Powerful supercomputers are vacuuming up so much information that logs of calls to or from innocent Americans could exist in government databases indefinitely, the nation’s top intelligence official said Tuesday.

An untold number of communication logs on US citizens could exist within a NSA database of information gained through warrantless wiretaps of foreigners abroad, McConnell said, because NSA spies do not examine the full contents on all the information it collects until it has a reason to do so.

In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on the impact the recent ‘surge’ is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003.

Previous estimates, most noticeably the one published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number (654,965 deaths). These findings come from a poll released today by ORB, the British polling agency that has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005.

Iraq has ordered the cancellation of the operating licence of US security firm Blackwater after it was involved in a shootout in Baghdad that killed eight people, a senior official told AFP on Monday.

Blackwater offers personal security to US officials working in Iraq.

“The interior minister (Jawad al-Bolani) has issued an order to cancel Blackwater’s licence and the company is prohibited from operating anywhere in Iraq,” interior ministry director of operations Major General Abdel Karim Khalaf said.

Finance ministers and central bankers have long fretted that at some point, the rest of the world would lose its willingness to finance the United States’ proclivity to consume far more than it produces - and that a potentially disastrous free-fall in the dollar’s value would result.

But for longer than most economists would have been willing to predict a decade ago, the world has been a willing partner in American excess - until a new and home-grown financial crisis this summer rattled confidence in the country, the world’s largest economy.

Six years after 9/11, the American public have still not been provided with a full and truthful account of the single greatest terror attack in US history.

What they got was a turkey. The 9/11 Commission was hamstrung by official obstruction. It never managed to ascertain the whole truth of what happened on September 11 2001.