One of its tactics, which Ritter cites, is its leaking of false information to weapons inspectors, and then, when the search is fruitless, using that as "proof" of the weapons' existence. He quotes a case in 1993 when "Rockingham was the source of some very controversial information which led to inspections of a suspected ballistic missile site. We ... found nothing. However, our act of searching allowed the US and UK to say that the missiles existed."
A parallel exercise was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US, named the Office of Special Plans.
If the tabloid headlines the day after the September dossier was published had read: "Blair says only 30% chance Iraq has WMDs" rather than "Brits 45 mins from doom" (the Sun), would the Commons vote still have backed the war? Rarely can the selective use of information have had such drastic consequences.

Montgomery and Strobel report that, to correspond with this reorganization, "the United States has diverted more than half the manpower and technology that had been targeted on al-Qaida to the war in Iraq."

"There can be no peace without law. And there can be no law if we were to invoke one code of conduct for those who oppose us and another for our friends" --President Dwight Eisenhower


But, as Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, says, the Feith-Carney memo omits the rest of the story: that bin Laden actually rejected the Hijazi overture, concluding he did not want to be “exploited” by a regime that he has consistently viewed as “secular” and fundamentally antithetical to his vision of a strict Islamic state.
But, less well publicized, bin Laden emphasized in the same tape his interest was in defending the Iraqi people, not an “infidel” like Saddam.
But all this is a far cry from solid evidence of ongoing cooperation between Saddam and Osama. The outing of the memo (a still classified document, as it happens) is likely now to become the subject of yet another Justice Department leak investigation. The CIA is expected to begin preparing a “crimes report” identifying the potential damage to national security (most likely pretty minimal). But there can be little doubt about the motive of the leaker: to shore up the Bush administration’s prewar claims and defuse the intelligence committee investigation into allegations of the misuse of intelligence.
mred - heres an msnbc/newsweek article nov19 that sheds doubt about the weeklystds osama/saddam link. i cant believe the nytimes let safire write that disgusting piece, and he actually linked to the std's story, and to a slate story (ive never seen the nytimes linnk to a site in a story b4). safire didnt mention, for example, this msnbc story from days earlier. corrupt.


Bush knows we have lost our public consciousness, or: He knows we have lost the emotional ability to respond to events around us, or: He realizes that we remain in a state of stupor; a kind of mental numbness resulting from a shock.

"Case Closed" first appeared on The Weekly Standard's home page at around 7:50 pm on Friday, November 14th.
The fabrication was now ready for step #2. Fox News Sunday on November 16th became the conduit designated to put running legs on this story. Fox News Sunday is the broadcast version of Fox's The O'Reilly Factor and the Hannity & Colmes Show.
The conclusion reached in the press release, a lack of interest by other media outlets, an inability to get an "on the record" opinion, and the characterization that DoD found the affair deplorable, would lead most Washington reporters to shrug and move on to the next story. Reporters would not be suspicious about the fact that the DoD statement was released @6:40am on Saturday.

Richard Perle told me in April of last year, for instance, that Saddam had already been “enriching the natural uranium that’s found in Iraq for some time.”

Why is the press avoiding the Weekly Standard's intelligence scoop?
What's keeping the pack from tearing Hayes' story to shreds, from building on it or at least exploiting the secret document from which Hayes quotes?
Help me! Many a reporter has hitched a ride onto Page One with the leak of intelligence much rawer than the stuff in Feith's memo.
Likewise, you'd be wise to bet your wife's farm that had a similar memo arguing no Saddam-Osama connection been leaked to the press, it would have generated 100 times the news interest as the Hayes story.
mred - huh??? nice cover!

BILLIONAIRE FINANCIER George Soros may be the new central banker of the Democratic Party. He's given $10 million to America Coming Together, a Democratic voter mobilization group aimed at defeating President Bush. He pledged another $2.5 million to the liberal group Moveon.org for a television advertising campaign highlighting "Bush policy failures," and as much as $3 million to a new Democratic think tank, the Center for American Progress.
mr ed - the attack plan on soros will probably never mention the fact that soros said he'd give his entire wealth if he could be guaranteed that it would stop the bush administration

pincus: A leaked top-secret memo that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith sent the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last month listing and analyzing raw intelligence reports on alleged connections between Iraq and al Qaeda has reopened a long-simmering behind-the-scenes battle between Pentagon and CIA officials.

