populicio.us

Washington (CNN) — The House of Representatives on Tuesday gave final approval to a nearly $59 billion emergency spending bill, the bulk of which would go toward the U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan.

Specifically, the bill includes almost $33 billion for Afghanistan, along with over $5 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, almost $3 billion for Haiti relief programs and $68 million for the oil disaster response in the Gulf of Mexico.

It now goes to the president for his signature.

The Senate passed the measure last week after stripping out more than $20 billion for domestic priorities favored by many Democrats.

Top Democrats struggled to maintain support for the bill among more liberal House members, who have increasingly turned against the Afghan war effort and are upset about the loss of funding for programs designed to prevent teacher layoffs, among other things.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wisconsin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, slammed the Senate for stripping domestic funding from the bill, including funding for teachers and other forms of education funding.

Obey said he opposed the emergency funding bill because of questions over the prospects for success in Afghanistan.

“The Afghan government has not demonstrated the focused determination, reliability and judgment necessary to bring this effort to a rational and successful conclusion,” he said.

The federal government has “appropriated over $1 trillion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to date, more than $700 billion to Iraq and $300 billion for Afghanistan,” Obey noted.

“To those who say we must pay it because we’re going after al Qaeda, I would note that Afghanistan is where al Qaeda used to be,” he said. “Today, there are fewer than 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan, which was publicly confirmed last month by CIA chief (Leon) Panetta. Al Qaeda has relocated to other countries and regions.”

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Massachusetts, called the Afghanistan war policy “deeply flawed.”

“Occupying Afghanistan in support of a corrupt and incompetent government will continue to claim the lives of our soldiers,” McGovern said. “It will continue to bankrupt us, and it will not enhance our national security. … It is a mistake to give this administration yet another blank check for this war.”

Also Tuesday, the House defeated a non-binding resolution that called for the withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel from Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan. Currently, the United States has more than 200 armed service members in Pakistan.

Fueling liberal discontent with the war effort was Sunday’s release by the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks of roughly 76,000 U.S. military and diplomatic reports about Afghanistan filed from 2004 to January 2010.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he is “concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information,” but insisted the documents don’t shed much new light on the war effort. A number of critics, however, insist the documents back their assertion that the war effort is foundering in part due to unreliable allies in the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, asserted Tuesday that the document leak would not affect the House vote. He noted that funding of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will run out early next month, and said Congress needed to ensure they have the necessary supplies.

“The fact is those troops are there now, and money to fund those troops … will be depleted as of the seventh of August,” Hoyer said. “So whatever we decide on policy in the longer term does not, in my opinion, affect our obligation today to make sure that the troops, as long as they are there, have the resources they need.”

CNN’s Alan Silverleib, Deirdre Walsh and Craig Broffman contributed to this report

House passes war funding bill

(CNN) — American officials from the president down tried Tuesday to downplay the leak of tens of thousands of documents about the war in Afghanistan, a disclosure experts are calling the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers about Vietnam.

Pentagon officials have not found anything top-secret among the documents, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday.

“From what we have seen so far, the documents are at the ‘secret’ level,” Col. David Lapan said. That’s not a very high level of classification.

Lapan emphasized that the Pentagon has not looked at all of the more than 75,000 documents published on WikiLeaks.org on Sunday.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he is “concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information” about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan but asserted that the documents don’t shed much new light on the issue.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, said Tuesday that the importance of the leak should not be overstated.

“I think it’s important not to overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents,” Kerry told the committee.

But, he said, the leak “breaks the law, and equally importantly, it compromises the efforts of our troops, potentially, in the field and has the potential of putting people in harm’s way,” he said.

The top-ranking U.S. military officer, Adm. Michael Mullen, said he was “appalled” by the leak but questioned the current significance of the documents, which date from 2004 to 2009.

