Junkie Up!

JUNE 20, 2003 SPECIAL UPDATE

Tumble Weed is deliberately ignoring scientific evidence of his own administration as to global warming. “The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs..

Agency officials said it [the report] was tentatively scheduled to be released early next week, before Mrs. Whitman steps down on June 27, ending a troubled time in office that often put her at odds with President Bush. Drafts of the climate section, with changes sought by the White House, were given to The New York Times yesterday by a former E.P.A. official, along with earlier drafts and an internal memorandum in which some officials protested the changes. Two agency officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the documents were authentic.

The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tail-pipe emissions and could threaten health and ecosystems.

Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion. – New York Times [Junkie: Another reason Whitman is stepping down.]

At the same time that TW is removing references to global warming from official reports by our scientists; the British government publishes a report from its scientists warning that global warming threatens the survival of our planet. “Rising global temperatures over the next century could trigger a catastrophe to rival the worst mass extinction in the history of the planet, leading British scientists warned today.

Researchers at Bristol University say their studies show that six degrees of global warming was enough to wipe out up to 95% of the species which were alive on earth at the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago.

Up to six degrees of warming is now predicted for the next 100 years by United Nations scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if nothing is done about emissions of greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide, the chief cause of global warming.

This compares with a 0.6C rise over the last century, according to the IPCC.” – Guardian Unlimited

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JUNE 19, 2003 UPDATE

ANOTHER TUMBLE WEED PREVARICATION

A TPJ theme in recent weeks has been Tumble Weed’s (Bush’s) FABRICATING WAR – FAILING AT PEACE. Tumble Weed’s prevarications are not limited merely to the war in Iraq. Tumble Weed has failed his promises to AmeriCorps. “AmeriCorps is a network of national service programs that engage more than 50,000 Americans each year in intensive service to meet critical needs in education, public safety, health, and the environment. AmeriCorps members serve through more than 2,100 nonprofits, public agencies, and faith-based organizations. They tutor and mentor youth, build affordable housing, teach computer skills, clean parks and streams, run after-school programs, and help communities respond to disasters.” – AmeriCorps

During his 2002 State of the Union address Tumble Weed portrayed the Republican agenda for “compassionate conservatism:”

We've been offered a unique opportunity, and we must not let this moment pass. (Applause.)

My call tonight is for every American to commit at least two years -- 4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime -- to the service of your neighbors and your nation. (Applause.) Many are already serving, and I thank you. If you aren't sure how to help, I've got a good place to start.

To sustain and extend the best that has emerged in America, I invite you to join the new USA Freedom Corps. The Freedom Corps will focus on three areas of need: responding in case of crisis at home; rebuilding our communities; and extending American compassion throughout the world.

One purpose of the USA Freedom Corps will be homeland security. America needs retired doctors and nurses who can be mobilized in major emergencies; volunteers to help police and fire departments; transportation and utility workers well-trained in spotting danger.
Our country also needs citizens working to rebuild our communities. We need mentors to love children, especially children whose parents are in prison. And we need more talented teachers in troubled schools. USA Freedom Corps will expand and improve the good efforts of AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to recruit more than 200,000 new volunteers.

And America needs citizens to extend the compassion of our country to every part of the world. So we will renew the promise of the Peace Corps, double its volunteers over the next five years -- (applause) -- and ask it to join a new effort to encourage development and education and opportunity in the Islamic world. (Applause.) – C-SPAN

In subsequent speeches across the country, Tumble Weed promised to increase AmeriCorps from 50,000 to 75,000 volunteers. A modest objective – but perhaps a lofty one for a neoconservative Republican.

Tumble Weed’s rhetoric belies the truth – his proposed budget for 2004 cuts AmeriCorps funding by 40M$ from 2003 levels. Congress has imposed a cap on volunteers – a limit of 50,000.

