encourage Iraqi soldiers to pursue terrorists that escape to Syria

WAR STUFF
* ""The mantra for Fox News is that we only hear the bad news," Feingold, a Democrat, said of the media outlet thought by many observers to be right wing.
"I was over there (in February), and we don't hear enough bad news," " LINK

* " The United States stopped sharing intelligence with the IAEA six months ago when it began efforts to replace ElBaradei." LINK
brilliant.

* "Specifically, the administration wants ElBaradei to be more publicly skeptical on Iran." LINK
think about that. thats the one thing they want from him. they want to be able to sell a war to the public. sad. sad.

* "President Bush's top foreign policy advisers met last week to discuss the government of Bashar al-Assad, mulling, according to two administration officials briefed later, a tougher policy that would allow American forces or encourage Iraqi soldiers to pursue terrorists that escape to Syria from Iraq for safe haven." LINK
go read. syria is so toast.

* "Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), whose flair for drama has included lugging around a replica of a suitcase-size nuclear bomb, alleges in a new book that Iran is hiding Osama bin Laden, is preparing terrorist attacks against the United States, has a crash program to build an atomic bomb and, as a Shiite country, is the chief sponsor of what is a largely Sunni-directed insurgency in Iraq." LINK

* "The WINPAC, responsible for what became the NIE’s outlandish claims on Iraqi nuclear weapons and aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, knew that a Cheney associate, John Bolton, stood ready to demand blood on the floor if the intelligence did not come out the way he wanted it. Bolton’s actual portfolio specifically covered proliferation and arms control. Bolton had actually gotten a U.N. official fired in an Iraq matter.
It is no longer possible to argue that the Iraqi intelligence estimates of 2002 were not affected by politicization. And John Bolton helped create the chilling climate in which that Iraq NIE had to be written. This was no mere intelligence failure. Sir Richard Dearlove had that exactly right, at the time. The intelligence was fixed and Bolton was a prime fixer." LINK

* juancole in salon: "It has gotten so that on the subject of Iraq, the way you can tell when Bush is lying is that his mouth is moving... It is always dangerous to democratic values for there to be such a large gap between what the president maintains and what the people know to be the case."

* heres powell on jons. they mention thememo. shorter powell: the intelligence was bad. shorter jons: you cant be serious. im trying to like you and give you a chance. LINK

* "Last year, 3,325 Army officers' marriages ended in divorce — up 78% from 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, and more than 3 1/2 times the number in 2000, before the Afghan operation, Army figures show." LINK

* ""The mix is changing," said Sen. Joseph Biden, citing conversations last week in Iraq with Marine and Army generals. "Now, the mix is increasingly more Islamist crossing the border ... and a lot of them are Saudis. It presents a different profile" that is harder for U.S. forces to confront." LINK
i wish biden would just shutup most of the time.

* my favourite AP sentence of the day: "Asked about estimates that Saudis make up 40 percent of suicide bombers recruited to Iraq by the Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Saudi Arabia differs from other nations that may export fighters to Iraq because it is also fighting al-Qaida insurgents on its own territory." LINK