Bush's Top 40

Steve Perry has finally published his article, "The Bush administration's Top 40 Lies about war and terrorism." See also his piece from last week, "The Emperor Has No Flight Suit."

Global Warming

While the Bush administration continues to drag its feet on global warming by pledging to continue studying the phenomenon, the former co-chairman of climate science for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has labelled it a "weapon of mass destruction."

In a related and ironic development, British researchers have found that Africa suffers the worst effects of global warming. Since the continent "is not as industrialised as most other continents it does not produce the pollutants, such as aerosol particles, that can help to shield against the sun," reports the Independent.

Betting on Terror

A futures market for terrorist attacks? Dear lord, they really have gone insane.

Thankfully, though, the program's since been scrapped.

What that likely means is that it's been put in traction until the public and the press forget about it. Or until DARPA's IAO decides to change the name, and tinker with objectives, like they did with TIA.

Update: Noah Shachtman of Defensetech has written an interesting piece in defense of the Pentagon's Policy Analysis Market.

Evils of Occupation

It sure makes my heart swell with pride to know the US Army is taking hostages in Iraq. Nevermind how prisoners are being treated.

Back to the Future in Afghanistan

There's a lot of interesting stuff brewing between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States, according to the Asia Times' Ramtanu Maitra.

For one, Maitra writes, "the Taliban and al-Qaeda are being nurtured, not in some inaccessible terrain along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border but in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Balochistan province where the Pakistan Army and the ISI have a major presence." Such developments remind Afghan President Hamid Karzai "of the pre-September 11 days when Pakistan was fully backing the Taliban and exercising ever-more-strident control over Afghanistan."

Even more curious, however, is the American silence over this. Rather than support, Karzai has been offered empty platitudes by American representatives, causing him to express concern that Afghanistan is on the verge of being "sub-contracted" to Pakistan.

Maitra does not view this fear as being misplaced, either. He concludes that the ambitious plans for Afghanistan have likely been scuttled, and Washington has "deemed it time to give up the 'Marshall Plan for Afghanistan' and settle for next best - Taliban rule in Afghanistan under Pakistani control, once again."

Collateral Damage in the Hunt for Saddam

As the US media is preoccupied with the "hunt for Saddam," the bodies of civilians killed in raids on suspected hideouts pile up. Unfortunately, you have to turn to the foreign papers, like the British Guardian and Independent, to read about this in any sort of detail.

HRW charges US backed warlords are creating a climate of fear in Afghanistan

A new report by Human Rights Watch charges that "the US-led coalition's support for warlords in Afghanistan is destabilising the country and could threaten next year's elections," according to the BBC.

"The United States and the United Kingdom in particular need to decide whether they are with President Karzai and other reformers in Kabul or with the warlords," says Brad Adams, the executive director of HRW's Asia Division.

Pipes for Peace?

In a controversial move, the Bush administration nominated Daniel Pipes to serve on the board of the US Institute of Peace back in April. The Senate was supposed to begin hearings on whether to accept Pipes' nomination last week, but they have since been delayed.

Incidentally, Pipes provided plenty of ammunition for his critics in a speech he delivered to the Young America's Foundation over the weekend. This is how the speech was reported by the Media Research Center's Cybercast News Service:

After September 11, 2001, when President Bush declared a war on terrorism, Pipes noted he should have called for war on "militaristic Islam."

"Terror is a tactic; it's what they use to fight us," Pipes said. "Our enemy is not terrorism but those who stand behind it." The true enemy is what Pipes called a "body of ideas" that "militaristic Islam" supports.

In fact, it would be difficult to get the Middle East to accept Western ways, Pipes said. They have a different outlook and are reluctant to "go the Christian way," he said.

Pipes added that he doesn't perceive the Islamic people as divided into two groups: the radical terrorists and those who are not. He said "there is no history behind such an outlook and nothing that would support such optimism."

"It would be like saying there were good and bad Nazis," Pipes noted.

Note, especially, the last two paragraphs. This is a perfect example of why the Senate should say no to Pipes.

Update: CNS has since retracted the description of the comments excerpted above:

The article erroneously stated that Pipes doesn't perceive the Islamic people as divided into two groups - radical terrorists and those who are not. In fact, Pipes used the term "supporters of militant Islam," not Islamic people.

"My view is 'no, there is no good and bad in militant Islam,' no more than there are good and bad Nazis," Pipes said, according to an audiotape of his remarks.

If you're looking for reasons to be wary of Pipes, perhaps you'll have to look elsewhere. Or, just peruse Pipes' website.

Miller's wretched reporting

Slate's Jack Shafer is still at NY Times reporter Judith Miller's throat.

After cataloging some of her worst reporting over the past few months, Shafer writes, "The most important question to unravel about Judith Miller's reporting is this: Has she grown too close to her sources to be trusted to get it right or to recant her findings when it's proved that she got it wrong? Because the Times sets the news agenda for the press and the nation, Miller's reporting had a great impact on the national debate over the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. If she was reliably wrong about Iraq's WMD, she might have played a major role in encouraging the United States to attack a nation that posed it little threat.

"At the very least, Miller's editors should review her dodgy reporting from the last 18 months, explain her astonishing credulity and lack of accountability, and parse the false from the fact in her WMD reporting. In fact, the Times' incoming executive editor, Bill Keller, could do no better than to launch such an investigation."

Update: In an article for AJR, Charles Layton offers his own analysis of Miller's performance, and stresses that Miller's gaffes were indicative of the larger failures of the American media in reporting the runup to war. Layton even concedes that "the New York Times' op-ed columnists were far better analysts of the administration's evidence, day in and day out, than the paper's news reporters and editors were." This was not a phenomenon confined to the NYT, either.

US to Seek New Afghan Aid Package Of $1 Billion

"The Bush administration will soon propose a $1 billion aid package for Afghanistan aimed at bolstering the government of President Hamid Karzai and countering criticism that U.S. officials have lost interest in rebuilding the country as their focus has shifted to postwar Iraq, senior administration officials said yesterday," reports the Washington Post.

