Whether participating in demonstrations, organizing a vigil, conducting town-hall meetings, or writing letters to their elected officials and the media, the participants in the anti-war movement have exhibited an energy and integrity that would make anyone proud. For myself, I have been vociferous in my defense of the actions of the majority of the anti-war movement, noting that the expression of their views is not only consistent with their rights afforded by the Constitution of the United States, but also that their engagement in the process of citizenship is a stellar example of the ideals and values set forth in that document, and as such representative of the highest form of patriotism in keeping with service to a document that begins, "We the People."

Lately I have noticed a growing despondency among many of those who call themselves the anti-war movement. With the United States now entering its fourth year of illegal war in and illegitimate occupation of Iraq, and the pro-war movement moving inexorably towards yet another disastrous conflict with Iran, there is an increasing awareness that the cause of the anti-war movement, no matter how noble and worthy, is in fact a losing cause as currently executed. Despite all of the well-meaning and patriotic work of the millions of activists and citizens who comprise the anti-war movement, America still remains very much a nation not only engaged in waging and planning wars of aggression, but has also become a nation which increasingly identifies itself through its military and the wars it fights. This is a sad manifestation of the fact that the American people seem to be addicted to war and violence, rather than the ideals of human rights, individual liberty, and freedom and justice for all that should define our nation.

In short, the anti-war movement has come face to face with the reality that in the ongoing war of ideologies that is being waged in America today, their cause is not just losing, but is in fact on the verge of complete collapse. Many in the anti-war movement would take exception to such a characterization of the situation, given the fact that there seems to be a growing change in the mood among Americans against the ongoing war in Iraq. But one only has to scratch at the surface of this public discontent to realize how shallow and superficial it is. Americans aren't against the war in Iraq because it is wrong; they are against it because we are losing.

Take the example of Congressman Jack Murtha. A vocal supporter of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, last fall Mr. Murtha went public with his dramatic change of position, suddenly rejecting the war as un-winnable, and demanding the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. While laudable, I have serious problems with Jack Murtha's thought process here. At what point did the American invasion of Iraq become a bad war? When we suffered 2,000 dead? After two years of fruitless struggle? Once we spent $100 billion?

While vocalizing his current opposition against the Iraq War, Congressman Murtha and others who voted for the war but now question its merits have never retracted their original pro-war stance. Nor have they criticized their role in abrogating the Constitutional processes for bringing our country into conflict when they voted for a war before the President had publicly committed to going to war (we now know the President had committed to the invasion of Iraq by the summer of 2002, and that all his representations to the American people and Congress about 'war as a matter of last resort' and 'seeking a diplomatic solution' were bold face lies). The Iraq War was wrong the moment we started bombing Iraq. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein is no excuse, and does not pardon America's collective sin of brooking and tolerating an illegal war of aggression.

The reality is, had our military prevailed in this struggle, the American people for the most part would not even blink at the moral and legal arguments against this war. This underlying reality is reflected in the fact that despite our ongoing disaster in Iraq, America is propelled down a course of action that leads us toward conflict with Iran. President Bush recently re-affirmed his embrace of the principles of pre-emptive war when he signed off on the 2006 version of the National Security Strategy of the United States, which highlights Iran as a threat worthy of confrontation. This event has gone virtually unmentioned by the American mainstream media, un-remarked by a Congress that remains complicit in the war-mongering policies of the Bush administration, and un-noticed by the majority of Americans. America is pre-programmed for war, and unless the anti-war movement dramatically changes the manner in which it conducts its struggle, America will become a nation of war, for war, and defined by war, and as such a nation that will ultimately be consumed by war.

It is high time for the anti-war movement to take a collective look in the mirror, and be honest about what they see. A poorly organized, chaotic, and indeed often anarchic conglomeration of egos, pet projects and idealism that barely constitutes a "movement," let alone a winning cause. I have yet to observe an anti-war demonstration that has a focus on anti-war. It often seemed that every left-wing cause took advantage of the event to promote its own particular agenda, so that "No War in Iraq" shared the stage with the environment, ecology, animal rights, pro-choice, and numerous other causes which not only diluted the anti-war message which was supposed to be sent, but also guaranteed that the demonstration itself would be seen as something hijacked by the left, inclusive of only progressive ideologues, and exclusive of the vast majority of moderate (and even conservative) Americans who might have wanted to share the stage with their fellow Americans from the left when it comes to opposing war with Iraq (or even Iran), but do not want to be associated with any other theme.

The anti-war movement, first and foremost, needs to develop a laser-like focus on being nothing more or less than anti-war.

The anti-war movement lacks any notion of strategic thinking, operational planning, or sense of sound tactics. So much energy is wasted because of this failure to centrally plan and organize. As a result, when the anti-war movement does get it right (and on occasion it does), the success is frittered away by a failure to have planned effective follow-up efforts, failure to have implemented any supporting operations, an inability to recognize opportunities as they emerge and a lack of resources to exploit such opportunities if in fact they were recognized to begin with. In short, the anti-war movement is little more than a walk-on squad of high school football players drawing plays in the sand, taking on the National Football League Super Bowl Champions.

In order to even have a chance of prevailing with the American people, the anti-war movement is going to need much more than just good ideals and values. It needs to start thinking like a warrior would, in full recognition that we as a nation are engaged in a life-or-death struggle of competing ideologies with those who promote war as an American value and virtue.

The anti-war movement needs to study the philosophies of those who have mastered the art of conflict, from Caesar to Napoleon, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz. It needs to study the "enemy" learning to understand the pro-war movement as well as it understands itself. It needs to comprehend the art of campaigning, of waging battles only when necessary, and having the ability to wage a struggle on several fronts simultaneously, synchronizing each struggle so that a synergy is created which maximizes whatever energy is being expended. The anti-war movement needs to understand the pro-war movement's center of gravity, and design measures to defeat this. It needs to grasp the pro-war movement's decision-making cycle, then undertake a comprehensive course of action that learns to pre-empt this cycle, getting 'inside' the pro-war system of making decisions, and thereby forcing the pro-war movement to react to the anti-war agenda, instead of vice versa.

There is an old adage in the military that "intelligence drives operations." The anti-war movement needs to develop a centralized intelligence operation, not a spy organization, but rather a think-tank that produces sound analysis based upon fact that can be used to empower those who are waging the struggle against war. Far too often the anti-war movement dilutes its effectiveness by either being unable to produce facts during a debate, or when it does, producing facts that are inaccurate, incomplete, or both. The mainstream media treats the anti-war movement as a joke because many times that is exactly what the anti-war movement, through its lack of preparation and grasp of the facts, allows itself to become.

The anti-war movement lacks organization. There is no central leadership, or mechanism to effectively muster and control resources. The anti-war movement takes pride in its "democratic" composition, but in fact it operates as little more than controlled chaos, creating ample opportunity for the pro-war movement to effectively execute a "divide and conquer" strategy to minimize and nullify whatever good the anti-war movement achieves through its efforts. The anti-war movement would do well to take a page from the fire service and implement a version of the Incident Command System (ICS) that firefighters use when fighting complex fires involving the integration of several departments, organizations and jurisdictions. The anti-war movement needs to develop its own "ICS for the anti-war" that is universally applied throughout the movement, so that an anti-war effort in Seattle, Washington operates the same as an anti-war effort in New York City, and as such can be coordinated and controlled by an overall command staff operating from Denver, Colorado.

Complex problems, such as faced by the anti-war movement, require complex solutions, which in turn dictate a flexible control mechanism that can coordinate and synchronize every effort to achieve the desired result at a time and place of the anti-war movement's choosing, and then be prepared to follow up on successes as they occur and sustain the movement over an extended period of time. It is not enough to win a battle against the pro-war movement; the anti-war movement needs to win the war of ideologies. As such it must not only prepare to win a particular fight, but to exploit that victory, massing its forces against any developed weakness, and drive the pro-movement into the ground and off the American political map once and for all.

I have indicated my willingness to apply my training and experience as a warrior in a manner which helps teach the principles of the art of war to those who call themselves part of the anti-war movement. There seems to be not only a need for this sort of training, but also a desire among the myriad of individuals and groups who comprise the anti-war movement for an overall coordinated strategic direction, operational planning, and tactical execution of agreed upon mission objectives. One can be certain that the pro-war movement is conducting itself in full accordance with these very same organizational principles and methodologies. And let there be no doubt: the pro-war movement in America is prevailing. In order to gain the upper hand politically, and actually position itself to stop not only those wars already being fought (Iraq), but also prevent those being planned (Iran), the anti-war movement will need to re-examine in totality the way it does business. I for one am ready to assist. However, in writing this essay, I am constantly reminded of the old saying, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." One can only hope that the anti-war movement is thirsty.

On Tuesday night, councillors in Montgomery voted unanimously to offer a formal apology to Parks, as well as "all others who suffered the same indignities."

The apology also applies to four women who filed a federal lawsuit at the time of Park's arrest to have the city's bus system made colour-blind.

The Montgomery bus system was segregated by race at the time Parks, then a 42-year-old seamstress, was arrested. That meant blacks could take a seat only if no white passenger wanted one.

"I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger," Parks told a reporter years after she took a stand by refusing to stand in compliance with the bus driver's order. "We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."

Parks' act of civil disobedience is credited with accelerating the American civil rights movement, as blacks across the South expressed outrage at her arrest.

Most of the current councillors in Montgomery are white.

Its 24 chapters profess to record discussions by Jewish leaders of plans to take over the world. Historians have traced parallels in the text to a 19th-century French book, directed against supporters of Emperor Napoleon III, which does not mention Jews.

"The Internet has about 500,000 sites where the book is discussed - about half and half for and against," Greene estimated.

The exhibit cites a quote from Joseph Goebbels, a decade before he became Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister:"I believe that 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' are a forgery. (However) I believe in the intrinsic, not the factual truth of the 'Protocols."'

In the United States, the exhibit points to the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest whose popular radio sermons in the late 1930s opposed war with Nazi Germany. His periodical, "Social Justice" serialized the "Protocols" in 1938.

When Egyptian government-sponsored TV showed a series based on the "Protocols" in 2002, the State Department condemned it.

In 2005, a new edition of the book was published in Syria and shown at the Cairo International Book Fair. The edition suggests, the museum says, that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were organized by a Jewish conspiracy.

Last October, an Iranian bookseller exhibited an edition published by his country's Islamic Propaganda Organization at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. The Holocaust Museum exhibit notes the display violated German law, which forbids libel against any religious group.

The report from the Government Accountability Office, to be released at a hearing today, details how long-recognized problems with military computer systems led to the soldiers being dunned for an array of debts related to everything from errors in paychecks to equipment left behind on the battlefield.

Retired Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Kelly, who lost a leg in a roadside bombing, received a letter in 2004 saying he was in debt to the government and was in jeopardy of being referred to a collection agency.

The problem came to light last year, as soldiers' complaints began to surface and several lawmakers became involved. The GAO had been investigating other pay problems caused by the defense accounting system and was asked by Congress to investigate debts among the battle-wounded.

The new report shows a problem more widespread than previously known.

"We found that hundreds of separated battle-injured soldiers were pursued for collection of military debts incurred through no fault of their own," the report said.

Last fall, the Army said 331 soldiers had been hit with military debt after being wounded at war. The latest figures show that a larger group of 900 battle-wounded troops has been tagged with debts.

"It's unconscionable," said Ryan Kelly, 25, a retired staff sergeant who lost a leg to a roadside bomb and then spent more than a year trying to fend off a debt of $2,231. "It's sad that we'd let that happen."

Kelly recalled the day in 2004 when, months after learning to walk on a prosthesis, he opened his mailbox to find a letter saying he was in debt to the government -- and in jeopardy of referral to a collection agency. "It hits you in the gut," he said. "It's like, 'Thanks for your service, and now you owe us.' "

The underlying problem is an antiquated computer system for paying and tracking members of the military. Pay records are not integrated with personnel records, creating numerous errors. When soldiers leave the battlefield, for example, they lose a pay differential, but the system can take time to lower their pay.

The government then tries to recoup overpayments, docking pay for active-duty troops and sending debt notices to those who have left the military. Eventually, the government sends private agencies to collect debts and notifies credit bureaus.

The computer system is so broken that 400 soldiers killed in action were listed as owing money to the government, although no debt notices were sent, the report said.

A total of $1.5 million in debts has been linked to the 400 fallen soldiers and 900 wounded troops. Of the total, $124,000 has been repaid. The government has waived $959,000, and the remainder of $420,000 is still owed.

Michael Hurst, a former Army finance officer in Arlington who has studied the issue, said the military should have taken action years ago to prevent the debts from being created.

"It's a complete leadership failure," he said. "We can't expect the soldiers to notice mistakes in their pay that the paid professionals have failed to notice and correct."

Although the GAO report focuses on battle-wounded soldiers who have separated from the military, there are probably others who were still on active duty when their debts caught up with them, Hurst said. Factoring those in, "I would say thousands" are affected by the problem, he said.

The GAO report said that 73 percent of the debts were caused by pay problems, including overpayments, calculation errors and mistakes in leave. Other debts were created when soldiers were billed for enlistment bonuses, medical services, travel and lost equipment.

House Government Reform Committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who is holding the hearing, has called the phenomenon "financial friendly fire." Yesterday, his spokesman, Robert White, reacted to the report, saying: "Literally adding insult to injury, the systems that are supposed to nurture and support returning warriors too often inflict additional wounds to their financial health."

In one case cited in the GAO report, the debts meant that a soldier's family had no money to pay bills and had to send an 11-year-old daughter to live out of state.

At today's hearing, Army and Defense Department officials are expected to testify about what is being done to correct the problem. A database of soldiers wounded in action has been created, but the GAO suggested that more needs to be done, including congressional action to forgive more soldiers' debts and provide refunds in certain cases.

Previously the GAO had issued 80 recommendations for improving the Army payroll processes. Army officials have said they are at work on those recommendations. An Army spokesman did not return calls yesterday requesting comment.

One change already has been announced: Chief of staff Andy Card officially will leave April 14 and is being replaced by Josh Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Under one scenario, Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, would replace McClellan, Republican officials said.

But other GOP strategists said they believe McClellan's position is secure because of his close relationship with President Bush going back to Texas. McClellan was a communications aide to the president when he was governor of the Lone Star state.

Despite the administration's public comments of support for Snow, sources inside and outside the White House have said Bush has been ready to replace the treasury chief for the past year and has been searching for an "acceptable alternative."

Others are expected to survive the shake-up. Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, Vice President Dick Cheney's team, and Joe Hagin, Bush's deputy chief of staff, likely will stay, administration sources said.

The White House press office declined to comment on personnel decisions.

The changes would come during a tough stretch of time for the president, whose poll numbers have dropped, in particular because of growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq.

Focus on Congress, communications

In his new role as chief of staff, Bolten is focusing on improving White House communications and legislative affairs to regenerate the administration's message and performance, said sources familiar with his thinking.

"There are two positions he is anxious to turn -- Scott's position and legislative affairs," said a source with close ties to the White House.

"It's not about who but what is broken. He does not view it ... in terms of personalities, that's the way Josh thinks," another source said. "Josh keeps his counsel fairly close. He's very logical, and the logical place to start looking is communications."

Numerous Republican officials said the discussion is focused on McClellan.

"There is a lot of dissatisfaction with the state of communications, the daily communication from the podium, the congressional communications and strategic communications from both in and outside the White House," said one White House insider.

Another such insider said, "It is something the president would have to decide directly. While Josh Bolten wouldn't have to get permission to get rid of others, the president really likes McClellan. They go back all the way back to Texas. And Scott has no real intention of leaving."

Several Republican officials said one idea under consideration would be to have Bartlett take over McClellan's spot.

"Dan would have to let go of significant responsibilities. All the chairs would shift if that happened," said one GOP official.

Sources with close ties to White House Communications Director Nicolle Wallace dismissed speculation she might leave. Recent reports revealed her husband, who has post at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, moved to New York last week.

'Elder statesman-type' sought for legislative liaison

Bolten is looking for a strong "elder statesman-type" to reach out to lawmakers, and many Republicans have complained the White House has dealt with Congress "as a transmitter but not receiver."

"The Bush White House has dealt with Congress in a highhanded way, and people are angry. But there is no magic cure," said one Republican official.

The future of Candida Wolff, head of legislative affairs, is unclear.

Many White House insiders said "she is not the problem," describing her as a "nice, smart, hard worker," but they said she is "too junior" to turn around the administration's poor relationship with some senior Republicans.

Some prominent names mentioned for the position include former Rep. Bill Paxon, a New York Republican, and former Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican.

Paxon, a lawmaker from 1989-99, is described as "someone everyone likes" and "after 10 years or so out of the spotlight might be ready to roll again."

Gramm, who stepped down in 2002, is described as "someone who would be a great play for the base but not a strong on the communications front."

Sources close to former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tennessee, and GOP adviser Vin Weber are no longer on the short list for legislative liaison.

Sources: Dissatisfaction with Snow not new

GOP sources said that even before the change in chief of staff was announced, Bush had been trying to find a replacement for Snow.

A couple of weeks ago, Bush offered the job to Time Warner Chairman and CEO Dick Parsons, who turned down it, sources said. (Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.)

Sources said the White House has had difficulty getting someone to accept the position.

Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick has expressed interest but is said not to be close to the president. Gramm has also expressed interest.

While those close to Snow dismiss talk of his imminent departure as rumor, one acknowledged "he's not going to be turning down the lights in January 2009 for the next guy to come in. ... He's going to leave at some point in time when it makes sense, but now he's focusing on his work."

But many White House and Republican officials are not so diplomatic.

"You've got an economic team that can't communicate about the economy. You've had two terrible secretaries. He's seen as really bad," an official said.

Most of us, presumably, know enough "Average Joe" types to fill a room. Most of us, presumably, don't know a single "Average Joe" type who could pull off a trick like the one reported by the New York Times last week. The issue centered, once again, around a memo that was drafted before the invasion of Iraq.

"During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003," read the Times, "[Bush] made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by the New York Times."

"The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable," continued the Times report. "Mr. Bush predicted that it was 'unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.' Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment. The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein."



Quite a nifty trick for an Average Joe, yes? This was from the same regular fella who ever-so-earnestly told journalist Helen Thomas last week that he didn't want war, because no president wants war. Here we have merely another lie, an accent in a symphony of lies. If Bush did not want war, why decide upon an attack despite the absence of the public motivator for attack, the weapons of mass destruction? Why try to goad Hussein into a fight?

Remember when the administration made that humorous little video of George searching the Oval Office for the weapons of mass destruction way back when? It was truly an "Average Joe" moment that, in light of the revelations afforded by this pre-war memo, brings the yellow bile up the back of the throat.

Seven more American soldiers died in Iraq over the last few days, bringing the total to 2,332. It is difficult to count the number of civilians who have been slaughtered in the it-isn't-a-civil-war-not-really violence of the last several weeks. It takes a special kind of "Average Joe" to get so many people killed in so short a time thanks to lies of such width and breadth. Most "Average Joes," after all, lie about sex or fishing or their bowling score from Saturday night.

Most "Average Joes," likewise, enjoy being considered straight-shooters. They don't hide from hard truths and expect to be able to handle whatever comes their way. Mr. Bush, it seems, would rather be massaged with pleasing fictions from his staff, and is perfectly happy to have his handlers encase him in bubble-wrap to protect him from the aftershocks resulting from astonishingly bad decisions.

Reporter Murray Wass, writing for the National Journal, wrote another essay last week that exposed more of the lies that were used to trick the people of this nation into supporting the unnecessary and criminal invasion of Iraq. "Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser," wrote Waas, "cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address - that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon - might not be true."

"The pre-election damage-control effort in response to (Ambassador Joseph) Wilson's allegations and the broader issue of whether the Bush administration might have misrepresented intelligence information to make the case for war had three major components," continued Waas. "Blame the CIA for the use of the Niger information in the president's State of the Union address; discredit and undermine Wilson; and make sure that the public did not learn that the president had been personally warned that the intelligence assessments he was citing about the aluminum tubes might be wrong."

