Wolfowitz Admits Iraq War Planned Two Days After 9-11
In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush said intelligence reports from the CIA and the FBI indicated that Saddam Hussein "had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent," which put the United States in imminent danger of possibly being attacked sometime in the future. Two months later, despite no concrete evidence from intelligence officials or United Nations inspectors that these weapons existed, Bush authorized the use of military force to decimate the country and destroy Saddam Hussein's regime.

Sharon sketches awful alternative
A grim warning from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to President Bush that Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than U. S. intelligence believes has triggered concern here that Israel is seriously considering a pre-emptive strike against Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor.

Is Iraqi Intel Still Being Manipulated?
But for the Bush administration, things quickly began to go wrong with the Obeidi story. True, Obeidi said he’d buried the centrifuge equipment, as he’d been ordered to do in 1991 by Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein and son-in-law Hussein Kamel. But he also insisted to the CIA that, in effect, that was that: Saddam had never reconstituted his centrifuge program afterward, in large part because of the Iraqi tyrant’s fear of being discovered under the U.N. sanctions-and-inspections regime. If true, this was a terribly inconvenient fact for the Bush administration, after months in which Secretary of State Colin Powell and other senior officials had alleged that aluminum tubes imported from 11 countries were intended for just such a centrifuge program. Obeidi denied that and added that he would have known about any attempts to restart the program. He also told the CIA that, as the International Atomic Energy Agency and many technical experts have said, the aluminum tubes were intended for rockets, not uranium enrichment or a nuclear-weapons program.

Lack of Intelligence: America's secret spy satellites are costing you billions, but they can't even get off the launch pad
The United States has invested $200 billion over the past four decades developing and operating its supersecret spy satellite programs. In this new age of terrorism, and as the nation faces bellicose regimes like North Korea and Iran, these programs are more important than ever. But there's a problem. The agency that builds and operates the satellites, a little-known outfit called the National Reconnaissance Office, is in crisis. Despite its $7 billion annual budget, its satellites don't always work as promised. Its projects run billions in the red and years behind schedule.

Homeland Security for Whom? Are Bush, Ashcroft, and Wolfowitz Protecting America or Their Own Regime?
For those of you believe the war on terror and the violent occupation of Iraq will ensure world peace, you've got another thing coming; and that thing is the illegitimate Bush Regime's homeland security infrastructure. Let me state the point of this article up front: The war on terror, and its "homeland security" counterpart, are flip sides of the same coin. They are the same ideology applied to foreign and domestic policy. But like CIA agent Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, their evil intention is wrapped in a complex matrix of transparent lies. Pointedly, that evil intention is to provide the Bush Regime with political internal security at home, thus enabling it to plunder the world with impunity.

EPA was swayed by White House in its response to 9/11
An investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general into official statements about air quality after the collapse of the World Trade Center has found that White House officials instructed the agency to be less alarming and more reassuring to the public in the first few days after the attack.

Powell's 'thick file' looking thin
For 80 minutes in a hushed U.N. Security Council chamber in New York, the U.S. secretary of state unleashed an avalanche of allegations: The Iraqis were hiding chemical and biological weapons, were secretly working to make more banned arms, were reviving their nuclear bomb project. He spoke of "the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world." It was the most comprehensive presentation of the U.S. case for war. Powell marshaled what were described as intercepted Iraqi conversations, reconnaissance photos of Iraqi sites, accounts of defectors, and other intelligence sources. The defectors and other sources went unidentified. The audiotapes were uncorroborated, as were the photo interpretations. No other supporting documents were presented.Still, in the United States, Powell's sober speech was galvanizing, swinging opinion toward war. "Compelling," "powerful," "irrefutable" were adjectives used by both pundits and opposition Democratic politicians. Powell's "thick intelligence file," as he called it, had won them over. But in Baghdad, when the satellite broadcast ended, presidential science adviser Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi appeared before the audience and dismissed the U.S. case as "stunts" aimed at swaying the uninformed. Some outside observers also sounded unimpressed. "War can be avoided. Colin Powell came up with absolutely nothing," said Denmark's Ulla Sandbaek, a visiting European Parliament member. Six months after that Feb. 5 appearance, the file does look thin.

"It Was Never About a Smoking Gun," by David Kay
The [linked] article by former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay first appeared in The Washington Post January 19. Permission has been granted for distribution and further republication, in English and in translation abroad and in the local press outside the United States.

High Tech Vote Fraud by Diebold Election Systems
Vote fraud is the ultimate computer crime, and it just got easier with “stunning new flaws” in Diebold Election Systems voting machines, as reported by a study from the Information Security Institute. Author of “Black Box Voting,” investigator Bev Harris also wondered why source code for Diebold voting machines, used in over 30 states and 5 Canadian provinces, was publicly available on the Internet.

Voting machines scrutinized: Hopkins study reports Maryland's flawed, could be manipulated
The state has hired a private consultant to review a study that found security flaws in the electronic voting machines chosen for use in Maryland. The study conducted at Johns Hopkins University found the Diebold Election Systems machines are so flawed that they could easily be manipulated.