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WEST COVINA, Calif. — A judge on Thursday lifted a seal on court records and transcripts that a Southern California man says will prove he was an informant for the FBI.

Craig Monteilh claims he has not been fully paid by the FBI for spying on mosques — an activity that angered the Muslim community and brought accusations that worshippers and clerics were being targeted instead of possible terrorists.

Superior Court Judge Carol Williams Elswick ordered the unsealing of 2007 court records related to a theft case against Monteilh, 47, a fitness consultant from Irvine.

Monteilh said the records include testimony from an FBI agent confirming he worked with the agency as an informant.

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WASHINGTON – How much does the U.S. government really trust Canada? Maybe less than you think.

Espionage warnings from the Defense Department caused an international sensation a few years ago over reports of mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters, until they were debunked. The culprit turned out to be a commemorative quarter in Canada.

But at the height of the mystery, senior Pentagon officials speculated whether Canadians were involved in the spy caper.

“I don’t think it is an issue of the Canadians being the bad guys,” the Pentagon’s counterintelligence chief wrote in an exchange of e-mails obtained this week by The Associated Press, “but then again, who knows.”

In the e-mails, released to the AP under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act with names blacked out but job titles disclosed, Pentagon officials question whether they should warn military officers in the U.S. Northern Command, who regularly met Canadian counterparts about classified subjects inside bug-proof, government meeting rooms. The rooms are known as secure compartmentalized information facilities, or SKIFs.

“Isn’t the Canadian piece something that should be briefed to Northcom since the Canadians sit in their SKIFs?” asked the Pentagon’s deputy director for counterintelligence oversight, in e-mails marked “Secret/NoForn.”

“Good point,” replied the Pentagon’s acting director for counterintelligence. “It is possible that DSS (the U.S. Defense Security Service) sent their report to Northcom. Then again, I don’t think it is an issue of the Canadians being the bad guys, but then again, who knows.”

Who knows?

Canada is among the closest of U.S. allies, its continental northern neighbor and the leading oil supplier for the U.S. The intelligence services of the two countries are extraordinarily tight and routinely share sensitive secrets. President Barack Obama chose Canada as the destination of his first foreign trip, to underscore what he described as the two countries’ long-standing and growing friendship.

In sensational warnings that circulated publicly in late 2006 and early 2007, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Service said coins with radio transmitters were found planted on U.S. Army contractors with classified security clearances on at least three occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

In January 2007, the government abruptly reversed itself and said the warnings weren’t true. But the case remained a mystery until months later, when AP learned that the flap had been caused by suspicions over the odd-looking Canadian “poppy” quarter with a bright red flower. The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy — Canada’s flower of war remembrance — inlaid on a maple leaf.

What suspicious contractors believed to be “nanotechnology” on the coins actually was a protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy’s red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada’s 117,000 war dead.

The Pentagon turned over the latest e-mails from inside its Office of the Undersecretary for Defense for Intelligence nearly two years after the AP requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. Many of the e-mails were censored over what the Pentagon said was national security and personal privacy.

One e-mail included a curious message on the same day the Defense Security Service publicly disavowed its warning about the spy coins. “I am guessing y’all know the status of the Canadian coin situation,” it read. It called for an internal meeting “to chat about the next step to put Humpty together again” and suggested notifying the media — and the Canadians.

President Barack Obama announced Tuesday he was dispatching 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, accelerating a risky and expensive war buildup, even as he assured the nation that U.S. forces will begin coming home in July 2011. The first new Marines will join the fight by Christmas.

The escalation — to be completed by next summer — is designed to reverse significant Taliban advances since Obama took office 10 months ago and to fast-track the training of Afghan soldiers and police toward the goal of hastening an eventual U.S. pullout. The size and speed of the troop increase will put a heavy strain on the military, which still maintains a force of more than 100,000 in Iraq and already has 68,000 in Afghanistan.

“The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 the fastest pace possible so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers,” Obama was to say in his Tuesday night prime-time speech. The White House released excerpts in advance.

The increased troops, Obama said, “will increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.”

Looking to America’s experience in Iraq, Obama put said a U.S. withdrawal would be executed “responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.”

“We will continue to advise and assist Afghanistan’s security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul. But it will be clear to the Afghan government and, more importantly, to the Afghan people that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country,” Obama said.

Obama also leaned heavily on NATO allies and other countries to join in escalating the fight.

“We must come together to end this war successfully,” the president said. “For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility. What’s at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

Obama’s Tuesday evening speech to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., to be broadcast nationally, ends three months of exacting deliberations that won praise from supporters and criticism from opponents. Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Obama was “dithering,” too inexperienced to make a decision on the troop buildup requested in September by commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Senior officials said Obama also would underscore his commitment to stabilizing Afghanistan and scouring corruption out of the government of President Hamid Karzai. Obama has vowed to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaida boss Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization.

