It cited reports that said he organised an attempt to shoot down a US military helicopter in May this year.

"After a few months he fled Baghdad due to Coalition Forces closing in on him," the statement said.

The military said the capture would lead them closer to Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who took over as leader of al-Qaida in Iraq after his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a US air strike in June.

Mouwafak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi government's national security adviser, said this month that 60% of al-Qaida in Iraq's leadership has now been captured or killed.

Meanwhile, two suicide car bombers killed at least 12 people in separate attacks across the Iraqi capital, police said.

A suicide car bomber slammed into a police checkpoint in Baghdad's Jadriyah district, killing 11 people and injuring 24, police said. The casualties included four killed policemen and six injured officers.

Hours later, police kept the neighbourhood cordoned off and morning commuters passed by the wreckage on foot.

Several prominent Iraqi politicians, including President Jalal Talabbani, reside in Jadriyah. The area is also home to Baghdad University.

One civilian was killed and four hurt when another suicide car bomb detonated near Kasra in north-eastern Baghdad, police said. The explosion also set fire to six parked cars, they said.

At least half a dozen other explosions were heard earlier in the day, some in the area of the Green Zone, where Iraq's parliament and the US and British embassies are based. The US military said it had no information on the blasts.

In other violence, gunmen kidnapped six Sunni men at a fake checkpoint 15 miles south of Baghdad at dawn, police said. The men were intercepted as they drove north towards the capital, their cars loaded with fruit and vegetables to sell there.

Police also said a Palestinian teacher was killed in a drive-by shooting in eastern Baghdad.

Also during the day, Iraqi forces assumed security responsibilities in the relatively peaceful province of Najaf, marking the first such handover by US troops as Washington struggles to get Iraq's fragile government to stand on its own.

US forces will remain on standby in case the security situation deteriorates.

Najaf was the third of Iraq's 18 provinces to come under local control. British troops handed over the southern Muthana province in July, and the Italian military transferred Dhi Qar province in September.

He noted that the United States was trying to retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, but was negotiating with the wrong parties, indicating that his group is the right one with which Washington should talk.

"I want to tell the Republicans and the Democrats together ... you are trying to negotiate with some parties to secure your withdrawal, but these parties won't find you an exit," Zawahri said.

In another section aired by the channel earlier in the day, theal-Qaida number two said that only Jihad (holy war) can bring about the liberation of the occupied Palestinian territories and any other way will only lead to loss and defeat.

Zawahri said Palestinian elections would not free Palestinian land and would deal a blow to holy war against Israeli occupation.

"Those trying to liberate the land of Islam through elections based on secular constitutions ... will not liberate a grain of sand of Palestine," he added.

Calling Abbas as "America's man in Palestine", he warned that if the Palestinians accepted Abbas as their president, it would be" the end of holy war."

The new message of Zawahri came two days after an Islamic militant website announced on Monday that Osama bin Laden's second-in-command would soon release a new message.

The Egyptian-born Zawahiri is regarded as the ideological powerhouse behind the Al Qaeda terror group and carries a $25-million US bounty for information leading to his arrest or death.

It was not clear when the latest videotape aired by the Qatar-based news channel was recorded. But it referred to recent developments, including the failed talks on forming a national unity government between the ruling Islamist movement Hamas and the Fatah faction of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The videotape, whose authenticity could not be independently confirmed, was released against the backdrop of escalating factional fighting in the Palestinian territories following a call by Abbas for early elections.

Abbas said in an address Saturday that new elections were the only way to end an increasingly deadly power struggle between Fatah and Hamas.

But Zawahiri also slammed Hamas, without naming it, for recognizing Abbas and running in elections.

Hamas - taking part in elections for the first time in January - scored a shock victory over Fatah and took power in March, but its government is boycotted by Israel and the West.

"Accepting the legitimacy of Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the national authority, America's man in Palestine, and mandating the PLO which recognizes Israel to negotiate with Israel is an abyss which will ultimately lead to eliminating the jihad and recognizing Israel," Zawahiri said.

Flanked by an automatic rifle, Zawahiri chided "some brothers in Palestine" who had been dragged into "elections on the basis of a secular constitution" because they had overlooked the realities of "the conflict between infidelity and Islam."

Participation in the polls in turn led to "respecting international [UN] resolutions," which was followed by accepting to form a government of national unity, and later by attempts to "get them [Hamas] out of government," he said.

"How come they did not demand an Islamic constitution for Palestine before entering any elections? Are they not an Islamic movement?" Zawahiri asked.

He said that it was "the duty of every Muslim" to recover Muslim land. "Hence, as Muslims, we cannot give up one inch of Palestine to Israel - there's no difference between 1948-Palestine and 1967-Palestine as far as we are concerned. All of it is Palestine and it all belongs to Muslims," he said.

"All international resolutions which ate up parts of it and recognized the existence of Israel ... are worthless" from an Islamic perspective and should be fought, Zawahiri said.

The turbaned Zawahiri frequently speaks for Al Qaeda in video or audiotapes.

In a video in late September, he lashed out at both Pope Benedict XVI and US President George W. Bush. In a previous video marking the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Zawahiri warned that the Gulf and Israel would be the next targets of Al Qaeda.

The Pentagon's Chemical and Biological Defense Program was revised in 2003 to implement those directives, endorsing "first-use" strike of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) in war, says Boyle, who teaches at the University of Illinois, Champaign.

Terming the action "the proverbial smoking gun," Boyle said the mission of the controversial CBW program "has been altered to permit development of offensive capability in chemical and biological weapons!"

The same directives, Boyle writes in his book Biowarfare and Terrorism, "unconstitutionally usurp and nullify the right and the power of the United States Congress to declare war in gross and blatant violation of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution."

