Al Qaeda types."