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Shaking the House of Cards

By BOB HERBERT

New York Times, 3rd October  2003

No wonder the sky-high poll numbers for President Bush have collapsed.  The fiasco in Iraq is only part of the story.  The news on one substantive issue after another could hardly be worse.  It's almost as if the president had a team in the White House that was feeding his credibility into a giant shredder.

Despite the administration's relentlessly optimistic chatter about the economy, the Census Bureau reported that the number of Americans living in poverty increased by 1.7 million last year, the second straight annual increase.  During those two years, the number of poor Americans has grown by 3 million.

Belt-tightening is also in order for the middle class.  The median household income declined by 1.1 percent, a drop of about $500, to $42,400.  It was the second straight year for a decline in that category as well.

Per capita income decreased, too.  It dropped by 1.8 percent, to $22,794 in 2002, the first decline in more than a decade.

Boom times these ain't.

On Monday we learned that there had been a steep increase last year — the largest in a decade — in the number of Americans without health insurance.

The international outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas is reporting that job losses in the U.S.  have resulted in a sharp decline in the number of dual-income families, particularly for those with children under 18.

And so on.

With the federal government piling up massive deficits and local governments struggling to provide the most basic of services (some areas are closing schools; others are releasing prisoners prematurely), Mr.  Bush is asking the nation to go much further into debt in the service of some vague notion of a civic renaissance in Iraq.

Even Republicans are beginning to ask what the heck is going on.

Contributing to the growing sense of unease in some quarters and outrage in others is the blatant war profiteering in Iraq by politically connected firms like Bechtel and Halliburton — profiteering that is taking place with the scandalous encouragement and connivance of the Bush administration.

A front-page article in The Times on Tuesday said: "A group of businessmen linked by their close ties to President Bush, his family and his administration have set up a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects."

Iraq is proving to be a bonanza for the Bush administration's corporate cronies even as it is threatening to become a sinkhole for the aspirations of ordinary Americans.

The vicious release to news organizations of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer could serve as a case study of the character of this administration.  The Bush II crowd is arrogant, venal, mean-spirited and contemptuous of law and custom.

The problem it faces now is not just the criminal investigation into who outed Valerie Plame, but also the fact that the public understands this story only too well.  Deliberately blowing the cover of an intelligence or law enforcement official for no good reason is considered by nearly all Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, to be a despicable act.

According to an ABC-Washington Post poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe a special counsel should be appointed to investigate the leak.

Now that so much has gone haywire — Iraq, the economy, America's standing in the world — the tough questions are finally being asked about President Bush and his administration.

Perhaps foreign policy was not Mr.  Bush's strength, after all.  And even diehard Republicans have been forced to acknowledge that the president was surely wrong when he insisted that his mammoth tax cuts would be the engine of job creation.  And nothing has ever come of Mr.  Bush's promise to be the education president, or to change the tone of the discourse in Washington, or to deal humbly and respectfully with the rest of the world.

Americans are increasingly asking what went wrong.  How could so much have gone sour in such a short period of time?

Was it incompetence?  Bad faith?

Loud warnings were ignored for the longest time.  Now, finally, the truth is becoming more and more difficult to avoid.

Who's Losing Iraq?

By MAUREEN DOWD

From the New York Times 31st August 2003

Karl Rove has got to be nervous.

The man who last year advised Republican candidates to "focus on war" is finding out that the Bush doctrine of pre-emption cannot pre-empt anarchy.

Now, General Rove will have to watch Democratic candidates focus on war.

We're getting into very volatile territory in the Middle East.

As Paul Bremer admitted last week, the cost of the Iraq adventure is going to be spectacular: $2 billion for electrical demands and $16 billion to deliver clean water. 

We're losing one or two American soldiers every day.  Saddam and Osama are still lurking and scheming — the "darkness which may be felt."

After a car bomb exploded outside a Najaf mosque on Friday, killing scores of people, including the most prominent pro-American Shiite cleric, we may have to interject our troops into an internecine Shiite dispute — which Saddam's Baathist guerrillas are no doubt stoking.

With Iraqis in Najaf screaming, "There is no order!  There is no government!  We'd rather have Saddam than this!," we had one more ominous illustration that the Bush team is out of its depth and divided against itself.