"Among other things, the funds -- to be shifted from existing foreign and military aid accounts so as not to increase the deficit -- would go toward highway and school construction, other infrastructure initiatives, police training, beefed-up development of the Afghan national army, education projects and programs to help women enter the workforce, the officials said."

A 3rd Gulf War?

The Financial Times reports that a new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank, warns that "the US may soon find itself in the midst of 'a third Gulf war against the Iraqi people'" and "blames bad planning by the US administration and the low priority given to 'conflict termination' and nation-building strategies by the Pentagon" for the intractable situation the US now faces.

The study's author, Anthony Cordesman, also suggests that the foreseeable future in Iraq won't be pretty: "The most likely case still seems to be a mixed and poorly co-ordinated US nation-building effort that does just enough to put Iraq on a better political and economic path," he writes, "but does so in a climate of constant low-level security threats and serious Iraqi ethnic and sectarian tensions."

The Land of the Free, Cont'd

Remarkably, the prison population in the US grew by 2.6% last year, while the crime rate dropped by 0.2%.

Of course, the disparity between the two figures is explained by the American preoccupation with mandatory sentences, especially for drugs.

Locking up so many people costs federal and state governments $40bn. With everyone in the red because of the collapse of the economy and the retrograde effects of the Bush tax cut, surely this money could be better spent.

Does Israel target children?

Chris McGreal of the Guardian investigates Israel's unfortunate habit of killing children.

As he notes, one-fifth of the Palestinians killed over the past ~3 years were kids. I consider this to be the dirty little secret of the intifada.

Oil firms shun Iraq contracts

Interesting, not surprising, and likely important:

A number of large oil companies have warned the US administration in Iraq that they will not make large investments in the country until the security situation is clear, reported MEES. The newsletter also warned that without political stability the Iraqi oil industry will not only be unable to expand but will fail to return to its previous capacity.

Bush said to have delayed 9/11 inquiry because it undermined case for war

Sen. Max Cleland is rattling some cages. He's now charging that the Bush administration deliberately delayed the publication of the joint congressional inquiry on 9/11 because they knew material contained within would undermine the case for war on Iraq, specifically because the report refutes the alleged Al-Qaeda connection.

Says Cleland, "The reason this report was delayed for so long -- deliberately opposed at first, then slow-walked after it was created -- is that the administration wanted to get the war in Iraq in and over...before (it) came out...

"Had this report come out in January like it should have done, we would have known these things before the war in Iraq, which would not have suited the administration."

Coincidentally, this lede was buried in a rewrite of an earlier UPI story.

Administration juggling

Will Jim Baker be taking over some of Paul Bremer's duties in Iraq? Is Condi Rice on her way out? Will Bremer be her replacement?

Tom Engelhardt breaks down some of these, and related, weekend developments.

Palast: Swimming against the mainstream

Following Ed Rampell's profile for Alternet, Christopher Horton provides an interesting interview with Greg Palast in the Asia Times.

Bill Kristol, Plagiarist

...of daddy, nonetheless. So says Eric Alterman:

It cannot possibly be a coincidence that William Kristol has chosen to defend President Bush and his slacker war against terrorism by impugning Richard Gephardt with the same phraseology that his father used half a century ago to defend Joe McCarthy. In this morning’s Washington Post, Kristol writes, “But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush’s foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush’s Democratic critics, they know no such thing.” In the journal Commentary in 1952, during the McCarthy era, Irving Kristol wrote, “For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”

This is truly amazing. It explicitly links the Neocons’ exploitation of the threat of terrorism to that no-good drunken bum, Joe McCarthy, and his use of the charge of “Commie” to ruin lives on a whim through a deliberately stoked mass hysteria. I think there is a great deal of this going on right now, but even I would have been reluctant to go so far. But there it is. The charge worked for McCarthy — at least for a while — and Kristol now seems certain it will work for his team as well. Just one question: Have they no shame? At long last, have they no sense of decency left?

CIA Probe Finds Secret Pentagon Group Manipulated Intelligence on Iraqi Threat

Jason Leopold is charging that a "half-dozen former CIA agents investigating prewar intelligence have found that a secret Pentagon committee [the Office of Special Plans], set up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, manipulated reams of intelligence information prepared by the spy agency on the so-called Iraqi threat and then delivered it to top White House officials who used it to win support for a war in Iraq."

This is a not a revelation, but I suppose it's worth pushing until someone musters the energy to call the Bushies on it.

TVC a front for big pharma

Well isn't this special.

A Christian lobbying group fighting the proposed importation of low-cost prescription drugs has received behind-the-scenes help from the drug industry, the latest example of pharmaceutical companies trying to influence Congress clandestinely.

The Traditional Values Coalition, which bills itself as a Christian advocacy group representing 43,000 churches, has mailed to the districts of several conservative House Republicans this sharply disputed warning: Legislation to allow the importation of U.S.-made pharmaceuticals from Canada and Europe might make RU-486, called the "abortion pill," as easy to get as aspirin.

The Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) portrays its campaign as a moral fight for the "sanctity of life." Documents provided to The Washington Post, however, show that drug lobbyists played a key role in crafting its argument and in disseminating the information to lawmakers. Pharmaceutical companies oppose the legislation -- which would legalize the reimportation of U.S.-made prescription drugs that sell for less in Canada than in the United States -- not over abortion but because it would erode their profits...

A recent TVC letter sent to Congress was signed by the coalition's executive director, Andrea Sheldon Lafferty. It was originally drafted, however, by Tony Rudy, a lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies and a former top aide to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), computer records show. Lafferty also circulated a memo -- linking the legislation to RU-486's availability -- that was drafted by Bruce Kuhlik, a senior vice president at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a trade group funded by the nation's biggest pharmaceutical firms.

9/11 Report: More questions than answers

The Financial Times suggests that the release of the 9/11 report will make the Bush administration's argument that the attacks couldn't have been prevented "much harder to sustain and could ignite fresh controversy for an administration already under scrutiny for manipulating intelligence information before the war on Iraq."