The New York Times rips Tumble Weed for the prevarication. In an editorial entitled, “The Spirit of Service Betrayed, “they write:

[T]his is yet another instance where the president's actions have not matched his "compassionate conservative" rhetoric. Instead of expanding AmeriCorps, Mr. Bush is presiding over a major cutback in its spending and scope. That translates into devastating cuts for many localities and community service organizations across the nation that rely heavily on AmeriCorps members, who serve up to a year and receive a $4,725 educational stipend.

. . .

President Bush never backed up his rhetorical support for expanding AmeriCorps with muscular lobbying to persuade Republicans in Congress to get on board. As a result, thousands of patriotic young people will be denied a chance to serve their country, and cash-strapped communities across the nation will be denied help they badly need. Long standing local programs with expertise in effectively mobilizing volunteers to deliver needed services will be wiped out.

. . .

Even amid cries for help from anguished community officials, the White House still refuses to acknowledge the extent of the damage, and the president's budget request for fiscal 2004 actually asks for $40 million less in AmeriCorps grants than he requested for 2003. That's strange behavior for a president supposedly committed to a robust program of national service. – New York Times

There is a reason we are Dems!
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JUNE 17, 2003 UPDATE

FABRICATING WAR

“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 President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.

The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has 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.

Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, 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 conclusion of the investigation ordered by the British Government - and revealed by The Observer last week - is hugely embarrassing for Blair, who had used the discovery of the alleged mobile labs as part of his efforts to silence criticism over the failure of Britain and the US to find any weapons of mass destruction since the invasion of Iraq.

. . .

The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control.” – The Observer

The conclusion of the British government has not received widespread media attention in the United States. The lack of media scrutiny in the US may explain these poll numbers.

            “More than four in ten Americans say the Bush Administration overestimated the number of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but despite recent scrutiny of the Administration's pre-war claims about those weapons, most Americans express confidence that the U.S. will eventually uncover those weapons, according to a new CBS News poll.

            Most still say Iraq was a threat requiring immediate military action.

            Finding those weapons does matter to most Americans. So does finding Saddam Hussein. Fifty-eight percent say it matters whether the U.S. finds weapons, and even more - nearly two-thirds - say it matters whether the U.S. is able to find Saddam Hussein.” – CBS

Despite the attitudes of the American public, the evidence keeps mounting that Tumble Weed’s administration knew the claims that Iraq possessed or was seeing to possess nuclear capability was false.

“Condoleezza Rice was asked on "Meet the Press" on Sunday . . . 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 Nicholas D. Kristof’s column in the New York Times. . . .

To help out Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney, Kristoff offer[s] some more detail about the uranium saga. Piecing the story together from two people directly involved and three others who were briefed on it, the tale begins at the end of 2001, when third-rate forged documents turned up in West Africa purporting to show the sale by Niger to Iraq of tons of "yellowcake" uranium.

Italy's intelligence service obtained the documents and shared them with British spooks, who passed them on to Washington. Mr. Cheney's office got wind of this and asked the C.I.A. to investigate.

The agency chose a former ambassador to Africa to undertake the mission, and that person flew to Niamey, Niger, in the last week of February 2002. This envoy spent one week in Niger, staying at the Sofitel and discussing his findings with the U.S. ambassador to Niger, and then flew back to Washington via Paris.

Immediately upon his return, in early March 2002, this senior envoy briefed the C.I.A. and State Department and reported that the documents were bogus, for two main reasons. First, the documents seemed phony on their face — for example, the Niger minister of energy and mines who had signed them had left that position years earlier. Second, an examination of Niger's uranium industry showed that an international consortium controls the yellowcake closely, so the Niger government does not have any yellowcake to sell.

Officials now claim that the C.I.A. inexplicably did not report back to the White House with this envoy's findings and reasoning, or with an assessment of its own that the information was false. I hear something different. My understanding is that while Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet may not have told Mr. Bush that the Niger documents were forged, lower C.I.A. officials did tell both the vice president's office and National Security Council staff members. Moreover, I hear from another source that the C.I.A.'s operations side and its counterterrorism center undertook their own investigations of the documents, poking around in Italy and Africa, and also concluded that they were false — a judgment that filtered to the top of the C.I.A.