For fiscal years 2001-04, the Federal government funded $14.5 billion "for ostensibly 'civilian' biowarfare-related work alone," a "truly staggering" sum, Boyle wrote. Another $5.6 billion was voted for "the deceptively-named 'Project BioShield,'" under which Homeland Security is stockpiling vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox, and other bioterror agents, Boyle wrote. Protection of the civilian population is, he said, "one of the fundamental requirements for effectively waging biowarfare."

The Washington Post reported December 12 both houses of Congress this month passed legislation "considered by many to be an effort to salvage the two-year-old Project BioShield, which has been marked by delays and operational problems." When President Bush signs it, the law will allocate $1 billion more over three years for new research "to pump more money into the private sector sooner."

"The enormous amounts of money" purportedly dedicated to "civilian defense" that is now "dramatically and increasingly" being spent, Boyle writes, "betrays this administration's effort to be able to embark on offensive campaigns using biowarfare."

Boyle said Federal spending has co-opted and diverted the US biotech industry to biowarfare, pouring huge sums into university and private sector laboratories. According to Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, over 300 scientific institutions and 12,000 individuals today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare and terrorism. At the same time, Ebright found, the number of grants by the National Institute of Health to research infectious diseases with biowarfare potential has shot up from 33 in the 1995 to 2000 period to 497.

Academic biowarfare participation involving the abuse of DNA genetic engineering since the late 1980s has become "patently obvious," Boyle said. "American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agendas, researchers, institutes, and laboratories to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the Pentagon and the CIA."

He continued, "These despicable death-scientists were arming the Pentagon with the component units necessary to produce a massive array of DNA genetically engineered biological weapons."

In a forward to Boyle's book, Jonathan King, a professor of molecular biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote "the growing bioterror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population" and "threatens international relations among nations." King said that while such programs "are always called defensive," in fact, "with biological weapons, defensive, and offensive programs overlap almost completely."

The US is "in breach" of the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and US domestic criminal law, Boyle writes. In February 2003, for example, the US granted itself a patent on an illegal long-range biological weapons grenade.

Boyle said other countries grasp the military implications of US germ warfare actions and will respond in kind. "The world will soon witness a de facto biological arms race among the major biotech states under the guise of 'defense,' and despite the requirements of the Biological Warfare Convention."

"The massive proliferation of biowarfare technology, facilities, as well as trained scientists and technicians all over the United States courtesy of the neocon Bush Jr. administration will render a catastrophic biowarfare or bioterrorist incident or accident a statistical certainty," Boyle warned.

Instead of finding a solution to this daily mass killing, Bush declared his support to the Iraqi sectarian government who is in charge of all these victims and insisted on keeping Malki, Ruba'i and other ulcers to accomplish their mission and genocide all the Iraqis except their loyalists and supporters.

In a funeral set up for one of the Iraqi retired officers who had been kidnapped in front of one of the banks in Baghdad while he went there to collect some money for his family, and after few days his body found at the forensic depratment in Baghdad and by miracle brought home, a group of women in the same neighbourhood came to console his Sunni wife and family but in fact each one of them sat to cry endlessly her own killed people.

The first woman who arrived when she heard the news, is a shiite woman whom her eldest son died on Al-A'ima bridge last year while he was heading to Kadimiyia shrine, he fell on one of the barriers and people stepped on his body, in the evening his body found in one of the hospitals in Baghdad left on the ground as there was no space to keep him in the fridge.

Her eldest borther killed last May after being kicked out of his neighbourhood, she sat in front of the wife to cry her neighbour and her dear son and brother.

After few minutes, another Shiite neighbour came, her brother was killed in a bombing of a Husseini in Khanaqien in Nov,last year, while he was preparying for his wedding, a suicide bomber blew up himself inside the Husseini where the brotehr was praying with other people there.

Soon, a Sunni woman came to join her neighbours and to cry her young son whom within three months dignoised with lempho cancer though he was a sport guy, but with the luck of good doctors and medications, the guy died at home within three months to leave only his pictures at home which the mother speak with them most of the time.

A christain woman came to the funeral to cry her two nephews who were killed in the bombing of one of the most popular resturant in Abu Nua's street last year while they were having breakfast there and some other policemen.

Another Sunni woman showed up whom her son was killed by daeth squads after being kidnapped just because his name is "Omer".

A shiite neighbour turned up whom her son in Law killed by an IED last year while Mahdi army was clashing with the Americans in Sader city with his friend to leave her daughter with two kids homeless, later on, she brought her daughter to live with the family.

Another Sunni woman came, her son who is a teacher in a High school was assassinated at the main gate of the school for reasons til now they could not figure out.

Another and Another and Another, I can assure you that all the people who came to the funeral have lost a dear person and they are in fear in losing more and do not know what to do and what is their crime?

All of them were exchanging terrible stories about killing, kidnapping, deportation, fear of sending their kids to schools and universities, luck of work and money to earn their living, luck of fuels and how the prices are very high and and......

In western Baghdad, a car bomb killed two people and wounded two others.

Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross called on kidnappers to release "unharmed, immediately and unconditionally" the remaining hostages taken from a Red Crescent office in Baghdad Sunday.

Fourteen of the 30 men taken have been freed. The Red Crescent said it will not resume its aid work in Baghdad until all are released.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with about 15 U.S. soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division in Baghdad on Thursday to gauge whether to send more troops to Iraq. (Watch Gates seek an unfiltered view of U.S. troops, Iraqis )

Several soldiers said extra forces would help, but military commanders have expressed concerns that a troop increase would slow down Iraqis' efforts to take control of their country. (Full story)

Gates has said the ultimate decision hinges on the "basic questions about the surge: What is the mission, what is the purpose, can we do it, how big can we go?"

Gates met with Gens. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, and George Casey, the top general in Iraq, on Wednesday.

