Cameron faces leadership questions over Europe

By Guy Faulconbridge and Andrew Osborn

LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron faced questions about his leadership on Tuesday after he bowed to pressure from inside the ruling Conservative Party to bring forward draft legislation enforcing a referendum on Britain's European Union membership.

Just hours after U.S. President Barack Obama cautioned against rushing towards the EU exit, Cameron was forced by a rebellion in his party into promising a bill that would pave the way for an in-out vote on Europe.

Cameron denied the move was a desperate measure to placate his increasingly restive and eurosceptic party, where many see the EU as an oppressive and wasteful "superstate" that threatens Britain's sovereignty.

"I think when all the dust has settled people will be able to see the substance of the issue," he said.

"That is that one party, the Conservatives, has a clear agenda: renegotiate, change Europe, have a referendum on it - the others parties don't take that approach," he told Sky news.

On the contrary, he said, he had shown leadership on the issue.

"The whole reason that we are now having this debate is because of the act of leadership I gave," he told ITV News, referring to an earlier promise to hold a referendum.

Yet the more ground Cameron concedes to his eurosceptic MPs, the more they want, deepening the 25-year battle in his party over Europe and undermining his own chances of leading it to victory in a general election set for 2015.

Divisions over Europe helped bring down the last two Conservative prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and many politicians compared Cameron's position to that of Major whose premiership was riven by rows over Europe.

"There is no way that he (Cameron) can give in any further because he's undermining his own position," said Sheila Gunn, who served as spokeswoman to Major.

RISKY PATH

Conservative MPs who back the new bill deny the move undermines Cameron. For them, it is a way of showing a sceptical public that the Conservatives really do want a referendum on Britain's EU membership, but are being held back.

The party's Liberal Democrat partners in coalition government are pro-Europe and oppose a referendum, while the opposition Labour party says it does not support a vote on the EU in 2017, the date proposed by Cameron earlier this year.

"We've set out our position and published this bill to give the British people an in-out referendum on Europe ... Now it's vital to hear whether Labour and the other parties are actually prepared to trust the British public," Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps said in a statement.

Cameron's advisers hope the draft bill on an EU vote will end internal bickering. A Downing Street spokesman insisted Cameron was still in charge.

History shows Cameron is treading a risky path.

The three eurosceptic Conservative Party leaders who followed Major failed to get into power, and Cameron's capitulation over the new EU referendum bill has created the impression he is not in control of his own party.

"David Cameron's weakness has turned a European issue into a leadership issue," Labour foreign affairs spokesman Douglas Alexander said.

In January, Cameron promised to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership and then hold a referendum by the end of 2017 in a speech meant to draw a line under the issue.

But some MPs had called for further concessions and media reports said Cameron's leadership could be challenged.

Cameron's potential rivals include London Mayor Boris Johnson and Education Secretary Michael Gove.

"RED LINE"

Cameron believes his decision to publish the draft bill will silence his eurosceptic MPs until the next election.

"This is our red line," one senior Conservative source said of the bill. "We're not going to give them any more ground."

Despite his latest concession, up to 100 eurosceptic Conservative members of parliament are still expected to criticise the government's legislative plans on Wednesday because they didn't include a bill promising a vote on EU membership.

Since coming to power in a coalition government three years ago, the Conservatives have been rattled by the popularity of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which campaigns for Britain's withdrawal from the EU and tighter immigration laws.

A Guardian/ICM poll showed that UKIP's support had surged to a record high of 18 percent, while support for Britain's traditional parties had fallen by 4 percentage points each.

UKIP took a quarter of the vote in local elections this month. Unless Cameron can convince his party he can win the next election he is likely to face more challenges to his leadership.

"With the story changing every day, it's very reminiscent of the old John Major days where, really, the government appears to be being blown around by events," said UKIP leader Nigel Farage.

The Guardian poll put Labour on 34 percent, the Conservatives on 28 percent and the Lib Dems on 11 percent.

UKIP's poll rating has climbed steadily since Cameron set out his EU strategy in January.

Cameron's bid to renegotiate the terms of Britain's membership has worried the United States, which has warned London that it would lose influence in the world if it did leave the world's biggest economic bloc.

(Additional reporting by Mohammed Abbas, William James, Costas Pitas and William Schomberg; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge and Andrew Osborn; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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Kerry says he'll answer questions on Benghazi

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday he's determined to answer any questions related to the deadly assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, as the House Republican leader pushed for more information from the Obama administration.