It is disturbing enough to encompass the hard fact that there has not been, at any point, an element of "incompetence" in the process that has left us in such a deranged state in Iraq. Virtually every item on the Bush administration's wish list has been obtained in the last four years, thanks to the invasion, occupation and conveniently subsequent mess that has followed. Objectively, one must know that a barrage of falsehoods was required to create such a situation. To see these lies exposed one after another, like a long line of sausage links, would seem to be beyond tolerance.

Sadly, our collective ability to absorb and discard such terrifying information appears to be without limit. The revelations offered by the New York Times regarding Bush's pre-invasion decision to go to war no matter what, and his decision to goad Iraq into a war whether or not they posed a threat, passed through the waters of the mainstream media with nary a ripple. The same went for Mr. Waas's report; the information he provided in such scathing detail was met by the mainstream press with a thunderous nothing.

It is almost amusing. The pundits and politicos are justifying each other's vapid and useless existence these days by carrying forth an empty debate as to whether or not Mr. Bush and his people lied us into a war. Yet when hard evidence of these lies is presented in stark black and white, the response is a whistling silence.

The duality is astonishing; if you are callow enough to subject yourself to the dreck that passes for news on television, you might actually see someone acknowledge the existence of the evidence of these lies before turning on a dime to claim that no one lied about anything. Maybe, just maybe, you'll see someone claim the administration is "incompetent."

No one who lies so often or so effectively can be described as incompetent. This kind of thing requires nimble skills combined with an utter absence of conscience.

"Iraq is becoming a country that America should be ashamed to support," reads a chilling New York Times editorial from Sunday, "let alone occupy. The nation as a whole is sliding closer to open civil war. In its capital, thugs kidnap and torture innocent civilians with impunity, then murder them for their religious beliefs. The rights of women are evaporating. The head of the government is the ally of a radical anti-American cleric who leads a powerful private militia that is behind much of the sectarian terror."

Not a bad day's work for an Average Joe.

He referred repeatedly to a December report from U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix to back his assertion that Iraq had failed to cooperate with the inspections. Evidently that cowed the reporters, for there has been little follow-up. But White House damage control should not be allowed to cover up this evidence that the president knew his case for war was based on faulty evidence.

First, the evidence is overwhelming that Bush hosted the January 31 meeting to manage his move to war, not as an occasion to review progress toward disarming Iraq. The record of the session shows this -- with talk of the war plan, the starting date, the justification and the securing of a second U.N. resolution as a legal cover, but there is more than that. Consider the context: the day the memo was taken U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell began the extensive review at the CIA of the allegations he would use to make his Security Council "briefing" -- already scheduled -- supposedly "bulletproof." It was also that same day that the codebreaking National Security Agency issued a directive to spy on the friendly nations who were members of the U.N. Security Council to divine their attitudes on the move to war.

The day before, according to Bob Woodward's account, Bush had told Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, "We will kick ass." By his account, Berlusconi tried to dissuade Bush from war. Woodward duly notes the president resorting to his standard line that no decision had yet been made on military action. The Manning memo suggests otherwise, with Bush revealing March 10 as the projected date for beginning bombing -- a campaign to hit 1,500 targets in four days, the "shock and awe" which U.S. officials bragged about at the time. Moreover, on January 24, the U.S. military commander, General Tommy Franks, had sent his final war plan up through Rumsfeld to the president. Bush's comment to Blair on January 31, that "he was not itching to go to war," is belied by the entire surrounding structure of events.

The other significant finding in the Manning memo concerns Tony Blair's intentions. The press reporting at the time -- regardless of what Scott McClellan says today -- was that the purpose of the Blair-Bush meeting was to decide whether there needed to be a second U.N. resolution. Postwar investigations in London show that in late January Blair received official advice from his attorney general Lord Goldsmith that such a resolution was necessary to fulfill the terms of the existing resolution 1441. At the meeting with Bush, however, the record shows Blair presented the project as a convenience. "If anything goes wrong... a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs," Blair said, according to Manning's memo.

Bush went along with Blair's talk of a resolution, but his own propositions on justifications for war revealed his true lack of interest in U.N. action. Bush speculated about deceiving Saddam into shooting at U.S. aircraft phonied up to look like U.N. planes, or getting an Iraqi scientist to assert that WMD were being concealed. The most widely reported aspect of the Bush-Blair meeting was these speculations (talk of a Saddam assassination was less justification than opportunity).

Bush told Blair he would "twist arms" to get a U.N. resolution, corresponding exactly to the NSA spy directive, which would track the success of Bush arm-twisting through U.N. members' own communications. Regardless of the outcome, Bush told Blair, "military action would follow anyway." Blair's assurance at that point that Britain stood with the U.S. put him squarely in the box with Bush of seeking to initiate an aggressive war.

Finally, on the matter of U.N. inspections, David Manning appears to have engaged in some policy advocacy, as opposed to strictly confining himself to recording the proceedings of this meeting in his memorandum to Tony Blair. Manning's paper notes the conversation among the leaders on the urgency of action if Bush's timeline was to be met. Blair's adviser argued that, "We therefore need to stay closely alongside Blix, [and] do all we can to help the inspectors make a significant find." But Manning's view did not reflect the realities of -- at least -- U.S. intelligence cooperation with the inspections. Rather, the CIA had been parsimonious in its help, taking weeks to begin providing tips, and then holding back many of its target folders, while national security adviser Condi Rice had put pressure on Blix to declare Iraq in violation.

Immediately upon finishing their talk, at 4:12 p.m. Bush and Blair appeared before newsmen, where Bush declared, "Saddam Hussein is not disarming. He is a danger to the world." Bush then added archly, "This issue will come to a head in a matter of weeks, not months," an almost exact repetition of Blair's comment at their secret meeting, as recorded by Manning, that "we should be saying that the crisis must be resolved in weeks, not months."

President Bush asserted, inaccurately, that Resolution 1441 "gives us the authority to move without any second resolution," a position the Attorney General of Great Britain had rejected only days before. Blair followed up, insisting that Dr. Blix had told the Security Council that Saddam was not cooperating with UN inspectors. In fact, what Blix had said when he reported to the U.N. on January 27 was that there had been difficulties with the Iraqi government but the situation was improving, and he added that his inspectors had made 300 visits to 230 different sites without finding any evidence of WMD. Nuclear inspector Mohammed ElBaradei had agreed, "We have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program." Hans Blix's own take on the Bush-Blair conversation rings true: "The U.S. government did not want to raise the hope that there was any way out but war."

On balance the newly revealed record of President Bush's secret meeting of January 31, 2003, confirms that by that date Bush's Iraq war was certain. The Manning memo supplies an explicit picture of Bush not merely cherrypicking only the intelligence he wanted to use, but scheming to overcome the consequences of not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In all likelihood the debate over the Iraq war will come to center on the question of how much sooner than January 2003 was Bush's war policy cast in stone. Was it September 2002, when Bush blurted out "I don't know what more evidence we need" and set up the White House Iraq Group to sell the war? Was it April at a previous Bush-Blair summit in Crawford or December 2001 when General Franks presented the first war plan to the president? Was it on or immediately after 9/11 or was it the day George W. Bush took the oath of office as President of the United States?

John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

Pace opened Tuesday's regular Pentagon briefing with a defense of the planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where U.S. troops have been battling a persistent insurgency since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government.

In the past month, three former generals have accused Rumsfeld of bungling the occupation of Iraq by refusing to commit enough troops to secure the country after taking Baghdad.

In a Time magazine essay published this week, retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold said the war plan was "fundamentally flawed," and many senior officers "acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard."

"When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military's effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction," wrote Newbold, who was the operations chief for the Joint Chiefs of Staff before retiring.

Another retired Marine general, former U.S. Central Command chief Anthony Zinni, has called for Rumsfeld to resign over his management of the war. And in a New York Times op-ed piece in March, former Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton called Rumsfeld "incompetent."

Asked if the criticism was affecting his ability to do his job, Rumsfeld said, "No."

Newbold left the service in October 2002 -- in part, he said, because of his objections to the upcoming invasion.

"Until now, I have resisted speaking out in public. I've been silent long enough," he wrote in Time. "I am driven to action now by the missteps and misjudgments of the White House and the Pentagon, and by my many painful visits to our military hospitals."

Rumsfeld said Newbold "never raised an issue publicly or privately when he was here that I know of." Pace also said he was unaware of any objections Newbold raised.

Pace said plans for the invasion were significantly overhauled between the time Newbold retired and the day American troops crossed the Iraqi frontier in March 2003.

He said members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed on to the war plan presented by Gen. Tommy Franks, then-commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, before it was presented to Rumsfeld and President Bush, and top officers had "every opportunity to speak our minds."

"And if we do not, shame on us, because the opportunity is there. It is elicited from us, and we're expected to," Pace said.

About 150,000 U.S. troops went into Iraq to topple Hussein, and about 130,000 remain there to provide security for Iraq's nascent government. But Zinni said estimates of the force needed for any invasion and occupation of Iraq during his 1997-2000 tenure as Central Command chief called for between 380,000 and 500,000 troops.

"The idea that you could control that country in the aftermath with those few troops was flawed," he told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Newbold criticized the Pentagon's civilian leadership for launching the invasion, which he said was done "with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions -- or bury the results." And he criticized fellow officers for not standing up to those leaders, saying their silence meant "that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war."

But Pace said "lots of concerns" were raised by both military and civilian leaders -- and Newbold was not one of them.

On Sunday, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers told ABC television that military officials -- even in retirement -- should keep their criticism to themselves.



"It's inappropriate, because it's not the military that judges our civilian bosses," said Myers, who left his post as senior US military adviser six months ago.

"There are professional standards that you have when you are in uniform that carry on when you retire," he told ABC's "This Week" program.



At least six former generals have called for Rumsfeld's ouster, some of whom held key combat commands and staff positions during the Iraq war.

They say the embattled defense secretary ignored military advice and deployed too few troops to pacify Iraq. Despite the outcry, President George W. Bush has declared his "full support" for Rumsfeld.

Among the defense secretary's detractors is retired major general John Batiste, who last week said that Rumsfeld showed too little regard for his uniformed advisers.

"When decisions are made without taking into account sound military recommendations, sound military decision-making, sound planning, then we're bound to make mistakes. When we violate the principles of war with mass and unity of command and unity of effort, we do that at our own peril," Batiste told US television last week.

The beleaguered Rumsfeld, for his part, characterized the critics as representing a minority opinion.

"Out of thousands and thousands of admirals and generals, if every time two or three people disagreed we changed the secretary of defense of the United States, it would be like a merry-go-round," he told Al-Arabiya television last week.

However, US Senator Christopher Dodd said the few generals who have dared to speak out represent the just a small fraction of the far larger number of detractors.

"These are generals who are not only speaking for themselves but I suspect are speaking for a lot of senior military people who are in uniform today," the Democratic lawmaker said.

"Generals are not in the habit, even as retirees, to go around being critical of the civilian leadership. This is a very, very important event," he told the "Fox News Sunday" television program.

"Secretary Rumsfeld, with all due respect, is a past-tense man," he said.

Republican lawmakers defended the Republican president's choice.

Senator Mitch McConnell called Rumsfeld "a spectacular secretary of defense, one of the best in American history," also appearing on "Fox News Sunday."

Meanwhile, the late president Richard Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, speaking on CNN television's "Late Edition" program, hailed Rumsfeld as "a distinguished public servant who has done an outstanding job as secretary of defense."

"The issue now is whether in order to deal with a decision made three years ago, one should undertake the blood-letting that these generals are asking for," he said.

But Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein told the same program that Rumsfeld has overstayed his welcome in the defense chief post.

"I think the president would be well served and the nation well served with a new team," she told CNN.

According to a December report by the army inspector general, obtained by Salon.com online magazine, the investigators did not accuse the defence secretary of specifically prescribing "creative" techniques, but they said he regularly monitored the progress of the al-Kahtani interrogation by telephone, and they argued he had helped create the conditions that allowed abuse to take place.

"Where is the throttle on this stuff?" asked Lt Gen Schmidt, an air force officer who said in sworn testimony to the inspector general that he had concerns about the duration and repetition of harsh interrogation techniques. He said that in his view: "There were no limits."

The revelation comes at a critical time for Mr Rumsfeld. He is under unprecedented scrutiny for his management of the Iraq war, after six former generals in quick succession called for his resignation.

The questions reached such a pitch by the end of the week that George Bush took the unusual step of issuing a personal note from Camp David in Mr Rumsfeld's defence. "I have seen first-hand how Don relies upon our military commanders in the field and at the Pentagon to make decisions about how best to complete these missions," the president wrote. "Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period. He has my full support and deepest appreciation."

And, responding to the generals, Mr Rumsfeld said in an al-Arabiya TV interview yesterday: "If every time two or three people disagreed we changed the secretary of defence, it would be like a merry-go-round." However, in the wake of the inspector general's report, Human Rights Watch said: "The question at this point is not whether secretary Rumsfeld should resign, it's whether he should be indicted. General Schmidt's sworn statement suggests Rumsfeld may have been perfectly aware of the abuses inflicted on Mr al-Qahtani."

The Pentagon also issued a statement in response to publication of the report. A spokeswoman said: "We've gone over this countless times, and yet some still choose to print fiction versus fact. Twelve reviews, to include one done by an independent panel, all confirm the department of defence did not have a policy that encouraged or condoned abuse. To suggest otherwise is simply false."

So far, only junior US officers have been charged and convicted for a string of prisoner abuse scandals since the Bush administration launched its "global war on terror", but rights activists have accused the administration of opening the way for the use of torture in 2002 by relaxing the constraints of the Geneva conventions.

Gen Bantz Craddock, head of Southern Command, overruled the investigators' recommendation that Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller, who ran the Guantánamo camp in 2002, be admonished for the techniques employed. Gen Miller was transferred to Abu Ghraib prison, and took with him his aggressive approach to interrogations.

The investigators found Mr Rumsfeld was "talking weekly" with Gen Miller about the al-Qahtani interrogation. In December 2002, the defence secretary approved 16 harsh interrogation techniques for use on Mr al-Qahtani, including forced nudity, and "stress positions". However approval was revoked in 2003.

Gen Miller insisted he was unaware of details of the interrogation, but Gen Schmidt said he found that"hard to believe" in view of Mr Rumsfeld's evident interest in its progress. Gen James Hill, former head of Southern Command, recalled Gen Miller recommending continuation of the interrogation, saying "We think we're right on the verge of making a breakthrough." Gen Hill then passed on the request to Mr Rumsfeld. "The secretary said, 'Fine,'" Gen Hill remembered.

Backstory

The US defence secretary has faced many calls to resign over Guantánamo, the invasion of Iraq and abuses at Abu Ghraib prison - but the pressure he faces now comes from a weighty new quarter: six generals recently retired from the military he runs.

Retired general Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, sparked the current round of condemnation in a New York Times article on March 19. On April 2, Anthony Zinni told a TV interviewer the US was "paying the price for the lack of credible planning" in Iraq. Seven days later, Lt Gen Gregory Newbold, a former member of the joint chiefs of staff, tore into the administration's "casualness and swagger... the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions".

On Wednesday, John Batiste, a former infantry commander, added his voice, and on Thursday his colleague John Riggs concurred. Charles Swannack, who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq, brought the total to six yesterday, telling the New York Times Mr Rumsfeld had demonstrated "absolute failures in managing the war against Saddam".

Mr Rumsfeld is understood to have offered to resign at least twice while in charge at the Pentagon, but both times President George Bush turned him down.

Also Tuesday, Rumsfeld planned to meet with a group of retired generals who regularly appear as analysts on television and in newspapers.

Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Donald Shepperd, a CNN military analyst who will attend the session, said more than a dozen similar meetings have been held in the past. But he said that Tuesday's meeting was called late last week, apparently in response to recent events.

Shepperd said such meetings give the generals an opportunity to ask tough questions and that they are not limited to those who agree with the Pentagon on every issue.

Recently, six retired generals -- including former commanders of two Army divisions that saw combat in Iraq -- have called for Rumsfeld to resign.

They accuse him of ignoring advice from senior officers about how to prosecute the war and sending too few troops into Iraq to manage the occupation after the March 2003 invasion.

In defense of Rumsfeld, four retired generals wrote an op-ed piece Monday in The Wall Street Journal suggesting that some of his critics don't understand the war on terrorism.

"Much of the acrimony expressed by Secretary Rumsfeld's military critics appears to stem from his efforts to 'transform' the military by moving to a joint expeditionary force that is lighter and more mobile in nature to meet the nation's current and future threats," the commentary said.

"Many senior officers and bureaucrats did not support his transformation goals -- preferring conventional weapons of the past ... which prove practically useless against lawless and uncivilized enemies engaged in asymmetric warfare," the writers continued. (Watch Rumsfeld fight fire with fire -- 2:18)

The op-ed piece was written by retired Lt. Gen. John Crosby, former deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command; retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, former assistant vice chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force; retired Maj. Gen. Buron Moore, U.S. Air Force, who was director of Central Command during Operation Desert Storm; and retired Maj. Gen Paul Vallely, former deputy commander of the U.S. Army, Pacific.

Of the two Rumsfeld critics the piece singled out, retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni is a former chief of U.S. Central Command and retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold is a former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"It unfortunately appears that two of the retired generals (Messrs. Zinni and Newbold) do not understand the true nature of this radical ideology, Islamic extremism, and why we fight in Iraq. We suggest they listen to the tapes of United 93," the piece continued, referring to the hijacked plane that went down in Pennysylvania on 9/11.

The four retired generals also said it was inappropriate for senior military officers -- active or retired -- to criticize the civilian leadership during war.

At the White House briefing Monday, press secretary Scott McClellan pointed to the Wall Street Journal op-ed as evidence that retired generals stand behind the defense secretary.

Also Monday, U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., a Tennessee Democrat running for his state's Senate seat, suggested replacing Rumsfeld with former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"Gen. Powell's experience resolving complicated and sensitive national security challenges is needed now more than ever," Ford said in a statement. "He will bring a respect for our military, a willingness to listen, a capacity to admit and correct mistakes and an attention to detail that is absent now in the top job at the Pentagon."

WASHINGTON - It has become a daily ritual, the defense of the defense secretary, complete with praise from serving generals, tributes from the president and, from the man on the spot, doses of charm, combativeness and even some humility.

A session on Tuesday was the third time in five days that Donald H. Rumsfeld had sought to make a public case to remain as defense secretary.

"There are no indispensable men," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon.

But the Bush administration sought to drive home the message that Mr. Rumsfeld was not going anywhere, no matter what critics might desire.

Again, Gen. Peter Pace of the Marines, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was at Mr. Rumsfeld's side, a visual prop to counter the message from a half-dozen or so retired generals that Mr. Rumsfeld should step down.

President Bush, having defended Mr. Rumsfeld on Friday from Camp David, had appeared before the cameras hours earlier, to make the case in person.

"I'm the decider, and I decide what's best," Mr. Bush said in the Rose Garden. "And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

Such extended repeated public displays of self-defense are not the norm in Washington, where beleaguered officeholders usually seek to maintain the pretense that criticism does not matter. Those who do respond most often use surrogates to extol their virtues.

But the extraordinary parade of generals who have stepped forward to defend Mr. Rumsfeld includes a bevy of retired officers, including Gen. Richard B. Myers of the Air Force, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, who commanded American troops in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

On Tuesday, Mr. Rumsfeld summoned another group of retired officers for a closed meeting, ostensibly to brief them on Iraq, but clearly also to enlist their support when they appear on television.

Perhaps the most notable examples of damage control since the retired generals' complaints gathered force have come from Mr. Rumsfeld, who has appeared on Al Arabiya television, the Rush Limbaugh radio program and, twice, before television cameras at the Pentagon.