Video: Congressmen talk WikiLeaks and the war

Video: Pentagon responds to WikiLeaks

“Much has changed since 2009, particularly with respect to our focus, our new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Baghdad, Iraq. “A lot of it is focused on the past, and I am very focused on the future.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered the Foreign Ministry and National Security Council to study the vast cache of documents, Karzai’s office said Tuesday.

The documents are divided into more than 100 categories. Tens of thousands of pages of reports document attacks on U.S. troops and their responses, relations between Americans in the field and their Afghan allies, intramural squabbles among Afghan civilians and security forces, and concerns about neighboring Pakistan’s ties to the Taliban.

The “direct fire” category accounts for the largest number — at 16,293 reports — while “graffiti,” “mugging,” “narcotics” and “threat” each account for one. And WikiLeaks has another 15,000 documents that it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to the website’s founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange.

He said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” that the firsthand accounts represent “the cut and thrust of the entire war over the past six years,” through the military’s own raw data: numbers of casualties, threat reports and notes from meetings between Afghan leaders and U.S. commanders.

“We see the who, the where, the what, the when and the how of each one of these attacks,” Assange said. That includes, he said, possible evidence of war crimes by both U.S. troops and the Taliban, the Islamic militia that has been battling U.S. troops since 2001.

Assange said some events listed in the reports are “very suspicious,” such as reports of skirmishes in which “a lot of people are killed, but no people taken prisoner and no people left wounded.”

“In the end, it will take a court to really look at the full range of evidence to decide if a crime has occurred,” he said. But earlier, he noted, “This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses, especially the Taliban.”

CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon has denied that they are what WikiLeaks claims they are.

On Monday, the White House condemned the release of the documents as “a breach of federal law” but simultaneously dismissed them as old news.

“I don’t think that what is being reported hasn’t in many ways been publicly discussed — whether by you or by representatives of the U.S. government — for quite some time,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. But he said an investigation into the source of the leak had begun by last week.

“There is no doubt that this is a concerning development in operational security,” he said.

The reports tend to be filled with jargon, like this one that describes a border incident from September 4, 2005:

“The Pakistan LNO [liaison officer] reports that ANA [Afghan National Army] troops are massing and threatening the PAKMIL [Pakistani military] 12km NE of FB Lwara [Firebase Lwara, a U.S. military base] …”

And that’s not even the entire first sentence.

Assange said WikiLeaks withheld some documents that dealt with activity by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA, “and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups.”

But he said the documents reveal the “squalor” of war, uncovering how a number of small incidents have added up to huge numbers of civilian deaths.

“What we haven’t seen previously is all those individual deaths,” he said. “We’ve seen just the number. And like Stalin said, ‘One man’s death is a tragedy; a million dead is a statistic.’ So, we’ve seen the statistic.”

The release of the documents is being called the biggest intelligence leak in history, drawing comparisons to the disclosure of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers.

“There hasn’t been an unauthorized disclosure of this magnitude in 39 years,” said Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime Pentagon official who leaked that multiple-volume secret history of the conflict.

Others disagreed with the comparison. Bruce Riedel, an analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, noted that the Pentagon Papers were part of a document prepared for U.S. leaders that analyzed how the United States got into Vietnam, “which assessed successes and failures in a comprehensive way.”

“This is really the raw material of the war — unassessed, raw, fragmentary data that I think in each case, you have to be very careful how much of a larger picture you can conclude from these fragments and snippets,” Riedel said.

And CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen said the Pentagon Papers revealed “a huge disconnect between what the American government was saying officially and internally.”

“Here, all sorts of American government officials are saying the war is not going very well. No one is disagreeing with that,” Bergen said.

But Ellsberg said the documents, “low-level as they are,” raise the question of whether the United States has a winning strategy in Afghanistan and whether it should continue to pursue the war.

“They do give us the sense of the pattern of failure, of stalemate, and why we’re stalemated — civilian casualties that recruit for the Taliban … and raise the question of what we’re doing there,” he said.

