According to the numbers, almost two thirds of the soldiers killed in Iraq since May 1 died in "non-combat related" mishaps like accidental weapons discharges, accidental detonations of unexploded ordnance, and questionable car crashes.

It reeks of desperation. This administration is learning a lesson that came to Presidents Nixon and Johnson with bitter tears: Scapegoat the CIA at your mortal peril.

If nothing is done about this, American justice is a sad, sorry, feeble joke.

Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That’s me.

CIA Director George Tenet has accepted blame for the false statement — but it’s obvious he’s simply serving as a “fall guy.”

"Patriotism often causes many Americans to believe anything their president says about a foreign danger, regardless of the facts. But we hope this naivete dissipates amid growing investigations of White House misinformation. A war that killed thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans is a profoundly serious matter — much too serious to have been based on untrue claims."
mr ed: will no-one ever learn? - patriotism is national pride - pride is one of the seven deadly sins.

London Daily Telegraph boss under fire over payments: The company's independent directors include Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, and Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board.

20 Lies About the War

Rice claimed, "We did not know at the time — no one knew at the time, in our circles — maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."

India said it would not send a promised division that would have added 17,000 troops to the forces on the ground

What human beings have proven incapable of doing ever before, George W. Bush has taken on as his personal mission, aiming to accomplish it in one election cycle, two at most.
There is no ridding the world of evil for the simple fact that, shy of history's end, there is no ridding the self of it.

Tony Blair's first Iraq weapons dossier used material culled from the internet to buttress the Government's case for war - exactly as the now-discredited second, so-called dodgy dossier did.

In his foreword to the first dossier - Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction - Mr Blair wrote: "This document is based, in large part, on the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) ... Its work, like the material it analyses, is largely secret. It is unprecedented for the Government to publish this kind of document."

In short, those who politicized intelligence in order to lead us into war, at the expense of national security, hope to cover their tracks by corrupting the system even further.

Things have reached a pretty pass indeed when you apologize for making a mistake, but nobody believes your apology. So it is today with CIA Director Tenet, and by proxy George W. Bush and his administration.

The moral of the story appears to be that rotten war evidence is not fit for international consumption, but is perfectly suitable for delivery to the American people.

"You've got three intelligence organizations in Australia, the intelligence organizations in the US, and every one is saying they knew this was bad information, but not one political leader reckons they were told. All three organizations have said they didn't give this information to their political leaders. It is unbelievable to the point of fantasy."

"Tenet's confession is designed to take the heat off," says McGovern, "to assign some responsibility somewhere. It's not going to work. There's too much deception here. "

If you're into conspiracy theories, "l"affaire George" provides rich fodder. Does it seem a remarkable coincidence that of the hundreds of journalists who descended on Baghdad in April, it was a British reporter for a paper supportive of the war and critical of Galloway who found the incriminating documents?

A South Australian police task force into child sex abuse within the Anglican Church had identified 217 victims and 48 possible offenders, police said today.

According to the FT, a Bush official said the study was merely a thought exercise.

Meanwhile, even as it relies on 75-year projections for Social Security, the same document replaces traditional 10-year budget projections with five-year ones, claiming the longer-term numbers were unreliable.

And before Lindsey was made to take a dive, he predicted that the war in Iraq could cost upwards of $200 billion, a figure that infuriated the White House, which was selling the anti-Saddam campaign as a comparatively cheap victory.

Earlier this year, a study predicting mediocre job growth from Bush's proposed $674 billion economic stimulus plan disappeared from the Council of Economic Advisers' Web site. The study forecast an average increase of only 170,000 jobs—0.1 percent of the workforce—every year through 2007. The study was pulled just after a major Jan. 7 Bush budget speech to the Economic Club of Chicago. "In the out years, by their own estimate, their plan is a job and growth killer," says Jared Bernstein, economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "Instead of doing what serious analysts would do and going to the drawing board to re-evaluate, they just took the offending document off the Web site."

However, you might have missed the resurrection of an updated version of the Operation Northwoods - the plan that America’s top military brass presented to President John Kennedy in 1963, calling for a phony terrorist campaign — complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes, and dead Americans -- to provide “justification” for an invasion of Cuba, the mafia/corporate fiefdom that had recently been lost to Castro.

I've never seen a president - I don't care who he is - stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles your mind. They always get what they want....If the American people understood what grip those people have on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don't have any idea what goes on. - Admiral Thomas Moorer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men. - Woodrow Wilson [U.S. President during World War I]

Today, the 13 million Jews around the world are the most prosperous and powerful ethnic group in the world. The existence, the military power, wealth, and brutal behavior of Israel toward its neighbors despite world condemnation is testament to that prosperity.