GAO's Final Energy Task Force Report Reveals that the Vice President Made A False Statement to Congress
This month, the General Accounting Office (GAO) - the investigative and auditing arm of Congress - issued a report that contains some startling revelations. Though they are couched in very polite language, they are bombshells nonetheless. The report - entitled "Energy Task Force: Process Used to Develop the National Energy Policy" - and its accompanying Chronology strongly imply that the Administration has, in effect, been paying off its heavy-hitting energy industry contributors. It also very strongly implies that Vice President Dick Cheney lied to Congress.

CELL HELL FOR HILLARY NEMESIS
AFTER more than two years in a Brazilian prison, a shadowy felon who says he has enough dirt on Hillary Rodham Clinton to end her career is going to be extradited to the United States - if he lives that long. Peter Paul - whose dealings with Bill and Hillary Clinton sparked an ongoing federal investigation into the former first couple's fund raising - has been wanted in New York to answer stock-manipulation charges since June 2001. In the past, he has fought extradition while negotiating with U.S. investigators, but that all changed recently when Brazilian authorities put him in the dreaded "Corridor of Death." Paul has claimed that he can prove Sen. Clinton accepted at least $2 million in campaign contributions from him in 2000 but reported only $500,000 of it.

Senior House Democrat Urges Top Defense Hands to Resign
A senior House Democrat called today for the resignation of the top two officials at the Defense Department, saying that miscalculations by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the deputy secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, had cost American lives in Iraq and damaged the nation's fiscal health. In a letter to President Bush, Representative David R. Obey, the ranking minority member of the House Appropriations Committee, said the Pentagon should be relieved of its role in determining foreign policy in Iraq, in part because of errors made by Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz before and after the war.

Revelations About Gulf War II Mystery Illness
The American Gulf War Veterans Association (AGWVA), an independent Gulf War Veterans' support organization, has long searched for answers to explain why nearly half of the 697,000 Gulf War I Veterans are now ill and why over 200,000 of those servicemen/women have requested disability, but have received no adequate diagnosis or treatment, from either the Department of Defense (DOD), or Veterans' Affairs. Though there have been over 125 studies done by the government at the cost of over $300,000,000 to the taxpayer, we still have no answers as to what caused so many of our soldiers to become ill. Meanwhile, the suffering veterans are receiving little, if any, medical treatment for this illness. It seems that whenever veterans become ill, the term "mystery illness" seems to be the first and often the only diagnosis that is ever made. Veterans are then left to fend for themselves, sick and unable to work, with little hope of a normal life again.

Day by day, the noose tightens round No 10
The narrative that still remains unresolved is what happened during the preparation of the WMD dossier this time last year, when intelligence analysts and spin doctors worked overtime to construct a convincing, unsinkable case for war. This is strictly outside the remit of Lord Hutton's inquiry into the circumstances of Kelly's death, but during the past 10 days of evidence the unlit border between the intelligence services and policy-makers has become surprisingly central to the hearing.

Britain and US back down on weapons of mass destruction claim
Britain and the US have combined to come up with entirely new explanations of why they went to war in Iraq as inspectors on the ground prepare to report that there are no weapons of mass destruction there. The "current and serious" threat of Iraq's WMD was the reason Tony Blair gave for going to war, but last week the British Prime Minister delivered a justification which did not mention the weapons at all. On the same day John Bolton, US Under-Secretary of State for arms control, said that whether Saddam Hussein's regime actually possessed WMD "isn't really the issue".

Of Assassination and Dialogue
While a bunch of Israeli and Palestinian women were hugging and kissing outside Tulkarm today, the Israeli government dropped three 250 kg (550 lb) bombs on an apartment building in Gaza, trying (unsuccessfully) to kill the ten Hamas leaders meeting inside. “We were only trying to send them a message,” said the news commentator on Israeli TV tonight. “We were trying to kill them,” corrected the anchor, “but screwed up.” Meanwhile, Abu Mazen resigned and Israelis have begun “the countdown” to quote more TV talk, on the life of Arafat. Will Israel finally make the kill or not? All agree that it’s only a matter of time. This kind of chatter about extra-judicial killing ­ this year alone, Israel has assassinated 110 Palestinians, during the course of which it killed another 73 unlucky bystanders ­ goes on in a country which does not have capital punishment. But that’s a technicality.

White House Silenced Experts Who Questioned Iraq Intel Six Months Before War
Six months before the United States was dead-set on invading Iraq to rid the country of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, experts in the field of nuclear science warned officials in the Bush administration that intelligence reports showing Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons was unreliable and that the country did not pose an imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East or the U.S. But the dissenters were told to keep quiet by high-level administration officials in the White House because the Bush administration had already decided that military force would be used to overthrow the regime of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, interviews and documents have revealed.