As families of the 9/11 victims aver, the report raises as many questions as it answers.

There's also one gaping hole in the report: some 28 missing pages. That's where all the juicy info about the Saudi connection is supposed to be. Bob Graham knows all about this; that's why he's pissed the material is being blocked from public view.

Excessive Force?

While the bulk of US media are high-fiving the military over the deaths of Saddam Hussein’s sons, Rod Nordland of Newsweek dares to ask: would it have been better if Uday and Qusay were taken alive?

The 9/11 Report

The Nation's David Corn has penned a preliminary response to the release of the report of the 9/11 joint inquiry conducted by the Senate and House intelligence committees. Here's his conclusion:

The report is a good start in establishing the historical record. It reads at times like tragedy, at other times almost as farce. The signs were there. Few paid attention. Two, if not more, of the hijackers were within reach of US law enforcement, but nobody saw that. Five days after the attacks, Bush said, "No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society." And in May 2002, Rice said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." Actually, the report has proof that the attacks of 9/11 were foreseen. Not in terms of date and time. But intelligence reporting indicated and terrorism experts warned that Al Qaeda was interested in mounting precisely these types of attacks. Yet the US government--the Bush II and Clinton administrations--did not prepare adequately. The attacks were far less outside the box than Bush and his aides have suggested. Thwarting them was within the realm of possibility.

The Administration has yet to acknowledge that--let alone reveal how--Bush responded to the intelligence he saw. The joint inquiry's work provides a solid foundation for the 9/11 independent commission, which is now conducting its own inquiry. Perhaps that endeavor will be able to learn even more and address the questions the Bush Administration did not allow the committees to answer.

Investigate WMD lies

Due to Moveon.org's efforts, more than 400,000 letters have flooded Congress in recent weeks calling for an independent investigation into how the Bush administration drove the US to war in Iraq.

If you think this is a worthy endeavor, add your voice to the pile.

Oh, and to make things even easier for Congressional members, the folks at TomPaine.com have already started compiling a partial list of witnesses the prosecution should tap. How nice of them.

Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud

Someone has finally picked up on Bev Harris' intitial investigation into the Diebold voting system.

The NY Times reports that the "first review of the software by recognized computer security experts" has found "serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected."

The team of experts who conducted the study, led by Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, have released the findings of their report, here.

Opening the Doors on Post-War Baghdad

Following a 9-day visit to Baghdad at the end of June, four Middle East historians have released their findings in a report of academic conditions and intellectual life in postwar Baghdad.

Anthrax

"In its pursuit of an anthrax suspect," Dan K. Thomasson writes, "the FBI hasn't displayed such incompetence since it targeted Richard Jewell."

Incompetence? Nah, I tend to think it's just a front for a cover-up.

Taliban: Undefeated

Remember the Taliban? It continues to regroup along the Afghan-Pakistan border, according to Time correspondents Phil Zabriskie and Spin Boldak.

9/11 report refutes Iraq-Al Qaeda link

The congressional joint inquiry committee is set to publish their 9/11 report today. So far, UPI has learned that it "reveals U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, or that it had supported al-Qaida."

One government official who has seen the report says flat-out, "The report shows there is no link between Iraq and al-Qaida."

But that's not what the Bushies have been saying...

Bush lies

Steve Perry of Bush Wars has released his first article on Bush's lies, "Better Late Than Never". Part two, "The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies About War and Terrorism," arrives on Monday.

For Steve's unprocessed list of lies, go here. He's since whittled them down a bit...

Uday/Qusay fallout

Marian Wilkinson of the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the "Pentagon and the White House are bracing for an upsurge in retaliatory attacks in Iraq following the assault by United States troops that killed Saddam Hussein's sons."

Wilkinson's report also features a few lines from Peter Bouckaert, a researcher for Human Right Watch:

"They were among the two most feared people in Iraq," he said.

"They were not just the people who gave the orders, they were directly implicated in a lot of the killings.

"When I was in Baghdad, people talked more often about the personal involvement of Uday and Qusay in killings than they talked about Saddam, who was a ghost figure for many Iraqis."

But Mr Bouckaert said it was unfortunate that the sons would not be put on trial. "It's a pity they were killed in this way and escaped the day they had to face the Iraqi people for the crimes they committed against them."

The Bush administration doesn't believe in trials, though. Instead, they plaster images of the two dead sons across available media (in clear violation of the Geneva conventions, but no matter), hoping that this will convince the resistance in Iraq to capitulate to the occupying forces.

Update: Retaliatory attacks? Geez. This was quick: "Three American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division -- the squad involved in the deadly raid on Uday and Qusay Hussein -- were killed Thursday when they came under attack from small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades in northern Iraq," reports Fox News.

Long term economic impact of AIDS more damaging than previously thought

The World Bank has released a new research report which "warns that HIV/AIDS causes far greater long-term damage to national economies than previously assumed, for by killing mostly young adults, the disease is robbing the children of AIDS victims of one or both parents to love, raise and educate them, and so undermines the basis of economic growth over the long haul...

"According to the new report 'The Long-run Economic Costs of AIDS: Theory and an Application to South Africa' most studies of the macroeconomic costs of AIDS, as measured by reduced GDP growth rates, do not pay enough attention to the way in which human knowledge and potential are created and can be lost."

The Wilson-Payback Scandal

A second scandal for Bush? Joseph Wilson, the envoy who went to Africa back in late February 2002 to determine if the Niger docs were real or not, is starting to make some waves for the payback he and his wife have received from the Bush junta.

The Kelly Blame Game

Brendan O'Neill is sick of the blame game surrounding the apparent suicide of David Kelly. "The truth," says O'Neill, "is that Kelly was responsible for his death, not the Foreign Affairs Committee, or the BBC, or anyone else."

Questions for George and Dick

Howard Dean has some questions for George Bush about the way his Administration led us to war. Dennis Kucinich and two other members of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations want Dick Cheney to answer some questions, too.

