Another day, another justification for Bush's bloody w-ar falls apart: "Inspectors have found no evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to transfer chemical or biological technology or weapons to terrorists, according to a report quoting US military and intelligence experts. This report is according to the Washington Post newspaper. Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provided new details about the weapons search and Iraqi insurgency in report released Friday. His report was based on briefings over the past two weeks in Iraq from David Kay, the CIA representative who is directing the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq, US civil administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer, and military officials. 'No evidence of any Iraqi effort to transfer weapons of mass destruction or weapons to terrorists,' Cordesman wrote of Kay's briefing."

AP reports: "Dutch marines said Wednesday that several dozen artillery shells discovered last month in Iraq contain no biological or chemical agents. The 130-mm artillery shells, which dated back to the 1991 Gulf War, were found just north of the town of Samawah in the Dutch-monitored al-Muthana province on Oct. 8. The shells were initially considered suspect because they showed signs of discoloring. They will undergo more tests by British and American experts. Marines spokesman Albert Markus said 'testing until now has shown no signs of chemical or biological weapons.'" Yet another WMD story is a bust. Let's see, there were the forged Niger Uranium Documents, the Aluminum Tubes, the Trailers, the Backyard Centrifuge, the Botulin toxin (that couldn't be weaponized) ... and now this... all a crock.

PentaPost: "Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use. Most notably, investigators have judged the aluminum tubes to be 'innocuous'... That finding is pivotal, because the Bush administration built its case on the proposition that Iraq aimed to use those tubes as centrifuge rotors to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear warhead... Cheney, in a televised interview last month, referred to a National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which said among other things that there was 'compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort.' Cheney said investigators 'will find in fact that they are valid.' His office did not respond to questions Friday."

Former Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri writes: "Belatedly, in a September 29, 2003 article in the New York Times by Douglas Jehl, the Defense Intelligence Agency has awkwardly admitted that most of the intelligence and information offered by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) for the past several years, which was provided by Iraqi defectors of questionable credibility, was of little to no value, all at a cost of $150 billion, more than 300 dead American soldiers, and at least 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians. A prominent and callous epithet of such defectors mentioned in the above article is Khidhir Hamza, the self-claimed Iraqi atomic 'Bomb Maker.' Given a short lived assignment in the Iraqi nuclear program in 1987 to lead the atomic bomb design team, he was kicked out a few months later for petty theft... He retired from the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in 1989 and became a college lecturer, a stock market swindler and a shady business middle-man."

Robert Parry writes about the history of the "Team B" model of distorting intelligence for political purposes. The latest "Team B" is William Luti's Office of Special Plans (OSP), that manipulated intelligence to make a bogus case for the Iraq War. The blueprint for this scheme originated back when Bush Sr. was CIA Director. He appointed a "Team B" commission under Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, that exaggerated the Soviet Threat. The "Team B" model was integrated into the bureaucracy of the CIA during the Reagan Years. Unmentioned in this report is that Rumsfeld has headed other Team B's, such as one on North Korea during the Clinton years. While this Team B blasted Clinton for being too soft on North Korea, it overlooked DIA reports that Bush family and rightwing benefactor Rev. Moon had paid the North Korean military leadership millions (ConsortiumNews.com has articles about this, too). This article also describes how George Tenet ingratiated himself with the Bushes over a decade ago.

"The Bush administration lied to Congress to pave the way for war with Iraq, alleged... Ray McGovern, 64, who was a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990. The Bush administration's deception of the American people began a year ago, according to McGovern. It was then that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson made a trip to Africa to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking uranium to build nuclear weapons. Wilson reported to the Bush administration that the allegations were false. But the Bush administration reported to Congress that intelligence indicated Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Resident Bush also gave 'many' speeches linking Iraq to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, McGovern said. 'Never have I seen such a cynically orchestrated campaign over a year and a half,' he said. 'Only a few weeks ago did Bush admit that Iraq was not involved in any way with 9/11.'"

"A suspicious sample of biological material recently found by U.S. weapons hunters in Iraq probably was purchased legally from a U.S. organization in the 1980s and is a substance that has never been successfully used to produce a weapon, experts said. The discovery of the hidden vial of C. botulinum Okra B, which was revealed in an Oct. 2 interim report by chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay, was highlighted in speeches by Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell and other senior administration officials as proof that Saddam Hussein's government maintained an illicit bio-weapons program before the war. The significance of the vial is one of several elements of Kay's report that are being called into question by U.S. biowarfare experts and former United Nations weapons inspectors... The vial of botulinum B - about 2 inches high and half an inch wide - was the only suspicious biological material Kay reported finding." Bush lied AGAIN - Impeach Bush Now!

"American officials in Baghdad have identified at least 30 businesses and individuals in the United States that investigators said they suspect sold tens of millions of dollars in military technology to Iraq before the war. Atop the list of suspects... is a father-and-son team from San Diego charged Wednesday with selling gunboats to Saddam Hussein's government." Okay, but why aren't they also investigating who sold Hussein WMDs and other arms during the 80's -- and up to the invasion of Kuwait in '91? These loans and deals were arranged by Bush Sr., and Reagan's envoy, Donald Rumsfeld -- through the Agriculture Dept and the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). Companies involved in the Iraqgate scandal include Bechtel, Honeywell, Bell Helicopter, Unisys, Rockwell, Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Eastman Kodak and Wackenhut. Bush Sr. ultimately left the US taxpayers holding $2 Billion in defaulted Iraqi debt. (Enter "Bechtel" in our search engine. Also, enter "Iraqgate").

"The person responsible for analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat for Colin Powell says the Secretary of State misinformed Americans during his speech at the U.N. last winter. Greg Thielmann tells Correspondent Scott Pelley that at the time of Powell's speech, Iraq didn't pose an imminent threat to anyone -- not even its own neighbors. 'I think my conclusion [about Powell's speech] now is that it's probably one of the low points in his long distinguished service to the nation,' says Thielmann. Pelley's report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes II, Wednesday, Oct. 15 at 8 p.m. ET/PT. Thielmann also tells Pelley that he believes the decision to go to war was made first and then the intelligence was interpreted to fit that conclusion. 'The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence,' says Thielmann."

"David Kay's interim report on whether Saddam Hussein had a serious program to build WMD - an investigation that Kay and 1,500 agents from the Pentagon have been conducting for three months now - is a shockingly lame piece of work. Bush has insisted that the report proves Saddam 'was a danger to the world' and thus vindicates the war. Colin Powell chimed in that the Kay report left him 'even more convinced that we did the right thing.' These statements were mustered to counter criticisms from Democratic senators who proclaimed that it proves only that Bush had no basis for whipping up prewar fears of an imminent Iraqi danger. A close reading of the actual, unclassified report... reveals not only that Bush's critics are closer to the mark, but something much more significant: that Saddam wanted and, in some cases, tried to resurrect the weapons programs that he had built in the 1980s, but that the United Nations sanctions and inspections prevented him from doing so."

"Anthrax was discounted as a threat by Australian military leaders 10 days before the Iraq war started," reports the Australia Herald Sun. "A controversial anthrax inoculation program for Australian soldiers and sailors was secretly suspended before the first shots were fired... Australian defence chiefs rated the anthrax threat so low they ordered a complete stop to inoculations just two weeks after the invasion began on March 20. They kept the decision from the Australian public, and 52 sailors and other personnel who refused the vaccine were told they were sent back to Australia for their own safety." In Bush's military, soldiers refusing the dangerous, unnecessary vaccines are given DISHONORABLE DISCHARGES! All for the "safety" of pharmaceutical company profits.

Josh Marshall: "From the Department of Says It All: 'Kay's discovery of one vial of a reference strain of botulinum toxin that an Iraqi scientist had stored in his refrigerator in 1993 at his government's request was described by Bush on Friday as a piece of evidence that Iraq was prepared to have prohibited biological weapons.' From Walter Pincus' piece in Monday's Post."

Glen Rangwala writes, "For at least 10 years David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, has staked his professional and business reputation on the case that Iraq was a serious threat. He was a frequent pundit on US television, making the case for regime change in blunt language. He called the attempt by Kofi Annan to broker an effective inspections process in 1998 'worse than useless'; claimed in 2002 that Iraq was pursuing WMD in order to bring about the elimination of the state of Israel; and said before entering Iraq that the Coalition would find not just a 'smoking gun', but a 'smoking arsenal'. Until October last year, Mr Kay was the vice-president of a major San Diego-based defence contractor, SAIC, co-ordinating its homeland security and counter-terrorism initiatives. It was while he held this role that he claimed that Iraq could launch terrorist attacks on the US mainland." SAIC ok'd Maryland's use of electronic voting machines to steal elections.

Cambridge University WMD expert Dr Glen Rangwala is the man who famously exposed Tony Blair's dossier on Iraqi WMD as a forgery. After examining David Kay's $300 million report, he concludes that all of its major claims - those cited by Bush on Friday - are lies. Lie #1) an Iraqi biologist had a vial of live C botulinum Okra B from which a biological agent can be produced. In reality, this would have taken weeks to weaponize, and there was no evidence of such activity. Lie #2) Iraq was building missiles with a range significantly beyond 150KM. In reality, Iraq was doing research, which was allowed under UN sanction. Lie #3: Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories ...suitable for continuing CBW research." In reality, there is no evidence of any actual research.

"An expert close to the U.N. nuclear watchdog Friday cast doubt on new U.S. claims that Saddam Hussein 's Iraq had been planning to revive its atomic weapons program until the U.S. invasion in March. Speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, the expert close to the International Atomic Energy Agency said David Kay's report was largely based on 'statements and opinions by scientists and officials with no apparent supporting evidence.' Kay, head of the U.S.-led team which has been searching for evidence of Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in postwar Iraq, said Thursday his team had found no stocks of such arms. But he said there was 'evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons.'"

"Chief U.S. weapons searcher David Kay reported he had found no WMD's in Iraq... 'We have not found at this point actual weapons,' he said... On biological weapons, a single vial of a strain of botulinum, a poison that can be used as a weapon, located at the home of a known biological weapons scientist. On chemical weapons, multiple sources told the weapons hunting group that Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled program after 1991. There had been reports that Iraq retained some of its old chemical weapons but Kay said none had been found. On nuclear weapons, Kay said that despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, 'to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.' But on missiles, Kay said the team had 'discovered sufficient evidence to date to conclude that the Iraqi regime was committed to delivery system improvements.'"

"The Bush administration is seeking more than $600 million from Congress to continue the hunt for conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein's government had an illegal weapons program, officials said Wednesday. The money, part of the White House's request for $87 billion in supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, comes on top of at least $300 million that has already been spent on the weapons search, the officials said... While the [earlier] Exploitation Task Force worked out of an abandoned palace and the servants' housing quarters near Baghdad airport and remained short of vehicles, air support, computers and even electricity during the initial months of the weapons hunt, the [new] Iraq Survey Group spent its first weeks installing air-conditioned trailers, a new dining facility, state-of-the-art software and even a sprinkler system for a new lawn." We demand an end to the Iraq WMD charade - cut all funds and impeach Bush now!

This article by Cheryl Seal gives a pretty good clue: "Until 2002, David Kay was VP of SAIC, a company with close ties to the Pentagon and Bush administration. Kay is rumored to still hold a big chunk of stock in SAIC. In 2001, SAIC was commissioned by G. W. Bush to construct a replica of a mobile WMD laboratory of the sort used by Saddam. This mock up, supposedly destined to be used to train teams searching for WMDs in Iraq, was designed by Stephen Hatfill, the WMD expert now being harangued into isolation and thus silence by Bush's FBI. Last spring, the Bush administration handed SAIC some of the biggest defense contract plums to be had -a billion-dollar chunk of the NexGen business and an unbelievably porky 10-year contract worth over $600 million." Btw - this week, just before Kay's report was released, the FBI officially apologized for Hatfill's persecution - looks like Bush is trying to sweep up the SAIC tracks!

NY Times editorial page editor Gail Collins writes as if Fox News is pointing a gun to her head. She pleads and begs for their understanding and cowers out of fear that they might pull the trigger at any moment. This editorial on Bush's failure to find WMD's in Iraq is a perfect case study in Collins contortions. Why doesn't Collins just come out and state the simple truth that BUSH LIED to the American people and the world? Why doesn't Collins take the obvious next step and demand the resignation or impeachment of Bush? Write letters@nytimes.com

Iraq WMD hunter David Kay has come up empty - COMPLETELY empty. But when he testifies before Congress next week will he tell the truth - the whole truth - and nothing but they truth? Fuggeddaboutit. Kay, who is in Washington this week finishing the document, is "still gathering information from the field," the CIA's chief spokesman, Bill Harlow, said yesterday. "Don't expect any firm conclusions. He will not rule in or rule out anything." Last month, after testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay told reporters that his team had "found some physical evidence." He added: "I think it's very likely that we will discover remarkable surprises in this enterprise." There is only one "remarkable surprise" - Bush LIED to the American people and the world. Impeach Bush Now!

"An investigation of files and archive film for my TV documentary Breaking The Silence, together with interviews with former intelligence officers and senior Bush officials have revealed that Bush and Blair knew all along that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed. Both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat ... On February 24 2001, Powell said: [Saddam] 'has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.' This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public. Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of 'containment' that had effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of what Blair said time and again. On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to 'build his military back up or to develop WMDs for 'the last 10 years'."

William E. Jackson Jr. writes, "A New York Times story on Sept. 16, 'Senior U.S. Official to Level Weapons Charges Against Syria,' was the most important to appear under the sole byline of Judith Miller since her mea culpa of July 20 in which she revised history as previously published by the Times. But her latest story subjected the slant of her reporting to new criticism, as it appeared that she was, once again, the 'drop' of choice for a politically motivated leaker. There was no follow-up by Miller in the Times the next day... Did Miller break credible hard news -- or only flack for hawks in the government, an all-too-familiar role for her over the last two years as she wrote a batch of stories supporting allegations that Iraq was developing and producing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons?" We demand the Times fire Judith Miller for lying America into war!

One of the reasons cited by the Bush administration for invading Iraq was Saddam's alleged stockpiling of smallpox as a WMD. But now the top U.S. scientists on "Team Pox," who have spent 6 months searching for smallpox, say that any stocks, if they existed, have long since been destroyed. Yet, in February, Colin Powell categorically stated Saddam had smallpox WMDs. And, just ONE WEEK AGO, Dick Cheney expressed "smallpox fears" as one of the "valid" reasons for invading Iraq. The only purpose the smallpox lie served, besides helping to trump up an invasion? The sale by pharmaceutical companies of millions upon millions of smallpox vaccine. Quite a killing, eh?

From Reuters: "Former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix now believes Iraq destroyed its weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago and that intelligence agencies were wrong in their weapons assessment that led to war. In an interview with Australian radio from Sweden, Blix said the search for evidence of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons would probably only uncover documents at best."

VOA News reports: "A senior official in Iraq's new science ministry says the country never revived its nuclear program after U.N. inspectors dismantled it in the 1990's. Abbas Balasem, an official of the new U.S.-backed administration in Baghdad, said Tuesday Iraqi scientists had no way to re-start the program because the inspectors took away all the necessary resources. The former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix echoed those sentiments, telling Australian radio he believes Iraq destroyed almost all of the weapons of mass destruction it had in the summer of 1991 - a position Iraq constantly maintained."

Josh Marshall writes, "The Sunday Times of London is reporting that 'Britain and America have decided to delay indefinitely the publication of a full report on Iraq's WMDs after inspectors found no evidence that any such weapons exist.' Let's be honest: there's no reason for delaying or refusing to issue this report, save for domestic political concerns in the US and Britain. None.... 1400 scientists, military and intelligence officials have been scouring the country for 4 months and interrogating most of the Iraqi government officials and scientists involved in weapons procurement and research. That's more than long enough to produce a preliminary report. The only question is whether it is published.... Here's the bottom line: the only reason for suppressing the Kay Report is to stymie the political debate within the US. That's unacceptable. Congress should demand the release of Kay's report - even if redacted in some form. No more game playing. Let the chips fall where they may."

"The chief expert on WMDs at the CIA, which was caught up in the recent storm over the invasion of Iraq, is quitting the agency next month after 26 years. Alan Foley, who heads the Weapons Intelligence, Non-proliferation and Arms Control Centre, became enmeshed in the row over inclusion of a bogus reference to Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Niger, in Bush's State of the Union address. In a note to colleagues, he alluded to the 'pressures' of recent months but denied he had been forced to leave. US officials have said White House national security council weapons expert Bob Joseph discussed the uranium line with Foley, but there were differing recollections about who said what. In one version, Joseph asked CIA's Foley if it was OK to use the uranium line and cite the British as the source. In another version, Foley told Joseph that the CIA had recommended the British not include the claim in their September 2002 Iraq dossier but the British included it anyway."

From Reuters: "British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon's fate may be sealed on Thursday when a parliamentary committee issues a report, which a newspaper said would accuse Hoon of 'misleading' a probe into the case for war on Iraq. The Evening Standard said the Intelligence and Security Committee would say Hoon misled its investigation into the arguments for war in Iraq, an accusation that, if true, could be seen to merit his resignation. But another newspaper, The Times, said the report will not be as damaging to Hoon as an earlier leak had suggested. But the British media is almost unanimous that Hoon's career will not survive an inquiry into the suicide of weapons scientist David Kelly, who killed himself in July after being named as the source for a reporter's claim that politicians 'sexed up' intelligence to justify war."