The appearances have been layered with the verbal flair, acerbic wit and defiant touches that Mr. Rumsfeld has made his trademark. But on Tuesday, there was also an uncharacteristic flash of humility - an olive twig, if not a branch - from a man better known for his combativeness.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who has said he offered to resign two times after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, said he was "not inclined to be instantaneously judgmental" about what his critics were now saying, a message that has included complaints that his headstrong style causes him to disregard much of what anyone in a uniform tells him.

"Because of the importance of these matters being discussed, I'd like to reflect on them a bit," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Within minutes, though, he said the views of the six generals who had called for his resignation were hardly representative, noting that the nation's 6,000 or 7,000 retired generals and admirals were not "unanimous on anything."

At Mr. Rumsfeld's side, General Pace added that soldiers in Iraq showed no discernible dissatisfaction with Mr. Rumsfeld. General Pace said Gen. Michael W. Hagee, Marine Corps commandant, had just been there and reported that he "got exactly zero questions about the leadership in the department."

The calls for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation have abated since last week, when Mr. Bush asserted his authority as commander in chief to declare that Mr. Rumsfeld "has my full support and deepest appreciation."

The group that has called for the resignation includes two retired major generals who commanded troops in Iraq and a retired three-star general who was director of operations on the Joint Staff. Their comments have been criticized by other retired generals, who have said the group risks politicizing the armed forces.

A danger for Mr. Rumsfeld is that Republicans running in the November election will decide that his continued presence in the cabinet could drag down their prospects and urge Mr. Bush to dump him.

A Senate Republican aide said that despite expressions of support for Mr. Rumsfeld by some Republican senators, many other members expressed deep concern privately.

"The nervousness here is with a figure as controversial as Rumsfeld at the head of a war that's declining in popularity, that becomes a real political problem for members who are up for re-election this fall," said the aide, who insisted on anonymity because he had been told not to discuss senators' private conversations.

With Congress in recess, the aide said, he knew of no organized effort among Senate Republicans to make their concerns public or to take them to the White House. But the aide said he expected discussions to intensify when senators returned next week.

There are signs that the efforts to keep Republicans from defecting are working. On Tuesday, Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a news release taking on Mr. Rumsfeld's critics point by point. The statement notes that the secretary had 273 meetings with senior commanders last year, illustrating "that Secretary Rumsfeld respects and relies on the judgment of the Pentagon's uniformed leadership."

After taking questions for a half-hour, Mr. Rumsfeld went to meet the retired military officers and civilian analysts. Many of those invited comment regularly on CNN, Fox News and other television and radio outlets and are part of the same community that is proving a problem for the secretary.

In past meetings with the group, Mr. Rumsfeld has opened with lengthy statements. This time he said he would go straight to questions, participants said. He was asked about the criticism, said Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Wilkerson, who retired from the Marines and who attended the meeting.

"He said it's a diversion, and that it's taken him away from the full-time focus on things he needs to do," he said. Mr. Rumsfeld "was not chastened. If anything, he looked like he was energized by it."

A major force in the administration from the start, Rove still is expected to have a big voice in policy but not the day-to-day oversight. Those responsibilities will shift to Joel Kaplan, who was promoted to deputy chief of staff from the No. 2 job in the White House budget office where he had served as Joshua Bolten's lieutenant.

Bolten took over Friday as chief of staff with authority to do whatever he deemed necessary to stabilize Bush's presidency, and he has moved quickly with changes.

With the
Iraq war hanging over Bush, the White House has been rocked by mistakes and missteps - from an ill-fated Supreme Court nomination to a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina - that have resulted in the president's plunge in the polls to the lowest point since he took office. Nervous Republicans told Bush he needed fresh people with new ideas.

McClellan, the press secretary for nearly three years, was the public face of the White House and a vulnerable target in an administration trying to show off new people. He had been bloodied by contentious press briefings and media criticism about an administration loath to give up information.

"The White House is going through a period of transition. Change can be helpful, and this is a good time and good position to help bring about change," McClellan said, his voice choked with emotion as he stood alongside Bush outside the White House. "I am ready to move on."

In recent months, McClellan had told people he enjoyed his job and wanted to stay for the long term. He said Wednesday he started to think about leaving in the past few weeks and concluded, with a new chief of staff, that it was a good time to go. He and Bush came to a decision in a meeting Monday in the Oval Office.

"I have given it my all, sir, and I have given you my all, sir, and I will continue to do so as we transition to a new press secretary," McClellan said.

"It's going to be hard to replace Scott," Bush said. "But, nevertheless, he's made the decision and I accept it. ... Job well done."

Bush patted McClellan on the back and they walked together across the South Lawn to the president's helicopter to begin a trip to Alabama. But the aircraft couldn't get off the ground because its radio failed, and they had to take a motorcade.

McClellan will remain until a successor is named.

Possibilities mentioned include Tony Snow, host of a program on Fox News Radio, Dan Senor, former coalition spokesman in Iraq, Trent Duffy, former White House deputy press secretary and former Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols.

More changes are expected. White House officials have done nothing to discourage speculation that Treasury Secretary
John Snow is leaving. Bush's communications chief, Nicolle Wallace, also is expected to depart because her husband has taken a new job in New York. Changes also are expected in the White House lobbying shop run by Candida Wolff.

The shake-up began with the March 28 resignation of Andy Card, Bush's longtime chief of staff, and his replacement by Bolten. Just this week, Bush has named a new budget chief and a new trade representative and is moving toward choosing a new domestic policy adviser

Kaplan, the new deputy chief of staff, will take over from Rove as coordinator of policy developed within the Domestic Policy Council, the National Economic Council, the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council. A trusted aide to Bolten, he will be the new chief's right-hand man.

"Joel Kaplan is a man of great talent, intellect and experience who possesses a deep knowledge of policy and budget processes," Bush said in a written statement.

Rove and Joe Hagin, who oversees White House administration, intelligence and national security, will remain as deputy chiefs of staff.

Rove still is under investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald for his role in the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA identity.

The episode also brought problems for McClellan. He at first denied Rove had played any part in the leak, saying he based his account on Rove himself. But later it was revealed that Rove had been a source for at least two reporters.

McClellan said Kaplan would focus on the day-to-day management of the policy process. "And so this really frees Karl up to focus on bigger strategic issues," the spokesman said. "He will continue to be a crucial voice and trusted adviser on policy ... as he has since the beginning of this administration."

'I told Tony, I said "rather than lose your government, withdraw from the coalition" - because I felt it was important for him to be the Prime Minister at this point in our relationship,' the President told the journalist Con Coughlin, author of a new book about Blair's relationship with the US. 'I saw his clear view and strength of character. And that's when he told me, "I'm staying, even if it costs me my government".' The account is unlikely to please anti-war Labour MPs, or Labour councillors contesting seats where Labour voters are still angry about Iraq, who would prefer the issue not to be discussed. Some were irritated by Jack Straw's hosting of a visit by Condoleezza Rice in the run-up to the local election campaign, highlighting once again the government's closeness to a White House administration many Labour voters dislike.

In the interview published in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, Bush praised Blair's courage, vision and personal qualities, calling him 'an easy guy to be around' who was straightforward with him.

The relationship grew after 11 September 2001 because he admired the way Blair saw 'that the free world has an obligation to defend itself against these killers', he added. However, Bush left open the question of how much influence Blair had over him in return for such unwavering support. Asked what input Blair actually had after 11 September, Bush suggested he did not need any: 'I'm the kind of guy that when I make up my mind - you know, I appreciate advice and counsel - but we were going. And the doctrine, if you harbour a terrorist you are equally as guilty as a terrorist, came right from my soul.' However, he said Blair had 'had a lot of sway' over the decision to pursue, ultimately unsuccessfully, a second UN resolution before invading Iraq.

Downing Street will also breathe a sigh of relief over Bush's denial that he was actually committed to invading Iraq almost a year before it happened. Bush insisted he did not take any final decision until 'after the ultimatum' from Washington for Saddam Hussein to stand down - delivered 48 hours before the invasion.

A source familiar with the discussions said Monday that newly appointed Chief of Staff Josh Bolten asked Snow to make a decision by early this week.

Two sources familiar with the discussions said Bolten wanted to fill the post this week, as early as Tuesday.

Sources familiar with Snow's deliberations said he has been focusing on family, finances and his health, as he battles colon cancer.

Neither Snow nor the White House would comment.

Sources familiar with the matter said the White House approached the Fox anchor several weeks ago. Snow then met with Bolten and other officials at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Snow serves as a political analyst for Fox News Channel, which he joined in 1996.

He was a nationally syndicated columnist with The Detroit News in Detroit, Michigan, from 1993 to 2001 and was a columnist for USA Today from 1994 to 2000.

Before that, he was an editorial writer at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia; editorial page editor of The Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia; deputy editorial page editor of The Detroit News; and editorial page editor of The Washington Times.

The conservative radio talk show host, who was born in 1955, served as a speech writer for President Bush's father in 1991.

In a separate personnel matter, discussions are also continuing about replacing Treasury Secretary John Snow, said two sources familiar with the issue and a third GOP source close to the White House.

Republicans familiar with the discussions said David Mulford, currently U.S. ambassador to India and a former Treasury Department official who also was the European chief of Credit Suisse First Boston, is considered a candidate for the job.

"There was no wholesale abdication of the attorney general's duty to direct and supervise litigation," he wrote.

Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had recused himself from the investigation because of his White House contacts. James Comey, who was deputy attorney general at the time, appointed Fitzgerald, giving him wide berth to conduct the investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters in 2003.

"This case provides the clearest example of why such broad discretion is necessary," Walton wrote. "Here, the attorney general believed there was a conflict of interest ... It was, therefore, entirely appropriate for the attorney general to remove himself completely from the investigation."

Walton said there must be a way to appoint special prosecutors to ensure that "the perception of fairness withstands the scrutiny of the American public" when high-level government officials are investigated for alleged wrongdoing.

Libby, 55, is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, accused of lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned about Plame and what he subsequently told reporters about her.

Conservative columnist Robert Novak named her in a column July 14, 2003, eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the Bush administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.

The CIA sent Wilson to Niger in early 2002 to determine whether there was any truth to reports that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports. But the allegation nevertheless wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

Walton said Comey made the legal analysis more difficult by failing to appoint Fitzgerald under Justice Department rules for special prosecutors. As a result, the judge said he had to rely on a series of letters Comey wrote to Fitzgerald outlining the CIA leak investigation.

The judge concluded that Fitzgerald's powers are limited because he can be removed by the Justice Department. Walton also said Fitzgerald's authority will expire when the CIA leak investigation and resulting prosecutions are concluded.

"The integrity of the rule of law ... is challenged to the greatest degree when high-level government officials come under suspicion for violating the law," Walton wrote. "And a criminal investigation of any individuals, prominent or not ... must be above reproach to preserve respect for the fairness of our system of justice."

Naeema al-Gasseer, the World Health Organisation's representative for Iraq, told The Washington Post it was a "shocking" state of affairs. "We're not sending the right message."

The US Agency for International Development says that in Iraq "diarrhoea, measles, respiratory infections and malaria - compounded by malnutrition affecting 30 per cent of children under five - contribute to excessive rates of infant and child mortality". Child malnutrition has doubled since the invasion, according to Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission's expert on the "right to food", and now stands at around 7.7 per cent.

Brigadier General William McCoy, the US Army commander with control over reconstruction projects in Iraq, said emergency funds were being sought for the clinics from the US military and foreign donors.

"It's continuing to gain strength. I look forward to the jobs numbers that we'll be reporting on Friday. I think they'll be good numbers," Snow said.

The Labor Department is scheduled to issue non-farm payroll data for February at 8:30 a.m. EDT on Friday. Economists polled by Reuters forecast a March increase of 190,000 jobs versus a 243,000 gain in February, along with an unchanged unemployment rate of 4.8 percent.

Snow also said he is looking forward to strong figures for first quarter gross domestic product due later this month, noting that private sector economists forecast first quarter growth of 4 to 5 percent.

Snow described that as "strong growth and the sort of growth that will continue to see more jobs created, businesses continue to be profitable, (and) investment occur." He added that would boost government tax receipts that already were running at a rate about 10 percent above last year.

Despite setbacks like Hurricane Katrina, which is costing the government billions of dollars, Snow said maintaining current low tax rates will stimulate growth that will allow
President Bush to meet a goal of cutting federal budget deficit by half by the time he leaves office in 2009.

"I think the American economy today is on a very good path and I'm hopeful that Congress will extend the capital gains and dividend (tax) reductions," Snow told the subcommittee. "Those reductions in tax rates on investment have been at the center of the strong results we've seen."

Snow's upbeat comments on the economy come as Republicans close to the White House have said the administration is increasingly likely to replace him and is considering a number of Wall Street executives and former lawmakers as possible candidates.

These Republican sources have told Reuters the White House wants a more compelling figure than Snow to lead its effort to highlight the strength of the economy ahead of November's congressional elections.

Snow declined to answer reporters' questions about his future at Treasury following the hearing and quickly left the venue of the hearing on Capitol Hill.

Snow told the subcommittee China needed to be more flexible with it yuan currency to fulfill commitments made in July 2005 to make it be more market-driven. "They need to do more. They're being too cautious," Snow said.

However, he said he preferred "quiet diplomacy" to achieve this. He did not address a keenly awaited report due this spring from the Treasury that could declare China a currency manipulator and potentially lead to sanctions.

He said Bush would discuss the issue of opening up China's markets during an April 20 meeting with Chinese President
Hu Jintao in Washington.

Snow added that he expects the yuan later this year to "move more in a direction that has a higher valuation" but did not expect a major revaluation in "one fell swoop."

These reports in the past month symbolize a welcome trend during an economic expansion that at first offered only tepid job gains, both in quantity and quality.

This good news about the breadth of job creation comes against a backdrop of labor-market anxiety that has persisted despite the economy's solid overall footing. Competition from imported goods, the threat of outsourcing services abroad, and a controversial influx of illegal laborers are just some of the forces that make many workers worried about their future.

Creating good jobs - the kinds that can keep American living standards rising - appears likely to remain a challenge. But the current employment picture at least indicates movement in a positive direction.

"We're creating lots of all kinds of jobs, across many industries, occupations, and pay scales," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. But he adds: "If your skill sets are rusty, or at the low end of the skill range, you're going to have a tougher time."

The economy added 211,000 jobs in March, according to a Labor Department report Friday - a solid showing about on par with expectations. The unemployment rate fell a notch, to 4.7 percent.

The new jobs still include plenty at the low end: An analysis by Merrill Lynch finds that some 40 percent of the net gain in March came in two areas known for low pay: retail services and leisure/hospitality, which includes restaurants.

But this is just part of a broader tapestry. Management and professional occupations are employing 1.2 million more people this month than a year ago - or about 1 in 3 new jobs in America. This is the highest-paying of five broad categories tracked by the Labor Department. Not all of them are CEOs or engineers, but the median paycheck for full-time workers in this category is $937 a week, far above the US median of $651.

The construction industry continues to hammer out more than its share of new jobs. It accounts for about 6.4 percent of US jobs, but has provided 14.4 percent of the past year's job growth. The quality of construction jobs is mixed - often offering higher hourly pay than the US median but with lower benefits.

Even the manufacturing sector, which has long offered blue-collar workers a measure of middle-class prosperity, appears to be stabilizing after a period of heavy job losses. Despite downsizing in the automotive industry, 175,000 more people are employed in production occupations today than a year ago.

"As this recovery gets under way, professional services have begun adding jobs fairly broadly," says Jared Bernstein, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington.

EPI tracks the weighting of higher- versus lower-paying jobs that are being added to the economy. For much of the current expansion, which began at the end of 2001, that indicator has been negative.

In the past year, however, it has turned positive, meaning that the new jobs in the economy are the kind that tend to pull average wages up, not down.

Beyond professional services, one example may be construction. The housing market is cooling, but commercial building is heating up.

"More of the work will be in nonresidential construction," predicts Michael Carliner, an economist at the National Association of Home Builders. That could mean demand for higher skills, such as equipment operation, that boost pay.

The question, however, is how much of today's strengthening labor market represents cyclical trends, rather than long-term gains.

At this point, perhaps midway into an expansion phase, it's not unusual to see the job mix improve and pay to rise in new and existing jobs alike. "I would expect wages and compensation to increase faster," says Rae Hederman of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

How long that pattern lasts will depend in some measure on the Federal Reserve, which is now trying to decide whether to raise interest rates further. Setting rates too high, some experts warn, could slow the economy and dampen job growth.

The labor market's gains are beginning to take on the shape of a barbell, with growth weighted heavily at the two ends of the pay scale. During the current expansion, the bulk of new jobs have come in either the highest-paid of five broad occupational categories - management and professional - or the lowest-paid, services. Together the two sectors now account for more than half of all jobs. (The other three major categories are sales and office work, construction and natural resources, and production/transportation.)

The economy's overall share of jobs with strong pay and benefits has failed to grow during the past quarter century, even though workers today have higher skills and more technology to make them productive, says John Schmitt, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research institute in Washington. That's a break with the past, he says, when "wages typically tracked closely with productivity."

"We want to have a system that is secure and safe but welcoming to travel across the world," said Sec Chertoff. "Americans lose when we put up walls and keep people out."

Business leaders have voiced deep concerns over a decline in international visitors due partly to more bureaucratic US visa policies and a battered image overseas September 11, 2001.

US market share of international tourism is at an all-time low, dropping 35 per cent between 1992 and 2004, which translates into $286bn in lost revenue, according to the Travel Industry Association of America (TIA).

"We are using technology to reduce delays to legitimate travellers while raising the bar to keep out those who are not," said Sec Chertoff. "Pilot programmes already running demonstrate that it is possible to confirm the identity of visitors quickly and screen out potential threats."

The US State Department and the DHS in January announced a series of measures to streamline travel to the US, including reducing wait time for visas; and setting up a "redress" process to address travellers' complaints about their poor treatment at borders or consulates abroad.

Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts and chairman of TIA, called for an aggressive campaign to market the US as a destination to overseas tourists. TIA has approved $500,000 to put together a strategic plan by year end to tackle the issue of declining tourism.

While about 20 US states have overseas marketing campaigns, there has not been a unified US-themed one in 15 years. The issue has become urgent as countries such as Australia and Ireland market themselves aggressively and capture greater share of global tourism.

Mr Rasulo blamed the slow response from the US on lack of cohesiveness from the diverse travel industry, which broadly includes hotels, airlines, restaurants, car rental agencies, cruise lines and related businesses.

"The travel industry has not spoken with a single voice," said Mr Rasulo. "We hope we're changing the channel."

Travel industry leaders also voiced concern over controversial Congressional proposals to reform immigration laws.

"Some in Congress want to criminalise undocumented workers and their employers," said J.W. Marriott, chief executive of Marriott International, the world's largest hotel operator by revenue.

"Do you industry executives think of yourself as felons? But if we don't stand together and demand good, comprehensive immigration reform, we will be criminalised if we unknowingly employ illegal aliens."

The US hotels industry employed nearly 1.8m people in 2004, many of them immigrants. The sector will demand an additional 300,000 employees by 2014, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Mr Marriott added, "In our hotels, we can't get the work done without workers from other nations and we still have jobs to fill."

Copyright The Financial Times Ltd.

Slated for release today, the report also shows a significant if not quite as dramatic increase in local black business ownership. It found 4,363 black-owned firms in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area as of 2002, up 38.8 percent from 3,142 in 1997. Revenue figures for the metro area, which includes Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland counties, were not available.

Doris Carson Williams, president of the African American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania, found the Census Bureau figures encouraging but not surprising.

As blacks join the numbers of those being downsized by corporations, she said, "more and more have found that entrepreneurship is a viable option for them. They don't want to go through the corporate menagerie again."

Both local and national figures show the greatest numbers of black-owned businesses in the fields of health care and social assistance.

Other categories with a strong presence of black-owned businesses include retail; professional, scientific and technical services; and transportation and warehousing.

