According to the newspaper, the papers were forged for money by the Niger consul and his assistant at the embassy in Rome as western intelligence agencies sought evidence about reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium ore.

They were said to have copied a real contract to make it look as if Niger would supply Iraq with 500 tonnes of ore, or "yellowcake", it added.

The documents passed into the hands of the French secret service by way of a former Italian agent.

The ex-agent passed the documents on to an Italian journalist in late 2002. The journalist then took them to the US embassy, whose officials in turn informed Washington, the newspaper said.

Former US ambassador Joseph Wilson travelled to Niger and found the claims about Iraq obtaining uranium to be without substance. He publicly attacked the White House's assertions on the matter in a critical newspaper commentary in mid-2003.

But that led to government officials briefing journalists that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative. Naming an undercover agent is illegal in the United States.

Last week, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a former aide to US Vice-President Dick Cheney, told an inquiry into the leak that it was Cheney who ordered the briefings and that
President George W. Bush had authorised them.

"I do say that there's been enough of a showing here with what's been filed of record in court that the president of the United States owes a specific explanation to the American people . . . about exactly what he did," Specter said.

Libby faces trial, possibly in January, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to the grand jury and investigators about what he told reporters about CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald did not say in the filing that Cheney authorized Libby to leak Plame's identity, and Bush is not accused of doing anything illegal.

"The president may be entirely in the clear, and it may turn out that he had the authority to make the disclosures which were made," Specter said.

But, he added, "it was not the right way to go about it because we ought not to have leaks in government."

The investigation is looking into whether Plame's identify was disclosed to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, an Iraq war critic.

Wilson had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction

In a federal court filing last week, the prosecutor in the case said Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, testified before a grand jury that he was authorized by Bush, through Cheney, to leak information from a classified document that detailed intelligence agencies' conclusions about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

A lawyer knowledgeable about the case said Saturday that Bush declassified sensitive intelligence in 2003 and authorized its public disclosure to rebut Iraq war critics, but he did not specifically direct that Libby be the one to disseminate the information.

"I think that it is necessary for the president and vice president to tell the American people exactly what happened," Specter told "Fox News Sunday."

"I do say that there's been enough of a showing here with what's been filed of record in court that the president of the United States owes a specific explanation to the American people ... about exactly what he did," Specter said.

Libby faces trial, likely in January, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to the grand jury and investigators about what he told reporters about CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald did not say in the filing that Cheney authorized Libby to leak Plame's identity, and Bush is not accused of doing anything illegal.

"The president may be entirely in the clear, and it may turn out that he had the authority to make the disclosures which were made," Specter said. But, he added, "it was not the right way to go about it because we ought not to have leaks in government."

The investigation is looking into whether Plame's identify was disclosed to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an Iraq war critic. Wilson had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who ran against Bush for president in 2004, said it was wrong for Bush to declassify information selectively "in order to buttress phony arguments to go to war " and to attack people politically.

"This was not a declassification in order to really educate America. This was a declassification in order to mislead America," Kerry said on "Meet the Press" on NBC. "I think it's a disgrace."

Wilson said Sunday that Bush and Cheney should release transcripts of their interviews with Fitzgerald.

"It seems to me that first and foremost, the White House needs to come clean on this matter," Wilson said on ABC's "This Week." "My own view of this is that the White House owes the American people and particularly our service people who have been sent into war, an apology for having misrepresented the facts."

The lawyer knowledgeable about the case said Bush instructed Cheney to "get it out" and left the details about disseminating the intelligence to him. The lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case for the White House, said Cheney chose Libby and communicated the president's wishes to his then-top aide.

"I don't think there's any evidence that the president told the vice president to go leak information to the press," said Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz.

Kyl said on CNN's "Late Edition" that a better way for the administration to have tried to counter Wilson's claims in a New York Times op-ed would have been to "have all of the press be given" the declassified intelligence material.

It is not known when the conversation between Bush and Cheney took place. The White House has declined to provide the date when the president used his authority to declassify the portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

"There has to be a detailed explanation as to precisely what Vice President Cheney did, what the president said to him and an explanation by the president as to what he said," Specter said.

Affleck appeared on Maher's panel with Senator Joe Biden and Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner. A couple of minutes later, after Sammon suggested Tom DeLay's resignation means the loss of a "poster boy for the left" so they can't use him anymore to raise funds, Affleck besmirched DeLay as a "criminal" while simultaneously demonstrating his political naivete. Though the Texas redistricting orchestrated by DeLay made his district less Republican, Affleck contended: "Tom DeLay personally gerrymandered that district so severely that it looks like a map of Italy....There won't be a Democrat elected in that seat for a thousand years. You can't say he's the poster boy for the left. He happens to be an incredibly powerful Republican who is a criminal and now you blame Democrats for pointing it out!"