Greg Mitchell is editor of "Editor and Publisher", a leading trade publication for journalists. He writes, "Some time in the next two weeks, David Kay, head of the Iraqi Survey Group, is expected to finally release a crucial report on his findings so far in his search for weapons of destruction. 'I am confident that when people see what David Kay puts forward they will see that there was no question that such weapons exist, existed, and so did the programs to develop more,' Colin Powell said Sunday. 'We did not try to hype it or blow it out of proportion.' Since no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) have been found in Iraq, close observers now report that Kay is likely to drop on the media a massive weapon of his own: hundreds or thousands of pages of summaries and documents purporting to prove that Saddam Hussein had WMDs recently (and hid them) and/or had numerous WMD programs underway that we succeeded in pre-empting... Would the media possibly fall for this?" Just watch!

"Iraq may have been truthful when it told the UN Security Council in December that it did not have chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, [Blix] said. The declaration, submitted December 7, was quickly dismissed as false and incomplete by the U.S. and U.K., which accused Baghdad of failing to disarm as required by UNSC Resolution 1441. These charges were later used to justify the invasion of the country in late March.... 'With this long period, I'm inclined to think that the Iraqi statement that they destroyed all the biological and chemical weapons, which they had in the summer of 1991 may well be the truth,' Blix told CNN.... A US investigative team headed top CIA weapons analyst David Kay that began its own search shortly after the fall of Hussein is to present its preliminary findings later this month. But US officials indicate it may fail to produce any 'smoking gun' as well.... Resident Bush did not mention the search for the Iraqi WMDs in his televised address late Sunday."

"Hussein was apparently convinced that American forces would never invade Iraq and oust him from power." Wow, Saddam must be the stupidest man on earth -- even stupider than Bush! "U.S. sources say that captured Iraqis insist Saddam's top strategic objective was to persuade the UN to relax sanctions on his regime. So, after [the] head of his unconventional weapons programs defected in 1995, Saddam ordered intensified efforts to hide or destroy blueprints, 'dual use' technology and any remaining germs or chemicals. Not only was material stashed or obliterated, but records showing what had been destroyed were also pulped... But U.S. Defense analysts are paying more attention to a 'working hypothesis,' based on stories told by Iraqi captives, that no live WMD may ever be found. Some [anonymous] U.S. officials even think Iraqi defectors who surfaced before the war saying Saddam was still making WMD were double agents dispatched by Saddam [!] to spread disinformation to deter his enemies."

"U.N. inspectors found Iraq's nuclear program in disarray and unlikely to be able to support an active effort to build atomic weapons, the nuclear agency chief said Monday. Reiterating that his experts uncovered no evidence of such a program, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said... that there was 'no evidence that Iraq had resumed such activities.' ElBaradei stressed that his teams had to withdraw ahead of the U.S.-led war before they could complete their inspections. But he said what they saw in the months preceding their pullout suggested the Iraqis were in no position to build a nuclear weapon. 'The agency observed a substantial degradation in facilities, financial resources and programs throughout Iraq that might support a nuclear infrastructure,' ElBaradei said.... 'The former cadre of nuclear experts was being increasingly dispersed and many key figures were reaching retirement or had left the country.'"

AP reports, "No weapons of mass destruction have turned up in Iraq, nor has any solid new evidence for them turned up in Washington or London. But what about Baghdad's patchy bookkeeping - the gaps that led U.N. inspectors to list Iraqi nerve agents and bioweapons material as unaccounted for? Ex-inspectors now say, five months after the U.S. invasion, that the 'unaccountables' may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years ago... Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix, as he left his post this summer, became more open in discussing discrepancies. After the mid-1990s, 'hardly ever did (inspectors) find hidden weapons,' Blix reminded one audience. 'What they found was bad accounting. 'It could be true they (Iraq) did destroy unilaterally in 1991 what they hid.'" Bush - and the corporate media - knew this was true ALL ALONG. Bush lied and thousands died - and more die Americans and Iraqis every day. Impeach Bush Now!

The Moonie Times reports, "A secret report for the Joint Chiefs of Staff lays the blame for setbacks in Iraq on a flawed and rushed war-planning process that 'limited the focus' for preparing for post-Saddam Hussein operations. The report, prepared last month, said the search for weapons of mass destruction was planned so late in the game that it was impossible for U.S. Central Command to carry out the mission effectively... Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage conceded in recent weeks that the Bush administration failed to predict the guerrilla war against American troops in Iraq. Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters have killed more than 60 soldiers since May 1, mostly with roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades... Most war planning was conducted by Gen. Tommy Franks at U.S. Central Command; the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the direction of Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman; and the Pentagon policy-writing shop led by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith." Fire them ALL!

"Hans Blix felt Washington was intimidating him to produce reports that would justify military action in the run-up to the Iraq war, says the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Elbaradei does not believe Iraq tried to revive its clandestine nuclear weapons program, despite continued claims by Bush and Blair. ElBaradei said Blix got the brunt of the bullying, however. 'I think there were probably more efforts to intimidate Hans Blix, because there were more serious concerns about chemical and biological (weapons).' Elbarabei says claims by Bush and Blair that Saddam had reconstituted its secret nuke program were unfounded. 'I would be very surprised if we were to discover that there was a nuclear weapons programme restarted in Iraq." So, Tony...what was that about your resignation?

Moonie site WorldTribune.com reports, "U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have finally been located. Unfortunately, getting to them will be nearly impossible for the US and its allies, because the containers with the strategic materials are not in Iraq. Instead they are located in Lebanon's heavily-fortified Bekaa Valley, swarming with Iranian and Syrian forces, and Hizbullah and ex-Iraqi agents, Geostrategy-Direct.com will report Wednesday. U.S. intelligence first identified a stream of tractor-trailer trucks moving from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon in January 2003. The significance of this sighting did not register on the CIA at the time. U.S. intelligence sources believe the area contains extended-range Scud-based missiles and parts for chemical and biological warheads." Karl Rove is hard at work, leaking bogus "intelligence" that will percolate up to right-wing talk shows and then to the PentaPost and NY Times. No more lies - impeach Bush now!

Iraq expert and blogger Prof. Juan Cole writes, "Former chief UN weapons inspector Richard Butler is raising the question of why the US is not sharing what Tariq Aziz and others have told them about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. (All the speculation that Chemical Ali, just apprehended, will finally spill the beans is silly; Tariq Aziz knows as much or more than he does).... Uh, Mr. Butler, the answer seems pretty obvious. Scott Ritter was right, and the Iraqis destroyed all or almost all of their WMD stockpiles and mothballed all or almost all of their programs. There have been numerous statements to the press by high Iraqi officials to this effect. If it weren't true, the US would have gleefully demonstrated the contrary. The US silence is the sheepish toe-swinging of a little boy caught in a tall tale that produced major carnage."

Newsweek reports: "Things quickly began to go wrong with the Obeidi story. True, Obeidi said he'd buried the centrifuge equipment, as he'd been ordered to do in 1991 by Saddam's son Qusay Hussein and son-in-law Hussein Kamel. But he also insisted to the CIA that, in effect, that was that: Saddam had never reconstituted his centrifuge program afterward, in large part because of the Iraqi tyrant's fear of being discovered under the U.N. sanctions-and-inspections regime... He also told the CIA that, as the International Atomic Energy Agency and many technical experts have said, the aluminum tubes were intended for rockets, not uranium enrichment or a nuclear-weapons program... Albright and others suggest that, with the Obeidi case, the message being sent by the Bush administration to Iraqi scientists being interrogated in Iraq is a troublesome one: if you don't tell us what we want to hear, you won't be rewarded. In fact, things might even get a little unpleasant for you."

Josh Marshall writes: "We know that the Iraqis had a biological weapons program and that there were biological weapons in the country. That's wholly undisputed. If Kay produces substantial evidence of such weapons in 1995 or 1998, that's meaningless. What we're trying to figure out is whether he had them in the period when we were considering going to war. What many suspect is that Kay is going to pull an intel version of a classic 1990s-era document dump. In other words, come forward with a mound of documents detailing the Iraqis' extensive programs, their histories, the means used to conceal them, whom they imported parts from, and so forth. And then conveniently leave as a footnote the fact that these programs had gone pretty dormant by 2002." Brings to mind the 'damning' Cox-Dicks congressional report on Chinagate. Buried deep in that document dump was the fact that the key secrets were lost under Reagan-Bush, not Clinton (enter 'chinagate' in the Democrats.com search engine).

Julian Borger writes: "The former UN inspector hired by the Bush administration to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction will claim in a report next month that Iraqi forces were ordered to fire chemical shells at invading coalition troops, according to US reports. But David Kay, who heads the 1,400-strong Iraq Survey Group, has admitted he has found no trace of the weapons themselves, and cannot explain why they were never used. One possibility is that the orders were part of an elaborate bluff, in the hope that they would be intercepted by the US and deter an attack." Or more likely, this is a Karl Rove concocted bluff --- another red herring to obscure the fact that Bush Lied, Thousands Died.

Here is BLOCKBUSTER revelation about Bush's Iraq WMD lies: "A former Energy Department intelligence chief who agreed with the White House claim that Iraq had reconstituted its defunct nuclear-arms program was awarded a total of $20,500 in bonuses during the build-up to the war, WorldNetDaily has learned. Thomas Rider... overruled senior intelligence officers on his staff in voting for the position at a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting at CIA headquarters last September... Rider ordered them to 'shut up and sit down' ... With Rider and Energy on board, the vote for the position that Baghdad had restarted its defunct nuclear program was a nearly unanimous 5-1... 'It is noteworthy that although DOE assessed that the tubes probably were not part of Iraq's nuclear program, DOE agreed that reconstitution was under way,' CIA Director George Tenet said in a four-page statement defending the NIE on Iraq." DoE Secretary Spencer Abraham paid the bribe - we demand a Special Prosecutor!

Karl Rove's stenographer Robert Novak writes, "Former international weapons inspector David Kay, now seeking Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for the Pentagon, has privately reported successes that are planned to be revealed to the public in mid-September. Kay has told his superiors he has found substantial evidence of biological weapons in Iraq, plus considerable missile development. He has been less successful in locating chemical weapons, and has not yet begun a substantial effort to locate progress toward nuclear arms. Senior officials in the Bush administration believe Kay's weapons discoveries should have been revealed as they were made. However, a decision, approved by Bush, was made to wait until more was discovered and then announce it -- probably in September." Get ready for a new Bushit propaganda offensive, full of alleged "evidence" that the corporate media reports in its headlines as PROOF of Saddam's WMD, which will all prove to be yet more Bushit.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace writes, "We have compiled major statements by senior Bush Administration officials on Iraq's capabilities to manufacture and hide chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and delivery systems." Here it is - all the lies, all in one place. For example: Cheney-Meet The Press, March 16, 2003: "We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons and we believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons." Rumsfeld-Press Briefing, June 24, 2003: "I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that Iraqis had nuclear weapons. I don't know anybody in any government or any intelligence agency who suggested that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons. That's fact number one." Ah yes, facts are stubborn things.

"The prime minister of Niger, Hama Hamadou, has demanded that British prime minister Tony Blair put up or shut up over his continued allegations that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium from the African country. In his first interview since it was claimed that his country had been approached by Iraq, Hamadou told Britain's Sunday Telegraph, on July 28, that Blair must produce proof of the allegation. Niger had never had diplomatic or bilateral relations with Iraq, he said, accusing the British and US government of mistreating his country, which sent 500 troops to support the Gulf War in 1991, by making the claim... Pointing out that neither Britain nor the US has made a formal accusation of any wrongdoing by his government, he said that the claim originated in efforts by those governments to win public support for their war against Iraq. 'Everybody knows that the claims are untrue,' he added."

From the Sunday Herald: "Pure uranium oxide which could be used in the making of a 'dirty nuclear bomb' capable of killing countless people is being offered for sale in a Basra souk for $250,000. Senior American officials have confirmed that rampant looting was discovered by US marines arriving at the al-Tuwaitha nuclear site on April 7. The Sunday Herald source, who cannot be named for fear of reprisals, was approached by black marketeers in Basra and asked if he would help sell the material. He said: 'The cylinders are about a foot long, grey in colour with a red band around the top. The skull and crossbones warning logo, and the label 'pure uranium oxide' are clearly marked in English.'" Mission accomplished? Bush's War has made the world less safe!

AP reports: "A close aide to Saddam Hussein says the Iraqi dictator did in fact get rid of his weapons of mass destruction but deliberately kept the world guessing about it in an effort to divide the international community and stave off a U.S. invasion. The strategy, which turned out to be a serious miscalculation, was designed to make the Iraqi dictator look strong in the eyes of the Arab world, while countries such as France and Russia were wary of joining an American-led attack...Saddam's alleged weapons bluff was detailed by an Iraqi official who assisted Saddam for many years. The official was not part of the national leadership but his job provided him daily contact with the dictator and insight into the regime's decision-making process during the past decade and in its critical final days." The 'bluff' part of this story smells like a Karl Rove/Alastair Campbell disinformation story.

AP reports: "David Kay... a special adviser for the weapons search, said inspectors have found physical evidence of Iraqi activity on weapons of mass destruction, but he declined to discuss details... He said investigators had made a 'tactical and strategic decision' to focus on biological rather than on chemical or nuclear programs... The Senate Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, expressed concern that the searches are being diverted away from finding actual weapons. 'Signs of a weapons program are very different than the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that were a certainty before the war,' Rockefeller said. 'We did not go to war to disrupt Saddam's weapons program, we went to disarm him.' 'It's looking more and more like a case of mass deception,' Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., said after Kay briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee. 'There was no imminent danger, and we should never have gone to war'."

"Iraqi scientists who have been questioned by U.S. officials have continued to deny that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. Four senior scientists and more than a dozen lower level ones who worked for the Iraqi government have denied that Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program or that he had developed and hidden biological and chemical weapons since United Nations weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the newspaper said, citing administration officials." Hey, Bushfeld - what was that you promised about Iraqi scientists supporting your claims?

Colin Powell has escaped much of the furor over Yellowcake-gate because he dropped it from his high-profile UN presentation on 2-5-03, knowing that it was bushit. But Powell "accused Iraq of importing special aluminum tubes as evidence that Baghdad was still working on a programme to produce atomic weapons" - even though his own Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) told him that was bushit also. Powell should resign - or be fired - for lying to the world.

UK's Sunday Herald reports, "Britain ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq. Operation Rockingham, established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defence in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD programme and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down. The existence of Operation Rockingham has been confirmed by Scott Ritter... The rebel Labour MP and Father of the House, Tam Dalyell, said he would raise the Sunday Herald's investigation into Operation Rockingham in the Commons on Thursday and demand an explanation from the government about selective intelligence. Ritter has also offered to give evidence to parliament." Stay tuned - this story could EXPLODE.

Michelangelo Signorile writes, "You do have to wonder how these guys could bungle things in such a big way. The fact that they thought we'd all accept the excuse that they were just quoting the British... is pretty mind-boggling. Is it all due to arrogance, with the Bushies starting to believe the lazy media's own claims that this is such a 'disciplined,' 'tightly wound,' 'on-message' crew? Why would the administration go to such lengths, inserting a dubious line in a speech, when it already had the American people wrapped around its fingers? After all, our catatonic, fear-instilled public - as well as most Democrats in Congress - had been manipulated since 9/11 and was ready and willing to wage war based on much less evidence than the sale of the uranium. There seemed to be no reason to pump up the intelligence - unless, of course, the administration's entire case for war was in danger of falling down like a house of (most-wanted) cards." Exactly - it was all Bushit.

Jack Shafer writes: "If reporters who live by their sources were obliged to die by their sources, New York Times reporter Judith Miller would be stinking up her family tomb right now. In the 18-month run-up to the war on Iraq, Miller grew incredibly close to numerous Iraqi sources, both named and anonymous, who gave her detailed interviews about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Yet 100 days after the fall of Baghdad, none of the sensational allegations about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons given to Miller have panned out, despite the furious crisscrossing of Iraq by U.S. weapons hunters... Judith Miller finds everybody associated with the failed search theoretically culpable except Judith Miller. This rings peculiar because Miller, more than any other reporter, showcased the WMD speculations and intelligence findings by the Bush administration and the Iraqi defector/dissidents. Our WMD expectations, such as they were, grew largely out of Miller's stories."

WSWS.org writes: "The assassination of the Hussein brothers has further undermined the claim that the US went to war to prevent the Iraqi regime from developing or using weapons of mass destruction (WMD). According to Judith Miller in the July 23 New York Times, Qusay Hussein 'was also responsible for overseeing Iraq's unconventional weapons. ... Qusay would have known, for instance, 'whether they had chemical weapons, how many they had, and where they were deployed.' ... Finally, he said, Qusay would have known not the exact hiding places but the 'broad brushes of the concealment policy and practices --whether Saddam had destroyed or hidden weapons or the capability for just-in-time production, and what the goals of this concealment were.' Obviously, by taking the decision to murder Qusay, the US government and military expressed their total lack of interest in the existence of WMD and, in effect, acknowledged that such deadly and dangerous weapons do not exist."

