Let others fight over whether the war in Iraq was a neocon vigilante action disrupting diplomacy. The neocons have moved on to a vigilante action to occupy diplomacy. / In The Post, nearly all of the names of those who could move up if Mr. Powell moves out are Iraq hawks: Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Newt Gingrich were mentioned as candidates for secretary of state; Wolfie, Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby and Condi deputy Steve Hadley, who may be radioactive after the uranium mistake, were mentioned for national security chief."

the president himself went on a monthlong vacation.

"The reputation of the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, took another battering yesterday when a Milan court described the conviction of one of his close associates as climax of the largest corruption case in postwar Italy."
mr ed: johnny howards mates are berlusconi, bush and blair... sweet!


Working in Iraq has helped turn around Halliburton's financial performance, its second-quarter results showed. The company made a profit of $26 million, in contrast to a loss of $498 million in the period a year earlier.

Former CIA director James Woolsey, a Pentagon adviser and close ally of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, gave the most explicit glimpse into the thinking of U.S. military planners this week when he revealed the details of a possible plan of attack against North Korea.

two high officials of al Qaeda now in U.S. custody have told interrogators - told them before the war, in fact - that the organization didn't work with Saddam Hussein.

The percentage of editorials in Tomasky's liberal sample that criticized Bush (67 percent) was 22 points less than the percentage of editorials in Tomasky's conservative sample that criticized Clinton (89 percent). Particularly dramatic are what Chatterbox will label the Praise Gap and the Self-Criticism Gap. The Praise Gap reflects the liberal papers' general reluctance to praise anyone, ideological friend or foe. Thus the liberal sample praised Clinton a mere 30 percent of the time while the conservative sample praised Bush 77 percent of the time. / The Wall Street Journal has a particularly strong aversion to self-criticism. Of the 40 Bush editorials Tomasky surveyed, only one criticized Bush.

They told The Guardian that more than 600 women and girls had reported being raped by soldiers in Monrovia since the beginning of July.

when you execute a terrorist, you lose a possible source of information. A period of utter obscurity in jail has led several Jemaah Islamiah and al-Qa'ida terrorists to co-operate with new information. Al-Qa'ida inmates at the US facility in Guantanamo Bay have given up vital, new information long after their capture.

voting systems are vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation, journalists Lynn Landes, Jerry Bowles and Bev Harris are alerting Americans to an electronic coup d'etat in the making. If their charges are true, and there is little evidence to contradict their claims, George W. Bush has already won the 2004 election. / no electronic voting system has been certified to even the lowest level of the U.S. government or international computer security standards such as the ISO Common Criteria, nor are they required to comply with such standards. Thus, no current electronic voting system is secure by the U.S. government's own standards. / A former news reporter in Florida discovered that votes were being tabulated in 644 Palm Beach precincts: but Palm Beach only has 643 precincts. An earlier court case in Florida found the same discrepancy. A reporter in New Jersey observed 104 precincts with votes in an area that has only 102 precincts. / In Comal County Texas, an uncanny coincidence resulted in three Republican candidates winning by exactly 18,181 votes each. Two other Republican candidates outside Texas also won by exactly 18,181 votes.

"It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting."

The Department of Homeland Security has suspended its No. 2 computer official with pay while investigators look into whether she obtained her academic credentials -- including a doctorate in computer information systems -- from a mail-order university.

Hawash's neighbors became suspicious after the September 11 terrorist attacks and called the FBI, according to the affidavit. One of the neighbors said Hawash was "spending more time at home following September 11, 2001" and "was not as friendly as usual."

Kwiatkowski's broadside coincides with the appearance in neo-conservative media outlets, notably the 'Wall Street Journal', of defences of Feith, who is widely seen here as the Pentagon's most likely fall guy if it is forced to shoulder blame for bad intelligence and planning. The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair has pressed Bush to fire Feith for several months, according to diplomatic sources.
In a lengthy defence published Tuesday, the associate editor of the Journal's editorial page described Feith's policy workshop as ”the world's most effective think tank".

the two-page executive order seemed to shield oil companies from liability -- even if it could be proved that they had committed human rights violations, bribed officials or caused great environmental damage in the course of their Iraqi-related business.