Meanwhile, the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, independently came to the exact same conclusion about those documents, according to Greg Thielmann, a former official there. Mr. Thielmann said he was "quite confident" that the conclusion had been passed up to the top of the State Department. "It was well known throughout the intelligence community that it was a forgery," said Melvin Goodman, a former CIA. analyst who is now at the Center for International Policy.

Still, Mr. Tenet and the intelligence agencies were under intense pressure to come up with evidence against Iraq. Ambiguities were lost, and doubters were discouraged from speaking up.

"It was a foregone conclusion that every photo of a trailer truck would be a `mobile bioweapons lab' and every tanker truck would be `filled with weaponized anthrax,' " a former military intelligence officer said ”None of the analysts in military uniform had the option to debate the vice president, secretary of defense and the secretary of state." -- New York Times

The Chicago Tribune publishes an article that asks the essential, unanswered question that remains unanswered, “Before the recent Iraq war, everyone knew that Iraq had a serious stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Conservative hawks knew it. Tony Blair's government in Britain proclaimed it. Even prominent Democrats and skeptical arms-control experts more or less bought the idea. Two months after coalition troops took over Iraq, the vast stockpile that everyone knew existed is nowhere to be found--not so much as a drop of sarin or a spore of anthrax. Even if some hidden stashes turn up, it's clear that the prewar depiction of Iraq as one big storage bin for banned weapons was way off target. How could so many experts have been so wrong? And why did most politicians, journalists and ordinary citizens believe an overblown assessment of Iraqi capabilities that now appears to have been based on questionable evidence?” That gullibility may be more troubling, in the long run, than the simmering scandal over whether the Bush administration distorted weapons intelligence to make its case for war. -- Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune fails to answer its own question. The author’s attempted answer is, “It was always easy to believe the worst about Iraq under Hussein. Many Democrats also were determined to bolster their homeland security credentials by taking a hard line on Iraq. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) staked out a position nearly to the right of the Bush administration.
. . . Administration officials on the defensive about the failure to find any weapons also have said recently that many news stories supported their claim that Iraq retained dangerous weapons and was working on nuclear arms. But that's a weak and circular defense. Many of the news accounts in The New York Times, for example, cited Bush administration officials as their main source.” -- Chicago Tribune While correctly noting the justification is “weak and circular,” the Chicago Tribune fails to offer any better explanation.

Answering the Chicago Tribune’s question is more compelling in light of more recent developments. Two CIA employees responsible for leading the Iraq intelligence effort have been “reassigned.”

“Two of the key players on this problem have essentially been sent into deep exile," said one agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The official added that the changes seemed designed to show the administration that "we're being responsive to charges that we did not perform well."

The moves come as congressional committees are reviewing prewar intelligence, and some Democrats are pushing for public hearings and a full- scale investigation.

Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee signed a letter this week seeking a meeting with Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., in an effort to pressure him to drop his opposition to a full investigation.

Meanwhile, staffers on the House and Senate Intelligence committees are already poring over thousands of pages of prewar intelligence documents turned over by the CIA in recent days.

One Capitol Hill aide who has reviewed the material said there are troubling contradictions in the documents and statements.

In some cases, records show officials reaching one conclusion on Iraq's weapons, only to offer a contradictory conclusion a few months later. "It's all fodder for the Democrats," the aide said. "What they'll find is people having said things that aren't consistent with what they're saying now."

An intelligence official familiar with the Iraq assessments said congressional investigators are not likely to find documented proof that analysts were pressured to tailor their assessments.

"They'll be hard-pressed to find any kind of smoking gun, a case of somebody coming in and saying, 'I wrote it this way and it came back from the seventh floor telling me to write it another way,' " the official said, referring to the location at CIA headquarters where Director George Tenet and top officials have offices.

Instead, the official compared the pressure analysts faced preceding the war to that applied by lawyers "badgering the witness -- asking the question over and over and over again to the point where people get worn down."

Much of this pressure, the source said, came from top officials at the Pentagon, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Pentagon officials have repeatedly denied seeking to influence the intelligence on Iraq.

The weapons controversy has exposed new fault lines between the White House and the intelligence community.