"I am pleased to present a Special Friday Presentation: Meria With Scott Ritter!!! One full hour with former U.N. weapons inspector, 12 yr Marine, author and true American Patriot. This show will REPLAY for FREE all weekend long until Monday mornings live show.Scott tells it like it is in Iraq now and then. Why we cannot 'win' this war. How this Bush regime needs to be held accountable and impeached; the bravery of our troops in an illegal war, and so much more.I don't want to ruin the show by telling you too much, but it's one of the best I've done. (and I think the first Republican I've ever interviewed - lol). Scott is great, the information excellent. This is what being an American is all about and once again proves the value of freedom of speech and the airwaves."

Jason Leopold writes: "A half-dozen former CIA agents investigating prewar intelligence have found that a secret Pentagon committee, 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. The former CIA agents were asked to examine prewar intelligence last year by Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet. The former agents will present a final report on their findings to the Pentagon, the CIA and possibly Congress later this year... The ad hoc committee, called the Office of Special Plans, headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other Pentagon hawks."

From a 'Global Message' dated 9/26/02 that remains on the White House website. "The danger is grave and growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons and is rebuilding facilities to make more. It could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb -- and, with fissile material, could build one within a year. Iraq's regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist groups -- there are al-Qaida terrorists inside Iraq." And who authorized the publication of "sexed-up" lies on the White House web site? Karl, was that YOU?

"Did it start with a break-in? On the morning of Jan. 2, 2001, Italian police discovered that the Niger Embassy in Rome had been ransacked. Not much was reported missing - only a watch and two bottles of perfume - but someone had apparently rifled through embassy papers, leaving them strewn about the floor. Some months after the break-in, the Italian intelligence service - the SISME - obtained a stack of official-looking documents from an African diplomat... Agents of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, it appeared, were angling to purchase from the cash-starved, mineral-rich African nation some 500 tons of yellowcake... A bombshell in the war on terrorism? More like an exploding cigar. The documents, a series of letters dated from July to October 2000, were actually crude forgeries... Italian investigators... have theorized that the thieves who broke into the Niger Embassy had come looking for letterhead stationery and official seals that could be copied to create bogus documents."

The best Iraqi WMD witness US forces have found is a military intelligence officer who said he oversaw part of Iraq's chemical weapons program. He "asserted not only that stockpiles of banned weapons had been destroyed from 1995 to a few days before the war, but also that the weapons programs were devised to continue research and development after the chemical stockpiles were gone. Military experts and administration officials who confirmed that the military spent hours debriefing the Iraqi said similar claims had also been asserted by other deposed Iraqi officials now in detention. But they declined to comment on what proportion of the stockpiles he said had been destroyed early on or why the intelligence agencies did not know of the stockpile destruction." Apparently this witness substantially confirmed the 1995 testimony of Saddam's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who said he had destroyed all biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, but Judith Miller won't report that fact.

The Pentagon has incessantly claimed that its crack "mobile exploitation teams" (METs) will find Iraq's WMD's. But even Pentagon Pressstitute Judith Miller now admits the METs are a charade, because they are prohibited from talking to Iraqi scientists. Instead, they are restricted to inspecting suspect sites, all of which have turned out to be innocent. "We said this is useless," said Captain Cutchin of MET Bravo. "It [the list of suspect sites] is toilet paper for us." The intelligence on sites was often stunningly wrong, one senior officer agreed. "The teams would be given a packet, with pictures and a tentative grid," he said. "They would be told [metaphorically]: 'Go to this place. You will find a McDonald's there. Look in the fridge. You will find French fries, cheeseburger and Cokes.' And they would go there, and not only was there no fridge and no McDonald's, there was never even a thought of ever putting a McDonald's there. Day after day it was like that."

In a shocking article that has received little attention, the NY Times has conducted its investigation: "American intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was LITTLE NEW EVIDENCE flowing into American intelligence agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum." And that "little new evidence" (like the Niger Hoax) was all Bushit, possibly even planted overseas by Busheviks. Still, Bush declared "He is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon." Wolfowitz declared: "It is a case grounded in current intelligence." And Tenet declared Intelligence "comes to us from credible and reliable sources." Each of these statements is a lie. Impeach Bush Now!

Here is a very important report from Canada that will certainly be ignored by the US media. "A conference of top-level military analysts was told Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - a message that later fell on deaf ears in the American capital, analysts say. Former Canadian military officer-turned-analyst, Sunil Ram remembers the June 2001 conference 'Understanding the Lessons of Nuclear Inspections and Monitoring in Iraq: A Ten-Year Review.' What he heard at the meeting he has repeated for months, he says, getting little attention from the mainstream media: that Bush had no grounds to base the invasion of Iraq on the disarmament issue."

David Kelly's suicide resulted from a BBC story by Andrew Gilligan that claimed Bush's flak Alastair Campbell "sexed up" intelligence reports by claiming Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in 45 minutes. According to PentaPost, "The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a 'Global Message' issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq 'could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given.'" Bush didn't even ask the CIA about this bogus "fact" - he just lied to the American people. Impeach Bush Now!

Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba, who writes for Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Panorama Magazine, claimed responsibility for delivering the Niger Uranium forgery to the US Embassy in Rome. Burba said her source "in the past proved to be reliable," but she would not disclose the name. Was it Berlusconi, or his own Karl Rove? Burba was suspicious of the story, so she traveled to Niger. Upon her return, she told Panorama's top editor "the story seemed fake to me," and the magazine refused to publish it. The State Department reviewed the document and came to the same conclusion, and so did the CIA. But Condi Rice's National Security Council staff ignored the warnings and put it into Bush speech. And since Bush doesn't "fact check," the rest is history...

Yellowcake-gate is just the tip of the iceberg of Iraq nuke lies. In his SOTU, Bush also declared: "Our intelligence sources tell us that (President Saddam Hussein) has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." And on March 16, three days before the U.S.-British invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney said Iraq was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons" and even that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons." But Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, who headed a uranium-enrichment unit vital to Iraq's pre-1991 bomb plans, told the CIA "that since '91 they hadn't resurrected a nuclear weapon program," and that the aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were for powering conventional rockets, not for separating uranium. Impeach Bush Now!

John Dean writes that Bush's "claim that these WMDs posed an imminent threat was his primary argument in favor of war... What I found, in critically examining Bush's evidence, is not pretty. The African uranium matter 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... So egregious and serious are Bush's misrepresentations that they appear to be a deliberate effort to mislead Congress and the public. So arrogant and secretive is the Bush White House that only a special prosecutor can effectively answer and address these troubling matters. Since the Independent Counsel statute has expired, the burden is on Bush to appoint a special prosecutor - and if he fails to do so, he should be held accountable by Congress and the public."

Cheryl Seal reports: "Whenever David Kay makes the rounds of the Bush-controlled media these days, he is always introduced only as 'former UN chief weapons inspector' and 'senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Research.' In short, Kay skips over several years of his interim history. Why? Maybe because during the 'missing years,' he was Vice President of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a company with extremely close ties to the Pentagon and to the Bush administration in particular. A company up to its armpits in post-war Iraqi business, not to mention secret contracts rumored to involve electronic spying. A company in which Kay is rumored to still hold a sizeable chunk of stock, one where he maintains a rich network of inside connections. No conflict of interest here, eh?"

AP reports, "Italian intelligence services did not give the United States and Britain documents indicating that Iraq sought uranium in Africa to make nuclear weapons, the government said Sunday, denying media reports that it had a role in passing on the disputed claims... 'The news reported by various information organizations, national and foreign, concerning Italy's claimed transmission to other intelligence organizations of documents of Niger or Iraqi origin, conveying evidence relative to uranium transactions between Niger and Iraq are without any foundation,' Premier Silvio Berlusconi's office said in a statement. 'The Italian information services, in fact, never provided any documents having such content and origin,' it said." So where DID the hoax originate? Isn't that what "intelligence" agencies are supposed to find out???

AP reports: "A top U.N. weapons hunter says it would have been 'virtually impossible' for Iraq to revive a nuclear bomb program with equipment recently dug up from a Baghdad backyard, as the Bush administration contends. Jacques Baute said the long-term monitoring of Iraq's nuclear establishment planned by the U.N. Security Council would have stifled any attempt to build a huge uranium-enrichment plant for making bomb material... Baute also said in an interview with The Associated Press that it appears the unearthed cache of uranium enrichment parts, surrendered by an Iraqi scientist last month, lacked critical components, and its accompanying blueprints were marred by errors... An enrichment plant, a vast array of thousands of centrifuges, would have been easily detected, said Baute, who once helped build French nuclear bombs. To have turned it into a full-blown enrichment program while OMV was in place would have been virtually impossible,' he said of the Obeidi equipment."

Eleanor Clift writes: "Claiming that Iraq tried to buy uranium from the African country of Niger wasn't a judgment call. By the White House's own admission, it was a fraud, a lie. The envoy sent to investigate the intelligence in February 2002, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, sought out the information and informed the administration. The only question is how high up the food chain his report got. Did it stop at low-level officials as the White House claims, or did it go all the way to the resident and vice resident? Wilson is not some wild-eyed lefty. He had experience in Iraq and North Africa, and completely understood his mission. He only revealed his identity a week ago in the face of continued insistence by the White House that it had no idea the documents were forged. CIA director George Tenet sent Wilson to Niger after Vice Resident Cheney asked for an investigation. Wilson asks why Cheney's office would demand this inquiry and not want to know the result."

From a New York Times editorial: "We're glad that someone in Washington has finally taken responsibility for letting Bush make a false accusation about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program in the State of the Union address last January, but the matter will not end there. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, stepped up to the issue yesterday when he said the C.I.A. had approved Mr. Bush's speech and failed to advise him to drop the mistaken charge that Iraq had recently tried to import significant quantities of uranium from an African nation, later identified as Niger. Now the American people need to know how the accusation got into the speech in the first place, and whether it was put there with an intent to deceive the nation. The White House has a lot of explaining to do."

The UK Independent reports: "Tony Blair's first Iraq weapons dossier used material culled from the internet to buttress the Government's case for war - exactly as the now-discredited second, so-called dodgy dossier did. The document, released last September, shows at least six separate items on Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction were lifted from reports up to 21 months old. The revelation will be acutely embarrassing to the Prime Minister who, only this week, defended the first dossier robustly, and insisted it supported the need for action."

"George Tenet gave Congress and the White House the accountability they demanded, declaring Friday that the blame for... Bush's false allegation about an Iraqi nuclear deal rested squarely with him and his agency. The CIA should never have let Mr. Bush repeat a British report that Iraq was seeking uranium from the African country of Niger when U.S. intelligence analysts could not corroborate it, Tenet said in a statement... 'Let me be clear about several things right up front,' he said. 'First, CIA approved the president's State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And third, the president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound.'" But the CIA and envoy Joseph Wilson warned Bush and Cheney repeatedly that the Niger Uranium story was untrue -- starting back in March 2002. So the Bush team didn't think to ask Tenet, Hey you told us back then it was bogus --- what makes you so sure now?

From TakeBacktheMedia.com: "Above - the article and graphic we pulled from MediaWhoresOnline and posted along with the link to the text at the CBS site. This was right before midnight PST. We urged fans to take this graphic and spread it far and wide - put it on blogs and sites everywhere and get the word out. But no. Look what showed up on the CBS site mere hours later!"

Fox News March 17, 2003: "The 25-member group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, composed mostly of former CIA analysts along with a few operational agents, is urging employees inside the intelligence agency to break the law and leak any information they have that could show the Bush administration is engineering the release of evidence to match its penchant for war. VIPS member Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran who gave intelligence briefings to top Reagan officials before retiring in 1990, said the administration has not made the case that Iraq has ties to Al Qaeda and is providing information that does not meet an intelligence professional's standard of proof. "It's been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy," McGovern said. 'That's why a lot of my former colleagues are holding their noses these days.'"

Months ago, ex-CIA agents warned that Bush was pushing the CIA to cook the intelligence on Iraq and to clear phony documents as "real." Now the administration is hanging the CIA out to dry: "The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency reviewed and cleared references to Iraq's attempt to buy uranium for nuclear weapons included in the January State of the Union speech, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said today, reports Reuters. Rice, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One. 'The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety,' Rice said in the briefing. 'The president did not knowingly say something we thought to be false. It is just outrageous to suggest that.'" Bet there are some CIA agents feeling pretty damned burnt long about now.

Julian Borger writes: "A former US intelligence official who served under the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq war accused the White House yesterday of lying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein... This was the first time an administration official has put his name to specific claims. The whistleblower, Gregory Thielmann, served as a director in the state department's bureau of intelligence until his retirement in September, and had access to the classified reports which formed the basis for the US case against Saddam, spelled out by President [sic] Bush and his aides. Mr Thielmannn said yesterday: 'I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq.' He conceded that part of the problem lay with US intelligence, but added: 'Most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided.'"

"It is not enough for the White House to issue a statement saying that... Bush should not have used that piece of intelligence in his State of the Union address at a time when he was trying to convince the American people that invading Iraq was in our national security interests. Did the president know then what he says he only knows now? If not, why not, since that information was available at the highest level. 'What else did the Bush Administration lie about? What other faulty information did Administration officials, including... Bush, tell the American people and the world? Did the Bush Administration knowingly deceive us and manufacture intelligence in order to build public support for the invasion of Iraq? Did Iraq really pose an imminent threat to our nation? These questions must be answered. The American people deserve to know the full truth.'"

"Senior administration officials told CBS News the President's [sic] claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was included in his State of the Union address over objections from the CIA. Before the speech was delivered, the portions dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were checked with the CIA for accuracy, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin." Bush lied, Americans Died!

(Ed. Note: Reposted from yesterday with correct link) From Reuters: "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Wednesday the United States did not go to war with Iraq because of dramatic new evidence of banned weapons but because it saw existing information on Iraqi arms programs [on what -- the programs you helped set up with your handshake and meeting with Saddam in 1983?] in a new light after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. 'The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit' of weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. 'We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light -- through the prism of our experience on 9-11.'"

Robert Scheer writes: "They may have finally found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, the incriminating evidence wasn't left in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces but rather in Vice President Dick Cheney's office."

The Financial Times reports: "The US government withheld from United Nations weapons inspectors evidence to back its claim that the Iraqi government had attempted to obtain uranium from Africa, despite repeated pledges to co-operate fully with the inspectors. In a letter released on Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it was forced to wait six weeks for the evidence - from December 2002 to early February 2003 - at a critical time, when it was investigating US charges that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear programme."

BBC.com reports: "Senior figures inside Whitehall no longer believe weapons of mass destruction are likely to turn up in Iraq, the BBC has learned. The BBC's political editor Andrew Marr says 'very senior sources' have virtually ruled out the possibility of finding weapons in Iraq. The development 'is of important political significance', he adds."

The BBC reports: "The CIA warned the US Government that claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions were not true months before President [sic] Bush used them to make his case for war, the BBC has learned. Doubts about a claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the African state of Niger were aired 10 months before Mr Bush included the allegation in his key State of the Union address this year, the CIA has told the BBC. On Tuesday, the White House for the first time officially acknowledged that the Niger claim was wrong and should not have been used in the p-resident's State of the Union speech in January. But the CIA has said that a former US diplomat had already established the claim was false in March 2002 - and that the information had been passed on to government departments, including the White House, well before Mr Bush mentioned it in the speech."

Walter Pincus writes: "The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time yesterday that President [sic] Bush should not have alleged in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. The statement was prompted by... the findings by the [British] House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee [which] undercut one of the Bush administration's main defenses for including the allegation in the resident's speech -- namely that despite the CIA's questions about the assertion, British intelligence was still maintaining that Iraq had indeed sought to buy uranium in Africa." Towards the end of this article, it's not clear as to whether US or UK "officials" are being quoted. An anonymous "official" now claims that "classified" documents show that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from two other countries. This smells like a Nixonian "modified limited hangout" -- to throw a new red herring out there.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports: "One of the [Australian] Prime Minister's justifications for war on Iraq was declared unreliable in a United States State Department alert to the Australian Government several months before. According to a former senior State Department official, CIA claims that the Iraqi regime had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program were strongly challenged by the State Department and the US Department of Energy, and this was made known to the Australian Government. The assertion by Greg Theilmann came as the US Government was accused of ignoring a report which rejected claims that Iraq had bought uranium from Niger, a premise ... George Bush, used to invade Iraq... Mr Theilmann's office had also investigated the Niger claims and rejected them in mid-2002. He had been shocked to hear Mr Bush on January 28 citing British intelligence reports claiming that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from an African country."

AP reports: "A former envoy sent by the CIA to Africa to investigate allegations about Iraq's nuclear weapons program contends the Bush administration might have manipulated his findings, possibly to strengthen the rationale for war. That conclusion came yesterday from Joseph Wilson, former US ambassador to the West African nation of Gabon, who was dispatched in February 2002 to investigate whether Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger... Writing in a New York Times op-ed piece, Wilson said it did not take him long 'to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.' In an interview on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' Wilson insisted his doubts of a Iraq-Niger connection reached the highest levels of government, including Vice Resident Dick Cheney's office. In fact, he said, Cheney's office inquired about the purported Niger-Iraq link." Eventually, "the United Nations determined the uranium reports were based predominantly on forged documents."

