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ByKarinLaub The Associated Press RAMALLAH, WEST BANK The Palestinian govern- ment blamed Israel on Thursday for the sudden death of a Cabinet minis- ter, citing preliminary au- topsy results — disputed by Israeli pathologists — that he died from a blow during a confrontation with Israeli troops. The contradictory inter- pretations of a joint autopsy on the minister, Ziad Abu Ain, threatened to further inflame tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, amid demands from an angry Palestinian public to halt security coop- eration with Israeli forces in the West Bank. Pathologists disagreed on the main cause of death, with Palestinian doctors saying the 55-year-old Cab- inet minister died from a blow to the body and Is- raeli doctors saying he had a heart attack. "The results of the au- topsy show that the ones who killed the martyr Ziad Abu Ain are the Israeli oc- cupying forces," Palestin- ian Health Minister Jawad Awad said. Despite the findings, Pal- estinian President Mah- moud Abbas appeared in no rush to comply with de- mands to halt security coor- dination with Israeli forces. The policy is highly unpop- ular, particularly at times of heightened tensions. How- ever, the alliance of Israeli and Palestinian security forces against a shared foe, the Islamic militant Hamas, has helped insure Abbas' continued rule in the au- tonomous areas of the West Bank. Abbas has also been leery of turning a strained rela- tionship with Israel into a confrontational one, despite repeated warnings that he would seek international sanctions against Israel in the absence of meaningful talks on Palestinian state- hood. Abu Ain died Wednesday following a confrontationbe- tween Palestinian protesters and Israeli soldiers that in- cluded pushing and shov- ing. At one point, a member of Israel's paramilitary bor- der police grabbed Abu Ain by the throat and pushed him. Troops also fired tear gas during the clashes. Several minutes after the scuffle, Abu Ain col- lapsed, clutching his heart. He received first aid and was evacuated, but died en route to a hospital. An au- topsy was conducted later Wednesday by Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli pa- thologists. Citing preliminary find- ings, Palestinian patholo- gist Dr. Saber Aloul, said Thursday that "the cause of death was a blow, and not natural causes." He said some of Abu Ain's front teeth broke off and dropped to the back of his mouth as a result of trauma to his face. He also noted bruises on both sides of the neck, the back of the tongue and the windpipe, which he said appeared to be caused by force. MIDDLE EAST Israel blamed for death of Palestinian minister By David Espo and Andrew Taylor The Associated Press WASHINGTON Swapping crisis for compromise, the House narrowly ap- proved $1.1 trillion in government-wide spend- ing Thursday night after President Barack Obama and Republicans joined forces to override Demo- cratic complaints that the bill would also ease bank regulations imposed after the economy's near-col- lapse in 2008. The 219-206 vote cleared the way for a final show- down in the Senate on the bill — the last major mea- sure of a two-year Congress far better known for grid- lock than for bipartisan achievement. Hours before the vote, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi delivered a rare public rebuke to Obama, saying she was "enormously disappointed" he had decided to embrace legislation that she de- scribed as an attempt at blackmail by Republicans. The White House stated its own objections to the bank-related proposal and other portions of the bill in a written statement. Even so, officials said Obama and Vice President Joe Biden both telephoned Democrats to secure the votes needed for passage, and the president stepped away from a White House Christmas party reception line to make last-minute calls. In addition to the gov- ernment funding, the bill also sets a new course for selected, highly shaky pen- sion plans. Despite the day's drama, 57 Democrats supported the bill, including two of the top three party leaders and Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who doubles as the chair of the Democratic National Com- mittee. The outbreak of Demo- cratic bickering left Repub- licans in the unusual posi- tion of bystanders rather than participants with the federal government due to run out of funds at mid- night. Even so, there was no threat of a shutdown in fed- eral services — and no sign of the brinkmanship that marked other, similar ep- isodes. Instead, the House passed a measure provid- ing a 48-hour extension in existing funding to give the Senate time to act on the larger bill. Said a relieved Speaker John Boehner, "thank you and merry Christmas." Hours before the mid- evening final vote, conser- vatives had sought to tor- pedo the measure because it would leave Obama's im- migration policy unchal- lenged. Boehner patrolled the noisy, crowded House floor looking for enough GOP converts to keep it afloat. He found them — af- ter the vote to move ahead on the bill went into over- time — in retiring Rep. Kerry Bentivolio of Michi- gan as well as Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana. The vote was 214-212. Even so, Republican de- fections required Boehner and supporters of the mea- sure to seek Democratic votes for passage. "Re- member this bill was put together in a bicameral, bi- partisan way," he said. Of- ficials in both parties said Pelosi was fully informed of the bill's contents before it was released to the public, and did not signal her op- position. If there was political drama in the House, there was something approach- ing tenderness in the Sen- ate, where several lawmak- ers are ending their careers. