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Washington-AP -- Don't jump to any conclusions just yet. That warning comes from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, after the U-S military in Iraq announced that a roadside bomb containing sarin nerve gas had exploded near a U-S military convoy. Rumsfeld told a Washington, D-C audience that the "field test" showing the presence of sarin may not be accurate. He says more analysis needs to be done -- and that it may take some time to find out just what the chemical was. In Baghdad, officials said the bomb was apparently left over from the Saddam era. They said two members...

WASHINGTON, May 16 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said for the first time on Sunday that he now believes that the Central Intelligence Agency was deliberately misled about evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing unconventional weapons. He also said, in his comments on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," that he regrets citing evidence that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories in his presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. The assertion about the mobile labs was one of the most dramatic pieces of the presentation, which was intended to make public the Bush administration's best...

Commentary: The blame shuffle in Iraq By Arnaud de Borchgrave UPI Editor at Large Published 5/11/2004 8:00 AM WASHINGTON, May 11 (UPI) -- It was the mother of all crises of confidence. America's name was suddenly mud all over the world. Political cartoons from Bangladesh to Brazil took their lead from the Financial Times: the Statue of Liberty was portrayed as the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner, electrodes tied to his wrists, swaying precariously on a pedestal. Doubtless Osama Bin Laden was also grateful for the U.S.-supplied recruiting poster. Would-be jihadis (holy warriors) from Morocco to Mindanao now have living proof...

The hawks who launched the Iraq war believed the deal-making exile when he promised to build a secular democracy with close ties to Israel. Now the Israel deal is dead, he's cozying up to Iran -- and his patrons look like they're on the way out. A Salon exclusive. - - - - - - - - - - - - By John Dizard May 4, 2004 | When the definitive history of the current Iraq war is finally written, wealthy exile Ahmed Chalabi will be among those judged most responsible for the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq and...

Court Passes on Davidians' Judge Case Mon Mar 22,10:35 AM ET by ANNE GEARAN, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal questioning the conduct of a federal judge involved in lawsuits over the FBI siege of the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Texas. The high court did not comment in rejecting a pair of appeals from survivors and from families of children who died in the fire that swept the complex in April 1993. U.S. District Judge Walter Smith, the only federal judge sitting in Waco, refused to recuse himself despite what the...

<p>Tiffany globe paperweight belonged to victim Gregory Milanowycz, 25, said his mom, Adele.</p> <p>March 21, 2004 -- EVERYBODY does it. That's the response Jane Turner got when she told federal investigators that a fellow FBI agent had stolen a Tiffany globe found at the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.</p>

What do you mean 'we' were wrong? Posted: March 20, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com Did you see David Kay's confession – "It turns out that we were all wrong" – before the Senate Armed Services Committee about a month ago? Maybe you wondered who "we" were. "We" certainly didn't include Kay's one-time boss at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hans Blix, who had come out of retirement to chair the U.N. Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission. "We" certainly didn't include Blix's successor at the IAEA – Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. So, what's this "we" stuff? Well, you...

Iraqi exile group fed news media false information By JONATHAN S. LANDAY and TISH WELLS Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to leading newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia. A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the INC's Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq. The assertions in the articles reinforced President...

Pentagon Pays Iraq Group, Supplier of Incorrect Spy Data By DOUGLAS JEHL Published: March 11, 2004 WASHINGTON, March 10 — The Pentagon is paying $340,000 a month to the Iraqi political organization led by Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the interim Iraqi government who has close ties to the Bush administration, for "intelligence collection" about Iraq, according to Defense Department officials. The classified program, run by the Defense Intelligence Agency since summer 2002, continues a longstanding partnership between the Pentagon and the organization, the Iraqi National Congress, even as the group jockeys for power in a future government. Internal government...

U.S. didn't interview tipster on mobile labs Friday, March 05, 2004 By Walter Pincus, The Washington Post WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's prewar assertion that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers, according to current and former senior intelligence officials and congressional experts who have studied classified documents. In his presentation before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell said "firsthand descriptions" of the mobile bioweapons fleet had come...