Time reports: "Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, Resident Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, 'Are you in charge of finding WMD?' Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. 'Who?' Bush asked."

AFP reports: "For the first time since the beginning of the war in Iraq, a solid majority of Americans believe the Bush administration either 'stretched the truth' about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or told outright lies, according to a new opinion survey. The poll by the University of Maryland found that 52 percent of respondents said they believed Resident George W. Bush and his aides were 'stretching the truth, but not making false statements' about Iraqi president Saddam 's chemical, biological and nuclear programs. Another 10 percent said US officials were presenting Congress, the American public and the international community 'evidence they knew was false,' indicated the survey which was made public Tuesday. Only 32 percent said they thought the government was being 'fully truthful' about the Iraqi arsenal."

"The CIA abruptly removed from its Web site photos that showed key uranium enriching equipment found hidden in Iraq because they revealed secrets that countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons might find helpful, analysts said Monday. The CIA had posted a statement and six photos of centrifuge parts that had been hidden for 12 years under a rosebush in the garden of an Iraqi scientist... The spy agency touted the discovery as an illustration of the difficulty of uncovering evidence of Iraq's alleged programs to develop [WMD], the rationale cited by pResident Bush in going to war. But [none] have been found, nor any evidence that Baghdad had restarted a nuclear weapons program... The photos showed engineering drawings of a centrifuge, which is used to enrich uranium... 'These documents would be incredibly useful to countries like Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan,' said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security."

Former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern writes: "Something scarier had to be produced, and quickly, if Congress was to be persuaded to authorize war. And so the decision was made to dust off the uranium-from-Niger canard. The White House calculated - correctly - that before anyone would make an issue of the fact that this key piece of 'intelligence' was based on a forgery, Congress would vote yes. The war could then be waged and won. In recent weeks, administration officials have begun spreading the word that Cheney was never told the Iraq-Niger story was based on a forgery. I asked a senior official who recently served at the National Security Council if he thought that was possible. He pointed out that rigorous NSC procedures call for a very specific response to all vice presidential questions and added that 'the fact that Cheney's office had originally asked that the Iraq-Niger report be checked out makes it inconceivable that his office would not have been informed of the results.'"

UK Guardian reports: "The unprecedented row between the Government and the BBC took a dramatic twist last night when Andrew Gilligan, the reporter at the centre of claims that Number 10 deliberately 'sexed up' evidence against Saddam Hussein, announced he was ready to sue a serving Minister. Gilligan, the defence correspondent for Radio 4's Today programme, said that he would take legal action against Phil Woolas, the Deputy Leader of the House, unless he received a full apology for allegations made against him."

Peter Beaumont writes for the UK Observer: "It is one of the oldest rules of political damage limitation. Deny the specifics, where they are deniable, as angrily as possible and hope that the wider accusations will collapse under the weight of your indignation. No one would deny that Alastair Campbell is a master of damage limitation. And last week, with the BBC, it looked as though he was playing for keeps. It is a high-risk strategy. For while Andrew Gilligan did get it wrong in the detail of his initial allegation that the Government had 'sexed up' its first dossier on Iraq's alleged retention of weapons of mass destruction in September to claim Iraq could launch those weapons in '45 minutes', the problem for Campbell is that a journalist who has followed this story knows that Gilligan still got it right."

Diane Carman writes: "It's getting harder to ignore. More and more evidence is emerging to suggest that U.S. intelligence was manipulated to justify going to war with Iraq... Several members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Democrats Bob Graham, D-Fla., and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., told The New Republic that they knew that evidence contradicting the Bush administration's claims had been concealed, but they were unable to reveal it because it was classified. Still, Congress, which spent $80 million to prove that, yes, Bill Clinton did have sexual relations with that woman, has yet to order an investigation. Rep. Diana DeGette claims to know why. 'It's obvious. It's because the Republicans control Congress and the White House,' the Colorado Democrat said."

The UK Independent reports: "A high-ranking American official who investigated claims for the CIA that Iraq was seeking uranium to restart its nuclear programme last night accused Britain and the US of deliberately ignoring his findings to make the case for war against Saddam Hussein. The retired US ambassador said it was all but impossible that British intelligence had not received his report - drawn up by the CIA - which revealed that documents, purporting to show a deal between Iraq and the west African state of Niger, were forgeries. When he saw similar claims in Britain's dossier on Iraq last September, he even went as far as telling CIA officials that they needed to alert their British counterparts to his investigation."

"Britain was forced to admit [Friday] that one of the central allegations against Iraq... was based on information from an overseas intelligence service rather than a British primary source. In a blow to the government's credibility, a Foreign Office mandarin admitted that a claim that Iraq had tried to procure nuclear material from an African country had come 'from a foreign service'... The dossier said: 'Uranium has been sought from Africa that has no civil nuclear application in Iraq.' The dossier did not name a country, but the finger of blame was quickly pointed at Niger. Within months the documents on which the allegations were based were exposed by the IAEA as forgeries. Tony Blair recently refused to withdraw the explosive claim, insisting that the joint intelligence committee (JIC) had judged it 'at the time to be correct'. But the remarks by Mr Ehrman, who sits on the JIC, will intensify the pressure on the prime minister to disown the African claim in the dossier."

Roger Schlueter writes: "You don't have to dig deep to find that from 1982 to 1990 the United States supplied Iraq with not only conventional arms and cash but also chemical and biological materials, including the precursors for anthrax and botulism... With the Ayatollah Khomeini controlling Iran, the U.S. feared a radical Islamic takeover of the region, so it began cozying up to Saddam -- you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Except that Reagan-Bush also armed Iran through Iran-Contra! "Then, just before Christmas 1983, Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld -- yes, the current secretary of defense -- to Baghdad to discuss resuming official diplomatic relations with Saddam, relations that had been severed during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war... It is thought that U.S.-supplied helicopters were used in the 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja, which killed 5,000 Iraqis -- the same attack frequently cited the past few months as a reason to overthrow Saddam."

Christopher Scheer writes for AlterNet.com: "Today, more than three months after Bush's stirring declaration of war and nearly two months since he declared victory, no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons have been found, nor any documentation of their existence, nor any sign they were deployed in the field. The mainstream press, after an astonishing two years of cowardice, is belatedly drawing attention to the unconscionable level of administrative deception. They seem surprised to find that when it comes to Iraq, the Bush administration isn't prone to the occasional lie of expediency but, in fact, almost never told the truth. What follows are just the most outrageous and significant of the dozens of outright lies uttered by Bush and his top officials over the past year in what amounts to a systematic campaign to scare the bejeezus out of everybody:"

AP reports: "Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee announced Friday plans to stage their own inquiry on the credibility of prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its links to the al-Qaida terror network. The announcement by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the panel's top Democrat, marked an unusual split with Chairman John Warner, R-Va., on an issue with strong political overtones ahead of next year's elections. Warner and Levin are longtime colleagues on the committee and repeatedly stress bipartisan cooperation... On Thursday, 24 House Democrats announced that would seek an independent commission to examine the Iraq intelligence. They say they want to know whether intelligence was inaccurate or whether the administration presented a distorted interpretation of the intelligence to make the case for war."

CNN reports: "The International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday the parts needed to develop a bomb program that the CIA says were found in Baghdad are not 'evidence of a smoking gun' proving Iraq had a current weapons of mass destruction program. 'The findings refer to material and documents of the pre-1991 Iraqi nuclear weapons program that have been well-known to the agency,' said spokesman Mark Gwozdecky... 'We knew that pre-1991 Iraq had been provided from foreign sources with a large number of original centrifuge drawings; the IAEA has only been provided with a few of these, of little technical significance.'" 'Provided by foreign sources' -- such as Reagan-Bush under their plan that became known as Iraqgate?

WashPost reports: "State Department's intelligence division is disputing the Central Intelligence Agency's conclusion that mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making biological weapons, United States government officials said today. In a classified June 2 memorandum, the officials said, the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said it was premature to conclude that the trailers were evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program, as Resident Bush has done. The disclosure of the memorandum is the clearest sign yet of disagreement between intelligence agencies over the assertion, which was produced jointly by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency and made public on May 28 on the C.I.A. Web site. Officials said the C.I.A. and D.I.A. did not consult with other intelligence agencies before issuing the report." Unmentioned in this article are the reports that these trailers were most likely used for producing hydrogen gas for weather balloons.

NY Times reports: "A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today... the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress. In a second hearing last week with the Senate Intelligence Committee, he made it clear that he had felt pressure from John Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, that originally dated to a clash the two had over Mr. Bolton's public assertions last year that Cuba had a biological weapons program. Mr. Westermann argued those assertions were not supported by sufficient intelligence."

"While Bush aides try to look calm, the search grows increasingly feverish. They predicted they would find Saddam Hussein's arsenal of mass destruction as soon as Iraq's experts could dare to tell the truth... There's only one problem. What the survivors are saying is not what the White House wants to hear. The detainees say Iraq destroyed all of its banned munitions years ago, and nothing more was produced. The scientists have been threatened, coaxed, offered all kinds of incentives, including safe haven outside Iraq for their families. Nothing changes their stories... During the invasion, U.S. teams raced through suspected WMD sites, scooping up documents that are only now being examined... Some documents could be problematic. One U.S. official describes newly found 'destruction documents,' apparent orders from high-level Iraqi officials in the late '90s to destroy chem- and bioweapons."

Tony Blair's "Weaponsgate" scandal is running several steps ahead of Bush's - thanks to an aggressive investigation by the Labor majority in Parliament, and the fact that the British version involves "sex". BBC defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan testified before the Foreign Affairs Committee that "a senior British official had told him that a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme had been 'sexed up' at the request of" Blair's office - specifically Blair's version of Karl Rove, Alistair Campbell. British MP's want Campbell to testify under oath, but Blair won't let him. Maybe they should subpoena Karl Rove!

AFP reports, "Finland was in a political vacuum after a Nordic version of Iraqgate brought down Anneli Jaeaetteenmaeki, the country's first-ever woman prime minister, after only 63 days in power... Jaeaetteenmaeki resigned suddenly late Wednesday amid claims she lied to parliament about her use of leaked secret government documents, becoming the first ever prime minister to resign amid a scandal. 'If someone comes before parliament and lies straight to our faces, then we cannot trust a prime minister like this,' said Greens leader Osmo Soininvaara. Transparency and openness are highly regarded in Finland, and the country consistently tops the list of least corrupt nations." Under Bush-Cheney, the US tops the list of most corrupt and least transparent - where is the outrage???

As all the world knows, Bush II has failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and he failed to prevent the rampant looting of the country. Now Reuters reports: "pResident Bush, trying again to explain the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said on Saturday that suspected arms sites had been looted in the waning days of Saddam Hussein's rule. 'For more than a decade, Saddam Hussein went to great lengths to hide his weapons from the world. And in the regime's final days, documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned,' Bush said in his weekly radio address." If Bush is telling the truth, he is admitting that his war on Iraq failed, resulting in the dispersal of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists -- the very thing the war was supposed to prevent. If he is lying -- again -- he has further damaged America's credibility. Either way, he has damaged Americans' security, and it's time for him to go!

Cynthia Cotts writes: "The most cynical strategy involves expressing disbelief that our leaders are capable of lying. 'Does anybody believe that President [sic] Bush [and his military brass] ordered U.S. soldiers outside Baghdad to don heavy, bulky chemical-weapon suits in scorching heat... to maintain a charade?' wrote Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post on June 13.... In retrospect, the Bush administration's most publicized war stories have all been the products of smoke and mirrors. Contrary to the initial hype, the Hussein 'decapitation strike' turned up no bodies and no bunkers. Chemical Ali walked out alive. Jessica Lynch was never shot, stabbed, or tortured by Iraqis. And despite all the hot tips Ahmad Chalabi spoon-fed to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the WMD search teams have not found a single silver bullet or smoking gun. The war on Iraq is a Byzantine puzzle that begins and ends with a lie. The media have an obligation to expose it."

Stephen Crockett and Al Lawrence (hosts of Democratic Talk Radio) write, "Weapons of mass destruction were quietly found in Iraq earlier this month. For reasons that will be revealed in this column, the Bush Administration has been reluctant to promote the discovery of a very large number of offensive missiles. The find was reported in the 'Periscope' section of the June 9th, 2003 issue of Newsweek in a short article titled, 'Return to Sender' ... They were sold to Saddam by the United States of America during the Reagan-Bush Administration! We all know the Reagan-Bush Administration supplied missiles illegally to the mullahs of Iran during the Iran-Contra Affair. It now looks like this was not the only WMD export to rogue nations under Reagan and the senior George Bush. We need public hearings into their actions during that time."

"The row over Iraq's missing weapons intensified in Washington [Tuesday] as a leading Senate Democrat accused the CIA of deliberately misleading United Nations inspectors to help clear the decks for an invasion of Iraq. The charge by Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, comes as Congress gears up for its own hearings... Mr Levin says that when the UN team under Hans Blix returned to Iraq last autumn, the CIA - contrary to what it claimed at the time - did not pass on its full list of 150 high or medium priority suspected weapons sites. This, in turn, enabled the US government to shut down the inspections quickly, opening the path for military action. 'Why did the CIA say that they had provided detailed information to the UN inspectors on all of the high and medium suspect sites, when they had not?' Mr Levin asked. 'Did the CIA act in this way in order not to undermine administration policy?'" Under pressure from the Bush gang?

USA Today reports: "Former CIA director Stansfield Turner accused the Bush administration Tuesday of 'overstretching the facts' about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in making its case for invading that country. Turner's broadside adds the retired admiral's name to a list of former intelligence professionals concerned that the CIA and its intelligence reports were manipulated to justify the war. Since Baghdad fell April 9, U.S. forces have been unable to find chemical and biological weapons the White House said were in Iraq... Turner suggested [CIA Director George] Tenet should tread cautiously because CIA directors 'can be made the fall guy' by administrations when policy judgments based on intelligence go wrong."

A very slippery, confusing article by the Times' James Risen: "In a wide-ranging report in November, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it was unlikely that Iraq would use unconventional weapons as long as there were United Nations sanctions against the country. President Saddam Hussein would turn to the weapons only 'in extreme circumstances'.[as a CIA report also concluded]...In September report the D.I.A. stated that it did not have 'reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has or will establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.'" But the November DIA report is presented as showing that analysts believed there were WMDs (or just a WMD program, not actual WMDs? It's not clear). Keep in mind that the DIA is under Rumsfeld -- who was twisting intelligence by the CIA to 'prove' the existence of WMDs in Iraq. So was the DIA strong-armed by Rumsfeld to change its September assessment?

After reviewing how the Busheviks lied to the American people, John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman write, "The Bush administration took office pledging to restore 'honor and dignity' to the White House. And it's true: Bush has not gotten caught having sex with an intern or lying about it under oath. But he has engaged in a pattern of deception concerning the most fundamental decisions a government must make. The United States may have been justified in going to war in Iraq--there were, after all, other rationales for doing so--but it was not justified in doing so on the national security grounds that Bush put forth throughout last fall and winter. He deceived Americans about what was known of the threat from Iraq and deprived Congress of its ability to make an informed decision about whether or not to take the country to war." C'mon guys, just repeat after us - Bush LIED.

A group of 36 House members led by Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) are preparing to submit a resolution of inquiry to the International Relations Committee requesting "documents or other materials in the President's [sic] possession that provide specific evidence" in 10 instances where members of the Bush regime claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. This resolution is the equivalent of a subpoena to the president by Congress. It requires a majority vote both in the committee and on the House floor. Unfortunately, the resolution will probably be only a symbolic gesture. The GOP majority is expected to quash the resolution; they've already demonstrated numerous times that they're more interested in political domination than in the truth. But this resolution will force them to go on the record as aiding and abetting Bush's lies.

Canada.com reports: "An inquiry into Britain's decision to wage war in Iraq opened Tuesday with two former ministers testifying that the government manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to bolster the case for an attack. Former House of Commons leader Robin Cook said the government had already decided on a policy of ousting Saddam and used intelligence to justify it, becoming the United States' leading ally against Saddam. Clare Short, the former International Development Secretary, said Blair 'pre-committed' Britain to conflict months before the war, even as the United Nations was working to resolve the crisis peacefully. 'I think the prime minister had said to President [sic] Bush, 'We will be with you,' Short told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee."

Before the Bushit War, Rumsfeld declared: "There's no debate in the world as to whether they have those weapons. There's no debate in the world as to whether they're continuing to develop and acquire them. There's no debate in the world as to whether or not he's used them. There's no debate in the world as to whether or not he's consistently threatening his neighbors with them. We all know that. A trained ape knows that." Hey Rummy - how about producing some of those "trained apes" for a press conference? We're far more likely to get the truth from them - than from you!