A draft report by government scientists at the National Research Council disputes the validity of an FBI method of matching bullets, potentially calling into question hundreds of criminal convictions that relied on such evidence, sources familiar with the findings said.

When Ann Coulter expresses regret that Timothy McVeigh didn't blow up The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal laughs it off as "tongue-in-cheek agitprop." But when Al Franken writes about lies and lying liars in a funny, but carefully researched book, he's degrading the discourse.

For example, here's President Bush on critics of his economic policies: "Some say, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper. It bothers me when people say that." Because he used the word "some," he didn't literally lie — no doubt a careful search will find someone, somewhere, who says the recession should have been deeper. But he clearly intended to suggest that those who disagree with his policies don't care about helping the economy.


The campaign against "political hate speech" originates with the Republican National Committee. But last week the committee unveiled its first ad for the 2004 campaign, and it's as hateful as they come. "Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists," it declares.

Again, there's that weasel word "some." No doubt someone doesn't believe that we should attack terrorists. But the serious criticism of the president, as the committee knows very well, is the reverse: that after an initial victory in Afghanistan he shifted his attention — and crucial resources — from fighting terrorism to other projects.

What the critics say is that this loss of focus seriously damaged the campaign against terrorism. Strategic assets in limited supply, like Special Forces soldiers and Predator drone aircraft, were shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, while intelligence resources, including translators, were shifted from the pursuit of Al Qaeda to the coming invasion. This probably allowed Qaeda members, including Osama bin Laden, to get away, and definitely helped the Taliban stage its ominous comeback. And the Iraq war has, by all accounts, done wonders for Qaeda recruiting. Is saying all this attacking the president for attacking the terrorists?

The ad was clearly intended to insinuate once again — without saying anything falsifiable — that there was a link between Iraq and 9/11. (Now that the Iraq venture has turned sour, this claim is suddenly making the rounds again, even though no significant new evidence has surfaced.)


It was a curious way to be given the boot. At 11pm a secretary from al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite news station, popped round to Yvonne Ridley's home in Doha, Qatar, and informed her that she was "terminated". Ridley, who had worked as a senior editor on the station's English-language website since July, was warned not to go back to the office and that security guards had been told to keep her out.
Sources close to the journalist fear that al-Jazeera may have come under pressure from the White House to get rid of her.
"The reality is that journalists all over the world are taking risks daily, but they accomplish them on the whole without something backfiring. If you look at Robert Fisk, I know he is one of the few journalists like me who has gone into Afghanistan and out of Kabul to get the stories of what is happening. I know that he has had to sneak around to be able to achieve what he has achieved. I was unlucky and I'm paying for it."

A coroner came close to acknowledging the existence of Gulf War syndrome yesterday when he ruled that service in the 1991 conflict played a part in the death of an Army officer.

Boeing's chief financial officer was fired yesterday over a mounting industrial espionage scandal involving the US aerospace and defence giant and its European rival Airbus Industrie.


One can see how easy it would be to gain total control of a nation of drugged apathetic citizens. People seem to be losing the ability to care, reason and to evaluate the events taking place in our world.

"I'm not running to bash George Bush. A lot of Americans really love him. They love what he represents, a man who's overcome adversity in his life from alcoholism and pulled his marriage back together and moved forward."
-- Gen. Wesley Clark
mred - lovely execution

A 22-year-old female soldier who died last spring after getting multiple vaccines, including the one against smallpox, succumbed to an immune system disease apparently triggered by the immunizations.

Shortly before the disastrous Bush visit to Britain, Tony Blair was at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. It was an unusual glimpse of a state killer whose effete respectability has gone. His perfunctory nod to "the glorious dead" came from a face bleak with guilt.


An unprecedented gathering of senior American intelligence officers, diplomats and former Pentagon officials met in Washington the other day to say, in the words of Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and friend of Bush's father: "Now we know that no other president of the United States has ever lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... The presumption now has to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything."