New York City had more black-owned firms than any other city at 98,076, followed by Chicago (39,424), Los Angeles (25,958), Houston (21,226), and Detroit (19,530).

Among states, New York had the greatest number of black-owned firms with 129,324, followed by California (112,873), Florida (102,079), Georgia (90,461) , and Texas (88,769). These five states accounted for about 44 percent of all black-owned businesses in the United States. Pennsylvania had 24,757.

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, the industry benchmark, is also above last year's high of 6.33 percent, reached in the week of November 11 after climbing on and off from a 2005 low of 5.47 percent in June.

The MBA's seasonally adjusted purchase mortgage index fell 2.7 percent to 407.4 from the previous week's 417.7.

The index -- widely considered a timely gauge of U.S. home sales -- was also below its year-ago level of 466.7.

The group's seasonally adjusted index of refinancing applications decreased 0.4 percent to 1,526.1 compared to 1,532.4 the previous week. A year earlier the index stood at 1,870.0.

The refinance share of mortgage activity increased to 36.4 percent of total applications from 36.0 percent the previous week.

Fixed 15-year mortgage rates averaged 6.19 percent last week, up from 6.17 percent the previous week. Rates on one-year adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) increased to 6.00 percent from 5.97 percent.

SIGNS OF COOLING IN HOUSING MARKET

Historically low mortgage rates have fueled a five-year housing boom, helping support the U.S. economy's recovery from recession despite uncertain business investment.

Analysts differ on whether or not there is a housing bubble, but most agree that the market is cooling off from its record run.

The MBA's soft data followed other reports this week that showed cooling in the U.S. housing sector.

The Commerce Department said on Tuesday the pace of U.S. housing construction slowed more than expected in March as both the rate of starts and permits declined to their lowest levels in a year.

Earlier in the week, the National Association of Home Builders said its influential index of U.S. home builder sentiment fell for a fourth consecutive month in April to its lowest level since November 2001.

The MBA's survey covers about 50 percent of all U.S. retail residential mortgage originations. Respondents include mortgage bankers, commercial banks and thrifts.

The government reported new homes sold at an annual rate of 1.21 million homes in March, up 13.8 percent from a revised 1.07 million pace in February. That easily topped forecasts for a 1.1 million pace from economists surveyed by Briefing.com.

The jump, the biggest since a 16 percent rise in April 1993, came even as mortgage rates hit an average 6.32 percent last month for 30-year fixed-rate loans, according to Freddie Mac, up from 6.25 percent in February.

The mortgage rate was the second-highest for any month since 2002. Rates have risen further since, climbing to 6.53 percent in the most recent weekly survey.

With rising mortgage rates driving up the cost of financing home purchases, most economists have been looking for the real estate market to cool off in 2006 after several years of record sales.

But economist Bob Brusca of FAO Economics said last month's drop in new home prices is a sign that the market for new homes isn't nearly as strong as the jump in sales would suggest.

He noted that the report showed an unusual drop in prices from both February and a year earlier, which could be a sign that home builders are cutting prices to move a large supply of new homes now on the market.

"New homes sales sprang back to life like a zombie in a cheap horror flick," Brusca said. "And like that zombie, housing really is dead. Don't let all that twitching fool you."

He said that many of the new homes sold in March were probably built in a stronger real estate market.

And unlike existing homes, where sellers can live until they get an acceptable price, "builders can't live in these houses unless they have a lot of family," he said. "By and large they must finance them at rising interest costs."

In fact, about one builder in five has reported a jump in cancellations of new home orders, according to a recent industry survey. And Wednesday's report showed that there were 553,000 new homes for sale in March, up 25 percent from a year earlier.

Meanwhile, average prices fell 7.1 percent from February to $279,100, after topping $300,000 for the first time in the February revised figures. The median price, which reflects the point at which half the homes sell for more and half sell for less, also fell 6.5 percent to $224,200.

And while month-to-month declines in home prices are not unusual, more significantly, prices also fell from a year earlier: a 2.2 percent decline in median prices and a 3.6 percent fall in average prices over that time.

Still, Wednesday's big jump in sales came after existing home sales also showed an unexpected increase last month in a report from the National Association of Realtors Tuesday.

New home sales, while a fraction of the overall real estate market, are more closely watched since they're more of a leading indicator of conditions in the housing market.

Existing home sales are recorded at closing, typically a month or two after a purchase agreement, while new home sales are tracked based on when contracts are signed.

The fight comes in an election year when members of Congress are under pressure to show they're getting federal spending under control, especially members' hometown and home-state spending. Senate floor debate was scheduled to begin today.

"This is more evidence of the dysfunctional nature of the Republican majority in the Senate," says Pat Toomey, president of the conservative Club for Growth. "The leadership is right this time, but the question is will they be able to hold enough of the rank-and-file members to do the right thing."

The committee that approved the increases is headed by Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran, who has battled to ensure his state gets its fair share of Katrina relief funds. His spokeswoman, Jenny Manley, says the Bush administration "does not have the sole authority to say what needs remain in the Gulf Coast. Members of Congress have more direct accountability to their constituents and know well what needs remain."

Bush sought $92.2 billion to pay ongoing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and hurricane relief along the Gulf Coast. The House approved $91.9 billion in March, but the Senate Appropriations Committee added about $14 billion to the measure in early April by inserting numerous items, including money for disasters back to 1999.

"The Senate committee's add-ons were astonishingly higher than the president's request," says Scott Milburn of the White House Office of Management and Budget. "That has caused serious concern."

"We would like to get it back down closer to the original request of $92 billion," says Bill Hoagland, a budget analyst for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

Senators have added projects large and small because they know money for wars and hurricane relief will run low and have to be replenished - which makes this a must-pass bill.

Among the projects:

- $700 million to relocate a freight railroad line from a section of Mississippi's Gulf Coast that developers want for casinos.

- $600 million for highways in states from Alabama to Alaska affected by natural disasters, some as long as seven years ago.

- $23 million for flood control in Sacramento and Hawaii.

- $20 million to help New England shellfishers recover from last year's toxic red tide.

- $15 million to help promote the sale of Gulf Coast seafood.

"Anything that isn't nailed down, they pick up and take home to their districts," says Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, one of several budget watchdog groups opposing the measure.

If the Senate approves the additional money, House Republicans will try to erase it during negotiations to produce a compromise bill. "We passed a clean bill, and we want to keep it as close to the president's request as possible," says House Appropriations Committee spokesman John Scofield.

White House opposition has emboldened Senate critics, led by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who charge that the war and hurricane funding bill has attracted "pork barrel" projects. The cost will get added to the federal budget deficit, estimated by the White House budget office at $423 billion this year. That's up from $318 billion in 2005.

Gregg, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, was the only senator to oppose the bill in the Appropriations Committee. He says the measure "has ballooned out of control." To pay for more border security, he plans to propose cuts elsewhere in the bill.

The largest new item is a $4 billion bailout of farmers affected in part by Katrina - but far more by high gas prices, and by droughts, floods, fires and mudslides as far away as Hawaii. The bailout includes a 30% increase in federal payments to the affected farmers and ranchers. Similar bailouts were passed in 2003 and 2004.

"This is an emergency," says Matt Mackowiak, spokesman for Sen. Conrad Burns (news, bio, voting record), R-Mont. "Hurricane Katrina has devastated farmers and ranchers, particularly in the Midwest." Hoagland, Frist's budget and agriculture expert, says the farm aid is "not needed."

Critics say droughts and floods and pests are part of the risks of farming. "When the Atkins Diet became a rage and people stopped eating carbohydrates, we didn't do something to protect pizza parlors," Ellis says.

Senators also were generous to governors from Gulf Coast states that asked for more money. They increased a special Katrina housing fund by $1.2 billion, largely to give Mississippi money to move families out of temporary trailers and into special new houses called "Katrina cottages."

They sought to reserve $4.2 billion in housing aid for exclusive use by Louisiana by adding another $1 billion for use by Louisiana's neighbors.

The committee included nearly $900 million, much of it for Texas, as compensation for the costs of educating thousands of Katrina evacuees.

"They're extorting extra funding under the theory that (Bush) will never veto it," says Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Bush has yet to cast his first veto.

"We have a strong economy, but high gas prices are like an additional tax on families that are trying to live within a budget," spokesman Scott McClellan said. "It puts a strain on working families, farmers and small businesses."

Bush will call on energy companies to reinvest their profits into expanding refining capacity, developing new technologies and researching alternative energy sources.

Critics aim to tap into public anxiety caused by rising gas prices as a way to blunt the White House push to take credit for overall good economic numbers.

Bush, a former Texas oilman, has called for the United States to kick its "addiction" to oil and predicted a "tough summer" for drivers, but there is not a lot he can do to reduce gas costs quickly and some parts of his plan have been in place for months.

POSSIBLE CHEATING

Bush will say that in recent days he asked the Energy and Justice departments to look into possible cheating or illegal manipulation of gasoline markets.

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be sending letters on Tuesday to all 50 states "to remind them to stay on top of this," McClellan said.

"It's important to make sure that there's not any price gouging," he said. "The federal government has a responsibility to act."

Republican leaders in Congress, worried that high fuel costs will turn voters against them, urged the Bush administration to investigate.

"Anyone who is trying to take advantage of this situation while American families are forced into making tough choices over whether to fill up their cars or severely cut back their budgets should be investigated and prosecuted," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert wrote in a letter to Bush on Monday.

Bush also will talk about how, at his direction, the FTC is investigating whether the price of gasoline has been unfairly manipulated, an order that has been in place since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year.

Democrats said Republicans would be held accountable for "turning a blind eye" to soaring gasoline costs and for failing to support legislation to give the FTC more authority to go after oil companies for price gouging.

Democrats have been hammering away at the $3 trillion in new debt the Republican-controlled Congress and White House have presided over during the past five years. This fiscal year alone, the U.S. budget deficit could exceed $400 billion.

The administration had proposed about $92 billion in emergency funds for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and to continue rebuilding southern states hit by Hurricane Katrina.

"If the president is ultimately presented a bill that provides more than $92.2 billion, exclusive of funding for the president's plan to address pandemic influenza, he will veto the bill," a White House statement said.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, applauded Bush and said he "will support a veto, if necessary."

In March, Congress defied a veto threat from Bush and pushed ahead with legislation to stop a Dubai-owned firm from managing some American ports. Dubai Ports World abandoned that plan when the extent of Congress' opposition became clear.

Republicans are deeply divided over spending priorities in an election year.

The Senate could take up to two weeks to debate the $106.5 billion measure that includes $67.6 billion the Pentagon says it urgently needs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. About $27 billion would be added to the cleanup tab for Hurricane Katrina. Various other projects totaled nearly $12 billion.

On Tuesday, the Bush administration asked Congress to approve an additional $2.2 billion in emergency funds to strengthen levees around New Orleans. This would be in addition to almost $1.5 billion previously sought.

But the overall spending in the Senate bill is about $14.5 billion more than Bush requested and what has been approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Included in the added funding inserted by senators was aid for farmers who have suffered weather-related disasters, funds for the U.S. fishing industry and money to move a Mississippi railroad critics say would only help developers and casinos.

Calling it the "railroad to nowhere," Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, and some House conservatives vowed to delete the $700 million for the CSX railroad line. Before he became Bush's treasury secretary, John Snow was the company's chairman.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican, defended the railroad project, saying "the future well-being of that entire coast area would be enhanced if the railroad could be relocated."

Hart said Coburn will join efforts to delete $500 million in the bill that would help Northrop Grumman Corp. offset "business disruption expenses" in its Gulf Coast shipyards, saying such losses would likely be covered by insurers and pending litigation.

"We are overweight and overspending," said Rep. Tom Feeney, a Florida Republican, referring to spending bills in recent years that have contributed to huge federal budget deficits.

It is not unusual for members of Congress, especially in an election year, to tack special-interest projects onto "must-do" legislation, such as a war-funding bill.

Bloated spending has undercut Republicans' long-standing claims they are the party of fiscal responsibility.

Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, said one need only look at huge federal expenditures over the past five years "if Republicans want to know why we're in the tank" with voters.

The report from the Government Accountability Office, to be released at a hearing today, details how long-recognized problems with military computer systems led to the soldiers being dunned for an array of debts related to everything from errors in paychecks to equipment left behind on the battlefield.

Retired Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Kelly, who lost a leg in a roadside bombing, received a letter in 2004 saying he was in debt to the government and was in jeopardy of being referred to a collection agency.

The problem came to light last year, as soldiers' complaints began to surface and several lawmakers became involved. The GAO had been investigating other pay problems caused by the defense accounting system and was asked by Congress to investigate debts among the battle-wounded.

The new report shows a problem more widespread than previously known.

"We found that hundreds of separated battle-injured soldiers were pursued for collection of military debts incurred through no fault of their own," the report said.

Last fall, the Army said 331 soldiers had been hit with military debt after being wounded at war. The latest figures show that a larger group of 900 battle-wounded troops has been tagged with debts.

"It's unconscionable," said Ryan Kelly, 25, a retired staff sergeant who lost a leg to a roadside bomb and then spent more than a year trying to fend off a debt of $2,231. "It's sad that we'd let that happen."

Kelly recalled the day in 2004 when, months after learning to walk on a prosthesis, he opened his mailbox to find a letter saying he was in debt to the government -- and in jeopardy of referral to a collection agency. "It hits you in the gut," he said. "It's like, 'Thanks for your service, and now you owe us.' "

The underlying problem is an antiquated computer system for paying and tracking members of the military. Pay records are not integrated with personnel records, creating numerous errors. When soldiers leave the battlefield, for example, they lose a pay differential, but the system can take time to lower their pay.

The government then tries to recoup overpayments, docking pay for active-duty troops and sending debt notices to those who have left the military. Eventually, the government sends private agencies to collect debts and notifies credit bureaus.

The computer system is so broken that 400 soldiers killed in action were listed as owing money to the government, although no debt notices were sent, the report said.

A total of $1.5 million in debts has been linked to the 400 fallen soldiers and 900 wounded troops. Of the total, $124,000 has been repaid. The government has waived $959,000, and the remainder of $420,000 is still owed.

Michael Hurst, a former Army finance officer in Arlington who has studied the issue, said the military should have taken action years ago to prevent the debts from being created.

"It's a complete leadership failure," he said. "We can't expect the soldiers to notice mistakes in their pay that the paid professionals have failed to notice and correct."

Although the GAO report focuses on battle-wounded soldiers who have separated from the military, there are probably others who were still on active duty when their debts caught up with them, Hurst said. Factoring those in, "I would say thousands" are affected by the problem, he said.

The GAO report said that 73 percent of the debts were caused by pay problems, including overpayments, calculation errors and mistakes in leave. Other debts were created when soldiers were billed for enlistment bonuses, medical services, travel and lost equipment.

House Government Reform Committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who is holding the hearing, has called the phenomenon "financial friendly fire." Yesterday, his spokesman, Robert White, reacted to the report, saying: "Literally adding insult to injury, the systems that are supposed to nurture and support returning warriors too often inflict additional wounds to their financial health."

In one case cited in the GAO report, the debts meant that a soldier's family had no money to pay bills and had to send an 11-year-old daughter to live out of state.

At today's hearing, Army and Defense Department officials are expected to testify about what is being done to correct the problem. A database of soldiers wounded in action has been created, but the GAO suggested that more needs to be done, including congressional action to forgive more soldiers' debts and provide refunds in certain cases.

Previously the GAO had issued 80 recommendations for improving the Army payroll processes. Army officials have said they are at work on those recommendations. An Army spokesman did not return calls yesterday requesting comment.

The French National Assembly recently passed legislation that will try to force Apple Computer to make the songs it sells through its iTunes Music Store playable on competitors' devices, and not just on the iPod. The French government says Apple's tight grip on online music amounts to a monopoly. Apple has responded by calling France's decision "state-sponsored piracy."

Worried about a cultural invasion, French President Jacques Chirac has called for the creation of a French rival to Google. Standing alongside Newsom, Delanoe defended his country's position.

"I think it's totally normal that the U.S. wants to be strong and protect their people and technology," Delanoe said through a translator. "But the rules have to be the same for everybody...the rules can't favor one country."

Delanoe said his visit was prompted by San Francisco's success in promoting digital media companies. He also commended Newsom's plan to offer citizens free Wi-Fi access.

Delanoe "said Paris is hoping to be the second city to do free Wi-Fi," Newsom told reporters. "This is a big issue internationally, the possibility of giving people free access to information. Mayors around the world are paying attention to what S.F. is doing. This effort is a big part of bridging the digital divide."

VNU's management has recommended that shareholders accept the offer, but several large stakeholders, including Fidelity International, have said that they will not accept any buyout offer at that price because it undervalues the company.

VNU began talking with interested buyers after it failed to convince shareholders Fidelity, Templeton Global Advisors and Knight Vinke -- which together control 40 percent -- of the merits of buying U.S. healthcare data firm IMS Health last year.

The offer is conditional on 95 percent approval and will be discussed on April 18 at the annual shareholders meeting. But Valcon can waive the 95 percent clause if less than 60 percent of shares are tendered and complete its purchase, according to the offer memorandum.

VNU said on March 8 it had considered selling the company in parts, which some investors still believe is the best option, but that it found no takers and that it would lose hundreds of millions of euros in tax benefits.

VNU reiterated in a letter to its shareholders, included in the memorandum, that no buyers were interested in its Media Measurement and Information unit or its Marketing Information division.

It said the price offered by the consortium was fair and cited two opinions written by VNU's financial advisers, investment banks Credit Suisse and Rothschild.

Credit Suisse values the firm at 29.60 euros per share on a stand-alone basis and between 25.90 and 29.35 euros in the case of a break-up. Rothschild sees a sum-of-the-parts valuation in a range of 26 to 29.50 euros and a range of 29.90 to 35.80 euros per share if VNU stays independent and restructures its units.

"The offer price exceeded both the high end of the range of the break-up private market analysis provided by NM Rothschild and the midpoint of the sum of the parts break-up analysis provided by Credit Suisse," VNU said.

HOLDOUTS

However, Fidelity, which owns around 15 percent of VNU, and Knight Vinke, have said they would not support the consortium's offer at the proposed price.

Analysts say it is unlikely that shareholders will be persuaded to support the bid.

"The fairness opinion, in which Rothschild arrives at a value of 35.80 euros, will raise questions to what extent the 28.75 euro bid is fair," Sander van Oort at F. van Lanschot Bankiers said.

"We believe an increasing proportion of shareholders will not tender their shares," he said, adding that a management crisis may emerge.

Chief Financial Officer Rob Ruijter said last week that some board members were prepared to resign if a buyout offer for the market research company was rejected by its shareholders.

The company is already searching for a new chief executive after shareholders rebelled against plans to buy healthcare data provider IMS Health for $7 billion last year, triggering the resignation of CEO Rob van den Bergh.

Van den Bergh joined VNU in 1980 and was named CEO in 2000.

VNU's share price has more than halved since 2000 and was up 0.5 percent at 26.96 euros by 0844 GMT on Monday. The DJ Stoxx European media index was unchanged.

VNU, based in the Dutch city of Haarlem, has transformed itself over the last 40 years from a small Dutch newspaper and magazine publisher into a U.S.-focused business information company that mainly sells data about consumer habits.

"Integrity and getting on with the mission and doing it right is more important than loyalty. Both are great traits, but integrity, honesty and performance and competence have to outweigh, in this business, loyalty," the former Marine Corps general said.

Zinni has called for a high-level shake-up at the
Pentagon since late 2003, the same year the United States invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein.

"There's a series of disastrous mistakes. We just heard the secretary of state say these were tactical mistakes. They were not tactical mistakes. These were strategic mistakes, mistakes of policies made back here," he said.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said over the weekend that "thousands" of tactical mistakes had been made with regard to Iraq, a statement she later backed away from.

Some 2,333 US troops have been killed in Iraq, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.