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The attacks were carried out by the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda, which operated from bases in Afghanistan with the approval of the Taliban, the fundamentalist movement that ruled most of the country at the time.

The invasion swiftly toppled the Taliban, but al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escaped and remain at large. Meanwhile, the Taliban regrouped along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is now battling its own Taliban insurgency as well.

Gary Berntsen, who led a CIA commando team in Afghanistan in the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said on CNN’s “Rick’s List” that the documents “probably are accurate.” But Berntsen, now a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, said the reports are likely to be a propaganda coup for the Taliban and “sap morale in the United States.”

“It does paint a bleak picture on this,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean this fight is less worth fighting and trying to make progress on.”

And Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the information should be put “in context” and that journalists should avoid publishing anything that could harm U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Assange, he said, “is an anti-war activist who has repeatedly cast a very unfair light on the American military and on the American population in general.”

“There are American troops in harm’s way getting shot and killed,” Rieckhoff said. “If WikiLeaks is endangering them, we need to push back, and the American public needs to push back.”

Once the jargon of the report is pierced, the stories can be eye-opening.

In a February 5, 2008, incident, Task Force Helmand reported that an Afghan National Police officer — referred to as ANP — was in a public shower smoking hashish when two members of the Afghan National Army walked in.

“ANP felt threatened and a fire fight occurred,” the report says. “The ANP fled the scene and was later shot. ANP and ANA commanders held meetings to contain the incident.”

An October 15, 2007, incident describes an Afghan National Police highway officer’s shooting of another Afghan National Police officer in the shoulder and leg, not seriously. “The shooting was not accidental the policeman had been arguing with each other for a few days,” the report said.

In a March 19, 2005, incident, “FOB [Forward Operating Base] Cobra received a local national boy who had received a gunshot wound to his stomach,” another report said.

“He had been shot during a green-on-green [Afghans attacking Afghans] firefight in Jangalak Village. The boy and his older brother had heard shooting outside of their compound and went outside to check it out, at which point the boy was shot in the stomach. Another brother had also been shot and died at the compound. No adult males had accompanied the brothers, and only the older brother of the injured boy could provide information on the incident. The older brother explained that men in the village were having personal disputes with each other and had then began shooting at each ones’ compounds.”

Assange said the documents were “legitimate” but said it was important not to take their contents at face value.

“We publish CIA reports all the time that are legitimate CIA reports. That doesn’t mean the CIA is telling the truth,” he said.

He said his website is not campaigning against the war.

“WikiLeaks does not have an opinion whether the war in Afghanistan should continue or not continue. … It should continue in a just way if its to continue at all,” he said.

He declined to tell CNN where he got the documents and said the identities of his sources are less important than the authenticity of the documents they provide. And he denied that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger and said the documents’ publication will help people make informed decisions about whether to support the war.

Assange, an Australian, said the site is coming under “significant pressure” from authorities, including several recent “surveillance events.” But he said that due to the response the latest release has received, “It is not politically feasible to interfere with us at a high level.”

CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr and CNN’s Atika Shubert, Richard Allen Greene, David DeSola, Adam S. Levine and Atia Abawi contributed to this report.

Pentagon: Leaked Afghan reports are not top-secret

By

Scott Bland,

By

Brad Knickerbocker,

(CNN) — President Obama and his family arrived Friday for a weekend getaway in Maine, but along with a little rest and relaxation comes criticism that the president is taking it easy with the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis in a critical phase.

The Obamas plan to spend the weekend on Mount Desert Island, home of Acadia National Park. The trip marks the president’s third weekend vacation since the oil disaster began in April.

The Republican National Committee launched a website blasting what it considers Obama’s “leisure activities or missteps” during the oil disaster, like playing golf, attending concerts and vacationing in Asheville, North Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and now Maine.

Obama has also faced criticism for scheduling a trip up north, instead of vacationing in the Gulf, as he advised other Americans to do.

