"Further, how did it survive so many drafts of the State of the Union speech in January, only to be thrown out, days later, by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who found the evidence so thin that he dared not take it to the United Nations for his own presentation?"
mr ed -it wasnt even good enough to make it into *that* speech!

William Perry, who served as defense secretary under former President Bill Clinton (news - web sites), believes the United States and North Korea (news - web sites) could be at war as early as this year.
"My theory is the reason we don't have a policy on this, and we aren't negotiating, is the president himself," Perry said. "I think he has come to the conclusion that (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Il is evil and loathsome and it is immoral to negotiate with him."

mr ed: triffic!


"The costs stemmed from the Whitewater investigation, which lasted more than seven years and cost the government $70 million.
The couple's lawyer, David Kendall, issued a statement saying former President Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) was reimbursed for 72 percent of his legal costs stemming from the Iran-Contra investigation, and his vice president, George H.W. Bush, was reimbursed for 59 percent of his costs in the same matter.

The decision to attribute it to British intelligence was clearly a desperate effort to get around the objections that had been raised by the C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies. By clinging to that weak justification, the White House is only compounding its mistake.

As Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence official, said last week, U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a "meaningful connection" to Al Qaeda. Yet administration officials continually asserted such a connection, even as they suppressed evidence showing real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia.
Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, seems more concerned about protecting his party's leader than protecting the country. "What concerns me most," he says, is "what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the C.I.A. in an effort to discredit the president."

North Korea has told the United States that it has finished reprocessing used nuclear fuel into bomb-grade plutonium and U.S. officials are seeking to verify the claim, the White House said on Tuesday.

"Bush defends his intelligence"

Studabaker, a former Bible scholar who served in Afghanistan, has been charged with sexual misconduct involving his niece, then also aged 12.

So the problem is not those 16 words, by themselves, but the larger pattern of abuse of intelligence. The silver lining is that the spooks are so upset that they're speaking out.