...In May, when Taguba testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen.Wayne Allard asked him a direct question: "Did we have terrorists in the population at this prison?" Taguba answered, "Sir, none that we were made aware of." His own files make clear, however, that a more accurate response would have been: "Yes, sir -- but only among the guards."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=6388256&rnd=1091509790764&has-player=unknown
2 facts may be of interest: Halliburton was the largest single recipient of Iraqi oil funds during the occupation, according to the Army Corps of Engineers' figures released last month. And among US politicians, according to the Center for Public Integrity, Mr Bush has been the largest single recipient of US oil and gas industry campaign contributions since 1998 - his total stands at $1,724,579.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1264765,00.html
WASHINGTON, May 13 (UPI) -- U.S. and coalition forces will leave Iraq if asked to do so by an interim Iraqi government, a State Department official told the House Thursday.
During occasionally combative questioning by bipartisan members of the International Relations Committee, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman said that the United States would respect the wishes of a newly sovereign Iraq even if it meant withdrawing troops before Iraqi general elections are held in 2005. The sovereignty handover is scheduled for June 30.
Grossman repeatedly insisted that he did not believe such a request would be made by the new Iraqi body.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." That's from George Orwell's 1946 essay "In Front of Your Nose." It seems especially relevant right now, as we survey the wreckage of America's Iraq adventure.
Despite statements by such officials as the Bush administration's former chief weapons inspector, David Kay; its former anti-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke; former chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix; as well as admissions by senior administration officials themselves, a majority of the public still believes Iraq was closely tied to the al-Qaeda terrorist group and had WMD stocks or programs before US troops invaded the country 13 months ago.
Thursday April 15, 2004 4:46 PM
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Bush is to blame for the death and violence that is going on in Iraq, said Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of the U.S. administration.
During a speech to commemorate his return to power in the wake of short-lived 2002 coup, the leftist Chavez also accused the Bush administration of playing a key role in the failed attempt to oust him...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3981202,00.html
...Cheney went to great lengths to cover-up Pakistan's nuclear weaponry. In a New Yorker article published on March 29, 1993, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040119fr_archive02 , investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted Barlow as saying that some high-ranking members inside the CIA and the Pentagon lied to Congress about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal so as not to sacrifice the sale of the F-16 fighter planes to Islamabad, which was secretly equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. Pakistan's nuclear capabilities and the had become so grave by the spring of 1990 that then CIA deputy director Richard Kerr said the Pakistani nuclear threat was worse than! the Cuban Missile crisis in the 1960s.