You can't conduct a great historical experiment in a petty and bickering frame of mind.  The agencies of the Bush administration are behaving like high school cliques.  The policy in Iraq is paralyzed almost to the point of nonexistence, stalled by spats between the internationalists and unilateralists, with the national security director, Condoleezza Rice, abnegating her job as policy referee.

The State Department will have to stop sulking and being in denial about the Pentagon running the show in Iraq.  And the Pentagon will have to stop being dogmatic, clinging to the quixotic notion that it only wants to succeed with its streamlined force and its trompe l'oeil coalition.  Rummy has to accept the magnitude of the task and give up running the Department of Defense the way a misanthropic accountant would.

Big deeds need big spirits.  You can't have a Marshall Plan and a tax cut at the same time.

It has also now become radiantly clear that we have to drag Dick Cheney out of the dark and smog.  Less Hobbes, more Locke.

So far, American foreign policy has been guided by the vice president's gloomy theories that fear and force are the best motivators in the world, that war is man's natural state and that the last great superpower has sovereign authority to do as it pleases without much consultation with subjects or other nations.

We can now see the disturbing results of all the decisions Mr.  Cheney made in secret meetings.

The General Accounting Office issued a report last week noting that the vice president shaped our energy policy with clandestine advice from "petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, electricity industry representatives and lobbyists."

Favoritism to energy pals led to last week's insane decision to gut part of the Clean Air Act and allow power plants, refineries and other industrial sites to belch pollutants.

Another Bush-Cheney energy crony is Anthony Alexander of Ohio's FirstEnergy Corporation, which helped trigger the blackout after failing to upgrade its transmission system properly since deregulation.  He was a Bush Pioneer, having raised at least $100,000 for the campaign.

This logrolling attitude has led to the U.S.  Army Corps of Engineers allowing Halliburton — which made Mr.  Cheney a rich man with $20 million worth of cashed-in stock — to get no-bid contracts in Iraq totaling $1.7 billion, and that's just a start.

All this, and high gas prices, too?

When he wasn't meeting secretly with energy lobbyists, Mr.  Cheney was meeting secretly with Iraqi exiles.  The Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi and other defectors conned Mr.  Cheney, Rummy and the naïve Wolfowitz of Arabia by playing up the danger of Saddam's W.M.D.'s and playing down the prospect of Iraqi resistance to a U.S.  invasion.

According to The Los Angeles Times, U.S.  and allied intelligence agencies are investigating to see if they were duped by Iraqi defectors giving bogus information to mislead the West before the war.

Some intelligence officials "now fear that key portions of the prewar information may have been flawed," the story said.  "The issue raises fresh doubts as to whether illicit weapons will be found in Iraq."

Karl Rove has got to be nervous. 

Bad Planning

By THOMAS L.  FRIEDMAN

From the New York Times 25^th June 2003

President Bush is sure lucky no weapons of mass destruction have been found yet in Iraq.

Because had we found these weapons our entire focus today would be on the real issue: why the Bush team — which wanted this war so badly and had telegraphed it for so long — was so poorly prepared for postwar Iraq.

I still believe that with the right effort Iraq can be made a decent place.  But that task has been made much harder because of the Pentagon's poor planning for postwar Iraq.  If the Pentagon's lapses can be overcome — and I hope they will be — then we should learn from them for future wars.  If they can't be overcome, then they will be grist for next year's who-lost-Iraq debate.

Let's start with the biggest analytical failure.  The Bush Pentagon went into this war assuming that it could decapitate the Iraqi army, bureaucracy and police force, remove the Saddam loyalists and then basically run Iraq through the rump army, bureaucracy and police.

Wrong.  What happened instead was that they all collapsed, leaving a security and administrative vacuum, which the U.S.  military was utterly unprepared to fill.  The U.S.  forces arrived in Iraq with far too few military police and civilian affairs officers to run the country.  As a result, the only way U.S.  troops could stop the massive looting was by doing the only thing they knew how: shooting people.  Since they didn't want to do that, and since Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seemed to believe that a little looting was O.K., so that Iraqis could let off steam ("stuff happens"), Iraqi government infrastructure, oil equipment and even nuclear research sites were just stripped bare.  As a result, we are not just starting at zero in Iraq.  We are starting below zero.  (How the Pentagon could have failed to secure the known nuclear sites is unbelievable.)