“Presidents are certainly entitled to vacation, just like everybody else, but there is a fine line as to when presidents should do it, what they should and where they should do it,” said Brad Blakeman, a former member of President George W. Bush’s senior staff and the deputy assistant for appointments and scheduling.

Video: Obama’s ‘good news’ on oil spill

“Presidents have to be cognizant of the fact that everything they do is going to be scrutinized,” said Blakeman, who also is a professor for Georgetown University’s Semester in Washington program.

Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said the Republican criticism is “galling,” considering Bush’s frequent trips to Camp David and his home in Crawford, Texas.

“Barack Obama is working as hard as any president that we’ve had in recent history and certainly harder than the most immediate previous president,” he said.

CBS’s Mark Knoller, who keeps track of presidents’ comings and goings, calculated that Bush spent all or part of 977 days at Camp David or in Texas during his two terms.

Blakeman noted that visits to those locations were working trips and not getaways. Bush’s staff would travel with him, and work would continue as usual. The Crawford ranch was known as the “Western White House” because of the infrastructure there.

As for calls that Obama should vacation in the Gulf, Simmons said, “Where he chooses to take his days off should really be up to him. We don’t want to get into a situation where the president is making familial vacation decisions based upon polling or political maneuvers.”

Scott Stanzel, Bush’s deputy press secretary who often traveled with the president when he was away from the White House, said that changing locations provided a good opportunity to escape the hustle and bustle of Washington.

“President Bush, on the weekends, would often go to Camp David because the size of the bubble you are in expands, so you can go out for a walk or bike ride without having to arrange security detail,” he said.

Stanzel was in Crawford with Bush for a number of crises that could not have been planned for, like the conviction of Saddam Hussein, the death of President Ford and the assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto.

Bush was notified of Bhutto’s death immediately and delivered a statement to the press pool. “It would have almost been like we were at the White House in terms of the teams that would convene and talk about the issues surrounding that assassination,” Stanzel said.

The problem for Obama, Stanzel said, is the visuals that could come out of his trip. A picture of Obama playing golf alongside images from the Gulf could send a negative message.

Paul Begala, a CNN contributor and former adviser to President Clinton, said that vacationing or not, “The president is the president wherever he is.

“I thought it was silly when people attacked Bush for going on vacation, so I’ll be consistent and say it’s silly when people attack President Obama for going on vacation,” he said.

“Of all of the concerns that Americans may have, they do not need to worry whether President Obama is a hard-working man. They may agree or disagree with his policies, but there is just no doubt that the guy is busting his rear end.”

Obama vacation brings rest, relaxation and rebuke

Washington (CNN) — While the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has put accidental spills squarely in the national spotlight, one U.S. senator is warning of another possible threat: deliberate sabotage.

Democrat Jim Webb of Virginia is calling on the Obama administration to develop plans to safeguard offshore platforms from attack by terrorists.

The senator, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made his case in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

“While Congress will continue to scrutinize BP and regulatory agencies, I write to urge you to also be vigilant against deliberate acts, such as an attack or sabotage, that could similarly devastate the region,” Webb said in the letter, referring to the Gulf Coast. But he wants the security plans adopted for all U.S. coastal areas.

While there are no oil derricks off Virginia’s coast, Webb, the state’s senior senator, favors oil and gas exploration in Virginia waters. He also backs a controversial moratorium in deepwater drilling ordered by the Interior Department, until risks and safeguards can be better assessed.

Webb notes in the letter that the BP oil spill is the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history. He said that, “With dozens of wells operating in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, we must employ policies that mitigate all types of risk.”

The senator said that a lack of vigilance on security issues “could leave the marine ecosystem, as well as certain areas of our national security, at great risk.”

He’s asking the federal agencies to assess how vulnerable offshore oil rigs are to attack and make recommendations to Congress for safeguarding them.

