told entirely in lies. (Via HuffPost)

Can the CIA legally kill a prisoner? (Via War and Piece)

has decided to include the Ed Schultz Show in overseas programming.” No launch date was specified — it should have happened three weeks ago.

Even Bill Kristol admits that fabricating intelligence for a war is wrong. From Kristol’s Weekly Standard column, posted 11/5/05:

Last Tuesday, Harry Reid took to the floor of the Senate and asserted that the Bush administration had “manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions.” This is a serious charge; if it were true, it might well be an indictable offense. But it is, in reality, a slander.

Kristol calls it “slander,” but it looks like he spoke too soon. The day after Kristol posted his column, the New York Times reported on an al Qaeda official in U.S. custody, who was, according to a February 2002 report, “intentionally misleading the debriefers.” Months after the report, the administration continued to use his evidence as “credible.”

Check your next Weekly Standard for Kristol’s principled call for indictments.

Mike Allen’s latest piece for Time magazine includes the following about the next possible “centerpiece” of the Bush agenda:

At the White House, aides are meeting every day to work out a new agenda. A possible centerpiece is a road show next year to promote a plan for simplifying the million-plus words of the tax code, one of Bush’s most reliable applause winners on the stump in 2004.

In other words, Bush’s next Big Idea is to roll back all the additions to the tax code that he made in his first term:

During [Bush's] term in office, there have been 227 tax-code changes that added 10,000 pages to the monstrosity known as the tax code.

The Bush administration’s talking point these days in defending its use of false pre-war intelligence is to blame Clinton. Scott McClellan said last week that critics “might want to start with looking at the previous administration.” Sen. George Allen (R-VA) repeated the mantra on CNN this Sunday: “[R]ecognize that even the Clinton administration thought Saddam posed a threat.” And Bill Kristol writes in the Weekly Standard that the White House should “fight back” by pointing out that Clinton administration officials “believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.”

To justify the war against Iraq, the Bush administration made a number of exaggerated and misleading claims about the Iraqi threat that went far beyond the public statements issued by the Clinton administration. Going beyond the argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration made a unique case on two specific fronts to justify the war: the supposed connections to al Qaeda and the Iraqi nuclear threat.

The administration argued that the evidence in these two areas amounted to a “grave and gathering threat” in a “post-September 11th world.” On the eve of the Iraq war, Bush said:

The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.

The imagery was clear: terrorists, such as those that attacked on 9/11, could do far greater damage with nuclear weapons, and the Iraqi regime was helping to make that scenario a reality. In fact, the evidence behind the supposed Iraq/al Qaeda connection and the evidence on the nuclear threat have turned out to be the weakest links in the case for war. See the evidence below:
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– President Bush, 11/6/05, after being shown a map of Brazil by President Lula da Silva.

will review the constitutionality of the administration’s military tribunals. Chief Justice Roberts has recused himself.