The US should apologise to the world for its role in the establishment of al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Asefi said.

The different sages who wrote the ancient scriptures never dreamed that the great myths, allegories, legends, dramas, metaphors and parables in which the old wisdom had come to them would ever be taken as literal fact or history.

"Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq"
mr ed: sounds like grubman et al!

Whether on the lips of Saddam Hussein, or in the pious mouthings of George W. Bush, this god whose origins are lost in the dankest swamps of human history has lied since the beginning to every tribe and tongue.
He is trotted out and knelt to whenever holy water is needed to cover the ultimate in human cruelty, ruthlessness, and greed.

Women who lived near the battlefields or whose husbands had fought in the Gulf War began having more babies with birth defects, doctors say. Some survived, usually those with cleft palates or missing limbs. Others were stillborn, including some with two heads, a single Cyclopean eye or such terrible malformities they barely appeared human.

Earlier this month, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, provoked a storm of protest after claiming weapons finds were "not crucially important".

"If it's right Iraq destroyed the weapons prior to the war, then it means Iraq complied with the United Nations resolution 1441."

The build-up to war: What they said
Intelligence leaves no doubt that Iraq continues to possess and conceal lethal weapons
George Bush, Us President 18 March, 2003
We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd
Tony Blair, Prime Minister 18 March, 2003
Saddam's removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction
Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003
Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a bit
Tony Blair 28 April, 2003
It is possible Iraqi leaders decided they would destroy them prior to the conflict
Donald Rumsfeld, US Defence Secretary 28 May, 2003

That's how it started in Nazi Germany. Hitler convinced a small core of Germany-first fanatics that Jews were a threat and the cause of their economic distress. "Good" Germans sat on their hands because they didn't want to be unpatriotic or unsupportive of their nation's leader.
It can happen here. It may already have started

rummy: "we don't live in a perfect world" and it is difficult to know about "repressive dictatorships and closed societies."


Radio Four's Today programme was reporting a much more damaging split - between the Government and its intelligence services, a division striking to the heart of the fabric of the state.

But perennial values, such as trust, become more important in eras of uncertainty. Its absence can only intensify the current climate of fear, in which citizens do not know whether it is really necessary to lose civil liberties or dot the capital with lumps of concrete to stave off terrorist attack.

Concern about missing weapons is sincere and widespread, not, as blergh suggests, merely the carping of disaffected pacifists...


The Guardian reported how a meeting between the two men took place at the Waldorf Astoria hotel shortly before the key security council meeting. On Saturday, the Foreign Office insisted "no such meeting" took place.

Tam Dalyell, the father of the house is expected to step up the pressure by asking about Ms Short's accusation that he was deceitful to the cabinet on three occasions.
In her BBC interview yesterday, she accused Mr Blair of:
· Agreeing in "secret" with Mr Bush at Camp David last September to go to war - and then telling the cabinet that he would try to act as a constraint on the US.
· Misleading the cabinet over Iraq's weapons capability - by "spinning" the claim that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes. "Where the spin came was the suggestion that it was all weaponised, ready to go, immediately dangerous, likely to get into the hands of al-Qaida, and therefore things were very very urgent."
· Falsely telling the cabinet and the world that Jacques Chirac, the French president, would veto a second UN security council resolution authorising war. The transcript of Mr Chirac's interview, which she subsequently read, showed the prime minister's claim to be wrong.

Prime Minister Tony Blair last night insisted he had secret proof that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq in his strongest signal yet that coalition forces believe they may have begun to uncover leads to Iraq's alleged deadly arms cache.

"Paul Wolfowitz suggested last week that WMD were a bureaucratic pretext to start a war. " - one question might be why dear paul chose vanity fair to make this astonishing statement... this stuff doesnt happen by accident...

You can lie in under 30 seconds - enough for Fox News - but you can't refute the lie in under 30 seconds.

As long as they're Washington's bastards - as Kissinger once put it - bastards are free to do whatever they want.

What is particularly sad in all of this is that a wonderfully hopeful story was available to the Pentagon to sell to the eager media: one in which besieged Iraqi doctors and nurses bravely cared for — and supplied their own blood to — a similarly brave young American woman in a time of madness and violence. Instead, eager to turn the war into a morality play between good and evil, the military used — if not abused — Lynch to put a heroic spin on an otherwise sorry tale of unjustified invasion.