The senator points out in his letter that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires that nuclear reactors be able to withstand plane crashes and said similar standards should be considered for the oil and gas industry.

Webb’s request for security measures comes as he prepares for a possible rematch in 2012 with Republican George Allen, the incumbent he narrowly defeated in 2006. Allen, a former governor, also supports oil and gas exploration off Virginia’s coast.

Senator warns of terrorist threat to oil rigs

Washington (CNN) — The National Oil Commission, just beginning its investigation into the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, faces a daunting task: Collect information, process it and within six-months make recommendations to President Obama.

And unlike presidential commissions examining the September 11, 2001, attacks, the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident, this one is unique: The disaster is still going on.

“In some ways, it really doesn’t make much sense because the importance of commissions is that they have data that no one else has,” said Stephen Hess, a presidential historian and scholar at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.

Obama signed an executive order on May 22 creating the seven-member commission, tasked with investigating the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf and the subsequent oil spill that has become the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history.

The commission is tasked with three things: determine why the oil rig exploded; make recommendations about preventing similar disasters; and determine whether offshore oil and gas drilling should continue.

“We will look at all aspects of the cause. … We should go well beyond April 20 to see whether there were decisions made or even a culture that was established that may have contributed to the series of problems and the faulty decisions that were made,” committee co-chairman William Reilly said.

Reilly, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency during President H.W. Bush’s administration, is leading the committee with former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham of Florida.

Is the six-month time frame feasible?

“It’s a much tighter time frame than that which characterized earlier commissions like the 9/11 commission,” Reilly said.

The 9/11 Commission began its work in November of 2002. Its final report was released two years later in July 2004. The Challenger commission, though, had a relatively quick investigation. It first met in early February of 1986, just days after the explosion, and published its report in June that year.

Reilly is confident the commission will complete two of its three tasks: make recommendations about preventing similar disasters; and determine whether offshore oil and gas drilling should continue.

Read more about the oil commission

As for the third task, the precise determination of the causes, Reilly said the group will do its best. He acknowledged that the commission is also fighting for information as other commissions and the Department of Justice are running concurrent investigations.

While the road ahead is daunting for the commission, Hess said they have some advantages: the backing of the president, the immediate attention of the American public, and the anger and frustration of Gulf Coast residents.

Hess said the residents and environmentalists are using the open hearings held by the commission as a way to vent their frustration.

“That defines this sort of commission,” he said. “A lot of commissions don’t hold open hearings. … When they hold open hearings they know exactly why they are doing it: to let people give their emotional pitches.”

A woman shouting about dispersants in the water interrupted the first commission hearings on Monday. BP is blocking LSU scientists from doing tests, she said, adding, “Everybody’s got to get upset about this.”

Tight mandates make for successful commissions, said Reilly.

“If [commissions] can be very specific and they can be very focused — and of course get a lot of attention — they can be useful.” He said the oil commission has some of those qualities.

Many recommendations from the Challenger and Three Mile Island commissions resulted in changes to operating procedures, stricter safety measures and stronger oversight.

But the oil commission also faces criticism, especially Republicans who charge that the makeup of the commission is unbalanced.

Several Republican senators, including John Barrasso of Wyoming and Robert Bennett of Utah, have criticized the lack of oil and gas experts on the commission and the use of what they call pro-environmental members.

And an editorial in New Orleans’ largest newspaper on Sunday questioned the makeup of the commission.

“The president weighted the group with experts who appear more qualified to deal with the spill’s effects than with its causes,” according to the Times-Picayune editorial. “We’re concerned commission members who have been environmental advocates may put their own agenda first, ignoring the nation’s energy needs and the livelihood of Louisianans.”

The editors went on to say that the president’s commission needs to keep an open mind and “make a balanced assessment of our need for oil and of ways to mitigate the risks.”

Advocates for the commission point out commission chief Reilly, a Republican, has ties to the energy industry, having served on the board at Conoco-Phillips. The Obama administration said the commission is full of well-qualified and unbiased scientists and experts.