He was scheduled to meet Thursday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Gates has been accompanied by Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Full story)

At a news conference Wednesday in Washington, President Bush said that he has not yet decided whether to send more troops to Iraq, and that he was listening to commanders, to people in and out of government, and to members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group "about coming up with a strategy that helps achieve our objective." (Full story)

While leaving the "surge" question open, the president said he thought the overall size of the Army and Marine Corps should be increased.

A shuffle of top American generals in Iraq is likely to accompany the shift in U.S. policy that Bush is considering, the AP reported. (Full story)

Soldier, Marine killed

A U.S. soldier and Marine "died from wounds sustained due to enemy action" during operations in Iraq's volatile Anbar province, the U.S. military announced on Thursday.

The Marine, assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, died Thursday, and the U.S. soldier, assigned to Regimental Combat Team 7, died Tuesday, the military said.

Roadside bombs killed two U.S. soldiers in and around Baghdad on Wednesday, the military said.

The deaths bring the number of U.S. service members killed since the start of the Iraq war to to 2,951. In the month of December so far, 69 U.S. troops have been killed.

Seven American civilian contractors of the military also have died in the conflict.

Dozens of bodies found around Baghdad

Police discovered 76 bullet-riddled bodies around the capital Wednesday, with one of them identified as an Iraqi army officer, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.

Finding corpses dumped around the capital has become a grim routine since the February bombing of Al-Askariya Mosque, the revered Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Wednesday's number is one of the highest daily counts since the first two weeks after the mosque bombing, the official said.

A report compiled by the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists details the murders of 55 journalists killed around the world during the course of their work this year.

The figure has risen from 2005, when the CPJ found that 47 journalists were killed. A further 27 deaths are being investigated by the group, which does not include accidental deaths in its findings.

Journalists have been targeted for their work revealing official corruption and local crime, for covering sensitive political issues and, in some cases, simply because they are journalists.

In Iraq, the worst attack on the press since the US invasion in March 2003 was the execution of 11 people by masked gunmen at the al-Shaabiya satellite TV channel in eastern Baghdad on October 12.

Five of those killed were journalists including the station's chairman, deputy general manager, two presenters and a video mixer. Four security staff also died, but the news chief and programme manager survived despite multiple gunshot wounds.

In Iraq, journalists are often targeted for working at organisations affiliated to the Iraqi government or sponsored by the US, such as the main state TV station al-Iraqiya.

In several cases, journalists were kidnapped or shot by men in police uniforms reportedly using weapons commonly used by the police, such as machine guns mounted on the back of pick-up trucks.

As a correspondent for Egyptian satellite channel Al-Baghdadia, So'oud Muzahim al-Shoumari was reported to have had confrontations with Iraqi police about extra-judicial killings and had also interviewed authorities about human rights violations.

Al-Shoumari was a Sunni Muslim and the channel's news director speculated that he was kidnapped by members of the Iraqi police force, which is predominantly Shia.

The only two non-Iraqi journalists killed in the country this year were James Brolan and Paul Douglas, cameraman and soundman for American network CBS. Both were killed by a car bomb in Baghdad while embedded with US troops.

CPJ executive director Joel Simon said that the number of deaths in Iraq reflected the deterioration in the status of journalists as neutral observers.

"When this conflict began more than three and half years ago, most journalists died in combat-related incidents. Now, insurgents routinely target journalists for perceived affiliations - political, sectarian, or western," he added.

In Mexico, seven journalists were murdered, including freelance Indymedia cameraman Brad Wills in October. He was shot while covering a demonstration in Oaxaca.

Crime reporter Perea Quintanilla, political journalist Adolfo Sanchez Guzman and crime reporter Roberto Marcos Garcia were also among those murdered in Mexico.

The murder of Russian political journalist Anna Politkovskaya in October was widely condemned. Politkovskaya was renowned for her coverage of the conflict in Chechnya, particularly her reports from a Moscow theatre when Chechen rebels took several hundred hostages.

Politkovskaya had already been jailed, exiled, poisoned and threatened by Russian authorities during her career, according to the CPJ. She was found dead from bullet wounds in her Moscow apartment.

Former Channel 4 contributor Martin Adler was also killed, while covering a demonstration in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in June. Adler was shot in the back while filming US and Ethiopian flags being burned, and was reportedly standing in the crowd rather than with the protection of guards.

Adler had won several prizes, including the 2004 Rory Peck award, for his report on abuse by US troops in Iraq.

Incoming Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D, NV), who owes his position to the popular revolt in November against the war, has said he can "go along" with a surge, but only for two to three months and only as part of a broader strategy to bring combat forces home by early 2008. Meanwhile, says Reid, Democrats will "give the military anything they want."

Is it conceivable that Reid doesn't know that this is about the next two years-not months? Former Army vice chief of staff Gen. Jack Keane, one of the anointed retired generals who have Bush's ear, is urging him to send 30,000 to 40,000 more troops and has already dismissed the possibility of a time-frame shorter than one and a half years. Egged on by "full-speed-ahead" Cheney, Bush is determined that the war not be lost while he is president. But events are fast overtaking White House preferences and moving toward denouement well before two more years are up.

Perhaps it was not quite the way he meant it, but Bush has gotten one thing right; there will indeed be no "graceful exit." And that goes in spades, if he sends still more troops to the quagmire.

Oxymoron

Let's send more troops to Iraq so we can pull our troops out of Iraq. A generation from now, our grandchildren will have difficulty writing history papers on this oxymoronic debate on how to surge/withdraw our troops into/from the quagmire in Iraq. Historians will have just as much trouble, especially those given to Tolstoy's theory that history is ruled by an inexorable determinism in which the free choice of major historical figures plays a minimal role. Tolstoy died before events put into perspective the legacy of Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat [Decider] Of All The Russias, and his Vice President/éminence grise, Rasputin.

Judging from President Bush's behavior in recent weeks, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he may be no more stable than Nicholas II. And if retired Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's top aide at the State Department, is right in saying that Bush still has the "vice president whispering in his ear every moment," we have an unhappy but apt historical analogy.