Rice made the remarks at a news conference on the second day of a trip to Iraq with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw - a visit aimed at pressing the Iraqis to complete formation of a national unity government following the Dec. 15 election. Both Rice and Straw emphasized that it was up to the Iraqis to decide on their new prime minister.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the nominee of the Shiite bloc, has been widely criticized by Sunni and Kurdish politicians whom the Shiites need as partners to govern.

"It is not my responsibility to determine who is going to be the prime minister of Iraq," Rice said. "That can only be determined by the Iraqis."

But she said the next prime minister "needs to be a strong leader, who's a unifying force, and someone who can bring stability and face the challenges of the Iraqi people."

Rice said the Iraqi people and the international community "need to see that process of government formation come to an end."

Both Rice and Straw spoke of the need for the next government to curb the power of sectarian militias alleged to have been behind the wave of reprisal killings of Shiites and Sunnis.

"You have to have the state with a monopoly of power," Rice said. "We have sent very strong messages" that there must be "a reining in of militias."

Terri Librizzi, 78, of the Milwaukee suburbs of Shorewood, was among the 70 percent of voters in the village to approve the measure. "Maybe if George Bush's daughters would have to go into the service, the war would end tomorrow," Librizzi said.

But Sister Bay resident Peter Trenchard said he wasn't surprised voters in his village voted down the measure. He said many people there did not approve of the war in the first place, but they don't see pulling troops out as a solution.

"Logic tells you you can't pull out of there. It would be a mess," said Trenchard, 67.

Most of the referendums asked whether the voters supported withdrawing the troops immediately, and Evansville also had one urging support of President Bush.

In the Columbia County town of Newport, voters rejected a referendum asking whether the United States should hand operational command of Iraq's national security over to the Iraqi government before the end of 2006.

Bush has refused to set a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Fifty-one soldiers from Wisconsin have died in Iraq since the invasion three years ago.

Geralyn Lu, 50, of Madison, voted to withdraw the troops in that city's referendum. "So many lives lost in a futile war. I didn't want them there in the first place," she said.

But Katy Hampton, 53, of Monona, said if the soldiers leave Iraq, the country will descend into chaos. That's why she voted against bringing the soldiers back, she said.

"There's still not a firm government in place," Hampton said. "I don't want it to be a mess. They should follow it through."

The government of conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel had previously argued in vain that the investigation would be a time-wasting distraction that would stir up anti-American feeling at a time when Berlin is trying to repair U.S. ties.

But the three opposition parties teamed up to force the inquiry after a spate of media reports alleging that two German agents in Baghdad helped the United States launch its invasion, including by picking out bombing targets.

Questions for the inquiry include whether ministers or officials knew and approved of the handing of information to the Americans, and of the details that were passed on.

Among those who may face pressure are Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who at the time was chief of staff and intelligence coordinator under Merkel's predecessor, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder.

SOME INTELLIGENCE PASSED ON

The issue is controversial in Germany because public opinion strongly opposed the Iraq war.

Schroeder, won an election in 2002 on the back of his public opposition to any military "adventure" in Iraq.

Merkel's conservative-Social Democrat coalition government has acknowledged that some intelligence from the two agents was passed on to the United States, including information on the Iraqi police and military presence in Baghdad.

But it says they played no role in selecting bombing targets, except to warn the Americans against hitting civilian sites such as hospitals.

Merkel herself is not under fire because her party was in opposition at the time. But by keeping the Iraq war in the headlines, the inquiry could hinder her efforts to turn over a new leaf in relations with Washington, which were badly strained by Schroeder's opposition to the invasion.

According to Sabah Saied, head of the local Red Crescent Association in Amara province, some 290km south-east of Baghdad, 380 Shi'ite families were currently seeking shelter in an abandoned factory there. "There's no shortage at all, but we need to have at least one ambulance in case of emergency," Saied complained.

Hamdan Abdullah, a 58-year old Shi'ite coffee shop owner, said that his family fled the Latifiya area, 30km south of Baghdad, after receiving leaflets reading: "Tell your Shi'ite government to provide you with houses far away from ours."

A spate of sectarian violence erupted in the wake of the 22 February bombing of a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, some 120km north of the capital. Since then, hundreds of people have been killed and dozens of mosques damaged or destroyed as a result of reprisal attacks between the country's two major Muslim denominations.

Fernandez went on to cite a number of problems facing local hospitals in Basra, which is located some 550km south of the capital, Baghdad. "Hospitals have no ventilators to help prematurely-born babies breathe," Fernandez said. "And there are very few nurses available, so hospitals often must allow family members to care for patients."

Many doctors in the area say that the local health situation has deteriorated markedly since the US-led invasion of the country in 2003. "The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30 percent compared to the Saddam Hussein era," Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at the Basra Children's Hospital, pointed out. "Children are dying daily, and no one is doing anything to help them."

Fernandez added that, for the last three years, the Maternity and Children's' hospital in Basra had not received any cancer drugs from the health ministry. "In all of Basra, a city with nearly two million inhabitants, there's no radiotherapy department available," Fernandez complained.

Khalid Ala'a, spokesman for local NGO Keeping Children Alive, said that Basra hospitals lacked many essential drugs and antibiotics used to treat infections common to the area. "We've asked for help from the Ministry of Health, but they only tell us they don't have money to supply hospitals," Ala'a said. "They tell us we must wait for investment, which could take months."

Health ministry officials, responding to the charges, point to the ongoing deadlock over the formation of a new government. "We depend on the central government for money," said senior ministry official Ahmed Salahdinne. "What we're receiving, we're distributing, according to our capacity, to all areas of Iraq."

According to doctors and NGOs, the primary causes of high infant mortality are unsafe water, diarrhoea, malnutrition, infectious diseases, maternal stress and poverty. In light of these grave circumstances, local NGOs and doctors have called on international aid agencies to help ease the situation.

On May 29, 2003, Bush hailed the capture of two trailers in Iraq as mobile biological laboratories and declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

Two days earlier, on May 27, 2003, the
Pentagon confirmed on Wednesday, a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) team faxed its preliminary report on the mobile labs. This report concluded the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons, the Post said.

McClellan said Bush made his statement based on the combined conclusions of the
CIA and DIA that were given to him in a May 28 white paper.

That white paper reflected the intelligence community's position at the time that the mobile units were biological weapons laboratories.

The dissenting May 27 view did not appear to have made it to the White House, and in fact, the intelligence community for months stuck to its analysis that the units were weapons labs.

Bush cited the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction as the prime justification for invading Iraq. No such weapons were found. In May 2003, U.S. officials were urgently seeking evidence to support prewar intelligence claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

A U.S. intelligence official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the field report was a preliminary finding that had to be evaluated.

"You don't change a report that has been coordinated in the (intelligence) community based on a field report," the official said. "It's a preliminary report. No matter how strongly the individual may feel about the subject matter."

McClellan said the Post story was "nothing more than rehashing an old issue that was resolved long ago," pointing out that an independent commission on Iraq had already determined the intelligence on alleged Iraqi biological weapons was wrong.

ABC ISSUES "CLARIFICATION"

McClellan criticized ABC News' "Good Morning America" for its version of the report on Wednesday morning.

The network responded later by posting a "clarification" on its Web site acknowledging that anchor Charles Gibson misstated the gist of the Post story by saying that when Bush spoke, he knew what he was saying was not true.

"I hope they will go and publicly apologize on the air about the statements that were made, because I think it is important given that they had made those statements in front of all their viewers," he said.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were classified and shelved, the Post reported. It added that for nearly a year after that, the Bush administration continued to publicly assert that the trailers were biological weapons factories.

The authors of the reports -- nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- were sent to Baghdad by the DIA, the newspaper said.

A DIA spokesman told the paper that the team's findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The team's work remains classified. But the newspaper said interviews revealed that the team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons.

Sources close to the Pentagon said Iraqi forces would take the lead, supported by American air power, special operations, intelligence, embedded officers and back-up troops.

Helicopters suitable for urban warfare, such as the manoeuvrable AH-6 "Little Birds" used by the marines and special forces and armed with rocket launchers and machineguns, are likely to complement the ground attack.

The sources said American and Iraqi troops would move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, leaving behind Sweat teams - an acronym for "sewage, water, electricity and trash" - to improve living conditions by upgrading clinics, schools, rubbish collection, water and electricity supplies.

Sunni insurgent strongholds are almost certain to be the first targets, although the Shi'ite militias such as the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical cleric, and the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade would need to be contained.

President George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, are under intense pressure to prove to the American public that Iraq is not slipping into anarchy and civil war. An effective military campaign could provide the White House with a bounce in the polls before the mid-term congressional elections in November. With Bush's approval ratings below 40%, the vote is shaping up to be a Republican rout.

The Iraqi government, when it is finally formed, will also need to demonstrate that it is in charge of its own seat of government. "It will be the second liberation of Baghdad," said Daniel Gouré, a Pentagon adviser and vice-president of the Lexington Institute, a military think tank. "The new government will be able to claim it is taking back the streets."

Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell at the State Department, said a crackdown in Baghdad was one of the few ways in which a fresh Iraqi government could bind the new national army and prove its mettle.

"They have to show they can liberate their own capital," he said. "Baghdad is the key to stability in Iraq. It's a chance for the new government to stand up and say, 'Here we are'. They can't do that if they are hunkered down in bunkers."

The operation is likely to take place towards the end of the summer, giving the newly appointed government time to establish itself. If all goes to plan, US troop withdrawals could take place before the end of the year. In the absence of progress by then, the war may come to be seen by the American public as a lost cause.

There are 140,000 US troops in Iraq. Lieutenant-General John Vines, who stepped down as commander of ground forces in Iraq at the beginning of this year, said it was essential to reduce the numbers.

"There is an incredible amount of stress and I'm worried about it," said Vines. He added that soldiers were on their third or fourth tours of duty in Iraq: "The war has been going on nearly as long as the second world war and we're asking a lot of the forces."

In a surprise, the new poll found that 44% of Republicans now back withdrawing some or all troops from Iraq. The number for all Americans, 64%, is higher, but the fact that better than 4 in 10 Republicans back this idea is notable. Indepedents are tracking much closer to Democrats on all issues related to Iraq.

In another finding, 57% of Americans say it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq, while 42% say it was not. Since December 2005, either a plurality or majority of Americans have said it was a mistake.

The breakdown on the troop pullout question is: 36% say to withdraw "some" troops, while 28% want to withdraw all troops.

Although there are seven orphanages in the capital, Baghdad, and another 16 in other provinces, "they aren't enough to provide assistance to all the orphans in the country", said al-Chalabi. She went on to point out that the increase in the number of orphans countrywide was an inevitable result of the bombings, assassinations and sectarian violence currently plaguing the country.

According to a 2005 report issued by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), there were some 5,000 orphans in the capital alone, many of whom have been ostracised by society and have little hope of finding education or shelter.

"My two brothers and I work with our uncle in the streets of Baghdad as peddlers," said Ahmed Chaloob, 10, whose parents were killed in a bomb attack two months ago. "I know nothing about orphanages, and I don't think my uncle would let us go because he needs us to work," added Chaloob, who currently lives in a small room with eight other relatives.

Orphans often live in the streets as beggars or drug addicts. Some are believed to have been used by terrorists to carry out attacks; others have reportedly been forced by criminal gangs to work as thieves, according to ministry officials.

Given the prevailing atmosphere of violence and confusion, there are no reliable statistics for the number of orphans in the country. "We don't have accurate numbers," said al-Chalabi. "Officially, there are 642 orphans registered in our orphanages," he added, estimating this number to represent a mere 10 percent of the total number nationwide.

"I've been here since 1996 with my brother, and I have two sisters living in [another] orphanage," said Mustafa Hameed, a 15 year-old orphan at Baghdad's al-Wazeriyah orphanage. "After our mother died in a car accident and our father remarried, we were taken here where we found care and love."

The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs provides some US $2,000 per month to each of the country's orphanages, and ministry officials hope to eventually increase this amount to cover the requirements of additional orphans in the future.

"Orphans are provided with food, social services, health care, psychological care, education and other activities, such as computer training and painting," said Abtesaam Rasheed, manager of the al-Wazeriyah orphanage. "But much more is required - we need support from the government and international NGOs to expand capacity and provide training for our social workers."

'I told Tony, I said "rather than lose your government, withdraw from the coalition" - because I felt it was important for him to be the Prime Minister at this point in our relationship,' the President told the journalist Con Coughlin, author of a new book about Blair's relationship with the US. 'I saw his clear view and strength of character. And that's when he told me, "I'm staying, even if it costs me my government".' The account is unlikely to please anti-war Labour MPs, or Labour councillors contesting seats where Labour voters are still angry about Iraq, who would prefer the issue not to be discussed. Some were irritated by Jack Straw's hosting of a visit by Condoleezza Rice in the run-up to the local election campaign, highlighting once again the government's closeness to a White House administration many Labour voters dislike.

In the interview published in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, Bush praised Blair's courage, vision and personal qualities, calling him 'an easy guy to be around' who was straightforward with him.

The relationship grew after 11 September 2001 because he admired the way Blair saw 'that the free world has an obligation to defend itself against these killers', he added. However, Bush left open the question of how much influence Blair had over him in return for such unwavering support. Asked what input Blair actually had after 11 September, Bush suggested he did not need any: 'I'm the kind of guy that when I make up my mind - you know, I appreciate advice and counsel - but we were going. And the doctrine, if you harbour a terrorist you are equally as guilty as a terrorist, came right from my soul.' However, he said Blair had 'had a lot of sway' over the decision to pursue, ultimately unsuccessfully, a second UN resolution before invading Iraq.

Downing Street will also breathe a sigh of relief over Bush's denial that he was actually committed to invading Iraq almost a year before it happened. Bush insisted he did not take any final decision until 'after the ultimatum' from Washington for Saddam Hussein to stand down - delivered 48 hours before the invasion.

Is Maliki a "hateful sectarian"? You be the judge. He is, first of all, the No. 2 official in the terrorist Al Dawa party, the Shiite fundamentalist sect-party led by Jaafari. Far from being a figure that can unite Iraq's warring parties, Maliki is a militant Shiite partisan. Like many of the Shiite fundamentalists who now dominate Iraq, Maliki spent many years in exile in Iran, and he has close ties to the Iranian leadership. Maliki was a main author of Iraq's divisive constitution and he was a leader (along with Ahmed Chalabi, the neoconservatives' pet) of the viciously excessive purge of Baathists in Iraq after the war in 2003, a move now seen as having seriously exacerbated the current civil war.

Last year Maliki pushed for a law that would have imposed the death penalty not only for insurgents but even their sympathizers, including anyone found to "finance, propagate, cover up, support, or provide shelter for the terrorists, no matter how involved they are." He has bitterly condemned not only the Sunni-led resistance that opposes the U.S. occupation, but also the two moderate, secular parties that hold several dozen seats in Iraq's parliament, led, respectively, by Salah Mutlaq and Iyad Allawi, the former a secular Iraqi nationalist who claims to maintain a dialogue with elements of the resistance and the latter a secular Shiite who spent years on the CIA's payroll as an opponent of Saddam Hussein. "It should be recalled that some of the electoral lists contain elements that were possibly part of the machinery of the old regime, i.e. Baathists who are subject to the de-Baathification law [and] intelligence agents or those who got involved in the Iraqi Intelligence Service immediately before the collapse of the regime," warned Maliki.

He enthusiastically endorsed the wholesale purge of the police force and the Interior Ministry that was imposed by Bayan Jabr, the hard-line official of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), saying, "Hateful elements have penetrated the security services and we must purge them." The result, of course, was the creation of a ministry whose commandos are heavily infiltrated by SCIRI death squads responsible for the murders of thousands of Iraqis.

In the deal that brought Maliki to power, the Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, deigned to make a deal with the two Kurdish warlord parties that control the Kurdish enclave in the north, and with the Sunni fundamentalist religious bloc, the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood secret society. But pointedly they excluded both Mutlaq and Allawi. By including the Sunni fundamentalists, whose leaders got both a deputy president slot and speaker of the parliament, Maliki and the Shiites put their stamp of approval on the Lebanonization of Iraq. And by excluding the secular Mutlaq and Allawi, they made it clear that Iraq has no place for anyone who wants a united state with a strong central government.

How can Maliki approach any sort of deal to quell the Sunni resistance? He can't. In fact, Maliki has denounced the off-again, on-again U.S. dialogue with the resistance as a plot to restore the Baath party to power. So how can Maliki offer anything to the growing Sunni-led insurgency other than war?

How can Maliki move to amend Iraq's constitution in a way that can right its obvious wrongs? He can't. As its author, he is committed to the constitution's provisions for radical federalism (i.e., the breakup of Iraq) and for giving the bulk of Iraqi oil revenues to the Shiites and Kurds. He is also committed to the constitutional provisions that enshrine Islam at the heart of the Iraqi legal system.

How can Maliki move to assure Sunnis that he will put an end to the Shiite death squads in the SCIRI-run Interior Ministry? He can't. He is on record asserting that the way to build the police is to integrate Shiite and Kurdish militia into the police, thus guaranteeing that police commandos continue to be seen as the armed wing of the Shiite movement.

All of this means that the Maliki-led government of Iraq will have little or no effect outside the Green Zone in Baghdad. Battle lines in the civil war are hardening, as exemplified by the unprecedented house-to-house street fighting last week in the north Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiya. There, in a mostly Sunni part of town, local neighborhood militia fought pitched battles with Iraqi government forces, led by the notorious Shiite-dominated police. It was the first recorded battle in which an entire Baghdad Sunni enclave fought against government troops and against U.S. forces. Meanwhile, even as Maliki's name was being announced, dozens of bodies continued to turn up in Baghdad morgues-including seven in Adhamiya-all victims of death squads. And nine more U.S. troops were killed in Iraq over the weekend.

The Bush administration cannot stanch the bleeding in Iraq simply by tinkering with the leadership of Iraq. First, the U.S. pushed for elections before the fractured country was ready-and against the advice of experts-and then publicly challenged the chosen prime minister. The chaos now engulfing Iraq is a direct result of the Bush administration's policy of pushing democracy on the cheap and by the barrel of a gun. But it's American troops and Iraqi civilians who are paying the price.

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com

"The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy." --Tyler Drumheller, formerly CIA's top spy in Europe

Confession time: In fall 2004, during a crucial presidential election campaign, I made the mistake of playing by corporate media rules that amount to self-censorship.

Specifically, I joined other journalists in denying the public the right to learn of a definitive investigative report by CBS' "60 Minutes" on President Bush's disregard for the truth concerning the weapons-of-mass-destruction threat allegedly posed to the United States by Iraq. Having received an advance copy of the devastating segment, I honored CBS' proprietary request not to write about the news it carried until after it aired.

Only, it never aired. CBS got cold feet, probably because of Dan Rather's troubles over an unrelated story critical of the president. The suppressed story was solidly reported and, by exposing the Bush administration's utter disregard for the truth concerning Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, should have been made available to the public before the November election. Now, no one seems to care.

The segment finally aired this past Sunday, in a more robust form. Unfortunately, the response has been tepid; it seems the media, at least, have become jaded with all the endless examples of the president's perfidy. But the CBS story remains very important as further evidence of the depths of the Bush administration's deception.

Perhaps most damning is an interview, added for the broadcast version, with Tyler Drumheller, a CIA veteran of 26 years' service who was the agency's top spy in Europe until his retirement a year ago.

According to him, before the war Hussein's foreign minister had been "turned" and was talking secretly to U.S. intelligence. At first excited by this rare inside look at Hussein's regime, the top dogs at the White House dropped the issue like a hot rock as soon as his information contradicted their overheated rationale for "preemptive" war.

"The policy was set," Drumheller told CBS correspondent Ed Bradley. "The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."

That's how more than three years later, after at least two major governmental investigations into prewar intelligence on Iraq and countless journalistic post-mortems, we are only just now finding out that a highly placed double agent in Iraq was poking a huge hole in the Hussein-as-WMD-bogeyman story.