One day after a lengthy House hearing on the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, Kerry told reporters as he traveled overseas that anyone culpable of wrongdoing will be dealt with appropriately. But he's withholding judgment on testimony in Congress suggesting that senior State Department officials were pressured or demoted for objecting to the administration's initial and since-debunked explanations for the attacks.

Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died when insurgents attacked the facility in two night-time assaults several hours apart.

Top administration officials first said the attackers were spontaneous protesters, angry about an anti-Islamic video circulating on the Internet. But they later acknowledged the attackers were well-equipped terrorists acting under plans.

Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on Thursday asked President Barack Obama to direct the State Department to release internal emails, sent the day after the Benghazi assault, that deal with the cause for the attacks.

Boehner told reporters that Republican investigators learned that "a senior State Department official emailed her superiors to relay that she had told the Libyan ambassador the attack was conducted by Islamic terrorists." Boehner said the State Department "would not allow our committees to keep copies of this email when it was reviewed."

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., read from the email during Wednesday's committee hearing.

State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters Thursday the department was following up directly with the House leadership and members about Boehner's request to publicize the emails that the committees saw privately.

Boehner and others have sharply criticized the administration's initial description of the Benghazi attacks by Libyan protesters, rather than a planned terrorist assault. Five days after the attack, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on the Sunday talk shows and cited the protests, statements that have been widely discredited.

National Intelligence Director James Clapper told a Senate panel earlier this year that the criticism was unfair because Rice was "going on what we were giving her." Officials in the intelligence community have said they were responsible for substantive changes in the talking points provided to Rice.

Boehner pointed out that an interim report by Republicans on five House committees suggests otherwise.

"Our committees' interim report quotes specific emails where the White House and State Department insist on removing all references to a terrorist attack to protect the State Department from criticism for providing inadequate security," Boehner said at his weekly news conference in the Capitol. While a few House members "were able to review these emails, they were not allowed to keep them or share them with others," the speaker said.

"Congress will continue to investigate this issue, using all of the resources at our disposal," Boehner said.

The White House dismissed Boehner's call for the document release, with spokesman Eric Schultz saying the administration has cooperated sufficiently with Congress.

"This administration has made extraordinary efforts to work with the five congressional committees investigating the Benghazi attacks — including, over the past eight months, testifying in what is now 11 congressional hearings, holding 20 staff briefings, and providing over 25,000 pages of documents," Schultz said.

Ventrell said part of an email that Gowdy read have been entered into the record incorrectly, so the department was working with the House to correct the record. The department's concern was over the use of the word "terrorist," he said.

Three State Department witnesses, including Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission who was in Tripoli, recounted the chaotic events during the deadly assault. But Ventrell said they had not revealed new information. He also said they wouldn't face retaliation for going public.

"We don't believe that new information was necessarily presented that hadn't been already either entered into the public record through congressional testimony or investigated by the ARB or otherwise looked at," Ventrell said, referring to the review conducted by former top diplomat Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"The department has not and will not retaliate against Mr. Hicks," Ventrell said.

Hicks had told the committee on Wednesday that he had been essentially demoted.

___

Associated Press writers Bradley Klapper in Rome and Jim Abrams, Charles Babington and Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed to this report.

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Victims raise legal questions about retired pope

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Attorneys who have tried unsuccessfully for years to sue the Vatican over failures to stop clergy sex abuse are looking into whether former Pope Benedict XVI is more legally vulnerable in retirement, especially if he travels beyond the Vatican walls.

A U.S. lawyer for the Vatican argues that, like any former head of state, Benedict retains legal immunity regardless of whether he is in or out of office. But advocates for victims say immunity in this case should be tested, since modern-day courts have never before dealt with an emeritus pope.

"So much of this is unprecedented," said Pamela Spees, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which is pressing the International Criminal Court to investigate the Vatican's response to abusive priests as a crime against humanity. "There's nothing set in stone about it."

Benedict stepped down last week, becoming the first pontiff in six centuries to do so. Before he became head of the Roman Catholic Church in 2005, he spent more than two decades in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that over the years gained authority to oversee abuse claims against clergy worldwide.

Still, his record on trying to end abuse stands above that of many other church officials.

Benedict spoke openly of ridding the church of "filth" and was the first pontiff to meet directly with victims, during a 2008 visit to the U.S.