But, you protest, the generals most intimately involved in Iraq, John Abizaid and George Casey, and Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker have made no secret of their strong reservations about sending large numbers of additional troops. And, if the Washington Post is to be believed, so have the Joint Chiefs. That may be correct; it is also irrelevant. As was the case in the Vietnam War, our top generals have long since morphed into careerists and politicians. Sadly, they have become accustomed to looking up for the next reward-and not down at the troops who bear the brunt of their acquiescence in political/military decisions that make no sense.

But what about Senators Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy-and Colin Powell, and even Donald Rumsfeld, all of whom have spoken out in recent days against a sizable surge in troop strength in Iraq? Not a problem. The Cheney/Bush team is the sole "decider."

This does not mean that Defense Secretary Robert Gates should renege on his promise to visit the troops in Iraq and hear the generals out. It does mean that by the time he gets there, the generals probably will already be "with the program," as they say. Just as they "never asked for more troops" at earlier stages of the war, they are likely to be instant devotees of a surge, once they smell the breezes coming from the White House. As for Gates, whatever input he has will almost certainly be dwarfed by Cheney's. And taking issue with "deciders" has never been Gates' strong suit.

Stalingrad on the Tigris

Whether Robert Gates realizes it or not (but the generals should), once an "all or nothing" offensive like the "surge" contemplated has begun, there is no turning back. It will be "victory" over the insurgents and the Shia militias or palpable defeat, recognizable by all in Iraq and across the world.

Any conceivable surge would not turn the tide-would not even slow it. We should have learned that last summer when the dispatch of seven thousand U.S. troops to reinforce Baghdad brought a fierce "counter-surge"-and the highest number of casualties since the Pentagon began issuing quarterly reports in 2005. Those who believe still more troops will bring "victory" are living in a dangerous dream world and need to wake up.

A major buildup would commit the US Army and Marine Corps to decisive combat in which there would be no more strategic reserves to be sent to the front. As Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway pointed out on Monday, "If you commit your reserve for something other than a decisive win, or to stave off defeat, then you have essentially shot your bolt."

I would be a matter of win, or die in the attempt. In that situation, everyone in uniform on the ground would commit every ounce of their being to achieving "victory," and few measures would be shrunk from.

Analogies come to mind: Stalingrad, the Bulge, Dien Bien Phu, the Battle of Algiers. It would be total war with the likelihood of all the excesses and mass casualties that come with total war. To take up such a strategy and force our armed forces into it would be nothing short of immoral, in view of predictable troop losses and the huge number of Iraqis who would meet violent injury and death. And for what? If adopted, the surge strategy will turn out to be something we will spend a generation living down.

Sen. Gordon Smith (R, OR) spoke for many of us last Thursday on the Senate floor:

"I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore."

Yesterday, when George Stephanopoulos asked Smith what he meant by "criminal," he replied:

"I said it. You can use any adjective you want, George. But I have long believed in a military context, when you do the same thing over and over again, without a clear strategy for victory, at the expense of your young people in arms, that is dereliction. That is deeply immoral."

W. Patrick Lang is a retired Army colonel who served with Special Forces in Vietnam, as a professor at West Point, and as Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East. Ray McGovern was also an Army infantry/intelligence officer before his 27-year career as a CIA analyst. Both are with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

An earlier version of this article appeared on TomPaine.com.

Words may be our most civil weapons of change, when they connect to actions of sacrifice, or good will, but they have no grace or power without bold clarity. So, if you'll bear with me, borrowing a line from Bob Dylan, "Let us not talk falsely now--the hour is getting late."

Global warming

Massive pollution

Non-stop U.S. war in Iraq

Attacks on civil liberties under the banner of war on terror

Military spending

You and I, U.S. taxpayers, spend 1 1/2 billion dollars on an Iraq-war-'focused' military everyday, while social needs cry out.

Health care

Education

Public transit

Environmental protections

Affordable housing

Job training

Public investment

And, levy building.

We depend largely for information on these issues from media industries, driven by the bottom line to such an extent that the public interest becomes uninteresting.

And should we speak truth, we stand against government efforts to intimidate or legislate in the service of censorship. Whether under the guise of a Patriot Act or any other benevolent-sounding rationale for the age-old game of shutting down dissent by discouraging independent thinking and preventing progressive social change.

The most effective forms of de facto censorship are pre-emptive. Systemically, we are encouraged to keep our heads down, out of the line of fire--to avoid the danger, god forbid, that someone in the White House, on Capitol Hill, or a media blow-hard might take a shot at us.

But, as a practical matter, most of the limits on creative expression and other forms of free speech come from self-censorship, where the mechanism of corporate clout offers carrots and brandishes sticks. We avoid a conflict before the conflict materializes. We reach for the carrots and stay out of range of sticks.

Decades ago, Fred Friendly called it a "positive veto"--corporations putting big money behind shows that they want to establish and perpetuate. Whether in journalism or drama, creative efforts that don't gain a financial "positive veto" are dismissible, then dismissed. We may not call that "censorship." But whatever we call it, the effects of a "positive veto" system are severe. They impose practical limits on efforts to bring the most important realities to public attention sooner rather than later...

We're beginning to see more revealing images of this war. But it's later now, isn't it? What we have to pay attention to are the results of these "practical limits." One, is that wars become much easier to launch than to halt.

I've got a feeling about how we can begin to change this process and I want to pass it by you. Children grow up in our country -- many by the way, under conditions of extreme poverty -- and are told from a very early age "You will be accountable!" "With freedom, comes responsibility!" And so the lecture goes...Democratic and Republican alike. Lie-cheat-steal, and there will be consequences! Theft will be punished. Actions that cause the deaths of others will be severely punished. The message, from leaders in Washington, news media, mom, dad, and church is clear. Criminals MUST be held accountable.