Anyone familiar with NATO operations in Bosnia and Kosovo should have understood that we needed two armies for this invasion.  The first was the fighting force that would kill Saddam's regime, and the second, following right behind it, a force of military police, civilian affairs officers, aid groups and public affairs teams to get our message across.  The Pentagon brilliantly prepared the first force, but not the second.

So, you get incidents like the one last week, where hungry Iraqi soldiers, protesting for back pay, get shot at by U.S.  troops — a great way to win friends — because our troops are unprepared for crowd control, a job for M.P.'s.  Most of the police and M.P.'s we send into nation-building are reserves, and there was already a shortage — something the Pentagon should have seen and rectified by reconfiguring our force structure.

Because we did not have enough soldiers, police or M.P.'s in Iraq, we could not seal the Syrian or Iranian borders or protect oil pipelines from sabotage.  As a result, Arab fighters have slipped in via Syria to join the battle against us and Iranian activists have crossed from their side.  Oil pipelines are being blown up daily.

As for the missing W.M.D., Bush officials keep saying that Iraq is the size of California and hard to search.  True, but Saddam's inner circle is the size of an N.F.L.  team — and we've captured more than half of them.  I find it incomprehensible that none of them have had anything revealing to say, one way or another, about the missing W.M.D.  A tarot card reader could have discovered more from these people than the Pentagon has so far.  A Western diplomat tells me Centcom has not managed the interrogations well and they are now in the hands of the C.I.A.

Because the Pentagon had no coherent postwar plan for reconstituting Iraq politically, it made it up as it went along.  Instead of a firm U.S.  hand guiding things from the top, the Pentagon initially appointed the hapless Gen.  Jay Garner to run Iraq.  He's been replaced by the more deft L.  Paul Bremer, but important time has been lost in which Muslim clerics have filled the vacuum in many areas.  We must establish an Iraqi secular authority — soon.

A successful U.S.  rebuilding of Iraq is the key to America's standing in the world right now.  But Mssrs.  Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be treating it like some lab test in which they can see how much nation-building they can buy with as little investment as possible. 

As one Marine officer said to me: There is something to be said for doing war on the cheap, but if you want to do war on the cheap, "pick a country that doesn't matter."

Denial and Deception

From the New York Times 23rd June 2003

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Politics is full of ironies.  On the White House Web site, George W.  Bush's speech from Oct.  7, 2002 — in which he made the case for war with Iraq — bears the headline "Denial and Deception." Indeed.

There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war.  The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious. 

About the deception: Leaks from professional intelligence analysts, who are furious over the way their work was abused, have given us a far more complete picture of how America went to war.  Thanks to reporting by my colleague Nicholas Kristof, other reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and a magisterial article by John Judis and Spencer Ackerman in The New Republic, we now know that top officials, including Mr.  Bush, sought to convey an impression about the Iraqi threat that was not supported by actual intelligence reports. 

In particular, there was never any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda; yet administration officials repeatedly suggested the existence of a link.  Supposed evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program was thoroughly debunked by the administration's own experts; yet administration officials continued to cite that evidence and warn of Iraq's nuclear threat. 

And yet the political and media establishment is in denial, finding excuses for the administration's efforts to mislead both Congress and the public.

For example, some commentators have suggested that Mr.  Bush should be let off the hook as long as there is some interpretation of his prewar statements that is technically true.  Really?  We're not talking about a business dispute that hinges on the fine print of the contract; we're talking about the most solemn decision a nation can make.  If Mr.  Bush's speeches gave the nation a misleading impression about the case for war, close textual analysis showing that he didn't literally say what he seemed to be saying is no excuse.  On the contrary, it suggests that he knew that his case couldn't stand close scrutiny.

Consider, for example, what Mr.  Bush said in his "denial and deception" speech about the supposed Saddam-Osama link: that there were "high-level contacts that go back a decade." In fact, intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and an infant Al Qaeda in the early 1990's, but found no good evidence of a continuing relationship.  So Mr.  Bush made what sounded like an assertion of an ongoing relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but phrased it cagily — suggesting that he or his speechwriter knew full well that his case was shaky.

Other commentators suggest that Mr.  Bush may have sincerely believed, despite the lack of evidence, that Saddam was working with Osama and developing nuclear weapons.  Actually, that's unlikely: why did he use such evasive wording if he didn't know that he was improving on the truth?  In any case, however, somebody was at fault.  If top administration officials somehow failed to apprise Mr.  Bush of intelligence reports refuting key pieces of his case against Iraq, they weren't doing their jobs.  And Mr.  Bush should be the first person to demand their resignations.