"They were enthusiastic" at first, said Drumheller, "that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis." CIA Director George Tenet reported the news that Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, was working covertly for the United States to a White House meeting attended by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Their initial enthusiasm, Drumheller says, quickly turned to cold indifference when Sabri told them the opposite of what they wanted to hear.

"He told us that they had no active weapons-of-mass-destruction program," said the ex-CIA official. "The [White House] group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "

The White House refused to comment for the "60 Minutes" report, but CBS noted that Rice has said Sabri was just one source, and therefore not reliable. It was ironic, considering how heavily the Bush administration relied on the now infamous Iraqi defector "Curveball," whose statements so informed the main administration allegations concerning Iraq's biochemical weapons.

Drumheller was in contact with the German intelligence agency CIS, which had detained the man with the apt code name, and says he himself informed the top CIA officials that Curveball was an outright fraud.

"They certainly took information that came from single sources on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all," Drumheller said.

No wonder this man, who risked his life gathering intelligence for our country, has become a critic of the Bush administration. He is clearly unwilling to allow what the president has described as a permanent war to destroy our democracy. True patriotism is not the blind acceptance of presidential deceit.

Imperial ambition turns truth-tellers into enemies, by default, because their goal is not the exaltation of the leader's power. No wonder so many national security professionals, be they top generals or intelligence officials, have gone public recently to denounce how the Iraq war has been sold and fought: The Bush administration's willful ignorance and buck-passing mock their dedicated service to the nation.

"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence failure," Drumheller said. "This was a policy failure."

Just as we were forever being told that the West had sold weapons to Ba'athist Iraq, so we are now being reminded that it was British and American agents who overthrew Iranian democracy in the first place, back in 1953. This last argument is very silly: the fact that we made mistakes in the past is not a reason to make more mistakes in the future. But the other objections are serious ones, and deserve to be considered separately.

Take, first, the argument that a military strike would destabilise the country. This is true: the mullahs are currently very stable indeed, having concocted a system that prevents Iranians from voting for anyone who dislikes them.

But this domestic stability is bought with international aggression. Not only is Iran arming paramilitary groups in neighbouring states, it has been implicated in terrorist actions as far afield as London and Buenos Aires. To borrow a metaphor from Lenin, Iran is exporting its internal contradictions.

As for Iran becoming a cause célèbre for Muslims in other countries, this is based on a misunderstanding. Iraq was a largely Arab country and, as such, part of a community that stretched as far as Morocco and was united not only by historical and linguistic ties but by a nexus of shared news media.

The Persians, by contrast, have been periodically at war with their Arab neighbours since the time of the Great Kings. More importantly, Iranians are Shia, which sets them apart from the orthodox Sunni teachings that attract some 90 per cent of the world's Muslims. To this day, the million-odd Sunnis who live in Teheran are not allowed their own mosque - unlike their co-religionists in, say, London or Washington.

Nor are Sunnis the only minority with a grievance. The ayatollahs have engaged in human rights violations every bit as gruesome as Saddam's, including the show-trials of Jews and, in one recent case, the execution of a teenage girl on adultery charges.

But what, you might ask, has any of this to do with us? The answer is that Iran's nuclear ambitions go well beyond the regional. Two years ago, the mullahs deployed Shahhab-3 ballistic missiles, with a range of 800 miles. Last October, this newspaper revealed that Teheran was receiving clandestine shipments of missile technology from North Korea. The best estimate is that Iran will have the bomb by 2008.

This is not some symbolic goal: the ayatollahs are building nuclear weapons because they want to use them.

President Ahmadinejad has called for the annihilation of Israel. His adviser, Mohammad Ali Ramin, wants to export military technology to the 150 countries that he believes would back Iran against the West. Another adviser, Hassan Abbasi, has - in addition to calling Britain the "mother of all evil" - observed that, once George Bush leaves office, the West will return to its traditional quiescence.

He is probably right: for the past decade, the EU has pursued a policy of "constructive engagement" with Iran. In what must stand as his single greatest failure, Jack Straw has repeatedly visited Teheran, hoping naively to coax the mullahs out of their nuclear ambitions.

As for the charge that it's all about oil, let us not be shy of saying that it is in no one's interests for a large chunk of the world's oil supplies to be in the hands of hostile fanatics.

What, then, should we do? There is, after all, a danger that military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities might boost support for Ahmadinejad - indeed, some Iranian dissidents believe that his wild rhetoric is designed to provoke precisely such an attack. Unlike Iraq, whose nuclear programme was wiped out with a single raid in 1981, Iran is attempting the more complex procedure of centrifuge separation of uranium hexafluoride gas in installations spread throughout the country.

A direct strike might be a necessary last resort. But our earlier objective should be to support the opposition groups. The enemies of the ayatollahs are divided: some are monarchists, some communists, some representatives of Iran's national minorities. Some are in exile, some in Iranian campuses. Around 40,000 are trained soldiers based in Iraq, where they have been disarmed by the Americans. But, together, these groups speak for perhaps 85 per cent of the population. They hold the key to replacing this wicked regime.

Iraq is clearly a disaster from a humanitarian perspective, as well as on the military front. Iraq is also becoming a political disaster for Republicans in the U.S. Not only do Republicans face losing control of Congress, but with President Bush's approval ratings in the toilet, Republicans may well lose the White House too. The lesson of the staged 9/11 and the ensuing war in Iraq is clear: Americans will rally around the president and his party during distressing times. What could be more opportune for this president and his party than another staged 9/11-like event, followed by another war of retaliation, this time against Iran ?

I don't believe another fake 9/11 is actually necessary for the president to launch another war in the Middle East. Just when I was beginning to think that the precipitously declining support - down to about one third of the public - for the war in Iraq was an indication that Americans were wising up, recent polls suggest that more than half of Americans support a new war against Iran! How can they favor starting a new war even as their support for the last one is declining? I was baffled by this inconsistency until I realized that the declining support for the war in Iraq is not a rejection of war, but a rejection of losing wars. Americans are perfectly fond of war as long as they're winning. In any case, there seems to be ample support from the American public for a new war against Iran. Another fake 9/11 attack is not necessary, though it may occur anyway in order to further the totalitarian ambitions of the government.

Withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq is out of the question. Such an action would be tantamount to an admission of defeat by this administration, an admission that will never be forthcoming. Besides, the U.S. expended great effort and resources to go into Iraq and build permanent military bases there. It is simply not going to leave for at least a few decades. Maintaining the status quo in Iraq is also untenable, as the voices calling for withdrawal intensify with each passing day. That leaves only one avenue of action to this administration: escalation.

A new war against Iran would divert attention from Iraq and firm up public support for the president and his party, as will be evidenced by renewed passion for red-white-and-blue and yellow magnetic ribbons.

Another good reason for a war against Iran is to divert attention from the economy. It's obvious now that the U.S. housing bubble is deflating. It may continue to deflate gradually or it might snowball with spectacular consequences, it's anybody's guess. How it plays out is largely subject to people's perceptions. People are still fairly optimistic about the economy, so perhaps that's why the housing bubble is deflating slowly right now. But that could change. In any event, with the housing bubble being the driving force behind consumer spending of late, and with consumer spending driving the economy, as the housing bubble deflates, consumer spending will go down. An imminent decline in consumer spending, coupled with other indicators, such as converging bond yields, hint at a recession late this year. A new war would be a great diversion from economic woes and afford the government a chance to pump "liquidity" into the economy. The U.S. Government recently discontinued reporting the broadest measure of the money supply, M3, perhaps in order to hide future liquidity injections.

Getting back to the master plan. Many have pointed out that attacking Iran does not stand up to a cost-benefit analysis. They argue that attacking Iran would cause Iran to retaliate by stoking the insurgency in Iraq and threatening oil shipments through the Persian Gulf. The implication is that the U.S. will not risk the lives of its soldiers in Iraq or risk soaring oil prices, all for the sake of imposing its political will on Iran . They argue that not even this administration is that irrational.

These people are missing the point, however. The single-minded goal of the United States in the Middle East is control of the oil, regardless of the cost. Let's examine the potential costs more closely. Would the U.S. endanger its soldiers in Iraq ? Absolutely. Just look at Pearl Harbor during World War II. The U.S. Government unquestionably knew the Japanese were going to attack and deliberately let it happen. The U.S. Government probably even abetted the attack by clearing an unobstructed flight path for the Japanese attackers. So would they sacrifice a few thousand more soldiers in Iraq? Sure. What if Iran manages to slow or stop the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf ? Again, that could work to the advantage of the U.S., as I will explain below. In the meantime, who would benefit from reduced global oil supplies? Oil companies. As oil has gone up in price during the last few years, the profits of oil companies have skyrocketed into the tens of billions of dollars per year, for each company. We also witnessed this administration look the other way when energy companies rapaciously exploited California's nascent "deregulated" electricity market, so we know where its allegiance lies.

Another "rational" argument against attacking Iran is that the U.S., by virtue of its constrained manpower, can only feasibly attack Iran by air, which would not be very effective if limited to "military" targets. This is true, but it misses the point. The initial air assault against Iran would be merely the first step in what the U.S. probably hopes will become a larger war. Why? Because the only way the United States can successfully neutralize Iran is by dropping a couple of nuclear bombs on its civilian population, forcing Iran to surrender unconditionally.

Even the U.S. will not dare to unilaterally break sixty years of nuclear taboo and drop a nuclear bomb on an Iranian city. However, it probably can get away with using "tactical nuclear bunker buster" bombs against ostensibly military targets. The world will be outraged, of course. But after a few months of media spin, the U.S. will probably quell the opprobrium.

n the meantime, Iran will foment Shiite insurrection in Iraq, resulting in a dramatic increase in casualties among American soldiers. Iran can also sink a few U.S. warships and oil tankers in the Persian Gulf , and indeed slow or stop the flow of oil through the gulf. Of course, the U.S. will spin this Iranian retaliation as a reckless and fanatical escalation of the war. Americans, angry at seeing their soldiers killed and their warships sunk, will rally even more fervently around their president. The U.S. Government will point to the world's growing economic problems ensuing from the shortage of oil as evidence that Iran needs to be stopped, whatever the cost. The world's industrialized nations that are so dependent on oil will publicly renounce taking harsher action against Iran while privately hoping that the U.S. does whatever it takes to get the oil flowing again.

Then, without warning, the U.S. will drop a couple of nuclear bombs on a couple of medium sized cities in Iran, just like it did in Japan sixty years ago. The justifications will be the same as before: to bring a speedy end to the war. Of course, the world will be outraged, but its reaction will be muted because the U.S. will have already broken the nuclear taboo when it used the "bunker busters," and besides, what can the world really do about it? Iran will surrender, and the U.S. will be fully in control of the Middle East and two of its most important sources of oil: Iraq and Iran .

The U.S. can then withdraw its soldiers in Iraq into its new massive, city-sized military bases and wait out the civil war, while keeping a close eye on the oil. The U.S. will be a pariah nation, but so what. It will control the bulk of the world's oil.

"The Iranians will retaliate, and they have many possibilities in an area where there are many vulnerabilities, from our troop positions to the oil and gas in the region that can be interrupted, to attacks on
Israel, to the conduct of terrorism," he said.

Zinni made his remarks after the publication of a pair of reports this weekend saying that the administration is seriously considering military action against Iran, amid a stalemate in diplomatic efforts.

The New Yorker magazine reported in its April 17 issue that the administration is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key suspected Iranian nuclear weapons facility.

The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential "Adolf Hitler."

"That's the name they're using," Hersh quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.

Hersh told CNN's Late Edition show that a "messianic" president feels driven to try to contain Iran and that the White House is determined to keep open a nuclear option against strong objections from some top
Pentagon officials.

"It's the fact that the White House wouldn't let it go that has got the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) in an uproar," he said.

"He (Bush) thinks, as I wrote, that he's the only one now who will have the courage to do it," said Hersh, the reporter who also broke the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

Hersh reports in his article that the administration already has advance forces on the ground in Iran.

"I think it's fraught with danger. But they're there," he told CNN.

Democratic Senator John Kerry, one of the administration's most outspoken critics, assailed the White House for what he said is its too-ready reliance on military might.

"That is another example of the shoot-from-the-hip, cowboy diplomacy of this administration," the former Democratic presidential contender said.

"For us to think about exploding tactical nuclear weapons in some way is the height of irresponsibility. It would be destructive to any non-proliferation efforts and the military assessment is, it would not work," he told NBC television's "Meet the Press" program.

Meanwhile, according to a report Sunday in the Washington Post, Bush is studying options for military strikes against Iran as part of a broader strategy of coercive diplomacy to pressure Tehran to abandon its alleged nuclear program.

Citing unnamed US officials and independent analysts, the newspaper said no attack appears likely in the short term, but officials are using the threat to convince Iranians of the seriousness of its intentions.

The paper said Bush views Tehran as a serious menace that must be dealt with before his presidency ends. The White House, in its new National Security Strategy, labeled Iran the most serious challenge to the United States posed by any country.

Zinni said he shared Washington's concerns about Tehran's motives, but said diplomatic efforts should first be exhausted.

"I believe that if the international community would stand fast, the Russians and the Chinese would stay with us, I think that kind of pressure, the fear of being isolated and condemned as a rogue state could have the effect that we need to halt the program.

"I'm not saying that there isn't a military action that will become necessary at some point," Zinni continued.

"But I believe ... when you take that military action, you have to ask the question, 'and then what?' Because you're going to have a series of those 'and then whats' down the road," he said.

Hersh told CNN however, that the White House has spurned Tehran's overtures for dialogue.

"This president is not talking to the Iranians. They are trying very hard to make contact, I can assure you of that, in many different forms," he said.

"He's not talking. And there's no public pressure on the White House to start bilateral talks. And that's what amazes everybody," he said.

The Washington Post wrote that despite estimations by American officials that Iran would need another decade before having the bomb, Israel believes that the critical breakthrough could take place within a number of months. Israeli representatives told the Americans that Iran has begun the most advanced centrifugal experiments in a speedier manner than experts predicted in the past.

'Israel preparing its own attack'

The newspaper said that Israel recently leaked its own attack plans, if the United States does not act. The Israeli plan includes aerial attacks, commando raids, a possibility of a missile attack, and even bombs carried on the backs of dogs. The newspaper quotes Israeli newspapers which said that Israel constructed an exact replica of the Natanz nuclear development facility, but the United States does not believe that the operation can succeed without using nuclear weapons.

The newspaper said that the Bush administration is studying the options for a military attack in Iran, and is planning for this possibility in order to pressure Iran by letting it know that such an option is getting closer. Despite that, it does not appear that such an attack would take place in the short term future, and many experts within the administration and outside of it are highly doubtful of the effectiveness of a military operation.

The Post claims that the Pentagon and the CIA are examining the possible targets for the operation, such as the facility at Natanz and the facility for enriching uranium at Isfahan, although a ground operation is not being considered

But a Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding mission had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons, the Post reported, citing government officials and weapons experts who participated in the secret mission or had direct knowledge of it.

The Post said the group's unanimous findings had been sent to the Pentagon in a field report, two days before the president's statement.

Bush cited the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction as the prime justification for invading Iraq. No such weapons ever were found.

A U.S. intelligence official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity confirmed the existence of the field report but said it was a preliminary finding that had to be evaluated.

"You don't change a report that has been coordinated in the (intelligence) community based on a field report," the official said. "It's a preliminary report. No matter how strongly the individual may feel about the subject matter."

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were classified and shelved, The Washington Post reported. It added that for nearly a year after that, the Bush administration continued to public assert that the trailers were biological weapons factories.

The authors of the reports -- nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- were sent to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, the newspaper said.

A DIA spokesman told the paper that the team's findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The team's work remains classified. But the newspaper said interviews revealed that the team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons.

"There was no connection to anything biological," one expert who studied the trailers was quoted as saying.

The NWO is not monolithic, nor is it of a single mind - it's a confluence of interests that is composed of several networks; a series of spider-webs where no single race or faith is dominant. At its core what unites these interests in their black heart of darkness-is POWER & MONEY and together these are wrapped in the amoral and duplicitous use of the flags of many nations. For his part Bush keeps playing with a confluence of interests: Christian fundamentalism, Apocalypse psychology, Zionism, Imperialism, Corporatism, Cronyism, and American Exceptionalism. But through the smoke and mirrors mostly what survives is for the home audience, those immoveable and largely apathetic Americans that have always been the target of these draconian policies.

The world is embarking on the beginnings of World War III, and many have wondered where is the vaunted Israeli army? Sharon is dead, but the insanity of his plans for Palestine apparently lives on. There are plenty of Israeli troops in that area, currently tormenting an imprisoned civilian population that they savage with regularity; but where are their multi-national interests in the larger issue that the War on Muslims will bring?

The War on Iraq was supposed to create a new "Peace Process" for the entire region. After the elections in Iraq, Bush demanded that the Palestinians hold an election of their own, and when the Palestinians voted overwhelming against the invading and now occupying Israeli army - the Palestine people were suddenly DENIED the means to survive by the cowardly policies of the EU, the US and probably the UN as well. So where's the GREAT benefit to freedom and democracy in the region now, for Israel or for anyone else?

This is again that double-standard in action and hundreds of thousands, if not millions will be directly affected, yet there is no "higher power" to reverse this: so the answer will come from the depths of the Whirlwind that has indeed been sown!

This is about Israel and the New World Order. Yet again and again the world sees not only a double standard whenever and wherever Israel is involved, but apparently Israel is making new demands-this time on Iran. Cheney, Bush & Rummy between them probably have about as much military experience as a one-year draftee has after six weeks of basic - yet these clowns are running the most costly war this nation has ever fought - and it isn't even being fought for us. Americans are fighting and dying and being maimed for the profits of the multi-national corporations; for the international Dark Powers that owe allegiance to no flag; for the American Jewish Lobby and for the State of Israel. Remove the Americans; let the Israeli's replace us if they feel they need to be protected: They have the arsenal for the job, the commute is minimal, and since they have 'the finest fighting forces on the planet' (they say) - let's get moving and let Israel live or die in its part of this sordid affair! If Israel wants to take out Iran, let Israel launch its own war (without American "defensive" weapons) and suffer the consequences like every other nation must. (something that America seems to be avoiding, since we 'bailed' on belonging to the World Court).

Israel has a long history of pre-emptive attacks and other unprovoked aggressions. Iran meanwhile, while far from perfect - is trying to live in what is fast becoming a nuclear world. Iran also sits astride the Gulf of Arabia and the international shipping lanes for oil from the Gulf. Its short range missiles can reach Israel, Kuwait, our military headquarters in the Gulf, as well as Iraq. Those who have looked at nuclear development have concluded that Iran is still years away from nuclear weapons development so - What's the rush? Bush is on record as having violated the Geneva conventions, broken international laws against murder, torture, and the US supports the killing of unarmed civilians plus there are dozens Crimes Against Humanity. Where was the authorization for any of that? Most of this came in fights that Israel should have undertaken in the first place. Now Bush has granted himself permission to attack Iran - but this is no more a US war than Iraq was. Dealings with Iran for Israel; should be an Israeli internal affair. Involving the world and the US in creating this idea of the Greater State of Israel is not in the best interests of the US or the world, despite the fact that Israel has been planning this "Greater State," for decades!

The world has always been beset by tyrants, but any attempt at domination to the degree currently underway, has never before been even remotely possible. Now everything has changed, just as the rules have all been altered by the advent of the computer age. Unless we begin to listen to things older than Madison Avenue or Radio; wiser and more arcane than profits or competition; more subtle than deconstruction, but more effective than black-ops-we shall not have the chance to finish out our lives. People everywhere must begin to trust again, whether we belong to clans or tribes or societies - if not, we will all soon be nothing more than targets for the New Barbarians that have come to steal, to plunder and destroy. That's what's at stake as world listens for the approach of a The Third World War - a war that our continued silence just might enable!