“The 9/11 commission had certain advantages because you didn’t have to put any terrorists on it,” Hess said. “There was one American point of view. But with the oil commission, we see there [is] more than one point of view.”

But even the 9/11 commission had trouble implementing some recommendations.

The 9/11 commission’s heads discussed their frustration in May, saying several of their recommendations had not been properly implemented.

All of the problems are bureaucratic in nature, but threaten public security, said former commission Chairman Thomas Kean and Deputy Chairman Lee Hamilton.

CNN’s Mike Ahlers and Shelby Lin Erdman contributed to this report.

Oil commission faces unique challenges

Moscow, Russia (CNN) — The United States and Russia completed a spy swap Friday, exchanging the agents on chartered planes at an airport in Vienna, Austria, a U.S. official and Russian media said.

The plane carrying 10 Russian agents, who were expelled from the United States on Thursday for intelligence gathering, landed at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport on Friday afternoon, the airport press office said.

A separate plane believed to be carrying four people convicted of spying for the United States was scheduled to land at Washington’s Dulles International Airport shortly before 5:30 p.m.

“The United States has successfully transferred 10 Russian agents to the Russian Federation and the Russian Federation has released four individuals who had been incarcerated in Russia,” Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the National Security Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, said in a statement released just as the plane landed in Moscow. “The exchange of these individuals … has been completed.”

The elaborately choreographed transfer — which took place while the planes sat on the ground for about an hour — was reminiscent of a scene from the Cold War.

The 10 pleaded guilty in the United States on Thursday for failing to register as foreign agents and were ordered out of the country. They then boarded a U.S.-chartered flight accompanied by U.S. marshals, a federal law enforcement source said.

Video: Spy swap between U.S., Russia

Video: Russian spies: Deal or no deal?

Video: Accused spy responds to photos

“As a result of the successful exchange … the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has requested that the court dismiss any remaining charges against the 10 Russian agents,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Friday.

In Washington, Attorney General Eric Holder said none of the 10 had passed classified information and therefore none was charged with espionage.

“They were acting as agents to a foreign power,” he told CBS News, referring to the Russians who, U.S. officials have said, had been under observation by federal authorities for more than a decade.

Four young children of the Russian agents are now in Russia, according to attorneys for the agents. Two older children are no longer in the United States, though their exact location is unknown. Another two older children have remained in America, the attorneys indicated.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told PBS’ “NewsHour” that although the 10 agents didn’t plead guilty to being spies, they “were clearly caught in the business of spying.”

In a conference call with reporters, senior administration officials said the agents agreed never to return to the United States without permission from the U.S. government.

Holding them would have conferred no security benefit to the nation, they said.

This “clearly serves the interests of the United States,” one official said.

A second official said the four prisoners in Russia were in failing health, a consideration that prompted quick completion of the deal.

Under the plea agreements, the defendants disclosed their true identities in court and forfeited assets attributable to the criminal offenses, the Justice Department said in a news release.

“Defendants Vicky Pelaez, Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko, who operated in the United States under their true names, admitted that they are agents of the Russian Federation; and Chapman and Semenko admitted they are Russian citizens,” the Justice Department said.

Carlos Moreno, an attorney for Pelaez, said his client does not want to take up residence in Russia and would prefer ultimately to live in her native Peru or in Brazil, where she has family. Pelaez hopes to continue her work as a journalist, according to Moreno.

Pelaez told the court that Moscow promised her free housing in Russia and a $2,000 monthly stipend for life, as well as visas for her children to travel to see her. Pelaez and her husband, both naturalized American citizens, were stripped of that citizenship as a part of the plea deal.

Authorities have lost track of an 11th suspect, who was detained in Cyprus, released on bail, and then failed to check in with authorities as he had promised to do.

In Moscow, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree Friday pardoning the four individuals imprisoned for alleged contact with Western intelligence agencies, the Kremlin press service said, according to state-run RIA Novosti.

