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Lots of Iraq war news today.

Study: Bush Administration Misrepresented Weapons Threat

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Three experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a report today that the Bush administration systematically misrepresented a weapons threat from Iraq, and U.S. strategy should be revised to eliminate the policy of unilateral preventive war.

"It is unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud missiles and facilities engaged in the ongoing production of chemical and biological weapons that officials claimed were present without the United States detecting some sign of this activity," said the report by Jessica T. Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George Perkovich.

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U.S. Withdraws a Team of Weapons Hunters From Iraq

From the New York Times:

The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.

The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.

A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.

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U.S. copter shot down in Iraq, killing 9

And a C-5 transport plane was also hit. Again from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A U.S. Black Hawk medivac helicopter crashed today near this stronghold of the anti-American insurgency, killing all nine soldiers aboard, the U.S. military said. A witness said the helicopter, which bore red crosses, was hit in the tail by a rocket.

And

At Baghdad International Airport, meanwhile, an Air Force C-5 transport plane with 63 passengers and crew aboard made an emergency landing, and a senior official at the Pentagon said the plane was hit by hostile fire.

The military also said a U.S. soldier died Wednesday of injuries suffered in a mortar attack that wounded 33 other troops and a civilian west of Baghdad.

The deaths brought to at least 495 the number of Americans killed in Iraq from hostile and non-hostile causes since the start of the war in March, according to the U.S. Central Command and the Department of Defense.

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So...a study shows what we knew already, that the White House lied about Iraq's WMDs. The Oval Office as much as admits it by yanking its search team. Meanwhile, the carnage continues: American boys continue to die; Iraqis continue to die. Nothing is amazing about all that. What's amazing is that the US population seems to be greeting such news with a collective yawn.

What the hell is going on?

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