Now, there's been a lot of talk lately on Capitol Hill about how impeachment should be "off the table." We're told that it's time to look ahead--not back...

Can you imagine how far that argument would go for the defense at an arraignment on charges of grand larceny, or large-scale distribution of methamphetamines? How about the arranging of a contract killing on a pregnant mother? "Indictment should be off the table." Or "Let's look forward, not backward." Or "We can't afford another failed defendant."

Our country has a legal system, not of men and women, but of laws. Why then are we so willing to put inconvenient provisions of the U.S. constitution and federal law "off the table?" Our greatest concern right now should be what to put ON the table. Unless we're going to have one set of laws for the powerful and another set for those who can't afford fancy lawyers, then truth matters to everyone. And accountability is a matter of human and legal principle. If we're going to continue wagging our fingers at the disadvantaged transgressors, then I suggest we be consistent. If truth and accountability can be stretched into sham concepts, we may as well open the gates of all our jails and prisons, where, by the way, there are more people behind bars than any other country in the world. One in every 32 American adults is behind bars, on probation, or on parole as we stand here tonight.

Which is to say that, globally, the United States is number one at demanding accountability and backing up that demand with imprisonment. But, when it comes to our president, vice president, secretary of state, former secretary of defense...this insistence on accountability vanishes. All of a sudden, what's past is prologue. And we're just "forward-looking." But some people can't just look forward. Men and women stationed in Iraq at this moment, under orders of a Commander-in-Chief so sufficiently practiced in the art of deception, that he got vast numbers of American journalists and the most esteemed media outlets of this country, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and PBS to eagerly serve his agenda-building for war. And the process also induced vast numbers of artists and performers (probably even some in this room tonight) to keep quiet and facilitate the push for an invasion in Iraq.

I'm sure many people who I met in Baghdad, both in my trips prior to and during the occupation, now similarly cannot just look forward. With lives so entirely shattered by a violence of occupation--an ongoing U.S. war effort and the civil war that it has catalyzed. All on the back of a crumbled infrastructure, following eleven years of devastating U.N. sanctions.

And, where is the accountability on behalf of the American dead and wounded, their families, their friends, and the people of the United States who have seen their country become a world pariah. These events have been enabled by people named Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice, as they continue to perpetuate a massive fraud on American democracy and decency.

On January 11, 2003, I made an appearance on Larry King's show following my first trip to Iraq. I suggested that every American mother and father sit down with a scrap of paper and pencil and scribble the following words: Dear Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so -- We regret to inform you that your son or daughter so-and-so, was killed in action in Iraq. I then asked that those mothers and fathers complete that letter in whatever way might comfort them should they receive it. When one considers what a bewildered continuation of those words a parent might attempt to write today, it seems inconceivable that this country could've ever bought into this war. Who were those mothers and fathers believing in?! We know it's not the administration alone, but a culture at large, cloaking itself in self-righteousness, religion, and adolescent hero-dreaming machismo. Would they have believed Rush Limbaugh if they'd known he was high as a kite on OxyContin? Would they have believed the factually impaired Bill O'Reilly if they knew he was massaging his rectum with a loofah while telephonically harassing a staffer? Hannity, had they known he was simply a whore to the cause of his pimps--Murdoch and Ailes? Or the little bow-tie putz, if they knew all he was seeking was a good laugh from Jon Stewart? Maybe our countrymen and women were listening to Ted Haggert while he was whiffing meth and boning a muscle-headed gigolo? Or Mark Foley seeking junior weenis? Joe Lieberman, sitting Shiva? And Toby Keith, singing about how big his boots are?

"Oh, there goes Sean...he had to go and name-call. They say he can't help himself." Or, did I name-call? Maybe I just quickly summed up 7 or 8 little truths. Oh, no, you're right--I name-called. I said, "putz". I take it back. Or, do I? Did I say "whore?" Pimp? These are questions. But, the real and great questions of conscience and accountability would not loom so ominously -- unanswered or evaded at such tremendous cost -- without our day-to-day failure to insist on genuine accountability. Of course we'd prefer some easy ways to get there. But no easy ways exist. Not a new Congress. Not Barack Obama. And, not John McCain. His courage in North Vietnamese prison makes him a heroic man. His voting record in Congress makes him a damaging public servant. We have gotta stand the fuck up and show the world how powerful are the people in a democracy. That's how we regain our position of example, rather than pariah, to the world at large. And that is how we can begin to put up our chins and allow pride and unification to raise our own quality of life and security.

They tell us we lost 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Is that enough? We're about to match it. We're within weeks, if not less, of killing 3,000 Americans in Iraq. I ask Speaker Pelosi, can we put impeachment on the table then? Without former FEMA chief Mike Brown being held accountable, post Katrina (scapegoat though he may have been) we'd have had the same chaos and neglect when Rita hit Houston. Think about it. And, the same people who trumpet deterrence as a justification for punishment when we speak of "crime and punishment," will boast their positive thinking when dismissing the deterrent qualities of an impeachment proceeding.

What is impeachment? It's not a Democratic versus Republican event. Not if used responsibly. If the House of Representatives votes to impeach this president, is he thrown out of office? No, he is not thrown out of office. That is not what impeachment is. Impeachment is the opportunity to proceed with accountability and give our elected senators, democratic and republican, the power to pursue a thorough investigation. The power to put the truth on the table. Mothers and fathers are losing their kids to horrifying deaths in this war every single day. Horrible deaths. Horrible maimings. Were crimes committed in enlisting the support of our country in this decision to go to war? For the moment we're living the most spineless of scenarios; where the hawks abused impeachment eight years ago, now, the rest of us politely refuse to use it today. Let's give the whistle-blowers cover, let's get the subpoenas out there, and then, one by one, put this administration under oath. And then, if the crimes of "Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" are proven, do as Article 2, Section 4 of the United States Constitution provides, and remove "the President, Vice President and...civil officers of the United States" from office. If the Justice Department then sees fit to bunk them up with Jeff Skilling, so be it.