Tuition hikes

State colleges and universities are witnesssing significant tuition hikes (as high as 21 percent in Maryland and almost 30 percent in Virginia, for example) in order to stem the fiscal crises that plague states across the nation.

White House Threatens Veto on Media-Ownership Cap

Reuters is reporting that the White House is threatening to veto a large spending bill in the House of Representatives if it reimposes media-ownership caps that the FCC recently relaxed.

Update: The House has voted to restore the media ownership cap by a vote of 400-21.

IDF crimes

Ha'aretz reports that the ICC "will not be prosecuting crimes committed by Israel Defense Forces' soldiers in the [occupied] territories."

In related news, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, Israel's leading civil rights group, has released its annual report which accuses the IDF of "cruel and sadistic behavior against Palestinians over the past year."

The multitude of civil rights violations by Israeli soldiers, the group charges, "arise not from any operational necessity, but from hard-heartedness of soldiers, who receive from above the message of utter disregard for the dignity, freedom and lives of innocent Palestinians.''

CIA Memos Raised Doubts on Iraq Bid

Today's Washington Post reports that the White House was specifically warned in memos from the CIA about the dubious nature of the Niger docs, in stark detail, 3 months before the SOTU.

The information, provided in a briefing by [Stephen J.] Hadley [Bush's deputy national security adviser] and Bush communications director Dan Bartlett, significantly alters the explanation previously offered by the White House. The acknowledgment of the memos, which were sent on the eve of a major presidential speech in Cincinnati about Iraq, comes four days after the White House said the CIA objected only to technical specifics of the Africa charge, not its general accuracy.

In fact, the officials acknowledged yesterday, the CIA warned the White House early on that the charge, based on an allegation that Iraq sought 500 tons of uranium in Niger, relied on weak evidence, was not particularly significant and assumed Iraq was pursuing an acquisition that was arguably not possible and of questionable value because Iraq had its own supplies.

Yesterday's disclosures indicate top White House officials knew that the CIA seriously disputed the claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa long before the claim was included in Bush's January address to the nation. The claim was a major part of the case made by the Bush administration before the Iraq war that Hussein represented a serious threat because of his nuclear ambitions; other pieces of evidence have also been challenged.

Uday and Qusay

So Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, have been killed in Iraq. For some reason, this news seems to warrant frontpage treatment even on ESPN.com.

American officials are hopeful that the killings will dampen the resistance to the occupying forces. But, as Robert Fisk claims, this is probably more indicative of American ignorance about the situation in Iraq than anything else. He writes,

there is a fundamental misunderstanding between the American occupation authorities in Iraq and the people whose country they are occupying. The United States believes that the entire resistance to America's proconsulship of Iraq is composed of "remnants" of Saddam's followers, "dead-enders", "bitter-enders" - they have other phrases to describe them. Their theory is that once the Hussein family is decapitated, the resistance will end.

But the guerrillas who are killing US troops every day are also being attacked by a growing Islamist Sunni movement which never had any love for Saddam. Much more importantly, many Iraqis were reluctant to support the resistance for fear that an end to American occupation would mean the return of the ghastly old dictator.

If he and his sons are dead, the chances are that the opposition to the American-led occupation will grow rather than diminish - on the grounds that with Saddam gone, Iraqis will have nothing to lose by fighting the Americans.

Conveniently, this news also loosens the noose around Bush's neck, by shifting attention away from the current imbroglio over Niger docs and other lies, and allows the humanitarian hawks to again play up their "war for liberation" line.

But it's not just the Bushies and the war-hawks who are elated about this. Everyone, across the political spectrum, is jumping up and down at the news. It's a pretty sad spectacle, actually. As Brooke Biggs laments, "This is what we have become, people. Not only a nation that commits political assassinations without compunction (and with merchandising spin-offs, like those most-wanted playing cards), but we have little parties in the streets when we succeed."

"An unsavory stench about Bush's claims"

Just 16 little words, eh? What about the rest of the SOTU?

John Dean takes a closer look and finds that the Niger fiasco "is merely indicative of larger problems, and troubling questions of potential and widespread criminality when taking the nation to war. It appears that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein's weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony."

War would make Hussein more of a threat

...so warned a National Intelligence Estimate. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reports:

Last fall, the administration repeatedly warned in public of the danger that an unprovoked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists.

"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," President Bush said in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States...

Pincus continues:

The declassified sections of the NIE were offered by the White House to rebut allegations that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The result, however, could be to raise more questions about whether the administration misrepresented the judgments of the intelligence services on another basis for going to war: the threat posed by Hussein as a source of weapons for terrorists.

The NIE's findings also raise concerns about the dangers posed by Hussein, who is believed to be in hiding, and the failure to find any of his alleged stocks of chemical and biological weapons. If such stocks exist, a hotly debated proposition, this is precisely the kind of dangerous situation the CIA and other intelligence services warned about last fall, administration officials said. A senior administration official said yesterday that the U.S. intelligence community does not know either "the extent to which Saddam Hussein has access or control" over the groups that are attacking U.S. forces, or the location of any possible hidden chemical or biological agents or weapons. Asked whether the former Iraqi leader would today use any chemical or biological weapons if he controlled them, the senior official said, "We would not put that past him to do whatever makes our lives miserable."

I hear impeachment bells. Anyone else?

Paving the way for war

Confirming what many have suspected, the Washington Post and NY Times are each reporting that the no-fly zones over Iraq were used to soften-up Iraqi defenses and gather intelligence before a formal war had been declared.

The plans were set in motion shortly after 9/11, and the bombing began in earnest in the early months of Summer 2002.

Suckering the Dems

All that stonewalling by the Bush administration over the past week and a half? It's just part of a clever plot laid by Bush and his Brain, says Bill Kristol.

Oh Bill, you're just too witty for us all. Please stop.

Empire on the cheap

Academic superstar and empire expert Niall Ferguson writes, "Back in April, administration officials talked as if the reconstruction of Iraq would somehow be self-financing. That seemed optimistic at the time; today it is simply incredible. What we are witnessing is not so much 'Empire Lite' -- in Michael Ignatieff's catchy phrase -- as 'Cut-Price Colonization.' Americans need to realize now that nations cannot be built the way Wal-Mart sells patio sets: on the cheap.

