There’s nothing in the news today that the anti-war movement hasn’t been saying since before the Iraq War started.

Bush lies. Repeatedly. There were no WMD. Newspapers can be propaganda funnels for the White House, spreading disinfo and slime while play-acting at being journalists.

Three years ago when anti-war groups like the ANSWER Coalition said this, we were ignored. Two years ago we were mocked. A year ago we were called left-wing radicals.

Today, what we’ve been saying for years is now front-page news across the country.

Just thought I’d point this out…

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The Washington Post’s ombudsman rebuked journalist Bob Woodward on Sunday for withholding what he knew about the CIA leak probe from his editor and for making public statements that were dismissive of the investigation without disclosing his own involvement.

The blowback from Plamegate has now badly damaged two major US newspapers, first the NY Times and now the Washington Post. In both cases, supposedly independent newspapers had journalists who were anything but that. Instead, they were conduits from the neocons, artfully speading lies and propaganda, feigning objectivity all the while.

Tag: Bob Woodward

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This is a bombshell. 

How U.S. fell under the spell of ‘Curveball’, front page LA Times exclusive

The Iraqi informant’s German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his information was ‘not proven,’ and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches.

The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Five senior officials from Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball’s information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons.

Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball’s accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball’s German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.

"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

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Greenland’s glaciers have begun to race towards the ocean, leading scientists to predict that the vast island’s ice cap is approaching irreversible meltdown.

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British-trained police in Iraq ‘killed prisoners with drills’

British-trained police operating in Basra have tortured at least two civilians to death with electric drills, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Here’s the jaw dropper.

The victims were suspected of collaborating with coalition forces, according to intelligence reports. Despite being pressed "very hard" by Britain, however, the Iraqi authorities in Basra are failing to even investigate incidents of torture and murder by police, ministers admit.

The article explains that Brit-trained police forces are controlled by militias, and they are torturing those found collaborating with, well, Brits.

Also from the Independent

The Dirty War: Torture and mutilation used on Iraqi ‘insurgents’

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Sue and I took the new Orange Line busway to the Red Line subway to downtown L.A. to see the opera Tosca tonight.

The Orange is an innovative transit idea, a bus-only line operating on an old train track. When it was time to leave, I looked at the freeway map and it said the downtown drive was 44 minutes, and that generally translates into an hour or more. And that’s how long it took using mass transit, with no freeway or parking hassles! Very nice indeed.

I know nothing about opera. Sue has loved it, and classical, since she was a child. We have a deal, she takes me to chamber music and opera, and I take her to weird music, roots music, that kind of thing.

Is Tosca relevant? Oh yeah. There’s thuggish police, political prisoners, and torture, plus murder, an execution, and suicide, all set to a backdrop of political chaos. Seemed quite relevant to me.

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