Video clip of Affleck talking about hanging and shooting Bush for treason (35 seconds). Real (1.1 MB) or Windows Media (1.25 MB), plus MP3 audio (200 KB).

A September 30, 2005 Washington Post story noted: "As part of a Texas redistricting that DeLay engineered and that led to Republicans gaining five seats in that state, DeLay's district lost some GOP voters."

(On Franken, an October 22 NewsBusters item, with video, recounted: "And so basically, what it looks like is going to happen is that Libby and Karl Rove are going to be executed" because "outing a CIA agent is treason," left-wing author and radio talk show host Al Franken asserted, to audience laughter, on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman. Franken qualified his hard-edged satire: "Yeah. And I don't know how I feel about it because I'm basically against the death penalty, but they are going to be executed it looks like." Franken later suggested that President Bush is at risk of receiving the same punishment, since Karl Rove likely told him what he did, but he added a caveat: "I think, by the way, that we should never ever, ever, ever execute a sitting President.")

Brief transcripts of the two portions of the April 7 Real Time with Bill Maher quoted above:

Bill Sammon, Washington Examiner: "A lot of critics are conflating the two and are saying that because Bush disclosed this piece of information, they're implying that Bush leaked the name."

Ben Affleck: "He probably also leaked the name. There's just no proof of that."

Sammon: "Even the prosecutor, even Fitzgerald is saying Bush didn't leak the name. So let's be clear, Bush didn't leak Valerie Plame's name -- not that we know of."

Affleck: "Because if he did, you can be hung for that! That's treason!"

Bill Maher: "That is treason."

Affleck: "You could be killed. That's not a joking around Tom DeLay 'I'll do a year, I bribed the state officials with corporate money.' That's like they shoot you in the battlefield for doing that. Don't you think we should find out who leaked that name?"

And moments later:

Maher proposed that Tom DeLay is "the poster boy for the kind of getting paid off, sludge fund, influence-peddling [said "petting"], crony capitalism that has turned America into something less than a first-rate power."

Sammon: "...You're right that he is the poster boy for the left. He's the guy the left loves to hate and his departure means you can't use his name to raise funds anymore. His departure means his seat will probably go to a Republican this time. His departure mean-"

Maher: "A Democrat, you mean?"

Sammon: "No, if he'd of stayed in the race he probably would have lost. By getting out, he actually makes it more likely for that to go to a Republican. "

Affleck: "Tom DeLay personally gerrymandered that district so severely that it looks like a map of Italy, you know what I mean?. There won't be a Democrat elected in that seat for a thousand years. You can't say he's the poster boy for the left. He happens to be an incredibly powerful Republican who is a criminal and now you blame Democrats for pointing it out!" (Loud applause)

"We want to make sure that there is due process, that there is a fair trial and that we don't do anything to jeopardise an ongoing legal proceeding," the spokesman added.

Indicted former top White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby revealed in court papers, made public Thursday, that Bush had authorised intelligence leaks ahead of the war in Iraq.

A federal prosecutor is investigating the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, in 2003 after her diplomat husband criticised the Bush administration's rationale for the war.

Libby, who is currently facing charges of obstruction and lying in the investigation, is suspected of having revealed Plame's job as an undercover CIA agent to a reporter - a federal crime in the United States.

"I know my government," Thompson ended lamely, "They're just not good enough to pull off something like this."

That's it, then? Thompson's reason for ridiculing those who question 9/11 is, "it's improbable such a ragtag group" is capable of attacking a vulnerable nation and killing thousands of its people? Man -- in the wake of all that has happened since 9/11, that dog won't hunt.

If Thompson is serious when he says "the many theories surrounding 9/11 come mostly from conspiracy buffs" -- or when he says those whose judgment he trusts "support the facts that Al Qaeda planned and executed the attacks," then his credibility is destroyed on this subject and on all other subjects as well. If he's serious, there's no reason to revisit Capitol Hill Blue or Thompson ever again.

But I'm not convinced Thompson is serious. He's too good at what he does. Like he says -- often -- he's been in journalism "for more than 40 years." He's a hard-hitting reporter whose cognitive and investigative skills are legend; whose "unnamed sources" walk shoulder-to-shoulder throughout the administration; frolic through the halls of Congress. Thompson doesn't just report the news, he breaks it, busts it wide open and takes no prisoners. It is inconceivable that Thompson would back off a story of this magnitude, given his penchant for holding the administration's cloven hooves to the fire, especially those of George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Thompson is the man who wrote on March 20 that "the most dangerous man in the world is not sitting in a jail cell somewhere in Iraq...He is not hiding out in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan...The most dangerous man in the world may well be working out of an oval-shaped office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC."