In other words, the Foreign Secretary fabricated a provision of the UN Charter which does not exist, then broadcast it as fact. When Straw does speak the truth, it causes panic.

"Our troops are warriors and liberators." US President George W. Bush, 11 November 2003
Warriors and liberators are not one. Forcing and freeing are different acts.

'Hocus-pocus' is a deliberate corruption of "Hic est corpus meum" ("This is my body")-the words of Christian consecration making bread into the body of Christ. For the faithful the words are sacred and transformative, for the faithless they are 'hocus-pocus,' a deception.

"My impression," Rummy mused on the war on terrorism in an October 16 memo, "is that we have not yet made truly bold moves."
Were bombing, invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq not acts of boldness? Would boldness mean reinstating the draft and then invading and occupying North Africa, Syria, Iran and Indonesia?

Here are quoted numbers of Iraqi forces, by dates.
October 9 : 60,000 (Bremer) ;
October 21 : roughly 85,000 (Rumsfeld) ;
October 30 : over 80,000 (Rice) ;
same date : 80 to 90 thousand (Wolfowitz) ;
same date : close to 100,000 (Rumsfeld) ;
November 1 : nearly 85,000 (Occupation Authority); November 2 : more than 100,000 (Rumsfeld) ;
November 11 : 131,000 (Myers).

In one month the official number of Iraqi police and para-militaries seems to have more than doubled. (The army has 1400 under training. That is one fact that can't be disguised or manipulated.) But somebody is telling lies. In fact it seems lots of people are telling lies.

I asked the artist who designed the vivid blood-splattered posters, David Gentleman, how he thought the mood had changed since February's demo. There was an optimism then, he said, that the war could be stopped.
That is the reason for the harsher mood among this week's protesters. We have seen the shop window smashed and now the thieves are stealing the jewellery.
Beneath Big Ben the chant and response was: "That's not what democracy looks like - this is what democracy looks like."
Viewers tend to side with the interviewer. He or she stands in for us. So we accept the assumptions that lie behind the questions.

A New York Times story on November 13 by Christopher Marquis is quite disheartening for those of us who still want to believe we live in a democracy rather than an oligarchy. The unconstitutional Cuba travel restrictions were first enacted into law in 2000 by Senator Trent Lott (Senate majority leader) and Congressmen Tom Delay (then majority whip) and Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R., Miami). In a stacked "conference committee" on the approved bills allowing sales of medicine and nutritional food to Cuba, they added a provision codifying the travel restrictions, which had nothing to do with the medicine-food bills and had not been debated or voted on.
Meanwhile the Bush Administration's yearly requests for enforcement money for the restrictions have been turned down each year by 55-60% majorities in both chambers.

But the pandering is not to Cuban-American voters (9% of Florida's registered voters). Recent polls over the past two years (which Mr. Bush is surely aware of) show 70% of Florida's Cuban-Americans want the restrictions repealed. Rather Mr. Bush is pandering to wealthy, reactionary Cuba "hard-liners" who fund his national campaigns, most of whom are not Cuban-Americans or from Florida, although some are.

Once again a very few powerful men have overruled the clearly expressed will of our Congress. Why do our so-called representatives allow this to happen? How can we accuse Cuba of being undemocratic? Are we a democracy or an oligarchy? Only if we face reality can we change it.

"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," said Chicago Mayor William "Big Bill" Thompson the day after members of Al Capone's gang murdered seven people in a slaughter already being dubbed the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," said Japanese Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso, the day after 100,000 civilians were killed in a single night during the firebombing of Tokyo by American forces.
"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," said U.S. General George Custer, in a battlefield interview during a brief lull in what he termed "a light skirmish" with Indian forces at Little Big Horn.
"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," said Napoleon Bonaparte, the day after a dawn raid by Russian partisans killed 50 French soldiers in a rearguard action outside Smolensk.
"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," said Prescott Bush, director of Union Banking Corporation, the day after a raid by British bombers damaged operations of UBC's Silesian American Corporation near Oswiecim, Poland.