"Without jobs and wages, many of the young men of Iraq will find the temptations of violent crime and guerrilla warfare impossible to resist. But for economic recovery to take place, three things are urgently needed: first, the effective imposition of law and order; second, the repair and restoration of basic infrastructure (water, electricity, telephones); and third, substantial expenditure on reconstruction to modernize the dilapidated oil fields and stimulate economic activity in other sectors."

That's all well and good. But Paul Street is wondering why such economic investment doesn't start at home.

Update: In a corresponding post, Kevin Moore links the issue of rebuilding Iraq with the question of whether the US should stay or go.

It's not just the Niger canard

Eric Margolis thinks Bush deserves to be impeached.

"Of course," he concedes, "all politicians lie.

"But lying to get one's country into an unnecessary war is an outrage, and ought to be an impeachable offence."

The 9-11 Report will slam the FBI

Michael Isikoff of Newsweek previews the forthcoming 900-page report on 9/11 from the Joint Congressional Inquiry. In this piece, Isikoff spends much time discussing the case against Omar al-Bayoumi, and the failure of the FBI to deal properly with the suspected terrorists living -- literally -- next door.

Hypin' Iraq due to 'sketchy data'

Confused about what's transpired in the past week or so? These articles from the Boston Gobe and the NY Times summarize the Bush-stretched-the-truth-on-Iraq case nicely.

The Revisionist

Rewind

It is taking me forever to go through just some of the stuff I've missed over the past few days, but here's what I'm finding interesting and relevant thus far:

* According to the AP, the CIA didn't receive the Niger doc evidence until after the SOTU, in February 2003, although Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reports that the State Department received copies three months before the SOTU and passed the info on to the CIA "within days." Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois also claims that George Tenet told him that a White House official insisted on including the Niger doc claim in last year's SOTU. In other news: Tenet blames Wolfie.

* Salon's Eric Boehlert and the Guardian's Julian Borger each report on how the so-called "Rumsfeld Intelligence Agency," the Office of Special Plans (OSP), drove the US to war in Iraq.

* India says it won't be providing troops to help the US in Iraq, but may change its tune soon. If it doesn't, there will be hell to pay.

* No surprise here: those high-strength aluminum tubes Bush cited in the SOTU "weren't meant for nuclear bomb production," according to the recent testimony of a high level Iraqi scientist.

* Bush has lied on a great many issues. So what makes the yellowcake lie so special? Timothy Noah has a two-part response on Slate: Part I; Part II.

* What went wrong with the Bush administration's postwar plans for Iraq? The LA Times examines how the "missteps in the planning for the subsequent peace could threaten the lives of soldiers and drain U.S. resources indefinitely" and finds that the "tale of what went wrong is one of agency infighting, ignored warnings and faulty assumptions."

* FAIR suggests that the Bush uranium lie is just the tip of the iceberg, while Jim Lobe reminds us that there's another lie lurking about in the Bush administration's habitual claim of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link. That lie has the PNAC's fingerprints all over it.

* Robert Scheer thinks that we have "the firm basis for bringing a charge of impeachment against the president who employed lies to lead us into war."

* GIs have been speaking out against the Pentagon, and will likely pay for doing so. After all, the journalist who reported this for ABC News has already received his payback.

* With Iraqis cheering the deaths of soldiers, it's no wonder morale is low amongst American forces. The LA Times summarizes their current status: "They're hot, they're cranky, and they're not leaving any time soon." On the homefront, those wives who complain about the predicament of their husbands in Iraq are being scolded for providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

* After a bitter legal battle, Dick Cheney has released his energy task force documents. There's some pretty interesting stuff in them -- like, ya know, maps of Iraqi oil fields dating back to 2001! Can the real reason for war be this crass? More background, here.

* Memo to the President: Make Dick Cheney resign. Read an interview with Ray McGovern, one of three signatories to the memo.

* Due to overstretch, the US may be forced to go back to the UN in order to bail out Bush. Todd Gitlin thinks this a good idea. Kofi Annan does, too, since this is what the UN has been planning for, now that three months have passed since the fall of Baghdad.

* Hey, whattaya know. The media is underplaying the US death toll in Iraq. And, of course, generally ignoring the death toll amongst Iraqi civilians and combatants.

* Agence France Presse reports that, according to UNICEF, "More than 1,000 Iraqi children have been killed or wounded by abandoned weapons and munitions since the April 9 fall of Baghdad."

* One of the "Baghdad Democrats," Jim McDermott, is lamenting the actions of the "Bush Terror Posse -- Donald Rumsfeld, Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft," who have been engaged in a "fear campaign designed to prepare Americans to do whatever the administration wants us to do" for the past 18 months. Since McDermott's earlier concerns turned out to be quite cogent, will this 21st century "Lord Haw-Haw" ever get an apology? Don't hold your breath.

* Tony Blair fell back on "high-sounding ambiguities" in his address to Congress last week. Not a bad idea, observes Stephen Gowans, especially when "you've just led your country into war on dubious grounds, and people are awakening to the possibility that they've been misled."

* "Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and break the law--in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?" asks David Corn. "It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted."

* Regime change or reform in Iran? This question is at the root of the "most contentious foreign policy issue in the Bush administration," according to the Telegraph.

* Don't mind North Korea, even though former defense secretary William Perry is warning that the US could be at war with that Communist nation as early as this year.

* The war in the DRC may be coming to an end, as a tenuous power-sharing plan has been implemented amongst the warring factions.

* A train loaded with radioactive waste is on the move in the US. See if it may be passing by your house.

* Frida Berrigan tells the story of depleted uranium, AKA the gift from the American military that keeps on killing.

* Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting) has been awarded the contract by the DOD for a new online voting system for the military. Lynn Landes wonders: do we really want such a dubious company owned by non-U.S. citizens in charge of potentially 6 million votes?

* This depiction of the federal deficit isn't pretty. In general, why isn't there much alarm over the deficit?