He is the one who unearthed a GOP memo less than a year ago suggesting that a "new attack by terrorists on US soil" could reverse the sagging fortunes of Bush as well as the GOP and would "restore his image as a leader of the American people." This strategy, the memo says, would "'validate" the President's war on terror and allow Bush to "unite the country in a time of national shock and sorrow," and would reverse the President's fortunes and "keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections."



And, as recently as April 4, Thompson wrote, "America is a bully, an international thug that uses fear, lies and deceit to advance the personal agendas of its leaders. Bullies do not deserve respect. Bullies do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Bullies are beneath contempt." Thompson continued, "Unfortunately, as long as Americans tolerate the despotic rule of George W. Bush, we share responsibility for the shame our leadership has brought upon a once-great nation called the United States of America."

Why, then, would Thompson say that he "cannot -- and will not" believe any explanation of what happened on 9/11 other than what the most dangerous man in the world tells him -- a despotic leader who's entertaining the "strategery" of murdering even more Americans for no other reason than to advance his political agenda, and who is a vicious liar who doesn't want the US Constitution thrown in his face because "it's nothing but a goddamned piece of paper?

Does Thompson's dog look to you like it's hunting?

It's futile to try to reach a mind so firmly closed. However, Thompson's reasons are more than passing strange. For example, the only investigation that apparently passed his "smell test" was conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) because he says "an engineer he'd known for 25 years" ran a computer simulation of the building collapses for him.

According to Kevin Ryan, formerly of Underwriters Laboratories (UL) which certified the steel used in the WTC buildings, "NIST put together a black box computer model that would spit out the right answers." Ryan said when the parameters did not generate the results they were seeking, they changed the parameters. The final model, according to Ryan, "produced video graphics that would enable anyone to see the buildings collapse without having to follow a train of logic to get there." NIST offered no proof for the dynamics of the amazing free-fall collapse of the only three buildings to do so in history as a result of fire, other than "...once the upper building section began to move downwards...global collapse ensued."

Thompson says he was at the Pentagon on 9/11 where he interviewed "dozens" of witnesses who saw the plane hit. He smelled the burning jet fuel. He says he's flown Boeing 757, 767, and 777 flight simulators, and he can safely assure us "the maneuvers made by the hijackers on September 11 were relatively simple course corrections that are not that difficult in planes equipped with modern navigational computers." Well, I've never flown a simulator, but I once knew a guy who practiced his riding skills on a mechanical bull, but when he hit the rodeo circuit, he got his ass stomped in two seconds flat.

According to a site dedicated solely to Pentagon research, Hani Hanjour, the pilot of Flight 77, was refused the rental of a Cessna 172 just weeks prior to 9/11 because of his sadly lacking maneuvering skills. But after reading a 757 manual on the way to the airport, Hanjour was able to cruise over the unsecured White House, enter Reagan International airspace while performing a 270-degree turn with a 7,000-foot drop in altitude in 2.5 minutes with military precision -- then hit five 25-foot, 293-pound steel lamp poles, a fence, a 39,500-pound generator trailer, two cable spools, two single-wide mobile home construction trailers and a tree -- before slamming into the only wedge in the Pentagon under construction, leaving only a couple pieces of debris small enough to hold in your hands. He left "no tail, no wings, no engines, no horizontal stablizer, no passenger seats, no luggage and no aircraft cargo," and left the lawn in front of the Pentagon untouched.

But it's Thompson's vicious "kill the messenger" ad hominem attack on actor Charlie Sheen for questioning the official scenario that is the most bewildering. Thompson wants to know -- Is Sheen the best we wild-eyed conspiracy nut jobs can do? Is Sheen our new poster child? Thompson sneered at conspiracy freaks for "pinning their credibility on a known drug user, admitted purchaser of the services of prostitutes and an intellectually-challenged misfit who couldn't even graduate from high school..."

Somebody should remind Thompson that Sheen, however randy and hot-headed he may be, is also a concerned American citizen, and he has a dog in this hunt. Sheen has an inherent right -- a duty -- to question his government. He wants to know, as we all do, how 19 amateurs armed with box cutters could take over four commercial airliners and fly around over New York City and Washington DC until they finally hit three of their targets.