He instructed the Rev. Marcial Maciel, founder of the conservative Legion of Christ religious order, who was favored by Pope John Paul II, to leave the ministry and lead a life of prayer and penance. Maciel had been accused for years of abusing young men.

Benedict also ordered bishops worldwide to craft guidelines on protecting children and keeping abusers out of the priesthood. Jeffrey Lena, a U.S. attorney for the Vatican, said that Benedict deserves "tremendous credit" for "recognizing the problem and helping to change the church's approach."

However, advocates for victims have criticized his reforms as half-steps.

As evidence, they point to the Maciel case. The pope never disclosed what the influential priest had done wrong. Only later was it confirmed that Maciel had molested seminarians and fathered at least three children. In Ireland, where church leaders had shielded guilty clerics from prosecution for decades, the Vatican during Benedict's pontificate refused or ignored repeated requests from state investigators for access to its case files.

Benedict's lengthy record dealing with the scandal before he was pope plays a part in the complaint against the church with the International Criminal Court. The court prosecutor, who can decide whether to open an inquiry, has not said whether he will act. Lena has called the effort, which was first filed in 2011, "ludicrous."

Spees said Benedict's resignation would play no role in the longshot case before the International Criminal Court. The world's only permanent war crimes tribunal, its prosecutor does not take into account traditional immunity claims.

However, she and others argue that at a minimum Benedict's resignation could help reduce resistance by prosecutors or other officials to take action against him.

Advocates point to how attitudes changed in the United States, where police and prosecutors once allowed local church officials to deal privately with priests' misconduct. After thousands of civil lawsuits revealed the scope of the abuse scandal, some American civil authorities began aggressively investigating whether Catholic leaders did enough to protect children.

And in staunchly Catholic Ireland, revelations by state investigators about abuse there led to an unprecedented dressing down of the Vatican in 2011 by Prime Minister Enda Kenny.

"They reframed the question," said Timothy Lytton, an Albany Law School professor and author of the book "Holding Bishops Accountable: How Lawsuits Helped the Catholic Church Confront Clergy Sex Abuse."

"Before 1984, nobody talked about it. Police wouldn't investigate it. Now, books are being written on the responsibility of the pope. All over Europe there are questions about the Vatican's role in all this and that is largely the results of lawsuits," he said.

Still, no lawsuit against the Vatican has come anywhere near a trial stage, and it's unclear whether Benedict will now be any easier to reach.

Of the thousands of abuse lawsuits filed against church officials, only a small number have named the Vatican as a defendant. They have come mostly from the United States, with a few from Ireland. In 2005, just months after the conclave that elected Benedict, a U.S. judge in Texas dismissed a lawsuit, ruling the pope had immunity as a head of state. The U.S. Justice Department had filed a motion arguing that allowing the suit to proceed would be "incompatible with the United States' foreign policy interests."

Many other lawsuits never got off the ground for a more mundane reason: No suit can proceed until the targeted person is officially notified.

Notes Lytton: "You can't hire a county sheriff to fly to Rome to knock on a door." Jeff Anderson, a Minnesota attorney who has represented thousands of clergy abuse victims over three decades, including in lawsuits against the Vatican, said in one case the Holy See returned the notification he sent stamped, "Do Not Want. Not Welcome."

Anderson says the lawsuits he has filed target the office of the papacy, not the man who served in it, so Benedict's resignation has no significance for any future U.S. civil suits.

Where the pope's novel status as a retiree could come into play, Anderson says, is if a government decides to take action against him.

Benedict has said he will retreat to a life of prayer in a monastery behind Vatican walls, leading victims groups to wonder whether preserving the former pope's legal immunity played a role in his choice of where to live out the rest of his days.

Lena insists immunity played no role in Benedict's decision. If the former pope does travel to another country, Lena said, he will be afforded the same dignities and protections given to any former high-ranking official. While the Vatican prepares the monastery for Benedict, he is staying in the town of Castel Gandolfo in the papal summer retreat which is technically part of the Holy See. The Vatican also has legal treaties that govern relations with Italy and many other countries and could provide additional protection from any legal action.

Still, some attorneys who fear Benedict will be targeted say they worry about the broad powers European magistrates hold to take legal action on behalf of their own citizens.

Nicholas Cafardi, a canon lawyer and professor at Duquesne Law School in Pittsburgh, who has worked with American bishops on abuse prevention, noted that in Europe, magistrates can, among other actions, arrest and detain officials before any trial. Next month, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, which has been a leading critical voice against bishops in the United States, plans a conference in Dublin for victims of abuse worldwide.

