A top military intelligence official has said the discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programme was drawn up "to make the case for war", flatly contradicting persistent claims to the contrary by the Blair government, and in particular by Alastair Campbell, the former prime minister's chief spin doctor.In hitherto secret evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Major General Michael Laurie said: "We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care."
His evidence is devastating, as it is the first time such a senior intelligence officer has directly contradicted the then government's claims about the dossier – and, perhaps more significantly, what Tony Blair and Campbell said when it was released seven months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Of course, with no such inquiry creating an official record in the United States, Condoleezza Rice is free to continue spewing her lies about bad intelligence. The actual bad intelligence having been, of course, her own.
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One year after the video of her speaking was "creatively edited" by Andrew Breitbart, Shirley Sherrod is returning to the USDA.
Shirley Sherrod is back at the United States Department of Agriculture, almost a year after she was forced out by a misleading video spread by conservatives falsely accusing her of discriminating against white farmers.Sherrod will not take her old position, reports Politico, instead rejoining the agency to work on civil rights. In her new job, she'll lead a program designed to improve relations with minority farmers.
The USDA is clearly in the tank for former employees who were smeared by deceptively edited videos.
Sherrod's lawsuit against Breitbart for libel and slander is still ongoing.
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The ICC in The Hague is expected to formally seek the arrest of Muammar Gaddafi for war crimes today.
Fine, but why not for Assad as well who has been every bit as brutal in Syria? The Independent.
It's such a double standard where we champion the International Criminal Court for everybody else but our criminals. If we tried them here it would be another story but one way or the other, the players in the Bush administration should, in no way, be allowed to walk the streets with impunity.
The nation's major health insurers are barreling into a third year of record profits, enriched in recent months by a lingering recessionary mind-set among Americans who are postponing or forgoing medical care.
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The Times has the first of what I'm sure will be many "we can't afford it" pieces about mandatory employee insurance, pitched to get one interest group an exemption. This one is from the nursing home lobby, though I'm sure we'll see one from every service industry that's built on low-wage employees.
After you've shed a tear for the mom-and-pop independent nursing homes that will be put out of business by Obamacare, ask yourself this: where were the nursing home lobbyists when we were debating HCR? Were they pushing to have universal government sponsored healthcare (Medicare for all), so their clients wouldn't have to worry about how they were to pay for insurance for all their employees? Or were they calling that socialism?
I don't know the answer to that question, because the Times' reporters didn't bother to ask it, but my guess is that the nursing home associations opposed Medicare for all, just like every other business. And, if so, fuck them and their "we can't afford it" whining.
Anyway, this guy was supposedly running for president of France, so that means "everybody" knew he had weird sexytime habits, allegedly. Have you ever been in some four-star hotel and thought, "Eh, maybe I'll rape somebody from the housekeeping staff"? Is this a normal thought, in the minds of the rich and the powerful? Sure seems to be common enough with the Eurozone's leaders. What is wrong with this crowd?
What is wrong with everything? The Internet! We haven't touched the computer all weekend, both because it was the weekend and also because, tonight, our power went out for like nine hours. And we wanted to save the last bit of battery juice to put on the classical station so we could sleep peacefully, but no, the power had to come back on, and we just had to check Google News, just in case! It gets dull, this habit. We remember turning off the lights and locking the office door about fifteen years ago so we could spend the three-day weekend drinking beer outside and eating psilocybin mushrooms in the park because it was a rare sunny holiday in San Francisco, and then we checked the news wires "just in case" and Princess Diana had been killed in that car crash in Paris, so there went the pleasant holiday weekend. Type type type, for the Internet.
Anyway, everybody in the "service industry" should be especially careful over the coming weeks, because the rich & powerful are getting extra weird. [New York Times]
Andy Borowitz Twitter: "At the rate that the French IMF guy is becoming a joke, by next week he will be a Republican presidential candidate..."
The Daily Show's Jon Stewart will debate Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on O'Reilly's show tonight regarding rapper Common's invitation to the White House. O'Reilly challenged Stewart to the debate on the faux-scandal last Thursday "because it's important," he said. Stewart referred to those upset by the "two-time Grammy-winning vegetarian's invite" as "twits."
They really seem to be floundering from plan to plan, but at least they've recognized that pouring radioactive water into the sea isn't making things any better:
TOKYO — An adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan indicated Sunday that a plan to flood and cool the No. 1 reactor's containment vessel at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant with water will be abandoned as holes have been created by melted nuclear fuel at the bottom of the pressure vessel.
Goshi Hosono, tasked with handling the nuclear crisis, told TV programs, however, that the government will keep intact the ''road map'' devised by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co to bring the Nos. 1 to 3 reactors under control within six to nine months.
On the original plan to completely submerge the 4-meter-tall fuel rods by filling the vessel with water, Hosono said, ''We should not cause the (radioactive) water to flow into the sea by taking such a measure.''
Hosono said that the government will instead consider ways to decontaminate water used to cool fuel in the reactor so that the water can be reused.
And in other news, TEPCO is maneuvering to have Japan's taxpayers pick up the cleanup bill. How... American!
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Crooks and Liars: Someone needs to tell David Gregory that his irony alert button is broken.
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The Immoral Minority: Palin turns to Twitter to make summer reading suggestions. For morons.
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