In the rising controversy over how the Bush administration built its case for war in Iraq, one curious fact stands out. Some who gave President Bush unwelcome information that turned out to be accurate are gone. Those who did the opposite are still around.
Former economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki voiced concerns about the expense, aftermath and forces that would be needed -- concerns now proving to be true.
Some political observers have expressed surprise that Tenet and Hadley appear to be surviving the flap, which has embarrassed the president, distracted his senior advisers and provided a big opening to Democrats.
But both have so far passed the loyalty test, deemed very important to Bush, White House aides said.

Mercifully, the Americans spared us the corpse of Qusay's 14-year-old son Mustafa who was also gunned down by the Americans, a fact which is, needless to say, not making any headlines in the United States

Taking a clear stand against anti-privacy provisions in the Patriot Act, the U.S. House of Representatives in an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort last night agreed to an amendment that would bar federal law enforcement from carrying out secret "sneak and peek" searches without notifying the target of the warrant.

Col. David Hogg, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. , he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in."

It's been only thirty years ago that the Church Committee showed us a dark side of our country, CIA ties to the Mafia, umbilical connections with Nazis, experimentation with LSD to the unsuspecting. Do we remember the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution when almost the entire congress swallowed Johnson's lie about a fabricated North Vietnamese attack? Remember the Maine. Can anyone call it unpatriotic to bury facts and consequent suspicions?

The European Central Bank is eliminating its holdings of debt issued by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two biggest U.S. providers of mortgage financing, and recommended that its national central banks do the same, according to a person who has seen the ECB's recommendation.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee about 42 percent of the $7 trillion U.S. mortgage market. Fannie Mae's mortgage portfolio is worth about $816 billion, while Freddie Mac controls about $573 billion of mortgages.

Bush's Dad was the head of the CIA - still has CIA ties and pals. So, the dirt that these guys could have on ANYONE would curl your toes. What could they have on Tony Blair potent enough to make him behave like a minion to "Little Hitler"?

You think it was pure coinkidink that, on Thursday, when that blacked-out 9/11 commission report was released that (1) so were photos of the very dead Brothers Badenov; (2) the government staged a very videogenic Al Qaeda attack drill, or; (3) that Vice-President Dick Cheney finally slithered out of his nest to speechify about how no president has fought terrorism like Bush has?

Iraqis have spent their lives fighting foreigners. Wasn't Uday doing the same? And history, which has an unhappy way of reorganising the most staged of events, might just conspire to turn these photographs into those of martyrs.

It is not the war itself that is proving to be the domestic crisis, but the disinformation that brought us to it. And that is the right result.

Bush has the means, motive, opportunity and essential stupidity to make the Dark Ages look like the good old days.

The vague warning came from information gleaned from interviews of at least one al-Qaida prisoner as well as intercepted communications, said one intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"The Internet is very viral and news spreads quickly," he said. "People just aren't skeptical enough."

What must worry the Bush administration, however, is a third possibility: that the American people gave Mr. Bush their trust because in the aftermath of Sept. 11, they desperately wanted to believe the best about their president. If that's all it was, Mr. Bush will eventually face a terrible reckoning.