Australian case for Iraq war was 'fabricated'
The Australian government "skewed, misrepresented, used selectively and fabricated" the intelligence used to justify its decision to send troops to Iraq, a parliamentary inquiry in Canberra was told yesterday.

War foes were right
Every public argument for making war on Iraq has broken down.

Australia 'twisted Iraq intelligence'
A former senior Australian intelligence analyst has accused Canberra of exaggerating the case for going to war in Iraq, on the first day of an official inquiry.

KABOOM! Has Bonehead Declared War on Europa?

Emails show how No 10 constructed case for war
Two radically different versions of what happened inside Downing Street in September last year in the run-up to the war with Iraq emerged this week from Lord Hutton's inquiry. The version that Downing Street presented to the public at the time was of a prime minister struggling to avoid war, intent on working within international law by going through the United Nations, and hinting that Britain was acting as a check on the wilder and more belligerent elements within Washington. But the emails from various staff members at Downing Street produced in evidence to the Hutton inquiry this week suggest an alternative narrative. These emails, covering the period between September 5 and the publication on September 24 of the government's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, are not full of concerns and proposals about how the dossier will impact on efforts to get the UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq and ensure that Saddam Hussein cooperated with them.

Voting Machines: Vote Tampering in the 21st Century

Intelligence Veterans Challenge Colleagues to Speak Out
Sixty-four summers ago, when Hitler fabricated Polish provocations in his attempt to justify Germany’s invasion of Poland, there was not a peep out of senior German officials. Happily, in today’s Germany the imperative of truth telling no longer takes a back seat to ingrained docility and knee-jerk deference to the perceived dictates of “homeland security.” The most telling recent sign of this comes in today’s edition of Die Zeit, Germany’s highly respected weekly. The story, by Jochen Bittner holds lessons for us all. Die Zeit’s report leaves in tatters the “evidence” cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell and other administration spokesmen as the strongest proof that Iraq was using mobile trailers as laboratories to produce material for biological weapons

Sharon is now a danger to US troops and hopes in Iraq

Vatican rewrites history to insist it did not persecute Galileo
The belief that the Catholic church persecuted Galileo Galilei for pointing out that the Earth goes round the Sun was quite wrong, the new secretary of the Vatican's Doctrinal Congregation, Archbishop Angelo Amato, has claimed.

Widow fears Pentagon 'lying' on pneumonia
Joining a growing chorus of families, the widow of a soldier in Iraq who died of a mysterious pneumonia-like illness said Thursday she fears the military may be lying about her husband's death.

US smallpox vaccination plan grinds to a halt
A plan to vaccinate nearly half a million healthcare workers in the US against smallpox in case of a bioterrorist attack has ground to a halt. Only 38,257 people have accepted vaccination, less than a tenth as many as planned. But the failure may run deeper. In a damning report released last week, the US Institute of Medicine, an independent advisory body, says the problem is not that so few have been vaccinated, but that so much time and money has been spent on the vaccination programme. It argues that this should have been spent on more important defensive measures such as disease surveillance and response plans.

Report: White House Misled City on Post-9/11 Health Issues
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.

It's official - Saddam was not an imminent threat
Hutton's remit was narrow - yet he has exposed the truth about the Iraq war

War Images Features Page

US Foreign Assistance To Israel Government Publication

'The Bush adminstration's shabby treatment of our soldiers
The Utah-based 2/23rd, one of the top Marine Reserve units, thought they would be riding into Iraq in armored vehicles. Instead, they rode in trucks with sandbags as their only armor. They had to share night vision goggles and body armor because there wasn't enough for everyone. They had no spare parts to repair weapons, radios or vehicles. Their automatic chemical detection alarm was a pigeon named Speckled Jim. They had 75 grenades for 200 Marines when they needed at least six times that. They didn't have enough ammunition pouches, but then again, they were also short on the ammo that would have filled the pouches.

Bush's Star Wars Credibility Problem: Labored, Not Layered Missile Defense
Without fanfare, the Department of Defense has revised and substantially changed the most important missile defense announcement to come out of a US administration in the last decade. In a variety of ways, these revisions effectively lower the bar for what will be expected of the upcoming deployment, while simultaneously allowing the Pentagon to enjoy the more expansive and robust view of capabilities widely publicized in the press.

Martin Luther King - The Fatal Shot Came From a Different Direction
Now, thanks to writer Ted Wilburn, in a story which follows, new evidence has surfaced to prove that the government and the media have been lying to the public about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Patriot Act II Resurrected?
Congress may consider a bill that not only expands the government's wiretapping and investigative powers but also would link low-level drug dealing to terrorism and ban a traditional form of Middle Eastern banking. The draft legislation -- titled the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003, or Victory Act -- includes significant portions of the so-called Patriot Act II, which faced broad opposition from conservatives and liberals alike and embarrassed the Justice Department when it was leaked to the press in February.

Scientists ask to see cash links
A group of prominent scientists is pressing two editors of leading scientific journals to require authors to disclose financial ties to products or companies that could benefit from the articles they write. In a letter to the editors, the scientists cited several recent cases in which authors of articles in the journal Science and in the journals of the Nature Publishing Group failed to disclose conflicts of interest. One scientist, the letter said, failed to disclose that he held the patent on a drug treatment that he praised. Another, with ties to pharmaceutical companies, suggested in an article that the nation's obesity problem could be solved "by better education and better drugs".