But he said that probably the “most historically significant feature” of the declassified report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.

That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to president Lyndon Johnson’s sharp escalation of American forces in Vietnam.

The author of the report “demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was ‘unimpeachable,’ but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that ‘no attack happened that night,’” FAS said in a statement.

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

See Sibel Edmonds’ web site: http://www.justacitizen.com/

A judge declared a mistrial on Thursday for six men accused of plotting to blow up America’s tallest skyscraper, Chicago’s Sears Tower, after a jury failed to reach verdicts on them but acquitted one other man.

Defense lawyers dismissed the charges as “nonsense” and said the entire plot was orchestrated by paid FBI informants.

A growing number of sheriff’s departments are using iris scans to identify sex offenders, runaways, abducted children and wandering Alzheimer’s patients.

More than 2,100 departments in 27 states are taking digital pictures of eyes and storing the information in databases that can be searched later to identify a missing person or someone who uses a fake name, says Sean Mullin, president of BI{+2} Technologies, which sells the devices.

Morse says his company will deliver test devices to the Defense Department next year that will allow it to scan a crowd and store iris data for many people at once.

Despite months of sabre-rattling by U.S. President George W. Bush, America’s top spies have concluded that Tehran’s ruling mullahs may not want a finger on the nuclear trigger after all.

As recently as October, Mr. Bush was hinting at air strikes against Iran’s secretive and mostly underground nuclear sites, warning that averting World War III meant preventing Tehran from tipping its missiles with nuclear warheads.

So a key finding in yesterday’s National Intelligence Estimate, that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program four years ago, was unexpected and may avert a showdown.