"Americans don't appreciate the vast powers that investigating magistrates have in Europe," Cafardi said. "It only takes one who wants to make a name for him or herself to issue an arrest warrant for the former pope."

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Defense questions FBI agent in NY cannibal plot

NEW YORK (AP) — A defense attorney for a police officer accused in a cannibalism plot pressed an FBI agent to explain where fantasy ends and reality begins Wednesday after the investigator read aloud several dozen Internet chats in which participants boasted of plans to cook and eat human flesh.

Attorney Robert Baum attacked FBI agent Corey Walsh's statement that 40 of the thousands of Internet communications of Officer Gilberto Valle that he reviewed contained "elements of real crimes." Valle is accused in Manhattan federal court of conspiring to kidnap, kill and eat women he knew, including his wife.

Baum's cross examination aimed to show little or no distinction existed between chats or emails the FBI deemed real evidence of a crime and those dismissed as fantasy.

The agent conceded both had similar elements: Valle discussing how to cook women, how much it would cost to abduct them and which women would make good targets.

Walsh conceded that some chats or emails considered fantasies contained photographs and names of real women and dates and references to past crimes, the kind of factual information that prosecutors have insisted proves Valle meant to carry out gruesome crimes including kidnapping, rape, torture, murder and cannibalism.

"Isn't it a fact that some of the chats you found to be fantasies involved cooking women?" Baum asked.

"It could have been," Walsh answered.

The agent also conceded that no women were kidnapped or harmed and that Valle never had contact with his supposed co-conspirators outside the Internet.

In addition, the agent said, no evidence of a crime was found in Valle's apartment besides a computer. There was no rope, pulleys or chemicals to render someone unconscious despite Valle's Internet boasts that he wanted to assemble a torture chamber or that he had an upstate property where he could cook women, Walsh said.

Valle, 28, has pleaded not guilty. He could face life in prison if he is convicted of conspiracy and illegal use of a crime database, a crime prosecutors say stems from his use of a federal database to research potential victims.

Prior to cross examination, Walsh showed jurors graphic X-rated communications between Valle and a butcher in India early last year as they discussed plans to torture and cook Valle's soon-to-be wife and a former college roommate.

"I have longed to butcher and cook female meat," Valle told Aly Khan, Walsh said.

Khan offered to provide a place in Pakistan to kill a woman once she was taken to India, the agent said.

For two days, Walsh has testified about chats Valle participated in last year with a New Jersey co-defendant and two supposed co-conspirators, a man in Great Britain and Khan, both of whom posed on the Internet as veterans of cannibalism who could teach Valle cannibalism skills.

In several emails read by Walsh, Valle seemed eager to offer the woman he would marry a few months later to Khan, though he added: "She is a sweet girl. I like her a lot. But I will move on."

Valle wrote that he could take her to India and then Pakistan, where they could gag her in a basement, hang her from her feet and take turns sexually assaulting her before slitting her throat and cooking her.

"I just love the thought of stringing her upside down," Valle wrote in an email shown to jurors.

He said he would like "to see her suffer" and "slowly roast her until she dies."

In a later email, Khan taunted Valle.

"Are you really into it?" he asked.

"Yes," Valle answered.

"Are you sure?" Khan asked.

"Definitely," Valle said.

Khan, seemingly content, said: "Get your mind ready. I will guide the rest."

Later, Valle discussed plans to attack a Columbus, Ohio, woman he knew in college.

"I want her to experience being cooked alive," he said in one exchange. "She'll be trussed up like a turkey. ... She'll be terrified, screaming and crying."

He wrote that her death would "definitely make the news" and there will be "plenty of suspects" because she is a prosecutor.

The woman, Andria Noble, testified Monday she never knew Valle to be violent when they attended the University of Maryland.

If jurors are offended or horrified by the gruesome testimony, they haven't shown it. Three of them even yawned during the reading of the Internet exchanges.

The six men and six women sitting on the jury mostly sat stone-faced and silent as they listened to the agent's monotone recitation of seemingly grimace-worthy evidence — remarks by Valle like, "I'm dying to taste some girl meat" and discussions about using one potential victim's severed head as a centerpiece for a feast of body parts.

The government hasn't said what roles Khan and the man in Great Britain played in the investigation.

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