What this new plan means is that Rove and Bush's other political handlers are about to callously sacrifice both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers in the interest of winning re-election next November. It may be possible, that is, for the U.S. to draw down the number of soldiers in Iraq during the peak months of the presidential campaign, enabling Bush to claim, with the help of a demonstrably compliant and unquestioning media, that he is winning the war in Iraq, but this can only be done by a) exposing remaining troops to much greater risk of attack and b) having the remaining forces adopt even more deadly and indiscriminate tactics against guerrilla attacks--for example wider use of helicopter and fixed-wing gunships to spread death and destruction over wide areas whenever there is an attack, and a return to more aerial bombardment. Look, for example, for carpet bombing of cities in the so-called Sunni Triangle, which will soon become Iraq's "Mekong Delta."

A U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory must replace up to 100,000 locks at a cost of more than $1.6 million, after staff lost several sets of master keys to the complex, then failed to notify superiors, it emerged Friday.

Judicial Nominee Janice Rogers Brown - To the Right of Thomas and Scalia

“IT IS THE central focus of my life,” Soros said, his blue eyes settled on an unseen target. The 2004 presidential race, he said in an interview, is “a matter of life and death.”
“America, under Bush, is a danger to the world,” Soros said. Then he smiled: “And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”
Asked whether he would trade his $7 billion fortune to unseat Bush, Soros opened his mouth. Then he closed it. The proposal hung in the air: Would he become poor to beat Bush?
He said: “If someone guaranteed it.”

“The legacy of Vietnam will be put to rest by the legacy of Iraq,” Clark said during remarks at the New Hampshire Political Library.

A judge has thrown out trafficking charges against a defendant (Fareed Ahamad) who was arrested when he agreed to purchase $20 in crack cocaine for a man in a wheelchair who was actually an undercover Toronto police officer.

"It's unspeakable that someone would stoop to these levels. ... The press has been using Jessica Lynch to serve its own needs."

The final version of the $87 billion spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan is missing provisions the Senate had passed to penalize war profiteers who defraud American taxpayers. House negotiators on the package refused to accept the Senate provisions.


Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche

REPORTS from the United States today claimed President George W Bush has become so frustrated with the Iraqi Governing Council, he may be planning to scrap it.

Whalen reported that Rove has turned against Cheney
because of the Veep's out-front role
in promoting and defending an Iraq war
and postwar occupation that has gotten out of control,
which jeopardizes Rove's long-set campaign strategy
of running Bush for re-election as the liberator of Iraq a
nd the hero of the war on terrorism.

He cited the recent conflict
between the National Security Council and the Pentagon
over control of the Iraq occupation,
exemplified by the Condi Rice memo
seizing control from Rumsfeld,
and the retaliatory Rumsfeld memo
on the failures to date of the war on terrorism, ``threatening between the lines, if he were dismissed, some
observers thought, to take Bush down with him. He could
doubtless do so with a few devastating pre-election revelations
about the origins of 9/11 and the Iraq war.''

Whalen noted that Cheney now suspects that Bush Sr.
is contemplating a push to replace him with Colin Powell
at the Manhattan nominating convention, which would
``end any concern about Bush II's 2004 re-election....
Powell's elevation, at a stroke, would not only signal
a new era of American racial equality and opportunity,
but also would revive urban moderate Republicanism
as a political counterweight and source of powerful cultural dynamism
to compete with the Sunbelt's evangelical fundamentalist `born again' Christians.''

"The president wants to win, and the Pentagon wants to get out," wrote Executive Editor William Kristol and Contributing Editor Robert Kagan in their piece called Exit Strategy or Victory Strategy?

Carlyle, known for the glittering roster of former statesmen among its partners and advisers, has ties to both Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the jailed Russian tycoons.


"Like with a horse, Powell is always able to lead Bush to the water. But just as he is about to put his head down, Cheney up in the saddle says, 'Un-uh,' and yanks up the reins before Bush can drink the water. That's my image of how it goes," Biden said.

The most stunning example was disclosed in a recent 'Washington Post' article that assessed Rice's performance as national security adviser. The authors reported that Bush had ordered Cabinet officials not to give any preferential treatment to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) as U.S. forces moved into Iraq last spring.