So why are so many people making excuses for Mr.  Bush and his officials?

Part of the answer, of course, is raw partisanship.  One important difference between our current scandal and the Watergate affair is that it's almost impossible now to imagine a Republican senator asking, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

But even people who aren't partisan Republicans shy away from confronting the administration's dishonest case for war, because they don't want to face the implications.

After all, suppose that a politician — or a journalist — admits to himself that Mr.  Bush bamboozled the nation into war.  Well, launching a war on false pretenses is, to say the least, a breach of trust.  So if you admit to yourself that such a thing happened, you have a moral obligation to demand accountability — and to do so in the face not only of a powerful, ruthless political machine but in the face of a country not yet ready to believe that its leaders have exploited 9/11 for political gain.  It's a scary prospect.

Yet if we can't find people willing to take the risk — to face the truth and act on it — what will happen to our democracy?

Blix: I was smeared by the Pentagon

Helena Smith in New York
Wednesday June 11, 2003
The Guardian

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. 

"It was like a mosquito bite in the evening that is there in the morning, an irritant."

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. 

Asked if he believed he had been the target of a deliberate smear campaign he said: "Yes, I probably was at a lower level."

Before he had even flown to Iraq to relaunch the sensitive weapons inspections after a four-year hiatus last November, senior US defence department officials were excoriating the septuagenarian as the worst possible choice for the post. 

It was just the beginning.  By autumn, the happily married father of two was being branded in Baghdad as a "homosexual who went to Washington every two weeks to pick up [his] instructions". 

"The Iraqis were spreading that rumour about me early in the autumn and then I heard the counter-rumour that I had told my wife, Eva, about this rumour and that she said she had never noticed it.  My alleged comment to her," he said, breaking into laughter, "was that nor had I." But the criticism clearly hurt. 

A lot of the sniping "surely came" from the Pentagon, said Mr Blix, who has since won plaudits for his handling of the unenviable brief of divining whether Iraq had disarmed. 

Staff attached to the UN monitoring and inspection commission, headed by the Swede for the past three years, openly say there is no love lost between hawks in the Bush administration and their mission. 

Mr Blix, a former foreign minister, prefers to remain sanguine.  "By and large my relations with the US were good," he said, reiterating his belief that the Iraqi regime would likely never have complied with any of the UN resolutions around disarmament had it not been for the presence of 200,000 US troops in the region. 

"But towards the end the [Bush] administration leaned on us," he conceded, hoping the inspectors would employ more damning language in their reports to swing votes on the UN security council. 

Washington, he claimed, was particularly upset that the UN team did not "make more" of the discovery of cluster bombs and drones in March. 

He said Washington's disappointment at not getting UN backing for an attack was "one reason why you find scepticism towards inspectors". 

The life-long civil servant -who is looking forward to returning to a shared life with his wife in Stockholm as he turns 75 - said he was convinced that "there are people in this administration who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things". 

Instead of seeing the UN as a collective body of decision-making states, Washington now viewed it as an "alien power, even if it does hold considerable influence within it.  Such [negative] feelings don't exist in Europe where people say that the UN is a lot of talk at dinners and fluffy stuff."

That was especially worrying given President Bush's openly proclaimed belief in the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes.  "It would be more desirable and more reasonable to ask for security council authority, especially at a time when communism no longer exists and you don't have automatic vetoes from Russia and China," he said. 

Similarly it would be much more "credible" if a team of international inspectors were sent into Iraq instead of the 1,300-strong US-appointed group now conducting the search for weapons of mass destruction, he said. 

What is The Truth?

What is the truth about what the US and UK governments put out about Iraq's "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (or WMD)?  Certainly, the US & UK were pretty strong about the reasons for challenging Iraq - and the threat to go to war "to remove them" if Iraq did not fully declare all its WMDs.

There was the WMD dossier, then the "Al Qaeda link" dossier, then Colin Powell's laborious presentation at the UN.  They all seemed phoney to me.  It was eventually found out that the UK-produced "Al Qaeda link" dossier consisted of a great deal of research work which was done by a US student and is up to 10 years old.  This particular dossier was put together by Tony Blair's press secretary, Alistair Campbell.