Twice in the past two days, Bush has attacked those who say Iraq did not have WMD's as "revisionist historians." What exactly does Bush mean? In his 6-17-03 press briefing, Ari went into great detail. Bush " describes as revisionist history those who now seem to cast doubt on the accuracy of the intelligence information that stated that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction prior to the war." So why hasn't Bush FOUND any of these WMD's? "He may have had some of it destroyed, that he had it hidden, as part of a whole apparatus of concealment that he mastered over the years as he dealt with United Nations inspectors." Bush is certain Saddam had the weapons, but Ari says they were destroyed or hidden. How much longer will this charade go on?

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the intelligence presentation Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations in February 'was accurate, and will be proved to be accurate.'" How can Rummy be so sure? It's quite simple! Rummy continued, "'We haven't found Saddam Hussein, and I don't know anyone who's running around saying he didn't exist,' Rumsfeld told reporters Thursday." Of COURSE! Why didn't WE think of that? We can't wait for the next installment of "Dumb and Dumberest"!

AP reports Andrew Wilkie, "a former Australian defence analyst who resigned in March claiming the government was exaggerating the Iraqi threat is to appear before British MPs investigating intelligence on Baghdad's weapons programmes... He quit in protest [after] Prime Minister John Howard ... backed US and British claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and links to the al-Qaida terror network [and] sent 2,000 Australian troops to the war that toppled the Iraqi regime. After resigning, Mr Wilkie argued that intelligence available to Australia suggested Iraq did not pose a serious threat to the United States and its allies... Wilkie told The Sydney Morning Herald he would expose the government's 'exaggeration' of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and 'concoction' of links between former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and terrorists in his appearance at the inquiry." We call on ALL principled intelligence officials in the US and UK to join Wilkie in telling the truth!

Harley Sorensen writes, "Why mince words? These are the facts: 1) George W. Bush is a liar. 2) Colin Powell is a liar. 3) Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is a liar. 4) Condoleezza Rice is a liar. To the above facts we might add these: There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, none were there when our war against Iraq began, and none will be found unless we plant them there. These are the conclusions one could reasonably reach after reading Henry Waxman's (D-CA) web site, the section about forged documents used as a justification for war. One might also conclude that Waxman has found the smoking gun that could -- and should -- bring down the corrupt Bush Administration... What we need, I believe, is a hue and cry in this country to match the hue and cry that went up when Bill Clinton lied about sex. We shouldn't leave Waxman dangling out there all by himself. He needs our support. For the sake of our country's future, we should expose the White House liars for what they are."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports: "The speech former Sen. Max Cleland gave here Saturday at the national Young Democrats convention lasted more than half an hour, and he read it fast. He made it clear he was giving it as a citizen and soldier, and not as a candidate for anything, including next year's Senate race. It was also the most scathing critique of the Bush administration's military and foreign policy we've heard from a Democrat this year, and it got an enthusiastic response from the audience of some 150 young party activists." Read the full text of Cleland's speech below the intro.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Harley Sorensen says it's time to stop mincing words: "George W. Bush is a liar. Secretary of State Colin Powell is a liar. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a liar. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is a liar. ...The sordid truth is that the Bush team lied through its teeth to justify its desire to go to war against Iraq... For the sake of our country's future, we should expose the White House liars for what they are." He's right. It's past time to hold Bush accountable for all his lies. A good place to start is http://votetoimpeach.org/.

From Moveon.org: "The President took the nation to war based on his assertion that Iraq posed an imminent threat to our country. Now the evidence that backed that assertion is falling apart. If the Bush administration distorted intelligence or knowingly used false data to support the call to war, it would be an unprecedented deception. Even if weapons are now found, it'll be difficult to justify pre-war language that indicated that the exact location of the weapons was known and that they were ready to deploy at a moment's notice. With a crisis of credibility brewing abroad and the integrity of our President and our foreign policy on the line, we need answers now." Sign the petition "asking Congress to establish an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the distortion of evidence now."

Eric Margolis writes: "Why, readers in the U.S. keep asking me, are so many Americans unconcerned their government appears to have misled them and Congress over Iraq, and then waged a war with no basis in law or fact? Why is there growing outrage in Britain over Tony Blair's equally exaggerated or patently false warnings over Iraq, while middle America couldn't seem to care less about George Bush's 'Weaponsgate.'" The CBS News Poll indicates that Americans attitudes about Weaponsgate are changing, but it still should be more than 58% who say it matters if the U.S. finds WMDs.

Jason Leopold writes, "Six months before the US was dead-set on invading Iraq to rid the country of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, experts in the field of nuclear science warned officials in the Bush administration that intelligence reports showing Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons was unreliable and that the country did not pose an imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East or the U.S. But the dissenters were told to keep quiet by high-level administration officials in the White House because the Bush administration had already decided that military force would be used to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein... 'A critical question is whether the Bush Administration has deliberately misled the public and other governments in playing a 'nuclear card' that it knew would strengthen public support for war,' [David] Albright said in a March 10 assessment of the CIA's intelligence, which is posted on the ISIS-online.org website."

A site calling itself "IntellectualConservative.com" reveals the utter bankruptcy of "conservative intellectuals" with this gem by Esther Hartstein, who insists it absolutely doesn't matter if WMD are found. "1. Iraq either has or had access to weapons of mass destruction. 2. Then-Iraqi-Dictator Saddam Hussein used these weapons against any group of people he felt were against him. 3. The United States qualifies as a group of people Saddam may have felt were against him." No 8th grade teacher would accept an essay this ludicrous.

OfficialSpin.com writes, "According to the [USA Patriot] Act, which was ushered through Congress by the Bush Administration, it is a violation of the Act, 'Whoever willfully ...conveys or causes to be conveyed false information, knowing the information to be false, concerning an attempt or alleged attempt being made or to be made, to do any act which would be a crime prohibited by this...' It is a violation of U.S. federal criminal law, including the broad U.S. federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony 'to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.' Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be 'a high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause." We demand the prosecution of Bush and his top officials for lying under the USA Patriot Act!

Americans are waking up and many don't like what they see. Finding WMD does matter to most Americans as does finding Saddam Hussein. 58% say it matters whether the U.S. finds weapons, and nearly two-thirds say it matters whether the U.S. is able to find Saddam Hussein. 44% of Americans say the Bush administration overestimated the extent of the Iraqis WMD, versus 39% two weeks ago. Of those who do suspect the administration overestimated and question its motives - over two-thirds of them believe the administration did it because it was exaggerating to build war support. But the growing doubt doesn't extend to the intelligence community. Fewer Americans today think the CIA and U.S. intelligence agencies overestimated the Iraqi weapons stash than thought so two weeks ago. 39% now say the intelligence agencies overestimated versus 52% two weeks ago. The times they are a-changin'.

"An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and Resident George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist. The conclusion [is an embarrassment for Blair & Bush, who have] claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein. [A British scientist and bio-weapons expert,] told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.' [The] Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control."

Carla Binion writes: "As former CIA analyst Ray Close notes in an article for CounterPunch, the question of the mere existence of WMD in Iraq should be eliminated from the debate. Instead, says Close, the issue should be framed around: 1. The fact that the Bush administration claimed it had absolute proof Saddam possessed WMD; that he was likely an imminent threat to the U.S.; and that this justified our preemptive (or preventive) attack on Iraq. 2. The fact that this preemptive war was carried out based on intelligence information represented to Congress, the American public and the world as 'incontrovertible proof' when, in fact, our leaders likely knew the information was false... A few TV reporters and politicians have said if WMD are found, it will mean the Bush supporters were right all along... That's not the case. Instead, the administration would also need to prove Saddam had both the intention and capability of delivering WMD in a way that constituted an imminent threat."

Knight Ridder reports: "Making his case for war with Iraq, pResident Bush in his State of the Union address this year accused Saddam Hussein of trying to buy uranium from Africa, even though the CIA had warned White House and other officials that the story did not check out. A senior CIA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 -- 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech -- that an agency source who had traveled to Niger could not confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country... Three senior administration officials said Vice pResident Dick Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the resident and others should include the allegation in their case against Saddam."

AFP reports: "A covert, specialized army unit scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, even before the US-led war, but has come up empty handed, according to a media report. Drawn from the US Army's special mission units known as Delta Force, Task Force 20 'found no working nonconventional munitions, long-range missiles or missile parts, bulk stores of chemical or biological warfare agents or enrichment technology for the core of a nuclear weapon,' said the Washington Post."

Newsweek reports: "Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are seeking access to a closely held classified transcript that could resolve a key question in the Iraq-war intelligence debate: whether the CIA misled Congress about documents purporting to show Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger... One missed opportunity to do that was Sept. 24, 2002 -- just as Congress was debating an Iraq war resolution -- when Robert Walpole, the CIA's national intelligence officer for nuclear issues, was questioned by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about British assertions that Saddam was seeking 'significant' quantities of uranium from Africa. Two sources at the classified hearing tell Newsweek that Walpole appeared to endorse the British report. 'He didn't say there was anything to be doubtful about,' says one source. But an agency spokesman insists Walpole told the senators that 'there were concerns about the accuracy' of reports from Niger."

Eleanor Clift writes: "The White House asserts that the CIA did not pass along the information about the forged Niger documents, and therefore Bush was unaware they had been falsified... Phoning around Capitol Hill..., I found a high degree of skepticism about the White House version of events. The SOTU is the most vetted speech a president gives. It's not credible to believe Bush and all the bigwigs around him were duped. A more likely explanation is that the administration needed to bolster the nuclear leg of its case... A congressional source says Powell knew what the administration's pro-war wing was doing, and that Tenet was trying to put up resistance while also serving his clients, a jujitsu act that sets him up as the fall guy in the unfolding WMD scandal.... Tenet is not a Bush loyalist; he was CIA director in the Clinton administration before Bush asked him to stay on the job. Getting hung out to dry on the front page of the Post is Tenet's reward."

AFP reports: "A top congressional Democrat slammed as 'totally inadequate' a decision by Republican lawmakers to hold closed door hearings on the quality and accuracy of intelligence reports used to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq. Republican leaders in Congress refused Wednesday to establish a special commission to investigate allegations that intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been manipulated to justify the war. The US House of Representatives' top Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, decried the decision, saying closed door hearings would be 'a disservice to the American people and their security."

Trudy Rubin writes, "The Bush administration claimed, contrary to reports by U.N. weapons inspectors, that Saddam still had an active nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration claimed that the danger of Iraq's handing off nuclear materiel to terrorists was a key reason for regime change. The administration knew full well what was stored at Tuwaitha. So how is it possible that the U.S. military failed to secure the nuclear facility until weeks after the war started? This left looters free to ransack the barrels, dump their contents, and sell them to villagers for storage. How is it possible that... looters are still stealing radioactive isotopes? The Tuwaitha story makes a mockery of the administration's vaunted concern with WMD. The U.S. military hastened to secure the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad from looters. But Iraq's main nuclear facility was apparently not important enough to get similar protection." Are you safer than you were 3 years ago? Impeach Bush Now!

"A senior CIA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 - 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech - that an agency source who had traveled to Niger couldn't confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country. Despite the CIA's misgivings, Bush said in his State of the Union address: 'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.' Three senior administration officials said Vice President Dick Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the president and others should include the allegation in their case against Saddam."

Nicholas Kristof writes that Condi Rice was asked on 'Meet the Press', "regarding President Bush's reliance on forged documents to claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. That was not just a case of hyping intelligence, but of asserting something that had already been flatly discredited by an envoy investigating at the behest of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Ms. Rice acknowledged that the president's information turned out to be 'not credible,' but insisted that the White House hadn't realized this until after Mr. Bush had cited it in his State of the Union address. And now an administration official tells The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney's office first learned of its role in the episode by reading that column of mine... To help out Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney, let me offer some more detail about the uranium saga."

Will Pitt writes, "Bush and his people used the fear and terror that still roils within the American people in the aftermath of September 11 to fob off an unnerving fiction about a faraway nation, and then used that fiction to justify a war that killed thousands and thousands of people. Latter-day justifications about 'liberating' the Iraqi people or demonstrating the strength of America to the world do not obscure this fact. They lied us into a war that, beyond the death toll, served as the greatest Al Qaeda recruiting drive in the history of the world. They lied about a war that cost billions of dollars which could have been better used to bolster America's amazingly substandard anti-terror defenses. They are attempting, in the aftermath, to misuse the CIA by blaming them for all of it. Blaming the CIA will not solve this problem, for the CIA is well able to defend itself... They lied. Period. Trust a teacher on this. We can spot liars who have not done their homework a mile away."

Knight-Ridder reports, "The CIA's March 2002 [de-bunking of] Iraq's alleged uranium-shopping expedition in Niger was sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Justice Department and the FBI the same day it went to the White House, the CIA official said... Among the most vocal proponents of publicizing the alleged Niger connection, two senior officials said, were Cheney and officials in the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The effort was led by Robert G. Joseph, the top National Security Council staff official on nuclear proliferation, the officials said. Cheney alleged in an Aug. 26, 2002, speech that Saddam 'has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,' and this March 16 he went much further, saying: 'We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.'" Were Cheney and Rummy fooled by the Niger Uranium Hoax - or were they deliberately lying to build public support for W-ar? Even Ken Starr could figure this one out. Impeach Bush Now!

Bush's Niger Uranium hoax is an incredibly simple story - no more complicated than the dozens of "Nigerian scam" e-mails we all receive each month. It involves a letter signed by an African "official" with a plausible name and title - who simply does not exist. George Bush does not need to do a Google search - he has an EMBASSY in Niger which certainly knows the name of the Energy Minister! The NY Times is trying to protect Bush by arguing that Bush was hoodwinked by the CIA - but that's complete Bushit! The CIA absolutely told Bush & Co. that the Niger story was a hoax - but Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfy, Condi, and Rove all WANTED to use this hoax to LIE to the American people. Tell the NY Times (letters@nytimes.com) to quit beating around the Bushit - Bush LIED, and thousands DIED. "Weaponsgate" may be the biggest scandal in American history. Impeach Bush Now!

"The CIA rejected any blame on Thursday for the use of a faulty intelligence report by ... Bush as he built his case for war against Iraq. A spokesman, Bill Harlow, voiced confidence that 'a careful reading' of documents supplied to congressional oversight committees would show the spy agency 'did not withhold information from appropriate officials' about Iraq's purported attempt to buy uranium in Niger... The latest challenge to the CIA involved a claim in Bush's State of the Union address that Saddam had been trying to buy 'significant quantities of uranium from Africa.' Bush aides have given somewhat conflicting accounts of how this claim made it into the speech... Ari Fleischer said intelligence officials declared the charge incorrect 'as the information was received.' On Sunday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said 'someone may have known' the information was false 11 months before Bush's speech, but the White House believed it to be true at the time."

Nicholas Kristoff wrote on May 6: "Consider the now-disproved claims by President [sic] Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons... I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice p-resident's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged... The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted -- except that President [sic] Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. 'It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year,' one insider said."

The UK Independent reports: "The widow of a British commando killed in the Iraq war has accused Tony Blair of 'deceiving' her husband with misleading claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Lianne Seymour lost her husband Ian, 27, a Royal Navy communications mechanic, in a helicopter crash in Kuwait hours after the war began. She has been left to raise their son Beck, three, on her own. Now, following the growing controversy over Iraq's 'missing' arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Mrs Seymour has become convinced that the war was unjustified. Thousands of servicemen and women will share her growing sense of personal betrayal, she claimed - and feel doubly suspicious about the next call to go to war."

"In the Jan. 29 speech, Bush made his case for war on Iraq, in part stating that 'the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.' But some U.S. officials say American intelligence indicated that was not true... Asked for an explanation, a senior White House official said 'we were very careful with what the resident said. We vetted the information at the highest levels.' But one international nuclear official told the New Yorker magazine that the information was so bad, anyone using an Internet search engine could have determined it was a forgery." So who "vetted" the hoax "at the highest levels"? It doesn't take a genius to single out Rummy... Wolfy... Condi... Cheney... Rove... and Bush. Impeach Bush Now!

Former Iraqi Nuclear Scientist Imad Khadduri writes: "During CNN's Late Edition[, Colin] Powell claimed that 'the two alleged mobile biological weapons labs, which are being studied by allied inspectors now in Iraq, are the same ones he described to the world last Feb. 5 at a U.N. presentation... 'I stand behind that presentation,' he said. He further asserted, 'I'll give you the killer argument why these vans were exactly what I said they were. I can assure you that if those biological vans were not ... what I said they were on the 5th of February, on the 6th of February Iraq would have hauled those vans out, put them in front of a press conference, given them to U.N. inspectors to try to drive a stake through the heart of my presentation.' Only if the Iraqis knew which vans he was talking about. In an article published on the same day as Powell's interview, the [UK] Observer [reported] that there [are] mounting indications that these vans were for 'balloons, not germs.'"

Joe Conason writes: "After tirelessly promoting the imminent threat posed by Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction' in his magazine, on television, on various Web sites and even in a quickie book, William Kristol now confesses doubt. On Fox News Sunday -- while host Brit Hume indulged in his characteristic imbecile bluster -- Kristol blurted out several near-truths. (I found his startling admissions in an article on Newsmax.com, which I checked for accuracy with the Nexis transcript.)"