Where are we going, and what lurks in the shadows of our daily lives? A number of interlocking directorates around the world, both corporate and criminal, have decided that it's time for A Return-to-the-Crusades! The Puppet-Masters designed it, but they can only have their way - if the real people remains as silent as we've been, while they continue to add more shackles to our chains. This is Class Warfare, between the haves and have-nots world-wide. Religions, creeds, policies, and flags are all potential divisive flashpoints to sap the power of open revolt and to attempt to mask that ugly smell of genocide, of famine, of racism, and of Greed Gone Wild!

How Did this Happen?

Today the world is waiting for Iran to become Part Two of the War on Iraq that continues to burn, in ever-expanding chaos, around the edges of every headline from the Middle East. But it's more than just that! The War on Iran will use the same flawed concepts that failed in Iraq: Bomb Iran back to the stone age, then the rebellious natives within will hail us as "liberators" and everybody joins in to chants of USA - USA - That was the party line in Iraq and that philosophy created fires that are still burning vigorously in the streets of the seven most populous districts in that war-torn land.

US foreign policy is non-existent. We have effectively decimated the Department of State, thanks to the total incompetence of that slithering Contessa of Lies who heads it. But competence is not something that is to be found in this administration that has killed so many people, for so much money - and for so little gain! Iran and Iraq are not isolated chess pieces in an outdated game, to be toyed with or destroyed at will. The real world is multi-dimensional, and the war game has moved well beyond the medieval chess board. There are international interests besides ours, global circles of influence that are threatened by what this cowboy nation keeps trying to do in the zeal of pomp and ignorance that seems to drive Cheney-Bush, and their minions. The new reality is unfettered by the crude simplicity of old world. planning and regimentation. Instead there are new strategies and tactics that can be 'checked' from almost any angle: not the least of which is that world famous "Law of Unintended Consequences"!

Tracing the history of those that planned and financed both the first and second World Wars, it is clear that they did not stop there. In the case of Europe, when the First World War erupted, there was a naiveté that was exploited because of the use of modern weapons never seen before. However; the outcome of the First World War made the Second inevitable, thanks to the redrawing of the world map by the Western Allies, and to the Armistice than impoverished Germany to the enth degree.

The Second World War was necessary to tie up the loose ends that the First World War created. But the end of that conflict still left far too much to be done, before the planet could be completely subjugated.

Old world Europe needed to be completely rebuilt due to the savagery and bombing of their entire industrial base and infrastructure. The industries and the ravaged cities were rebuilt with the latest factories and the latest innovations, to position these "new" nations for the coming financial battles for the soul of money itself.

As for the rest of the planet, The New World Order was ready with their plan to corner every market, to control the labor and parcel out the profits: but first they needed to eliminate the remaining real power among the smaller nation states. Those nations that were self-sufficient were restructured along the lines of The New Order. To comply with the restructuring, they would need to change from the diversity of their sustaining production, and switch to huge single crops or product lines for export. Assistance was readily available from the friendly global-financial agencies, and their sponsors, that made billions in those bargains.

The sustenance of the smaller nations was to be guaranteed by the imports they would need to buy, with the profits they would make, from their own exports. Lost in this shuffle was the fact that each nation was no longer self-sufficient - and could be intimidated or coerced - by the larger and more powerful markets where the longer range desires of the money-changers remained supreme! Institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF were some of what assisted with "nation building" in the undeveloped world and from the wreckage that these institutions wrought - a "third world" was created - a world that can seemingly never get out from under the debt and penury, designed especially for them by the reigning powers. Latin American is beginning to change that whole equation, but it has taken nearly a hundred years!

This brings us to Part Three of this Seizure of the World for Fun & Profit. After the diversion of the Cold War that served as cover for this plan to steal what remains of the independent family of nations; the remaining "power" in the world was the USA. Admittedly this nation was infected by much of what happened with third world counties both before and during the Cold War, because part of the power of the Jackals was based here. But once "the Wall" went down in Berlin, the Puppet-Masters became impatient to get on with their Return to the Crusades, to finally "Own the World." Some believe this is happening: Others just watch and continue to wait.

It is not easy to believe - but the target is the coming War upon America - to turn this nation into an American version of what Baghdad is now. Why? Because there are simply too many risks involved in allowing a country that was as rich and powerful as this one was - to exist - in light of what has been planned for over a hundred years, by people who have only used the flags and words of others to achieve for themselves those things that live in eternal darkness and stand always in opposition to life in the real world. Since this plan of theirs involves the total financial and military takeover of the planet; those behind the scheme didn't seem to think that allowing the USA to exist with our rights and wealth and ideas in tack - would be too wise - in case America suddenly wakes up!

Here's a printable image older than recorded history - I called it Again & Again, because it's about those who used these facets of life for personal gain or glory. How often in history have these trials been unleashed to burn their marks into the living flesh of all of us? http://www.kirwanesque.com/gallery/4_horsemen.htm

Conquest and the burning "Flag of All Nations" with its five pointed star in the colors and shades of humanity, surrounded by that thin green line for what is left of the earth; against the dirty blue background for the corruption of air and water (painted in 1977). The molten gold of the head with no need for a mouth because Conquest does not speak it only conquers War on a crimson mount; his helmet plume three flaming fists, forever closed; The shield is fashioned from the pawns of war who would not choose - and in so doing, chose! In his upraised fist the hilt of his blade reveals a captured American eagle, now darkened with the shame of Vietnam. Famine upends the scales where life-giving food is outweighed by gold, and the starving children move him not, just as his sightless eyes never see the horror that famine brings. And finally Death, for the tyranny of time that too often is cut short. The red-head on the pommel grasps one hand of a clock, in a futile effort to stop the passage of the moments left to her. His mount is translucent because it stands for the mystery of death that each of us must one day enter. These four then are some of the shadows that have haunted the march of humankind down through the centuries - and now They're Back - AGAIN!

Despite all the deception and the lies in all the shadow play that so many have tried to bring to this sagging global stage-should those of us now caught up in this; not finally begin to ask - is MONEY all there really is? Should not human life revolve around a different set of values? Nothing in our lives is given; because everything political is fought for. We have allowed the Torch of Freedom to go out - to fall away from us. We must regain that freedom that belongs at the core of every life. Where are the Americans that we thought we were-has everybody disappeared before the onslaught of the bankers and money-changers? Have all Americans been silenced: Or is it just that so many have yet to speak?

Europe was caught off guard in World War One, but much has happened since. Both The Puppet-Masters and the Whirlwind are coming now. Will this nation will fight for life; or will we simply follow the well-worn paths of all those other failures that have gone before?

Jim Kirwan, kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net

"I am certain we will look at measures that can be taken to ensure that Iran knows that they really have no choice but to comply," Rice told reporters.

Chapter 7 makes a resolution mandatory under international law for all U.N. members. It can lead to sanctions and eventually the use of force if it specifically calls for them or threatens "all necessary measures."

A Chapter 7 resolution passed against Iraq has been seen as giving the United States a legal argument for the bombing and then invasion of that country. Russia, in particular, fears that the United States might interpret a Chapter 7 resolution in the same way against Iran.

Russia and China, key players on the Iran issue with veto rights in the Security Council, strongly oppose sanctions or the use of military force against Tehran. All other council members, including close ally Britain, oppose military action.

The United States, believing Iran is intent on making an atomic bomb, has said that while all options are on the table, it is pursuing the diplomatic course and rejects reports that it is stepping up plans for a military strike.

Rice, who has called for "strong steps" against Iran, said Tehran had done nothing to show it planned to adhere to calls by the international community to abandon its nuclear plans and the world must respond.

"We are going to have to have a response and it can't be another presidential statement," said Rice, referring to a statement issued by the Security Council last month against Iran.

The Security Council has told Iran to halt all sensitive atomic activities and on March 29 it asked the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, to report on its compliance in 30 days.

Iran's declaration this week that it enriched its first batch of uranium is unlikely to spur the divided Security Council to take any substantive action sooner than May on the question, council diplomats said on Wednesday.

"When the Security Council reconvenes there will have to be some consequence for that action and that defiance. We will look at a whole range of options available to the Security Council," Rice said.

Speaking at the same news conference, Canada's Foreign Minister Peter MacKay said his government supported sanctions against Iran if Tehran did not cooperate soon.

"There will be a progressive response and progressive consequences. I don't believe we want to take any drastic steps that will destabilize a very volatile situation," said MacKay.

Political directors from the six major powers handling the Iran issue are set to meet in Moscow next Tuesday on the sidelines of a planning meeting for a summit of the G8.

Mr Peres was speaking a day after Mr Ahmadinejad told a Palestinian solidarity conference in Tehran: "Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading towards annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm. Our power is growing, while the Zionists' power of resistance is growing weaker. Israel is a danger, but that danger is about to end."

Last week, Mr Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had successfully enriched uranium and would soon be able to build an atomic bomb. It has already tested delivery systems that could reach Israel and other Middle Eastern states.

The Institute for Science and International Security, an American think-tank, published satellite photographs yesterday showing that Iran has built a new tunnel entrance to a uranium conversion laboratory in Isfahan and has reinforced two cascade halls - in which uranium is enriched in centrifuges - against aerial attack.

"This entrance is indicative of a new underground facility or further expansion of existing ones," said the ISIS. Its director, David Albright, a former UN arms inspector, added: "Iran is taking extraordinary precautions to try to protect its nuclear assets."

Richard Clarke, a former White House counter-terrorism chief, warned the Bush administration against a military strike on Iranian reactors. President George Bush has dismissed reports of such plans as "wild speculation". Mr Clarke, who has advised three presidents, wrote in The New York Times: "A conflict with Iran could be even more damaging to our interests than the current struggle in Iraq has been." He recalled that the Clinton administration had also considered a bombing campaign against Iran amid tensions in the 1990s, but "after a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favourably for the United States". Although Israel has not excluded a rerun of its 1981 destruction of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak near Baghdad, it is rattling no sabres. It prefers to play a supporting role in efforts to isolate the Islamic republic.

Mr Peres cautioned: "Israel needs to let the United States and the international community lead the campaign to defend world peace from the Iranian leader. We must not let Israel stand at the head of the campaign, since then it will be perceived as an Israeli-Iranian issue and could lead to an end of international pressure." Nonetheless, senior Israeli military intelligence officers complain that the international response is too weak. "Iran spat in the world's face," one of them told The Jerusalem Post, "but the world hasn't done anything. The way it looks now, it is doubtful that the United Nations and the international efforts will succeed in stopping Iran."

* With infighting between the old and new regimes tearing Palestinian politics apart, Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister, has appealed to rival parties to join a national unity coalition. "The door is open to Fatah," a spokesman said. But President Mahmoud Abbas's party, which declined to attend an emergency meeting in Gaza, is in no hurry to agree.

Speaking in a mosque on Friday, Mr Haniyeh accused the President of forging "an unholy alliance" with the international community, which is boycotting Hamas officials, to bring down his government. Fatah spokesmen blamed Hamas for destroying the Palestinian economy and urged the Islamic movement to endorse previous agreements with Israel.

It took place on a day that a Palestinian suicide bomber struck a packed fast-food restaurant in Tel Aviv, killing nine people in the deadliest bombing in Israel in more than a year.

Recent statements by the Palestinian government, Iran and Syria, including one by Hamas on Monday defending the suicide bombing, "are clear declarations of war, and I urge each and every one of you to listen carefully and take them at face value," said Israel's ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman.

"A dark cloud is looming above our region, and it is metastasising as a result of the statements and actions by leaders of Iran, Syria, and the newly elected government of the Palestinian Authority," he said.

The Palestinian UN observer, Riyad Mansour, condemned the suicide bombing and the loss of innocent civilians on both sides, but attacked Israel for trying to portray its latest military escalation - which killed 21 Palestinians between April 7 and 9 - as a response to violence from the Palestinian territories.

"Israel, the occupying power has been relentless in its grave breaches of international law, including the wilful killing and injury of civilians and the practice of extrajudicial executions," he said.

Israeli aircraft retaliated for the attack on Monday night, firing missiles at a metal workshop in Gaza City, and yesterday morning Israeli troops raided a West Bank village near Jenin, arresting the father of the suicide bomber responsible for the attack.

Yet there is also pressure on the acting Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who has yet to form a government following general elections late last month, to moderate his response lest it undermine US-led efforts to isolate the Hamas government diplomatically and financially unless it renounces violence and recognises Israel.

On Monday the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, called the escalating violence "very worrying" and urged both sides to avoid putting civilians at risk.

He also announced that the Middle East Quartet of peacemakers - the UN, the US, the European Union and Russia - would meet in New York on May 9 to discuss how to advance the stalled roadmap to peace.

Japan has announced that it would not extend new aid to the Palestinians via the Palestinian Authority until it becomes clear that Hamas is committed to the Middle East peace process, Foreign Affairs Ministry officials said yesterday.

Japan - which has given $US840 million ($1.1 billion) in aid to Palestinians since 1993 - will however continue to offer fresh humanitarian aid if the need arises, said a spokesman, Akira Chiba.

"Until we have a clearer picture ... there won't be a situation where new aid would be given."

The French president insisted that the door remained open for a resumption of talks as soon as Iran went along with the requests of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN Security Council, stressing that "more than ever the choice is in the hands of the Iranian leaders."

Iran, suspected by the West of wanting to acquire the atomic bomb, has refused to suspend its uranium enrichment activities in spite of pressure by the big powers.

The Security Council has asked Iran to suspend those activities by April 28.

Major powers meeting in Moscow on Tuesday discussed the possibility of sanctions against Iran for its suspected nuclear weapons program but reached no agreement, the US State Department said.

Chirac is sticking to the diplomatic option to try and get Tehran to budge while US President George W. Bush has not excluded any option, including military action against Iran.

The French president reaffirmed Iran's "legitimate right" to civil nuclear energy, but on condition that the country give "objective guarantees on the peaceful nature of its program."

"The IAEA found that its nuclear activities had been carried out in an underhand way," he said. "Besides, Iran is pursuing a worrying missile program."

Egypt is calling for a diplomatic solution to the crisis but is also worried by the fact that Israel refuses to sign the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Experts believe Israel has some 200 nuclear warheads.

Chirac is expected to share Mubarak's "conviction" that the setting up of a zone free from arms of mass destruction would bring progress for peace and stability in the Middle East.

The French leader called on the hardline Hamas-controlled Palestinian government and Israel to "make the necessary gestures" for a resumption of "real" peace negotiations.

"In the immediate future we call on Hamas to understand that the way of violence is pointless and to continue its transition toward political action, continuing to respect the truce and committing to a process of renouncing violence and recognizing Israel," Chirac said.

The interview was carried out before a suicide bombing Monday in Tel Aviv claimed nine lives apart from that of the bomber, the deadliest attack since August 2004. The Palestinian government refused to condemn the attack and said Israel bore responsibility for it.

Chirac continued: "But we also say to the Israelis that they must brush aside the temptation of unilateralism, end targeted killings and the pursuit of settlements."

In other remarks, Chirac defended the cautious reforms carried out by Egypt, including electoral changes, describing them as "fruitful."

He said France had "no hidden agenda concerning Syria", implicitly denying that Paris wanted a regime change in Damascus.

While Iran leads a war of words against nuclear-armed Israel and has defied a U.N. Security Council request to stop all uranium enrichment, Brazil is peaceful and democratic. It doesn't have border disputes, is not in an arms race, and strives for good relations with all nations. Its last war ended in 1870.

''Brazil doesn't cheat on the Nonproliferation Treaty and it does not exist in an area of high tension,'' said David Albright, a former U.N. inspector who runs the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

The U.S. Embassy in the capital, Brasilia, referred all questions to the State Department in Washington, where spokesman Sean McCormack dismissed any parallel between Brazil's nuclear program and Iran's.

''My understanding is they have a peaceful nuclear program,'' he said Thursday.

Still, Brazil's enrichment program - and its reluctance to allow unlimited inspections - has raised suspicions abroad.

''Brazil is beginning to be perceived as a country apparently wanting to reevaluate its commitment to nonproliferation, and this is a big part of the problem,'' said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

The government-run Industrias Nucleares do Brasil S.A. has been conducting final tests at the enrichment plant, built on a former coffee plantation in Resende, 90 miles west of Rio de Janeiro. When it opens this year, Brazil will join the world's nuclear elite.

Brazil has the world's sixth-largest uranium reserves, but until the plant becomes operational, it can't use the fuel for energy without shipping it to and from URENCO, the European enrichment consortium.

Brazil says its plant will be capable of enriching natural uranium to less than 5 percent uranium-235, an isotope needed to fuel its two reactors. Warheads need ore that has been enriched to 95 percent uranium-235, a material Brazil says it can't and won't produce.

''If you can enrich to 5 percent, you're decades away from enriching to 90 percent,'' Odair Dias Goncalves, president of the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission, told The Associated Press. ''You need a whole new technology that we don't have.''

But former U.N. inspector Albright said he worked with Goncalves at the Brazilian Physics Society on a project to show that the Brazilian centrifuges could be used to produce highly enriched uranium, even if that wasn't their intended use.

''Centrifuges are very flexible,'' he said. ''Reconfiguring the cascades or recycling the enriched uranium multiple times can allow for the production of weapons-grade uranium.''

Brazilian leaders insist the fuel will be used for the nation's $1 billion nuclear energy industry. Already Latin America's biggest nuclear power provider, Brazil plans up to seven new atomic plants to reduce its dependence on oil and hydroelectric power and plans to export enriched uranium to provide energy for other countries.

Brazil initially refused inspections by the International Atomic Energy Association, arguing that providing full access to its state-of-the-art, Brazilian-designed centrifuges would put it at risk of industrial espionage. Since then, IAEA inspectors have visited the plant many times, monitoring the uranium that comes in and out, but they're still prevented from seeing the actual centrifuges, which are covered with opaque screens.

The IAEA inspectors have said they're satisfied no material is being diverted. Brazilian physicist Jose Goldemberg said Brazil won't be able to produce enriched uranium for export until 2014.

Brazil had great nuclear ambitions during a 1964-85 military dictatorship, when it built the two nuclear energy plants, worked to develop a nuclear submarine and had secret plans to test an atomic bomb in a 1,000-foot-deep, concrete-and steel-lined hole in the Amazon jungle. That idea was formally scrapped in 1990, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in 2004 that ''we know for sure that Brazil is not thinking about nuclear weapons in any sense.''

But Brazil's nuclear ambitions have been rekindled under leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in part, analysts say, because joining the nuclear club would boost Brazil's status internationally and possibly earn it a permanent seat on the Security Council.

What is really at stake in both Brazil and Iran is self-image, Goldemberg said. ''It's nationalism, pride. That's the real reason,'' he said.

The use of military force against Iran was "probably the last choice," Lieberman said, before adding: "But it has to be there."

The Connecticut Democrat compared the rhetoric coming from Iranian President Mamoud Ahmadinejad, who threatened just last week to "annihilate" Israel, to declarations from both Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler, noting:

"Sometimes when people say really extreme things, which at some level a lot of people don't want to even believe . . . they may actually mean it. They may intend to do it. So I do think that the statements of Ahmadinejad are taken very seriously, both with regard to [speaking of a world without] the US and with regard to Israel."

Lieberman told the Post that any U.S. strike against Iran would not involve ground troops, explaining: "I don't think anyone is thinking of this as a massive ground invasion, as in Iraq, to topple the government."

He also said flatly that Iran would not abide by the Friday deadline to suspend uranium enrichment.

"If you take the first step wrong, the wrong trend will continue. We welcome any logical proposal to resolve the issue. They just need to say why should we suspend," Larijani said.

Iran's former President, Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaking at the same conference, claimed that Iran openly launched its nuclear program - which it insists is for peaceful energy purposes only - "but the behavior of Western countries forced it to carry out its nuclear program independently, based on local expertise and knowledge without relying on Western countries."

The International Atomic Energy Agency's chief spokesman, Marc Vidricaire, said Tuesday it would not comment on Iran's threat to scuttle all cooperation if sanctions are imposed. He said the IAEA planned no public statements ahead of agency head Mohamed ElBaradei's report to the Security Council and the agency's 35-nation board of governors, expected by the end of this week.