It appears that the US & UK governments deliberately misled the UN Security Council, and everyone else in the world, by saying that war against Iraq was imperative because of WMD, and particularly, Iraq's capability of deploying them quickly.

This is what some informed observers say...

Below is an article by Paul Krugman, which appeared in the New York Times on 3rd June 2003.

Standard Operating Procedure

By Paul Krugman

The mystery of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction has become a lot less mysterious.  Recent reports in major British newspapers and three major American news magazines, based on leaks from angry intelligence officials, back up the sources who told my colleague Nicholas Kristof that the Bush administration "grossly manipulated intelligence" about W.M.D.'s.

And anyone who talks about an "intelligence failure" is missing the point.  The problem lay not with intelligence professionals, but with the Bush and Blair administrations.  They wanted a war, so they demanded reports supporting their case, while dismissing contrary evidence.

In Britain, the news media have not been shy about drawing the obvious implications, and the outrage has not been limited to war opponents.  The Times of London was ardently pro-war; nonetheless, it ran an analysis under the headline "Lie Another Day." The paper drew parallels between the selling of the war and other misleading claims: "The government is seen as having `spun' the threat from Saddam's weapons just as it spins everything else."

Yet few have made the same argument in this country, even though "spin" is far too mild a word for what the Bush administration does, all the time.  Suggestions that the public was manipulated into supporting an Iraq war gain credibility from the fact that misrepresentation and deception are standard operating procedure for this administration, which — to an extent never before seen in U.S.  history — systematically and brazenly distorts the facts.

Am I exaggerating?  Even as George Bush stunned reporters by declaring that we have "found the weapons of mass destruction," the Republican National Committee declared that the latest tax cut benefits "everyone who pays taxes." That is simply a lie.  You've heard about those eight million children denied any tax break by a last-minute switcheroo.  In total, 50 million American households — including a majority of those with members over 65 — get nothing; another 20 million receive less than $100 each.  And a great majority of those left behind do pay taxes.

And the bald-faced misrepresentation of an elitist tax cut offering little or nothing to most Americans is only the latest in a long string of blatant misstatements.  Misleading the public has been a consistent strategy for the Bush team on issues ranging from tax policy and Social Security reform to energy and the environment.  So why should we give the administration the benefit of the doubt on foreign policy?

It's long past time for this administration to be held accountable.  Over the last two years we've become accustomed to the pattern.  Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters — a group that includes a large segment of the news media — obediently insist that black is white and up is down.  Meanwhile the "liberal" media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up.  And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies.

If this same lack of accountability extends to matters of war and peace, we're in very deep trouble.  The British seem to understand this: Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent — who supported Britain's participation in the war — writes that "the prime minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks."

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.  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.

But here's the thought that should make those commentators really uncomfortable.  Suppose that this administration did con us into war.  And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr.  Bush can fight what Mr.  Hastings calls a "khaki election" next year.  In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted.

Below is an article by Nicholas D.  Kristof, which appeared in the New York Times on 6th May 2003.

Missing in Action: Truth

By Nicholas D.  Kristof

"When I raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D.  recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at me.  The gist was: "You *&#*!  Who cares if we never find weapons of mass destruction, because we've liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant."

But it does matter, enormously, for American credibility.  After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.: "That is what this war was about."

I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq.  But there are indications that the U.S.  government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world. 

Let's fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda.  Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don't want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit. 

Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons.  As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously. 

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president'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 reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade.  In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible.  The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President 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. 

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995.  Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr.  Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr.  Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D.  program in the early 1990's.  Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr.  Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public. 

Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again."

"In this administration, the pressure to get product `right' is coming out of O.S.D.  [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]," Mr.  Lang said.  He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S.  troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem.  "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome," he said.  

"The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D.  was either defective or manipulated," Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted.  Another senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated."

The C.I.A.  was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan's policies.  Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom."

Iraq Body Count

Iraq?

Guilty of developing weapons of mass destruction?
Guilty of attacking other countries?
Guilty of threatening other countries?
Guilty of ignoring many U.N.  Resolutions?
Guilty of undemocratic election of the President?
Guilty of training forces for acts of terrorism?

So this is Saddam Hussain's Iraq?  Well, it might be...

...but I am describing the United States of America!

Since the second world war THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT has bombed 21 countries:

(From New Internationalist)