Most of the new forces will be combat troops. Military officials said the Army brigades most likely to be sent will come from Fort Drum in New York and Fort Campbell in Kentucky. Marines, who will be the vanguard, will most likely come primarily from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

There will be about 5,000 dedicated trainers in the 30,000, showing the emphasis on preparing Afghans to take over their own security. And the president is making clear to his generals that all troops, even if designated as combat, must consider themselves trainers.

Announcing a start to a U.S. withdrawal by July 2011 does not tie the United States to an “end date” for the war, officials said. They all spoke on condition of anonymity because the speech had not been delivered.

The address could become a defining moment of the Obama presidency, a political gamble that may weigh heavily on his chances for a second White House term. It represents the beginning of a sales job to restore support for the war effort among an American public grown increasingly pessimistic about success — and among some fellow Democrats in Congress wary of or even opposed to spending billions more dollars and putting tens of thousands more U.S. soldiers and Marines in harm’s way.

A new survey by the Gallup organization, released Tuesday, showed only 35 percent of Americans now approve of Obama’s handling of the war; 55 percent disapprove.

Even before the president spoke, his plan was met with skepticism in Congress, where Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and liberal House Democrats threatened to try to block funding for the troop increase.

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee had a hand pardoning or commuting many more prisoners than his three immediate predecessors combined. Maurice Clemmons, the suspect in Sunday’s slaying of four Seattle-area police officers, was among them.

For a politician considering another run for the White House, Clemmons could become Huckabee’s Willie Horton.

“In a primary between a law-and-order Republican and him, I think it could definitely be a vulnerability,” said Art English, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. “It is very damaging when you have someone like that whose sentence was commuted. That’s pretty high profile and very devastating and very tragic.”

English said it’s hard to avoid comparing the case to Horton, a convicted killer who raped a woman and assaulted her fiance while on release as part of a prison furlough program supported by Michael Dukakis when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Allies of former President George H.W. Bush ran ads criticizing Dukakis for his support of the program, undermining the Democrat’s presidential campaign.

As recently as Sunday, hours before the shooting suspect was linked to him, Huckabee said he was leaning against running again for president, telling “Fox News Sunday” he was “less likely rather than more likely” to run.

On Monday, Huckabee said he takes responsibility for making Clemmons eligible for parole in 2000, and called the case a failure of the justice systems in Arkansas and Washington. Huckabee cited the length of Clemmons’ sentence – 108 years – and a state judge’s recommendation that it be reduced as factors in his decision.

“If I could have known nine years ago that this guy was capable of something of this magnitude, obviously I would have never granted a commutation. It’s sickening,” Huckabee said on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”

After months of debate, President Barack Obama will spell out a costly Afghanistan war expansion to a skeptical public Tuesday night, coupling an infusion of as many as 35,000 more troops with a vow that there will be no endless U.S. commitment. His first orders have already been made: at least one group of Marines who will be in place by Christmas.

Obama has said that he prefers “not to hand off anything to the next president” and that his strategy will “put us on a path toward ending the war.” But he doesn’t plan to give any more exact timetable than that Tuesday night.

The president will end his 92-day review of the war with a nationally broadcast address in which he will lay out his revamped strategy from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He spent part of Monday briefing foreign allies in a series of private meetings and phone calls.

Before Obama’s call to Britain’s Gordon Brown, the prime minister announced that 500 more U.K. troops would arrive in southern Afghanistan next month — making a British total of about 10,000 in the country. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose nation has more than 3,000 in Afghanistan, said French troops would stay “as long as necessary” to stabilize the country.

Obama’s war escalation includes sending 30,000 to 35,000 more American forces into Afghanistan in a graduated deployment over the next year, on top of the 71,000 already there. There also will be a fresh focus on training Afghan forces to take over the fight and allow the Americans to leave.

He also will deliver a deeper explanation of why he believes the U.S. must continue to fight more than eight years after the war was started following the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaida terrorists based in Afghanistan. He will emphasize that Afghan security forces need more time, more schooling and more U.S. combat backup to be up to the job on their own, and he will make tougher demands on the governments of Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.

“This is not an open-ended commitment,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. “We are there to partner with the Afghans, to train the Afghan national security forces, the army and the police so that they can provide security for their country and wage a battle against an unpopular insurgency.”

On a few of the bigger questions most on the minds of increasingly restive members of Congress and the public, such as how much the additional $30 billion to $35 billion cost will balloon the already skyrocketed federal deficit, how long the U.S. commitment will continue and how it will wind down, Obama was expected to make references without offering specifics.

Gibbs said detailed discussions on costs would be held later with lawmakers.

Even before explaining his decision, Obama told the military to begin executing the force increases. The commander in chief gave the deployment orders Sunday night, during an Oval Office meeting in which he told key military and White House advisers of his final decision.

At least one group of Marines is expected to deploy within two or three weeks of Obama’s announcement and will be in Afghanistan by Christmas, military officials said. Larger deployments will begin early next year.

The initial infusion is a recognition by the administration that something tangible needs to happen quickly, officials said. The immediate addition of Marines will provide badly needed reinforcements for those fighting against Taliban gains in the southern Helmand province, and also could lend reassurance to both Afghans and a war-weary U.S. public.

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