The United States, Britain and France maintain that Iran actually wants enriched uranium for atomic bombs, which would violate its commitments under the treaty. Iran denies the charge, but Washington is pressing fellow members of the Security Council to impose economic sanctions.

Meanwhile, an Israeli defense official said Israel was launching a satellite to spy on Iran's program, as Iran's leader persisted with his calls for the Jewish state's destruction.

Israel planned to launch from Siberia later Tuesday its Eros B satellite, designed to spot images on the ground as small as 27 inches, the defense official said. That level of resolution would allow Israel to gather information on Iran's nuclear program and its long-range missiles, which are capable of striking Israel, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive subject matter.

On Monday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "fake regime" that "cannot logically continue to live." Last year, he called the Nazi Holocaust a "myth" and declared that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

Ahmadinejad's government insists the nonproliferation treaty gives Iran the right to enrich uranium for fueling civilian nuclear power plants, and he has given no ground in the international faceoff. The fiery hardline president said Monday he was reconsidering Iran's adherence to the treaty, which is aimed at stopping the spread of atomic weapons while allowing peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

"What has more than 30 years of membership in the agency given us?" he asked at a news conference, only the second since he took office last year at which foreign journalists have been allowed to ask questions.

As a member of the IAEA, Iran is obliged to honor the agency's basic nuclear safeguards agreement. However, that agreement is limited to select declared atomic facilities and programs.

It is not the first time Iran has threatened to curb cooperation: Several months ago, Tehran announced it would not honor the U.N. nuclear watchdog's so-called "additional protocol," which gave the IAEA increased and more thorough inspection powers.

Suspicions about Iran's intentions have grown since it was discovered in 2002 that Tehran had for two decades secretly operated large-scale nuclear activities that could be used in weapons making.

The IAEA says it has since found no direct evidence of an arms program, but it also says the Iranians have not been fully forthcoming in answering questions about their nuclear activities. After repeated attempts to resolve the issue through negotiations, the IAEA reported Iran to the Security Council for noncompliance.

Iran deepened international concerns by announcing April 11 that it had for the first time enriched uranium with 164 centrifuges - a step toward large-scale production of nuclear fuel.

The United States and others are urging the Security Council to take a tougher stance by imposing a mandatory order for Iran to halt enrichment, a move that would raise the threat of sanctions.

Russian and China, which are among the five permanent members that can veto council actions, have opposed that approach, saying diplomacy has not run its course. Ahmadinejad appears to be banking on their support to dissuade Washington from pressing a sanctions vote.

He said that Iran's longest-range missile, Shahab-III, had a maximum range of 1,200-1,500 kilometres, which meant that Iran could not attack North America or Western Europe. "No substantial evidence has yet been found that Iran has nuclear weapons, and anyone saying that Iran is a threat to the world is lying and deceiving the world," Margolis said. He said that Bush's statement about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction had "proved baseless". The US and Israel were planning to attack Iran's nuclear infrastructure and major military installations, he said.

Margolis said that Iran had been trying to acquire nuclear weapons since 1970, when it signed an agreement with Israel to provide it with nuclear warheads and medium range missiles. He said that Pakistani intelligence sources had told him that decades ago, Iran had offered to pay for Pakistan's entire defence budget for 10 years in exchange for nuclear technology. "Why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons? It is surrounded by nuclear powers like Pakistan, Russia, Israel and India," Margolis said. He said that the US was providing India with nuclear secrets and the latest nuclear technology in spite of the fact that the latter had not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. He said that India is developing submarine-launched missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, and Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles with a range of 7,000 miles. "With these weapons, India can strike even the US, but the Bush administration is still providing India with modern nuclear technology," he said. He said that the US had supplied Israel with bomber airplanes, which could travel to Iran and even Pakistan. It had also given Israel around 500 "penetrating bombs, which are very lethal".

He said that a US or Israeli attack on Iran could be "very dangerous", as Iran had the ability to "punish American forces in Iraq". He said that the present Iraqi government was a Shia government which is very close to Iran. "So an attack on Iran can outrage the Shia community of Iraq," he said. Margolis said that Iran had the ability to launch "commando attacks" on US forces in the gulf. "Iran can attack US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. Iran can hamper oil exports from the area, which will create a major panic in the world and in the US," he said.

"Iranians are prepared to take huge casualties (to defend themselves) because they are a dedicated and nationalistic nation, whereas the US lacks this advantage," Margolis said, adding that Iran can even send troops to Iraq.

Other Israeli security officials said the new missiles would put eastern and parts of central Europe within firing range, including the Czech Republic, Italy and Romania. Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the news media.

The report comes as UN members consider slapping sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt uranium enrichment. The United States, Israel and other western countries say Iran is trying to get nuclear arms, but the Tehran says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only.

The UN Security Council has given Iran until Friday to stop enriching uranium, a necessary step for developing nuclear fuel which, if taken far enough, can also be used in nuclear weapons.

Should Iran refuse to comply, which it has indicated it will do, the Security Council is likely to consider taking punitive measures.

Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin, head of the Israeli army's intelligence unit, has warned of the new Iranian missiles in several recent interviews.

Iran already has missiles capable of reaching Israel, but the BM-25 missiles are a significant upgrade over its existing the Shihab-4 and Shihab-3 missiles.

Those missiles spurred Israel to develop its Arrow 2 anti-ballistic missile system, which is can intercept the Iranian missiles.

Israeli concerns have been heightened in recent months by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's calls to wipe Israel "off the map."

Iran has also tested several long-range missiles in recent weeks, including a "top secret" missile capable of being fired from all military helicopters and jet fighters, the Iranian state-run television reported.

Iran also tested the Fajr-3, a missile it said can avoid radar and hit several targets simultaneously using multiple warheads. Iran also has tested what it calls two new torpedoes.

American intelligence officials have said that Iran is at an advanced stage of developing a missile that can carry a nuclear warhead. The United States has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency of the details of the Iranian missile program.

On Tuesday, Israel launched a satellite meant to spy on Iran's nuclear program. The satellite, launched from Russia, is designed to spot images on the ground as small as 70 centimetres and would allow Israel to monitor Iran's nuclear program and long-range missiles, an Israel defence official said.

Past administrations have put an emphasis on appealing for restraint on all sides.

The bombing Monday in a restaurant killed nine people and the bomber. It was the deadliest attack on Israel in 20 months. Islamic Jihad, classified by the department as a terror organization, claimed responsibility.

The attack was called legitimate by the Hamas-led Palestinian government, which the United States, the
European Union and Canada are boycotting.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned condolences to Foriegn Minister Tzipi Livni and her wishes for a speedy recovery to the injured, McCormack said.

Asked whether the administration had urged Israel to be restrained in any retaliatory strike, the spokesman replied: "Our position is that the Israeli government has the right to defend the Israeli people."

McCormack added: "We, as always, ask them to consider the effect of their actions upon the future prospects for peace. That position is long-standing and unchanged."

"When you are talking about fighting terrorism or extremism, I'm not doing that for the US or Britain. I'm doing it for Pakistan," he said. "It's not a question of being a poodle. I'm nobody's poodle. I have enough strength of my own to lead."

If necessary he had "teeth" to bite back, he added. "Yes sir, I personally do. A lot of teeth. Sometimes the teeth do not have to be shown. Pragmatism is required in international relations."

Gen Musharraf pledged to hold free and fair elections next year as urged by Mr Bush during his visit to Islamabad last month. Opposition parties fear the poll, which government officials claim will be the most open since Gen Musharraf seized power in 1999, will be rigged.

"It is ironic that I'm sitting in uniform talking of democracy ... but to bring democracy into Pakistan I thought I needed it," he said.

An American Predator drone fired Hellfire missiles at a house in Bajaur tribal agency in January, killing 18 people but missing their target, al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The attack near the Afghan border caused public uproar and brought renewed accusations that Gen Musharraf was a US puppet.

Local journalist Hayatullah Khan, who photographed missile fragments linking the strikes to the US, disappeared four days later and is still missing. A western diplomat said he was probably being held by Pakistani intelligence and may have been mistreated.

The strike underlined tensions in the anti-terror alliance between Pakistan and the US, which has also been strained by Washington's nuclear deal with India, its insistence on democratic reforms, and alleged American meddling in the sprawling south-western province of Baluchistan. "The strike was an infringement of our sovereignty and I condemned it," said Gen Musharraf.

Pakistan also faces criticism from the US and Afghanistan for not doing enough to flush extremists from its tribal areas. Mr Bush said he had come to Islamabad "to determine whether or not the president is as committed as he has been in the past to bringing these terrorists to justice".

Gen Musharraf insisted yesterday there was no question of Pakistan submitting to American scrutiny and said claims that his government acted at Washington's bidding were nonsense. "There is no need of any checks - that is the reality," he said.

Gen Musharraf, who faces revolts in Baluchistan and along the Afghan border, admitted to feeling embattled. He added that there was a growing problem of "Talibanisation" in Waziristan, a troubled tribal area where several hundred al-Qaida suspects have been killed.

The battle against al-Qaida was almost won in Waziristan, he said. "Because of our successes in the cities where we got 600-700 of them, and then in the mountains where we occupied their sanctuaries, thankfully they are on the run."

But a new form of local fundamentalism was taking its place in Waziristan, which is ruled directly from Islamabad under colonial-era laws. "Extremism in a Talibanised form is what people are now going for. Mullah Omar and the Taliban have influence in Waziristan and it's spilling over into our settled areas."

This week militants occupied a market in the regional capital, Miran Shah, for several hours, burning newspapers and threatening local people. Two taxi drivers accused of collaborating with coalition forces in nearby Afghanistan were found beheaded. More than 150 pro-government elders and officials have been killed in the past year.

Gen Musharraf defended his tactic of using military force instead of negotiation to quell the violence and said some collateral damage was inevitable when militants' hideouts were attacked.

"We take extreme care to be 100% sure of the target from all sources of intelligence ... There is minimum collateral damage. If someone happens to be very close to [the target], that somebody is an abetter and they suffer the loss. Sometimes, indeed, women and children have been killed but they have been right next to the place. It's not that the strike was inaccurate but they happen to be there, so therefore they are all supporters and abetters of terrorism - and therefore they have to suffer. It's bad luck," he said.

Gen Musharraf also played down unrest in the resource-rich province of Baluchistan, where nationalist militants are blowing up gas pipelines and trains and attacking army positions. He described the rebels as "mercenaries" and their attacks as "pin pricks", and said the disturbances were confined to one-twentieth of the province's area.

"So what revolt are you talking about? People talk about an East Pakistan situation," he said, referring to the secession of Bangladesh in 1971. "I understand strategy. These people are pygmies."

Criticism of his military-driven strategy came from "people who sit in drawing rooms and talk", he said, but added that a political solution was also being sought.

Gen Musharraf has survived two assassination attempts but elections scheduled for next year are expected to pose the greatest threat yet to his grip on power. Overt and behind-the-scenes US and British pressure for a free poll has become another friction point in the west's relationship with Islamabad.

The leaders of the two main opposition parties, Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan Peoples party and Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League, are in exile and face arrest if they return home. Meeting in London this week they launched a fresh political alliance and called for western support.

Gen Musharraf said his mission was to democratise Pakistan. "My popularity has gone down ... but at this moment my country needs me. I've put a strong constitutional democratic system in place. That will throw up a successor. I'm a strong believer in democracy."

Backstory

Pervez Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999 when he was head of the country's armed forces, forcing the country's elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, into exile in Saudi Arabia. Initial international condemnation faded after September 2001, when Gen Musharraf dropped his support for the Taliban and threw his weight behind the US-led "war on terror". He has since become a key ally in the west's hunt for al-Qaida extremists but his popularity has plummeted due to widespread anti-American sentiment. In December 2003 he survived two al-Qaida assassination attempts in two weeks. Gen Musharraf attempted to legitimise his rule through elections in 2002 that observers described as deeply flawed. A self-described liberal, he has introduced some social reforms but also allied himself with hardline religious parties when necessary. Last year he advanced the peace process with India through "cricket diplomacy".

The court's action clears the way for Padilla to be tried on criminal charges in a federal court in Miami. However, it leaves unresolved the question of whether the president, as commander in chief, has the power to arrest Americans in this country and hold them without a trial if he believes they are working for the enemy.

President Bush and his lawyers have claimed this power as part of his wartime authority. They argue that in its war on terrorism, the government needs special powers to intercept and question Al Qaeda conspirators who are plotting attacks in this country.

But the U.S. Constitution and federal law says American citizens cannot be arrested and held without "due process of law." That usually involves, at minimum, a hearing before a judge in which the detained person can challenge the government's basis for holding him.

From the start, the case of Jose Padilla vs. Donald Rumsfeld had the potential to be a legal landmark in the area of presidential powers and civil liberties during war. Instead, it has been an exercise in frustration for the lawyers who challenged Bush's view.

In June 2002, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced that the government had disrupted a plot to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States. Padilla, a Bronx-born Muslim, it was alleged, had trained at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. He was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport after a flight from Pakistan.

Rather than charge him as a suspected criminal, the White House said the president had decided to hold Padilla in military custody as an enemy combatant. He was not permitted to speak with his family or a lawyer, and no charges were filed against him. Civil libertarians said this was blatantly unconstitutional.



Two years ago, the administration dodged a likely defeat in the Supreme Court when the justices, by a 5-4 vote, dismissed Padilla's first case on technical grounds. His lawyers in New York had filed a legal challenge to his detention there, but their client was then held in a military brig in South Carolina. The court said his lawyers should have filed their claim in South Carolina.

Four liberal justices dissented, saying the "essence of a free society" involved freedom from arbitrary imprisonment.

The same day, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia made the same point in a related case that freed U.S.-born Taliban soldier Yaser Esam Hamdi. "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the executive," Scalia wrote. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy voiced a similar view.

The stated views of Scalia and the moderate Kennedy strongly suggested that Padilla would eventually win. His lawyers started over again in South Carolina, hoping to quickly get his case back before the high court. But last fall, when his second appeal was pending before the justices, the Bush administration changed course.

It indicted Padilla on a terrorism conspiracy charge in Florida that made no mention of a "dirty bomb" or a plot to blow up buildings in the U.S. The government moved him from military custody into the federal court system and urged the high court to dismiss his appeal as moot.

Monday's decision not to hear the case meant that the administration had again avoided a likely defeat. Civil libertarians voiced disappointment.

"It's unfortunate that the executive has been able to avoid final review for so long of a case that presents such fundamental questions of the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens," said Deborah Pearlstein, a lawyer for Human Rights First. "But there's no question that the court's opinion puts the president on notice."

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer voted to hear Padilla's latest appeal. Nothing prevents the government from switching course again and returning Padilla to the brig, Ginsburg said.

Three others - Kennedy, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice John Paul Stevens - issued a statement explaining they had turned down the case because Padilla was no longer held by the military.

His case "raises fundamental issues respecting the separation of powers" and that "counsels against addressing those claims when the course of legal proceedings has made them, at least for now, hypothetical," they said.

Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. apparently voted against hearing Padilla's case, but they did not say why.

Three justices who voted not to hear the case - Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and John Paul Stevens, along with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. - filed an unusual opinion explaining their position. They noted that Mr. Padilla, who is now out of military custody and awaiting trial in federal district court in Miami on terrorism-related charges, was entitled to a criminal defendant's full range of protections, including the right to a speedy trial.

Most significant, the three justices warned the administration that the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, stood ready to intervene "were the government to seek to change the status or conditions of Padilla's custody."

The comment was clearly a reference to the sequence of events last fall, when the administration, days before it was due to file a brief in response to Mr. Padilla's Supreme Court appeal, announced that it had obtained a grand jury indictment and planned to shift him to civilian custody.

The administration then filed a brief arguing that the appeal had to be dismissed as moot, since Mr. Padilla was getting the relief he requested when he filed his original petition asking to be released from custody or charged with a crime.

The Miami indictment charges him with providing material support to terrorists as part of a cell that is said to have sent money and recruits overseas. He is being held without bail; a trial is scheduled for Sept. 9.

In simply turning down Mr. Padilla's appeal, Padilla v. Hanft, No. 05-533, the court did not make a formal determination that the case was moot. But Mr. Padilla's transfer from military custody to the civilian justice system rendered his legal claims, "at least for now, hypothetical," Justice Kennedy said in the explanatory opinion, which the two other justices signed.

"Even if the court were to rule in Padilla's favor, his present custody status would be unaffected," Justice Kennedy said.

In shifting Mr. Padilla to civilian custody, the government said that it reserved the right to redesignate him as an enemy combatant and send him back to military custody. His lawyers argued that for that reason, the Supreme Court should hear his case.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed, filing an opinion on Monday dissenting from the court's refusal to hear the case.

"Nothing the government has yet done purports to retract the assertion of executive power Padilla protests," Justice Ginsburg said, adding that "nothing prevents the executive from returning to the road it earlier constructed and defended." She said she was "satisfied that this case is not moot."

Justices David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer did not sign Justice Ginsburg's opinion, noting only that they, too, had voted to hear the case.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., who voted against hearing the appeal, neither signed Justice Kennedy's opinion nor offered an explanation of their own. It is possible that they objected to the language in the Kennedy opinion about the court's readiness to intervene "promptly to ensure that the office and purposes of the writ of habeas corpus are not compromised" if the administration were to change Mr. Padilla's status once again.

The silence of these three justices was only one of several mysteries surrounding the court's disposition of the case, among the most prominent of the cases generated by the administration's handling of those it has labeled enemy combatants.

One mystery is what took the court so long. Mr. Padilla's appeal had been pending for months, and had been taken up by the justices at their weekly closed-door conference eight times since mid-January. That length of time was hardly needed to produce the four pages of opinions, three for Justice Kennedy and one for Justice Ginsburg, that the court issued on Monday.

Another mystery is the role played by Justice Stevens, who signed Justice Kennedy's opinion rather than provide a crucial fourth vote to his natural allies - Justices Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer. Two years ago, Justice Stevens wrote for Justices Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer in dissent from an earlier ruling in Mr. Padilla's legal saga.

That was a 5-to-4 decision holding that the federal appeals court in New York, which had ordered Mr. Padilla released, lacked the authority to decide the case. The five justices in the majority then required Mr. Padilla to file a new habeas corpus petition seeking release in South Carolina, where he was held in the Navy brig in Charleston.

Justice Stevens, dissenting, criticized the majority as failing to address the merits of Mr. Padilla's case, which he said "raises questions of profound importance to the nation."

In her dissenting opinion on Monday, Justice Ginsburg quoted those words, identifying them as those of Justice Stevens. As a careful writer, not given to wasting words herself, Justice Ginsburg appeared to be sending a signal of her dismay at Justice Stevens's failure to join her in dissent this time.

The two mysteries - the lengthy consideration and the role of Justice Stevens - may not be unrelated. It is possible that the Kennedy opinion was the result of a long negotiation, and that the price Justice Stevens exacted for not giving the dissenters the crucial fourth vote needed to hear the case was insertion of the language that can be read as warning the administration not to presume on the court's patience.

The test may come if Mr. Padilla is acquitted by a jury in the Miami federal case or receives and serves a short sentence. The government would then have to decide whether to set him free or find a way to keep him confined.

The federal court charges against him bear little if any relationship to the accusations the administration made after he was arrested after arriving at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on a flight from Pakistan. He was then described as an operative for Al Qaeda on a mission to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States.

In another development on Monday, the court agreed to resolve a dispute among the lower courts with implications for thousands of deportation and criminal sentencing cases. The question is whether a drug offense that is only a misdemeanor under federal law, but that an individual state's criminal code treats as a felony, is deemed an "aggravated felony" for purposes of immigration law or for adding time to a federal sentence.

The issue is particularly important in immigration law because deportable aliens with "aggravated felonies" on their records are ineligible for administrative discretion, making their deportation essentially automatic, no matter the individual circumstances. To resolve the issue, the court accepted two cases, Lopez v. Gonzales, No. 05-547, and Toledo-Flores v. United States, No. 05-7664.