* According to the NY Times, "The first report to document the impact of the government's new formula for financial aid has found that it will reduce the nation's largest grant program [the Pell Grant] by $270 million and bar 84,000 college students from receiving any award at all."

* Pat Robertson is praying for God to smite three Supreme Court justices so they can be replaced by conservatives.

* American masculinity is in crisis, says Kristen Kidder, but no need to worry. Viacom is coming to the rescue. In a related piece, Katha Pollitt delivers a sort of informal State of Feminism for 2003.

Hiatus

I'll be away for a few days visiting friends. No posting till next week, probably.

Americans want facts and flags

Americans are pretty conflicted about how they want the war on terror reported, asserts Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Globe.

The American public may want its coverage of the war on terror straight down the middle, but it wants it delivered by people who share its patriotism.

That's the finding of a new Pew Research Center survey of 1,200 Americans and their media habits and views. It comes amid an ongoing debate within journalism circles about whether embedded reporters, flag logos on TV screens, and the undiscovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq suggest American news organizations were too jingoistic or complacent in their coverage of the war against Saddam Hussein.

The Pew study -- taken from June 19 to July 2 -- found that 70 percent of the respondents thought it was good for news outlets to take a strong pro-American point of view. Yet, 64 percent said news coverage of the war on terrorism should be neutral.

Pew Research Center director Andrew Kohut believes the poll shows citizens want objective news, but want to feel in sync with those gathering and presenting it. ''They don't want propaganda,'' he says, ''but they want the media to be on our side, so to speak, giving you the sense that they have your values, your interests.''

That may be a narrow tightrope to walk. Kohut says the survey contains findings pointing to a ''public still on balance suspicious of the media.'' Nearly half of those polled -- 46 percent -- say some news organizations are becoming too critical of America. The survey also revealed that 43 percent worry that media criticism of the military was weakening the national defense, compared to 45 percent who thought such scrutiny kept the nation prepared. After the Gulf War in 1991, Americans believed that journalistic scrutiny of the Pentagon was good for the country by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

Jurkowitz also relays that the "long-smoldering issue of liberal media bias is alive and kicking, with 51 percent of the public subscribing to that belief, compared to only 26 percent who see the press as conservative."

Lies everywhere

Check out the most recent list of 20 lies about the Iraq war, compiled by the Independent with the help of Glen Rangwala.

See also: Christopher Scheer's top 10 and politicalstrategy.org's top 30.

Who lied to whom?

If you're looking for a good, quick rundown of how the Niger "yellowcake" scandal came to pass, read Seymour Hersh's piece from March's New Yorker.

And, as I have mentioned before, the best take on the Bush administration's general chicanery on the Iraq war is the Ackerman and Judis article from TNR.

The "preeminent political analyst of our time"

Bill Moyers interviewed Jon Stewart on PBS' NOW this week. Check the transcript.

CIA warned of Niger docs 3 months before SOTU

As the White House and its supporters try to spin themselves out of the yellowcake scandal -- "it's only one line in the speech!"; "the statement is technically true"; "it's a minor detail"; "Bush didn't pin his war case on Niger docs"; "it's the fault of the Brits"; etc. -- the Washington Post reports that the CIA "successfully intervened with White House officials to have a reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential speech last October, three months before a less specific reference to the same intelligence appeared in the State of the Union address."

The Post continues: "The new disclosure suggests how eager the White House was in January to make Iraq's nuclear program a part of its case against Saddam Hussein even in the face of earlier objections by its own CIA director. It also appears to raise questions about the administration's explanation of how the faulty allegations were included in the State of the Union speech...and as new facts emerge a different picture is being presented than the administration has given to date."

So, the White House can't pass the buck on this one. They knew the Niger docs were dubious, and chose to include the reference because it lent a sense of urgency to their claims that we needed to invade Iraq, and invade soon.

Iraq-Al Qaeda Links, Part XXXIV

No doubt looking to divert attention away from the Bush administration's distortions on the Iraq war, the Weekly Standard is hopeful that the proof of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection has been found. They're really stretching on this one.

In the meantime, the AP's Matt Kelley reports that the Bush administration's habit of citing Iraq-Al Qaeda links is again coming under fire in the wake of the Niger uranium fiasco.

Niger evidence too weak for UN presentation

Andrew Buncombe and Kim Sengupta of the Independent report that Colin Powell "did not mention the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal in his now famous presentation to the UN Security Council because he 'did not think it was strong enough' - even though President George Bush included it in his State of the Union address just a week before."

The evidence served a nice propaganda function on the domestic front, so it was used. In the international arena, such brazen claims would detract from Powell's "credibility," so they were scuttled.

Where's the apology?

Rather than a empty diatribe against the evils of slavery, what would an apology from George Bush have meant last week? Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe has an answer:

An apology would be the start of a new America. Anyone can acknowledge that evil existed. An apology is personal. If a white president of the United States were to apologize for slavery, it would say that the nation officially recognizes that white wealth before the Civil War came from what this nation did to black people (and Native Americans in the process).

It would officially recognize that European-Americans, whether they come from a long line of American citizens or whether their parents came over dirt poor from Europe in the 20th century, continue to benefit from a white privilege that allowed them to move up the ladder into the suburbs. Meanwhile, slavery's replacement, segregation, blocked generations of African-Americans from building up wealth because of redlining, intellectual capital through inferior public schools, and political capital through disenfranchisement.

As Bush came amazingly close to saying - perhaps because he said it from the safety of his safari and not in front of racist Bob Jones University in the 2000 campaign or while filing a Supreme Court brief against affirmative action - racial bigotry is not over. Because of that, an apology would mark the official end to the I-didn't-own-any-slaves denial of this country. An apology would say not only yesterday's wealth, but today's wealth, was built on yesterday's evil.

An apology would acknowledge that slavery's damage still requires repair. To some people, the repair would be cash reparations to black people. Some call it fully funded public schools. Some call it affirmative action. Some call it serious enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. Whatever form the repair takes, the president needs to deliver his message in America, not just Africa, to Americans, not just Africans.

