As recently as last month, Vice President Dick Cheney said there was reason to believe a disputed Czech intelligence report that Mohamed Atta had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001, suggesting a tie between Iraq and the Sept. 11 plot.

… the bipartisan commission’s final report found no evidence of close collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, appearing to undermine a justification for the Iraq war.

The commission found no credible evidence to suggest that the Prague meeting took place and no evidence of any kind to show Iraqi involvement in attacks by Al Qaeda against the United States. While there had indeed between periodic contacts in the late 1990′s between Al Qaeda representatives and Iraqi officials, principally in Sudan, the commission found, those contacts did not amount to much.

Link: New York Times

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“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center,” Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s national security adviser, said in May 2002.

1. … in its investigation, the commission found that an attack described as unimaginable had in fact been imagined, repeatedly. The commission said that several threat reports circulated within the government in the late 1990′s raised the explicit possibility of an attack using airliners as missiles.

2. … in September 1998, based on information provided by a source who walked into an American consulate in East Asia, that “mentioned a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city.” In August of the same year, it said, an intelligence agency received information that “a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade Center.”

3. The North American Aerospace Defense Command had gone so far as to develop exercises to counter the threat and, according to a Defense Department memorandum unearthed by the commission, planned a drill in April 2001 that would have simulated a terrorist crash into the Pentagon.

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‘I thought I was smart,’ complains Tony, ‘and that’s why I bumped him up and protected him. Turns out, I’m just a fucking robot to my own pussy-ass weakness.’ Well, who isn’t, really? And now that the psychic weight has been lifted from his shoulders, Tony is finally able to indulge in some of that patented introspection we all know and love. ‘You know, sometimes what happens in here is like taking a shit,’ he observes. ‘I prefer to think of it more like childbirth,’ replies Melfi. ‘Trust me,’ he tells her. ‘It’s like taking a shit.’

Which do I like better, the show itself, or the writers at television without pity.

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McCain had been rumored for months to be on Democrat John Kerry’s list of potential vice-presidential running mates, an overture he has rebuffed on numerous occasions. While McCain has defended Kerry against Republican attacks on his patriotism, he left no doubt yesterday about his support for Bush. “He has led this country with moral clarity about the stakes involved,”McCain told the crowd. “He has not wavered in his determination to protect this country and to make the world a better, safer, freer place. You will not yield, nor will he.”

link: Seattle Times

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So Tenet leaves the CIA. I want more.

I want Humpty (Wolfowitz) and Dumpty (Rove) both, twisting in the wind. Read the rest of this entry »

“What I don’t know is how muslims manage to live in this country given the climate of hysteria”

by AnwerB

“Well, what I did when the FBI called me and asked me to come in for questioning is call a lawyer. They called me in the middle of the day at my office, knew everything about me and started asking questions about my brother, family, etc. They then told me that I could come into their office for questioning … or if more convenient, they would come to my office and question me there.

After asking them what they wanted, they finally told me that with the upcoming war in Iraq (this was about a year ago,) they wanted to know if I had any knowledge about weapons of mass destruction (really, I’m not joking.)

I told them that I was three at the time I had left.”

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