Though the four Russians were released to the custody of the United States, that does not necessarily mean they would go to America, an embassy spokesman said.

“Three of the Russian prisoners were convicted of treason in the form of espionage on behalf of a foreign power and are serving lengthy prison terms,” the Justice Department said in a letter to U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood, who handled the case in the United States. “The Russian prisoners have all served a number of years in prison and some are in poor health. The Russian government has agreed to release the Russian prisoners and their family members for resettlement.”

It added, “Some of the Russian prisoners worked for the Russian military, and/or for various Russian intelligence agencies. Three of the Russian prisoners have been accused by Russia of contacting Western intelligence agencies while they were working for the Russian (or Soviet) government.”

The individuals pardoned by Russia are Alexander Zaporozhsky, Gennady Vasilenko, Sergei Skripal, and Igor Sutyagin.

All four appealed to the Russian president to free them after admitting their crimes against the Russian state, press secretary Natalia Timakova said.

But in Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner denied Thursday that Sutyagin had been a spy.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the move was made “in the general context of improving Russian-American relations, and the new dynamic they have been given, in the spirit of basic agreements at the highest level between Moscow and Washington on the strategic character of Russian-American partnership.”

CNN’s Dugald McConnell contributed to this report

U.S., Russia swap spies at Vienna airport

Washington (CNN) — President Barack Obama wrapped up a two-state campaign swing Friday, stumping for embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid while talking up the economy in a speech at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Reid’s “a fighter, and you should never bet against him,” Obama said in his prepared remarks. “And that’s just what we need right now. We need someone who’s going to fight for the people of Nevada and for the American people.”

“Harry and I are going to keep on fighting,” Obama said. “Until wages and incomes are rising again, businesses are hiring again, and Americans are headed back to work again. Until we not only recover from this recession, but rebuild our economy stronger than before.”

Reid slammed Senate Republicans for being “the party of no,” claiming he’s only been able to work with a dwindling handful of GOP moderates. “They’re betting on failure,” he said.

Nevada currently has the highest state unemployment rate in the nation at 14 percent, adding to Reid’s tough reelection fight this year against GOP nominee Sharron Angle. At a rally on Thursday. Obama ripped into Angle, alleging among other things that she wants to phase out Medicare and Social Security along with federal education funding.

Obama also attacked Angle for recently calling BP’s Gulf compensation fund a “slush fund” during a radio interview on Wednesday. Angle retreated from her comments on Thursday, saying she shouldn’t have used the term “slush fund” and asserting that she supported the fund.

Nevada is the second stop on a campaign tour also brought the “campaigner-in-chief” to the Midwest this week to help out another Democratic Senate candidate — Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan.

Carnahan will most likely face off in November against seven-term Republican Rep. Roy Blunt, in a battle between two of the most famous political families in Missouri. Both candidates are fighting to succeed Republican Sen. Kit Bond, who is not running for re-election this year. The race is one of the few where the Democrats have a chance to pick up a GOP held seat.

Obama’s visit was his fourth to Missouri since losing the state in the 2008 presidential election to Sen. John McCain by less than 4,000 votes.

In March, Republicans pounced on Carnahan when she didn’t attend an Obama health care reform event in her state, saying she was trying to keep her distance from the president. Carnahan’s campaign said she was in the Washington, D.C. for a conference as part of her duties as secretary of state. Carnahan did team up with Obama when he came back to Missouri a month later to hold an event on the economy.

“Presidential visits are a double-edged sword. They raise money for Democratic candidates and energize Democratic voters, but they give Republicans plenty of ammo and interject Obama into every contest,” says Stuart Rothenberg, publisher and editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report.

Following his stop over in Missouri, the president headed west to Las Vegas.

CNN’s Alan Silverleib and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.

Obama talks economy in Las Vegas

By

Tarini Parti,