Twenty-five Death Row convictions have been overturned in Florida, several involving the efforts of the CCRC.

Earlier this week it emerged that Mr Powell had been so disturbed about questionable intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.
The team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech because they could not be verified

President Bush's is now claiming that "we found the weapons of mass destruction."This statement is flat out false according to the evidence presented by his own administration, however.

The question before the table is not whether the war against Iraq was a good idea. The question is why the administration felt it necessary to lie so grandly and consistently about the reasons for the war, and why the media let those lies go largely unchallenged for so long.
As the liberal, traitorous New York Times reported last Sunday, the administration spends less per capita in Afghanistan than it does in East Timor or Rwanda.

Ah, screw it. Let's just give in. Let's just laugh bitterly and toss back a shot of something potent and grain based and throw ourselves under the GOP steamroller and give in to the great excruciating cosmic joke of it all.
"Our actions will advance our goals of diversity and localism," FCC Chairman and noted sniveling GOP errand boy Michael Powell actually had the nerve to say
You simply have to admire the utterly shameless anti-choice rallying cry, the astounding brazenness with which the GOP machine is working like frothing dogs to quell independent voices and Keep America Dumb.

After promising $11 million, no funding for the congressional probe appeared in the supplemental war budget submitted to congress. In sharp contrast, NASA immediately received $50 million to investigate the shuttle disaster.

"What's the difference between genius and stupidity? Genius has limits."
--marie gemelli-carroll

A new poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes finds that 41 percent of Americans either believe that W.M.D.'s have been found, or aren't sure. The program's director suggests that "some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."

"Historian and war correspondent Max Hastings commented in the independent, conservative Sunday Telegraph (6/1) (Internet version):  "Even by the standards of the Bush administration, last week was a remarkable one for diplomatic folly.  Paul Wolfowitz, the Assistant Defence Secretary, disclosed that the U.S. wilfully exaggerated the threat of weapons of mass destruction, to rally support for an Iraq war.  Likewise, Wolfowitz's boss, Donald Rumsfeld, declared that he has little expectation of finding any WMDs."

mr ed - u know what - i just cant believe for the life of me that the game here is 'folly' - we are dealing with smart people, presumably with a plan - it might be folly to the extent that it is stupid, but it certainly isnt folly in the sense that it wasnt well considered... and who'd have thought these horrible people wouldnt consider dropping tony in the shit at the bat of an eyelid

and why the fuck has nobody even mentioned the fact that if 'saddam destroyed weapons MD before the war', wouldnt that be largely in compliance with 1441? which means the war was explicitly invalid? and if saddam was faced with an apparent choice, of comply or get blown up, that is, destroy your weapons MD or get blown up - why on earth would he destroy the weapons but then not tell the inspectors so that he didnt get blown up?

Curtis demolishes the rhetoric behind the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, revealing how they fit a pattern, not of humanitarian intervention, but of control of 'Third World' natural resources and markets through the installation of US-friendly 'democratic structures'.

The French philosopher Jean Guehenno has said that "the worst betrayal of intelligence is finding justification for the world as it is".

People have little stake in the elite and therefore have no reason to trust it.

A month after the September 11 attacks, Blair was careful to reassure the public that no steps would be taken against Iraq as part of a feared "wider war" unless there was "absolute evidence" of Iraqi complicity in the attacks... Now, failure to cooperate, or even failure to be sufficiently +proactive+ in cooperating, is sufficient to trigger war, according to Blair.

"Sometimes the job of the prime minister is to say things people don't want them to say but we believe are necessary to say because the threat is real and... the consequences of our weakness will haunt future generations." no shit tony

"Environment minister Michael Meacher's attendance at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg this month has been vetoed by Downing Street because of fears of... junketing by ministers at the expense of the world's poor."

Even Goebbels supported freedom of speech for views he liked.

The veteran columnist Alan Watkins shrewdly notes that "Mr Blair strikes me as possessing the capacity of the religious maniac to regurgitate, with every appearance of sincerity, any piece of garbage which may be required in the temporary service of some higher cause."

"Leaked minutes of one of the BBC's Weekly Review Board meetings showed BBC executives directing that the reporting of the war should be concerned 'primarily with government statements of policy' while impartiality was felt to be 'an unnecessary irritation'. " (John Pilger, Hidden Agendas, p. 492)

Channel 4 correspondent Alex Thomson wrote, "So, if you want to know why the public supported the war, thank a journalist, not the present government's propagandist-in-chief [Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's press secretary]" (Quoted by Charles Glass, ZNet daily commentary, 1 August, 1999, www.zmag.org)

The Guardian's Maggie O'Kane, made the same point: "Campbell should acknowledge that it was the press reporting of the Bosnian war and the Kosovar refugee crisis that gave his boss the public support and sympathy he needed to fight the good fight against Milosevic."(Glass, ibid). Even the BBC's John Simpson spoke up for the media's support of Nato: "Why did British, American, German, and French public opinion stay rock-solid for the bombing, in spite of Nato's mistakes? Because they knew the war was right. Who gave them the information? The media." (Glass, ibid)

"In democracies governments are supposed to represent the people, so that there shouldn't be a need for massive protests to get the government to do what the public wants done. We shouldn't see 'democratic' governments  trying furiously to drag their country into actions that people oppose - and that many oppose passionately - even after being subjected to intense propaganda and disinformation." (War-makers, Bribees, And Poodles Versus Democracy, Edward Herman, February 18, 2003, www.zmag.org)

As Noam Chomsky, repeatedly points out: "We basically have two choices: give up, and be sure that the worst will come; try, and it may make things better. Because a great many people make the second choice, the world does become a better place. A good shot in the arm is to spend a little time with people who do not share our immense privilege, but go on to struggle, without ever asking questions, facing terrible risks and sometimes enduring harsh punishment, even assassination. It's a humbling experience."

If said of any other imperial power in history, this would be ridiculed as the propaganda that it is.
And how "un-American" was this brand of "liberation"? In 1976, Amnesty International reported that Iran under the Shah had the "highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" which was "beyond belief".
In 1979, as the Shah crashed down in the bloodbath he had created, researchers William A. Dorman and Ehsan Omad wrote of the tyrant: "We have been unable to find a single example of a news and feature story in the American mainstream press that uses the label 'dictator'."

Bernays described the public as a 'herd that needed to be led.' And this herdlike thinking makes people "susceptible to leadership."

Entire sections of the release or in the case of video news releases, the whole thing can be just lifted intact, with no editing, given the byline of the reporter or newspaper or TV station - and voilá! Instant news - copy and paste. Written by corporate PR firms.
Does this really happen? Every single day, since the 1920s when the idea of the News Release was first invented by Ivy Lee. (Stauber, p 22) Sometimes as many as half the stories appearing in an issue of the Wall St. Journal are based solely on such PR press releases.. (22)