Wayne Madsen writes: "'Weaponsgate' may ultimately bring about the downfall of the Bush regime and its allies in London, Canberra, and elsewhere. The neo-conservatives may have also finally stirred something in the Fourth Estate, which has suddenly begun challenging the lying echo chambers in the White House and Number 10 Downing Street... But the historians and scholars, who will look back on what turned the tide for a supposedly 'popular' war president, will point to the self-described 'cabal' whose lies brought about a credibility gap unseen in the United States since the days of Watergate. In fact, Bush's 'Weaponsgate' will be viewed as a more serious scandal than Watergate because 1) U.S. and allied military personnel were killed and injured as a result of the caper; 2) Innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, died in a needless military adventure; and 3) the political effects of the scandal extended far beyond U.S."

The following letter was sent on June 10, 2003, from Rep. Henry Waxman, the ranking member of the House Committee on Government Reform, to National Security Advisor Condi Rice: "Since March 17, 2003, I have been trying without success to get a direct answer to one simple question: Why did President Bush cite forged evidence about Iraq's nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union address? Although you addressed this issue on Sunday on both Meet the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulos, your comments did nothing to clarify this issue. In fact, your responses contradicted other known facts and raised a host of new questions." You GO, Henry!

AP reports, "Senate Republicans are resisting Democrats' calls for a full-blown investigation of whether intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs was inaccurate or manipulated to make the case for war. Leading Republicans say there is no evidence of wrongdoing and no need yet for an inquiry that goes much beyond routine oversight. Democrats want a more thorough investigation in light of doubts raised about some of the intelligence and the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction." NO EVIDENCE OF WRONGDOING? A twice-elected President was impeached for one insignificant lie. Now we know that Bush LIED, Cheney LIED, Rummy LIED, Colin LIED, Condi LIED, Ari LIED - not once, but over and over again - at a cost of THOUSANDS of lives. Impeach Bush Now!!!

"Neither Tony Blair nor Alastair Campbell will allow the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to question them about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Downing Street revealed yesterday. The MPs wrote on Friday to ask if the Prime Minister and his communications chief would give evidence to their inquiry into claims that the Government had 'sexed up' intelligence to justify the war. However, Mr Blair's official spokesman made clear that neither man would be appearing before the committee. He said 'precedent' dictated that Number 10 officials did not talk publicly about their jobs. The Prime Minister will instead meet members of the Intelligence and Security Committee at Downing Street when they publish their annual report on MI5, MI6 and GCHQ today. The committee... takes evidence in private and which can have its reports censored by the Government." Can you spell C-O-V-E-R-U-P? Why are Bush and Blair so terrified of the TRUTH?

The UK Guardian reports: "Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector, lashed out last night at the 'bastards' who have tried to undermine him throughout the three years he has held his high-profile post. In an extraordinary departure from the diplomatic language with which he has come to be associated, Mr Blix assailed his critics in both Washington and Iraq. Speaking exclusively to the Guardian from his 31st floor office at the UN in New York, Mr Blix said: 'I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media. Not that I cared very much. In a wide-ranging interview Mr Blix, who retires in three weeks' time, accused: The Bush administration of leaning on his inspectors to produce more damning language in their reports; 'Some elements' of the Pentagon of being behind a smear campaign against him; and Washington of regarding the UN as an 'alien power' which they hoped would sink into the East river."

Scotsman.com reports: "Pressure intensified on Tony Blair yesterday to hold an independent inquiry into Downing Street's use of intelligence material after Alastair Campbell apologised for discrediting the security services by publishing a 'dodgy dossier' on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Mr Campbell contacted the head of M16 after No10 admitted its document, Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation, released in February, was partly based on a 12-year-old PhD thesis by a student in the United States which had been found on the internet. The revelation will cast further doubts over Mr Blair's denial that No10 doctored another dossier, published last September, to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons."

"On Sept. 8, 2002, Judith Miller and her colleague Michael Gordon helped co-launch the Bush II sales campaign for Saddam-change with a front page story about unsuccessful Iraqi efforts to purchase 81-mm aluminum tubes, allegedly destined for a revived nuclear weapons program. Pitched to a 9/11-spooked public and a gullible, cowardly U.S. congress, the aluminum tubes plant was a big component of the 'weapons of mass destruction' canard, which resulted in hasty House and Senate war authorization on Oct. 11. Months later, when the tubes connection was thoroughly discredited (UN weapons inspectors past and present said the tubes were intended for conventional rocket production), the Times did not think it necessary to run a clarification. Nor was Ms. Miller disciplined for shoddy work; on the contrary, when the A-bomb threat had faded, the Bush administration astutely shifted the media's focus to chemical and biological weapons - and Ms. Miller fell into line with the program."

Marie Woolf and David Usborne write: "Downing Street is to come under fresh pressure this week to explain why an intelligence report, which said there was no proof that deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein posed a growing threat to the West, was suppressed. MPs on Sunday said British Prime Minister Tony Blair and communications and strategy chief Alastair Campbell should be forced to appear before a committee of MPs to explain why the intelligence dossier produced last March was shelved. The six-page report, produced by staff working for the Joint Intelligence Committee, said there was no evidence that Saddam posed a significantly greater threat to the West than in 1991."

The UK Independent reports: "As the two supposed laboratories threaten to join a lengthening list of WMD 'discoveries' which later prove to be false alarms, the public confidence of the US and UK governments is giving way to behind-the-scenes recriminations about the quality of the intelligence provided to them and whether it was manipulated for political purposes. Mr Blix said last week that he had been disappointed with the tip-offs provided by British and US intelligence while his inspectors were still in Iraq. They had been promised the best information available, he told the BBC. 'Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say. 'I thought - my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?'"

AP reports: "U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on Resident Bush to explain why no banned arms have been found. After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say they are now waiting for a large team of Pentagon intelligence experts to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and documents. 'It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time,' said Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 percent. 'We're hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future'... Still, Resident Bush insisted Monday that Baghdad had a program to make weapons of mass destruction. 'Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced that with time, we'll find out they did have a weapons program,' he said."

Paul Krugman writes: "What is clear is that an initial report concluding that they were weapons labs was, as one analyst told The Times, 'a rushed job and looks political.' President [sic] Bush had no business declaring 'we have found the weapons of mass destruction'... One last point: the Bush administration's... severe underestimation of the problems of postwar occupation. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that occupying Iraq might require hundreds of thousands of soldiers for an extended period, Paul Wolfowitz said he was 'wildly off the mark' -- and the secretary of the Army may have been fired for backing up the general. Now a force of 150,000 is stretched thin, facing increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks, and a senior officer told The Washington Post that it might be two years before an Iraqi government takes over. The Independent reports that British military chiefs are resisting calls to send more forces, fearing being 'sucked into a quagmire.'"

"It is time that we had some answers. It is time that the Administration stepped up its acts to reassure the American people that the horrific weapons that they told us threatened the world's safety have not fallen into terrorist hands. It is time that the President leveled with the American people. It is time that we got to the bottom of this matter... Iraq's weapons of mass destruction remain a mystery and a conundrum. What are they, where are they, how dangerous are they? Or were they a manufactured excuse by an Administration eager to seize a country? It is time to answer these questions. It is time--past time--for the Administration to level with the American people, and it is time for the President to demand an accounting from his own Administration as to exactly how our nation was led down such a twisted path to war." You GO, Robert!

The UK Observer reports: "But the Democrats and Republicans leading the charge to investigate allegations that intelligence was fabricated - echoed now in Britain, where Downing Street last week gave in to demands for an inquiry, albeit limited, into the use of information - have an agenda that goes beyond the issue of Iraq. What is driving them, as much as a desire to find out the truth, is a desire to limit the huge influence and power that has been accumulated by the Pentagon and the coterie of hawks gathered around Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, which many fear is now dominating America's relations with the rest of the world. At the heart of the burgeoning controversy is whether those Pentagon hawks deliberately misused intelligence gathered by the CIA and DIA - the Defence Intelligence Agency - to make the case for war."

Norway's Aftenposten reports: "A US-based Norwegian weapons inspector accuses the USA and Secretary of State Colin Powell with providing the United Nations Security Council with incorrect and misleading information about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), newspaper Dagbladet reports. Joern Siljeholm, Ph.D. in environmental chemistry, risk analysis and toxicology, said that the USA's basis for going to war is thin indeed, and called it a slap in the face to the United Nations weapons inspectors. Siljeholm told Dagbladet that Colin Powell's report to the Security Council on how Iraq camouflaged their WMD program was full of holes. 'Much of what he said was wrong. It did not match up at all with our information. The entire speech was misleading,' Siljeholm said. Asked if the Americans lied, Siljeholm said: 'Lie is a strong word - but yes, the information Powell presented about Iraq's nuclear program was simply incorrect.'"

The UK Guardian reports: "Downing Street is to express regret about the fundamental flaws in the second 'dodgy dossier' on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Senior Whitehall sources told the Observer that the officials who will be called before the Intelligence and Security Committee inquiry into the weapons issue will say that the second dossier on Saddam's history of deception undermined public trust in government information. If Blair is questioned on the issue, he will concede that mistakes were made. Number 10 officials now admit that the second dossier, which was largely culled from a 13-year-old thesis by a Californian PhD student, is damaging the Government's case for war against Iraq... Although officials will admit that there are some 'serious questions' about claims in the first dossier that Saddam was trying to procure nuclear material from Niger - the claims were based on crudely forged documents - they will say that Number 10 relied on security analysis."

"Britain ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq. Operation Rockingham... was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD program and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down. [In a staggering attack on Don Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans (OSP), former CIA officer Larry Johnson said] the OSP was 'dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace', adding that it 'lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam'. He added: 'It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated.'"

"The Observer has established that it is increasingly likely that the [trailers Bush and Blair claim are bioweapons factories] were designed to be used for hydrogen production to fill artillery balloons, part of a system originally sold to Saddam by Britain in 1987... 'Senior Iraqi [claim] that the trailers were used to chemically produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.' Artillery balloons are essentially balloons that are sent up into the atmosphere and relay information on wind direction and speed allowing more accurate artillery fire. Crucially, these systems need to be mobile. The Observer has discovered that not only did the Iraq military have such a system at one time, but that it was actually sold to them by the British. In 1987 Marconi, now known as AMS, sold the Iraqi army an Artillery Meteorological System or Amets for short."

BBC News reports: "A dossier including the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes was repeatedly returned to intelligence chiefs for changes, the BBC has learned. A source close to British intelligence has told BBC diplomatic correspondent Barnaby Mason that Downing Street returned draft versions of the dossier to the Joint Intelligence Committee 'six to eight times'."

The UK Independent reports: "Intelligence officers are holding a 'smoking gun' which proves that they were subjected to a series of demands by Tony Blair's staff in the run-up to the Iraq war. The officers are furious about the accusation levelled by the Leader of the Commons, John Reid, that 'rogue elements' are at work in the security services. They fear they are being lined up to take the blame for faulty intelligence used to justify the Iraq war. The intelligence services were so concerned about demands made by Downing Street for evidence to use against Iraq that extensive files have been built up detailing communications with Mr Blair's staff." Said a Ministry of Defense official, "The mood is very fractious at the moment. Intelligence officials are keen that the inquiries should establish the demarcation between what was supplied to Downing Street by them, and what it received from the Americans."

The Bush's distorted intelligence & presented conjecture as fact to justify the Iraq invasion, according to Greg Thielmann, a retired intelligence official, who served during the months before the war. "What disturbs me deeply is what I think are the disingenuous statements made from the top about what the intelligence did say." The greatest distortion was in the nuclear field. Thielmann was director of the strategic, proliferation & military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence & Research. He was privy to classified intelligence about Iraq's chem-bio & nuclear programs. Thielmann believes Iraq may have presented an immediate threat to U.S. security in two areas: nuclear weapons, or ties to Al-Qaida. Evidence was lacking for both, despite claims by Bush & others, Thielmann said. Suspicions were presented as fact, contrary arguments ignored.

AP reports: "The Pentagon's intelligence service reported last September that it had no reliable evidence that Iraq had chemical agents in weaponized form, officials said today. The time frame is notable because it coincided with Bush administration efforts to mount a public case for the urgency of disarming Iraq, by force if necessary. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others argued that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical, biological and other weapons and was hiding them."

The UK Guardian reports: "Tony Blair suffered a damaging blow yesterday when the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, launched a point-by-point attack on Anglo-American warnings about Iraq's banned weapons. As George Bush promised to 'reveal the truth' about the weapons, Mr Blix criticised Britain for 'jumping to conclusions' that Iraq posed a serious threat to world security. In a valedictory appearance before the UN security council before his retirement this month, Mr Blix said: 'It is not justified to jump to the conclusion that something exists just because it is unaccounted for'... As a UN official, Mr Blix did not name Britain and the US. But there was no doubt who he had in mind when he said there was no evidence that Saddam had continued with his banned weapons programme after the 1991 Gulf war. This contradicted Mr Blair's warning last year that Iraq's banned weapons programme was 'active, detailed and growing'."

William Pfaff writes: "It has been charged that the decision to go to war was taken in Washington last autumn and that everything that followed was an expedient charade... Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has given a candid and convincing explanation of how it began to the magazine Vanity Fair. Implicit in his account is that the Bush administration last year wanted to go to war but had no excuse for doing so. The bureaucracies were called together and told to find an excuse. The 'core' casus belli they could agree upon was Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction."

Brian Balta writes: "We're at about two and one half months since the beginning of the offensive into Iraqi territory. When we launched this war, it was because Iraq had WMD. That was very simple. We had all the other crimes of the Iraqi Regime, but the justification for the war was the WMD. We could not allow the WMD to get into the hands of Al Qaeda and others. We could not allow Iraq to blackmail the world. Etc. You know the drill... However, it's still a possibility that the intelligence was right. We haven't firmly disproved the idea that Iraq might have had a substantial covert WMD program... I think it's time to say that, at this point, the idea that the pro-war folks were right is far more terrifying for the U.S. than the idea that Iraq was unarmed. Why do I say that it would now be a terrible thing that Iraq had a WMD program? No, not because I'd be proven wrong. It's because two months have gone by.

W. David Jenkins III writes: "This is such nonsense. Now we are forced to watch the members of Bush Inc. back-pedal away from every reason they had to invade a country. Let's call it like it is - they lied. Plain and simple. They couldn't wait for international support, let alone a good reason - so they just lied. And, what, nobody cares? Oh just shut up, Jenkins! They would never lie. Saddam just either hid those WMDs or sent them to Syria or...Iran! Yeah, that's the ticket! Just give 'em a little more time. I just can't believe that folks haven't caught on to the fact that whenever things start looking pretty bad for the Keystone Kowboys - there always, miraculously, seems to be something else just a little more important to plaster all over the news."

"Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed. As I remarked in an earlier column, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, which was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable. To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked."

James Risen writes: "A top secret United States intelligence report last fall is now at the center of an internal C.I.A. review to determine whether American intelligence miscalculated the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. The report had concluded that Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program. The document, which was described by intelligence officials familiar with the review, provided Resident Bush with his last major overview of the status of Iraq's program to develop weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war."

WashPost reports: "Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials... the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, 'sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here,' one senior agency official said yesterday... 'They were the browbeaters,' said a former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving. 'In interagency meetings,' he said, 'Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt.'"

AP reports: "Graham, a three-term Florida senator and former governor, said political manipulation of intelligence information is just one possible explanation for why an extensive weapons program in Iraq has yet to surface. 'In our system of government, the president is ultimately accountable -- whether it's his decision, or the decisions of those responsible to the president,' Graham said after attending a health policy forum at the University of California, San Francisco. 'It would raise serious questions about the political leadership that engaged in that manipulation and the misleading of the American people'... On Capitol Hill in Washington, another presidential candidate, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio... said he will introduce a resolution of inquiry today asking for the evidence to back up 10 statements made by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and White House press secretary Ari Fleischer from Aug. 26, 2002 through March 30, 2003."

"The opposition leader [Iain Duncan Smith] who backed war with Iraq turned against Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday, calling for an independent inquiry into Blair's claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready to use in combat... Blair pledged cooperation with a parliamentary probe into the government's use of intelligence material, but yielded little ground to those who claimed British blood was shed without reason. Blair has been accused of exaggerating the dangers posed by Iraq, of overruling intelligence officials to publicize questionable information and of secretly agreeing with President [sic] Bush last year to go to war... Clare Short, who resigned as Blair's international development secretary last month, charged in the House of Commons debate that Blair agreed with Bush on war long ago. Short said she was told by 'three very, very senior figures'' that Blair and Bush last summer set a date of Feb. 15 for war, then extended it to mid-March.'"

AP reports: "More than a decade of suspicions about Iraq's missile industry and its capabilities for delivering weapons of mass destruction could be investigated quickly now that American forces control the country. But no U.S. weapons hunters or intelligence officials have visited the heart of Iraq's missile programs -- the state-owned al-Fatah company in Baghdad, which designed all the rockets Saddam Hussein's troops fired in 1991 and again this year. Not only that, it's not even on their agenda. 'We have the most sensitive documents here,' said Marouf al-Chalabi, director-general of al-Fatah. 'We were sure the Americans would target us but they haven't even dropped by.'" Maybe because Bush's War was never about finding evidence proving -- or (especially) disproving -- the existence of WMDs.