Sheen wants to know how the official story of fuel running down elevator shafts could cause the inferno it would take to bring down the world's two tallest and most solidly built buildings. He wants to know about the early eyewitness accounts from the media and bystanders about "huge explosions" in the bowels of the WTC -- and why WTC landlord Larry Silverstein openly admitted the decision to "pull" building 7 before it toppled in 6.6 seconds into its own footprints.

But Thompson will not be moved. He said, "I have yet to get a report from a structural engineer or demolitions expert that support the theories of internal explosions and too many witnesses saw the planes. If an engineer or expert with credentials that could be verified came forward I might be willing to take another look at this but in the absence of such, I'll go with the conclusions of experts I trust."

If Thompson has viewed "Loose Change, 2nd Edition" or perused Brigham Young University Physics Professor Stephen E. Jones' critical paper, "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse"; if he has visited the many 9/11 research sites, and is still determined to cling to administration experts he trusts, so be it.

The hunt for the 9/11 truth will go on -- whether Thompson's dog is in it or not.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net. © 2005 Sheila Samples

To recap, Libby's alleged perjury occurred during his testimony to a grand jury investigating the blown cover of CIA clandestine officer Valerie Plame Wilson, bound up in a White House bid to neutralize criticism of the Iraq war. The Plame affair started as an effort to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whom the CIA had sent to Niger to look into charges that Iraq was buying uranium ore there. Wilson found nothing to substantiate the claim and subsequently became a critic of Bush's resort to war. His wife was outed in an attempt to undermine Wilson's charges.

Continued legal filings in the case now reveal Prosecutor Fitzgerald as a guardian of White House secrets and Scooter Libby plus his defense team as assiduously implicating President Bush. For those who questioned George Bush's modus operandi in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq and afterwards these are perhaps not unexpected developments. But the gradual emergence of the contents of the Libby grand jury testimony is important not only because it contradicts the president's public denials of the leaks, but also for potentially placing the president at the center of a smear campaign.

Prosecutor Fitzgerald's April 5 response to the Libby team's latest motion to compel discovery of a vast array of documents discloses that Vice President Dick Cheney told Libby that President Bush had "specifically" authorized officials in the summer of 2003 to reveal certain contents of the secret U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. There will be an argument over whether Bush or Cheney actually had that authority (which is vested in the Director of Central Intelligence by a law on the books since 1949) but that is not the concern here. Rather, the disclosure of this deliberate Bush leak-given to Judith Miller of The New York Times and others-provides new evidence that the White House regarded the top secret NIE not as an intelligence appreciation but as fodder for political warfare. In fact on July 12 Cheney ordered Libby to speak to the press about the NIE.

The new evidence also says something about Bush secrecy. This administration has moved on many levels to restrict public-and even official-access to information. Cutting off flows of data formerly routinely provided to Congress or the public, defenestrating access to the records of former presidents mandated by the Presidential Records Act, curbing the Freedom of Information Act, refusing to describe to Congress its domestic communications interception program and most recently reclassifying documents in the public domain for years. Suddenly we see President Bush, without a care, releasing secret records he felt would bolster his case.

Moreover, the way in which this was done should send shudders down the spine: according to the Fitzgerald filing, Scooter Libby told the grand jury that "he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials-including Cabinet level officials-were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson's trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003," evidently a reference to the materials assembled by CIA officer Robert Walpole regarding Iraq's weapons programs and used for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's speech to the United Nations Security Council a couple of weeks later. If Libby's testimony is accurate, documents were to be simultaneously deemed secret and declassified, depending upon White House whim, convenience, or legal liability.

This is the same administration that is seeking to prosecute those who leaked information considered less favorable to its cause, such as the fact of the National Security Agency's dubious domestic spying program or the existence of the CIA's secret prison network. Under the interpretation of the Espionage Act the Bush Justice Department is using to prosecute two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, even reporters who gain access to such information, media that inform the public of it, or persons who merely possess the information are currently at risk, although the statute appears to criminalize only the act of leaking. Indeed, the law makes it necessary for the NIE data not to be classified in order for Libby to legally leak it. There may be an argument here that under the Bush interpretation of the statute the act of declassification to abet a leak could amount to a criminal conspiracy, in this case by President George Bush himself.

Those who contend that there was no Bush effort to make political use of intelligence in the months leading up to the war will now have an even harder time of it. At various points during those months there were similarly orchestrated leaks-of claims about aluminum tubes supposedly being used in an Iraqi nuclear weapons program and of alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to name just two. And there were carefully prepared occasions where Bush officials took advantage of those leaks to advance the cause of war. The events of July 2003 demonstrate that this was a standard administration tactic, not an aberration. Given the circumstances, the need for a "Phase II" investigation of the political use of intelligence for the Iraq war becomes inescapable.