No evidence found on pilot's fate By DREW BROWN and JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - Despite nearly a year of searching, the Navy has no new intelligence to resolve the fate of a Navy pilot who was shot down on the first night of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and is still missing, the Navy's top admiral said Tuesday. Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher's FA-18 Hornet was shot down in western Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991. Speicher, 33, originally was listed as killed in action, but the Defense Department changed his status to "missing-captured" in January 2001,...

Hussein ties to al Qaeda appear faulty The administration's case on ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda relied on intelligence that was weaker than that on Iraq's illegal weapons programs. By WARREN P. STROBEL, JONATHAN S. LANDAY AND JOHN WALCOTT WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda -- one of the administration's central arguments for a preemptive war -- appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons. Nearly a year after U.S. and British...

FEB. 29, 2004: PASSIONATA Early Thoughts on the Passion On the Other Hand On the other hand, I have to say I was very disturbed by something Gibson said in his interview with Peggy Noonan in Reader’s Digest. Gibson’s father is of course a notorious Holocaust denier and trafficker in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Noonan offered Mel Gibson an opportunity to separate himself from his father’s views. Here is Gibson’s reply: “I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in...

Pentagon still paying informants with faulty intelligence Up to $4 million set aside for former Iraqi opposition group By JONATHAN S. LANDAY, WARREN P. STROBEL and JOHN WALCOTT Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON — The Defense Department continues to pay millions for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced exaggerated intelligence that President Bush used to argue his case for war. The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. Defense Department official....

London Times February 19, 2004 New inquiry examines Hollinger bonus plan From Abigail Rayner in New York RICHARD PERLE, the former US Assistant Defence Secretary and Hollinger International board member, is under investigation for allegedly failing to disclose bonuses worth about $3 million (£1.6 million) which he received for running an investment scheme, The Times has learnt. Mr Perle, a vocal supporter of President Bush, was awarded the money as a reward for investing Hollinger shareholder funds in a series of separate businesses. Mr Perle also held a stake in some of those businesses. While the scheme put Hollinger International...

The BBC was doing its job – bring back Gilligan By Boris Johnson (Filed: 29/01/2004) So there he goes again. The cordite is carried off by the breeze. The dust settles and out of the crater creeps the Prime Minister, beaming his chipmunk grin. He acknowledges the cheers of his back benches, flicks an invisible speck from his irreproachable Paul Smith sleeve and saunters off back to Downing Street. It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly...

Charity Event May Have Terrorist Link Pentagon Adviser Who Spoke at Function Thought Money Was for Quake Victims By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 29, 2004; Page A08 Pentagon adviser Richard N. Perle, a strong advocate of war against Iraq, spoke last weekend at a charity event that U.S. officials say may have had ties to an alleged terrorist group seeking to topple the Iranian government and backed by Saddam Hussein. The event, attended by more than 3,000 people Saturday at the Washington Convention Center, generated enough concerns within the administration that officials debated whether they had...

Vol. 20, No. 3 February 9, 2004 Backtracking on al-Qaeda Ties by Thomas R. Eddlem Colin Powell’s admission that the Bush administration had no "concrete evidence" of an Iraq–al-Qaeda terrorist connection is a full reversal of his earlier statement to the UN. "We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We’ve learned that Iraq...

Best, brightest being indoctrinated, parents say --------------------------------------------------------- By George Archibald THE WASHINGTON TIMES Critics of the International Baccalaureate program at Reston, Va.'s Langston Hughes Middle School and South Lakes High School have focused on the program's promotion of cultural egalitarianism, pacifism and what they say is its anti-Western bias. "Administrators do not tell you that the current IB program for ages three through grade 12 promotes socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism, and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty," Jeanne Geiger wrote last year in the Reston Connection, a local newspaper. Mrs. Geiger opposed her children...

From Iraq to Libya, US knew little on weapons Doubts that Hussein had WMD raise questions about war's rationale and intelligence reliability. By Peter Grier | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor WASHINGTON – When it comes to unconventional weapons, Iraq may have been far from the most dangerous country in the world after all. In recent days a string of surprising revelations has scrambled the world's proliferation threat assessments. Iraq's weapons programs were apparently in shambles, for instance, while Libya's were surprisingly advanced. Pakistan's nuclear scientists might have been rogue agents, proffering secrets for cash. And it appears...