Paul Krugman writes: "It's no answer to say that Saddam was a murderous tyrant. I could point out that many of the neoconservatives who fomented this war were nonchalant, or worse, about mass murders by Central American death squads in the 1980's [or about Saddam Hussein's atrocities, back when Reagan-Bush were arming him]. But the important point is that this isn't about Saddam: it's about us. The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat. If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst scandal in American political history -- worse than Watergate, worse than Iran-contra. Indeed, the idea that we were deceived into war makes many commentators so uncomfortable that they refuse to admit the possibility."

BBC reports: "The US Congress has ordered an investigation into possible abuse of intelligence information about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The inquiries, launched by both Republican and Democratic politicians, will include public hearings that will be televised live... The announcement came the day that Hans Blix - the man the UN appointed to find out whether Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - submitted what is likely to be his last report to the Security Council before leaving the post. The inquiries are to be conducted by the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees... Henry Waxman, a California Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, called on Mr Bush to explain why the administration cited dubious and later discredited documents to back its claims about Iraqi weapons. 'To date, you have offered no explanation as to why you and your most senior advisers made repeated allegations based on forged documents.'"

"The case against Iraq was based largely on assumptions rather than hard evidence, Newsweek reported, citing unnamed administration and intelligence officials. The newsweekly said Secretary of State Colin Powell suspected officials had 'cherry-picked' information that supported the administration's point of view for his February 5 presentation to the United Nations. The Pentagon also tended to choose the most dire explanation for intelligence where the meaning was not clear, Time said. 'There was a predisposition in this administration to assume the worst about Saddam,' a senior military officer told the newsweekly. 'They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction.' An unnamed Army intelligence officer blamed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the tendency. 'Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically, distorting the intelligence,' the officer told Time."

USNews.com reports: "On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should--and should not--say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. 'I'm not reading this,' he declared. 'This is bulls---.'"

During Monicagate, Republicans never stopped talking about Bill Clinton saying "it all depends on the meaning of 'is'." But now that it is clear Saddam did not have WMD, Republicans are trying to argue that "it all depends on the meaning of 'has.' Here is John McCain's justification for Bush's lies: "I'm satisfied that Saddam Hussein not only had weapons of mass destruction, but if we had not overthrown him, he would have went [sic] back to pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction." Notice how smoothly McCain slips from the past tense "had WMD" (a point he doesn't want to defend, because all evidence points in the opposite direction), to the pluperfect conditional "would have". There's no question what the meaning of "Republican" is - LIAR!

William Rivers Pitt writes, "According to Mr. Bush, the entire thing was aimed at that one mobile lab. The thousands of tons of WMDs we were promised do not exist, so that empty mobile lab is what we must settle for if we are to justify this war in our hearts and minds. Once upon a time, we impeached a sitting President for lying under oath about sexual trysts. No one died, no one had their legs or arms or face or genitals blown off because of the lies of a President who had been caught with his pants down. Today in America, we endure a sitting President who lied for months about the threat posed by a sovereign nation. That nation was invaded and attacked, and thousands died because of it. The aftereffects of this action will be felt for generations to come. The very democracy which gives us meaning as a country has been put in peril by these deeds. When the smoke cleared, every reason for that war was proven to be a lie."

"Colin Powell defended U.S. intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction Monday, saying he was convinced by 'overwhelming' evidence that they existed, even though none have yet been found. In some of his most extensive comments on the issue, Powell tried to dismiss reports suggesting U.S. intelligence was flawed or overstated to justify the war. He insisted there was no point in getting 'trapped in the long-winded debate about what was known and not known' about Iraq's weapons programs before the war. 'There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It wasn't a figment of anyone's imagination,' Powell said... 'There was no doubt in my mind as I went through the intelligence, and as I prepared myself for the briefing that I gave to the Security Council on the 5th of February, that the evidence was overwhelming, that they had continued to develop' weapons programs, Powell said." Then where's the proof, Colin? Face it - you were used by Rummy! Anyone with character would RESIGN.

The SF Chronicle reports: "Bush's contention that America went to war with Iraq to rid Saddam Hussein of hidden biological and chemical weapons 'could be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time,' the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee warned Friday. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Rancho Palos Verdes (Los Angeles County), has sent a letter along with Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., the Intelligence Committee chairman, to CIA Director George Tenet asking him to explain what intelligence led spy agencies to believe Iraq had stocks of the banned weapons or that al Qaeda operated on Iraqi territory."

The UK Guardian reports: "Transcripts of a private conversation between Jack Straw and Colin Powell expressing serious doubts about the reliability of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme are being circulated in western government circles where there is a growing feeling that officials were deceived into supporting the Iraq war. A document known as the 'Waldorf transcripts' - after the New York hotel where the US secretary of state was staying before making a crucial speech to the UN security council earlier this year - is described by an official of one NATO country as 'extremely useful'. The description is used in a paper seen by the Guardian as part of an effort among NATO allies to 'rein in some of the less acceptable policies of the Bush administration'. Mr Straw yesterday denied he had had a private meeting with Mr Powell on February 4, the eve of the security council meeting where Mr Powell gave a dramatic presentation."

"A group of former US intelligence officials has written to President [sic] Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war. The group's members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts with senior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was 'cooked' to persuade Congress to authorise the war. The manipulation of intelligence has, they say, produced 'a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions'. They write in the letter to Mr Bush: 'While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorise launching a war."

Fred Kaplan writes: "Much has been made this week of two trailers, found in northern Iraq... , that the CIA says are 'mobile biological-weapon production plants.' In a May 28 report, considered so significant that the administration released it to the public, the agency goes so far as to call the trailers 'the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological-warfare program'... Read closely, though, the CIA report reveals considerable ambiguity about the nature of these vehicles. For example, it notes that Iraqi officials -- presumably those currently being interrogated -- say the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather-balloons. (Many Army units float balloons to monitor the accuracy of artillery fire.) In response to this claim, the report states: '...The plant's design possibly could be used to produce hydrogen using a chemical reaction, but it would be inefficient...' One could ask: Since when was Saddam's Iraq considered a model of efficiency?"

From Reuters: "A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq. A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terrorist groups... The top Marine Corps officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said on Friday U.S. intelligence was 'simply wrong' in leading military commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the March invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam."

The UK Independent reports: "The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it was politically convenient, a top-level official at the Pentagon has acknowledged. The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair... 'For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,' Mr Wolfowitz tells the magazine... They come to light, moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz's immediate boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, conceded for the first time that the arms might never be found... The magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz was even pushing Mr Bush to attack Iraq immediately after the 11 September attacks in the US, instead of invading Afghanistan."

"If Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed enough of a threat to justify war, they should have been found by now, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday. Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia challenged comments by Bush administration officials that the weapons were well-hidden and may not be located soon... Rockefeller said that if the weapons were so well concealed, the United States should have considered giving U.N. inspectors more time to find them... Ari Fleischer Thursday called the two trailers 'proof positive' that Iraq lied about not having mobile labs. But Rockefeller said it's not enough to prove the weapons existed. 'In the business of WMD, and proving to the American people your case, you've got to come up with WMD. It's not happened,' he said. In a related matter, Rockefeller criticized the FBI response to his request for an investigation into forged documents [claiming] that Iraq tried to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger."

Katha Pollitt writes: "At the present moment, the question of whether Rick Bragg personally witnessed the 'jumping mullet that belly-flop with a sharp clap into steel-gray water' is trivial compared with Judith Miller's credulous reports on Iraq. Here we have a Pulitzer-winning reporter who alleges that an unnamed Iraqi scientist has proof both of WMDs and of Saddam's connections with Al Qaeda and Syria. Miller got this fascinating scoop from her Army handlers--she never questioned him herself; indeed, she never even met him! She allowed the Army to vet her copy and determine the timing of its publication. Result: a front-page story that was trumpeted everywhere as the retroactive justification for war. Where were the editors who should have reined in this Administration-friendly flight of fancy? The person who put Miller's story on page one has more to answer for than the harried administrator who didn't notice that Blair's travel receipts were from a Starbucks in Brooklyn."

France's Le Monde opines, "It's a question then, undoubtedly, of the biggest State Lie of recent years. Of a campaign of manipulation probably waged in full knowledge of the facts... Donald Rumsfeld declared Tuesday that it was possible that the Iraqis had 'decided to destroy (them) before the conflict'. This is a confession. More precisely, the beginning of a confession that the American and British authorities started a war in Iraq in March to 'destroy' these weapons, while they enjoyed the quasi-certitude that those same weapons no longer existed at that date. Iraq had such weapons in 1991. But a long campaign of inspection and destruction carried out under the aegis of the UN considerably reduced its arsenal. Did Saddam Hussein hold more of them hidden somewhere? Undoubtedly. But the most likely scenario, that we can now reconstruct, is that Iraq destroyed whatever weapons were left by November 2002, when the UN voted for Resolution 1441."

UK Guardian reports: "Downing Street doctored a dossier on Iraq's weapons programme to make it 'sexier', according to a senior British official, who claims intelligence services were unhappy with the assertion that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were ready for use within 45 minutes... The unnamed official told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'Most people in intelligence weren't happy with the dossier because it didn't reflect the considered view they were putting forward.' Describing how it was 'transformed' in the week before it was published to make it 'sexier', he added: 'The classic example was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes. 'That information was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn't reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-source but that was single-source and we believe that the source was wrong.'"

How many times did George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Meyers, and other top Busheviks LIE about Iraqi WMD? Billmon counts 28 lies between 8-26-02 and 5-28-03. Impeach Bush Now!

"The American defense secretary said Iraq may have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war [When? Back in the '90's?]... Donald Rumsfeld, speaking in New York on Tuesday, said it was possible the reason Iraqi chemical or biological weapons had not yet been found, was that... Hussein's government 'decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict' [ah, the shoot-themselves-in-the-foot theory]... Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld's comments vindicated his own stance. 'If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven't been there for quite a long time... the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat'... Labor Party legislator Glenda Jackson said, 'This war was fought on illegal and immoral grounds and there were no reasons for it.'"

"No traces of biological warfare agents have been detected in a specially equipped tractor-trailer found in Iraq but US intelligence has concluded that production of biological warfare agents was its 'only consistent logical purpose,' the CIA said on Wednesday. Analysis of samples taken from the trailer, which was seized in April in northern Iraq, was 'negative for five standard BW agents, including Bacillus anthracis, and for growth media for those agents,' the Central Intelligence Agency report said. 'We suspect that the Iraqis thoroughly decontaminated the vehicle to remove evidence of BW agent production,' the report said... Experts who examined the trailer were unable to identify any legitimate industrial use that would justify the expense of a mobile production capacity, the report said." Can we get a second opinion on the likely use of this trailer -- besides that of "experts" from BushDaddy's CIA? Why won't they let UN inspectors weigh in?

"The chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said [last week] that he suspected that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. He added that 'in this respect' the war might not have been justified. 'I am obviously very interested in the question of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction - and I am beginning to suspect there possibly were none,' he said in an interview... He referred to Saddam Hussein's chief scientific adviser, Lieutenant General Amer al-Saadi, who surrendered last month and said in an interview: 'Nothing else will come out after the end of the war.' 'The fact that al-Saadi surrendered and said there were no weapons of mass destruction has led to me to ask myself whether there actually were any,' Dr Blix said... Iraq's evasive behaviour could have been due to Saddam's desire to dictate the conditions under which people could enter the country. 'For that reason he said 'no' in many situations and gave the impression he was hiding something.'"

"A dustup between two NY Times reporters over a story on an Iraqi exile leader raises some intriguing questions about the paper's coverage of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein. An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper's top reporter [sic] on bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles has been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is [paid by] top Pentagon officials. Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding WMD?... [Miller told Baghdad Bureau Chief John Burns that Chalabi] 'has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper'... According to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress was a key source of information about weapons for the Pentagon's own intelligence unit -- information sometimes disputed by the CIA. Chalabi may have been feeding the Times, and other news organizations, the same disputed information."

NY Times opines, "The failure so far to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the prime justification for an immediate invasion, or definitive links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda has raised serious questions about the quality of American intelligence and even dark hints that the data may have been manipulated to support a pre-emptive war. These are critical issues that require thorough review not only by the C.I.A. but also by high-level oversight bodies in the administration and Congress... Bush should ask the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board... headed by Brent Scowcroft... to assess the record on Iraq, and the Congressional intelligence committees should conduct their own reviews. When Bush and Powell repeatedly assured the world that Iraq's unconventional weapons were a threat to international security, they relied on America's intelligence agencies. The country needs to know if the spy organizations were right or wrong."

Mike Hersh writes: "Thomas Friedman of the New York Times - and the mass media in general - cannot be troubled to hold Bush accountable. After tacitly endorsing the series of lies the Bush Administration used to justify the war, they now applaud Bush's continuing circus train of fabrication, distraction and deception." Hersh runs Friedman's latest pro-Bush blather entitled 'A Postcard From Iraq' through the wringer looking for something real.

AP reports: "The U.N. nuclear agency and the United States are discussing the return of U.N. nuclear weapons inspectors to Iraq to investigate reports of looting and destruction at the country's nuclear sites, an agency spokesman said Wednesday... [U.N. nuclear agency spokesman] Mark Gwozdecky said the IAEA was discussing the return of inspectors to Tuwaitha, Iraq's largest nuclear facility. The agency has been critical of the U.S. handling of the Tuwaitha nuclear complex, which was looted. Before the war, the Tuwaitha site held two tons of low-enriched uranium and several tons of natural uranium, Gwozdecky said... U.N. inspectors found no evidence before the war to support the Bush administration's claims that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was reviving its nuclear program. After the conflict began, the United States chose to conduct its own weapons search rather than include the IAEA and U.N. inspectors."

"Still another postwar factor that could matter again in 2004 involves public frustration with a war-related scandal... After World War I, Americans started to get angry when they heard that bankers and munitions makers had played a role in bringing about the war. Similarly, after the 1991 Gulf War, the 'Iraqgate' scandal became a problem for the elder George Bush... from 1984 to 1989, Bush, as vice president and then as president, was secretly helping provide arms to Iraq, the country that he decided in 1990 was run by a second Hitler and that he wanted to attack. The current p-Resident Bush could have similar difficulty in 2004. If we don't find any significant weapons of mass destruction, then the 43rd p-resident was either mistaken or cynically manipulating voters to support war. But if we do -- critics will want them checked to make sure they weren't made from parts or processes provided 15 years ago. Iraq is not a country in which the Bush dynasty has clean hands."

"U.S. intelligence called this place 'Possible SSO Facility Al Hayat,' after the Special Security Organization of President Saddam Hussein. It ranked No. 26 on a U.S. Central Command priority search list. Allison's team pulled up in six Humvees, not long before noon on May 1, to scout for biological and chemical arms... Smashing padlocks and deadbolts, the men checked for booby traps as they felt their way by flashlight from room to room. They reached a murky stone passage, smelling of mold. Cement covered its windows... Interrogation cells? Munitions vaults? One last bolt snapped. The door creaked open and Deal stepped through. There, in the innermost chamber, he found a cache of vacuum cleaners. So it goes for Site Survey Team 3, which today begins its ninth week in the hunt for illegal weapons. One of four such units assembled before the war, it has screened intelligence leads from Basra to Baghdad with discouraging, even darkly comic, results."

Ellen Goodman writes: "In October, Condoleezza Rice warned, 'We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.' In January, the resident's State of the Union address talked about tons of munitions, thousands of liters of anthrax and botulinum toxin. In April, Ari Fleischer described weapons of mass destruction: 'That is what this war was about.' Well, the imminent nuclear alarm was something of a scam. And now, the U.S. search team is getting ready to leave Iraq without having found a smoking gun or solid evidence of WMDs... And while we are on the subject of slippage, in his speech at sea, the resident made yet another connection between the Twin Towers and the regime change: 'The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001.' Where was the reminder that there is still, no matter how many times it's said and no matter how many people believe it, no verified link between the hijackers and the Iraqis?"

"Britain back-tracked on the contentious issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction yesterday when the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was forced to concede that hard evidence might never be uncovered. He said it was 'not crucially important' to find them, because the evidence of Iraqi wrongdoing was overwhelming... His comment, seized on by critics of the war, was a dramatic retreat from a claim by ministers last year that Saddam Hussein could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes. Mr Straw may also find himself in trouble with Dr Blix, who may take exception to the claim that he produced 'overwhelming' evidence of banned weapons. The ever cautious Dr Blix only ever said there was a 'strong presumption' that Iraq had 10,000 litres of anthrax... Alice Mahon, the Labour MP for Halifax, ... said: 'The whole basis of the war is based on an untruth. The whole world can see that ministers are backing away from their claims...This is making the war even more illegal.'"

WashPost reports: "The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants. The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war... U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top 'non-WMD sites,' without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success." Bush and his cabal are a bunch of lying warmongers! Impeach Bush Now!

"The suspected presence of weapons of mass destruction was a prime justification by President [sic] Bush for waging war to disarm Saddam Hussein's regime. Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of the Army's 5th Corps, told reporters at the Pentagon in a videoconference from Baghdad that U.S. forces have uncovered 'no evidence of him trying to employ them directly against U.S. troops.' He said he could only speculate on the reasons and offered several theories. One possibility he suggested was that in their haste to hide material from inspectors 'they were so clever in disguising that and burying it so deep' it could not be retrieved rapidly enough." The dog buried their WMDs? "Others were that U.S. forces moved too fast for Iraqis to respond and that pre-war initiatives urging commanders not to use weapons of mass destruction succeeded." Gee, wouldn't you think that, like most everyone, Hussein saw this war as inevitable and he would have been prepared to use WMDs -- if he had them?