In a series of media appearances this week, senior White House officials including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice stressed that all of the administration's prewar claims came straight out of briefings from the CIA.

"You had a director of central intelligence that produced an estimate that said this regime had weapons of mass destruction," Rice said in a television interview.

Earlier this week, the White House put Tenet in charge of the ongoing weapons hunt, a job that had previously belonged to the Pentagon. "They handed the whole ball to George," said one intelligence source familiar with the details of the assignment. He said the message being sent to Tenet seemed clear: "You said (the banned weapons) were there. You go find them."

Many in the intelligence community are now pessimistic that stocks of anthrax, botulinum toxin, sarin gas or other agents Iraq was accused of producing will be found.

"It's not that they were never there or that we worked for years on erroneous information," one intelligence official said. Rather, there is growing concern that the nation's spy community missed the destruction of the materials because analysts were not prepared to consider Hussein capable of taking such a step.” – San Francisco Chronicle

Wayne Madsen has written an article in CounterPunch, “WeaponsGate: The Coming Downfall of Lying Regimes?,” that offers far more compelling reasons the American public was mislead by Tumble Weed and his minions. [Junkie: There is no active hyperlink to this article – sorry.]

“You wouldn't know if from listening to the leading Democratic candidates for President, but "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.

. . . 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. shores to the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and other countries.

. . . Paul Wolfowitz, a chief neo-con cabalist, let the cat out of the bag in Singapore when he said that everyone could agree on a cause of war being Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That would be the common denominator in justifying an attack, whether or not such weapons could ever be found. Wolfowitz also stated that Iraq's swimming on a "sea of oil" was the reason it had to be attacked and not, for example, North Korea. The fact that weapons of mass destruction are actually possessed by North Korea, a country lacking any significant natural resources, is of no concern to the neo-cons. Oil was and is the bottom line in Iraq. . . .

. . .

            The most dramatic revolt against George W. Bush and Tony Blair can be seen from the high-level leaks of classified information from the top levels of American and British intelligence. Just consider that the United States has never experienced such repeated leaks of classified information since the years of the spies in the 1980s, a time when a number of intelligence
employees were caught selling U.S. secrets to the Russians and Israelis. Yet, the current leaks are not acts of treason, but acts of unbridled patriotism.

            The leaks from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), CIA, State Department, and other agencies are testimony to the deep divisions within the Bush administration over the phony war on Iraq. Intelligence agencies that are often at odds with one another over policy have united like never before in blowing the whistle on the neo-con agenda. The Bush administration lied flat out over the Iraqi WMDs and Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. It's just that simple. Career intelligence officers, who know the penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, are showing more courage than most of the Democrats in Congress who seem more fearful of the neo-cons and their supporters than in exposing "Weaponsgate."

            The most recent classified disclosure was a DIA report on chemical weapons that concluded that there "was no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether Iraq has or will establish its chemical agent production facilities."

            On June 8, the Bush administration paraded its usual shills, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, before the Sunday talking head shows. Rice and Powell said they based their claims that Iraq had WMDs on an October 1, 2002 national intelligence "white paper." But that paper stated that Iraq had a capability to produce chemical weapons within its chemical industry, not that it was producing such weapons. Hans Blix recently said the so-called intelligence passed to him by the Bush regime was useless for his own UN weapons inspection team in its search for WMDs in Iraq. It now appears that all the so-called U.S. and British "intelligence" was nothing more than a collection of neo-con propaganda and disinformation. In the face of incessantly probing questions on CBS's "Face the Nation," Rice, in her school marm-like best, could only keep repeating that "there are still bad people in Iraq." Bad people? Is this the best terminology we can get from a PhD in International Studies? Or is that the phraseology she uses in explaining foreign policy matters to Bush? The latter explanation seems more likely.

