According to former CIA head George Tenet, "There were many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD."

Tenet's statement is accurate. Moreover, there were high level CIA officials who believed Iraq possessed no WMD. In addition, foreign governments stated there was no hard evidence Iraq had WMD, as did the heads of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC).

When CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted on 12/7/07 that the CIA destroyed torture tapes in 2005, anonymous sources blamed the head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez. But today the New York Times says four top White House lawyers debated the decision: Harriet Miers, John Bellinger, Alberto Gonzales and David Addington. (If you find it hard to keep track of the details, bookmark the outstanding detailed timeline on the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes by Cooperative Research.)

Former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) is serving jail time for $2 million in bribes he received from defense contractor Brent Wilkes. Last week, Wilkes was indicted for "conspiracy, bribery, money laundering and unlawful monetary transactions to Cunningham in return for government contracts."

While Wilkes was bribing Cunningham, he was also bribing the #3 guy at the CIA, his old pal Dusty Foggo. Back in February, Wilkes was indicted on "11 counts of the same charges in connection with a $1.7 million water-supply contract Foggo allegedly helped win for one of Wilkes' companies while he was working as a logistics coordinator at a CIA supply hub overseas."

Remember the CIA's secret torture prisons in Eastern Europe? They haven't gotten much coverage in the U.S. because the CIA denied their existence and no one really knew where they were. Now we do, thanks to Larisa Alexandrovna and David Dastych of RawStory.com.

Milan Court Indicts 26 Americans In Abduction - CIA Operatives May Be Tried in Absentia
ROME, Feb. 16 -- An Italian judge gave approval Friday for what will be the first overseas criminal trial of CIA officers involved in a covert counterterrorism operation, as a court in Milan indicted more than two dozen Americans on charges of kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric four years ago. (more)

A War On Terrorism or a War Of Terrorism?

Reports as usual vary wildly and small wonder that some news sources are trying to pin this on yet another subsidiary of "Al Qaeda". But this wasn't a suicide attack.

The terrorists drove a car, packed with explosives, up to a bus carrying soldiers of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Some reports say that they forced the bus to stop by firing on it with automatic weapons, others that they blocked the road with the car while pretending to have broken down. Either way, they quickly escaped on motorbikes before detonating the car bomb by remote control.

We interrupt the Corporatist State Media's Saint Gerald Ford Memorial Beautification Propagandafest for this report from the reality-based community... All right, I've had up to here with this Canonization of Ford by the Corporatist State media. Can we all take a deep breath and contemplate Gerald Ford as a politician, and how his actions belied his bumblin' "regular guy" persona? Well, perhaps a two-by-four up side your head is necessitated... Selected, not elected. Sound familiar?

Heal the nation? I think not. More like the ultimate enabler. Thanks to Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon, the seed of Criminal Republican Rule was thereby fostered and allowed to grow and flourish in a direct timeline from Nixon's criminal enterprise to the present criminal and illegitimate rule of Dear Misleader. Personified by the likes of Nixon WH war criminal Henry Kissinger, and "youngsters" Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld... (more)

Reuters reports that a draft European Parliament report shows that at least some European nations knew about the secret off-shore US jails and obstructed investigations into the prisoners' transport, called "renditions" (the practice of extradicting prisoners to third countries to avoid breaking US law and subjecting prisoners to constitutional protections) and the illegal detentions at so-called "black sites."

The head of the Italian intelligence service, SIMSI, "concealed the truth" when he told the European Parliament that Italian intelligence agents weren't involved in the CIA kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric.

New evidence revealed in a BBC report puts three known anti-Castro CIA operatives at the scene of the assasination...

Update 12-04-06: YouTube has yanked the video, Google Video substituted...

Google video

Amy Goodman interviews Center for Constitutional Rights president Michael Ratner, former Gen. Janis Karpinski, and CCR lawyer Gita Gutierrez about the lawsuit filed in Germany Tues. against Rumsfeld and the rest of Bush's Torture-Mongers. What I find most interesting is that all of them are named, with the glaring exception of Bush and Cheney themselves (due to defacto immunity of sitting heads of state). The list includes Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet, AG Alberto Gonzales, Under SecDef for Intell Stephen Cambone, former asst. AG Jay Bybee, former deputy asst. AG John Yoo, Gen. Counsel of the DoD William James Haynes II, David S. Addington - Cheney's chief of staff, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez - former top Army official in Iraq, Gen. Geoffrey Miller - former commander at Guantanamo, Major Gen. Walter Wojdakowski - senior Iraq commander, and Col. Thomas Pappas - the former head of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib. 'Bout time the whole bunch of torturin' bastages had their names listed together in one place...

War Crimes Suit Filed in Germany Against Rumsfeld, Other Top U.S. Officials Over Prisoner Torture - Attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a war crimes lawsuit today in Germany against outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other high-ranking U.S. officials, for their role in the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo... (more)