The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

If they did or not isn't clear, but as stupid as these guys are, it wouldn't surprise me.

06/05/2008 | Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn. The US is able to threaten Iraq with the loss of 40 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves because Iraq's independence is still limited by the legacy of UN sanctions and restrictions imposed on Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the 1990s. This means that Iraq is still considered a threat to international security and stability under Chapter Seven of the UN charter. The US negotiators say the price of Iraq escaping Chapter Seven is to sign up to a new "strategic alliance" with the United States.

Bush is learning! He's progressed from fights to blackmail!

US issues threat to Iraq's $50bn foreign reserves in military deal - Middle East, World - The Independent

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

I want to say this is unbelievable, in the literal sense of that word. But it's not. This is yet another illustration of why the current administration and their fellow fifth columnists should be run out of town on a rail.

Italian’s Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face - New York Times

I believe that my co-worker could have survived if he had been riding in an armored car. At the time, the armored car that he would otherwise have been riding in was being used by the contractor’s manager to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad.

Quote of the week! Just, wow...

DynCorp Manager Used Armored Car To Transport Hookers in Iraq

The chickenhawks are coming home to roost because if they leave the country they end up headed in the same direction as Slobodan Milosevic.

YouTube - War Crime Charges for Bush Officials?

The senior staffer, however, was still reluctant to let it go: "New products on the market? They haven't been TSA approved. Probably shouldn't be permitted,"

Way to go TSA. Schmucks.

MacBook Air stumps TSA agents, owner misses flight : Ben Patterson : Yahoo! Tech

To anyone who still says hard interrogation is good (or torture works):

"How do you separate the sheep from the wool? There’s no fingerprints, no DNA," said a former senior intelligence official who helped set up the CIA’s interrogation program, and who would not speak for attribution. "You don’t know if you have Osama bin Laden or Joe Shit the rag-man."

Yeah, we got all kinds of good intelligence, we didn't know who we were even talking to.

Bush has said those interrogations provided "vital information necessary to … protect the American people and our allies." But FBI agents familiar with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah have claimed that the waterboarding was worthless—and that the only valuable information from Abu Zubaydah came from documents captured from him. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn’t believe him," FBI agent Dan Coleman told The Washington Post. "The problem is they didn’t realize he didn’t know all that much."

They didn't give us information, the stuff they had did.

Similarly, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed stated at a Guantanamo Bay hearing that he murdered the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002, though Pakistan has already convicted a terrorist named Omar Saeed Sheikh for the slaying, casting doubt on the information Mohammed gave his interrogators under torture. Perhaps most infamously, al-Libi told interrogators that al-Qaeda received training in weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, which never happened. al-Libi recanted his claim in 2004, about a year after Colin L. Powell cited al-Libi’s false, torture-derived information to the United Nations as he made the case for invading Iraq.

And the information that we did get proved to be worse than useless, people said what they thought we wanted to hear.

It was worse than useless.

Six years of breaking our laws, violating the Geneva conventions, and an echo of the Spanish Inquisition later, and what we have to show for it is a broken world image, a broken military, a broken government, two wars in the middle east where the only people who think we're doing better than break even in either are the White House and the viewers of Fox News, saber rattling to start a third war with Iran, 3900+ dead US soldiers, nearly 30,000 wounded, and 250,000 soldiers with brain damage. This is not a legacy, it's an indictment.

CIA Largely in the Dark on Interrogation Tactics - The Washington Independent

Mr. Cheney has not been deposed, and his involvement in the arrest remains uncertain. But one of the three agents assigned to him, Daniel McLaughlin, said in his deposition that Mr. Reichle’s description was backward.

Mr. McLaughlin said Mr. Reichle, who has since been transferred to Guam, asked him in a call several hours after the encounter to say that there had been an assault to bolster justification for the arrest.

The Secret Service has standing offices in Guam? Is getting sent there like the Air Force sending you to McMurdo Station?

Secret Service: Detailed Look at ’06 Turmoil - New York Times

That NIE, made public Dec. 3, embarrassed the administration by concluding that Tehran had halted its weapons program in 2003, which seemed to undermine years of bellicose rhetoric from Bush and other senior officials about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document, said a senior administration official who accompanied Bush on his six-nation trip to the Mideast. "He told the Israelis that he can't control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE's] conclusions don't reflect his own views" about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, said the official, who would discuss intelligence matters only on the condition of anonymity.

That same intelligence structure that was privately saying Iraq didn't have WMD in 2002 but was overruled by the White House is now saying Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program now, and what's the White House saying? Yes they do.

We've been down this road before, and it goes to Candy Mountain.

Bothersome Intel on Iran | Newsweek Periscope | Newsweek.com

“We noticed that one of them was hovering right over the intersection in front of our checkpoint,” he wrote. “There was a small amount of white smoke coming up from the intersection. I grabbed my radio and asked one of the guard towers what the smoke was. He answered that it looked like one of the helicopters dropped a smoke grenade on the cars in the intersection. I asked him why were they doing that, was there something going on in the intersection that would cause them to do this. He said, nope, couldn’t see anything. Then I said, well what kind of smoke is it?

“Before he could say anything, I got my answer. My eyes started watering, my nose started burning and my face started to heat up. CS! I heard the lieutenant say, “Sir that’s not smoke, it’s CS gas.”

Just plain out of control.

2005 Use of Gas by Blackwater Leaves Questions - New York Times