Guantanamo's First Suicides Pressure U.S. (LAT)

Three Middle Eastern detainees being held without charges at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay hanged themselves, military officials said Saturday, becoming the first captives to take their own lives at the prison and prompting new calls for an immediate shutdown.

Fear of Big Battle Panics Iraqi City (LAT)

Fears of an imminent offensive by the U.S. troops massed around the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi intensified Saturday, with residents pouring out of the city to escape what they describe as a mounting humanitarian crisis

Palestinian Vote on Statehood Plan Set for July (LAT)

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday set a date of July 26 for a territorywide referendum on a statehood plan that would implicitly recognize Israel, a proposal bitterly opposed by the ruling Hamas movement.

In this paper, war heroes are MIA (LAT Op-Ed)

During the last two weeks, the Los Angeles Times has printed at least four front-page articles, and several others on inside pages, about a Marine squad accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha and possibly falsifying reports about the incident. Some of the information reported by The Times was based on the military's own investigation. The Times' reports seemed fair, stressing the conditions of combat and confusion faced by our troops.

Iraq's Pentagon Papers (LAT Op-Ed)

Today, there must be, at the very least, hundreds of civilian and military officials in the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, National Security Agency and White House who have in their safes and computers comparable documentation of intense internal debates — so far carefully concealed from Congress and the public — about prospective or actual war crimes, reckless policies and domestic crimes: the Pentagon Papers of Iraq, Iran or the ongoing war on U.S. liberties. Some of those officials, I hope, will choose to accept the personal risks of revealing the truth — earlier than I did — before more lives are lost or a new war is launched.

Taliban Surges as U.S. Shifts Some Tasks to NATO (NYT)

A large springtime offensive by Taliban fighters has turned into the strongest show of force by the insurgents since American forces chased the Taliban from power in late 2001, and Afghan and foreign officials and local villagers blame a lack of United States-led coalition forces on the ground for the resurgence.

Terrorists Trained by Zarqawi Went Abroad, Jordan Says (NYT)

At the time of his death, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was still trying to transform his organization from one focused on the Iraqi insurgency into a global operation capable of striking far beyond Iraq's borders, intelligence experts here and in the West agree.

His recruiting efforts, according to high-ranking Jordanian security officials interviewed Saturday, were threefold: He sought volunteers to fight in Iraq and others to become suicide bombers there, but he also recruited about 300 who went to Iraq for terrorist training and sent them back to their home countries, where they await orders to carry out strikes.

U.S. Seeking New Strategy for Buttressing Iraq's Government (NYT)

President Bush's two-day strategy session starting Monday at Camp David is intended to revive highly tangible efforts to shore up Iraq's new government, from getting the electricity back on in Baghdad to purging the security forces of revenge-seeking militias, White House officials said. . . . One of the senior officials involved in the strategy session characterized it as a "last, best chance to get this right," an implicit acknowledgment that previous American-led efforts had gone astray.