The most important aspect of the new evidence is that it locates the center of the effort to discredit Ambassador Wilson, and of the actions taken to further that aim, squarely within the Oval Office. If that project rose to the level of a criminal conspiracy, or if anything done to further that goal was in fact illegal, it is George W. Bush who must be called to account. That is a very troubling development indeed. The censure motion introduced by Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold may turn out to be merely the opening salvo in a very intense political battle.

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).

This is the first time the special counsel has acknowledged that White House officials
are alleged to have engaged in a coordinated effort to undercut the former
ambassador's credibility by disseminating classified intelligence information
that would have contradicted Wilson's public statements."

So there it is. We have Bush authorizing the disclosure
of classified information, and we have that disclosure taking place for no
other reason than to discredit an administration critic. Bush is often fond
of defending his wildly inappropriate and often illegal activities by claiming
that he has every right to do whatever he wants because America is "at
war."

Never mind that no war has actually been declared.
If we take his premise that we are in fact at war, than the disclosure of classified
information for political gain must be defined simply and directly.

It is treason.

Representative Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the
House Intelligence Committee, made the following statement on Thursday. "Leaking
classified information to the press when you want to get your side out or silence
your critics is not appropriate. The reason we classify things is to protect
our sources - those who risk their lives to give us secrets. Who knows how
many sources were burned by giving Libby this 'license to leak?' If I had leaked
the information, I'd be in jail. Why should the President be above the law?"

 "The President has the legal authority to declassify
information," continued Harman, "but there are normal channels for
doing so. Telling an aide to leak classified information to the New York Times
is not a normal channel. A normal declassification procedure would involve
going back to the originating agency, such as the CIA, and then putting out
a public, declassified version of the document. I am stunned that the President
won't tell the full the Intelligence Committee about the NSA program because
he's allegedly concerned about leaks, when it turns out that he is the Leaker-in-Chief."

We can even take this a step further. The name of
covert CIA operative Valerie Plame was all over the classified National Intelligence
Estimate Bush ordered to be leaked. The pertinent text of the 1947 National
Security Act reads as follows:

SEC. 601. (50 U.S.C. 421) (a) Whoever, having or having had authorized
access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally
discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not
authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information
disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking
affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship
to the United States, shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or
imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.



(b) Whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified information,
learns the identity of a covert agent and intentionally discloses any information
identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified
information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert
agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal
such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be
fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned not more than five
years, or both.



(c) Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify
and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would
impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States,
discloses any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent to
any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that
the information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the United
States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such individual's classified
intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title
18, United States Code, or imprisoned not more than three years or both.

George W. Bush and his people lied with their bare
faces hanging out about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

They lied about connections between al Qaeda and the
Iraqi government, lied about Iraqi connections to September 11, and further
lied about the threat to America posed by Iraq.

They made a decision to invade that had nothing to
do with those weapons, and even conspired with their British counterparts to
goad Hussein into a war regardless of whether the weapons were there or not.

They used September 11 against the American people
to frighten them into a fearfully subservient acceptance of the invasion.

They bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act in order to spy illegally on thousands of American citizens.

They leaked classified intelligence information in
order to destroy a political foe, and in the process annihilated an intelligence
network run by Valerie Plame. That network, it should be noted, was dedicated
to tracking any person, nation or group that would deliver weapons of mass
destruction to terrorists.

Every time they broke the law, their cronies in Congress
manipulated those laws to make the actions taken legal.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead. Tens
of thousands more have been maimed. Millions live with the wretched deprivations
caused by this war. The new Shia-dominated government wants no part of American
involvement in this, and their so-called armed forces are in truth death squads
masquerading as police and soldiers.

2,345 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq,
with 17 of those deaths coming in the first six days of April alone. Tens of
thousands more have been grievously wounded; nearly two thirds of all injuries
suffered by American soldiers in Iraq are brain injuries, and amount to permanent
debilitation.

We will be generations digging out from under the
vomitous refuse left behind by this administration. From this day forward,
any politician who claims that censure is not appropriate and impeachment is
a waste of time should have their head examined by a whole team of medical
experts. Bush and his people have committed treason, and did so for the lowest
of reasons: personal gain and political protection.

"The dead cannot cry out for justice," said
Lois McMaster Bujold. "It is a duty of the living to do so for them." So
very many have died at the hands of this administration, its lies, and its
crimes. If there is to be no reckoning for this, even after all this time,
there will never again be a person in America who can speak of justice
while keeping a straight face.