So...look, if we attempt to impeach for lying about a blowjob, yet accept these almost certain abuses without challenge, we become a cum-stain on the flag we wave. You know, I was listening to Frank Rich this morning, speaking on a book tour. He said he thought impeachment proceedings would amount to a "decadent" sidetrack, while our soldiers were still being killed. I admire Frank Rich. And of course he would be right if impeachment is all we do. But we're Americans. We can do two things at the same time. Yes, let's move forward and swiftly get out of this war in Iraq AND impeach these bastards.

Christopher Reeve promised to get out of that chair. Well, I don't know about you, but it feels like he's up now and I wouldn't be standing here if it weren't on his shoulders. Let it be for something.

Georgie, there's a crowd downstairs.

Thank you and good night.

Two members of the ISG were responsible for George Bush's becoming president. Baker had manoeuvred through the thicket of the 2000 Florida contest, finally bringing Bush v Gore before the supreme court, where Sandra Day O'Connor was the deciding vote. (Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker reported that she had complained before hearing the case that she wanted to retire but did not want a Democrat to appoint her replacement.) Through the Iraq Study Group, Baker and O'Connor were attempting to salvage what they had made possible in Bush v Gore. Upon Bush's receipt of the report, a White House spokesman told the press,"Jim Baker can go back to his day job."

The day after the report was submitted, on December 8, Tony Blair appeared at the White House. He had testified before the Baker commission, and supported its main proposals, but now stood beside Bush as the president tossed them aside, talking instead of "victory."

"The president isn't standing alone," explained White House press secretary Tony Snow. Blair left to pursue a vain mission for Middle East peace, emphasising by his presence the US absence. His predetermined failure outlined the dimensions of the vacuum that only the US could fill. On December 18, Chatham House, the former Royal Institute of International Affairs, issued a report on Blair's foreign policy: "The root failure of Tony Blair's foreign policy has been its inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way despite the sacrifice - military, political and financial - that the United Kingdom has made."

The day before the Chatham House report was released, former secretary of state Colin Powell appeared on CBS News's Face the Nation to announce his support for the rejected Iraq Study Group and declare, "We are not winning, we are losing." He made plain his opposition to any new "surge" of troops in Baghdad, a tactic he said had already been tried and failed. Powell added that Bush had not explained "the mission" and that "we are a little less safe."

The Chatham House report describes Blair and Powell as partners before the invasion of Iraq who had concluded that Bush was set on war and decided to lend their voices to its defence. "The British role was therefore to provide diplomatic cover," the report states. Powell, of course, delivered the most important speech of his career justifying the invasion before the UN security council on February 5, 2003, which was later disclosed to have been a tissue of falsehoods and which he called a "blot" on his record. Since the time of the Reagan administration, when he was national security adviser, Powell had been aligned with Baker, Bush Sr and other foreign policy realists. But during his tenure as secretary of state he had suppressed his scepticism and obligations as a constitutional officer in favour of his loyalty as a "good soldier" to his commander in chief. Now, his reputation in tatters, he is trying to restore himself as a member of his original team and speaking for the unanimous opposition to Bush's new plans from the Joint Chiefs of Staff of which he was once chairman.

Bush's touted but unexplained "new way forward" (his version of the ISG's "the way forward") may be the first order of battle, complete with details of units, maps and timetables, ever posted on the website of a thinktank. "I will not be rushed," said Bush. But apparently he has already accepted the latest neoconservative programme, artfully titled with catchphrases appealing to his desperation - "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq" - and available for reading on the site of the American Enterprise Institute.

The author of this plan is Frederick W Kagan, a neoconservative at the AEI and the author of a new book, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy, replete with up-to-date neocon scorn of Bush as "simplistic", Donald Rumsfeld as "fatuous", and even erstwhile neocon icon Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defence and currently president of the World Bank, as "self-serving". Among the others listed as "participants" in drawing up the plan are various marginal and obscure figures including, notably, Danielle Pletka, a former aide to the senator Jesse Helms; Michael Rubin, an aide to the catastrophic Coalition Provisional Authority; and retired Major General Jack Keane, the former deputy army chief of staff.

This rump group of neocons is the battered remnant left of the phalanx that once conjured up grandiose visions of conquest and blowtorched ideological ground for Bush. Although neocons are still entrenched in the vice-president's Office and on the National Security Council, they mostly feel that their perfect ideas have been the victims of imperfect execution. Rather than accepting any responsibility for the ideas themselves, they blame Rumsfeld and Bush. Meyrav Wurmser, a research fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, whose husband, David Wurmser, is a Middle East adviser on Dick Cheney's staff, recently vented the neocons' despair to an Israeli news outlet: "This administration is in its twilight days. Everyone is now looking for work, looking to make money ... We all feel beaten after the past five years." But they are not so crushed that they cannot summon one last ragged Team B to provide a manifesto for a cornered president.

Choosing Victory is a prophetic document, a bugle call for an additional 30,000 troops to fight a decisive Napoleonic battle for Baghdad. (Its author, Kagan, has written a book on Napoleon.) It assumes that through this turning point the Shiite militias will melt away, the Sunni insurgents will suffer defeat and from the solid base of Baghdad security will radiate throughout the country. The plan also assumes that additional combat teams that actually take considerable time to assemble and train are instantly available for deployment. And it dismisses every diplomatic initiative proposed by the Iraq Study Group as dangerously softheaded. Foremost among the plan's assertions is that there is still a military solution in Iraq - "victory."

The strategic premise of the entire document rests on the incredulous disbelief that the US cannot enforce its will through force. "Victory is still an option in Iraq," it states. "America, a country of 300 million people with a GDP of $12 trillion, and more than 1 million soldiers and marines can regain control of Iraq, a state the size of California with a population of 25 million and a GDP under $100bn." By these gross metrics, France should never have lost in Algeria and Vietnam. The US experience in Vietnam goes unmentioned.