Imagine the shock felt by the State Department when, shortly after Bush gave the order, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and 600 of his armed followers into southern Iraq in early April "with the approval of the vice president."

Cheney told Israel's defence minister, albeit privately, that he thought Palestinian President Yasser Arafat "should be hanged."

Similarly, Cheney played a much more important role than Rice, despite Rice's much closer personal relationship with Bush, in the appointment of both cabinet and sub-cabinet national-security officials, beginning with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

Not only did Cheney personally intervene to ensure that Powell's best friend, Richard Armitage, was denied the deputy defence secretary position, but he also played a key role in securing the post for Paul Wolfowitz.

With several of his political allies, including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Middle East director Elliott Abrams, on Rice's larger but more diverse staff, Libby "is able to run circles around Condi," a former NSC official told IPS earlier this year.


Consider, for example, that before the war, the president's policy advisers assured the American people that Iraq would largely be able to finance its own reconstruction through oil revenues, seized assets, and increased economic productivity. The $18 billion in this supplemental earmarked for the reconstruction of Iraq is testament to the fallacy of that prediction. It is the American taxpayer, not the Iraqi oil industry, that is being called upon to shoulder the financial burden of rebuilding Iraq.
The international community, on which the administration pinned such hope for helping in the reconstruction of Iraq, has collectively ponied up only $13 billion, and the bulk of those pledges, $9 billion, is in the form of loans or credits, not grants.

This supplemental spending bill is a case in point. One of the earliest amendments that was defeated on the Senate floor was one that I offered to hold back a portion of the reconstruction money and give the Senate a second vote on whether to release it. Apparently, the president and his supporters did not want to give the Senate an opportunity to review the progress—or lack of progress—in Iraq and have a second chance to debate the wisdom of spending billions of taxpayers' dollars on the reconstruction effort.

Time after time, the conference committee was given opportunities to restore or impose accountability on the administration for the money being appropriated in the Iraq supplemental. And time after time, the conference majority beat back those measures. The conferees, for example, defeated, on a party line vote, an amendment I offered which would have required that the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq be confirmed by the Senate. Senate confirmation would have ensured that the person who is managing tens of billions of dollars in Iraq for the American taxpayers would be accountable to the public. The current appointee, L. Paul Bremer III, is not. He answers to the Secretary of Defense and the president, not to Congress or the American people.

The conferees approved a provision creating an inspector general for the Coalition Provisional Authority, but I am dismayed that this individual is not subject to Senate confirmation. I am dismayed that the conferees defeated my amendment that would have required the inspector general to testify before Congress when invited. And I am dismayed that the president can refuse to send Congress the results of the inspector general's work. Could it be that the president's supporters in Congress are afraid to hear what the inspector general might tell them? Could it be that the president's supporters in Congress would rather blindly follow the president instead of risking reality by opening their eyes to what could be uncomfortable facts?

The conference also stripped out my amendment to the Senate bill that would have required the General Accounting Office to conduct ongoing audits of the expenditure of taxpayer dollars for the reconstruction of Iraq. On the Senate floor, my amendment requiring such audits was adopted 97 to 0. In the House-Senate conference, it was defeated by the Senate conferees on a 15 to 14 straight-line party vote.

Sprinkled throughout the Iraq supplemental conference report, provisions euphemistically described as "flexibilities" give the president broad authority to take the money appropriated by Congress in this bill and spend it however he wishes. I tried to eliminate or limit these flexibilities—and in a few cases succeeded—but there remain billions of dollars in this measure that can be spent at the discretion of the president or the Secretary of Defense. Although the money is appropriated by Congress, these so-called "flexibilities" effectively transfer the power of the purse from the Legislative Branch to the Executive Branch.

Moreover, we should not forget that not all victories are created equal. In 280 BC, Pyrrhus, the ruler of Epirus in Northern Greece, took his formidable armies to Italy and defeated the Romans at Heraclea, and again at Asculum in 279 BC, but suffered unbearably heavy losses. "One more such victory and I am lost," he said.

After wrangling for months to get a clearly reluctant Turkish parliament to authorise the contribution of as many as 10,000 troops to U.S.-led occupation forces in Iraq, the administration hinted this week it may soon cancel the idea in the face of unanimous opposition from its hand-picked Governing Council in Baghdad.