Previous banal and self-serving “warnings” from Ashcroft and Ridge that never materialized have created an illusion of government incompetence and quite frankly, a real warning based on hard evidence will simply go unnoticed.

There are persistent rumors, by the way, that some kind of a BW attack will be launched against Israel.


"We must start thinking differently," says Air Force Gen. Ralph E. "Ed" Eberhart, the newly installed commander of Northern Command, the military's homeland security arm. Before 9/11, he says, the military and intelligence systems were focused on "the away game" and not properly focused on "the home game." "Home," of course, is the United States.
Eberhart's Colorado-based command is charged with enhancing homeland security in two ways: by improving the military's capability to defend the country's borders, coasts and airspace — unquestionably within the military's long-established mission — and by providing "military assistance to civil authorities" when authorized by the secretary of Defense or the president.
The U.S. military operates under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the direct use of federal troops "to execute the laws" of the United States.
Of course, what he knows is that amendments approved by Congress in 1996 for that earlier civilian war, the war on drugs, have already expanded the military's domestic powers so that Washington can act unilaterally in dispatching the military without waiting for a state's request for help. Long before 9/11, Congress authorized the military to assist local law enforcement officials in domestic "drug interdiction" and during terrorist incidents involving weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the president, after proclaiming a state of emergency, can authorize additional actions.
Given the absence of terrorist attacks inside the United States since 9/11, it may seem surprising that Northern Command is already working under the far-reaching authority that goes with "extraordinary operations." But it is.

Slipping on the mantle of Britishness, Murdoch pronounced that "I don't like the idea of any more abdication of our sovereignty in economic affairs or anything else."
To be lectured on sovereignty by someone who junked his own citizenship for commercial advantage is an irony to which Mr Murdoch is evidently blind."
Page's detailed and compelling case, based on his investigation of Murdoch's operations in Australia, Britain, the USA and the Chinese People's Republic, amounts to this: as an international operator, Murdoch offers his target governments a privatized version of a state propaganda service, manipulated without scruple and with no regard for truth. His price takes the form of vast government favors such as tax breaks, regulatory relief, monopoly markets and so forth. The propaganda is undertaken with the utmost cynicism, whether it's the stentorian fake populism and soft porn in the UK's Sun and News of the World, or shameless bootlicking of the butchers of Tiananmen Square.

William Safire needs mental help.
He writes for the newspaper of record. His words are deemed "fit to print." But either he has no fuckin' clue what's really going on or he's 100% aware...and thinks all is swell.
The former Nixon speechwriter turned corporate media mouthpiece further demonstrated his possible mental instability by using the words "clearly articulated" and "detailed, coherent, and inspiring" in relation to something George W. Bush said out loud.
(Note: Safire didn't type those words by mistake. Check the Times corrections box for November 11 and you'll see no mention of his column being riddled with errors.)

Nor has the current leadership explained when, or why, they abandoned their 1991 view that "the best of all worlds" would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein"

The governments of Old and New Europe were distinguished by a simple criterion: a government joined Old Europe in its iniquity if and only if it took the same position as the vast majority of its population and refused to follow orders from Washington.

The wall between objective journalism and partisan politicking at Fox News fell last week when it became clear that Fox News staff contributed to the orchestration of the Republican-led 39-hour Senate talk-a-thon intended to counter the Democrat filibuster against four of President Bush's most radically conservative judicial nominees.

The idea for the food-and-cot political spectacle, also known as "Justice for Judges Marathon," had its origins on the editorial pages of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. Also owned by Murdoch, Fox News took the idea a step further. Fox News anchors Brit Hume and Tony Snow pitched the idea outright to Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist on the October 26th broadcast of Fox News Sunday.


A former ambassador who has been posted in the Middle East and Africa under Republican and Democratic administrations, Joseph Wilson has until recently been known as the last U.S. official to meet with Saddam Hussein. At the time he was deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Iraq and was one of the first to note that the Iraqi dictator used to try to stare foreigners down and would drop his hand during the handshake so the visitor was forced to look down and thus appear obsequious.
There's a tendency to wonder if all the characters in this saga aren't just a little batty as well as being vindictive. Isn't this the proverbial tempest in a teapot?