BAD DAY FOR BUSH AND COMPANY IN IRAQ

U.S. soldier killed, several wounded in separate clashes in Iraq

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The attacks brought to eight the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq during the past eight days and brought home the dilemma facing occupation forces as their efforts to provide security in towns and cities make them more vulnerable to attack.

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Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of occupation forces, has identified Fallujah and a handful of other towns west and northwest of Baghdad as trouble spots where what he described as "remnants" of the Baath Party loyal to deposed president Saddam Hussein have targeted Americans.

Pentagon probe found no evidence of Iraq chemical weapons

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The Pentagon's intelligence agency had no hard evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons last fall but believed Iraq had a program in place to produce them, the agency's chief said today.

The assessment suggests a higher degree of uncertainty about the immediacy of an Iraqi threat -- at least with regard to one portion of its banned weapons programs -- than the Bush administration indicated publicly in building its case for disarming Iraq, with force if necessary.

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The administration began building its case against Iraq last August in a series of speeches by Vice President Dick Cheney. "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney told a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Aug. 26. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."

In September Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld joined in.

"We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons," Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18. "His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons -- including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas."

Analysts have doubts Iraqi trailers were germ labs

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At least three teams of Western experts have examined the trailers and evidence from them. While the first two groups to see the evidence were largely convinced that the vehicles were intended to make germ agents, the third group of more senior analysts disagreed sharply over the function of the trailers, with several members expressing strong skepticism, some of the dissenters said.

"I have no great confidence that it's a fermenter," a senior analyst with long experience in unconventional arms said of a tank which the first investigators thought had been used to multiply seed germs into lethal swarms. The government's public report, he added, "was a rushed job and looks political." This analyst had not seen the trailers but had reviewed evidence from them.

We are losing soldiers at a higher rate than we did during the so called combat phase of the Iraq invasion. The happy Iraqis, cheering their "liberators," didn't come to the party. Democracy in Iraq is now almost as impossible as it is in the United States. Politicians and the corporate news media can call it what they want: the US military is now, and presumably for years to come, an imperial occupying force in Iraq. Just as with the Taliban "remnants" in Afghanistan, Baath Party "remnants" don't seem to realize that the US has already "won" the war.

Meanwhile, White House Iraq lies continue to fall apart (and still no outraged US population). They're really clutching at straws now: the Batmanesque "mobile germ labs" are absurdly funny especially because this tall tale was discredited almost as quickly as Paul Bunyan could clear cut an old growth forest. This is serious. These are not petty lies about oral sex. Oval Office mendacity has led the nation down the path of brutal empire, killed thousands of Iraqi civilians and conscripted soldiers under threat of execution, killed numerous US soldiers who naively believed that they were defending American freedom, squandered billions of tax dollars, ruined US diplomatic relations with the entire world, and to top it all off, made the threat of radical Islamic terrorism much worse.

Metaphorically speaking, it is now, once again, 1966. We are in Vietnam. Despite the small number of stories suggesting "confused" US intelligence reports (a clear understatement), the news media overwhelmingly support the Pentagon. The US public blindly supports the lying bastards who rule the country. Dissenters are unAmerican or simply stupid. American soldiers are dying at an increasing rate:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

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