Bush's rejection of the Iraq Study Group report was presaged by a post-election speech delivered on December 4 by Karl Rove at the Churchill dinner held by Hillsdale College, a citadel of conservative crankdom. Here Rove conflated Winston Churchill and George Bush, Neville Chamberlain and James Baker, and the Battle of Britain and the Iraq war. "Why would we want to pursue a policy that our enemies want?" demanded Rove. "We will either win or we will lose ... Winston Churchill showed us the way. And like Great Britain under its greatest leader, we in the United States will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail."

A week later, on December 11, Bush met at the White House with Jack Keane, from the latest neocon Team B, and four other critics of the ISG. But even before, on December 8, in a meeting with senators, he compared himself to an embattled Harry Truman, unpopular as he forged the early policies of the cold war. When Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill, offered that Truman had created the Nato alliance, worked through the UN and conducted diplomacy with enemies, and that Bush could follow his example by endorsing the recommendations of the ISG, Bush rejected Durbin's fine-tuning of the historical analogy and replied that he was "the commander in chief."

The opening section of the ISG report is a lengthy analysis of the dire situation in Iraq. But Bush has frantically brushed that analysis away just as he has rejected every objective assessment that had reached him before. He has assimilated no analysis whatsoever of what's gone wrong. For him, there's no past, especially his own. There's only the present. The war is detached from strategic purposes, the history of Iraq and the region, and political and social dynamics, and instead is grasped as a test of character. Ultimately, what's at stake is his willpower.

Repudiated in the midterm elections, Bush has elevated himself above politics, and repeatedly says, "I am the commander in chief." With the crash of Rove's game plan for using his presidency as an instrument to leverage a permanent Republican majority, Bush is abandoning the role of political leader. He can't disengage militarily from Iraq because that would abolish his identity as a military leader, his default identity and now his only one.

Unlike the political leader, the commander in chief doesn't require persuasion; he rules through orders, deference and the obedience of those beneath him. By discarding the ISG report, Bush has rejected doubt, introspection, ambivalence and responsibility. By embracing the AEI manifesto, he asserts the warrior virtues of will, perseverance and resolve. The contest in Iraq is a struggle between will and doubt. Every day his defiance proves his superiority over lesser mortals. Even the joint chiefs have betrayed the martial virtues that he presumes to embody. He views those lacking his will with rising disdain. The more he stands up against those who tell him to change, the more virtuous he becomes. His ability to realise those qualities surpasses anyone else's and passes the character test.

The mere suggestion of doubt is fatally compromising. Any admission of doubt means complete loss, impotence and disgrace. Bush cannot entertain doubt and still function. He cannot keep two ideas in his head at the same time. Powell misunderstood when he said that the current war strategy lacks a clear mission. The war is Bush's mission.

No matter the setback it's always temporary, and the campaign can always be started from scratch in an endless series of new beginnings and offensives - "the new way forward" - just as in his earlier life no failure was irredeemable through his father's intervention. Now he has rejected his father's intervention in preference for the clean slate of a new scenario that depends only on his willpower.

"We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush told the Washington Post on Tuesday, a direct rebuke of Powell's formulation, saying he was citing General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs, and adding, "We're going to win." Winning means not ending the war while he is president. Losing would mean coming to the end of the rope while he was still in office. In his mind, so long as the war goes on and he maintains his will he can win. Then only his successor can be a loser.

Bush's idea of himself as personifying martial virtues, however, is based on a vision that would be unrecognisable to all modern theorists of warfare. According to Carl von Clausewitz, war is the most uncertain of human enterprises, difficult to understand, hardest to control and demanding the highest degree of adaptability. It was Clausewitz who first applied the metaphor of "fog" to war. In his classic work, On War, he warned, "We only wish to represent things as they are, and to expose the error of believing that a mere bravo without intellect can make himself distinguished in war."

Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University, is just the guy to size up the war's financial consequences. He served as chief economist at the World Bank and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton, and his book Globalization and Its Discontents has sold more than a million copies. Stiglitz sat down with Rolling Stone in New York to discuss the costs of Bush's misadventure in Iraq.

What's wrong with dropping a lot of money on the Iraq War? Didn't World War II pull America out of the Great Depression?
War is a lousy form of economic stimulus. The bang you get for the buck is very low. If we hadn't had to fight during the Depression, we would have become a much richer country by investing the money we spent on the war. Think of the Nepalese contractors doing work in Iraq. They spend their money in Iraq or Nepal -- not in America.

Because the war drove up oil prices, we are also giving more money to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela. It follows that we are not investing that money. And instead of spending the money we have left on things that will make us wealthier, we are spending it in ways that have just the opposite effect. I don't want to reduce this to cold, hard economics, but when you educate young people for twelve to eighteen years, you're investing a lot of money in them. If you then have them killed, maimed and debilitated, you destroy capital.

How did you arrive at the $2 trillion figure?
There were three parts to the calculations that I made with Linda Bilmes, a professor of public finance at Harvard. The first part is based on actual expenditures -- the impact on the federal budget. But the budget doesn't include a lot of expenditures we will be making in the future as a result of the war today, like paying for the health care and disability benefits of all the people who have been injured. These are lifetime expenditures, but they aren't included in the $600 million a year the Defense Department expects to spend on Iraq. They're just talking about the hardware of war.

The second part of our calculations estimates future expenditures to replace what we lose in the war. The budget includes spending for new ammunition, but not the wear and tear on weapons systems. Eventually the weapons must be replaced, but the administration doesn't count that as part of the projected cost of the war.

A third important category is a little more hidden. The defense budget has gone way up, beyond the money earmarked for Iraq. You have to ask why. It's not like the Cold War has broken out again. We infer that they are hiding a lot of the Iraq expenditures in the defense budget. We only attribute a small fraction of the increase to Iraq, but it would be hard to explain them any other way than the war.