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., choked up as he delivered a farewell speech from his desk, and Republicans and Democrats alike rose to ap- plaud him when he finished speaking. The spending measure was one of a handful on the year-end agenda, with the others ranging from an extension of expiring tax breaks to a bill approving Obama's policy for arming Syrian forces fighting Is- lamic State forces. The $1.1 trillion legisla- tion would provide fund- ing for nearly the entire government through the end of the budget year next Sept. 30, and lock in cuts negotiated in recent years between the White House and a tea party-heavy Re- publican rank and file. The only exception is the Department of Home- land Security. It is funded only through Feb. 27, when the specter of a shutdown will be absent and Repub- licans hope to force the president to roll back an immigration policy that promises work visas to an estimated 5 million immi- grants living in the coun- try illegally. When Congress con- venes in January, Repub- licans will have control of the Senate for the first time in eight years and will hold their strongest majority in the House in more than eight decades. A provision in the big bill relating to financially fail- ing multi-employer pension plans would allow cuts for current retirees, and sup- porters said it was part of an effort to prevent a slow- motion collapse of a system that provides retirement in- come to millions. "The multi-employer pension system is a tick- ing time bomb," said Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., who negotiated the agreement privately with Democratic Rep. George Miller of Cali- fornia, who is retiring after 40 years in Congress. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. estimates that the fund that backs multi-employer plans is about $42.4 billion short of the money needed to cover benefits for plans that have failed or will fail. Miller said the legisla- tion would give retirees the right to vote in advance whether to enter a restruc- turing that could cut their benefits. He, Kline and oth- ers said the alternative to the legislation might be an even deeper reduction in benefits. CONGRESS De mo cr at s, O ba ma p art o n $1 .1 T sp en di ng b il l By Ken Dilanian The Associated Press WASHINGTON CIA Direc- tor John Brennan, respond- ing to the Senate torture re- port, acknowledged Thurs- day in a rare televised news conference that "abhorrent" tactics were used on terror detainees and said it was "unknown and unknow- able" whether the harsh treatment yielded crucial intelligence that could have been gained in any other way. Brennan began his pub- lic explanation — a rarity for his by-nature secretive agency — recounting the horrors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, his agency's deter- mination to prevent more such assaults and the fact that CIA officers were the first to fight and early to die in the Afghanistan war. The CIA, he said, "did a lot of things right" in a time when there were "no easy answers." Brennan criticized the Senate intelligence commit- tee's investigation on multi- ple fronts, saying, for exam- ple, it was "lamentable" that the committee interviewed no CIA personnel to ask "what were you thinking" and "what was the calcu- lus you used" in determin- ing interrogation practices. Without that, he said, "you lose the opportunity to re- ally understand what was taking place at the time." Even so, on the central contentious point of this week's report — its conclu- sion that none of the tor- ture or other brutal inter- rogation methods produced critical, life-saving intelli- gence — Brennan said that cannot be proved one way or the other. In that re- spect, he stopped short of the claims of other defend- ers of the program who said the tough methods saved thousands of Ameri- can lives and provided the breakthrough in finding Osama bin Laden. Valuable information was indeed obtained after the harsh interrogations, he said, including some on 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. But he added it was impossible to know whether the detainees pro- vided that information be- cause of the "enhanced in- terrogation techniques." He said the cause-and-effect re- lationship is "unknown and unknowable." Brennan refused to say whether he considered the techniques to be torture, declining to even use the word in his 40 minutes of remarks and answers to questions. As he spelled out his ob- jections to the report, the office of Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate intelligence com- mittee, unleashed a barrage of tweets challenging him. One said that "every fact" in the committee's report was based on CIA records, ca- bles or other evidence. Brennan denied that the CIA intentionally misled lawmakers, and he spoke up forcefully for agency em- ployees, "a workforce that was trying to do the right thing" even though some came up short. "We take exceptional pride in providing truth to power," he said point- edly, "whether that power agrees with what we say or not and regardless of polit- ical party." The Senate report doesn't urge prosecution for wrong- doing, and the Justice De- partment has no inter- est in reopening a crimi- nal probe. But the threat to former interrogators and their superiors was under- lined Wednesday as a U.N. special investigator de- manded those responsible for "systematic crimes" be brought to justice, and hu- man rights groups pushed for the arrest of key CIA and Bush administration fig- ures if they travel overseas. Current and former CIA officials pushed back, deter- mined to paint the Senate report as a political stunt by Senate Democrats. It is a "one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation — essen- tially a poorly done and par- tisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America," former CIA directors George Te- net, Porter Goss and Mi- chael Hayden wrote in a Wall Street Journal opin- ion piece. The intelligence com- mittee's 500-page release concluded that the CIA in- flicted suffering on al-Qaida prisoners beyond its legal authority and that none of the agency's "enhanced in- terrogations" provided cru- cial information. It cited the CIA's own records, doc- umenting in detail how waterboarding and lesser- known techniques such as "rectal feeding" were actu- ally employed. In a formal 136-page re- buttal, the CIA suggested Senate Democrats searched through millions of docu- ments to pull out only the evidence backing up prede- termined conclusions. Tenet, the director on Sept. 11, 2001, said the in- terrogation program "saved thousands of Americans lives" while the country faced a "ticking time bomb every day." Former Vice President Dick Cheney also pushed back, saying in a Fox News interview that the Senate report "is full of crap." WASHINGTON CI A ch ie f cha ll en ge s Se na te t or tu re r ep or t co nd em ni ng a ge nc y' s pr ac ti ce s PABLOMARTINEZMONSIVAIS—THEASSOCIATEDPRESS Central Intelligence Director (CIA) Director John Brennan gestures during a news conference at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va., on Thursday. Suzy Noble: snoble@redbluffdailynews.com GoMultimediathisChristmasSeason! Flights of Fancy Available November 1 through December 20 6 column inch size ads or larger Publi sh 4 times within 7 days, get t he 5th run FREE! Only $5.75 per column inch Even lower rates when you add online display! 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