Yet what is disturbing to many war critics about the American reaction to the war is that Bush secured majority backing by misleading the U.S. public about key facts – and the majority of American people don't seem to care. [Emphasis mine.]

As Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine, observed, the pre-war debate in the U.S. was less a reasoned discussion about a profound redirection of America from a republic toward an empire than it was “agitprop,” the intelligence term for propaganda intended to agitate a population into a pre-determined course of action.

“I don’t know how else to characterize the Bush administration’s effort to convince the public,” Lapham wrote. Citing the paucity of evidence about Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction. Lapham took note of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s instant-classic rationale for war: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” [Harper’s Magazine, April 2003]

When Secretary of State Colin Powell took the propaganda campaign to the U.N., that absence of evidence was padded with references to unnamed “sources” and photos of trucks and buildings that proved nothing. Powell played an intercepted phone call between two Iraqis shouting Arabic at one another and then Powell added fictitious words to the State Department’s translation to make the case that the Iraqis were cleaning out illegal weapons before a U.N. inspection.

Powell read from the supposed transcript of one Iraqi’s words: “We sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there.”

What the full State Department transcript said, however, was: “We sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.” In the full transcript at the State Department's Web site, there was no order to “clean out all of the areas” and there was no instruction to “make sure there is nothing there.” [Powell’s apparent fabrication of the transcript was first reported by Gilbert Cranberg, a former editor of the Des Moines Register’s editorial pages.]

In his U.N. presentation, Powell also hailed a British dossier that he said described in “exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.” The British report, however, turned out to be cribbed from an outdated student paper on the Internet. Powell further shredded his personal credibility by insisting that a communique broadcast by al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, which denounced both the U.S. intentions to invade Iraq and the Iraqi government, was proof that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were “in partnership.”  

The Central Intelligence Agency issued a report last week claiming that the opposition leader airlifted by the Pentagon to Iraq over the weekend, Ahmad Chalabi, would not be an effective leader to replace Saddam Hussein because many Iraqis do not like him.

In a classified report distributed widely within the U.S. government, the CIA argues that Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon civilian officials, and Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, the leader of the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, have little popular support among Iraqis on the ground. ...

The CIA has long considered Chalabi an unsuitable leader for the government that replaces Saddam. In 1992, while the agency supported Chalabi and an open strategy to spark a rebellion against Baghdad from the north, they also pursued a palace coup strategy without telling him. The agency has also held Chalabi accountable for compromising a coup attempt in 1995, when Saddam's men rounded up disloyal military officers the agency had hoped would kill the Iraqi leader.

The US managed to bomb the offices of both Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV yesterday in Baghdad, and then denied that they were purposeful. We also bombed the Al Jazeera office in Kabul in Afghanistan during the bombing there as well. I'm not sure whether I believe the Pentagon on this or not.

The database also would store information from state and local law enforcement agencies, records of telephone calls and terrorism-related information from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Defense agencies. It would also contain data from the 66 joint terrorism task forces at FBI field offices, as well as from the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, an interagency group formed by Attorney General John Ashcroft in October 2001 to keep known terrorists and suspects out of the United States and to track them if they do enter the country.

Lowery acknowledged the security and privacy concerns that would likely be raised by placing so much sensitive information in one place. He said that security of the database is a top priority, and that a CIA official detailed to the FBI is working on the system’s design and can “veto” elements that don’t meet strict standards. Also, Lowery and other officials said information would be collected according to guidelines established by the attorney general.

Ashcroft told a Senate subcommittee Tuesday that in 2002, the Justice Department made more than 1,000 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes law enforcement surveillance, including wire taps, of suspected terrorists in the United States. Also, Ashcroft requested 170 “emergency” surveillance requests, three times the total number obtained in the 23 years prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. The emergency requests allow collection of information for 72 hours prior to court review, and are personally authorized by the attorney general.

[W]e are ridding the people of Iraq from one of the cruelest regimes on earth."

The Jessica Lynch story has all the elements of a Hollywood classic. As the Independent's Deborah Orr observed Friday, right from the day she disappeared, Lynch commanded all the media attention, far more than her less fortunate sisters-in-arms, Shoshana Johnson, whose terrified eyes in that PoW video will haunt me forever, or Lori Ann Piestewa, a Hopi Indian we will never see alive.

It is, wrote Orr, "recognisable that America does have a hierarchy of life, with pretty blondes at the top, black Americans and Native Americans further down and the rest of the world trailing hopelessly. Which might help explain the unseemly rush to war."

The fabled pendulum of liberty may not swing back this time. Why?

...[U]nder cover of a war that has caused the news media to ignore other important news, the Bush administration issued an order that will guarantee the wrongful arrests or harassment of innocent people. The Justice Department told the FBI it no longer needed to worry about the accuracy of its National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database containing 39 million criminal records, including some documents that would barely pass the gossip hurdle.

NCIC records are used every day by law enforcement agencies all over the nation. The accuracy requirement was established under the 1974 Privacy Act, one purpose of which was to ensure that federal records, which could have enormous impact on people's lives if misused, don't contain erroneous information. For more information, as well as an online petition asking for a reversal of this misguided shift, visit the Electronic Privacy Information Center Web site ( www.epic.org/actions/ncic/ ).

The Bush administration's attitude, assisted by a Congress that long since abandoned any commitment to liberty, is that government has the right to know absolutely everything about you and that government can violate your fundamental rights with impunity as long as the cause is deemed worthy.

You, on the other hand, have absolutely no right to know what the government is doing in your name and with your money, unless the information is deemed harmless by people who have every motive to cover up misdeeds. Bush and his people have turned secrecy into a mantra, and too few people recognize the danger that poses to our freedoms, much less our pocketbooks.

A facility near Baghdad that a US officer had claimed might finally be "smoking gun" evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons production turned out to contain pesticide, not sarin gas as originally thought. ...

The belated correction was an embarrassment for the US forces in the region, who had been quick to say that they thought they had finally found the proof they have been actively looking for, that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction....

"We don't have any extraordinary finds at this point while we're still looking," CentCom spokesman US Brigadier General Vincent Brooks told a news briefing.

He expressed confidence that the US forces would eventually find the proof they were looking for.

In a further sign that US commanders are unconcerned about an Iraqi nuclear, biological or chemical attack, they ordered forces near Baghdad on Monday to shed their protective gear.

I miss Richard Nixon. What I mean is, I miss the days of Richard Nixon when, even while the Trickster and Spiro Agnew were abusing power, a loyal opposition resided in Washington, D.C. I miss the days when a loyal opposition was bipartisan, well-spoken and independent-minded, when it included people like Daniel Moynihan, who died this week, and Lowell Weicker, then a Republican Senator from this great state. I miss the time when the Republican Party had smart people in it, even if you disagreed with them, people like Mark Hatfield, Barry Goldwater, John Chaffee. I miss the time when even so-called "doves" like William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, George McGovern and Morris Udall were admired by those who voted differently from them. I miss the checks and balances that were built into our Constitution and worked so well for this nation up until November 2000.

I miss America.

...I miss the fact that, even in his darkest hours, Nixon conducted regular, unscripted press conferences, his upper lip and enormous forehead beading with sweat as he fielded one tough question after another from unsycophantic (even openly hostile) journalists. I miss Nixon's ability to speak in complete sentences and foment strategies that, even if you disagreed with them, were consistent. I miss Nixon's occasional forays into moderation and even shockingly prescient policy (e.g., opening the door to China, creating the Environmental Protection Agency).

Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha said last week that India has a right of pre-emptive strike against Pakistan and that the United States has already set an example for such an attack by invading Iraq.