            Last March, a classified State Department report, prepared by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and titled "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes," countered neo-con claims that a democracy in Iraq would foster democracy throughout the Middle East. The report, dated February 26, 2003, concluded that democracy would be difficult to achieve in Iraq, electoral democracy in Iraq would be exploited by anti-American elements, and that the idea that other Middle East nations would be transformed into democracies is not credible. So far, all those predictions have come true. Iraq is currently an American protectorate lacking even fundamental human services, anti-American Shi'as in the south are increasingly venting their anger at U.S. occupiers, and far from extending democracy throughout the Middle East, Mauritania's Arab pro-American government barely survived a military coup attempt by Islamist and pro-Iraqi elements in the counry's armed forces. So much for the Middle East "domino theory" concocted by Richard Perle and his American Enterprise Institute clones and parroted by Bush in a speech before the right-wing "think tank" the same day the State Department prepared its opposite report.

            In another slap at the neo-cons, who have supported the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi, the CIA leaked a classified report about their favorite Iraqi. The report, which surfaced in April 2003, concluded that Chalabi had little popular support among the Iraqi people. No wonder then that it is Chalabi who appears to be the source for all the bogus intelligence about Iraqi WMDs, Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda, Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and other false flag intelligence. Chalabi, who is as big a liar as his neo-con friends, hoped to lull American intelligence into believing him over seasoned Middle East intelligence hands. No one but Rumsfeld; former CIA Director James Woolsey (who has taken hundreds of thousands of consulting dollars from Chalabi over the years); Wolfowitz; Doug Feith; America's new monitor for the Middle East peace road map, John Wolf; and their comrades were taken in by Chalabi, a wanted scofflaw from justice in Jordan.

            One day the names Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Woolsey, and Chalabi will become as familiar to students of "Weaponsgate" as the names Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Liddy, Mitchell, and Stans are familiar to those who study Watergate. And in a very interesting nexus between the two scandals, Richard Nixon's former counselor John W. Dean has written that Bush's lying about the reasons for the United States to go to war is an impeachable offense.

            For those who are looking for the straw that broke the camel's back in "Weaponsgate" they need not look any farther than Number 10 Downing Street. The troubles that Tony Blair are now experiencing may be a harbinger for things to come in Washington. Blair is in deep trouble and he knows it. After returning from the G-8 summit in Evian, France, Blair was reported by The Observer to be running around Number 10 in a pathetic panic. In a moment of temporary insanity, which must have been precious to people who loathe Blair, the toothy Prime Minister was pacing about his residence and yelling that people needed to get a grip on what was happening. One of Blair's aides had to comfort Blair and convince him that his advisers were on his side. Blair must have had thoughts of John Major getting ready stick it to Margaret Thatcher or of Brutus getting ready to plunge a knife into the back of Julius Caesar. Blair's political opponents within his own Labor party had seized on his government's use of a "dodgy dossier" on Iraqi WMDs to support the attack on Iraq as an example of Blair's deceit. The dossier, titled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation," was based on a 12-year-old PhD thesis culled from the Internet and the bogus Chalabi documents about Nigerien uranium.

            The revolt against Blair should serve as a warning for Bush. Just consider what is happening in Britain. Blair has been abandoned by some of his most senior government officials, including former Leader of the House of Commons Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and former International Development Minister Clare Short, in addition to a number of lesser Cabinet officials.
Over 70 of Blair's Labor members of the House of Commons are in open revolt against his duplicity. No wonder Godric Smith, Blair's official spokesman, announced his resignation the same day that Ari Fleischer was announcing his departure in Washington. The wheels are coming off the transatlantic neo-con wagon. New Labor and the "Compassionate Conservative" Republican Party have been shown to be total ruses. Their war policies and global domination goals have been thoroughly exposed as neo-fascist manifestations of the teachings of neo-con philosopher Leo Strauss.

            But Blair faces an even more serious revolt from his intelligence officials. Blair's use of bogus intelligence to claim that Britain had only a 45-minute warning prior to an Iraqi chem-bio attack reportedly resulted in the threatened resignations of the heads of MI-6 and MI-5, Sir Richard Dearlove and Eliza Manningham-Buller, respectively, And there was the leak of a January 31, 2003 Top Secret memo from the National Security Agency to its Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) counterpart, which asked for British help in electronically snooping on members and non-members of the UN Security Council to determine their stance on America's anti-Iraq UN resolution. That memo was reportedly leaked with a wink and an nod from the highest levels of British intelligence.

