There is a problem in society, I thought, and it's me. Or people like me, those who always take the easy option, who always want more ...'

I was fat, greedy, a drunk, a drug-taker, a heavy consumer of everything I could find. I was 42 and I thought that I had messed my life up at every available opportunity. There is a problem in society, I thought, and it's me. Or people like me, those who always take the easy option, who always want more ...'(Observer)

what Rove's leak and Novak's column really exposed was the depravity of the administration's deliberate use of a false WMD threat and its willingness to go after anyone willing to tell the truth about it.

In the end, though, what Rove's leak and Novak's column really exposed was the depravity of the administration's deliberate use of a false WMD threat and its willingness to go after anyone willing to tell the truth about it.
(Los Angeles Times)

The Senate Intelligence Committee appears to have dropped a second stage of its own investigation that was to have focused on the administration's use of intelligence.

In the run-up to war, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials sometimes overlooked warnings about the reliability of the intelligence and divisions among intelligence agencies, overstated what the intelligence said and used information from sources that some officials suspected - and in several cases knew - weren't trustworthy.

"We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programs. ... We have low confidence in our ability to assess when Saddam would use WMD," the nation's intelligence agencies concluded in a National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002.

In another caveat that was delivered to the president and his top advisers in the same document, State Department intelligence officials disagreed with the conclusion that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa.

Bush nevertheless repeated that assertion in his State of the Union speech a few months later. The White House later retracted the allegation.

Cheney was even more definitive in his accusations against Saddam.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," the vice president said in August 2002.

Silberman said the commission had no authority to consider how policy-makers used intelligence that was sent to them during the buildup to war. When pressed, he suggested that the president was misled by a steady stream of information that exaggerated the threat.

"We looked at the flow, or the stream of intelligence that came to the White House. ... If anything, it was even more alarmist," he said.

The issue may never be aired fully. The Senate Intelligence Committee appears to have dropped a second stage of its own investigation that was to have focused on the administration's use of intelligence. (Knight-Ridder)

The prosecutor has been investigating charges that the Bush administration leaked (a CIA operative's) name to several journalists...

The prosecutor has been investigating charges that the Bush administration leaked Plame's name to several journalists in retaliation for an article that her husband, former envoy Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote in the New York Times that accused the administration of using faulty intelligence in deciding to wage war in Iraq....
....Over the weekend, a lawyer for Karl Rove, Bush's deputy chief of staff, acknowledged that Rove had spoken with (reporter Matthew Cooper) in the days before the Novak article appeared, but denied that Rove had identified Plame or broken the law.
(Los Angeles Times)

Bush Is Serving Up the Cold War Warmed Over

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," said Eisenhower, a Republican, in 1961. "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." (L.A. Times)