You also examine the cost beyond the impact on the federal budget.
Yes. We look at where the budget underestimates the social cost of the war. Take disability pay. If you're wounded, the government pays you only twenty percent of what you would have earned if you could work. The disability payment is a budget cost, but the economy misses the salary you would have been making now that you're not able to do anything.

At least they saved taxpayers money on body armor.
Not really. Rumsfeld made the defense budget a little lower in the short term by not providing the troops with adequate body armor. But the government now has to pay for the care of vets with disabling brain and spine injuries -- and society loses what their contribution would have been had they been gainfully employed. It's a good illustration of how looking at the short-run number leads you to think the war isn't costing all that much. It's costing the government more, our society more and our veterans enormously more.

Another example of Rumsfeld's budgeting is the huge bonuses we're paying to get soldiers to re-enlist. He wanted to lessen the impact of the war on the military, so he used private contractors, who are more expensive. What he didn't realize was that he was setting up a competition that has driven up the price of a soldier. If someone who has served his enlistment has a choice of working as a contractor for $100,000 or in the military for $25,000, what's he going to do? Wages and bonuses had to go up. Maybe that's a good thing -- the regular military was being cheated, in a way. But it's another cost of the war that isn't figured into the budget.

So Bush's budget for the war is as out of touch with reality as his justifications for invading Iraq in the first place.
The administration is trying to sell the notion that they have repealed the laws of economics. They want us to believe that we don't have to choose between guns and butter -- that we can have them both. The reality is, the money spent on the war could have been spent on other things.

Such as?
One quarter of the war budget would have fixed Social Security for the next seventy-five years. George Bush says that Social Security is a major economic problem. If you believe him -- although there are many reasons not to believe him -- the war is four times worse as an economic problem.

With $2 trillion, we could have funded the entire world's commitment to foreign aid to poor countries for the next twenty years. Or just think what we could have done to stop global warming if we had spent that two trillion developing cheaper photovoltaic cells to convert solar energy into electricity. With our technological advantages, we could have had some real breakthroughs. We have the resources -- we just need to redirect them from destroying another country.

Will average Americans notice any economic fallout from the war?
We'll have a lower living standard than we otherwise would have achieved. The median American income is going down. Most of us are worse off than we were five or six years ago. Why are we getting poorer? This big pot of money we spent on the war obviously has something to do with it. Americans have a hard time seeing it when the numbers come out in dribs and drabs. But when it's $2 trillion? Did we really want to spend it like this? It's hard to think how we could have spent it worse.

Has Bush responded to your calculations?
To my knowledge, nobody in the administration has challenged our numbers. All they've said is that we didn't include the benefits of the war, which is true. There is no way to assess the benefits. There are some little savings we subtracted out, such as the no-fly zone over Iraq: We don't have to pay to patrol it any more, because there is nothing to enforce with Saddam out of power. But the administration can't exactly claim that they have brought peace, stability and democracy to the Middle East.

They also argue that they didn't go to war on the basis of green-eyeshade calculations. That's true, but they did do a calculation of the cost. They were just off. Like every other aspect of their analysis of this war, they were either deliberately misleading or incompetent.

Paul Wolfowitz actually claimed that the war would pay for itself with oil revenue.
You have to wonder: What reward should he receive for such acumen? Bush made him president of the World Bank.

Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Ilyas Omarov stated officially that the three Kazakhs arrived in the country on Saturday and were met by relatives. The official said the three would not face any investigation and charges "because their release means that they had been cleared of all suspicions of having terror links."

No further details were given on the case.

About 50 percent of the ex-Soviet republic's population are Muslims. Unlike its Central Asian neighbors that are poorer and have predominantly Muslim populations, Kazakhstan has been little affected by a rise of radical Islam in the region after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

Three other ex-Soviet Central Asian countries, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, border on Afghanistan. Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is the region's most radical. It was linked to al-Qaida and had training camps in Afghanistan. The IMU is believed to have been broken as an organized militant force during U.S.-led coalition bombings of Afghanistan in 2001.

Among 759 people who have been held over the years at Guantanamo, there also were 12 Tajiks and seven Uzbeks, according to U.S. Defense Department documents released to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The court ruled earlier Wednesday that British author Irving, imprisoned on charges of denying the Holocaust, would be released to serve the rest of his three-year sentence on probation. The court granted Irving's appeal and converted two-thirds of his sentence into probation, said Anton Sumerauer, vice president and spokesman for the court. Since Irving has already spent more than 13 months behind bars, the ruling means he will be released from prison, he said. In February, another Vienna court sentenced Irving to three years imprisonment under a 1992 law which applies to "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media." The law calls for a prison term of up to 10 years.

During his one-day trial earlier this year, Irving pleaded guilty to the charge of denying the Holocaust but maintained he never questioned it in the first place. Both the defense and the prosecution appealed the sentence. In September, Austria's Supreme Court upheld Irving's conviction. Irving has been in custody since his November 2005 arrest on charges stemming from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 for which he was accused of denying the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews. He has contended that most of those who died at concentration camps like Auschwitz succumbed to diseases such as typhus rather than execution.

Irving was present at Wednesday's hearing and was brought into the packed courtroom in handcuffs. During the session, senior public prosecutor Marie-Luise Nittel argued that Irving's words should "in no way be underestimated." In comments quoted by the Austria Press Agency, Nittel added that Irving was "like an idol, whose words provide the basis for the right wing scene." Irving's lawyer, Herbert Schaller, argued that his client should be freed because of his age and the fact that he has an ailing wife and a young daughter, Austrian radio reported. Once the verdict was announced, Irving said "Your Honor, thank you," according to APA. Austrian radio also reported that Irving would give his first interview in England. Schaller could not immediately be reached for comment.