            The public row in Britain has forced Alastair Campbell, Blair's own Karl Rove-like spinmeister, to apologize to the British Security Services for combining their intelligence material with the bogus material it used in developing the Iraqi WMDs dossier. However, some of Blair's advisers seem willing to go down with their Prime Minister faster than the deck hands on the Titanic. Blair's new House of Commons leader John Reid, a former member of the British Communist Party, ranted that "rogue elements" within the intelligence services were leaking classified information to bring down the government. Reid also stated that for all anyone knew, the leaks were coming from some "man in a pub." Such are the cynical words from a
government on the brink of collapse.

            Blair is not the only "Coalition of the Willing" partner beginning to get nervous. Australian Prime Minister John Howard is distancing himself from the forged and phony intelligence on Iraqi WMDs, claiming his intelligence services took at face value what was presented by the Americans and British. Denmark, which has very little tolerance for lying Prime Ministers, is opening up an parliamentary investigation of why Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen lied about the Iraqi WMDs. Bush's allies in Spain and Italy face similar inquiries. Blair, who appears to be heading for an ignoble British-style heave-ho, is sticking to the lie but with an interesting caveat. At a June 10 news conference, Blair restated the canard, "There is not a shred of evidence that we have doctored or manipulated intelligence." But then he added, "that would be absolutely gross if we did so." Blair may be entering the typical "let's look for a scapegoat" phase. He won't be successful. The intelligence services won't let him get away with it. He and his supporters will have to pay the price for lying to the British people. Barring a miracle, Blair's days in office appear to be numbered.

            . . . However, the leaders of France, Germany, Canada, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, Ireland, Belgium, South Africa, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, and the other countries who withstood constant berating from Washington and the American ambassadors accredited to them, can take heart in the fact that they were correct all along. They will reap the electoral benefits of their stance while they see their pro-American colleagues take the consequential and inevitable
electoral fall.”

As one astute observer noted, “What comes next is straight out of a Tom Clancy novel. In a front-page report in Thursday’s Washington Post headlined CIA DID NOT SHARE DOUBT ON IRAQ DATA, 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. If true, that means that George Tenet, head of the CIA, knowingly placed a verifiably false piece of information in the president’s hands that Bush used as a key element in the road to war when he spoke to Congress and the country. If Bush truly believes his CIA director set him up like that, he should fire Tenet.

Phoning around Capitol Hill for reaction to the Post story, 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. The hard-liners running foreign policy didn’t have enough to claim Iraq was an imminent threat with chemical and biological weapons. Most experts don’t regard them as real WMD; they’re terror weapons, and absent a convincing connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, which the administration couldn’t make, they did not pose an imminent threat to the United States

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. ‘He’s a good politician in the worst possible sense of the word,’ says a Senate foreign-policy aide. ‘He plays both sides of the street.’ – MSNBC

[Junkie Editor Michael Carmichael: The recent episode of paranoid panic of Tony Blair is revealed to be symptomatic of his politically fatal condition (unmasked manipulator of intel). Blair's predicament is not unique to him, but also for the top layer of numerous neoconservative governments in Europe and Australasia. According to Madsen, we may be nearing the tipping point, and numerous governments may soon experience massive political implosions. The trigger - the top levels of the intelligence community who feel betrayed by their political bosses swirling around the desks of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice and Blair. Let's hope so. The evidence points to the dynamics of the western intelligence community and the consequences of the malign mismanagement of intel for short term political gain. Junkie: Reading all of the information leaking out demonstrates the logical fallacy of Tumble Weed’s position. Essentially, everyone knew the nuclear “intelligence” was false, even members of Cheny’s staff. But, one has to believe that Defense, Cheny’s staff, the State Department and the CIA never informed Tumble Weed who was going to use the information in one of the most important speeches a President gives – The State of the Union. The “dots” are starting to connect – not that Iraq had nuclear capability – but that the President and his minions ignored the truth to justify the war.]