Joe Conason writes: "Yet troubling news keeps filtering in from Iraq that might raise doubts about Mr. Rumsfeld and the other 'grown-ups' in command of the coalition forces. According to The Washington Post, a newspaper that fervently supported the war, the Pentagon utterly failed to secure Iraq's nuclear facilities at Kut and al Tuwaitha. The result has been wholesale looting, with unknown losses of such potentially dangerous radioactive materials as cesium, cobalt and partially enriched uranium. So far, Special Forces detachments have found at least two nuclear caches that were 'plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen.'"

David Corn writes: "Why was the Iraq Survey Team not assembled by the start of the war and ready to rush in as soon as possible in an attempt to locate and secure these items that menaced the United States? The war, after all, came as no surprise. And the news from Iraq has not been encouraging. Looters cleaned out Iraq's nuclear facilities long before US investigators reached them. Were they only scavengers who unknowingly grabbed radioactive material posing health and environmental dangers? Or were some terrorists looking for dirty-bomb material? Gellman reported, 'appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control.' Sometime in mid-April, US Central Command had sent a detachment to guard the gate to the facility. But for two weeks--until the special team arrived--this security detail allowed Iraqis who claimed to be employees of the research center to come and go."

Nicholas Kristoff writes: "Consider the now-disproved claims by President [sic] Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons... I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice p-resident's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged... The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted -- except that President [sic] Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. 'It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year,' one insider said."

Scott Ritter is the Bush reelection team's worse nightmare. The former UN chief weapons inspector and card-carrying Republican is barnstorming America with a blunt message: Bush's war on Iraq was waged on a "bodyguard of lies." "We need regime change, and we need it quick," Ritter told a gathering of peace activists in New Jersey on Sunday. "George W. Bush does not have the right to represent the American people, if he told a lie. And he told a whopper." The Whopper? Iraq had WMD. "I want the president [sic] impeached because he lied to the Congress of the United States," Ritter said. "He may well go out and tell another lie about weapons of mass destruction" being found amid the rubble in Iraq. "What happened in Baghdad last month was not in accordance with international law. What happened in Baghdad last month was a west Texas lynching."

Former Iraqi Nuclear Scientist Imad Khadduri writes: "In addition to the non-existent nuclear weapons program, two developments in the past two months have convinced me that, since 1991-1992, Iraq did not rejuvenate its chemical or biological weapons programs, either. The first development was a Newsweek story on March 03, 2003 unveiling, after eight years of suppression, the transcript of Hussain Kamel's debriefing by officials from the IAEA and the U.N. inspection team known as UNSCOM... In it, he affirmed that Iraq had indeed destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles after the Gulf War... The revelation of Hussain Kamel's detailed confession, by itself, did not induce me to endorse his assertion bluntly or publicly, though it was illuminating and historically authentic... It was the second event, which took place two weeks ago, which convinced me of the futility of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

Neil Mackay writes: "The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction. Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq. According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq [When? During the 90's? As former UN weapons inspectors claimed?] Ironically, the claims came as US Resident George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America... The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no 'smoking gun' and that the war against Iraq -- which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified."

Paul Krugman writes: "Meanwhile, aren't the leaders of a democratic nation supposed to tell their citizens the truth? One wonders whether most of the public will ever learn that the original case for war has turned out to be false. In fact, my guess is that most Americans believe that we have found W.M.D.'s. Each potential find gets blaring coverage on TV; how many people catch the later announcement -- if it is ever announced -- that it was a false alarm? It's a pattern of misinformation that recapitulates the way the war was sold in the first place. Each administration charge against Iraq received prominent coverage; the subsequent debunking did not. Did the news media feel that it was unpatriotic to question the administration's credibility?... Thanks to this pattern of loud assertions and muted or suppressed retractions, the American public probably believes that we went to war to avert an immediate threat -- just as it believes that Saddam had something to do with Sept. 11."

AP reports: "A metal drum found in northern Iraq that initially tested positive for nerve and blister agents might instead contain rocket fuel, according to new tests, a U.S. chemical weapons expert said Monday... Novikov's comments raised the prospect that the discovery was the latest in a series of false alarms as U.S. troops try to find the remains of Saddam Hussein's suspected programs for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons."

AP reports: "High-ranking Iraqi prisoners are uniformly denying Saddam Hussein government had any weapons of mass destruction before the war, U.S. officials familiar with their interrogations said Tuesday."

Raymond Whitaker writes for the UK Independent: "The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. 'They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat,' the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, 'Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies', he added: 'You can draw your own conclusions.'"

Last week US troops found a barrel maybe "full of the nerve agent cyclosarin and a blister agent that could be a precursor of mustard gas." This week, AP reports it "might instead contain rocket fuel, according to new tests...More tests [oh yes] were planned in the coming days, said Lt. Col. Valentin Novikov, chief chemical weapons officer of the 4th Infantry Division, the unit which found the site. [His] comments raised the prospect that the discovery was the latest in a [looong] series of false alarms as US troops try to find the remains of Saddam Hussein's suspected programs for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. By design, initial test procedures favor positive readings, erring on the side of caution to protect soldiers [and perpetuate the nasty weapons myth]. Also found at the site were two unmarked vans that soldiers first suspected to be mobile chemical laboratories...Novikov, however, said the vans 'could be' a rocket fuel mixing station." Or a hotdog stand with mustard?

John Moody writes in a Buzzflash Reader Commentary: "Pity the Bush Administration. They swore to the world that Saddam had massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons all primed and ready to launch. Indeed, we were told that we had to attack due to the dire threats these horrible weapons posed. Then comes the war and 100,000 British and American troops tramping through Iraq with seemingly an equal number of embedded reporters and wouldn't you know it, no WMD anywhere. Why we were led to believe that you couldn't take a walk in Iraq without tripping over the damn things. But as luck would have it, just as the whole world was starting to shout, 'Liar, liar, pants on fire!' the military gets a visit from the WMD Fairy."

From MediaWhoresOnline: "Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans. 'We were not lying,' said one official. 'But it was just a matter of emphasis.' So why didn't the Bush Regime tell the American people it was overemphasizing the danger from the weapons they claimed represented an imminent threat - in order to gain support for committing mass slaughter in their name and sending their loved ones to their deaths? 'Officials now say they may not find hundreds of tons of mustard and nerve agents and maybe not thousands of liters of anthrax and other toxins.' So why didn't the Bush Regime tell the American people it 'might not find' the weapons the regime claim represented the reason for committing mass slaughter in their name and sending their loved ones to their deaths?" Impeach Bush Now!

"Bush raised the possibility Thursday that any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were destroyed before or during the U.S.-led war, suggesting for the first time that coalition troops may come up empty in their search. Bush, who is expected to mark the end of hostilities soon, defied much of the world to wage war against Saddam Hussein in a bid to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. Iraqi leaders asserted the nation had none, and an intensive search by coalition forces has uncovered no proof so far of chemical or biological weapons or a nuclear weapons program... 'The resident said... 'But we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth." Yeah, sure, right... Karl Rove will make up some BS, that Rush Limbaugh will spoonfeed to the gullible dittoheads. Like Bush himself said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you need to concentrate on." (Type "Bush Fool Concentrate" in Google).

David Corn asks: "The obvious question is, where are the weapons of mass destruction that supposedly prompted the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz quartet to invade Iraq? The less obvious one is, where's the massive search-and-secure operation that should be scouring Iraq to locate and control those stocks of chemical and biological weapons and WMD-related materials, technology and records?"

"'The US was very eager to sway the votes in the Security Council, and they felt that stories about these things would be useful to have, and they let it out,' he said. 'And thereby they tried to hurt us a bit and say that we had suppressed this. It was not the case, and it was a bit unfair, and hurt us. [We] felt a little displeased about it.' He also reiterated his disquiet at how documents the International Atomic Energy Agency 'had no great difficulty finding out were fake' managed to get through US and UK intelligence analysis. Also disturbing, he said, was the question of who was responsible for the falsification."

"It is hard to figure why U.S. officials are reluctant to invite U.N. inspectors back into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction. The United States has everything to gain and nothing to lose by cooperating with Hans Blix and the U.N. inspectors... For openers, the U.N. inspectors have experience. They know the sites they examined before the war and what they found or did not find there. Second, if the United States discovers evidence of banned weapons, many people in other nations will assume that the Americans framed the Iraqis, that they planted the goods. If, by contrast, the U.N. inspectors confirm the American finds or make the discoveries themselves, that would lend credibility to the process. Blix says he and his team want to return to Iraq, but only on their own terms. They demand independence and don't want to be seen as dogs on an American leash. Fine. If the Americans grant the U.N. inspectors the autonomy they desire, that will only enhance their credibility."

"An apparent split emerged [Monday] between American and British officials over whether United Nations weapons inspectors should return to Iraq." The Boston Globe reports, "Marc Grossman, [US] undersecretary of state for political affairs, said in Rome... that a role for the UN inspectors in Iraq was 'hardly realistic.' But Britain, Washington's closest ally in the Iraqi war, sees the UN as playing a critical role in substantiating any claims by a US-controlled process before a suspicious international community. 'We need to have some element of independent verification,' Foreign Office Minister Mike O'Brien of Britain said yesterday in an interview with BBC Radio. The Bush administration has used allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a major justification for going to war. The Pentagon's insistence on controlling the process and keeping a lid on information is fueling suspicion of the American efforts, according to proliferation specialists."

"With little to show after 30 days, the Bush administration is losing confidence in its prewar belief that it had strong clues pointing to the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction concealed in Iraq, according to planners and participants in the hunt." Worst case scenario: WMDs may have been removed under cover of looting -- to be sold on the private market! "If such weapons or the means of making them have been removed from the centralized control of former Iraqi officials, high-ranking U.S. officials acknowledged, THEN THE WAR MAY PROVE TO AGGRAVATE THE PROLIFERATION THREAT THAT RESIDENT BUSH SAID HE FOUGHT TO FORESTALL... Bush launched and justified the war with a flat declaration of knowledge 'that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction'... Colin L. Powell, who took the lead public role in defending that proposition, said... that 'our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons' agents." Impeach Bush Now!

"A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said [oh, that makes sense - destroy them just before they were useful to Hussein]. They said the scientist led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs." He buried them, or did Bush spooks plant them there? "The scientist also told American weapons experts that Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda." Funny how he gives the exact story that Bushfeld would love to hear! "While this reporter could not interview the scientist, she was permitted to see him from a distance." Whaddya expect?

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter writes: "Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office has acknowledged that among the material briefed to the California Democrat by the CIA in the weeks before the Senate vote granting war powers to the president [sic] were reports about Iraqi procurement of uranium ore from an African country. But we now know that the documents used to sustain this allegation were forged by a foreign intelligence service. Did the White House and the CIA know the information briefed to Congress was inaccurate?" CIA doubts about these documents, he says, "did not stop pRresident Bush from referring to the reported procurement of uranium in his State of the Union Address. Given what is known about the fabrication of evidence in the form of forged documents, a thorough investigation should be carried out by Congress into this matter...The irony here is that there is a real possibility that the United Nations succeeded in disarming Iraq and never even knew it."

The Guardian reports: "Tony Blair is facing the threat of a fresh rebellion from Labour backbenchers who are growing increasingly alarmed that the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will confirm that the war was illegal. As a 1,000-strong Anglo-American task force of inspectors prepares to search hundreds of suspicious sites, Labour MPs are demanding an inquiry to establish whether MI6 misled ministers about Iraq's weapons programme."

AFP Reports: "The US government should be 'embarrassed' over the apparent failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, retired intelligence officials who opposed the war said. 'It's going to be very embarrassing when it turns out they have nothing to declare,' said Eugene Betit, a former defense intelligence analyst who belongs to Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), formed in January to speak out on the use of intelligence to justify the war. Another, former CIA station chief Ray Close, said: 'I'm hoping they will be embarrassed into acknowledging a role for some independent body. And who could it be but the UN?' Retired CIA intelligence analyst and VIPS member Ray McGovern told AFP: 'Some of my colleagues are virtually certain that there will be some weapons of mass destruction found, even though they might have to be planted... He added: 'Even if the planting were discovered by and by, they'll say, 'ok, the weapons were planted -- fine.'"

James Ridgeway writes: "We know that Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to egg on the dictator in his war with Iran. At the time, the U.S. provided Saddam with loans, military intelligence, and other assistance... Rumsfeld, then a drug company CEO, also was acting as a messenger boy for high officials in the Reagan administration who wanted to get rich building an oil pipeline from Iraq to Jordan. Secretary of State George Schultz, a former top official of Bechtel, was chief among them. He supposedly hoped to cash in on the deal if Bechtel got to build the pipeline. The U.S. manipulations in the Middle East then became more and more confusing as the CIA provided intelligence reports to both Iraq and its Iranian enemy. One former official told UPI that he personally had signed off on a document that shared U.S. satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran 'in an attempt to produce a military stalemate.' On doing so, he said, 'I thought I was losing my mind.'"

AP reports UN inspectors are ready to return to Iraq to look for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, but not under US direction. Chief UN inspector Hans Blix said, "We're not dogs on a leash." He said UN teams would be willing to confirm any discoveries of banned weapons US troops report, but noted "they haven't found any." Bush officials said one of the war's main goals was to rid Iraq of such weapons. With the US now controlling much of Iraq, Pentagon teams have inspected dozens of sites and come up empty handed. Def. Sec Rumsfeld recently said, "It is not like a treasure hunt where you just run around looking everywhere, hoping you find something." No one knows that better than Blix, who came under heavy criticism from Busheviks angered that he wasn't backing their position. "We had credibility and we didn't lend it to their contentions, and I think we were right," Blix said, "and so far nothing has proved us wrong."

AP reports, "The US military's search for chemical and biological weapons is unlikely to succeed until Iraqis lead American forces to them, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. 'I don't think we'll discover anything, myself,' Rumsfeld said at a town hall-style meeting with Pentagon employees...US troops have found suspicious chemicals and facilities at a number of sites but tests on the materials have proved negative or inconclusive [bugspray, etc.] Eliminating such weapons was a chief reason pResident Bush gave for the US-led invasion of Iraq that began March 20. A Defense Department employee [Dig it] asked Rumsfeld what could be done so the United States would not be accused of planting any chemical or biological weapons that might be discovered. Rumsfeld said he believed such charges are likely and there is little the United States can do to avoid it." Since he's planning to do it any day now?

Harley Sorenson writes: "In 1983, Reagan made a show of trying to preserve peace in Lebanon by shipping Marines there. On Oct. 23 of that year, somebody drove a truck bomb into the marine barracks, killing 242 of them... [Reagan] told the nation that he took 'full responsibility' for those 242 deaths, a statement that meant exactly nothing. It was all for show. Reagan continued on as if nothing had happened... It's hard to find instances of American success in the Middle East. During the protracted Iran-Iraq war, we secretly supplied arms to both sides [including the Iranian sponsors of Hezbollah - after they bombed the barracks; i.e. Iran-contra]. We helped Saddam procure biological and chemical weapons and stood aside and pretended not to notice when he used them... under Reagan, we pumped $2 billion in agricultural credits into Iraq... our special envoy to Iraq was one Donald Rumsfeld, who was on a first-name basis with Saddam Hussein" - in pitching Bechtel's Aqaba pipeline!

Andrew Gumbel writes, "After three weeks of war, after the capture of Baghdad and the collapse of the Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction - those weapons that Bush, on the eve of hostilities, said were a direct threat to the people of the US - have still to be identified. Many influential people have begun to wonder aloud if the weapons exist at all... Lt. Gen. Amer Hammoudi al-Saadi, who handed himself over to US forces yesterday, continued to proclaim that Iraq no longer holds any chemical or biological weapons. He should know: the British-educated chemical expert headed the Iraqi delegation at weapons talks with the UN. The few 'discoveries' trumpeted in the media - the odd barrel here, a few dozen shells there - have not been on a scale that could reasonably justify the unprovoked military invasion of a sovereign country, and in most cases have been proven to been no more than rumour, or propaganda, or a mixture of the two."

"Leaders of a U.S. Marine Corps combat engineering unit claimed earlier this week to have found an underground network of laboratories, warehouses and bombproof offices beneath the closely monitored Tuwaitha nuclear research center just south of Baghdad. The Marines said they discovered 14 buildings at the site which emitted unusually high levels of radiation, and that a search of one building revealed 'many, many drums' containing highly radioactive material... But an expert familiar with U.N. nuclear inspections told The Associated Press that it was implausible to believe that U.S. forces had uncovered anything new at the site. Instead, the official said, the Marines apparently broke U.N. seals designed to ensure the materials aren't diverted for weapons use - or end up in the wrong hands. 'What happened apparently was that they broke IAEA seals, which is very unfortunate because those seals are integral to ensuring that nuclear material doesn't get diverted,' the expert said."