Calling slavery evil is as old as the Founding Fathers. It would be original to tell America that the white privileges bestowed by the tragic mistake of the Founding Fathers are over. The reason one of the greatest crimes in history has not yet resulted in a great apology is because the reward for the crime remains too great.

Trading on fear

In a preview of their forthcoming book, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber explain how post-9/11 fear has been exploited to sell everything from SUVs to the war in Iraq.

'No real planning for postwar Iraq'

A revealing article by Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel contends that the civilian leadership of the Pentagon "didn't develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader as the country's leader."

Installing Ahmed Chalabi is now viewed as an impossibility, and Landay and Strobel report that there is "no backup plan."

Tenet's the scapegoat

George Tenet took the fall for Bush on the Niger doc scandal. Bush now thinks the case is closed. That's wishful thinking; more likely, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

After all, the deceptions on Iraq don't begin and end with the Niger docs.

In the run up to war, the administration and its minions did everything they could to scare people in this country into accepting the need to attack Iraq. There was an elaborate, willful effort -- a marketing campaign, as Andrew Card called it -- to conjure evidence, no matter how tenuous, which suggested that Iraq was ready to plunge a dagger at America, or pass off the means to do so to other parties more willing to the task. They eschewed contingency, doubt, and whatever caveats were attached to intelligence; they leaned on intelligence analysts; they made wanton accusations and dropped "assertions of fact" which were unsupportable. In short, they engaged in a propaganda campaign that dragged a nation into war on false pretenses, precisely because they had decided on a war months, if not years, ago.

Bush Knew Iraq Info Was False

CBS News is reporting that the Bush administration knew that the Niger-uranium link with Iraq was likely false prior to the State of the Union, and made a conscious decision to include this bit of information in the speech.

CIA officials warned members of the President’s National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.

The White House officials responded that a paper issued by the British government contained the unequivocal assertion: “Iraq has ... sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” As long as the statement was attributed to British Intelligence, the White House officials argued, it would be factually accurate. The CIA officials dropped their objections and that’s how it was delivered.

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Mr. Bush said.

The statement was technically correct, since it accurately reflected the British paper. But the bottom line is the White House knowingly included in a presidential address information its own CIA had explicitly warned might not be true.

This should not come as a surprise since the CIA knew the Niger docs were bogus nearly one year before Bush's declaration in the SOTU.

Update: While the Bushies are trying to pin this mess on George Tenet and the CIA, the Washington Post reports that the CIA tried to persuade the British to drop the Niger claim from their intelligence paper, which Bush cited in the SOTU, in September 2002.

Update II: CBS News has revised their headline for this story, which now says, "Bush Knew Iraq Info Was Dubious." The story has also been slightly altered, for better contextualization. Take Back the Media has a capsule on how the CBS story changed over time.

WMD 'unlikely to be found'

According to the BBC, "Senior UK Whitehall sources no longer believe weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq." These sources still maintain that the weapons existed, and contend that were hidden or destroyed by Hussein prior to the Anglo-American invasion.

Rummy's Revisions

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld claimed that the US invaded Iraq not because of any new evidence of Hussein's pursuit of WMD, but because the "coalition" saw the existing evidence "in a dramatic new light -- through the prism of our experience on 9-11."

Rumsfeld also revised his estimate of the cost of operations in Iraq in his testimony. Between January and September of this year, Rumsfeld admitted that the conflict's pricetag will be approximately $3.9 billion per month. The NY Times reminds us that this is "a figure considerably higher than previous estimates."

Investigating 9/11

As the Bush administration continues to hamper the investigation of the 9-11 Commission, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are getting ready to publish their final, "highly explosive" report on the attacks.

The report, which will likely become public in the next two weeks, will reveal new information about the Saudi role in financing the attacks, how much intelligence was floating around prior to that fateful day, and indicate the Bush administration was warned of a "spectacular attack" by Al Qaeda earlier in the Summer of 2001.

Afghans see progress

Mark Memmott of USA Today reports that things are looking up in Afghanistan for a change.

CTS: The Pentagon's Plan for Tracking Everything That Moves

"Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch," Noah Shachtman writes in the Village Voice. "Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon."

$15bn for AIDS?

With Bush off to Africa, he is sure to tout his $15bn plan to combat AIDS at every opportunity. But in reality, as Linda Bilmes of the Financial Times observes, "nothing like $15bn will ever be spent."

So far, Bush has only requested $1.9bn in his 2003 budget -- "an increase of just $450m on what was spent in 2002 and a third less than the $3bn a year" promised in this year's SOTU. And, because of the growing federal deficit, it'll be very difficult for Bush to raise this number in the future.

In other words, as Bilmes puts it, "the US still has to put its money where its mouth is."

Update: In a related story, the BBC reports that "Republicans in Congress are planning on cutting back the money allocated to [Bush's] much-vaunted plans to tackle HIV/Aids and encourage development."

10% of artifacts returned; many still missing

The AP reports that approximately 10% of the artifacts known to be missing from Iraqi museums after the war have been recovered, totalling around 1,200 items.

Still, according to one museum staffer, the missing items from the storage room of Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities numbers 13,000, with 47,000 pieces missing from the main exhibition hall.

War for Israel?

Robert Dreyfuss wrote in The Nation a few weeks ago that the forged uranium documents from Niger may have come out of Ariel Sharon's office. Justin Raimondo has picked up on this and is again on his "this was a war for Israel's benefit" tip.

The Liberated Orphanage

Remember when US forces "liberated" more than 100 children from an Iraqi prison? Well, it turns out that the prison was really an orphanage. Oops.

HR 111

Tell Congress to support the Rachel Corrie Resolution, and call for an American-led investigation into her death.

Government Information Awareness

Make sure you check out the new website, GIA, which "turns the tables on government officials."

It was, after all, inspired by TIA.

Bush uranium claim had "flawed origin"

The White House has admitted that the Niger-uranium story was bogus and that they shouldn't have cited it in last year's SOTU.

What's going on here? Have they finally seen the light and started admitting the error of their ways?

Of course not. Josh Marshall explains what the Bush administration is likely up to.

Bigger than Watergate?

Some intrepid journalists are claiming to have found massive security holes in the voting systems in the US, thus compromising the entire election system.

Update: Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.com is the main party behind this voting scoop. Salon ran an article on some of her preliminary findings back in February, while Benedict Spinoza provides some additional context.

Imagine for a moment...

“Why are Arabs always angry?” Let Ramzy Baroud explain.

U.S. must avoid appearing colonialist

As more forces die with each passing day, it is imperative that the US reshapes its image in Iraq and avoids donning the mantle of the ugly colonialist.

To this end, Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish suggest that the best way to "get out of this emerging mess is to bring the international community, especially the UN, as well as Arab states, into serious and meaningful roles in the nation-building effort. This would add instant legitimacy and reduce the specter of colonialism, ease tensions, reassure Iraqis that their future was not in the hands of a single foreign power and help relieve the American people and military of the massive burden that occupation entails."

Sounds like smart advice. Too bad US officials will be unlikely to heed it until the costs of occupation rise even further.

Only dopes get duped

The debate on both sides of the Atlantic over whether we were conned into war is a "shameless exercise in blame-shifting," writes Brendan O'Neill.

The question over how the US and British were drawn into war "has been reduced to an evidence-based affair," he contends, "where the only question is over which facts are true, which aren't, and who made up what. This is politics with the politics taken out - where principle and judgement have been replaced by technical squabbles, and where no one is prepared to take responsibility for what is going on in Iraq."

Re-thinking Objectivity

In a perceptive article in Columbia Journalism Review, Brent Cunningham argues that the elevation of the principle of objectivity above all else is harming the practice of journalism.

"Lost" Iraqi POWS

The International Committee of the Red Cross is criticizing the US and Britain for their handling of Iraqi POWs. As of now, only 2,000 have been accounted for.

What happened to the rest? Maybe they're at Guantanamo Bay. Hopefully they didn't face the same fate as those at Qala-i-Jhangi in Afghanistan.

Rainforests set to disappear in next decade

"More than 23 million acres of the world's forests - enough to cover the whole of Scotland - are disappearing each year because of logging, mining and land clearance for agriculture," reports Marie Woolf of the Independent.

"Power tends to confuse itself with virtue"

William Blum takes a few quick stabs at current events in his "Anti-Empire Report" for this week.

Weary Troops

The Christian Science Monitor reports that troop morale in Iraq has hit "rock bottom" and that many yearn to return home.

More Bush Manipulation

The AP reports that an "envoy sent by the CIA to Africa to investigate allegations about Iraq's nuclear weapons program contends the Bush administration manipulated his findings, possibly to strengthen the rationale for war."

Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador to Gabon, made this assertion in an opinion piece in Sunday's NY Times.

On to Liberia?

As US military advisers arrive in Liberia to assess the situation, G. Jefferson Price III of the Baltimore Sun is wondering whether Bush's sudden preoccupation with that war-torn nation is just a distraction.

Over the past few days...

* Some intelligence analysts have come to the conclusion that Iraq destroyed its WMD sometime in the 1990s. Sure would have been nice to have had this information before we went to war, eh? Oh, wait. We did.

* Two GOP Senators say evidence of WMD finds in Iraq is forthcoming. The information is simply classified right now. Really.

* "Commanders on the ground have found no evidence to substantiate allegations by the military's Central Command that a deadly explosion at a mosque compound [in Fallujah, Iraq] may be related to bombmaking activities," the Boston Globe reports. The idea that the mosque may have been fired on by the US has thus far been dismissed, but the military still cannot explain what happened.

* Israeli officials think they've won and broken the Palestinian resistance. Now, negotiations can begin.

* Where will the negotiations and the "Road Map" to peace lead? Why, to even more ethnic cleansing, says Ed Herman.

* The US has "cut off military aid to 35 friendly countries in retaliation for their support of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and refusal to exempt U.S. soldiers from the ICC's jurisdiction," reports Jim Lobe of IPS.

* "Bring 'em on," says Cowboy George. "Bring 'em home," say family members of US troops.

* The NY Times continues to circle the wagons around Judith Miller.

* The Economist explains what's going on with West Africa's civil wars, and that Bush is planning on bringing "regime change" to the continent. Meanwhile, the Observer reports that Bush "has ordered the US military to plan for a massive expansion of its presence" in Africa.

* The US economy is still in shambles, even though economists have been predicting a turnaround for several months now.

Independence Day

No posting till next week. Off to enjoy the Fourth...and the usual fireworks.

Food aid for everyone in Iraq

Ricardo Grassi of IPS reports that the "war in Iraq has made the entire population of 27 million dependent on food aid."

Oxford bans student for being Israeli

This is an upsetting story. It is utterly deplorable that individuals are being discriminated against because of the activities of their state.

US strikes mosque?

Islam Online is reporting that ten people were killed in the main mosque in Fallujah, Iraq yesterday when it was fired upon by an American helicopter.

Needless to say, if true, an action like this does not bode well, as it is sure to contribute to the growing animosity towards the American occupation.

Polls in and about Iraq

Scott Peterson of the CSM reports that "the results of a first-ever poll of Iraqis, reported by CBS earlier this month," indicate that "nearly two-thirds of Baghdad residents want US forces to stay until Iraq is stable and secure, and that only 17 percent want US troops to go home immediately."

A related CNN/USA Today Gallup poll suggests that only 56% of Americans think the war is going well, and that 37% believe the Bush administration misled the public about the Iraqi threat. Additionally, CNN notes, "more than half said it would matter a great deal if they were to become convinced that they were mislead."

And, finally, a third poll indicates that 52% of Americans believe the US has found "clear evidence" of a Saddam- Al Qaeda link.

Rescuing Information...

The Memory Hole is on a brief hiatus. In the meantime, check out some of the editor's picks from the past year.

Rubbing it in

Those folks at the Weekly Standard sure have a keen sense of humor...